What I Gave Up for Christmas

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 6 Comments

I already have one of my main New Years’ Resolutions – to simplify. I am quite sick of feeling overwhelmed and exhausted and for a variety of reasons, life will become even busier in the next year. While it isn’t even January yet, I’ve already started applying this philosophy to my life, starting with Christmas. I love Christmas traditions, but I’ve decided that these just aren’t worth the effort – at least not this year.

Merry Christmas!

1) Baking cookies for my co-workers. I like giving my co-workers gifts for the holidays, but between federal ethics requirements and my own cheapness, baked goods are the best bet. However, with only two weekends that we’re actually in town, both filled with other holiday activities, finding the time to do this just wasn’t happening. Ideally, baking cookies is a lovely activity to do with your child, but I’m not giving away anything a two-year-old has helped bake. And cramming it into the three hours between Sprout goes to bed and I do just sounds rushed and unpleasant. While I know my boss likes snickerdoodles, he’ll just need to make them himself this year.

2) Sending out Christmas cards. I always feel like a crappy friend when I start getting Christmas cards and haven’t sent any out myself. I was going to do a photo collage this year, but after both CVS and Walgreens totally screwed up our orders last year, even that seemed like too much work. As we’ll be home for two weeks with grandparents eager to babysit, maybe I’ll send out New Years cards. Or maybe not.

3) Being obsessive about buying local/ethically. I am a huge proponent and fan of buying ethically, especially toys and gifts. But as the mother of a young child who doesn’t have unlimited time or energy to flit around in local boutiques (many of whom don’t want a two-year-old pawing their stuff anyway), I just did the best I could. I tried looking in our local Barnes and Noble and at Powell’s Books online for the specific books I wanted, but neither of them had them. So Amazon it was for those items, as much as I hate their lack of corporate responsibility. I reassured myself that 1) at least I tried, 2) individual actions aren’t the end-all and be-all, and 3) by buying thoughtful gifts, there will be less waste altogether.

4) Not buying all of the gifts myself. I still was the one to pick out the large majority of the gifts, but I actually sent Chris out to purchase at least a couple of them. After all, he’s the one home during the week! It’s a pain to drag a toddler around a store, but it’s still less impossible than me doing it during my work day.

5) Not seeing Santa at the mall. Sprout got to see Santa twice – once at the mall with Chris’s parents without us and at Sesame Place with my parents – which is really enough. Instead, we waved to him as we passed by; he even waved back. It’s all about teaching the kid small pleasures.

6) Elaborate decorations. I’ve never been an elaborate decorator, but I’ve always wished I could be. (Albeit never like my mom, who actually made all of the Christmas ornaments for the entire tree one year.) This year, I stuck some of Sprout’s Christmas books on the coffee table, put Elmo in a mini Santa suit (which is actually for a wine bottle!), and pulled out our wooden nativity. It’s got some holiday cheer and some religious aspect. That’s enough for me.

7) An intolerance for singing stuffed animals. I generally forbid singing toys in my household for their lack of educational value and high level of personal annoyance. But my mother-in-law adores singing animatronics and gifted Sprout a Christmas tree that croons “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” last Christmas. Both of them absolutely love the ridiculous thing. So out it came with the rest of the decorations, along with a piece of my sanity. Sprout’s enthusiasm thankfully dwindled after the first 30 times or so playing it in a row.

8) Feeling guilty for these things. I’m still working on this – as you can see from all of my justifications above – but this is probably the most important one of all. There’s far too much guilt and shame in my life for not living up to my own unrealistic expectations. Like everything else in life, the holidays are exactly what you choose to make them. I’m at least trying to choose peace, hope and joy.

All Aglitter: ZooLights at the National Zoo

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

My son’s eyes and mouth went wide when he spotted the blue tree. Festooned in lights, it was far from anything natural, but it was sure pretty. This past Sunday, we attended ZooLights, an annual month-long event at the National Zoo that turns it into a winter wonderland.

