Illustration by Barry Falls Growing up without religion was fine for the writer. Until Christmas rolled around.

This is the time of year when parents pass on traditions to their children. It is also the time when the absence of tradition can become a tradition all its own, as parents who were brought up celebrating “nothing” or “differently” try to decide what to tell their children about belief.

You have read Johanna Stein on Motherlode before. You loved her rather graphic sense of humor and many of you asked that she write more. On this first night of Hanukkah, here’s a gift from Johanna — about growing up with a complicated relationship with the holidays and with gifts.

Merry Something-or-Other

By Johanna Stein

My daughter, who is one month shy of her 3rd birthday, just asked me what Christmas is. When I opened my mouth to answer, all that came out was a raspy, choking sound. It was an awkward moment, to say the least.

Here’s the thing: I was born to a pair of card-carrying, dope-smoking, radical hippie Jews in Winnipeg, Canada. There are not a lot of Jews in Winnipeg and even fewer card-carrying, dope-smoking, radical hippie ones.

My parents were “free thinkers” and felt that organized religion was a “thin construct of a shallow, emotionally enfeebled culture.” As a kid I didn’t have the foggiest idea what that meant (actually, I still don’t), but it didn’t matter because on Sunday mornings, while my friends were waking up at 7 a.m. to pull on itchy wool dresses and dusty tights for church, I was cocooned in a warm blankie, laughing at Bugs Bunny cartoons while jamming handfuls of Count Chocula into my face. There I was, all those Sunday mornings, gloating at my good fortune with brown marshmallows stuck in my teeth.

And then December would roll around.

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When we become parents, our parents become grandparents, and each generation bumps on up the ladder. With each passing Thanksgiving, Larissa Kosmos has become more keenly aware of the love of her grandparents, whom she made great-grandparents twice over. In a guest post today, she sends her love long distance. She won’t be seeing them until Christmas this year, but they will be joining her nonetheless at her Thanksgiving table.

Blessings

By Larissa Kosmos

At my wedding nine years ago, I gave a toast, in Ukrainian, to my grandparents. Baba and Deedo were second parents to my brother and me growing up in Cleveland, and we spent many Saturdays sleeping at their house. At night, Baba would sit by me on the bed, which she had fitted with half a dozen pillows so that I would be cushioned head-to-toe at every turn, and tell me colorful stories.

Even into my 20s, when I moved from Cleveland to Washington and saw them only during my visits home, Baba remained my storyteller. We would sit together on the living-room couch and, inevitably, she would take me on a fascinating, sometimes emotional, journey into the past, bringing to life events and family dramas often set during World War II.

Deedo was more the listener. He liked hearing about my work, my studies, my travels, my perspective on things. With a few supportive words and a kiss on the head, he always encouraged my pursuits.

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Illustration by Barry Falls Is it possible that there is at least one upshot to the sleeplessness that comes with being a parent?

I have always had a complicated relationship with sleep. Back before I had children I was a night owl, not going to bed until single digits in the morning and sleeping as late as school, and then work, would allow. My brain didn’t really fire on all cylinders unless it was dark outside.

Then, when my sons were younger, I sleep-walked through many of my days, waking often during the night, then up for good before dawn, falling into bed at what most people consider a reasonable hour, with the disorienting feeling that I was exhausted, but not yet ready to sleep.

Now it’s my boys who are night owls, happy to stay awake until 2, then sleep until noon, if life would let them. I, in turn, am a mash-up of my rhythms before and after motherhood. A chronic insomniac, I usually fall asleep just fine then wake at 2 a.m., as if my body is remembering a life it used to lead. I get a lot of work done in those wee hours.

So, apparently, does Josh Tyson, an editor and musician (whom you met when he wrote here about making music with his young son). Read more…

Illustration by Barry Falls

Johanna Stein, a TV writer, who describes herself as a “first time parent and long-time neurotic,” read my post about the mother and child who were escorted off a Southwest flight last week, and sent me an essay she wrote about being that parent — the kind whose child won’t stop screaming.

Many of us have been where she sat. But, she warns, most of us would never want to do what she did.

How to Survive a Midair Disaster

By Johanna Stein

I am at the O’Hare airport with my daughter and the guy she calls “dada.” We are about to board a Florida-bound plane to visit my mother-in-law.

But the child is losing it.

After two years of being the perfect travel companion she has suddenly developed a fear of flying. For a toddler, she’s pretty smart (I’m not bragging when I say that… it actually creeps me out) and I wonder if maybe she’s worked out the physics of what we are about to do. Perhaps she has come to realize, as I have, that manned flight is a practical impossibility and is certain to end in our fiery deaths.

Or maybe she’s just toying with me.

