The Green Parents of Hatchet Cove Farm

On this blog, we’ve chronicled our efforts to defy the SUV-centered, socially-fractured, concrete and strip mall, Velveeta cheese and microwaved broccoli culture of this great city Houston. Today’s post, however, is a break from our urban struggle. We had the honor of interviewing two young organic farmers from Maine – Bill Pluecker and Reba Richardson. They have a beautiful toddler and are visiting Houston to see their brother, who is a friend of mine, for the Thanksgiving holiday.

I always tell MaGreen that our baby should grow up to be an organic farmer and she tells me that I have a romantic notion of organic farmers’ lives. So I jumped at the chance to talk with Bill and Reba. The interview did indeed disillusion me of my romantic ideas about the organic farming life, but it also renewed my respect and admiration for organic farmers. Their lives are clearly not an escape from the tribulations of modern life. They are busy and overwhelmed. They have a hard time balancing family life and work. And yet, the satisfaction they get from their labor is so clear. And they look so damn healthy. Not like appendages to computer workstations. I want to become an organic farmer just to have such a strong, vital body.

To hear the interview, click here – interview of the green parents of Hatchet Cove Farms.

If you live near Friendship, Maine, I would like to encourage you to join their CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program. You can reach them at 207 832 2264.

Plucking the Tofu in time for Thanksgiving

The last post was a little long and self-indulgent. But my nostalgic demon had to have it before I could get on to what I wanted to write, which is more on the topic of Green Parenting, and is short and sweet... Although it is another cooking post, but I promise it's the last for awhile.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks learning how to cook tofu. I haven't learned sooner because I'm terrified of marninades. But since I've been an on-off vegetarian for over ten years, I figured it's about time I got over that hump. Oh, and when I write, "I've been learning to cook tofu" I mean, actually, that I’ve just tried the same two recipes twice: A Veggie Loaf and a Veggie Cutlets with gravy.

I’m doing this partially in order to provide my family with tasty food on Thanksgiving, but mostly because I just miss hearty food supplemented with a vegetable, sometimes, and beans and/or pasta doesn’t always do it for me. I'm not experimenting with the Tofurkey because that's my friend Chuck's territory.

I found the recipes at Vegweb.com, and since I really hate most tofu-based meat replacements, and I really loved these recipes, I decided I ought to share them. I don’t know how long the link will work, as they’re special Thanksgiving recipes, but if it breaks, go to VegWeb.com and look up holiday/Thanksgiving recipes.

The two I like are Thanksgiving Meatloaf and Marc’s Cutlets -- and note, something like fifty other people also gave them five stars... And I'm sure I don't need to tell you these hardcore vegan/vegetarian types are generally pretty damned stingy with the stars. Both recipes are really well flavored...

My special notes for anybody who actually decides to lift one of these recipes:
Veggie Cutlets: a) you eventually turn the marinade into a gravy GreenDaddy is a huge fan of, and which will allow us to finally have gravy on Thanksgiving; b)I pressed, then froze, then thawed the tofu before marinating; c) I dipped the marinated chunks in egg to make the breading stick better, added chopped almonds to the breading to make it more glamorous, and cooked it in the oven instead of on the stove. GreenDaddy likes the baked, which are crunchier; I like the fried, which are fattier, but still crunchy.

Meat Loaf: I didn't try, but think you could use the old tofurkey-collander method to make this shaped like a dead and plucked turkey. I also accidentally purreed the onions on my first round of making it, and I think it made the recipe better, it wasn't at all crumbly like the second round was.

So there you have it. And if anybody out there can point me to any other types of tofu recipes...please do!

Catalogue of Thanksgivings...

The first Thanksgivings I remember were celebrated in the house I grew up in, which was attached to my dad’s bar, the Three Legged Dog Saloon. He invited anybody without family to join – that usually meant men working on the oil rigs, women who had crushes on my dad, ‘barmaids’, and a few Utes who lived on the reservation the bar was in and were regulars. People crowded around a table filled with generic Thanksgiving fare that my father always made himself: turkey, potatoes, beans, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pies. Lot’s of wine, too, but that was store bought. I was usually the only child, but I relished that role. Everybody was extra kind to me because of it, especially on this day when everybody missed the vestiges of real families and a little girl fed their nostalgia as much as the food and the tradition did.

After that, there were Thanksgivings I spent in Salt Lake City, which I never enjoyed as much because they were formal and lacked the chaos I associated with the day. And then there was the college Thanksgiving I forgot about until seven or eight at night, when my friend Nick Jackson and I went to a convenience store and bought a couple turkey pot pies (only in Minnesota do convenience stores carry pot pies). It felt hip and I was impressed with our ingenuity.

In New York City I cooked my first bird in a fast-cook method, because I didn’t realize how long it took to thaw a turkey. My college friends Wi Sorenson and Eric Heaton refused to eat it because, though I found it tantalizingly juicy, they were convinced it was raw and might kill them. I was congenially distressed.

In Houston, I spent a few Thanksgivings with the same friends, usually at the Wolfes’ fabulous abode. About sixteen close friends from the writing program all smoked up before dinner, and we ate Steve’s incredible food, and passed out all over his house, our sleep sound as Rip Van Winkle’s (which was appropriate as Van Winkle himself was a creation of one of our friends’ great, great, great, etc. granfather.).

When that group broke up, I hosted several at my little blue house. These events were like my fathers’, filled with people I knew, but usually not very well. We drank wine and argued and flirted and had a good time. Finally, I became a vegetarian again, as I had been in college. My first vegetarian Thanksgiving was actually a vegan one, which I spent at my friend Chuck’s. We awaited Janice Blue, host of Pacifica’s Go Vegan Texas, like she was the Easter Bunny, and when she arrived with her Textured Soy Protein Turkey, the countless sweet potato, corn, and barley dishes immediately appeared not only less oppressive, but ordained.

By then I was dating GreenDaddy, and my mom joined our first Thanksgiving together – it was the first Thanksgiving I’d spent with a family member since I was 18. My friend Kate was going to bring a turkey, but she was very stressed, and for the only time in the history of my knowing her, she bailed on bringing it over late on in the game --the night before Thanksgiving. My mom needed a turkey and was worried it would never thaw in time…but luckily, Houston isn’t Myton, Utah, and not all turkeys are frozen. We went to Whole Foods, picked one up, and cooked it with our friend Jenny’s help. Mom came the following year, but the year after that she was too sick; and now she’s coming again this year.

For the first time in years, we’ll have Thanksgiving at the Wolfe’s again. So the Houston Thanksgivings come full circle. And actually, a good chunk of the original Wolfe Thanksgiving participants will be at this years’ event. And my mom will be here, so I’m excited. Steve and Diana will have a turkey, Chuck will bring Tofurkey, and I will bring some foods derivitave of the Americas…Amyrynth stuffing, probably, and I’ll also bring either vegy loaf or vegy cutlets.

And it’s BabyG’s first Thanksgiving. She had a mild bout of Scarlet Fever and had to take Amoxicillan, and since then has refused most food outside of breast milk, so she’ll be vegetarian this year…though she’s about the size of a big turkey.

Thanksgiving is a holiday I’ve spent with so many people, many of whom I no longer am in contact with, and many of whom I still see daily. I like that. I like that my father modeled it as a night of community and that I continue to celebrate it in this way. That’s about as profound as I feel like being, and after over a week of no posts, I feel like owe more to the blogging world. But I just wanted to say I like Thanksgiving, and I am happy to have a little baby girl and a fabulous husband to celebrate the next couple dozen or so with.

My Pasta Recipe and the Wagon

Last night, for the first time in months, I concocted my standard pasta dish -- a core recipe I goof around with about every time I make, depending on the attributes of my pantry, but that turns out "good" about 90% of the time.

1. You boil shredded kale or collards with penne noodles -- or you mostly boil the noodles, then add spinach about thirty seconds before you take the noodles out
   
2. Meanwhile, you saute 6 garlic cloves and a hot red pepper in about 1/3 c. oil, along with any other vegetables you'd like to star, and usually whole walnut pieces.
   
3. You add a little marinara sauce...store-bought works out okay, if you're pressed, because of all your other additions. Even plain Pomi (boxed tomatoes) sauce, or chopped tomatoes, works. If you use about 1/3 c of oil in the sauteeing, use about 1/2 cup of tomato sauce. Or use less oil and more sauce. Let it all cook until you have the noodles & greens drained.
   
4. Then mix in sauce w/noodles & greens. Add about two tomatoes diced fairly largely, and fresh Parmesan. Salt it. It's very tasty.
   
5. Sometimes I puree lots of nuts & basil & add that when I am combining the sauce & noodles & greens. Or I add nuts and shredded parsley. I often add carrots to the saute, or a leek, whatever vegetable looks handy. Last night I added shredded yam to the boiling water (which neither added nor detracted, so was sort of pointless).

I generally make this about once every couple weeks, maybe a little more frequently. It is always spicy and comforting.

