The Brown House Years (Home)

I’m at that place where I’ve finished a very satisfying bit of writing  - a review of Bringing Up Bebe - and looking down the long road ahead, The things that need to be written and the questions that need to be answered for the book. I find the whole process of writing a bit Kafkaesque, like being lost in the woods (though, come to think of it woods aren’t terribly Kafkaesque). I trudge around making the trial with post it flags only to find a blue flag among the red, presumably put there by me, signifying what? I have no idea but it feels like I’m wandering in circles. Where does Kafka come into it? Perhaps in that I have sprouted four more legs. Do can hardly conceive of how other people find the clarity of vision to put one foot in front of the other, all six limbs working in concert and moving though space en-route to a destination that is a thing of beauty, a perfectly conceived pitstop on the road to enlightenment. I can see it, but my path is choked with weeds. 

And yet there are times when it comes easily. Though what I write then is of no account to anyone except me. There is, for instance, my youngest son’s face. He has that little boy look - asymmetrical right down to the single front tooth with a sprinkle of freckles across his nose. That single front tooth seems enormous in his little mouth. He smells like a little boy too. he came in after playing baseball outside smelling like grass and sunshine and Spring.

Sometimes he sits on my lap holding my face in his hands. He pushes my cheeks together so that my lips shmoosh forward like a fish. He pauses, shifting his head from one side to another studying his work. Then he clambers down from my chair and bolts away with a ” So long sucker!”   

I am a sucker. I am a sucker for my son little face and his little crooked smile.

This morning the deer out numbered us as we walked to the bus stop: four to our three. For a few moments they paralleled us in the woods as we made our way up the snow packed gravel drive that leads to the paved road, the mailboxes and ultimately the school bus. 

The boys saw them first.They don’t shout with amazement any more, but they gasped just the same. And C whispered “They’re so big!” We heard the crush of leaves as they bounded through the woods, first along with us and then, away with a flash of white under tails.

A storm front is pushing warm air through the Finger Lakes. In the confusion of temperature over night, the winds picked up and littered the way with any branches too frail to resist. I thought how cold it will be in my office today where the windows are only technically closed. I sometimes find a snowdrift in miniature along the inside of the window frame.

We walked in silence, listening to the eerie call of geese above us. Their “v” formations were pointed south, but the wind blew them from east to west. Wave after wave passed as we walked. It’s been a strange winter, cycling snow then rain then ice. We wore rain boots today but it could be snow boots tomorrow or even, I joked with the boys, ice skates since the hard-packed snow on the drive will surely freeze over night.

I sometimes dread this walk to the top of the road. The boys fight or C, who will never be a morning person, rages about the injustice of coats and back packs and school and books and who got to play on the computer and who didn’t. His brother is seldom sympathetic. They bicker and an tussle on the road while I urge them on. I do this so we won’t miss the bus of course, but mainly because perpetual motion is the only thing I can manage this early.

The bickering continues at the corner while I check the mail box for the paper. I warn the boys to stay back from the road. It’s not busy but C especially is small and easy to miss.  He inches closer taunting me until I pull him back by the scruff of the coat.

We all breathe a sigh of relief when we see the flashing red lights of the school bus making its way down the road to our corner. I look down at their faces rimmed with fur or gap-toothed with a sheen of dried milk on one cheek and bend down to kiss them while the bus unfurls the magic sign that stops traffic so they can sprint across the road and hop on board. It happens so fast. I miss and kiss fleecy hat or nylon hood and they’re on the bus. I can’t see them through the tinted windows as it drives away, but I wave anyway. I feel a little pang as I walk home alone to the sound of the wind and frustrated geese.

I am back from a mini vacation from writing and an extended vacation from writing for the blog. I finished a review of Joan Didon’s Blue Nights and wrote a cranky piece about Xmas cards. The cranky Christmas article is becoming a tradition. It’s amazing how much of the collective psyche is played out on this particular holiday. This year I focused on Christmas-ish cards. In the dim and distant past I tended to choose cards that said “Happy Holidays” to distinguish my secular cards from religious cards. It was all so simple then. Recently however, I have embraced “Merry Christmas” with gusto because someone has to stick up for secular, universalist Christmas and it seems it’s going to be me.

In other news the big office downstairs is being painted as I write which means we will be able (in theory) to move all the things that should go in that office out of my office. I’d like that. I am beginning to feel like Bartleby working among the boxes and crates. Except that Bartleby was probably more productive than I am being now. Still, there is no point in the dread, guilt and emotional blackmail that accompanies getting back into a productive routine. There is, as Yoda would say, “no try, there is only DO”, or possibly “try there is no, DO there is only.” Yoda has been a Jedi for a gazillion years but still normal sentences can not form. Watched the series over the break on Blu Ray we did.

Right now I am working on adapting a paper I wrote about neuroscience and early childhood education back in 2009 for a chapter in a textbook comparing international approached to early childhood intervention. I sent off some questions to the editor today. I haven’t had time to really look at it until now, but I have given myself a month to revise it. That ought to be enough, she typed with trepidation.

One of the themes I explored in the paper was the way that explanations of poverty have changed over time the social to the cultural and now to the scientific (I’m using the word science with some irony since it’s all highly suspect). But the striking thing about much of it is how the idea of poverty as something passed from one generation to the next underpins the whole thing. It’s just that the relationship between the generations has been posed in different ways: genetically, culturally, psychologically, etc. It’s such a very old idea but continually represented in new ways. It makes me appreciate Jerome Kagan all the more. Thank you, Jerome Kagan. It might be an idea to speak to Harvard about the Charlatans in the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. It will save them embarrassment and humiliation of being associated with it later on. It’s not like they are academics, after all.

