parenting

I was surprised this morning to see anything at all about Sandy Hook in the news; when I saw that the father of the shooter had done an interview with Andrew Solomon, I wanted to read it. Solomon is the author of Far From the Tree, which is an interesting if overlong look at children who are different from their parents in some substantial way. Solomon profiles autistic kids, down syndrome kids, deaf kids, severely disabled kids, transgender kids, kids who are the result of rape (possibly the most disturbing chapter, honestly), kids who commit crimes. I liked the book, and Solomon's writing and thinking, enough to want to read this interview with Peter Lanza.

The article is semi-lengthy, and I was appalled by it. And sad. Really, really sad. Because from Peter's recountings, Adam had issues for a very, very long time. Being diagnosed with Asperger's seems to have allowed his parents to pigeonhole all of his behaviors under that classification, and to ignore things that were inconsistent with "just" Asperger's.
Maybe I would have thought differently had I not read Solomon's book, but the thing that stood out the most for me in reading Peter's interview was how little he seemed to understand his son. Not even his son, post-mass murder/suicide. But his son as a kid and teenager who CLEARLY had problems beyond Asperger's or autism or any tidy diagnosis. For instance:
"According to the state’s attorney’s report, when Adam was in fifth grade he said that he “did not think highly of himself and believed that everyone else in the world deserved more than he did.”"
"He said that he hated birthdays and holidays, which he had previously loved; special occasions unsettled his increasingly sclerotic orderliness. He had “episodes,” panic attacks that necessitated his mother’s coming to school"

Peter says: "“It was crystal clear something was wrong,” Peter said. “The social awkwardness, the uncomfortable anxiety, unable to sleep, stress, unable to concentrate, having a hard time learning, the awkward walk, reduced eye contact. You could see the changes occurring.”"
"uncomfortable anxiety" seems like rather an understatement for panic attacks that sent him home from school.

"“Adam was not open to therapy,” Peter told me. “He did not want to talk about problems and didn’t even admit he had Asperger’s.”"

and this: "“If he had been a totally normal adolescent and he was well adjusted and then all of a sudden went into isolation, alarms would go off,” Peter told me. “But let’s keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird." "

He describes his son as "weird" repeatedly.

When he was sixteen, his mother wrote: "“He had a horrible night. . . . He cried in the bathroom for 45 minutes and missed his first class.” Two weeks later, she wrote, “I am hoping that he pulls together in time for school this afternoon, but it is doubtful. He has been sitting with his head to one side for over an hour doing nothing.”"

"“He was exhausted and lethargic all day, and said he was unable to concentrate and his homework isn’t done,” she wrote. “He is on the verge of tears over not having his journal entries ready to pass in. He said he tried to concentrate and couldn’t and has been wondering why he is ‘such a loser’ and if there is anything he can do about it."

The thing that most struck me in the relation of Adam's past was this snippet:

when Nancy told Peter that Adam had been crying hysterically on the bathroom floor, Peter responded with uncharacteristic vehemence: “Adam needs to communicate the source of his sorrow. We have less than three months to help him before he is 18. I am convinced that when he turns 18 he will either try to enlist or just leave the house to become homeless.” Nancy replied, “I just spent 2 hours sitting outside his door, talking to him about why he is so upset. He failed every single test during that class, yet he thought he knew the material.”

And that....seems to be the end of the story. "communicate his sorrow"? What a peculiar and cold choice of words. A sixteen-year-old boy crying hysterically, talking about himself as a loser and pointless, locking himself into his room and refusing to eat -- and "communicate his sorrow" is what they looked for? The mom's reaction, too, is so strange: Failing a bunch of tests when you think you knew the material would definitely be upsetting. But hysterical crying? And the locking-out of his mother and not eating had been happening before this.
There's just such a fundamental misunderstanding between Adam and his parents that it's excruciating to read. Solomon focuses mainly on this history's absence of warning signs of violence, and in fact a number of doctors and other professionals who saw Adam never worried about violence.

Okay, fine. But - this is a distraught, disturbed kid. He had been prescribed anti-depressants and experienced side effects - after just a few days he stopped taking them and never would again.

Right around here - the refusal to acknowledge the asperger's diagnosis, the refusal to take meds coupled with the hysterical crying, the apparent self-loathing, the intense intense isolation - it's right here where I think: This kid should have been taken to an inpatient facility. If he refused to accept treatment at home so vehemently, then he should have been checked in to a psychiatric center where he could be treated against his will. Normally, I don't feel good about things like "treated against his will" but he was so clearly suffering, and his parents and he were so clearly incapable of dealing with it effectively on their own. And he was still a kid, 16 years old.