Last night GreenDaddy said, "Wow! I just thought you were going to use bottled sauce on spaghetti." As if I were Queen Ragu©

So since I've made this non-bottled-sauce thing for years I thought: "Since when have I ever done that?" And then I thought a minute more and remembered how demented my comprehensive exams made our eating habits...for at least three months, we had broken all major rules of food:

We ate out almost every day, and ordered in a pizza once a week, at least.

When we almost bankrupted ourselves accomplishing the former, I bought lots of frozen dinners -- "natural" -- but, what does that MEAN?, right?

One night, GreenDaddy asked what I wanted do for dinner, with the cringe he had recently developed specifically for that question. By this point, the word "frozen" put tears into his eyes, and stressed as I was, I took pity and found some pasta in a cabinet. We had no store-bought sauce -- I never buy that shit, right? -- and no Pomi or garlic or peppers or carrots or nuts or basil.

But I recalled that during my white trash past, we often dumped a can of cream of mushroom soup over pasta and called it fabulous. So I dumped a can of Organic Wolfgang Puck Mushroom Soup over the pasta.

Campbell's soups always have the benefit of tasting like something salty but not exactly repulsive. They recall, at least for me, the tastes of childhood. So even if they help you make something foul tasting in concept -- like Tuna Casserole or spaghetti with fake sauce -- it's a fondness-inducing sort of foul taste you're creating.

Not so with the Wolfgang Puck organic cream of mushroom.

So that next day I went out and bought four bottles of tomato sauce and GreenDaddy went out and bought three. And we ate bottled tomato sauce on spaghetti one night, and frozen dinners the next, for about three weeks straight.

[[Okay....This blogpost is interrupted, officially. Something just busted into the attic. A critter. How do I get it out without going up there???}}

[back to the blogpost]

So one thing the comps have made me, you're noticing, is long in getting to a point. But I do have one.

After all these years of conscious eating and serious choices, just how did our 'greenness' go poof so completely in a matter of months? And it wasn't just the food. On the few occasions I cooked, I didn't even take the scraps to the compost, because GreenDaddy is too harried to turn the soil, and I'm scared of it. And I haven't made all BabyG's baby food -- she's eaten lots of organic, pre-made baby food. And a couple weeks ago somebody stole the kitchen recycling bin, so I stopped recycling some kitcheny things.

Which isn't to say I'm not on track now. But how easily did we, the people with a website called Green Parenting, fall into Greyish Parenting! I just read Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and a running theme is: "It isn't easy."

And that's such a bummer. Especially when you really, really believe you ought to be green.

More Thawing of My Jello Brains: Halloween

Saturday I spent making our Halloween costumes, and then went to our friend Kate’s fabulous Halloween party, where BabyG fell asleep and we stayed later than we expected. I even got to return, after putting BabyG to bed at home, because we’d swiped Nicole’s purse on accident. I got to stay up till one or two talking with Kate and Nicole, the last of the partiers.

On Halloween itself, I completely didn't know it was Halloween. I thought it was Wednesday, not Tuesday. All night long I was convinced the School District had announced kids had to go out a day earlier. Don't ask me why I came to this conclusion: I just saw kids dressed up in a grocery store and decided it was the wrong day. When trick-or-treaters came, I gave them candy, but I still thought it was October 30th. I said to 13 year old next-door-neighbor-boy, in a tone of voice suggesting that he was on my side and thought Halloween should be celebrated on the 31st: "But you're having your party tomorrow, right?"

"This would be my party," he said, mortified, rolling his eyes the way 13 year-old-boys with loopy neighbors are apt to do. But me? I thought, "How sweet, Ben's getting moody and sulky for no reason at all." But still didn't think it was Halloween. Not until I got online, and I saw the date, did it occur to me.

BabyG was in bed by the time I realized she should've been wearing the Itsy Bitsy Spider outfit I made her. At Kate's, she was the spider, and I made GreenDaddy into a water spout, and I was the sun and the rain. These were the first costumes I ever put any real thought into…and the itsy bitsy spider was the first Martha Stewart ‘recipe’ I ever followed. It was a no-sew costume, which I mistakenly thought meant simple and not-time consuming.

I used tools I’d forgotten about: a razor, wire, duct tape, a glue gun, and cardboard. It was very relaxing and all-consuming, much to Raj’s chagrin, as he had a paper to write. He put off all his work until my comps were over, and then I spent my first “freeday” and his first “workday” slacking.

But making BabyG’s costume was a little bit of a coup for me. It’s definitely one of the things I’ve done in order to undo my own Halloween experiences growing up. I never had the cool parent-help-made costumes. I was always made out of whatever was laying around the house after the Halloween party at my dad's bar. One year my dad made me into a cone head…a Saturday Night Live skit based costume my dad had worn the year before. Another year I was half witch, half Snoopy, because my dad found green paint and we had a witch’s hat from one of the barmaids, and somebody picked up a plastic Snoopy mask at the grocery store. But the most memorable year was when I was eight or nine and I trick or treated wearing my step-mother’s fur coat, wearing dog ears, and told people I was a stray.

So I felt very hefty and supreme spending an afternoon constructing a costume for BabyG that looked like somebody (new to crafts) cared. Which isn’t really fair to my parents, because there is something to be said for the on-the-spot-creativity Halloween evoked in my family…on the spot thinking is probably one of the best traits I inherited from my dad, at least.

And of course, if you asked BabyG about it, she’d tell you she didn’t really like wearing spider legs. Luckily, her annoyance at the legs only enhanced her costume. Her pal Cosmo had a Superman outfit comfy enough to sleep in. I saw the question in her eyes: Couldn’t mommy have just found me some Wonder Woman Underoos?

Alas, dear BabyG, Momma couldn’t have. You will probably work hard to let your kids trick or treat in whatever get-up they can muster…but for the next few years, at least, I’m going to have to impress myself with my sloppy, well-meant craft-making, at your expense. When you’re old enough to vocalize, I promise to use the glue gun according to your specifications.

Digression for my Thawing Brain

Obviously everybody in the world is dying to know what I did with my first free moments after having taken my PhD comprehensive exams…which I won’t know if I passed until my graders tell the English department. IT COULD BE YEARS. But probably will only be days…

Because of Netflix, GreenDaddy and I watched The Bicycle Thief. It had a cute little boy in it. (But if my wife sold our linens to buy me a bike, and if the bike was stolen, and if without the bike my family would starve, I would not drag my son through the streets of Rome, looking for a bike that looks like all the others. I might try to get a loan or get help, and if after a few hours of that nothing gave, I would, first thing, enlist my cute son to help me steal some well-off-looking person’s bike and not even feel bad. Not because I want to teach him not to like rich people, but because I want to teach him how I like my family not to die of hunger. If I felt a little bad about it, after I started earning the big bucks as a bike messenger, I would take him to donate a bike to somebody else who might starve without it...because, dear me, I am a dirty hippy...so, if you ever find out the grizzlybirds at Greenparenting are starving and need something you have, better look out...)

Free Hugs ReUppies

Well, I took both comps last week but am not quite thawed out enough to begin blogging.

But I thought I'd wet my feet by learning to post a U-Tube video on the blog...and perhaps you've seen this video, but I've been in bookland for awhile. It was nice to see this on the way out.

An Interview with Laurie Boucke, the Guru of Infant Potty Training

Laurie Boucke has been researching infant potty training since using it with her third son in 1979. She is the author of three books on the subject. Her most popular book is Infant Potty Training: A Gentle and Primeval Method Adapted to Modern Living, which has been translated into Italian, German, and Dutch. Her work on infant potty training has been written about in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, and other major newspapers. Her documentary, Potty Whispering, is scheduled to be released in November 2006. She kindly joined me for a live telephone interview from Boulder, Colorado on Border Crossings, a radio show on Houston's Pacifica Radio Station, KPFT 90.1.

Click here to listen to the interview. The whole thing is nearly forty-five minutes. She gives a brief explanation of the method at the beginning. We had a lot of fun doing the interview, so I imagine it will be fun to listen to. Also, here is a link to more information about infant potty training that is mentioned during the interview: pottywhisperer.com.

I Love My Poetic Husband

We've had a very stressful last week or so...BabyG got strep that turned into very mild scarlet fever...and was understandably, vociferously, and persistantly aggrieved...GreenDaddy got an unknown, draining sickness and a headache...I tried to study every spare moment...GreenDaddy's hardrive crashed with an already-three-days-late joint project on it...I started making the stressed-out grimace GreenDaddy hates...it rained inside my car which smells like rotting corpse breath, now...BabyG was too sick to do her favorite weekend-at-the-pool-with-Daddy routine...

And now my comps are a week away! I study every night until 2am because I get at least three, sometimes four hours of absolute alone time.

In all this muck, GreenDaddy wrote me a poem...And I wanted to post it because my concept of Green Parenting isn't just about junk mail, overgrown gardens, and the general lifestyle of dirty hippies: it's about relationships, and supporting not only the children in the family, but the grown-ups...and I feel so lucky to have a poetic, caring, supportive husband at this juncture that I could cross the street with my eyes closed.


