Bonus episode: Everyday failures // Monday, August 10
Shelter in Place is taking a break from making new episodes so that we can make this work sustainable and bring you season 2. If you’d like to help us with that, you can join our community for as little as $5/month at shelterinplacepodcast.info. You can also sign up for our newsletter, so you’re the first to hear news about season 2 and get a behind the scenes look at our show.
During the break, we’re re-releasing a few episodes from season 1 that we want to make sure you don’t miss. Some of them are episodes we particularly enjoyed putting together, episodes we heard that our listeners loved, too. Others are one that feel particularly relevant to the moment we’re in now.
Here in Oakland, our kids start school today. I wish I could tell you that this time in quarantine has made me a master parent and homeschool teacher, but the opposite is true; I’ve never been more painfully aware of my parenting failures. So today’s bonus episode combines two episodes from two very different times in this pandemic. The first one you’ll hear was from episode 71, where I recounted a particularly humiliating moment of parenting in early June. After the break you’ll hear one of the very first episodes I recorded, when I was still learning how to record and edit.
What these episodes have in common is that they look at personal failures with heavy doses of humor and humility. Whether you’re feeling sunk by parenting yourself or irritated with the obnoxious kids two doors down, I hope they’ll give you a laugh and some much-needed grace.
Earlier this week, I got a testy email from one of my neighbors who lives just down the street. Their security camera had recorded my three children picking the plums off the tree in front of their house. This might have been forgivable if my kids had stopped there, but they didn’t. They fetched a ladder from our back yard and carried it out to the sidewalk, where they proceeded to lean the ladder up against our neighbors’ car and harvest every single plum their little grabby hands could find--even the ones that weren’t ripe yet.
You might think that this is the point where my shameless children trekked back home, their mouths smeared with plum juice and their hands sticky. I wish they had. But no. Instead, our 3-year-old waddled up the path to our neighbors’ house, looked around, pulled down her pants, and peed in their bushes.
All of this was recorded on our neighbors’ security camera, and recounted to me later.
I was mortified, and also furious. Nate has taken over the bulk of childcare during this pandemic, and my children’s illicit behavior had happened on his watch, while I was working. When I demanded an explanation, he said he’d been busy making a smoothie for the kids, and figured there was no harm in them picking some plums since the little strip of soil between the sidewalk and the street is technically city property, a detail I am certain our neighbors aren’t aware of. Nate had the back door open as he worked, watching and calling out to the kids as they came and went. He said that when they got the ladder he’d been impressed by their initiative.
I didn’t agree with his judgment, but even I had to admit that the ladder was pretty ingenious. My kids are 8, 6, and 3, and short for their age. It must have been quite a sight to see them hefting that 6-foot ladder.
But Mattea peeing in their yard. That was just too much.
Nate paused and looked at me bashfully.
“That one might have been my fault,” he admitted.
“You peed in their yard?” I shrieked.
“Of course not,” he said quickly. “But the kids have occasionally seen me pee in the bushes in our back yard when I was doing yard work and didn’t feel like going inside. It’s good for the plants.”
I groaned and put my head in my hands.
I made Nate promise to repair the relationship with our neighbors and not to pee in the yard anymore. And to tell the kids it wasn’t okay to do, either, and make sure they didn’t pick any more plums. The next day the kids made a card saying that they were sorry. Nate talked to our neighbor and patched things up. And so goes another week of pandemic living.
With children, more is caught than taught, as the old saying goes.
We’ve seen the truth of this over and over, often in ways that are humorous. It’s why our 3-year-old pinches salt from our stoveside ramiken to season all her food--no matter what she’s eating. It’s why our son gripes about wasting water whenever his sisters put the tap on full blast while washing their hands. It’s why our kids throw their dirty clothes in the corner of the hallway instead of putting them in the hamper. They see us do these things every day. It’s debatable whether or not they even register our requests to do otherwise.
Unfortunately, this principle extends to more serious things as well. It’s also why our kids harp at each other irritably no matter how much we ask them to use kind, gentle voices. Why they blow up when they’re mad. I didn’t think we had problems managing our anger until we started hearing verbatim the same words we’d uttered in moments of anger from the mouths of our babes. My kids are all tantrum throwers of varying degrees. Turns out their parents are, too. Given that Nate’s nickname for all of his childhood was “chill,” I think it’s safe to say that the anger he’s discovered in adulthood is something he’s caught from me.
Of course not everything our kids have caught from us is bad. Recently, when Nate and I were arguing about something and the conversation was escalating, our son interrupted and said, “I think both of you should stop arguing and take ten deep breaths.” He was absolutely right, and we did just that. It all but fixed the problem.
