RedLake Redux

Posted on April 4, 2013 by admin

As entries from my old, defunct blog at blog-city become relevant to my friends from Sandy Hook, they will find their way into my new blog.  I wrote this after the Red Lake tragedy, but I’m reposting for the Sandy Hookers:

Red Lake 3/27/05

This is not even remotely writing related, but I have such an intimate connection that the Red Lake, MN community is all I can think about today. But the connection doesn’t feel as close as it would have six years ago, or even three years ago. Just as I am no longer who I was before the shootings at my school, neither am I who I was when I was still so totally drowning in the tragedy.

I do remember wanting so much to talk to someone who had been through it. I would have given anything to be able to sit down with someone from Jonesboro or somewhere like that. I wanted to know that there really was light somewhere at the end of the tunnel. Now, I wish that I could talk to the teachers at Red Lake. I would tell them that it’s a long row to hoe. They (whoever “they” were) told us, right after the shootings, “This is not a sprint; it’s a marathon.” God, truer words never spoken.

I’d tell the folks in Red Lake that there will be so many days that you are sure you are going to break to your knees and just spend the rest of your life kneeling in the dust, puking. You will be so damned angry when you have to keep pulling yourself to your feet again because people keep expecting you to go on living. It gets easier, though. And then it gets hard again. You want to give up and no one will let you. Honestly, it’s like that for years. And then you start to find that you can live with it. You never get over it, but you can live with it.

Finally, you reach a point where you can walk away from it. It’s still there with you, always—every day—but it’s on the periphery. It’s a place you stumble across unaware more and more rarely. You know where it is and get better at avoiding it. Unless you want to go and visit, stand at the edge and look it all over. It’s familiar territory in your soul, but it feels different each time you go back. After a while, you can let go of all the useless questions and futile wishes that it could have been prevented. In time, you understand that it’s senseless to beat yourself or anyone else up over it.

It’s like going back to stand on the bank of a lake you nearly drowned in once—a lake that took people you love. You can choose to go in again or not, but you’re not drowning anymore, and you have to work to remember the exact inflection of their voices, their quirky gestures, their smiles. I know so intimately what those teachers and students are going through at this minute. They still aren’t entirely convinced it isn’t a dream. There’s still a part of them waiting to wake up. They are clinging to each other and pushing away well-meaning outsiders. They feel violated by the media. They feel so helpless and sad and angry. They are looking around at their community, and it seems at once familiar and strange, because they have changed, and they will never see the world the same way again.

This, too, they will come to live with. The survivors among them will even find an odd comfort in it. It’s impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t been through it. Soon, the rest of America will begin to point their fingers at whatever they believe was “wrong” with the Red Lake community. They’ll come up with inane theories about Native American culture or the Neo-Nazi connection or stick a microscope into the boy’s dead grandfather’s life and the way he was raising his grandson. I won’t be listening. We are members of the same club, but I am not a member of their community. I may understand what they are going through more intimately than most of the rest of the country, but I wasn’t there, and I am not one of them, and I cannot begin to judge.

There are so many people affected by this. Teachers’ marriages will go on the rocks, and their spouses will want to shake them until their teeth rattle to “snap them out of it.” Community members will see profound changes in their young people. Some changes will make them sad, others will seem like changes for the better. Those changes won’t last. The bonding, openness, caring, will gradually fade as the kids who experienced this grow up and move on, and the new teens become normal kids with all the old issues. This brings its own pain and frustration—a sense of losing what good there was to be gained.

All I can do is pray, and I know what to pray for. I pray that the people of Red Lake will dig deep and find a wellspring of courage and strength they never knew they possessed. I pray that they will find the ability to remain compassionate toward each other, despite the soul-searing agony each of them is experiencing individually. I pray that they will be able to keep their eyes inward, and not allow the rest of the world, people who do not know them and only think they understand them, to define them. For the families of the victims, I pray that they can find some comfort and some positive way to channel their pain and anger.

At the same time, I know that’s a tall order. I know this is a long and rather depressing entry. I apologize for that. I guess I’d just like to wrap it up by wishing you all well. We all have things in our lives that we’ve had to rise above. I’ll be sending out an extra prayer for everyone who could use a little comfort and a little extra strength. Peace be with you.

Posted in Columbine, Life, the Universe, and Everything | Tagged | Leave a comment

Creedless, Spiritual, and Religious

Posted on February 25, 2013 by admin

This blog entry is brought to you by this book review: “Spiritual-Not-Religious or Just Lazy?”

