Monthly Archives: January 2011

I would be on facebook right now posting on C____ M____’s wall saying.

Hi! Do you remember me? You painted Swastikas in front of my house with shaving cream when we were 12. Now you’re bald and I can only hope that your wife is fucking the mailman.

But I’m an adult. So I decided against it.

Jane wants a new computer. She doesn’t want any old computer, she very specifically wants a new MacBook. Her current MacBook is a three year old computer.

Cry me a river.

The reality is that the kids get a fair amount of “group work”, and they’re all on macs. Last night Jane and her classmate used screenshare for about an hour to work on a spreadsheet together. The computer is an important tool in her academic career.

Another reality is that the one she has isn’t really “broken” and I have a hard time spending a thousand dollars on a computer for a kid who has one already.

Here’s the deal we made. Jane’s school has an Honor Roll and a Dean’s List. A 90% weighted GPA will land you a spot on the Honor Roll, and a 93% weighted GPA will get you the Dean’s List. I told Jane that if she makes the Dean’s List I’ll buy the computer for her to use and that she can keep the computer for as long as she stays on the Dean’s List.

Here’s the way I see it. When I do my job well I get paid. When I don’t do a good job I don’t get paid much.

Some Moms have been horrified, “You pay for grades?”

Well. Yeah.

I had a post that I wanted to put up today, but it will wait until tomorrow.

Today I spent the morning feeling sorry for myself. I’m losing my hair. I’m not bald, not by a long shot. But my hair is falling out. It appears to be a side effect of the drugs for my RA.

I used to wrap a ponytail holder around my hair twice with no extra space. Now I’m wrapping it three times. I spent the morning on the phone with the Doctor and then at midday my pity party was interrupted by the sounds of sirens.

Police sirens were everywhere for the better part of an hour. With most of the LAPD going to Woodland Hills where an LAUSD police officer was shot in the chest and an armed man was on the loose. It’s 5.30 pm and 9,000 kids are just leaving schools that were locked down all day.

I’m an incredibly selfish woman, because I’m still sitting here staring at my thinning hair and ordering Rogaine.

My inbox has exploded with links to articles about Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Everyone was asking me what I thought of Amy Chua’s controversial new book.

Amy Chua is a marketing genius.

I wanted to pop off about the posted excerpts of her book. I wanted to talk about how miserable her daughters must be, how lonely and socially inept that sort of child must be. My instinct was to question the manliness of her husband, and wonder how she had time for a career. I found that press was more than willing to make those leaps for me. No one seems to want to print the full text of the front cover:

This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs.

This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones.

But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.

The book is good. It’s mostly well written and I was able to read it in a day. It’s extremely uncomfortable to read. The lack of perspective is unnerving. As Amy Chua talks about her relationships with her daughters in a matter of fact tone, I was waiting for love and tenderness to peek through. It is only in the occasional line that Ms. Chua talks about loving her daughters. It is a strange read for this Western Mother.

It is clear through Amy Chua’s incredible actions and her unwavering focus that she loves her daughters. It is just as clear to me that this isn’t the sort of love I’d like to pepper on my two children.

According to the book, the Chua-Rubenfeld household decided before the children were born that they would be raised the Chinese way. In the many swipes Chua takes at the Rubenfeld family we learn that her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, was raised in a very permissive American home. Every time she writes about his psychologist parents with her trademark unemotional tone the reader winces. Sometimes I was left wondering how this marriage could last, and other times imagining how my husband would explode were I to treat the children he loved in such a callous manner. The reader is left to wonder if Rubenfeld ever could have understood just what Chinese parenting meant to Chua.

The book is good until page 222. It is an engaging light read about a mother who is driven to ensure that her children succeed. As you turn each and every page Chua’s unreasonableness escalates, and just as it’s about to hit a crescendo she has glimmers of self awareness, and moments where she realizes that her daughters (and the rest of the world) do not like her. These chinks in her armor are all that keep the reader’s blood from running cold. For a moment Chua self reflects and you think there is hope, but then she gets back into gear and becomes the brutal taskmaster for her daughters once again.

