The Gun on Hampshire Street

1. This summer, we moved back to San Francisco's Mission district after a year-long sojourn in suburban Palo Alto. Three weeks ago we were putting my son to bed. He was finally drifting off, and so was I. The heavy curtains were pulled shut and it was very dark in the room. I heard sounds outside but they were phantasmagoric nighttime city sounds, spectral sirens and echoing shouts and groaning buses.

2. Then I heard a string of words, blurry but filled with fear. My eyes flew open and I was awake. The next words were absolutely clear. "He has a gun! He has a gun!"

3. We've met most of our neighbors on Hampshire Street. There's the Mexican family of six above us, who share their three small rooms with another family of three, a mother and two children who are not supposed to be there, according to the lease, who slip in and out of the apartment like ninjas. Next to them, there are the five (or six, or seven, or four?) almost-certainly undocumented Mexican men, who also live as invisibly as possible, running shadowy errands at all hours of the night. There's the nice, professional, Euro-American lesbian couple in the apartment next to ours. There's the childless, biracial, heterosexual couple next door, one an architect (I think), the other a composer (I think) who listens to Satie and Debussy in their bamboo backyard garden. On the corner, there's the self-appointed Chairman of the imaginary Hampshire Street Sidewalk Gardening Society, a gray-bearded gay man who always dresses in black from head to toe and spends his weekends trimming the leaves and watering the soil of the potted plants that line our street. There's the elderly Chinese woman who butchers and plucks chickens on her stoop, streaking the sidewalk with wine-dark blood and bone-white feathers. Then there is the house directly across from ours, the one whose picture window is covered by the proud pirate banner of the Oakland Raiders. I don't know how many people live there. I see and know the two matriarchs, one Latina, the other white. There are two very young kids, one toddler and one baby. There are two (?) pre-teen girls. There are many teenage boys, boxer shorts always visible above the low line of their jeans. Only once have have I seen a grown man enter the house.

4. Liko was awake and I was awake and my wife was awake. I crossed my arm over them and told them to lie still, and we waited. I waited for one minute, my eyes on the clock. I didn't hear anything else. No shots. There were noises of misery, but they were subdued. I asked Liko and my wife to stay where they were and I went to the window. I parted the curtains. I found our street carpeted with police cars from one end of the block to the other, their lights silently flashing. I could see a line of civilian cars beyond them, stalled and waiting. I was disoriented. How could I have not heard the police arrive? Why were they there? I watched. Two of the young men who lived across the street were on their stomachs, their hands cuffed behind their backs. One of the boys, the older of the two, had an officer sitting on him, knee in the small of his back. I looked for guns. The police had drawn theirs, shadows in their hands. There were no other weapons that I could see. Now I was aware of one of the mothers who lived there, whom I'll call Maria. Maria was hysterical, standing over the police and her sons, now crying. It was her voice that I had heard, shouting about the gun. "Daddy?" said my son. He had gotten off the bed and was standing next to me, his face next to mine against the window, taking in the cars, the police, the guns. I put my arm around him but I didn't tell him to go back to bed. Part of me wanted for him to witness what was happening, so that he would know these things happened. "Did the police get the bad guys?" he asked.

5. I went outside. The stepfather of the girls who live upstairs was already there on the sidewalk. He doesn't speak much English and I don't speak much Spanish, but in a roundabout sign-language and Spanglish way we shared what we knew, which was practically nothing. We watched as the boys across the street were hauled to their feet and pushed into the backs of police cars. We watched as the mother fled up her stoop and ran screaming into her house, wrapped in the arms of a man I had never seen before. One by one the police cars pulled away and the backed-up traffic trickled slowly down our street, the drivers' eyes wide, wondering if they had taken a wrong turn into the wrong neighborhood. Then everything was still and quiet and dark, and we, the other father and I, slipped inside, returned to our families, not knowing what had happened in front of our building.

6. That morning I was angry at the families across the street. I assumed many things. I assumed the gun in question belonged to one of the boys and that they had been engaged in some kind of criminal activity that brought the police down on them. This hadn't been my first encounter with the neighborhood's simmering violence, and I was angry with myself for having moved there and exposed my son to these things and other things, from the trash on the street to the stink of urine that we walked through on our way to school. I pledged to move back to Palo Alto as quickly as possible.

7. The following weekend one of the girls upstairs had a birthday party. They grilled and shared their steak and corn with us, and I brought up a six-pack of beer. My wife and son played a board game with the birthday girl. Then we strung up a homemade Spongebob piñata on the sidewalk and the kids took turns pounding on it with a baseball bat, enraged one minute and laughing the next. I stood there with beer in my hand. I stopped watching the kids. Instead I was looking across the street. The matriarchs were on their stoop with the youngest kids. They waved at me and I waved back. Then I crossed the street.

8. I asked what had happened the other night. I wanted to know and felt I had a right to know what happens on my street. I was polite but underneath that, I was angry with them, and at myself, for exposing my son to violence. I expected to hear, I guess, that their sons had been the targets of a stealthy drug bust, which would explain why the police cars arrived silently on our street. I expected to hear that one of their sons had pulled a gun on the police. I suppose that some part of me wanted an apology. Not just for that, but for everything. All the shit we had to deal with in the Mission. I was so fucking sick of the filth and the stench and the criminality and the weapons. The night before, a father of two had been shot and killed in back of the restaurant where he worked, five blocks away from our building. He had been sitting in the alley taking a smoke break. The newspaper said he had been killed by two gang members; it seems he had been wearing the wrong colors. I wanted an apology for that. I wanted someone to be sorry. I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind I was remembering how I had almost been killed on my birthday, three weeks before my book was released, by three young men from the Mission. They had beaten me over the head with a tire iron and pointed a gun in my face. I wanted an apology for that, too. Someone had to be responsible. Why not the mothers of these dangerous children? If they're not responsible, who is?

9. Maria told me that her two teenage sons, the ones who had been arrested, had been in trouble with the police many times. The other mother, whom I'll call Nancy, sat with us. As Maria and I talked Nancy wove in stories of her own life on Hampshire Street. Nancy's seventeen-year-old son had been shot and killed in front of our building, I discovered. He had not been in a gang, she said. He hadn't done anything wrong, his mother claimed. He just got into a fight with the wrong guy. It was after Nancy's son had been killed that things seemed to go wrong with Maria's boys. They got angry. They were kicked out of school. They were arrested for stupid things related to fighting and vandalism. The older one became intensively, obsessively protective of his brother. I stood on their stoop, the beer can warm and tight in my hand. I held my head still and I listened, and the awareness grew in the back of my mind that I was a privileged idiot, a judgmental prick, a tourist, a gentrifier.

10. The night they were arrested, the two boys had been sitting on the stoop talking, just as I was with their mother as she told me this story. A police car glided down the street, slowed, and stopped. Out jumped a police officer. The cop knew the boys. He had arrested them before. He walked up the steps, his hand resting on his gun, and demanded to know what they were doing. The cop didn't know it was their home. He didn't know about Nancy's son, probably. He didn't know anything about them, except that they were known to him. Maria's oldest went off. He yelled at the police officer, told the cop to get the fuck away from his brother and away from his house. Yes, that was not a smart thing to do. Young men often do dumb things. The cop's partner called for backup. As cars arrived, the confrontation escalated. It got physical. Maria saw the flashing lights of the police cars through her curtains--like me, she hadn't heard sirens or heard the argument outside--and she raced out of the house and saw both her boys being thrown to the sidewalk. She didn't know why. She had been talking to them not 30 minutes before, and all had been peaceful. She saw her younger son struggling as he was pushed to the cement, and as she came out of the house she saw a cop pull his gun. That's when she screamed. That's when she shouted, "He has a gun! He has a gun!"

