When it comes to understanding gender and kids’ development, my expertise reaches exactly as far as my own dinner table.  At 7 and 4, my daughter and son have already embraced and defied gender stereotypes a million times over:  Tessa’s Matchbox cars drove in happy families, with the Mommy cars always taking wonderful care of the Baby cars.   She loves dance and dresses – and math and engineering.  Calder is intensely physical and alarmingly unafraid.  He turns every stick into a weapon – and can rock a purple tutu like nobody’s business.  My very small study suggests that boys and girls are different, but that gender isn’t the whole story.

Peggy Orenstein has done more research, but she tends to agree.  The differences within genders – in terms of academic aptitude, interests, social interaction, and on and on – are greater than the differences between genders.  (One of my favorite librarians is reading this right now, and I want to know what it says.)

Whatever the verdict is on biology, girls and boys definitely have very different experiences.  Cinderella Ate My Daughter explores “the frontlines of the new girlie-girl culture,” and this particular war-zone has me terrified.

When it comes to sexting, cyberbullying, and all the other  horrors of modern teen culture, I like to imagine they’ll be resolved before they affect my family.  Poof! Orenstein not only challenges that illusion, she suggests that they’re already affecting my family.  That pink and pretty and Barbies (which we don’t have) and American Girls (which we do) are already teaching my daughter that how she looks is more important than how she feels, and that the “freedom” to be ultra-girlie isn’t all that free.

Orenstein’s book is fantastic.  Smart, thoughtful, funny, incredibly readable, and deeply troubling.  It’s the kind of book that makes me want to invite my most interesting friends over for some wine and a week-long book group.  It’ll take at least that long to figure out if my instinct – that’s not my girl, that isn’t happening and won’t happen for her – is accurate or defensive.  I’m just too close, and the stakes are too high, and the story is too complicated to know for sure.

Case in point:  A few weeks ago Tessa and a friend were playing a game.  They were dressed up in leotards and plastic high heels.  (We have bought exactly ZERO of these, yet have two pairs.  Score one for Orenstein on the sneaky pervasiveness of girlie-girl culture.)  Tessa and Charlotte were frantically primping for an imaginary ice skating show, and when I questioned their liberal use detangler (the only hair product in the house), they confided that being beautiful was non-negotiable.  The imagined show director had threatened to fire them out if they weren’t pretty enough.

My feminist hackles shot up.  WTF? That was totally unfair, I told them.  So unfair it was against the law.  If anyone ever tried to limit what they could do based on their appearance, they could – and should – fight back, and -

“Mom, I know,” Tessa said with exasperation.  “This is a game, and games are more interesting when there’s some conflict, you know?  So the show director is bad, and we have to fight and win so we can take over the show and kick him out.”  She shook her head, pitying my simplistic understanding of her imaginary world.  “It would be boring if we just pretended to be in a show.”

I’m both horrified and proud.  Yes, my seven-year-old has already internalized gender discrimination to the point that it figures prominently in her imaginary play.  But when it does, she fights it and wins.

Cinderella had better watch out.  My daughter just might eat her.

It just hit me.

One month into 2012, and I realized I’ve been focused on the wrong one-little-word.  I thought I was sure, even started writing about it:  In pyschology, flow is a state of completely focused motivation.  To be lost in your work – to flow – is to engage wholeheartedly.  Flow cannot be forced.  It can happen anytime, though it’s more likely when you face a challenge with skill.  Flow is attentive, meditative, rejuvenating, and joyful. But something wasn’t right.

The first clue came when I switched out the letters above my desk.  Present looked so beautiful, and I told myself it was just the change that made flow look so… wrong.  I couldn’t quite commit to posting about flow, and since I couldn’t let myself off the hook either, I decided to add a widget for my Reading Challenge.  Huh, I thought, I’m doing a food challenge, too.  And a running challenge.  Seems like my word for 2012 might just be challenge.

Once I let it in, I knew it was right.  Flow is beautiful and elusive.  It can’t be guaranteed.  But it can be cultivated- when we face a challenge with skill.  Sometimes those challenges lead to a state of reverie; sometimes they’re just hard.  Whatever.

I haven’t put challenge up above my desk yet – I’m going to need more Alphabetown cards first – but I have a feeling it’s going to be beautiful.

It was a long week.

