Ransom Notes and Separation Anxiety

There's a fair amount of reaction to this ad campaign at NYU (describes children w/autism as being "kidnapped") from people I respect and admire (Pat Schissel, Kristina Chew). I think it's over the top, personally, and I agree that it's part of this changeling mythos around autism.

I remember talking to a friend of mine about the flareup of hoopla around Soma Mukhopadhyay and Rapid Prompt Therapy, which was featured on network TV and then forgotten. I said that it feeds into a parent fantasy, which is that there is a wonderful person in there, trapped and waiting to get out, as in Dibs: In Search of Self and other miracle accounts (including Bettelheim's, I suppose--the notion is that this is a strategy of self-protection). And he said, correctly, that there is a wonderful person in there. Which is true, but there's a wonderful autistic person in there, and as I've gone around and around with over the years, I can't separate my children's wonderfulness from their autism, the same way I can't separate my own skills from my shadow tendencies.

Except: I have my two responsive, bright, talented, affectionate kids, and I can't separate my own take on this from my children's comparatively mild deficits. There are people whose kids smear feces, stay up all night, and get physically aggressive. That's autism too. Maybe I'd be thinking kidnapping if I were a parent in that situation. Maybe I'd need to separate disability from person to save my own sanity and love for my child. As humans and as parents, it's asking a lot for us to be infinitely understanding and accepting (I'm not saying there aren't parents who can accept and love, just that to me it seems entirely reasonable that some of these parents might feel trapped, or that their children are trapped).

And as I've said way too many times, the feminist in me gets concerned about the backlash against parents who DON'T infinitely accept, the parents who appeared in Autism Every Day, the parents who are honest about the difficulties of their lives and their own desperation. We are not, as parents and especially as mothers, supposed to have these negative feelings about our children. We are not supposed to be angry or resentful. And I am willing to believe that some of us aren't, but I also believe that it is natural and not at all sinful to have some of those feelings. When I met Emily Perl Kingsley this summer, she was, besides being lovely and patient with me, honest about her own feelings of sorrow and worries about her child's life after she's gone.

Great takedown of the NYT article on girls with autism on Autism's Edge, a blog I found via the always excellent Kristina Chew of AutismVox. I attempted to leave a comment along the lines of "Word! Testify!" but couldn't: let's just say that I've been wondering for years re diagnosis and gender bias. I'm glad that the Times article mentions (I think it mentions) the unfortunate ratios of girls:boys in spec ed classes. This was a huge issue for my friend's daughter, who went from a class with three girls and eight boys to one girl and seven boys the next year. Didn't work out so well.

Also, as one of the commentators at Autism's Edge pointed out, girls may have a harder time in m.s. b/c girls' relationships at that edge are so complicated and cruel. Which I was mulling over the other night when I heard that Primera was having a hard time at a party b/c some girl decided that the middle of a party was a great time to isolate the birthday girl and tell her some deep dark secret that could only be told then and only to the birthday girl and like one other kid, NOT Primera. Which was probably less about exclusion than filiation and attention-seeking, but nonetheless my rigid compulsive and very nosy kid was going to have a very, very hard time backing away and thinking, "Eh, Fuck her and her deep dark secret."


I've also read something to the effect that people w/AS may be more accepting of alternative lifestyles, so I'm wondering if more AS women are perhaps living gay or bisexual lives? Which would cut down on the marriage rate, I'd think.

Okay, can I just say how irritating I find and have always found Naomi Wolf? She has a talent for repackaging ideas that most educated people have deemed chestnuts for the past twenty years and selling them to the mass media as if they were new. Hence The Beauty Myth. I pre-ordered that book back when it came out in the Pleistocene era, thinking I was about to read something new about women and appearance from this Yale-educated Rhodes scholar, and instead it was the same stuff available in the middlebrow press for the previous bazillion years (I recall a much more entertaining article in the WaPo about fifteen years ago that talked about body type in relation to political climate, por ejemplo). This as opposed to Susan Faludi's Backlash, which came out within a year or two of The Beauty Myth, IIRC, and had legitimately interesting things to say and relied more on actual punditry.

Just decided to take a look at her WaPo article on Paris Hilton. Why did I bother? I could have written the damn thing for her. Paris, so La Wolf claims, is this generation's version of Zelda Fitzgerald, apparently, a regressive throwback as women have gained so much power. Hello? What exactly happened in 2007 that made us need Paris Hilton? What threatening signs of women's power have appeared on the horizon recently? What a reductive, simplistic argument. Take a look:

Most American women are becoming ever more comfortable with their capabilities
as they break into new professional roles, learn how to do electrical wiring or
automobile maintenance, tackle life insurance, IRAs and tax planning on behalf
of the many configurations of family they are nurturing, or even put their lives
on the line as warriors in Iraq. They are surprising themselves and the culture every day by not falling apart as they take on tasks that the prefeminist world was sure
would lead them to collapse in a heap, needing smelling salts.