When I started writing I asked a screenwriter friend of mine what the secrets were to crafting a good story. He told me this:

Your outline is everything. It’s a map to the story you want to tell. When you draft your outline you are essentially creating a map as you would for a trip, only it has to have every single detail on it. If you have to go to the bathroom after four hours you need to know exactly where you’ll stop. If you chose the wrong offramp there’s a very good chance that you will never get back on track. Most writers have a difficult time ending their books, not because they don’t tell a good story, but because they didn’t have a good plan. They wanted to go from Los Angeles to New York, but they didn’t know that they were going to have to drive through Pennsylvania.

Amy Chua knew she wanted to raise her daughters the Chinese way. Amy Chua believed in her heart that it was the best way her girls to be raised. One daughter played Carnegie Hall while in the eighth grade, and then had the unusual insight to write an essay that included the phrase, “Carnegie Hall. It didn’t seem right. This was supposed to be the unattainable goal, the carrot of false hope that would keep me practicing for an entire lifetime.” Sophia Chua shows more intuition in her three sentences than her mother shows in 229 pages.

Amy Chua’s book and her mothering share some undeniable traits. They are void of outward loving emotion, but incredibly passionate. Her book, like her mothering is laborious and tidy, it is the perfection she is striving for, but careens out of control. She is unable to write a good chapter to end her otherwise well written book, just as she is unable to control her teenage daughter.

On page 223 the chapter entitled Coda begins. A Coda is the concluding section of a musical composition. This chapter is awkward at every turn. There’s an uncomfortable family photograph, and a confession that the bulk of the book had been written in just eight weeks. She mentions that her husband and her daughters had helped her edit the stories, and that is why we see so little of her husband.

After reading about Sophia and Lulu and the childhood they were denied, I was looking for a chapter that would pay tribute to them and to their talents. What I got instead were a few words about the family loving her in the awkward way we’d glimpsed throughout the book.

Our children love us because we are their parents and we needn’t be anything more than Mom and Dad to get that adoration. They look up to us and work for praise, love and hugs. I have always believed that childhood is worth sanctifying, and that play is the work of children.

Today I asked my son what he wanted to be when he grows up. “You always ask me that.” He said. As he sighed and put his hand to his forehead, he looked up at me and asked me, “What do you want me to be when I grow up?”

“A good father and a good husband.” Was my only reply.

I’ve done the unthinkable. I’ve shared my age and my weight in a public forum and I’ve lied about neither one. Earlier today my husband and I were out and about and we had the following conversation.

MR. G: You look good. Are you feeling better?

ME: How do I look good?

MR. G: [smirking] You just look, you know, good.

ME: Is there a specific part of me that looks good?

MR. G: All of you [more smirking].

ME: Do my eyes look good? Maybe my lips?

MR. G: All of you looks good.

ME: Have I lost weight?

MR. G: You didn’t need to lose weight.

ME: But maybe I lost weight. Do I look thinner to you?

MR. G: Uh, no, you just look good.

ME: But how do I look good.

MR. G: I’m not stupid.

Then I went on to tell him that I’ve been back to the gym, but not tennis just yet. I also told him that I’ll be running a half marathon for the first time since my RA appeared, and he was (as usual) incredibly supportive and sweet. Which is good, because I haven’t lost any weight this week.

I guess I knew that my gym was popular with gay men. What good is a gym without a gay population. My husband is ridiculously handsome, but he’ll never work out and preen like a go-go dancer. Well, maybe he would, but it would take a lot of Heinekin, and I’m pretty sure that we’d giggle, not get horny.

My gym buddy is going back to college. I guess it’s good, perhaps his PhD at Princeton will prove more useful than doing plank with me at at our local gym. I’m not really clear on how that will all work out, he’s an academic, and I’m thinking that he’ll only get smarter but the days of getting cuter are dwindling.

What’s fabulous about having boy genius at the gym (he’s 20 and working on a PhD at Princeton, you do the math) is that I am now made aware of the cruising at the gym.

Really, that Go Go Dancer from the really hot spot in WeHo? Well, he and another guy keep approaching bald men and showing them something on their blackberrys. Porn perhaps? Is there recruiting? The preening isn’t what I thought it was, apparently there’s a lot of eye contact happening, and the men with the amazing bodies who never seem to sweat just might be doing there real workouts somewhere else.

I’ve been working out there for six years. Six years of mating games before my eyes, and I never noticed it.

I really think my gym buddy should skip the PhD and stay to snark with me.