One day, a long time ago, my kids came home from school and asked me what the Underground Railroad was. They’d read some book in class and it just didn’t make any sense to them. It just doesn’t make any sense to me, either, I told them.

That was one of those moments when I had to choose between protecting my children and preparing them. I looked at those babies who never factored skin color into any equation, who I’d purposely taken out of the all white, all money school and enrolled in the 70% free and reduced lunch, 30/30/30 racially split school with the three classrooms dedicated to students with extreme needs so that they’d always know that life, she is the most beautiful rainbow, and I knew I had to make a decision. I had to let them think that the world holds hands and sing Kumbaya or I had to let them know what’s real.

I chose the latter.

I sat them down and started with slavery. I moved on to emancipation. I continued to civil rights, to Dr King and Malcolm X and Rosa Parks. They wept, and I joined them. They asked, “Why, momma?” and I told them I didn’t really know. I told them that some people in the world will go to any lengths to be more than, better than, others. I told them that there is a whole lot of evil in the world screaming in our ears, and it’s our job to drown that out with song.

I explained to them that sometimes, weeds will grow so thick and strong in a garden that everyone can just start to accept them, even admire them. People can look at an over-run, weed infested garden and think it looks lovely and right, because that’s how weeds work. They bloom flowers that look pretty and grow in patches that look appropriate and they fool the people who aren’t paying attention. The truth is that they are killing everything around them, choking the ground, ruining the garden. They’re hard to get rid of because the take root so deep, so fast, and spread everywhere when you’re not paying attention. But sometimes, someone comes along who is paying attention. Maybe that person will plant a rose bush. That rose bush will start small, and it will struggle, but that person will tend to it and push the weeds away from it and make sure it has just enough light and air and soil, and that rose bush will slowly grow. Maybe someone else will see that rose bush, and they’ll come plant another one. Maybe another person will, too. In a city of people moving together, thinking collectively, jointly blinded by what is just there and what is just easy, maybe you’ll get three people who can see things for what they are, and those three people can make a rose bush grow tall and strong amid the weeds. And then one day, while everyone else was busy accepting the way things are, that rose bush has grown taller and stronger and more beautiful that anything around it, and then everyone will notice.

That doesn’t mean they’re going to come pull the rest of the weeds with you, but at least you’ve gotten their attention. At least they can see the weeds for what they are. At least you’ve shown them what their world could be, should be, if they just opened their eyes and ears and hearts and started digging.

My husband and I have been married for eleven years. Eleven years is a long time to do anything. We’ve seen our share of ups and downs, and that is the understatement of the year. I am not the easiest woman to be married to, for any number of reasons. I am grossly insecure and particularly needy and excessively sensitive. He’s got his things, too, but this isn’t about him today, it’s about me. I’ve made him work for this relationship. I change the rules on him constantly and expect him to just keep up. Example: When he met me, I worked three jobs, 19 hours a day, 6 days a week. Now I stay home and let him go to work for at least 12 hours every single day while I fail in every way to so much as wash the dishes. He does this with a smile on his face, or so I assume; it’s not like I ever actually see his face anymore. I’d like to say that he at least gets to come home to a hot little body waiting for him in lingerie, but what he really comes home to is a snoring wife wearing his sweat pants hogging his side of the bed who used to be a size -0 and is now a solid 12.

I make few apologies for this. It’s not like I knocked myself up with a baby that decided to make me gain 105 pounds in nine months, after all.

However misguided my feelings on the subject, I do feel a little bad that the 98 pound girl with a D cup you could stack plates on that he signed up for a life with has now turned into a National Geographic centerfold. I feel bad enough, in fact, that I, on occasion, will buy him pistachios and roses and have them waiting for him when he comes home in the middle of the night after the umpteenth night straight at work.

He reciprocates occasionally, coming home late from work on the nights he’s due in early, bearing gifts for me, too.

That is a gym membership, brought home for me last week, because apparently he wants a divorce. You leave a man enough times and he’ll start double-dog daring you to do it again, all for the low low price of $31/month.

