Race 2012 Post #2: “A Like-Me Presidential Candidate”

The following is my second (technically third) post for the blogging project affiliated with Race 2012: A Conversation about Race in America, the PBS Documentary that airs tonight, right after the presidential debate, and will be rebroadcast on October 19th.  Check your local listings; the air times are approximate and different everywhere.  Read more details about the blogging project on my friend Monica Medina‘s website.  Tune in!

“A Like-Me Presidential Candidate”

You are on the subway, on your way to work, the train hurtling through the tunnels, when suddenly it screeches to a halt.
“We are experiencing delays,” the conductor announces over the aged, whistling speaker system. “There is a sick passenger on the train directly ahead of us.  We expect to be moving shortly.”  Maybe he expects to be moving shortly because he’s new in town.  You, however, have been riding the subways for 20 years.  You know that “a sick passenger” on the train ahead equals roughly a 45 minute wait.  So you settle in.  You sigh, you look around the train car for a kindred spirit with whom to make eye contact, share a sigh and a headshake.  You’re a woman in your thirties.  Chances are the one with whom you make eye contact is also a woman, also in her thirties, or else forties, or twenties.

Or maybe you’re not heading to work; you’re going to the zoo and have your child in a stroller.  Your child fusses with the sudden motionlessness of the train, the noise of the speaker.  Some riders glare at you as the baby gets louder: maybe it’s not your fault we’ve stopped, but it is your child making the wait less pleasant.  But now a woman, clearly a mother herself, smiles at you.  It helps because you guess that she’s been in your shoes.  Another woman offers a baggie of crackers she usually saves for her child in situations like these.  She asks how old your baby is and tells you a story of her child at that age.  And just because of who you are and what you represent: a mother with a child, you have a community.

Your child is calm now, munching away on crackers.  You look up to notice that two elderly black men who did not get on the train together, who were not sitting near one another, seem to have introduced themselves and struck up a conversation.  Now they are laughing, warmly, with the acknowledgement of some shared experience.  They are too far away for you to hear what they’re saying but you can feel it between them: community.

And those college age girls, both dressed in black, eyes outlined in thick kohl—now they’ve exchanged the eye roll, the headshake.  Community.  You’re like me; I’m like you.  We’ll be here for a while.  But at least we’re a we sharing this nightmare.  And that we-ness, belonging to a group defined as much by who we are as who we’re not, really helps you get by sometimes.

Sometimes the we-ness comes from age, gender, being a parent or not a parent, sometimes from religion, class or marital status and sometimes from race.

Ah, race.  I see it as just one of many aspects of the person, but it’s often the one you see first, the one that’s most loaded, hardest to talk about and therefore the one I’ve been asked to discuss in the context of this current election.

How much does racial solidarity impact how we vote?  How important is it to have a “Like-me” president?   And when a candidate reflects our race, are we more likely to approve of him?  Are we more likely to find fault with a candidate of a different race?

In some ways, this election, like the last, is all about identity.  The issues that matter to a voter depend on his or her personal history,  socioeconomic status, education level and yes, in some cases, race.  Each of us wants our president to suit who we see ourselves as being.

Last time around each ticket had its own flavor.   We had the dynamic, black community-organizer-attorney and the older white guy with down home appeal.  On the other side was the aging, white war hero and the plain-spoken hockey mom who said things like “you betcha”?  Which ticket felt like YOU?  Were you one of Sarah Palin’s Mama Grizzlies?  Or were you an Obama Mama?  Were you a member of the chai-drinking, tree-hugging liberal elite?  Or were you a gun-loving bible thumper?  Wherever you stood, whatever the candidates’ styles and values, right there in all our faces was this brand new development that meant something in history and to most everyone in the country as well.  The next president might be a black man.  A big deal, no matter how you felt about it.

Before 2008, only white, straight, Christian men had the option of picking a “like-me” candidate.  But with the last election, for the first time in history, it seemed that people of other descriptions might get that choice in the near future.  Those who supported a “liberal agenda” (and I mean liberal in a good way, going by the dictionary definition which is something like “applauding progress”) came in all persuasions, all races, orientations and religions.  Many saw themselves in Obama.

For affluent, educated blacks, Obama was more than a black candidate, he was a stereotype buster.  He made very public the image of a black man that we identified with and wanted the country to see.  Educated, well-spoken, passionate and above all, a family man through and through.  That the number one criticism of Obama, as he campaigned through the grain belt and the rust belt, was that he was too elite, too aloof, didn’t understand the concerns of the “working man” (remember Joe the plumber?).  For all of us who’d been living in the shadow of the angry-lazy-violent black stereotype, this was vindicating.  So you guys don’t want him because he’s too smart to be president?

Jump ahead four years.  It’s 2012 and we’ve been living with a biracial president for four years.  The fact of his race is no longer a novelty, but  there are those who still see the president first and formost as a black man.  He has been accused of hating white people, and at the same time, due to his mixed heritage, of not being black enough.

In any case race still matters in this country.  I know this when I Google words like African American, or black women, or interracial families.  I come up with blogs where strong opinions are voiced on everything race-related.  Some of it’s intense: white-separatist, Afro-centric, and everything in between.

Alas, we are not a post-racial society—as some jumped the gun in declaring, back in 2008, popping open the champagne bottles, tossing the confetti, cheering not just the election of the first African American president, but also the end of the Age of Race as we know it.   I think it was foolish to believe that electing a black president might somehow make racism a moot issue.  The higher any minority rises, the more of a threat he is to bigoted haters, the more vocal those haters will become.  All over the blogosphere are so called “patriots” who “love” the country and are heartbroken to that anyone with roots in the African continent should be running it.  They openly admit to hating Obama because of his race.  They call him horrible names, and the caricatures—don’t get me started.  But I believe those so called “patriots” (who flaunt their rabid disrespect for the president of our country) are on the fringe.

For the many of us who want him around for another four years, I think it’s less about Obama’s race these days than what he stands for. This time, it’s about the president’s policies.  How do you think he handled the mess he was handed?  Do you believe Obama truly saved us from another Depression?  And what about his approach abroad?  Do we want to keep him at the helm going forward?   Regardless of race, I do.

I won’t vote for Mitt Romney—not because he is white or Mormon or rich.  I won’t vote for Romney because I have no idea who he really is.  I don’t believe a word he says; I don’t trust him.  And maybe I think it’s cool that the president is biracial like me, but it’s not why I’m voting for him.  I’m voting for him because his worldview—not his skintone—matches mine.

Lady Gaga: Eating Disorder Aftermath in the Spotlight

When I first heard about Lady Gaga, it was from my daughter, who kept singing Bad Romance and Alejandro and Edge of Glory, making me play the radio stations that played these songs until I have to say I was fairly addicted to them myself.  The girl is talented.

