Though caregiving can be a positive experience, nearly half of those survey respondents say it has impacted their personal finances. Many report contributing less (or nothing) to their retirement and emergency savings, taking on more debt, or cutting back on expenses while juggling care for their parents and kids.

But undermining your own financial security can lead to more problems, said Cameron Huddleston, a journalist and author of “Mom and Dad, We Need to Talk,” a book that helps adults communicate with their aging parents about finances.

“You’re only going to perpetuate that cycle, and your own kids are going to need to step in later on and perhaps support you if you don’t have the resources,” said Huddleston, who provided care for her mother while raising three young kids with her husband.

If you find yourself in this demographic, there are ways to help your parent and ensure your own financial security in the process. 

Create a family budget

If you’re thinking about moving your parent into your home or financially helping in some capacity, go through your current budget. Or create one by calculating your take-home pay and listing your recurring expenses. If you have funds left over after covering your bills and having a little bit of spending money, earmark those funds for savings or debt payoff.

Now, figure out whether any of your expenses will increase or if you need to add new line items after your parent moves in. Then talk with your parent about whether they can fill those gaps or find other ways to contribute to the household finances. While asking Mom to pay rent might not go well, Huddleston said, it’s perfectly acceptable to ask her to chip in for groceries, utilities or gas money.

“They would have been covering those costs anyway in their home, and they’re saving money already if they’re not paying for a mortgage anymore or paying for the upkeep of a home,” Huddleston said.

Consider the cost of care

Parents usually need to move in with their adult kids because of some type of medical issue. Depending on what they need help with, you might be able to handle it yourself if you’re already staying at home to care for young kids. 

But if you and your partner both work or the parent needs more advanced health care, you’ll need to consider how you’ll cover the costs. 

The least expensive option is enrolling your parent in adult day health care, where they receive social and health care services in a group setting. Nationally, families can expect to spend $2,058 a month on this type of service. Hiring a home health aid is another option, though it triples your costs — $6,292 per month on average. 

Some caregivers may be able to leverage their parent’s assets to cover these expenses. For instance, Huddleston sold her mother’s house and used the proceeds to pay for home-based health care services. “I knew this would be the best way to stretch her resources out as much as possible and care for her,” Huddleston said. 

Alternatively, people with very limited resources may qualify for Medicaid benefits. In some states, Medicaid may even pay you to act as a caregiver for your aging parent. The American Council on Aging provides a list of Medicaid’s home and community-based services by state on its website. 

You can also reach out to any Council on Aging chapter near you for a list of resources or information about adult day health care and home-based care.  

Fund your savings

Stashing money away for your retirement and emergency savings can help secure your financial future, so it should be a non-negotiable expense in your budget. First, try to set aside three to six months’ worth of expenses in a dedicated emergency fund. This account can help you cover bills and living expenses during a financial emergency, like a job loss.

If your workplace offers a 401(k) or similar retirement plan, contribute enough to secure any company match that’s offered to you. Then consider increasing your contributions as much as possible. 

You can also deposit pretax money into a health savings account (HSA), and later use those funds in retirement for qualified medical expenses. 

If you don’t have access to a workplace retirement plan or you want to save beyond the annual contribution limits, consider opening an individual retirement account (IRA) or a regular brokerage account.

Get financial documents in order

While it might be uncomfortable to discuss health and financial matters with your parent, it’s a crucial part of caretaking. First, make sure your parent adds beneficiaries to all financial accounts, such as bank accounts, retirement accounts, life insurance policies and annuities. 

Your parent may also decide to grant you durable power of attorney, which allows you to handle their finances and make medical decisions if they cannot. Another legal document, a will, allows your parent to distribute their property and other assets after their death.

Some of these documents have to be drafted and signed while your parent is still mentally competent. If there is memory loss, it doesn’t mean it’s too late. Huddleston suggests speaking with an elder law attorney for guidance.  

She offers another pro tip: Make sure your own documents are in order while you arrange your parent’s finances.

Seek support when needed

Getting logistical and emotional support can help you prevent mental burnout and financial stress, so it’s an important step. 

Start by talking with your siblings or other family members. If they live nearby, ask them to drive Mom or Dad to their doctor’s appointment, cook meals or stay with your parent while you take a vacation. If they don’t live near you, ask them to chip in financially. And for small favors, consider reaching out to good friends or asking for volunteers at your place of worship.

It’s also important to realize you’ll need to make trade-offs, since “you can’t give 100% to all the people who are counting on you,” Huddleston said. Those trade-offs might mean hiring someone a few days a week to watch your parent or having a conversation with your boss about adjusting your work schedule. 

“Remind yourself it will be temporary,” Huddleston said. “It’s going to be tough for a while, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

The post Managing finances for the Sandwich Generation appeared first on Salon.com.

What my dad said next changed everything.

Before that conversation, I often felt distant from him. He was a technology-obsessed risk management analyst. Meanwhile, I only valued computers to the extent that they provided Internet access. He spent his career making recommendations in uncertain circumstances, whereas I dreaded decisions, from selecting college classes to choosing between job offers. 

To feel closer to my dad growing up, I embraced his skiing hobby. On weekend trips, I closely followed him down snow-covered mountains, trying to fit my skis within his tracks. My enthusiasm had a performative aspect, though. I clung to this interest because I couldn’t grasp anything else. 

Still, despite our differences, I valued his insight. After my high school counselor discussed potential careers with me and shared pamphlets on teaching and journalism, I consulted my dad. Until that point, I’d spent my childhood immersed in books, developing a love for words. The obsession was born when I “wrote” my first story by copying "Madeline" onto construction paper. I progressed beyond unknowing plagiarism as I grew older and penned novels, relishing the feeling of ideas shaping themselves into words. 

Yet by the time I turned 18, writing didn’t seem practical. My dad confirmed my hunch, saying, “Do something with a stable income to support yourself.” 

I took his suggestion to heart. Opening my college application, I changed my major from “English” to “Teaching English.” As I did, I felt something break loose inside me. 

I buried the feeling. During college I did peer tutoring and volunteered at schools to prove to myself that I enjoyed teaching. I took creative writing classes too but saw them as passion pursuits. 

I graduated with a teaching job lined up. But as I entered a field notorious for burnout and low wages, I had lingering doubts.

My fears solidified during my first year teaching at a Manhattan public school. My classroom boasted a shattered window and a leak that forced us to evacuate twice. Every week I spent eight hours toiling outside my contractual workday. Listening to some students discuss their trauma or poverty in their neighborhoods, I worried about them. 

There were bright moments as well, like when a student wrote a note thanking me for pushing him, or when another student hugged me after she finally read her essay about self-harm aloud. At my best, I was honored to do my work. But teaching required surrendering all needs — the bathroom, food, time to pay that bill —for eight hours a day. Giving so much to others meant I lacked energy for my passions or friends, and I ached for more time to process my thoughts on the page. 

Longing for a career that sustained my creativity and wishing I had studied English in college, I began applying to editorial jobs on weekends. When I explained my struggles to my dad, he validated my feelings. “Just don’t linger on things you can’t change,” he warned.  

But I couldn’t stop thinking that I had made a mistake. I knew I wanted to write since I was six —why had I thrown that gift of clarity away? 

After my first year of teaching, I visited my parents, feeling lost: Should I do grad school to become qualified for a new field? Should I teach for a while to save money first? Angry and regretful, I wondered how my dad didn’t realize the immense influence he wielded. Of course a girl who grew up skiing in his tracks would do whatever he said. Following his guidance was, I realized, another way to feel closer to him. But that didn’t mean it was the right choice.

One night that August, my dad and I discussed my dilemma. He said attending grad school for writing would be costly without guaranteeing a job. When I asked why he hadn’t discouraged my sister from her similarly expensive, ambiguous humanities degree, he said, “It was undergrad, not a master’s she was paying for alone.” Outrage stirred inside me — a feeling that I had trapped myself, and he had unwittingly helped build the cage.

“I guess I should’ve studied what I loved when you were helping fund my degree, then. Why didn’t you say this before?” I asked desperately. 

He looked at me, his expression sincere. Everything else fell away as he said, “If you switch careers, I’ll support you fully. I just wanted you to be able to take care of yourself. My role is helping you do that.”

I sat back, stricken with a realization: My dad was just a person, trying to be the best parent he could be. His word wasn’t infallible, but helping me secure financial independence was an expression of his love. 

If I had expressed my feelings more in high school, maybe he would have nudged me toward journalism. I’ll never know, but I now realize that it is unrealistic for parents to provide perfect advice all the time. Instead, I can expect that everything my dad says is well-intentioned and then make my own decisions, knowing best what’s in my heart. 

We talked for two more hours that evening. Having my dad hear me and explain his perspective was a turning point. The whole time I was thinking, "This is all I ever wanted!" Finally, a conversation where we both were engaged as equals.

Now, in my second year of teaching, I’ve let go of blame. Recently I called my dad as I was researching grad school. He picked up on the first ring, and we talked for an hour. I was thrilled that what we shared that August night wasn’t gone. He was there for me. In turn, I wanted to know about him — the conferences he was attending, his project to convert vinyl records into MP3 files for his friend with Alzheimer’s. 

Feeling more secure in our relationship helped me feel confident in my decision to pursue writing professionally, too. No longer skiing solely in his tracks, I’m building on the foundation of his lessons and love to forge my own path. This time, I’ll leave words in my wake.

The post The two-hour conversation that changed my relationship with my dad appeared first on Salon.com.

Many adults feel unprepared to broach the subject of personal finance with kids because we never received a useful financial education ourselves.

A lot of advice for parents asks you to teach kids certain financial habits, like saving, investing and dealing with debt. But this isn’t different from asking parents to teach kids the birds and the bees — if you didn’t learn it, you can’t teach it with confidence. For the details, rely on financial education resources, and don’t be afraid to learn together with your kids.

It’s not important that you be an expert in financial education. What’s important is that you start the conversation. Avoiding money talk leaves kids to draw their own conclusions, likely from incomplete information.

“Kids are always watching and learning from their parents,” said Melinda Wenner Moyer, a science journalist and author of "How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t A**holes." “From the time they’re babies, they are essentially little social detectives. They want to understand how the world works and how they should act.”

Similar to other taboo subjects like race, sex and death, money is part of life whether you talk about it or not. Kids in your life will pick up on your relationship with money and develop habits based on their interpretation of it.

“Kids are always watching. Seriously, always,” said early childhood expert Janice Robinson-Celeste. “They’re like little sponges, soaking up every conversation, action and even the unspoken stuff, like body language or the vibe in the room. We might think some things go over their heads, but they pick up on way more than we realize.”

If you’re not talking with kids about money, here are some unintended messages they might be picking up:

Message #1: Money is shameful

“When parents talk to kids about money, they communicate to kids that money isn’t a shameful or taboo topic,” said Wenner Moyer. “It makes them more comfortable discussing the subject with others.”

Avoiding the topic reinforces the belief that money is shameful, laying the foundation for the shame our culture places onto how people earn and spend money as adults.

“Kids are often being exposed to these topics anyway, through their peers, the media and overhearing conversations,” said Wenner Moyer. ”So if we don't talk to them about these issues, all we’re doing is ensuring that the information they’re getting is incomplete and sometimes woefully inaccurate.”

Message #2: Money is scary

Your kids probably pick up on your money stress, even if you don’t mention it, the experts said.

“If [kids] see parents spending frivolously or constantly stressing about finances, they might adopt those habits or anxieties themselves,” said Robinson-Celeste.

Talking about the financial challenges your family faces can offer kids context and help them understand your money moves. Leaving issues unspoken lets them only feel the fear you exhibit, which could leave them feeling like dealing with personal finances is necessarily scary.

Message #3: People get what they deserve

“Kids often make unfortunate inferences about money and inequality if parents don't provide them with accurate information,” said Wenner Moyer.

Research shows that even young children pick up on markers of wealth and use those to draw conclusions about a person’s competence, popularity and work ethic. If you don’t provide the context about systemic and structural inequalities, those observations can lead them to believe everyone who’s wealthy has earned their wealth and vice versa.

“These ideas ultimately cause kids to accept inequality as fair,” said Wenner Moyer, “especially when they’re on the privileged end of it.”

Message #4: Men are better with money 

Wenner Moyer shared that studies find parents talk to boys about money at a younger age than they do with girls. They continue to talk about money more with boys throughout their childhoods. Other research shows that boys tend to be slightly more proficient in financial literacy, and women are twice as likely as men in adulthood to have negative feelings about money.

“Because of this, the conversations parents have with their daughters about money are especially important,” said Wenner Moyer.

Like every other way we embed gender norms in children, subconsciously favoring your sons over your daughters in money talk can not only leave girls less prepared for money management but also set them up as adults to believe they’re less competent with money than the men in their lives.

The post What are you unintentionally teaching your kids about money? appeared first on Salon.com.

In the days before my dad died, the hospital was already asking me to make major financial decisions. What funeral home or crematorium do you want to use? Do you really want the basic package? Was your beloved father basic? Funeral homes aren't even required to list prices on their websites — though that may be changing thanks to the Federal Trade Commission. While Dad was on his deathbed, I was Googling customer reviews and checking my credit card limit.

Since then, my life has been consumed by settling my parents' estate. Executor and Successor Trustee is my new part-time job — one I never asked for, and one I'm technically not being paid to do, though I suppose the inheritance counts. Over the past few months, I've learned about death certificates (you will need an absurd number of copies), the difference between having something notarized and getting a Medallion Signature Guarantee (the latter is essentially a fancier version of the former), and how you should respond when your dead parent receives a jury summons (depends on the state, but you usually have to contact the County Clerk to have the aforementioned dead parent removed from their lists). I've had to sell a condo, a boat and a car. Real estate: every Millennial's expertise!

On top of the complicated stuff that might get me in trouble with the law if I mess up, there's also the weird, sad stuff. In their Florida condo, my mom had 34 decorative fish. What am I supposed to do with those? What's the best way to transfer my dad's ashes from the basic urn to the nicer, Frank Lloyd Wright-esque urn I purchased for his eternal rest? The answer, as it turns out, is a Solo cup.

And then there's the memorial, which is like planning a depressing wedding, both in logistics and in cost. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2021 was $7,848 — a little less if the guest of honor is cremated. But that's what the life insurance money is for, right? Assuming your parents had a life insurance policy.

Fortunately, ours did — a few, in fact. We held my mom's memorial at a local bar-restaurant and catered it with her favorite pizza. We held my dad's at the golf course near our childhood home — he designed the clubhouse. It was easier the second time around: we already had easels to display the pictures, and we were able to import the invites from Mom's big day over to Dad's.

No one is truly prepared for their parents to die. When I asked my aunts and uncles and friends' parents for advice, they didn't have much to spare—all they could remember was the horrible grief of it. And many of them had hired lawyers and accountants to deal with the bureaucracy for them; unlike my generation, their generation had already built the financial security to afford such luxuries.

In Boomers' defense, those luxuries can sometimes become necessities. Though my dad had a living trust — which should have saved my sister and me from probate court — he failed to update one life insurance policy, so it does have to go through probate, and we've hired a lawyer in Florida accordingly. We'll be more than able to cover her fees with the money we're paying her to get for us.

But I'd argue that Millennials are particularly ill-equipped to navigate the obstacle course of estate law. I'm extraordinarily privileged in that I have no student loans to pay off and my parents weren't carrying loads of debt. The vast majority of my friends — and the vast majority of my generation — are not in my position. Many Millennials are barely scraping by as it is. And while for some of them, an inheritance may help, for others there will be no inheritance — only more creditors to deal with.

Even as a privileged Millennial, this process is by no means easy. Every day, whether I'm trying to untangle my parents' TD Ameritrade account (how does the stock market work?) or correct my dad's death certificate (did you know a death certificate can be wrong?), I'm confronted with the reality that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's terrifying.

Death wasn't a taboo in our household, but it wasn't a common dinner table conversation, either. I knew both my parents wanted to be cremated. My mom sometimes joked that we should "just shoot her" if she became very ill, and though my dad had plenty of guns (which I also had to figure out how to sell), none of us wanted to call her bluff during her last days. After I broke the news that he wasn't going to get out of the hospital this time, my dad told me the name of his lawyer. "He won't screw you," were his exact words.

I wish death had been a common dinner table conversation. Money, too. Don't spend more than you have is about the extent of my financial literacy. I wish my parents had talked to me about their assets instead of leaving me a cardboard box full of paperwork to comb through next to the Christmas decorations. At least I'm old enough to know how a checkbook works.

People keep telling me how sad it is that I lost both parents at such a young age. Here's what I want to tell them: I'm at the bottom of a bell curve. The Boomers are starting to die — my parents just went early. Over the next decade or two, more and more of my peers are going to join the dead parents club. The time to get cozy with the Grim Reaper is now, before he comes uninvited.

The post My parents are dead—can I afford avocado toast now? appeared first on Salon.com.

Oh but let’s go back anyway to a beginning, to the night they met in Googie’s on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. It’s 1972. Alexis, she has named herself, is stunning: 5’9″ — taller in platforms — with long brown hair and a whistle that stops cabs and if anyone asks she’s 24. She’s been coming here for two years now, since she came to New York; this is her place. There is sawdust on the floor and stained glass behind the bar and she holds her own with an older crowd — artists, musicians, poets. Everyone is poor and everyone is interesting. What does she have in common with other 15-year-olds anyway? She’s in the Fat Black Pussycat watching Allen Ginsberg while they’re primping for Prom.

She is from everywhere, all her father’s forts and bases and towns. He went to war and she left Kansas at 13 to fade behind her in the prairie sun: Colorado, Boston, then New York. A lot of runaways in those years ended up dead, she tells me, or trafficked; Children of God got so many kids, even Karen from seventh grade. Not her. She is a pacifist, but after she’s jumped she gets a knife. She uses it once, the time she breaks the hitchhiking rules she won’t break again.

This is her reality and it’s all a lie and only she knows it because nobody looks or listens closely enough to notice and if they do, they pretend to forget. They all want a young girl anyway, she knows. On her real 21st birthday the owner Jimmy Red Benedetto will wish her a happy one and she’ll laugh and say Yeah, Jimmy, I’m finally old enough to drink in your bar and he’ll nearly have a heart attack when he does the math but tonight she’s here with her 19-year-old roommate Judy, a single mom who waitresses while Alexis babysits her son during the week, then they drop him off with his grandmother and party until Sunday. She didn’t want to miss what was happening in New York then, she has always told me. She couldn’t have done this in Kansas. Does she look older than Judy or younger? Can nobody tell or does nobody care?

That night they’re hanging out with her friend who gets her security jobs at concerts around the city. She works almost all the Dead shows, Doctors Hook and John, Hot Tuna, Procol Harum, the Beach Boys, you name the band, she keeps the girls away from them — unless the band says otherwise — and confiscates joints to keep the fire marshal happy and keeps the men out of women’s bathrooms, and the pay is just $25 a night but they get to keep all the pot and it beats running that scam in Port Authority soliciting donations for NORML just to pocket the cash. He has a crush on her but she’s not into it. She’s into his roommate, this tall guy with red hair and a red beard and the blue eyes I inherited. Everyone calls him Red and he looks wild like a Viking, and Daddy knows how to work his charm. He is full of stories and songs and memorized poems and he’s smarter than the other guys, at least to a girl who skipped out on high school. He knows a little bit about everything: a bullshitter, sure, in that irresistible Irish way. He is 36, close to her father’s age, a Renaissance man who drives a cab and has been in the city methadone program for a year, a decade lost to heroin and a Rikers record behind him. He woos her. This is important.

On their first date, Daddy takes her to The Captain’s Table on Sixth Avenue, she thinks; some details are lost to time. She wears her favorite dress: a halter-top maxi, midnight blue with purple clouds and moons on it. A plainclothes cop approaches their table and asks to see her ID. She tells him she left her purse at home. It could have all ended there. This is my wife, Daddy tells him. He doesn’t know yet what he’s saying but the cop doesn’t ask for proof of that. He is given a reason not to care, and that’s enough.

She doesn’t tell Daddy how old she really is until a little later when they are already in love. He says, Shit, this really sucks. And she shrugs, This is just the way it is. She has conjured a woman they can all believe in if they don’t look with a cop’s eye; she wears her well. For decades I just accepted the fact of them together as preordained — who doesn’t fall in love with my mother? — but now I want to know why, even though I know what it would mean, at that moment he didn’t break her heart.

There’s the first pregnancy, my shadow siblings, twins she loses, and yet after she isn’t pregnant anymore he insists they need to get married. It is November 1972 and she is still 15 but she finds a way and then they are in Queens in front of the priest, a cousin of the guy who got Daddy his new job, with his family and both of their roommates. Grandma and Grandpa hear her given name for the first time when the priest says Do you . . . ?

We call this child marriage now; there’s a movement to ban it for good. New York signed its new law just last year. She waits three months to call her own parents. When are you coming home? Grandmother asks. I’m not, she says, I’m married. In the background, the Colonel says, Oh thank god. We don’t have to worry about her anymore. They don’t show up at the apartment to drag her home the next day. I will never understand this. They send a gift instead: a poppy-red percolator and an iron. Their marriage certificate gets bronzed, as if its weight will anchor them until my brother and I arrive two and four years later, respectively. She ages herself backwards, slowly, to meet herself finally on my birth certificate, and things are what they are until they are not.