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Trudging up the big hill to the Zoo from the Metro station, I yelled, “The lights! We’re almost there!” We were greeted with a wall of sparkling blue, transforming into a melange of additional colors as we got closer. A sign proclaiming ZooLights featured a red panda wagging its tail, a likeness of the naughty animal that escaped the Zoo last year.

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While most of the real animals were sleeping, a whole menagerie awaited us in lights. Hummingbirds flapped their wings, snakes swayed, lizards smacked flies with their tongues and an eagle joined its mate in a high-up nest. My favorites were the surreal ocean animals and the quirky naked mole rats. Sprout seemed to like the anteater slurping up ants as they came out of their hill, although he shied away from the snake.

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We did see one animal, although it was sleeping. We received a stuffed bison from my uncle for Christmas, so I wanted to show Sprout a real one. Unfortunately, as Sprout said, he was “a little scared” by its size. While he had nothing to be afraid of at the zoo, that will serve him well if he ever visits out West at least.

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But Sprout’s favorite part wasn’t even inside anyway – it was the model train display inside the main visitor’s center. Thomas and Friends, along with a Lego train, chugged by zoo animals, miniature town halls, storefronts, fishermen crabbing, and even chefs breaking down the seafood on the beach. Sprout could have stood there all night if we’d let him. Judging by the crowd of kids against the fence separating them from the trains, he wasn’t the only one.

The Visitor’s Center wasn’t the only busy place – the whole zoo was pretty full. While the event is normally very popular, the 60-plus degree weather really drew out the crowds. I’d imagine there were long lines to get food or go on the rides (like carousel or slide), but it was fine if you just wanted to see the lights. We only noticed it when there was a bottleneck.

We ended up seeing a little less and leaving a little earlier than expected because Sprout was falling asleep in his stroller. While he usually likes to get out and walk around a bit, he just responded with a sigh and “no” whenever we asked. His eyes were fluttering when we got back to the Visitor’s Center, where we planned to change him into pajamas in the hope he’d sleep on the train ride home. Of course, that was invigorating and he didn’t come even close to falling asleep until we put him in his crib.

However, his newfound energy did come in handy when he and Chris caught sight of “Panda Claus,” a person in a panda bear outfit with a Santa hat. Sprout thought high-fiving the panda was just fantastic and mentioned it several times on the way home. I suspect he was a bit disappointed when I showed him the actual, cute but kind of boring pandas on the Zoo’s PandaCam yesterday morning.

Besides the lights themselves, one of the things I like best about ZooLights is the price -free!  It’s easier on my wallet, which is nice, but it also opens it up to a lot of families who might not be able to participate. A lot of Christmas activities are astoundingly expensive – looking at you, Ice at the National Harbor – so it’s great that this is open to everyone.

While we don’t have too many Christmas traditions yet, visiting the ZooLights is very likely to become one of them. In fact, we’ve already promised Sprout that we’ll be back again next year.

Always Be Yourself. Unless You Can Be Santa; Then Be Santa

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 5 Comments

How can anyone dislike Santa Claus? However, my relationship with him as an adult is a bit ambiguous. While I hate lying, I’m a storyteller at heart. I hate the modern-day commercialism around Santa Claus, but love the magic of the toymaker myth. So I thought I was going to have a lot of heartache about how to treat Santa Claus when Sprout got old enough to understand him. But I think I’ve come upon an approach that makes sense – emphasizing the idea of Santa Claus as a character rather than an actual person.

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It certainly helps that Sprout is the most familiar with Santa as a character rather than a real person. We already read about Santa in books, from ones as simple as Biscuit’s Pet and Play Christmas to as weird as Lemony Snicket’s The Lump of Coal. The un-reality of Santa is emphasized even more by the fact that Santa isn’t even human in all of the books – in Pete the Cat Saves Christmas, he’s a cat, and Merry Christmas, Ollie! features Father Christmas Goose.

Through these stories, we can talk about whatever parts of Santa we want to, instead of the dominant cultural version. We’ll emphasize the idea of Santa as a generous toy giver who brings gifts because he loves people, just as we give each other gifts because we love each other. (And to tie to the actual religious part of Christmas, because people loved Jesus and brought gifts to him.) We won’t touch the “good girls and boys” nonsense with a ten foot pole because I’m already ideologically opposed to using toys as rewards.

