Tag Archives: nonchalant parenting it’s legit

Easter Bunny no more

Dear Easter Bunny, please accept our sincere apology for banishing you to the land of creepy holiday creatures where you will reign supreme I am sure.

You were slayed when 9-year-old Mr. Monk declared that he no longer believes in Easter Bunny.

Rejoice!

The Husband took the boys to Wal-Mart last night because I had failed to procure pastel things to appease the Easter Bunny. This man loves a great bargain and is not afraid of those greeters; he falls square in Wal-Mart’s target segment. While there, Mr. Monk made the surprise announcement. Now that there’s no need to keep up the charade, they came home with a bow and arrow set, a Captain America shield and two water pistols, and created the bestest Easter baskets at the fastest speed in the history of this household.

 

The boys had given up soda pop for Lent hence the giant bottles of soda in the baskets. Mr. Monk took one long sip of his orange soda and declared, “This is the BEST Easter ever!”

Deprivation is the mother of poetry joy.

If I could tell you one thing about parenting

My 8-year-old, known as Mr. Monk here, is singing a song that he improvises right now. In the middle of the Kaleidoscopic of lyrics, I heard,

 

Thank you for being our mother.

 

I chuckled. “I honestly do not know how to take that.”

“Well, don’t take it as an insult. I am not being sarcastic.”

“Well, thank you.” I said while remembering what I did to deserve this: Did not get home until 8:30 because I was trapped on the train due to a wind advisory while the kids stayed home by themselves; Fed him leftover chicken from the rotisserie chicken I bought on Sunday but forgot to take it out from the fridge; Gave him half-melted ice cream which I did not remember until an hour after I got home from the grocery store.

This goes to show that whatever you do, keeping the expectations low is going to make parenting a lot easier.

 

My Chinese babysitter is going to FIRE me soon

I sometimes feel very sorry for my children: because how I am caught between two worlds, they too are caught between two worlds.

Many of you have commented on my responses to the Tiger Mom Controversy with great insight, grace and kindness. One comment that made me pause and reflect upon the factual state of what I am doing to my children came from MacDougal Street Baby:

Nobody knows what happens behind closed doors. We can pontificate all we want about how others are raising their kids but, really, there’s no way to know what’s going on. Believe in your own way. Trust yourself. And then deal with the fallout.

It is this unwavering conviction that has been eluding me ever since I became a parent. I am torn between the “Chinese way of parenting” and the, for the lack of a better term, “Modern American” way.

So I wobble.

One day I am a Chinese mother. The next day I am an American mother. I feel so schizophrenic and now am worried what this kind of wishy-washy parenting is doing to my children: they have no way of knowing which mother will be greeting them every morning. It is like living with Eve White.

Either way, I am constantly feeling guilty because of the pressure coming from both sides.

I am either too strict and overprotective or too lenient and permissive.

The worst would be when I am “confronted” by other Chinese parents either in this country or back home.

I am not kidding when I mentioned my brother asking me whether he could discipline my children on my behalf. “Just a slap on the face will solve all your problems!” In fact, he did not even need my approval since he is my elder brother and as their uncle, he has all the “right” to discipline my children the way he sees fit. Even my nephew, who was a so-called “problem child” in his youth  (with petty misdemeanors, unfinished high school and truancy which constituted as “family scandals” that shall not be spoken of, and who, one would thought, should hate this kind of heavy-handed, literally, parenting style), asked quite a few times with exasperation, “What do you mean you cannot beat your child? Oh I am telling you, it pangs me to watch them misbehave so much that my hands are itching. Could I please just hit them upside the head?”

(If you are wondering WHAT crime did my children commit to deserve such wrath? My kids were simply, according to the American standard, “being independent, rambunctious boys”.)

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We have a babysitter that comes every morning to accompany Mr. Monk to his bus stop: I have to leave before that in order to catch my train downtown and my husband travels a lot. We are now on our second babysitter who started last month. Our babysitter does not need this job: she lives in a house bigger than ours and drives a Mercedes. As a fellow Chinese, she is doing this as a favor for me and for that, I am very grateful. But I am afraid that she is going to quit very soon.

Mr. Monk was reading at the kitchen table and ignoring both of us when we asked him what he would like for lunch. I could see his finger moving across the page. I could tell that he was frantically trying to get to a place where he could stop without losing his place on the page.

He is a child of many peculiarities since birth. I have learned to go along with these special requirements of his to keep a smooth and orderly existence. I have learned the hard way.

If it were his elder brother at the table this morning? I would have punished him for blatantly ignoring me.