Next, I began to see photographs of Lady Gaga all over the place, particularly the supermarket and the waiting area at the Counseling Center where I worked, where People Magazine was an absolute staple.  Her crazy outfits and makeup didn’t faze me, seeing as I grew up in the heyday of Boy George, Grace Jones, Robert Smith, Cyndi Lauper and, yeah, everyone in the eighties.  What I found alarming about Lady’s photographs were how skinny she was.

Maybe she doesn’t look terrifyingly thin to you in the above photograph.  But consider that she’s five feet one inch tall, and proportionately looks like a 6 foot supermodel.  If you look this thin in photographs and you’re this short, you’re really skinny, often by unnatural means.  I know this from experience.  Here I am at 18.  I was struggling with a form of anorexia at the time.  I look too thin, in my opinion, but I was somehow not considered emaciated.  (I’m just two inches taller than Gaga.)

Given my own experience in the ballet world, where skinny was the norm and people got there any way they could, given my own eating disordered past, any time I see photographs of extremely thin models and celebrities, I can’t help wondering: is that starved-looking girl okay?  Is she just naturally like that because she’s six feet tall and seventeen?  Or is she struggling?  Does she slave for hours on the elliptical or the treadmill?  Does she limit her caloric intake to harrowingly low numbers?  Does she rely on illegal drugs to keep her body humming away while failing to notice the need for food?

Lady Gaga is young, so I didn’t jump to any conclusions right away, though of course I suspected there was something going on.  Pop stars have access to cocaine, which keeps you rail thin and hyped up (and on a crash course for, well, crashing).  Young pop stars have youth—which is always great for weight maintenance–possibly good genes–good jeans too, for that matter.  But seeing as Gaga was a rich, successful celebrity, I wasn’t especially worried about her.

Then she disappears and gains twenty-five pounds which I have to say, probably brings her into the range of healthy.  (Yes, it’s true.  It may look smashing in a bikini, but being seriously underweight, as physicians will attest, puts your health at risk.)

Be that as it may, the media was abuzz with reports of Lady Gaga “ballooning,” the tabloids temporarily relegating Kate Middleton’s posing nude and/or sporting an alleged “baby bump” to the second page.

I know, when celebrities gain or lose weight, it’s always big news, because we’re all weight obsessed and starstruck.  We love to know that stars are human just like the rest of us, but at the same time there’s this special American brand of schadenfreude, this glee when misfortune befalls the outrageously fortunate.  In any case, I must state for the record that this:

is not a photograph of a fat person.  I’ll own, it is a picture of a woman in a really silly outfit photographed from a less-than-flattering angle.  But fat?  Really now.

In interviews, Gaga confessed: she has struggled all her life with eating disorders.  Lamenting the caloric bonanza of the food at her father’s restaurant, Gaga confessed that she stays out of New York to avoid the place, claiming she needs to be where she can “drink green juice,” safe from temptation.  Gaga, whose album, Born This Way, celebrates individuality and loving oneself, warts and all, is clearly not one of those very rare souls who is an effortless size double zero.  Still, until the much touted twenty-five came on, she’d appeared in public to be just that size.

As Huffington Post blogger, Michelle Konstantinovsky puts it:

“Mixed messages much? While I wholeheartedly appreciate the rare transparency, I can’t help but wish the “eat less, exercise more” ideal had never been blasted out to so many undeniably impressionable fans. Moreover, I wish Gaga had never subjected herself to fitting a narrow, predetermined pop star mold if she truly hadn’t been born that way.”

The mixed messages continue.  On one hand, Gaga says she’s not a bit bothered by the “extra” weight; referring to the curves she says her boyfriend prefers.  On the other hand, says she’s dieting hard to lose it.

But I don’t blame her for saying one thing and doing another.  I do not fault a young, way-too-famous 26 year old, maybe-or-maybe-not-ex-bulimic for being confused about the meaning of food, size and hunger in her life.  I give this girl a break.  And hope she gets some gentle, supportive help from an eating disorders specialist soon.  The good news is that Lady Gaga has begun The Body Revolution, a campaign on her website inviting fans to share their body struggles in the interest of healing.  Let’s hope it helps.

Recovering from an eating disorder is so challenging.  When you are recovering from bulimia especially, when you are even at the stage of considering recovering from bulimia (the lingo is “I’m trying to stop,” or “I’m thinking about stopping”), you have no idea how to begin, unless you are in very good treatment.  You don’t understand food, you don’t understand what hunger is, you have to learn everything from the beginning.  The result is often weight gain.  Sometimes significant weight gain.  I say often, not always, because I can’t find the statistic, but I can’t think of a single case when this was not the result.  Food is scary, eating is scary, mirrors and scales are scary.  I was only able to recover when I looked in the mirror and said to myself: I would rather be overweight than bulimic.  Did I mean it?  Was it that simple?  More on that in another post, but I was on my way to being free.*

Whether you are anorexic, bulimic, or a tidy combination known in the therapy world as EDNOS (eating disorder not otherwise specified), the addiction to thinness—however elusive your idea of thinness is—and the coinciding dread of fat can be paralyzing.  You communicate mixed messages to yourself all day long.  Food is too good for me.  I’m too good for food. In addition, you have lost your connection to food, lost your sense of nurturing your body and virtually shut down your metabolism.  When you go from drinking only green juice, or in my case, consuming only apples and an occasional cup of popcorn, (throwing up anything over and above) to eating normally, you will get much fatter than you were before.  I put it in those terms because that is how eating disorder sufferers think.  This is your mindset: To have fat on my body is to be fat.

For me, challenging that way of thinking took three years of cognitive-behavioral therapy (which ultimately is how I overcame my illness).  But how dare the media inflict that same kind of language on the public, especially young girl fans of Lady Gaga.  And imagine–just imagine–what it must be like to live the journey of eating disorder recovery in the public eye.

Lady Gaga has been called a publicity hound (and worse).  To be fair, you probably wouldn’t wear a dress made of meat if getting attention weren’t your thing.  But she’s lived an eating disorder, and possibly, privately still lives it.  It’s a life of fear and ambivalence, no matter what the crowd sees on stage.   So even if she puts nearly nude photos of herself on her site post weight gain, publicly “embracing her curves,” she’s still got a struggle ahead.  Especially if she’s still dieting to get “her body back.”  (Which one is she embracing again?)

Here I am, by the way, after my own twenty-five pound weight gain (I’m far right, in the sunglasses).

Without those essential pounds I doubt I would have my children or my life.  Here’s to “ballooning.”