Yep, it's surprising the culture every day, what these women can do. Um, Rosie the Riveter, anyone? Or Vera Brittain? And a reference to smelling salts, forsooth. Gah.

Also: punditry of this type is incredibly hard to pull off unless you have a really broad frame of reference combined with the ability to analyze and see in unexpected ways.

Also, I'm willing to believe that Paris Hilton represents something sordid and unseemly in American culture, something worth thinking about that gives me an excuse for reading TMZ and sampling the Zeitgeist. I'd love it if someone could give me an alibi.

I'm not sure what it says about me that I've been so hopped up on self-maintenance lately. Today we went for the whole eyebrow-waxing thing, b/c otherwise I look like Brezhnev. Or Colin Farrell, but not in a good, sexy, Black Irish kinda way.

Unlike the generations of self-sacrificing, exemplary mothers from whom I am descended, I have no difficulty spending money on myself or thinking my needs count. I feel guilty about this. A little.

Also? The article approvingly quotes Christina Hoff Sommers as an expert a couple of times: not sure if they identified her as a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

A Non-Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

Some article in Newsweek on how boys are being shortchanged by our nation's schools. I came across this gem midway through the second paragraph and stopped reading:

The number of boys who said they didn't like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses. Thirty years ago men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body. Now they're a minority at 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, says Margaret Spellings, U.S. secretary of Education, "has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy."

Erm, what percentage of girls was going to college thirty years ago? Does this mean so much that fewer boys are going or that a much higher percentage of girls opts for college? I.e., that the women's movement worked ITO encouraging girls to get themselves educations?

My public is back, I see--hi Deb! Hi bro! Dreary-looking day; anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Random mental association: women who are post-feminist really chap my ass. Must be nice to be amnesiac and entitled.

I'm very grumpy this morning: I haven't had caffeine b/c I have to have bloodwork done. Feh. I wonder how much it matters that I had a teeny little piece of Cadbury bar last night after dinner. Surely not much.

Happy New Year! And in the holiday spirit, found this article on girls' education in Africa affecting:

BALIZENDA, Ethiopia - Fatimah Bamun dropped out of Balizenda Primary School in first grade, more than three years ago, when her father refused to buy her pencils and paper. Only after teachers convinced him that his daughter showed unusual promise did he relent. Today Fatimah, 14, tall and slender, studies math and Amharic, Ethiopia's official language, in a dirt-floored fourth-grade classroom.

Fatimah Bamun, 14, is the only girl in her fourth-grade class in Balizenda, Ethiopia, where a lack of sanitation threatens education for girls.

Whether she will reach fifth grade is another matter. Fatimah is facing the onset of puberty, and with it the realities of menstruation in a school with no latrine, no water, no hope of privacy other than the shadow of a bush, and no girlfriends with whom to commiserate. Fatimah is the only girl of the 23 students in her class. In fact, in a school of 178 students, she is one of only three girls who has made it past third grade.

Links might have been nice. I went to the Unicef site, looking for info on making donations. If I find anything, I'll post it, not that anyone reads this thing anyway.

The Fat Lady Goes Shopping, Part the Millionth

Yesterday I went to Century 21 and the WW Mall. I wanted either of the following: an oatmeal-colored fisherman-knit cashmere sweater; a chocolate-brown turtleneck, also cashmere (no, I was not hungry when I made up this shopping list). So I go there and find horizontal-striped clingy cashmere sweaters, and I find crappy single-ply cashmere, and I find nothing like the Platonic conception of the sweaters I have in mind. Which was partly my fault, because Century 21 is not the place for Platonism. It is the place for serendipity, or not, as the case may be. But nothing, nothing, nothing. Or something, but not nearly as marked down as I was expecting. What about all those business articles talking about the deep discounts because of the lackluster holiday sales? I don't want no steenking half off. And I go to Bloomingdale's, and I go to Saks, and I saw not even the pale conception of what I want. How hard is this? Why can't they design sweaters for women with large racks? Why?

Newsflash from Emily to fashion industry: woman past the age of 22 do not like exposing their stomachs. Think: childbearing years. As a data point, most women are past the age of 22. Why is it so hard for you people to get this? And fucking stop using fabrics that cling to every lump we have. Assholes.

Also? The whole shrug/wrap thing with distressed/tortured fabric? Please stick a fork in it. It looks good on like three women. Flattering cuts. Nice fabric. Is this so hard????? Also? Ix-nay on the unic-tays. Now get to work.