A Great Vibration

When I took courses in physics I learned about particles
about the resonance of benzene rings
about the supposed measurability of all things
as if a meter exists for all phenomena
and if a given meter does not exist
it will be invented.

In philosophy courses I learned about limits to knowledge
about the failure of metaphors to describe the electron
about the difference between the wavelength for red
and the lived experience of redness
as if the connection between consciousness and the world
will never ever be understood.

And yet, at midnight last night,
when I walked out of the bedroom
there was a great vibration
not in the air
but in the substratum
in the ether
in the layer of the universe that Michelson and Morely
proved does not exist
and I could sense that it was coming from your head.

Your books were spread across the table
-- the classics, the masterpieces, the cannon! --
and you had turned them into something shimmering
like a thin layer of water
spilling over a dark stone.






 

I Talk Too Much We're Rude, Deal With It

Friday, our blog was reviewed by I Talk Too Much, We're Rude, Deal With It, a group of people whose schtik is, for the most part, to say nasty things about other peoples' blogs. Not surprisingly, they were very angry about our site.

The reviewer was so put off he couldn't muster more than three sentences about why he hates it. Usually they devote at least five or six paragraphs. So we stunned him with horror, bascially. The best part to read in the reviews, really, is the comments, though.

Things that put people off:
1) GreenDaddy taking BabyG to the Pro-choice rally
2) The site design
3) Our "enviro-fascism"
4) Dirty hippiness of the site
5) They think their lives are not political, and by extension, that our attempts at Green Parenting are somehow more political than their blissfully ignoring the environment, society, etc.

A couple people on their site liked ours, which was nice; one woman defended Raj's taking BabyG to the rally.

I'm the one who put the site up for review because I just wondered what people in other facets of life think of a blog lik ours.

I'm actually very satisfied with the review, for some reason. Most of our friends, and commenting readers, think the way we do. I start thinking everybody believes the same as we do. It's a good reality check to remember a lot of people are afraid and/or annoyed by people consciously making choices.

The Incompetent Gardener, Part II

I had a dream a year ago, before our baby was born that by this time I would no longer be the incompetent gardener. I dreamed that our whole yard would be edible and that I would have a rotation of plants that produced seasonal, organic food to supplement our regular groceries. I dreamed of turning our food waste into compost and using that compost to fertilize our garden, thereby avoiding pesticides and chemical fertilizers. But with childcare, my forty-hour work week, and MaGreen preparing for her doctoral degree exams, our yard looks rather pathetic. And BabyG has strep right now.

My garden plots are mostly overgrown with weeds. The six tomato plants I bought never produced a single tomato. They are scraggly vines. I should pull them all out, but I just look at them with disappointment every time I park my bicycle by the side of the house. The seeds I bought from Bountiful Gardens are slowly becoming unviable in the refrigerator.

Even the hardy chard and dill plants I wrote about in my last installment of The Incompetent Gardener finally died. It was these two survivors that "renewed my enthusiasm not only for gardening, but for the whole green parenting project." I was again on the verge of giving up on gardening altogether as a silly romantic yearning. Then one afternoon my neighbor gave me new hope. I'm not sure neighbor is the right word. He shares a long wall with us in the split duplex we live in. He is a union electrician and is given to walking around the property aimlessly, poking at the ground, or talking to the sky. When I saw him that one afternoon, he showed me his latest discovery, an oak seedling growing next to my tomato patch. Although my soil improvement and constant watering did not produce any tomatoes, a little oak tree thrived because of my efforts. A beautiful and momentous accident. I really want that seedling to grow up with BabyG, so I can tell her they were born around the same time and that were babies together. I dug it out of the ground and potted it in my compost so I can move it to a perfect spot this winter.

A few other survivors of my incompetence subsequently kept my hope alive. I planted an eggplant plant from the store and it grew huge. It has produced three eggplants in the same number of months. What I value about that eggplant is not the food it has produced, but that I have closely witnessed for the first time in my life how a flower turns into a fruit (or vegetable or berry or whatever it is). I am embarrassed to admit that I never saw how the blossom closes up and then slowly starts to fill out. How it takes on the purple color.



Another survivor is this basil plant we brought home from Whole Foods and stuck into the ground. It was destroyed by a tree trimming service we hired. I think they ran over it with a machine. MaGreen harvested the crushed plant down to a stump. Our neighbor really wanted the plant to live because he used the leaves in his salsa. I think his cravings coaxed the basil, and my gardening dreams, back to life

Greendimes: another use for "Just One Dime A Day"

I keep not wanting to write because I feel like I've been off studying long enough that when I return I should have a fabulously written, hilarious, and/or life-changing post to regale you with. And I don't. But now GreenDaddy keeps dropping hints about the abandoned state of Green Parenting, and clearly, he is not talking about HIS having abandoned it. All I have time for lately is studying and eating and kissing my baby and, um, trying not to trip over ALL THE CREEPING MOUNDS OF JUNK MAIL THAT MAKE MY LIFE A WALKING, HOARY NIGHTMARE. You know what I mean.

A-hem. Speaking of junk mail, I just paid $36 to have this organization called Greendimes write letters to all the junk mail senders to take me, Raj, all our alter-egos, as well as the alter-egos of the people who moved away from this address years ago but left their trash-mongering names behind, off their lists. I could have paid $3 per month, but I opted to have them write letters once a month for a year because we're neck deep in mail here.

But wait! There's more!

Also, every month, these people are going to plant a tree to help replenish the world with more junkmail sources. (Remember: a tree is just another name for the Junkmail Bush). Right. Really, I think they're going to plant the tree to symbolically counter-act all the trees junkmail has killed...100 million a year, they say.

So we'll get twelve trees planted in our name, somewhere in the world...and our mail will no longer consist of things that come almost daily and that go straight the recycle bin: UFO related offers, chain letters, Marlboro coupons, and half-priced psychic readings...all meant for Aaron Fance (God DIME you Aaron Fance, wherever you are!); credit card offers in my name but good for anybody who opens the mail and sends it in (God DIME you too greedy people!); and, most peeving, of late, Party City Haloween ads filled with seven year old girls dressed like hookers...which is too depressing, really, to damn with a cheesy pun.

Anyways. Greendimes is a fairly new business, it seems. They have good customer service. I'm excited to see if this system works.

They also want other people beside me to join. I think you might as well. (And they're not paying me to say this. They don't even know what Green Parenting is.)

Well, now, toodle-oo. I'm off to study more books -- or actually to study the Too Late the Phalarope Summary on BookRags. I read the book but now they're all blurring in my head and I need something to sort my ideas out. ...but no more chatting, people, because my comps are just 13 DIMES AWAY...)

A Recent Interview with My Eight Month Old

Me: I’m not sure I want you to grow up thinking that we live in a Global Capitalist Patriarchy in perpetual crisis like you implied in our last interview. I want you to be happy. I want you to go hiking more than I have and spend less time shouting into megaphones.

My Baby: But Daddy, have you considered that another word for crisis is opportunity?

Me: I think I read that once in a Deepak Chopra book. Or did I hear that on the Oprah Winfrey show?

My Baby: I want you to be serious.

Me: OK. So you are saying that crises are openings. Ways out. Chances to create a different world. Opportunities to resist.

My Baby: Not just opportunities to resist, Daddy, but opportunities to live more joyfully.

Me: Give me an example.

My Baby: Well, we’ve talked about how capitalism tends to tear apart communities, social structures, and families. Even Sweden has elected a new government that plans on reducing state support to women and families on the grounds of making their economy more competitive in this era of globalization. It’s a race to the bottom. Families are preserved only in so far as they hide costs like childcare. On the other hand, as Rosemary Hennessey points out in Profit and Pleasure, women in paid employment can often live outside of traditional kinship ties. They can choose to refuse marriage. They can choose to be lesbians. They can choose to enter a heterosexual marriage. They can choose to leave one.

Me: So you want to be a lesbian?

My Baby: Would you be OK with that if I did?

Me: I want you to try to create the most meaningful and joyful life for yourself as possible. If that meant being a lesbian, I’d be fine with that.

My Baby: What if I think being a cheerleader for a professional American football team is the most meaningful and joyful life I can live?

Me: No.

The Compact

I joined the Sierra Club last year so that I could vote against the board take-over attempt by anti-immigration forces. To my delight, I received a backpack, which we use as our diaper bag, and several publications, both in print and online. A couple of day ago I was reading a Sierra Club publication called The Green Life. It had an article about a little movement out of San Francisco called The Compact. People who agree to the Compact promise not to buy anything new for a full year. They can buy fresh food and medicine, but not new clothes, bike seats, vacuum cleaners, cell phones, or couches. The idea is to consume less and leave less of an ecological footprint.