 

Race 2012: A Conversation about Race and Politics in America. Post #1: The Colored Drug Store

I am honored to be participating in a blogging project for the upcoming PBS documentary Race 2012: A Conversation About Race & Politics in America, airing Tuesday, October 16 (check local listings). The program takes a provocative look at race amidst the 2012 election and beyond.
(Click on the link above to “Like” the program on Facebook and follow it on Twitter.) Many thanks to my friend and fellow blogger, Monica Medina for inviting me!

                       

Though I did an earlier post about President Obama, The Would-be-Master-of Compromise, which is now included on the Race 2012 site, the following is my first official contribution to this conversation.  I will be doing three posts, examining the idea of racial solidarity, how members of historically oppressed groups champion one another, how we feel when barriers start coming down, and this sentiment’s impact on the presidential election. The post below, entitled “The Colored Drugstore” begins with the grandmother I never met, and ends with the event of my voting for Barack Obama in 2008.  

“You be sure and go to the colored drug store, now,” my grandmother said, watching her boys head out the door, referring to the only drugstore in town run by a fellow African American.

Walgreens was close by and bigger, with more of a selection.  Still, my father and his brothers did as they were told.  Whatever their mother needed, no matter how urgently, it wouldn’t have mattered if the colored drug store was in the next county.   You patronized your own.  If a black man opened a business, that was where you took your business.  It was all about solidarity and survival.

The year was 1935.  The Great Depression was in full swing and you could bet there were plenty of white men down on their luck who’d have some choice words for a black man running his own business.  They might even have had some choice eggs to throw, if food hadn’t been so scarce.  As it was, there were threats, there were thugs with bats.  It took a brave black man to open a store.  Which was why, as far as my grandmother Albertina was concerned, it was the duty of every black consumer around to support him.  To shop at Walgreens was a slap in the face to your entire race.

There were no Jim Crow laws in Chicago like they had in the south.  My father attended an integrated public elementary school.  Later he was one of a handful of black students at a predominantly white high school, where no one especially objected to his presence, though all the black students had to have a niche, a way to stand out and prove themselves of value to the student body.  Dad was too small to make a name for himself on one of the sports teams as some of his friends did, but wound up using his wit and artistic talent as the chief cartoonist of the school paper.  Dad and the other black students looked out for one another, just as my grandmother looked out for the owner of the colored drugstore.

Though my father knew blacks who had been chased and beaten for “showing their color” in the wrong part of town—though my father had been chased more than once himself—he did not grow up separate from, hating, or even mistrusting whites in general.  But he had internalized the notion that your black brothers and sisters would have your back. You should have theirs too.  Just in case.

My father married my mother, a Jewish woman who shared his views, also a member of a culture where oppression had strengthened tribal bonds.  An anecdote:  sometime in the 1940s, my mother’s cousin came running into the house with a joke to tell his mother.

“Guess what?” He said, “A boy down the street just got run over by a steamroller, and they folded up his body and slid it under the door!”

His mother, my mother’s aunt, looked up from the stove, concerned about one thing: “Was he Jewish?”

The punch line was of course spoiled, but it hadn’t mattered to my great aunt.  What mattered was that no Jewish boy had been injured.

Group solidarity—members of an oppressed group supporting and championing one another—was not, is not, limited to blacks and Jews.  Women have it too.  We cheer when one of our number breaks through the glass ceiling, or otherwise gains acceptance into turf previously reserved for men.  My Latina friends cheered for Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court (well, I did too).  Every group has this sentiment to one degree or another.  People have a tendency to stand up for those like them, even if there are fundamental differences of opinion within the group.

For blacks, however, it is more complicated.  Attitudes toward blacks and blackness: black speech, black features, black culture, are often charged with a combination of fear, admiration and repulsion.  The stereotypes of black Americans as violent, dumb and lazy—perpetuated on television and film (though I believe this is improving)—are some of the most insidious around.   For most blacks, these stereotypes are fictions with no bearing on their lives.  Most blacks I know are proud of who they are, their group identification compatible with their sense of individuality.  But there are some young people who internalize the stereotypes in order to feel accepted, claiming that successful blacks are “acting white.”  So that when a black person succeeds, she risks claims that she has left her people behind.  This came up with the president in 2008; there were questions circling as to whether  Obama was ‘Black Enough.’ This is why many believe that it is important for successful blacks to remain connected to the community, to be a role model, and to acknowledge: I am one of you and one of you has made it to where I am. (More on this in a later post.)

“Breaking the color barrier” was a phrase I heard a lot while I was growing up, from my parents and their friends.  Jesse Owens,  Jackie Robinson, Marian Anderson, Hattie McDaniel, Paul Robeson, Thurgood Marshall, Arthur Ashe.  Blacks who went where no black man or woman had gone before, adding color to their field, breaking ground for others.  Both my parents rooted for these black pioneers, hailing their presence on the world stage as game-changing.

My father, who died in 1995, never imagined that there would be a black president.

Once a year, on my father’s birthday, I have this ritual.  Late at night, by the light of a candle, I take out his picture, play his favorite music and I give him an update.  I tell him about my life, my family, but also the world.  I give him current events he’d be interested in.  I tell him things he’d get a huge kick out of.  Like his grandchildren.  Like the Williams Sisters (he played tennis himself).  Films and books he would have loved.  The fact that two of his friends—unlikely compadres because of their different backgrounds—met and became bosom buddies at Dad’s own shiva.  I talk about the adventures my mother has had since he’s been gone; the trips she’s taken, the friends she’s made. I tell him about the internet, all the things it allows us to do: from Google searches to blogging.  These things would amaze and amuse him if he were here to see them all.

On his birthday in 2008, I told him about Obama.  I said, there’s a black man running for president, Dad.  And I think he might win.  I got teary saying it aloud, imagining what Dad  would think if he could really hear me.

On election day itself, I waited to vote until both my kids were out of school so that I could bring them with me into the booth.  I wanted them to see me help make history.  And, as I pressed the red button (those big cranks were already a thing of the past), registering my vote for Obama, I thought of my dad and began to cry.  This made my children laugh; they still can’t understand the concept of crying when you are emotional and happy, not sad.  Finally, my son—then five—sobered up.

“I know why you’re crying,” he said.  “Because Barack Obama is brown like Grandpa Mel.”

I hugged him, hugged them both. “Well, something like that,” I said.

On Dad’s next birthday, in 2009, I said, Guess what Dad?  The president of the United States is a black man.

My father’s sense of solidarity would not have spared the President from Dad’s sharp political scrutiny, any more than my father’s pride in the accomplishments of black artists and musicians spared them his occasionally harsh artistic judgments.  But while Dad might have frowned in disagreement at some of the President’s choices, nodded in approval at others, the fact that Obama had broken the ultimate color barrier—well, that would have just made my father grin.

