What does it feel like now that I have two autistic kids?

I wanted to explain what it feels like now that not only just one but both of my children are diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.  It is... complicated.

I believe that I am a fully valid person whose being on the autism spectrum is fully part of who I am.  Some days are harder to feel that way because I have to fight to believe in myself.  As I told someone not long ago, I wish I had known I was on the autism spectrum earlier in life so I could have understood why I felt so different from other people and not just like some kind of unexplainable freak.  As an extension of fighting to believe in myself, I have to believe in my children no matter whether they are autistic or not.  Part of me wishes their life didn't have to be as complicated as mine.  But the bigger part of me believes just as much as I believed when my wife and I decided to have children that the kind of life I represent deserved to have a chance to be lived.  We always knew genetically we had a high chance of having autistic children.  That being said, I never would have intentionally tried to have all of my offspring be autistic if I could.  I would have been perfectly happy to see what a non autistic "version" of me could have been like through my offspring.  Now I know that won't happen.  Life is hard enough we don't expect to have any more children and both of my kids are autistic.  While it is easy to say the words "I accept you no matter what" in reality the act of acceptance is tied to the complicated idea of accepting myself.  There is nothing simple about it.

How I feel about my son being diagnosed is so closely tied to how I feel about myself that it is almost impossible for me to approach the subject with other people without including that context.  The thing is, I mostly "pass" as normal and get some privilege from being able to do so.  Whenever I disclose that I am on the spectrum there is always the possibility that I'll run into whatever bizarre stereotypes people have or even direct or subtle bigotry and ablism.  Every single time a person on the spectrum commits an act of notable public violence the news can't help sensationalizing their diagnosis as an explanation for their violence regardless of the fact that autistics are statistically no more violent or prone to criminality than other people.  I can't just walk into my new job and announce "Hello, I'm new here an I have Asperger Syndrome" without wondering whether a coworker will start to fear that I'm a mass murderer waiting to happen or whether my manager will start to view my performance with a biased pessimism based on the assumption that a disabled worker could never be as good of a contributor as a non disabled one.  As a result, even trying to talk about how Lionel has been diagnosed and how I feel about it is a socially tricky situation to navigate.  Unfortunately to be an effective advocate for my sons I need to learn to navigate these kinds of situations.  I already had that problem once over, now I have it twice.

Now I have to confront the world of treatments.  With Taliesin his main problem has always been that social interactions were so frightening that he couldn't talk except to us in specific situations, or in other words selective mutism.  Working with speech therapists in multiple settings and of course just letting time pass has done wonders and he is making great strides to being able to talk to a larger and larger sphere of people.  While he has other problems as well they are not as daunting to us personally.  We've never felt a need to pursue any dramatic scale treatment program.  Mostly he is just fine the way he is as a quirky kid and we could feel ok pursuing narrow treatments for narrow problems.  Lionel, on the other hand, is more "severely" impacted.  I hate using such language often expressed as whether the autistic person is "high functioning" and "low functioning" because these terms generally are used in popular language to mean whether the observer using such phrases is immediately aware of the problems the autistic person has in their life without having to guess much.  Taliesin is not "obvious" if you don't see him in a setting where he is having problems talking, but has problems in his life that I won't elaborate on that are stereotypical of "low functioning" kids even though most people would call him "high functioning" because they can't see the problems.  Lionel, on the other hand, has issues that immediately stand out as what would popularly be called "low functioning" including a delay or abnormality in his ability to use language at a level developmentally appropriate for his age and rather severe issues with trouble paying attention.  In any case, there is a more obvious need to get him a broader scale treatment program.  And, for the first time, we actually have insurance coverage that will help us do that.  In a way is wonderful.  In a way it is a daunting prospect filled not only with questions of how to find the providers, find the time, and find the money but also with the complicated tasks of avoiding the ethical pitfalls of how our culture deals with the treatment of autism.

Therapies for autism have a sullied history.  While I haven't been exposed to many of them first hand since I wasn't diagnosed till I was an adult I've been a part of the autism community enough to learn about the skeletons in the closet.  There are plenty of dead ends filled with fads and quack doctors selling hope instead of medicine.  Some treatment protocols in the past openly advocated for violence and abuse against the children in the name of "curing" the symptoms through behaviorism based psychological interventions.  While generally such dramatic violations of people's dignity are looked down upon now the ghosts of the past are not completely gone.  There are still treatment centers out there that will openly advocate for the use of aversive's and punishments to try to reprogram behaviors.  And even program that don't "intentionally" inflict harm and claim to only practice positive reinforcement can be tainted.  Putting children into situations where they are highly pressured to not show the symptoms that would let people know they are disabled can be extremely distressing- such as being required to suppress stimming or required to show gestures of affection on command with strangers or required to show the appropriate patterns of eye contact no matter how personally distressing.  Once a service provider who had to decide what version of therapy program to run told me that they personally struggled to offer such a program because forcing children into such high stress situations made them obviously miserable.  To an extent valid medicine can hurt just like an injection for a vaccine is still valid medicine even though it hurts.  But when therapies can easily become side tracked by the question of making the child "look normal" instead of trying to help them adaptively interact with the world the infliction of distress and suffering can become questionable.  Another pitfall can be that aggressive service providers and desperate parents will often try to set up treatment protocols calling for extremely long therapy sessions- perhaps longer than 8 hours a day- taking over the life of everyone involved in an act of desperation more than because it is evidence based.  Another pitfall associated with these marathon training programs is that in order to try and make the positive reinforcement training as powerful as possible the service provider will work with the parent to systematically identify everything the child enjoys or takes personal pleasure from- and then remove all access to those things so that the only way the child can gain access to anything they enjoy in life is as a reward for achievements in therapy.  Such a program might technically be positive reinforcement only but is performed in a context of abusively restricting access to anything the child enjoys in life.  I've read that autistics who grew up in such treatment programs learn to try to hide anything that they take pleasure in to the point where as adults the normal social act of someone asking simple questions about what they enjoy is an extreme invasion of their need for privacy that developed as a defense mechanism against their parents and service providers trying to deny them free access to anything that they enjoyed.  Another pitfall of therapy programs is that in order to try to teach "normal" verbal communication it is often suggested that parents refuse to acknowledge any attempts at communication unless a child can reframe the message into "normal" speech.  The problem is that it is completely an unknown factor whether an autistic with a language delay will ever comfortably develop a "normal" speech ability.  Refusing to communicate except through "normal" speech can become a pervasive refusal to communicate or to treat any adaptive attempts to communicate as inherently invalid.  To a point insisting on verbal communication helps develop verbal skills.  Past that point its an abusive refusal to respect the human dignity of the child because they aren't normal.  There is no easy answer as to what is the right thing to do.

On top of it all of the ethical questions and social pitfalls to avoid we simply don't have much spare  time or money to use to pursue treatments.  Even getting Taliesin the limited services he has had has been a real strain.  The entire prospect is honestly daunting and leaves me feeling tired.

After all is said and done, Lionel is still the same person he was before the diagnosis.  He is still the little guy who obsessively loves large trucks, dinosaurs, and trains.  He is still the affectionate little guy who can climb almost anything in the house and on some days loves his broccoli almost as much as he does chocolate cake.  He is still the little odd ball who has for a long time phrased practically all of his questions as statements and frequently communicates through tangential references to his favorite books and movies.  We are enough of an autism family that the diagnosis grants us less an understanding of Lionel which we already had and more gave us the passport to helping the outside world understand who he was, give him the supports that are his due, and have a chance to accept who he is.  So in a way perhaps I shouldn't feel different than I did before.  But there is something in the nature of naming a problem that makes you face it with an urgency you could avoid before.  I could just wish it weren't so complicated.

Heart Transplants and Easter

One of the recurrent themes in the Bible is of life created out of sterility or death.  With my nephew's transplant operation coming up in just a few hours, it just brings to mind powerfully the way's that we as a society working with modern medicine have worked to be able to perform acts of love to bring life from what otherwise would be only death.  That is so much more true in a situation like this- where a heart transplant is the kind of life that can only come tragically from another death.  In this season of reflection in preparing for Easter and in this shadow of waiting to see if my nephew will have a new lease on life, a hymn about death and renewed life seems appropriate.  Now the Green Blade Riseth is a favorite of mine.



In celebrating Easter I hope we can seek not just to celebrate the past, but to find ways to participate in the renewing of life and the world.

It never rains but it pours...