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Did you take your child to see “Where The Wild Things Are” this weekend? Rachel Aydt did not — she went alone. A writer who teaches journalism at the New School (and blogs at briefplanet.com), Aydt loves the book, but was not sure whether it was right for her 6-year-old. Since I imagine many of you have the same question, here is a guest blog with her thoughts and conclusions:

TOO WILD FOR MY CHILD
By Rachel Aydt

I went to see “Where the Wild Things Are” today, alone. I frequently see films by myself, and expected a large crowd for opening day, even a weekday at 11 A.M.

What I honestly wasn’t expecting, even in Manhattan, was to see class after class of young kids, tethered to teacher after teacher. They’d ditched school to see this picture on its first day. I wondered what their teachers were feeling, watching their students sit through the first desperately intense 20 minutes.

I’m an easy weeper, and so it was that my waterworks kicked in during the first few scenes. I related a little too easily to Max’s mom’s impatience over his totally typical boy behavior; I’ve been trying not to say “don’t” every other sentence with a failure that leaves me ashamed. And I was also tossed back into the confusion of childhood fears and loneliness; not the make-believe kind found in perilous story books, but the real kind that being raised by a single mother in a foreign land brought to the doorstep of my young consciousness.

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Neanderdad is back. By this point I hope he needs little introduction. He is Garrett Rice’s evocation of stumbling through new fatherhood, and in this latest chapter he explores how Dad’s feelings can be bruised when a daughter announces she wants Mommy instead.

We traded off “doing bedtime” at our house during the bedtime years, and with each boy there was a painful stretch when they would cry in protest as I left them with my husband. When Evan was a toddler there was a show on television about a family of cartoon dinosaurs, and a scene where the father tries to take care of the baby so the mother can take a nap. It does not go well, and ends with the baby banging on his father’s head with a metal pot shouting “Not the Mama! Not the Mama!” My husband and I quoted that line a lot during stages when my sons played favorites, but though it kept us laughing, I felt my husband’s pain back then as I feel Neanderdad’s now.

(You can hear a snippet of the original audio here:

Neanderdad’s Night

By Garrett Rice

Neanderdad concentrated so hard that his brow ached. He knew his attention had a tendency to drift, but he was alone today with the girl and he wanted to stay in the moment. He wanted her to know that she was his sole focus. That she was loved. The only distraction in the dwelling was the dog, who had tried to insert himself in their play several times. Neanderdad pushed the beast away.

The girl was playing with her Bitty Baby doll and was explaining to him an important detail about Bitty’s warm relationship to Brown Bear, but not Blue Bear. He now understood that Bitty and Brown Bear were best friends. He had also learned that Blue Bear was bossy and mean. Neanderdad wondered how Blue Bear had managed to create that perception. The doll seemed incapable of being either bossy or mean, with its cheerful face and soft fur.

She gave Bitty Baby a tremendous hug and carefully packed her and Brown Bear into the stroller. Then she rolled around the house with them, pointing out the sights. Neanderdad followed afterward, the outcast Blue Bear dangling from his meaty hand. The dog followed too, creating an odd parade. “That’s the kitchen, Bitty” she said. “That’s the sofa, Brown Bear.” Neanderdad chimed in too, naming items in the house. It was fun. But just when Neanderdad was starting to think things couldn’t be going better, the girl suddenly halted the parade.

“Whose night is it, Daddy?” Read more…

This day will always bring more questions than answers. How to explain to your child what happened on a crystalline morning eight years ago? And if your child is Muslim, those questions have added layers, and more complicated answers. In a guest blog today, Moina Noor (a freelance journalist who blogs about public education at NorwalkNet.com) describes trying to make sense of it for her young son, while still trying to understand it all herself.

Explaining 9/11 to a Muslim Child

By Moina Noor

Recently on the morning drive to school my 8-year-old son asked me a question I’ve been dreading since he was a baby, “Mom, what happened on 9/11?”

Mass murder is impossible to explain to yourself, let alone a child. But how do I, as a parent, explain the slaughter of innocent people in the name of a religion that I am trying to pass on to my boy?

Bilal was just 8 months old when September 11 happened. He was just starting to crawl and put everything in sight into his mouth, and I remember having to peel my gaze away from the television screen and remind myself to keep a watchful eye on where he lay nearby.

After Bilal was born I viewed everything — especially current events — through the lens of parenthood. I knew the world had changed irreparably on 9/11, and while I mourned the innocent and raged against my crazy coreligionists, my nagging anxiety was for my son.

Even in those early surreal hours after the attacks when images of towers falling and long-bearded men in caves flooded the television screen, I knew that Bilal’s childhood would not be like mine.