Announcing My New Practice Website

Two and a half years ago, I took a leave from my psychotherapy practice to write and be home with my children in the after school hours.  Now, as mentioned in this blog, I have begun to see clients again.  Please visit my new website:

http://rosenbergtherapy.com

Lisa W. Rosenberg, L.C.S.W.  to learn more about the work I do.  In the blog section of the new site, I’ve reposted some of the more therapeutically-oriented pieces from this blog, as well as added a few new ones.

Of course, I will continue this as my regular blog, posting there occasionally as my practice takes shape.

Snapshot of Innocence

Who is that kid?  No it’s not another picture of my daughter.  It’s another child I care for quite deeply, actually.  I’ll give you a hint.  It was taken in 1970.

Yes, it’s me.  Looking pretty pleased with myself, my life and the mess I’ve made of my milk and strawberry ice cream.  My best friend Claire still lived on the ninth floor of my apartment building, I still went to the Manhattan Country School.  My favorite toy was a big, green and white corrugated cardboard puppet stage and I still believed I was going to get a dog and a baby sister one day, somehow.  I didn’t hate my hair.  I didn’t think I was fat.

The reason I love this picture is that I can see in my eyes all of the above.  I can see how safe I felt, how trusting and truly innocent I was.  When I look at that picture, I see the good, sweet, silly little girl I was and it makes me want to be good—to her and for her.

I know the expression “inner-child” has been used ad nauseam, fodder for cheap sit-com laughs for more than thirty years, but there’s something about remembering who we were as children, and how we were back then—that goes a long way toward banishing negativity in our present lives.

If you can, go and get a picture of yourself when you were little, say four or five.  Still the age of magical thinking, but old enough to have the language to order your thoughts, and an idea of what was going on around you.  Look at the picture for a minute.  A whole minute and see what you’re feeling.  Imagine that the child can see you and your life.  What conversation might you have?  I know what you wouldn’t say.  You wouldn’t tell the child she’s stupid or worthless or an idiot or a fat pig or ugly or incompetent.  You’d never tell her: “I can’t believe you screwed that up!”  “What’s wrong with you?” or anything so harsh.

I hope you don’t talk to your big-adult self that way either.  But sadly, a lot of people do.  Not all the time, but sometimes and sometimes is enough to count as beating yourself up.  Now think back to the last time you put yourself down, called yourself dumb or fat or anything intended to hurt yourself.  Imagine what you’d do if you saw someone treating the child in the photograph that way.  You’d probably defend the kid.  You’d stand up to the bully on the child’s behalf.  And finally you’d try to rectify the situation by building the child up, telling her something positive and hopeful.  You’d work at it until you saw her smile again.

Why?  Because children are all potential, all hope, all beautiful dreams.  No matter what their circumstances, they are blameless and deserving of the chance to be and do anything.  As adults, we have to recognize life’s and our own limitations.  We set more realistic goals, but strive, hopefully, to be the best we can at what suits us.  Sometimes there are false starts, unfortunate career choices, misguided relationships.  From every experience, good and bad, you learn and use that knowledge the next time you’ve got a choice to make.

I love that everyone is writing letters to past versions of themselves these days.  I think it’s such a wonderful mix of reflection and self acceptance.  Oprah had a whole section of her May 2012 issue devoted to  letters written by celebrities to their younger selves (hers is first).  And there’s the upcoming Dear Teen Me, to be released in October, edited by Miranda Kenneally and E. Kristin Anderson, an anthology of YA authors’ letters to teens they once were.

All these letters are full of advice and reassurance: It’ll get better, don’t eat so much sugar, don’t smoke, have more fun.  The idea is to look back tenderly at your old self, nurture Kid You with the perspective Grown-up You has gained over the years.  Since we’re generally nicer and more patient with children than we are with adults, this might be a step toward showing yourself love.

When I’ve done trauma work—with teens and young adults who were victimized as children— there is a visualization exercise we do.  The following is a generic, sketch-description (and note that this kind of exercise is never done too soon in the therapy, never too early in a support group).

Close your eyes and imagine yourself a small child again, at the time when [the abuse] took place.  Remember yourself, your room.  Tell me some of the details, what toys are around? What’s on the walls?  Where are you in the room?  Remember the place where [the abuse] happened.  Tell me what is happening.  Now, I want you to choose someone from any time period in your life—even the present—an adult who is strong and loyal and can protect and defend you.  Now bring that person back with you.  Let that person protect you and stop [the abuse/abuser]. (Can you tell me what’s happening?  How the protecting adult stops [the trauma]? 

Now, Can you tell me who it is that saves you?

More than once, when I did this exercise, either with an individual or with a group, the answer to the last question was:

“MYSELF.  That’s who saves me.  Myself as an adult, how I am now.”

There is something very powerful in the notion of you—the grownup—saving your past self.  Only you can be that loyal to you.

You are not that child anymore.  You are not reliant on other adults to guide you, nurture you and cheer you on.  (Maybe you’re parenting kids of your own, caring for your own parents at the same time.)  But that child is still part of your identity.  You carry her with you always.  Remember her: the hope she had, the small joys and big dreams, no matter how much they’ve changed over the years.  You can honor her by being true to your current goals, your current dreams, by believing in yourself.

So have standards for yourself, for your work, for your parenting and treatment of others and care for the environment.  But don’t make those standards impossibly high, and don’t chastise yourself on those days when you fall a little bit short.  Instead, look at the picture, look into the child’s eyes and believe you deserve the same love she did.

The Story of Your Identity

Mom, Writer, Therapist, Wife, Self …

My blog has shifted a little in the nine months since it began.  I’m writing more and more about parenting, less lately about body image.  My Mom-identity—as multifaceted as that is—is really dominant lately.  I’m restarting my therapy practice, so I’ll be home less—which, ironically, is why motherhood is so much on my writing-mind right now.  I’m aware of the upcoming changes, preparing to miss being home as much as I am now, yet exhilarated by the idea of all the adventures my kids will have to share with me when we’re together.   In any case, my mom-self has been driving this blog lately.  So today I thought I’d go back to basics—and do a post about identity itself.

The subject of identity is so broad; so much has been written on it.  There’s gender identity, racial and religious identity, national identity.   Your identity comes, not just from the place you live in, but also from your place in the family.   Were you the parentified first-born?   Were you the “troubled middle child?” Were you the baby?

Think about your roles too.  How different you are with your colleagues, with your friends, your spouse, your children.  Do you surprise yourself by regressing every time you visit your parents’ home?   Or maybe you manage an office full of employees, yet have to stand on your head while singing Old MacDonald just to get your toddler to try a single mouthful of peas.

