Sense and Sensibility

Motherhood has made me unhappy

Motherhood has degraded my  level of happiness.

I am pondering  this as I watch a large, fat, whiskery fish prowl the pebbly bottom of an aquarium. It is 6:45 a.m. and I am at Yale-New Haven Hospital in the pediatric surgery unit, waiting.

Social scientists have found almost zero association between having children and happiness, said Dr. Nattavudh Powdthavee, of the University of York’s Department of Economics and Related Studies.Studies from Europe and the USA found that parents report significantly lower levels of satisfaction than people who haven’t had children.” – Science Daily.

Eight weeks ago, I sat in this same room, transfixed to an exit door, waiting for doctors to repair a break in my son’s right femur by drilling four metal dowels through his skin and into his bone. “They think it’s broken,” my husband said over the cell phone, and I pictured my son with a thigh-to calf-length cast, embellished with Cub Scout patches and 8-year-old signatures in bright Magic Marker. I didn’t picture drilling and I didn’t picture surgery, but, after all, it was just a broken leg. It could have been worse.

The belief that ‘children bring happiness’ transmits itself much more successfully from generation to generation than the belief that ‘children bring misery,’ reports Daniel Gilbert (2006). The phenomenon, chich Gilbert says is a ‘super-replicator’ can be explained further by the fact that people who belief that there is no joy in parenthood – and who thus stop having them — are unlikely to be able to pass on their belief much further beyond their own generation.”—The Psychologist.

Since my son’s accident, he has been transported daily to school by a small, squat bus that carries about four children, three in wheelchairs, to school. One of the children has a wheelchair far more elaborate than my son’s. It cups around his neck and braces his two skinny arms. My son, 8, knows the child’s name but says the child rarely speaks.

Using data sets from Europe and American, numerous scholars have found some evidence that, on aggregate, parents often report statistically significantly lower levels of happiness (Alesina et al, 2004), life satisfaction (De Tella et al., 2003), marital satisfaction (Twenge et al, 2003) marital satisfaction (Twenge et al, 2003) and mental wellbeing….—The Psychologist.

Every day, since my son’s initial operation, we must clean his four “pin sites,” which crust with dried blood and other fluids. Cleaning these sites is essential to prevent infection Every day, when we do this, my son screams, cries and begs us to stop. We do not stop. We keep scrubbing.

At the physical therapy center, where my son goes twice weekly, I watch a brawny man hold the hand of a four-year-old girl with a floppy body. I do not know what is wrong with the girl, but she walks as if made of rubber. I watch the man walk her to the car and when she stumbles, as she does frequently and spasmodically, the man swoops her up with a reflexive, arching tug at once inelegant and gorgeous.

In the few moments when my son was reduced to tears by his condition, I try to explain to him the difference between finite and infinite. I tell him that his injury will mend, but that some children are afflicted with damage that will only worsen. I tell him that the only value to being in a wheelchair is that he will now understand what it is like for other children who are consigned to them for so much longer.

In the waiting room of the pediatric surgery unit, a tall, thin man walks in with an infant no bigger than a bag of oranges. A blonde woman in a red parka straggles behind him, struggling with a diaper bag. They are young and attractive and their child sleeps peacefully against the man’s chest. I remember what it felt like to hold my son across my chest that way and the mixture of hope and fear and elation that went with it. I jostle my son’s chestnut hair and pull him toward me. Is it happiness that makes my heart race or is it the surge of adrenaline and anxiety that has turned my life into a constant prayer?

In a pediatric surgery unit on an early morning in October, it is difficult to tell. I feel certain I will be happy when they wheel my son out of the recovery room, the pins removed from his leg. But perhaps I will only feel relief and hold happiness, once again, at bay.

contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

Open the files and invite the stranger

How about a conciliatory gesture between Christians?

A homecoming gift, if you like.

Now that the Vatican has extended an invitation to Anglicans to join its flock, it may want to sweeten the pot with a little candor.  

I am referring; of course, to the 12,000 pages of sexual abuse documents the Bridgeport, Conn., diocese insists are just too secret to share with the rest of us.

