Cobb

Stop Crying

So about a year ago I witnessed something that stuck with me. Over in Sunnyglen Park where I did my morning runs, I saw parents out with their young kids. One of the kids was riding on a scooter. He must have been about 3 1/2 or 4. I can't remember if he was wearing a helmet but he did an Arte Johnson. Fall down go boom. As he recognized that he was in pain, he started yelping and the parents rushed over. Of course they were young parents and so they didn't know how to deal with the situation, not as well as I do of course. They were reacting to the pain he was feeling, not the wreck. And when you're crying and people are reacting to your cries, you cry until they guess right or promise you ice cream. 

The proper thing to do when your kid is bawling his eyes out is to get him to start talking about what happened. You want to encourage him to talk and then he'll realize this and then he'll have to pipe down to explain the situation. So the first logical question is What happened? (sob sob, I fell down), Where? (sob. over there) Over here? (no) Show me where. (right here). OK. Where does it hurt? (sob. on my arm) Let me see. (see?) Oh. Yeah I see. 

If you are more perceptive than a 4 year old, then you'll see how the misdirection gets him to focus on the series of events that lead to the boom. Not the present pain. By the time you get through this exercise, the kid will have put together some cause and effect stuff in his head. You can even elaborate with some forensics. OH. Look at this bump. I bet you hit that bump and it made your scooter fall. (yeah. stupid bump!) Well you know to watch out for that bump. Now the kid is oriented to be smarter about his scooter riding and the consequences of bumps, rather than the quickness with which he can procure ice cream by crying loudly at all the mommies and daddies in Sunnyglen Park. 

Thus endeth today's non-fableized fable.

The Strategic Air Command Parent

I'm not a helicopter parent, I'm a Strategic Air Command Parent. I basically have five levels of engagment which are roughly equivalent to DEFCON. I have never had to go to DEFCON 1, and have only been once to DEFCON 2.

As a reminder, DEFCON stands for defense condition, and I think it is appropriate to consider parenting to be an exercise in defense readiness. We understand that as parents we are firstly successful and civilized adults. Our children are not. We defend our sanity in the same way we defend our civilization, by removing from our society those who defy it. In the case of our children this means restraining their free reign in our home and their free will in our lives. But it also implies that at some point they would need to be kicked out of the house in those situations in which their activity brings unpardonable shame or legal action upon it. That would represent a state of war between parents and children, in which the children must lose that thing they've only earned through love and trust, which is the dedicated protection of their parents. I will not protect a criminal or psychopath in my home.  

Defense condition	Exercise term	Description	Readiness	Color
DEFCON 5	RELAXED	Come and go as you please, but let us know what's up.	Normal readiness	Blue
DEFCON 4	EYEBALLED	Give us a plan and an outline of the day.	Above normal readiness	Green
DEFCON 3	RESTRAINED	Checking hourly on what you are required to be doing. Extensive questions and answers.	Medium readiness	Yellow
DEFCON 2	GROUNDED	You ask permission to do everything. You eat and poop on our schedule.	War readiness	Red
DEFCON 1	EXPELLED	Authorities are involved.	Maximum readiness	White

My kids are not the coolest people I know, but they are some of the best people I know. I tell them this on the occasions that it becomes obvious. They each have done rather well and have given me a great deal of pride, but my starting and basic underlying principle remains. You are uncivilized and you need to grow up. My job is to provide the right environment, to make myself available and to be the man that I am while giving them a special window into my opinions, thoughts and feelings. I do not run a democracy, I run a workshop. This is how we are civilized. These are our values, our ideas, our morality. This is what inspires us, this is what is fun, this is what we find offensive. Clean your room. Do your chores. Finish your homework. Do I have to tell you everything? The usual.

The Spousal Unit and I generally run on two different levels. This has evolved from our temperament and our schedule. I enjoy my solitude and in my career I have often been on the road. So I am rarely at Defcon 3. I stay at 5 and regularly weigh in at Defcon 4. When I go to Defcon 3, everybody notices. It is the kind of attention that makes them uncomfortable. I may have some outsized notions, but my scrutiny can be of the exasperatingly whithering sort. Don't disappoint Dad. My wife, on the other hand, starts and remains on 3, pretty much all of the time, or perhaps it seems that way to me. I am the one who looks at them in the eye and calls them a slob. My wife provides the verbose hectoring. Clean your room x 5. I'm not going to tell you again. Did you clean it? OK you're grounded. 