A full day of funeral on Monday, travel on Tuesday, and catch-up the rest of the week left me, as we say around here, with a lot of feelings.  I was tempted to crawl into bed by Friday night, but instead we went to Hillary and Mirek’s for a Friday Night Jam Session.

There were little ones with egg shakers and big ones with guitars.

There was homemade stromboli and plenty of wine.

There was, on a cold winter’s night, a solid helping of peace.

Iowa.

I’ve never lived here, but in some ways it will always be home.  My mom and dad and their eight collective siblings all grew up here, but only one settled in the Hawkeye State, and it’s for her that I’m here right now.  Her husband, my Uncle Mark, died Thursday morning, nineteen months after his colon cancer diagnosis, ten days after his 58^th birthday.

Mark married my mother’s little sister when he was younger than I am now.  I was Calder’s age, awed by the beautiful bride (my aunt!), irritated that I couldn’t sit with my mother (a bridesmaid), and completely smitten with my new uncle.

He was nothing like my father and his brothers.  They were opinionated and loud, sparring over politics and sports and all manner of minutia.  Mark was different.  Just as tall, but stronger, quieter, and more straightforwardly kind, he became my hero.  I wanted nothing more than to be his darling, and I thrilled every time he called me squirt.

To my little-girl mind, Mark’s accomplishments were beyond comprehension.  He was a builder, and he had a pick-up truck with his name on it. He built an addition on my grandparents’ house – an actual room, with a floor you could stand on, a roof overhead, and windows looking out into cornfields.  He took me on toboggan rides across a golf course that might as well have been the Alps.  He paid attention to me, smiled his tremendous smile, and made me feel safe.

I confess a selfish disappointment when I learned that Mark and Mary Jane were expecting a baby of their own.  I had plenty of cousins, but only one uncle who called me squirt, and I didn’t want the competition.  (Sorry, Thomas.)

Thomas, and then Sarah, may have knocked me out of the running for Mark’s favorite child, but I still relished his company.  We saw less of each other through the years, marking family milestones at graduations and weddings and rarely speaking in between.  Family is family, though.  My children didn’t know Mark well, but my cousin Sarah plays the same epic role in Calder’s imagination that her father always played in mine.

It hurts to look for silver linings in the early, painful death of a good, kind man.  Mark and Mary Jane should have had decades more together.  Mark should have walked his beautiful daughter down the aisle and delighted the adorable grandchildren he’s sure to have.  There is nothing welcome or fair about this.

But there is nothing squandered, either.  Mark’s illness was a lens that focused love and hope in his life, and in all of our lives.  It illuminated a powerful blend of optimism and realism, of struggle and acceptance, of the cards we want and the cards we learn to play.

My first memory of Mark is that wedding, thirty-one years ago, when he and Mary Jane vowed in sickness and health and until death do us part.  My last is of how beautifully they lived it.

This is how Tessa spent last weekend:

She’s been working at reading for a long time.  Directionality and print concepts, letter sounds and beginning-middle-end, listening and storytelling – all the small steps that add up to one big life-altering moment.  We knew it was coming – she’s had the skills for some time, but not the confidence to sit down and read a chapter book.

We assured her that independent reading didn’t mean the end of being read to.  It will be years before she’s ready to read the books she loves to listen to – The Hobbit and Harry Potter and American Girl Mysteries – and that’s good, because I have a long list of books to read aloud.

But reading a chapter book all by herself… she was ready.  It wasn’t great literature.  It wasn’t even passable or literature, but she did it.  She carried her book with her everywhere we went and asked for help on a handful of words, but mostly she read.

The rest of us didn’t know quite what to do.  Ari and I kept shaking our heads in amazement, overwhelmed by her step away from us and into a million other worlds.  Poor Calder was bored silly.

And Tessa?  She’ll never be bored again.

We have a lot to be thankful for, and amazingly, that’s not new.

Families that aren’t really as far away as they seem, and friends who step in to make sure there’s a crowd for the holidays.  Food raised, prepared, and shared with people we love.  A bounty we can barely describe.

Last year was hard.  It was our first Thanksgiving in a home we still weren’t settled in, in a community we hadn’t quite embraced.  This year was the picture of contrast.

Eight adults, seven children, three generations.  Two kinds of potatoes, three kinds of stuffing, four kinds of pie.  One snowstorm, hours of backyard exploring, and some traditional Thanksgiving activities.