To his credit, he did include all-you-can-eat childcare in the package. So now I can’t bitch about being fat, having no where to go OR having no one to watch my kid while I go there anymore. It’s like he’s robbed me of everything, including my lovely lady lumps. Asshole.

But I’m determined to use it, partly because I do want to get the fuck out of this house occasionally, and I would like to do it sans-four-year-old, but mostly because I’m sick people congratulating me and asking me when the baby is due. The best answer to which is, “Four years, three months and eleven days ago; thanks for asking.” So I went last night to try this thing out. I got the four year old ready to go and the nine year old announced that he’d like to go as well. So I put my gym bag down, huffed a little, and called to see if I had a two-for-one daycare special. Which I do. I grabbed my bag, my two youngest, and headed out the door when my eleven year old ran down the stairs in full gym gear asking if he could come, too. You know, to work out with me.

Seriously, I just started being able to poop without company. Will there never be a moment’s rest from these people?

So I put everything down, again, and called the gym, again, huffed, AGAIN, and lied about his age, again, and found out that I could bring him. So off we all went. 45 minutes after I was planning on getting to the gym, we had two kids checked into daycare and one magically-turned twelve year old on an elliptical next to me. Who beat my fat fucking ass, hard. Every spanking this kid has ever received in his entire life was repaid last night, in full. He pwned me.

Vengeance is a dish best served sweaty, with burning quads.

It’s not like I can let me kid out-work me. If he does 50 crunches on the ab-thingy, I have to do 50, also. If he’s barely broken a sweat after 20 minutes on the elliptical, I have to grin and pray silently for god to strike us all dead and spare me this humiliating torture. If he gets through an entire circuit and asks to do it again, well, I just have to do it all again. Even if I can’t stand upright anymore. Even if I’ve sweated out every drop of moisture in my body and am now replacing that sweat with blood. Even if my legs are jello and I can’t recall where my arms used to be. Even if I just want so scream that THIS WAS MY PRESENT AND YOU ARE RUINING IT, SHORT PERSON. I can’t do that, now can I? We’re having a bonding moment, right? One of those fleeting mother-son moments that will be over the second this kid learns what a Playboy magazine is. Which, thanks to him, I may be able to appear in someday.

My kid learned how to read so he could play a video game.

After that, I never argued video games again. Maybe I’ll decompose someday with Sonic Heroes in my head, but it’ll be worth it, if for nothing more than that.

My family, we’re gamers. Not me, exactly, but the rest of them, for sure. My dad, my brother, my nephews, my boys…they likey their games. They used to be a mindless time-suck (really, Jungle Hunt has NO practical life applications outside of Compton) but something has happened in the gaming industry. Someone grew a brain.

We hung out with the people at EA a few months ago, and the woman who hosted us told us about the CEO of the Hasbro division at EA, how he had kids and gave up his spot in some other branch of EA to run the Hasbro side, because his kids shifted his priorities, and he realized that he could help make kids a little better, a little smarter, a little more eager to learn with his games. That’s kind of awesome, if you ask me.

Even more than my kids being able to see the world through a well-coded video game, I’ve seen than, through these games, the gap between our generations is being bridged. We’re driving down te street one day and Dream On comes on the radio. 2of3 asks me to turn it up. I oblige. He starts singing along and then asks me if I’ve ever heard of a band called Aerosmith.

Um, the name is vaguely familiar, yes.

Because my kids play Guitar Hero, they’ve learned to love the music I grew up with. And don’t think I haven’t spent the last decade trying to indoctrinate them into the House Of Zepplin. They just don’t listen to me, because I am old and boring an don’t know shit about that which is cool. But Rock Band does.

This new wave of video games is leveling the playing field in a lot of ways for families. It’s making what we loved acceptable and accessible to our kids. And I, for one, am grateful for it. It’s also giving us more options for family time. Wii Sports? Yep, my kids will spend all day kicking my ass at tennis. And I’ll gladly waste away any afternoon with my best friend Sheryl letting her kick my ass at it, too. When I first moved back in with my husband, after the Great Divorce, we spent those awkward first weeks at night together having hours on hours of sports.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…that damn Wii saved my marriage. Not kidding.

