Journeys in Pediatric Dentistry

Like most people, I do not love change. This is particularly true if the change in question involves putting up buildings where there were none. I realize the need for economic development: More buildings generally mean more jobs, and that more jobs are good for the overall welfare of our community. Still, I’d rather have grass and trees than bricks and mortar. If a building must occupy land, I’d rather have a charming, crumbling farmhouse than a new construction.

I’m weird that way.

But when we returned to Vermont after five months away and I noticed a brand-new construction on a formerly vacant lot on Route 7 with a sign out front proclaiming it the future home of Middlebury Pediatric Dentistry, I thought, “It’s about time!”

Click here to continue reading my long-awaited pediatric dentistry column in this week’s Addison Independent!

No Child of Ours

Last week — the week when Alton Sterling was fatally shot by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile was fatally shot by police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota — I had my monthly book club meeting.

The two events may seem entirely unrelated: Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were both young black men in their 30s; my book club is comprised of seven white women in their 30s and 40s. But this month, our book club was discussing my reading pick, the book Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

(I was actually all set last week with a “Faith in Vermont” column about pediatric dentistry in Vermont, and then I came home on Thursday night — after a brutal day of getting ready to go on vacation in two days and getting ready to move houses in three weeks — and I had to write this. I wrote it very tired, very raw, and way too late into the night. I think it may be one of the more important things I’ve ever written. But don’t worry — you’ll see the pediatric dentistry column in the near future, too. Because, in my circles, pediatric dentistry is a pressing issue….)

California Sabbatical: Some Lessons of Sabbatical

I was not exactly looking forward to our family’s sabbatical in Berkeley, California. Our five-month sojourn was a year-and-a-half in the planning, so my mind had plenty of time to run through every nightmarish scenario imaginable. I worried that we couldn’t possibly find a comfortable and affordable home for a family of six. I worried that I would be stuck in this uncomfortable and expensive home all day long with four bickering children and no breaks. I worried that I would miss our life back in Vermont and become depressed.

Yet, even as I worried about these things, here’s how I expected the narrative to unfold: We would arrive in Berkeley, and everything would be fine! All of my worries would prove unfounded, and – as has happened repeatedly in the past – I would say, “I don’t know why I worried so much!”

Imagine my surprise, then, when in fact everything I’d worried about came true – and then some! A few weeks into our sabbatical, not only was I depressed, missing Vermont, and stuck all day in a cramped and expensive rental home with four bickering children, I’d also been blindsided by unexpected setbacks. I hadn’t expected to fracture my foot on our second day in California. I hadn’t expected my husband and children to miss Vermont as much as I did. I hadn’t expected to find the Bay Area – where we’d lived for five years – infinitely more challenging than I remembered because we were no longer used to city life and lines and traffic. I hadn’t expected our California friends to be so very, very busy that it would take months to see some of them.

“It wasn’t supposed to go this way,” I told my husband tearfully. “I worried, so everything was supposed to work out.”

It took nearly the full five months for me to realize that sabbatical was an enormous gift to our family.

Click here to continue reading about the lessons I learned from our sabbatical in this week’s “Faith in Vermont, California Sabbatical” column in The Addison Independent. (This will be the FINAL California edition of this column — actually filed from Oregon, where our family is on vacation before heading back to Vermont!)

California Sabbatical: Goodbye To Berkeley

As we prepare to leave Berkeley, California and return home to Vermont, here are some Berkeley stories from the past five months of our family’s sabbatical:

It’s late January. We are a few weeks into our homeschool curriculum, and for science I’ve been taking my daughters on nature walks around our neighborhood to observe West Coast flora and fauna. This particular morning, we’re squatting on the sidewalk sketching a Bird of Paradise plant, when a nearby house’s door opens and a man emerges. I’m concerned that he’s about to chase us away, but he asks what we’re doing in a friendly manner.