What’s new this year – besides the hubbub we crave – is this feeling that things are right.  I am madly in love with my husband, my children, my home, my life. There are temper tantrums and dismal days, for sure, piles of laundry and lists to-do, but I am somehow deeply, peacefully happy.

It’s a little unsettling, and I knock wood wherever I go.

And yet.  There’s something empowering about this feeling.  Some potential ready to be unpacked.  Something to be thankful for.

I’ve been a writer my whole life, but I’ve never taken a writing class.  Never applied for a creative writing program, never workshopped a piece, never been in a writing group.  Until now.

There are six of us.  We’ve all made our livings with words, in one way or another – an editor, a librarian, an indie bookseller, some wordsmiths-for-hire – and we’ve all taken jobs for the sole reason that they’ll support our writing habits.  Three of us met to lay the groundwork last month, and we each invited another.  The first full meeting of the Rockville Writers’ Group is next week.

We’ve decided to workshop one piece each session, and Ari is going first.  He’s always been brave about showing people his work, but I’m strangely protective of it.  I consider myself, with more than a little arrogance, to be his perfect reader, and I’m fighting the impulse to explain exactly how to read and respond.  He’s a careless speller, I want to say, but a precise storyteller.  He’ll get to the punctuation and sentence structure once the story is just right.

I’m so different.  I wrestle with each sentence, spend a whole morning on one paragraph, can’t move on till it feels solid and complete.  Of course, I sometimes toss the whole thing out because the words I agonized over turned out not to belong.

There’s more than one way to write a story.  Till now, I’ve only ever understood two approaches: mine and Ari’s.  Liza, Lacy, Cree Jen: I can’t wait to learn your writing.  See you on Wednesday.

Dear Hannaford,

Thanks so much for inviting my daughter’s first grade class for a tour of the Camden store.  The kids all enjoyed it, and it’s certainly prompted lively discussion around our table.  You don’t have to reach out to the community with free nutrition tours, but since you do, I have some suggestions to help you take advantage of this great public relations opportunity.

Ask educators to help you develop an interactive program. Our Hannaford tour guide was friendly, but she clearly overwhelmed by a class of enthusiastic six year olds.  The teacher kept the kids focused, but this is your program, and you’ve got to lead it.  That means more than pointing out each department and offering a few samples.  Some of your employees were terrific at engaging the kids; sit down with them and ask them how they do it.  Put together some scavenger hunts for healthy foods, have kids plan a menu, get them to do something.

Stand behind your Guiding Stars.  I’m all for helping people make healthy food choices, and I like the simplicity of your Guiding Stars program.  I bet you worked hard to assign good-better-best nutrition labels.  Explain the system to your staff, and make sure every item that qualifies for a label gets one.  If there are categories of food that don’t get ranked, make sure they have labels explaining that.  Without a clear explanation, I got distracted by the number of processed foods with stars (like Whole-grain Frosted Mini Wheats) and the number of whole foods lacking them, and stopped trusting the system at all.  (Seriously, Hannaford?  Egg whites in a carton get three stars, but organic, cage-free eggs don’t get any?)

Update your materials. Thanks for all the information about the food pyramid.  Did you realize that the USDA dropped the food pyramid last June in favor of the MyPlate program?  It’s easier for kids to understand, and it applies to every meal rather than the whole day.

Be honest about your stock.  You sell some horrifically unhealthy “foods.”  That’s just true.  People buy them, and that’s good for sales, and that’s all fine and good – except it’s not.  If you’re going to offer nutrition tours to kids, you need to admit that.  You’ve gone to the trouble of creating a “Nature’s Place” organic section, but you didn’t even mention it to the kids.  Why not?  You offered a taste test between organic and conventional baby carrots, but you didn’t explain the difference or why shoppers might choose one over the other.  Why not?

Identify your goals. Are you offering these nutrition tours because you care about helping kids make healthy choices?  Because it’s good publicity?  Because it makes you feel better about all the crap you sell?  Or is it just something Corporate told you to do?

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful.  It just that kids are impressionable, and they listen to what authority figures tell them.  My family eats well.  We get our vegetables from local farmers and put tons away for the winter.  We get our local, pasture-raised meat from friends who run their own butcher shop, and eggs from friends who keep chickens.  We make our own bread.

We also shop at Hannaford, and you better believe that my daughter will be looking at your Guiding Stars.  She wants to know why we get 1% milk instead of skim (fat is bad, you know), and she’s worried about the olive oil we cook with (oil is bad, too).  I want her to think about her food and make healthy choices, but I don’t want her on the road to an eating disorder.  Neither should you.

