Will Self-Compassion Make You a Wuss?

Introduction

Recently, my wife had me read a short article about self-compassion. Two things about this I found interesting: 1) the article, and 2) the fact of my wife’s recommending it. Obviously she feels I could be better at self-compassion, and I suppose I agree. So why shouldn’t I just have you read that article? One, I lost it. Two, it had the common flaw of trying to appeal to too broad an audience by being really brief—a series of five tiny nibbles that added up to an unsatisfying snack. In this post I’ll delve deeper, and ask a thorny question: why do I have so much trouble with this?

What’s wrong with self-compassion?

I guess to begin with I should define the term. Wikipedia’s description does a sufficient job: “Self-compassion is extending compassion to one’s self in instances of perceived inadequacy, failure, or general suffering.” It’s basically cutting yourself some slack.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. Self-compassion leads to all kinds of benefits; Wikipedia lists life satisfaction, happiness, and emotional resilience, and the article I read said something about reduced inflammation.

And yet, something about self-compassion makes me instinctively bristle. Delving into this reaction, I’ll confess that to some degree, it’s simply a habit. I grew up the youngest of four boys, and if there’s a polar opposite to compassion, my brothers exercised it at every turn. If I hurt myself, or even if they hurt me, they would say, “Ohhhh, poor baby! Did that hurt? You poor, poor thing!” This was delivered with the most brittle, icy sarcasm available—which was a lot. To visibly suffer was to demand sympathy, which was treated as a shameful act.

Perhaps our father helped create this culture. I remember how, when I was 12, my brand-new bike was stolen during the few minutes I spent using a San-O-Let at a bike race. Far from expressing sympathy, my dad was livid. “If you had spent your money on a good lock instead of a fancy cycling cap, you’d still have your bicycle!” he thundered at me. This was a pretty typical scenario, so I guess I’m not surprised that my natural reaction to any personal failure is still self-flagellation.

But in a sense, my hesitation to grant myself some compassion isn’t wholly irrational. On a very conscious level, I take some issue with compassion in general, if it’s applied too generously. As I’ve written before in these pages, “For every person who pushes himself too hard and needs to lighten up, I’d say there are 10 who are just too complacent to push their comfort zone.” Something about self-compassion strikes me as defeatist—like, by the time you’re doling out compassion, you’ve kind of given up, haven’t you? Shouldn’t we temper our our magnanimous acceptance with an opposing effort to encourage and challenge?

This is all very abstract, so I’ll give an example. For the past few years, I’ve coached high school mountain biking. The afternoon before every race, our team rides the course. Early in the season, one of the new riders showed up for the pre-ride but suddenly balked. “Coach, I can’t race tomorrow,” he said. “I’m having trouble breathing.”

Nothing about asthma or bronchospasm was mentioned in this rider’s pre-season medical evaluation, and he looked fine to me. Was it time to be compassionate? Of course! I looked him right in the eye and said, “Wow, I’m really sorry you’re such a pussy.”

No, of course I didn’t really say that! (Just having a little fun here … this essay was starting to drag.) I decided compassion was indeed called for with regard to the obvious butterflies in this kid’s stomach, but I wasn’t ready to concede that he had a bona fide breathing problem. So I told him, “Hey, how about you go ahead with the pre-ride, see how that goes, and decide in the morning if you feel like you can race.” Well, once he got out on the course, he started having fun, gradually picked up the pace, and next thing you know he was leading the team. At the end I told him, “Hey, the way you were riding today, I sure hope you can race tomorrow.” Which he did. (I asked him afterward, “Are you glad you raced?” To which he grinned, “No.”)

How does this tough-it-out business play in my own life? Well, it definitely causes me stress. For example, when I bought a new dishwasher, I really wanted to just pay someone to install it and be done with it, but I’d have felt like a wuss. The uncharitable side of me demanded that I man up and figure it out for myself. I reached out to my brother, and though he’s far more supportive today than in the “Ohhhh, poor baby!” days, he wasn’t letting me off the hook, either. By egging me on, and in fact questioning my manhood, Bryan applied powerful pressure, which gave me the motivation to continue. If instead he’d shown the same compassion as my wife had (something like, “Just hire somebody … you have more important things to do”), I’d be out a bunch of money and would’ve missed out on the satisfaction of rising to the occasion (and blogging about it).

Another issue I have is that, given my privileged life, self-compassion can feel indulgent and even ungrateful. I’m lucky enough to live in the Bay Area, to have close family and friends, and to enjoy good health—and any one of these privileges ought to be enough to keep me from ever feeling sorry for myself. To accept others’ solicitude, or grant it to myself, feels like tempting fate … as though God might say (perhaps in my late father’s voice), “I’ll give you something to cry about!”

So … will self-compassion make you a wuss?

So is that it? Should stoicism and a hard line always trump compassion? Of course not. Self-compassion, I must admit, is often appropriate given the various assaults that even a life of privilege can wage on our emotional health. With all these gifts, happiness can seem almost compulsory—like anything short of flat-out elation, under these circumstances, is a kind of failure. We’re not such rational creatures that we can simply talk ourselves out of feeling inordinately bummed about this or that personal slight, unfulfilled ambition, or grey day. Whatever our blessings, it’s hard not to compare them to the better life and better self we could have if we could only just … just … whatever. With this in mind, I’m ready to advance the idea that self-compassion doesn’t just ease our burdens, lower our stress, and serve as a balm; it can actually make us stronger.

How? Well, first of all, self-compassion can help us stand up to our own egos when it comes to tackling something difficult. I’ll use writing as an example. Something about spending a lot of time with one’s own text is almost intrinsically soul-crushing. Several times already, during the composition of this essay, I’ve fought the temptation to throw up my hands and say, “This is boring! Nobody wants to read this! I should just stick with fart jokes!” And maybe you agree—but that shouldn’t stop me from trying, should it? Many a wannabe writer gets so caught up in self-editing and self-critiquing that he fails, or declines, to produce anything at all. If every wannabe succumbed to this self-doubt, we’d have no writers, and nothing to read. The fact that this blog exists attests to my charitable acceptance of “good enough.”

(Is “good enough” actually acceptable? I can’t help but to keep asking this. But it is acceptable, and here’s why: when I was trying to write back in high school, I was far worse at it than I am today … but I’m still glad I made those early efforts. For one thing, they document that time of my life, and where my head was, in a way that memory cannot. Also, because I know I’ve improved, I can have fun taking shots at my early stuff, as I’ve done here.)

In case you’ve never wanted to write, here’s a more universal example: sometimes, by forgiving our physical limitations—especially the ones imposed by age—we can set more modest fitness objectives for ourselves, and thus do something rather than nothing. As a longtime cyclist, I’m perennially drawn into the data-slave mentality of monitoring my performance throughout every ride. This habit has become progressively more discouraging as I age, to the point that not infrequently I’ll feel like giving up mid-ride and slinking home because I’m going so slow. But I’ve learned to temper this, and not just with self-talk (e.g., “Who cares, it’s a nice day and a gorgeous road”). I have learned, on those bad days, to ignore the heart rate and stopwatch altogether, by turning my bike computer to “the weather channel.”

This doesn’t mean I won’t reflexively glance at the device to see how I’m doing, but when I do I’m reminded to forget about performance. The thermometer reminds me I’m not in control, that I’m subject to global forces larger than myself. I’m letting myself off the hook.