There’s a time in every story when a choice changes everything; a moment in hindsight becomes a beginning. The choice you focus on determines whose story you’re going to tell. I am alive because my father met a girl in a bar and sang her songs, recited her poems, talked about the books he had read and the places he’d been and was admired for it. My mother met a man in a bar and drew herself up to her full height. She told the world a story about herself. Nobody knew the whole truth of that moment, or else nobody cared. It was a different time, we say now about men and girls and then and now and the choices we linger on and the choices we forget or forgive. But when has it not been dangerous to walk through the world as a girl, even with a knife and the lessons of hitchhiking written in blood? At 15 I was yet a year away from primping for Prom, not hitchhiking to Seattle where nobody knew me. I wanted to know interesting people, but I knew that could wait; this is one of her triumphs. Also, I knew she would have found me, would never have stopped trying to bring me home.

This was supposed to be a story about my father, but there is no story anymore but hers and everything that leads up to it and everything that comes after. Your father, oh, he loved you kids, she tells me. I’ve never seen anyone as in love with anyone as he was with you and your brother. Today we don’t talk about later, and everything that leads up to his death when I am not quite six. Today we linger in the beginning, when the story is new in some ways and in others has been in motion for years — two, 10, 15, 36, depending on where your eye is drawn. I can’t ask him to tell me the story of that night and what came after, about how quickly he decided to live with her truth and make it his, too. I can’t tell it as well as he would have, she says, and here she laughs gently, but then again, you know, he lied a lot. It is strange for her, to talk about this girl who moved so boldly through the city so long ago, but she indulges me because that is love, and surviving this story is also her triumph.

One day, sometime after Daddy has been gone for years, his old roommate calls her to reminisce, the sounds of his annual Woodstock reunion party in full swing behind him. Alexis, he says to her, we were all just talking about that time you were on stage when Richie Havens was singing “Here Comes the Sun” and you were dancing, and you were wearing that one dress, you remember? And Mom, she just laughs. I wasn’t at Woodstock. I was only 12, are you nuts? This is a fond family joke. That was some other girl on that stage dancing in some other dress. But I see now how just like that, men can absorb a girl into their story, somehow convinced of her inevitability, as if she had always been there dancing on the edge of their lives, waiting for the right night in the right bar, the one moment that would make her permanent, part of someone else’s record. They have their own stories. My father had his. This one is hers alone.

The post Married at 15, or How he met my mother appeared first on Salon.com.

You probably would prefer to have a peaceful holiday season this year. You are likely not the sort of person who enjoys storming off from the dinner table, or crying in your childhood bedroom, or sullenly texting a friend while you furtively drink in the bathroom. And you may be dreading this time of year, knowing that there’s a very real possibility of any or all of those things happening, with people you may not even have seen in two or three years.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

The polarization in our country — and by extension, our families — is real, profound and possibly irreversible. A New York Times and Siena College poll last month found that “Nearly one in five voters — 19 percent — said that politics had hurt their friendships or family relationships.” Yet as I learned the year my relations took heated sides over the artistic merits of a certain Broadway musical’s revival, family is a minefield and people will fight about anything. 

Back then, I grudgingly kept my Sondheim-loving opinions to myself and just stalked off. Since then, I’ve completed my studies at my university’s conflict resolution program, on the way to my doctoral dissertation work on crisis negotiation. Over the past two years, I’ve learned about international peace brokering, about labor disputes and noisy neighbors. And while I find it highly unlikely I’ll get out of this time of year without at least one major blowup, I know I’ll be able to manage any family fights — musical theater–related or otherwise — better. You can too.

Establish some ground rules

The first rule of family fight club is that you talk about family fight club. You will not jinx anything or create a self-fulfilling prophecy acknowledging that things might get heated. That is what is known as superstitious nonsense. If you’re fought in the past, let’s assume you will again. 

I used to believe the whole reason for the season was avoiding conflict — a skill my daughters will tell you I entirely lack. That I — an individual whose catchphrase is “What did you just say to me?” — now have accredited training in conflict resolution is hilarious to them. You want to go? Let’s go. Let’s just do it without burning everything to the ground. Disagreement can be healthy. Openness to different points of view can foster creativity. And siloing ourselves in our echo chambers distorts everybody’s reality.

This doesn’t mean your Viking-hat-donning cousin is right about Nancy Pelosi, or that it’s your job to quietly endure any rhetoric contrary to your values. What it does mean is that this is a good time to ask yourself, what do you really want from your family gatherings this time around? Admit that this experience isn’t just going to be dinner or tree-trimming; it’s a dialogue. When I spoke earlier this year to Yale professor Zoe Chance about her book, “Influence Is Your Superpower,” she mentioned “coming in prepared” as a key element of any successful negotiation. 

Unfortunately, in the anarchy of family dynamics, we rarely articulate the guidelines. So if you’re anxious and concerned about the alchemy of the gathered personalities, put an early offer on the table for something different. “I think that trying to set some terms for communication is not a bad practice,” says Jonathan Golden, Ph.D., program director of Drew University’s Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict. “If there’s a history of these types of caustic interactions at the table, then it’s actually pretty wise for someone to just say, ‘Okay, why don’t we all try and do this a little differently this year? Why don’t we see if we can have some ground rules for talking? We’ll take turns, everyone will say what they have to say, we won’t shout.’ Really simple stuff. It doesn’t have to be like you’ve put a paper in front of everybody and had them sign some compact. You can just make a very light statement about talking respectfully.” 

And then stick to them

Regardless of whether anybody else actually accepts or abides by your proposed protocols, the very act of offering them is a gesture of peace. It also gives you your own code of behavior to stick to when things feel like they’re going off the rails. I say this to you a self-identified loose cannon — it is actually very empowering to just make a deal with yourself about your limits. It holds you accountable to your own values, and sets an example to your kids if you have them, to promise no name-calling and then not do any name-calling. 

Remember that listening is powerful

Since studying conflict resolution, active empathy has become my biggest secret weapon. It starts by not tuning out the moment that person across the table starts mouthing off. It deepens every time you can say — calmly and without sarcasm or distortion — “So you’re saying…” and then repeating back what that person has said. You can further ask here for clarification — “Where did you hear this? Am I understanding this correctly?” 

Checking in with the other person or parties about what they’re saying or experiencing serves a variety of purposes. It shows that you’re listening, which is a big deal. It nips misinterpretations and assumptions in the bud. It can even neutralize a statement just by letting the other person hear it repeated back to them. If nothing else, it can help you get a better understanding of where they’re coming from, and avoid future land mines. 

And from there, you’re likely going to be in a stronger place to ask, “Now can I say something?”  and make your own case.

Keep calm and take breaks

It’s not a murder trial, it’s just a family get-together. You don’t have to come to a unanimous verdict on anything; you aren’t literally trapped. But stress makes everybody feels anxious and defensive and (surprise!) less receptive to other views. Going in with gritted teeth sets a shaky groundwork. The more emotionally fortified you can be, the lower the odds of a stormy encounter for all parties. 

In a formal mediation, you can call for a caucus. At the holidays, if you need to request a time out, that’s fair. If you want to go off to check in with a friend, have at it. Just don’t use your break to doom scroll through Twitter or stew in your rage. It’s about protecting your own mental and emotional resources, not gathering more ammunition for another round of battle. 

Know that the zero-sum game is an outdated and terrible concept

You are not going to win at Thanksgiving. You are not going to do a victory lap around your sister-in-law at an eggnog brunch. It’s not going to happen. The likelihood of changing anybody’s mind is pretty slim. So don’t approach the holidays like that’s somehow the point. The good news is that it means nobody’s going to change your mind either, right? 

Modern resolution techniques focus on finding common ground and mutually beneficial outcomes. If you have agreed to show up and spend time with people who push your buttons (also known as your family), then the best you can do is get through it with your integrity intact. 

I have relationships I’ve walked away from because I wouldn’t “agree to disagree” on issues that are fundamental to my ethics. And I still fight with my family, often about very stupid stuff. But among the people I care about, I would rather find a way to constructively work through our squabbles. I fell in love with the study of conflict resolution because when you can disagree with respect and empathy, you can actually get a lot done. It’s worth it to try, and it’s more fun than sitting in the driveway, freezing and mad.

This stuff is not easy. “I joke that it’s a lot easier to do this in a professional setting and with strangers or work associates than it is with family,” says Golden. “With those other people, it’s easier to put on your most professional demeanor and have your frontal lobe working at all times. When it’s with family, you usually let your guard down, your triggers are heightened. When you’re sitting with them, it’s just much harder to inhibit all those feelings and emotions.”

The post I’ve studied conflict resolution. Here’s what it’s taught me about surviving the holidays appeared first on Salon.com.

Reared in a big Michigan family with three brilliant loud science brain brothers, I’d always felt left out by their Disease Game at dinner, where Dad threw out cases for my siblings to diagnose.

“Forty-two-year old Cambodian refugee vomiting blood?” he asked.

“Schistosomiasis,” Brian answered. “Pass the potatoes.”

I was freaked out by bees in jars in the refrigerator, pet rats and the calves’ esophagus dissected in the kitchen sink. Our house was their laboratory. I’d eat alone upstairs, homesick in my own room.  

RELATED: Why my father fasted on Yom Kippur: On survival, memory, and the power of a family story

Having grown up poor on the Lower East Side, getting to study medicine was Dad’s American dream. So of course he was encouraged the boys followed in his footsteps. But my conservative father disdained my liberalism, confessional poetry about my addictions and screwy relationships, and focus on creative writing. Flunking biology and chemistry, I learned my literary aspirations shamed him.

“Gonna sell your poems on the subway?” he asked. “Stop running naked through the streets.”

I argued against his red-state politics. Until the summer I turned 16 and worked at his Detroit office where I uncovered a secret file of medical charts of long-term low-income patients he treated for free. My dad was more complex than I thought. When I asked about it, he replied, “Mind your own business,” but I didn’t really have one. Each field I tried, I failed.

After grad school, my magazine job salary was $200 a week. Four years later, still an assistant, I quit. Not funny enough to be a stand-up comic or sit-down humorist, I did piecemeal assignments about being a single working girl for women’s magazines. As my brothers settled down, had kids and made a good living, my folks sniffed that I was “freelance everything,” fueling my career inferiority complex. At 33, my first teaching gig came with a miraculous equation: I showed up, they paid me.

“Finally, a real job,” Dad said. 

When I was 35, he was thrilled to walk me down the aisle, partly because my husband’s work had a better healthcare plan.

“To stay healthy, avoid all doctors, hospitals and medicine,” Dad told me, only half-joking. Needle-phobic, squeamish and scared of invasive procedures, I avoided tests, checkups and surgeries. I was lucky to be hale and have access to free advice; my father and I got along best when I had a physical problem he could fix over the phone.

I eventually found an Orthodox Jewish ophthalmologist who shared his idea for a thriller where the microfiche was hidden in the Hasidic spy’s eye. The endodontist I went to for an emergency root canal was a fellow Bob Dylan fanatic who let me blast “Blood on the Tracks” on his iPod which — on laughing gas — I sang along to loudly to drown out the drill. The radiologist who did my sonograms penned an op-ed, “Why Mammograms Matter,” that landed her on the “Today” show that we discussed at length. I picked an OB-GYN who published bestsellers on women’s health. I found it mercifully distracting when he’d talk about his book deals while  examining me.

By day I kept struggling with my own literary projects. At 43, I was overjoyed that Random House published my humorous memoirs about my past screwed-up relationships and addictions. My father wasn’t so joyful. “You’re humiliating me and your mother,” he snapped. 

“He isn’t your audience,” my therapist consoled, suggesting I tell Dad he could be proud of my accomplishment without loving my book. When he and my mother flew to New York for my launch party, my relatives asked, “How are you holding up?” as if they were sitting shiva. 

To undercut the hurt, I tried counterphobic humor. I joked in my bio that I was the author of books my family detested and  told my classes, “The first piece you write that your parents hate means you’ve found your voice.” Although I made a niche helping students see print, my father still trashed my bylines. However, he praised me for being a good teacher, wife, and aunt to his five grandkids.

“He’s proud of me for the wrong things,” I told my therapist.

“Just be happy he’s proud of you for something,” he replied. 

But Dad and I had common ground: we were both workaholics. It wasn’t until his heart attack at 80 that he was forced to quit the full-time job he’d had for half a century. He was sad to retire. Visiting my parents for a week, I took a stack of essays to grade from a seminar I’d given where  my students paid $150 per piece. Dad was marking papers too. The state of Michigan sent him medical cases to evaluate how long the patient required hospitalization, paying $150 each. I liked the connection, as if I’d inherited his critical faculties. 

“Shapiros could have a controversial opinion over a shoelace,” a  friend joked.

At 85, when my father was admitted to his former hospital with heart and kidney failure, we had a rare afternoon alone.  Sitting by his bed, I confessed to feeling inadequate for not giving him grandchildren and taking so long to figure out my finances.

“I have a lot of regrets,” he said. “It took me too long for me to make a decent living, screwing up jobs because of my bullheadedness and big mouth.”

They were traits we’d shared, though I thought I was the only late bloomer in our family.

I was nervous when his physician Olaf emailed me, but it wasn’t bad news. “Your dad says you’re an acclaimed author and professor who helps people publish. Could you help me?”  he asked.

“What did you tell Olaf about me?” I questioned Dad that night over the phone, still surprised. 

“That you stuck to your guns and became a success,” he said.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

“I’m telling you now,” he said, pleased when I helped Olaf publish his first magazine piece.

Young Susan Shapiro and father (Photo courtesy of Susan Shapiro)

Telling Dad how many students enrolled in the  classes I’d launched in my home, he was impressed with my new business acumen, saying “Who would have thought you’d be a Brownstein?” 

“What does that mean?” I asked Mom.

“It’s a compliment,” she explained. “The Brownsteins were the branch of his family who were good at business. The Shapiro side wasn’t.”

After losing my father four years ago, I was bereft. To feel closer to him, I reread over all our emails where he was my health proxy. When I tried to worm out of getting a needle biopsy after a breast cancer scare, he wrote, “Stupid is as stupid does … Steve Jobs decided to treat his pancreatic tumor with fruit juice and yoga.  Denial is very common in intelligent people and can lead to disasters.” He was scanned my test results, which came back benign. 

Another time, I sent him a picture of the bunion on my right foot and he’d replied, “Cure’s worse than the disease. So your toe’s not going to Hollywood.”

Fascinated by infectious diseases, his favorite story was eradicating a syphilis outbreak in St. Louis in the 1960s by giving out free beers at a bar to anyone who’d get the penicillin shot. I wondered what he’d make of the pandemic, and all the physicians suddenly in my cyber student body.

Hilariously, those with medical degrees were the most likely to screw up — ignoring rules and protocols, along with my boundaries, emailing me 24/7, sending in homework a week too soon, cc’ing me on rude follow-ups to editors. 

“I’ve had no response from you regarding my article submitted Monday,” an OB-GYN from the Midwest impatiently emailed an editor  days later, as if she was a nurse not following his orders.  

“Chill out a little,” I replied, suggesting he read the info I’d already shared about best  time and ways to follow up. “You think your great expertise in one arena automatically transfers to another field, but it doesn’t,” I told the doctor, realizing he was just a few years younger than my father.

“Wow thanks. How did you know that?” he emailed back with a smile emoji. 

“You remind me of someone,” I told him, wondering if I was forever locked in a struggle to find common language with my late paternal figure.

“I believe I came to the right place,” the gyno told me. 

I was happy he slowed down, did it right and nailed it. He sold his piece to a top newspaper.  

Several students referred to me as the “writing doctor” who’d “saved” their work. Of course, my field would never be as important as saving lives. But maybe I’d been emulating my father all along. Reading what someone wrote, I’d “diagnose” the problem and offer a prescription for how to fix it.  I’d learned The Disease Game after all – in my own realm where I had a chance at winning.

I wish Dad were here so I could share the latest stories by my physician students. But in a way, he still is, as I channel everything he taught me about hard work, brutally honest feedback and never giving up doing what you love.  Recalling that he treated patients in need without insurance who couldn’t pay him, I let former pupils having a rough time study with me for free, in his honor, trying to heal the world in my own small way, with all the strength that he gave me. 

More personal essays on complicated fathers: 

• “Dear Father” letters and DNA tests
• Married at 15, or How he met my mother
• My father won’t read this, and that’s OK with me

The post My disapproving doctor father hated my work — but we had more in common than I thought appeared first on Salon.com.

She had just turned 21 when she learned she was pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, a man who had recently dumped her. She had already started dating someone else. She was living with her parents. She had a low wage job in a department store, a high school diploma, and a mother who told her she’d kick her out if she didn’t get married. This was before Roe v. Wade, and the poor girl was Catholic to boot.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

My parents were strong armed into doing the seemingly right thing. There are no photos of their wedding. There is only one picture of the two of them together at all. They are sitting outside in a wicker loveseat, their faces inscrutable. My mother is six months pregnant. My father will leave her a few days later, heading out for work in the morning and telling her simply, “I’m not coming back.” In the third trimester, my father decided he really didn’t want a baby, so he exercised his right not to have one.

My mother never tired of telling me how harrowing her pregnancy and early motherhood was. I can’t recall ever not knowing of her botched attempts at miscarriage, or how she wished it had been cancer instead. I remember her telling me how she had prayed she would die when she was in labor, and how, when her brothers would wander in and out of the house, free and unencumbered by family obligations, she envied them. (She never once, however, expressed a wish she’d been able to have an abortion. That would have been a sin.) As I grew older, she told me just as frankly how difficult it was for her that I resembled my father so strongly, and that I’d had so many opportunities she’d never been granted. After I hit 21 myself, she never acknowledged a milestone in my life without commenting, “When I was your age, I was raising a child.”

She didn’t say those things to me to be cruel — her cruelties had an altogether different tenor. She said them because she had so much shame around her feelings, and like any good Catholic girl, she felt a need to confess. I just think she wanted forgiveness. A child is always supposed to be a blessing, and motherhood is always supposed to be your highest purpose as a woman. It was true in her day, and it’s still very much the default expectation now. I can only imagine how deeply all of her frustration and pain around the subject troubled her.

RELATED: The Christian right didn’t used to care about abortion — until they did

I know that my mother loved me, and I can look back on my early years and recognize how much good there was in them. I can see myself next to her in the front seat of her car — because child safety had not been invented yet — singing along with every pop song on the radio. She was young, after all. She loved music. She loved to dance. She looked cute in everything she wore. And when I could function as her similarly cute little friend, we always had a great time. It was the parenting part she always wrestled with.

There’s no way of telling what my mother might have become had she not been forced to become a single mother at such an early age. Her social class, gender and family history of mental illness would have been just the same. But she might have had a more fair shot at a life of her own making. If nothing else, she would have had more time. Time to be that spirited, carefree young woman that I sometimes caught glimpses of, and remember most fondly. I have never felt that lost opportunity more acutely than I have these past few days, knowing that she is gone and everything she might have been is gone with her as well.

I was not much older than she had been when she had me when I endured a contraceptive failure and a late period of my own. In that brief, panicked period of wondering, before the reassuring verdict of a home pregnancy test, I vividly imagined two futures for myself. Because I could. I could choose motherhood, just as I could choose abortion. The path would have been mine to take. The foes of reproductive freedom always seem to make it out that choice equals abortion. It’s actually so much simpler — choice means choice. When you hear those stories of supposedly brave women who faced an unplanned pregnancy and “chose life,” just remember, that would not be possible if you took away the choice part.

Over the years, several of my friends have faced similar dilemmas, because roughly one in three women will have an abortion in her lifetime. In my unscientific observation, I don’t know a single woman who has regretted her abortion, just as I don’t know a single woman who has regretted having her children. That’s the incredible gift that so many of us (though fewer and fewer all the time) who’ve come of age after Roe have been given — not just for us, but our kids too.

There are plenty of people walking around in this world whose conceptions were not planned but whose presence nine months later was still welcomed and cherished. And there are others whose mothers clearly and explicitly wanted not to be pregnant, whose circumstances were truly dire, and who never got a say in the matter. It is not easy being either the mother or the offspring in that latter population. Forcing women to have babies is nothing short of punitive. It is punitive toward them, it is punitive toward the children they bear.

My firstborn is 21 now. When her grandmother was that age, she’d no doubt have told her, she was raising a child. Looking at her, it really does blow my mind. My daughter is, in so many ways, just a kid. But she is first and foremost her own woman, which means that at least for now, she gets to decide when and if she has children. Her younger sister is currently applying to colleges, and the two sisters had a rueful laugh on Christmas when their cousin in Austin asked if there were any Texas universities on the shortlist.

It’s infuriating that my children’s generation faces more serious obstacles to their reproductive rights than mine has. It is outrageous that we have a Supreme Court with judges who cavalierly wave away women’s legitimate concerns by babbling about safe havens, as if childbirth in this country is not for many a physically and psychologically dangerous proposition. I’m not going to change anybody’s mind by saying this; it doesn’t negate the truth of it.

My father’s retreat had been singular and abrupt; my mother’s was cumulative and slow. In retrospect, I had seen it coming my whole life. I’m not qualified to offer a psychiatric diagnosis, but I have my own guesses, and I witnessed firsthand how much she struggled with her mental health. That struggle manifested in multiple ways, including in the icy silences she instituted for family members and friends when she grew angry at them, or simply weary of their company. With me, things started to change when I had my own children. She found excuses not to come to birthday parties and Christmases. Then she stopped answering her phone. Eventually, she cut herself off from everyone — her siblings, her in-laws, everybody — except her second husband.

My mother did her best, she really did, and I turned out OK. I still love her and grieve for her, and I will be doing both for the rest of my life. But nothing can change the fact that a sheltered girl, loved only conditionally by her parents and her community and not at all by the man who got her pregnant, was let down by everybody when she was at her most frightened and vulnerable. Nothing can change that my good life came at the expense of hers.