Now that the Roman Catholic Church, of which I am a part, wants to open its doors to disaffected Anglicans, perhaps the church will open those dusty old files, too. It would be a refreshing – if improbable ‑ gesture of candor.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider hearing the diocese’s case, which seems unlikely given that the court has already refused to block the documents release. The Connecticut Supreme Court has twice upheld a ruling that the documents were subject to a presumption of public access.

For the last seven years, the Bridgeport Diocese, which settled 23 lawsuits that alleged sexual misconduct by eight of its diocesan priests, has resisted having government officials pawing through its papyrus. It asserts that it has a First Amendment right to keep its personnel documents to itself – even if those documents reveal how the church dealt with priests in its employ who allegedly committed vile crimes against children.

William Lori

Though it would be refreshing if the diocese would come to its senses and recognize that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to lose, public relations has never been the organization’s strong suit. After the Supreme Court rejected rejected the court-ordered release documents, the current Bridgeport bishop, William E. Lori, said, “The right of the church to determine the suitability of its own ministers has been compromised by this decision.”

The Bridgeport Diocese, then headed by former New York City Archbishop Edward Egan, now retired, seems to believe it is in 12^th century England, wrangling with a mercurial Plantagenet over clerical control. If, of course, the diocese had done such a bang-up job on personnel screenings they would not have had to settle 23 lawsuits against it from former altar boys and parishioners said they were victims of sodomy, rape and brutality. In one of the Bridgeport cases, a priest admitted biting a teenager’s penis during oral sex – which the priest “blessed…as a way to receive Holy Communion,” Time reported. That priest, Rev. Laurence Brett, was later discovered by The Hartford Courant, “living a secretive but comfortable life on the tropical island of St. Maarten in the Caribbean.”

This is not a diocese whose bishop should be uttering “suitability” and “ministers” in the same sentence.

Four newspapers, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Hartford Courant and the Washington Post, sought to have the documents unsealed because they played, “an important part of the record of institutional decisions that caused many children harm,” the Times reported.

After seven years of stonewalling, perhaps the Bridgeport diocese should just fall on its scepter, realize the gig is up and rid itself of this humiliating spectacle.

Cardinal Edward Egan, Archbishop of New York, holds mass April 10, 2005

In 2002, The Hartford Courant published several incriminating stories concerning how then-Bridgeport Bishop Edward Egan ignored accusations or protected priests who were accused of such carnal skullduggery . Wouldn’t it be refreshing for the Bridgeport Diocese to open those files up to refute such depraved assertions? 

The Bridgeport Diocese won’t say how much it has spent to preserve the sanctity of its personnel files, but since the pedophilia scandal broke in 2000, six other Catholic diocese have filed for bankruptcy, largely as a result of a flood of lawsuits on sexual abuse allegedly perpetrated by clergy members. As of 2004, sex-abuse related costs totaled $573 million, involved nearly 5,000 clergy who were accused of abusing 13,000 minors, reports the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

That same report indicated that, between 1950 to 2002, only 4 percent of Catholic clergy have had an allegation of abuse leveled against them. But the grim reality is that too many good priests have been tainted by the same despicable brush. Men who have led good and decent lives have been soured by the malevolence of others whose crimes have been veiled by the diocese’s counterproductive fixation with secrecy.

I’d love to be joined by my Anglican friends at the pew. But I cannot in any conscience invite my fellow Christians to be part of a church that has not only participated in this villainy, but has spent precious resources to cover it up. The church will be a better host for all of us when its skeletons, however odious, are out of the closet.

Come see me in Washington Depot

Award-winning columnist  Tracey O’Shaughnessy will speak about her first book, “Every Little Thing: Reflections on Family, Faith and Friendship,” a collection of her best newspaper columns, on Sunday, Dec. 6 at 2 p.m. at the The Hickory Stick Bookshop 2 Green Hill Road Po Box 394 Washington Depot, CT 06794

The book, which has won praise for its ability to spark laughter and tears in its readers, is available on Amazon and bn.com, Barnes and Noble, Waterbury, the Hickory Stick Bookshop in Washington and www.traceyosh.com.