It caught my eye because so many people I know describe themselves as SBNR and because Peter Morales, the President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, has been spending quite a bit of time discussing this group and their close cousins the “nones,” the growing number of Americans who check that box when asked to describe their religion.

Once again, I find myself frustrated by the absolute unwillingness in our culture to accept the idea that a person can be truly, deeply religious without believing in a personified, sentient deity.  A number of years ago I was reading an article in an education journal that described the demographically “average” teacher.  She was described as female, in her early forties (which I was at the time), married, white, and religious.  “What do you know?” I said to my son, who was sitting next to me at the time.  “I am exactly demographically average in my profession.”  To which he replied, “Religious?  That’s pushing it.”

That boy grew up going to church every Sunday, and more often than not, his grandmother and I were his Sunday school teachers.  I had missed family dinners on a monthly and sometimes weekly basis throughout his upbringing to attend church committee meetings and rehearsals for church plays.  And if the problem were merely that he saw me going through the motions of our faith without practicing it, that would be one thing, but my faith infuses every aspect of my life—the way I do my job, the way I interact with my family, and the way I treat strangers.  He questioned my religiosity because I do not believe in a personified, sentient deity and I doubt any kind of afterlife.  He lives in a society that insists that, without this set of beliefs, there can be no religion.

But I am a member of a religion, and I am orthodox in its practice, because here’s the thing, my religion has no creed; it’s all about the practice.  Being a Unitarian Universalist does not require me to believe in any single set of scriptures or any deity or an afterlife.  It requires me to affirm and promote the following:

  • The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
  • Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
  • Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
  • A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
  • The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
  • The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
  • Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

I would argue that living by these principals 24/7 requires ruthless self-examination and genuine repentance when I fall short.  (In religious terms, which is the context I use here, to repent means to feel genuine remorse and endeavor in all ways never to commit the same error twice).  In short, it requires rigorous spiritual practice.  It must be done religiously.

At work today, a colleague and I got into a discussion we’ve had before.  It’s the general “public education is going to hell in a hand basket” discussion.  The almighty tests are designed to manufacture a crisis in schools, and they’re doing a great job of it.  The ultimate goal of this manufactured crisis is to get schools to be complicit in their own demise so that schools can be privatized and the haves can gain an even greater advantage over the have-nots.  It’s working like a charm.  A more detailed explanation of this would have to be the subject of another blog, because it wasn’t the point of contention today.  My colleague and I agree on this.  The point of contention was whether or not we should just give up.  Her daughter is in 3rd grade (the first year kids take the state test) and had such a terrible experience that my colleague is considering exempting her from the test from here out.

This is an important part of how the test is designed to undermine public schools.  Her kids get exemplary scores.  If she exempts them, the school must average in a zero instead of the high score her daughter would surely earn.  The more parents who exempt their bright kids from the test in hopes of avoiding the passion-killing effects of the damned things, the more zeros average in, lowering the school’s scores and reinforcing the illusion of crisis for those who wish to privatize education.  I was arguing that by exempting her child, she was aiding an agenda that would ultimately leave the poor without access to quality education.

Her argument is that the demise of public schools is inevitable at this point.  The wheels are set in motion; public schools will ultimately collapse, and the best she can do is look out for her own child. She says one person cannot stop this.  I say that every single person who sees this situation for what it is must try.  She says it’s futile.  I say I have to do it anyway.  She is thinking rationally.  I assert that I am thinking religiously.

Yes, that’s right.  I’m a UU who just juxtaposed “religious” and “rational.”  While I don’t think that religious thinking has to preclude rational thinking (in fact, it shouldn’t—that’s the mess many religions get bogged down in), it is a different kind of thinking.  Rationally, I can see my colleague’s argument that the task is beyond her individual influence or even her professional one, and that she has far greater influence over her own child’s progress.  But if I am to live my faith, I must affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, justice, equity and compassion in human relations, and respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.  Since I also believe that strong public schools are necessary to these things, I have to do everything I can to preserve them, including subjecting my own two children to that clusterfuck of a state test every year they were required to take it, because their scores would be helpful to their schools though they were meaningless to them.  Doing everything in my power to preserve public schools is, for me, a religious mandate.  How is that any different from a Catholic opposing abortion on religious grounds?

