Weigh in Wednesday

by

Weigh-In Wednesday: Waving at Babies

My husband and daughter are absolutely mortified by my habit of interacting with babies and small children in public.

My position: Reacting enthusiastically to our youngest members of society is a key part of the social contract.

Their position: It’s weird and creepy.

To be very, extremely, crystal clear: I’m not approaching strange children. I’m talking about being in the cereal aisle at the grocery store, and a baby in the shopping cart a few yards away waves or babbles at me. Or standing in line at the bank or the airport, and a toddler makes eye contact and smiles.

I will 100% always smile or wave back.

On occasion, I have been known to talk to a baby. Like, if they proffer a toy they are holding, I might say, “Oh, that’s a beautiful duck.” Or if they say, “Hi!” or “Bye!” I will respond in kind. I stop short of asking children their names.

I do respect distance; I’m not getting up in a stranger’s personal space, no matter how small that person is. I’m not going to tickle a bare foot or pat a child on the head. That is a bridge too far. But waving and smiling and even playing peek-a-boo all seem reasonable to me.

Trying to think back to when Carla was small, I think it would have hurt my feelings if she tried to participate in social behavior with a stranger and they ignored her. I thought she was darling, and I was proud that she felt confident enough to interact with other humans, and I would have loved it if adults had responded to her bids for engagement. I did not (and do not) love it when strangers ask Carla her name, or where she lives or goes to school, although these are good opportunities for us to discuss what kind of information is okay to share with strangers and how to respond politely and truthfully without giving away too many personal details. (Also, most of the time, these questions seem very innocent and friendly, with no ill intent from the asker.)

I do understand that the calculus of what’s appropriate or not might be different for men than it is for middle-aged women. Although I still think, like, making silly faces at a baby over the back of an airplane seat is a totally acceptable way to interact with a young human.

However, I am willing to acknowledge that I may have wildly misunderstood the assignment. So I would like to know what you think.

image from Canva
by

Weigh In Wednesday on a Thursday: Current Identity Crisis

Lately I’ve been feeling like I’ve outgrown this space. Which isn’t to say I have any real desire or intention to stop blogging. It just feels like I don’t know what to post, that anything I do write is inconsequential or boring or dumb or… I don’t know. 

I’ve also begun to dislike, more and more, my blog name. It fit me once, a long time ago. But I no longer feel like my identity is Doctor’s Wife, nor do I think my life is any different from anyone else’s, nor do I write a whole lot about the doctor’s-wife-specific aspects of my life anyway, and it just feels dumb and stale and cringe. 

One of the most memorable – and most sobering / terrifying – quotes I’ve come across is Annie Dillard’s “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” If I look at my blog archive as a catalog of how I spend my life, it’s full of posts about parenting, relationships, food, my cat, worries / anxiety, and day-to-day minutiae.

The things I write about here are topics that interest me. But do they add up to anything???? Sometimes the silly and frivolous things I post about feel so very silly and frivolous. Am I wasting my time, and yours, by dwelling on such inconsequential topics?

I want to write about deeper, heavier themes. And yet, many of them feel outside of my ability to discuss with any nuance or intelligence; many feel too personal, or too revealing of the private lives of people who aren’t me; many feel so heavy I fear I’ll drag us all down (and we have enough of that, elsewhere). 

More and more often, lately, I find myself thinking, What am I doing here? 

  • I write for this blog because I believe in the practice of writing. But shouldn’t I be devoting time and energy to my other writing, the writing that I’m neglecting all too often? 
  • I write for this blog because I love keeping a sort of loose record of my life. But isn’t it far too loose, when I’m barely delving into anything real? Will I revisit this in twenty years and think – my god, was my whole life really wrapped up in coming up with meals to make for my family???? Would Future Me be better served by writing a private, messy, no-details-spared journal?
  • I write here because I love interacting with you. But couldn’t I get the same feeling of connection by reading and commenting on your posts (which I do far too infrequently, let’s add that to my list of failings), or texting / emailing / calling you more often? 

