Tough work week this week, and it is only barely half over. Monday night I had to sit in on a group for parents who have children that were sexually abused. Tuesday I was set to observe a group for parents in one of the poorest sections of town but no one at the site had any idea what I was talking about. Last night was a group led by a Philadelphia Narcotics Bureau officer for parents trying to get their children out of juvenile justice placement. That was held at a mental health and substance abuse center, so most of the parents there had some pretty hefty issues of their own.
I've had way more experience with sex offenders and their victims than any nice white girl from Pennsylvanilla ever should, but this was my first time speaking with parents about their children's rapes since having Jake. With new eyes I watched the guilt and sorrow pass across a mother's face while she talks about how she never suspected her loving and supportive husband of being the cause of her daughter's delinquency, promiscuity, and mental health issues, the anger that rises in a man's neck when he recounts the day his daughter was lured into an 80's model Chevy Van right in front of the house while the family was busy setting the table just right for a holiday dinner, the frustration of a woman who is unable to move out of a home that sits two doors down from the third grader who violently molested her five year-old son because subsidized housing requires that you must live in your first placement for two years or face serious penalties that pretty much guarantee you will never rent in these parts again. The Housing Authority Board does not see the situation as being dangerous since both mothers agree to keep their children apart from one another and have been sanctioned to supervise their children at all times for the duration of their leases. The boy who's mother I met with is not allowed to play on the street with the other neighborhood kids, and can only have indoor playdates in his living room with a social worker present. The other boy was sanctioned to therapy and can go anywhere his mother feels like watching him go. Since he was so young it was deemed that he didn't know the nature of his offense. We used to have a saying when I worked in sex crimes about how no victim ever goes unpunished. Ain't that the truth.
Tuesday night in "the Bottom" of Philly was hype, as they say there. It was 80 degrees, everyone was out, everyone was drinking, and everyone was nekkid. It was like a damn rap video out there, and I loved it. It was reassuring to see some of the dealers who used to keep me safe when I was doing field work out there a few years ago, and some of the prostitutes who made sure I got to the bus stop safe and sound if I was out after dusk are still running around. People like that don't have much of a shelf life in this town these days.
The Q's were fired up, and no one messes with a preppy Weber or little red Coleman out that way. Oil barrels are cut in half and loaded up with eighty different parts of a chicken, seventeen different sausages, half pound burgers, peppers, onions, corn, and brontosaurus ribs. Everyone is happy, everyone says 'what's up?', and everyone ducks inside when the streetlights come on because someone is getting dead in that kind of weather. I think Philadelphia is up to 96 or 97 murders so far this year. The news teams make a sport of it and keep us abreast of how many people were killed:how many days have passed in 2007. We got off lucky last night since the temperatures dropped. It was way to cold for vengeance and mayhem. I think we're holding strong at 97:88 as of today. For the first time in all my years in this town I look over my shoulder when I walk through the projects. It never used to be like that. Damned kids these days, ruining everything.
Last night was by far the worst. Officer Brunswick brought a PowerPoint presentation along with him to the medical center on Broad and Wyoming(ish). The Bureau has a program called HEADS UP that aims to educate parents and teens about drugs and alcohol. Old hat, you say? Not like this. Far from a Scared Straight approach, the presentation included people who have been effected by drugs and violence over the past decade or so. The video went over the types of drugs that are out there, and I was surprised that no one attending the class had ever heard of LSD ("now why the hell would someone put acid in they mouth? That just trifling', burnin' yoself and shit", one formerly crack-addicted mom asked) and only a few had heard of Ecstasy. The ones that did, love it and thought it was harmless. Three of ten had heard of date rape drugs, and all were surprised when the heard what was in meth. People like us (blog readers tend not to dabble in crackwhoredom) just assume that the education and information is out there, but it really isn't. A lot of heavy drug users don't go to school much past sixth or seventh grade, and their mothers were too busy smoking crack and shooting up to tell them about the dangers of what they were doing. "If it feels good, do it" rules the land. There is not likely to be a television in the house that tunes into TLC, Discovery, or PBS and when kids are getting the facts from the music they listen to and the movies they watch and from what their friends and family do, you can imagine the way their brains work. It's scary what is normal in some of these neighborhoods.