And don’t try to say it’s different because God doesn’t figure into it for me.  God absolutely figures into it.  I may not believe in a personified, sentient god, but I believe that I am a part of something much bigger than me, that to live in service of that greatness, I must live my faith.  Poetry and mythology have personified death.  The fact that it is not actually person-like does not mean it isn’t real.  I feel the same way about God, and while you may disagree, what it all comes down to is this: we’re talking about religion, so in the context of this argument, what I believe about God is as valid as what anyone else believes.  Other UUs may not use the word “god” to describe what I’m talking about, but they get it, I assure you.  In the end, when I go to church on Sunday, I join in community with others of my faith who serve the greater good, regardless of what they call it, in whatever capacity they can.

We got religion.

Posted in Education, Life, the Universe, and Everything | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Roads Not Taken

Posted on February 12, 2013 by admin

Since I’m an American lit teacher, it’s pretty much de rigueur that I love Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”  I don’t know about you, but I have always tended to view two friendly paths, dappled in shade, but mostly sunny.  As described, one is more worn than the other.  I’ve thought about it differently this past weekend.

I found myself saying several times to various people that they are entering a dark forest, and they must keep in mind that, no matter how dark it gets, every step in is a step out, because the only way out is through.  I went to assure them that sunlight lay at the far edge of the forest.  I kept my focus there on the way to Sandy Hook.

Of course, many of their questions were less about what lay ahead than what path to take now.  I could tell them the paths I’d taken, but there were other ones I’d passed up, and you know, “way leading unto way” and all that, I could tell them I wish I’d taken some, but I can’t really know whether those would have gotten me through the wilderness any faster, any easier, with any fewer contusions on my soul.

I wish I’d said yes to meds sooner.  I wish I’d found a better fit in a therapist, rather than giving up and going it alone.  In part because I didn’t go it alone.  I wonder how much more arduous my choices made my husband’s journey.

I wonder who I would have been when I reached the other side if I’d taken those other routes.  Would I have become an author?  Would I have left Columbine in 2002 never to return?  Would I have left at all, even those two years?

I mean, who would I be now, and would I like her as well?  All modesty aside, I very much like who I am now.  Would it really have been better to medicate earlier and take a therapist along with me? It’s so hard to know what to tell people.

I do know that I would spare them the pain of the journey through these woods, but I can’t, and it wouldn’t be my place anyway.  They’ll find their own ways.  They’ll call to one another in the darkness, as we did.  Kiki and I will keep cheering them on, shouting “Keep coming! Keep coming!”

And they’ll make it.  The teachers I met have mettle.  They are hurt, and sad, and angry, and confused, and all the things we were, but I hope we looked like we had half as much grit back when we were six weeks out.

The paths before them are dark and scary, and none are all that well traveled (thank God).  The folks at Sandy Hook, too, will choose.  They will be glad they made some choices and wish they’d made some different ones.  I hope we all stay in touch throughout the journey.  I so want to greet them as they come to the far edge.

Posted in Columbine | Tagged | 5 Comments

A Little Perspective

Posted on January 31, 2013 by admin

I wrote this for an upcoming edition of our Jefferson County Education Association newsletter:

I’m in a contemplative mood as I write this.  The weather is gearing up for snow, and my colleague and I have just finalized our plans to fly to Newtown, Connecticut, where we will try to give the teachers from Sandy Hook Elementary a bit of an idea of what it will be like, now that they have joined the club we at Columbine joined 14 years ago.  It’s an association no one enters by choice; they get dragged in at gunpoint.

As horrible as it is to be in the circle of schools that has experienced a shooting, there are blessings in it, too.  I know, unequivocally, what the worst day of my life was, and no day since has touched it, though some, like the death of my father, come close.  Put into that perspective, fender-benders and student meltdowns are nothing.  Nasty parent emails are nothing.  The line at the grocery store is nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

A fourth grade teacher at Sandy Hook has written to us of her good friend, Vicki Soto, one of several heroes on December 14, who gave her very life for the safety of her students, and this reminds me of how important teachers’ bonds are to our students and to each other.  They are bonds no one else can understand, bonds we, ourselves, are often unaware of.

I know what it is like to have long-standing animosity with a colleague dissolve in gladness to see each other alive.  I have learned how coworkers can hold each other up through the hardest of times, and when I feel cranky or short-tempered with one, I think of what I know he or she would do for me in a crisis—a real crisis, not a snippy little exchange over shared materials—and I get a sense of perspective. It was hard to do this before the shootings, hard to imagine what my most difficult colleague would be like if one day all hell broke loose.  It’s easy for me now. Those who can learn this lesson without the terrible price are well ahead of the curve.