Everybody asks Mom if it's OK to go to place X or Y. She handles all of the logistics, details and trivia that I cannot be bothered with - like the names of the parents, the friends. I am the one who whispers in the ear of my daughter on the way to the prom. "Make memories you will always fondly remember, and none you will regret". In short, I am strategic and the wife is tactical. 

For about 80% of the things involving money, and all of the things in which several factors must be considered, the Unit comes up to the room, sits on the bed and waits for me to clear my head and swivel around in my desk chair. She gives me her look of exasperation or weariness and explains the situation. I am the calmly rational who consideres, weighs and voices all of the implications. Occasionally we need a spreadsheet and a calandar, sometimes a letter needs to be written. These are my strengths. They don't cheer her up, but she can move again. My wife is a shark of home economics. She is relentless. I am the great and powerful Oz. 

There is something about being SAC parents that we notice, which is that we don't have hostility. My daughter recently went with her scout troop to Orlando and did talk to us once that week. But she was the one who mentioned to us how odd it was that some other girls wanted to do anything *but* talk to their parents. They do actually like and admire us as we do them. We *do* provide strategic airlift, and our kids know that if they sound the alarm we are going on full alert to get them whatever it is they need. And ther are times when they will tell us that we spoil them. We are comfortable enough so that their contribution to the running of the house is only chores - they don't have to pitch in. The money they earn on odd jobs or from saving their allowance lets them buy those special shoes. What we've been trying to get them to do is exercise judgment. That said, some are better than others. But the point is that our aim is to establish the family relationship in such a way that they will realize how outside in life, nobody has necessarily got your back, or is necessarily interested that you are civilized. 

Of all the things we stress, these are the most important things, and we're confident that they know that they have souls and are working to protect them from the skullduggery and vulgarity of our society. We do not shelter them so much as express our revulsion at that which is revolting. We have enough evidence to suggest that their tastes are not naive nor pornographic. And so Netflix and Rdio are open without monitoring as is Facebook and everything else. I'm not sure we could have done that on an entirely secular basis. So we've insisted that they get their Christian education although without any restraints on picking a denomination. I think that choice was lucky although in retrospect it is precisely the course that I took in my youth - though a series of different Christian churches only one of which I found adequate. They've always had VBS and youth group friends. 

Now that Christopher is off at college, but just a long commute away, I've promised to have a monthly lunch with him. It has only been a week and the balance of things has already dramatically changed. I am spending more time with my daughters already, and nobody has vacuumed. We'll see how else my role will change. Three years from now, I'll have three kids in college. That's going to be.... wow. But even now, transititioning from being a parent to being an investor is how I'm looking at it. They're already promising to put me in a good home when the time comes. Hoo boy.

Someone To Watch Over Me

Daddy's House Is Full Of Love

When I was 13 years old and my afro was long enough for me to see my own hair I won a dance contest. I'm sure that there were some bellbottoms and pop locking involved. My prize? It was a 7Up electric popcorn popper, which was about as cool then as an iPod is now. You see in 1974, dance contests were socially important as was 7Up. It sounds funny, but I know it to be true and I am about as proud of that accomplishment now as I was then - it got me the girl. 

I just finished reading the WSJ article by Amy Chua about the Tiger Mom. The story has been on the periphery of my mediasphere and intervened at a low level yesterday afternoon. As I was driving home from work I remembered that I am about as happy as I can be, basically except for the fact that I would horribly miss watching the rest of my family's life play out, I would die happy today. What's importantly implied in that fact is that I am confident that I have been a successful parent. The Spousal Unit and I are tremendously proud. So yesterday found me considering for the nth time, but for the first in the 'Tiger Mom' context, thinking about writing up book about 'parenting', a verb that didn't exist when I was a kid. I think that I would name the book, Daddy's House is Full of Love. So here's a brief sketch of the big themes I can pop off the top of my head. 

Themes and frameworks is how I do things, and The Unit and I have collaborated in our own way just about every practical arrangement. So while you could say that we are nominally rule based, our rules come in terms of phrases that we can all recite, like the title. But the themes are how we work.

Royalty
Royalty is a theme in our house and in our family. That means we parents are King and Queen. This is not a democracy in any stretch of the word. We are benevolent dictators with the right to be tyrannical. We have never had to be. But everybody knows that we can. 'Because I said so' never has to be said because the way we have run things, there has never been any example or assumption that there was another way out. You are loyal to the king and queen, period. 'Or else' doesn't even have to be said. We simply stare our kids down and state things matter of factly. Sometimes, the 'No' comes out before the question is stated, but we always listen. We always consider, and we let our logic in making decisions out in the open. The result is that we don't hear 'But what if I don't want to do it?' instead we hear an alternative. Not an extensive bartering negotiation that goes back and forth, but a concise promise. And so we run off a checklist to see if our requirements are met based on the following rule:

Do what you have to do, and then you can do what you want to do.  