That idea has been circulating in my head. I think I have probably unintentionally lived by the Compact in the recent past. When I was living on a teaching assistant salary, I may well have not bought anything new for a year, except for books. I have never enjoyed shopping. When my mom took me to the shoe store once, I remember sitting down to try some sneakers on. There was a scraggly haired guy – an Eastern Kentucky mountain man type – at the other end of the bench. He looked at me and said, "These are the first new shoes I'll have bought in five years."

"I have to get new shoes every year," I said. My feet were growing after all.

"I would keep wearing my old ones, but they've got big holes in them now," he said. The tattered shoes he held up were completely beyond repair. I had never seen anything like them. At that moment, to my mom's dismay, I decided that when my feet stopped growing I would wear my shoes out just like him.

So not only do I not enjoy shopping – every minute spent in a store I could be picking at my guitar or napping or talking with my grandma instead – I enjoy the familiarity of heavily used objects, the concavities worn in by one thousand footfalls. As my good friend Hosam pointed out to MaGreen last Tuesday, I only have three pairs of pants. For me, not buying stuff is a preference not a virtue. That said, I don't think it would be possible for new parents to live by the Compact. Newborns equal stuff. And if your children are older, living by the Compact would surely be a shortcut to what I call the Gandhi effect. That is, you might become famous for your lifestyle, but at least one of your children will deeply resent you and try to do everything to oppose your ideals.

All childless people should try the Compact, especially college students in San Francisco. For parents, maybe it is a worthwhile thought experiment. A mental exercise, but not an ideal. Some baby gear has to be bought new, right? Like carseats.

A Male Primary Caregiver Tells All

A few months back, I heard from my old friend Darragh. He had seen our blog and found my email address. During the time we hadn't been in touch, he had become a dad too. His wife, who I went to medical school with before I quit, is training as a surgeon. She is half Chinese, half white. Darragh, who is from Ireland, is staying home as the primary caregiver, or PCG as he likes to put it. I'd like to share a mini-interview we did by email.

What's it like being a male PCG?

We are in a small town in Ohio called Gallipolis. Jocelyn is two weeks into an eight week rotation in a rural hospital. We love it here, the town is on the Ohio River and so is the small house we stay in. There are great hiking trails in the area. I use a Baby-Bjorn when hiking; both Meilyn (the baby) and Deckard (the dog) love it.

Being a male PCG, I obviously have a strong bond with Meilyn due to the time we spend together. We have exclusively breastfed her since birth, with the help of an electric breast pump. When Jocelyn feeds her directly from her breast it keeps the physical and emotional bond strong between them.

Another observation I have is that I will dress Meilyn with comfort being the primary concern and the child will stay in these clothes until they are dirty or no longer comfortable. Women in general tend to inflict their habit of constantly changing what they wear onto the child. She is not a doll. Men rule O.K.

What are your thoughts on childcare as an Irishman living in the States?

My biggest fear of raising a child in America is the quality of the public education system here. Ireland, although not flawless by any means, has an excellent public education system. All social and economic classes educate themselves together as private schools are virtually non-existent. Ireland also offers free third level education across the board (not means tested). This system not only reduces the poverty cycle but helps cement a singular sense of community that has a greater social conscience. A far less abrasive class and social system exists in Ireland than in America, in part because of this. I believe high quality education exclusively for the wealthy is immoral.

What do Americans take for granted that they should question?

As a guest in this country I am always uneasy criticizing America, especially in these overly patriotic times. The blind patriotism is diminishing slowly but surely and giving way to a more subtle blend of undiplomatic international arrogance. Despite my preceding statement please note that I do not want to convey the notion of a sinking hell that is America and Ireland or anywhere else for that matter as a shining beacon of social moral virtue. We are not concentrating on the imperfections of Ireland (of which there are many) or elsewhere, at this moment in time.

A society that cannot constantly examine its flaws, re-think, re-position, renew itself militarily, socially, and economically is a country that is not evolving, a country that is doomed. I am glad to say that America will always be a country that has a disgruntled public voicing their opinions. I say to all these people whether they are the minute men (with whom I disagree) or they be the anti-war protesters (with whom I do agree), "Shout louder, keep kicking the elephant or the donkey whomever it may be."

To live in a time that quells these voices, such as the firing of Peter Arnett by NBC, uncontrolled wire-tapping, and every other violation of civil liberties that hides under the disguise of the Patriot Act or the “war on terror,” has lead this country down a blind path. This leads me to Abu-Grab, one of the greatest single unanswered injustices in the Iraq war. I have heard celebrities on late-night talk shows make light of these horrors, to the cheering of the live audience. It is at times like these that I can understand how some German citizens took the path they did in WW2 (blind, ignorant patriotism). Am I over-reacting? Can I see the woods for the trees? Please tell me.

Sunday in the Park with Daddy

BabyG and I attended a rally in support of women's right to choose. Even though I like to talk about politics with friends and family, I generally do not bring up abortion. People have such deeply entrenched positions that discussions never lead anywhere. The vocabularies of each "side" are so overdefined and embattled that even if two people want to have a meaningful conversation about abortion, it can be difficult. The terms are set. The arguments have been rehearsed. When I taught writing at the University of Houston, I told my students not to write about abortion because I have never seen a college paper that manages to present the issue from a fresh perspective, or that showed the writer had listened to those who disagreed with them. I won't pretend to make a unique contribution to the debate.



That said, I won't be silent either. I firmly believe that my daughter and all other women ought to have the right to choose what happens inside their bodies. I believe that if abortion is thought of as an abstraction, it is easy to condemn. But the particular stories behind each decision are far more difficult to judge. And I believe that criminalizing abortion creates a public health catastrophe.



The rally itself was very calm. It was at Bell Park off Montrose. The temperature has finally cooled here in Houston. BabyG had been grumpy, but when I put her on the ground next to her friend Cos she relaxed and enjoyed herself. There were some speeches, but none of them were shrill. There was a wonderful vibe of love and community.

On Chanting

I have chanted my whole life. It has taken me too long to admit that to myself. That I have always chanted. That I can't escape it. It has taken becoming a father.

My family is from India and I was taught to chant Om. I think that when most Americans think of chanting Om, it is something bizarre. Laughable. Woodstock hippies chant Om. Even for those who are into yoga, I think chanting Om must feel exotic. But my exposure to chanting was from a very early age. First my dad gave my brother and me instruction in Prana Yama, or breathing techniques. Then when the Hindus in Mobile, Alabama, where I grew up, got a group meeting going every month, I learned more about chanting from Dr. Virupaksha Kothandapani. We called him Dr. Pani for short.

Dr. Pani taught us that there are four parts to expressing Om. The first is an aa sound. Then the oh sound. Then mmm. And finally silence. He explained the cosmological significance of each segment. He explained that the four parts blend together. He discussed the way your lips should move. How the sound comes from the depths of your body. How your chin might vibrate. How there are really two parts to the silence. The first part where there is no breadth and the second part when you take in breadth. We discussed whether you should keep your eyes open or closed or half opened. I took him so seriously. The way only a child can. If Dr. Pani knew how seriously I took him, I think he would have had second thoughts about those lessons.

At the beginning of each meeting, the whole group – about one hundred people – would chant Om together ten times. People said that chanting Om together relaxed them. That it made them momentarily forget their problems. It got them ready to discuss scriptures. One month, at the beginning of the meeting, during the chanting, on about the fifth or sixth Om, a tremendous and indescribably feeling washed over my entire body. My whole sense of self and being got subsumed in this totally overwhelming joyousness. I started crying. Part of me wanted to jump up and explain what had happened. But I thought that people would think I was a fool or seeking attention. It was 1986. Eight-year-old Indian-American boys didn't declare they had experienced satchitananda in 1986.

X

For a long time, when I chanted I tried to recover the intensity that I felt when I was eight. And without success. I had to portage around what was going on in my mind too often. By the time I was sixteen, when I closed my eyes the image of some girl I was infatuated with was likely to fill my mind. When I was taught Hinduism, the central lesson was a verse from the Gita that goes like this, Karmanye Vadhikaraste Ma Phaleshu Kadachana, Ma Karma Phala Hetur Bhurmatey Sangostva Akarmani. It roughly means that you should act according to your duties, but you should not be attached to the fruit of your actions. Attachments spiral into animal like behavior and suffering. So any attachment – as in lust for the red-headed goth who I saw in the hallway everyday between first and second periods – was not an appropriate beginning to start chanting from. So I stopped chanting.

A few years later, when I was a sophomore in college, I was a volunteer DJ for the college radio station. So I had access to the station's library of recordings. I would pick out five albums a week and listen to them in my room. I was desperately trying to figure out my taste in music. I came across a CD in a hardcover booklet. It was called Deep in the Heart of Tuva: Cowboy Music from the Wild East. The recordings were of Tuvan chanting, which is a kind of multi-tonal throat singing. One person sings in such a way that they produce at least two clear notes – a really high top note modulated into a melody above a guttural base note. It sounds kind of like an air-conditioning unit or a jet engine or a vacuum cleaner. I didn't come up with those comparisons actually. They were in the liner notes. I think the whole packaging – the title of the album, the booklet, the liner notes – tried to help Americans appreciate something very bizarre. I'm not criticizing the album or the packaging. But I think the album meant something else to me because it brought me back to chanting, back to what I had done before.