To me - and obviously I am not qualified to make any determinations - it sounds like Adam was having some pretty intense depression. That plus OCD plus the rather ominous phrase "his mother warned the school that he might not stop doing something because it hurt" -- that adds up to Something Is Very Wrong With Your Child.

And his parents weirdly - didn't ignore his issues, but somehow totally misread them. It seems both parents couldn't really accept that their kid was something more than "weird" - he needed specialized help. That instruction for him to "communicate his sorrow" fails so totally to recognize anything like clinical depression, where the "sorrow" is not communicable - it is deep in your bones and not always identifiable with a cause or reason.

The "shocker" of Solomon's interview, of course, is Peter's revelation that he wishes his son had never been born. Early in the article, Solomon notes that Peter has no photos of either of his sons in evidence in his house; Peter says "You can’t mourn for the little boy he once was."
Peter describes his son - not his son's actions, but his son - as evil.


And....I don't think you arrive at that point without years of maybe even subconscious priming for dislike or rejection.  The rejection of "mourning the little boy he once was" is so cold. It is such a total rejection and denial and abnegation of Adam, and of Peter's relationship with his son. Pop psychoanalysis is tacky and bad practice, I know, but my guess is that Peter was uncomfortable with, disappointed in, frustrated by his "weird" kid in ways that were very legible to that weird kid all along.

Look: it is not Peter's or Nancy's fault that adam murdered 27 people then killed himself. That was Adam. And it is profoundly horrible. I would not ever try to argue it isn't. But that isn't the issue here. It's the curious distaste and revulsion Peter expresses for his kid.
After Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and tried, his father wrote and spoke publicly about how difficult it was - because he loved his son but was horrified, naturally, by what he had done

Timothy McVeigh's father said, publicly, right up to (and probably after) McVeigh's execution that no matter what McVeigh had done, he was still his son, and he loved him. Even though what he did was terrible, abhorrent, ghastly beyond belief, totally at odds with everything his dad thought and felt and believed. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people, 19 of whom were children in a daycare, and injured hundreds more. He blew them up intentionally, purposely, with considerable planning beforehand. And yet his dad could still love him.

Why can't adam lanza's?

I'm not sentimental about children or parental love or any of that kind of thing. And in the end, it doesn't much matter to anyone except Peter how he feels about anything. And on the outside, even on the inner-outside as Solomon was, there's just no way of knowing what's really going on.

But to wish your child had never been born? to feel convinced that he would have killed you as well? I don't know. I don't know how you get there; I don't know how you get there in less than 15 months. I think years of failure to properly recognize and understand the profound difference between himself and Adam had a lot to do with this post-murder/suicide attitude. And I would bet money that Adam intuited, at some point, his father's dislike? discomfort? rejection? of him - and that probably added to the kid's suffering, which seems to have been considerable.
It's shocking, and depressing, how even in such a horrifyingly sad and upsetting story as the Sandy Hook murders, there's still room for one more sad story to get even sadder.

Why Mister Rogers Matters

A lot of academics spend a great deal of time trying to explain why their scholarly work matters. I know I spent a lot of time - and still do - trying to justify my ivory-tower life: what does reading and writing have to do with anything in the Real World? How is this not a relentlessly selfish pursuit?

First: because I teach. The activist angle of teaching was first made clear to me at Georgetown, by my brilliant and wonderful advisor. She said: "yes, these kids are privileged [and at Georgetown, almost quadruply so] but they are also the people who will be in charge of corporations and companies. They'll be in politics and positions of power. And if you can introduce to them now some of these ideas [any activist/progressive/radical ideas], it may affect the way they do their business in future."

Teaching is, or can be, activism, and my teaching often is. This is good, and it's the main thing I do, day in and day out, to make sure my work actually does something.

The second thing I do - and what I'm writing about now - is scholarly work on things that matter. Things that can actually make a difference in the way people understand themselves, or others, or the world around them. I made a decision in my first year in Pittsburgh that I was going to consciously write in clear, legible prose; I jettisoned the obfuscating and tortured jargon and construction of so many literary theorists. If a roomful of PhD students can't make sense of a phrase from Frederic Jameson, how in gods name can the "workers," the disenfranchised, the disaffected, make sense of it? And if it's all just babble to the elite, how can it be anything but condescending, self-congratulatory largesse?