My mother didn’t want to be a mother, not like that anyway, and she spent the remaining decades of her life traumatized because she was made to become one regardless. In time, though, she found a way to extricate herself from that identity, just like a trapped animal will leave behind a limb as the price of escape. In her final years, my mother made a choice. And when I stepped back in to her life after my stepfather died suddenly in 2020, I was not particularly surprised to learn how many of my mother’s care providers had no idea that she’d ever had a daughter.

More life stories: 

• I grew up in a Christian commune. Here’s what I know about America’s religious beliefs
• We were American Girls: What Addy taught me about Black hair, freedom and myself
• My mother and I haven’t talked about the Atlanta spa attacks

The post My mom finally made her choice, after a lifetime colored by the one she wasn’t allowed appeared first on Salon.com.

We all have hobbies, habits and routines we guide our lives by. My mom reads tarot cards. She started reading cards about 10 years ago when she was volunteering at a yoga retreat where tarot and astrology were widely used. They made sense to her intuitively because she considers herself a spiritual person. 

RELATED: Why business is booming for psychics during the pandemic

My relationship with my mom hasn’t always been easy. For the longest time, tarot was one more thing I thought I would never understand about her. Tarot is a mystical guiding system that has been used throughout history for fortune telling. The cards first emerged in Europe in the 15th century and were used simply for card games. The use of tarot cards in divination came into usage during the 1700s and have since been connected to the occult and mysticism around the world. Recently, tarot and astrology have become popular with millennials, along with other New Age spiritual practices. Co-Star, an app that provides users with their astrological charts and daily horoscopes, has gained 5.3 million users since launching in 2017. This rise in popularity may have more to do with the opportunity these pursuits offer for self-evaluation than beliefs grounded in the validity of mystical divination. 

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

When my mother first got into tarot, I kept my distance. I believed there was no realistic explanation for predicting someone’s life through a deck of cards. Then one day, during the pandemic, driven half out of boredom and half out of the certainty nothing could be weirder than what we were already living through, I asked my mom to give me a reading. It was startlingly accurate. Over the course of the next year and a half, I asked her for readings on a regular basis. She predicted the outcome of various periods of time in my life and gave me advice based on her readings, which were not only accurate but insightful.

In a tarot reading, the participant asks a question, and the reader will flip over a series of cards, interpreting an answer based on each card’s meaning. Usually, I ask for a three-month overview of what is in store for me. My mom examines the cards, pointing out their meanings as she works to build the overarching message in response. After reading the cards and evaluating the relationships they have with each other, she fits the message into the context of my life. 

RELATED: What a skeptic learned from consulting psychics — and astrologers, tarot readers, empaths and more

My mom doesn’t believe in fortune telling. For her, that’s not what tarot cards are about. She uses tarot to offer insight, understanding, new perspectives, or renewed hope on challenges the person she is reading for may be facing. The cards provide a space for deeper self-reflection and give the participant an opportunity to ask questions about situations they are currently struggling with. She says it’s like a fun way of doing therapy — instead of talking to a medical professional, you’re playing a card game. 

For me, it’s given me a way to open up to my mom again. When I moved away to college a few years ago, we grew apart. Sometimes we wouldn’t talk for a couple of weeks. One time a whole month flew by with no communication. When we did talk, I often felt like she couldn’t offer me the support or the advice I needed because my life had taken its own course. During my sophomore year I felt overwhelmed, juggling my role on the school newspaper with sports, work and classes. Over the phone, my mom advised me to drop some unpaid work with the newspaper so I would have more time to manage everything else. I told her that was ridiculous. She didn’t understand how important the newspaper was to me. I didn’t even consider the possibility of scaling back on anything after that. Her advice made me resistant to examining my problem from a new perspective, even if it could have been helpful, because I felt she didn’t understand what my priorities were anymore. So I forged ahead with everything still on my plate. It did not turn out well.

Some of that overwhelming busyness came to a halt during the pandemic, and tarot became a way for us to re-connect while quarantined. Throughout the year, we would convene regularly to puzzle out the future, and I began to develop an understanding of how the cards worked as well as where her interest in them came from. It was reassuring, during a time when nothing seemed normal and predictable about the world, to feel we could see possible outcomes of situations.

When the pandemic cost me my on-campus jobs, I became stressed about paying for school. It was a terrible period of uncertainty; I didn’t know how I would pay my upcoming bills. In our tarot readings, my cards kept telling me to be patient — I had pentacles (the money card) coming my way. Even though I’m usually extremely impatient, I took her advice and held off on making impulsive financial decisions. Then I received some educational support grants from my school, which helped take care of my tuition expenses. 

As the cards continued to provide me with unsettlingly accurate predictions, I tried to piece together explanations on how they worked. I considered multiple theories. They present situations and patterns you recognize in your life only because you are primed to see them. They could simply be self-fulfilling prophecies. The readings could also be so general they could apply to anyone’s life and could fit any situation. 

I also considered how the existing relationship I have with my mom could be influencing the readings. She knows more about my life then a stranger would so would have more of an insight into how the readings could apply to my life making the reading seem more accurate. But a lot of what she has read in the cards dealt with situations or relationships she didn’t know about. 

In the absence of explanations, we seek to fill in the blanks. To cope with uncertainty, we often develop our own stories about the world around us. Like upside-down cards, any situations we face in life can be turned around if we reorient how we think about it.  

If my mom had simply told me to be patient about money, I probably wouldn’t have taken her advice the same way. Through reading tarot we were able to establish a relationship that took some of the pressure off both of us. I wasn’t asking my mom a question; I was asking it from the cards. She wasn’t giving me a mother’s advice; she was reporting what she had decoded in front of us. The intermediary allowed me to be more accepting of her wisdom and support. It also allowed me to develop a new kind of relationship with my mom — one where we could share the same experience and learn more about each other’s lives through this process of self-evaluation. 

Despite our personality differences and the challenges we have faced in our relationship, my mother probably knows me better than anyone else in the world. And thanks to tarot, now I know her better, too. 

Read more personal essays about mothers and daughters: 

• It’s my mom’s fault I stole her letters
• The enigmatic gift from my estranged mother that I decided to keep
• My mother and I haven’t talked about the Atlanta spa attacks

The post Tarot helped me take advice from my mother appeared first on Salon.com.

The Daily Beast reports that in “Pennsylvania, Maine, Michigan, and Iowa in recent months, school board meetings have been disrupted by allegations that educators are giving special treatment to furry students.”

The first notable instance of furry panic occurred when right-wing activists pushed a false claim about schools in Michigan placing litter boxes in bathrooms to allow furry students to use them, and the bogus rumors about furry infiltration into the public education system have only grown from there.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

In York County, Pennsylvania, for example, Facebook rumors began swirling around among conservative locals warning that furries “could be in your child’s classroom hissing at your child and licking themselves.”

Patch O’Furr, proprietor of the furry news site Dogpatch Press, tells The Daily Beast that many of the same people spreading bogus furry rumors are the same people agitating to ban books they don’t like.

“It’s culture war, it’s control, and it’s not about protecting kids,” O’Furr explains. “If you actually look at who’s doing this, at some of the political groups getting involved, they’re all far right.”

The post Fear of “furries” in schools grips conservative parents fooled by absurd Facebook rumors appeared first on Salon.com.

I would know, as I was among the 52 percent of millennials living with their parents during the pandemic. My now-husband and I saw our lives in flux before our wedding; as a result, we moved in with my mom for a few months.

Given how close I was to such a major adult milestone, I was surprised at how my living situation changed my psychological disposition. Suddenly, I was visibly losing my patience with my mom, complaining to my fiancé how annoyed I was with her, and often taking walks just to get out of the house.

It wasn’t until I was venting to a friend that I realized this feeling was all too familiar in a very uncomfortable way. I felt like I was regressing to a 15-year-old version of myself again. To be clear, I have a very good relationship with my mom. But, we both agreed that we cohabitated a little longer than either of us could tolerate.

The experience I’m describing isn’t an abnormal one, and it often happens as many people pack their bags and spend days or weeks with their parents during the holidays. These reunions generally start off cordially; but at a certain point, after the niceties have passed, a family may find themselves regressing to versions of themselves they’d prefer to forget. 

That’s not only true of adult children. Parents often regress to a state where they feel as though they’re parenting a teenager or child again, instead of a 20-something, 30-something, or even 40-something adult. Why does this happen?

According to Dr. Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist and author of “Joy From Fear,” a childhood home can be a trigger for “old dynamics.”

“Many people assume that psychological growth naturally matches chronological growth, but unless a person works to individuate from a family of origin in healthy ways, returning to a childhood home can certainly trigger old dynamics — especially the unhealthy ones,” Manly said. “Moreover, parents often unconsciously assume pre-existing authoritarian roles when their adult children return home; this can create difficult challenges for the adult child who wants to be seen and treated as an adult.”

Indeed, when a person goes back in time mentally and emotionally — in the sense that memories are triggered by a specific place, like a childhood home — that can change everyone’s behavior. Dr. Mark Borg, co-author of the upcoming book, “Making Your Crazy Work for You,” agreed that an environment can trigger old habits and patterns, but noted the environment isn’t always a physical home.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

“The primary caretaker, or caretakers, is the environment,” Borg said, adding that the relational patterns we develop with our parents and siblings when we are young often repeat themselves throughout adulthood. What we learn about ourselves and others in our early life becomes “a blueprint” for how we expect things to be, Borg added. “It creates a tendency (it’s been called a ‘compulsion’ ) to seek, find and recreate in future relationships familiar elements from the most salient and influential times in our history.” Borg explained that “the influence is mutual. . . that is, children are heavily influenced and transformed by their parents, and their parents are, in turn, influenced by their role as caretakers.”

Borg said the holidays are “particularly salient for such repetition.”

“They are already so heavily imbued with profound and irrepressible memory and emotion,” Borg said.

Another reason this regression can happen is because both the adult child and the parents don’t know these newer versions of themselves.

“The parents often do not know the adult versions of their children as well as the child versions; they may also still see their adult children as ‘kids,'” said Rebecca Tolbert, a therapist in Washington DC. “The adult children have set beliefs about what their childhood home and parents are like; both parties fall into what is ‘typical’ instead of addressing the situation and intentionally building something new.”

Tolbert said to think of it like an athlete who has routinely practiced a sport for years.

“You’ve spent 18 years with your parents every single day in a specific dynamic, and if you are an athlete and you’re practicing something all the time, that’s the routine and the rhythm that is going to be established,” Tolbert said. “So when you come back to your parents’ house, they know this person that they’ve spent 18 years with every single day as a specific person, maybe you’re 40 years old, but they still have spent all of that time with that version of you than they have with this adult version.”

Clinical psychologist Forrest Talley said regression can happen in both healthy and unhealthy parent-child relationships.

“Interestingly, this often occurs even in healthy relationships,” Talley said. “But the regression is much less intense, and the impact on the visit is transitory at best.”

Tolbert suggested families talk about this before the holidays to avoid regressing to an unpleasant dynamic, and recommended Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication strategy as a way that people can have these conversations.

“I would recommend families sit down and have honest conversations about expectations from each other,” Tolbert said. “Understanding expectations and boundaries can help change the dynamic into one that is most beneficial for everyone.”

The post Do you feel like a sullen teen again when you visit your parents for the holidays? You’re not alone appeared first on Salon.com.

Using the uptick of parents storming the once-placid meetings to complain about mask mandates and critical race theory (CRT) as a springboard, the sketch saw bellowing cast-member Cecily Strong began by telling the startled board members, “I am concerned and I am also crazy– let’s begin,” before rambling about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and concluding, “This is all about Israel.”

Asked, “Okay, ma’am, do you have a question about the district’s Covid policies or your child’s safety?” Strong shot back, “I don’t have a child, and I don’t live in this town.”

Another mom (cast member Heidi Gardner) stepped up to state, “I am so mad I am literally shaking right now. Forget Covid, the real threat is critical race theory. My question is: What is it? And why am I mad about it?”

You can watch below:

The post ‘I am concerned and I am also crazy’: SNL nails sketch about parents hijacking school board meetings appeared first on Salon.com.

Accordingly, most of the nation’s school districts — and parents of school-age children — planned for a slightly more “normal” 2021-2022 school year. Amanda Herman, who has three children between the ages of two and eleven, was among the optimistic parents who, earlier this summer, was eager to re-enroll her kids in school for the 2021-2022 school year.

“I was ready at the end of spring; I was like, ‘okay this is great and we’re good,'” Herman said. “Homeschooling was not great for everyone’s mental health, but I think it would have been better if we were not in a pandemic.”

How things have changed in the past three months. Children under 12 almost certainly won’t be eligible for a vaccine by next month, and COVID-19 cases have risen dramatically nationwide due to the highly transmissible delta variant. Now, that feeling of hope that Herman had back in May has been supplanted by an all-too-familiar sense of dread. 

“I’m becoming more anxious, again, now that everybody’s enrolled and we’re getting ready to go back,” said Herman. “There’s people coming to our school board meeting, saying that they don’t want the kids wearing masks, protests at the local high school, a whole group of people online saying that they’re just going to send their kids without masks and say that they don’t have to wear them.”

One of Herman’s children has asthma, which is one reason why the possibility of children not wearing masks to school is highly disconcerting to her as a parent. Despite re-enrolling her children to in-school learning, Herman and her husband are seriously considering a last minute pivot — possibly back to homeschooling.

“It’s scary,” Herman said. “Especially when you hear what’s going on in the South.”

Herman is one of several parents of children under 12 whom Salon spoke with. Some have children who are immunocompromised; others live in more conservative states where mask-wearing has been politicized. No matter their individual situation, all are exhausted.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

As Herman alluded to, children’s hospitals in many red states with low vaccination rates — like Florida, Texas, and Louisiana — have pediatric units filling up with kids who have COVID-19.

Until the spread of delta, parents of school-age children might have found solace in data that showed transmission of COVID-19 among children was rare. If children did get infected, the likelihood of a severe outcome was low. While that appears to mostly still be the case, cases among children are now on the rise. As reported by the American Pediatric Association (APA), in the week before Aug. 5, 94,000 children tested positive for COVID-19 — a 31 percent increase in the number of cases from the previous week. In total that week, children accounted for 15 percent of all COVID-19 cases. 

Fortunately, the APA reported that hospitalization and death remain “uncommon.” In states where data was available, according to their analysis, less than 2 percent of all child COVID-19 cases required hospitalization; 0.00% to 0.03% were fatal.

Whether the delta variant is making kids sicker than previous strains remains unclear. Yet many experts believe that the numbers are simply rising among kids because the delta variant is more contagious.

“This virus is really tracking the unvaccinated,” Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a professor of pediatrics and infectious diseases at Stanford University, told NPR. “Because children under 12 are not able to be vaccinated, we’re just seeing the same increase in infections in that group because [the delta variant] is so infectious.”

This is in part why both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) latest updated guidance for schools, and now recommend that all students over 2 years old, along with staff, wear masks regardless of their vaccination status.

“In addition to universal indoor masking, CDC recommends schools maintain at least 3 feet of physical distance between students within classrooms to reduce transmission risk,” the CDC states. “When it is not possible to maintain a physical distance of at least 3 feet, such as when schools cannot fully reopen while maintaining these distances, it is especially important to layer multiple other prevention strategies, such as screening testing.”

But these are just recommendations. As Salon has previously reported, not all states and school districts have committed to following and implementing them.

Bobby Mathews of Hoover, Alabama, was struggling with the decision to send his two children, ages ten and six, back to a school that does not require masks nor do contact tracing in the event of an outbreak. Virtual learning, Matthews said, was off the table all summer, too. Finally, after a group of parents fought against the lack of masking, the school agreed to implement a 30-day mask mandate.

Mathews, who said he and his wife were “angry” and “anxious” about the situation, considered homeschooling as an alternative, or even moving school districts. Now, with the month-long mask mandate, Mathews decided to send his children back to school and “push for metrics” to be presented after the month is up.

“We are kind of celebrating this as a victory,” Mathews said. “Right now we just have this huge sense of relief and almost joy at this very small victory. It’s hard because my kids want to go back to school, my kids want to see other children.”

But after 30 days, he knows they will have to “reevaluate.”

“We all want to get back to that normalcy, but you can’t just pretend that everything’s gonna be okay,” Mathews said, adding that he and his family moved to Hoover in part because it had one of the best reputations for schools in the state. He has been shocked by the lack of consideration for his children’s safety and wellness during this time by people who he previously believed had their best interest at heart.

“This has already developed a lot of fissures and I don’t know if they can be healed,” he said. “This has shown me that I can’t trust people that I ought to be able to trust — people who are supposed to be in charge of my kids.”

Parents of younger children face a similar dilemma with preschools. Alison Manor, parent to a three-year-old and an eight-month-old infant, has been hemming over whether to send her daughter to preschool or wait a while longer.

“At this point she really hasn’t interacted with other kids — she was only a year-and-a-half when lockdown started,” Manor said. “We’re so excited about preschool, but now it’s like, with delta, it’s really become really hard to make that decision — even with her wearing a mask.”

Manor is on the fence because COVID-19 cases are rising in her county, and Manor and her daughter already had COVID-19 once. Manor lost all feeling in her hands due to it, and hasn’t regained it. Even with masking, Manor is worried about the vaccination status of the teachers, assistants, and other children’s parents.

Until her children can get vaccinated, she likely won’t feel totally comfortable sending them to school.

“[My daughter] had it before — and I don’t know if she has any long-term COVID effects from the one she had previously. Do I really want to take that chance if I can wait another six months?” Manor asked. “I’m not sure.”

Now, Manor must confront this renewed feeling of uncertainty.

“We were so hopeful,” Manor said.

The post “I’m becoming more anxious again”: Parents feel hopeless as school year begins appeared first on Salon.com.

The idea was recently floated by Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance.

“Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children,” Vance told a conference on the Future of American Political Economy.

The hosts of Fox & Friends discussed the merits of the idea that the “childless left” should not be able to vote.

“I think it’s an interesting idea,” host Will Cain said. “I’m into interesting ideas. Let’s think about it. Let’s talk about it. He’s saying childless leaders are making decisions that are short-term in mind, not focused on the long-term future health of this country because they don’t have a stake in the game. Parents have a stake in the game, they have children so give parents a bigger say.”

Co-host Pete Hegseth pointed out that fellow co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy would get nine votes because she has nine children.

“I don’t know about that solution, that seems not feasible,” Campos-Duffy said. “But I will say that I agree with the premise of it, that it is absolutely true that people like [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], Pete Buttigieg — you can name the left-wing politicians, people who think that we should legalize marijuana because they don’t have kids and they don’t really have a stake in what that looks like.”

“I agree with him 100% that they don’t have a stake in the game,” she continued.

“That is looking at it through the lens of the actual solution, which is the family unit,” co-host Pete Hegseth agreed. “So many ills that we have in our society stem from that breakdown. I agree with you. [It’s] not a feasible policy but what it is in principle is a reflection of the fact that — what Ronald Reagan said, freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”

“And if you’re Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — our favorite comrade — and you’ve said the world is going to end in 12 years, what do you care?” he added. “It’s this idea of absolute pessimism that the world’s going to end and as a result, we’re the problem and don’t have kids.”

According to Hegseth, a large family is “a reflection of optimism.”

“Do you want to pass AOC’s America off to America or J.D. Vance’s?” Campos-Duffy asked. “American Marxists want to tear down the American family.”

Watch the video below from Fox News:

The post New idea gaining steam in right-wing circles: Only parents should be able to vote appeared first on Salon.com.

I have a six-year-old and an eight-year-old. It should come as no surprise to you that the pandemic has been hard with two kids. Not only have I had to maintain my full-time job in sales, but I spent most of last year being an unofficial teaching aide for first and third grade Zoom.

My husband is helpful, but given the flexibility of my job and its hours, I’ve taken on more responsibilities with the kids and their schooling. Fortunately, they are back in school in person, but there were definitely some days I wanted to pull my hair out. And honestly, some days I still do.

Anyway, I write to you because I’m anxious about what the summer will bring, and what it will mean for my half-vaccinated family. I’m getting my second Pfizer shot this week, and my husband is getting his next week. But when will my kids be able to get vaccinated? We’ve been invited to every summer event imaginable— weddings, reunions, and block parties. We so badly want to have a normal summer — whatever that means — with our friends and family. But it feels a bit risky with unvaccinated kids. My biggest fear is that the world will move on this summer, and parents like myself will still be stuck in our own pandemic purgatory. Any advice on how to have a fun summer — rather than another lockdown like last year?

Sincerely,

A Parent in Purgatory

Dear A Parent in Purgatory,

I can’t imagine what it’s been to be a parent during this pandemic. All I know is what I hear from friends and family, or read in stories with depressing headlines like “The Primal Scream: America’s Mothers are in Crisis.”

These headlines, this so-called “primal scream,” is your reality. Which is why I so badly want you to have a “normal” summer — like you said, “whatever that means.” I want you to be able to visit with your family, visit friends, go to a carnival, attend a birthday party at a Chuck E.  Cheese, and not have to worry about your children getting COVID-19.

But it’s looking more and more like that won’t necessarily be the case.

At the same time, I’m also hopeful it won’t be as bad as what the anxious part of your mind is conjuring.

The pandemic has certainly exposed the lie that working mothers can have a work-life “balance.” It’s also reiterated how when a country prioritizes profit and patriarchy over the needs of every community, including working parents, it’s the women who suffer the most. Fortunately, you’ve been able to keep your job, but I sense from your letter it’s been a struggle and you’re exhausted.