It is published by Gold Mountain Press for $18.95.

As Charles A. Monagan, Waterbury resident and editor of Connecticut magazine has said, “I am one of the lucky ones who get to read Tracey O’Shaughnessy’s essays every week in my local Sunday paper. Her writing is colorful and intelligent, and her thoughts on home and faith are amusing, provocative and often moving.”

Her “Sunday Reflections” column—many installments of which appear in “Every Little Thing”—was singled out for the prestigious Wilbur Award by the Religion Communicators Council in both 2001 and 2003; and earned awards in 2005 and 2006 for Best Opinion Writing on Religion Award from the American Academy of Religion. She has won a Clarion Award for her writing on women, and her work has also won numerous top honors from the New England Associated Press News Executives. Most recently, she received the 2008 Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Award.

A native of Lexington, Massachusetts, O’Shaughnessy is a graduate of Wesleyan and American universities. She has also studied both writing and theology at Georgetown University. Her freelance work has appeared in Connecticut Magazine, the Washington Post and Wesleyan Magazine. The Society of Professional Journalists has called O’Shaughnessy’s essays “journalistic literary pieces. Every piece, long or short, is a thought provoking essay on life. 

 For more information, visit www.thefunkymonkeycafe.com or call (203) 439-9161.

Roman’s Time for Prosecution is Now

Adrian Brody, in "The Pianist."

I loved “The Pianist.”

The chilling story of a brilliant Polish pianist scrambling to live in the rubble of Warsaw as his family faces deportation, the 2002 film is a reminder of the moral ambiguities of war, where survivors are not necessarily the most noble or courageous, but often simply clever, resilient – and lucky.

Roman Polanski, who directed the film, is all of these things, and more. He is among the most daring and creative of directors, and if I find much of his work a tad too gory for my taste, I can forgive it all for “Chinatown,” another gift of the exiled director Polanski.

Roman Polanski.

Last month, Roman Polanski was arrested in a Zurich airport on an outstanding warrant relating to conviction for sex with a minor. It is an old charge, dating back to the 1970s, and while half the world seemed to shrug, “Why now?” the other half seemed to cry, “What took them so long?”

The answer to that last question may have much to do with a 2008 Marina Zenovich documenaty “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” which portrayed the director in a positive light. That cannot have gone over well with the Los Angeles Police Department, who had already bungled one to many celebrity cases. Los Angeles County district attorney Stephen L. Cooley asserted that Polanski “has been trying to get [the case] resolved on his terms, but it’s going to be on the terms of the Los Angeles County justice system.” Yeah, the country’s finest.

Posturing aside, all sorts of people, including the victim, Samantha Geimer, want this whole seamy thing to go away. Oh for pity’s sake. It was all so long ago. Hasn’t the guy suffered enough? Hasn’t his victim? Enough is enough.

Roman Polanski with Sharon Tate.

“Let the guy go,” Peg Yorkin, founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s bad a person was raped. But that was so many years ago. The guy has been through so much in his life. It’s crazy to arrest him now. Let it go. The government could spend its money on other things.”

More than 100 of Hollywood’s finest signed a petition asking that the Swiss release Polanski. The list includes Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Michael Mann, Mike Nichols, Woody Allen and Neil Jordan.

On the television show “The View,” Whoppi Goldberg said, “I think he’s sorry. I think he knows it was wrong. I don’t think he’s a danger to society.”

Yes, let’s leave the jurisprudence and psychic divination to Whoppi, who can not only see contrition in a person’s eyes, but can predict recidivism rates with unerring accuracy.

To the dismay of some victim’s advocates, what the victim of a case wants is irrelevant. If a law has been broken, it is the responsibility of those whose job it is to uphold the law to enforce it. That the LA justice system has been plodding, at best, in enforcement of this case, has only exacerbated this revolting spectacle. The man should have been arrested long ago, served his time, and gone on to roll again.