Incidentally, I just tried googling bohemian ethnic women clothing over 40 and found some truly frightening things.

More questions from Primera re her disabilities: "Am I a special needs child?" She's very interested in that term and keeps using it, and she's finally noticed the mort of books around the house with the words Asperger's or Autism in the title. I basically said that there were some things she needed work on but that she was learning the same things everyone else was. Which is true enough: I'm big into not answering more than she asks, though I try to act incredibly receptive and eager to polka through this conversational minefield (hey! Dancing Through the Minefield! Annette Kolodny! I used to read Annette Kolodny back when I used to be someone else! Feminist playful pluralism!).*

Lately I've been doing more reading about NVLD, b/c while it isn't a "real" diagnosis in the sense that it's in the DSM-IV, the materials do a better job of describing her deficits. She doesn't talk about train schedules all day; it's more about the weaknesses in what she does than it's about absences or aberrations, if that makes any sense (the alliteration sounds nice, but I'm having trouble articulating). I can sense, deep within me, a book-buying bender--I put the books into the online shopping cart and then don't hit "Proceed to Checkout." I have just that much control, but every morning I wake up thinking that I need to buy a book by Pamela Tanguay. I can't go on I must go on.

*I'm sufficiently narcissistic (oh yes, plenty sufficiently narcissistic) to be interested in the fact that my transformation into Our Lady of Special Ed, refuge of sinners, comforter of the afflicted, occurred late in life, that up until my mid-30's I'd been someone else completely. Certainly the wardrobe was different.

myblogsucks.com
noonereadsmyblog.com

I think I've had about ten hits in the past week.

And today's topic? Reading comprehension. No really. It's a weakness of Prima's, and I've been reading a little bit about it. What's somewhat fascinating to me is what the research shows about "good" readers versus what my own academic training has been. I'm reading this book Mosaic of Thought, and there's a lot of stress on making connections from self to text, which is exactly the kind of thing I'd see in my 'shmen. I was always interested in reader response, the transaction b/w text and reader and what a roomful of readers would do when confronted w/the same text. Except instead of celebrating what I'd bring to the text, I was analyzing it: was that justified? What informed my associations?

Though some of the feminist criticism that delighted me most--Literary Women by Ellen Moers, for example--focused on exactly that. What she'd read, why she'd read it, how it had been (mis)read, how much depends on who's reading it. Or even books like Millett's Sexual Politics, which seemed positively quaint even when I was reading it in the late 1980's, except its kind of overtly subjective, politicized sometimes completely wrongheaded reading was exactly at my level.

Larry Summers, Dumbass

Schadenfreude reading the Times the past few days. I don't for a minute think that Summers "thinks less of us," as one reductive-minded Harvard student was quoted as saying. I am amazed that he was stupid enough to play the role of provocateur and open that particular can o' worms (re women, biology as destiny, and the number of women in the sciences). Where could that discussion possibly go? Assuming there even is anything to a determinist argument re women and science, where could that discussion possibly take people? And it's an argument anyone could demolish in two seconds: with a more level playing field, what are the percentages of women winning, say, Intel awards? And how could biology possibly account for the rapid diminution in the number of women at each stage of the pipeline?

Though I have to say, the figurative language swirling around this particular controversy is so over-the-top: a tsunami? How could anyone dare use that language right after what just happened? I've always HATED that kind of promiscuity and carelessness of figurative use. It's so cheapening--reminds me of the way the right to life movement attempted to appropriate the language of the Holocaust.

[seguing] One of the weirdnesses of American life is how irrelevant intellectual and academic life seem, when college, especially admissions, are seen as so critical. How many parents whose kids are applying could even name the president of Harvard?

The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry

Fairly boring discussion going @ places like Crooked Timber (I'm too bored to link to it) re political women bloggers, their existence or lack thereof. Bitch. Ph.D. does a funny sendup of the whole discussion. I'm not as confident as she is that it's a sexist question to be asking: seems to me that back in the day, asking where all the women writers were on the syllabus was a pretty good question to be asking, but my academic career died a-borning in the heyday of the Culture Wars. Hegemonic worldview and all that. But that whole discussion re what we're defining as political and important dates back to the Paleozoic Era. I'd say the fights are so fierce because the stakes are so small, but a) I'd be quoting Henry Kissinger w/tacit approval, and that won't do, and b) the stakes aren't that small. But then I'd have to think about how depressingly conservative this country has become, and that won't do either.

Hark! The clanking chains of Jacob Marley! Eggnog. My house is bereft of eggnog. I have been remiss. This is what I get for posting on the Sabbath. And on Erev Christmas, no less (sorry, Lone Reader, mon semblable, mon frere. We did, however, light the candles).