You ask: When will my kids be able to get vaccinated? That’s a very good question. In late March, Pfizer released results from its clinical trial for children between 12 and 15 which showed that its vaccine had 100 percent efficacy and “robust antibody responses.” Pfizer also recently requested to expand use of its adolescents within this age range, too. Both Pfizer and Moderna are conducting trials for those under the age of 12 now.

It is standard practice to test older children first, because children of different ages can have a different response to the vaccine. As a recent Nature article explained, the goal of these trials is to find a balance between the correct age and dosage of the vaccine in which a strong immune response is triggered without too many side effects. Children have different immune systems since they haven’t been exposed to as much crap as adults. So teens will likely be able to get the vaccine this fall, but for elementary school-aged children — like yours — it might not be until the beginning of 2022.

I know this is super frustrating, because it’s not like kids can’t get the coronavirus. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), K-12 aged kids account for slightly less than 10 percent of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Fortuitously, younger children are more likely to be  asymptomatic and have less severe outcomes. Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) is also a reported condition associated with COVID-19 that has been affecting children’s health. And like many aspects of this pandemic, Black and Hispanic children carry the burden of COVID-19 cases. The CDC notes that Black children and Hispanic children are also associated with increased risks for hospitalization.

The truth is children aren’t 100 percent protected from COVID-19 — and even if all the adults are vaccinated, if there are other unvaccinated children around, there is still a risk of transmission.

I know this is disappointing, as it means that yes, your family might feel more restricted this summer. But I don’t think that you’re looking at summer full of FOMO (fear of missing out) in another parental lockdown. Epidemiologists with school-aged children recently shared with The New York Times how they plan on vacationing and actually doing things this summer which will require the same safety precautions as now: making sure that everyone in your group over 2 wears a mask, maintaining six feet from people outside your household, avoiding big crowds, and washing hands frequently. And frankly, children or no children, this is what most people will be doing this summer too. Mask mandates aren’t going anywhere — especially when it comes to public gatherings.

My advice on how to have a fun summer would be this: stay off social media, which can amplify any FOMO you might feel, and make an effort to do things you actually enjoy doing with your family. And on the hard days, remember this won’t last forever. This is one more weird-ish summer, but definitely won’t be as weird as last year. However, on days when you feel that primal scream bubbling up inside, remember you’re not alone. And to prove that, you can listen to a catalog of screams throughout the pandemic from the now defunct Just Scream hotline — which by the way is no longer taking scream calls, but instead is taking messages of hope. Indeed, though you may feel a little hopeless about this summer, know that there is hope.

Sincerely,

Pandemic Problems

“Pandemic Problems” is an advice column that answers readers’ pandemic questions — often with help from public health data, philosophy professors and therapists — who weigh in on how to “do the right thing.”  Do you have a pandemic problem? Email Nicole Karlis at nkarlis@salon.com. Peace of mind and collective commiseration awaits.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

The post I’m vaccinated, my kids aren’t. Will that ruin our summer plans? appeared first on Salon.com.

Today, I make a list of the Asian American women who raised me: my massage therapist half-Japanese mom; her older sister, my neighborhood-walking, visor-wearing Japanese auntie; and my octogenarian Filipina paternal grandmother currently holed up in her house (fully vaccinated, thank goodness). I think about my white grandfather and then I think about everyone’s white grandfather. The ways we learn to talk about them: sorting pennies and playing computer chess, taking care of their progeny or truly loving their wives. I am not here to make any claims about anyone’s origin story except for mine. Part of me knows the secrets are dark and hold shame. I am probably a product of someone’s fetishism. I am a person who exists because of and despite white supremacy. And how do you decolonize when you are a product of colonization?

I don’t have answers, only questions at this point. I know that something horrible happened to my Japanese aunt that made her lose her mother tongue. I know that my white grandfather married two Japanese women: the first was my maternal grandmother, who died before I was born. I know that this grandfather thinks he saved her. They met in Japan when he wore a khaki Air Force uniform, according to a vague letter that gave me more questions than answers.

* * *

My mom once told me that people discriminated against her for being too white in her Hawaiian high school. Her last name was white because her dad was white. Her Japanese mother was hidden in so many ways. In the crevices of memories and stories, in a dark bowling alley snack bar working as a cocktail waitress, in a foggy story about her upbringing in a brothel, the way she died and no one but her new husband knew where she was buried. This woman does not show up on my mother’s face much. One of my mom’s eyes has a droopy lid — she jokingly calls it her “Asian eye.” Before that asymmetry, she always identified as a half-white girl. The other half (the Asian half) invisible or ambiguous. Even her email address means half-(white) foreigner.

When my sister was little, we watched the movie “Corrina, Corrina,” starring Whoopi Goldberg, and she was outraged at the way Whoopi’s character is treated. She said, But we’re all Black, except for mom. (We are not Black; our dad is Filipino.) In the early 1990s, “The Ernest Green Story” came out as a made-for-TV movie. My dad watched it in front of me, seven or eight years old. First day of desegregation and a girl spits the N-word at the main character, teenage Ernest Green. What is that? I ask my dad. He just says, It’s very bad. Then she is the N-word, I tell him, but I say the whole word, pointing to the blonde bully in saddle shoes. I do not remember what he said to me next, but I got in trouble. I felt as if I’d done something wrong, but I did not understand what. These two examples are representative of our education about race and identity as children.

When I was in my twenties I argued with my mom about that racial slur, a thing I had learned to keep out of my mouth, a thing whose history evaded me until I asked the right people the right questions, read and listened. I don’t remember how it came up. Maybe it was the comfort with which it sat in her mouth. A round, heavy stone. She didn’t use it as a slur, but referred to it, pronouncing the R, and when I cringed, she argued that words don’t have power. She said this to me, a writer, and it was hard for me to guard my little heart and tell her, Oh yes, they certainly do! I probably said something about history and memory and hatred, about how a word like that doesn’t exist for a person like her, so there’s no way for her to really understand how it feels. At the end, I felt I made a strong point and she understood. I do not know if we could have a productive conversation like that today.

* * *

I thought talking to my 80-year-old conservative Filipina grandmother about police brutality and racism would be hard. She surprised me — she was incredibly receptive. She even told me a story about how police in SWAT team gear, with guns drawn, surrounded her townhouse once while she was at work. (She lived in a predominantly Black neighborhood then, and currently lives in a very white neighborhood, three houses down from my mom, her ex-daughter-in-law.) When I asked, Do you think that kind of response: having guns pointed at your house, was necessary? Do you think they would have done that in this neighborhood? She thought for a moment, and replied, No. I asked her to read “The Letter for Black Lives” in Tagalog. She has lived here since 1976 and speaks and reads English as well as Tagalog. I won’t pretend that she didn’t sow anti-Blackness in my childhood brain when she made comments about her Black neighbors, or that she doesn’t uphold white beauty standards as a symptom of the Philippine colonizer’s mentality. But acknowledging this country’s “brutal truth,” as James Baldwin puts it, is at least a step in the right direction.

My mom is different, somehow: harder to reach. The pandemic has not, as it has for many folks, allowed her to reassess the ways she might contribute to or benefit from a capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy. Instead it has intensified the rate at which she consumes conspiracy theories. Since last summer, my mom and I have argued about masks and vaccinations. I am for them; she is not. We step into our same worn rolls of argument, and I’m suddenly 14 again. She condescends to me: Use your brain. Think critically! She asks if I even know someone who has been affected by COVID-19? Yes. And are they dead? No. So that means, ostensibly, that because she is not personally affected (yet) and does not know people affected, that it does not exist in her reality. This seems to be her same approach to the damaging effects of racism and white supremacy.

The last time I talked to my mom about racism I was in grad school, teaching bell hooks and Baldwin to white kids in Indiana. She told me that I was giving racists power by reacting or expressing my anger and exhaustion. She told me a story about her full-Japanese half-sister, my auntie, who would just let it roll off her back: One time someone bumped her in TJ Maxx and said, Watch it Toyo! She didn’t let it bug her, my mother said. That same aunt once told my mom that sometimes she was surprised to see a Japanese woman in the mirror, that she expected to see a white woman. Maybe she didn’t let it bug her because she didn’t feel that it applied to her. What happens when you embody, celebrate, take pride in, and identify with the part that they are insulting?

In “Killing Rage,” bell hooks describes a specific kind of rage in response to racism, and explains why she does not remain silent: “Rage can act as a catalyst inspiring courageous action. By demanding Black people repress and annihilate our rage to assimilate, […] white folks urge us to remain complicit with their efforts to colonize, oppress and exploit.” The type of silence my mom wants us to perform does feel akin to both assimilation and colonization. The English in our mouths asks us to pronounce politely. We are conditioned to fake-laugh along for their comfort because it’s just a joke. I understand that defense mechanisms are sometimes necessary for survival. However, absorbing the blows, the micro- and macro-aggressions, keeping your head down and working hard, not reacting: these do not empower me. These non-reactions do not give me agency. I refuse to prioritize a stranger’s comfort over my own. I refuse to believe that my discomfort or anger gives an ignorant person power. Fuck that. I am not white-passing, I do not have a white person’s last name. I am an obviously brown, tattooed person. I am visible in all the ways that make racist people squirm or grimace: Because I exist, and I am not sorry. In a time when six Asian American women were murdered, in a time with record hate crimes against AAPI folks, I am terrified and sick and exhausted. I am full of rage. I picture my own family’s faces in each news story.

My mom and I have not spoken about the Atlanta shooting, and part of me wonders if she even sees herself (or her own mother or sister or daughters) in those women. The truth is that we haven’t talked because it’s difficult to talk to her. Any attempts to have conversations about race and history are ignored or evaded. I can’t make assumptions about how she may or may not identify with these victims; based on the ways she talks (or doesn’t talk) about race, I think she leans on her whiteness to distance herself from issues that POC typically experience. Maybe what I am saying here is that it’s safer for her to identify and see herself as half-white, and it’s part of her privilege that she can make that choice. However, the rest of us in the family are not half-white, so her denial can’t cover us all. 

* * *

I have not let my son spend time at my mom’s house since she left the state for a conference in the summer of 2020 and posted a photo using the hashtag #NoMasks. I have a hard time talking to my husband about it without yelling. He flinches sometimes at the barrage of response meant for my mother. Can I say, too, that she used to be the most progressive liberal person I knew? She ranted angrily about George W. Bush when I was in high school, but has fully done a Kanye West-style 180. In the last 15 years I have had several impassioned arguments with her about words she should not use. Two weeks ago, she posted about Dr. Seuss’s books, and claimed that caricatures of Asians do not offend her, but banning books sure does!

How do you mend a relationship when it feels like your own family denies your experience? How much impact can a conversation have when the person you are speaking with digs their heels in, doesn’t respond, or responds by gaslighting? Our communication has been bruised since our first pandemic argument last summer. I craft carefully edited statements that I agonize over for days before sending, she responds with links to platforms that brag about their “lack of censorship” and promoting “free speech,” despite the fact that it’s often misinformation or hate speech, and videos that deny the effectiveness of masks or spread conspiracy theories about the pandemic. My sister’s tactic is to send her jokey responses or treat her like someone passing out fliers on a busy street corner: No thanks! Have a good day! My three-year old is asking about seeing his grandmother. My dad asked me and my sister to please talk to her. What can we even say that hasn’t been said already?

The post My mother and I haven’t talked about the Atlanta spa attacks appeared first on Salon.com.

My parents met each other in 1977 and married in 1980 with the blessing of my mother’s dad, who passed away and went on to glory just as she found out she was pregnant with me in 1991. Mommy always says my grandfather and I passed each other going down and coming up to heaven. By the time I was born, after 15 years together, my mother and father were well out of their honeymoon phase. At the time of my birth, they were separated and living apart. I remember being as young as five years old and feeling like a repellent to any masculine presence in my life. What is it about me? I’d wonder then. As an adult, I had similar questions: What is it about me that keeps men from wanting to be there for me, or with me? I’d ask the men I’d date and find casual entanglements with. 

The housing projects where we lived on Third Avenue were only a stone’s throw away from Webster Avenue, where my mother was raised. The projects had inexplicably hot baths upstairs, and men who stayed up all night playing dominoes on Formica and chrome fold-out tabletops downstairs. I could count on those men being there every day on the red-tiled steps, slamming their black and white marble pieces down, more than I could count on the men in my own family at that point. And my perception of men, shaped by the lack of a consistent presence of them in my own home, only worsened over time.

Our grocery store of choice was CTown. When we’d get to CTown my mother would grab my fat little chin, lovingly, to ground me from our walk and give me her Black mother’s spiel, finger-wagging about keeping my hands to myself and not on the store shelves. She warned me many times not to run in the market, but did I listen? No, and I still have the scar on my head from the time I was knocked out after colliding with a rack of goldfish crackers at the end of an aisle at full speed. While Mommy and I would walk home from CTown I would drag my strapped jelly sandals and little toes along the concrete jungle and daydream of all sorts of things, like the Spice Girls and when I’d next see my Daddy.

Our visits happened on random weekends, with no rhythm or reason I could detect. He’d pick me up and take me and my glittery pink Minnie Mouse satchel that I called my “daddy bag” home with him to Queens. Sometimes I’d sit near the entrance of our apartment and wait for his lanky body to stroll through the door, but he wouldn’t show. He wouldn’t call with an explanation. That never dampened my excitement for our next scheduled visit, until it did. 

Feeling abandoned and disappointed gets old quick. Initially, my whole heart was in Queens. Daddy would put hot dogs and sugar in his spaghetti sauce, creating a gourmet dish worth a five-year-old’s dreams, and he allowed me to run through CTown as fast as I wanted. Daddy would play cassette tapes on the silver sound system he kept encased in a breakfront chest. The system was worth more than anything else in his small one-bedroom apartment, and the tapes he played ranged from DJ Premier mixes to Mary J Blige’s “What’s the 411.” Later I realized that his choices in music and food, let alone our trips to see daddy’s friends at the playground, weren’t appropriate for children. His behavior was wrong, but to a kid it felt so right. Being with him felt like being at Disney World, but it was just brash-ass Queens. Daddy had a way of making ordinary things feel extraordinary, maybe because they were often unexpected — his visits were frequently as untimely as his eventual death. 

Daddy’s final exit from my life started long before it happened, with a routine call from my mother’s sister Vanessa. I watched her curl the coiled phone cord around her finger with her red Revlon nails. I was never too far from my mother in those days and I attribute our synchronous nature now to that early closeness. After that phone call, during bath time, my mother posed a life-altering question to me. “Do you want to move to Baltimore?” I was five years old, a hardheaded daydreamer who inherited at least 50 percent of my developing decision-making matrix from a haphazard if loving father. Mommy has always taught me that even a child should have an equal say in their own life. Looking back, she had probably already decided to move to Baltimore, where Auntie Vanessa already lived, anyway, but knowing that she included little me felt good. “Yes,” I answered. 

The week I left The Bronx I was six years old. My leaving was unceremonious; it wasn’t like in the movies — no old Ford with suitcases and a rocking chair hitched to the top. And my dad didn’t come to see us off. We had said most of our goodbyes to close friends and family in the weeks prior to leaving. It hurt leaving all five years of what I had known behind — pissy project elevators, enchanting playdates on the Lower East Side. New York held a quinquennium of history for myself and 40 years for mommy, and that history included my daddy. I was pleased with myself and our decision to move over 200 miles from the gum-laden concrete walks to CTown, but as we packed I wondered if she would miss my dad as much as I would. My mother much kept a poker face when it came to her feelings about my dad. For leaving behind someone she had been with for 20 years, she seemed relaxed and unbothered. So I followed suit.

Once in Baltimore, we lived with my Aunt Vanessa and her family, and I started school at Deer Park Elementary. In my daydreams, I’d wonder what it would be like to to have my mother’s finger-wags and my dad’s mixtapes in the same house. My mother must have been dreaming too, because after our first year, in what I guess was a Hail Mary attempt at keeping my father in our lives, she asked him come down and help us move our things out of storage where we put them while she saved for our new apartment, and he did. When we were settled into our new third floor apartment on Old Court Road, Daddy never left.

Old Court Road was a far cry from Queens, and we didn’t have that kind of grass, bike riding hills or this many kids to play with in the Bronx. I couldn’t have been happier. Baltimore County must have had something in the air. All of a sudden the friction between my parents was quelled. My daddy’s chest was warm as his beating heart inside. He could fill a room with his snaggled grin. Days in Baltimore county with dad were filled with stops to Snowball stands, learning how to plant my feet on mountain bike pedals, and all types of food, from Jamaican jerk to spicy Korean barbecue. If we ordered, the whole neighborhood ate.

Why my parents had separated in the first place remained a mystery to me then. I had traced out every blemish on him as a little girl, hoping to bump into a flaw that might lead me to why my mother just couldn’t live with him, but found only a scar, big and visible, from when he swallowed a paper clip as a child, sitting just a few finger paces away from his belly button. He and my mom even renewed their vows in a beautiful ceremony. But just when everything felt perfect, he died due to complications from a cocaine addiction he had been battling since our days in New York. 

It’s hard to make sense of grief as an adult, let alone as a pre-teen. Was it my fault? Was it because of our decision to move? Was I a bad daughter? I was angry with God, Baltimore, cocaine, and for a while, all Black men. For years after his death, I asked why my father had abandoned me again, and this time for good.

When I got older, I asked my mother why she and Daddy separated. She sat me down and told me how cocaine riddled their marriage. My mother admitted that she had done coke as well, but stopped before she became pregnant with me. Daddy just didn’t. She grew up and focused on life and family, while he continued to play the same games. Despite their history together she still loved him and dreamed of a life with him; she hurled herself into him at top speed despite the warnings their history gave her. I’m sure mommy had her own scars from her relationship with Daddy — scars I couldn’t have known were there. Now I had my own.

In the months before he died, I watched my father fall apart. He had a rough time in finding work in Baltimore, and fitting society’s definition of what a man should be. The food and snowball dates stopped, and the laughing and joking went away, too. For too many nights I would stay up late, or sleep close to the door on our old white couch, waiting for his keys to jingle in the door. Some nights they wouldn’t jingle at all. That feeling of disappointment — waiting for him with my sparkly daddy bag packed, only for him not to show — came rushing back.

That childhood feeling that followed me from New York to Baltimore continues to find me as an adult. After my father’s death, a man leaving me was the worst thing I could imagine. So even when there were warning signs, I turned into a clone of my mother and ran toward men who would hurt me, holding onto them for dear life, trying not to feel the pain of my father leaving me. And that created a bitterness inside of me that I carried into many of my romantic relationships. From the first date to the break-up text, I already knew, somewhere deep in my mind, that my relationships weren’t going to work out. Dad left, so every other man will leave, too.

It took me years to realize that every Black man is not my father. Dating, falling in and out of love, meeting new and interesting people, and learning how to break up with men who try to hold on to me for dear life, taught me that all men are not the same. Some open doors and some don’t. Some are aggressive and some are sensitive. And the collective of them are all perfect and flawed in their own ways, unique sums of their experiences, influences and ideas. Blaming one man and one formative, traumatic experience for all men’s possible and present shortcomings was a cycle I had to break.

Facing the unknown, knowing something might not work out and mapping the scars on a new person anyway is a  daunting task. We should inspect the scars of those we are dating, but there are always going to be scars we don’t see, or not right away. I scanned my father so many times, and even his biggest visible scars didn’t tell me everything I needed to know. It’s taken me years to unlearn my fear that every relationship with a Black man will end in a nasty spill and a new scar of my own.

In hindsight, my mother asking me at five if I wanted to move — which made me feel, in my grief, like I bore some responsibility for my father’s death — caused me to have so much anxiety about committing to things, to places, to people. But taking that risk also brought so much beauty to my life. All that time and closeness I had with my father, while watching my mother be loved by him, was very important for me to see. Men might leave and that might hurt. But not every one will, I know now. Even relationships that don’t last my lifetime might give us worthwhile time together. I know that now. I can pack away that sparkly bag from childhood that held so much disappointment, and vow never to carry it with me again. 

The post My grief made me cynical about men appeared first on Salon.com.

OK. Orders another cocktail.

But then — line up those cocktails — years later I published a memoir, and a key character from my past contacted me with yet a third version of what had happened. THE version. Everything changed. Again. I didn’t know who or what to believe. I was in my 40s, and I still didn’t know how my mother Creola died.

On April Fools’ Day. Did I mention that? Bartender….

The suicide theory was hard to shake. I had proof. One Saturday afternoon, I had found my mother with a plastic bag tied around her head, held tight at the neck with the blue madras belt from my brand new Easter suit. Just before then, I had been playing outside, some made-up game with knights and dragons and a damsel in distress. I needed a costume, so I ran inside to get my older brother Ed’s bathrobe: perfect for a Medieval skirt, with maroon ribbed corduroy and gold trim. Regal enough for a king, or at least the little third-grade queen that I was. I went into Ed’s bedroom and found my mother lying face-up on the bed: arms held rigid at her sides, hands clenched, as if forcing herself not to rip off the dry cleaner’s plastic covering her face. Under the translucent blue of the plastic, complete with imprinted warnings to “keep away from children,” she looked like she was floating at the bottom of a pool. She moved before I did, clawing off the plastic; her face was sweaty and red. She said she was trying to get rid of a cold, and not to tell my father.

I didn’t. I didn’t tell anyone, and a few months later she was dead. April Fools’ Day, a date impossible to ever forget. She’d been very groggy in bed that morning, too sick to teach her fourth grade class. My father called the principal to say they’d need to get a substitute teacher for her.