11. I don't know how much of this account to believe; my gut feeling is that Maria was telling as much of the truth as she knew. This much is certain: neither boy was armed. It was the police who had the guns on Hampshire Street, not the boys. It was police who drew weapons outside of my sleeping son's window. The brothers were booked that night, the younger for disorderly conduct, the older for resisting arrest. The older brother was taken to the hospital for minor injuries. When the boy, eighteen years old, emerged from the ER, he didn't see any police waiting for him. He asked the nurse where they cops had gone. "They left," she said, not looking at him. "Can I go?" he asked. "I guess so," said the nurse. The boy had to walk home from the hospital. He didn't have any money or a cell phone. He couldn't call his mother. His mother didn't know where he was. As Maria told me this story, I remembered my son's question. He asked me: "Did the police get the bad guys?" The bad guys.

12. Palo Alto is a funny place; maybe it's just typical. A friend of mine once said, "Nothing can ever go wrong in Palo Alto." The streets are clean and they smell great. The schools are excellent and safe. There are no homeless, there's no visible misery. You can't buy a home for under a million and a half dollars. Everyone works for Google or Facebook or Stanford or one of a hundred start-ups. Everyone's angling for their IPO. Disaster is something that happens to people you don't know. It's other people's children who are shot on sidewalks, other people's fathers who are shot in back alleys. And you know what? Disasters will happen, but I don't want them to happen to my son. I don't want him anywhere near disaster. I don't want to ever see him bleeding on a sidewalk. We're going to leave the Mission, or at least this street in the Mission. We're not staying. You can judge me for that if you want. You can call it "white flight." You can call it anything you want. But we're ultimately leaving. (I say "we" but I should make it clear this is what I want; my wife, for the record, has a different take on things, seems willing to put up with the things I won't.) That's our personal solution. For some, there are always personal solutions. Some of us have options. We can, for example, run away.

13. We're not going to leave because of Maria or Nancy or their sons. We're not leaving because of the families or the men upstairs, our friends and neighbors. We're leaving because of the police, or what they represent. We're fleeing the front line of a war that our society is waging against poor people. The Republicans have accused President Obama of "class warfare" for suggesting that maybe possibly we could ask America's richest people for a few pennies to help finance infrastructure, education, health care--and yes, the two wars and occupations we put on a global credit card, not to mention the militarization of the border with Mexico (where tens of thousands have died in a drug war that reaches into neighborhoods like the Mission). The rich are refusing. Places like Palo Alto are refusing. Let someone else pay, they say. They're explicit: Why, there are Americans who are supposedly too poor to pay any taxes at all! Parasites! That's not fair! Or--some, not just Democrats, whisper--let's just raise the debt ceiling. Let's put it on credit. We'll pay it off later, after our IPO, after the next election. After, later, someday. Let the children pay.

14. This morning I saw the rivulets of blood flowing across the sidewalk. There on the stoop squatted the old Chinese woman, a coffee-colored Americana headless at her feet. I said hello and she did not answer. Instead she turned her face and hunched her shoulders, as though ashamed of what she was doing. I walked more quickly and plunged my hands into my pockets, my footprints bloody on the cement behind me. I felt ashamed as well. Ashamed and angry.

For a less personal, more political take on the same issues, see Sally Kohn's op-ed in Friday's Washington Post, "President Obama shouldn’t be afraid of a little class warfare."

Urban Butterflies

Here's a little video my friend Axel put together about our "Bees and Butterflies" group, which involved a group of almost 20 San Francisco families to explore the life-cycles of bees and butterflies, and to introduce basic ecological concepts to our kids. That's me in the goofy brown and green sweater, reading a customized version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar; that's my wife talking about the puppet show we did at our local farmers' market. Want to start your own neighborhood group? My pal Olivia Boler describes how we did it over at Shareable.net.

What happens when compassion hurts?

This is the edited transcript of a May 7 talk I gave to the nurses of UC Berkeley Health Services on surviving compassion fatigue. It occurs to me that it applies just as much to parents. Originally posted to the Greater Good blog.

I’m going to warn you: This is a somewhat difficult talk, full of paradoxes. I’m going to talk about the best in human nature and behavior, and also the worst. I’m going to talk about how human beings seem designed to care for each other, but also how the grind of daily care can be soul-destroying. And in the end, I hope to share my thoughts on how we can work with other people to bring out the good in each of us.

I’m an early riser, and I do most of my writing in the early morning. A month ago, I was walking to a coffee shop at 6:30 am, and I was doing what I often do during my early morning walks, which is to look around at the Victorians and hills and mist of the place where I live and think about how beautiful all of it is.

Without warning, I felt a blow on the back of my head, and someone ran past me holding a tire iron.

An afternoon in the library

1. I walk up to the book and pull it from the shelf. Moved by a strong intuition, I do something that I've never done before: I flip to the index looking for my name. There it is. I flip to page 248 and there I am, being quoted about robots. It seems like a message in a bottle, dropped into the water by a younger self who thought robots were more important than babies.

2. I walk upstairs and on the mezzanine all the chairs are filled by homeless people, each one surrounded by debris dragged in off the streets. One man snores softly to himself, the rest just sit, staring into space. In the past, I've always shrugged when foreigners asked me why there were so many homeless people in America: I don't know, I'd say. Now I think I know the answer: It's our isolation. It's not that they don't have jobs or homes; those are just symptoms. In fact, they are there on the mezzanine because they have no where else to go.

3. Crossing through the part of the library reserved as a study space for teenagers, I see two boys peering at a computer screen. As I get closer, I see they are leering at a photograph of a black woman in a thong and one of them whispers, "Cool." I imagine my son as one of those boys. I want to sit down and talk to them, somehow save them from the labyrinthine coldness of the screens, but instead I walk more quickly away.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

The sidewalk in our neighborhood, unusual for the galaxy of Chicago pavement, ends a block and a half up the street.

At the last house, across from a vast tree-ringed field, the sidewalk stops. If you're small like Spot, you'll notice that the regular series of cracks that mark the progress of your daily walk come to an end, and an unruly universe of chlorophyll, litter, and uneven ground opens ahead of you.

Instead of the cracks, so useful for games of 2-square, we come upon a transition of cosmic proportions. Behind us, smooth concrete pavement skirting a row of tidy homes. Ahead, beyond the edge of the last concrete paver, the wilderness: dirt, weeds, the riotous undergrowth of mid-summer, low-hanging mulberries, the snow of cottonwood in July, and a grassy path along the ancient lake shore where the trains go by.

There are no moon-birds where this sidewalk ends, and no peppermint wind, but there is a community garden, some garbage, an old tree-house, an occasional homeless person, and a 93-year old German gardener named Gerta.

Or maybe that's not right: Gerta may indeed be a moon-bird. If nothing else, she is certainly a very rare creature, a sort of ivory-billed woodpecker swooping out of the European past. On our last few walks, Spot and I have learned that, as she put it, there are two things that keep Gerta alive: summer gardening, and, in the winter, season tickets to the symphony.

We've invited her over for dinner, but she won't come. She used to attend free concerts at the University a few blocks away, but got tired of asking for rides. If she goes anywhere now, she walks to her garden along the tracks, or takes the bus downtown to Symphony Hall. We usually find her where the sidewalk ends.

After a number of conversations about dill and chives, drainage and fragrant mosses, I attempted myself to turn some earth.

"Where were you born?"

"Berlin."

"When did you leave Germany?"

"1939."

So she was there. She had seen it all. At least, everything anyone would have needed to see, and more than anyone would have wanted to, before getting out. Which she did, leaving behind a brother in the SS, another in the infantry, and a mother in the Party. It was ten years, she told me, before she went back, sat down with her family at the kitchen table and told them that everything that had happened, they had brought upon themselves.

Spot sits in my arms, nibbling on his forefinger as he does when in a contemplative mood, and lets us talk, about crooked Chicago politics, Japanese beetles, and the butterfly season. We talk about the election of January, 1933, when Gerta was 17, and she remembers the day.

These are some of the most interesting conversations of my daily stay-at-home-dadness, far more interesting than any chit chat at the playground. They all happen on the sidewalk, near the end of it. I'm beginning to realize that a lot of stuff happens on the sidewalk. Spot's first few steps, kids on bikes and push scooters, averted glances, altercations, and joyous reunions.