Things That Bore Me

Postfeminists lamenting that they're no longer au courant hot chicks (She's That Girl!). I don't know: didn't most of us wake up somewhere in our mid-twenties with the lyrics to the Talking Heads on continuous loop (This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!)? Shouldn't it stop being shocking to discover that our minds will never again romp like the mind of God? That we are not in fact style-setters? It's a Youth Culture, man (I'll skip the fact that hiphop probably represents the biggest musical gulf b/w the Pepsi Generation and their children). Why is this news?

I'm a cranky bitch this AM.

Things Worth Reading
This post from Body and Soul. A) ITA re Nicholas Kristof: he just lives to epater les feministes. And she focuses consistently on human rights and the disenfranchised, and what's more important....

Also, someone is translating this poem by Leivick from the Yiddish. The next installments are here, here, and here.

Sitting here watching the wheels go round, in that state of ADHD/Inattentive stasis that is my normal waking state.

Was talking to my father a few days ago, about a relative who had started out working making moulds in a foundry. I know this story, sort of, so I said, "Because his wife's parents didn't encourage him to go to college."

"Yes," he said. "There were very leftwing, almost Communists, and they believed in the dignity of the working man." Now, there's a sentiment that's fallen way out of fashion. Which reminded me of another relative, whose parents also told him not to go to college, because "a man should work." Which isn't all that different, just a few words, and I always made the lame joke, "Are you sure these people are Jewish? We're supposed to be the people of the book." We also used to be the people of the left. Does that even show up in mainstream American Jewish literature? The kind that gets taught? Only in Philip Roth's I Married a Communist, which was much more about payback for Claire Bloom writing a memoir.

Imagine a transition. The kids are finishing camp this week. I can't get Primera to read much: she decodes quite fluently and her comprehension is just about average, but she doesn't have much interest in reading on her own. Last night I hooked her in by reading the Reader's Digest version of Heidi to her and Secundo. Predictably, I got all teary when Heidi cried over Peter the goatherd's blind grandmother.* Secundo is hypersensitive and, like his father, doesn't like to hear about things that upset him. Primera, though, was riveted and did a pretty nice job of interpreting what was happening. She even made a good guess about who the "ghost" was going to be: she thought maybe it was Heidi's grandfather, sneaking back to visit her.

She keeps doing the camp handclapping games by herself, and it's turned into a kind of stim. In my infinite maternal wisdom I keep swooping over and saying, "It looks inappropriate!" Behavioral lesson # 1: replace it with another more appropriate behavior. I think I need "Sniffy the Rat" version 2.1.

*I, Victorianist. I will retain to my dying day my love for Victorian deathbed scenes and angelic but sickly girl-children. Which reminds me that today (Saturday, as I'm editing this) there was an asinine article in, say, the Times, by Laura Miller arguing that "classic" children's literature that you are supposed to like (by implication, few children actually do like--where do the nostalgic grownups she describes come from?) is full of such deathbed scenes. Um, Laura, lots of children like them because of the deathbed scenes (nor does the masochistic fun stop in childhood. Bette Davis movies, anyone?).

And if that's not hep enough for your seemingly po-mo-grrl-power-loving heart (would Bette's gay iconic status help?), consider that the invalided girl actually was powerful, in a subversive passive-aggressive way. In general, I've found Miller's criticism and essays to be shallow, this particularly so.

Okay, I feel better now.

I want the Deans to go away.

I'm already bored beyond measure by the dissection of their marriage, though I'm slightly interested in the inversion of the standard intermarriage cliche a la Philip Roth: swanky Park Avenue type marries achieving Jew, only in this case the Jewish partner is the wife and surprise! We get to keep the kids.

Though it does lead me to one of my favorite hobbyhorses, the portrayal of Jewish women.

This would be to my knowledge the third presidential candidate with a Jewish wife: Michael Dukakis, Joseph Lieberman, and Dean.

Segue.

Am shopping for furniture: we have a tiny living room and dining room and I am replacing our evil wall unit with something. The item I like best at the moment is something called the Verona hutch and china cabinet, brought to you by Pottery Barn. Verona makes me think of Venona, for some reason, which leads me back to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It shouldn't, but it does.

Course, I just did a search of NOW's website and only found three hits for Cambodia, but the Feminist Majority Foundation had a section devoted to global issues. And NOW is a national organization. Just thinking aloud here....

Also, WTF is up with Nicholas Kristof? This is the second time I've seen him lob unfair potshots at feminists for not doing more for third-world women. Does he really think we don't know or care? And has he noticed that feminism isn't exactly on the ascendant politically these days?

There's something about his tone in all this that disturbs me and reminds me of Gladstone washing prostitutes' feet....