Nobody ever told my twin brother Tim and me how she ended up dead, between the time we left for school that morning and the time we got home that afternoon. In the weeks to come, the vague phrase “brain aneurysm” floated around, which someone explained to me as “her brain exploded.” I imagined her bedroom walls covered with blood and brain matter, like President Kennedy’s head after getting assassinated, 30 miles away in Dallas. The reality, which I also began to hear in small-town Texas whispers, is that her bed had been covered with empty pill bottles and crushed-up pills. It seemed as if this time she had succeeded at suicide, with pills instead of plastic.

For the next decade, that became the secret history of my life: how I might have prevented her death if only I had told the “getting rid of her cold” story she told me not to tell. There was a lot I should have told some responsible adult: how she had once attacked my father with a cast iron skillet, beating him as she screamed, “The Great Apostle Paul told me to do this!” How her fugue states often called out the family doctor, who would ask her to count backwards from 10 and name the president. In my adult years, I came to presume she was bipolar, a phrase that didn’t even exist then.

Fast forward, and I’m visiting my much-older brother Ed in Washington, D.C. We’re having what feels like our first grown-up dinner, man to man, and it took just one martini for Ed to tell me his secret history:

“You know, Daddy killed Mother.”

Uh, no … I didn’t know.

My reaction was the same as when I found Mother’s head covered in see-through plastic: I couldn’t make sense of it. Now I was the one looking up from the bottom of a pool.

“You mean…the way he treated her. His drinking. His running around on her. Emotionally he killed her? He killed her spirit?”

“No, he killed her killed her. He forced her to take pills and made it look like suicide.”

Over more martinis, and popcorn shrimp — you never forget your first — Ed began to spill out his litany of proof: Mother calling him at college a few weeks before her death, to say she was leaving Daddy and taking us — the boys, the twins — with her. Daddy was having an affair and she couldn’t take it anymore. (In fact, I did remember that secret “field trip” she’d taken us on, to find an apartment in a nearby town, complete with her now-familiar warning: “Don’t tell your father.”) Finally, the fact that Daddy refused to let an autopsy be performed on her. That was the clincher.

Everything made a different kind of sense now. That sweet new woman who ran the shoe repair shop near Daddy’s job who suddenly appeared in our lives just after Mother died. The new shoes he wore; the moccasins she gave us. The suppers we began eating on TV trays at her house. And the sucker punch I felt when, after Ed’s revelation, I finally looked at the register from Mother’s funeral. The very last name signed in the book, before my mother went into the ground, was Rita Cobb, the woman our father married just seven short months later. 

It was almost impossible to believe. My father a killer? Really? But maybe that was easier to believe, even better to believe, than thinking she had killed herself without leaving a suicide note. Without saying goodbye to the three sons everyone said she loved so much. Now, I didn’t have to hate her for abandoning us; I could just hate him for killing her.

God, what a line to have to write. But at least case closed.

Uh, not so fast. You might want to look at that cocktail menu again.

In 2009, I published a family memoir called “The History of Swimming.” Doing publicity, I got an email from a name I didn’t recognize at first. On the slug line were these two simple, ominous words: “Your Mother.”

It turned out to be from my fourth grade teacher back in Texas. The very same woman who had been my mother’s student teacher for all of three days when my mother died; the woman who then took over her job. She wrote, “There’s something about your mother’s death you need to know.” She proceeded to tell me a story I had never heard before. A true story, I think. The true story. The Holy Grail I’d been seeking for over four decades.

On that beautiful last day of March, on playground duty at J. L. Greer Elementary School, my poor distracted mother — worried about losing her mind and her husband, worried about making a future by herself, with two young children in tow — wandered straight into the orbit of a tether ball in mid-flight and was knocked unconscious. Instead of going to the hospital she was brought home, and the next day she died of that mysterious brain aneurysm.

Death by tether ball, a punch line I never saw coming. On April Fools’.

In those next days of mourning, as her fellow teachers brought over platters of food and smothered us with their perfume and powder, no one said a word about that damn tether ball. Maybe to my father, but no one else. (Certainly not to my older brother and aunt; otherwise why did they become obsessed with indicting my father?) Maybe the teachers all thought someone else had told us.

“I thought YOU did.”

“No, I thought YOU did.”

No one did, and I spent the next three decades in a sort of limbo, playing a game of “either/or.” Either suicide or murder. Was one better than the other? A gruesome playground injury never entered the equation. Did finding out finally change everything — or anything? Is the anger finally gone, at her for not leaving a note, at him for not killing her? At those damn teachers for never telling us what happened on the playground? At God, for playing that cosmic joke? Is that why I’ve been such a tempestuous, angry person for so long?

For better or worse, those decades of not knowing still feel like a part of my DNA. You just can’t shake all that overnight. Maybe that core mystery is such an essential part of my life, I need it to keep me going. Maybe her death, in some bizarre way, was a perfect storm that involved all three things, a crumbling house that Creola built: the ball led to the pills that my father was stockpiling to do her in anyway. All the evidence is there, to make a case for any one of the three.

What would my mother tell me, if she could solve the mystery once and for all?

I couldn’t write another memoir, but I did write a new novel to give her a voice of her own. Room to answer. In my new novel, “Rules for Being Dead,” little Kim isn’t the only one on the hunt. “Creola Perkins” is too, in limbo and floating above a little Texas town, after watching her own body being taken out of our house in a body bag. She knows how she ends up, but not how she gets there. And she finds the answer, for both of us.  

The post Solving the mystery of how my mother died: Was it murder, suicide or death by cosmic joke? appeared first on Salon.com.

I didn’t envision that seven years later, my students would be my seven-year-old twins. In first grade. In our suddenly too-small apartment. Like so many others, I’m juggling Zoom calls with addition and subtraction problems on an elementary school iPad; I’m reading books with my kids as I’m trying to write my own. 

My newest book with Oxford University Press is called “A Change is Gonna Come: How to Have Effective Political Conversations in a Divided America.” The thesis is pretty simple: we need to find a way to interact with other people — particularly those with whom we may disagree —  if we’re going to have a functioning democracy. In practice, Americans have become poor communicators, falling into opinion silos and communication traps that make political discussions feel impossible.

My research and writing on American politics, public opinion, and attitude change has had more implications for my personal life more than I could have imagined. Deploying the strategies in my research to negotiate with cranky seven-year-olds has proved relatively successful — there’s a lot to be said for taking a deep breath and having a calm, rational conversation. These techniques are effective across different generations, too — like when I’m talking to my parents.

I grew up in a Republican household and was a political appointee for President George W. Bush. While I no longer identify as a Republican, I have two parents who are Trump voters. They’re in their 70s and like everyone else, I’m concerned about their well-being during the pandemic, particularly given that Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA) is not being as aggressive in the state’s response as other governors around the country. Iowa’s COVID-19 cases have grown higher than in neighboring, more populous states. Many believe that increase is because Iowa does not have a mandatory shelter-in-place policies. The governor says it is not necessary and my parents agree.

As a political scientist, I know about issue polarization and biased information processing; as a son, I know from where they’re getting their information. I’m also worried about their health.

When speaking with older people (possibly your own parents!) about how to stay safe, remember that a global pandemic invokes a lot of emotion: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, to name a few. Different emotions require different strategies and tactics. For example, anxiety can actually facilitate persuasion because it leads to a search for information and also a decrease in the salience of prior beliefs. Anger can be mitigated into more manageable emotions and a more open headspace if you take the time to build trust.

Arm yourself with well-known, reputable sources to counteract biased or motivated reasoning. Point people to data from Centers for Disease Control or a state health agency. Be empathetic, listen, and try to find a reasonably likely outcome. If your 75-year-old parents think they aren’t at risk for being exposed to the coronavirus when they’re at their Wednesday night bowling league with 15 friends, think of what you want to accomplish. Tell them about the health risks to people in their age bracket (from a reputable source) but also show them how to use FaceTime to have a virtual cocktail party with friends. You may not convince them about the dire threat you perceive but you can encourage them to consider new information and to change their behavior in ways that mitigate risk.

Contentious things can be hard to talk about. The old school taught us to avoid talking about uncomfortable things like politics and religion in polite company. The conventional wisdom, however, no longer applies. While we’ve hashed and re-hashed bitter political disagreements, we have paid less attention to concrete, actionable ways to better understand each other.

It may feel like it’s just too much to engage with someone, that the enormity of our “new normal” makes it feel impossible to make a difference. We need to find a way to talk to each other about American politics, however, even with those (and especially those) with whom we disagree.

This is not about civility, being nice, political correctness, kowtowing to others’ views, or agreeing to disagree. This isn’t a call for us to hold hands (virtually), to all sing “Imagine” (via Zoom), and to “come together” (whatever that means). Bridging divides takes genuine effort; some conversational forethought; a lot of patience; and the right mindset about what you can reasonably accomplish in a conversation. You won’t always be successful and you can’t control others’ attitudes. What you can control is how you interact with other people.

Even if person with whom you’re trying to speak is your child or your parent. And they’re throwing a tantrum.

The post How to convince your Trump-loving parents to take the coronavirus seriously appeared first on Salon.com.

When I visited on Christmas Eve, it was the first time I had returned since papaw died in 2011. Granny died a couple of years before he did. Now having full reign of the house, it looked like what I imagine my father must have felt inside. He had tacked a blanket over one of the doorways to keep the warm air in the living room. He had put a recliner and television in there, which was all wrong — papaw’s recliner and television had always sat in the room that was now blocked off. That’s also where the wood stove sat, and Granny used to bring in firewood from the front porch wearing men’s gloves. She never seemed to mind that chore, which I noticed as a child. I didn’t realize until much later that their home was never cold in the winter and never hot in the summer. Dad had covered nearly all of the windows in thick plastic, so you couldn’t see outside. The heat was dry and made thicker by the cigarette smoke that hung in the air with nowhere to go.

Dirty dishes sat in the sink, and the dirtiness of the house made me certain I wasn’t hungry for the food Dad offered us. The darkness inside was made worse by father’s mood, and I wondered why he didn’t have the usual drugs in his system. I had learned as a child that he could be cheerful, even generous, when he had his drugs. But when he didn’t, there was no ignoring the edge to his voice. I knew from experience that he could explode at any time, and was probably looking for a reason to.

This house was the site of every Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner I can remember. Granny made me birthday cakes, which we ate at the round kitchen table that once belonged to her mother. On the best years, the cakes were strawberry with rainbow sprinkled icing. I watched her can the vegetables she grew, putting quart Mason jars into a water bath in the same round, metal tub that she sometimes bathed us kids in. We ate fried chicken or hamburgers at her table after church each Sunday. Sometimes, when my mother ran from my father, we came here first.

Granny kept their wood floors polished and clean. I don’t think I ever saw a mess in her house. She almost never listened to music, and the only sound from the outside world that interrupted the peace of her home came from quiet voices on Papaw’s television, which he usually watched in the evenings. They prayed before every meal, and Granny and Papaw prayed with me next to them when I spent the night there. Their prayers ran like cool streams into my child mind. Dear heavenly father, we thank you… we come to you… help us… help our loved ones… forgive us all.

I went up there on Christmas Eve feeling obligated to the visit that I had put off for a year, making excuses and vague claims that I would come as soon as I could. Since Papaw died, my father had been living in my grandparents’ house with my teenaged half-sister who was about 15 years younger than me. My half-brother was also just a teenager and used to live there, but he didn’t move back in after the last time they entered the foster care system. Their mother was still in prison. 

I was in my early thirties and took my 12-year-old son and five-year-old daughter with me. I drove up there thinking that despite all the pain he had inflicted on me, my siblings, and my mother, my father would never hurt his grandchildren. I thought I was giving them an important piece of their family — an imperfect one, but also a vital connection to the holler where I had grown up. I had been pushed and pulled by the dominant forces of that place, some impalpable and some visible, as it formed and forced me into the imperfect person who eventually became a mother. I brought gifts for my father and young siblings. My father gave my son $20 and told him they would go camping soon.

Dad smoked inside, which was never allowed when my grandparents were alive. The house was filled with shadows where before, light and cool breezes had swept through, refreshing the haven my papaw and granny created through their quiet labor. When Dad started talking about his guinea hens and the neighbor, and how he would shoot that neighbor, an old, familiar panic rose inside me. Does he have a gun? Surely he’s pawned them all for drugs. But what if he hurts someone in front of my kids? How will they ever recover? What am I doing here?

We left soon after that, and I decided I would never go back. 

* * *

The first time I heard my dad was shooting up, my brother told me how he watched. They were in a trailer where Dad lived, not far from the mouth of the holler where we had grown up. Our father took a needle from another man who had just used it, plunged the brown liquid into his arm, and offered the needle to my brother. I wasn’t sure what was worse — offering his son heroin, or offering him a dirty needle. I wondered how it was that heroin had come to our small town in eastern Kentucky. Growing up, I knew that heroin was a city drug, and I associated it with all of the filth and crime and danger of cities in movies I watched in the 1980s. But the best pills had changed — you couldn’t crush them up and snort them anymore. You couldn’t even crush them and shoot them. Though my father had been an addict my entire life, his willingness to use needles seemed to mark a new low.

How is it that a region known for its outlaws became so dependent on pharmaceuticals and the welfare state? Some would have you believe that it’s a natural progression for an entire population to move from fierce independence and lawlessness to slinking around doctors’ offices for every shady prescription a person can get. They would have you believe that an entire group of people can be ignorant, morally bankrupt, and irredeemably lazy – and that those qualities have nothing to do with educational systems that were broken from the beginning, economic disparity, or even the cumulative experience of being told that your people are lazy, stupid, unimportant. You would think that Appalachia had the market cornered on poor character.

I used to hate it that my father found pills at such a young age — in his late teens or twenties, just a child compared to my age now. But I think about the prospects he faced as a young man working at a gas station. I think about the mockery that still spewed from the television at me when I was a child, and how I still hear it and see it now, long after we’ve supposedly outgrown that kind of class humor. I think about the nights we went to bed hungry or afraid to lose our home, and I think about the kids I went to school with who were living in a school bus, and I wonder sometimes why the whole world isn’t snorting pills.

After I learned my father was shooting up, it would be a while still before I heard anyone talk about the opioid crisis and I would wonder what  it was that had happened in our holler and in my family and in the families around me for at least 30 years before anyone noticed. And I will admit that I felt no small amount of disdain when I realized the news stories — the tearjerkers, the ones that are supposed to spur lawmakers into action and inspire new school programs to save our children — they still didn’t talk about people like my father: a high school dropout who was in and out of jail, who has been lost to us for at least 40 years now. 

But our family needed and wanted him to be a husband and father and son when we were just poor and poorly educated in our little holler, before any of us knew what an opioid was or how the pharmaceutical industry works. Long after we knew so much about the different kinds of pain one person can feel.

* * *

When I went to see the house right before I bought it, I didn’t expect that he could have made the place even worse than when I had seen it six years before that. Garbage and forgotten things covered the property. Chicken coops and a cruel version of a doghouse, made out of chicken wire and a metal roof, sat in the yard. A large dog that seemed both aggressive and afraid greeted me. I knew it would have never been to a vet. I wondered if my father hit it with his belt, like I had seen him do to other dogs when I was a child. 

When I stepped through the back door, I saw two filthy stoves in the kitchen. Another kitchen stove sat idle on the front porch. Every surface in the house was dirty, but every surface was also a thing — old mail, dirty dishes, empty cigarette packs. The gloom was worsened by the plastic and curtains that he had tacked over the windows and by the soot that covered the walls, ceilings, and doorways. He laughed as he showed me the large burned circle in the living room floor. “We were wild on pills,” he said. “We let the kerosene stove get out of hand and it caught the couch on fire.” I later found out the fire had happened years ago. 

He went to jail shortly after he moved to a trailer I bought him as part of my payment for Granny’s house. He had only moved a few of his things, and I was left to move everything else he deemed valuable, as well as all of the garbage. For the next six months or so, I drove the hour and a half to Granny’s house every time I possibly could. I didn’t know what to do with the house I had bought, but I decided that I could honor my grandparents by cleaning the evidence of my father’s sorrow from the property. Not knowing what the result would be, I would just serve the land and the home that had served me so well as a child.

For months, I found myself directing a crew to restore this sacred site as best as we could. We burned some of the garbage — books, furniture, even my papaw’s clothes. Another man cut down the bushes and brambles that had grown up in front of the house, right next to the creek. An electrician removed the live wires that went from the house to the outbuilding and from the outbuilding to the cellar. His father bush hogged the field. I paid a septic tank cleaning service to come empty the septic. “It hasn’t been cleaned out in 20 years, maybe never been cleaned,” he told me. I thought about that later, wondering what kind of poetic justice there was in me cleaning out my father’s literal shit, and all that had accumulated from people I held dear for so long.

I tried to scrub the soot off the walls. White ovals and squares dotted marked the spaces where my grandparents’ photos of us had hung before the couch fire. Dad took the majority of the photos with him. He left dirty dishes in the sink, full garbage bags in the cellar, some chickens and guinea hens, and Luke, the dog I was afraid of.

Eventually, I sanded the walls and painted them all. The guineas died pretty quickly, and I would discover their bodies and the smell, and move them with a shovel so we could continue working and cleaning. We took out the old carpet from upstairs — the carpet my granny kneeled on next to her bed as she said her prayers and I listened, knowing there was power in the words she spoke. The same carpet my father let his dog use as a bathroom. The chickens disappeared one by one, just as I got one of the chicken coops ready to fix up. Somehow, I thought I could save them all. 

I wondered if I was doing something crazy, trying to fix all the things he had broken and clean his messes, save the creatures he had forsaken. Was I driven by a sick, sad need to right my father’s wrongs? To erase his sins? Or could I actually give something back to the home, the land, the grandparents who are gone, through sheer will and lots of sweat? Maybe I’ll know, eventually. 

I considered moving into the house more than once, but I knew my father would eventually come back, expecting it to be his home as well. I had dreams where I had moved in and my daughter was taken from me. In others, Granny came to me in a panic, telling me not to stay. Whether they were prophetic or simply reflections of my anxiety probably doesn’t matter.

The irony was not lost on me that I found myself cleaning up my father’s mess the year I turned 40. I had spent decades trying to clean up the mess of my own self, left full of fear and anxiety after an unstable childhood. As I worked to reclaim the house and land that used to be the only place I felt safe, I slowly realized I was giving myself the gift of transformation. I was assuring myself — once again — that what has been neglected can thrive, what has been forsaken can be saved, as long as I keep trying, not knowing the ending, but trusting that something beautiful will triumph.

The post Mercy and grace: Reclaiming the family home lost to my father’s addiction appeared first on Salon.com.

But even if I found the courage to stare down her familiar handwriting and write back, Mom would never respond. She died a decade ago, when I was 23. Which was why it was all the more extraordinary when a month before my wedding, a box of her love letters arrived on my lap.

My mother met my father on a blind date in Boston in 1978. Dad was living in Massachusetts and Mom in New York, so they wrote letters to keep each other warm during the Blizzard of ’78. I grew up hearing about the words that convinced Dad that she was “The One” but had never seen them, so when my mother died, I hurricaned through our house in search of them…and found nothing.

The love letters now in my possession are not addressed to my father, though. They are addressed to her college ex, written when she was 19 and 20 and 21, just shy of the age I was when I lost her.

Reading someone else’s love letters feels illicit. Reading your mother’s love letters to a man who is not your father, downright traitorous. But a dead letter is undeliverable. Unreturnable. There was nothing else to do but keep reading.

I knew about Mom’s college boyfriend because he had emailed her right after she got sick. Mom had shared his message with me when she was feeling low, her breast cancer diagnosis new and heavy on her chest:

A long, long time ago there lived a smart, funny, nice and beautiful Fairy Princess who met a Curmudgeon and decided to spend some time with him. The Curmudgeon had a Dad who was not only a curmudgeon but also very obsessive and compulsive, keeping track of every meal he would eat in a notebook as well as tracking how many shaves he would get from each razor blade he purchased.

Unbeknownst to the Curmudgeon, the Fairy Princess sent a series of letters to his Dad, which he dutifully kept in a neat pile next to his bedside table.

Many years later, the Curmudgeon’s Dad passed away and as the Curmudgeon went through his Dad’s personal effects he saw the stack of very well-thumbed letters still in a neat pile next to his Dad’s bedside table. It was obvious that the Princess’s letters had given the Curmudgeon’s Dad a great deal of happiness over many years… The moral of the story is that sometimes even a princess may not know the lasting impact of her good deeds.

When Mom’s ex appeared at her funeral, he looked at me like he’d seen a ghost. I ran into him again at a wedding, when he told me across a green lawn that smelled like summers with Mom that I had my mother’s legs. I never wanted to see him again. Until he told me he had an entire box of love letters from her that he wanted to give back. He responded immediately to my email: “Call me.”

This man Mom once loved picked up on the first ring: “I was hoping you’d call. I almost threw these out but couldn’t bring myself to do it.”

He had a daughter, it turned out, who lived nearby in the West Village. He was visiting her this weekend. Could I…? 

I could not. I would be in Boston for my bridal shower. I was getting married, I explained, I wouldn’t have time. I was sweating so badly I had trouble holding the phone to my ear. Here I was, betraying my father and my mother, too. But I was too hungry for her words to let this chance at holding her handwriting again go.

We decided he’d leave the letters with his daughter for me to pick up. This felt like a safe, sensible solution. He lingered on the line before uttering two more words that changed everything. 

“I’m sorry.” 

I let his apology hang in the air, uneasy about what he’d say next.

“Sorry for what?”

“I’m sorry that I wasn’t there for her when we were together. I didn’t know how to handle her grief.”