And Gerta. I'm glad Spot knows Gerta. It's a strange but pleasant feeling holding a baby and talking to this stooped, lucid, bronzed and 93 year-old German gardener, who crosses challenging traffic twice each day to tend to her flowers and greens, and can prove to Spot, or at least to me, that the world began much earlier than the day either of us were born.

This is what love looks like

It's Thursday and the news alert pops into my email: California Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage. I think, "I'll have to blog on that.” That afternoon I meet with a colleague. He’s a gay dad who has raised two children (now grown) with his partner of many years, and he’s overjoyed. I don’t find the time to write a blog entry.

I get home and my wife calls: She and my son are stranded at a bus stop—the twenty-four bus, she says, is being routed around the Castro because of spontaneous street partying, but a friend is coming to pick them up.

I can’t resist: I jump on my bike and ride down Castro and walk through the gathering throng. People are dancing and talking in small circles on the street, and I see many couples wander through crowd with dazed looks on their faces: the mood somehow combines wary happiness with giddy disbelief. Cops stand at barricades, but they look relaxed and they laugh and joke with the people streaming into the Castro. A DJ sets up at the intersection of Castro and Market.



When I get home, my family is there. That night, it’s warm enough so that you can leave your house without a coat. This happens maybe five or six nights a year in the usually very cool and foggy city of San Francisco, and so I drag the mattress out onto our deck and the three of us go to bed outside.

I look up at the clear sky and the big dipper is directly overhead. The tree in our yard rustles in the breeze. The street party at the bottom of the hill is now in full swing, and we drift asleep to laughter and the thump-thump-thump of electronic dance music. Liko throws an arm over my chest and snuggles into my neck.

Friday, another hot day, I get a text message from our friends Jessica, Jackie, and their little boy Ezra: Do we want to have dinner that night? We meet at Savor and get a table on the patio, and two other families join us.

Jessica orders wine. We want to celebrate, she says.

Why? I ask.

We’re getting married, says Jessica, throwing her arm around Jackie.

It hadn’t even occurred to me: our friends can now get married.



A feeling of happiness sweeps through my body; I feel a smile pop onto my face. It’s a rare kind of happiness I’m feeling, the kind that has nothing to do with me. I happy for Jackie, Jessica, and Ezra, genuinely happy for them, through them.

Why? I’ve never been a great friend of marriage. I’ve always seen it as optional. But I see how much it means to my friends: They never expected it, never dreamed of it, but here it is, marriage. They are silly with plans: they quiz the straight couples on venues, clothes, vows, invitations, costs, the whole crazy thing. Mark volunteers to get the food; Karen says she’ll design invitations. Their marriage becomes one more thread that ties our little community together.

Now I am thinking of the California Supreme Court judges who wrote the decision. Their working lives consist of books, papers, arguments, precedents, a place apart from our small, private lives. Did they know this one decision would create such happiness and improve so many lives? Could they have imagined it? And do we as a society have the courage to embrace the happiness they helped create?

Harvey Milk for President!

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician "in the history of the planet," to quote Time magazine. He represented my neighborhood on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and was killed in 1978 (along with Mayor George Moscone) by city supervisor Dan White, a seemingly nice guy, by some accounts, who turned out to be a raving lunatic.

But when White was sentenced to a mere seven years for the crime, there were riots at City Hall and in the Castro. Here's some (murky) footage:



Now director Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Paranoid Park, etc.) is making a film of those events, staring Sean Penn as Milk, and much of the shoot occurred during the past several months on Castro Street, where I live on the border between the Castro and Noe Valley neighborhoods.

It's fascinating to watch a film put together: the facades of many Castro businesses were torn down and rebuilt to appear as they were in the 1970s; we saw famous people loitering around coffee shops; we watched staggering amounts of preparation for scenes that appeared to last for two minutes; and we residents were herded like cattle to avoid stumbling into scenes where our clothing would have made us anachronisms. Here's a little video someone did on the transformation:



But it was also interesting to hear gray-haired gay men reminisce about those days--and to hear the Castro's children ask about this Harvey Milk person. Liko wanted to know what all the fuss was about, of course, and I explained as best I could.

He gets that some of his friends have two mommies or two daddies, and it doesn't seem weird to him. I don't need to explain "gay" to him, though he doesn't know that word. He just knows that kids have different mixes of parents, and that boys can be affectionate with boys and girls with girls, just like his mom and I are affectionate. That's not so complicated, is it?

But it was painfully difficult to explain that there was once a time when the parents of his friends could not be parents--they couldn't be anything. They were invisible. And people like Harvey Milk helped create a place for them in playgrounds, schools, neighborhoods, and every area of life.

Love is easy to explain; hate is hard. It's not really suitable for children. One early morning I walked with Liko down Castro, and they had apparently just finished filming scenes of the "White Night Riots." The Castro was once again transformed, now with smashed windows, burned-out cars, and graffiti.

"What's going on, daddy?" Liko asked. I didn't say anything and I was just thankful that this was the reenactment of the riot, not the real thing. It was genuinely chilling to see the neighborhood in a state of ruin, however temporary and imaginary.

This history is often news to children of both queer and straight parents--both are learning about Harvey Milk and what he meant for the neighborhood. One afternoon during the shoot I heard this conversation between my friend Lisa (a lesbian mom) and her oldest son, about 9:

"Why was Harvey Milk so important?"

"He helped stand up for the rights of gay people."

"But what does that mean?"

"It means that we can take care of you and not be afraid of anyone taking you away."

Which is really cool, in every single way. I'm glad Van Sant is making this film, and I'm looking forward to seeing it, and I'm proud to live in a place with such great history.

By coincidence, the video of an updated version of Wyclef Jean's "If I Was President" was shot in the neighborhood at the same time as Milk. Liko and my wife Olli got roped into it one afternoon and they cheerfully participated, and now the video is out and they're in it, with many amusing San Francisco street scenes. They appear (for about a second in front of the Castro Theater) at the three minutes, eleven seconds point, near the end:



It's an accidental, personal juxtaposition, but it seems to me that "If I Was President" has a lot to say to Milk:

[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president...
If I was president

An old man told me, instead of spending billions on the war,
we can use some of that money, in the ghetto.
I know some so poor, they use the spring as the shower,
when screaming "fight the power."
That's when the vulture devoured

[chorus]
If I was president,
I'd get elected on Friday, assassinated on Saturday,
and buried on Sunday.

If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president...
If I was president

Tell the children the truth, the truth.

The Walk

Liko and Shelly are both ill and they both go to bed early. I tuck them in, do the dishes, pick up his room.

Now what? It's only 8:45 and I'm not tired. I pull on my coat, grab a book, and walk out the door and down Castro to 24th. I walk into The Dubliner and order a Guinness.

Thirty minutes later Amanda strolls in with a gaggle of friends.

"Hey," she says. "What are you doing here?"

I tell her the situation. "And you just went out for a beer?" she says.

"Yep."

"That so cute!"

Cute?!

Amanda is with the other mothers in her coop preschool. They gather in the back, sipping beers, excited to be out at night.

"I love the coop right now," Amanda says, glancing over.

"That's great," I say.

She goes to join the moms.

I finish my second Guinness, leave The Dubliner and walk back up 24th. I see my friend Joey in the window of the restaurant where he works as a bartender, putting chairs on tables, wiping down the bar. He doesn't see me outside; watching him, I realize that I've known him now for seven years. Seven years. His wife is about to have their second baby.

I remember teaching Liko to walk on 24th. I'd give him his little cart and make him push it towards me, and then one day I took the cart away. Passerby would gape at Liko toddling down the sidewalk, his wide-open smile promising all of us that there is always something better. It hits me that those days are gone and they're never coming back.

Now I'm turning up Castro: up, up, up, I don't even notice the climb. My hill. There's my house: the blue and yellow Victorian, our landlords below, us above; our lights are on in the gable. I think about Roxie, how she hooked me up with my publisher, and I feel grateful to her.