Then he says, “My wife sent me out here to offer you some lemons.” He gestures towards the lemon tree in his front yard, laden with lemons bigger than my fist (he tells us they’re Eureka lemons.) He cuts down four lemons, one for each of my daughters. We thank him and take the lemons home; later, we will use a recipe from The World of Little House, a companion book to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series of pioneer memoirs, to make delicious lemonade from these lemons.

For more of our Berkeley adventures, click here to continue reading this week’s California edition of “Faith in Vermont” in The Addison Independent.

Using Our Words

I took my two-year-old and my five-year-old to a playground this afternoon, while my two older daughters attended their little homeschool History Club.

After a while, my five-year-old came up to me and said, “Mommy, I want to play with somebody. Somebody new. Somebody who’s not my sister. I want to make a new friend.”

There weren’t many other children at the playground: a handful of babies, the rejected two-year-old sister — and three girls who were, from the looks of them, about two years older than my daughter. Of course, these were the girls my daughter was eyeing.

“Go ahead and ask if you can play with them,” I prompted, praying silently that these “big girls” would be kind.

“I’m feeling a little shy,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

So I said I would hold her hand and come with her, but I wouldn’t speak for her — she had to do the asking.

Hand-in-hand, we approached the big girls.

Here is what my daughter said, completely on her own, in her tiny voice:

“Hi, I was wondering if I could play with you? Because I don’t have a friend here, and I’m feeling lonely.”

They were kind: They said yes. (Thankful prayer from me.)

I walked away from this exchange marveling at the beautiful request my daughter had made. It was simple, honest, and vulnerable. This is not because my daughter is anything special — of course, I think she’s something special, but really she’s just a regular kid. She said what she did precisely because she’s a regular kid, and to say anything else wouldn’t occur to her.

And then I realized that the days when my daughter can make this sort of request are numbered.

Think about it: If somebody approached you and said, “I was just wondering if we could hang out for little bit, because I don’t have a friend and I’m feeling lonely,” how would you react? I know how I would react: I’d probably make some excuse and dash off. We adults are generally too busy for this kind of neediness. If we’re honest, vulnerability freaks us out a little bit.

It’s funny: I’ve spent the first five years of each of my daughters’ lives — what will amount to twenty years’ worth of effort — encouraging, begging, pleading with them to use their words. “Please, stop screaming and just tell me what you want,” I exhort them.

But then, not too long after — by about mid-elementary school, by my estimation — we (the big “we:” society, culture, all of us) begin implicitly teaching our children to stop using their words. To put up a brave front. To not say what they want. Because in our world, to be vulnerable, to admit loneliness, is to be weak. It freaks people out. It’s tantamount to an admission of failure.

It occurs to me that a great deal of trouble — emotional distress, interpersonal strife, political discord — might be avoided if we hadn’t somehow been discouraged along the way from just using our words.

An Open Letter to the Citizens of Berkeley

Good People of Berkeley:

I’m here from out of town, although I used to live among you. So, I’m prepared to tell you how the rest of the country thinks of you. Mention “Berkeley” to most people, and they immediately conjure up an image of progressive, liberal, peace-loving descendants of the 1960s hippie movement, eating artisanal whole foods while dressed in tie-die and smelling of patchouli. It’s a stereotype, sure, but in my experience it’s a stereotype that the population of Berkeley does little to discourage.

Except for the “peace-loving” part.

Berkeleyites, never have I been among a more stressed-out, rage-filled group of people.

How do I know that you’re stressed-out and rage-filled? Because never in my four decades of life have I been as scolded by complete strangers as I have been in the past five months that I’ve spent among you.

I have been chastised for my driving (usually for not being aggressive enough.) Other people have scolded my children for minor offenses, and then turned and criticized my parenting. And, just this morning, I was barked at for not realizing that the proper system in the bakery where we had taken our children for breakfast — where the line snaked out the door — was not to select your items from the open bins first and then take your place in line (which, confusingly, is the system when the line is shorter), but was instead to wait on line first and select your items as you passed the bins.

