I was bothered by the post telling girls to not post images of themselves in provocative poses online not because of the general statement that was made about teenage girls and the ways they present themselves, but because I was immediately worried about a specific girl; the girl (or girls) described in that post.

She doesn’t name her, but she describes her enough that a savvy reader from her town, a child who knows her sons, could probably figure out exactly which girl’s pictures became the tipping point for that post.  And now, that girl has been shamed in a very public manner.  Cyberbullied in a sense.  By an adult.  Who wanted to make a point about what she allows her child to see on his social media account.

The way to handle concerns about an image is to privately contact her parents.  To contact the child herself (after all, she gives the girl specific instructions to run to her account and delete the pictures — wouldn’t it have been easier to contact the child directly if she wanted that to happen?).

She could have sent a letter, made a phone call, asked the school to do a very non-specific school-wide assembly on Internet postings.  She could have even written the very same post without the focus being on the girls themselves, how they are posing, and what they are wearing.  She could have kept a tighter focus on her own actions as a parent.  If she hadn’t described specific images, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it.

But she did.

And there is a child out there who might be feeling the effects of being discussed online.  There are people who know exactly which girl she is referencing.  And there are people out there who are spending the night trying to guess which girl she’s referencing and shaming other girls along the way.  There’s a bunch of kids in her son’s school who are getting a very hard lesson in what it means to be part of the online world.

That author’s post was judgmental.  Her tone wasn’t concern: “Wow – you sure took a bunch of selfies in your skimpy pj’s this summer!”  It was condescending.  It was shaming.  And that was what got under my skin: because no child is going to respond positively to that type of message.  Especially not done on a public stage.  And adults who care about getting a message across work to deliver it in a way that gets heard.

And frankly, the excuse of “but usually no one reads my blog” doesn’t hold up.  Anything and everything that we place on a public blog has the potential to be seen by a lot of people outside our small circle.  Including this post.  So if it does make it to that girl described in the picture, I just want to tell her that there were better ways for an adult to handle this situation.  And I hope you don’t learn from this that you should take shaming to the Internet rather than discussing problems in private or opening up public discussions with general terms rather than specific details.

After all, the author writes: “I know your family would not be thrilled at the thought of my teenage boys seeing you only in your towel.”  She knows them.  She can talk to them directly, rather than talking to all of us about this girl.  So please do.  Please — even now that you’ve publicly shamed this girl — please call her parents and talk about it with them.  If you do that, I’ll believe that you actually care about this girl too.

If you ever need to figure out what you should say publicly and what you should say privately, write the post and then imagine having to read it aloud to the subject of the post.  And if you can do that to their face and not feel embarrassed or pained at the expression they may wear, post it.  But if you gulp over realizing how your words will be heard, leave it in the draft folder or send it to them privately if you feel the words must be read.  By the way, to the author of that original post, I would totally feel comfortable reading this post aloud to your face, and that has everything to do with tone.

Last week I went white water rafting with my niece and father.  It had been 12 years since I last rafted on the river.  About 10 years since I had last kayaked since I gave it up during fertility treatments.  I tried on my water shoes the night before.  I slipped my feet inside and took a step.  The shoes were suddenly huge; my foot swimming in them.

“Oh my G-d, my foot shrunk since the last time I wore them.  That’s how long it’s been!  My foot is smaller,” I gasped at Josh.

“Is it possible that the material stretched?  It doesn’t seem very likely that your foot shrunk.”

“I’m telling you, look at my foot.  It is much smaller than the rubber sole.  Maybe the material stretched out, but the rubber sole didn’t change size.  I am shrinking.  I’m becoming ancient.  And when you become a shriveled old crone, your foot shrinks along with your gnarled hands.”

“Mel, are those my shoes?” Josh asked.

“Are they?”

“Well, they’re my size.”

A quick trip up to our bedroom determined that yes, those were Josh’s shoes.

*******

It felt odd to be out of my routine; driving towards West Virginia in the early morning.  I had been out of my routine all summer, and only back in my routine for a few days.  But still, it felt odd, as if I was playing hooky.  I turned off my phone and left everything behind, my pockets completely empty.