And then the right things happen. This also means that you can never play 'Uncle Bill'. Uncle Bill is my internal way of remembering a story told by Bill Cosby about a stingy relative who couldn't wait until his nieces and nephews screwed up so that he didn't have to deliver on the miraculous promises he made to them. We don't play carrot and stick. We play duties and liberties. 

The other part of Royalty is extended family. When the Spousal Unit and I had access to luxurious living conditions in Georgia that put 3000 square feet of new construction for the price of about 9 months of our combined annual income, we were apart from family. So we decided that we would take the hike to California so that our kids could grow up with their cousins. Right decision. Our kids are close to their cousins and they know each other well. It is a different quality of play and looseness that they have with their kin that they don't have with other kids. It's respectful but ends up in horseplay. There always ends up being a knot of girls tickling each other on the floor. 

Best Friends
Each of our three kids has a best friend. And these best friends have been so for quite some time. We have always played intelligence officer roles when it came to relations between our kids and others in the neighborhood. We asked our kids to know kids by first and last name, and who their parents are, where they live, and to give their relationships hierarchies. We literally had them draw up lists for concentric circles. C-Zero was family. C-One was the closest circle of friends. You know them, their personalities and you like them and they like you. You know where they live and their parents recognize you. For our kids they each had about 3 or 4 C-Ones. C-Twos were kids that you saw on a semi-regular basis. Maybe at Church, maybe in Scouts. If you didn't see them for a month, maybe you would wonder what happened to them. They are on your team, in your class. You speak. C-Threes are everybody else. C-Ones can come by our house on the regular. Your best friend is always welcome.  C-Twos can come over with permission and they are greeted and introduced at the door. C-Threes, not so much. 

Yes we do sleepovers. With the best friends, it's a regular thing. We are on a friendly basis with the parents of the best friends, even as they have changed. Our youngest has several C-Ones. Our oldest has one, but they are the closest and longest of best friends, as much as boys admit. But he has many more C-Twos, some older nerdy geeks that give my wife the creeps. 

Grades In School
Every C is a problem. Every B is an opportunity. Every A is a celebration. A D stops the world. And we never see Fs.  We require a 3.0, period. We mostly get Honor Roll. For that we celebrate. Your job, we told the kids early on, is to succeed in school. Outside of this house, that's basically all you have to worry about. 

I don't know much about raising girls, but I've learned a lot. I do know about boys, being the oldest of four. I raised my son to be what I have striven to be, a scholar-athlete-geek. It worked but it turned out that he did so with a lot more mellow personality than I expected. I'm more hard-boiled than he is, but some of that is by design. Every day when I dropped my kids off to school, which was basically every day of their elementary years I gave them the following sendoff:

Be smart, be friendly, keep sharp, stay focused. 

The verbs may have changed, but the four adjectives never did. I tell my children, because I absolutely know it to be true, they are some of the best people I know. And why wouldn't they be? They reflect what I find important and valuable in people, and the three of them express the complete spectrum each contributing a unique combination of strengths, virtues and values. I take them places and walk with pride amongst them. That is the vituous circle that has become easier as time goes by. Which gives me a moment to think about something else I recognized early on that changed my approach to being a father.

Babies are completely uncivilized. Part of my responsibility is to civilize my kids, which brings us to the transition. I'll soon be send my puppies into the world. Where I have to be tough is to let them fail and start regarding them with the cold disdain that the world does, and give them an inside track. That's all for now...

 

 

Family First

Good Mom, Bad Mom: Rebecca Walker Speaks Truth to Feminist Power

Rebecca Walker is in the news again. Why? Because she's more normal than her famous mother, and now she's dredging up the awful truth.

I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son  -  her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.

Well, so be it. My mother may be revered by women around the world  -  goodness knows, many even have shrines to her. But I honestly believe it's time to puncture the myth and to reveal what life was really like to grow up as a child of the feminist revolution.

I couldn't predict at the time that the battle would get to be such a heated one. But I did see that Rebecca Walker was heading to directly contradict a lot of what passes for feminist wisdom a few years ago when I was working in Philadelphia. Back then I wrote:

Walker's audience was largely comprised of women who have not suffered through the cleansing agony of childbirth, and one could sense their conflict and ambivalence from a distance. Walker is a master of talking to them straight and guiding them gently. She's got a writer's honesty and self-knowledge. As I surfed her website and perused her bio, I found she's got much experience talking to young folks such as these.