This is part of the hopeful message my colleague and I will take to our friends in Connecticut: They have a long, hard, rocky road to travel, but they will forge bonds that last, rising above politics, personal choices, and the passage of time.

I am Facebook friends with many former students, a lot of them from the year of the shootings and the hard, hard years after.  They are in their late twenties and early thirties now, and we often disagree passionately over things like the size and role of government and the amount of gun regulation required in this Frightened New World.  But our conversations don’t ever devolve into the nasty exchanges that sometimes happen online.  In the end, not one of us can dehumanize the people we suffered with so deeply, the people with whom we laughed in our darkest hours.  My former students will never forget the feel of my arms around them as they wept over coffins, and I will always remember the days they spoke softly and worked hard without prompting because they could tell I was struggling.

In the wake of tragedies like the one at Sandy Hook Elementary, people talk about how deeply they are affected, and of course they are, but sometimes I think the world would be better if we all suffered to the same degree over those.  It’s not because “misery loves company.”  It’s because suffering is universal.  Because the poet Countee Cullen was right:

Joy may be shy, unique,

Friendly to a few,

Sorrow never scorned to speak

To any who

Were false or true.

Because if we all shared in some suffering equally we could never dehumanize anyone; we would all know that getting cut off in traffic is nothing, that when the chips are down, our bonds will trump our differences.

This is what I will take with me to Sandy Hook Elementary when I visit with my colleagues.  Then I thought, what the heck, I’d offer it to you, too.

Posted in Columbine, Life, the Universe, and Everything | 5 Comments

Special Offer

Posted on January 24, 2013 by admin

A few years ago I wrote a romance novel that both my agent and I loved, but I do like to take on some fairly serious themes in my romance novels, and while Kensington had been willing to let me do that with the first three novels, the market had changed enough that this fourth novel was a much harder sell.  It wasn’t that anyone felt it wasn’t good; it just didn’t fit the market.

This ended up becoming a problem for me as both a reader and writer of romance.  I like a little substance; nothing too heavy—it is, after all, a romance—but some.  That’s why I ended up changing genres with Hester.  There was more freedom in historical fiction (though even that is tightening up, too).

Anyway, this is one of the cool things about the opening up of the publishing field.  While I’m still a firm believer in traditional publishing houses, self-publishing offers authors and readers a chance to explore beyond the safe confines of “the market.”  At last, with the help of my fabulous agent, I get to release the book we both loved: That Kind of Woman.  It’s already getting some lovely reviews at NetGally calling it “a smashing historical romance…very entertaining and sensual” and “a wonderful escape for the afternoon!”

It is the story of Miranda Henley Carrington, the Duke of Montheath’s bastard daughter with his mistress of 30 years.  The book opens with Miranda’s scandalous marriage to the Earl of Danford—all pretty standard romance novel fare, I admit.  On this foundation, I have built in many of the problems a family today might have, things we believe are “modern” problems, but that are really just human problems: issues with soldiers returning from war, parent/teen conflict, and all the ways the love in one’s heart may conflict with the expectations of those around us.

The book comes out in ebook and paperback through just about every online retailer out there, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble, on January 31.  On my Facebook page, I’m offering a bonus read to anyone who contacts me through Facebook by February 28, 2013:  I have written a 30-page prequel, the story of how Miranda’s bold and shockingly straightforward mother ended up with the illustrious Duke of Montheath.  Contact me through my Facebook page and I will email you a PDF of “Oh, Mistress Mine” for free.  Also, please pass this link along to anyone you know who loves historical romance novels.

Happy reading!

Posted in Writing and Being a Writer | Leave a comment

Trashy Novels and Tragedies

Posted on December 21, 2012 by admin

I’ve been torn pretty much in two about this blog.  On the one hand, I really should be promoting those ebooks right now—my agent has made an investment in them, and frankly, so have I.

On the other hand, it seems awful to be thinking about anything commercial right now.  I often post after tragedies about that process, but I just haven’t had it in me.  This one has hit so very, very hard, and what I’m feeling hardly goes with the holidays and romance novels and happy endings.

But what the hell.  It’s the last day of the world, and I’m up for a challenge.  Yes, I’m going to write about my romance novels.  Why?  Because they saved me.