When I walked into the office where you sign in for your boat, the smell brought back such intense memories of being in college, between semesters and taking kids out on rafting field trips.  The guides were usually a year or two older than I was.  I came back so often that I got to know them each summer, hanging out in the gear room, flirting underneath the hanging life jackets.

My niece was a baby the last time I had been there.  I was getting married to Josh.  I had been away from the camp for many years, returning for this single summer to make some extra money to furnish our new apartment.  I felt awkward that I was several years older than the guides.  They could have been my camper, I thought to myself.  They could have been my student.

But now my thoughts were, you could be my kid.  I mean, yes, I would have had to have gotten pregnant at the beginning of college, but the age gap was now so large between myself and the guides that I could easily be their mother.

Their freakin’ mother.

*******

What I wanted much more than the rapids themselves were the stories.  A good guide will tell you how the various rapids got their name or tiny snippets of history as you travel down the river.  We got a good guide; a good story teller.  I got to hear for almost the 50th time how Bull Falls got its name, and remember navigating the two staircases with a boyfriend one summer, and bucking on White Horse.  And I said the same things I always said when I rode this stretch of the river, as if I were in a bucolic Rocky Horror Picture Show, shouting out the lines.

When we turned the bend in the river and saw the Mennen’s toilet powder sign on the rock, I waited for the guide to tell the story.  Except that for the first time on the trip, he wasn’t saying anything.  He was just looking around at the scenery.

Back when I was younger, I brought so many people to the Whitman Walker Clinic for HIV testing that I began being able to recite the 45 minute informational session that came with the saliva test.  One day, the man delivering the presentation skipped a few lines, and I immediately raised my hand and excitedly told him that he had missed one of my favourite parts.  And then proceeded to fill in the blank.  I really hate the idea of a story left partially unsaid, and that applies to HIV-testing informational sessions and trivia from the river.

“Aren’t you going to tell the story?” I asked.  “You know, of the Mennen’s toilet powder sign?”

The guide looked at me without saying anything.  So I finally had to admit that I had done this stretch of the river probably 48 times that I could remember.  “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked me.

Because I wanted to hear the stories.  It wasn’t a waste of time to hear them again.  You know how a kid wants to have you read the same story over and over again?  Or how you ask your parents to repeat family stories even after you have them memorized?  Well, the Shenandoah River is like a member of my family; it feels as corporal as a person, and it has shaped who I am as much as the people around me.  Hearing the stories about the various rapids was as enjoyable as recounting old family vacations from years past.

For a few moments, we each played coy, refusing to tell the other the story we knew about the advertisement on the rock face.  And then we both spilled, co-constructing the story as we passed over the rocks like water.

*******

Lori was surprised when I told her that I was white water rafting.  I’m sort of the last person you’d ever imagine enjoying white water.  I don’t go on roller coasters, don’t enjoy drops or heights or fast movements.  I got anxious on the freakin’ mail boat that one summer.

But for whatever reason, I like white water rafting.

A long time ago, I wrote a post about how everything I ever needed to know about navigating blogging I learned from kayaking.  I thought I had posted it, but when I looked to link to the post, it was still in draft form.  I have so many stories in draft form, unpublished.  Sometimes I don’t know what I’ve put up and what I’ve left to languish unread in that folder.

If I had posted it, she wouldn’t have been surprised.

I don’t get many things right the first time
In fact, I am told that a lot
Now I know all the wrong turns
The stumbles and falls brought me here

I wanted to play the kids Squeeze’s 45s and Under but I didn’t have it on my iPhone.  This was after I had sung the same six or so lines of “Goodbye Girl” over and over again while I washed dishes.  Maybe they didn’t really want to hear Squeeze sing it, but I wanted them to hear Squeeze sing it.  Sometimes I pretend that I can’t hear them protesting while I scroll through the artists list.

Except they were spared because I didn’t have any Squeeze on the iPhone.