The video showed overdose victims, and what can happen if you don't die. I'd rather be dead, personally. It showed victims of DUI accidents and victims of stray bullets. The dead ones were horrible, the ones who managed to survive were ghastly.
Men and women who've gone down in history as cold-blooded monsters were shown. As children. Their mothers gave the police home videos from Christmas and first birthdays and pictures from the first day of kindergarten and home-made Mother's Day cards and all the stuff that makes you love your baby so much it feels like your heart just might burst. Sweet little boys and girls who made some bad choices and landed themselves in jail or worse were paraded across the screen as I fought back tears and the urge to run home and kiss Jake.
And the worst part of all this, all the stories were local. Every third or fourth dead kid was a friend or family member or neighbor of someone in the room. The ones we didn't know we remembered seeing his mother fall out in front of the news cameras, and her daughter lighting a candle for the memorial shrine that builds on the street corner where her pregnant mother was gunned down in front of her. Bad stuff.
This job is amazing, but it is taking a toll on my heart strings. I am working a few nights, and I feel like I am being robbed of time with Jake. When I get home I have to fight the urge to take Jake to bed with me so I can hold him all night long. But, as much as I don't want him to be a thugged out heroin addict who gets shot up in the hood and get 40s poured on his grave, I really don't want to be kicked in the chassis all night long. This stuff makes me tired and I need a good night's sleep.
3.17.2007
one finger old
I did it. No one is dead. We all still have two eyes, and everyone has front teeth.
It was pretty touch-and-go there for awhile, but I managed to keep it together well enough for an entire year and I have a living, breathing, walking, squawking toddler in my house to prove it.
Jake does everything and eats everything a one year old should. He can walk from one end of the house and back again, but sometimes he prefers to do it on his knees or crawl so his potential to touch everything with his entire body is maximized. Words come out kind of well, and I only get a "mama" if he is whining. Dave and I are both "dada" and Tyler and Bailey are both "ticky"'s. Jake can say "Cheech" and "cheese" pretty well and is working on everything else. His daycare lady and I can understand him when he says "milk" and "up" and a few other things but you probably couldn't. Your mastery of the English language is most likely way too evolved for Jakey-nonsense.
I could go on and on about how much life has changed and all that crap, but I'll spare you. But boy, has life changed. Everything is harder. Work, budget, socializing, marriage, errands, everything. For the first time in my life I feel that those things are all worth the hassle, and I'd like to say I am a better person for it. Who knows.
Jake had his one year check up today, and weighs in at 20 pounds, 10 ounces and is 30 inches long. Pretty big difference from that tiny 5 pound, 12 ounce, 20 inch monkey we brought home last year. His weight hovers somewhere between the tenth and twenty-fifth percentile and his height has dipped to about the seventieth. I blame Dave.
It was pretty touch-and-go there for awhile, but I managed to keep it together well enough for an entire year and I have a living, breathing, walking, squawking toddler in my house to prove it.
Jake does everything and eats everything a one year old should. He can walk from one end of the house and back again, but sometimes he prefers to do it on his knees or crawl so his potential to touch everything with his entire body is maximized. Words come out kind of well, and I only get a "mama" if he is whining. Dave and I are both "dada" and Tyler and Bailey are both "ticky"'s. Jake can say "Cheech" and "cheese" pretty well and is working on everything else. His daycare lady and I can understand him when he says "milk" and "up" and a few other things but you probably couldn't. Your mastery of the English language is most likely way too evolved for Jakey-nonsense.
I could go on and on about how much life has changed and all that crap, but I'll spare you. But boy, has life changed. Everything is harder. Work, budget, socializing, marriage, errands, everything. For the first time in my life I feel that those things are all worth the hassle, and I'd like to say I am a better person for it. Who knows.
Jake had his one year check up today, and weighs in at 20 pounds, 10 ounces and is 30 inches long. Pretty big difference from that tiny 5 pound, 12 ounce, 20 inch monkey we brought home last year. His weight hovers somewhere between the tenth and twenty-fifth percentile and his height has dipped to about the seventieth. I blame Dave.
