A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

I almost always enjoy finding out that someone reads my posts. We are social creatures and it's not enough to just call out into the darkness; part of the pleasure comes in knowing someone out there has understood and answered back. I write about my experiences with anxiety and mental health care -- including medication -- because I am living them. But also because I believe strongly that we can't de-stigmatize mental health issues if no one who has them is ever willing to out herself.  I write about my experiences as a parent -- and a child. I write about my experiences with race, gender, economic class, status, religion, hierarchy, and social norms because it is only through thinking and writing about the world that I ever understand even a small slice of it -- and my relationship to it. I write about politics and policy because these are the intellectual pursuits that fire me. If there's one moment to sum up my adult life it's of my 21-year-old self wandering...

My youngest is an ardent practitioner of attachment childing. He wants me to "come be my friend"  beside him in the bed while he falls asleep, and I am usually happy to comply. As a working parent I cherish these nighttime moments and the sweet, informative conversations that bubble up out of children trying to procrastinate sleep. Mid-day queries to my oldest of "How was your day?" are typically answered with a curt "nuffink" as though he were a British hooligan trying to avoid interrogation with conversationally-incorrect answers. Bedtime discussions of the same question, however, yield all kinds of enthusiastic answers, usually now about whales and sharks much as it used to be about dinosaurs and trains, but also about his friends and what books he likes to read at school and what he does during "circle time." My youngest likes these conversations too but goes far beyond requiring that I simply exclaim interest in his stories. He demand...

As those of you who had to listen to me crying at my desk every day for six months know, 2013 was not a banner year for me, mental health-wise. So in 2014 I was prescribed anti-anxiety medication -- or as Siri just transcribed it, "anti-exciting medication," which is appropriate since it made me less excitable (volatile). It was life-changing. I could function again, I could think rationally (and empathetically) again, I was happy. The only downside is that I gained 30 poun ds in nine months. Having been both skinny/sad and fat/happy, I can say definitively that I would rather be fat/happy. (Also, one of the anxieties that anti-anxiety medication alleviates, I've discovered, is anxiety about being fat.) But when the psych suggested that I might not be anxious, just crazy, she switched me to a different medication that did not have the weight-gain side effect. The jury's still out on how well this new drug is working (I might be both anxious AND crazy, after al...

James comes into kindergarten with a very different skill set than most of his peers at our neighborhood school, a skill set that seems to hold a mirror up to our family, reflecting our generation, our economic class, our culture, even our personal quirks. He knows his letters, alphabet sounds, numbers, sight words. He knows every train part ever made, from the couplings to the traction rods, and can describe to you how steam and diesel engines differ in their production of energy. He knows every dinosaur ever discovered (or so it seems) and pronounces their names better than I do. He easily types "dinosaur" into the iPad, using it with better skill than most adults. But he can't write his name or put on his shoes and he will NOT draw. He's always had parents culturally willing and financially able to give him maximum attention, to read to him, to facilitate with books and videos and flashcards and toys and trips to far-flung museums his intellectual obsessions, but...

For better or worse (and without my ever having been entirely cognizant of it until this moment), our little family has been largely free to operate autonomously for years, our schedules shaped (but not controlled) by the predictable waxes and wanes of Congress, but little else. And cantankerous Congress -- where nothing of importance happens before 10 am and the most critical votes each year aren't cast till after the bars are sweeping out their last diehards for the night -- has been a good fit for a family of committed night owls, heretics, and contrarians. Now the sweet lull of lazy August is interrupted by a new, unfathomable bureaucracy with its early-morning attendance, its authority figures of questionable English ("Ima?" I was tempted to ask the teacher of my child) who seem to radiate dislike for my son, its seemingly arbitrary rules, its totalitarian demands on time and financial resources. The "damned independent" streak noted (approvingly) by my ...