"The Taking of Christ," by Caravaggio.

One of the more perverse aspects of this fracas has been the undercurrent of a pernicious belief that artists are naturally a little odd and therefore more subject to illicit urges than the rest of us. Caravaggio was a murderer. Louis Carroll was probably a pederast; Bernini was an adulterer. Picasso was a womanizer and the rest of them are, well, crackpots. But look at the legacy they’ve left us!

We never consider the disservice this does to artists, many of whom are decent, charitable, caring people trying to make a living doing what they do best. Talent is no justification for rape nor a license for turpitude. It does not make its possessors any more or less disposed to goodness or wickedness. If fortune is with them, the talented, whose ranks include Polanski, will be remembered for the majesty of their artistic contribution – not the cowardice of their exile. It is time for Roman Polanski to face the music, and begin again, as all offenders must, to restart their lives unblemished.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

c. Repblican-American

Do I really have homework at this age?

My son has homework — And that, in the modern parental translation, means I have homework.

So, when my son comes home and tells me he does not want to do his homework, I am puzzled. Why shouldn’t you want to do your homework? It’s your duty, I think. Ever the faithful catechist, I try to impress this on my son. “You think I want to go to work every day?” I ask. “Of course not. But I do it. I do it because I must.”

Unsurprisingly, this fails to make an impression. My son is near tears, and I feel like one of those sadistic Magdalene Sisters, absent only my cassock and rapier ruler.

Now, I am a working mother and don’t relish the thought of coming home at night and cracking the whip on my 8-year-old. There is nothing more I want to do than to cuddle up with my son and a bowl of Pepperidge Farm gold fish and read “Geronimo Stilton” for the 437th time. I am exhausted and not up for another fight.

My son is a bright boy and clever, in the way only children can be. He learned to read at 4, and I’d like to take credit for it, but, the truth is it just seemed to come easily to him and he enjoyed it. Intelligence, I am quickly beginning to believe, seems coiled up in some strand of DNA and needs only a flint or two to ignite.

But discipline, where does that come from?

My youngest brother, Michael, used to get up every morning at 5 a.m., mix himself a batch of Aunt Jemima pancakes and study before the sun came up. Nobody told him to do it and nobody ever needed to rouse him. He just did it. Unsurprisingly, he excelled.

I, too, had a monkish addiction to routine and regimentation, and the quality served me well. But where did it come from? Beyond a vague presumption that my siblings and I would attend college, unlike my high-school educated parents, I don’t recall any punishing rituals or demands from either of them.

What I do recall, however, is fear. Most of my academic success was rooted in a deep panic that I would fail at school, lose my scholarship and chance for economic success and end up scooping mint chocolate chip at Friendly’s for the rest of my days.

Panic can be a motivator, but my son, the progeny of two middle-class college graduates, has none of that. What he has is presumption. Presumption that he’ll go to college. Presumption that he’ll be a home owner. Presumption that he’ll be a contributing member of society.

What it means to be a middle class, college-educated parent is that your children assume that all you have gritted your teeth, sacrificed and beared down for will accrue to him as naturally as the new pair of shoes that appear, miraculously, in his closet.

Discipline is a quality I will have to instill in him. It is no fun.

What it means is that I get to come home after an exhausting day and push him. I will sit there with a pencil in my hand and irritation in my bones and try to get him to make 89 cents with eight coins. It means I will have to try to solve for x, recite the 14th Amendment and distinguish between the Federalists and the Republicans. It has meant, so far, that I have had to hold my son in my arms and comfort him, because sometimes the homework is too hard. It has also meant that we have had some big belly laughs over Mommy’s math deficiency. It has meant making dance routines out of vocabulary lists and Mommy reduced to shouting “Think!<$>” with a condescension that disgusts me.

Some nights, I hold my head in my hands and think of my son 20 years hence remembering me as a drill sergeant. “I didn’t sign up for this,” I tell my husband. “I want him to remember me as loveable.”

He will, my husband assures me. There is a great love in discipline, even if it seems so painfully elusive.