All these people who have helped me in life: Why do we help each other? None of us can make it without help. I unlock the door and go inside.

We won't last too much longer in this house; it gets smaller every day, and San Francisco seems to get more expensive. I turn on the laptop and start writing this. My fingers feel thick as I type, but I have to get this trivia down, before it goes away.

No hitting: The play

Scene: Dinner at Savor in Noe Valley. I'm eating humus; Liko is eating pasta.

Me: Liko, do you want to go to the antiwar protest tomorrow?

Liko (mouth full): What's an antiwar?

Me: In an antiwar protest, people get together and they ask war to stop.

(Liko swallows.)

Liko: Why?

Me: Remember what we talked about yesterday? War is really terrible. Mommies and daddies and little kids like you get hurt really bad, sometimes they get killed.

Liko: Where is war?

Me: Tomorrow we are going to protest the war in Iraq.

Liko: Where is Iraq?

Me: I showed you yesterday on the globe. It's very far from here. The people there don't speak our language or dress like us, but they're people just like us and they don't like to get hurt.

Liko: Are we going to get dessert?

Me: I don't think so.

Liko: Why?

Me: Because you already had ice cream today. Do you want to go to the antiwar protest?

Liko: I want to be a war-guy and hurt people!

Me (flustered): What? We don't want to hurt people, Liko. We want to help them.

Liko (bashes table with his hand): I want a war-stick! [Meaning, a gun.]

Me: Liko, please don't hit the table.

Liko: Why?

Me: Because we're in a restaurant and we don't hit tables.

Liko: Why?

Me: Because it bothers the people around us.

Liko (looking around): Are those people going to antiwar protest?

Me (glancing around and feeling slightly defeated): Some of them might, sure.

Liko: What do people do at antiwar protest?

Me: We march and sing songs and hold signs.

Liko: What do signs say?

Me: They say things like "Stop the war" or "War is bad for children."

Liko: I want to make a sign.

Me: OK. What should it say?

Liko: No hitting!



Photos courtesy of our neighbor Woody Hastings.

Old vs. New Tapes

From today's New York Times:

For the first time, women in their 20s who work full time in several American cities — New York, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis — are earning higher wages than men in the same age range, according to a recent analysis of 2005 census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York.

For instance, the median income of women age 21 to 30 in New York who are employed full time was 17 percent higher than that of comparable men.

Professor Beveridge said the gap is largely driven by a gulf in education: 53 percent of women employed full time in their 20s were college graduates, compared with 38 percent of men. Women are also more likely to have graduate degrees. “They have more of everything,” Professor Beveridge said.

A lot of young women “are of two minds,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families, a research organization. “On one hand, they’re proud of their achievements, and they think they want a man who shares house chores and child care. But on the other hand they’re scared by their own achievement, and they’re a little nervous having a man who won’t be the main breadwinner. These are old tapes running in their head: ‘This is how you get a man.’”

Bay Area residents, mark your calendars: On Wednesday, October 17, I'll be moderating a panel with Stephanie Coontz on the challenges faced by new parents, along with psychologists Philip and Carolyn Cowan, and psychotherapist Joshua Coleman. The event will start at 3 pm at the Lipman Room on the 8th floor of Barrows Hall, on the UC Berkeley campus. Barrows Hall is located off of Bancroft Way at Barrow Lane and Eshleman Road, on the south side of the Berkeley campus. Click here for a map, parking information, and directions to the Lipman Room.

This event will celebrate the release of Greater Good's Fall 2007 issue on “The 21st Century Family,” with contributions by Stephanie Coontz, Scott Coltrane, Ross Parke, Constance Ahrons, and me, writing about how today’s non-traditional parents overcome social isolation and build new communities. I'm still providing free copies of the issue to any blogger who pledges to review it online--send me a note at jeremyadamsmith (at) mac.com.

Altruistic birds vs. altruistic humans

Reports the Washington Post:

A just-published study of birds reports new insights into the evolution of altruistic behavior. It suggests that sometimes the greatest beneficiaries are neither those giving or receiving alms, but those whose main job is the care and feeding of the neediest members of the population.

It is believed that about 10 percent of bird species show "cooperative breeding" behavior, in which one or more mated pairs produce chicks, which are then fed not only by the parents but by other birds sharing their territory. The helpers are usually nonbreeding males from the female's broods of the previous year - the brothers of the hatchlings they are helping to feed.

To find out what motivates this behavior, a team at the University of Cambridge in England "compared the eggs laid by females that had helpers with those laid by solo females":

They found that fairy-wrens with helpers produce eggs with less fat, protein and carbohydrate than eggs produced by females that do not have helpers. The hatchlings of those "lite" eggs are smaller than normal chicks, but their initial scrawniness is quickly overcome by the extra food brought by the nonbreeding helpers.

The one who benefits is the mother.

Cooperatively breeding females have a 1-in-5 chance of dying over the next year, compared with a 1-in-3 chance for females without helpers. This is presumably because they are slightly healthier and stronger, having expended less energy to produce their eggs and feed their young. Their longer life span, in turn, gives them a chance to leave more offspring behind, the ultimate measure of evolutionary success.

"The mothers are stealing child care from their current young and spending it on their future young," Kilner said.

What might this say about humans? Maybe nothing. It's simply another clue in solving the mystery of why altruism exists in nature and how cooperation emerges among members of a species.

However, there are parallels with human behavior. The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has pointed out how cooperative child rearing has been essential at certain points in human history--for example, in hunter-gatherer societies--when fathers and adults besides the parents had to take a strong role in the care and feeding of young children. In an essay that will appear in the September issue of Greater Good magazine, I speculate that cooperative child rearing (or alloparenting) is making a comeback in American cities, driven by the geographic and social isolation of new families, rough economic parity between men and women, and the high cost of quality childcare. One thing is for sure: parenting is a social activity that no one should have to do alone.

(The photos that go with this entry depict my wife playing with other people's kids, namely Plum and Ezra. They're part of a photo essay on alloparenting by Jackie Adams that will go with my essay.)

On that note, I'd like to point readers to the blog Doodaddy, who writes about the loneliness of his early days as a stay-at-home dad and how he overcame it:

We have really good friends now... What surprised me, I think, is how intentional this social life had to be: there was nothing at all automatic about it, and if I didn’t pursue sociability, I could go days and hardly talk to anyone.

I’m not the only one shocked by how difficult it can be to be a social adult and a stay-at-home parent. Park Buddy and I ran into an old playground friend of hers at the zoo a couple of weeks ago. They’d moved out of San Francisco into the suburbs with their 2-year old girl; it’s an old story: they’d left behind urban stress and parking challenges for a bigger house and a yard and the cleanliness of the suburban landscape.

And you know what? She hated it. She was lonely, having to recreate a social life for herself and her daughter, a job that had been relatively easy in San Francisco. Out of her natural habitat, though, she was at a loss for how to manage it. Some days they don’t leave the house.

Why we are having only one child

There are two hot new trends in my social circle: divorce and second children. Some couples are separating, others are reproducing, again.

We won't be jumping on either bandwagon, I'm afraid.

It's no surprise to see that as families grow, marriages are strained. I can cite, off the top of my head, a half dozen peer-reviewed studies that all say more or less the same thing: about two-thirds of couples experience a big increase in hostility and disagreement in the three years after the birth of their first child. According to the current numbers, half of marriages won't survive.

Why? Oh, I know the conservative line, and so do you. They blame the divorce rate on feminism, gay marriage, Murphy Brown, etc. In short, it's Satan's fault. But social scientists who study marriage and family--people like Phil and Carolyn Cowan at UC Berkley, John and Julie Gottman at U. of Washington, psychotherapist Joshua Coleman, and historian Stephanie Coontz--have actually asked couples about their troubles, and they discovered that there are many factors driving the divorce rate that have nothing to do with the dark prince of evil (unless you're referring to Dick Cheney and the Bush Administration's economic and family policies).