Earlier this year our family all came down with the flu.  I was disappointed since I normally never get the flu and we all got the flu shots, but this year was just bad luck for the flu shots not working.  Ever since we got the flu our youngest son has been acting strangely.  At first we just assumed he had some post flu grumpiness or that he wasn't feeling all the way better yet.  But the behaviors never went away.  He became very clingy, wanting to be held by his mommy all the time.  He wouldn't even let me pick him up for a while.  He might ask me to pick him up, but the moment I tried to lift him he'd squirm away and go running for mommy as if he were frightened.  His behaviour became ritualistic and very concerned with things being the "right way."  He developed phobias of pooping in the bathtub (to the point where he didn't want to take baths) and of bees (to the point where he didn't want to go outside).  Finally we called the pediatrician and had a basic evaluation appointment.  The doctor thinks that either he has just had a regression event into autism or some kind of anxiety class disorder has just popped out of the blue on us.  His speech abilities seem unaffected and we don't know whether his socializing abilities are affected yet because he won't go outside to play with other kids these days because of his new found fear of bees.  Without knowing if his social behaviors have changed, the doctor isn't sure whether its an anxiety disorder like OCD or if he is autistic like his older brother.  We have a family history for both classes of disorders, so either are possibilities at this point.

I'm not sure what to think or feel about the possibility that I might have passed on being on the autistic spectrum to both of my children.  We always knew there was a possibility of this happening, but Taliesin had always seemed like the obvious one where that was playing out- missing communication milestones, ritualistic, shy, and very rule based from the beginning.  Lionel was always the easy going communicative one who wasn't shy of anyone.  It's painful to see the easy going nature suddenly disappear in favor of a very ritualistic and anxious one where Lionel painfully afraid of situations and things he used to enjoy very much.  Hopefully we can remedy much of that with proper intervention.

The narrative that autism is a state of merely being different rather than broken is easier to accept when the traits simply grow organically in place as the way things have always been.  Its easier to accept it that way.  You can't imagine things having been different.  But when things were different and become decidedly worse in very specific ways over a short period of time, you can imagine both ways.  It hurts more.  It doesn't make it any less part of the person that you love, but you feel a bigger need to fix it.  Striking a balance between providing opportunities for many things in life to not be as hard for him and providing acceptance and a compelling narrative of self worth is difficult at best.  We don't know what the future will hold, but at least we know to be looking to know what we can do to help.  Life could be easier and I wish so many hard things didn't happen so close together.  But that's life...

Diagnosis for Taliesin

So we went to the USU clinic today and got the diagnosis for Taliesin.  They apparently had a lot of trouble deciding between selective mutism and autism.  There is a lot of inherent overlap in the symptoms between those two so I can understand that.  They decided in the end that his pattern of rigid routines etc was not typical for selective mutism and therefore decided to diagnose "autism spectrum disorder with features of selective mutism."

Part of me is just elated that since we now have an official diagnosis for him I can try to make his life better than mine was.  I never received any proper services as a child because at the time the diagnosis didn't really exist in a useful way for me.  Another part of me just isn't sure what to think.  The doctors dumped a rather large plateful of suggested therapy routes for him on our plates and part of me just wants to push back and say we don't need that much help.  Maybe its because for me the process of diagnosis was more about re self discovery and self acceptance but not about getting help from anyone part of me wants it to mean the same thing for him, even though that makes no sense.

I wish I felt like I could talk to more people about this.  Since T essentially inherited this from me I almost feel like I can't talk about it without talking about myself at the same time.  And as a general rule I generally don't talk about my own diagnostic situation with just about anyone.  Its something I've been loosening up on quite a bit over the last few years, but only so much.  I spent so long fearing that people wouldn't believe me if I talked about it or would assume horrible things about me that its just still really difficult to talk about it.  But now it seems that I'll have to navigate a new path if I want to act as an advocate for Taliesin.  Perhaps that is what scares me the most of anything.

Hurry up and wait

As a sequel to my earlier post I thought I'd write up a little more explanation of what's going on with T's evaluations.  It sounds like the DSM-V has advanced the formality of diagnostic decisions a great deal- either that or my personal experiences were rather primitive for some other reason.  For the initial interview Bonnie Jean had to answer and explain her answers to about 90 questions regarding T's abilities and behaviors, and each answer will eventually be assigned a score which then feeds back into a diagnostic formula which gives them the most likely diagnoses.  Then further testing can be performed to check for certain which of those is actually the case.  They won't be able to give the results of the initial assessment for several weeks and the next diagnostic appointment where more testing might be done won't be available it sounded like for probably at least a month after the initial visit.  This university clinic handles the official government caseload for the entire county and is therefore somewhat overloaded with work.

The speech pathologist who performed the interview said her first impression was that possibly we were looking at selective mutism since T appears to be able or unable to speak based on the social context and several other characteristic tendencies for autism spectrum disorder don't really show up prominently.  For example we've never noticed T to stim or show any particular sensory sensitivities.  But she also acknowledged that she isn't the psychologist so someone else entirely will be making the judgement call.  But it sounded like the speech pathologist was fairly certain we were seeing something unusual going on and that we were on the right track having him evaluated.

On the plus side, we are officially poor enough to get a reduced price on the diagnostic services the clinic offers and will only have to pay 15% of the actual cost.  Given that even the initial interview was supposed to originally cost $250, we're very happy about these savings.  But in the meantime it will be quite a wait till we know anything in particular for certain.  We're glad the specialists can put so much precise effort into figuring this out, especially since it is such a complicated area we've never been comfortable with arm chair diagnosing T as anything and its always possible to inherit just a few quirks without getting the full package.

The Passing of Genetic Destiny?

Even as far back as when Bonnie Jean and I began serious dating, we talked about the possibility that our kids would be autistic.  It was just part of the package that came with the idea of marrying an autistic man.  I seem to remember Bonnie Jean saying that once she understood me better, she didn't think she'd have a problem with it.

When we got pregnant after a few years of trying, it wasn't too far from our minds.  The medical intake forms for the OBGYN asked if there was any history of autism in the family, and I seem to remember joking that I wondered whether the doctor would be surprised if I told him that yes there was a history of autism in the family because I had Asperger Syndrome.

When Taliesin was born I don't remember how it came up but I took one of my blind leaps and somehow ended up disclosing my autism to one of the nurses at the hospital who was absolutely fascinated by me.  Talking about my Asperger Syndrome diagnosis can be hard even with people that I trust will react well- even to the point that I've had times that the experience leaves me shaking.  But sometimes I just dive in and let it flow.  Fortunately it turned out well.

When Taliesin was late with his language development milestones or broke into sobs of tears because a stranger dared smile at him, autism wasn't far from our minds.  He was so scared of strangers that we had to tell the people who took care of nursery at the church not to pick him up to calm him down when he was upset.  He'd calm down faster if he wasn't also screaming about someone touching and looking at him.  Fortunately they were willing to believe us and reported with some bewilderment that our judgement was right, he calmed down faster on the floor than being cuddled by a stranger.

Some family members have kind of started from the assumption that every one of these signals was a definite sign that our little boy was on the autistic spectrum.  But we never saw enough to consider it a justified assumption.  We've let our pediatricians know our family history and routinely discussed Taliesin's quirks with him.  But until recently our pediatricians had never considered that enough symptoms were falling into place to be taken seriously.  It always seemed a possibility that Taliesin might just inherit a few of my quirks without getting the whole package.  During our last well visit though we explained the severe social anxiety, literal concrete thinking patterns, rigid routines, and ritualistic play patterns that our son was developing.  And now we've got a referral to the University for an autism screening.  While the result isn't certain, we're feeling more settled that they will make an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis.

I'm starting to see a lot of my own limitations in my son.  As we were describing how Taliesin literally took months of acclimatization to be willing to talk to the newly moved in neighbor kids because he'd rather just stand there and smile shyly it made me think of myself as an adult at work.  It takes me a long time of adjustment- weeks to months actually-to feel comfortable with a new social group and be ready to do anything much more than just sit there and read by myself.  I'm just happy to have people around so that if I choose to take the effort to interact they'll be there for me.  After a long time maybe I'll find a few people that I can figure out how to talk to on a more chit chat basis.  When changes in seating arrangements force me to sit by new people on a regular basis I quickly become mostly silent and miserable.

Within the last few weeks my son has finally gotten over his initial shyness to try to talk to the new neighbor children.  But somehow they are just feeling confused by his choices of conversation- such as what kinds of shoes they are wearing or whether there are ravens on the roof of the building and what noise they make.  And yes- he knows what ravens look like, along with a number of other birds because his bird obsessed father has been teaching him.  So the little girls he is trying to befriend just ignore him, perhaps just not knowing how to react- especially given his history of not being up to speaking to them.  Just to example how firmly that expectation of his silence has formed, Bonnie Jean saw one of these little girls wanting to play with Taliesin's bike but being stopped by her mom who wanted the little girl to ask Taliesin first.  The little girl burst into tears, crying that Taliesin wouldn't answer.  Fortunately, Taliesin was feeling social and was willing to speak to the girl and answer yes.  And just like me at work trying to figure out how to chit chat with fellow employees, the comfort required to say that much took him months.