Now, I recognize that angry, stressed-out scoldings of total strangers are not unique to Berkeley, but the fact is: I’ve only experienced them here. Sure, I come most recently from a small town in Vermont where everyone knows everyone, which tends to encourage kindness (in public, at least.) But I also lived in Manhattan for seven years. And never once, in all that time, was I lashed out at the way I have been in Berkeley, where I’ve averaged at least one scolding a month.

Let me also say this: The people I actually know in Berkeley are kind, and peace-loving. These scoldings all come from people I don’t know, which, frankly, makes them worse. I can take correction from my husband and close friends, whom I trust to know me, but scolding from a stranger who has no idea of my struggles (although they are generally apparent in the four wiggly young children surrounding me) seems completely unjust.

And do you know who the worst offenders are? Affluent-appearing Caucasian men and women in their 60s and 70s; in other words, the very people who were alive during the Summer of Love and “Give Peace A Chance” and “Imagine” and “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke.” The very people who gave Berkeley the stereotype it still bears.

I understand that it’s stressful to live here: You have to sit in traffic and wait in lines for everything – even if you wake up at 8 AM on a Saturday, the bakery line still stretches around the store. I understand that this degree of congestion fosters the idea that other people are aggravating impediments to your own personal muffin consumption, in much the same way that you might take compassion on one ant in your house, but when there’s a line of ants marching across your floor you have to annihilate the suckers. I understand that, in order to live in a city where the median home price is in the $800,000 range you probably work long hours creating technology that encourages human relationships to be played out over screens. I understand that living in a place with a reputation for progressive thinking might encourage a certain aggressive self-righteousness. But here, as an ambassador from small-town Vermont, are two simple suggestions for you, Berkeley:

First, let’s just agree that we should never, ever, EVER take it upon ourselves to correct other people’s children or give unsolicited parenting advice. I think most parents of young children would agree with me that the only times we welcome interference or advice are: 1) If we’ve asked for it, or 2) if death is imminent (i.e. my child is running into traffic.) Otherwise, not to put too fine a point on it: BACK OFF.

No, my children are not perfect. That’s because they are children – they are works in progress. And guess who’s responsible for raising them? ME, that’s who. I’m doing my best to raise responsible adults, but we’re not there yet, and it’s hard work.

My children aren’t perfect, but neither are they monsters. And, if you stopped a moment, you might think that they’re kind of cute. Maybe you could even smile at them, because one thing my children and I have both noticed is that nobody smiles at them here. You might feel better if you did.

So, lady in front of us in line for the gas station bathroom, next time you see a mother surrounded by four young children and one of her children neglects to cover her cough: Before you lash out at mother and child, perhaps consider that this mother has a lot on her hands, that maybe she was about to remind her child of proper hygiene before you stepped in, and also this is a gas station bathroom and those germs are surely not the worst ones around.

BE KIND. The people around you are just as complicated and sensitive as you are. They have hopes and dreams and struggles, just like you do. It behooves us all to consider one another’s humanity as we interact. The things you say and the way that you say them have an impact on people.

Back to my bakery experience: When the man in line barked at me for what he perceived as my cutting the line, he had no idea of my story. And when I apologized and explained that we were from out of town and hadn’t known the system, it made absolutely no difference in the tone he used with me. When my eyes strayed behind him in hopes of finding sympathy elsewhere, I saw that the man behind him was snickering at me, presumably at my stupidity.

These were grown men, and they made me feel like I was back in junior high.

And you know what? It ruined my morning. My scone felt like sand in my mouth, my heart rate was elevated for the next hour; I felt like a bad person. And all we were trying to do was to take our daughters out to a special breakfast.

Berkeleyites who read this might be thinking: Grow a tougher skin. Don’t let one jerk ruin your breakfast. To which I submit: Is that really how we want to be with each other? Grow tougher skins so that others can spew their rage all over us without consequence?