I couldn’t actually ride a skateboard again, even if the Space Invader aliens came down and threatened my life with fluorescent green laser blips if I didn’t. But my kids can, and that makes my 13 year old heart skip a pubescent beat. All I wanted were a bunch of little skate rats, and I got them. And maybe its not the same as me, outside, at the skatepark on a half pipe, but I have to admit that this skateboarding game we got to play,with Tony Hawk, was pretty fucking awesome, if for nothing else, the hearty laugh they had at my uncoordinated ass. 

Which they kicked.

Again.

Maybe that’s the key to successful parent/child relations…finding something you used to be able to do, and letting your kids absolutely cream you at it.

I was born with the ability to play the piano. This is no surprise; my parents are, and I’m not kidding, two of the most gifted musicians you’ll ever meet. My father taught Jim Croce’s brother to play guitar, not kidding. All of us are musically inclined, whether or not we choose to use those skills. And hell, have you ever seen my fingers? They’re like pipe cleaners sticking out of dough, I tell you what. They’re made for three things….guitar, piano and masturbation. Thankfully or unfortunately, I can’t decide which, I was so indoctrinated with cultish visions of damnation and hellfire that one of those three was forever ruined for me.

As for the other two, I taught myself how to play guitar with a book full of Janis Ian sheet music and my 4th grade music teacher realized one day that I could just play piano. He taught me basic notes and chords and sent me home, and my mother handed me the sheet music to The Incredible Hulk and a dry erase marker for the piano keys and told me to have at it. A year later, I could really play the piano. It’s the ugliest thing in the world, watching me hammer away on the keys, but it sounds right and hell, I’m sure that Beethoven looked like an asshole when he played, too, but no one’s smacking him down for form today, now are they?

I am no Beethoven. I am no Elmo on a piano, but if I wanted to be, I probably could rock that shit.

For a while, I wanted to be. We had two player pianos in our house, side by side in our tiny living room, donated to us by our church in what I can only guess was a misguided attempt at keeping our little fingers busy with anything that didn’t involve our naughty places. I used to BEG my mother for lessons, but she refused on the grounds that we couldn’t afford it, which was probably true seeings how we only ate a few times a week, and no amount of the Rainbow Connection and church hymns filling the air would also fill our tummies, but it didn’t make me want them any less. I was very understanding of the whole situation, though. I’d sit while my bat-shit crazy grandmother who thought she could channel George Washington and make the dog levitate tried to teach me how to play the score from Oklahoma with her squeaky little voice that wasn’t completely unlike that shrimp from Poltergeist’s demon voice. I’d hammer out Suicide is Painless, which maybe wasn’t exactly the smartest sheet music to hand a suicidal pre-teen in hindsight, but bygones, until I got it right, and I still fall asleep with Ted Cassidy’s voice in my head, telling me about science gone awry and Dr David Banner’s struggles with elastic waist bands, muscle shirts and finding a nice shade of lipstick to compliment his earthy skin tone. Or something like that.

And then one day, after spending the better part of a year teaching my little brother to play the Pink Panther theme, my mother announced that she was getting him piano lessons because he was clearly gifted and deserved the extra help.

Cue head explosion.

I swore, SWORE, that no matter what my kids wanted to be in life, I’d make it happen. If they dreamed of being a world-class marathon runner, I’d put down the cigarettes and strap on the Nike’s and train with them. If they wanted to be carpenters, I’d hand them a hammer. And a bandaid. If they wanted to be starving musicians, I’d buy them their first Les Paul.

Of COURSE I ended up with the kid who’s only goal in life is to beat every level of Guitar Hero and then become, not just a professional, but a sponsored skateboarder. I have a really hard time asking my husband for $8 when I need milk and bread, but I’m supposed to figure out how to get Element to pay my kid to skate? Christ on a goddamn cracker, yo.

The boy is dead serious. He will skate for someone, and well, and he’s not going to stop until this happens for him. Or he breaks his legs. Or he starves to death under a half pipe. Or he falls over backwards at the skatepark and hits his head so hard he cracked his Bell helmet all the way up the back. Oh, wait, that already happened, and it really didn’t stop him. It did stop any number of parts on me, however, but I think I’ve started breathing again and I seem to have a pulse, so I think I’ll recover. He thinks it’s pretty cool. Bastard. Bastard who now wears his helmet everywhere he goes, though, so I win.