When we decided to get pregnant we knew this might be the result.  I've known my life was worth living and therefore worth passing on, especially if I could make it a better life for my son than I had had- undiagnosed and coping with the emotional strain of a sometimes horridly abusive home.  As much as I want to ease the difficulties, I know I won't ever be able to completely make them disappear for him, just like I can't do that for myself.  Like me, he'll be likely to susceptible to episodes of anxiety and depression.  Like me, he'll probably have trouble seeing into his own mind to understand the emotions churning there.

I hope that like me he'll have a passionate commitment to justice, gentleness, and truth.  I hope that like me, he'll be able to take a fierce joy in obsessively enjoying life.  I hope that like me he'll thirst to learn new things all his life.  And I hope that, unlike me, he'll learn much earlier in life to love and understand who he is as he goes through every step of life in his own way.

Advice regarding emotions and relationships

Every once in a while it happens- someone asks me for advice about a situation defined by its emotions or about relationships.  Sometimes it happens in more formal ways- like when our married student ward asked my wife and I to teach the marriage and family relationships class.  Sometimes it is more informal like a friend at work asking if I could think of anything better that they might have done in a frustrating situation with their girlfriend.  I appreciate the trust people extend to me when this happens.  But it honestly feels just a little odd.  Because, I honestly struggle with emotions and relationships.  I feel like a blind man being asked how to see.

When Bonnie Jean and I were engaged, I was off trying to sell alarm systems with about as much skill as a plumber that had never owned a wrench.  Life was getting pretty frustrating and I was talking with Bonnie Jean on the phone about how I was feeling.  There were all these components to how I was feeling and I couldn't figure it out why I should be feeling that particular set of emotional and physical sensations or what they meant.  Bonnie Jean finally said "it sounds like your depressed."  Then everything clicked, depression was what I was feeling, how amazingly good it was to finally be able to put a word to how I was feeling.  I had been feeling depressed for several weeks before finally figuring out exactly what was going on.  This is not the only time in my life when there has been a substantial time lag between the onset of depression and realizing that it happened.  Its just the sort of thing that happens to me from time to time.

And as far as relationships go... well, lets just say that I can sit next to someone at work for hours without talking to them or even realizing if they stay put or get up and leave.  There's a strong chance that I won't ever talk to them at all.  Engaging with random strangers in a social manner takes a certain amount of courage, mental effort, and sometimes a measure of desperation.  Basic skills of managing the image I portray of myself to other people are difficult for me to manage, and avoiding giving offense and overcoming hostility that can come from small offenses can be an exhausting effort for me.  Making and keeping friends can be hard.  I still think its a small miracle that Bonnie Jean and I met and got married in the first place.  There are so many things that other people can do by feel that I do by thinking about them.

But maybe that explains a little bit of why people ask for advice sometimes.  Maybe the way I spend time thinking through these things gives me a fresh perspective that is unique to others when they hear it.  So instead of the blind man describing the elephant I'm the blind man with x ray vision trying to describe an elephant.  Or maybe just occasionally I earn up enough good will and trust that people value what I think and feel regardless of whether they think I really have any answers.  I don't know.  I do enjoy feeling trusted though.  It makes it seem as if I've established a real connection with another human being.  And with how isolating the world can be, knowing those connections are there matters a great deal.

Poverty and Abundence

One thing that is kind of hard to forget sometimes is that I'm poor as things go.  Apparently, according to a website I found, only about 12% of the married households in the United States make less than we do.  With Mom and Dad and two kids, money doesn't always seem to want to stretch as far as we want it to.  Ignoring tuition reimbursement at my work, I'll probably only make $27,500 or so this year.  While all our basic needs are met, we'd still like to be able to afford life insurance, disability insurance, a better apartment or maybe a house, a real piano for my wife, and new clothes.  While we've worked hard to build up our savings, if anything happened to either of us our hard earned savings would evaporate pretty quickly.  But, last we checked, life insurance would probably be another 50$ a month expense or more depending how the insurer rated our health.  Disability insurance is available through my work- but again that's more money down the drain.  Our apartment is nice enough, but L sleeps in the laundry/storage room.  It used to be the laundry/storage/office room, but that got too impractical and the office part got shoved into our bedroom.  We had to arrange the room just right so that if an earthquake knocked the cans of food off our storage shelves they wouldn't rain down on L inside his crib.  The temperature only stays reasonable through the apartment if the doors stay wide open, which means at night when we close the door to keep it quiet so L doesn't wake up, his room can get really cold really easily.  Our electronic piano is wonderful and a big step up from the old one we had, but its still not a real one and doesn't play quite like a real one.  As for clothes, a lot of mine have holes in them.  Every once in a while we make another trip to the thrift store or something to update my outfits with things that fit pretty close to right even if they are a little too big etc.  But when I'm looking for clothing without holes in my closet, I have to pay attention-just randomly picking out stuff would get clothes with holes a lot of the time.  My wife's body has had the common changes with pregnancy, birth, and nursing.  Unfortunately, money has been tight enough that its hard to keep buying new clothing each time something changes and there are some types of clothing that she doesn't even have any that fit properly, she just makes them fit anyways.  Even after a couple of raises at work, it still feels like there just is never enough to make everything fall into place the way we'd like to.

At the same time, I sometimes just get possessed with an awareness of how much we have and how lucky we are.  We've worked hard to save money for emergencies and long term expenses.  And as a result we have about $18,000 in normal bank accounts.  We don't live paycheck to paycheck.  Our retirement accounts are worth about $29,500- nothing to brag about in the long run but the point is I'm still fairly young and that money is growing.  Both our kids have 529 education trust funds set up for them.  Granted there isn't much in either of those trust funds, but each kid gets $5 a month added to them and when times are better for us we'll start adding more.  At the moment I do have a considerable amount of student debt, but there's actually less student debt than I have money in the bank and we have no other forms of debt.  So our retirement savings is close to our actual net worth.  That means that we're in the 76% percentile for net worth of people aged 29-30, according to http://www.4cdg.com/cgi-bin/calculators/wealth2.cgi  We've worked extremely hard to be able to build up our savings and I tend to be really proud of what we've accomplished on paper.

But there are every day reminders of this sense of affluence as well.  If something goes on sale at the grocery store, we don't have to sit around wishing we had money to take advantage of the lower price.  We have spare money to buy in bulk when sales come around.  If the item in question is perishable, we can still save money on it because we have a chest freezer that we were able to purchase with our savings.  When the option to use cloth diapers came around to save money we didn't hesitate because the initial purchase of modern cloth diapers can be over a hundred dollars in just set up costs.  We had the money to do it without really hesitating.  When WIC doesn't give us enough bread to eat we don't buy it, we make it from scratch with a host of kitchen gadgets at our disposal including a kitchen aid, a wheat grinder, and bread maker.  Recently we've been struggling to make our food budget work.  One area in which we spend a lot of money seems to always be our pasta, which we eat pretty much every day.  We decided we'd see if we could make our own pasta, and had the money to shell out $60 using Christmas money on a nice pasta machine.  Though we haven't run the numbers yet, I expect that making our own pasta will probably be cheaper than buying it at the store.  Regardless, the home made pasta we've tried so far has been superb tasting.  When we make bread or pasta, I feel like some how I am changing from a position of poverty eating cheap pasta and bread from the store to a position of privilege- eating excellent quality home made foods that are cheaper than anything I could buy and often better quality than anything I'd care to afford.  Granted, we do these things because the money is tight, but I don't feel impoverished by my cooking experiments.  I feel enriched.

When my wife and I were first married and we started developing our own family cooking traditions, I remember being in awe of the number of pasta's we had in the cupboard.  There was the elbow macaroni, lasagna noodles, large and small shells, angel hair, spaghetti, rotini, and acini de pepi.  I didn't grow up eating a large number of different types of pasta or even really much pasta in general.  I hadn't even know most of these types existed.  So when I looked in that cupboard I felt like I was crazy wealthy.  I couldn't believe how blessed I seemed to be staring at a cupboard full of pasta that promised so many different flavors in their different recipes.

Depending on if you focus on my income (12% percentile of married couples) or my net worth compared to my age (76% percentile), you could argue am I either  wealthy or poor.  On the one hand, very few make so little money as I do.  On the other hand, not as many people have as many cash resources as I do and their net worth can be close to nothing.  In the end I'm both affluent and very poor.  If we spent money as if we were affluent we'd have none left over and the savings would promptly disappear.  As we spend money as if we didn't have cash to spare and can only afford to occasionally invest in some cost savings measure or other, then the savings continue to pile up.  I'm really both poor and affluent at the same time.  It's just one of life's little paradoxes.