3.04.2007
parenting 101
Whether you realize it or not, you have become your mother. And your dad. Which means that you are now your own grandparent. Funny how that works, isn't it?
I am taking a break from Sunday morning housework. Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon is blasting through the house, the dryer is humming in the background, and Jake is talking to his Fisher Price Chatter Phone and is surrounded by his Fisher Price stacking rings. I'm drinking coffee and wearing a blue bandanna scarf on my head. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to my house. You'll notice that it is in a perpetual state of the mid- to late- seventies, please don't jump around like monkeys or the record might skip. There is a Tupperware pitcher of KoolAid in the fridge, help yourself.
I swear by Murphy's Oil Soap for my furniture and Oil of Olay for my face. I still call household cleaner "Cinch" and only buy Palmolive dish detergent. I drink Miller High Life for godssake. You can stop calling me Lora and start referring to me as Janet at any time. I'll probably even answer to Roy. It's almost sick.
I promised you that I would share with you the key points of parenting I have learned from my years of social services and more recently from logging hundreds and hundreds of hours in parenting seminars and classes. I will get to that one day this week or next, but first I want you to think about the way you felt as a child when your parents parented you. How did you feel when they read to you, sang with you, tucked you in, took you in the pool, ate with you, played with you, yelled at you, punished you? I had a middle school teacher who often told us to remember the way we feel right now, it will help us be compassionate to children when we grow up and make us better parents when we have our own kids. It was the best parenting advice I may ever get.
Remember how it felt to be a little kid in a big school?
A third grader? Eight year olds are the worst, aren't they? Being eight was the worst. You are stuck in the middle of everything and you are afraid that you may never grow up.
Remember how it felt to be twelve years old? You were expected to learn algebra in an environment that was hardly conducive to breathing, lest you look like a geek. Fifteen? Talk about hard to breath. Pheromones were everywhere, invading your psyche and your pants.
How about a senior in high school, trying to enjoy your last year at home even though it was the absolute pits?
When I lead or sit in on parenting classes, especially those dealing with punishment, I ask the class to close their eyes and think about how they were punished. Then I ask them to think about how they felt. Did they learn anything from the punishment? Did they change their behavior as a result? Were they angry? Humiliated? Afraid? Bruised? Then I ask them to think about how they punish their children. Is it similar? Why would you scare/embarrass/hurt your child if it didn't work for you? Because, the answer I give them, you have become your mother. You learned it from her and now you are teaching your children what you learned. They in turn will do the same to their children unless someone breaks that proverbial cycle.
Although I am not allowed to say it at work, I am not anti-spanking. I may not use it in my house (we'll cross that bridge when we come to it) but if you spank your kids I probably won't call the people on you. But I am a mandated reporter, so watch it. If my boss sees me see you beat the bejesus out of your brat and I don't call DHS, I'm in tons of trouble. And you will pay my fine or support me while I find another job.
The current trend in punishment is to completely ground your child for no more than three days after discussing with (not screaming at) the child the wrongdoing and the reason for the repercussion. It's kind of like a SuperTimeOut. Take everything away- no television, iPod, stereo, privileges, etc. for as long as you feel necessary. Just remember that kids operate in the here and now, so giving them a long punishment is usually ineffective because they can't see past the ends of their noses and you probably won't keep true to your word of a long punishment. Trust me when I tell you that you don't want to see their faces around the house non-stop for a month straight. Give your kid some grunt work to do around the house that you don't feel like doing and when the punishment is over, move on.
I guess this works. It worked for me. Somehow my parents were visionaries in child rearing and had a fifteen year leg up on parenting in the new millennium. I don't sneak out of the house anymore, anyway. I did that once.
Once.
As long as you aren't seriously hurting your kid in a bodily or emotional fashion (because I do love that kid. He/she/they is/are the best) I don't care how you dole out punishment in your house. Just be sure that you are giving out about three times as many compliments and congratulations than you are punishments. Communicate to your child the right thing to do and give them a pat on the back when they do it. A little bit of positivity goes a long way, and a lotta bit of it goes on indefinitely.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to slide on my Dr. Scholl's and run out for a Tab. Blogging makes me thirsty, and I need to rehydrate myself so I can slave over my Fry Daddy and Crockpot all afternoon.