Food shouldn’t be this complicated, but it is.  If you’re going to be part of the conversation, be clear about what you’re saying.

Happy eating,

Kathleen

The box set of books from my childhood hides yellowing pages and crumbling covers.  They needed extra care when I first read them to Tessa, and this time around we’re leaving them neatly tucked away.  The bindings of the library’s copies are so much stronger, and the larger font so much easier for my little reader, and the story, after all, is the same: a little girl, a little house, and a world that’s hardly anything like ours.

The days of Little House in the Big Woods were already fading when Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the first of her classics.  The series eventually numbered nine, earned five Newbery Honor awards, and inspired a beloved television show.  Even now, eighty years after the first book was published and almost 150 after Laura and Mary explored the Big Woods, the stories are still astoundingly perfect.

Snuggled in our own little house on the edge of our own big woods, Tessa and I are rereading Little House.  It’s her second time, though she claims not to remember reading them when she was four.  (I remember it all, but then I can’t count how many times I’ve read these beautiful books.)  We commiserate with Laura – it’s so hard to be good, no matter when you live – and marvel at the simple pleasures of Pa’s fiddling and a rag doll for Christmas.  We wonder if there’s anything Caroline Ingalls cannot do and laugh at how lucky we are not to rely on me for butter and cheese, dresses and straw hats, and every material thing that makes a life.

There is something in these books that gives even the youngest reader pause.  It could easily be nostalgia, but nostalgia grows old, and these books have a vitality that’s hard to explain.  Laura’s life is so strange to us, and the details so dated, yet Laura’s voice is clear, and her experience is timeless.

At the end of Little House in the Big Woods, Laura thinks to herself, “‘This is now.’ She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now.  They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now.  It can never be a long time ago.”

Tessa and I read that sentence together, then snuggled tighter.

The long list of books I’ve read has a new column: since April, I’ve been recording why I chose a particular book at a particular time.  It’s a who’s who of authors I know, agents I covet, and most importantly, readers I respect.

My friend Charlotte is the reason I spent all weekend curled on the couch, breathing in When She Woke, and she’s earned herself a glass of wine at the restaurant where she first mentioned her friend Hillary Jordan.  We talked about art and families and careers and books that night, and the next week Charlotte brought me a copy of Mudbound.  I thought for sure I would write about it, but all I managed to do was scribble  A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. and press it into the hands of everyone I met.  I promise to do better this time, if only because the next time my writing-crush comes to visit our mutual friend, I will insist on meeting her, and I hope to have something coherent to say.

The back-cover copy for When She Woke claims that Hillary Jordan channels Nathaniel Hawthorne by way of Margaret Atwood in this fast-paced, dystopian thriller. I wish I’d written that first, because it’s the perfect nutshell account.

The novel begins when Hannah Payne awakes, red as a stop-sign, into her new life as a Chrome.  In this future America, Church has swallowed State and criminals are injected with a virus that colors their skin to match their crimes.  Yellows have it relatively easy; they are shunned but not really feared for their misdemeanors.  Murderers like Hannah have a tougher road, and she doubts she’ll even survive the sixteen years she’s sentenced to be a Red.

Jordan doesn’t make us wait long for the details of Hannah’s crime; the whole book hinges on the circumstances of her abortion and her refusal to identify either the practitioner who helped her or the prominent (married) evangelist who impregnated her.  As a Chrome, Hannah discovers a bitter reality that her insular dedication to her faith had always hidden.  Disowned by her mother, victimized by those who offer to “rehabilitate her,” and embraced by the fringe groups she’d been raised to fear, Hannah finally learns to think for herself.  When She Woke is intensely political, incredibly subversive, and, in the end, heartbreakingly hopeful.

It’s also blissfully literary.  Hannah’s crime – even her name – are clear references to The Scarlett Letter that sent me straight to the bookshelf to see what else Jordan has borrowed from Hawthorne.  The dystopian future that stacks the deck so unfairly against women rings with echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale and might finally convince me to read Oryx and Crake.  I’ve been reading dystopian YA novels for a while now, but the sophisticated reality that Jordan creates makes me want to experience Atwood’s.

Charlotte and I have plans to get together next week for another book talk, and I’m hoping she brings a stack of recommendations – she’s on quite a roll.

What about you?  What are you reading?  What should I read next?