Now, distinguishing between a character and a real person sounds terribly naive when talking to a two-year-old. But while little kids have difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality, it doesn’t mean that they’re incapable of it. Contrary to 1960s British “moral campaigner” Mary Whitehouse’s position, kids back then did not actually believe that Tom Baker (then playing the Doctor in Doctor Who) was actually drowning for the entire week between a cliffhanger and resolution. Even Sprout, who is only two, knows that characters in books are not “real.”

So when it comes time for him to find out that Santa isn’t a “real” person, I hope that this approach allows us to acknowledge the fundamental fiction of Santa while maintaining the magic and spirit. An excellent book for doing this, which is also had the most heart-breaking first chapter of anything I’ve ever read, is The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, by Julie Lane. (There’s a couple of other books of that name, but this is the best, obviously.) The beautiful part of it is that it roots Santa Claus and the traditions associated with him in tragic, beautiful, real world (albeit still fictional) circumstances while maintaining a little of the mystery.

Besides “Santa as story,” I think it’s also important when the time comes to provide some explanation as to why we’ve been pretending to be Santa this whole time. Fortunately, even that’s rooted in an idea that Sprout understands – cosplay! Because of our foray into costuming for Baltimore Comic Con, he already understands that sometimes adults wear costumes and pretend to be characters because it’s fun. Clearly, people dress as Santa because everyone wants to be him. People dressed as Batman or Groot aren’t actually Batman or Groot, but it’s fun to pretend we are. And who wouldn’t want to be Santa? He gets to give out presents, eat cookies, ride on a sled pulled by flying reindeer, and only works for a month a year (I assume production at the North Pole starts in late November).

No matter how we get there, I want to teach Sprout that we are all Santa for each other. While there’s no single jolly old man in red dropping off presents, we can act in that spirit by giving each other gifts and reaching out to those in need. Instead of Christmas becoming an orgy of consumer receiving, we want to frame it as a gentle season of generosity. And if I can teach him that, the magic of Santa will always be in his life.

Making the Most of A Very Furry Christmas and Thanksgiving at Sesame Place

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

Making the Most of a Very Furry Christmas and Thanksgiving at Sesame Place. (Photo: Very large statue of Elmo dressed as a toy soldier.)

While bringing a toddler to Target while you’re heavily pregnant can be an adventure in and of itself, our family longed to find something a little more travel-oriented. Simultaneously, we wanted to avoid a giant influx of toys at Christmas. To us, spending money to make memories via experiences is more valuable than a huge pile under the tree. (Even if my husband does love the visuals of that huge pile.)

But where could we go in the beginning of winter that was kid-friendly, relatively near Washington D.C., and not staggeringly expensive?

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A Time of Giving Thanks

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Thanksgiving is a love or hate it holiday, largely depending on how you feel about your family. While I disagree with my extended family about many, many things – shockingly, not everyone shares my very liberal views on politics or theology – I both love and genuinely like them. So having most of my extended family together on my mom’s side this Thanksgiving was pretty awesome.

Both of my parents are from northern New Jersey, land of traffic and Wawas. While they high-tailed it for upstate New York, many of my relatives stuck around. When I was a kid, we’d always make the three hour trek down to my Aunt Linda’s house for Thanksgiving, bringing my mom’s signature dishes of mushroom dip and cranberry mold.

Thanksgiving at my aunt’s was the host for a variety of “coming-of-age” experiences. In my late teens, I realized I was seeing my extended family get seriously tipsy for the first time. They were drinking port and playing a movie trivia game when my conservative uncle imitated the bit in Ace Ventura when Jim Carrey talks out of his butt. Although I couldn’t drink, it felt like I was getting initiated into an odd, vaguely uncomfortable club. Similarly, a visit a few years ago revealed how big the gap between my viewpoint and others were when a simple conversation about my job steered into a comment about young-earth creationism in literally one sentence.