Homeschooling

I was homeschooled from about 6th grade on.  The reasons why are kind of complicated, but lets say there was a big project involving being required to study astrology in math class, being given word puzzles as English homework on a regular basis, and getting an A on an assignment because it involved a % mark.  It's been a long time since I left that world, and I think I can look back on it now with a lot better perspective than I had at the time.  I wanted to give a quick review of what I felt about the experience in terms of the quality of academics, my emotional well being, and my social well being.

Quality of Academics

Homeschooling did help some parts of my academic progress.  For instance, grammar was something that always eluded me until I studied it at home.  Instead of writing assignments being something that were inflexible and arbitrary, I could adapt writing assignments to my own ideas and style and developed in writing much more than I would have otherwise.  I also don't think I would have ever studied poetry if I hadn't been home schooled, and an ability to enjoy poetry has enriched my life even if the poetry I write is only mediocre.

In some ways homeschooling actually hurt my academic progress.  During the time that the whole curriculum plan was built for us by Calvert School it went pretty well, but afterwards when we tried to build our own it went downhill.  My parents didn't feel up to teaching me chemistry or biology or having me self study.  So we signed me up for a BYU independent study biology course.  I don't know if they've improved, but the BYU high school independent study course for biology was pretty horrible at the time.  And I had no lab experience.  Its not that you can't experience biology labs in home school, its just that you have to buy them, and we didn't.  In chemistry we signed me up for a chemistry class from the local community college.  That by itself was actually a very good move.  It got me a little college credit, I learned much better than I would have at home, and it broke down some of the fear of college level courses for me.  But, we never thought to sign me up for the lab section of the chemistry class, which for whatever reason was optional at Montgomery College.  So I missed the labs again.  Yes we could have purchased those too, but my feeling is that unless your parents are already professional chemists, that is probably a bad idea.  At school you actually have a full set of safety equipment.  The things we used for civics studies didn't allow for any serious alternate world view presentation, and didn't encourage critical thought or introspection.  Even though I learned to break past writers block, grammar, and any fear of writing, my parents were unable to provide serious contributions to the maturity of my writing.  Most of what I wrote during that time except for humor pieces is so embarrassing to me today that I can hardly read it.

Emotional Well Being

Public school during 5th and 6th grades was living hell for me.  One of the things I liked the most about leaving the public school system is that breaking out of the environments where so many bad things happened to me allowed me to let go of a lot of the hatred and anger that had been building up in my personality.  Trying to navigate childhood with Asperger Syndrome is hard, and its harder when your undiagnosed and hardly anybody really gets you.  Despite not being diagnosed, the school councilors and psychologists could tell there was something wrong and had me spend some time in the special ed program.  They knew all about how I had trouble socializing, had problems empathizing, and learned things in an unusual pattern.  All the dots were there, but the paradigm to connect them hadn't been accepted in the DSM yet, so I was stuck with vague labels and assignments to write and read things that encouraged looking at stories from more than one perspective.  Didn't do me much good, and other than offering to let me spend more time playing with other special ed kids they didn't do anything that I am aware of to try to help me make friends.  And who really wants the stigma of spending lots of time with the special ed kids?

So I got to heal from a lot of the pain of public school just by leaving it.  But homeschooling does something funny to your emotional well being.  Its puts a lot of your eggs into one basket.  An overwhelming portion of your time is spent in one social group, and if family relationships go sour then you have very few options to escape it.  To imagine how badly that can end, think of how many people like or dislike subjects in school based on whether they liked or disliked the teacher for that class and for no other reason.  So say your mom is your teacher in ALL of your subjects and the relationship goes sour.  You either have the choice to hate academics, or make the mature decision to base your like or dislike of a subject on something other than who is helping you learn it.  Fortunately I didn't like or dislike subjects based on teachers.  And, when my mom would start to threaten to withdraw all support from me to force me to obey her idea of perfect study methods or habits, I just call her threat and learn to self study.  This was how I lived with my mother in general- find ways to reduce any need for physical, academic, or emotional support from her to as little as possible.  It taught me good study habits, even if my life at home was pretty much living hell a lot of the time just like public school had been.  It is normal for teenagers to need to learn some independence from their parents and authority figures.  Public school decentralizes those authority figures and allows you to take breaks from people you have trouble getting along with.  Home schooling centralizes many of your authority figures into one and gives very few opportunities to take breaks from people you don't get along with.  The only times I routinely wasn't with my family was during early morning seminary, mutual night at church, and church itself.  Other than that I spent almost all of my time with my family.

In the end I'm unsure whether the living hell of public school would have been better to continue if it would have meant not having to deal with living hell at home.  Its possible that I would simply have had bad experiences in both places at once if I had stayed in public school.

Social Well Being

Because I didn't have any effective way to deal with the problems inherent in having Asperger Syndrome, my social well being was pretty much broken and would have been broken no matter which path I took in life.  Public school wasn't working.  Homeschooling only allowed me to socialize at church or church events or with people from church on a regular basis.  Luckily, my group of friends at church was really great and our little group did tons of things together.

We did try to break out of not having socializing opportunities in different ways.  There was a group of homeschooling families in the neighborhood that gathered at a public park to play together on a regular basis.  They were good and intelligent people.  Unfortunately the brand of Christianity they belonged to made them somewhat apprehensive of mormons and I think there was almost a standing ban on us playing together in non public settings.  It got awkward quickly, which is too bad because I got along with some of them pretty well.  Since hanging out with the local Christian homeschooling groups didn't work out so well, we tried forming our own mormon homeschooling groups instead.  This had its own problems.  Most of the homeschooled kids were pretty young, and when I was a somewhat older teenage boy most of the other kids involved were pre adolescent girls.  Not so much my thing.  There were occasionally boys my age in these groups, but there was a problem with trying to be friends with them.

The thing is, one of the major reasons teenagers get taken out of public school and home schooled when the parents aren't concerned about the academics of the school district is to rescue them from some kind of bad behavior or a bad situation where the school isn't protecting them.  They don't tend to home school for very long, just long enough for their parents to feel like they have gotten past some life crisis of immoral or illegal behavior or simply a dangerous situation.  So they don't tend to be part of the homeschooling community for very long and they tend not always to be the kinds of people you want to spend time with when they are.  I remember a play event where my mom brought me a boy to play with and pre warned me that this boy was into some bad things and that if he proposed to do anything illegal or immoral that I should feel free to reject his ideas of a fun time.  During one of these visits he told me about how he wanted to grow up to be a hacker or a drug dealer because that was how to make a lot of money.  Even if the kids were well behaved and not spending their time with you making crude gestures and crude jokes and planning their future criminal life, I'm an Aspie, which means that I won't necessarily be able to become friends easily with anybody just because you throw them at me.  I had some play visits where I just sat there and watched the other kids play video games that I had never played before and couldn't easily learn because I had never played anything more complicated than a sega genesis.  If I hadn't been so well integrated into the social life at church, homeschooling would have been an utter failure for me at allowing me to have a social life.

So was I glad that I was home schooled?  Yes and no.  I was traumatized by 5th and 6th grade enough when 6th grade was in the elementary school, that I think I would have been severely damaged by middle school.  Maybe by high school that would have all calmed down.  Before I left the public school system I would have my mom call people to ask to play based on which kids weren't making fun of me, and then those kids would start making fun of me just to get the message across that my friendship wasn't wanted.  So I think socially and emotionally it gave me a valuable break that allowed me to recuperate in preparation for the epic control battles with my mother that ended with me pushing her out of my life in many ways.  I managed to do this in a way that left her proud of me and left a path forwards for the relationship to continue to develop in a positive way.  But I don't know how I would have managed dealing with middle school and early high school and the battles with my mother at the same time.

If I had to do home school over again and I could change something about what I did academically, it would be that instead of just doing the one class at Montgomery College as a 15 something year old I would have dropped almost all the classes I was self studying and tried to get an associates from Montgomery College before I turned 18.  That would have been a much better investment in myself than the self study courses I was doing and would have prepared me for life much better than the distance studies courses I started taking from George Wythe College.  For whatever reason having me take more college classes from the community college just never occurred to us.  Which is really too bad.

Chaos in Stillness, and Stillness in Chaos

Today I stood in the bathroom, looking at my wife and kids.  The three year old, or T as we have been abbreviating him online, is sitting on top of the toilet kiddy seat, completely naked, telling me about how he is sitting on the potty like mommy and daddy.  I’m glad he’s so happy about this.  Most of the day he’s been vomiting and unable to eat, or sleeping.  The 1 year old L is sitting in the sink, playing with the breakable travel alarm clock we keep on the counter and my breakable electric razor before I take it away again.  My wife is about to try to read to me out of the bible as I try to get both the kids into the bath.  Most nights I’m not home for this, and the last several times I’ve come home from work after the kids have had baths there was water splashed half way across the bathroom floor.

But at least during that moment of chaos, I’m holding still.  At least on the outside.