Children have different identities too.  Think of the little girl who’s quiet and shy at school, but a wild, silly cut-up at home?  She’s cautious in the school environment where “good” behavior is stressed, then lets loose where she knows she’s safest.  (Both sides to her are normal and healthy.  You only worry when she seems anxious and withdrawn in the place where she’s usually at ease.)  It’s good to be flexible, adapting the different sides of you to the situation at hand.

In addition to being a mother, I am a daughter, a wife, a writer.  I am a therapist, a friend, a former dancer.   I’m the old friend who makes you laugh. I’m a city kid, an only child, a Biracial Jew, and a member of two different PTAs.  My identity is made of all these pieces and more.

Heidi W. Durrow, the author of Bellwether Prize winning The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, a favorite biracial author (right up there with Zadie Smith) describes her identity in an NPR interview as “a story.”  She is talking about her parents’ backgrounds, how they met, how she grew up–how all that added up to who she is today.   I love this description.  I believe we are all stories.

When I was doing my post-grad work at the Ackerman Institute, we studied Gregory Bateson and the Milan Group and learned about “Circular Questioning,”  also the work of David Epston and Michael White on Narrative Therapy or Re-storying.  We’d encourage families to tell the stories of their problems, asking for different perspectives from the different members present.  Sometimes a client would have difficulty breaking out of a destructive behavioral pattern and we’d find this linked to an inner personal narrative.

“I’m the lazy one in the family,” or “I’ve always been the trouble maker.”

We’d ask, “Who in the family might have a different description of you?”  “Who might tell another story?”

A pause, some thought.  “Well Grandpa always said I was a late bloomer, a diamond in the rough.”

The idea was that thinking about yourself in a new way stretches your identity and opens up new doors.

Sometimes you get to tell the story of your identity; sometimes it comes from others you know.  Sometimes it’s something pinned on you that you take issue with.  For example, when one sister is called “the beauty” and the other is called “the brains.”   No matter how unfair or limiting those designations might be, they are still part of each sister’s identity–if only as something she’ll want to break free from one day.

Sometimes the part of your identity that feels most difficult to bear, or most threatened or most outnumbered, is the one you’re most aware of.  For example, if you’re the only woman in a room full of men, if you’re the only grown-up in a mini-van full of rowdy tweens, the thing that sets you apart is the identity you’re most connected to.

Which parts of you come into play the most?  Which piece of your identity is dominant right now?

Raising Scout: Why a Little Old-Time Danger is Good for Kids

When my friends and my husband lament the regimented life-style of kids today—the lessons, the arranged play-dates—reminiscing about the freedom of their 1970s rural or suburban childhoods, where “we ran outside, found our friends and played until our mothers yelled at us to come home for dinner,” I just nod, half wishing I’d grown up like that, half glad I didn’t.

Other people’s stories of childhood, the freedom, the excitement that took place beneath the radar of parents, always seem to involve trees, long shadows, mysterious sounds in the dark woods, and secrets whispered about nearby graveyards.  I listen to my sister-in-law’s harrowing tales of dodging snakes in the deep Wisconsin woods, my neighbor’s yarns about impromptu games of street-tag and rescuing her little brother time and time again from the town bully—for me, these stories carry the full mystique of  Harper Lee’s Scout and Gem Finch, braving the Macon County twilight, crouched in the brush outside Boo Radley’s home.  At the heart of all these stories is danger, risk, requiring the grit, the pluck, to make it home alive without adult intervention.  It’s what I loved about To Kill A Mockingbird (racial politics aside), what I love about all stories of children left to their own devices.

Those devices (call them life-skills or street-smarts) are part of growing up for all kids; they need to be developed and honed to achieve true adulthood.  Childhood pluck becomes adult self-reliance, self-efficacy: the idea that I can accomplish this, or, better yet: I have what it takes to get myself out of this mess.   Mastering danger as a kid can lead to adult confidence.  It’s why too much safety—helicopter parenting in a too-sterile environment—can lead to an anxious child.

I grew up in New York City—far from snakes, where trees and their shadows were confined mostly to fenced in parks—the only child of older parents who’d waited a long time to have me and weren’t taking any chances with my safety.  Our apartment complex on West 100^th Street—the dividing line of Manhattan’s Upper West Side—had terraces and tennis courts (where the Mayor himself came to hit); a nice laundry room, pretty playgrounds, gardens and a parking lot.  But right across the street were housing projects, where you could always hear loud voices at night, glass breaking, police cars pulling up.  I could hear the sirens from my bedroom window on the seventeenth floor; I knew there was danger: crime, fights, drugs.  There were also children down there, many left largely to their own devices, roaming their own not-so-pretty playground.  No matter how late I got into my nightgown, teeth brushed, book waiting on my pillow, if I looked out of the window, the children from across the street were always still out.  To me they seemed to have it good.  How lucky, I thought, not to have a bed time.

For me, there was a time for everything: lessons each day after school—ballet, gymnastics, and piano—playdates each Friday, more gymnastics on Saturdays, family bike-riding outings on Sundays and dinner at seven each night with both parents.  When nothing was scheduled, I went to my room and played on my own, drew, or—more often than not—worked on the “book” I was writing (I started it in second grade and finished in fifth).  I had a big imagination that kept me company; I was never lonely.  Just sheltered.

Of course there were moments without supervision.  I rode the bus to and from school alone, and made the most of it.  Unbeknownst to my parents, I’d get off the bus several stops after I got on and wait for my friends who were coming from the East Side on the crosstown bus.  Then we’d all get on a later bus together, treating less-than-appreciative commuters to our noisy grade-school banter and antics.

Friday playdates weren’t always supervised either.  By the time my friends and I were in third grade, everyone’s parents let us walk around our various neighborhoods without an adult.  We could go to a playground, or to a grocery store for bubblegum and high bouncing balls, as long as we made sure to walk on the nicer side of the street and avoid anyone who seemed drunk or crazy. (Not always easy in New York City in the ’70s.)

The city wasn’t safe in those days, but child abduction wasn’t on anyone’s radar.   Instead we worried about “maniacs,” treacherously armed vagrants who got lots of press by holing up at various subway stations, taking mostly unsuccessful swipes at riders, but evading the cops with relative ease.[i]  We kids could all identify the best-known maniacs: for example, Plastic Bag Lady (she wore one over her face), who presided over the traffic island on 96^th and Broadway; Hatchet Man, who was stationed at the 72^nd IRT line.