These include economic instability, more hours at work, social isolation, longer life spans, ambiguous roles, and unrealistically high emotional expectations. In their two-decade study of 200 nuclear families, the Cowans discovered that "the normal process of becoming a family in this culture, at this time sets in motion a chain of potential stessors that function as risks that stimulate moderate to severe stress for substantial numbers of parents."

In plain English, becoming a parent today can drive you crazier than a shithouse rat. Once upon a time, parents had a village to raise their children. Today, it's usually just you, your equally crazy spouse, and whatever help you two can afford.

Many parents cope admirably with the stresses of modern life. But for others, it's too much. Here's a fun fact: When the Families and Work Institute asked 1,000 children what they would change about their parents' work and how it affects family life, only 10 percent of kids made wished their mothers would stay home more and 15.5 percent made that wish about their fathers. Instead, the most popular wish by far was for moms and dads "to be less stressed and tired"—-which tells me that a) parents are really stressed and it affects their relationship with children; and b) it's the quality, not quantity, of time with parents that matters most to children.

Thus I think part of the secret to building a happy family today is knowing where to draw the line. I'm often asked when we are going to have our second, and people who don't know me well seem surprised when I reply, Never. "But you seem to love being a dad," said one person, eyebrows raised. It's true. For example: Recently my wife went away for four days and I took time off work to take care of Liko. By the end of our little vacation, I was in a terrific mood; I felt better than I'd felt in years. When I am able to give him my full and undivided attention, nothing makes me happier than to be with my kid.

But that's the problem. I can only rarely give him "my full and undivided attention." Among other things, I have to work. I have a one hour commute to my work. Outside of work, I have dishes to wash, relatives to call, emails to check, blogs to read, errands to run. So do you. It's not that our lives are harder than those of previous generations. My grandparents had it much worse, in many ways. They had their own problems, like, you know, the Depression and World War II. Our specific, contemporary problem is that our lives are rootless and overstuffed. Every time you have another child, life gets that much crazier. "Two kids are twice the fun, ten times the work!" says my friend Jodi. No kidding.

I don't want to put that strain on my life and my marriage. I've had one child. He's a great, beautiful gift that I never expected to receive. I know he wants a sibling--he's asked for one, several times, provoked by the bulging bellies of his friends' mothers--and I know that in many ways, he'd be better off in a larger family. But then the higher brain functions take over and I do the math of money and hours--and I look at our divorcing friends--and I know that we can't and shouldn't do it. He deserves to have two parents who love each other, who get along, who have civic and intellectual lives outside of the family.

Perhaps our hearts aren't big enough. Maybe we're not tough enough. But I think three is enough.

The Zen of Strolling

The Spot is my zen master. He does it all while wrapped up like a monk in his sedan chair -- I mean stroller -- while being pushed around the neighborhood, an ageless child-sage. My wife and I have wondered if he might be on the short list for a shot at incarnating the Dali Lama, though his timing is a little off. Why not? The rabbis will tell you that both your child and mine knew the Torah by heart until forgetting it all at birth. That's a lot of reading, so surely a little spiritual virtuosity is not impossible?

Every day, for about an hour or so, we pick a circuit in the neighborhood and head out. Occasionally I bump into my friend Steve down the block, and we caravan for a few blocks before parting ways. That's about as social as strolling gets -- with a few exceptions -- and that's fine with me. We swing wide of the play parks and their fountains like freight traffic getting shunted off onto a business beltway. We'll be in the play parks soon enough. For now, I need my stroller zen.

The Spot more or less goes along. He could just as happily be on his activity mat, yanking on multi-colored giraffe legs or trying to eat the blue monkey. Instead, being the mensch that he is, he lets me get out of the house, and doesn't object when I occasionally call a halt to our perambulation before a passing but sublime moment of urban beauty.

It's hard to find the peace of mind that this brings while sitting in my living room. Strolling with Spot forces me to inhabit the world of the concrete, consisting primarily of the sidewalk in front of us. We judge the size of cracks in the pavement. We gage the slope of the street. We keep an eye on the thunderheads above. With every change in direction, I readjust the awning and carriage to protect Spot from the sun. We dodge sprinklers. If we get caught in a shower, I batten him down. When it's windy, I listen to him laugh while the awning brushes his face.

It's these everyday details of strolling that get me out of my head. And this is where the zen comes in: absorption in the immediate leads to the transcendent. In a way that would be impossible in a car, attention to the simple details of slow travel opens my mind to the occasionally edifying things around us. We could be hiking in Yosemite, or canoeing in Ontario. We just happen to be strolling in Chicago.

In June we strolled through clouds of cottonwood seed, blowing through the neighborhood like a summer snow, collecting against the curbs in small drifts. Out by the Lake we saw the waves roll in on a dry, northerly Canadian breeze. Later, we saw the water lie flat under a soggy dome of Gulf air. On the right block at the right time, the city can feel deserted, the wind in the canopy of oaks above is audible. A flock of green parakeets bobs down the street and flies up through an opening in the trees, and I notice that the sound of internal combustion has, for the moment, disappeared.

I can't imagine taking care of the Spot someplace where it was difficult or unpleasant to do our daily stroll. I know such places exist. They tend to be suburban or exurban areas with no sidewalks and 8-lane roads, or pockets of urban, gang-ridden social pathology. Small towns are perfect for strolling, as are dense urban neighborhoods. Either way, all you really need are halfway decent sidewalks, and some trees for cover against the summer sun and winter winds. Plus a good zen master to help you see things again, but for the first time.

Race, Violence and (Black) Fatherhood

For a little while now, I've been stopping by a local bakery every Friday morning to pick up a challah loaf. Most often I was served by Charles, a good-looking black man who ran the morning shift, seemed to love his job, and clearly had a sense of pride in his work that he shared with the rest of the staff, a mix of young neighborhood and university students.

We never really got to that level of familiarity that sometimes develops between regular customers and staff. But he clearly had a rapport with other customers, especially students, even the geeky foreign ones whose English was not great and who spilled their change all over the counter in the middle of the morning rush. He had an aura of toughness and street-cred that was unmistakable but not threatening. He had been there for what seemed like forever. The staff clearly looked up to him, and he seemed to anchor a hip and friendly camaraderie behind the bread racks.

The last time I stopped by, about a month ago, I had the Spot in a stroller. Charles had just finished the morning shift and was waiting for his ride by the door on a sunny but chilly spring day. I'm not sure if he had a car. I didn't know then that we had a few substantive things in common: fatherhood and age. He had 4 children and was 38, almost exactly the same age as me. I wished him a good weekend, and he returned the pleasantry as I maneuvered my stroller through the foyer, preoccupied with the fluctuating caffeine level in my bloodstream and the timing of Spot's next meal. That was the last time I saw him.

Charles Carpenter was shot to death on Saturday night, May 19.

I happened to know who he was. But he was preceded and followed by others unknown to me. A few weeks before, one teenage black male boarded a CTA bus near a local high school and fired four rounds, killing another teenage black male, who happened to be someone's only son. Just a few days ago, a black bank teller was murdered by robbers when he insisted that he didn't know the bank vault's combination. Tramaine Gibson was 22 and father to a 4 year-old daughter. All of these spasms of violence happened in seconds. They are part of the steady beat of black-on-black violence that fills the morning metro section, a tiny bit of Bagdhad hell here on the Chicago River.

A former black student of mine, a devout 30-something single father, once told me that most young men in his neighborhood felt there were basically two avenues in life that offered real chances of success, and the respect that came with it: rapping or sports. Charles Carpenter wasn't heading down either of those avenues. Neither was Tramaine Gibson. They were both holding down jobs and raising children on the classic middle class model. They were doing what for so many American men is a matter of course. In their case, it was heroic.

Looking at the Spot as he fidgets in his stroller, I've become aware that his being is the greatest risk I will ever assume. His conception was an enormous gamble in a game of chance that never ends. In a lot of ways he has the odds in his favor -- so far. Not all children are so lucky. If Charles at the bakery were still around, I would make it a point to say hello more often. To find out what he thinks about being a dad, what his kids are like. To let him know that he has my respect.