I didn’t really feel like listening to anything else, but I already had the music app open, so I put on Ben Fold’s Rockin’ the Suburbs.  I sang loudly through the first two songs, as if that would help the twins like the album better.  Because my voice warbling off-key louder than Ben Fold’s voice makes it that much more enjoyable.  The twins ignored me.

“You know that one of our wedding songs is on this album,” I told them.

“Oh my G-d, do we have to listen to something in Hebrew?”

“No, it’s in English.  Do you want me to skip to it?  It’s a love song.”

The Wolvog rested his forehead on the table, as if mushy songs shove him downward like an upperclassman dangling his head over a toilet.  “Please.”

“Okay, I’m going to take that to mean that I should skip to it.”

I skipped straight to the “Luckiest” at the end of the album.  Actually, first I fought the iPhone to get the screen to turn from the horizontal view to the vertical view.  Then I muttered to myself about how I didn’t know how to get back to the song choices.  And then I pushed a bunch of buttons.  And then the Wolvog came over to help me even though if I was actually successful, he was going to have to hear a mushy love song.  Then I skipped straight to the “Luckiest.”

They both stared at me while I sang the first verse by myself, but then I coaxed the Wolvog to dance with me.  He formally placed one hand around my waist and weaved his fingers through mine in our outstretched hands.  We swayed around the kitchen while I rested my cheek on the top of his head.

“When I danced with your daddy at our wedding to this song, I had no idea that 12 years later, I would be dancing with my little boy in our kitchen.”

I know that is always true.  We can always look back at a moment and realize what we didn’t know back then which is taking place now.  But there was something about that song, about the concept of fate, of holding my son’s hand, of the scent of his head, that created a bridge between the then and now, bunching together all the tiny moments as if they were just flowers in a bouquet.  They seemed so important in the moment; the fights and the phone calls and the awards and the deaths and the births and the blood draws and the movies and museum trips and jumping the waves on the beach.  Moments — when you’re in them — seem so huge, so all encompassing, capable of changing your mood, of blotting out the sun.  And then 12 years pass and those individual moments seem as tiny as beads gathered on a simple string: all the same size, all small and round and pretty to think about as you sway in the kitchen.

“Were there iPhones when you got married?” the Wolvog asked, breaking into my thoughts.

“No.”

“Do you know they’re releasing iOS 7 soon and it’s going to have many amazing features.”

“Shhhh, you’re destroying my perfect moment of remembering my wedding and realizing that I’m dancing with my son to the same song I danced with my husband.”

“I want to dance too,” the ChickieNob told me as the song ended, and the Wolvog started it back up again (any excuse to touch my phone).  The ChickieNob danced with me until Josh came home and cut in.  He moved slowly, at first holding me formally and then sliding his arms around me until we were in a long hug so I could cry into his shirt.

I am the luckiest; I recognize that now even though there have been times when it hasn’t felt that way.  I didn’t get things right the first time or the fifth time or really any of the times that we tried without assistance.  But all those wrong turns and stumbles and falls brought me right back here, from the library where I married Josh to the kitchen where I made him dinner, and it brought me to those two children ignoring my music as well as their dancing parents.  I would never wish for the wrong turns and stumbles and falls, but I am glad that this is where I ended up.  I can’t imagine any of those other tries — those other boyfriends and those other pregnancies — being as sweet as this.

*******

Every single year, we get a do-over.  We get to do every single day again just with a different year tacked to the end of the date.  Today is the last day of 5773 on the Jewish calendar.  Tonight, Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish new year — begins, and it brings with it a lot of hope.  That this year will be different, this year will be better, that whatever didn’t work in the past year won’t be repeated again, that whatever worked in the past year will continue to be perfected.  Humans never learn.  But I like this idea of hope sometimes.  Today, it’s a small good thing.

L’shana tova — happy new year, everyone.  May 5774 bring us all a lot of happiness.

I read Family Building with a Twist’s post about the guilt she feels over sending her child to private school which was compounded by the Slate article with the link-baity title and opening:

Title: If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
Lede: You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

Right, not link-baity in the least.  I purposefully am linking to Family Building with a Twist’s post and not the Slate one, though you will find a link to the Slate one from KeAnne’s post.