My latest cycling breakthrough has been shortening my standard route, to the point that I often ride for less than an hour (which I’ve traditionally thought wasn’t even worth suiting up for). I’m acknowledging to myself, “I’m 50. I’m busy. I’m tired. South Park is a bloody hard climb. It’s enough.” Is this a cop-out? Not as much as the dangerous alternative: deciding I don’t have the time or energy for a proper ride so I’ll just stay home.

The beauty of this scaled-down approach is that sometimes it frees me to scale back up later. Half the time when I set out on the short ride, I end up feeling okay after all. And once I’ve got the adrenaline going,  I’ll throw in one more climb—a “bonus climb,” so I can take it as slow as I want—and next thing I know I’m drilling it up Canon Drive and ending up with a pretty sweet hit of endorphins.

Another way self-compassion defies self-indulgence: it takes us out of ourselves, if we approach it the right way. If the opposite of self-compassion is dwelling on our failures, we need to remind ourselves how this affects those around us. When we suffer, so do they. Too much of this and we become insufferably self-absorbed. When I fear I’m succumbing to this, I try look at my situation from a loved one’s point of view and see if it looks as bleak from there. If it doesn’t, that tells me something. Using this trick to forgive myself thus reduces my self-absorption.

Finally, self-compassion helps me be more honest with myself. How? Well, consider how hard it is to confess to something when you have no expectation of forgiveness. I mentioned already how unforgiving my dad was; need I mention that my brothers and I generally hid our blunders from him, even when we could have really used his help? By the same token, if we can’t learn to forgive ourselves when we fail, how can we expect to be really honest with ourselves?

In other words, we might stoop to self-deception if the alternative is too painful to face. For example, let’s say I get bawled out by my boss. If I’m afraid to concede that she may have a point, I’m not likely to take her criticism very well. Instead of seeing her perspective, I might succumb to that self-protective reflex—to feel wronged, to decide she’s a jerk, and to channel my inner Dilbert and shrug off the criticism. This isn’t self-compassion—it’s denial! On the flip side, if I can forgive myself and be honest, I’m more likely to see her point. In this way I can actually improve—so my ability to forgive myself, so that I can face my failure and learn from it, is more of a life tool than an indulgence.

So … we’re good here, right?

Of course it’s easy enough to spew forth all these platitudes (actually it’s not, I’m starting to gag), but putting them into practice is another matter. I suppose I wrote this pro-compassion tract as much to convince myself as to convince you, whoever you are. So I’ll make you a deal: if you promise not to silently mock me for this earnest essay, I’ll try to do the same.

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ECLIPSE 2017, BAYBEE!

Introduction

Oh, shit! I’ve only got an hour and a half to write about the big eclipse! If you missed it yourself, maybe I can help give you a sense of what it was like. And if you saw it in person, clearly you love a solar eclipse and this post is for you, too.

Total solar eclipse of Aug 21, 2017

I witnessed the eclipse from the Bay Area, or to be precise my house at 37.8851 latitude, -122.27531 longitude. (Well, that’s precise enough to give you the idea, without helping you burglarize my house.) Of course I could have found a better locale, but to be honest I put off my eclipse planning until the morning of. Local options, according to a helpful website, included Indian Rock Park, UC Berkeley, Civic Center park, the public library, and the Chabot Space & Science Center. Most of these recommendations centered around who else would be there (e.g., “There are sure to be gaggles of smart Cal students viewing the solar eclipse around campus”). While I can appreciate this—after all, the most fun part for me about touring Amsterdam’s Red Light District wasn’t watching the sad, ragged prostitutes but rather the Oklahoma hayseeds ogling them—astronomy really is more of a solitary activity, don’t you think?

Part of my decision came down to weather, of course. I wasn’t about to drag my family up to the Chabot Space & Science Center if the Berkeley hills were blanketed by fog, so at dawn I did a little recon of the area, by bicycle. (Full disclosure: I’d have ridden up there anyway.) Here’s what I found:

Dang it! I decided to avoid any kind of hassle and just watch from home. My hopes weren’t entirely dashed, though, as the forecast was for the fog to burn off by 10 a.m., with the eclipse starting at 10:15. It was going to be close.

At 10 sharp, with the sky still a uniform grey, I decided to wake up my kids. (Yeah, that kind of teenager, that kind of summer.) I made like this was gonna be epic. My younger daughter grabbed her camera. We headed out back. I’d set a timer to count down until 10:15, without telling my kids the inconvenient truth that they’d probably already missed a lot of it. To be honest, I was a little vague about the details myself. I knew I was supposed to get some kind of special viewing goggles, so that we could see a progressively larger bite being taken out of the sun before things got dark, but I never got around to procuring them. My wife was similarly useless.

Speaking of my wife, I’ll confess I have no idea where she even was for the eclipse. It’s possible she didn’t know what time or even day it was to transpire. She’s not a giant astronomy fan. Back in like ‘97 we were vacationing at Canyonlands National Park and my dad joined us. We went to this very remote place, far away from any lights or people, and my dad set up his telescope. For the next 2 or 3 hours (or so it felt) he gave us an astronomy lesson. I’m not a great lover of this subject myself; the only constellations I can make out are  the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt. My interest waned, at a very young age, after I found out my brother Max had lied to me about the Big Dipper. He said that meteorologists can predict rain based on whether the Dipper is right-side-up or upside-down. This seemed so incredibly useful that I couldn’t take the truth later. Plus, to a simple guy like me, the constellations seem like such bullshit. It takes so much imagination for this or that collection of stars to resemble something, you might as well just make it up from scratch. “There’s the Devil’s Skateboard over there, you see, and if you follow that line of stars up—there, you see that cluster there? That’s Dracula’s Harelip.”

So anyhow, my dad’s lesson was losing me entirely, I was suffering from museum knees, and then my wife heard a noise and turned on a flashlight to make a quick scan around us.  “Thanks a lot,” my dad chided, “you just ruined astronomy.” (The flashlight beam had spoiled our night vision, you see.) I’ll never let my wife live this down. If she ever suffers a setback I say, “Well, you are the woman who ruined astronomy.”

It’s tempting to say our poor eclipse preparations were a result of my intimidation in the face of science types, or my wife’s emotional scars from the Canyonlands episode, but the truth is, we’re just kind of disorganized. This poor parenting is particularly flagrant considering how well my dad had risen to the occasion for my last solar eclipse, which was in February 1979 and which I witnessed from my hometown of Boulder, Colorado. My dad, who was an actual rocket scientist, had equipped my brother Max and me with these cool little flat rectangles of smoked glass. If we stacked the two of them together, we could look right at the eclipse. This might not seem like a big deal in this modern day and age where everybody and her mom gets special eclipse glasses, but in those benighted days nobody had this. We were all just supposed to go outside and prance around and be excited until the darkness came.

And that’s what my less fortunate classmates were doing (the whole elementary school was let outside for this, and it was a brilliant sunny day) when they spied Max and me taking in the action and uttering spontaneous wow-cool noises. They crowded around and begged us to let them have a turn with our little glass pieces. This was unprecedented. I mean, sure, kids gathered around us on the playground all the time, but only to shout insults, pummel us, witness us being pummeled, and so on. They never gave us anything approaching friendly interest.