During this pandemic, our kids have caught some things we hadn’t anticipated. With school out and playing with friends off the table, our daughter Grace has taken to jogging up and down our block while she pushes her little sister in the jogging stroller. This isn’t some little kid stroller. It’s the one I took on the trails when all three of my kids were little. Running has been my go-to survival mechanism for most of my time as a parent, my primary source of sanity for my entire adult life. I can tell you that even as an adult, pushing that stroller is a lot of work. The stroller is heavy, and almost as tall as Grace. But that doesn’t deter her a bit. She begs to run around the neighborhood pushing Mattea in the stroller. The last time I ran with her, she made it eleven minutes before she had to stop and walk.
We’ve gradually allowed our kids to have a little more freedom during this pandemic since fewer cars come through our neighborhood, and most of our neighbors know our kids by name. For the past month or so we’ve allowed Grace to run back and forth on our block with Mattea in the stroller as long as she comes back to check in every few minutes or so. Our friends Heather and Reka live in the house at the end of the block, and so we told Grace she could run there, and then turn around.
On one such occasion, Reka was outside, and so each time Grace came to her house, they chatted. Grace let her know that she had her Mommy’s permission to be there, but after a few minutes, she needed to go home and check back in. This cycle repeated three or four times, each time with Grace chatting with Reka and then coming back to let me know she and Mattea were still safe.
But then Grace came back a fifth time. She chatted with Reka the same as the other times, at last telling her it was time to go. But then she looked down the sidewalk, and her eyes grew wide with horror. The blood drained from her face. She glanced over at Reka with a look of pure terror.
“There’s a person on the sidewalk,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. “I can’t get home and still stay six feet away.”
Reka assured Grace that the woman walking her way would likely go in the street to let Grace pass. Which is, of course, exactly what happened, much to Grace’s relief. Reka and I had a good laugh about this later. But also, we recognized the implications of Grace’s reaction. For better or worse, our kids are learning to be afraid of human contact during this time. Even as a six-year-old, Grace is on guard, walking through the world with a six foot radius. I’m grateful that my kids understand social distancing, but also, I wonder how this life where touch is scarce will form their world view, if they’ll carry that sense of danger and self-protection into adulthood.
They’re learning, too, that this world is not equally safe for everyone. They’ve been to three different protests, all of them family friendly and observing social distancing. They’ve insisted on carrying the #BlackLivesMatter signs they’ve created themselves. The protests aren’t just a first for them, but for me. I don’t think I ever really fully grasped the importance of protests before this time. In this area, my kids are teaching me.
The most recent protest we attended was a kneel-in, held at a busy intersection within walking distance from our house. At a designated time, everyone took a knee and knelt in silence for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the amount of time that George Floyd was pinned down, long enough to kill him. As people on all four corners knelt, even the busy street grew quiet. Occasionally someone would drive by and honk and raise a supportive fist out the window. It was a shockingly long amount of time, long enough to feel the pavement through my jeans, long enough to feel worried that my kids, who are loud by default, would be unable to hold the gravity of that silence.
But as we knelt, I heard Mattea whisper, “what you doing?” and Grace whisper back, “we are doing this because there are white people in the world killing black people, and it’s not okay. We have to figure out a way to make sure that it doesn’t happen anymore.”
I teared up hearing her speak, hoping that for all of the things we’ve modeled wrong as parents, maybe this could be something we finally got right.
And then Grace asked Mattea if she needed to go to the bathroom. I breathed a sigh of relief as Mattea whispered that she could wait until we got home.
Until I saw Grace squatting in someone’s front yard.
I can get really discouraged when I think about all of the things my kids do because they’ve seen us do it first. We try to be good role models for them, but almost every day we fail. We read parenting books, and ask advice from friends and family who are further down the line, but when it comes down to it, the biggest work we need to do to be good parents is the work we need to do on ourselves.
This doesn’t let us off the hook for modeling better behavior for our kids, but it gives us a place to start. And maybe that’s the daily sanity today--not just for parents, but for all of us. If our kids catch our behavior by watching it, then perhaps others do, too.
Maybe if we start to model the behavior we’d like to see more of in our world, maybe others in our lives will catch it, too. None of us is going to do a perfect job of that. Probably, there will be times when we realize the thing others have caught from us is the very thing we hoped not to pass along. But knowing that our behavior matters can help us make different decisions, ones that will make ourselves--and our world--better.
It’s hard work to not just talk about being better, but to actually live in a way that changes things. There might be some really shameful moments, of realizing your kid peed in someone else’s yard because they saw you do it first. But those moments are also opportunities to invest in relationships that we might have otherwise ignored, to make the card that says I’m sorry, to take some deep breaths, and try again.
I’ll be back with more right after this short break.