Perhaps it is indicative of the poor education the author claimed to get, but her reasoning was so simplistic and dismissive that I don’t really think you need to actually read it to get pretty much the gist of it from this: whether you are sending your kids to private school due to family traditions, a care about their education, religious reasons, behavioural reasons, learning differences, or problems with safety in the local school, you are a terrible person for not opting in to your public school.

As a former private school teacher and product of the public school system who has now sent her own children to both private and public schools, I think I have a fairly decent scope of the situation.

I’ve worked at hoity toity, almost-$40,000-per-year-tuition private schools that served a gourmet lunch on china plates with silverware.  I’ve worked at experiential education schools that had no permanent buildings on campus in order to have complete respect for the environment.  I’ve worked at happy, friendly, community-building private schools that churned out free-thinkers rather than focusing on hardcore academics.  I even taught college for two years at a nice, sprawling public institution.

And I’ve experienced public school my entire life: from kindergarten through graduate school.

And all I can say is that the school should fit the child; not the other way around.  All schools are like huge ships, too big to turn quickly.  Private school or public school — they cannot cater to a single child.  So just as not every body type fits every article of clothing despite it being the correct size, not every learning type fits every school despite it containing an appropriate grade for your child.

And it’s a parent’s job to make sure that they’ve placed their child in their best learning environment.  THIS is more important than public vs. private because in either situation, a child in their wrong learning environment does more to tax and disrupt the system than removing kids from public school.  A child scared of the outdoors can’t thrive in an experiental outdoor-ed program, and if placed there, sucks out resources such as the teacher’s attention at a rate that depletes the system.  A child who is a free-spirit can’t thrive in a restrictive, traditional, uniform-wearing school.  Place them in that environment just because she has a legacy at that school, and what you’ll have is a student who detracts from the community, negatively impacting the education of the students around her.

And the same is true for placing a child who won’t thrive in public school in the public school system.

Of course, there are times when that can’t be helped.  Financial realities get in the way.  Your home base doesn’t have the resources for your child.  There are children who end up needing to remain in public school despite the fact that public school clearly doesn’t fit them.  Unlike Slate’s author, I’ll never say the choices are easy.  That they’re all do-able.  Sometimes, when it comes to your child’s education or their special needs, you have a kid who clearly doesn’t fit the system but there is very little you can do to get them out of that system.

And those are the times when I think we need to offer those kids an apology: I am so sorry that the world is so unbalanced that we can’t even get a child into an education system that fits them.

For the most part, I think public school is a little bit like vanilla ice cream: most people wouldn’t pick it as a first choice, but we can all agree that it serves as a decent base for a host of other toppings.  I know kids who go to public school, and that is the extent of their education.  And that is fine: just like a plain scoop of vanilla ice cream.  You’re still getting ice cream, and who (except for the lactose-intolerant) is going to complain about ice cream in the same way that you are getting a basic education, and who is going to complain about a basic education?  But the people who end up really enjoying that vanilla ice cream are the ones who layer on the toppings: in-school extra enrichment programs, after school activities, or kickass volunteers who come to the school the same time your child is there to bring their expertise for everyone’s benefit.

I think private schools tend to be like flavoured ice cream.  The flavour actually matters.  You can’t ask someone who hates pistachio ice cream to eat a big, heaping dish of pistachio ice cream and enjoy it.  Can they gag their way through it?  Sure.  But they won’t thrive.  But give someone who likes pistachio ice cream that dish and they’ll lick it clean.  And they’ll figure out ways to improve the ice cream for other pistachio lovers.  The same goes for Rocky Road or rum raisin: preferences (and learning styles) matter in the ice cream shop.  Not all options are equally great for all customers.

I enjoy other flavours of ice cream more than vanilla, but I’m a perfectly content vanilla-eater and a perfectly content product of the public school system, so much so that I went to a public college and public graduate school.  For myself, I would always choose vanilla because I like the flexibility of building my own flavours by adding or removing toppings.