Since then, Chris and I haven’t been back up there often. It was difficult to leave the D.C. area between his work schedule and a new baby, and when we did, we’d go up to our hometown. But since Chris’s parents were visiting his sister this year and we didn’t to drive between 6 and 10 hours to Albany for a long weekend, New Jersey made a lot of sense.

In some ways, it wasn’t all that different from when I was a kid. The trip was about the same length and I sat in the backseat. However, instead of reading quietly, I was throwing random entertainment sources in front of Sprout. At various times, I sang at least ten verses of Old McDonald, drew random letters on his knock-off Magna-Doodle, discussed the intricacies of Elmo, and switched between reading Kakfa and the Little People Let’s Go to the Farm book.

Arriving there, we experienced an outpouring of hugs and kisses from the relatives, to which Sprout responded with shock. While he knows my parents, being in a new place with a lot of new people dazed him. He wasn’t upset, but whenever anyone asked him a question, he’d just stare.

That all changed by the time Thanksgiving dinner rolled around the next day. Having everyone around was obviously far more exciting than eating turkey or carrots. He chattered away, keeping a running tab on dinner. My mom exacerbated the situation by giving him a serving of cranberry mold right off, which is mostly sugar with a little bit of cranberry. Although he did ask for it, once he had a bite, there was no hope of getting real food into him. (No grilled cheese, but this comic rang true to me.)

The excitement extended far beyond dinner. During dessert, my cousin, his wife, and their kids came over, who Sprout has never met. At 9, 7, and 1 1/2, they meshed well despite the age gap. Sprout delighted the older ones by repeating anything they asked him to (“Holy Moley Spicy Guacamole!” was a favorite). He didn’t get along quite as well with the little one – he was surprisingly jealous about his books and there was a shoving incident over a kids’ couch – but it was about as good as we could expect with toddlers. Everyone cracked up as we shared family tongue-twisters like Stella-Ella-Bella-Henusky-Steina-Schawba, supposedly the name of my great-grandfather’s girlfriend (presumably before he married my great-grandmother). My mom added onto it by telling the older kids to say, “One smart fellow he felt smart,” which was simultaneously horrifying and hilarious for the 9 year old boy. (Say it out loud.) I’m sure his mom was thrilled.

In addition to the second cousins, we had the rare opportunity to see both of my grandmothers on the trip. While Sprout had met them both before, he was too little to remember. One of them, who lives in Florida, has been at my aunt’s for the past several months recovering from a paralyzing case of the shingles. Although Sprout cried last time he met her, this time, he smiled and even kissed her several times. She worried that her oxygen tube would scare him, but he took pride in helping move her tube under the couch so that people wouldn’t step on it.

While my other grandmother is possibly in better physical condition, she has severe Alzheimer’s and lives in an assisted living facility. My dad, Sprout and I visited her there, where she was already sitting in their spacious, well-lit common room. Already a bit nervous, I was further disoriented by the fact that even my dad didn’t recognize her at first. While she was gaunt, it was the empty look in the eyes of a once vibrant woman that made her appear so unrecognizable. But once we introduced ourselves, she focused and we started to see her past self a little. Conversation with her was forced, of course – we needed to constantly remind her of who we were and details of our lives. It wasn’t as disorienting as I thought it would be, but it was still sad. Nonetheless, I’m still glad we went – even if she didn’t remember it, she clearly appreciated us being there in the moment. Fortunately, Sprout didn’t catch on to the underlying sadness – he was too distracted by the TV playing the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and the residents playing Bingo with candy corn. It’s always a relief to me when his joy brings light in difficult situations.

From the youngest to the oldest, being with our family members was truly a cause for thanks.

Songs to Grow Up With: Alice’s Restaurant

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 6 Comments

Many people have favorite Christmas songs, but few have favorite Thanksgiving songs. But there’s one song that has been part of my Thanksgiving since I was very little: Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. This sprawling protest song no doubt influenced my current-day activism as much as 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth or actual politics. So of course, it will inevitably be part of my son’s childhood as well.

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For those unfamiliar with it, Alice’s Restaurant is a 2 part, 18 minute saga supposedly based on truth, but leavened with a heavy dose of absurdity. The live version is the definitive one, where Arlo invites the audience to sing along and then berates them for not harmonizing correctly.