Did I mention my office is quite cold? The children are do home so I will try to work in one more fire in the fireplace - combined with domestic chores before I have to prepare a quick meal and take the Colin to cub scouts this evening. Hardly blog worthy, but what’d you expect? Herman Melville?

I got caught up in a discussion of Rothko which got me to thinking about the problem of talking about painting.

Someone remarked that the abstract expressionists were trying to create a new visual language. I think it’s more like a particular vocabulary.

We have always had a visual language but it doesn’t always translate well into words. This doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I’ve come to think of moving pigment around as deeply and fundamentally human perhaps because we have been doing it so long?

For me there’s a continuity that as clear in Rembrandt as it is in Rothko. To describe it as emotional or spiritual doesn’t do it justice. It is just satisfying in some essential way. I used to feel somewhat defensive on this point. It seemed irrational and a historical but I have come to believe that it is neither. It is a different realm of human experience that needs to be understood in its own terms. If there is an emotion, for me it’s in how much richer my life is for finally accepting that art is not the icing but the cake.

Perhaps it was the dog at the Cub Scout meeting last night that left me gasping for breath at the end of an hour and a half or perhaps it was because J was away. Maybe it’s the time of year or that I stayed up too late, ostensibly unwinding by watching BBC on Demand. Why ever it was, I didn’t sleep well, waking every hour with a dry mouth, a stuffy nose and head full of annoying loops, a song, a phrase… I can’t remember now.

Finally at 4:30 am I decided to check my email even though I knew it would probably mean sleep would be out of the question. It may be 4:30 am where I am the the UK is up and around.

The news this morning was not so good. I was copied in on a note from my friend, Ellie responding to an email from an academic who attended the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies conference on Science and Parenting. The article, from then New Republic was one of the most grotesque examples of the way science is being used the bulwark for intervention into the parent-child relationship. 

The article, The Two Year Window  just fills me with despair. The road to hell is surely paved with good intentions, but good intentions are no excuse. Ostensibly this article tries to make the case for early childhood education but it’s clear about three quarters of the way through that it’s really about intervening in the most intimate relationships of the poor, insinuating ‘professionals” into a triangle between parents and children, especially single parents. It does this on the basis of the most egregious distortion of science. 

It’s bad enough that complex social phenomena are being recast as problems of parenting and that science is being used to promote a particular moral vision of what constitutes good parenting (a perspective that we should question not just for poor parents but for all parents) What’s worse is that every single “scientific” point is either entirely wrong or grotesquely distorted. Take this lurid passage about what happens when a baby cries:

“Deep inside the adrenal glands, which sit atop the kidneys, cells pump out adrenaline - a hormone that makes the lungs breathe and the heart beat faster, increasing the supply of oxygen to the muscles. In the outer shell of the glands, different cells produce cortisol, which helps the body devour stored sugars and prepare the immune system to ward off invaders.” 

and

“With these hormones sloshing around, blood pressure rises, muscles tighten and energy surges. A baby wails for somebody to provide milk, dry clothing or maybe just a warm embrace. When comfort comes, quickly the brains goes back to business as usual. And if this happens repeatedly, as it should, the nerve impulses crackling in the brain will carry the signals for effective coping with stress over and over again - building pathways that the baby can use later in life to solve problems and overcome difficulty.

But the baby, (my italics) who is ignored or neglected just keeps screaming and flailing. Eventually he exhausts himself and may appear to with draw… Constant activation of the stress system causes wear and tear on the bran altering the formation of neural pathways so that coping and thinking mechanisms don’t develop in the same way. For example a baby who endures prolonged abuse or neglect is likely to end up with an enlarged Amygdala: a part of the brain that helps generate the fear response.”

It seems so definitive but there is little or no scientific basis for any of these claims what-so-ever. The best you can say about this is that someone has taken a handful of random findings, many of them based on the extreme experiences of Romania orphans, and extrapolated from that experience to create a mythology  of about how experiences in infancy determine an individual’s potential.

Think about that for a minute. It’s not just saying that bad experiences are hard to overcome, it’s saying that bad experiences limit the potential of individuals to overcome them. It’s like writing the word “LIMITED” over a human life in indelible ink. 

As for the nitty gritty of the “science” of the brain, Raymond Tallis, Stuart Derbyshire and John Bruer pretty thoroughly demolished the claims being made about brain development at the Parenting Culture Studies conference. So much so, it’s hard to imagine how advocates can make these statements with a straight face. Such is the power of moral prejudice.

The irony for me is that I believe that the free provision of nursery school and free child care can make a huge difference in people’s lives - not just for children but for families. I think it should be available for everyone. But I have to wonder whether the trajectory of early childhood interventions is really about making lives better or simply damage limitation. It seems perverse that advocates can talk about improving the lives of children in one breath and argue that by age two it’s already too late. But then again perhaps it’s not really about children at all. 

The article ends with a quote from James Heckman of the University of Chicago. “We can gain money by investing in early to close disparities and prevent achievement gaps, or we can continue to drive up deficit spending by paying to remediate disparities when they are harder and more expensive to close… The argument (for investing in early childhood programs) is very clear from an economic point of view.” 

Perhaps it really is just as crass as this.