I am taking a break from Sunday morning housework. Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon is blasting through the house, the dryer is humming in the background, and Jake is talking to his Fisher Price Chatter Phone and is surrounded by his Fisher Price stacking rings. I'm drinking coffee and wearing a blue bandanna scarf on my head. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to my house. You'll notice that it is in a perpetual state of the mid- to late- seventies, please don't jump around like monkeys or the record might skip. There is a Tupperware pitcher of KoolAid in the fridge, help yourself.
I swear by Murphy's Oil Soap for my furniture and Oil of Olay for my face. I still call household cleaner "Cinch" and only buy Palmolive dish detergent. I drink Miller High Life for godssake. You can stop calling me Lora and start referring to me as Janet at any time. I'll probably even answer to Roy. It's almost sick.
I promised you that I would share with you the key points of parenting I have learned from my years of social services and more recently from logging hundreds and hundreds of hours in parenting seminars and classes. I will get to that one day this week or next, but first I want you to think about the way you felt as a child when your parents parented you. How did you feel when they read to you, sang with you, tucked you in, took you in the pool, ate with you, played with you, yelled at you, punished you? I had a middle school teacher who often told us to remember the way we feel right now, it will help us be compassionate to children when we grow up and make us better parents when we have our own kids. It was the best parenting advice I may ever get.
Remember how it felt to be a little kid in a big school?
A third grader? Eight year olds are the worst, aren't they? Being eight was the worst. You are stuck in the middle of everything and you are afraid that you may never grow up.
Remember how it felt to be twelve years old? You were expected to learn algebra in an environment that was hardly conducive to breathing, lest you look like a geek. Fifteen? Talk about hard to breath. Pheromones were everywhere, invading your psyche and your pants.
How about a senior in high school, trying to enjoy your last year at home even though it was the absolute pits?
When I lead or sit in on parenting classes, especially those dealing with punishment, I ask the class to close their eyes and think about how they were punished. Then I ask them to think about how they felt. Did they learn anything from the punishment? Did they change their behavior as a result? Were they angry? Humiliated? Afraid? Bruised? Then I ask them to think about how they punish their children. Is it similar? Why would you scare/embarrass/hurt your child if it didn't work for you? Because, the answer I give them, you have become your mother. You learned it from her and now you are teaching your children what you learned. They in turn will do the same to their children unless someone breaks that proverbial cycle.
Although I am not allowed to say it at work, I am not anti-spanking. I may not use it in my house (we'll cross that bridge when we come to it) but if you spank your kids I probably won't call the people on you. But I am a mandated reporter, so watch it. If my boss sees me see you beat the bejesus out of your brat and I don't call DHS, I'm in tons of trouble. And you will pay my fine or support me while I find another job.
The current trend in punishment is to completely ground your child for no more than three days after discussing with (not screaming at) the child the wrongdoing and the reason for the repercussion. It's kind of like a SuperTimeOut. Take everything away- no television, iPod, stereo, privileges, etc. for as long as you feel necessary. Just remember that kids operate in the here and now, so giving them a long punishment is usually ineffective because they can't see past the ends of their noses and you probably won't keep true to your word of a long punishment. Trust me when I tell you that you don't want to see their faces around the house non-stop for a month straight. Give your kid some grunt work to do around the house that you don't feel like doing and when the punishment is over, move on.
I guess this works. It worked for me. Somehow my parents were visionaries in child rearing and had a fifteen year leg up on parenting in the new millennium. I don't sneak out of the house anymore, anyway. I did that once.
Once.
As long as you aren't seriously hurting your kid in a bodily or emotional fashion (because I do love that kid. He/she/they is/are the best) I don't care how you dole out punishment in your house. Just be sure that you are giving out about three times as many compliments and congratulations than you are punishments. Communicate to your child the right thing to do and give them a pat on the back when they do it. A little bit of positivity goes a long way, and a lotta bit of it goes on indefinitely.
Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to slide on my Dr. Scholl's and run out for a Tab. Blogging makes me thirsty, and I need to rehydrate myself so I can slave over my Fry Daddy and Crockpot all afternoon.
3.03.2007
where's mommy's nose?
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