The thing about Tuvan chanting is that the singers aren't monks. They are mostly nomadic people. Shepherds. They don't chant to rid themselves of lust. They chant with the passion of men and women who live in the world. They chant for their animals, their yaks and their sheep. They chant for their lovers and their children. They chant to evoke spirits, demons, and ancestors. That wordly, celebratory, bodily aspect to the Tuvan chanting blew open a big door for me. It was one way back into the spirituality I grew up with, not the scriptural discourse of being unattached, but something else.

My dorm room was next to Michael Kraskin's. He was encouraging me to collaborate with him as a cellist and as a composer. We were sound designing a performance that David Terry was putting together, which has subsequently become the subject of episode 44 of their podcast, Catalogue of Ships. I spent so much time on music that I nearly failed a really important organic chemistry exam. If I wasn't working out a new section of the score with Mike or at one of David's insane rehearsals, I was in my room by myself practicing the cello, listening to the Tuvan chants, or chanting myself. I had a little tape recorder and I would record my chants. I kept trying to hear the multiple tones that I knew were already there. If I could hear the different tones, I thought I could tease them out. It felt crazy. But Dr. Pani had already taught me the basics when I was eight. I mean I wasn't Tuvan chanting back then, but the shaping of the lips, the contouring of the mouth, and the diaphragmatic breathing he taught me were exactly the right preparations for Tuvan chant.

I count those performances with Michael for David's play as a major accomplishment in my life. I played the cello as I had never done before. I even brought some chanting in. I was studying to be a physician, but I thought maybe I should be an artist.

A few weeks later, on a weeknight, sometime after midnight, I sat down on the floor in my dorm room to chant softly. Then I stopped and focused on my breathing. Then I started to feel an energy work its way up my spine. When it reached my head, I lost sense of time. Unlike when I was eight, there wasn't a whole room of people to worry about. By the time my ecstatic experience ended, I could barely walk. I was frightened. It seemed like I had experienced what the Hindu scriptures described as an endpoint, but I did not want to go back to that place and lose myself there, or deceive myself into thinking I was all of a sudden enlightened.

I gave up Tuvan chanting. I gave up meditating. I stopped collaborating with Michael and David. And I got the highest score on the next organic chemistry exam. I completely annihilated the curve.

X

Over the following years, the Tuvan chanting would creep back. I went to medical school. I quit medical school. I lived in Chicago. I lived in New York. I moved to Houston. I would chant for my friends. Then I would try to stop again. When I first met MaGreen, there was this party we were both at. It was poolside at a fancy apartment complex. We went swimming and there was a waterfall you could sit underneath. I just had the urge there to chant in accompaniment to the water with MaGreen and some other new friends there listening. It felt right. But then people asked me to do it again and again like it was a party trick. And that saddened me. So I swore off chanting again.

MaGreen understood that the chanting was sacred to me, which I appreciated. She understands the quivering line between the sacred and the silly. However, she's a bit tone deaf. She really values the lyrics in music and the overall effect of music. But she doesn't sing or play an instrument. We can't make music together. That's something I have had to silently forgive her for.

So when MaGreen went into labor and started to moan in a chant-like way, I was really surprised. That was about a year ago. On my birthday. Our daugher BabyG was born on my twenty-eight birthday. We had gotten to the hospital at midnight. We thought MaGreen was in full-blown labor, but when the midwife drove in she told us to try to sleep because active labor hadn't started yet. I slept until six am. I woke up to MaGreen's moaning. It was a high-pitched moan with an even higher tone ringing above the main note like a lone fire truck hurdling through the night sounding its sirens. Not to clear traffic but to align all the elements in the universe to focus all the forces from above and below calling them to the cause. Outside the hospital, the city was waking up. Jets howled, the buried pipes and cables whirred, lawnmowers, compressors, and heaters groaned, whined, and growled. The highway was one long wail. But MaGreen outmoaned it all, the whole city. Her moan was beyond any of my chanting. It was beyond any of the recordings of Tuvans I had heard. Her moan emanated from the walls and floor as if her moan never wasn’t there. It was not accidental like a leafblower’s whistle, like an air-conditioning unit's dueling drones. It was a sound beyond profit, beyond time-use and opportunity costs and comparative advantage, beyond concrete spilling over steel. She moaned with singular purpose. She started crying for air because she moaned it all out of her. Then she moaned some more.

I used to think chanting was something I would pass on to my child. But when I remember Lila's and my birthday, how MaGreen moaned, I think that maybe sound is not arbitrary. When I listen to BabyG chant herself to sleep in the car seat, I think maybe sound isn't just an artifact of particles or waves or wavicles. Maybe the phenomenological experience of sound isn't just an accident of evolution, a footnote of survival and selection, of frontal lobe development. And maybe chanting isn't just a culture or a tradition, or even a higher order physiology. Maybe to think I should pass chanting on to BabyG is like thinking I should write the moon and the stars into my will.

How many more milestones till grown up?

Here to report that our daughter is already an energy conservationist. Which is my fancy way of saying: she prefers not to crawl.

I suppose the guy at littlegeneva would suggest it's because the whitish half of her wants to go one way and the brownish half wants to go the other. Or maybe it’s not about race. Maybe it’s a Hindu/generic-American-spiritualism thing.

In any event we have already caught ourselves saying, "BabyG, Cos crawled a couple months ago, don’t you want crawl, too?”

I have caught GreenDaddy tipping BabyG over so that she might accidentally crawl.

And tonight, our friend Nicole came over, and suggested I set BabyG on her knees to inspire her. BabyG fell flat on her face and screamed.

My grandmother would say, “I never saw a baby who didn’t know how to walk into Kindergarten.” Meaning, of course, these first five years are full of babies moving at their own speeds, and worrying about these things is useless. I know she's right.

Cos’s mom, Kayte, has pointed out that BabyG was an early clapper. She also poos most all the time on the potty. And she has all that hair. Why should a kid who won so big in the hair game care about crawling?

The desire to see her put her proverbial pedals to the metal is less about wanting her do do what other babies do just for the sake of it. It's more specific. I love watching Cos cruise, being surprised by what sorts of things he loves to find...and I really want to see where BabyG would go if she crawls. Even though I know most of my life will be full of me doing just that.

Probably the Zen thing for me to do is to look at where she goes as she’s sitting. That’s not so hard, and actually, BabyG’s a pretty far-out sitter. She sings and makes raspberries and has long word-less conversations with herself, her toys, and her friends. She lectures the broken cell phone for long periods of time. She’s an entertaining, fabulous sitter.

But where will she WANT to crawl!!!! That's all I'm asking! I am terrible with suspense.

Sigh. I almost wish I didn't know anything about the stages of development so that one day she'd just crawl and I'd say, "I'll be damned, look at what the little tyke is doing GreenDaddy!"

And by the way, BabyG's not even actually behind on crawling. She's just fine. Lot's of babies aren't crawling at nine months. I'm just impatient. And excited. All flurried.

I’m sure all this is normal: freaking out over some dumb milestone slash learning how not to freak out. Anybody have their own stories about this sort of thing, from which I might glean whatever it is I need to glean?

On Redemption and Race-Mixing

The company that hosts our website provides us with information about who visits our website. When we began blogging, we had about 100 "unique visitors" per month and now, a year later, we have over 3,500 per month. I don't know how this statistic is calculated, but I assume that around 3,500 individuals take a look at the Green Parenting blog and some portion of this number regularly reads our posts. Our host also lists the sites that link to ours. This week I noticed 200 visits from littlegeneva.com. I went to see what wonderful people decided to promote our blog. A tiny little confederate flag – the flag of the slave-holding states during the American Civil War – popped up next to the url. I knew I was about to see something interesting.

The basic argument propounded on littlegeneva.com is that the Bible tells Christians to marry within their race and that America's greatness depends on racial purity. The post with the link to Green Parenting was called "Reject Race, Reject America" and the title of the link was "Race-Mixers and Pagans," which went to my post about how MaGreen and I have different religious backgrounds. The post included a picture of Amba Ma, a Hindu goddess, with the face of Jesus spliced on it. I am pleased that my post seems to have really hit the mark for littlegeneva. Not only are we "race-mixers," but we are also pagans. We seem to epitomize exactly what he loathes.

I've shared this discovery with some of my friends and co-workers. They ask, "Aren't you worried?" As a matter of fact, I'm not worried by the link to our blog. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama. Racial insults and threats were not quite a daily occurrence, but they were common. At the nearly all-white school I attended, St. Paul's Episcopal, my classmates refused to touch me my first year there. I was an untouchable. The substitute nigger. They often called me by names including mix-breed. I always wanted to say, "I'm not a mix-breed. My family can trace back its Nagar Brahmin ancestors for fourteen generations. You're the mix-breeds. You don't even know where your families come from." I never actually said that. What I did do was trounce the rest of the students every year and in every single class including Bible Study. When I made a perfect score and they barely passed, I would clench my fist and relish my academic superiority, which did not help matters.