Stop me if I’ve already told you this…  See, it was my husband’s idea that I go back to writing as a way to get my head out of the darkness that had enveloped me in the years after the shootings.  The first book, the one I’d started in, like, 1988, stopped around 1990,  and finished in 2001, is really bad, but it helped.  I felt a little better.

Then I wrote Into His Arms.  Life was feeling really out of control.  I was watching good people suffer.  The politicization of education was just picking up steam.  Bush was still governor of Texas, but his good buddy Bill Owens decided to model Colorado’s schools after Texas’s, and we started getting all dolled up for the test-taking orgy that was about to begin.  I saw, way back then, the mess we’re in now coming, but teachers who questioned the wisdom of this new system were simply accused of not wanting to be held accountable.  I was grieving for the kids we’d lost, the person I’d been, the job I’d loved.

So I wrote a book about a woman who was about to be literally forced into bed with a man whose agenda and smug self-certainty she found appalling—a Puritan minister named Owen Williams.  (Scroll back up; who was Colorado’s governor at the time?)  She had to leave behind the quiet sureness of her old life, question her foundations, and find solid ground again.  I reveled in getting to be the goddess of my world.  Everyone got what they deserved: good people lived happily-ever-after, and a certain minister burned down his own house (but sadly, he burned the church, as well).

Then I wrote For Her Love, and I gave a woman with PTSD a happily-ever-after, too.  I went into the darkness of slavery and gave people light.  I gave them freedom and control over their lives, and I started to get mine back, as well.

By the time I wrote Nobody’s Saint, I was ready to just have a good time, but I wove into it the reminder that no matter how alone we may feel, we are part of something timeless and much grander than we can see from our limited perspective.

So if the days seem too dark, take in the lights on your street, and don’t let anyone tell you that the escapist stuff you read and/or write is trash.

Posted in Columbine, Education, Writing and Being a Writer | Tagged | 1 Comment

Contest!

Posted on October 23, 2012 by admin

I’m hoping to get 100 “likes” on my Facebook author page.  Once I hit that milestone, I’ll draw a name from the list and give away a free paperback of Into His Arms.  If you already have that one, I’ll exchange it for For Her Love.  Head on over and “like” Paula Reed (author).

Posted in Life, the Universe, and Everything, Writing and Being a Writer | 1 Comment

Relaunch of Into His Arms

Posted on October 17, 2012 by admin

The ebook version of Into His Arms, the first book in my Caribbean trilogy, is now available.  For all that I said I’d never self-publish, I am glad my first three published books don’t have to die just because they’re out of print.  Besides that, since Hester came out, I’ve had a number of folks ask me if any of my previous books are available, and now I can say yes!

The story of Geoff and Faith is dear to me.  It was a huge part of dealing with my PTSD, in many ways a literal lifesaver.

Also, check out the new cover!

If you didn’t have a chance to buy the paperback version in 2004, you can buy the ebook at: All Romance, Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, and Kobo.

Then, on November 15, you’ll be able to buy the next in the trilogy, For Her Love, the story of Geoff’s first mate, Giles.

One more thing: I hope you’ll like me on Facebook!

Happy reading!

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Spanking

Posted on October 2, 2012 by admin

I actually posted this the first time in July of 2006, when my son was 15 and my daughter 11.  Recently I was in an exchange on Facebook regarding a photo of a man and his child on the street, the child holding a sign reading “I lied to my dad.”  There were a lot of views about whether this was take-charge parenting or bullying.  My position was, and still is, public humiliation is not an effective method of conflict resolution.  As a parent, I would not model that for my child. After a few comments about my own parenting style and how I handle conflicts with often very difficult kids at school, someone suggested I write more.

I’m starting with this recycled entry from my old blog, and I’ll probably add more later. The original post was the result of an email from a gentleman who used to send emails to me when responding to my blog, preferring to do that rather than leave comments. He suggested that I write about spanking children.

I was spanked, as were the vast majority of my friends. You know those little toy paddles with the red rubber ball attached on a piece of elastic? I imagine they’re made of plastic these days, if they’re still made at all, but when I was a kid they were wooden, and my parents broke the ball off and used the paddle on our backsides. The wood was sturdy enough to cause a sting, but the paddle broad enough that it couldn’t do any real damage. (We are definitely talking about a spanking, here, not child abuse.)