Mom was a freshman in college when her big brother’s plane was shot down over the mountains bordering Vietnam. She had rushed home to be with her parents, writing her boyfriend:

I didn’t have you and I kept thinking about things. I hated to answer the phone, before I picked up the receiver I kept thinking it was going to be bad news—and after I picked up the receiver I hated to go through all the details again and again…I wish I could go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow and have everything be the same.

I found myself trying to comfort this stranger who had let Mom down: “You were both so young. It’s hard to love someone when they’re grieving.”

I would know.  

Dad called me three times on Halloween night my senior year of college. I had ignored the first two calls, too busy working on my costume. When I finally answered, he told me that Mom had stage IV cancer. I didn’t leave bed for two days. I called home every night that year and the next, when I was living in New York at Mom’s insistence: Go, go, I’ll be waiting for you when you get back.

Mom died a month after my own college boyfriend and I moved in together, before our pots and pans were even unwrapped. He was the one who entered the hospice room minutes after she died, who held me when I sobbed into his neck as Mom’s grew cold, who spent his birthday at her wake. But as time moved on and I didn’t, the distance between us grew. 

Many nights, I went to bed alone in our Astoria apartment, waiting for him to join me. I’d fall asleep to the sound of the video games he played in the living room, gunshots followed by bodies falling. I’d tell myself, if he comes to bed I’ll stay.  

He’d later tell me he didn’t know how to touch such a sad, grieving girl.

I was unhappy, but too terrified to leave. Moving on from him meant moving on from Mom. Nobody else will have met her, I told myself, no one else will ever know me as hers. 

The letters before me were undeniably Mom’s. I grew up watching her write thank-you notes for thank-you notes and drafts of birthday cards; if she wanted you to love her, she’d write her way straight into you. In her letters to her ex, she was funny and self-deprecating and practically begging to be loved:

April 28, 1972

I hate you. 

P.S.: I love you, baby.

P.P.S.: I love you muchly and only you.

 On June 23, 1972:

My mother has just given me some friendly feminine advice. She says I shouldn’t fall all over you (i.e., play hard to get) or else you’ll forget about me. Well I’ll ask you now—should I let you know how I feel or should I keep it a secret that I love you?

Her return addresses would make a postman blush:

Polly P.B. Pearce
Innocent Lane
Super Straight, Virginia 

Irate Father
Arrest Warrant Enclosed  

Long Time
No Write
Howcom, PA

She enclosed tiny gifts in exchange for his words: A white pebble from the beach. A handmade Valentine. She wrote an entire letter on toilet paper and covered it in playful puns. Every expression of need was couched in a joke, a just kidding, an apology for emotions threatening to overtake her. 

Sitting down with these letters days before my own marriage was a revelation. Mom left her ex-boyfriend because she trusted that there was someone else out there who would love her saddest self alongside her most dazzling…and I did, too. Love requires more than fairy tales and Mom wasn’t a princess. Removing that weight freed me to walk down the aisle toward my own great love.

I met my now-husband at work. My back went out before our first date so he brought me pillows, his brand of devotion so different from the struck-match partners of my twenties who always flamed out too soon. When he got up the courage to ask my Dad for my hand in marriage, my Italian-American father hugged him, welcomed him to the family, and cautioned him: “Losing her mother was hard on her. Can you promise me you’ll be there for her, son?”

Dad was only asking Now-Husband what he himself had given my mother. Mom’s last Valentine’s Day card to Dad is not funny or self-deprecating. It is full of the gratitude of a grown woman unafraid of sharing every part of herself with her partner:

When I get upset over the problems that we come across, you calm me. When I am too sick to care about myself, you comfort me. And when I am depressed about my brother, you soothe me… I love to cuddle up next to you in bed when I feel so cold and you feel so warm. I guess what I’m trying to say is I love you and always will.

Mom died on October 29, 2009, at the age of 56. My father was holding her hand.

My father took my hand and walked me down the aisle on May 26, 2019, a few days after what would have been my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. 

Mom and I were irreparably changed by our grief. We could be hard to love. But my god, we were—and are—loved. Ten years after her death, reading her letters was a reminder that I was worthy of that kind of love, too.

January 2, 1971: “It’s time to sign off now, so remember me, O.K.? Love, Linda.”

The post “Love, Linda”: Reading my late mother’s love letters to a man who is not my father appeared first on Salon.com.

With back-to-school around the corner, it’s time to re-establish some limits on media. These strategies can help you get a jump on things:

Have a last blast. Plan a special media-centered event that the whole family will enjoy — something you couldn’t do during the school year. A movie in the park, an all-day video game session, a binge-watching marathon of streaming shows are all fun ways to say, “so long, summer.”

Prepare your kids. Talk about the routine changes that come along with the school year. Discuss the concept of “balance” —a daily mix of exercise, reading, social and family time, school work, and entertainment. A week before school starts, get serious about bedtime, and turn off the TV, games, and electronic devices at least an hour before hitting the sack. The stimulation of media makes it hard for kids to settle down.

Create a school-year media plan. Take out a calendar, and work with your kids to create a weekly schedule that includes homework, chores, and activities — plus TV, games, movies, etc. Kids don’t always understand the concept of “Thursday,” but if they see their activities written down, they know what to expect and when to expect it.

Raid the library. Go for the books, but also find out whether your local branch offers programs for kids — like puppet shows, reading hours, or other activities. It’s like a little baby step to school.

Remember you’re their role model. Sneak your iPhone under the table, and your kids will catch you. Model the healthy media habits you’d like your kids to follow.

The post 5 ways to bring rules back after summer appeared first on Salon.com.

This is especially true for low-income households who often spend more than half their income on rent.

The U.S. has a number of housing policies to help low-income families find and afford housing, but only about one quarter of eligible households got assistance in 2018.

Thus, my colleague Katherine Michelmore and I considered whether a different type of policy – the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) – might help improve families’ access to housing by giving parents more disposable income. We wanted to know if further expanding the credit might help address the housing affordability crisis.

Getting money back

The EITC is a refundable tax credit that provides a subsidy to mostly low-income working parents.

Although people without children can get the EITC, fewer are eligible. The EITC allows low-income workers to both reduce their total tax liability and get money back – on average about $3,000 a year – even if they do not owe taxes.

This means that for a low-income family who makes about $20,000 a year, the EITC can increase take-home earnings by more than 15%.

The EITC began in 1975 as a temporary credit aimed at helping low-income parents. The goal was to reduce payroll taxes these parents paid and help them with the rising costs of basic goods, like food and gas.

The EITC was made permanent in 1978 and has been expanded a number of times since then. For example, in 1993 the benefit was expanded to give families with two or more children a larger credit.

In 2009 it was again made larger for families with three or more children. Our study looked at all of the expansions from 1990 through 2016.

In the U.S., about 26 million families a year got the ETIC. Many studies have shown the EITC increases employment and reduces poverty, but we could find no previous studies that had looked at its impact on housing.

On their own

Our study focused on low-income unmarried mothers, who are most likely to get the EITC.

Using information from two large U.S. Census datasets and a study of low-income families, we examined whether policy expansions – both federal- and state-level changes in the EITC – affected mothers’ housing.

Essentially, we calculated the average EITC each unmarried mother with a certain number of children could expect to receive in a particular state in a given year.

We then compared similar families before and after EITC expansions to estimate the effects on their housing. By using data that covered a 26-year period, we captured many changes in EITC policy at the federal and state level.

We found that getting additional money from the EITC reduced mothers’ housing cost burdens, or the share of their earnings that was spent on rent. In other words, the EITC helped make housing more affordable.

We also found that getting a larger EITC led mothers to move out of shared living arrangements where they were living with other adults who were not their partner.

Better still, after getting a higher EITC, these mothers were more likely to move into a home with their name on the lease or mortgage.

Owning or renting a home rather than living with someone else leads to more stable housing, which is generally better for children because studies show that frequent moves, which are more common when people live with others, are linked with poorer school outcomes.

Because these mothers were no longer doubled up, they were also less likely to live in a crowded household, which is also better for children.

A number of proposals

Overall, our study suggests that expanding the EITC might be an effective way to combat some pressing housing issues. But increasing it won’t fix all housing problems.

Our study also found that EITC expansions had no effect on homelessness or eviction, likely because families cannot get the EITC if they are not working.

Currently, there are a number of policy proposals to expand the EITC. These proposals aim to combat poverty and reduce economic inequality.

As our study suggests, the EITC just might also help families improve their housing too.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter. ]

Natasha Pilkauskas, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post This tax credit wasn’t meant to help with housing, but that’s exactly what it’s doing appeared first on Salon.com.

This isn’t because I’m anti-marriage or kids. But in this economy, milestones that used to be considered staples of stable adulthood and even happiness are increasingly becoming luxuries.

My friends and I often discuss future plans and while some of them do want to get married, the conversation is usually structured around how expensive weddings are, and that spending that money on say, a house, seems so much more productive. And with crippling college debt, massive rents and cost of living that outpaces low wages, leaving little to nothing for savings, it often feels like there’s only room in the budget for one or the other, if at all.

For others, the sheer history of marriage, with its patriarchal roots and the transference of property (both women and actual property), has some men and women rejecting the whole idea of it.

“The paradigms are shifting and the old model requiring marriage vows to validate one’s relationship doesn’t appeal,” psychologist, relationship expert and author of “The Ultimate Guide to a Multi-Orgasmic Life Antonia Hall,” told Bustle in 2016. “Many Millennials were raised with rising divorce rates and broken homes, so they’re far less likely to buy into marriage as the only or best form of relationship for themselves. Add to that the increase in educational costs and debt, and Millennials feel less financially secure, which makes entering into what’s considered a binding contract with their significant other far less appealing. With everything from hookup culture to poly lifestyles and open relationships, there’s an emerging expansion of views on what partnerships can look like. This has led to a desire to exploring more than the outdated ‘one method for all’ that is marriage.”

So, millennials are generally choosing to get married later in life, prioritizing financial security, career trajectory and home ownership before deciding to tie the knot — if they get married at all. The average age for marriage has increased to 27 for women and 29 for men (personally, both numbers seem low) — a six-year increase from 1963, when the average ages were 21 and 23, respectively.

But also, only two out of five millennials were married in 2015, whereas two in three adults were married in 1980. Culturally, marriage isn’t the be-all end-all for adults anymore, and women in particular are increasingly untangling marriage from their own self-worth.

When it comes to children, the birthrate in the U.S. reached an all-time low in 2017, according to the Centers for Disease and Prevention. However, women older than 35 did see an uptick in first-time births, clearly reflective of medical advances and the growing ways for women to conceive later in life.

Becoming parents at a later age, or choosing to forego children entirely, can be tied to economic anxiety as well. Children are expensive, and in many places child care rates are exorbitant. “Child care for infants costs more than tuition at four-year public colleges in 28 states and the District of Columbia,” according to the Conversation. “Similarly, child care for 4-year-olds costs more than public college tuition in 15 states and the District of Columbia.”

We are hearing scores of stories about how even two-parent households are forced to make challenging decisions about their family’s future. Even if both parents want to work, child care can quickly outpace one earner’s salary. Most single parents have even fewer options and generally have to rely on family members to pitch in.

While low-income families can sometimes get financial help, that’s not something families can rely on now. “Spending on assistance through various federal programs is at a 12-year low. Today just 15 percent of eligible children are served by federal subsidies,” Elle reported. “The Child Care and Development Block Grant, the main source of this kind of support, currently serves the smallest number of children since 1998; 364,000 were dropped from its register between 2006 and 2014. And subsidies fail to reach anyone living much above the poverty line.”

The economics of having children can be daunting for all millennials, but especially for women, because of the implications for their personal financial security. There’s been a lot of attention — though not action — paid to the gender pay gap, but recent data suggests that it’s largely morphed into the motherhood pay gap. According to the New York Times, women who are unmarried and without children earn much closer to what men do. The Times pointed to many reasons for this, but it ultimately comes down to how unequal the division of labor is in many households, or at least that employers still assume that will be the case.

If we lived in an equal society, where good jobs, affordable housing, access to quality education, health care, child care were all seen as rights and not luxuries, it’s not far-fetched to surmise that marriage and parenting statistics might shift. It’s not a sure-fire fix, however; birth rates are down all over the world as people in general are choosing to have fewer children, waiting longer to do so, and many can’t configure having a thriving career with fewer at all. Denmark, with its robust social welfare program, also has the greatest proportion of babies born through in vitro fertilization, indicating in part that women are able making active choices about their reproductive lives irrespective of age and life partner status. They’re not being deterred by surging child care costs, either; couples spend less than 11 percent of their income on child care costs, and that drops to less than three percent for single parents. (Compare that to the U.S., where two-parent households pay around 25 percent of their income for childcare, and single parents 52 percent.)

Other factors make millennials feel a little more bleak about the prospects of bringing kids into a culture of violence and an economy that operates on a work-to-survive model for the majority, to say nothing of looming climate catastrophe. But if the U.S. actually cared about the family unit as much as Republicans claim to, perhaps they could start by enacting policies that prioritize the livelihoods of women and children. They certainly have a long way to go.

For millennials, choices, or the ability to steer our own futures, seems to be the missing variable in so much of our adult lives. So maybe we are on a serial-killing rampage of American trends, after all. If the decisions to buy a home, or throw a wedding our families and friends can attend, or even have kids are already out of the question, at least we can still control the trivial things in our lives — like tuna sandwiches for lunch.

The post What could millennials kill off in 2019? Weddings and becoming parents appeared first on Salon.com.

My father has many times hinted, but never overtly said, that by writing about my life I would bring about his death. I hate to hear him say these words, but now that he has, now that they hang in the air between us, I’m surprised by how calm I feel. I am relieved, I realize, that my dad’s negative reaction to my work, which I’ve feared for years, has finally come to pass. Maybe now I can stop fearing it, I think, maybe now I can finally heal.

I’ve known that the imperative to protect my dad — to protect all men — by diminishing myself, my body and voice, has been engrained in me by the patriarchy against which I must rage. I’ve known that what’s stayed secret between us has kept me from truly healing. But what does one do when the actions necessary to self-knowledge and self-actualization, not to mention career, life dreams and financial security, come at the expense of one’s last living parent? What does one do when the truth of one’s emotional interior is so frightening to their father, that he says it may lead to suicide?

The answer, I suppose, is that one finds a way to assign responsibility where it is due and move forward. The answer is, one protects herself. I’m doing it right now, as I did when I sent my dad my book, as I did when I wrote it, chronicling my experience on the page, saving myself through writing, despite the painful fear of what the work I produce might lead my father to threaten or create. Facing this fear is the most challenging work I have ever done.

My dad and I end our phone call abruptly when he says he has to get dinner on the stove, then hangs up before I can say love you or even, goodbye. That I never said these words haunts me as the days pass, as the worried texts and voicemails I send go unanswered.

What would my mother say? I wonder now, especially because the book I have written is yoked to her experience, her life story and that of her mother’s before her. Something comforting, I imagine, about boundaries. “He’s lashing out,” she’d say, rattling off psychobabble about narcissism and telling me how full of shit he is, how much he loves me beneath all that shit, how much he wants to support me, but can’t, because of so much shit. She’d talk about the years she tried to save him, to prevent his threats, his outbursts, his angry silences, by stifling herself, a dynamic that sometimes seemed like the foundation of their marriage, a dance they did with no conclusion.

Even after the divorce, the dance continued. She watched from afar as my father’s life fell apart without her, (a development he blamed her for), watched me, twelve years old and shell-shocked, ducking falling rubble. She yearned to save us both, then, and spent hours on the phone with her friends, hours in her therapist’s office, figuring out how to salvage only me, remembering her boundaries. These boundaries, she taught me, were essential to my freedom, to creating the life I wanted despite my narcissistic dad; these boundaries were essential to making art. I have tried to remember her lessons, though it has not been easy.

READ MORE: My grandfather wasn’t a Nazi-fighting war hero — he was a brutal collaborator

When I finally reach my father, he is even angrier than before. “Why am I always the bad guy?” he yells. “Has everything about our relationship been a lie?” I cower in response, rushing to assure him no, to control the damage I’ve done, to protect myself from him, to protect us both from his past actions, the anger they make him feel, the despair lurking behind it. And as I do so, doubt creeps in — was it really that bad? Was I overreacting? — as it always does when his voice trumps mine. In that moment, I wonder if it’s worth it, publishing this book, telling my truth, forwarding my career, if it’s going to cause us both so much pain.

There’s another truth I need to honor, I think then, panicked and afraid, and that is my love for my dad. I love him with an ache deep as lifelong hunger. I’ve never thought of my writing, no matter how blunt or honest, as coming from any place but this core of love. But maybe I was wrong.

In “The Art of Memoir,” Mary Karr writes that she doesn’t waste time writing about people she doesn’t deeply care for, even if the relationship was, or still is, complicated. Neither do I, nor do I think that writing of any genre that sets out to lambast its characters is likely to be good. To write honestly always necessitates showing angles: light and shadow. Maybe I have failed to do this. Because though I’ve known my work would upset my father, though I’ve feared and avoided his wounded reaction, I’ve hoped he would see the love in it.

Julie Buntin, in “On Making Things Up: Some True Stories About Writing my Novel,” writes of her mother’s response to her book, “Marlena,” which Buntin’s mother initially saw as a violation, even though it was fiction. “The daughter part of me shatters,” Buntin writes of her mother’s response, “sees this as a failure that will change our relationship forever.” But, she writes, “The other part of me, the part of me that belongs to no one, is registering the burn marks on the stove, the spray of toast crumbs and coffee grounds, is thinking of my mother’s pride, the perfectly clean stoves in all the homes of my childhood, is hearing her and thinking the worst thing I could do is write this down, knowing, even as I think it, that I will, and when I do—here I am!—my voice will override hers again.”

Which is to say, as Buntin so expertly does, that the impulse to write the most shameful, emotional, true, will always push us writers, because we know that shame and sadness and fear and careful observation create the material that carries the most heat and exposes the most truth. Exposing truth, rather than reiterating fact, is what makes writing powerful. It is also what gives us personal and professional freedom.

Facing our fears, rendering our trauma despite the chorus of voices urging us to stay silent, is how we make peace with it. “Don’t avoid yourself,” writes Melissa Febos in “The Heart-Work,” “The story that comes calling might be your own, and it might not go away if you don’t open the door. I don’t believe in writers block. I only believe in fear.”

I don’t believe in writers block. I only believe in fear; these are the words I tape to my keyboard after those first phone calls. I am in the last editing phase of my book. It is a make or break moment, a time to write the trauma that defined my past; a time to ignore the shattering child part of myself that aches to protect my father, and grieves the impossible bind I am in. I want to free myself by writing and to shield him by keeping the secrets we once shared. But the two are at odds with each other. I know I have to choose myself, my story, but it feels like I am sacrificing my dad, betraying him; I can’t yet see that writing honestly of my own experiences could never be a betrayal, not for me, not for him; it could only ever be a liberation for us both.

Shortly after I submit the draft, I reach my father. He’s still in a bad place, he says, but better. He agrees to meet in person to discuss the book. My copyedits will be due soon, I tell him, asking for notes on what he’d like to change, fact-check, discuss. He arrives in my kitchen with a yellow legal pad and the fat brick of paper that is my manuscript clutched to his chest, held over his heart like a shield.

“I want you to know,” he says, sitting at the kitchen table, his voice restrained, choking down a yell, “that everything I did back then, I did to protect you.” He’s talking about the dark days again, the money he lost, the money he borrowed and never returned, the lies he told, the angry words he spoke of my mother, all, he says now, in the service of protecting me. I believe he believes this; at the same time, I work to remind myself that just because a man says he is protecting me, does not make it true.

We sit for seven hours, rising only to pee and to refill our water glasses. My father does most of the talking, telling me stories about himself that have little to do with the time period in my book. I do my best to go with it, asking questions, listening intently, trying to piece together the deep meaning behind each story he shares. By the end of the day, he’s softened. “This is your art,” he says, as he orders the pages, rises from his seat and stretches, looking relaxed, nonchalant, nothing like the despondent man he’d been hours earlier. In the moment, everything feels normal; I feel heard, loved, protected.

But after my dad returns home, he reverts to anger, and once again we have the conversation, sit face to face across the table. This time, I urge him to go line by line with me, reviewing passages he finds painful. I’m surprised by what he dislikes: my use of the term “day trading” as it pertains to the way he invested and lost his money; the word “rage” as it pertains to his anger. That’s it? I think, these easy changes? We can work together to pick words we both agree with, I say, but he hesitates when I offer, changing the subject. “I’m a f**king fraud,” he says, putting his face in his hands and speaking through his fingers. “I’m worried,” he says, “that if the stress of all this doesn’t flat out kill me, it’ll make me sick.”

No matter what I change, I realize then, he will say this, threatening to leave me, to trade my words for his eternal silence. My writing might kill him, he says, but I realize then that I can choose to see it differently, to imagine that my writing, my book, the story I tell in it, the secrets I refuse to keep, the threats I refuse to cow to, might somehow help my father face what scares him, might somehow help him heal.

My mother once said that one person changing in a family system often forces everyone else to do so too. I was 20, in treatment for disordered eating, OCD and drug abuse, grappling with all the mechanisms I’d used to mask my pain. My mother came to family sessions with me; we healed together. “This will be a good opportunity for your dad, too,” she said, “should he choose to take it.” He didn’t. But now, after our initial conversations, as weeks and then months pass, as my dad’s pain and anger over my book persists, he tells me he’s become frightened by himself, tells me he knows he needs help. He finds a therapist. He starts to speak of his own trauma, his childhood abuse, a lifetime of unexpressed pain. “It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done,” he says to me on the phone, “but it’s good, I know it is.”