Jackie and Jessica's Story: The missing piece of the puzzle

I am in the process of interviewing Bay Area families for a series of writing projects on stay-at-home fathers and non-traditional families, collected as the "21st Century Family Project." For the next year or so, I will periodically post sketches of the families based on the interviews, as a kind of public notebook of the work I am doing. What follows is the story of Jackie and Jessica, who live in San Francisco's Noe Valley.

Jackie and Jessica met ten years ago. “I think we were destined to be parents,” says Jackie. “We would stay home, we would watch movies, then we moved in together. It was always about creating this home. We always talked about having a kid.”

Of course, a lesbian couple cannot simply stop using birth control in order to get pregnant.

“We decided to put the word out that we were looking for a donor,” says Jackie. “When we met Dave, we knew immediately that this was going to work. He didn’t want to have any fathering responsibilities, but he just thought it would be a great idea and he wanted to help us.”

After work, Dave would drop by the couple’s apartment, where he found a discrete glass of wine, a tube of lube, a stack of porn videos, and a small jar waiting for him in the living room. It didn’t take long for Jackie to get pregnant.

After a 28-hour labor, Eli (“the only name we could agree on”) was born.

“I don’t think I slept for literally a month after he was born,” recalls Jackie. “I was pretty messed up for that first month of his life. Jessica needed to work, she only got two weeks off, and she slept in the living room so she could actually sleep and function at work. I remember just being with him 24-7 and I don’t remember sleeping, and he would just sit there awake or I would be awake while he was sleeping, and I remember actually hitting my head against the wall at one point, because I just couldn’t control it at all. I couldn’t go away from it, I knew needed to be there, and it was so much, so crazy. It was such an intense beginning, that it just kind of broke me. There is just something that you have to succumb to, in order to maintain your sanity.”

Meanwhile, Jessica’s life and self-image were being turned inside-out. Though she had read dozens of books on birth, nothing prepared her for the brute reality of the labor—or the demands her new role as breadwinning, non-biological parent placed on her. “I remember during the labor just feeling really useless,” she says. “After we got home, we had this situation where she was in bed with him and I was on the couch. I was just like, ‘Are you OK, can I get you anything?’ That surprised me. Because I think culturally we’re trained to assume that that’s what the father does. In the movies, the mother does stuff and the father runs around looking silly and saying, ‘Are you OK?’”

“I did feel silly,” says Jessica, “but I definitely didn’t feel like a father, because I’d grown up learning to be a mother. Growing up and in our relationship, it was always my intention to have a baby. I think anyone who gives birth has this very instinctual knowledge of what that baby needs, but I didn’t know how to make myself a part of the nourishing of this little person. We had both grown up believing that this is the mother’s role, and she was doing the mother’s role, but I wasn’t going to do the father’s role. To call myself the father felt like that was a further step away from being the parent, from being the mother.”

“When I’m not at work or not here at home, then I feel very guilty,” continues Jessica. “I don’t have a lot of time to myself. I feel like I have a job that I’ve had for eight years and I guess that makes a career, but I could just as easily have a different job. I grew up with a father who said, you don’t take a job unless there are benefits and health care. He taught me first you get the things you need, then you get the things you want.”

Both moms say that parenthood has invested their lives with a meaning that they’d never had before. “Before I was a parent,” says Jackie, “I’d be running these errands and doing grocery shopping, and it just felt so meaningless to me. I feel like with Eli there’s more meaning now, with the cooking and dish-washing. Everything is so structured. When am I going to have that moment when I scream, ‘I just can’t do this anymore!”? I’m waiting for myself to go crazy and just let everything go, and then I’ll have one of those houses that everyone is really scared to come to, but it hasn’t happened yet. Right now I just live moment to moment.”

Though he now lives in Hawaii, the donor, Dave, is close to the family. “We had a hard time with that in the beginning,” reports Jackie. “I was very, very possessive, and I didn’t want Jessica to lose that feeling of being a parent, because people are so focused on that question of who’s the father. But Dave is just such a love, there’s such an honesty to him, that it makes me want to open up more and allow this extended family to work out. Today, he’s more than an uncle, he’s closer than that.”

Jackie and Jessica have also found a wide circle of parents, straight and queer, who share their values and accept them as part of the community. “The companionships that we have developed over the past year or so have felt genuine and that has meant the world to me,” says Jackie. “Respect plays the main role in my day-to-day existence. When I see other parents respecting other parenting styles that are unlike their own, I take note and appreciate their ability to be open and accepting. I find myself instantly drawn to them and I, who used to be an extremely shy person, am sparking up a conversation and making a new friend. Parenthood has definitely turned me into an open person. Something I thought I would never be.”

Jessica agrees. “We are finding that because Jackie took Eli to the playground so often, and we go to the farmers’ market together, we have started to find a legitimate community of people we like. [Now] hanging out with Eli and other kids and their parents is essentially my only social interaction with adults. Outside of work, play dates are my social life...and it’s pretty nice.”

“When Eli was born,” says Jackie, “we felt like he was the missing piece of the puzzle, for some reason. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to being just Jackie.”

Rally at St. Luke's in San Francisco

Our son Liko was born at St. Luke's hospital in San Francisco. We were supposed to go to Kaiser, but in the most harrowing sixty minutes of our lives, Liko came out as a double-footling breech in what is technically called a precipitous labor -- that is to say, really, really fast. The closest hospital was St. Luke's in the Mission, where my wife was prepped for an emergency Caesarean. But things moved too quickly: one of Liko's feet was out and he wasn't waiting for surgery.

(My wife remembers hearing somebody yelling, "Where's the anesthesiologist? Where the fuck is the anesthesiologist!?" I don't remember hearing this.)

Doctors aren't usually trained in this kind of vaginal delivery. Fortunately, St. Luke's is one of a handful of hospitals in the city to employ a staff of midwives. The midwife raced into the room. (I was later told she just happened to be nearby.) She reached in and pulled the other leg out. Liko's arms were up around his head, preventing delivery, and so she next reached in and pulled his arms down. Now Liko's face was facing the ceiling and his chin (if memory serves) would have caught on the pubic bone--and so the midwife turned Liko's face toward the floor and Shelly pushed him out.

Everything I described in the previous paragraph happened in a matter of seconds. Literally five minutes later, my wife was alert and energetic, and was able to hold and play with newborn Liko. Afterward she felt only minimal pain. This would not have been the case if she had had a C-section.

St. Luke's merged with California Pacific Medical Center on Jan. 1 of this year, and shortly thereafter stopped scheduling patients who wanted a vaginal birth after having had a C-section, known as a VBAC. There is, in fact, a serious risk associated with VBAC: "a .5 to 1 percent chance of tearing the uterine seam from the previous surgery, causing heavy hemorrhaging and requiring an emergency C-section to save the mother's uterus, her baby, and herself," as the SF Weekly reports. The decision to have a VBAC is not one to be made lightly.

However, "VBAC advocates argue the decision was more about money than safety, since St. Luke's has been successfully delivering post-Caesarean vaginal births for years. Advocates say the move limits a soon-to-be mother's control in one of the most important events of her life — forcing women to choose between a natural birth at home that lacks the safety net of an operating room steps away, or hospitals that may be more likely to urge women to have a repeat C-section, a surgery with more risk of complications and a longer recovery than a vaginal delivery."

Now my friend Karen (whose child is due to be delivered at St. Luke's) tells me that in another cost-cutting measure, a portion of the midwifery section called Homestyle Midwifery that serves low-income women at St. Luke's is being shut down. It's not clear to me what impact the closure will have on St. Luke's ability to serve low-income families or what it means for midwifery at St. Luke's. I don't know if this is part of a reorganization or a genuine cut-back. But with four fewer midwives on staff, I wonder if St. Luke's still has the ability to deal with an emergency like the one we faced.

