Recently in Family Category

I spent the weekend down in south Louisiana, celebrating my father's 75th birthday. It was a great time. I sat down with Daddy in the back garden with my Flip camera, and interviewed him about the things he'd seen and done in his life, which began in 1934. It went well, but we filled the camera up without any means of downloading the files, so I have to finish the interview when I go back around Christmas. I tell you, I can't get enough of these stories. Daddy talked about how hard times were during the Great Depression, and how he and his brother got to be crack shots hunting squirrels with their Benjamin Pump BB guns, because if they weren't, the family would go without meat. He said that folks in the cities had it much harder than country people, because city people couldn't hunt or, in many cases, grow their own food. Years later, when he joined the military, he said the country kids usually qualified the first day as marksmen, because they'd all come through the Depression as hunters.

One thing that helped his family and neighbors get along is that they didn't know how poor they were; they thought this was just how life was. He talked about the war, and how everybody stayed close to the radio during the war, because it was their only lifeline to what was happening on the front. He also talked about how growing up in the country taught one resourcefulness, and made one strong. When he was 12 years old, he could hoist a 100-lb. sack of feed on one shoulder; when he was 14, he could hoist one on each shoulder at the same time. He said when he was 12, he had his own bank account, and was raising crops and livestock after school. I've never known anyone more self-reliant than my father, who has no patience for people who won't work. He was the first one in his family to finish college, but to this day disdains and distrusts educated people who shirk physical labor. Unsurprisingly, he worries a lot about what would happen to the country if we had another Depression ... and he worries that we're headed back to those times.

Anyway, it was a great and illuminating weekend, full of stories bringing to mind this column I wrote about him for the Wall Street Journal a few years back, when I was living in New York, and the birth of my first son caused me to reflect on manliness and the world that shaped my father. My mother took the photo below of us just before we started the interview; she snapped it with my iPhone, using the Toy Camera app, which I highly recommend.

Actual real-life dialogue just now:

"Nora, there is NO SUCH THING as a girl Death Star!"

"Da-a-a-d, Lucas says there's no such thing as a girl Death Star!"

"Lucas, I think there really might be a girl Death Star in some universe."

"See!"

It was the three-year-old girl sassily affixing her hand to her hip, and sticking her hip out when she said, "See!", that made the moment.

Alex e-mailed to me the remarkable story of Gaby Hinsliff, the political editor of The Observer newspaper in England -- or rather, the former political editor, inasmuch as she resigned because she concluded she couldn't have both a high-powered career and a satisfying family life. Excerpt:

Tucked away down a winding track on a remote Welsh peninsula, the farmhouse we rented for a family holiday last June was a much-needed haven from real life. My two-year-old son and his cousins ran wild on the empty beaches all day, chasing crabs through rock pools. When they all finally fell asleep in a sandy tangle of sheets, the adults cracked open another bottle and watched the sun sink slowly into the water. Months of tension melted away... until the night someone flicked on the television for the weather forecast, just in time to see James Purnell resign from the cabinet.

"That's the end, then," I said.

Of Gordon Brown, someone wondered? But I meant, of the holiday. The point of journalism is being there when things happen: the blessing, and the curse, of political journalism is that things happen so often. I rang the office, and started packing.

All the way back down the motorway, the car seethed with resentment. "Freddie NOT go home," said my son mutinously, kicking the back of the seat. "Yes, well, Daddy doesn't want to either," my husband muttered. Even the dog glowered.

And was that the tipping point? The moment I realised I couldn't do this any more, couldn't do it to my family any more, and would therefore have to resign from the job I loved? It would make for a convenient story if it was. But in all honesty, it was a slower, subtler thing than that.

Surrender steals up on the working mother like hypothermia takes a stranded climber: the chill deepens day by day, disorientation sets in, and before you know it you are gone. In the sleepless blur of the last three years, I can barely even remember now how it started.

More:

Every day became a battle against the clock. I never listened properly to phone conversations with friends, because I was always simultaneously doing something else. I was so on edge I raged at the tiniest delay - tourists blocking tube escalators, a computer slow to spark up in the morning. Running for the train in high heels, I sprained my ankle: the doctor prescribed some exercises, but who had time for that? I wore flat shoes, took painkillers.

My reward was that for two crazed but fantastic years, I did - in that loaded cliche - have it all: terrific job, plus small child. Thanks largely to a brilliant nanny and a hands-on partner, I don't honestly believe either suffered from the other.

But what got lost in the rush was a life, if a life means having time for the people you love, engaging with the world around you, making a home rather than just running a household.