It all comes back around to the simple problem that I’ve outgrown the “life of a doctor’s wife” conceit. If I find a focus or a point or a perspective, I could imbue my writing with fresh purpose. But… what would my focus be? I have no specialty or expertise, no original wisdom to share, no unique viewpoints, no secrets to offer. Even if I changed my blog identity, I would still be the same over-anxious, often-cranky, germ-averse, self-absorbed, quick-to-catastrophize, food-and-cat-obsessed middle-aged me. And, to be honest, even if I did have some area of expertise, I don’t know if I would WANT to write an “XYZ advice” blog, you know? I don’t necessarily want to be locked into one thing. I kind of like having a place where I can moon about my child growing up or discuss my dinner plans for the week or overthink gift ideas. If I were to suddenly to be The XYZ Blog, would I still feel able to post those things?

Speaking of focus, I already have a profoundly neglected book blog. Maybe I should shift all my energy to writing about books and writing. I love books! I love writing! Maybe writing about books and writing would mean I’d read more! And write more! But do I really have anything revelatory or interesting to say about the books I read? Could I write anything about writing except that I am very, very slow and mediocre at it? Plus… the book blog is “public” in a way this one isn’t, and I don’t feel entirely free to be me there. (And what does THAT say about me, that I feel more open when I am semi-anonymous than when people I know offline might be reading?) (And have things become extra complicated, now that I know several bloggers in my offline life, too?) 

Now that I have so many lovely “real life” connections, do I even need this blog anymore? It was a lifeline when I was a lonely newlywed, working from home in a new city while my husband was at the hospital all hours of the day. Many of those connections have grown and lasted and crossed over into offline friendships, and wasn’t that the hope all along? Have I achieved a goal, making the ongoing pursuit of that same goal superfluous? After all, I can continue to read YOUR blog, even if I stop posting on mine.

If I reverted to “just” a blog reader, would that feel like enough? Would I magically shift all the time I spend writing blog posts toward other, more valuable pursuits? Somehow I think I would still itch to get all the random silly mundane frivolous cranky food-and-cat-related thoughts out of my head.

But if I feel driven to do that anyway, why not share those random thoughts with kind people who will empathize and offer insights and make me laugh? 

As you see, I continue to travel in circles. 

Okay. Let’s see here. Is there anything concrete we can derive from today’s post? If you haven’t already clicked away from this drivel, perhaps you could weigh in on my current identity crisis by answering the following polls.

Well, that’s it. That’s the dumb post that’s been stopping me up, writing wise. If you made it through this meandering, whiny, naval-gaze of a post, I salute you. (And believe it or not, I cut 500 of the dumbest, whiniest words from it.) I hope posting it here allows me to move on.

Thanks, as always, for reading and understanding and weighing in.

by

Weigh-In Wednesday: Mean Kids IRL

Are you walking with Elisabeth today? I haven’t gotten my walk in yet, but I have one planned for this morning with my dear friend K. 

Carla and I got outside after dinner last night for a quick walk around our neighborhood. The topic? Mean kids. 

Oh, how grateful I am that I am not in middle school any more. I would not go back to middle school for anything, that’s for sure. Or high school. It’s a miracle that any of us survives. 

My memory of middle school is that I was neither popular enough to be “in” with the popular crowd nor enough of an outcast to be a target. But oh how I remember the popular crowd. Supposedly, there are two kinds of popularity: popularity through status and popularity through likability. While I can think of someone in high school who was most definitely the latter, the middle school ruling class seemed to operate through some complicated algorithm of beauty, power, and skill (at sports or academics or arts) that I’ve never quite been able to understand. 

A few people seemed to always remain at the top of the popularity pyramid. They were the ones who had the ability to demote people from inner circle to outcast, or to promote people from unknown to one of the in-crowd. It seemed so capricious, the way people shifted positions. And the thing I didn’t understand then – and am no better at understanding as an adult – is how people could be nakedly mean to others, but if they were popular, other kids simply followed their lead. 

One of my friends has a kid who has been bullied, on and off, for several years. It breaks my heart just to hear about it; of course it must be a thousand times worse for my friend, and even more awful for her kid. Our school has a very clear No Bullying policy, with a structured response system… maybe it makes an immediate difference in how kids treat each other, but it doesn’t seem to deter repeated bullying in the long term. 