Of course, I have these dreams of my boys winning Pulitzers and accepting Nobel prizes and graduating from Ivy League colleges but maybe that’s not in their cards. Do I want my kid to put everything he has behind skateboarding? Honestly, a little. Skateboarding is awesome. But there’s that grown-up in me that wants to tell him to have a “fall back” career, some “real” skill, something “substantial” to base his life’s dreams on. Because I didn’t even go to college and it’s taken me 34 years to even find a job that doesn’t require an apron. And if I want anything in this world, it’s for my children to know more than I did, to live better than I ever could have.

But my baby wants to skateboard, and I can’t deny that. I mean, look at that shit. It’s poetry.

God shield I should disturb devotion. So tomorrow, I’m packing these boys up and, under the guise of testing out the new Tony Hawk video game Ride, I’m lugging them down to San Diego to spend a weekend with His Holiness himself, Mr Tony Fucking Hawk. Because maybe I’d also like him to have a law degree, but I’d really much rather watch him have his dreams come true. And of all the things that matter to me, the fact that my kid knows I support him, in whatever, is the most important thing to me in this whole world.

Besides getting to meet Tony Hawk, of course. I’m kind of flipping out about that one.

Three kids in, I know a few things about how their little brains develop and one of those things I can track like clockwork is the leap into empathy. I’ve watched each one of my children go from one day, not being able to think past their noses to the very next day, taking on the weight of the world. All children do this. I didn’t realize when my first kid was one year old that he was incapable of feeling sorry or understanding what share meant or realizing that pulling momma’s hair hurt her, because and I hate to go all Freud on your buttocks but I’m going all Freud on your buttocks, he was still stuck in his Id.* By kid three, I had that one all figured out, and good GOD did my parenting life get easier. Banging your head against year old bricks walls hurts after a while.

Somewhere in-between the Ego* and the Superego*, in my opinion, is where the capacity for empathy lies. It’s the instinctual part of the Superego, the ingrained tendency that makes a person able to accept moral guidance and incorporate it into themselves. If I’m correct, and I’m probably not, I think it was Freud who thought that the only real instinct we have is sucking; that everything else is taught or developed. I bet I’m wrong, and I should probably just erase that line, but it goes to my point so I’ll leave it. I went to public high school; sue me.

I Sure Hope There Aren’t Any Psych Majors Reading My Blog, Because I’m About To Talk Out Of My Ass Aside:

*For all you non-geeks who don’t study psychology for fun because you have lives or something:

• Id is the personality that you’re born with, the one that functions solely on need. (Or, as Freud would state, pleasure.) It makes sure you get what you need, and it doesn’t much see past that.
• Ego is one step past that. It still wants and pursues getting its needs/desires filled, but can assess situations and comprehend realities. It starts to understand, not just demand.
• Superego is what happens when you introduce a belief structure and nurture the ego. It’s your ability to adopt what you are taught is right or wrong. It’s your moral makeup.

I think empathy is instinctual. I think that, unlike walking or talking which also just happen, that empathy is actually a necessary development, like the ability to suckle. You need it to survive. You know how you sometimes notice that your infant or toddler can immediately sniff out the good guys from the bad guys? That’s what I’m talking about. Children instinctively can read people; they’ll know who is going to love them and feed them and they know who’s a risk. Like my neighbor baby, how he doesn’t cry when the 11 year old holds him but he does when the 9 year old does. They both love him equally, but the 9 year old just isn’t physically big enough to hold him safely. And the baby knows that, instinctively. No one told him that, my boy doesn’t hold him any differently than his big brother does, and the kid has never so much as seen a measuring tape..he just knows.  It’s survival.

Random excuse to insert british sub-pop aside:

I also believe that you can over-develop a child’s empathy-drive once the Superego kicks in and turn them into paranoid introverts who are so afraid of what everyone thinks of them, they are socially crippled. I think you can under-develop it and have children who grow into adults who are pariahs.