There is genuine confusion and empathy. A thousand conversations that cannot occur in bars await the patient author on book tours. I could feel the tender tendrils extending as each young person walked up to the table after the talk. With one in particular whom I seem to recall in a denim skirt, the two women reminded me of my own two daughters whispering to each other. Oh how women talk. And where else could they go but to each other?

They can come to me, because in the end, big brother that I am, I spent most of the evening acquainting myself with a universalized version of this ritual. How can I protect this, I kept asking myself. How can I keep this part of society working? How can I recognize this from the fraud of eclexia? Walker invoked he who is Chesterton in my mind when she expressed that family works and has worked for hundreds and thousands of years, and 'we' shouldn't be so quick to dismiss its value. She recognizes what era she's living in, and said that those are dangerous words in some quarters. I imagine she would know that very well.

Well now it's clear that Rebecca Walker is one of us. She has, through her own experience as a mother, found the true meaning of life by creating life and protecting life. I'm going to keep her in mind more and more knowing that she has joined the battle. And in case you decide not to read the full piece that I linked to, let me give you a small piece that makes it all very clear.

A good mother is attentive, sets boundaries and makes the world safe for her child. But my mother did none of those things.

Although I was on the Pill  -  something I had arranged at 13, visiting the doctor with my best friend  -  I fell pregnant at 14. I organised an abortion myself. Now I shudder at the memory. I was only a little girl. I don't remember my mother being shocked or upset. She tried to be supportive, accompanying me with her boyfriend.

Although I believe that an abortion was the right decision for me then, the aftermath haunted me for decades. It ate away at my self-confidence and, until I had Tenzin, I was terrified that I'd never be able to have a baby because of what I had done to the child I had destroyed. For feminists to say that abortion carries no consequences is simply wrong.

Well. Not much ambiguity there. I was just writing about the Peasant Box. Another reason I am conservative has to do with my rejection of the counter-cultural movement that was baked into the narrative of The Sixties. It continues to be assumed, quite falsely, that black Americans wanted hippie, pacifist, sexual revolution as part and parcel of the defense of their Civil Rights. That to be black was to be against the War in Vietnam, and everything white parents appeared to be to their idiot baby boom children. It was that reactionary rebellion that made stars of people like Alice Walker and others who were part of Black Radical Chic. And to this day 'black culture' continues to be a foil for a 'white culture' meaning two parent families, marriage and a lack of radical politics.

The myth continues, but Rebecca Walker is not pretending and playing nice any longer. Good.

It's Got Groove, It's Got A Meaning

Scholar, aka F15, aka Coco Loco, my oldest daughter is once again contributing to the arts. This time around she's in the Belasco production of Grease. If you happen to be anywhere in Southern California between now and the 11th of July, you could do far worse than spend a couple hours in Hermosa Beach enjoying this musical. I guarantee that you will be impressed by what these young people can do.

Opening night jitters have now been dispensed with and the company is confident. They had a celebratory dinner last night at CPK and Loco is very excited about how things are going. I've seen these kids do The Wiz and Fiddler on the Roof, and they're very good. Check them out. All you need to know is right here.

Are We Cool?

I'm reflecting on this reflection.

But you know what I’ve learned? Raising a boy, my son, scares the daylights out of me at times. I don’t know what he’s thinking most of the time. He has a great social maturity for his age and he is a studious and well thought of boy, but I don’t exactly know what makes him tick. Maybe it’s me. Maybe those schoolyard battles, those not so nice encounters with teachers and those feelings of awkwardness are what scare me about my son. I got through that maze called life due to some stroke of luck. How will my son get through it?

Men have to get through on strength, because there are few things as dangerous as a weak man.  But few things are as frightening as thinking your son might be stronger than you. I think every father has to inevitably face that possibility, and every good father has to prepare for that as an eventuality. The eventuality that the sort of power he has used over his son, will most likely be the sort with which the son will establish independence from the father - and the likelihood that the son will be more powerful.

I have listened to tales of this sort from all angles. But most familiar is the one in which middle aged men think about what they might have to do if and when their son does something that might get them in trouble with the law. Basically kick his ass. Show who's boss. Prove the old man has still got skills. I could go on about a specific black man's dynamic especially vis a vis pledging fraternities and being beat into and out of gangs, but the basic lesson is still there. There is a dominance and subordination dynamic at work with fathers and sons that we hope will both strengthen the son and mature into a respect of equals. And in the world of men, it basically boils down to a question of honor - who deserves a beatdown?

