My first daughter, Amber, was and is a marvelous creature. In her infancy, she was “easy” in every way. She did not fuss, she would take the breast or the bottle with no preference. She nursed in moderation and settled easily to sleep. She made eye contact and with time, expressed herself without words in ways that make loving a child so all-encompassing and pleasing—and explains why you go for number two.
There were exceptions: Amber slept in our bed. While in residency, we were a collective of young doctors starting families and our fellow residents from the midwest had a head start. At dinner, when Terri found out that Amber was still sleeping the night between us at six months, she raised a stink. “That baby should have been in a crib after the first month. You guys are doing it wrong and are going to regret that!”
I am pretty sure Terri would fall into the “Republican” school of child rearing.
We disagreed (definitely independents). That night feeding by breast at 2AM (we were NOT on a schedule) was so simple and sweet—not to mention it allowed me to sleep virtually uninterrupted-and yet, the sense of when one made the transition was not clear. We knew of people who breast fed verbal kids who could express preference for the right or left breast and we somehow felt that we did not want to follow those footsteps (those of the Democratic school of child-rearing). So when to cut the cord on sleeping together?
We resolved to try it and Amber finally made it to the crib in her special room, on the second floor. Sometime in the early morning, she fussed. Not normal. We resolved to be firm. She cried. Finally, nearing the time to get up for work, we went up to the room and found that she had wiggled herself into a corner and agitated and rubbed her head raw on the crib bars.
We were devastated. It took two weeks for the divot to heal.
And, parenting 101, when we revisited the experience of her sleeping alone, we would check to be sure what the fuss was about when it happened. We repeated after certain time limits and established safety, caring, while modifying behavior during the night. The process worked and she was on her own and sleeping through the night much to Terri’s satisfaction.
Better late than never.
A year later, before Amber was super verbal (which is a now familiar characteristic), she had continued to be an affable, wanting-to-please child who could be convinced to do just about anything in the day-to-day. One day, that changed. She was irritable, prone to tears, and short with us. We worried about the big picture: was this what they called, “the terrible twos?” We had certainly seen that exhibited in the children of our friends. I found myself getting short with her as she fussed and would not settle one more time. When not distracted with work or post dinner clean up, I had Amber in my lap and she was once more irritable. It occurred to me that despite the absence of a fever or runny nose, a mother complaining to me in the clinic of these symptoms would find me looking in a child’s ears.
I found that Amber had her first raging ear infection.
We were devastated. Happily, the Amoxacillin, despite claims that it could not work that fast, transformed our child back to her normal state within eight hours.
These anecdotes take me to the crazy times and protests that now populate the news. College students are on the march again (I wondered often in the last decade what happened to the drive that found earnest young people in college protesting— something —with moral righteousness and often, with shrill voices or the cheerleader chants that have never worked for me).
I have never like public displays of moral indignation—especially by mobs—not in the 1960’s and not now. That is an aesthetic sentiment; while I don’t like such displays I have often sided on the issues of such demonstrators. I don’t have an alternative to the demonstrations —-never did. Voting your conscience is usually not enough to effect a needed change. So demonstrators may have been effective in a way I never could be.
The cries of young people shouting abuse about one part of our very violent world (Palestine) and the sheer chutzpa (pun intended) of laying out moral indignation that will not resonate widely (The US has always had a special relationship with Israel that has not always been rational) are as irritating to me as a small child’s crying, for no apparent reason, or tears and irritability that interfere with how I thought things were going or at least supposed to go. And yet, something was wrong when those things happened. Looking into what the problem was with all this fussing proved useful to all parties.
The news feeds are not reliable for being clear, point-by-point in what are essentially mobs of people in heterogenous collections of colleges. We will see placards with statements, chants, and the occasional self righteous sound bite to satisfy the orientation of whatever news stream is being watched. I can’t make sense of what a mob “wants” but my take-home is what I have already got running in my head:
Our US relationship with the state of Israel stems from guilt after World War II and our paranoid fears about the Cold War. We could relate to a Jewish state in a way we could not relate to Islamic states that looked for support from the Soviet Block or the Chinese.
The Israeli state as it is constituted is antithetical to my American way of thinking re how a government should function: there should be a separation of religion and state. I feel this way about the Saudis and the Iranians—who also have no clear line between religion and government. I am an American; I am not Jewish. I believe that other cultures can solve their problems without using the USA as their model. I stand by my belief that the Jewish state as a Jewish state knows no parallel in my country with the possible exception of the State of Utah. Our federal government had issue with that. I have no idea what the polling in Israel would be re living in a reconstituted secular state but suspect a majority of the voting public would not favor that step. They would have reason to fear it as a form of suicide. It is not clear who in Israel would get to vote on that one—not Palestinians living under Israeli rule.…who are perhaps 50% of the population? The current government does everything it can to put the idea of such a state in the grave—-for what is formally Israel as well as the West Bank. I don’t see how this violent world can change unless something gives—like allowing a two state solution or a one state secular solution. Neither appears to be likely in my lifetime.
The following article, written by a columnist in Israel is quite interesting as it relates to the political system we do not know (Israel is not like the United States in this regard) in Israel.
And then, a grounded link from an American Palestinian:
The politics of ‘From the River to the Sea’
Regardless of what you think of campus agitation; consider that the strategy it reflects is misguided, but that it is identifying that something is very wrong and we would all do well to pay attention to what that is and consider our choices—as individuals, as voters, as a government that is not longer fighting a cold war (?). As much as I did not like the protesting in the 60’s, I give it credit for helping end a war that should have never been started. It did not end that war directly, but did get people talking and thinking about it differently in 1971 than we were in 1965. It saved lives. Whether in Hanoi or Saigon, it looks like people are doing better than in surrounding Laos or Cambodia or Myanmar for that matter…..
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