Muggings were a big concern too.  Everyone knew someone who’d been mugged.  Kids got mugged for their bus-passes and candy cash all the time.  Getting mugged didn’t depend on the neighborhood you were in.  You could get mugged anywhere.  A big topic of conversation among us kids was what to do if muggers caught up with you.  Give them everything, people said, especially if they have knives.  Some parents packed extra money in kids’ backpacks just in case.  Word was, if you had too little cash on you, it could anger the mugger, and you might really get hurt.  The best thing to do, said one of my friends (whose brother had been mugged walking home from his private school on 91^st Street) was—anytime you saw anyone suspicious coming at you—just run as fast as you could go and hide in a store, anywhere you could.

My friend, Laura and I used to play this game on our way from school (on 63^rd and Central Park West) to her home on 71^st Street.  We’d link arms and walk, one of us looking to the right, the other looking to the left; if either of us saw someone unsavory-looking, we would give the watchword: Creep!  And both would run for our lives.

Though our criteria for a creep was pretty broad—it could be a man or woman, of any age or race—our prototype was an aged, white man with a matted, soot-encrusted beard and missing teeth, who had actually approached us one day, offering candy in a dirty, brown paper bag.  We’d screamed and run that day, concluding, once we were safely in Laura’s lobby, that the candy was poisonous, designed to knock us out so he could drag us off to his lair and chop us up into bite-sized pieces.

Laura and I did a lot of screaming and running for our lives, as we made our way along one of the most expensive stretches of real estate in the city.   It was thrilling.  Like Scout, Gem and Dill, running away from Boo Radley’s home in To Kill A Mockingbird.

My own children play Hunger Games with the other kids on our block, running wild through all the connected backyards, forming alliances and hunting one another down, armed with weapons they’ve fashioned out of K’nex.  I (along with the other moms on the block) am wary of this game, based on a bestseller about kids who survive by doing one another in, but I won’t intervene unless asked to.  Growing children have an innate need for such thrills.  They’ll find them anyway, anywhere they can.  Best served with a heaping dose of imagination.

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[i] Not being flippant here, just describing my view as a child of the seventies’ mass-deinstitutionalization of severely mentally ill patients.  One devastating result was an explosion in the mentally ill homeless population.

What are you Waiting For? Limbo vs. the Meantime.

“I’m waiting to hear.”

“I’m waiting to find out.”

“We were hoping to close before the end of the month but the buyers are stalling.”

“The doctor thinks it’s benign but we won’t have the results for another day or two.”

“My son applied to sixteen colleges.  We won’t hear until February.”

What are you waiting for?  In my case, there’s the writing-related waiting: for my teenage beta readers to finish with my YA novel so I can fix it and submit it; to hear from the couple of agents I’ve sent query letters to.  Then, there’s the family waiting:  to learn what my husband’s next job will be, to find out my daughter’s schedule, my son’s teacher—so I can get on with the back to school shopping already.  And of course, as it is for so many free-lance moms, though we’re loathe to admit it (sometimes), I’m waiting for school to start so I can get something done.  (Of course, back in June, I was waiting for summer to start so we could all relax a little!)

For review: I can’t shop until I know their schedules.  I can’t revise until I’ve gotten feedback.  Hear that message?   I can’t do X until another person does Y.   I’m in Limbo.  You’ve probably saidthat to someone recently.  If not, I’m sure you’ve heard it.

Webster’s defines Limbo (the secular definition) as “… an intermediate or transitional place or state … of uncertainty.”

Limbo is a hard place to be.  Your life has been hijacked; everything is on hold, your eyes fixed on the uncertain future.  You’re a prisoner to the whims of others.  Checking your voicemail, the mailbox, the email, again, and again.  It can be a recipe for anxiety, irritability, and depression.  But guess what?  Limbo doesn’t own you.  You can choose to be free.

I know a woman who has survived cancer, bravely enduring the diagnosis and the painful, sickening rigors of treatment.  Then more treatment to make sure the first treatment really worked.    Then more tests and continued monitoring.  The waiting is never over for her, but somehow she refuses to see it that way.   “I can’t live my life in fear of the future.”  She has children who need her now; she has a husband, and a job, now.   She takes pleasure in her family and her garden, in beautiful weather and in rain, in cooking and in reading.  She gets scared sometimes, sad sometimes, and frustrated with people who try to make her dwell on illness when she’s focused on health.  But mostly she lives now, surrounded by people who love her, who appreciate her joie de vivre and who join her in the seizing of each day.  She’s grown strong on the love of life, exchanging hats for headbands, losing the headbands as hair grows back in.   Maybe one day it will be gone again, but now is what matters, her children and husband and friends.  The little things, like a phone call or an email that hasn’t come yet, some editor’s elusive approval—these wouldn’t faze her.  She may yet have all the time in the world, but she won’t waste a minute of it in Limbo.

I try my best to learn from this and I’m getting better.   When I start to get anxious and hyper-focused on the future—on the parts I have no control over (whether an agent will fall in love with my protagonist, whether I can make a feuding couple hear one another, whether my daughter will make friends in middle school)—I do a few things:

• I sing.  In the shower, in the car, with my kids:   show tunes, the Beatles, Queen, Journey, Katie Perry, Taylor Swift, The Little Mermaid … anything.  Just sing.  It feels good, and I actually read a      study once that found singing enhances your mood.
• I treat myself as if I were my own client.  I nurture myself, reality check, point out my own strengths or the strengths of my kids if it’s their uncertain futures I’m worrying about.
• I breathe—like a yogi.  Full disclosure: I don’t do yoga, (the only reason being the time; if I have it to spare I’ll dance, which I never get to do enough).  However, a yogi friend of my husband’s taught him a series of deep breathing exercises, which he taught me.       And though this is third hand stuff, the deep breathing really does      help get me out of future-panic mode and back into the moment, the      present.
• I read.
• I connect with people I love and miss.  You know—the ones you’re too busy and angst-ridden to see?  Hearing about their lives takes you out of your own.   Cheer them on, console them if they need it, share yourself, laugh together.  Be in the moment together.
• I think  about my mom, how she worries about me and my family just because we’re her children—how silly I think she is for doing it.  Everything is going to be fine, Mom, it really is.  And saying it to      her, I believe it.
• I play with my kids.  Because they are the moment.
• I hang out with my husband (oh yeah—him!)

These things are the opposite of Limbo:  they are how I make the most of the meantime.

When my father was dying, when my mother and I knew it would be soon, we were in a very trying kind of limbo.

“It’ll be any day now,” said the visiting nurse.  Any day now seemed like a pretty big margin of error.   In any case, we were in a holding pattern, as my mother described it.  We didn’t want to go too far or commit to anything.  We were determined to be with Dad when he passed.  The waiting went on for two whole weeks.