There will be a protest of the VBAC ban on Friday, May 11, though I know some people will be there to generally rally against St. Luke's moves away from natural childbirth. Participants are asked to meet at the 24th and Mission Bart Station at 10:30 AM and then march to St. Luke's Campus at 11:00 AM. A rally will follow at Dolores Park. With questions or to get more involved, contact charitypc@yahoo.com.

I can't be there, but Shelly and Liko will!

The Power of Magical Thinking

For the first year of my son’s life I was the sole means of support for our family. I worked at an independent media organization that by the time of Liko's birth had turned from a dynamic, innovative nonprofit into a failing business. With others I had fought against that direction, but in the end we were beaten. In dribs and drabs, my allies left.

In the summer of 2005 I joined them, depressed and humiliated by what I saw as a professional failure. I sent out a few desultory resumes, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that what I really wanted to do was spend more time with my son. Unfortunately, my wife’s job would not be enough to support the three of us. I knew that I would freelance and consult, but there were no guarantees. In the middle of anxiously sleepless nights, I envisioned us homeless, forced to live with relatives.

Despite our fears, we made the leap into being a “reverse traditional family.” Like many stay-at-home dads, I didn’t want to stay in the house all day. The minute my wife left for work, I’d take Liko out the door and onto the streets. Together we’d walk, moving from shop to restaurant to playground to bench to friends' living rooms and back to the playground, stepping into the flow of the city.

“Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t affair,” writes Annie Dillard in her essay “Seeing.” This is equally true of cities. It is also true of parenting. They are worlds unto themselves, containers of consciousness, definers of perception; but we are never quite able to hold them in our senses. During these months of uncertainty, San Francisco seemed to constantly shift in and out of focus, and so did my son. The babble from Liko's mouth sharpened into words, the syllables flashing like sunlight on windows. We'd cross the street and on the other side, he'd seem suddenly older.

During these months of transition I found myself doing a funny thing (“found myself,” meaning that thought followed action; perhaps also meaning that I uncovered an aspect of my personality that I'd never seen before). I'd give away money to anyone who asked for it: five dollars to a beggar, one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to a canvasser for California Peace Action, a dollar to the barista who made my $1.40 espresso. Once I found a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk; without thinking, I turned and gave it to the man behind me. (“Uh, thanks,” he said, and hustled away, maybe worried that I’d change my mind.) This went on for months, and only began to fade once I felt my freelance work was a going concern and the financial uncertainty had ended.

This week I started full-time at my new job, as managing editor of Greater Good magazine, a publication of the Center for the Development of Peace and Well-Being at UC Berkeley. This morning as I edited an article on homelessness and begging, I recalled the period of my life after I left my job, when I gave away hundreds of dollars to absolute strangers.

Why did I do that? It seems crazy, given the uncertainty we were facing. Though it might seem like I am bragging about my own generosity and martyrdom in writing about this, in fact this is the first time I’ve admitted it to anyone but Liko (who merely gurgled mysteriously whenever I gave away cash). My wife did hear about the donation to Peace Action; at the time she gave me a pained, disappointed look. I mumbled something about wanting to stop the Iraq war, which sounded pathetic even to me. In context, my actions seemed foolish and even self-destructive. I hid them like an alcoholic hides a bottle.

The comparison with alcoholism might be warranted. I was addicted to giving away money, with each donation like a hit of some drug that alleviated my burdens. In the instant I handed over the money, my anxiety over money vanished. I felt floating, free, above it all. Of course, in a minute I’d fall back to earth, but that just caused me to want another hit.

Obviously I was not motivated by spiritual love for humankind, though certainly such moments have come up to me from behind, scaring me half out of my wits with their imperious demands that I change my life. I told myself at times that I was just looking for good karma; on a semi-conscious level, I believed that by helping others, it would somehow make people more inclined to help my family and me. I felt that the world was accumulating some kind of debt to me, quite without its consent, and that when I needed it, I could go to the world and ask to be repaid.

(In the article I edited this morning, the author paraphrases and quotes Søren Kierkegaard: “Sure, he said, we think a person who is loved owes a debt of gratitude to the one who loves them. There is an expectation that it should be repaid in kind, on installment, ‘reminiscent,’ [Kierkegaard] says sarcastically, “of an actual bookkeeping arrangement.’ Instead, [Kierkegaard] turns the whole thing on its head: ‘No, the one who loves runs the debt; in feeling himself gripped by love, he feels this as being in an infinite debt. Amazing!’” Kierkegaard was never a parent, but he seems to have understood parenthood well enough.)

There’s a phrase for this: magical thinking. Maybe the magic worked. I got plenty of work as a freelancer and consultant, more than I could handle given my responsibilities as a dad. When I found out about the position at Greater Good, at first I didn’t even consider applying. I was happy having so much time with Liko, making my own hours and doing work I wanted to do. Why mess with success?

Though it fell upon me almost by accident, being a stay-at-home dad irrevocably changed by interests and direction – it might not be an exaggeration to say that it changed the very core of my being, whatever that is. But I picked up a copy of Greater Good and thought about its mission – to “highlight ground breaking scientific research into the roots of compassion and altruism” – in relation to my life and my writing, in which I had increasingly turned my attention to parenting and kids. I met with the staff, and they told me about how they were researching the childhood roots of adult happiness, trying to figure out how to foster pro-social emotions and behaviors, and challenging, on scientific grounds, worldviews that depict human nature as primarily sinful, dark, and violent.

At the same time, I heard about another job at Stanford; this time the attraction was a heap of money. I applied for both and both were offered to me. In the end I don’t think that I had any choice. The mission of Greater Good vastly outweighed the salary at Stanford. Once again, I gave away money, hopefully to someone who needed it more than we do. Once again disappointments and fears dissolved, and I felt some degree of freedom.

So here I am. I go to work in the morning and come home in the evening. Shelly stays home and takes care of Liko. We’re a traditional family again, though we don’t think of ourselves that way. A year ago it seemed like life had kicked me in the stomach; in fact it had given me a gift. For that I’m grateful.

When the Summer Comes Undone

Whew -- summer vacation is over! Back to school! I'm not always so excited to return to the books and bells, but the end of summer vacation has come (mostly) as a great relief this year, a welcome return to routine and regularity.

I teach high school, and ever since (almost 4-year-old) Cole was born I've cherished the summers where I get to spend long days with him. And I definitely enjoyed this summer, but things were different -- way different. Most notably, Cole's mom left me earlier this year, and, while we were theoretically co-parenting, Cole was with me most of the time. In fact, there was a particularly low point in the summer where I thought she might bow out of parenting altogether. Things have changed since then, and we're now splitting time about 60-40 (I'm the 60), but this summer Cole was with me a lot more than that.

As many of the posts here illustrate, being an attentive parent is challenging. I don't think I was quite prepared, however, for how much more challenging it would be to do it on my own. Cole is wonderful and full of joy most of time, but he's definitely been exhibiting some exaggerated up-and-downs while he tries to deal with his parents splitting up. And, like any little kid, he's constantly pressing the people closest to him, trying to see where the limits are and how people react to different behavior. All that's to be expected, but it's a lot to deal with when you're the only parent in the picture from dawn to dusk, especially while trying to keep a lid on the day-to-day stresses of laundry, dishes, bills, and a messy house.

Things got more challenging when my sister (my only local family member) moved to New York in July. By the time August rolled around, when I was really struggling to find free moments to get ready for the school year. I found myself wishing I could just call in a substitute parent for a day or two. Unfortunately, though, it seems someone forgot to write sick time into the parenting contract.

After feeling the stress of being a single parent, combined with weeks spent walking around the Mission, with its dilapidated (and often deserted) playgrounds and passed-out junkies, left me planning out ways to escape. As Cole gets older, I often find myself wishing I could give him a little more freedom without fearful adults watching him every second. I'd like him to be playing with his neighbors, learning how to ride a bike, and out looking for bugs, and it's sometimes hard for me to picture those things happening in San Francisco.