A few weeks ago we invited someone over to dinner.  With two kids our meals can be something more like a zoo feeding time than a ‘proper’ dinner.  But we try to laugh and have fun with it anyways.  Trying to hold intelligent conversation, eat, fend off the two little bandits trying to steal my attention and my cup of water, and figure out all of the social communication signals involved with having someone new in my environment is hard.  Probably about a week later I’m still internally freaking out because I don’t know if how we use cloth napkins might have communicated a confusing contradiction because cloth napkins normally are used at more formal events and in reality our chaotic dinner habits are born of trying to feed two small children in a hurry.  Our guest was very politely following a formality of etiquette that I am aware of but unfamiliar with, leaving me unsure how to interpret what it means when they used it in a complete mismatch to the chaos of the situation.  But if you took a photograph of our meal, any given moment might have looked calm enough.

At work the other day my manager praised me for having won the most fake money on our team for use at the year end company auction.  Apparently I had 11 customers who gave me 100% scores on good customer service after our phone calls (apparently not many other people got so many) and I practically never miss work or even come in late.  On the surface it looks good.  Underneath, I’m going crazy from the stress of strained relationships from having too little time away from work and school, strained relationships with myself from having too little time to invest in myself, financial goals that seem just out of reach of our income unless we fight for each dollar, chronically almost incomplete or almost late school work, and just trying to make myself slow down the pace of my inner life.  Some days my stress is so high that my acid reflux never really calms down between meals and I spend my time at work massaging my stomach to help relieve the tension building up inside of it.  I sometimes stop being able to digest my food fully- I’m not joking that happens to me when I’m on the danger zone of being stressed out.  I feel so mentally exhausted that even asking my customers names seems like too much to ask.  I frequently forget and have to ask at the end of the call, but honestly I just feel too exhausted to care.  As for making multiple sales pitches per call, forget it, I feel great if I can make myself offer them just one sales pitch.  I’ve still never figured out how to make even one sales pitch to a 3rd party monitoring tech support company that calls me because their connection to the customers modem went down- they aren’t the decision makes and probably never even talk to the decision makers other than when their monitoring contract was drawn up.  And how do you even start to think about selling our own IT support to an on site IT specialist?  “Hey just so you know Mr. Local IT, we have this great product that will make your boss lay you off, want to pass the word along to see if your boss wants it?"  But if I forget to make those two sales pitches my quality stats will suffer.  If I don’t make the calls shorter eventually someone is going to freak out on me and threaten to fire me again.  So I still stress about it all, even though I still feel too exhausted to even care some of the time.  I need to reinvest in me, but where do I start when there isn’t very much of me left to go around any more?

I like to say that trying to take care of my own emotional well being is like driving a car with a broken gas tank indicator.  I don’t tend to know I’m low on emotional energy until I run out.  Sometimes I hit bottom, and won’t even be able to tell what’s happening to me until I’ve had to stop and think about it.  By then I can be pretty messed up.  So I try to reboot my self care, start trying to read books for fun between calls instead of doing low quality homework because I can’t concentrate very well at work anyways, try to force away some of the urgent things in life so that I can just relax a while with my wife.  Try to force away some of the stupid things in life that suck the energy away from me but give me little back.  Take a few moments I’m getting dressed for the day to read something uplifting  Try to spend more time romping with my kids.  Life never stops, even if I wish I could take a vacation from it every once in a while.  But for those few moments that I spend relaxing with my wife, reading something uplifting, or tickling my kids, I try to approach stillness that is on both my inside and my outside, even if its just for a few moments.

Over the rainbow

While visiting my parents in their new place I explored a little loft they had for a grand kids playroom.  It was a very emotional experience.  Seeing all the little toys that we had played with growing up it felt like someone had taken a bunch of my memories, put them in a box, shaken them, and then poured them out all-out of context.  One toy in particular caught my attention.  There was a little plastic toy music box shaped like a radio that played over the rainbow.  I can still remember seeing it on the shelf at the store and imagining that if I moved the little blue slider up and down that it would play different "channels" or songs but I was pretty happy that it just played over the rainbow.  I really liked musical toys growing up and this was one of the three that I at times insisted should play simultaneously while I was going to sleep.  Finding it in the playroom, my son took a liking to the box and insisted that I play the song over and over again so he could listen entranced while watching the little display showed pictures of kids flying over a rainbow.

Growing up involved its hard knocks.  I was ordered twice to leave the home and never come back and once walked the streets for a good part of the evening before a member of the church found me and took me back home.  I can remember being screamed at to ask if I thought my mother was stupid because I couldn't accept her word as perfect truth 100% of the time even on matters as trivial as what size clothes would fit me or not, being told that I would never accomplish anything in life, being laughed at for being stupid to try to motivate me to think harder on math problems, being told that I was inherently untrustworthy to figure out life skills my own way, and being punished as intentionally rebellious when I honestly had trouble figuring out all my life skills as fast as was wanted.  I rarely had any issues where I intentionally and blatantly tried to defy my parents, but was treated more or less like I was on a pretty regular basis.  Or there were the ways my emotional needs were kind of steam rolled over to make room for the emotional needs of other family members.  These are memories I more or less try to avoid.  They don't bring me happiness to dwell on them.

I prefer to remember how I beat the system and convinced my mother that I wasn't evil.  Like how I chose to have my biggest fight with my parents where I intentionally defied them  about whether I was being an evil rebel child for staying up late to read my scriptures more.  If you pick the right ground to fight on its hard to loose and I won my parents respect.  I won what one of my sibling told me at the time was the first time in which any of us had convinced my mother that we were privileged to conduct our own direct conflict resolution with another sibling instead of having it all controlled and done in isolation by my mother.  I remember doing the math to prove that the rate at which I was doing my homeschooling work had me on pace to complete everything we had planned before I went to college almost an entire year early- that kind of shot down the you'll never get to college put down that I was zinged with on a regular basis before.  I remember being put in situations where a lot of parental support was withdrawn to intentionally try to make me fail at something to force me to accept increasing levels of control and I fought back by achieving my own independence- simultaneously withdrawing my trust in my folks while winning their respect.  These are victory memories which helped define the kind of person I wanted to be.  But victories happen in battles, and battles happen with a lot of bloodshed.  You can be glad you fought the battles, but you don't want to relive them.

Listening to that little music box play over the rainbow was a reminder of all the bright moments, times when there was joy and peace.  The memories of the song aren't about how I survived emotional abuse or even about any other person but me.  Its about laying in bed quietly waiting for sleep while thinking about hope.  Its about finding joy in the beauty of music.  Its about remembering that there is something more to your past than just the dragons you had to slay to survive growing up.  Or a smile or laughter that spilled out often in spite of the circumstances, because life is just a happy place.

"Family Life" education

A while back there was a bill proposed in Utah  that would have allowed school districts to opt out of teaching any sexual education and prohibit (if I recall) any mention of contraception.  After a great deal of controversy, it became clear via polls and public outcry that the plan did not have public support.  It was passed by the legislature, vetoed by the governor, and in the following election the man who introduced the bill lost his re election bid.

To put context on this, Utah law already bans encouraging contraception use (though not mentioning that it exists) and parents are allowed to opt their children out of sexual education as it exists.  The sexual education as it exists will depend on the school district, I believe my wife stated that the only sexual education done in her school district was a quick meeting where they told you to anticipate the development of secondary sex characteristics.  And that was it.  Not much to opt out of.

The debates on the subject of how much sexual education to put in school often seem to come back to the idea that we are afraid of "giving kids ideas."  The thing is, kids have dumb ideas all the time without any adult having to tell them about anything.  It reminds me of a job I had doing customer service for a cell phone company.  There were countless parents who called in shocked that there was an enormous charge on their bill showing that their child had been using text messaging.  They often tried to claim that their child didn't know how to text message because they hadn't taught them how.    My coworkers and I used to jokingly tell these parents that if their kids are in school, have friends, and have a phone they know how to text.  Nobody has to show them how for them to figure it out.  Similarly, teenagers have all the relevant anatomy, the correct hormones, and coed environments.  Even if nobody tells them "how" to go about getting pregnant reliably, teenagers inherently have all the ingredients necessary to have lots of clueless sexual interaction.  On top of that we live in a rather sexually obsessed and saturated culture.  Not talking about sex only makes it so that the doors of communication between the school or parents and the child on the subject are shut, it doesn't actually keep the child from receiving lots of sexual communication, much of it unhealthy and attached to negative social stereotypes and roles.

Certainly sex ed is awkward.  Even though I never attended it in public school myself (parental opt out), I had to deal with classmates who were trying to find a way to relate to all the new information that was dumped on them and in a poorly disciplined classroom this led to several awkward moments where students sat around discussing whether their bodies were mature enough to achieve ejaculation or drew pictures of penises (with smiley faces) on the blackboard.  The solution to awkwardness isn't to run away though, and in the situations in which I grew up, better discipline in the classroom could have solved most of the problems.