Then, the night before he died, my mother and I watched a movie together on the small TV set in the living room.  Though it wasn’t a comedy, the relief of doing something besides wait got the better of us and soon, we were both in stitches, enjoying each other, enjoying this small piece of life, though my father was leaving us gradually in the other room.*

We hadn’t abandoned him; he was in the care of a nurse who’d get us as soon as we were needed.  But during those two hours, we were free from Limbo, making the most of something beautiful in the meantime … life.

What about you?  When you find yourself in a holding pattern, what do you do to celebrate “the meantime?”

The Would-be Master of Compromise

Sometimes I wish I were Obama’s therapist.  Not that I think he suffers from any kind of mental illness, on the contrary, he may be the sanest man in Washington.  It’s just that I think anyone with a stressful life deserves someone to talk to, to help them manage daily frustrations without taking them out on loved ones, developing an ulcer, or worse.   I don’t know what the president’s out-of-network mental health benefits are—if any—but I’d take him on pro-bono, viewing it as my patriotic duty.

I’d start with the unraveling of his well-intended plan to be a “bridge builder” between left and right, to heal this country as a Master of Compromise.  Boy did he walk into a firestorm with that one.  But I understand all too well where he was coming from.    My hypothesis?  On some level at least, it’s a biracial thing.

There’s a sort of naïve, benevolent, yet hubristic thing you do as a mixed person.  You believe you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, say anything about any issue and be heard in a way you wouldn’t be if you couldn’t claim membership in so many groups.  You’re pliable, agile, adaptable, with loads of finesse (stored up from fitting in with relatives of both colors who might not have gotten you or trusted you at first, but who you now have wrapped around your finger).  You believe you can fit anywhere, join any group—even ones you weren’t born to.  You have black friends, white friends, East Asian, South Asian and Latino friends.  You get along with them all and believe, in some small part of your brain, that you have what it takes to make them all get along with one another.  You believe if you’re careful, if you’re nice, if you’re smart, if you speak the right way; you can pull anything off.

Being mixed is different for all of us, we all have different experiences, different attitudes, different alliances, different world views.  Even within a family, siblings have different lives.  The variables include family constellation, birth order, gender, age, education level, socioeconomic status, as well as physical things like hair texture, skin color, facial features.  Yes, the degree to which you “look black” affects your experience of being biracial.  For example, if you appear white—to whites and others—you may go through life feeling angry and misunderstood, even as you unwittingly reap certain privileges.  You might go out of your way to prove your blackness to others, becoming more Afro-centric than you might otherwise be.   I’ve seen this in colleagues, friends and psychotherapy clients alike.   If you appear black—to whites, to other blacks—if your mixed-ness is invisible, you might feel defensive about your dual heritage being constantly overlooked.  You might bend over backwards to avoid having black stereotypes pinned on you.  I’ve seen this contribute to eating disorders in young women (myself included), as well as anxiety and depression in young, professional men.

As a family therapist, I’ve worked with lots of interracial families and couples, as well as biracial individuals.  (Once word got out that there was a biracial family therapist in my very diverse town, I began getting almost weekly referrals from clients answering to those descriptions.)

On several occasions, I got intake calls from young men, hoping to make appointments—either for their families, with spouses or for themselves alone.  The voice on the other end would be soft, yet clear and chatty—total absence of accent, flawless diction.  The tone would be deferential: Doctor Rosenberg, they’d call me, though as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, I am no such thing.

Gentle voices, polite patience, clipped consonants—fastidiousness about taking down the hours I was available and agreeing to my full fee without the slightest hesitation.

“That guy’s biracial,” I’d say to myself.  And four out of five times he was.  (The fifth time he was white and gay, but that’s another story.)

These guys presented as the polar opposite of the stereotypical angry, black man.  Some of them had gone through phases where they’d had to prove themselves to “the brothers,” acting “blacker” during high school, but then “whiter” during college, where success depended on not matching anyone’s stereotype.  By the time they got to me, these guys were mostly settled in being themselves, with flexible identities, stores of bicultural competence, a few different selves to wear depending on the occasion.  I didn’t consider this dishonest; they were just gauging the situation and coming prepared.  (During the intake calls, I’d been treated to their professional telephone voices.)

These men still had trouble expressing anger however.  They were the appeasers in their families, leaving wrathful outbursts to “whiter-looking” siblings; they were the quiet ones in their marriages, sighing wordlessly as their wives (who were a range of races) hurled accusations and went on tirades.

And yet, the exhausting task of controlling how they were seen, how they were judged, how they did or did not defy expectations, meant that the guys were often full of unexpressed rage.  One man—who had been bullied by employer after employer—said to me:

I can’t let myself get as angry as I feel; if I do, I’ll choke on it—or choke someone else.  Then I’ll have given them what they expect.

He settled that day for tears, which streamed down his face.  What, I wondered, would it have been like for him to stand up for himself in a healthy way?  How would he have been seen and how would he see himself?

I know anger can be destructive.  It can stand in the way of accomplishing great things.  When you are yelling, it is impossible for others to listen to your words.  But anger, channeled properly, can lead to action, to addressing injustice, to change.  Which brings me back to the president.

What would it have been like, Mr. Obama, to challenge your haters as soon as you took office?  When you learned how committed our Republican Congress was—not to working with you to save the economy, create jobs, invest in education and infrastructure—but to making you a one-term president?  I’m not in Washington, I’m not even in politics and sometimes I miss the news because I’m so preoccupied writing books about ballerinas and getting my kids to tennis on time.  Still, I noticed it, how long the list was, how it was growing, even as you took your oath on that blustery January day in 2009: the list of people devoted to purging you from the White House.  They’d stop at nothing.  Even when evidence pointed to your stimulus package’s effectiveness in preventing another 1929 style Depression, they blocked your continued efforts to boost the economy. They signed the Norquist Pledge, tying their own hands, even as they knew—they had to know—that all cuts, no taxes would only dig us into a deeper, more divided hole.  They knew that if they worked with you, if things improved, you would look good and their one-term dreams would go up in smoke.  It was more important to make you look bad than to help save the country.  You got that, but you got that too late, only after the hand you reached across the aisle got bitten a slew of times.  You believed too long in your own power to make a pie-in-the-sky dream of compromise come true.

But then again, I guess I share that with you, Mr. Obama, as I shared it with those young men I saw for therapy: this idea—often but not always misguided—that we are uniquely suited to build bridges wherever we go.  How very biracial of us.

Why am I sad? Anxiety in Disguise

I’d been encouraging my normally chipper eleven year old daughter to consider getting a new dresser, a bigger one where we wouldn’t have to annex pajamas to a shelf in her closet.  I’d shown her some in catalogues—which she normally loves poring over.  But she declined, with a defiant no that seemed disproportionate.