So structurally, linguistically, theoretically, I choose the pragmatic and readable.
The topics are even more important.
My dissertation is, ostensibly, about imaginary/imaginative play spaces in children's media, and the way these spaces enable and encourage radical play, difference and experimentation (specifically with gender and sexuality, but with other aspects of life as well).
Really, though, what I'm writing about are places where it's okay - even great, even better - to be different. To be yourself. Places where you, in whatever form you feel like expressing yourself, are safe and loved and admired and respected.
The ultimate of these is Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, a show which seems to have made worlds of difference in the lives of scores of children (and their families). I've spent considerable time in the archives, reading viewer mail, and the love and affirmation these kids (and adults) feel for and from Mr Rogers is staggering. Almost every letter is a tearjerker. Almost every letter mentions, at least once, Mister Rogers' mantra of "I like you just exactly the way you are."

How rarely are we told this?

Lesley Kinzel, the astute and incisive writer of Fatshionista, writes back in response to the appalling burst of suicides from young gay kids in recent weeks - the most dramatic and spectacular of these, of course, being the death of Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi. Lesley writes, in an effort to support those kids who are bullied and hurt and abused and sad and lonely:

So instead, I’ve written what I would have liked to hear, back then, in my darkest adolescent moments. I am touched by people every day who tell me that the things I write here — even the things I am convinced no one will relate to, that I believe are too specific or too raw or too me — that these things help them. That hearing it helps people to know that they’re not alone. Thus, I’m hoping that this will likewise speak to some of you.
You are okay.

She's doing the work of Fred Rogers here, whether she means to or not. We should all be doing the work of Fred Rogers: reminding each other that yes, YOU are likable and lovable; that you make each day a special day but just your being you; that there is no one else in this world exactly like you, and that that adds to the glorious variety of the world. That I like you just the way you are.

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood is off the air in most districts now, except perhaps on weekends; in Pittsburgh, home of the program and Fred Rogers, it's still on daily. It's dated, sure; there are no cellphones, no iPods, no laptops. No networking, except through Mr McFeely's speedy deliveries. No Facebook, except all the real friends who visit each other, both in Mr Rogers' neighborhood, and in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

There's nothing like this on tv now, where educational children's television is all about skills acquisition, and not about emotion.  There's no Mister Rogers, showing up every day at the same time - as he promises at the end of every episode - to say "Hi neighbor. I like you!"

The letters in the archive come from parents, from children of all ages, from adults, from the very elderly. Everyone you can imagine writes to Mister Rogers, and they all say, in varying ways, the same thing: we love you, Mister Rogers, because you love us. We need someone to tell us, every day, that we're okay, and mean it. We feel better about our abilities and disabilities, as children, as mothers, as friends, as siblings, as fathers, as retirees, as very elderly single women with no families, because of you. We are able, because of you, to go out into our worlds as happier, more confident people, willing and able and actively doing things to make the world a better more interesting place.
So writing about Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, for me, is activism. It's me saying: LOOK! Look how much we needed Fred Rogers. Look how much he - just one guy, on a low-budget public tv show - was able to do, for so, so many people. Look how little he had to do, to do so very much.
It's saying, Fred Rogers wasn't a saint. He was a very, very good man with powerful motivation and a message that we all need, that we all know we need. If he could do it, so can we all. There's nothing so extraordinary, after all, in that show: bringing in something new to look at and think about. Going on a visit to an everyday place: a music shop, a restaurant, a dance studio, a potter's workshop, a shoe factory. Saying: sometimes it's really hard, isn't it? and you get angry, or sad, or confused, or scared. And that's okay, because I like you when you're angry, or sad, or confused, or scared. Because I like you, just exactly as you are.
Because you make every day a special day, by just your being you.

Because every one of us is important and meaningful and real and human. Always, every day, even when you're scared, or angry, or confused, or hurt, or sad. And you contribute to the infinite variety on this planet, the infinite variety that makes the world so very interesting and fun and curious and amazing. Losing even one person from that huge mosaic of difference makes the whole thing a tiny bit less bright and shiny.

It's so incredibly easy, to do what Fred Rogers did. To listen, to be there, to say: I like you, just as exactly as you are. To say, with words and actions: I care about you, because you're you, you're a person who is unlike anyone else in this world world.

To say, and mean it, that You make every day a special day, by just your being you.

and that's why i'm writing my dissertation.