The story begins in the small town of Stockbridge, MA, which is so small that “they got three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car.” Before Thanksgiving dinner at his friend Alice’s house, Arlo and his friends decide to help her out by taking care of her garbage. But when they discover the dump is closed on Thanksgiving (one suspects there was some pre-meal non-food indulging), they take the logical step of throwing it over a cliff, to accompany somebody else’s garbage that’s already there. The next day, they get arrested and thrown in jail for littering, “the biggest crime of the last fifty years” in sleepy western Massachusetts. Despite the over-enthusiasm of the cops with their “twenty-seven 8 x 10 colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one,” the judge merely fines them $50 and makes them pick up the garbage.

The song then fast forwards to several years later, when Arlo has been called up for the draft in Vietnam. In a “building down in New York City called Whitehall Street … you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected!” Because of his “criminal record,” he gets assigned to the Group W Bench, which he shares with all kinds of “mean, nasty, ugly-lookin’ people.” When he points out that the army is asking him if he’s moral enough to “burn women, kids, houses and villages after being a litterbug,” they tell him “We don’t like your kind! We’re going to send your fingerprints off to Washington!”

Needless to say, none of this is fare meant for little kids. But despite that, my family listened to it every year driving to my aunt and uncle’s house in New Jersey. We usually tried to catch it on Q104.3, the New York City rock station that always plays it at noon. If we were delayed, we’d put in the battered Best Of cassette and also listen to The Motorcycle Song (which manages to be much, much sillier). It became part of my Thanksgiving tradition as much as turkey and my mom’s mushroom dip.

Obviously, I didn’t understand the song at all at first. I just liked singing along to the catchy chorus. But as I got older, it was one of my first introductions to anti-war messages. I think it was particularly effective because the messages are embedded in a funny, specific story and so become universal. Rather than critiquing the injustice of the Vietnam War specifically, it frames war itself and our approach to it as fundamentally absurd, as ridiculous as taking aerial photography for prosecuting littering. That combination allowed it to transcend its very 1970s context to appeal to me, a girl growing up in the pre-War on Terror 1990s.

And appeal it did. As I grew older, my interest in politics intensified, to the point where I was actively interested in educating others on it in high school. Singing along at Thanksgiving became an act of rebellion, not against my parents, but a corrupt political system that hadn’t changed all that much since the song was released. As the phrase “The personal is political” began to resonate, I realize now it was one of the first things I was exposed to where a personal story (albeit an exaggerated one) was used to make a political point. In the modern day of Tumblr where everyone has a personal/political story to tell, Alice’s Restaurant stands out as a great example of how to do it right.

I think it also shaped my opinions on how political change can and must happen. There’s a great line in the comic book Phonogram (which is all about the power of music) that “the only way for a revolution to succeed is to be more fun than the alternative.” While it comes from a morally ambiguous character, I agree with her. Activism can be exhausting and depressing, something that doesn’t really inspire people. To get people to want to change requires painting a picture of a future that’s better than the current one – more attractive and ideally, more fun. It’s very clear in the song that the hippies are the ones having a hell of a lot more fun than the stuffy, authoritarian police officers and draft recruitment staff. Similarly, it showed me how art can be political. While I got a crash course in using theater to do activism when I participated in the “Stop Shopping chorus” singing Anti-Corporate Christmas Carols in grad school, Alice’s Restaurant was my original introduction to the concept.

Needless to say, this song was one of the touchstones of my life, especially my activism. Although I hope it can be for Sprout as well, I don’t want to force it. We’ll just play it on Thanksgiving and leave it to him to figure out significance it will have in his life. While Arlo sings, “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant,” I know that I already have.

Up, Down and All Around: Baltimore’s Children’s Museum, Port Discovery

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Most museums don’t have multi-floor climbing structures running up their middle. Then again, most museums aren’t designed for patrons under 10 years old. But Port Discovery, the children’s museum in Baltimore, has a great variety of exhibits for kids of all ages. With Chris’s parents in town, we were lucky enough to visit the museum this past weekend.