(You might think I’m exaggerating. I encountered a Bay Area native recently who has always thought of Boulder as a dreamy, hippie, flowery place where everybody is sweet and good and nice. I assure you that Boulder in the ‘70s was nothing of the kind. Schoolyard bullying was entirely tolerated and the place was full of vicious little bastards. Believe me.)

So this benign attention from my classmates was novel. Kids were actually saying “please” to me. And so, after I’d had my fill of the spectacle of the sun looking a bit like a progressively less full moon, I relented and allowed my friends a try. “Now here’s the thing,” I cautioned, “you can’t put one lens over each eye. You have to stack the little glass lenses together and look through the pair with just one eye.” (Actually, however I put it was surely less articulate than that.) I went on, “If you look through just one of them, you’ll be blinded!” My dad had driven this message home to Max and me, and we weren’t even tempted to push our luck. But my friends ignored this warning completely and put one lens over each eye.

“Man alive, that’s AMAZING!” they cried. Now they were set upon by the other kids, and of course my friends (all two of them) let their friends have a try, and they let their friends, or at least the more popular kids they wanted to curry favor with, and pretty soon half the school was getting a turn. I kind of wanted my lenses back, but the more pressing matter was that every single kid was doing it wrong, holding one lens up to each eye, so I knew the whole lot of them were going to go blind and it was all my fault. I could have yelled, “Stop it, you fools, you’ll go blind!” but I was just too shy.

Finally, some even quieter kid (who had probably been waiting in vain for a turn) said, “Isn’t everybody going to go blind?” I shrugged and said, “Yeah, I guess.” This kid went running off to get the Principal, who came running out, horrified, and confiscated Max’s and my lenses. He eventually gave them back but on the condition that we only blind ourselves with them since we had our parents’ permission to do so. Ah, those were the days.

But Max and I only got the basic eclipse gear… for our older brothers, Dad did something even cooler. He built this thingy that would attach to the non-eyepiece end of a telescope to turn it into a projector. Little wooden rods a few feet long attached to a white disk onto which an image of the eclipse would be projected. I don’t suppose this is actually a miracle of engineering, as I’ve just looked online and found similar (though frankly less elegant) versions depicted. But back then, nobody ever took initiative like this. Boulder dads were smart, I guess, but in my experience they were either absentminded professor types always puttering in the lab, or granola-loving hikers wandering around on trails, or the generic grunting type of dad who seemed to always be watching the Bronco or Buffs game. These men didn’t send their kids to school with a precious telescope, tripod, and handmade thingy to worry about breaking.

And so my older brothers, Geoff and Bryan, were even bigger heroes than Max and I were. The whole fricking junior high crowded around them as they assembled the amazing eclipse-viewing apparatus, and everybody oohed and aahed at the sight of that bitten-into sun. In fact, one teacher was overheard telling her colleague, “I heard Dr. Albert is an honest-to-god rocket scientist, plus he’s tall and has broad shoulders. I would sleep with him in a heartbeat.” I might be exaggerating a bit here, because a) I wasn’t actually there, this being at my brothers’ school, and b) I totally made that up. But it could have happened.

The newspaper showed up, and my brothers with their telescope apparatus made the front page—big photo, story, the whole bit!  The reporter spelled both their names wrong … I mean, he wasn’t even close. It was like “Brien and Gorrlfley,” almost like he deliberately got them wrong out of spite, or so it seemed to me back then.

Getting back to 2017, and this recent eclipse: when my timer chimed, indicating the official start of the totality, I yelled, “Kids, it has begun!” I tried to get them to prance around joyfully but they seemed a bit disappointed in the reality of the spectacle. At this point, special eclipse goggles would have been useless. What would we have even looked at? From across the fence I heard my neighbor yell, “Where’s the sun?”

Now, don’t think I didn’t bring any gear to the event. I did have my camera and made a movie. Look, here it is!

My favorite part of the eclipse was when my neighbor called out over the fence, “Dana, I’m so glad to have shared this profound experience with you.”

But the eclipse wasn’t over yet! I ran inside and called my brother Bryan. He was witnessing amazing things even as we spoke, having taken his lucky family on a long road trip to Culver, Oregon, near Bend (i.e., in the middle of nowhere). I tried to find Culver on Google Maps. “It’s near this hippie commune called Madras,” Bryan explained unhelpfully. Here’s the map.

Bryan was so excited. “Dude, did you see the Bailey’s Beads?” he asked. “Did you see the Diamond Ring?” I’d never heard of either of these phenomena in my life, but I confidently answered, “We did not.” He hadn’t either, somehow, despite everything else being perfect.

“It wasn’t pitch dark,” he said breathlessly, “but we could feel it getting colder. The streetlights came on. We could see planets, but not stars. We were supposed to see these snake-y shadow things, like snakes slithering over the ground. Maybe the hippies up in Madras could see those. It was so, so unbelievably cool. The shadow moves at 4,000 mph across the ground. We could see this mountain range in the distance that wasn’t dark yet.”

I asked about this thing only lasting for two minutes. That really didn’t match my memory of it. “No, it’s the total darkness that lasts for two minutes [you fricking moron],” he said. “The bite being gradually taken out of the sun takes like” (what did he say, an hour? two hours?). “I’m still watching the sun come back out from behind it, even as we speak [you ignorant fool]!”

I asked if he had protective goggles. “Yeah, stupid protective goggles!” he said. “They’re so lame, they’ve got these warnings all over them, across every printable surface, warning how dangerous this endeavor is, saying it every way they can think of, saying ‘Do not look for more than 3 minutes.’ Why not? I’m gonna look for an hour and then write them a letter!”

Here are a few of my nieces rocking their über-cool eclipse goggles:

I bemoaned my lost opportunity to travel to a good eclipse-viewing spot where I could inculcate in my offspring the majesty of the celestial heavens. “Well, there are lots of lunar eclipses you could watch with them,” Bryan offered. I made the mistake of admitting that I’m not real clear on what a lunar eclipse even is. He started to explain it, and I felt like a kid again. A stupid kid.

“You see, the Earth rotates around the sun on one plane. The moon rotates around the earth in a slightly different plane. When these line up you get an eclipse. So there’s the shadow of the moon that’s smaller than the earth, so it crosses over the humina humina humina and then there’s this arctangent and blah blah blah penumbra, and then over here you’ve got your lunar orbital plane 5.1 degrees from the ecliptic, and then [unintelligible], and you are getting very sleepy, keep your eyes on the swinging watch, you are going down, down, down….”

Suddenly my neck jerked. “Hello, hello, hello?” Bryan was asking. “Sorry, I was talking to Mute,” I said sheepishly. “So … tell me about your road trip. Tell me about the venue. [Tell me something I can grasp.]”

“Dude, so, you need to get signed up on Twitter, because NASA has some really cool stuff. I’ve seen countless lunar eclipses because I’ve been on guard for them,” Bryan said, apparently in earnest. So if there’s anything I’ve learned from this eclipse, it’s that there are even nerdier people in this world than I.

“[Enough with the lunar eclipse!] So tell me about your road trip,” I persisted. “Tell me about Culver.”