The gateway question: Are we cool?

This is the kind of question that exists on the border of IN vs OUT. It is a question of the weak man to the stronger man. It is a question that a father should ask the son in preparing the son for manhood. It is the question a son is always asking his father whether or not he speaks it aloud. It is the bottomless pit for the man who has no father. The man asking needs to know, now. The man being asked needs to respond now. If the answer is 'yes' then everyone goes his own way. The matter is settled. If the answer is 'no', prices and terms need to be explained.

A son needs to know if he is cool with his father and his father needs to be consistent and fair. I say this as if it were obvious, but it is one of those things we lose track of in our popular de-masculinized, relativistic culture where anything you can get away with is cool because.. well what difference does it make when everybody can 'do their own thing', or as I believe the popular term is 'do me'.

I say that the most dangerous thing in the world is a weak man, and I refer to my old suburban dad chestnut of soccer. When boys play soccer and there is a foul, they immediately get in each other's face and fight. The fight is over, and the next day they play again, the fight forgotten. When girls play soccer and there is a foul, there are tears and evil looks. The next year revenge is still being exacted. 'This is for what you did to my friend last season', is what a girl says. Such are the consequences of a failure to teach courage. Courage allows you to live in the moment - it is the single quality that enables swift justice.

Another way to look at this dynamic, aside from that classic scene in 'Pulp Fiction', is Chris Rock's admonition about how far to trust a man - as far as his options enable him. In all cases, a real man (yike I find I must say that) will try to get away with as much as possible, but he also wants to know that he is cool, if not with you, than with somebody who can apply the beatdown. Maybe only God.

A boy in a society of men, a man in the world, seeks his fortune and seeks to do all that he can - he wants to be free and he will use whatever strength or cunning he can muster to insure his survival in the world that is indifferent to his ego. And so he will explore and test every limit. This is a good thing, for without that there is no learning, no expansion of humanity, we'd all stay in the nest. A clever boy knows it is better to ask forgiveness rather than permission and so goes off on his way filling his pockets with rubberbands, coins, sticks, marbles and whatever he can get his dirty hands on. A man doesn't bother to ask always and everywhere what is going on in another man's mind - except when the rules are fuzzy and the limits are unclear. He just needs to know whether a man is good or bad, if he's going to need a beatdown for breaking the rules or not. It's all that simple.

My 14 year old son gets up at 5 in the morning and is out the door hours before I awake. He's off to wrestling practice and then band practice before his first class. So we don't speak at length on the daily. Last weekend we talked for a while - driving in the car to go get the holiday ham. He told me that his wrestling coach is not as strict a disciplinarian as his football coach. Within the short span of a dozen sentences I was able to communicate an entire set of manly lessons of character, and could see that he had internalized a good many already. We were both passing judgment on his coach and the other wrestlers, some seniors that he depends upon to help run the practices by discussing the nature of the competition and habits.

In order to be a man, it's all about what you do. The dynamic of dominance and subordination is a well-understood dynamic in power and respect relationships between men, between men and the rules, and thus between all of us in society, bound as we are by power and rules. Where a man fits in is a matter of honor and the guidelines for honor doesn't require a great deal of talk, not for men who understand it. It is part of the way we see things all the time, whether or not we speak about it at length.

A Reflection on Power Moms

(from the Archives July 2005)

One of the fundamental questions is the role of the mom. Having lived in So Cal for 8 years in 3 different neighborhoods, I can tell you that unless and until you have moms sharing responsibilities for each other's kids real community isn't happening.

In the first neighborhood, we had our kids interact with other kids at the public park through their various public programs. There were maybe three full-time staff, and my wife made pals with the number one woman who ran the program. We had her over for my barbecues and we wer basically tight.

In the second neighborhood, more of our kids were in school and most things were school based. There was a real friendliness among the parents at school but we weren't there long enough to establish a lot of bonds.

In the third neighborhood, where I live now, we can see things coming to a real fruition at about the fourth and fifth grade level. This is where kids really start to choose their friends, have sleepovers and parents are making the commitments to get to know each other. (You have to if it's going to be a sleepover). There are three or four families where we are close enough to spontaneously have their kids over our place or ours at theirs. This is a very different level of cooperation than just doing the 'activity based' relationships. When kids are playing sports on the same teams or scouting or going to the same church school, that's one level, but the sleepovers and family outings - that's a different level.