When I was growing up in suburban Connecticut few people knew much about Muslims, let alone cared. Read more…

Illustration by Barry Falls Play

Summers have stories in a way that’s true of no other season. They tend to contain more firsts — the first time a child dips their feet in the ocean, or catches fireflies, or makes s’mores — or maybe it’s just that summer firsts stick better in our memories.

As this one ends, Lydia Denworth is looking back on what it meant for her children, particularly Alex, whose stories have a little more tension in them than his mother would like.

Jumping Higher

By Lydia Denworth

For years, my youngest son, Alex, who is now six, has watched one of his brothers do gymnastics. Jumping on the trampoline and swinging from the high bar looked like a lot of fun. Every time he was in the gym, Alex asked if he could do gymnastics, too.

Every time, I had to say “no.” Alex is hard of hearing. He has a cochlear implant in his right ear and a hearing aid in his left. He also has a condition called Enlarged Vestibular Aqueduct, or EVA, which means a bump on the head could cause him to lose what hearing remains in his left ear. Gymnastics didn’t seem like a good idea.

But this summer, I surprised myself. I let Alex go to gymnastics camp. When I asked myself how far we could and should go to protect Alex, I found that my answer — my line between fun and danger — had shifted.

Three and a half years ago, after Alex’s hearing loss had been diagnosed, a CT scan revealed that the underlying cause was both a congenital deformity of the inner ears and EVA. “No Contact Sports,” I wrote in my notes when the doctor called with the news. “No soccer, football, karate, scuba diving, etc.”

I hung up and turned to see Alex, then two, and his brothers leaping off the couch and crashing to the floor. Scuba diving was not going to be the problem.

Read more…

Even in a more typical year, parents in schools around the country would be asked to give of their time in the classroom. Or maybe they would be elbowing each other out of the way to be allowed time in the classroom; depends on the parent and the school.

In this particular year, as budgets are being slashed, and school supply lists include ever more things that used to be paid for by the school district –- paper and pens for the teacher, activity fees to pay the electric bill for after-school clubs, even, in some places, contributions toward the salaries of classroom aides -– the relationship of parents to classrooms is even more complex.

Jody Becker, a writer and mother of two young daughters in California, sees each request from the school as a reminder not of how much her children need as students, but how much they have. In a guest post today she explores the widening guilt between the haves and have nots when it comes to education –- and what she plans to do about it.

SEPTEMBER DILEMMA

By JODY BECKER

This year I promise not to be part of the problem. I will not spend hours in my daughter’s over-resourced public school classroom, tripping over other suburban moms to do things like glue a beard onto 33 identical cut-out Abraham Lincolns or listen to competent readers become more fluent, so they sound good on test day. It makes no sense. But I did it last year, and my daughter is going to beg me to do it again. And this year, I am being asked for money, too.

The letter from my daughter’s school has already arrived: due to California’s budget crisis, maintaining arts and other enrichment offerings in this blue ribbon public school means each parent needs to send more money: about $300, please, to keep the programs flowing. Do my kid and her classmates really need more, when so many have so much less? Read more…

Last week brought more than the average number of sad and troubling posts on Motherlode, and a few readers wrote to ask for something a bit lighter.

I think Marc Peacock Brush and Josh Tyson might hit just the right note. The two friends have a band, and before they had children they would get together every Saturday with the goal of recording a song per week. They both became fathers within a month of each other, and their band is now called “New Age Dad.”

They still meet on Saturdays, with Josh’s son, Elias, and Marc’s daughter, Harper, joining in the music making. In a guest post this week, Josh explores the role of music in a child’s life, the role of hobbies in a parent’s life and the joy of introducing your baby to something that you love. As an added bonus, you can go to their website, and hear some of the songs.

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

By JOSH TYSON

Marc is sitting on the couch strumming some chords into the microphone. I’m at the laptop monitoring the guitar on GarageBand. Elias is stomping around the room eating hunks of banana from a plate I set on the ottoman. We don’t have much time to get this song, “Western Anxiety Situation,” built, so Marc is playing the same three chords over and over again to the metronome. I’ll build a loop using the best pass — something that will repeat throughout portions of the song. Suddenly, Elias runs over to the mic and yells “a dib dab, a dab dab doh.” We’ve got our take.

This is a typical Saturday in the life of New Age Dad, the band that Marc and I formed when we were both expectant fathers. My son, Elias, was born about a month before his daughter, Harper, and for those first few months, our recording sessions involved one of us keeping the babies fed and entertained while the other recorded a track. There were also lots of naps, so we had ample headphone time to fine-tune what we’d recorded. Generally, we were able to write and record a song every Saturday.

Now Harper and Elias are very mobile, very busy and very vocal, and accordingly our Saturday sessions have morphed into something more spontaneous and rambunctious. Read more…

An article in this morning’s Books section of The Times, coming on the heels of a post here on Motherlode last week, has me thinking more deeply about something I already think about quite often — a parent’s obligations to a child’s privacy.