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Losing my Religious Community

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 9 Comments

This Sunday, I felt – and cried – as if I was losing a family member. But it wasn’t a person Chris and I are losing – it’s a community. A community that has inspired thought and action, provided comfort even when they didn’t know it, and loved us and Sprout so very much. We’re in the process of losing our church.

Our church started in 1938 as Bethesda First Baptist, part of the American Baptists, who are much more liberal than the Southern variety. About eight years ago, the congregation decided to relaunch, complete with a new pastor and focus. About a year later, with the congregation down to a handful of people, they brought in our current pastor, Todd. Under Todd’s leadership, the church became “multi-denominational,” embracing Christian traditions from a variety of times and places. From discussions of the saints to contemporary worship songs, the church embodied a unique mix of theology and ritual.

Chris and I came into this story long before we even knew about the church itself. After experiencing spiritual community in college and volunteering at Homeworkers Organized for More Employment (HOME) in Maine, I knew I wanted a church that deeply connected people together. While evangelical churches had previously been my go-to, I abandoned that branch as unfruitful after Chris found only disrespect for being Catholic. Not long after, I read Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy, which is about finding wisdom and depth in a broad array of Christian traditions. After we finally decided to get married in a Catholic church, I told the priest that I wanted a church that combined a strong sense of community with the theological diversity. In response, he not unkindly laughed and said, “Shannon, you’re simply not going to find that.”

And yet, we found exactly what I was looking for in the Church in Bethesda. The longer we were there, the more both we and the church matured. I led theological discussions and attended studies on ancient spiritual practices. Chris and I joined the leadership team, called the Servant’s Group, where we discussed the church’s vision and struggled with budget issues.

As part of the leadership, we realized that our community’s main strength was our focus on radical welcome. Our valuing of theological diversity expanded to include diversity of socio-economic levels, race, and sexual orientation. Beyond simple acceptance, we started emphasizing peacemaking, social justice, and reconciliation with groups often left out of Christian hegemony. We took pride in welcoming everyone without strings attached, from a Muslim family who stopped by to a Jewish woman who never comes to service but always shows up afterwards for snacks.

But just as it felt like we as a church had found our purpose – a very needed purpose – everything was falling apart.

All at once, we had a huge departure of young families. The year Sprout was born, there were 9 other kids born; now none of their families attend our church. While most were military – we have a large medical military school nearby – others couldn’t afford to raise a family in the D.C. area. At the same time, we didn’t have a new influx of people to replace them. Where we regularly had 70 people on Sunday mornings, we had dropped down to 40 on the very best of days.

To pile on the problems, our building was literally falling apart. While we always had problems, the first real emergency was the belltower shedding stones during the 2011 D.C. earthquake. After that, we had a major new repair every few months. The culmination was our boiler completely breaking down and flooding the entire basement last winter. When the repair crew drained the water, they found a natural gas leak. Then a water leak in a previously-frozen pipe and another and another. We didn’t have heat in our sanctuary for the entire winter. (Fortunately, we could meet in a smaller room.) While insurance covered the boiler, the building has continued to disintegrate. Only a couple of weeks ago, the radiator in the front hallway broke, leaving a huge puddle on the carpet in the back of the sanctuary.

Between the loss of members and the continuing bills, we simply couldn’t keep up financially. Our pastor took on a second job as a customer service person for the local Apple store. Members of the leadership group took over maintenance tasks, like mowing the lawn.

I stepped up by doing what I do best – communications. We organized events, increased our social media, improved our website, posted online ads. Our Easter Egg hunt attracted many more families than anticipated, nearly overwhelming our resources. But even though we made sure every kid walked away with a special treat, none of the families returned. The Earth Day event was even more of a bust, with no one outside of the volunteers showing up to hear the speaker from Interfaith Power and Light.

Each Sunday morning, I sat in the back with Sprout playing on the floor and counted the number of people. There were never more, never enough. Even though I had done the best I could, it felt like failure.

