“I’ll make a peanut butter and matzoh sandwich since I can’t have bread,” Lizzie said, grabbing a knife from the drawer. My daughter, at 13, has decided she’s a little Jewish. Her ancestors, Irish Catholics, are as Jewish as I am, but the only dad she’s ever really known, who came into our lives when she was 4, is a nonreligious Jew. And, as an agnostic ex-Catholic married to him, I don’t mind at all that Lizzie is experimenting with religion. But I do hope it’s non habit-forming.
Lizzie has been trying on bits and pieces of religions for years now, discarding each after a little wear. A few years ago, as we read the decidedly secular Nancy Drew together one night, she asked out of the blue if I believed in God. As she snuggled into the crook of my arm, chewing on a strand of dark blond hair, she waited for an answer.
“Well, some people believe in God,” I answered, carefully putting on the same serious but accessible voice I’d used to answer previous uncomfortable questions about where babies come from and why there are Republicans.
“Do you believe?” Lizzie said, stressing the you so I could almost see the italics flying out of her mouth. There was no getting around it. I had to answer.
“No, I don’t,” I said as concern creased her face.
Should I have lied and just said I believed? After all, God seems to lurk in almost every nook and cranny of this country. Way back, in kindergarten, the Pledge of Allegiance told her she’s part of one nation under God. Lizzie sees friends and family go to church or temple each week and smiles at the store clerk who tells her to “have a blessed day.” Giant decorated trees and huge menorahs are everywhere she looks each December (rather, menorahs used to be everywhere — then we moved to Portland). Every time I dig through my wallet to find bills to buy a gallon of milk — or anything at all — I see His name. In God some may trust, but not all of us.
There are chunks of society saying if you don’t believe in God you’re a bad person. Will Lizzie intuit that she’s bad if she doesn’t believe — or that her mother is? Or is it OK to tell her what I believe: It’s a superstition that many people believe but I don’t, and that, to me, it seems like mystical make-believe. Maybe I should take what I like about religion — the moral and ethical bits — and drop the rest, my own personal ecumenical smorgasbord. I’ll take One Golden Rule and seven of the Ten Commandments, please, and hold the mortal sin and transubstantiation.
My disenchantment with religion started long ago, when I went to Mass each Sunday. I wore frilly dresses that my mother had carefully laid out the night before and the white acrylic tights that itched my legs and sagged uncomfortably as I sat, week after week, on the polished dark wood pew, standing and sitting on command, but not really listening to the priest. I chanted when everyone else did — my religion, with its comfort of ritual and repetition, seemed made for obsessive compulsives. But instead of mediating on God’s glory, I’d flip though the hymnal and wiggle on the hard wooden seat. After my First Communion, I’d go each week and eat Jesus, in Catholicism’s ritualistic cannibalism. As the wafer dissolved slowly on my tongue, I realized that to me it was just a wafer. The church didn’t fill me with the Holy Ghost, just the feeling it was a scam. There wasn’t one single event that made me feel this way — just a series of Sundays and something deep in me. I was a closeted agnostic at 6. But I kept going. When I was a teenager, I’d sullenly attend each Sunday morning, studying the other teenagers, potheads and cheerleaders. A cheerleader who, at school, strutted past with a flip of her feathered hair as if I didn’t exist, smirked a fake lip-glossed smile at me and shook hands when the priest told us to offer each other a sign of peace. As soon as Mass was over, the detente ended and everyone went back to their roles, the weekly pretend play over. I smoked dope with the potheads, and cheerleaders ignored lesser girls.
High school also taught me how malleable faith could be — religious beliefs seemed as steadfast and unbendable as tin foil. After losing my religion as a teen, I lost my virginity and got pregnant. My parents, avowed Catholics, took me to the clinic for an abortion without a second thought. We didn’t even consider any other alternative for more than 20 seconds — and thanks be to my parents for that. But it crystallized the feeling that religion was full of hypocrisies — and you could twist it and turn it to fit your needs. I still went to church, though, with my parents weekly. I didn’t ask them not to go and they didn’t tell me to go; it was expected that I go, so I did. And as soon as I left home, I left my religion without a second glance. During my 20s and 30s, I gave as much thought to religion as I did to my 401K — pretty much nothing. But in my mid-40s, I found myself back in church for the first time in decades.