And yet, I never got beat up. I knew what lines not to cross and when I was in real danger. I spent time with all kinds of white people in Alabama. My Boy Scout friends and I had this game whenever we were out in the country where we would rate pick-up trucks for the number of Confederate flags displayed, the number of guns in the rack, and other such features. I remember one afternoon at Camp Maubila, the regional Boy Scout campgrounds, spent trying to teach some very poor white boys from Bayou La Batre how to spell words like "socks" and "shoes." The same day at dinner, the boy behind me in the cafeteria line grumbled, "hurry up sand nigger." So I grew up very much in my skin. I often wished I was white. Up until we left Alabama, I felt that I was ugly and undesirable. My pen and my intellect were my refuge.

Years later, when I visited India, my identity as a victimized person of color was turned inside out. I really was the pure-bred Brahmin. I was the light-skinned person benefiting from the privileges that my family there took for granted. I identified with the people my family and my ancestors looked down on and, arguably, exploited. Simultaneously occupying a privileged, high-caste position and the subaltern position of the substitute nigger has given me double vision. That doubleness feeds my empathy for the exploiter and the exploited; my questioning of gender norms; my passion for ecological balance; my impatience for economic injustice; and my deep connection with MaGreen, who grew up in very different circumstances from me but came out with the same basic perspective on the world.

I thought about writing a comment on the littlegeneva blog. But how am I to engage with someone who bases his beliefs on obscure quotes from the Old Testament? It saddens me that bloggers can create amazing communities, but the worldviews of these communities can be so dramatically different there is no potential for fruitful exchange. Littlegeneva sees the browning of America. He so energetically documents the sea change taking place here. It makes him deeply angry, as if he is being attacked. He thinks the British, European, White, Christian customs that were planted in America's fresh soil will be vanquished. I wish he could see what I have seen. Then he would know that if those customs can be redeemed from their awful pasts, it will be by the mix-breeds like my daughter.

The Argumentative Indian: An Interview with Amartya Sen

Last February, I had the honor of interviewing Amartya Sen, the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. We talked about his recent book, The Argumentative Indian, a history of rational thought, skepticism, scientific inquiry, and secularism in India.

The interview was recorded for a radio show in Houston called Border Crossings, which has a South Asian focus. Although parenting wasn't the topic of the interview I did manage to squeeze in one question about raising children. However, I believe the whole interview is relevant to parenting. In all of Sen's writings, there is an amazing integration of different kinds of analytic tools, knowledge, and values. I think parenting requires the same kind of flexibility. And Sen always keeps in mind the goal of creating a more just world where every individual can choose the life she or he finds most meaningful. He is a father. When his second wife died, he raised their two children as a single parent. I believe that experience informs his thinking. For all these reasons, I think of Amartya Sen as a patron saint of Green Parenting.

Click on the following link for the interview -- Amartya_Sen_Interview.mp3. I hope you enjoy it.

Let My Daughter See the Stars

I lived on the edge of a salt desert in a city called Dhrangadhra. The house had two rooms and a kitchen. All my roommates were social workers and engineers. They worked from ten in the morning until nine at night. I wrote reports about their work. Summaries of how many homes they helped rebuild after an earthquake. I told them I was a poet and they treated me that way. When my stomach could not hold food, they brought me yoghurt. They showed me the way along the shepherds’ paths to the temple of Sitala Ma. I was invited to dinner on a concrete rooftop.

I was told the name Dhrangadhra comes from the Sanskrit for stoney ground. When I say the name – Dhrangadhra – it feels like I’m rolling stones in my mouth. The local industry was the carving of statues. I saw women heaving rock out of the ground with pick axes. I saw men hammering out goddesses in the middle of the street.

In this city, on the edge of the salt desert, water flowed through the pipes once a day for half an hour. I was told we were lucky to have that much water. The year before water was driven in by truck. Every evening at about eight, the power went out. The whole city blacked out. At first, I had the generator outside the office fired up so I could keep typing up reports. Ultimately, I planned on the darkness. I left the office and walked to the house with two rooms. Though night had fallen, the social workers and engineers were still in the field. I waited alone for the black outs to come. And when they came, the earth disappeared beneath me and the stars emerged.

I had seen the stars – as in all of them – only once before. In rural Alabama, a field in the woods, just where you wouldn’t expect a brown boy to be. In Dhrangadhra, on the edge of a salt dessert, where the water flows through the pipes once per day for half an hour, where the lights black out at eight in the evening, I saw all the stars every night. That’s when I realized the gravity of the theft of the night sky.

I do not speak of stars metaphorically. When I speak of the stars, I do not mean an archaic worldview. I do not mean to evoke magic (although I am partial to the possibility of mysteries). I do not mean to bash science. My ancestors were skeptics and rationalists. When I speak of stars, I mean the stars themselves. Fusion. Plasma. Heat. Light. That throbbing area of methodical inquiry. I mean the spectacle of the universe, seeing it from our little corner. Considering. To put your self in perspective is the beginning of wisdom, well-being, poetry, ecological awareness, and the will to struggle. Seeing the stars is neither necessary nor sufficient for achieving this kind of perspective. But it sure helps. The most elegant poetry about stars I have read was written by our most eloquent voices for justice. Pablo Neruda, Ernesto Cardinal, Nazim Hikmet. Is this an accident?

Now I live under the perpetual glow of street lights. The sky in Houston is a giant emblem of our own opacity. Development as blindness. Dhrangadhra is so strange to me now. I’m afraid I might have made it up or read about it in a book. I have started this essay many times. I should have finished it years ago. But now I am a father. There is a new sense of urgency in me when I look up at the grand blankness of our nights.

Something Svan-durful

GreenDaddy opened the box to the Healthy Choice High Chair as I observed him from behind my copy of Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition. I thought he might vomit inside the box because of the look of horror on his face after his first peek inside...Had he discovered a rotting rat? A dismembered thumb? Or worse, a nondismembered thumb?

What's wrong, I asked him.

He tossed a dramatic hand into the box and procured the high chair's food tray. He swung it in front of him like an infested flag. He didn't have to say anything at all to me, once I saw it: it was large, white, and... plastic.

BabyG only has a few plastic toys, most are wooden or stuffed. I sent away for special metal spoons to feed her with. I don't buy organic Gerber baby food, when I buy food, because its in plastic containers. We have written extensively about the dangers of plastic, especially of putting it in your mouth. If BabyG picks up a plastic rattle, of course, I don't wrench it away from her; I am not yet a total nutcase. But when I'm thinking about what rattle to give her, I usually pick out her wood & gourd maracca; when people ask me what sort of toy she'd like, I tell them wood or metal or soft.

So here was this perfectly fabulous high chair, one we'd researched and picked out purposely, just a year before. And it had a big plastic tray. It wasn't quite a dilemma, because we just knew we couldn't keep it. It wasn't like having a rattle or a little plastic music maker she plays with sometimes; I mean, how could we make BabyG, the whole impetus of our Green Parenting website, spend her first three years eating every meal off a plastic plate?

We felt jammed up. We felt silly. If I saw somebody else's baby with a plastic high chair, I wouldn't think, "Whoa, that's child abuse." I wouldn't even think, "They really oughtn't do that." I would tell them what I know about plastic sometime, and let them decide what to do. People make the best decisions they can for their babies, in the context of their particular lives. Some people won't let their babies get in chlorine filled swimming pools, but BabyG goes all the time. You choose your battles.

Plastic is one of our battles. We couldn't let BabyG eat on that high chair. So I sold that high chair on Craig's List, and we looked for used wooden high chairs. Most were rickety. One was an antique that had a hole in the seat for the baby to potty in while she ate...and we're into EC and all, but there are limits.

After researching around on the web awhile, we fell in love with the Svan High Chair, which costs about twice the amount of the Fisher Price Healthy Choice.

But it is made of wood. And it IT IS SO COOL LOOKING.

And it converts into other forms as BabyG grows so it remains useful fifteen times as long. When she's a toddler the seat will boost her up to the table, and we can lower it as she gets taller. And when she's officially tall and wants to sit in the same chair as the rest of us, she can use it as her desk chair, heh heh. She can take it to college with her, by then it'll be retro.

I think all this was interesting because as parents, we're learning about what lines we draw. Chlorine, yes. Plastic high chair tops, no. I wonder what choices other parents make, choices that might make them feel (or make others feel) they've gone over some edge. Or can people think of things their parents did...what rules or what beliefs they had that were inflexible?

Probably this is too big a question for this post. But here it is.

How Green is Your Driving?

I am madly studying for two PhD exams, and have less time to devote to Green Parenting for the next month and a half. So I'll be posting shorter, and taking shortcuts when I can.