“Oh yeah! So we got here at like 3 a.m. No problem parking. Biggest issue is that the town didn’t really prep for the eclipse crowd. Fortunately there are 3 San-O-lets left over from the crawdad festival (kinda bummed I missed that), but they were totally overflowing, each with this mountain of crap almost up to the hole, and no toilet paper of course. That was pretty gross. On the plus side, the mayor came through with all these pans of cornbread, also left over from the crawdad festival, which she was trying to get people to take. We ended up accepting a 20x30-inch pan of cornbread which we ate with chili. It wasn’t bad. Apparently here in Oregon they believe that incarcerated people should work, so the cornbread was baked by prisoners.”

 “So you found all these files baked into it?” I asked. He replied, “Yeah, and wads of spit too. But good.”

That’s almost my entire story of the big eclipse. But then there was this sad epilogue yesterday evening. My older daughter was sitting at the computer looking really glum. My wife was concerned and trying to draw her out, to figure out the problem. College prep worries? A falling out with a friend? My wife was getting nowhere.

Finally I said, half-jokingly, “Is it the eclipse?” My daughter almost smiled. “It is, actually,” she said. She was touring the Internet reading about the eclipse and came across Randall Munroe’s xkcd cartoon about it. If you hover your mouse over the cartoon you get an extra caption: “It was—without exaggeration—the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Munroe is to my daughter what Justin Bieber is to most teenage girls, so this was a profound statement. It was dawning on my daughter just how much she’d missed out on by having a deadbeat, incurious, non-science-obsessed dad.

I had to make it up to her. So we looked up the next big eclipse, which hits Texas in 2024. We studied the eclipse path online. It goes right through Austin, a city I’ve always wanted to visit. “Look,” I told her, “your Uncle Peter raced on the national team with Lance Armstrong. Surely Lance will remember him. Lance has a place in Austin. A big ol’ ranch, I’ll bet. I’ll send a few e-mails, call in some favors, and get us invited.  I’m getting such an early start … surely this can be arranged. So. Count on it. You, me, Lance … ECLIPSE 2024, BAYBEE!”

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From the Archives - The Closet, or My Claustrophobia

Introduction

Ever wonder what it would be like to be really, really claustrophobic? Well, I am. Read on for a tour of this sometimes absurd phobia.

The Closet, or My Claustrophobia – June 10, 2010

I’m terribly claustrophobic. When I have a bad dream, it often involves being inside a tall tower, making my way up a spiral staircase and having to crawl through progressively smaller openings between floors. Often I’m trying to keep up with somebody who is much better at squeezing through. Usually I reach a gap that’s too small to squeeze through, and I don’t have enough room to turn back. I’m trapped.

In my waking life I’m pretty good at staying out of small enclosures, but my phobia can still strike. Nine years ago I had a bizarre episode. I was at home alone and attempted to fish a cat toy out from under a solid, 7-foot-tall cabinet (aka “entertainment center”). There was a six-inch gap below the cabinet, but a strip of trim between its underside and the floor made for a narrow gap. Lying on my side on the hardwood floor, I was able to work my arm underneath and feel around for the lost toy. I groped around until I found it, then tried to pull my arm out. Alarmingly, it got stuck at the elbow.

No matter how I twisted and turned my arm, I could not get it out from beneath the cabinet. How had I gotten it in there? It was like a strange puzzle. Could it be, I wondered—my anxiety growing—that removing my arm might actually prove impossible? Was this a one-way deal, like a fish hook or a funnel? My arm writhed, chafing against the rough wooden trim of the cabinet. The absurdity of the situation wasn’t lost on me, but I couldn’t find it funny. My breathing got faster as I started to descend into panic.

Of course there was no actual danger, but such is the nature of a true phobia. Anybody would be uncomfortable being, say, buried alive in a coffin or trapped in a mine, but the true claustrophobe falls prey to utterly irrational notions. I have always cultivated in myself a highly ordered, rational mind—my older brothers used to call me “Logic Lad”—but part of my brain doesn’t always play along. So it was now, as I lay there stuck and fuming. I knew full well that, in this large, high-ceilinged living room, I could not run out of air –and yet I believed I already was.

It’s not hard to guess where this claustrophobia came from. It was brought on, or at least hugely exacerbated, by a cruel game my brothers called “The Closet.” They stumbled on it when I was nine and they happened to throw me in the front hall closet where we kept coats, boots, and the vacuum cleaner, and discovered to their delight that I began to freak out. So they hauled me out of there and dragged me down the hall to a tiny linen closet. It had shelves from floor to ceiling that extended to within eight inches of the door when it was closed. I had to turn my head to keep my nose from getting crushed as the door slammed shut.

My cheek was pressed against a stack of towels, and I inhaled the faint scent of the detergent they’d been laundered with. This could have been a pleasant smell had I not suffered the sensation of gradually suffocating. The smell became stronger as, hyperventilating, I beat against the door of the closet and begged for mercy. The doorknob on the inside had been broken off and never replaced, and I tried in vain to turn the stub as a brother held the knob on the other side.  When I thumped against the door, the dull thud told me my brothers were leaning against it; even if I burst the latch I’d still be stuck. My tormentors cackled and shrieked with glee. That their voices were muffled by the door made me feel I was stuck not just in a closet but in an impenetrable vault.

“Guys! Please let me out! The air is getting thin!” I wailed. They became utterly engulfed in laughter. When they could finally talk they all mocked me: “‘Ooh, the air is getting thin!’ Did you hear that? ‘The air is getting thin!’” They laughed their asses off. I beat my toes, knees, hands, and elbows futilely against the door as tears streamed down my face. Only my brothers’ eventual boredom could save me, but I couldn’t help but beg for mercy. The irrational part of my brain foolishly believed my brothers weren’t 100% cruel. Finally, when my energy gave out and I could only sob quietly, my brothers finally lost interest and set me free.

In a just world, I’d have come out swinging, decking each of my brothers in turn, maybe breaking out some sweet karate moves they never knew I had. But in the real world of my childhood, I had absolutely zero recourse. I suppose I could have gotten in one good sucker-punch to somebody’s kidneys, but that would only make things worse: they’d beat the crap out of me and then put me right back in that linen closet. They’d discovered my Room 101.

Not that they needed any excuse to put me in there. From the day they discovered The Closet, my brothers would inflict it whenever they were bored or had a new friend over who hadn’t yet witnessed the spectacle. My brothers never questioned their God-given right to torment me for their own amusement. The twins, three years older than I, were very shy at school and swim team, but at home, with my parents perpetually absent, they ruled like storm troopers. The middle child longed to be accepted by the twins, and thus unquestioningly did their bidding. (They enjoyed snubbing him anyway.) I was the baby: quiet, bookish, and aloof, which made me a natural target for the twins and their lackey. Any time I was approached by more than one brother, I’d instinctively make a run for it, but they’d always catch me, and begin dragging me towards the hallway.

Come with me for tour of the brutal ritual. My skin burns against the cheap, nylon, orange-red carpet of the house as they drag me. In the front hall, just before the living room, is a flight of stairs down to the basement, and there is a wrought-iron railing around the stairwell. As we pass this railing I tear a hand free from my brothers’ clutches and seize it. The instant my hand touches the iron rail, I get a big shock from the static electricity my body has stored up from being dragged across the carpet. I rip another hand free and, lacing my arms and wrists through the railing, grasp each hand with the other. My brothers continue pulling on my body, so I’m stretched (like taffy, it feels like). The rails are fashioned in a twirl, like fusilli, and they chafe painfully against my wrists. Grunting and laughing, my brothers keep pulling until my hands get too sweaty to maintain their grip.