“Okay,” I said.  “No big deal.”  Just a dresser, just a suggestion.  Then I took a risk and asked why she’d snapped at me, if something was wrong.  She might have snapped again; she might have denied that she’d raised her voice (it’s what I might have done at her age) but she didn’t.  Instead she confessed to being grumpy lately.

“And I don’t know why,” she said.

My first thought was: uh-oh, here they come: the new moods of early adolescence.  But maybe it was something more fundamental than that.  Maybe it had to do with some Really Big Changes coming up in our family.

First, after nearly a three year sabbatical, during which I wrote two novels, choreographed three children’s musical productions and began blogging, I am resuming my psychotherapy practice which will mean a shift in everyone’s schedule as well as some form of childcare.  My kids are used to me being there all of the time; now they’ll have to adjust to most of the time.  Second, my husband is in the middle of a job transition, which means some extra stress and uncertainty.  On a lesser and more predictable note, my son is turning nine, which to me feels like a bigger deal than eight (“eight” sounds little still; “nine” not so much).

But the biggest change of all, the one we’re talking about the most anyway, is that my daughter is starting middle school, which, in our town, begins in sixth grade.  It’s not just that she’s going to a new school, bigger and further away than her old one, where she’ll have to take the bus instead of walking or being driven by me.  It’s not just that she’s saying goodbye to many old friends who are going to different schools or “hello” to a whole new crop of kids she doesn’t know (and whose parents I don’t know).   It’s all of these things and more: the unknown.  For most people, anxiety—identified or not—is a big part of venturing into unfamiliar turf.  And, as I know from personal and professional experience: anxiety can feel just like depression.  Especially if you throw a little sleep deprivation into the mix.  (My daughter is still recovering from a week of sleep-away camp.)

For me the change is significant too.  Becoming the parent of a middle schooler is the start of some new and really big words.  Adolescence.  Independence.  Inevitably Increased Screen Presence.  On some level, I believe myself to be prepared.  As a family therapist, I specialize in adolescence; for the six years I worked at the former Montclair Counseling Center, about fifty percent of my clients were teenagers; about twenty-five percent were families and couples who’d come into therapy to talk about issues related to their kids and teens.  I felt confident translating between teens and their parents.  I gave talks on the teenager-parent power struggle.

I’ve had countless kids tell me they felt a certain way or were acting a certain way—and didn’t know why.  Actually, my favorite part about being a therapist is tracking feelings.  I don’t know why I’m angry; I don’t know what’s making me sad.  Even in the case where moods are truly biological or chemical in origin, there are always triggers: losses, moves or other life events that contribute (which is why therapy is always recommended along with medication!).  It’s so normal, so common to be grumpy, grouchy, sad or however you manifest stress when things are in flux.  Day to day snapping at people, nightly bouts of tears, feelings of emptiness and I-don’t-know-why listlessness—when you trace them back, it’s not surprising to find something concrete that you didn’t think bothered you all that much.

I remember when I was nineteen, on a leave from college, about to move to the Midwest for the first time to join a mid-sized ballet company.  I was excited about living in an apartment of my own for the first time, not a dorm, paying my own rent, my own utilities, groceries, such as they’d be.  The best part was that dancing with a real ballet company had been my dream for as long as I could remember; now it was coming true.  I’d have my own pointe shoe order, an amazing repertoire to learn, not to mention a paycheck—a real pay check.  But why was I feeling down?  Why these unexpected crying jags at night?  The therapist I saw at the time made her usual quizzical-sympathetic face (a face I swore never to make once I became a therapist, right up there with the phrase how did that make you feel?) as she wondered aloud whether I was having some feelings about leaving home for the first time?

“Absolutely not,” I said.  “I can’t wait to leave.  Besides, it’s not the first time; I’ve been in college (one hour’s drive away) for over a year.”    And then I began to cry anew.

Well how about that?  Maybe I did have some feelings about leaving, about dancing full-time, about living in Ohio … about all the wild and crazy new-ness, the fear that maybe I wouldn’t be able to handle it all.

Most people I know, clients as well as friends and family, suppress fears and worries to a degree, just to get through the day.  But it builds.  It can makes you sad or angry if you don’t explore what’s going on and sort it out.  You take it out on others, if not yourself.

When it comes to transitions, most people have plenty of fears and worries, even if the transition is something they’re thrilled about on some level.  A move to a new house, a new job, a new baby, a new school.  All can be hugely exciting; all can increase anxiety, bring on or exacerbate depression.   In a few weeks, my daughter will have a new school, new classes, a new bus, and new peers.  A Hogwarts-like house system, a specialized arts program, an audition for the school play the second week of school.  Going from a tiny school where every teacher knows and loves her, to an enormous school where no one knows her.  Going from being the oldest in the school to the youngest.  Lots and lots of changes.  Possibly enough to make anyone grumpy.   My therapist training had given me the skills to talk about this with kids.  But those were other people’s kids.  They were in my professional realm, not my personal one.  This was my own daughter.  Since I’m her mother, I am—by status, by role, and by virtue of the fact that I make her do things like make her bed and write thank-you notes—really annoying, which cuts down on the credibility I might have had with a tween client her age.   I had to choose my words and tread more carefully, wanting to be supportive, hoping to get her talking but not wanting to sound too therapist-y.

“Summer is ending,” I said, trying to sound neutral.  A cricket outside chortled its agreement.  “Think you might be feeling a little sad about that?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“And …” a deep breath, “middle school is coming up soon.  Any feelings about starting middle school?”

She assured me it wasn’t that.  “I can’t wait for middle school to start.”

But we talked a little more.  There were some details, she admitted, a few small ones, she might be wondering about.  Like the bus, like being in a House with the friends she’s got from elementary school.  Like some other stuff she hadn’t realized were on her mind.  We talked about the worries that she said weren’t really worries until her excitement about going to this big new place really took over.  Soon she was gushing about the cool things she’d heard from friends with older siblings who went there.  I’ve found this with clients too: when you’ve got mixed feelings about a transition: both thrills and doubts, you can only really enjoy the thrills once you’ve unpacked the doubts.   My daughter had moved on to the thrills, happily speculating about the future.  But I felt like I had to get in my therapeutic mama moment:

“It’s so normal,” I said.  “To worry about things even when you’re happy about them.  And sometimes, worries you don’t talk about can make you sad without knowing why.”  I was saying it after the fact; it might have been moot anyway at this point, but I said it.

“Hmm.”  She said, pretending to think it over, though really I think she was patronizing me.  She rolled over and went to sleep.  But I know she heard me.  And maybe next time the “grumpies” set in, we’ll have a good place to start.