And the first shortcut, I found via our friend Laura's blog, which she found from the Guardian Online. It's a quiz to find out how "green" your driving is. Laura got six out of eight, but I scored a measley three of eight on the test.

Click here to see if you can out-green me.

I'm fairly certain most people will. Probably will follow this post up with Green Driving tips, as it seems I'm in need of learning them.

Raising Kids Who Will Make a Difference

The author of Raising Kids Who Will Make a Difference, Susan Vogt, is deeply Catholic. If there was only one thing I could tell you about the book, that would be it. Nearly every aspect of Vogt’s parenting approach is informed by Catholicism. The title might lead you to expect that the author holds the beliefs commonly attributed to the so-called “Left” in the United States. However, if you try to make sense of politics as a spectrum from right to left, Catholic folks can be downright infuriating and this book will be infuriating too. I remember when I first started working with Catholic people in social justice movements I often felt disoriented. They oppose abortion. Homosexuality may be something to be tolerated or channeled, but definitely not celebrated. The church hierarchy is like a living museum of classical patriarchy. And yet, you’re likely to find Catholics at the forefront of peace movements, anti-death penalty movements, and economic justice movements working in coalitions alongside liberals, anarchists, and socialists.

Once I reconciled myself with Vogt’s avowedly Catholic approach, I was able to open myself up to the wisdom she had to share. For example, when she suggests listing the qualities you might hope for from your child and she includes “sexually chaste until marriage” in her suggestions, I took away the basic idea of making such a list. And I tried to make up my own language like “sexually responsible” or “takes joy in all things corporeal without getting hurt” or “respects her body.” (By the way, I’ve been singing a folk song to BabyG with the refrain “My body’s nobody’s body but mine, you take care of your body and I’ll take care of mine.” It’s a fantastically hokey song.)

The names of the twelve chapters – Identity, Time, Materialism, Ecology, Media, Health, Peacemaking, Spirituality, Global Awareness, Diversity, Service, and Motivation – should give an idea of how encompassing and wholistic Vogt’s conception of parenting is. The book doesn’t really present step-by-step guides. It mostly features the generalizing reflections of a lifelong activist, marriage counselor, and mother of four grown children. She speaks of what worked initially but that had to be let go of or adapted as her children became adolescents. She advises patience. In the Epilogue, she writes, “Some might call these stories of failure…” Indeed, what really sets the book apart are the responses she includes from her children and other parents. Her sons and her daughter expose the gaps in her accounts of family life. Her friends recount having daughters who get pregnant in high schools, sons who are in jail, and children who grow up to be Republican investment bankers. Vogt goes on in the Epilogue, “[R]emember that a parent’s willingness to go beyond embarrassment to vulnerability is a gift to all the self-flagellating parents that inhabit our planet—many of them mothers.”

Vogt’s vulnerability is a gift. Even though the book is definitively in the self-help genre, by the end I felt the degree of intimacy I expect from a well-written memoir. Her best advice is often about what she seems to have struggled with most. “We must take care to not over-control our children,” she writes, “or become too proud of how little we own and consume. Our children and friends will resent our self-righteousness. And our souls will suffer from arrogance.” After all the advice on written contracts with children and morality lessons at the dinner table, I got the sense that the Vogt home was saturated with self-righteousness. Or worse, a humorless and ruthlessly ambitious drive for righteousness. The Vogt children’s responses are worth studying. They resisted. They fought. They played their way out, and back to, their parents’ vision of living with integrity, valuing simplicity, and caring for others.

Go, go, go Rocky Anderson!

There's not generally a lot of good news from back home, in Utah. But over the years, one of the topics my father and step-mother relish most, is the mayor of Salt Lake City, Rocky Anderson. They call me up and giggle about the funny things he's done. Like making a city-wide law requiring orange flags to be placed at all street crossings. People are supposed to carry the flags across the streets, so they won't get run over by all the SUVs. Dad made a lot of fun of Rocky for doing that, and I think it's pretty funny, but I also love crossing the street holding those flags. Just last week, too, the New York Times ran an article on his xenoscaped lawn -- in which they quoted a neighbor saying they loved his lawn, because before it was xenoscaped, it was a browning patch of green.

Anyway, for the second time in his mayorship, he has chosen to protest the arrival of President George Bush to Utah rather than to pretend to welcome him -- and Utah is one of the only states that still has a high approval rating for the president.

And I'm proud of Rocky for sticking to his principles. He's a rare bird in these times -- a democrat who is actually a democrat. To me, he is the best of Utah: a very creative, weird, enigmatic man standing in high contrast to the social conservatism my state is better known for. I am proud of his flags and his supporting gay marriages and his xenoscaped lawn. He's a green politician in a land full of ashen ones.

Moreover, his success in a state like Utah makes me hopeful for the future -- hopeful because there ARE intersting, thoughtful, innovative candidates out there, not just those bland, old-money democrats that so often depress voters. Hopeful because he was elected twice. In Utah.

Since it's hard to find things Utahn to brag about, I want not only to brag about Rocky, but I want to post the speech he made in the Bush Protest he participated in on Thursday. I find it inspiring to hear these words from an American politician, and though we're not in the habit of publishing speeches at Green Parenting, I think this one is worthwhile...I'm going to print, almost in full, even though it makes for a lot of text. I just think speeches like this ought to be spread out through the web, onto as many servers as possible.


