Floating Upstream: Sunday Slivers, 5/15/11: From the Outside

Beautiful new bench for the art table, handcrafted and airlifted by Bob, all the way from Montana.

I've been harboring the ~~secret suspicion~~ unspoken certainty for a while now that parenting in the early twenty-first century in the Silicon Valley is a heavier sort of affair than parenting in the nineteen-seventies in the Eastern Block was. It's not that our parents raised us negligently, or willfully did things to our disadvantage, or failed to learn things that were available to learn. But, unlike us, they did not negotiate heaps of daily advice from expert and amateur parenting gurus on public media and online forums, had no choice but to send us to the local daycare and elementary school which were run by people whose understanding of early-childhood development was never questioned, and rarely, if ever, battled parental guilt because they were not spending money or time on the next trendy activity that would give their children the notch on their toddler resume that would guarantee their success in high school and beyond.

I spend most days choosing to trust my instincts about how to manage my kids' lives so that they feel happy, confident, and loved; for the most part, I try not to manage. I feel good about it some days, and not so good on others. I tell myself that trying hard is the best each of us can do, and trying hard is what every single parent around me does. Ours is not a part of the world where parents can be accused of being slackers. It's not a place where sending your kid to public or private school is an easy or casual decision. It's not a place where choosing Montessori over Reggio-Emilia over Stratford is a flip of the coin made over a midnight glass of beer. Everyone works hard, and everyone does what is best for their children. We think hard about being parents, and, I suspect, we often over-think it.

I've been pondering all this over the last few days, because a visit from one of my dearest friends made me feel for a brief while as though a magnifying lens was placed over our daily life. For a short few days, everything we did and said as parents seemed subject to examination, not because we were being judged, but because we had chosen to show Bob, who had never visited us since the birth of children, what our life is like from dawn to dusk. It was a novel and fascinating exercise.

I found myself silently trying to justify letting my boy walk around all day with a hair clip that he pilfered from his sister, when on a normal day I wouldn't have given it a moment's thought.

I wondered if Bob thought a trip all the way to Monterey was worth it if all we did was watch our kids play in the Splash Zone and then lunch with a view of the ocean, before galloping through a few exhibits. Were we giving their needs too much priority, and ignoring ours? Did we engage with them enough at the Aquarium, or were we mostly shepherding them?

He initiates play with another child,

and she actually shares.

They are good kids.

I tried to look through his visitor's eyes, and judge whether, in his view, we live in a friendly 'playborhood,' because a spontaneous playdate over a stomp rocket does actually happen. I found myself giving the definition of 'playborhood,' and wondered whether he thought it's all an affectation of the rich.

I asked myself whether he thought that, because we live in a place where people choose to drive Audi and Lexus SUVs, our children's values will be warped for life.

I watched him observe the bizarre Google culture during a visit on Bring Your Child to Work Day, and I wondered what this sort of work space communicated to someone born before the end of WWII. Was he fascinated by it, puzzled, disgusted? Did he think it gave our children the wrong idea that life is a fanciful playground, when it is not?

She's a doggie.

For much of the time, though, I also watched him observe two kids who are a joy to have around.

Ready for school. She has an uncontrollable compulsion to imitate.

One who just learned how to slide down the big pole all by himself, and could not be prouder:

and another who has more personality than the other three members of her family combined:

This shirt sums her up.

I watched her lean over and purr "Hiiii, Bob!..." fifty times each day, and I listened with him, as she recited with me every Mother Goose rhyme that we have ever read. Unbeknownst to us, she has been memorizing the little rhymes, and she obliges unfailingly in our newest game by giving the last word of every line:

Mommy. Yankee Doodle went to...

Raya. town!

Mommy. Riding on a...

Raya. pony!

Mommy. Put a feather in his...

Raya. hat!

Mommy. And called it maca...

Raya. roni!

It is no exaggeration that she could do this exercise with every one of the two dozen poems in our most recent favorite of the many Mother Goose editions we've borrowed from the library. She'll also sing good chunks of Itsy Bitsy Spider, and today sang, without a prompt, the whole first verse of Baa Baa Black Sheep. She speaks little English, but she certainly knows her English poetry.