I grab the edge of the floor where it ends at the stairwell. The carpet is secured by tiny, headless nails, which scratch my fingers as I’m pulled away. Next I lunge for, and reach, the edge of the sofa, a big blocky thing upholstered in cheap velour, its color halfway between burnt orange and silly putty. My panic is giving me a superhuman grip, so as my brothers pull on my ankles, the sofa slides away from the wall. Pathetically, even as I suffer I secretly hope my big brothers admire my strength.

My brothers cooperate, like hyenas. “Go after his arms! Pry his fingers off!”

I can’t resist forever, and they eventually pull me free, drag me down the hall, jerk me to my feet, and stuff me into The Closet, squishing the door against me until the doorknob latch clicks shut.

That’s when the real misery starts, that I already described.

Thank God I’m through with all that. Over the years I inevitably caught up to my brothers in size and strength, and who knows, maybe they developed some humanity. The Closet was finally abandoned—but the claustrophobia I’m stuck with. Which is how, decades later, I managed to find myself inordinately close to panic from seeming to be trapped in a large, airy room.

I tried rocking the cabinet with my free hand, but it wouldn’t budge. For the first time, I longed for the cheap stapled-together furniture of my college days, which you could knock over with harsh language. I focused my gaze on the stuccoed ceiling of the living room, high above me. This is a huge room, I told myself. My wife will be home in six or eight hours and there’s no way I’d suffocate in that time.

Could anybody else help? To distract myself from my confinement, I listened to the world outside my house: the percussive sounds of a construction site; the groaning power-take-off of a garbage truck; a commercial vehicle backing up, beeping shrilly; the neighbor’s baby screaming; the squawking of birds in the trees. I was calming down enough to appreciate how much goes on in a quiet neighborhood, not including a grown man stupidly pinned to the floor of his living room. I was eventually able to actually chuckle at my lugubrious plight. I pictured my wife finding me, and laughing at my predicament—except actually she wouldn’t, on second thought. Only the legacy of my brothers’ taunts had me imagining such a thing.

And then, seized with fresh determination, I tried again to free myself. With a flinging, twisting, rotating, wiggling, and yanking motion, I finally ripped my arm out from under the cabinet. I suffered a sizeable scrape in the process, but it was worth it—I was free! I chucked the cat toy over to Misha (how long had she been slyly watching me?) and got on with my life.

Epilogue

Looking back now (in 2015), do I think I was emotionally scarred by this?  Any shell-shock?  No, probably not ... the claustrophobia my brothers discovered had to be somewhat innate.  And do I hold a grudge?  Nope.  Take a look at my last post ... my friendship with my brothers is alive and well.

From the Archives - When You Are Engulfed in Shame

Introduction

Last May, I took a writing class called “Memoir: Art of the Personal.” The instructor encouraged her students not to shy away from troubling material. Her advice was something like “go where the pain is.” This makes sense. Had Dostoyevsky written a novel called Obedience and Praise rather than Crime and Punishment, he might not be so famous.

More recently, I read a parenting book called Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children. It has a chapter titled “Why Kids Lie” that offers some, well, shocking statistics. A four-year old, a cited study attests, “will lie about once every two hours, while a six-year-old will lie about once every hour.” The book goes on to describe how “kids who live in threat of consistent punishment don’t lie less. Instead, they become better liars.”

As a kid, I was no exception: I was not above lying. Plus, I stole. If this seems interesting to you, perhaps you will enjoy this story, which I wrote for my class.

When You Are Engulfed in Shame – May 27, 2010

When I was about ten, I stole money from my family. Not just on one occasion, but repeatedly—daily, in fact—for a couple of weeks. I felt no remorse (at least at first), and had no regard for consequences. I was pilfering change from the bus money jar.

Every day, as soon as we got home from school, my brother Max and I would to get a dime from the jar for our bus fare, and walk about half a mile to the bus stop to catch the slow, meandering #5 bus that would take us all the way across Boulder to the YMCA. It was a boring trip made all the more boring by our taking it five days a week for years. At the Y we had swim practice. I hated swimming—still do—and especially hated being bullied in the locker room afterward. Bigger kids would roll towels into a “rat’s tail,” get the end wet, and snap us with it, leaving red marks on our bare skin. Then, my eyes burning from the chlorine in the pool, I’d wait with my brothers for forty-five minutes for our mom to pick us up around 7. Given the time demands of swimming and school, I had no life.

The money I stole was for Zēmis. A Zēmi was a fancy soft drink, prepared to order by a high-tech vending machine in the Y’s lobby. You’d put in your 25 cents, select your flavor (cherry, lime, whatever), and then watch in awe as a tapered plastic cup— ornate as a crystal goblet —dropped onto a little grille and was half-filled with crushed ice. The Technicolor syrup came next, climbing the ice. Then carbonated water fizzed in, right to the top—such precision! I’d treat my friend John to one, too. (He was a year older and really weird—he used to fly his hand along ahead of him as we walked, making it dip and soar, making cool spaceship noises.) My generosity was half the fun of the Zēmis for me: I loved being Big Mr. Moneybucks.

I wasn’t so naïve as to think the stolen bus money wouldn’t be missed. My family had already gone through a bus money embezzlement scandal. That time, my brother Max—the troublesome middle child—had been blamed, and was harassed for days. It finally come out that our dad had needed change and raided the bus money cache, and hadn’t thought to mention it. Though Max was exonerated, the stigma never really went away. So now, when I was stealing bus money for real, I figured I’d have a readymade scapegoat when the theft was discovered.

When Mom noticed the embezzlement, an ad hoc tribunal was formed. Each of the four brothers was both a prosecutor and a defendant. Max was harassed all over again, even while I continued to steal to support my Zēmi habit. I repeatedly accused Max myself, both to make my innocence more realistic and for the sheer joy of it. My brothers and I thrilled to the intrigue of crime and punishment, basked in the righteous indignation of shaking down a suspected wrongdoer and bringing him to justice.

(That it wouldn’t be actual justice didn’t matter a bit: the satisfaction was the same. Once, years before when I was like five, sitting around the house bored, I decided to scrape my leg with a Lego until a large red welt appeared. Then I went crying to my oldest brother, Bryan, telling him Max did it to me. I watched with great satisfaction as Bryan went over and beat on Max, bawling him out the whole time out for hurting his little brother. It made no difference to me that Max was innocent; the spectacle of richly deserved punishment being meted out was really all I needed.)

Perhaps to prevent us from all getting spanked by our dad, my mom actually offered amnesty. “Okay, this is your chance,” she said. “Whoever stole the money, step forward now, and you won’t be punished. Just admit you did it, and all will be forgiven.” I wasn’t even tempted to do this. Maybe Mom wouldn’t punish me, but I’d have to listen to my brothers castigating me not only for my heinous theft, but for having accused Max the whole time. It would also be tough to witness Max himself attaining new heights in righteous indignation.

And, truth be told, I had finally become ashamed of my actions. Funny how that works: if nobody had noticed the missing money, I’d have blissfully gone right on stealing (just like a pro athlete who blithely dopes and will go on doping until he gets caught and then, sobbing, apologizes to his fans and vows to help clean up the sport). I cursed myself, my friend, and those damn Zēmis. I’d never felt so low. It became more important than ever to hide my guilt.