I tend to view sex ed for teenagers like drivers ed.  We expect children to grow up and probably use a car daily in navigating their world.  Learning to drive isn't automatic like learning to breathe, so we have drivers ed requirements where society does something to help make sure everybody knows the basics to help keep them safe.  Similarly we hope that children will grow up, form relationships, and have families (or shall we say it, we hope they will have sex) as part of a normal emotionally healthy life.  Overwhelmingly, the human goal in life isn't celibacy.  There is nothing automatic about learning to have healthy relationships with emotionally and physically satisfying sex in them.  There are plenty of parts the schools certainly can't help with, but plenty they can.  Just like we don't raise children with a goal in life that they should be unable to drive, we should stop talking about sex ed as if the goal for our children was for them to be celibate.  Sure there are limits on that.  We don't put toddlers in drivers ed and we don't include nascar driving or drag racing in the list of skills for teenagers to master for their drivers license.  Similarly, we can choose what information to give to teenagers in sex ed.  There is no reason we need or want teenagers to be able to recite the Kama Sutra or recite all the sex tips that were talked about in last weeks grocery store magazines.  But some basics are a good thing to help them form safe and healthy relationships that we expect some day will be sexually satisfying.  Since in our culture families and friends haven't been reliable sources of information (too scared, too embarrassed, too whatever it is) some teaching in schools can be a good thing. 

Natural Childbirth

So Bonnie Jean and I had been looking more seriously at natural childbirth.  Our first child had a very long wait between induction and the epidural being given because labor was progressing too slowly for the epidural to be given.  We had little training for the labor process and didn't know what we were doing.  It ended up being a lot of pain until they gave up and decided that even if she wasn't dialated to a 3 she should still get the epidural.  As soon as she had the epidural the pain went down, she relaxed, and the labor proceeded quickly.  She couldn't walk around or really do anything about the pain because they felt strongly that the moniters should be attached at all times unless she was going to the bathroom, she had an IV, and as a result was essentially tethered to the bed.

So we really wanted to know some options to allow us to work around the stuck phase before an epidural would be possible.  We did do some self study on the bradley method.  The basic concepts he talks about seemed nice, but the nicest parts of them seemed to have been incorporated into the other methods that are widely promoted.  The stats supporting the method seemed encouraging but lacking scientific rigor (like giving a high percentage success rate when only measuring the people who decided not to change and get an epidural half way through the process).  The supposed bad practices being railed against, as far as we could tell, had more to do with the past than the present.

Labor woke my wife up at somewhere between 3-4 AM.  She woke me up around 4:23 when contractions were about 8 minutes apart.  Before we could finish gathering up to go they were coming at 4 minutes apart.

When we got to the hospital they insisted on keeping her hooked up to the monitors during most of the intake and medical questionnaire process.  She wasn't feeling so great at that point.  Once they were done they let her walk around, which felt much better, but she still was feeling like she might probably want an epidural.  We thought we'd try the hospital hot tub next.  That was marvelous, the water helped take the pressure off her back, the heat relaxed her, and things went along swimmingly.  They insisted on checking her again with the monitors since no one had bothered hooking up the portable monitors they had available.  Then, frankly I think they forgot about us.  It was only supposed to be a quick stop for a short monitoring and then back to the tub.  Bonnie Jean was feeling so miserable I went and asked someone if they couldn't hurry up and let us back to the tub.  They checked her again and discovered the hot tub and worked so nicely that she had gone to an 8.  The OB/GYN had another surgery waiting on her so she wanted to break the water in hopes of causing the labor to finish up rapidly.  They moved her into a classic birthing table posture, and being stuck on the table on her back being unable to move around made things miserable, hard to relax, and progress kind of ground to a halt.  Because the anesthesiologist was in surgery, the epidural wasn't an option and narcotic painkillers have a history of making Bonnie Jean feel nauseated and loopy.  So with the exception of some local painkillers injected in anticipation of stitches etc we were pretty much a drug free childbirth.

She started to feel like she needed to push very badly, but was still only between an 8 and a 9, not really ready to give birth.  Eventually it got to a point where there was only one edge of the cervix on the side that hadn't gone anywhere.  They kept telling her to bear down a little bit so they could watch what happened to see how likely it was the baby could get past that little bit of swollen cervix that was left, which left neither Bonnie Jean or I certain whether we should be working on relaxing or pushing because we were being asked to do both more or less at once.  That part of labor was extremely painful because we essentially lost control of the relaxation.  Eventually, the doctor felt that she could just hold that part out of the way and the baby could come past it.  The final part of labor was again very painful, none of the "if you push hard enough you won't feel a thing except a mini orgasm as the baby's head clears" the natural birth promoters were promising.  The doctor injected a painkiller on the part of the cervix that was refusing to retract, which helped some, but it was still some of the worst pain I'd heard my wife go through.  Perhaps if she had been given a more realistic option to stand or move around during the final part of the labor process she wouldn't have been in so much pain, but who knows.  Encouraging her to bear down a little bit to see what would happen when they weren't really wanting her to bear down was NOT a good idea from a making sure the contractions actually accomplish something perspective.  They only stopped telling her to do that when they decided that keeping up their little experiment was going to tear her cervix.  If she had an epidural perhaps that method would have been fine because she would have been in less pain and better able to relax or bear down at will.  But when the relaxing has to happen against an extreme backdrop of pain the whole thing was making it harder for us to do anything useful.  And breaking the water might have been ok if Bonnie Jean could have moved around.  They were just hoping that labor would become so rapid at that point that they wanted to be ready to catch the baby.  Perhaps in most cases that would have worked.  In this case, because it involved having to hold still on the labor table it kind of backfired.

In general I'd say if you are considering natural birth go for it, but be ready to be forceful about not being forgotten about stuck to the monitors for any longer than necessary.  If you have a hot tub at your hospital definitely try it out, it was amazing for us.  Don't let anyone promise you a painless paradise of the baby gliding into sight.  If the pain is managed right and there aren't complications forcing you to do things that interfere with the techniques it can be much more comfortable than it might be.  But don't be surprised by or disappointed by a painful labor.

Since the contractions became less productive as soon as we were out it made us wonder about water birth.  We don't care at all about the theories that supposedly since a baby is in a water type environment before birth exiting into a water environment will be better.  We did like how being in a hot tub allowed Bonnie Jean to profoundly relax in a way that she wasn't achieving elsewhere.  The contractions were so effective in this state of relaxation that she moved from a 4 to an 8 in something around three and a half hours.  We don't know if this would be the case at any typical center offering water birth.  But that hot tub, combined with vigorous massage, verbal support, walking, and moving around was a good ticket to effective labor.

Biking

Today in class we were supposed to write down the factors that were barriers or benefits we felt directed whether we walked, bicycled, carpooled, used public transportation, or drove.  When I stopped to think about it, my feelings about bicycling kind of made me laugh.

To put this in perspective, Bonnie Jean and I owned a car when we got married but didn't really feel we could afford it so we sold the car as soon as we could.  I ran all the errands for almost the entire time bicycling a week of purchases on my back every week.  The weight could become so intense I'd get headaches from supporting it on my shoulders and Bonnie Jean insisted I purchase a set of saddle bags which I was very grateful to own once I had them.  I would bike when it was sunny, when it was rainy, or even if it was snowing.  About the only time I didn't bike is if the roads were one solid layer of ice.  We would rent or borrow a car occasionally for out of town trips and special occasions, but only rarely.  Even with the saddle bags my grocery trips would become so extreme I'd often get comments on the way out of the store as I might have two saddle bags weighed down with heavy liquids like milk, cereals and other light objects filling a large backpack, fruit/bread and other delicate dangling from loops tied to the back pack on the back and shoulders, a frozen pizza wedged behind my back and the backpack, and maybe one or two bags hanging over the handle bars for good measure.  We were avoiding about a 150$ a month for the car payment, 150$ a month insurance payment, and 30$ a month in gas by living this way.  All in all that's 3960$ a year.  It contributed greatly to our ability to begin saving and investing money when we were making very little.  It was the only form of exercise I had but I made good use of it commuting to work, school, and running errands.  At my height of strength during the summer I was such a speedy cyclist I once left the front door of my apartment at the same time as one of my coworkers and beat them to work even though our route included a 50 mph highway.  Granted, I did some crazy stuff to do that like cutting through empty parking lots to avoid stop signs and honing my traffic pattern to avoid having to stop at as many stop lights.  While I walked into work I called out to my coworker, only then exiting her car, that she should go get a bicycle if she was in a hurry to go to work since I beat her there.  I only tried that once, I had such a bad asthma attack from the exertion that I couldn't talk properly.  I think my boss thought I was crazy.