What finally brought everything to a head was the decision from our pastor to leave at the end of this year. I can’t blame him – while it was exhausting for the leadership group, it was far worse for him. He was spending too much time just trying to keep the church above water with little time for his spiritual / vocational development and no financial stability. As his friend, I completely understood.

But as a parishioner, I was angry and frustrated. Not at him personally, but the entire situation. We don’t have enough money to keep up our failing building. We don’t have enough money to pay a new pastor. We don’t have enough volunteer time or energy to run a regular service. More than half of the Servants’ Group were too burnt out to start from scratch. The future was a big blank.

So at last week’s congregational meeting, we took the first step in figuring out what to do come January – we gave up control of our building.

While it wasn’t the end-all, be-all, it felt like the first step towards complete dissolution. We had put so much in for what felt like so little. I had envisioned bringing my son up in this community and that simply couldn’t happen now.

Which is why I was sobbing in the pews. All of the community, all of the values that we stood for are needed, now as much as ever. They’re needed in a world with terror, hunger, racism, and violence. We as a society and individuals need to hear and embrace them.

But maybe, our society doesn’t need those values wrapped up in a traditional church structure. Maybe they’re needed in service, art, music, and something completely different from what’s come before. Maybe we can rebuild.

But for now, I’m still sad for the fact that what the future holds will never be the same as the past. I’m still in mourning for what had been and uncertain of what is to come. I already miss my faith family.

Do It Myself!

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

“Do it myself!” I could probably live happily without ever hearing those words again. Unfortunately, they – or some variation – are a crucial phrase in every toddler’s vocabulary, including Sprout’s. While I appreciate his need to be independent and all of that bullshit, they’re really annoying in practice.

The phrase arises most often when Sprout is supposed to be doing something that he can do, but isn’t actually doing at the moment. For some reason, it’s the most common in the bathroom. When he’s supposed to be washing his hands, he often just sticks his right hand under the water rather than rubbing them together. Other popular options include splashing in the pool of water or sticking his palm against the faucet so it sprays everywhere. For toothbrushing, he prefers to gnaw on it with his back teeth instead of actually brushing them.

In both of these cases, he knows perfectly well how to do the activity – as I’ve seen him do it correctly – but is utterly uninterested in doing so. He’d much rather mess around playing in the sink or delaying bedtime. However, when I try to help him, he flails his hands and yells, “Do it myself!” While he can, it doesn’t make his futzing any less annoying when dinner is getting cold or his official bedtime is long behind us.

Unfortunately, my options for hurrying him up are limited for both philosophical and practical reasons.

In theory, I could get him to obey by physically forcing him to do it the way I want him to. However, I try to limit my physical enforcement of rules as much as possible to only the most dangerous of situations (like running in the road).

Physical enforcement often goes hand-in-hand with “might-makes-right” and authoritarian parenting, messages that I try to avoid at nearly all costs. The more I can convince Sprout that he should follow the rules because he wants to – or at least feels he should – the more he’ll form a moral compass in the future.

On a sheerly practical level, physical enforcement seems more effort than it’s worth for the stress. In a power struggle between a toddler and an adult, the toddler will always win in some way or another.

For example, the dentist recommended if he wouldn’t let us brush his teeth that one of us hold him between our knees and the other force his mouth open. Because that’s a great way to calm a toddler down before bed! No thank you on the additional half-hour needed to bring him down from a massive tantrum.

In fact, forcing him to do these things can actually be pretty dangerous. When he brushes his teeth or washes his hands, he uses a small stool to reach the sink. If he freaks out, waving his hands and stomping his feet, he could easily fall off it. He’s fallen off “dancing” around, much less throwing an actual tantrum. Slightly cleaner hands done a couple minutes earlier isn’t worth head trauma.

Instead, I try to find alternative ways to motivate him. When he says, “Do it myself!” I tell him, “I know you can – so show me!” Sometimes that works. When he’s spraying water all over the place, I prevent him from getting what he wants by cupping my hands around it so the spray is limited. I’ll only sing the tooth brushing song if he’s actually brushing them correctly. When he does actually do things correctly, I congratulate and praise him heartily.