So for me personally there has been a progression of integration with other families that really doesn't seem to get into gear until kids are in the third grade. It becomes clear after a while, who the power moms are in the community. It's all about knowing the power moms.

Now I would say there's going to be a big difference in the quality of community based upon how many women are working. In the last two neighborhoods, there were plenty of stay at home mothers, and if you ask me, that is the single most important determining factor in the quality of community life. It's all about what's going on at 4:20, and if mom is not watching... well, you know what happens. If you shift the burden of organizing and watching children to public institutions, you will by definition get results that are not up to par. I don't believe you can invest properly without fundamentally altering the relationship between kids, the school and parents - which is to say that the school has to be greatly expanded. Where there are working or single mother families, the school has to be day care, park, babysitting, homework monitoring, communications exchange and trusted surrogate. I don't think that there is enough public money for that or that there ever will be, but I could see how making school a place where parents can pick up their kids up to 9pm at night would work.

Supermom Cranks It Up A Notch

This morning I am once again in wonderful Cleveland thanks to the safe, but enervating experience of air travel. I took a redeye which was two hours late. But I'm not the only one who is haggard. The Spousal Unit has completed a marathon of momhood, successfully. Again.

The Unit is a supermom. Not just a responsible parent, not just a soccer mom, but one of those backbones of the community. Anybody who watches the TV show 'The Unit' knows Regina Taylor plays Molly Blane who is the wife of Dennis Haysbert's character. That's what kind of woman my wife is, and for the record of those who say there are no strong black women on television - there are at 47 episodes which make all the difference. This time, my Unit got my two daughters through The Wizard of Oz.

Not that I really know, but there must be in Los Angeles, two dozen theatre companies for little kids to cut their dramatic teeth. My brother Deet and his wife are somewhat connected out Pasadena way with such things and have been involved with various professional and amateur productions over the years. This time we were invited to join a production of the Wizard of Oz which culminated in four 2 1/2 hour productions over the weekend. I've seen school plays and talent shows, but this was an extraordinary deal with a live orchestra performed at Pasadena City College. The baby Bowens made a strong representation all around with their cousins, Deet's kids. So we had four in the cast all with multiple roles in two of the casts including the Tin Man.

The Unit, for her part, did extra volunteer work and the kind of gap-filling that makes all the difference in the end. In addition to getting the kids out to rehearsals every week for 12 weeks or so, 80 miles round trip, she managed the whole food thing, as usual. See, the Unit is brilliant when it comes to feeding the masses. As a caterer, half-restaurant owner, and industrial food buyer and cafeteria manager, she's knows it all. It has made her invaluable to the PTA, the soccer league, the baseball teams, the family reunions, the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts, the church, on God only knows how many occasions. People eat, always. She is there always. I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars we've spent at Smart & Final waiting for a reimbursement from a fellow caterer or charitable organization. She's not a machine, but the results speak for themselves. She puts everybody else to shame, with her organizational skills and yet charms them to putty. She is clockwork, backbone, and the doer of deeds. She puts on the apron and all the right things happen.

A couple months ago I bought a replacement wedding ring. This one is Tungsten. It's not glamorous, but it's stronger than gold. That's how I think about my marriage. It's made of working metal, not bling. And my daughters know very well that they have a high standard to live up to. That chapter of organized drama is now officially over. We'll get the DVDs and I'll have some stills. The flowers will stand in vases for a while staying fresh as the memories. But the continuum of work that the Spousal Unit has assembled will long be felt, not only by our family but others as well. It's an extraordinary blessing to be married to a woman such as this.

Now if I can only get the airlines to recognize.

The Baxter Dissent

I predict that California will have a a constitutional amendment in defense of marriage, and that activists for the cause of gay marriage have made a fatal error. California has insured every right except the express permission to redefine marriage, and now the State Supreme Court has overstepped its bounds in defiance of the will of the people. It's going to get loud and ugly and it is now most definitely a constitutional crisis.

I concur with the thrust of Baxter's dissent:

The question presented by this case is simple and stark. It comes down to this: Even though California’s progressive laws, recently adopted through the democratic process, have pioneered the rights of same-sex partners to enter legal unions with all the substantive benefits of opposite-sex legal unions, do those laws nonetheless violate the California Constitution because at present, in deference to long and universal tradition, by a convincing popular vote, and in accord with express national policy they reserve the label “marriage” for opposite-sex legal unions? I must conclude that the answer is no.