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Yesterday, I had a really bad day. It’s not that I haven’t had my low points before this, but on the whole, I was hanging in there, keeping my own suffering in perspective. Yes, completely reconfiguring our lives to homeschool our children on a drastically reduced income is hard, but we’re not actively fearing for our lives, or homeless, or living through a war. We still have a lot to be grateful for.
Normally I work in the morning and then take the kids at lunchtime so my husband can work in the afternoon, but yesterday he had a morning meeting, so we traded. I figured that would be fine. No one was going to die if my episode got up a little later than usual.
But from the moment my kids woke up, it was immediately clear that I was in for trouble. All three children were mouthing off, fighting with each other, and being more defiant and ornery than usual. My son in particular had woken up determined to be difficult. He didn’t want to do any of the usual school stuff. He rolled his eyes at everything I said.
By 10:30 our morning was falling apart. I sent the kids outside for recess, hoping that would change their mood. It was a beautiful day. But within seconds the girls were in tears because of something their brother had done, and he was whining about how he didn’t feel like being outside. All of my attempts to switch things up or make them laugh or be creative were failing.
They came back inside, and my son went to the cupboard and chose a fragile wine glass for his water. I stifled my initial protest, telling myself this was good that he was taking initiative. Maybe eight years old is old enough to handle a fragile glass. But then he started crashing around the kitchen with it, climbing the doorframe with it in his hand. I told him in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to use that glass, he needed to sit down at the table. He acted as if he hadn’t heard me. I took the glass, dumped it in the sink, and told him, “try again.” He walked to the sink, took the empty glass, once again packed it with water and ice, and stood there drinking it with the fridge door wide open. I took the glass from him again. “You’re not allowed to use this glass anymore,” I said. “You’re showing me you’re not ready.” This time I put the glass in the dishwasher. My son rolled his eyes, walked to the cupboard, took another wine glass, and proceeded to fill that with ice and water. I took a deep breath, and promised myself I would not act out of anger. Then I quietly took his glass from him, marched him to the back porch, and dumped his glass of water over his head.
When I walked him back inside, all three of my kids looked at me like I’d just pulled back my skin Mission Impossible style and revealed a monster. They said they liked Daddy better. I told them that Mommy needed a five-minute time-out, and that each of them needed to decide if we were going to have a good day or a bad day.
As I sat on our back porch, breathing deeply with my eyes closed, I thought, ‘who raised these kids?’ Oh wait, that was me. Our new reality felt suddenly crushing in a way that it hadn’t before. This was going to be our life from now on, for months to come.
Meanwhile inside, my kids had already moved on. They were singing the song my mother-in-law emailed us last week to help the kids learn the names of all 50 United states. It’s a catchy little jingle and my kids love it. But the song begins, “the United States, the United States, I love my country the United States.”
Both my husband and I had an immediate gut reaction to that first line. As my kids sang through the fifty states in alphabetical order, I thought about how my feelings for my family are a bit like my feelings for my country. Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s not a perfect metaphor. I have a great relationship with my dad.
But even though my family drives me crazy sometimes, even though we’ve hurt each other--sometimes in ways that required a lot of work to repair, even though we’re sometimes really dysfunctional, they’re still my family. I wouldn’t trade them for another one. I love them.
My country makes me crazy sometimes, too. Certainly, there are injustices, things that need to be set right. We’ve got some skeletons in the closet that I’m not sure we’ll ever fully reckon with, though many of us are trying. There are things we’ve done that I’m ashamed of, that I wish we could undo. But at the end of the day, it’s still my country. I’ve lived in other parts of the world, and I’m grateful for the lessons those places and people have taught me, one of which is that there are things my country has done that need to be made right.
But when it’s all said and done, this is the country that has shaped me most. And yet I can take no more credit for my U.S. citizenship than I can for the family I was born into. That first line in my kids’ song made me squeamish because my feelings for my country are complicated--maybe far more complicated than my feelings for my family. And yet I suppose in the same way that I love my family with all its imperfections, I do love my country, too.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that need to change, or that I should be passive. If no one ever pushed back and fought against the wrongs our country has contributed to, women might still not have the right to vote. Slavery might still be legal. We still have more work to do. But with both my family and my country, if all I do is gripe and feel angry, everybody feels bad. We have to find some way to move forward as a family and figure out how to work together better while acknowledging that we still have a long way to go.
I have a friend, whose name I can’t share, who is working on issues related to our global pandemic, pretty close to the top. For years, he’s been the person I go to if I need to check my own politics. I’ve learned from him that what we read in the media--even high quality media, that is trying hard to get it right--often isn’t the whole story. With COVID-19, it’s only been in the last couple of days that major news sources have published what my friend has known for a while: the National Security Council has been out front on COVID-19 from the beginning, quietly working behind the scenes while a very different message got out to the rest of us about what was--or wasn’t--being done. I’ve included these published stories in my show notes, so you can read them for yourself.