So when my long-suffering husband was offered a new job in Oxford, involving the move to the countryside he has always wanted, there was strangely little to discuss. For years he had organised his own career to let me do what I loved, and now it felt like his turn. I closed my eyes and jumped.

But I never expected the emotional outpouring that followed. "Wish I had the guts to do the same," texted a junior minister, when I announced my resignation.

A seemingly unflappable PR confessed secretly agonising over "not being the kind of mother my son deserves": a colleague whose slick work-life balance I had always envied admitted she was "at the end of my tether", dying to quit.

Confessions tumbled compulsively from people I barely knew: tales of stricken marriages, miscarriages, only children who were meant to have siblings but then a career got in the way. "Too many of us once had relationships that we haven't got now because of this job," said a veteran male reporter, now divorced.

"I can't afford regrets," mused a cabinet minister, "because I've had this fantastic career, but..." Politics had, he said, dominated his children's lives.

I hope you'll read Hinsliff's whole essay.

Hinsliff is now writing a blog about her life as she tries to downshift from high-powered career woman to stay-at-home mom. Here's an excerpt of a recent entry:

I come from a family where good food and the rituals associated with eating together -- talking, arguing, laughing, getting drunk -- mattered.

When I worked fulltime, cooking supper marked the transition from office to home: here is something terribly soothing about chopping, stirring, spooning. But it was also one more thing to fit in, and sometimes by the time it was finished I was too tired to eat it.
So Henry has reminded me that now I have more time I want to spend more of it on food: cooking for friends, cooking with my son, maybe growing a bit more of our own stuff, and working out how to use cheaper cuts and leftovers.

After all, without a fulltime salary, there can't be expensive takeaways and convenience foods and nice stuff from the deli. But there might actually be time to eat without getting indigestion.

I don't mean to give the impression that Hinsliff believes she's stepped out of a stressful life into a garden of domestic bliss. She's struggling with a lot of anxiety over whether or not she's done the right thing, and getting used to life at home all day instead of being at the office. What Gaby Hinsliff did takes courage, and I bet she'll embolden many more couples to try it. Her blog is one to watch.

Watch this short "Sesame Street" clip:

Grover: "Well, I guess that's what marriage is about."

Brilliant propaganda, this. You can't very well accuse "Sesame Street" of openly promoting same-sex marriage, but come on, that's plainly what's happening here. Why on earth would you run a segment asking a little boy to define marriage if you didn't have in mind the idea of defining marriage in the minds of your young, receptive viewers? Is it too much to expect "Sesame Street" to stay out of the culture wars and teach the freaking alphabet to kids? What's next, Bert and Ernie affirming their partnership, and getting a wedding announcement in The New York Times? I'm joking -- and have your Jerry Falwell/Tinky Winky jokes (Falwell was bonkers on this point) -- but this really is insidious stuff, from a traditionalist point of view.

[Via InkTank.]

UPDATE: If, as one commenter said, this clip originally aired in 1987, then I'll feel really stupid ... but so will gay blogs (e.g., here and here and here) that recently cited this clip as Sesame Street promoting same-sex marriage. I've Googled around a bit and it seems that the commenter is correct. The joke's on both sides in the marriage war, for reading our own agendas into this old Grover clip. I thank the reader for pointing out what politicized morons we are. Nevertheless, while Grover obviously wasn't consciously put into the service of normalizing same-sex marriage, despite what gay activists and traddies like me thought, what do you suppose the point of this clip, and Grover portraying marriage as he did? I'm asking seriously.

Turns out that stage father Papa Heene has this thing about directing his sons to make bratty videos, presumably to show off their ersatz Dennis-the-Menace-like scampiness. Here's a lovely video in which the Heene children pick their noses to make a booger soup to serve to Mom:

Here's a clip in which the Heene children get paid to pick up what they call "dog sh*t." It's always charming when small children swear:

In this clip, described by one of the Heene parents as "outrageously funny and comical" (funny and comical both), the trio makes dessert. I particularly love it when the littlest one calls his brother a "dumbass," and later suggests putting "sh*t" on the plate. Har har! No wonder this YouTube channel is titled "Hilarious Heene Family." Verily, these frisky tots ought to be given their own reality show. Well, whaddaya know, Richard Heene has been unsuccessfully pitching just such a project to the cablers.

I look forward with lip-smacking relish to the truth about the Balloon Boy story coming out. It might be the only thing that saves these three children from having their lives ruined by their world-class jerk of a father.