Berkeley is one of the most innovative and creative regions in our country right now. You don’t have to let people steal your muffins, but don’t tell me you can’t come up with more polite methods of correcting people.

There are signs up around Berkeley now that read, “Drive Like Your Kids Live Here.” My daughter saw one of these signs and misread it: “Mommy!” she laughed, “That sign said, ‘Drive Like Your Kids!’ They want you to drive like your kids!”

It was a hilarious misinterpretation that’s become a family joke. But I can’t help thinking how it’s indicative of the Berkeley way of life. All of the signs – the face Berkeley presents to the outside world – seem to encourage responsible and kind cohabitation. Yet in reality, many Berkeleyites are driving like their kids – both literally on the road and metaphorically in their interactions. They bash into each other and cut each other off and honk their horns like a bunch of preschoolers on the playground.

Because the truth is, your politics don’t make you a peacemaker. Neither does your money, your intelligence, or your success. Peacemaking comes from recognizing that every single person out there was created special and deserving of respect. That’s what we teach our kids, right? So let’s drive like our kids live here.

California Sabbatical: The Surprising Joy of Homeschooling

Husband: I was thinking we could go to Berkeley for the second half of my sabbatical. We have family and friends there, and I could do research in my old department at UC Berkeley.

Me: Sure, that makes sense.

Husband: And we’d enroll the girls in school in Berkeley for the spring?

Me: Oh no, I’ll just homeschool them while we’re out there.

And so, over burgers at Park Squeeze in Vergennes in the spring of 2014, some very major decisions were made very quickly.

Click here to continue reading about our homeschooling adventure in this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Five Misconceptions About Sabbatical

And just like that, Thanksgiving’s over. Before we had a chance to toss out the dried-out autumnal gourd decorations and boil the turkey bones for broth, there were wreaths around town, Christmas carols playing in the stores, and – could it be? – Christmas trees blinking in our neighbors’ windows. With a mere two days between Thanksgiving and the start of Advent, the holiday season seems to be upon us in an even more breathless rush than usual.

But that’s okay: I can keep breathing. It’s not like I’m also preparing to move our family across the country for five months, during which major renovations will be happening on the house we’ll move into after we return, while at the same time our current house goes on the market.

Oh, wait a minute! That’s exactly what’s happening!

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Scanning the Skies and Picking Up Messes

Life has been busy here.

Life is always busy, of course, but the past few months of our family’s existence have felt like a three-ring circus: preparing for our semester-long sabbatical in California, planning the renovations that will happen in our new house while we’re away, and readying our current house for sale (also while we’re away.)

Then, this week, our 4-year-old daughter caught pneumonia when the cough-and-congestion bug making its way through our entire family decided to park in her lungs.

She’s fine now — the worst part of the whole ordeal has been convincing her to take 9 mL of amoxicillin three times a day — but there were two days during which I was mostly housebound, save for a couple of trips to shuttle other daughters to their activities.

On the afternoon of the day her fever broke, my girl and I walked down to the end of the driveway to meet her sisters’ school bus.

“Look!” I said to her as we stood there, blinking in the strange sunlight, “Almost all of the leaves are off of the trees now. The branches are all bare. Winter’s really coming.”

This should not have surprised me. For one thing, we’ve enjoyed an autumn that an octogenarian friend informs me has encompassed one of the loveliest and longest foliage seasons in her memory; we are overdue for those leaves to hit the ground. And for another thing, earlier in the week I had spent upwards of an hour sweeping piles of dried leaves off of our deck.

But my nose had been so buried in my earthbound tasks that I hadn’t taken the time to scan the skies; I hadn’t noticed that the season was really and truly changing.

Something similar has been happening with my children.

This past weekend I arrived home from a full morning out (shuttling a daughter to activities, meeting with a Middlebury College student) in order to prepare for company that afternoon, only to find that our house, by no means perfectly tidy when I’d left it, looked as if it had been torn apart by hooligans. Because it had, and the hooligans were three of my daughters.