This is, it strikes me now, the best possible outcome for my writing, for any writing or testimony. Stories are guides for ourselves and for others. Especially now, as women feel safer speaking of their experiences, breaking the web of silence woven over us by patriarchy, the impulse to protect men, the impulse to privilege them, then men will have to do the same. And this is a good thing. Although women understandably want men to listen, bear witness and attempt to understand, ultimately, the goal of collective healing will be for us all to liberate, express, heal.

This is what I hope my memoir will be, both for myself, and for others: a liberation, an expression of women’s voices across space and time, and a reclamation of the labels and beliefs — hysterical, unstable, in need of protection — historically leveled against us. In expressing these voices, I have peeled the dressings off my father’s many untended wounds, and he has lashed out in pain and fear of the ugly truth of what’s gone unhealed. In the months to come, I am sure, other men will do the same, reaching out to threaten me because I am a woman brave enough to write, especially because I am a woman brave enough to write about other women.

I’m sure this will frighten and confuse me, too. I may doubt myself, or cry, or question my own reality, which is, of course, the point. But by telling the story of my pain and silence, the story of other women’s pain and silence before me, I’ve learned that change occurs and healing begins only when we break the silence and begin the difficult conversations. Doing so is complicated and hard; it is work. But it is also freeing, an act of resistance, an act of love.

The post Writing truthfully about my father: An act of resistance, an act of love​ ​ appeared first on Salon.com.

Quart, the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, also profiles efforts to improve the lives of parents and care workers — and offers suggestions about what’s still to be done. She spoke with In These Times about the challenges of organizing parents, why we’re so attached to the fantasy of middle-class life and why she considers her book “radical self-help.”

In These Times  I’m interested in the theme of self-blame that runs through “Squeezed.” You write that after your daughter was born, and it became clear that you and your husband’s freelance earnings weren’t going to be enough to raise her, you began to blame yourself. Why did you have that reaction?

Alissa Quart: I think we have a tendency to blame ourselves, or we blame others. It’s binary. You can see that tendency in the way some disenfranchised groups now blame immigrants, say, and then on the other side, there’s a lot of rhetoric of self-punishment in American culture that you’re responsible for your own success and if you don’t make it then there’s something wrong with you.

The self-blame and guilt discourse comes from conservatives but it also emanates off of a certain kind of bootstrap self-help, like “Lean In.”  “Why aren’t you asking for a raise, why aren’t you earning more money, why aren’t you doing more for your child?” There’s a perfectionism that places a lot of pressure on parents.

ITT: What role do employers and the welfare state, such as it is, play in reinforcing parents’ tendency towards self-blame?

Quart: We don’t have the policies in place that make parenthood easier. You look at parental leave in all these other countries — in Scandinavia, but even in a place like Canada. In Quebec, maternity leave insurance covers 18 weeks of paid leave, plus five weeks for the father, at 70 percent of the parent’s income. Daycare after that is $7 to $20 a day. You don’t have to go to Scandinavia, there are lots of examples. In South Africa, women pay less for a vaginal birth than they do in the United States.

As for employers, there’s still a lot of discrimination against pregnant women. The rate at which pregnancy discrimination cases are filed has increased. There are all kinds of ways in which employers make the experience of pregnancy and motherhood harder, like when women are not permitted to pump in a clean and private place at their place of work. They’re penalizing parents who are trying to do everything right and play by the rules.

ITT: And do you think these parents who try to do everything right and play by the rules are politicized by their experiences?

Quart:  I would like that to be the case, but I feel like people turn it inward. As we’ve talked about, there’s a strong tendency to blame themselves. And there’s a well-behavedness among liberal, middle-class parents. These aren’t people who are necessarily accustomed to seeing themselves as precarious. Also, among mothers in particular, there can be a discomfort around advocating for themselves and making complaints.

They also have a tendency to relativize suffering, to say, “Well, think of all the people who have it worse than me.” But the middle class’s earnings, expenditures, and discomforts make it not what it once was, and make it a much more precarious place to be.

ITT: In the book, you focus on the struggles of middle-class parents. Why did you choose to frame the book that way, rather than focusing on parents who are members of the working poor?

Quart: To be fair, I include some members of the lower middle class or the working class. Some of them are aspiring to be middle class. Some are also in a symbiotic relationship with middle-class parents, like daycare owners or caregivers. I wanted to get at the way in which we are in our class positions like matryoshka dolls. There’s sort of a nesting doll effect. In terms of paid caregivers, for instance, the new anxiety and deprivation of the parents who use their services and their care work is affecting them directly.

In other words, I didn’t want the book to be just another one of those middle-class mums books that don’t look at, say, the care workers who are propping up the middle-class parents.

But yes, I focused on the middle class for the most part and the reason I did so was that it’s the class is always referred to politically as tumbling down or on shaky ground but the counters of that vulnerability, what it looks like up close, isn’t explored granularly. I wanted to do a deep dive into those stories. While the middle class is used as collateral in political campaigns, for instance, politicians aren’t really responding to their needs. After all, there’s so much challenging middle-class life, from the weakening of unions to the rising cost of healthcare and education. There are so many sops thrown to corporate interests — and that’s not just the Republicans, that’s both parties. The people who talk about the middle class aren’t upholding their interests in the legislature.

ITT: Parents aren’t generally unionized or part of collective organizations that are meant to advocate for them. What forms of collective organizing might be able to help parents?

I love that idea. The people in this book need that sort of thing. And there are plenty of examples of white collar organizing happening right now that I write about in “Squeezed.” One thing we’re doing with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the nonprofit I direct, is providing financial support to journalists, who were formerly middle-class. We have a Denver Post fund and a Gothamist fund set up to help employees of those companies, which have been destroyed by a hedge fund and a billionaire, Joe Ricketts.

There’s also a lot of organizing around adjuncts, people with PhDs who are precariously employed and may be earning poverty wages that I include in my book. It’s the result of the ways that middle-class people have become what I call the “middle precariat.” What it means to be part of the category of middle class has really changed. There’s been a shift in the imagination of what the middle class is. We think of it as a fixed sign, as a way of containing and satisfying aspiration. But the possibilities of middle-class life are different now. We need to make that mental shift. I think these white collar workers who are organizing, like adjuncts, made that shift because they had to.

ITT: Why do you think people are so attached to this vision of middle-class existence, which is historically very recent and was also always based upon the exclusion of many groups, including people of color and women?

I think it’s a fantasy space, in a weird way. It’s become synonymous with the American dream. People see it as a rung of the ladder at which a person is not overreaching — you’re making it but in a pleasant way.

ITT: What are some of the challenges of organizing parents?

Some of it is time. You have lots of overwork, for instance, what I call the forever clock. It’s happening in lower-middle-class professions, like nurses’ aides and it has extended to middle class people who work in HR or IT or law. They’re working much more than they once did, and characters in the book have like two or three hours a week, not even, to be with their kids.

In other words, how would parents have time to even meet with other parents?

In addition, among women and mothers especially, there’s a lot of shame associated with struggling as a parent. It’s supposed to be something natural, and you’re supposed to be able to do this yourself. But many of the struggles parents have are around money, and having wealth and income is not some failure of natural instinct.

Also, I think the competition for good education pits people against one another. Good schools and good daycare are seen as a scarce resource you have to fight over. Indeed, the moments I found most moving while doing research for the book were the opposite of that — people coming together and sharing resources. In the book, I talk about parents who are co-housing and co-parenting. But I want to say, I don’t recommend these alone as a broad social solution. After all, just taking care of ourselves is quietist. In the end, we need societal change.

ITT: “Squeezed” is a book about parents, and how they’re being threatened by stagnant wages, automation and all these other things. But in that way, it’s actually a book about all of us. What’s the relationship between parents’ struggles and everyone else’s struggles?

I think that’s true. I used to teach at the Columbia journalism school and I would tell my students that every book has to have a sentence that motivates it. I think mine has something to do with what happens when American capitalism hits family life, how it distorts it and how we overcome these distortions.

In the book, I’m really concerned with that and how to make that experience better for parents and kids.

My hook for this book was that it would speak to parents in a different way than most parenting books. It’s offering them a labor-focused account of parenthood. Most of the other parenting books don’t talk about the pressures of capitalism that now accompanies parenthood.

I see my book as self-help to get people to stop blaming themselves and start taking systematic action and to realize that the system is stacked against them in some ways.

Call it “radical self-help”.

The post Is it time for parents to unionize? appeared first on Salon.com.

Two Moms, Two Dads, Today’s Families

On one hand, many families are already formed when a parent comes out and usually it is a surprise to the kids and many adjustments have to be made. On the other hand, many same-sex couples decide to adopt or have children through a surrogate or in vitro fertilization. Being a parent and raising a family is not easy. Is it harder if you don’t have a traditional family? Since I don’t have kids, I relied on the interviews and surveys to get a better understanding of the challenges these families face for Rainbow Relatives. I will leave most of the advice to them and let their answers speak for themselves.

LGBTQ Parents

If you could give advice to other gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender parents or same-sex couples with kids or thinking of having them, what would it be?

• Andrew: I think that it’s the most amazing thing I’ve done . . . and the hardest. I’ve learned more about myself in this journey (both good and bad). Someone gave us the advice that if Oliver ever says, “I want a mommy,” to think about it as if he said, “I want a horse.” Our son doesn’t know what a mommy does versus his daddies . . . and it will keep us from feeling like we’re depriving him of something.
• Thea: It’s awesome, but only do it if you are 100 percent sure. I always thought I wanted a biological child but I could not love my adopted kids more.
• Bruce: Having kids, it’s the greatest thing ever.
• Primrose: Adopt from foster care! So many kids in our own cities and states need parents.
• Albert: Make sure you are both on the same page; it makes life better when you both know what the other is thinking.
• Kathy: Join an organization such as Pop Luck Club (PLC), an organization in Los Angeles, California, made up of families with two dads and go to Maybe Baby (a fertility group). Seek out other gay parents. Visit with other families, be a camp counselor, go read to kids in schools, volunteer. If you have never been in charge of other kids, like mentioned above, then it can be tough; already knowing how kids act can really help.
• Ted: Do it. It’s the best gift in the world.

Were there any issues, challenges, or interesting stories (serious, humorous, or heartwarming) at school or other social settings regarding your kids having a gay/lesbian/bisexual/ transgender parent?

• Andrew: On Mother’s Day we were going to brunch, two dads and our son, and a woman stopped us on the street and said, “It was nice to give mom the morning off.” We pointed out that Oliver didn’t have a mother but that he had two dads and she said, “I’m going to pray for you and remember Jesus loves you,” and she then crossed the street. I thought the woman’s reaction was rude, while my partner thought she was being nice. I don’t know what her motivation was for saying it, so I decided to be happy someone was praying for us.
• Daniel: One main issue that continued to come up in their early years was other parents’ confusion when our children stated that they had two dads. Classmates usually didn’t care, but they did mention their parents said that our lifestyle was “wrong.”
• Eduardo: We’ve really encountered very few negative responses when people learn we are gay parents. I expect this will get a little more complicated as they move out of the private preschool into public school. We try to prepare them gradually for the reality of how some people think badly of gay people and gay parents. For example, I recently donated some money to help some gay Ugandans escape Uganda. We talked about that and how there are some places in the world where people like their dads might be hurt or killed for loving each other.
• Frank: I am a stay-at-home dad in a very “soccer mom” area. Going to the grocery store always brings on comments, and of course the old Southern ladies ask the most questions. When they say, “Your wife must love that you do the shopping and take your daughter,” I smile and say, “My husband lets me be a Real Househusband of Atlanta.” Their looks are priceless.
• George: Tough time was at Mother’s Day when the boys would make something for a grandmother or aunt. I would talk to teachers ahead of time, but they usually forgot. Most classmates didn’t care. Having worked with kids before and being very present at their schools helps offset any weirdness. When applying to schools, I always asked if there were any other same-sex parents at the school.
• Harry: It’s liberal here, so not too big an issue; I don’t think it even came up at all in preschool. In kindergarten, an older kid came up to me and asked, “Does Wes really have two dads?” I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “Oh,” and went about his playing. They have told him he must have a mother somewhere, a birth mother at least, and he’s asked about his birth mother and we tell him again how a woman grew him in her tummy for us. It’s a bit confusing since her name is the same as about three of our friends!
• Igor: He has a classmate (with two gay dads) who came out of the same tummy as his sister (!) and that hasn’t been an issue. It’s probably actually helped, because it makes gay dads less unusual and he’s not the only one. I really do think “Will & Grace,” “Modern Family,” and Facebook have helped the country accept gays.
• Julie: My churchy conservative friends from school days see me and my family on Facebook and I think it must give them pause at first. I wonder, are they going to reject us because we’re gay? But they haven’t and now they get to see we’re pretty normal folk, with granite-cleaning issues and stain-removal questions. We don’t have after-hours parties and thongs. I have family members who stopped watching “Friends” because of the gay wedding, and now “Modern Family” is their favorite show, so we’ve come a long way pretty quickly.
• Ted: Not yet. We did put a “I love my dads” T-shirt on the boys and the teachers at school “love the shirts.” I heard that about two or three times when I went to pick up the boys, who are two and five years old.

What are some questions your kids have asked about having a gay/lesbian/transgender parent? How old were they when they asked, and how did you answer? Describe the coming-out process.

• Julie: We have a nineteen-year-old daughter and a twenty-one-year-old son. Some of the questions they asked at ten and thirteen years old were things like, “How are we supposed to respond to people saying that our lifestyle is wrong? How are we supposed to make friends?” Our first response to their question was that they cannot always change the way people view others. Also, that true friends would judge them on their friendship, not their parents’ sexuality. We never actually came out to them—we were out before the children came into our lives.
• Kelsey: We have a six-year-old boy and an almost three-year-old girl. Our son sometimes is into bridal dresses, and asked if we got married and when. We told him we had, then he asked, “Which one of you wore a bridal gown?”I said, “Neither of us. We’re both men, so we both wore regular clothes. We got married during a heat wave and the ceremony was outside, so we just wore regular clothes.” (I realize now that we could have worn dresses!) Then our son asked, “If two women get married, how do they decide which one wears a gown?”“They both could, or neither could—it’s up to them; it’s their wedding, so they can do what they want.”He was probably four years old at the time. We didn’t have to come out since they’ve been with us since birth and they know and see other gay and single parents, so they know there are all sorts of families. When school starts, it is clear most families have a mom and a dad, so it comes up. He has been around pregnant women, and he knew they were carrying babies, so we have told him, “We really, really, really wanted a baby, and since we’re two men and babies only grow in women’s tummies, a woman grew you in her tummy for us.”

What do you feel are some of the benefits of raising kids as an LGBTQ parent? What are some benefits for the children?

• Katie: The ability to show them, firsthand, about love and diversity. And the ability to teach them about and exercise tolerance.
• Lauren: The obvious advantage is that most gay parents have their kids on purpose. (Almost) no accidental pregnancies in our group! I think gay parents tend to be very accepting of their kids being different from our expectations for them. We know what it’s like not to be accepted by our parents and we try very hard to love our own kids unconditionally.
• Lawrence: We have loving homes, with two parents that really wanted children, who have to not only put a lot of time but money into having a family.
• Michelle: LGBT parents can be more open to recognizing depression, bullying, or even just holding back. I think it promotes a healthy attitude towards sexuality and being able to talk to your kids about sex when the time comes. Hopefully, it’ll help kids learn to be more understanding of others.
• Maurice: We have a lot of friends who don’t have children, so our daughter is very lucky to have so many people love her.
• Ted: I’d like to think we have a built-in “accept everyone” policy in the household. And I think it’s easier to say, “be whomever you want to be.”

What are some of the disadvantages of having LGBTQ parents?

• Nico: People expressing their opinions can be very cruel.
• Nannette: Our kids are likely to be exposed to discrimination and negativity about their families, but it can be character-building as long as it isn’t too extreme.
• Oliver: People asking about their mom or why I’m not married . . . I don’t want my kids to feel different. I want them to feel loved!
• Paul: Possibility for being picked on, and, if single, you definitely need a strong female presence from an aunt, grandma, or friend.
• Ted: Well, life as we know it. They will get ugliness. And we’ll be here to remind them there is more happy than ugly in the world.

Many of the topics, issues, and inspiring comments that came up in the surveys were common among the families. To get more of a feel of households with same-sex parents, I did a few personal interviews and have shared them with you in the following pages.

Can You Miss Something You Never Had?

Many people worry that a child with two moms or two dads might be missing out by not having a mother or a father. I believe this is a legitimate concern. In a perfect world, every child should have positive male and female role models, but the best we can ask in this real world is for a child to be brought up with love and taught to be kind and to respect others. Whether a child is raised by a single mom or dad, a mom and a stepdad, grandparents, or two dads or two moms, love and strong values are what matter most. As a child of a traditional family, it took me a while to come to that conclusion. My only suggestion—which really comes from those I interviewed—is that if a child has same-sex parents, it might be good to have a friend or godparent of the other sex to be there as a role model as well.

In the book “Now That You Know: What Every Parent Should Know about Homosexuality,” by Betty Fairchild and Nancy Hayward, the authors highlighted many advantages for children of same-sex parents. One woman they interviewed about female same-sex parents stated, “There are things that a father would miss that the second mother picks up every time.” Their research did not turn up any evidence that heterosexual parents are “better” parents in terms of offering love, support, or stability in the home.

TOP TRENDING:

The post Advice for and from LGBTQ parents, in their own words appeared first on Salon.com.

“I want to be able to record every beautiful thing I see, so that when I look back on my life in a time of darkness, I won’t be able to say that I have never lived in light.” — From your diary, 1996

The summer you turn 16 finds you in the mountains with your father. It is August and the sun blazes over the plains but the Teton Range is still capped in snow. You can see the mountains towering mythic and forbidding beyond the twist of the Snake River, their granite peaks rising from the dry fields of sagebrush, and you name them because your father has taught you: Middle, Grand, Teewinot, Mount Owen, Mount Moran.

There are only three radio stations in Teton Park and all of them play country. You fiddle listlessly with the dial until gravel finally churns under the tires of the Ford and your father turns down the narrow dirt road to the Climbers’ Ranch. The sameness of the place is like greeting a friend: The aspens still flutter their silvery leaves along the banks of Cottonwood Creek. The climbers’ cabins are still stacked like Lincoln Logs in the flat bed of grasses that borders the steep, pine-covered hill. Your father’s brown eyes soften like he is greeting a memory.

Once, he tells you, this was the land of the Shoshones.

Your father is not Native American. He is a city boy who does not like concrete, a Jewish man who does not believe in God, a university lecturer of 35 years who is not a professor, a former Navy lieutenant who does not believe in rank. He is a storyteller who could not write a book. When winter is slow giving way to spring you roll your eyes as he bows his head and echoes T.S. Eliot: “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” No, he is not Native American, but he wishes he were, you think. He knows their stories and their spirits – Coyote, Bear and Fox. Sometimes when you walk the woods he reaches a hand out, stilling you. You try to walk like him, without making a sound.

Dusk falls at the Climbers’ Ranch, and men with three-day beards gather around their fry pans and propane stoves like moths around porch lights, telling tales of glaciers and grizzlies in the softly sinking light. You fall asleep on a plywood bunk, the silence of the high peaks ringing in your ears and somewhere in the dark below, the sound of your father breathing.

In the morning your stomach feels like a skein of wet wool. You eat because you know your body will need it. Your father hefts his pack onto his back and you smear zinc on your face, following him up the trail. It’s shady and quiet here, under the canopy of green. But as the sun climbs its arc in the sky you begin to learn there is no such thing as battling a mountain. The switchbacks tell you that, the way they slowly twist, wicked and ceaseless, the packed summer dirt of the trail kicking small clouds of dust off the back of your father’s boots. You fix your gaze on him and remember how many mountains you have climbed simply by following his muscled back, by simply putting one foot after the other. The wet skein of wool lodged in your belly tightens; the snatches of beauty are never enough to compensate for the long stretches of pain – a child’s legs fighting to keep time with her father’s, or the harsh scratchings of fear – the mountains mean being lost in the dark when you ache to be home, being too wet with snow, being too hungry with a packet of spoiled food. There is always a mistake. And yet his feet plant with purpose, a moving meditation.

“Breathe,” he reminds you. “Breathe.”

At 7,000 feet the switchbacks fall away and you step into the tufted pine meadows of Garnet Canyon. Clumps of alpine grasses dotted with wild blue flax and rich golden butterweed shiver with the breeze sweeping up the canyon. You lean, each of you on a boulder, take some water and trail mix, and all too soon it’s time to resume the climb. Sweat soaks your shirt beneath the thick padded straps of your 75-pound pack. Spruce, pine and gently swaying aspens give way at the tree line to boulder fields and their sloping shoulders of ice. You wish you didn’t know there were another 4,000 feet of elevation to gain before you reach the Lower Saddle. You begin to feel as though you are wading through molasses.

“What will it be like when we get there,” you ask. “You know, where we camp?”

Your father sighs. This question is perilously close to Are we there yet, and he too, is fighting for breath.

“It’s a glacial moraine, an alpine pass. The Lower Saddle hangs between the Middle Teton and the Grand.”

It sounds desolate and cold, like camping on the moon.

The trail narrows, then disappears. Your father takes out the guidebook and shakes his head, traces the route with a weathered finger. Your trailblazing father has lost the trail. There is nothing to do but try to find it. You follow his surefooted boots blindly, gripping your way up a steeply pitched boulder field, lungs flaming in the thinning air. And then when you come to the top, everything changes.

You see your father’s face has gone pallid.