Washington Square Salt Lake City, Utah August 30, 2006
      ...Let no one deny we are patriots. We love our country, we hold dear the values upon which our nation was founded, and we are distressed at what our President, his administration, and our Congress are doing to, and in the name of, our great nation.
      Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.
      A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating president.
      That is not a patriot. Rather, that person is a sycophant. That person is a member of a frightening culture of obedience - a culture where falling in line with authority is more important than choosing what is right, even if it is not easy, safe, or popular. And, I suspect, that person is afraid - afraid we are right, afraid of the truth (even to the point of denying it), afraid he or she has put in with an oppressive, inhumane, regime that does not respect the laws and traditions of our country, and that history will rank as the worst presidency our nation has ever had to endure.
      In response to those who believe we should blindly support this disastrous president, his administration, and the complacent, complicit Congress, listen to the words of Theodore Roosevelt, a great president and a Republican, who said: The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole.
      Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.
       To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.
      ...We have been getting just about everything but the truth on matters of life and death . . . on matters upon which our nation's reputation hinges . . . on matters that directly relate to our nation's fundamental values . . . and on matters relating to the survival of our planet.
       In the process, our nation has engaged in an unnecessary war, based upon false justifications. More than a hundred thousand people have been killed - and many more have been seriously maimed, brain damaged, or rendered mentally ill.
       Our nation's reputation throughout much of the world has been destroyed. We have many more enemies bent on our destruction than before our invasion of Iraq.
      And the hatred toward us has grown to the point that it will take many years, perhaps generations, to overcome the loathing created by our invasion and occupation of a Muslim country.
      What incredible ineptitude and callousness for our President to talk about a Crusade while lying to us to make a case for the invasion and occupation of a Muslim country!
       Our children and later generations will pay the price of the lies, the violence, the cruelty, the incompetence, and the inhumanity of the Bush administration and the lackey Congress that has so cowardly abrogated its responsibility and authority under our checks-and-balances system of government.
       We are here to say, "We will not stand for it any more. No more lies. No more pre-emptive, illegal war, based on false information. No more God-is-on-our-side religious nonsense to justify this immoral, illegal war. No more inhumanity."
       Let's raise our voices, and demand, "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"
       Let's consider some of the most monstrous lies - lies that have led us, like a nation of sheep, to this tragic war.
       Following September 11, 2001, the world knew that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were responsible for the horrific attacks on our country. Our long-time allies were sympathetic and supportive. But our president transformed that support into international disdain for the United States, choosing to illegally invade and occupy Iraq, rather than focus on and capture the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.
       Why invade and occupy Iraq? Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice represented to us, without qualification, that there were strong ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
       In September, 2002, President Bush made the incredible claim that "You can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam."
       President Bush represented to Congress, without any factual basis whatsoever, that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks.
       Our President and Vice-President, along with an unquestioning news media, repeatedly led our nation to believe that there was a working relationship between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government, a relationship that threatened the US. Even last week, when I met with Thomas Bock, National Commander of the American Legion, I asked him why we are engaged in the war in Iraq. He said, "Why, of course, because of the 9/11 attacks on our country." I asked, "What did Iraq have to do with those attacks?" He looked puzzled, then said, "Well, the connection between al Qaeda and Iraq."
       I was shocked. Here is a man who has criticized us for opposing the war in Iraq - and he is completely wrong about the underlying facts used to justify this war.
       Not only has there never been any evidence of any involvement by Saddam Hussein or Iraq with the attacks on 9/11, but there has never been any evidence of any operational connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
       Colin Powell finally conceded there is no "concrete evidence about the connection." "The chairman of the monitoring group appointed by the United Nations Security Council to track al Qaeda" disclosed that "his team had found no evidence linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein." And the top investigator for our European allies has said, 'If there were such links, we would have found them.
       But we have found no serious connections whatsoever.'"
       President Bush himself finally admitted nine days ago during a press conference that there was no connection between the attacks on 9/11 and Iraq. It's terrific that the President has now admitted what others have known for so long - but where is the accountability for the tragic war we were led into on the basis of his earlier misrepresentations?
       Besides the fictions of Saddam Hussein somehow being linked to the 9/11 attacks and his supposed connection with al Qaeda, what was the principal justification for forgoing additional weapons inspections, failing to work with our allies toward a solution, refraining from seeking additional resolutions from the United Nations, and hurrying to war - a so-called "pre-emptive" war - in which we would attack and occupy a Muslim nation that posed no security risk to the United States, and cause the deaths of many thousands of innocent men, women, and children - and the deaths and lifetime injuries to many thousands of our own servicemen and servicewomen?
       The principal claim was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction - biological and chemical weapons - and was seeking to build up a nuclear weapons capability. As we now know, there was nothing - no evidence whatsoever - to support those claims.
       President Bush represented to us - and to people around the world - that one of the reasons we needed to make war in Iraq - and to do it right away - was because Saddam Hussein was seeking to build nuclear weapons. His assertions about Saddam Hussein trying to purchase nuclear materials from an African nation and about Iraq seeking to obtain aluminum tubes for the enrichment of uranium were challenged at the time by our own intelligence agency and scientists, yet he didn't tell us that! Ten days before the invasion of Iraq, it was proven that the documents upon which President Bush's claim about Saddam Hussein trying to obtain uranium was based were forgeries. However, President Bush did not disclose that to the American people. By that failure, he betrayed each of us, he betrayed our country, and he betrayed the cause of world peace.
       Neither did the vast majority of the news media disclose the forgeries - until it was far too late. It took our local newspapers here in Salt Lake City four months - until after President Bush declared that major combat in Iraq was over - to report the discovery that the documents were forgeries - and, therefore, that there was no basis for the false claims about Saddam Hussein trying to build up a nuclear capability. By its failure to promptly disclose the forgeries, the news media betrayed us as well.
       Had the American people known we were being lied to - had President Bush informed us that the documents were forged and that he had no other basis for his claim - had our nation's media done its job, rather than slavishly repeating to us the lies being fed to it by the Bush administration - our nation may well not have allowed the commencement of this outrageous, illegal, unjustified war.
       To President Bush, to his administration, to our go-along Congress, and to our news media, we are here today, demanding, "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"
       Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said that high-strength aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," warning "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
       Undisclosed by President Bush or Condoleezza Rice was the fact that top nuclear scientists had informed the Administration that the tubes were "too narrow, too heavy, too long" to be useful in developing nuclear weapons and could be used for other purposes. Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, agreed.
       So much for the phony claims of Saddam Hussein building nuclear weapons - the primary claims justifying the rush to war.
       What were we told about chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction? These claims were as baseless and fraudulent as the claims about nuclear weapons.
       President Bush told us in his January 2003 State of the Union address that Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. Then, in May of 2003, he made the outlandish statement that, "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories."
      Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told us, "We know where the [WMDs] are." Vice President Cheney and then-Secretary of State Powell also joined in the chorus of lies and misinformation about weapons of mass destruction. Of course, no stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons were found.
       Bush Administration Weapons Inspector David Kay noted that Iraq did not have an ongoing chemical weapons program after 1991-a conclusion remarkably similar to statements made by Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 attacks - and before they sacrificed the truth in the service of promoting the Bush administration's case for war against Iraq.
      On February 24, 2001, less than 7 months before 9/11, Colin Powell said that Saddam Hussein "has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors," said Colin Powell.
      And in July 2001, two months before 9/11, Condoleezza Rice said: "We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."
      It is astounding how they changed their claims after the President decided to make a case for the invasion and occupation of Iraq!
      To think that we could be lied to by so many members of the Bush administration with such impunity is frightening - chilling. Yet these imperious, arrogant, dishonest people think we should just fall in line with them and continue to take them at their word.
      The truth has been established. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on the United States. There is no evidence of any operational ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. And there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
      What a tragedy, leading to greater tragedy. We are fed lie after lie, our media reinforces those lies, and we are a nation led to a tragic, illegal, unprovoked war.
      We are here because of our values. We love our country. We cherish the freedoms and liberties of our country. We don't call those who speak out against our nation's leaders unpatriotic or un-American or appeasers of fascists. We have good, wholesome family values. In our families, we teach honesty, we teach kindness and compassion toward others, we teach that violence, if ever justified, must be an absolutely last resort. In our families, we teach that our nation's constitutional values are to be upheld, and that they are worth standing up and fighting for. Our family values promote respect and equal rights toward everyone, regardless of race, ethnic origin, and sexual orientation.
      In our families, we teach the value of hard work and competence - and we are left to wonder about a President who, after receiving an intelligence memo about the threat posed by al Qaeda, decides to continue his month-long vacation - just before the 9/11 attacks on our country.
      As we demand the truth from others, let us also face the truth. Our government all too often has not cared about the human rights of people in other nations - and it doesn't really care about democracy, unless it leads to the election of those who will do our bidding.
       Consider the irony regarding the claims that Saddam had chemical weapons and, because of that, we needed to rush to war in Iraq. When Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons - first against Iranians, then against his own people, the Kurds - our country provided him with biological and chemical agents and equipment to make the weapons. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush refused even to support economic sanctions against Hussein for his use of weapons of mass destruction.
       What did our nation do in response to Hussein's use of chemical weapons, killing tens of thousand of people, when he actually had them?
       We befriended, coddled, and rewarded him - with government-guaranteed loans totaling $5 billion since 1983, freeing up currency for Hussein to modernize his military assets.
       Perhaps those in the US government who aided and abetted Saddam Hussein to further US business interests, while he was gassing the Kurds, should be sharing his courtroom dock as he is being tried now for crimes against humanity.
       No more lies, no more hiding of the truth, no more wars that more than triple the value of stock in Dick Cheney's prior employer, Halliburton - and which, as of last September, has increased the value of the Halliburton CEO's stock by $78 million.
       We are patriots. We're deeply concerned. And we demand change, now.
       No more lies from Condoleezza Rice about whether she and President Bush were advised before 9/11 of the possibility of planes being flown into buildings by terrorists.
       No more gross incompetence in the office of the Secretary of Defense.
       No more torture of human beings.
       No more disregard of the basic human rights enshrined in the Geneva Convention.
       No more kidnapping of people and sending them off to secret prisons in nations where we can expect they will be tortured.
       No more unconstitutional wiretapping of Americans.
       No more proposed amendments to the United States Constitution that would, for the first time, limit fundamental rights and liberties for entire classes of people simply on the basis of sexual orientation.
       No more federal land giveaways to developers.
       No more increases in mercury emissions from old, dirty, dangerous coalburning power plants.
       No more backroom deals that deprive protection for millions of acres of wild lands.
       No more attacks on immigrants who work so hard to build better lives.
       No more inaction by Congress on fixing our hypocritical and inconsistent immigration laws and policies.
       No more reliance on fiction rather than the science of global warming.
       No more manipulation of our media with false propaganda.
       No more disastrous cuts in funding for those most in need.
       No more federal cuts in community policing and local law enforcement grant programs for our cities.
       No more inaction on stopping the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.
       No more of the Patriot Act.
       No more killing.
       No more pre-emptive wars.
       No more contempt for our long-time allies around the world.
       No more dependence on foreign oil.
       No more failure to impose increased fuel efficiency standards for automobiles.
       No more energy policies developed in secret meetings between Dick Cheney and his energy company cronies.
       No more excuses for failing to aggressively cut global warming pollutant emissions.
       No more tragically incompetent federal responses to natural disasters.
       No more tax cuts for the wealthiest, while the middle class and those who are economically-disadvantaged continue to struggle more and more each year.
       No more reckless spending and massive tax cuts, resulting in historic deficits and historic accumulated national debt.
       No more purchasing of elections by the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the country.
       No more phony, ineffective, inhumane so-called war on drugs.
       No more failure to pass an increase in the minimum wage.
       No more silence by the American people.
       This is a new day. We will not be silent. We will continue to raise our voices. We will bring others with us. We will grow and grow, regardless of political party - unified in our insistence upon the truth, upon peace-making, upon more humane treatment of our brothers and sisters around the world.
       We will be ever cognizant of our moral responsibility to speak up in the face of wrongdoing, and to work as we can for a better, safer, more just community, nation, and world.
       So we won't let down. We won't be quiet. We will continue to resist the lies, the deception, the outrages of the Bush administration. We will insist that peace be pursued, and that, as a nation, we help those in need. We must break the cycle of hatred, of intolerance, of exploitation. We must pursue peace as vigorously as the Bush administration has pursued war. It's up to all of us to do our part.
       Thank you everyone for lending your voices to this call for compassion, for peace, for greater humanity. Let us keep in mind the injunction of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."