parenting for authentic success

My friend Judith Warner has reviewed an important-sounding book in today's New York Times Book Review, on a topic forever close to my heart.  Titled Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success and authored by Madeline Levine, the book is about teens pushed toward false ideals of success, and the consequences. It's about the teens with whom Levine, a therapist, works—"depleted, angry, and sad as they compete for admission to a handful of big-name colleges" and about the parents "who can't steady or guide them, so lost are they in the pursuit of goals that have drained their lives of pleasure, contentment, and connection."  It's about a society that has, in Warner's words, "reached a tipping point, in which the long-dawning awareness that there's something not quite right about our parenting is strengthened into a real desire for change."

The review closes with this paragraph:

After all, as Levine notes, the inconvenient truth remains that not every child can be shaped and accelerated into Harvard material. But all kids can have their spirits broken, depression induced and anxiety stoked by too much stress, too little downtime and too much attention given to external factors that make them look good to an audience of appraising eyes but leave them feeling rotten inside. 

I read this review at this early hour and my mind returns to George William Shaw, whose funeral earlier this week was deeply moving.  Geordie, George's son, spoke eloquently.  Describing his father as an extraordinary ordinary man, Geordie went on to list George's greatest achievements:  He never put himself first.  He was a quiet provider.  He made all who knew him comfortable.  He made us laugh.  He loved his wife and let her know, every single day.  He bought his daughter roses every birthday.  He taught the neighborhood kids how to pitch.  He never missed a sporting or school event when his children, or their friends, were involved.  He treated his daughter-in-law like a daughter.  He was proud of his roots.

These achievements seemed to me to be of the very highest order.  These achievements, in the long run, mattered.  Vacationing neighbors chartered a plane back to my neighborhood to attend the funeral of this man. A former neighbor flew in from Steamboat Springs.  The friends of George's children came.  Every neighbor in these parts stopped whatever they had planned for Thursday and gathered in memory of George.  This was because of who George was and not because of George's resume.

George's life is proof of the power of goodness, plain and simple.  George's achievements are, perhaps, the kind that we parents can dedicate ourselves to teaching, the kind that Warner and Levine are suggesting we must.  The what will come for our teens.  The who is long and tender in the making.

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the day that was: Melissa Firman, George Shaw, Small Damages, Truth

I began a blogging conversation with Melissa Firman of The Betty and Boo Chronicles so long ago that I can't remember the first prompt, the earliest words.  Melissa and I share many things—proximity (at least until a transfer took her west), friends, a love for our children, a love for books—and the first time I actually met Melissa was on a bitter cold night, when she came to a talk I was giving about the impact of place on my work.  She came bearing books, my own.  She has built, over time, an embarrassingly generous Beth Kephart library.  Even as she does so many things, for so many others, and even as she keeps her Facebook friends abreast of the special people in her life.

And so Melissa's words today, about Small Damages, are the words of one who has read an oeuvre with great care.  They are the words of someone who has carefully, patiently watched my work evolve over time.  Reading Melissa's blog post was, to me, akin to reading a scholarly piece.  I learned so much and became so absorbed in Melissa's thinking that it wasn't until the end that I remembered that she was writing about me.  This post was so exceptional that my publicist, Jessica Shoffel, sent an email earlier:  Making sure you saw this one.

I share Melissa's words at the end of a day of many emotions.  We honored our George Shaw this morning at a beautiful service in which grandchildren read, a son eloquently remembered, and family and friends and neighbors knit tight.  How proud George is, looking down, on his gigantic community.  His son referred to George as an extraordinary ordinary man.  My own son, sitting near me in the pews, said later that that is the best kind of man. 

After the service and lunch I came home to read Handling the Truth one last time, for it is bound for copyediting soon.  I'll never quite forget the note Lauren Marino, my Gotham editor, wrote last night to tell me that we are entering the book's next phase.  Having just sat here today and read all 61,000 words through again, I hope it is all right to say here that I am so at peace with Truth.

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Ganshowahanna: in memory of George Shaw

Today we are honoring the life of our friend George Shaw.  In remembrance of him, I recreate a passage from the book Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River, an odd book George loved to kid me about.  This is an early page.  This is the Schuylkill River speaking.  Lenape traditions.  Lenape faith in soul.

We love you, George.

The sky is theirs:  The hunters after the bear, the Thunderers and Horned Serpent of last night's storm, and the souls on the long, white trail—rising.

It was just yesterday that the Lenni Lenape boy and his father stood at my shore shadding with the claw of a bird and a net of knitted hemp.  A bead had worked itself loose from the boy's black wampum—a kernel of grief sunk down and in among bones and stones, surrendered seeds, the bulrushes that once released themselves from the earth and drowned.

Today, in the smoky aftermath of the storm, in the mood of mourning, I ride the humped back of that dark whelk.  It is the eleventh day of a mother's dying, and soon the skies will change again.  Her heart soul will ascend to the heavens, on its Sky Journey.  Her blood soul will hover ever close.

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in remembrance of my beautiful neighbor, George William Shaw

Thursday afternoon, as readers of this blog know, my neighbor Jane arrived with the heartbreaking news that our mutual neighbor George had quite suddenly entered the final chapter of his magnificent life.  Early this morning, I woke with a start, sensing that something was gone.  A few hours later, the devastating news:  the beautiful, witty, eloquent, elegant George William Shaw had slipped away.

How I will miss him.  How deeply we all will—his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his family near and far, these neighbors, this very neighborhood.  Theirs is a corner house—essential, pivotal, a nexus.  George, with Shirley, worked the peonies and the potted plants in their garden, made room for new green things beneath their prize-worthy cherry tree.  George, with Shirley, held picnics for their grandchildren, hailed the proud carriages of the Devon Horse Show, wore sherbet-colored shirts to block parties (never matching, always complementary), and, before all that, before I even moved in, Shirley and George were (everyone speaks of it) extending themselves toward every child on the block.  Teaching one baseball and another to love tomatoes and another the power of personally designed and delivered nicknames. 

George liked to fly, he liked to travel, he had an engineer's intelligence, he was excellently good at laughter.  He liked to grill and once he (together with Shirley) cooked up a scheme designed to get my reluctant-in-the-kitchen husband to discover the power of cooking with live flames.  (Note to George and Shirley:  my husband, on the rare and happy occasion, now lights up his grill, thanks to you.)  Jokingly George would complain that my river book, Flow, had too many big words, even though we both knew he owned more words than I did.  He'd kid me about my strange writer life but I knew (you could always tell with George) that he cared, that he was asking me questions because he wanted actual answers.  "Hey, George," I would call out as I passed by, at least once each week, and he'd always wave back, tossing out some grand witticism, and I'd always be happier than I had been just thirty seconds before.

I live in an exceptional place, among people who define the word community. Look, for example, at the second photograph above, snapped one afternoon when I was on my way home from Penn.  It was the neighbors bearing a surprise cake for George's 80th birthday, like rogue carollers in summer.  It was George and Shirley in their bright colors, full of grace and love.

To you, George, and to all of us who loved you.

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