The truth came out soon enough. My brothers, who had long envied my fancy drinks, now questioned whether it was really my friend John paying for them. I insisted that it was. “Well, I’ll just give a call over there and find out,” Geoff announced. I was almost sure he was bluffing—after all, all four of us were deathly afraid of the phone. (Just calling a business to find out its hours, as our mom sometimes made us do, was almost impossible. Whichever kid made the call would be almost unable to talk—his throat would go dry, his vocal chords would contract, and his strangled voice would come out in a thin, reedy squeak. Naturally, his brothers would mock him for this.)

But I couldn’t bring myself to call Geoff’s bluff. There was just that small chance that he would actually go through with the call, and my friend would unknowingly sell me out, and that was just too much to face. So I spilled my guts before Geoff dialed the first digit. I confessed.

Right away my brothers lit into me, cackling like hyenas, thrilling to my shame like rabid journalists. Max was the most triumphant. Over and over he cried out, “I can understand a liar—but a fieth?” He brandished this indignant cry like a Gatling gun, making sure everybody heard and appreciated it. It became the slogan for my defeat. I felt so low I didn’t even have the heart to correct my brother (“It’s not ‘fieth,’ it’s ‘thief,’ you moron!” I’d have said). I let my brothers have their day in the sun, and felt completely deserving of my humiliation. After all, I’d stolen repeatedly, lied, and—worst of all—sold out my own brother, all for a fizzy drink.

dana albert blog

The Bigger Picture

Introduction

The character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is often held up as the poster child for indecisiveness. However, the literary elite have called him the most intelligent character in all of literature. Indecision can be a sign of intelligence, while at the other end of the spectrum are people who are great at making up their minds and sticking to their guns (often literally), and who keep things simple by refusing to consider, process, or otherwise pay attention to conflicting information.

This post is about the struggle to see the bigger picture—not in books or plays, but the little trials that pepper our lives. I offer three case studies from my life to illustrate the complexities of honing your perspective.

Case study #1 – The Escalator

I was hurrying to Bart, the Bay Area commuter train, heading home from work. As I made my way down the escalator, two steps at a time, my train was rolling into the station below—it looked like I’d just make it. But suddenly, an obstruction: a couple was standing, side by side, instead of walking down the escalator. The young man, eighteen or so, was kind of hanging on his girlfriend. They seemed to be in their own little world, like Tony and Maria when they meet for the first time at the high school dance in “West Side Story”—you know, where the rest of the dancers blur out, the music becomes muted, and the two have tunnel vision (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here and watch from a little over 4½ minutes in). Now, I’m all for people getting together and enjoying their romance and everything, but in a crowded train station during the commute hour? I was pretty ticked. I mean, who did they think they were? Were they so busy being in love they didn’t realize they were holding people up?

On top of being about to miss my train, my own annoyance annoyed me. I felt that I ought to be one of those philosophical types who thinks, “Ah, young love!” and sighs with pleasure, maybe winks at the happy couple. But I wasn’t the magnanimous sort—I was a rushed commuter absorbed in his own impatience, barely calm enough to accept the delay, much less think happy thoughts about the young lovers. Was I jealous of these two, of their youth and their fresh romance and carefree attitude? Or was I really just in a hurry? I was on the brink of saying, “Excuse me, coming through!” or perhaps glaring at them. But ultimately I managed to suck it up and simply resign myself to getting the next train.

Good thing. As I followed the pair off the escalator and got a better look, I realized that the guy was blind. He wasn’t hanging on his girlfriend—he was just getting some help on the escalator. I was instantly awash with relief for not having said or done anything. What a jerk I’d have seemed if I’d rushed them along or given them stink-eye. How certain I’d been about my instant assessment of the situation—and how wrong! I think back to this near-miss whenever I’m on the brink of a snap judgment during a social conflict.

Case Study #2 – The Plastic Bag

Recently I was working on something in my home office when I heard my daughter Lindsay bawling. I figured it would be a typically short-lived outburst, but she kept it up for awhile. When it became obvious my wife wasn’t going to do anything about it, I asked her what our daughter was crying about. “A plastic bag,” she replied, a hint of annoyance in her voice.

If you think I’m about to speak ill of my wife, think again. I can relate to her frustration. Lindsay cries a lot. This isn’t uncommon for her age, but that doesn’t make the crying any quieter. And as parents, we’re torn about how to react. If we run over and make a big fuss, we’re kind of indulging our daughter, perhaps even promoting her outsized response to life’s frustrations. And by making a big show of sympathy we may be dragging out her despair, helping her overinflate a minor grievance.

I was the crying kind of kid myself, but by older brothers never let me get away with it. They’d mock me, sarcastically gushing, “Oh, poor little baby!” Of course this made me feel worse, and cry harder, but it made me mad, too, and I credit the frequent repetition of this scenario with helping to make me the scrapper that I am today. Being retroactively grateful for my brothers’ taunts, I cannot default to coddling my own child whenever she cries.

Still, Lindsay was obviously really upset about something, and anyway I felt like taking a break from what I’d been doing, so I sought her out. She tried to run away—being more angry than sad, I realized—but I scooped her up, grabbed a chair, and sat her down on my lap. (Another reason for my intervention: it won’t be long before she’s too big to sit on my lap, so I’m enjoying it while I can.) I asked her to tell me all about it. As she sputtered and sobbed, the full story gradually came out.

Her older sister Alexa had a friend over and they were playing at something that involved large Ziploc bags. Lindsay was tagging along, and the two older girls gave her a bag and asked her to fill it with water and bring it back to them. But it was a trick: the bag had a hole in it! They expected her to carry the thing back leaking water all over the place; if they were lucky, she’d even get in trouble.

This is the kind of thing older siblings are always doing. I remember one time during my pre-teen years when I was at a video arcade with a friend playing Tempest and we got tired of my friend’s little brother hanging around watching us play. So we gave him fifteen cents and told him to head down to Dairy Queen, a couple blocks away, to buy us some whip. (I’d once seen it on the menu under “toppings.”) Happy to be included, even in a servile role, my friend’s brother gamely headed out on the errand. It was a really hot summer day, and this was the most popular Dairy Queen in town, and the poor kid stood in line for at least half an hour before getting to the little window and being told he couldn’t just buy whip by itself. He came back bearing the bad news, and—managing not to laugh—we scolded him: “Doggone it, we told you to get us whip! What do you mean they won’t sell it to you?! It’s right there on the menu! Now you march straight back there and get us our whip!” (We will both go to Hell for this, of course.)

Mostly, though, I was on the other end of these sibling affairs, being brushed off by older brothers who wanted nothing to do with me. I remember once how Max (the next oldest) and I once wanted to play in our bigger brothers’ friend’s clubhouse. They refused to let us in. Max demanded a reason, so they told him it was because his nose was running and he had an ugly bruise on his forehead. They even made a song to taunt him with: “No snotty-pot bruise-heads allowed in the clubhouse!”