My 40-year-old cousin and her two young children had been killed. There aren’t words to explain the awfulness of what happened, but here are a few to describe it: It was late. It was dark. My cousin was driving with her two kids tucked safely into their car seats. Something happened and the car hit a tree. It burst into flames. Everyone died.
Red electric candles flickered in the corners and incense burned my nose and eyes. Flowers and tiny white coffins were wheeled into the church and placed next to the larger coffin — children snuggled next to their mother in death, as in life. All around, mourners sobbed. My cousin’s husband was lost to his grief, his entire family gone in less time than it takes to say three Hail Marys. What can you say to someone drowning in misery, how can anything you say possibly make it better? You can’t.
The priest’s words, meant as comfort to the family, fell flat to me. Everything seemed like a false comfort offered for such bottomless loss. Part of me wants to be able to tell Lizzie her second cousins are in a better place, to buffer her from the sadness of children dying. But it feels like a lie. So what do I say when other people tell her they’re in heaven? Do I stare straight ahead when she looks quizzically at me? What’s wrong with a white lie to help ease grief? I fight the urge to answer like a therapist. (“Are my second cousins in heaven?” “What do you think?”)
I feel comfortable with what I believe about not believing, but I still find it hard to talk to Lizzie about it. I want to give her the wisdom I have but also the room to decide for herself and not have her beliefs trailer-hitched to mine. So we read my old children’s Bible, Greek myths and Native American creation stories. Her dad tells her the story about the Maccabees and the oil when we eat latkes at Hanukkah and about Moses at Passover. I tell her about Jesus during Christmas and Easter. But I feel compelled to stress to her that these are myths that some people believe. And is it hypocritical on my part to even talk about Moses and Jesus? To have a tree? To search for eggs? To eat latkes?
Lizzie is sifting and sorting and exploring theology in her own way. She and her dad started their own religion, Dalala, after her fish Sparkly died. It involves lighting a candle for all the people or animals who’ve died in the past year — so they can come back as babies. And it involves eating pancakes. We’ve observed it annually, every March 26, for seven years now. It sounds as plausible as anything I grew up with.
So Lizzie has the room to believe what she wants. I taught her to brush her teeth, to look both ways before crossing the street and to think about religion from a historical standpoint. She’s a kind and thoughtful child, a living Golden Rule. And if she one day decides to get religion, I’ll love her and forgive her.
Interview your own bully -- and send it to Salon. Read how
here. A week before the seventh grade, my family moved for the 13th time. My dad was in the oil business, and we left Indonesia, where I’d had friends, for a small Southern town, where I had none. My only companion dressed exclusively in navy culottes and white button-down shirts, her wardrobe compliments of her Pentecostal religion. We were practically the only two girls without The Hairdo: a feathered Farrah Fawcett cut that necessitated a cloud of Aqua Net hairspray to tame it in Louisiana’s humidity.
Each morning of seventh grade I took the bus to school, and each morning I was bullied by a girl I’ll call Jane.
“Ew — don’t you wash your hair?” Jane shouted at me from two rows back as her sidekick Kim laughed. I did wash my hair, but apparently once a week was not enough. And I wasn’t exactly the most fashion-conscious kid. In fact, I was pretty much fashion unconscious — to the point where I could have used some smelling salts and a personal shopper. I thought sitting behind the bus driver would protect me. Instead, he just turned up the volume on the Eagles. (Years before Noriega was tortured by rock ‘n’ roll music, so was I.) This went on all through seventh grade. That year, I pretended to be sick so often that I’m surprised my parents didn’t whisk me to the local hospital.
But eighth grade would be different! I waited for the bus on the first day of school wearing a maroon skirt and polyester beige shirt printed with cowboy hats and horses. I looked great! But as soon as I boarded the bus, Jane and Kim started to neigh. It was clear that eighth grade was going to be just like seventh — only with bigger breasts.
Even though it’s been more than three decades since I rode that bus to middle school, I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. My daughter, Lizzie, recently started seventh grade and I see my old social awkwardness reflected in her. Although she’s met her share of bullies in previous years, middle schools girls are different. They take bullying to new highs (and lows). There’s overt cruelty, shunning someone like an excommunicated Amish, and the kind of mind games that would make Machiavelli cringe. Toss technology in with their newfound freedom and independence and it’s a wicked brew. It makes the kindergarten threat of “You can’t come to my birthday party!” seem charming.