My book signing at the John Bale Book Company

Here is a video of my signing.

Our Revolting Cultural Balloon Ride

I never realized how incomplete my mornings were until I watched 6-year-old Falcon Heene projectile vomiting on the “Today” show.

In a moment sure to loom large in his childhood reverie, the most famous attic dweller since Anne Frank upchucked in response to co-host Meredith Vieira’s probing interrogation.

Falcon (and my brother’s name is owl) Heene is the famous “balloon boy” whose imagined runaway balloon flight transfixed a nation only just recovering from the breakup of Jon and Kate. While authorities called out the cavalry and media fanned out all over the Rockies, Falcon nested in the attic, fearing his father’s wrath or auditioning for another reality show. His father, Richard Henne, a reality show reject whose backyard enthusiasms include low-cost aircraft assembly, insisted the frantic hunt was not a hoax.

This is a man with a storm-mobile in his garage who, when not hurtling himself and family into the eye of tornadoes, is searching the ozone for E.T’s brother.

The “balloon boy” story was the lead story on all three networks. It was on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post, this newspaper and USA Today.

It was, like Octomom, one of those queer news belches we are at pains to ignore, and are complicit in perpetuating. Falcon will no more vanish into deserved obscurity than Jon and Kate or Richard Hatch or Susan Boyle or Anna Nicole Smith. Never mind that the child may have a bird brain for a father and a nut hatch for a mother, we all want to be in our living room to watch the kid go completely batty.

The New York Times listed no fewer than seven reporters on its errant balloon story. The Washington Post’s media critic Howard Kurtz insisted that the “floating silver portabello mushroom” story was impossible to ignore.

And maybe it was ‑ for the cable networks that have air time to chew up or the hapless Associated Press, obliged to cover any incident regardless of its absurdity. The issue is not that the media covered the story, but that it treated a two-hour mishap with the same rigorous inquiry it devotes to suicide bombers or health-care legislation. That lack of discrimination plays right into the hands of publicity hounds like Heene, who cannot seem to breathe outside of a camera lens. In addition to his storm-chasing exploits, Heene was in the cast “Wife Swap,” which sounds like a John Updike novel but was actually an ABC reality program.

In an out-of-the-mouths-of-babes moment, broadcast on CNN, Heene asked Falcon why the boy didn’t respond to repeated calls of his name. Falcon said, “You guys said … that, um, we did this for the show.”

All sorts of indecencies are done “for the show” these days, which is why we now have top chefs trying to impale one another on the rotisserie and “real housewives” who think a cat fight was what they did in the Roman coliseum. The more outrageous, indecorous and vulgar the outburst, the more air time, ink and Google-hits it engenders.

Where we once looked to television and the media to tell us what family life should look like, we now look to TV to gauge how much we can get away with.

Just how much the public demands this voyeurism and how much of it is foisted upon them is anyone’s guess. Certainly, networks would not continue to ladle these things out like baked ziti if viewers were running from their living rooms in disgust. For many Americans, stressed by financial and familial woes, reality shows are guilty pleasures akin to beach books or fat-free yogurt. For still other Americans, balloon boys, Jon and Kate and Susan Boyle are peculiar obsessions only a cloistered monk could avoid. I have never watched “Jon and Kate Plus 8” but feel I know this dysfunctional family intimately by virtue of the attention the show receives from other media.

Nowhere in this orgy of prurience does anyone seem to care about the emotional health of the individuals – many of them children – involved in this debacle. When Falcon Heene lost his cookies live in front of an audience of 6 million it was a tipping point moment. That was the time for TV viewers to look at themselves and consider the cultural wreckage they had wrought. When a little boy vomits under the glare of the klieg lights it’s time for those paying the electric bill to pull the plug.

contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

Is the Kindle the Blank Slate of the Future?