Now, Lindsay’s response to her sister’s prank was pretty clever—she was no dupe. She spotted the hole in the bag, and instead of merely pointing out the older girls’ treachery (which would have accomplished nothing), she devised a clever retaliatory plan: she would swap out the defective bag for a perfect one, and casually return with it properly filled, not leaking a drop. She could pretend to be sweetly accommodating, and watch with delight as the other girls, astonished, beheld her achievement. It would be, in the parlance of childhood triumphs, a “burn-royal-fry.” (If this term confuses you, allow me to explain. When I was a kid, getting the better of somebody was called a “burn.” Getting him real good was a “burn-royal.” A true burn-royal-fry, needless to say, was exceedingly rare.)

But (my daughter now sobbed), her plan did not work out. She managed to obtain a good Ziploc bag, but in the process of trying to open it, she ripped it, and it turned out to be the last Ziploc bag in the house, and now everything was ruined. This was the real cause of the outburst: she’d had the perfect plan but she botched it through sheer clumsiness and haplessness. She was furious with herself.

Poor kid. It’s my fault: she’s clearly got the Albert self-flogging gene. Not all of us Alberts have it, but it’s not uncommon in our family. Of course, this excess of self criticism—a refusal to be compassionate with oneself—is not unique to us. I remember a childhood pal who made a mistake during his piano recital and actually stopped playing so he could smack himself in the head and say, “Stupid! Stupid!” I’ve also seen self-flogging behavior on TV when a pro soccer player has screwed up and falls to his knees, tearing at his hair. Etc.

But the self-flogging gene isn’t all bad; it all depends on how it pans out. If it leads you toward sorrow, you can become paralyzed, depressed. But if it leads to toward anger, you might either a) hit yourself in the head and say “Stupid!” or b) take some constructive action. So, hearing Lindsay’s story now, I realized the best thing I could do would be salvage her original scheme. I found some food in a large Ziploc in the fridge, dumped it out, and gave her the bag. Her spirits were instantly restored, and she galloped happily away toward the sink.

My point here is that to fully appreciate Lindsay’s grief, it’s not enough to know about the ripped bag. You also have to have been a younger sibling: it takes an understanding of the casual cruelty with which an older sibling turns the younger into a plaything on the way to rejecting her. Moreover, it takes a kindred pugnacious spirit. And, to truly feel Lindsay’s pain at the ripped bag, you need to share with her the self-flogging gene. Given the full picture of the poor kid’s angst, it’s almost a miracle she found anybody who could truly understand and relate.

Case Study #3 - Mad Max

When I was about twelve, I saw “Mad Max,” an action movie about a renegade cop taking revenge on a gang of psychotic bikers. But I came in late, to a scene where one of the cops, Jim Goose, goes berserk and tries to beat up some guy, and has to be held back by his fellow cops. I was fairly horrified at his behavior.

However, some time later I saw the whole movie from the beginning, and had a totally different reaction. Goose was a hugely likeable character, and the guy he tried to beat up, Johnny the Boy, was a little bastard who liked to terrorize small towns, raping and pillaging just for fun. In the scene where Goose loses his temper, Johnny and various other thugs had just been released from prison because no witnesses showed up for the trial, being too cowed by the gang to testify. In this context, Goose’s outburst seemed completely appropriate, and I was swept right along with the rest of the movie, where Max hunts down the gang members one by one and murders them.

For years I had fond memories of that film, and my brothers and friends and I frequently quoted bits of its dialog, but somewhere along the line it dawned on me that this movie is a guilty pleasure at best. Obviously it’s not a morality tale, and isn’t supposed to be anything but entertainment, but for a mature person to fully buy into the revenge fantasy, as I had as a teenager, would be kind of sick. My malleable teenage mind, I have come to understand, had been manipulated by the filmmakers. Looking back at Goose’s blowup, I realize my reaction has come full circle: I was right to be appalled when I first saw it.

This presents an interesting case in my “big picture” discussion. Sometimes a total lack of context is just fine, because context doesn’t always matter. For example, police brutality is never okay, period. Looking at a somewhat bigger picture—such as the one the filmmakers made—gets you into dangerous territory: you’re lured into an extreme position by a totally one-sided narrative. The real big picture here requires a nuanced appreciation for what a filmmaker may do to titillate a jaded audience, without regard to how his movie, and others like it, may gradually pollute our attitudes.

The upshot of today’s exploration?

• Stop and think, hard, before you accost a complete stranger.
• Appreciate that, though it might take a highly specific perspective to realize it, sometimes a plastic bag is actually worth crying over.
• Try to remember that in the quest for the big picture, sometimes bigger isn’t big enough.

dana albert blog

Back To School

Introduction

“Back to school.” One of the most powerful phrases in the English language—or at least it was to me as a kid. The newspaper ad inserts hawking school supplies presented the new school year like it was a good thing. How I resented those ads, and the very idea of summer being over. It was with nothing less than dread that, each fall, I faced the beginning of the new school year.

How odd, then, that this year I found myself excited about my kids’ first day of school. Even more odd was that my kids were looking forward to it themselves. The school year starts absurdly early in Albany—August 25 this year—and as a kid I’d have been outraged and whining about it. But when I reminded Lindsay the night before, she said, “Tomorrow?! Really?! Yahoo!” Alexa was similarly enthusiastic.

This post examines the back-to-school phenomenon and recalls episodes from my school days. There’s no real thesis to this essay; it’s as aimless and pointless as childhood itself.

Savoring and rushing

After allowing our kids a largely unstructured summer, my wife Erin and I have shifted smoothly—for now—into an effective morning routine. That is to say, we haven’t yet settled into our normal just-in-time, frantic mode. The first day of school went particularly smoothly: the kids had set out clothes the night before and were up and dressed before we got out of bed. Still, we managed to squander most of our wiggle-room and had to walk the girls briskly to class. Not that they bought into the briskness. Though Alexa is capable of fretting about a tardy slip throughout the half-mile walk, she’s just as likely to be oblivious of the time. Here are the kids enjoying a little footpath instead of marching swiftly along the sidewalk as we’d have them do:

I remember how, when I was a kid, the excitement (and dread) of school starting seemed to enhance my sensory perceptions. I remember the weave of the purple rug in the classroom, viewed in macro mode (I tended to lie around on the floor a lot in the early days). I remember the teacher’s decorations in the classroom, like the Caps For Sale tapestry in my kindergarten classroom. Most of all, I remember the smell of new crayons. It’s not like crayons have a strong scent, but you get enough kids with new boxes of Crayolas and the aroma is unmistakable. (Remember the larger crayons that, instead of being cylindrical, had a D-shaped cross section, so they would sit flat on a desk instead of rolling off? Whatever happened to those?) I also remember the smell of the glue. (This was non-toxic Elmer’s glue—we weren’t huffing it or anything.) Decades later, I’d be hyper-aware of the smell of new carpet in the office where I started my first big corporate job. Surely an anthropologist would have something clever to say about this.

Here Lindsay walks with a bounce to maximize the drumming of her new lunchbox in her backpack:

The drop-off

The crush of kids always frightened me on the first day of grade school. It was a fevered delirium of little boys running around, yelling, shoving each other, seeming completely at ease while I felt like I didn’t belong and would get singled out for abuse at any moment. I was completely craven. One time in kindergarten I encountered a first-grader in a hallway who pointed a finger at me and said, “You’re in big trouble, mister.” Rather than deny this, and/or assert that I’d done nothing wrong, I naturally assumed I’d misbehaved somehow and was done for. I burst out crying. It never occurred to me that the kid was just screwing around.