The article today, by my colleague Patricia Cohen, is about British author Julie Myerson, whose book “The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story,” was just published in the United States. It is about her son Jake and his descent into drug addiction, and has already caused quite a stir in the U.K., where Myerson has been accused of exploiting the teen’s pain.

Although Myerson has said that Jake approved the manuscript before it was published, he has since told the Daily Mail, “What she has done has taken the very worst years of my life and cleverly blended it into a work of art, and that to me is obscene.”

This comes just after a post by guest blogger Anita Tedaldi, last Thursday, which is still generating heated comments. Tedaldi wrote about her adoption of a boy she gives the pseudonym D., whose special needs and attachment issues were too overwhelming for her family to handle, leading her to terminate the adoption after the child had been her son for 18 months.

Read more…

David Sexton is a software development manager who lives in Hoboken, N.J., with his wife, their 3-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son. When his son was found to have cerebral palsy a few months back, he turned to writing as a way to sort out his thoughts. His first post for Motherlode touched many of you, and he has started a blog with updates on how his family is navigating CP (and life in general) together. Some days, he writes in a guest blog today, are easier than others.

SWIMMING IN THE DARK

By David Sexton

Whenever I have to do something difficult and unavoidable, I find myself thinking of the first night at the overnight camp I attended as a boy. No sooner would we get off the bus and unload our footlockers, then we’d be marched down to the swim area — it was usually dark or getting dark — for our swim test. The counselors knew that we’d be in the water first thing the next day and they wanted to know at once if they had anyone who couldn’t swim well. Something about the beauty and the silence of that wooded lake at dusk together with the dread of hitting the cold water in the dark stuck with me permanently. I knew I could swim, and that I would, but I just hesitated a little at the edge caught between the wonder and the dread.

Coming home from work last week, I was on the verge of something unpleasant and I wasn’t looking forward to the next day. Read more…

Masha Hamilton’s latest novel, 31 Hours, explores what it means to be the parent of a young adult. As I prepare to take my oldest son off to college (more about that next week), the question she raises — in the book and in a guest essay today — is one that has been looping through my brain for months now: after years of protecting our kids, what should we do — and what are we allowed to do — to keep them safe once they are grown?

Frogs on the Highway

By Masha Hamilton

I learned I was pregnant in the midst of covering the intefedah in Gaza and the West Bank. The doctor asked what I did for a living and what I knew about the stages of pregnancy and then he shook his head. “Try to avoid tear gas for the next few months,” he said. I was still so young, and fearless.

The first baby arrived, everything about her perfect — tiny faultless fingernails, the exquisite shape of her head, the little noises she made: pure poetry. I, who detested exclamation points, was reduced to superlatives. Still prone an hour after the C-section in the Jerusalem hospital where she was born, I told my husband I wanted three.

“Hold on,” he said, laughing wryly, enigmatically. “Let’s get used to one first.”

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I have met countless parents who vowed that their children would be omnivores, exposed to all kinds of food from birth, happy to follow their parents palates wherever they might lead. I have met far fewer parents who didn’t default to the few “kid-friendly” foods their particular child actually agreed to eat. Parents who used to see food as nutrition for the soul as well as the soma come to find themselves scarfing rather than savoring, as meals become quick and dirty and often consist of the crusts of whatever junior just had for dinner.

Nicole Sprinkle, a writer living in Manhattan, has decided it does not have to be that way. Maybe life no longer allows the time to wander exotic food markets, or leisurely plan elegant menus, but there is an art (born of desperation) to taking what you find in your kid-friendly pantry and creating an adult-friendly meal, she says. She calls them “Crazy Mom Meals.” After you read about one of her concoctions, use the comments to write about similar determined-to-eat-like-a-grown-up meals you have cooked.

My Crazy Mom Meals

By NICOLE SPRINKLE

I am a mother of a two-year-old. I work full-time. My husband is self-employed. I love to eat. I love good food. Before I had a child, I spent a lot of time making sure I went to the hottest new restaurants in New York City. I even dated a famous New York chef for years. Now, when I go out, it’s almost always to the one decent restaurant on our block, where I predictably order either a burger (for lunch), Croque Monsieur (for brunch) or Angel hair cilantro/lime pasta with chicken (for dinner).

I also like to cook. Before the baby, I’d experiment with recipes from Epicurious, Martha Stewart, Ina Garten — sometimes even combining elements from all of them to come up with my own creative version of a dish. I actually once made a chocolate raspberry layer cake for my husband’s birthday using part of a recipe from Martha Stewart, part from Julia Child, and part from The Joy of Cooking. And it looked pretty and tasted divine!

Ok, so that was then. This is now. Read more…