Was I crazy?  In many people's eye's yes I was being completely crazy.  I was living married life with no car in a town with bad winter snowstorms and minimal public transportation.  We only bought a car when we were supposed to get temporary custody of my nephew because I couldn't imagine any way I could bike home a giant box of diapers along with what I was already trucking around town.

Now my biking isn't any where near as extreme as it used to be.  When it snows I drive.  Bonnie Jean does the errands in the car or by bus and I mostly bike the work and school.  The car is ours free and clear, our emergency savings goal of having all our insurance deductibles and three months of living expenses saved up is 50% funded, we have an investment portfolio far beyond what most people my age or at my income level could manage, and considering everything the student debt I have is growing a lot slower than it might because I'm using the tuition reimbursement program at work to pay myself back the large majority of those loans.  A part of this foundation was built by my asthmatic lungs puffed me along 50 miles per week by bicycle trying to avoid higher living expenses anywhere we could by visiting sometimes 2-3 stores per week searching out the best deals on food prices.  So how do I feel about bicycling?  I feel really macho.  Which is hilarious because that's not normally the way I view myself.  Just the sheer amount of physical effort directly contributing to our financial well being has always made me feel more like a man.  I suppose that's one reason to keep cycling.

Take me with you

Tailesen these days either becomes very upset when I'm trying to leave.  He's very adept at spotting when I'm getting ready to go and the other day when I was trying on new gloves to see how they fit with my coat he became very upset thinking I was trying to leave and insisted I hold him and read him a story to reassure him I wasn't going anywhere.  The other day when I was trying to gather things up to go he brought his shoes to me and sat down for me to get him ready to go to.  I think he'd really like to just come with me.

I think I've figured out a large part of why he wants to spend so much time outside, is fascinated by bicylces, and tries to get me to carry him to work.  Its the same phenomenon as when I can sometimes get more work done if I mostly close the office door than if I close it.  If its closed he knows he's been denied access and therefore tries his best to demand entrance.  If its open but mostly shut, he's more likely to think I'm just being boring.  Going to work or school with me is something he never gets to do.  Repeatedly denying access just reinforces that it is something special.  Also, he sees me bike away at one time of day and then hours later sees me come back still riding the bike.  I bet he thinks I spend the whole time at class zipping around on the bicycle.  If daddy loves the outdoors and bicycles that much, it stands to reason he should like them too.  Maybe one day we'll set up a bicycle trailer and I'll have enough time to take him zipping around town.  So far, its not happening.

Laundry, toilets, and persistance

My son loves to play games where he takes objects in and out of containers.  A perfect opportunity for him to play these is when Bonnie Jean sorts laundry.  As a standard part of laundry clothes are taken out of the dryer, put into a basket, removed from the basket, folded, and put back into the basket.  If he's lucky Bonnie Jean will even put him inside the laundry basket as she empties the laundry from the drier so he gets to enjoy all the warm clothes as they come down and she'll let him ride inside the laundry basket as it moves to the living room for sorting.  Laundry, from his perspective,  means put things in, take them out, wave them around and rumple them, and put them back in the white plastic laundry basket.

So Bonnie Jean was doing laundry and he was doing his best to participate in the general taking in and out and waving around involved.  He noticed another white plastic container in the room that he hadn't ever used in this game before.  Mommy almost never made a fuss about him playing container games with the laundry, so it was a perfect opportunity.  He grabbed my white Sunday shirt and proceeded to try to stuff it into the kitchen trash can.  Bonnie Jean tells me he was being quite persistant on this point and really really wanted to stuff my white shirt in the trash.

Then again, Bonnie Jean often is telling me these days about how persistent he is.  One of his favorite things is running splashing water.  When we start running his bath water we can hardly keep him out of the tub.  I've given up and started putting him in the tub while its still filling so he can admire how water comes out of the facet.  I have to get him most of the way washed while the water is still running because as soon as its done he'll probably decide its time to get out fairly soon afterwards.  This is all fine and dandy, but we use a diaper sprayer to clean the poop off the cloth diapers into the toilet.  This means that several times a day we make running water spray and splash into the toilet.  Very few things rivet his attention so well.  Since he can pull up on furniture now and is learning to climb it can be a struggle to keep him out of the toilet water.  A while ago Bonnie Jean tells me  he learned he didn't have to give up just because she was between him and the toilet.  He even decided he didn't have to give up when he crawled around her and she blocked him with her leg.  He climbed into the tub, explored a bit till Bonnie Jean had forgotten to watch out for what he might do next, and climbed over the edge of the tub on the side near the toilet to splash in the toilet water.  Just like Mommy, who was still trying to squirt the poop off the diaper.  I got home and Bonnie Jean told me "Your son is very persistent."  Whenever she says that, I know I'd better ask what he did this time...

Happy 4th

Bonnie Jean and I celebrated the 4th by setting off our own fireworks.  I'm guessing we set off about 25 all told.  Not the up in the air kind that were just legalized here, but the cheaper smaller ones that stay on the ground.  Or, at least they are supposed to stay on the ground.  There were a couple that were supposed to spin more or less in the same place on the ground that decided to shoot off side ways and one which levitated onto my neighbors balcony (or at least that's where we think it was headed, never found it again afterwards).  It was fun.  Setting off their own fireworks was a family tradition for her growing up and I had never done it before.

This fourth hasn't felt as sunshiny for me as some in the past.  I've been studying American History post civil war and its harder to talk about being the land of the free when you understand just how recent our understanding of the idea of freedom actually is.  I read a document written by a black man looking back on world war one when he complained about facing the enemy guns abroad and the lynching mobs at home and how tempting it was to simply sit the war out and try not to commit to a nation that hadn't committed towards their safety and freedom.  Or the history of the migrant workers who faced violence, restricted civil rights, and absurdly dangerous working conditions.  Its one thing to speak nostalgicly about all the ethnic minority immigrant groups making up our melting pot nation and another entirely to read about how only about half of the melting pot people stay since they by and large came as migrant workers looking to save up some money to take home to europe.  They weren't very melty and its only later looking back you can talk about how wonderful their integration and naturalization went when at the time depending on the group, place, and time there were mobs that would form to drive ethnic minorities out of town to keep the land and the work available for the 'pure' white race.  Laws were passed so that these ethnic minorities sometimes couldn't vote, couldn't own land, couldn't testify in court, weren't allowed to intermarry etc...

Now, based on my studies the Holocaust completely changed our views of human rights and what was right and wrong concerning racial evaluations.  But once you know all the nitty gritty about how we got here, the surprising thing isn't that its a land of the free.  Its traditionally been a land free for specific groups at specific times.  There are other places you could say well if you only look at the empoered group then sure its a land of the free.  Closer to the truth I think is that the US is one of the first places were certain kinds of thoughts entered human consciousness about human rights and that those ideas have been expanding over time.  And that's a very different from saying it a land of the free.

Solvency

Budgeting isn't something that is always easy with children around.  When the nephews and niece first came to live with us we tried to redo the budget as part of a park play trip.  Supposedly the two older children would watch the baby and play with each other while we worked the budget.  What actually happened was the two older children mostly ignored their baby brother and our budgeting was interrupted more or less continuously by making sure he didn't wander off the park and get lost and I think even (if I recall which day this was when it happened) by a prolonged search for a shoe which was thrown backwards into the underbrush of someone else's back yard as part of a game of catch.  So the finances were never reworked the entire time they lived with us.  Between me finishing off my first degree, both of us working, and taking care of our nephew even after the older children left we never had a chance to sit down and look at things.

When we took the leap to Bonnie Jean not working, we did so based on a financial analysis that was incomplete.  Basically, we made sure there was going to be enough money for day to day living expenses.  Since then we have redone the budget to include all those once a year expenditures like buying Christmas presents and found we were lacking.  Since Bonnie Jean not working has been an important improvement in our relationship health we have kept trying to figure out a way to make sure we had more money coming in than going out.  Some of the things we've done I don't think we ever expected to do.  Diapers and other disposable hygiene products including napkins have been replaced with cloth reusable.  We've changed cell carriers (lower rates), replaced my bike (avoid using gas), purchased a second freezer (to allow us to store frozen foods when they go on good sales), and aggressively purchased foods when they were on sale.  Assuming the interest rates from out bank accounts say similar to what they are now, we can finally say that including all of our yearly predictable expenses and meeting the savings targets we have planned for (which aren't as high as we'd like but they're something) we now have a predictable $15 excess cash per month.  And that's assuming we spend every penny we have budgeted and Bonnie Jean has been so aggressive on keeping food expenses low we're an entire week ahead in grocery costs.  We also have our crisis savings fund 3/5ths funded, which I think is the highest its ever been considering our 3 months living expenses prediction and all insurance deductibles goals are also the highest they ever have been because of having a baby.  Last I checked, our retirement investments are worth about 19k and Taliesin's college trust even has $90 in it.  It's taken a lot of effort to get to this point and honestly I'm thrilled.  Bonnie Jean is very relieved to finally see the numbers saying that even with all the money we were saving that there is enough money coming in to pay for what is going out.  Feels like we've finally done it.