We’re still trying to figure out our kids, whether they’re okay with vanilla (with a heap of toppings) or whether they would really do something amazing with a differently flavoured school.  Some of that changes from year to year.

I agree with the author of the Slate article who says that we need to commit to schools beyond paying taxes: we need to get in there and bring our personal expertise to help the next generation.  I go into my local public school and volunteer two days per week teaching writing — for free.  I do this because I believe strongly that all children should have a lot of exposure to writing at a young age, because I am a decent teacher and can convey the information to them, and because I enjoy teaching and this is a way I can teach without having to commit to a daily classroom.  I can do this because I have a flexible job, timewise.  The days I volunteer, I end up working from 9 pm to midnight.  That’s my choice, and I would never ask another person to make the choices I make in terms of giving to the community and having a fairly sucky schedule in return.  There are plenty of other things a family could do that goes beyond contributing money that could benefit your local school, whether or not you have children there.

But volunteerism: that’s not a sustainable change.  That change is only in place as long as I am there or you are there or Jim down the street is there.  No one else can fit the me-shaped spaces we create when we give back to community.  So for Slate to suggest that it’s as easy as pie; we’ll all just pitch in and help out and all will be fine in a few generations is reductive.  When we’re gone, our work is gone too.  And in the case of charter schools — a whole extra bucket of fish that Slate never taps into within their article — while they are more sustainable, they truly serve more like life boats during the Titanic.  The kids who get in them get rescued from the school system while the rest of the school — the main ship in this analogy — sinks under the water, dragging down the people who remain trapped in that system.

As a whole, just as we should take people on face value and realize that while there are certain characteristics that may change but people don’t overhaul a whole personality, we should also recognize that schools may tweak tiny aspects of their program, but overall, their personality doesn’t change.

So choose a school based on what fits rather than asking the child to conform to the largely intractable personality of the education program.  Doing so not only is best for YOUR child, but for the children who needs to be around your child since a child in the wrong education program tends to be a child who disrupts and taxes the system, destroying it for others.  So no, I don’t think you’re a bad person if you put your child in private school.  I think you’re a good parent for paying attention to actually raising your child vs. just keeping them alive.  And I think you’re a good citizen for choosing a school that fits your child rather than putting them in the wrong system that detracts from all around them.

A few weeks ago, I asked a question about phone call lateness which raised a tangential question: do you always pick up the phone when it rings?

I’m always a bit surprised when someone answers the phone to tell me that they can’t talk.  Why didn’t they just allow voice mail to pick up?  Then we would have effectively accomplished the same thing: you would know I want to talk, I would know you can’t talk at the moment, you would call me back.  I don’t take it personally if I call someone, knowing they’re home, and they don’t pick up.  I just assume that they are busy inside the house.  Not everyone sits around, drumming their fingers on the table, waiting for me to call.

Plus, if it goes to voice mail, I can say what I needed to say.  If they pick up and say they can’t talk, I now need to go write down the question I was going to ask them so I still remember it when they call back.

This is obviously different from screening out phone solicitors.  I mean, I don’t pick up for phone solicitors at all, even if I’m not busy.  (I apologize, phone solicitors, but I will never buy something over the phone so it feels like a waste of your time too if I pick up.)  I don’t screen anyone else’s call though.  I pick up for everyone who isn’t a phone solicitor if I can talk.  So if I’m not picking up, it means that I can’t talk or I’m not home.

But some of the answers on that phone lateness post (and whether you turn your cell phone off at night) made me wonder if I was being rude by not picking up.  Was it better to pick up the phone and explain that I really don’t have time to speak?  Would people respect that and allow me to get off the phone immediately, or would they argue with me that the thing they had to say would only take a second?  There are times when I’m cooking when even a second is a second too long.

So, am I the only one?  Do you answer the phone when you can’t speak to tell the person you can’t speak, or do you allow it to go to voice mail/the answering machine and then call them back later?  Do you take it personally when you know someone is home and not answering?