My mother wants me to get a Kindle.
“A guy had one on the boat,” she gushes, referencing her recent cruise. “You can get everything on them. Before long, even you will be on Kindle.”
Me, on Kindle. It is, I suppose, better than being used for kindling, although somehow I suspect the results will be similar.
Kindle is Amazon’s voguish e-book reader, as slender as a magazine and as light as a paperback. No need to lug around those door-stopping Truman biographies. With a few clicks, users can download as many as 1,500 books on to Kindle’s 3Gs of library space.

Kindle boasts a selection of 350,000 books, along with dozens of newspapers and magazines. “Our vision for kindle,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said, “is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds.”

That the Kindle looks like a high-tech version of a school child’s chalk slates is only one of its ironies. The book-delivery device may end by slaying books altogether. The Association of American Publishers estimates that hardcover sales have dipped 13 percent in 2008 and have dipped 15.3 percent since July. Sales of E-books, on the other hand, though hardly robust, are increasing, 1.6 of total book sales, according to The New York Times.
Many avid readers feel an almost reflexive revulsion at the thought of reading a book on a computer screen. These are the same Luddites that like to hold a newspaper – imagine! — rather than scroll through on-line text. But beyond the knee-jerk rebuff of anything new, there are real concerns about the proliferation of e-books. Chief among them is piracy.
If you think the music industry is battered by the Napster-ized, iTuned, CD-burning venial theft that goes on hundreds of times daily, consider the poor publishing industry. Sales are stagnant; Harry Potter is gone; Dan Brown is nowhere near is profitable excoriating the masons as he is crucifying the Catholics, and the only savior on the horizon is Sarah Palin, a woman notorious for being unable to name a book she’d read.
What publishing doesn’t need is the you-share-mine-I’ll-share-yours intellectual rip-off of e-book piracy. It does not exactly warm the cockles of one’s heart to learn that one of the leading Silicon Valley digital publishing startups is called “Smashwords.”
Ah, progress.
But there are other reasons to view the emergence of e-books with circumspection. What will happen to the sensual pleasure of embracing a book with your hands? Where will the clean, pulpy scent that wafts from a book’s creases go? And what of the strange, vaguely erotic sensation of turning the yellowed pages of a used book, its pages smudged by the oily fingerprint of a stranger, its passages underlined by an earlier reader who found this excerpt meaningful – and why that one?
I have always been a book snooper, by which I mean that whenever I am in a home for the first time, I gravitate to the bookshelves. Some people scrutinize the furniture; others the art. But to me, nothing is as riveting or revealing as a book case. A bookcase so represents the soul that even our closest friends can be surprised by what they discover about us there.
A bookcase is the most intimate piece of furniture we own.

Nothing really starts a conversation — by which I mean real conversation — like a collection of book spines. Organize them by height, or by author, or by subject or color, or simply squeeze them, slapdash, wherever they’ll fit. I visited a couple with bookcases so considered and precise that they began with Andrews and ended with Zola. I interviewed a man who laid his books cheek-by-jowl under his mattress to form a box spring. Book spines glitter like jeweled chips, each representing a journey. I love the mosaic of their spines, spliced together like shards of memory.
The man who became my husband had no chest of drawers and no television, but had scores of cheap, pressed-wood folding bookcases that ringed his living room like chain mail. In the bedroom, the shelves were jury-rigged and precarious but the books were beautiful – Everyman editions you could hold in the palm of your hand and Library of America volumes he had wrapped in thick cellophane paper. When he pulled out a Austen’s “Emma,” holding it as gently as a kitten, I knew I was sunk.
When I am feeling nostalgic, I weed through my own bookcases, so much more bloated and nicked than when I first bought them. I dust off a paperback or two and turn to the inside, where I always date a book when I finish it. I remember where I was when I read the book, geographically and emotionally. I remember the feeling I had when I held the book in my hand, turning its pages, staining the jacket with tea and the pages with hand cream. The book became a part of me, and if its power is not as vital to me now as it once was, the memory of its effect lingers.
I would have so much less dust with the Kindle, and so much more room for other, less space-hogging, indulgences.
But a Kindle is merely a blank slate. And while I, too, may have started out as one, it is not the way I want to end up.