My first response was to get angry with my husband, who’d gone outside to blow leaves off of the lawn (those leaves again!), leaving three young children — including our terrible 2-year-old — unattended in the house, and then neglected to have them pick up the resulting, inevitable mess.

Then I realized that, as valid as that anger may be, my husband was not solely responsible for the situation. The terrible 2-year-old has almost no impulse control, but my other children are old enough to know that they need to clean up after themselves. Next week, my oldest daughter will celebrate her eighth birthday; that is more than old enough to take responsibility for household tasks.

My children were growing up, and I’d been missing it. The season was changing and I hadn’t noticed; I hadn’t scanned the skies.

So part of the fault for the situation in which I found myself, having to spend 45 minutes cleaning the house for our guests (not making it perfect, mind you, just making it somewhat welcoming) — part of that fault lay with me.

Children rarely take responsibility for themselves, for their possessions, for household tasks, unless they are given that responsibility. And I had clearly been lax in equipping my children with responsibility.

I had been lax because I had been dealing only with what was right under my nose: the logistics of a year involving three houses and three moves, shuttling daughters around to activities, trying to keep the 2-year-old from playing in raw sewage. Those are important things, but I’d neglected the big picture: I didn’t have a plan for my children growing up.

And more important than a plan — Because who really has a plan for parenting that doesn’t get chewed up and spit out by our offspring? — I hadn’t made time for my children growing up.

It takes time and effort to confer responsibility. It is so, so much easier to just keep buying velcro sneakers rather than to teach my children to tie their own laces. It’s much easier to pack their lunches myself rather than endure the mess of a 4-year-old attempting to make her own peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. And, I confess, it’s easier to pick up their messes myself rather than nagging them to pick up after themselves. It’s also quieter, because you skip all the screaming.

But the season is changing. If I sent my daughters outside in tank tops and flip flops in December, people would consider me an irresponsible parent. How much more so if I unleashed children upon the world who wouldn’t clean up after themselves?

So we sat the girls down, and we had a talk that went something like this:

“You know how we always try to be on time, because if we’re late we’re showing that we’re inconsiderate of other people’s time? Well, cleaning up is like that, too: If you don’t clean up after yourself, if you just leave your mess laying around, then you’re showing that you’re inconsiderate of other people’s time. Because if you don’t clean up your own mess, then somebody else has to — somebody who didn’t make it in the first place. Back when you were much younger, Daddy and I would clean up your messes because that was our job. But just like it’s not our job to change your diapers anymore, it’s not our job to clean up your messes anymore.

“So from now on, when you take something out to play with, you need to put it away when you’re finished playing with it, and we shouldn’t have to remind you of that. If you want to come back to it later, put a little note on it that says ‘Save.’ Otherwise we’re going to assume it’s trash, and that’s where it will end up.”

These course corrections in parenting can feel like turning a cruise ship around, but they’re well worth the effort. When I take the time to scan the skies, I find so many areas in which I can start training my girls in responsibilities commensurate with their growing maturity: they can cook, they can clean, they can help their younger sisters — they can even, with adult supervision, use knives and light fires in the wood stove.

And you know what? For the most part they relish taking on these responsibilities. They feel proud of themselves. So do I.

Oh! The Places We Didn’t Go!

It was early August, and our family’s minivan was midway across the Connecticut River bridge between New Hampshire and Vermont, headed home from a visit to Rhode Island, when it hit me: Road trips with our children no longer felt like extended torture sessions! In fact, road trips with our children had become…enjoyable!

I’d like to think that this is because our children are gaining maturity and patience as they grow up, but I suspect it has more to do with the fact that all of our children are now big enough to see the portable DVD player.

After that trip, I made a list of day trips for our family to take on weekends throughout the fall. There are so many wonderful spots within a few hours’ drive of Addison County, and we’ve explored so few of them because, until now, the drawbacks of a car trip with four young children far outweighed any possible enjoyment.

Click here to read more about our [exciting fall travels?/failure to motivate?] in this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.