He has set down his pack and his peppered head is bowed, his body caved, his hands on his knees. He is struggling for breath in great rasping heaves and his eyes are too wide. He is blinking at old age as if it caught him by surprise. The surprise catches you too: You never imagined his body could be anything but invincible. And yet never has your father seemed so fragile – a smooth-shelled egg of a man, teetering on the tip of a canyon. Your eyes sting and you turn your head away, but he is your father. He can smell your tears like a threatening storm.

“Hey,” he tells you. “Hey. It’s OK, kiddo. It’s OK.”

His dark eyes are filled with a determined sense of wonder.

“This is why I wanted to do this. I’m getting old,” he says, and his voice is gentle. “This may be the last great mountain I will ever climb.”

You sink into a place where words do not live. In the fibers of your body, you knew this. He is only 56 years old. You did not come because you wanted to climb this mountain. You came because you did not want your father to climb it alone.

Several minutes tick by and you help him shoulder his pack. Looking down from this height, he points out the Lower Saddle sprawling beyond, a desert of gray boulders and ice. Somewhere below is the hollow trickle of a glacial stream.

Together you pitch the tent at 11,600 feet.

You wake up at 3 a.m. to begin the final ascent and the velvet sky has exploded with stars. You realize you have been sleeping nestled closer to the heavens than you have ever been before. So much light. Outside the tent, light from the stars illuminates the barren moraine like fairy dust. The snow that shoulders the peaks glows like a white-winged moth in the darkness. The trickle of ice water seems to whisper, this, this, this.

You understand that here, your father has found his God. This is why the month of planning and preparation. This is why the tedious road trip more than halfway across the country. This is what living can show you.

Can you see it?

Will you remember this?

Eyes opened wide, you blink like the shutter of a lens in an effort to embalm it, this moment, before the pain claims you – of climbing, of aging, of burning into dust. He studies you in the dimness and nods. He says with his eyes, Good, kiddo. You finally understand.

In the shelter of the tent you don hat, headlamp and expedition-weight long underwear. You slip your rock shoes into your daypack and look to the mountain overhead, never imagining there will come a time in your life when the only mountains you climb will be constructs of glass and steel beam. When you will try to find the heavens and see no stars at all, only pinpoints of light from the Brooklyn Bridge, or the fluorescence of Midtown.

Years from now you will remember how the gusts of wind against the barren rock of the Exum Ridge sounded like a herd of wild buffalo, how you folded yourself into granite chimneys on the shadowy expanse of the Western face – the mountain held you then, like a mother who forgave your stupidity. Like the calcified embrace of a compassionate old man. You closed your eyes and wished you could stay.

You will remember how you reached the summit too late, the 2 p.m. shadows on the crags of the rocks, your triumph tempered by the darkening storm clouds billowing their way toward the peak. You’ve heard stories of climbers who’ve gotten pinned by weather near a summit, struck down by lightning or frostbitten or worse. You snap one quick photo of the patchwork expanse below and it’s time to descend. You haven’t gone far when you reach the first big free rappel, a 200-foot drop over the edge of a cliff with no rock to anchor your feet upon. Your father drops his daypack and pulls out the blue climbing rope, ready to clip in and rappel you back home.

He has uncoiled the rope and worked it through the carabiner, peering over the sheer rocky drop. It’s then that he stops.

Slams his fist on the granite beside him.

“Goddammit!”

His curse is venomous and you wince involuntarily. He shakes his head, rubs his hands over his face. His rope is not long enough to get you back down. There is a flash of despair before his eyes harden. He knows he screwed up but he’ll never say it. This is not the first mistake, but this is the worst. There is fury and you swallow it because what is the point? This is the last great mountain your father will ever climb.

You won’t remember how it was decided that you would be the one to go in search of help and a long-enough rope. Maybe he didn’t want to leave you alone at the top of a mountain. What will stay with you is the moment you choose between fear and survival. You use the short rope as far as it can take you. You unclip and demand your fingers stop shaking in their crevices of rock. Now you are free-climbing down the western face of the Grand. Your climbing shoes slip on black ice. You look down 13,000 feet to the border of Idaho and realize that sometimes in life there is no room for mistakes.

And so you cannot make one.

In the end when you find climbers, they will not lend you a rope. It’s your father’s fault, they say. He has no business climbing a mountain. Tears brim to the surface then. You shrink back to the rock and begin the climb up to your father.

This is when I would lean in, a shadow of the woman you will become; as your fingers sought for notches in the granite, as your legs and arms worked like a spider, slow and cautious in spinning her web because her life will depend on it. This is when I would tell you:

Neither of you will die on this mountain, but in 10 years, your father will be gone.

It will happen in his sleep, 10 days after Christmas. He will be home in his bed. Outside his kitchen window there will be cardinals and chickadees and snow on the feeder. You will be watching the taxis rush up and down Broadway when you get the call. The shock feels icy as the water of Cottonwood Creek and all you can think is, I saw him, I just saw him, until you collapse onto the floor in search of a lower altitude. You will never know what causes his death. Heart failure is what they say, after all, when the human heart stops beating. And what you will wish is that you could have collected every bright moment you spent with him, not only that summer you were 16, but all seasons after and before, as if you could pluck their effervescence from the darkening sky and seal them in a jar.

For years without end you will keep two of his undershirts tucked in the back of a drawer. There are photos. Bones, antlers, fossils and turkey feathers. A mountain egg of granite from the slope of the Lower Saddle.

When your fingers grip the roughened rock you will remember the calluses on his fingers and your father’s last great climb.

You will not have to remember disaster because just when you thought the mountain wouldn’t let you down, two Australian women came upon you and your father. They had summited so late, close to 3 o’clock, but they were smiles and good cheer as they knotted their rope onto yours. After you and your father were safely down, they glided down the mountain side-by-side in their rappel and did not even pendulum, not one fraction of an inch.

You will forget how many days it took to drive from Jackson Hole, Wyo., to Ithaca, N.Y.; the journey will be a blur of rest stops, of flat lands and corn, of big sky and distant lightning. Too vaguely, you’ll remember the way your father’s thick fingers turned the dial down on Mozart to talk about the Native American Medicine Wheel; how it was composed of the four directions, and how people were composed of these four directions, too.

“North is the way of the buffalo,” he says, “and its color is black. These people are directive, they are our leaders. South is the way of the deer; its color is green. These people are our nurturers, they are our healers. West —” he holds up one finger like he does when he’s teaching — “is the way of the bear; its color is sunset. These people are the doers, our hard workers who pay great attention to detail.”

He glances over at you. His dark eyes sparkling.

“You are of the East,” he tells you. “The way of the eagle. Your color is blue. You are imaginative, and creative. But you cannot follow through.”

You never ask your father his direction. Maybe you are cross with him and you don’t want to know. But you know he is right. You may have climbed this mountain, but you do not follow through. You make things hard so you can quit when they get difficult. You have inspirations that breathe in the back of your mind but you leave them to suffocate in a box where failure cannot touch them. You will become a city girl who begins to long for the country. An editor who remembers that some day, long ago, she wanted to write.

It will take his death to make you quit your job and leave New York. His leaving will cause you to seek out your own gods in faraway mountains. You will mine your own stories from the belly of the earth and hold them up to the light. And the adventures you have will teach you something about mountains, too. You’ll learn that there is nothing so lasting as those granite giants. Not love, not even sadness. You will realize your father did not live long enough to finish the lesson he began in the car all those years ago.

You are not only one direction, north, south, east or west. You, like everyone else, are parts of them all.

The glittering of the stars and the trickle of glacier stream, the view from the office tower and the scattering of cirrus clouds that sweep the Grand Teton. You cannot battle life, and you cannot conquer it. What your father hoped to teach you was how to survive it. How to appreciate what brilliance you happen upon – to roll in it and smell it, and feel it sift between your fingers. You can only hope to move through vast canyons and experience their wonder, because even when they are desolate, there is a beauty in their breathing. Our footsteps fall into the land and they become a part of it. Just as your father will always be a part of you.

The post Facing death on the mountain: What my father taught me on his last great climb appeared first on Salon.com.

Vida, I learned with some digging, was about to land at JFK Airport en route from London with two of her finest Papillons, a kind of toy spaniel. Vida would stay with us for the week, in our New York City apartment, while she showed her dogs at the Westminster Kennel Club Show. Westminster was the biggest dog show of them all, and Vida was coming to win.

Among my “aunts,” Vida Wayne was the most intriguing. For starters, she was an oil heiress. Vida was born Vida Halliburton, daughter of Erle P. Halliburton, founder of the Halliburton Company and one of the world’s richest men. Vida, Erle’s fourth of five children, never wanted for anything.  She married pop singer and Hollywood producer Artie Wayne, and together, their young children and film crew in tow, plied the world’s oceans in their yacht, a converted Navy minesweeper, making movies. This was when my mother, a radio producer seeking her own fortune in Hollywood, struck up a friendship with Vida. Ultimately, Vida’s interests shifted to her prize-winning dogs, and she was now mostly on the road with them. Vida was fun, and wickedly eccentric, and unlike some of my mom’s other friends, not disposed to climb into my business.

It was February 1980. A crust of snow coated the sidewalks, and flurries were in the forecast. My sister and I scrambled to clean up the room where Vida and the dogs would stay. We put down towels where the dogs would track in snow from the park. As city kids, my sister and I had never owned a dog, and we were excited to receive our new charges.

I didn’t really know Vida — a sandwich layer filled by my mother saw to that — but she was a welcome guest. As were the other “aunts,” who came to stay from time to time. All were unusual, even exotic women. Norma was a model and TV “weather girl.” Peg was the creator and star of an early radio and TV sitcom. Gladys was a song and radio jingle writer. And so on.

Albine, while not in show business, was the most mysterious of all. She had known my mother since early childhood, growing up in the house next door in Queens, New York. She was there for the upheavals of my mother’s youth: the times she ran away from home, the first marriage about which my mother never spoke — scraps I picked up from sentence fragments overheard in empty corridors. But if Albine had stories — information — about my mom, she wasn’t telling.

I understood roughly how these women were connected to my mother, but little else about their friendships. Each woman was linked to a period in my mother’s life, including her career in radio. As a child I held a suspicion that these links concealed elusive truths about my mother — truths she kept from me and my sister. But if these truths were discernible from the way my mother pursued these dear friendships, I didn’t see it. Nor did I trouble to ask why I was to address these women as “Aunt.” I simply did, in the way of a child. It was not until I became an adult that I understood this designation was really about my mother, a gaudy homage to friends she had accumulated, and not at all about me, or even them.

On schedule, Vida arrived by taxi with the two Papillons. The date was Sunday, February 10, 1980. Away from the primping and klieg lights, the Papillons were still dogs, and my sister and I spilled out onto the apartment landing to scoop them up.

Something immediately wasn’t right about Vida. Normally smooth and confident, today she was unfocused and shaky. As she settled into our apartment, and over the next couple days, Vida’s peculiar behavior had my sister and me whispering to each other in the halls: “Aunt Vida just came back from walking the dogs in her nightgown. In Central Park. It’s February!” I broached the subject with my mother. She waved me off, with a quick sound bite about medication. Beyond that, there was no discussion of Vida’s behavior. Per usual I was out of the information loop. I decided to keep my distance.

Our apartment was a hive of activity on Tuesday morning, the opening day of the Westminster dog show. The dogs had the run of the apartment, and they were yapping about. The dogs’ handler, the renowned Barbara Humphries, came by to collect the dogs to shuttle them to Madison Square Garden. Meanwhile, my mother and Vida, both fashionable women, were in the midst of their own productions, primping, perfuming and preparing for the day out. Vida always wore jewelry befitting an heiress, and this day she was decked out in her diamonds. I was in my room getting dressed for school, when I heard Vida in the entryway yelling in to my mother: “Charlotte, are you ready? It’s getting late.” My mother was going to drive Vida down to the Garden. My mother, from the other end of the apartment, yelled back: “Just a minute, Vi, I’m finishing my makeup.”

I slipped past Vida in the entryway, exited our apartment building, and hopped on the bus to school. The day was uneventful, until I returned home. “David, have you seen your Aunt Vida?” my mother asked rhetorically as I came in and dropped my bag. I had not. My mother related how she’d come out of her bedroom that morning, ready to drive Vida, and Vida was gone. Eventually my mother drove down to Madison Square Garden, expecting that Vida had grown impatient and left the apartment without her. But Vida wasn’t at Madison Square Garden, and didn’t turn up there all day. My dad arrived home from the office. We had dinner. My mother called the police.

The police were nonplussed, as my mother would later recount:

“It’s been less than 24 hours, ma’am, she’s not a missing person,” the detective chided over the phone.

“She’s wearing a quarter-million dollars in jewelry,” my mother rejoined.

“We’ll be right over.”

There was no word from Vida that day, or the next day, or the next. The NYPD missing person’s unit visited our apartment several times. An alert was issued: “Vida Wayne is 58 years old, 5’ 4”, weighs 120 lbs., and always wears a man’s ring with a gold lion’s head with a diamond protruding through the nose on her right index finger. Anyone having information should contact. . . .”

My mother engaged a psychic.

Leads were plentiful. Vida’s wallet was found in the back of a taxi. The New York Times reported that the taxi had dropped Vida at Madison Square Garden, but the driver didn’t notice if she’d entered the building, and no one else came forward to say they saw her there. Later that day, according to the police, Vida walked into a McDonald’s at Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street and asked an employee behind the counter to cash a $50 traveler’s check. The employee turned away briefly, and when she returned Vida was gone, leaving behind a fur hat and a pocketbook containing an airline ticket to Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Vida’s family in Los Angeles began placing daily ads in New York City’s three major papers. The ads gave a description — brownish-red hair, wearing a light brown fur coat, maroon boots and a black leather skirt — and offered a sizeable reward. The ads failed to generate new leads, and the trail started to grow cold. Vida was nowhere.

After Vida disappeared, my sister and I continued to go to school, my dad to work, and honestly I don’t recall what my mother did. Truth is, I don’t remember much from that week — surprising to me given that an oil heiress, one of my mom’s close friends, my “Aunt,” had just vanished from our home. I seem to recall that, apart from the disappearance, the week felt ordinary.

I’d like to report that the mood in the apartment was frenetic, as we organized searches for Vida; that we combed the streets looking for her; that we posted fliers; that all non-missing person activity came to a halt. That we were distraught, my mother in tears. But I can’t say these things — because they didn’t occur.

If we huddled as a family and talked about Vida, the fate that might be befalling her, and our own feelings about Vida’s disappearance, I don’t remember that at all. What I do remember, quite distinctly, is that, with Vida missing only a few days, my mother drove my sister and me to Vermont to ski for President’s Day week. As we stuffed our skis in the car, I recall asking my mother, “Is it OK to leave?”  “Yes,” came her one-word reply. I knew not to question, and I climbed into the backseat. In many families, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. In my family, this was time for a road trip.

It’s a regular source of surprise to me, the things people choose to say to the ones they love — and the things they don’t. I imagine my family sitting at the dinner table in the days following Vida’s disappearance, staring at each other and wondering who was going to speak first about the tragedy unfolding in our home. But if my mother wasn’t going to ask if I was upset about Vida going missing, I wasn’t going to volunteer it. I wasn’t going to lead that conversation.

And I’m left to wonder how uncommon a dynamic this is in families: the child looking to the parent for direction; the parent who won’t — can’t — engage the child. Each person contributing to a growing space between, and into that silent space flowing misgiving and regret, a warehouse of feelings not expressed and actions not taken. And what’s left, I think, must be blankness and rigid veneer, slick surfaces to which memory and sentiment don’t adhere.

I don’t remember when they pulled Vida’s body out of the East River that summer. Or when the medical examiner’s office returned her — her jewelry intact — to her family. I don’t remember if there was a funeral for Vida, and if there was, if my mother attended. I don’t remember what I may have said to my mother at the time in consolation, or what she may have said to me. But after 38 years, I remember enough to have learned, finally, that this is not just a family story about an heiress who disappeared from a New York City apartment. It’s also a story about family, and the things we leave unsaid.

The post The day Vida Wayne vanished, wearing a quarter-million dollars in jewels appeared first on Salon.com.

The truth is, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The internet is so woven into our lives, we need to be aware of the worst-case scenarios that can strike when we’re unprepared. Below are a few of those scary things that can and do happen. But with some eyes and ears to the ground, they are totally preventable.

Your kid could be spied on. Smart toys including My Friend Cayla, Hello Barbie, and CloudPets are designed to learn and grow with your kid. Cool, right? Unfortunately, many of these toys have privacy problems. As the 2015 data breach of Vtech’s InnoTab Max uncovered, hackers specifically target kids because they offer clean credit histories and unused Social Security numbers that they can use for identity theft. These toys also collect a lot of information about your kid, and they aren’t always clear about when they do it and how they use it.

• Protect yourself. Make sure you buy a toy that has a good privacy policy that you understand. Only provide required information, not the optional stuff they ask for, and turn off the toy when it’s not being used.

Your kid could get accused of a crime. Everyone has the right to privacy, especially in their own home. But home assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Mattel Aristotle are designed to butt their noses into conversations. These devices collect — and store — untold amounts of data. It’s unclear what the companies do with the extraneous “noise” they pick up. And if it’s subpoenaed, they might have to hand it over. Say your kid jokes about terrorism or something else illegal; if there’s an investigation into those activities, the companies might have to cough up the transcripts. In Arkansas, a prosecutor asked for a murder suspect’s Echo smart speaker in case its information could shed light on the crime. The suspect agreed to hand over the recordings, and Amazon was compelled to make them available.

• Protect yourself. Turn off your home assistant’s microphone when you’re not using it. You also can prune your data in your devices’ app settings, deleting stuff you don’t want to store on your phone or in the companies’ cloud servers. Or choose not to use a home assistant until the privacy regulations are ironed out.

Your kid could get hurt. With location-aware social media such as Twitter, Kik, and Facebook, kids can reveal their actual, physical locations to all their contacts — plenty of whom they don’t know personally. Imagine a selfie that’s location-tagged and says, “Bored, by myself, just hanging out looking for something fun to do.”

• Protect yourself. Turn off location sharing on your kids’ devices, both in the phone settings and in the apps they use, so their status updates and photos are not automatically tagged with their locations. Make sure your kids never tell strangers their address, their school name, where they hang out, or where they’re going to be. Teach kids to choose “no” when asked to share their locations.

Your kid could lose out on opportunities. Posting wild and crazy pics from prom ’17 paints a picture for potential admissions counselors, hiring managers, and others whom teens want to impress. They may not care that your kid partied — only that he showed poor judgment in posting compromising images.

• Protect yourself. Tell your kid not to share photos of questionable activities on the internet. If those kinds of photos do wind up online, tell your kid to ask his or her friends either to take them down or not to tag them so the photos can’t be traced back. And remember to model responsible online sharing; don’t share photos of your kid without asking permission, and share them with a limited audience — for example, only grandparents.

Your kid could be sold short. Schools are increasingly using software from third-party providers to teach, diagnose potential learning issues, and interact with students. This software includes online learning lessons, standardized tests, and 1:1 device programs. And the companies that administer the programs are typically allowed to collect, store, and sell your kids’ performance records. Wondering about all those offers for supplemental reading classes you’re receiving in the mail? Maybe your kid stumbled on her reading assessments — and marketers are trying to sell you “solutions.” Curious why Harvard isn’t trying to recruit your kid? Maybe they already decided she’s not Ivy League material based on her middle school grades. (Learn about our Student Privacy Initiative.)

• Protect yourself. If you know that your kid is going to be using third-party programs at school, find out what the software opts them into and what they can opt out of. Tell your kid to only supply required, not optional, information. If you have the time (and the stomach for it), you could read through the privacy policies of all the software your kid uses at school. Otherwise, talk to the principal about how the school vets companies’ policies. If you’re not satisfied, raise the issue with other parents (say, at the PTA meeting) to learn how your school can do more to protect student privacy.

Your kid could be limited. As schools automate procedures, they create student records with sensitive — and potentially damaging — information. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), schools are allowed to share certain information without getting parents’ consents. That means that an individual education plan (IEP), attendance records, a disciplinary record, prescribed medication, or even a high body mass index could be disclosed and used to unfairly disqualify your kid from opportunities, such as advanced classes, government services, or special schools.

• Protect yourself. Schools are required to send parents information on how they handle student privacy. Find out what information your school collects, how it’s stored, who gets to see it, and what future administrators are allowed to do with it. Under FERPA, you have the right to request, correct, or add an amendment to your kid’s records through your district’s educational department.

Your kid could be humiliated. Sharing fun stuff from your life with friends is fine. But oversharing is never a good idea. When kids post inappropriate material — whether it’s a sexy selfie, an explicit photo session with a friend, an overly revealing rant, or cruel comments about others — the results can be humiliating if those posts become public or shared widely.

• Protect yourself. Talk to your kids about keeping private things private, considering how far information can travel and how long it can last, and how they can talk to their friends about respecting one another’s personal privacy.

Your kid’s data could wind up in the wrong hands. The Cambridge Analytica scandal that involved scraping information from people’s profiles on Facebook proves that you can never be sure how companies are protecting your data, who they’re sharing it with, and what information they’re giving to third parties.

• Protect yourself. When you sign up for a social media account, only provide the basic information needed to set up your profile. Services such as Facebook ask for a lot of information, but often it’s not required to register. When you use third-party apps, such as a downloadable quiz on Facebook, review the information the app says it’s taking from your profile. If it’s over-reaching, for example taking data it doesn’t really need or taking your friend’s data, just say no.

The post Real-world reasons parents should care about kids and online privacy appeared first on Salon.com.