The People, directly or through their elected representatives, have every right to adopt laws abrogating the historic understanding that civil marriage is between a man and a woman. The rapid growth in California of statutory protections for the rights of gays and lesbians, as individuals, as parents, and as committed partners, suggests a quickening evolution of community attitudes on these issues. Recent years have seen the development of an intense debate about same-sex marriage. Advocates of this cause have had real success in the marketplace of ideas, gaining attention and considerable public support. Left to its own devices, the ordinary democratic process might well produce, ere long, a consensus among most Californians that the term “marriage” should, in civil parlance, include the legal unions of same-sex partners.

But a bare majority of this court, not satisfied with the pace of democratic change, now abruptly forestalls that process and substitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the People themselves. Undeterred by the strong weight of state and federal law and authority, the majority invents a new constitutional right, immune from the ordinary process of legislative consideration. The majority finds that our Constitution suddenly demands no less than a permanent redefinition of marriage, regardless of the popular will.

In doing so, the majority holds, in effect, that the Legislature has done indirectly what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. Under article II, section 10, subdivision (c), that body cannot unilaterally repeal an initiative statute, such as Family Code section 308.5, unless the initiative measure itself so provides. Section 308.5 contains no such provision. Yet the majority suggests that, by enacting other statutes which do provide substantial rights to gays and lesbians — including domestic partnership rights which, under section 308.5, the Legislature could not call “marriage” — the Legislature has given “explicit official recognition” (maj. opn., ante, at pp. 68, 69) to a California right of equal treatment which, because it includes the right to marry, thereby invalidates section 308.5.5

I cannot join this exercise in legal jujitsu, by which the Legislature’s own weight is used against it to create a constitutional right from whole cloth, defeat the People’s will, and invalidate a statute otherwise immune from legislative interference. Though the majority insists otherwise, its pronouncement seriously oversteps the judicial power. The majority purports to apply certain fundamental provisions of the state Constitution, but it runs afoul of another just as fundamental — article III, section 3, the separation of powers clause. This clause declares that “[t]he powers of state government are legislative, executive, and judicial,” and that “[p]ersons charged with the exercise of one power may not exercise either of the others” except as the Constitution itself specifically provides.

Download lockyer_decision.pdf

Punching Yourself in the Nose

When my kids exhibit self-doubt I tell them that they are punching themselves in the nose. They all know this story I told them.

The story I tell starts once upon a time there was a princess (or prince) who woke up one day to find a small pimple on her nose. All through breakfast nobody said aything but it was all she could think of. She thought that everyone at the table could see her nose and was simply being polite. Immediately after breakfast, she ran to the bathroom to check her nose again. She decided to pick at the pimple and as she did it began to bleed - so that day she had to go to school with a bandage on her nose.

All that day she adjusted her hair so that it would take away attention from her nose, but her hair got in her eyes and she walked into a pole. Smack on the nose. Now her nose was in pain and started to swell. That evening at home she looked even worse. She took off the bandage and the pimple was mostly gone but now her nose was very sore and a little bit red. The following morning her nose was pretty much back to normal but it felt horrible. She put extra makeup on it, just to make sure and she wore some very loud colors to distract from her face.

All this time, people noticed she was acting strange but not about her nose. Only she knew that her nose was making her behave this way - and yet she never told a soul because by now her story was just too embarrassing. Sure enough some kids laughed at her clothes and pointed their fingers at her. She went into the bathroom and cried. She was so mad at herself that she began to punch herself in the nose. She ran home and checked again in the mirror. She had given herself a bloody nose. The more she tried to fix her nose, the more things went wrong, the more she punished herself, the more embarrassed she became. It went on for a week until she finally broke her own nose. Now it became obvious to everyone that her nose was indeed ugly, swollen and slightly crooked.

There are several lessons to be learned from this story. The first is that perfect is the enemy of good. The second is that vanity is self-destructive. The third is not to second-guess what people think about you. The most important is that you can be your own worst enemy because only you know exactly what torments you most.

The story can obviously be changed around or extended to more tragic lengths, but I always like the punch in the nose idea because as a kid I had a lot of fights. I would come home after crying with my face in pain, and unless I had a black eye or my nose was still bleeding, I could feel the pain but nothing would show. The same thing was true after a really good game of football. And so it always fascinated me that people could feel pain and not convey it - that nobody really knows what's going on with you unless you tell, that overcoming the fear of telling releases you from the pain of your insecurity.

Of course you can become a pain in the ass, but that's another story.