My mother, being the one who spent the most time with us, spanked far more often than my father, but my father’s spankings hurt more. Then again, it may have been psychological. I was such a daddy’s girl. It killed me to make him mad enough to spank me. My brother and I had been known on more than one occasion to take the paddles out to the neighbor’s trash on trash day and bury them in the can as it sat on the curb. I paid for this one day. My mother, unable to find an official paddle, dug one out of my toy box, broke the ball off, and let me have it. Mental note: leave official paddles where you find them. It was a consequence to be avoided, but I didn’t fear my parents or suffer from long-term damage to my fuzzy-wuzzy little self-esteem (FWLSE).

In my studies to become a teacher, I had to take a lot of child development classes. The more I thought about discipline, the more I realized two things: The first is that teachers manage thirty or more children at once, and they are not permitted to use corporal punishment, so obviously, a single child (or two or three) can be managed successfully without hitting them. The other is that I wanted to make it very clear to my own kids that hitting is not an acceptable means of conflict resolution, and kids learn from what you do, not what you say. My brother and I did get into physical fights, and he’s three years older than I am, so you know who generally won those. (Then he got spanked for hitting his sister.) At any rate, I decided that I would not ever hit my children.

My husband said we couldn’t pull it off. He was convinced that it was impossible to raise well-behaved children without hitting them. Now, he’s right in there with me in supporting the idea of raising kids without spanking. For one thing, from the very beginning, I tried to go with logical consequences first. If my toddler son hit the dog with his toy fire truck, the fire truck was taken away for the rest of the afternoon. I also worked hard to “catch him being good.” When he was being appropriate with the dog, I’d say, “Oh, you’re being so sweet to Brandy. See how much she loves being with you when you pet her so nicely?”  Time-out was a last resort. If you use it too much, the kid figures out that it’s really no big deal. I also felt no compunction about saying to him, “I don’t want to be with you when you are behaving this way.” That’s an important life lesson. No one wants to be with you when you’re acting like a brat. Bear in mind that I also told him how much I enjoyed being with him when he was behaving appropriately, so I wasn’t just ragging on his FWLSE.

When time-out was over, I would pull him onto my lap and ask four questions: 1. What did you do that landed you in time-out? 2. Why was that not okay? 3. What were you feeling when you did it? 4. What would be a better thing to do the next time you feel that way? I did this with him EVERY time. He was not allowed out of time-out until he had provided thoughtful answers, even when he was only three years old. He quickly learned that he got out of time-out faster if he started thinking about how he would answer the questions before the time was up, which meant that he did exactly what I wanted him to do in time-out. He thought about his actions in a productive way.

By the time he was four, he went through these questions before he acted, making good choices for the most part, and avoiding punishment altogether. I haven’t had to really punish him since then. Every now and then he makes a poor choice, but we simply have a more sophisticated review of those four questions and it’s sufficient.

My daughter was a bit more of a challenge, at first. For one thing, when I’d sent my son to time-out, he stayed put and cried pitifully. My daughter would not stay there. I had to hold her there. Now, any reinforcement of a behavior, even if it’s in anger, is reinforcement. (Got that in a child development class.) If I held her down and scolded her, she’d keep doing it. So I held her down and gazed calmly out the window, refusing to look at her or talk to her, despite the fact that she was screaming and struggling and pitching a fit. I had to do this on six or seven different occasions before she finally gave up and stayed where I put her. Also, she never got to the point where she’d think about the questions in time-out. The debriefing process was much longer, because the questions always seemed to take her by surprise. At one point, though, she just made the jump to thinking before acting, skipping the intermediate part of thinking while in time-out. Nonetheless, by the age of four, she was staying out of trouble, for the most part.

Is this an incredibly time-consuming process? Yes. Was it worth it in the long-run? Oh, yeah. The end result is that people often comment on how “lucky” I am to have such well-behaved children. My daughter had a bit of an adjustment learning to keep her mouth closed in school, so we put her on weekly reports and enforced consequences at home at the beginning of each school year (which was when she’d always test to see if her latest teacher didn’t mind chatter-boxes). We’d keep this in place for the first four weeks or so, until she got a grip, and the rest of the school year would be fine. By third grade, she got the message—we were just as consistent about this as we were about everything else. Now she gets straight A’s in citizenship. All this, and my children have never physically fought with each other. Oh, they drive each other crazy in the back seat of the car, committing such abominations as touching, breathing on, and looking at each other. They are far from perfect, but neither one has hit the other one in anger since my daughter was a tiny toddler and still learning not to hit.