Memorial day

So I don't really have any memories of celebrating memorial day growing up.  I have no idea where any of my nearest related dead relatives are buried (though I'm certain I could easily find out).  I've enjoyed visiting the national cemetery before, but its different thinking that the person in the ground is connected to you.

It was a very different experience celebrating memorial day with my in laws.  The family dinner, well, lets say I was a little busy shoveling baby food into my son's mouth to be paying much attention.  But visiting the grave sides was very different.  I started thinking about what I would want on my own gravestone.  Probably an outrageous pun if I could think of one that would ease people's memory of me.  It tugs at the heartstrings seeing the little grave markers for children who died very young and thinking about my own son.  I hope he outlives me by a long time.  I'm glad to have had a chance to visit the grave sides.

Speaking in Church

I suppose I'm finally considered an adult, first time ever being asked to speak as one of the main speakers on a subject in a family ward on a special occasion.  In any case, the Bishop requested I speak to address the concerns and feelings of women who were not mothers on mother's day.  He recommended I use as a text the talk on The Eternal Blessings of Marriage by Richard G. Scott.  He requested I cover the subject from the subject material of who women are and how they should be treated.  I didn't end up using Elder Scott's talk much because its all about how to treat one another within marriage and part of my target audience is, shall we say, unmarried women.  And most of what he had to say was about how wonderful marriage was and how we should treat our spouses wonderfully.  Not specifically about the concerns of women without children.  Given that I'm a married man with a child the talk suffered from problems of me having to establish my authority to speak about such concerns and also from cultural balancing issues were I can't talk about the concerns and feelings such women have without brushing up against and possibly being somewhat critical of the cultural dynamics that create those concerns in the first place.  If I don't go far enough I'd be rather irrelevant to actual concerns, if I state the problems with too little delicacy it comes across as an offensive attack on LDS beliefs.


I was only informed of my assignment to write this talk a week and a half ahead of time and only 3 days of that time period were after my finals were done.  So lets say this was a rush production.  I'm very pleased with how it turned out, however, and several members of the ward thanked me for my comments profusely.  Since I figured getting this talk right mattered a lot more than my privacy, I included things that I normally don't talk about.  Several parts I actually changed when I actually went to say them, for instance I said "I think it was a miracle I married such a wonderful woman" instead of leaving it as stated in the original planned text.  This would have been more polished, but I finished it at 1:30 AM on Sunday morning.  So, here is the talk:

After five and a half years of being married, my wife gets to celebrate Mother’s Day today for the first time as a mother.  We had planned to start having children as soon as we had the medical insurance, but soon after getting married we discovered that unless we found a cure for some medical problems we had, we would likely never have any children at all.  With little money, even less medical care, and major life crises that repeatedly interrupted our progress, it was far from certain that Mother’s Day was ever going to be for us instead of just for our parents.  After three years of trying, a lot of prayer, and the help of an excellent doctor we were finally blessed with our little son.  I like to say he’s our little miracle.

There are so many ways he’s our little miracle.  Neither Bonnie Jean or I were likely to marry at all in the first place, the medical condition we faced is rare enough many doctors are unfamiliar with it, and the pregnancy was difficult enough at the end that the doctor had us coming twice a week just to make sure our son’s heart was still beating strong.  As wonderful as our little son is and as much joy as he brings to our hearts, it doesn’t change the reality that miracles don’t always happen.  We like reading of such miracles in the scriptures and there are many examples including the birth of Samuel, Isaac, Samson, John the Baptist, and arguably even Christ himself.  But there are some things I’d like to point out about these miraculous births.  First, those mothers weren’t blessed with children because they became more righteous.  The scriptures explicitly describe these women as being extremely righteous and several of them had lived long lives without children before the miracle happened.  Second, the scriptural pattern suggests that if the Lord hadn’t had in mind for them an assignment to raise a specific child to do a specific thing, they would have remained childless.

Though having children is something we yearn for, not everyone gets the same assignments in life.  Speaking of children in this way reminds me of when I applied for a mission call.  When they raised the bar they not only decided to raise the spiritual bar, but also the medical requirements so that mission presidents could focus on leading groups of missionaries and not patients.  Even though my medical problems are mild enough no one would have dreamed they’d disqualify me under the older rules, no matter how many months I spent trying to convince the missionary department otherwise, I was honorably excused from serving.  The Lord didn’t have that calling and assignment in mind for me and not because I had committed any moral transgression.  It was still difficult to live with at times because in the past we let serving a mission practically define what it meant to be a worthy spiritual 19 year old man in the church.  Similarly, I think we accidentally let motherhood be the definition of worthy womanhood.

No one would criticize the prophetess Deborah, who helped Barak to defeat the Canaanite King Sisera, because we remember her for something other than the children that we don’t even know if she ever had.  What matters is that she received assignments from the Lord and fulfilled them.  Today on Mother’s Day I think we should pay tribute not just to the women who have had the opportunity to be mothers, but also to all women who have touched our lives for good.  From my own life, I can still recall a seminary teacher I had who was so Christ like that it didn’t even matter what she taught or what she said in her lessons, I could learn how to be a better person just by watching her actions.  The compassion she would express in describing someone, the comments she would make about our spirituality, and the love she would express in describing some of the more disruptive students in our class would tell me volumes about how to love people.  I knew another woman who recently passed away as a consequence of an epileptic seizure who used to come to church wearing a bicycle helmet to protect her head if she fell during a seizure.  The helmet always had flowers in it.  If there was anyone who could take a problem in life in stride with grace and dignity it was her.  Her gentleness, happiness, and love she always seemed to be overflowing with brought happiness to those around her.  She and her husband were always ready to serve, as I can well remember when one of the major portions of the work we had to do for my eagle scout only worked because they helped me.  I can also remember an elderly mother and daughter in our ward who were probably the best geneologists I’ve ever known.  They used their own family names to send our ward youth to the temple for monthly baptism trips on a regular basis.  We had a good-sized mutual program and probably cleared through several hundred names each time.  When the trips stopped if I recall it was because the bishop felt some of us youth were too rowdy for the temple, not because we had run out of names.  I can remember my trombone tutor who said she always had wanted to either have a lot of children or teach a lot of children.  She never had the children, but made up for it with the many she taught.  She demanded excellence and enriched my life as I learned to appreciate music and play the trombone.  She didn’t only teach in public schools and in private tutoring but also organized trombone choirs and sponsored me into summer bands and competitions that I couldn’t have entered easily because I was home schooled.  We as a church have many opportunities to celebrate the goodness, the accomplishments, and the contributions made by the women in our midst married or unmarried, mothers or not mothers.  From the writing of the hymnbooks we use, the founding of the primary, the vital work of the Relief Society, and many other contributions that women have made we cannot forget the women in the church.  We honor women who sacrifice so much as mothers, but just like for Deborah sometimes God might have in mind a different kind of miracle in mind.

In Isaiah chapter 54 we read:

Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord.

Though Isaiah was describing the house of Israel and the latter day church as a whole, this promise is a powerful reminder that no matter what seems to be the situation now, in the eternities God has not forgotten us and is eagerly and powerfully desiring to bless us. The future of the House of Israel couldn’t be predicted from how many children Abraham had when he was 85 years old, so God’s approval and future blessings of us can’t be guessed just by looking at whether we are married and blessed with many children.

When I was a teen, my mother sternly told me that if she ever heard of me disrespecting any girl that I would be in the biggest trouble ever.  My father was an excellent example in respecting my mother, so I tried to take the message to heart.  I started watching my leaders and teachers in the ward to see how they treated and talked about their wives and former girlfriends.  One of the most prominent good examples I saw was my seminary teacher and her husband.  I got to know them fairly well over the years because besides being my seminary teacher my father and I were their home teachers and their family company later hired me.  I never once saw either of them say a disrespectful word against the other or any moment where frustrations seemed to become more important to them than their affection.  I’ve tried to imitate the intense goodness and affection they showed and also the level of respect my father has shown my mother ever since I can remember.  While marriage is a marvelous place to build and polish the skills of love and self-control, we shouldn’t forget that the basic principles of treating one another with respect are the same in and out of marriage.  My mother’s admonition that I had to treat all women with respect wasn’t just proper because I might marry one of them or because it was practice for how I’d treat my wife later.  It was important because she wanted me to be the kind of person who didn’t feel that I could disrespect a woman just because she was a woman.  May all the women in our lives receive the courtesy, respect, and honor from us that they deserve as children of our Heavenly Father.