Madam President

It's official. My youngest daughter now has a new provisional nickname, 'Madam President'. Today she won election to student body president at her elementary school. All hail the president.

I Love My Children

I have run out of good things to say and it finds me at odd moments just wishing I had more time and money. Even as I begin to write this it sounds like a parody from the Onion. I'm supposed to love my kids, why would I not? I'm merely excited as the possibilities in their lives.

Once again they have scored top awards and honors in their respective classes. The Sprite, aka F10, my youngest, the Baby Girl has done it again. This time with a snapped finger in my face. She got five awards including Honor Roll with distinction at the end of her fourth grade year. She would have gotten perfect attendance too if I hadn't made her late for class one day. Last week she went camping with her Girl Scout troop and yesterday at a puppy party, a tarantula pissed on her and she screamed. If it hadn't been for her baller bands, she would have had a nice bite on her wrist. I doubt it will change her love for animals, as she told me the story she said she laughed and cried at the same time - she was scared but amused by the hilarity of the situation. Sprite is preternaturally complex and she rarely fails to comprehend the higher implications of her situation. In that regard she is rather the polar opposite of Boy, whose powers of concentration block out all external forces, including common sense. But we'll get onto him momentarily. Sprite is a tomboy, sorta. But she loves her Daddy most of all. When I'm out of town she sits on her bed and cries looking at my picture. As soon as I get home she jets to me and I spin her around in a swinging hug. She sleeps like a rock and she sits at the dinner table half out of her chair, itching for the next adventure.

The First Daughter, our middle child is the dumb bunny of the bunch. She only managed a 3.5GPA with two awards this last trimester. For some inexplicable reason, she has failed to master a musical instrument in her twelve years on this planet. We're thinking about giving her up for adoption. But seriously, Scholar continues to live up to her name and has found a new love in singing. Her little YouTube career has begun and she finally believes what we've always known, that she has an angelic soprano. She continues to be the most understated and sophisticated of the trio, a literal mountain of empathy and. As she buds, becomes more like her mother, a guardian of family values and history. As well, she is constantly on patrol for flecks of spinach in our teeth, literally and metaphorically. She has a subtle way of reminding me of everything I need to do. Dramatic and demonstrative, she continues to pen her epic saga "Hey Mama", which exhibits inklings of Pat Conroy and Flannery O'Connor. I get the most forehead kisses from Scholar who still holds my hand when we walk in the mall.  How cool is that?

Boy continues to shock and amaze.  At 13 he is too tall, too strong and too energetic. He's starting to look older than he is, so that when he doesn't speak you expect him to be able to do things he still lacks the focus to do. This illusion is accentuated by his bearing. He moves with confidence, not quite like it's his world but like Bear Grylls - fearlessly enchanted by the adventure of it.  This report card he knocked out a 4.0 and was accepted into the GATE program for gifted students by scoring 97% on something called the Otis-Lennon SAT. We actually weren't expecting all that. Already he's his scout troops' Bugler having only picked up the trumpet about 4 months or so ago. He's got a disarming humility about him. He never brags, well except at Gears of War, and yet I watch him play amongst the foul mouthed peers of his youth, and he still literally says 'aw shucks'. He told me yesterday that Bruce Willis is his favorite actor but I'm still his hero, and that keeps me in line.

I worry that I'm not going to have enough juice to push up the ceiling. They are all running so strongly that I have to concern myself that I am properly capitalizing them. They already know and deal well with our lower upper-middle class status. Only Scholar has the cell phone and hers doesn't have unlimited texting. But it's not that stuff, but the next hurdle that makes me think I'll be wearing the same shoes for the next 15 years. High School. To private prep or not to private prep, that is the question. Somehow I'm confident that they'll all do well, but maybe I'm not pushing them to have the real hunger. They're all quite well-adjusted and exhibit none of the telltale signs of overachiever's angst. I wonder if that means that Yale is out of the question. Hard to say. We've already got two legacies at Brown, although I would hope their politics... eh. I'm not pushy. But I am.

It's impossible to guess what their world will be like, what their America will provide and deny, what their survival or triumph will demand. I just know they are the kids that I wanted to be, and be around when I was a kid. Capable, genuine, unspoiled and bright.  I think they know that, but I'm going to find another way to tell them today. Today is Sunday and I love my children. It's time to wake them up.

The Beryl Motto

At Beryl, I strive to:
Be the best I can be, to put forth my best
Effort in all that I do, to be respectful and to take personal
Responsibility for the choices I make. I have begun my
Year long journey as a positive role model for
Life-long learning.