Living closer to my parents sounds really appealing sometimes, living in Berkeley seems really appealing sometimes. Being able to buy a house sounds really appealing almost all of the time. So maybe a move or a change is order, or maybe I'm just feeling a bit of divorcee depression that will pass now that my thoughts aren't just rattling around in my own head all day long. I'm just going to let things be for a while, and hopefully settle on a plan in the next two years, before Cole starts kindergarten. We'll see how things end up.

Hirshman vs. Parents

Linda Hirshman is gaining more publicity, this time in the progressive media: in The Progressive, Ruth Connif takes her ideas apart and doesn't bother to put them back together again; in AlterNet, readers do the job. All the hostility naturally makes me want to give Hirshman a second look: are her ideas really so terrible? I gave it some thought.

But I'm afraid that the answer is still a big, fat YES. What's good about Hirshman is what was good about second-wave feminism. She calls for smart, talented women to resist to the pre-ordained role of the housewife and use their intelligence and skills to make a difference in the world. "You can't have an equal, just and fair workplace and a gendered family," says Hirshman. I agree; I'm all for de-gendering the family.

Hirshman says she wants to start a social conversation about women and work - also fine and good - but unfortunately she doesn't do much to bring the conversation to the next level. She's still stuck in the second wave, and doesn't see how men have changed and are changing as a result of the feminist movement. "What about those who say raising children is the most important job a person can do?" asks the AlterNet interviewer. "I have no idea what they mean by that," replies Hirshman. "If, in fact, it were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it? They'd rather make war, make foreign policy, invent nuclear weapons, decode DNA, paint The Last Supper, put the dome on St. Peter's Cathedral; they'd prefer to do all those things that are much less important than raising babies?"

First, as documented here and elsewhere, more men are "doing it" - the advances of second-wave feminism made it possible for more and more men to become caregivers. Wasn't that one of the goals? Second, for forty years many men have been explicitly rejecting the destructive empire-building roles Hirshman identifies as more desirable (making war, nuclear weapons, etc.) than raising children. (There's also considerable psychological, medical, and sociological evidence that focusing on work and neglecting family leads to profound unhappiness and health ills such as high blood pressure, but that's a point to be made at another time.)

Most perilously, I think the very existence of Hirshman's obtusely and arrogantly rendered argument drives a needless wedge between people who should be allies. Recently I've been reading and thinking about the political competition between Red States and Blue States (as part of a project for Political Research Associates), which is more accurately characterized as a rural vs. urban split. In his new book Welcome to the Homeland, public radio reporter Brian Mann cites example after example of "homelanders" (as he calls rural conservatives) who vote Republican because they feel scorned by the intellectuals and city folk whom they see as dominating the Democratic Party. "There's nobody there that I can relate to," says Mann's brother Allen, a homelander.

Mann's numbers, mostly from the 2004 election, are chilling: they show that Republicans have almost completely lost the cities and Democrats have mostly lost the country. The American political mix (e.g., the structure of the electoral college and the Senate, etc.) has given Republicans an edge in recent decades, but it's a precarious edge. Their small towns are in demographic and economic decline, while the cities keep growing stronger. Politically and culturally, we really and truly are becoming two nations, divisible and alien to each other. Though city folk are losing most of the national battles at the moment, in the long run we stand to win the war. Homelanders can sense that their way of life is dying; their fantasies of persecution do have some basis in reality.

Sure, to a degree homelanders have brought it on themselves. In a global society, fear of immigrants and foreign ways is an economic and cultural liability. In a knowledge-based economy, distrust of education and the scientific method is economic death. Homelanders are fighting Darwin in the classroom, but for their own sake they should be reading him. "It's not the strongest of species that survive," Darwin writes, "nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

Sometimes when I think about this I feel galvanized; I want my side to "win" and I want the rubes to "lose" (yes, I'm angry, too). In more reflective moments, I just get depressed and I wonder what kind of country Liko is going to live in when he's my age: it can't be good for a culture and an economy to be split so severely and thrown so far out of balance.

That's why Hirshman's relentless scorn for childrearing, which is so inescapable and important to so many people, troubles me. I'm in favor of fighting when fighting is the only option: we can't afford to compromise with homelanders on issues of human and civil rights (I'm thinking of gay marriage, abortion, and the use of torture, in particular). But does it follow that we have to sneer at everything they stand for? We shouldn't be wasting time telling potential allies in the homeland that it's "stupid" to focus on raising children instead of making money.

From where I stand, our children and the experience of parenthood might be all that we have in common. It is, at least, what I have to talk about when I'm talking with someone from the homeland, and if our styles and roles differ, well, that's something we can talk about. For those of us who have freely chosen to have children, raising them is the most important job we can do; working is a part of that, but I've learned the hard way that there's more to life than work. Denigrating caregiving - as Hirshman certainly does, despite her denials - confirms the worst stereotypes of homelanders hold about selfish urban yuppies; it burns the only bridge we might have.

Perhaps it doesn't matter what Hirshman says or what I say; maybe all the good will in the world doesn't amount to a hill of beans. There are forces at work that none of us can control. But we can never know that for sure, and though there might be things happening that are bigger than any one of us, we as individuals still have ethical choices to make. I don't disagree with Hirshman because I believe (quoting from her interview) "that women's lives aren't important enough to merit a real analysis." I disagree with her because her message is completely at odds with my experience.

OK, that's the last thing I have to say about Hirshman.

The City vs. Kids

This afternoon for lunch (I'm working today) I stopped by a playground near San Francisco's City Hall. I walked right past a sign that said, "NO ADULTS WITHOUT A CHILD," figuring that since I'm a dad the prohibition didn't apply to me. I sat down and opened a book.

A group of street people sat nearby, inside the playground gates. They were mostly minding their own business, although they also dominated that half of the playground. A grandmotherly woman walked up to me. "You should leave," she said, obviously nervous at confronting me. "This is a place for children, and your presence here violates the sanctity of the place - and the same goes for those people over there."

She was right, and I told her so. I closed my book and left. She didn't ask the street people to leave, for obvious reasons. Perhaps I should have; maybe I should have found a cop.

Dealing with homeless people, drunks, crazies, and junkies is a part of playground life in the city. This past Sunday I brought Liko to Mission Dolores park. There a drunk took it upon himself to regulate the children's play. He told one boy to get down from the monkey bars; he told a girl to give a toy back to the boy she took it from. The parents avoided eye contact and they kept their kids away, which is just about all parents can do in such situations. You learn that it doesn't pay to be confrontational, especially with your kid present. Better to just ignore them until they go away, and hope no one crosses a line.

That very afternoon, after a nap, we went to a completely different playground in Noe Valley - a mommy friend called to see if we could meet her and her boy there. Noe Valley's a pretty safe neighborhood, but when we got there we discovered a homeless-looking guy sleeping on the grass. "He was making me nervous," said the mommy, which is why she called us. Not nervous enough to leave the park; if you left every park where a drunk is sleeping on the grass, your kid wouldn't have anywhere to play.

Later the guy woke up and wandered directly into the playground, which is about the size of a postage stamp. He turned out to be a raving lunatic. He babbled to the kids and wandered in a circle around us. We followed procedure, avoiding eye contact, etc. It was a difficult situation, but eventually he wandered out into the street, where he was almost run down by a car. (By the way: all the drunks and crazies mentioned in this post were white guys, in case anybody is harboring an image in their heads of dark-skinned urban predators.)

This is the sort of thing that horrifies suburbanites and turns progressive moms and dads into the kind of people who vote for Rudy Giuliani: on the playground you find yourself wishing for a cop, though of course there never are any. In the absence of law and order, you contemplate abandoning the urban commons and moving to the privatized suburbs, where kids play in backyards or in malls that charge admission to indoor playgrounds. Where you can buy a house. Where the schools have doors on the bathroom stalls.

I'm not sure that I have an intelligent conclusion to share, but it troubles me and so I want to write about it. I'm a committed urban blue-state dad: I want my son to grow up in a place where cosmopolitanism and cross-pollination are facts of life. But sometimes, I wonder if it's worth it. And sometimes, I even wonder if people like Giuliani are right about what it takes to run a city that is fit for kids to live in.