Bullying is, of course, its own horrific animal. But there’s also just run-of-the-mill mean. Saying you can’t sit next to them at lunch. Ignoring you in the hall. Whispering with another friend in front of you. Consistently rejecting your ideas. Deriding your appearance or behavior or belongings. Being mean to you in private but pleasant to you in person, so complaining makes you delusional or over-sensitive. And this is all in-person stuff. The sky is the limit for how nasty kids can be via digital means!

My memory is terrible – which is a blessing when it comes to some things. I can’t remember specific incidents in middle school. But I do remember the mean girls. How you could so easily fall from grace, for no greater blunder than wearing the wrong color shirt.

I could be misremembering, but it seems like my parents’ catch-all advice was “ignore them and they’ll go away.” Which is decent advice, as far as advice goes… and is also nearly impossible to do when you’re in middle school. 

How DO you deal with mean kids in middle school???? 

Carla and I watched a bunch of YouTube videos together, purporting to offer techniques. We discussed the possible sources of meanness, and talked through a bunch of potential ways she could react to the current mean girl. Unfortunately, all the things I could come up with weren’t workable for some reason or other. Which I get. When you’re in middle school, things like friend groups and who sits where and what you can say to one another feel very rigid. For instance, one of Carla’s great strengths is that she is friendly with pretty much everyone, so I suggested she simply sit at a different table with another friend. But it sounds like there’s no precedent for moving among different friend groups, especially at lunch time. 

How do you deal with mean people as an adult? 

Fortunately, I haven’t had a lot of experience with mean people as an adult. And, even more fortunately, it is MUCH easier to avoid mean people as an adult. (It’s trickier when the mean person in question is a colleague, and the only tactics I’ve used in those cases are a) scrupulous professionalism and b) finding a new job.) On rare occasions, I’ve been able to call someone out (in an admittedly timid, conflict-averse way), saying something like, “Wow, that sounded pretty harsh.” Or “That hurt my feelings.” Or, in the case of comments about other people, “That person is my friend, so I’d prefer not to discuss her when she’s not here.” My best strategy is to be briskly friendly when I encounter the mean person, but to limit my interactions with them to the absolute minimum. 

Years ago, there was a person in my circle who had some mean girl qualities. The main one was gossiping about people behind their backs. (Which, of course, made me highly reluctant to share anything with her about myself.) One day, she made a completely thoughtless comment about my friend who died. I was shocked, but in the moment, I was able to push back gently, saying something like, “Yikes. That probably didn’t come out the way you intended it!” only to have her double down. That was when I began disentangling myself from her for good.

But of course, when you’re in middle school, it’s nearly impossible to extricate yourself from a relationship with a mean kid! They are always there! In your classes, in the hallway, in the lunchroom, on the playground! In many cases, they are in your friend group – and why should you have to jettison your entire friend group because one person is a jerk? Middle school power dynamics make it difficult to oust someone from the top of the popularity pyramid… and, even if you manage to do it, where does that leave you? With a shiny new Mean Girl label on your chest?

It stinks so much when my kid is struggling and my only advice is “ignore it and it will go away.” Or “there will be a time after this.” Those things are so much harder to implement when you are twelve than when you are forty-three. There are lots of recommendations to have empathy for the mean kid, who must surely be mean because they feel bad about themselves or have something bad going on in their own lives. Empathy is important, don’t get me wrong. Carla and I have talked a ton about what might be driving mean behavior and how we should feel more pity than anger toward someone who’s mean. But empathy doesn’t fix the meanness.

Are there any books that offer real, usable advice? We already own several from the American Girl “Wellbeing” series, and I think I’m going to order this one as well. Now I’m worried that Carla might be too old for American Girl books. Perhaps I should also get her this one. And this one, too. (I always turn to books for advice, which makes me feel kind of like a dinosaur. But I can’t stop. And I do sometimes find Carla reading through the advice books I’ve gotten her, so I know she is aware of them and has turned to them in times of need.)

Is there any advice for parents whose kids are dealing with mean kids??? When my friend told me about her kid being bullied, all I could do was listen. I had no advice. She’s doing All The Things she can do besides switching schools; the bullying still happens. She’s read all the same stuff I have, about how the most important thing for kids being bullied is that they have a secure home life to turn to for support. She knows as well as I do that kids grow and change, popularity shifts. That her kid will eventually find Their People. That sometimes the only way out is through. 

But oh, how impossibly hard that is. Especially when it’s your child’s soul that’s suffering.