When I feel down on my family, when it seems like we are all dysfunction and no joy, one of the things that helps me to change the tide is to be on the lookout for the things we’re doing well. My son, who defiantly disobeyed me yesterday, is also the big brother who loves to read to his little sisters and comfort them when they’re sad. Last night at dinner, out of nowhere, he sat for twenty minutes solemnly asking questions about what it was like for Native Americans when the first settlers came to this land. The same kids who were mouthing off to me yesterday are also the kids who take pride in helping out with cooking, and cleaning, and setting the table and writing each of our names in tape on the placemat. They’re the kids who remember to put food and water in our car for Rick, the homeless guy who lives near our highway off ramp, so we can give it to him the next time we see him. They’re the kids who tenderly put their arms around me and say, it’s okay, mommy, when I’m crying. They’re good kids. But they’re not perfect. Neither am I.
When I asked my friend what he was most frustrated about right now, he said it’s that we’re the unrivaled global leaders in providing foreign assistance around the globe and no one knows it. More than $9 billion per year annually, plus over a billion dollars in New COVID-19 assistance signed into law last month. He said that while China is promoting itself through “mask diplomacy,” giving away (or selling) medical supplies/equipment, they’re not actually giving much in aid money.
The United States has been the largest supporter of the World Health Organization since its creation in 1948. U.S. contributions in 2019 exceeded $400 million, almost double the 2nd largest member state contribution. China, in contrast, contributed $44 million, and doesn’t even make the list of top contributors. An interesting side note is that the Gates Foundation is 5th on that list.
UNICEF was one of the first organizations to provide aid to the Chinese people during the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in January, they delivered 6 metric tons of respiratory masks and protective suits for health workers. This wouldn't have been possible without U.S. support. In 2019, the U.S. contributed more than $700 million to UNICEF, compared to China’s $16 million. In 2019, the United States contributed nearly $1.7 billion to the United Nations Refugee Agency, making it clear that we care about human suffering no matter where it occurs. China contributed $1.9 million.
These numbers are just the US gov’t contribution. That’s not even taking into account the $1.5 billion in COVID-19 assistance tallied so far from US private sector and nonprofits.
Even as I read those numbers, which you can find on the U.S. Department of State website, it feels like a pissing contest to say them out loud. I want to be clear that I think it’s great that China is providing medical equipment and masks and PPE to countries around the world. But my friend pointed out that these boxes of stuff cost little and have a high propaganda value. China hasn’t yet stepped up their offers of foreign assistance (that is, money) much at all.
I found this quote by Secretary Michael R. Pompeo on the U.S. Department of State website, written on March 27, just a few days ago:
“Whenever you see high quality, effective COVID-19 aid being delivered around the world by UN humanitarian and relief agencies, what you are seeing is the generosity of the American people and those who share our humanitarian values. We are by far the largest contributors to organizations like the UN Children’s Fund and the World Food Program because we believe in effective multilateralism that is focused on helping those in need, not scoring political points. This is what true global leadership looks like.”
Yesterday when I went back inside after the water incident, one by one my kids told me that they had decided to have a good day. I wish I could tell you that the rest of the day was smooth sailing, but it wasn’t. We muddled our way through the morning, and in the afternoon my neighbor’s yard guy used power tools on and off for the better part of the next few hours, making it impossible to record. The kids were still fighting with each other at dinner. We got through it. Some days that’s the best we can do.
There was a point yesterday after I came back inside, when my middle daughter looked at me tearfully and said, “Mommy, do you hate us?”
I sighed and put my head in my hands. “No, Sweetie,” I said. “I love you more than anything. You three kids and Daddy are my favorite people in this world. But do you ever feel like you hate Daddy and me?”
She hesitated, and then nodded. “But you know we love you even when you hate us,” I said. She nodded again.
“Sometimes,” I said to my daughter, “the people we love most are the ones who make us the craziest.”
When I see the numbers that illustrate the help my country has extended to the world during this crisis, I wonder if it’s possible to hold both our outrage over the things we still need to change, while also celebrating the ways we’ve cared for the world. This might be a rare chance for our highly polarized country to come together on something. I wonder if even in the moments when I feel like I hate my country, I can remember that there are things to love about it, too.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/02/nsc-coronavirus-white-house-162530
https://share.america.gov/hundreds-of-millions-in-u-s-foreign-aid-to-combat-covid-19/
https://www.state.gov/the-u-s-role-in-international-organizations-response-to-covid-19/