“You are very permissive. I would have snatched that book away this instant.” My babysitter commented in Chinese.

I explained to her what Mr. Monk was trying to do and his needing such an order in his life.

“You should have fought to get him to change. You should have made him change through persistence. If it were my daughter, I would have taken that book away already.”

I made some feeble attempt to explain why I did not. Could not. “He’d be harping on this for the rest of the day if I did so. Maybe even tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. He’ll remember this for the rest of his life.”

“My daughter remembers everything too. Oh she fought but I persisted. You just have to be persistent and make them change their ways. It is not possible for him to not change if you just work harder.”

“You must have been very strict with your daughter?” I asked, as a compliment.

“Yes, I was.” She beamed with pride as she should since her daughter is now a VP at a prestigious investment bank on Wall Street.

“Oh she hated me back then. I am pretty sure she hated me but I persisted. She is very nice to me now, she calls me all the time. I think she finally understands why I needed to do what I did. She can see now.”

“You know, I cannot do that.” I admitted to her. “It must have taken a lot of strength on your part to remain strict.” I stopped short at telling her, “But I need my children to like me, and I cannot stand the thought that they may hate me.”

“Yes.” She paused. “But I did what I had to do.”

In traditional Chinese culture, (Warning: Gross generalization ahead. Buyer beware!) your success as a parent is not evaluated by how happy your children are but by how obedient they are when young and how successful they are when grown-up. Providing your children with a happy childhood is not a requisite for being a good mother. I am not suggesting that Chinese parents go out of their way to make their children miserable but rather that IT is not a priority.  Or rather, the definition of happiness is quite different, and also who gets to define happiness is debatable since we were often told, “You don’t know what you want. You don’t know what will make you happy. You will know when you are older.”

I am happy for her and for her daughter’s accomplishment. As I said, I am grateful for her coming here every morning so that I could keep my job. But it feels like an indictment of me as a parent every single morning. I will be getting out of the house as soon as she arrives from now on.

The Need for Convenient Justification

This is a different reaction from my reading of the controversy surrounding Amy Chua’s WSJ article, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior?

Yesterday, I said, Bring it on! The can of worms has been opened! Today, I will continue to clear this raging case of “Oh oh oh I have something to say Pick Me Pick Me” via pontificating on my blog.

Disclaimer needed, again: I am not agreeing with Chua’s parenting style. This is simply ONE of my reactions as all these conflicting thoughts racing through my brains…

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Like many, I felt great anxiety and anger when I was reading Chua’s article. But I get anxious easily when it comes to parenting. Heck, I felt like screaming when I watched a holiday video from a Chinese friend showing her kids playing piano AND violin at a recital, speaking fluent Chinese AND French. Again, not because I wished my kids were better but because that video, akin to a resume for the future “survival of the fittest” audition, raised my anxiety level over whether I am doing enough to prepare my children for their future. And you know what? I wish my friend were a Tiger Mom, so I could easily dismiss her accomplishment as a parent by thinking, “Well, but her kids are like robots, and she is cold and unemotional.” They are not, and she is not.

To parent like this (ok, sans the name calling, BUT I did call my kids dumbasses more than once when they were, well, being dumbasses), it takes a lot of dedication and efforts. I am too selfish to devote myself like that to my children.  I cannot even spend an hour every day teaching my children Chinese. It really is easier to say, “To hell with it. Who needs to know Chinese anyway? [Ha!]” than to deal with all the crying and resisting. I WANT my children to like me. I don’t want to be the mean parent. My husband can be the bad cop. Me? I want to be the good cop.

I thank Amy Chua, not for the article since I knew all about “The Chinese Way of Parenting” and there was no surprise there, but for the 7000+ hateful comments and the public condemnations.  They reassured me, “Hey, what I am doing or not doing is OK. She thinks she is so successful, and her children are so successful, and her family is so successful, but you know what? They are all zombies with no emotions. And the Americans, including the Chinese Americans, HATE her.” Hopefully when I go home this February, when my parents cannot communicate with my children because they do not speak English, when people ask me why my children cannot speak Chinese and how come so-and-so’s American grandchildren can not only speak but read and write fluent Chinese and why I did not beat their asses so they would learn Chinese against their will, when my brother asks for the Nth time whether it is ok if he gives my independent children a beating and I say “Of course not” and he relents with a sigh “Americans…”, I will feel less like a failure.

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As the kids and I hurried along Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago this Sunday night in the freezing temperature, I spotted a mother bundled up with her two children on the sidewalk. There was a can in front of them with a few coins inside. She was trying to cover the little one’s head with a tiny scarf. My heart skipped a beat. I stopped to give her some money and quickly walked away. My oldest patted my arm as we walked further.