Musical interlude:

*ahem* I think that the one, and maybe only, distinct advantage to having multiple children is that they are given more opportunities to develop empathy, and therein humility, than a single child. Take my three; the first two were born right on top of each other and so have always had to take each other’s feelings into consideration. My third? She’s more or less an only child. She’s coming into this stage WAY later than her brothers did, because she’s really never had to before.

Until just recently, if she hurt someone or did something naughty, she’d instantly burst into tears because she knew that tears were called for, she just didn’t know why. She felt what the proper feeling was, she just couldn’t categorize it because that empathic sense hadn’t kicked in yet, so what she’d do it start rattling off everything she could think of that might quantify the bad feelings floating in the air.

“3of3, you may NOT grab the gerbil by its tail and wing it around. That HURTS Niblow.” This makes no sense to her, because she isn’t in pain, so the gerbil couldn’t be. If it’s real, it has to be happening to HER. There’s your Id.

“Momma! *tears flow* I tired! I hungry! My self hoits! I meed take a nap! You hoit me!”  Straight to her Id; her base needs. Freud wasn’t as insane as everyone thinks he was. Coke whore incestuous pedophile, sure, but a very sane one. He’d totally get the chair today.

She’s also not really ever had to fight for anything; attention, toys, food, education…she’s had me, more or less undistracted, for her entire life. And the thing with children developing empathy isn’t that, like we associate with the word, that they become sensitive, kind, humans…it’s that they start not just understanding the feelings of others, but are able to manipulate them. They are able to get into your head and feel from your angle, and use that information.

For the most part, this means that when my daughter’s friend hurts his toe, she can realize that he feels pain even though she can’t feel it, she can assess that pain and imagine it, and she can then take steps to alter it. She can pull from her surroundings and change his perspective on his pain, with a candy or a toy or a joke.

What this also means, however, is that when her friend makes her angry or accidentally hurts her when he takes one of his toys out of her hand, she can feel that pain, she can take the steps she needs to alter it (telling me) and then she can project it onto him. She can pull from her surroundings and change her friend’s perspective, to make him feel her pain, too.

She can understand situations and assess them, and it doesn’t always happen in the happy way.

She can walk right out of the front door, right after she’s ratted him out and I’ve consoled her, and march across the street to that boy, her friend, and say, “My momma says you a baaaaad boy”, even though her momma said no such thing. She knows that boy will care, because she understands his feelings, and when he asks, “Did she say she didn’t like me anymore?” she’ll tell him that I did. Just to rub it in. Just to manipulate his feelings and force-feed him her pain. Just to make him cry, too.

What she doesn’t get, because she hasn’t reached the Superego yet, is that what she’s done is called “mean” and “lying” and because she’s just done what comes naturally and hasn’t yet learned the societal, moral ramifications of reverse-empathy. Or being a shithead. Call it what you will.

She can be a week from four and not know what a lie is because she has no reason to lie in her everyday life. She’s never emotionally challenged because she deals with ME all day and almost no one else. Her brother, my middle son, had lying down to an artform by the time he could string a sentence together, because he had an older brother. His older brother had dominating and, well, mind-fucking down by the time his brother had lying down, because he had a little brother. My third has a mom and some playdough. My third is behind the curve.

My third had to learn what lying was today when I ran outside, grabbed her by her little arm, drug her back over to her friend and asked her, in front of him, if she’d said what I heard her say. Luckily, she’s not actually consciously “lying” yet, so much as assaulting feelings with skill, so she naturally fessed right up to it. She had no idea that she could lie her way out of that one….yet. And then we talked about hurting people and making up mean stories and all the while, I held her right in front of her friend so the only thing she could see was his sad little sweet face and she GOT it. She said she was sorry. She offered him a hug. She took her little butt in the house all by herself for the few minutes it took her to process the concept that she’d hurt someone, with her mind.

A belief structure was put into place today, and that was that she may not use words to hurt people, especially not made up ones. A bridge between the Ego and the Superego was built. And I realized that if I don’t get have another baby or enroll this kid in preschool soon, I’m totally going to have to change her name to Heather. And hide the drain cleaner.