And sometimes I just breathe deep, put my head in my hands, and wait. Eventually, he’ll do it right if I just give him time. After all, it’s just a phase.

When does your kid (or one you know) say, “Do it myself!!”

A Walk through My Bookshelf

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

I’m one of those people who always snoops in a person’s house by looking at their bookshelf. Unfortunately, ours has been a mess for years – unread books next to favorites next to grad school textbooks next to Chris’s collection of ginormous cookbooks. But in the ongoing process of organizing our study, the other day, Chris pulled all of the books off the bookshelf along with a large number in boxes and spread them on the floor of our basement. Much of my literary collection sat in seven piles, organized by genre. While I originally planned on going downstairs to merely formulate a plan of attack, we spent an hour and a half sorting through books, laughing and remembering.

Most of the books I kept were obvious, at least if you know me. Many were old favorites in SF (Slaughterhouse 5, The Martian Chronicles), graphic novels (V for Vendetta, Maus), and first person non-fiction (Traveling Mercies, The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Chris and I spent quite a bit of time discussing these, especially why we loved them so much. A few were college or graduate school books that I should keep for reference, like Visual Communication. Others were personal reference, such as those those on gardening, parenting, and community building. Any humor books specific to parenting that I could refer to for a laugh stayed. A few were kept for reasons unrelated to their re-readability, such as the fact they were signed, were relatively rare, or had a particular memory attached to them. I certainly wasn’t going to get rid of the love poetry book I gave Chris in high school or the non-fiction book about the community where I did my graduate thesis.

One of these nostalgia books in particular cracked me up. In high school, Chris sometimes forgot to return books to the teacher at the end of the year. While I was very glad to banish The Fountainhead from our shelves, I was baffled by Light in August. Who would assign Faulkner to high school students? Oh right – Mr. McCain, Chris’s Modernism teacher, who headed the teachers’ union, quoted Irish poets at random students in the hallway, and was one of my favorite teachers on reputation alone. Opening the book, we realized Chris was not the only student who had that book in their presence. Inside the front cover was the name of one of our other good friends from high school! Turns out, she didn’t read it either.

Of the unread books, both the books I kept and those I discarded say quite a bit about me – both who I was then and who I am now. I kept a number of “high-faluting” classic fiction books, even if my desire to read them is aspirational at best. I may not tackle James Joyce’s Ulysses until I retire, but it would still feel like a defeat to remove it from my library. Others were foundational texts in science communication that I feel like I “should” read, like A Brief History of Time. Too bad I’ll never have time to read it at work as professional development. Still others, like The Experts’ Guide to 100 Things Everyone Should Know How to Do and Simplify Your Life remained in the keep pile out of the vaguely desperate hope that “reading this will make me feel like more of an adult.” Like many people, I frequently suffer from Imposter Syndrome and stave it off by trying to gain new skills. It doesn’t actually work, but at least I’ve learned something. Lastly were the “fun” books (mostly in the aforementioned genres) that I just haven’t gotten around to reading due to my voracious Internet reading habit and my own writing.

Photo of several piles of books

While that sounds like a lot, I dumped a substantial amount too. I said goodbye to a number of academic books that I will simply never reference, like a huge tome on Wetlands. I suspect that even if I got a communications job in the Environmental Protection Agency’s wetlands division that I could refresh myself on the needed knowledge from my colleagues and the Internet. Others in the pile were gifted and free books that attracted me with their lack of price, but offered little else. I kept them for so long because they were free, but they were taking up more room than I could afford. A few were aspirational books that after taking a long, hard look, I decided I didn’t actually want to read. Should I give Pride and Prejudice another chance after not liking it when I was 14? Probably. Do I want to? Not really. But I did keep Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Not all of the books were mine, of course. Chris refused to give up any of his cookbooks, no matter how ridiculous they are. (Yes, we do have a Thomas Keller cookbook. No, we have never cooked from it.) Sprout’s bookshelf just keeps growing, supplemented regularly by books my mom bought for her classroom and then brought home when she retired.

But the large majority of them were mine, reflecting my literary history and tastes. It’s amazing how much you learn about yourself when you take a long, hard look at your own bookshelf.