“It is freezing. Those kids must be freezing.” I said. “I don’t know why she’s sitting on the sidewalk in the cold. There are shelters. Doesn’t she know there are shelters?”

In an effort to comfort me, he said, “I heard a story about this guy who would go into the city every day and beg and then every night he comes home to a big house and car and everything.”

“Do you know why this story became so popular and everybody likes to talk about it?”

“Because it gives you the justification you need for not doing anything?”

“Exactly.”

Sundays in My City – Small Things in Life

I sometimes wonder whether this whole brouhaha over “small things in life” is not a conspiracy started by people who did not have an exciting life to begin with.

Oh… *Rubbing hands together* Let’s make them believe that the small things in life are far more grand than the BIG things. This way they would not pity us for the lack of excitement in our mundane existence, and instead, they would be jealous of our ability to cultivate an appreciation for the mundane, the boring. The City Mouse will envy the Country Mouse. The urbanites with their late-night parties and cultural affairs and social engagements will put back their sneers towards the suburbanites.  The sophisticates will look at their ennui and wish they have our kind of boring life instead.  Excellent.

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To be honest, being a working parent, BORING WEEKENDS are what I look forward to…  I have worked my ass off during the week, what do you mean I am in charge of entertaining the kids on the weekends? So yeah, is there a conspiracy? You be the judge…

Nothing happened on this long Labor Day weekend. We live in the burbs and we don’t have cable and I did not find time to read the newspapers and I was kind of banned from my laptop (aka the Internet aka Twitter) so it is as if the world has stopped existing.

The most exciting thing that’s happened around here has been the opening of a new grocery store. I am not kidding. More than three people told me, on separate occasions, “Have you checked out _____ Market?” They made it sound as if this new store were the Second Coming (in both senses). So we checked it out.

OMG freshly made pizza! OMG sandwiches made from high quality meats and cheeses! OMG freshly squeezed orange juices (“Like the ones I saw in València!” my too-well-traveled husband exclaimed)! OMG bakery stocked with gorgeous looking cupcakes, giant cookies, lavishly-decorated cakes, European-style pastries, plump donuts!  Please note our family’s total disregard for what this grocery store is actually famous for: Fresh produce. Thank you.

Say what you may about the Great Conspiracy. This weekend we got to have our cake and eat it too.

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And we made a brouhaha out of the accidental rainbows (which regularly appear every morning) at the breakfast table.

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The DOUBLE RAINBOWS have nothing on this, as we all know, “A rainbow in the hand is worth two in the bush”!

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Russell: Sometimes, it’s the boring stuff I remember the most.

From the movie “Up” which we watched again this weekend. I told you: it’s that kind of boring weekend.

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Unknown Mami

Nonchalant Parenting. It’s legit.

Many of the things that we do or don’t do can be legitimized if only we could find a proper name for it, in conjunction with a cool, catchy definition.

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Once you settle on a name, remember to capitalize it to make it into a Thing. Like so.

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To further reinforce the legitimacy of your parenting style, google and see whether you can find books written based on a similar premise. And of course there it is, out of the 16,562 books listed on Amazon.com under “Parenting (paperback)”.

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“The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids” in the UK; curiously, "Why Laid-Back Parents Raise Happier and Healthier Kids" in the US with a less inspiring cover...

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Voilà! You’ve got yourself a legitimate school of thoughts to follow (or continue to do or not do what you have been doing or not doing)…

As this article in The New York Times says, “[Y]ou can turn guilt on its head and call it a parenting philosophy.”

“The one constant over the past century has been parents’ determination to find the right answers when it comes to raising their children. In this latest chapter, we have replaced the experts who told us what a good parent worries about with experts who tell us that a good parent doesn’t worry so much. We may even see parents stop aiming to prove how perfect they are and start trying to prove how nonchalant they are.”

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A week before Father’s Day, I asked Mr. Monk to sign the card for my father-in-law. (Let’s for now park the burning question of WHY as soon as you entered into a committed, heterosexual relationship, all remembering and gift giving for miscellaneous dates and holidays became the woman’s job… Yes, let’s shelf it for now until we have some free time…)

“You should put lipstick on and put kisses all over the card to go with the big hug.” I said, without thinking. I was being witty.

“Can I? Oh, can I?” There were stars in his eyes. This kid has been dying to try on my makeup if it were not for the death threat issued by his father.

“Sure. Why not!” I grabbed the camera, thinking, “Honey, this is what happens when you are not around to sign your own father’s Father’s Day card!”

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The Joker

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