My kids don’t seem to live under that dark cloud. Like their friends, they wear their lives lightly and understand facetiousness, irony, and other kinds of subtle rhetorical forms unknown to me at that age. At a big potluck at a neighborhood park the other evening, Alexa was playing hide and seek and her friend couldn’t find her. “Where’s Alexa?” I asked the friend. She said she didn’t know. I replied, straight-faced and in a serious tone, “Hey, I was counting on you to keep track of her!” She shrugged, like “Yeah, right.”

My kids were relaxed and in good cheer when we arrived at the school. Here is Alexa nonchalantly taking leave of her old man and striding into her fourth-grade classroom, in a small building she’s never set foot in before.

Lindsay, I’m told, was just as sanguine when it came time to head through the door. (The girls start at the same time, so Erin and I could only see off one daughter apiece.) But of course a good drop-off doesn’t guarantee anything. Much could go wrong during the school day to disappoint or frustrate a child. I should know.

School trials I have known

My very first day of kindergarten was a disappointment. Early in the previous school year, my brother Max bragged about Cowboy Day at school. I was crazy about cowboys, and decided to follow Max there for the festivities. He kept telling me to turn around and go home, but I refused. (Kids back then, at least in my family, were never escorted to or from school.) Once I got to the classroom, I was turned away by Max’s teacher, and walked sadly home. The teacher had assured me I could attend Cowboy Day “next year” and, one year later, in my childish stupidity, I expected the first day of my own kindergarten to be Cowboy Day. It wasn’t.

Perhaps that’s the reason that on the second day of my academic career I cut class for the first time. I hid behind the giant boulder in my back yard and entertained myself all morning by making up songs. When I saw my brothers coming home at the end of the school day, I headed in myself. To this day I don’t know why nobody seemed to notice my absence. If a kindergartner failed to show these days, they’d have SWAT teams and bloodhounds out in full force and it’d be all over the evening news. All I remember was that the next day the teacher said, “Gosh, it’s really too bad you weren’t here yesterday. You missed lots of fun things. We even read Caps for Sale!”

Kindergarten got no better after that. During the first week, for Show & Tell, I brought an origami bird that one of my brothers had made. If you pulled the tail the wings would flap. As we lined up to go into the classroom that morning, some kid begged me to let him try my bird. I refused, saying it was too fragile and I needed it to work for Show & Tell. The kid promised to be gentle so I reluctantly handed it over. He yanked on that bird as hard as he could, deliberately ruining it, a big grin on his face. That bastard! I don’t remember who he was because, frankly, he was no different than any of my other classmates. Any one of them would have done the same thing.

First grade (which Lindsay starts this year) was even harder for me. I wasn’t a terribly self-conscious kid during kindergarten and the beginning of first grade—in fact, I was a daydreamer, barely conscious of anything—but at some point that second year I become terribly, cripplingly self-doubting and shy. Like a dog smells fear, the other kids seized on my weakness and taunted me at every turn. All flatulence, even fictitious flatulence, was blamed on me. Et cetera. I didn’t like the teacher either, because she ripped masking tape with her teeth and then told us never to do this. Like she had some special dispensation allowing her to do things she herself acknowledged were wrong.

I did have a friend or two in first grade though, and I once entertained Robbie Bifocal (I never bothered to get his last name right) by saying sternly “Accidents do happen!” while snapping a crayon in half. Word of this got around and soon everybody wanted a live demo of my stunt. Hungry for positive attention, I always obliged. Somehow I never got busted for this (which was probably a great disappointment to the other kids, who—now that I think about it—probably had no other motive in asking to see my trick than to watch me get in trouble). Still, I hated to break the crayons. The paper label never ripped uniformly so it would stick out past the edge of the broken section, like a hangnail. I could never trim the paper edge just right so I’d end up ripping off the rest of the paper, and then the crayon would be naked. Plus it was just a useless little stub. These crayon amputees I found disgusting, and I inwardly suffered for my destructive behavior. Still, “the kid who breaks crayons” was a better identity than “the human fart.”

(My brother Geoff, meanwhile, became “the kid who eats glue.” As our brother Bryan said in a comment to an earlier albertnet post, “Geoff was known all through elementary school as the kid who ate glue, because he did in first grade, and [so] he and I were the twins who ate glue. I would usually try to convince the accuser that it was only Geoff who ate the glue, though my guilty conscience wouldn’t let me try too hard, because I’m sure I at least tasted it myself. But Geoff just didn’t care that the other kids made fun when he ate the glue, he ate it anyway because it was so darned good…. In fourth or fifth grade, I guess, Mom gave us Coca Cola® flavored Chapstick®. It was so delicious I ate the whole thing while sitting in the library, in one sitting, and it made me sick. I’m sure Geoff probably ate his, too.)

Will Lindsay have her own such troubles in first grade? Probably not. Alexa never did, and she’s in fourth grade this year. What troubles might await Alexa? My own fourth grade experience was terribly strange. The evening before the first day back, I broke my leg in a bike crash and missed at least the first week. When I got good enough on crutches to start school, all the kids—pitying me and fascinated by my cast—were nice to me for the first time ever. All of a sudden I was getting invited to birthday parties, which had never happened before. Of course I was glad to be invited, but it was bittersweet: it meant realizing that these parties been ongoing throughout my school years and I was just never invited before.

I felt like an outsider at these parties, hopping on one leg to try to pin the tail on the donkey, or mooning about at the outskirts of the roller rink, unable (of course) to skate. I couldn’t help feeling like a novelty, a social trinket. Pity will only take you so far, and by the time the cast came off my schoolmates had tired of me. When I stopped getting invited to birthday parties, I was, though disappointed, also somewhat relieved.

The pick-up

I worked from home on the first day of school so I could go along to pick up the kids after class let out. Alexa was the first one out, and was still in good spirits. Here, she totally fouls up the special goodbye fist-bump but doesn’t even blush:

Alexa had nothing but good to say about her first day. The closest she came to complaining was to say, “I’m groaning inwardly at the thought of my homework.” She delivered this line (a literary allusion, I imagine, to Harry Potter or some such) without conviction, as though just trying out the words. A pose, you might say.

I know all about that pose. In my early days, when my mom asked me how school was, I would immediately answer, “Terrible!” She didn’t pursue the matter right away, but after the third or fourth day of this, my mom asked me what was so terrible about school. This question caught me completely off guard. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was any other opinion to give; after all, this was how my brother Geoff always answered. My bluff having been called, I’d had to admit that school wasn’t that bad, actually.

After fetching Alexa we went to Lindsay’s classroom. When came through the door, she might as well have been arriving fresh from the spa. Someday when she’s a surly teenager I’ll have to show her this video and say, “What a happy kid you were! How far you’ve fallen!”

Epilogue

The kids have been back at school for a week now, and already our morning routine is slipping. Starting out too late to walk yesterday morning, we had to take the bikes. Lindsay sat on the top-tube of my 3-speed (wearing her ladybug helmet, of course) while Alexa flanked us on her mountain bike. This was the first time Alexa had ever ridden to school, and she forgot her bike lock. Thus, after the drop-off I had to ride both bikes home, rolling Alexa's bike next to me. I’m not troubled by such minor struggles: we have the rest of the school year to get it right.

dana albert blog