Lehman brothers, bad bets, regulation, and self-regulation of mamas and babies

Today is a sparkly sort of day, all golden and underlit and shiny. Andi looked out of the window at breakfast and remarked that the light was glittering under the leaves on the (still green) trees. A fairy day.

Ari is (gradually, I think) sleeping more at night, which is a good thing because I have just about gone crazy with lack of sleep. The challenge of not getting enough sleep coupled with the new stressors of school, Ari's school, and placement--and with Ari's own being tired--were starting to feel almost dangerous. Ari is naturally pushing limits and exploring what he can and can't do, and this was always going to be hard for me. I so hate to set the limits when he explodes with angry tears and begs to have me change my mind. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but inconsistency makes a hobgoblin of your toddler. Yikes! I don't have the natural patience of so many of the wonderful mothers that I know, so I find myself getting into petty power struggles with him and then sometimes letting him get away with something because I don't want to fight about it anymore. Especially when I'm tired. Last night, he kissed me a soft kiss goodnight and then curled up like a little puppy against me and went to sleep, and I reacted by nearly snarling. (I can't remember what I said, but I made some sort of protest that was senseless.) In the night, around 3am, he woke up screaming and kicking, and again, I responded with contraction and anger. Whoa, Mama! Finally waking up enough myself, I was able to pick him up and hold him and he dissolved and went limp against me, falling back asleep as I sang to him. I realized that he had had a nightmare, and that his waking had nothing to do with clamoring to be nursed. I know I can't help getting angry sometimes, but it just doesn't feel good when that is the first reaction toward him--especially since he is under so much stress, too.

By the way, here is my very slightly altered Buddhist-lite version of the Free to Be You and Me song that I sing to Ari when he cries in the night:
"It's all right to cry
Crying might get the mad out of you
It's all right to cry, it might make you feel better
Raindrops from your eyes
Washing some of the sad out of you
It's all right to cry, it might make you feel better

It's all right to feel things, though the feelings may feel strange
Feelings seem like real things, but they change and change and change
It's all right to know, feelings come and feelings go
It's all right to cry, it might make you feel better."


I did get a chance to hear Michael Greenberger talking on NPR about the national financial disaster that is here and that is to come. Be warned, everyone who believes their savings are safe because they are FDIC insured. The FDIC does not have enough money to bail out all the banks that will likely go into crisis because of the real estate lending mismanagement. If Greenberger is to be believed, that is, and I thought he made a very cogent argument. We may wind up bailing out the FDIC, but that will cost taxpayers billions or maybe trillions of dollars.

Here's his website. Go this and click recent media and then you can get to a podcast of his recent npr interview on here and now:

http://www.michaelgreenberger.com/

I started getting very scared about all of this, but then I realized that we are all in this together. Either we will help each other out, or we will fall into some wolfish lord of the flies decline. I can't know, so all I can do is keep going forward as if all will be well. Right? Here's another related link:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2008/09/is_it_time_to_grow_your_food.html


Change and change and change.

Need to start while it all ends

This is the oddest way and day to start a blog. I am about to go into an impossibly busy year; I am taking care of my wandering toddler. But I was struck by the poignancy of saying good-bye to my dear friend who I have not seen in 4 years. She returns to France. Ari chases the dog who bites. I must go pick up my car and then go to a bakery to get supplies for my parents, then drive down to RI for the last weekend of the summer. The summer is over. Will I take Ari to the yard first, to ride his new (to him) tricycle? Will he live to see his fortieth year, or will global warming short change every child on this planet? How do these worries seem to elide into one another? As I say good-bye to my dear Suzi and her beautiful wife and daughter, I realize I am letting my fears of what might happen in this world drive my life. And that is not living. That is merely taking up house room in this fearful, miraculous world of ours. Suzi is such a good example of living life vibrantly and gently, all at the same time. I want to be like her. Or something close.

I get to read Harper's magazine--another thing that I won't have time to do this fall, read for my own delectation--and am struck by what they say in Findings on the back page. Predictions are that penguins will be extinct in 2037. Ari will be only 30 years old. He will never know the planet as I did. Do any of us?

I used to envy my parents' childhood. I mean, not exactly. Not my dad's, surely, though he did get to go roam the World's Fair, he says, alone, when he was not yet 10. He did deliver flowers all over the City (New York, for those who don't realize that New York is The City) by the time he was 12. There were some idyllic parts, but really, it is my mother's childhood that I always wanted, thought was the norm, thought was Every Life, the milk in the glass bottles delivered to the back door, the neighborhood stores, the riding around until twilight on your bike with your neighborhood friends. 1934-1952, prosperous and WASPy, that gorgeous sheen of everything done right: beautiful house in the suburbs, academic job, Bach in the house at all hours, Wednesday pasta nights, learning Latin by age 10, life turning by the seasons: Christmas carols in Woolsey Hall, Easter hunts in pastel dresses and May poles, swimming and sailing with cousins in Newport--all of these stories have the element of myth to me. I want to create a Jewish Buddhist much less prosperous and much more urban version of this for Ari. He climbs in my lap now, insistent. It all isn't possible. But still we all try.