In the end, I don’t think that either hitting or time-out is what makes the difference. It’s really about consistency. The out-of-control kids I’ve known are mostly out of control because consequences are not consistent. Sometimes they’re allowed to do things and sometimes they’re not. They attach consequences to what kind of mood the adults around them are in, rather than to their own behavior. Also, parents have to take the time to teach their kids how to think. Those four simple questions I asked them covered the most important things to consider when choosing a course of action. If I do this, will it be okay? What will the consequences be? Why do I want to do this? How can I meet my needs in a way that won’t cause unwanted consequences? Yes, it’s hard to do all of this, especially with the needed consistency, when your kids are small. Every time I had to turn off the stove in the middle of cooking dinner or take a break in a shopping trip that I’d hoped was going to be a short one, I promised myself that it would pay off in the long-term, and it has.

Time warp back to 2012:

My son is almost 22 and my daughter 17.  I wouldn’t change a word of what I wrote before. One thing I would add is the way those four questions cultivated a sense of the importance of relationships and compassion.  The answer to the second question, “Why wasn’t that okay?” usually revolved around things like “because it hurt…” (the dog, my sister, my friend, whomever) or “because it was…” (mean, dishonest, dangerous, etc.).  The third question allowed them to own their feelings.  It was always okay to be angry or frustrated.  They weren’t in trouble for their feelings, or even their attitude.  They were in trouble for their actions, and actions have consequences–not so much the time-out, but the hurting of someone’s feelings or the violation of a very important, fundamental value.  As I said, I started this as soon as they were old enough to verbalize these ideas, even in the simplest terms, so considering them would become second nature.  It’s worked out well at our house.

The other thing I’ll add is that both of my kids work with kids.  My son’s summer job is at a day camp for 10- to 12-year-olds; my daughter works with 2- and 3-year-olds at church every Sunday.  Both get high marks from supervisors for being able to firmly manage children’s behavior without hurting or humiliating them.

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Luke (Again)

Posted on September 24, 2012 by admin

Five years ago tomorrow, the world lost a good man.  After I learned about this, I wrote an entry about him in my old blog that his family was gracious enough to ask me to share at his funeral.  Well, the old blog is gone, but my good memories of Luke are not, so I am posting it again here, in case you missed it the first time:

Luke 9/28/07

I want to tell you all about a former ACE student.  His name was Luke Milam.  Years after a student graduates, I tend to remember images more than specific events.  When I conjure Luke in my mind’s eye, he is standing at the end of one of the long tables in the classroom, because he wasn’t a boy who liked to sit.  He would, if he had an assignment to do, but the minute he was finished, he was on his feet, usually surrounded by friends, talking camping, cars, girls, whatever…  

He didn’t much like school.  Of course, that describes the vast majority of ACE kids, but he did well in ACE.  Every year, we have a handful of kids who are very successful in that class because they are essentially smart kids, it’s just that no other class has been so suited to their learning style.  In ACE, Luke was a great student.  One of the best.  These are the kids you know will succeed out in “the real world” because they have what it takes as long as they find something they love.  Luke graduated in 1999.  It wasn’t the best year to be a senior at Columbine, but it was what it was.

  I have come to understand that Luke found something he loved: being a hospital corpsman in the Navy, caring for injured Marines through three tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.  He was awarded the Purple Heart, two Combat Action ribbons, two Good Conduct medals, a National Defense Service Medal, a Global War on Terrorism Service Medal and two Sea Service Deployment ribbons.  What did I tell you?  The kid was bound to do well once he graduated.

I’ll be seeing Luke again this Thursday, or, more accurately, I will be seeing his flag-draped coffin at his funeral.  He was killed last Tuesday by a rocket near Musa Qula, Afghanistan.

My ninth-graders and I have just finished Antigone, an ancient play in which a proud ruler’s hubris prevents him from listening to the will of the people in his kingdom or the counsel of wise men and seers, which leads to his downfall.  The play also asserts that to lie unburied and unwept when the battle is done is the cruelest fate for a warrior.  I understand why Luke was sent to Afghanistan better than I understand why he was sent to Iraq, and he was a healer more than a warrior, but one thing is sure:  He will be buried with full honors, wept for by his family, friends, comrades-in-arms, and at least one former teacher.

In pace requiescat, Luke.

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