But there’s an added challenge with Lizzie in middle school. I’ve brought my past to her school experience. I have to constantly remind myself that she’s not me and that she handles mean girls differently than I did — which was basically to sink into myself. She attends a school with a no-bullying policy that has teachers who help kids work though social dynamics. (At my school, they practically taught classes in bullying.) Lizzie feels safe telling someone they made her feel bad. And she also feels comfortable — for now, anyway — talking to her dad and me about being excluded. But when a girl rips Lizzie’s poetry out of her notebook or sends a vicious email, uninviting her from a much anticipated group outing, I’m right back on that school bus.
One day, my husband gently suggested I try to find Jane. Maybe it would help ease my own pain and prevent me from imposing my own past on my daughter’s. Actually, I did talk to Jane about it one time — in eleventh grade. I had bumped into her at a Catholic school I briefly attended. As we shared a cigarette behind a bus during recess, away from the nuns’ prying eyes, I inquired why. She studied the ground and flicked an ash. She didn’t answer, but looked embarrassed. A bell rang and we went back to class, matter dropped.
Thirty-five years later, I have a family and a profession that I love. I’m happy, healthy and (most of the time, anyway) well-adjusted. I have wonderful friends. Still, when I looked Jane up on Facebook and sent her a note, I reverted back to my old teenage self, shyly suggesting that I was sure she wouldn’t remember me, but could I ask her a few questions.
An hour later, I heard back. I was right. She didn’t remember me, but said she would love to hear more. I responded that I’d hated middle school and now that my daughter was that age, I was sifting through memories and trying to sort the then versus now and see how it all fit together. I asked if she remembered the bus ride to junior high school. I was honestly curious if she had any recollection of it. Middle schoolers assume they’re living under a giant klieg light and that everyone is watching their every move. But while she didn’t remember me — she definitely recalled being cruel.
“Oh yes, I was the mean girl,” she wrote. “No doubt. When we shared the cigarette (I can’t believe you remember that!), I’m hoping I was embarrassed and was on my way to changing. But I did change — when I went to college and met really mean girls.”
When I asked Jane why she’d been like that, she said she thought it came down to three reasons. She’d felt an enormous sense of entitlement. “My mom put me up on a pedestal and I was told I was special, so I acted special and better than others.” She’d come from a family of huge personalities and, as she put it, “I was an attention whore — positive or negative.” And it turned out she’d been bullied herself in fifth grade. “My bully was brutal and the police had to get involved. That kid took a lot from me emotionally, physically and materially. He actually ended up much later going to prison for murder. And I know what you’re thinking — if I was bullied, why would I become one? Because if I was mean first then others would be afraid of me, not the other way around.”
“I just wish I’d known back in middle school what I know now, but we both know that’s not how life works. I’m sorry I made fun of you and your hair and made the bus ride a nightmare. I’m sure today we’d both enjoy each other’s company — well, I hope you’d like me!”
So what about me — why hadn’t I stood up to Jane in junior high? I didn’t have a “Bully me!” sign taped to the back of my polyester horse-printed shirt, but I might as well have. Because we’d moved so many times, I was shy and quiet. And shyness was a social liability like corrective shoes, headgear or a love of fantasy in a school that seemed to reward the extroverts and popular kids who liked things like football and cheerleading. I became a passive victim, guzzling a bully-me cocktail: mix together equal parts low self-esteem and social awkwardness with a dash of desperation and stir.
With Lizzie, it’s different. We talk about many things that I never did with my parents as a kid. I may have passed my shyness on to Lizzie, like a family heirloom, but she seems to feel more comfortable in her skin than I did as a middle schooler, even with her slightly dyslexic reading of social cues. I know I can’t buffer her from every mean girl and from every disappointment, as much as I’d love to do so, but I’ve found discussing with her about how I was bullied seems to help keep the dialogue going. When I told her I contacted Jane, she seemed surprised. “The bus bully?” she asked. I told Lizzie I wished I’d said something to her a long time ago. Lizzie nodded.
Jane now has a 15-year-old daughter and so she is extremely cognizant of bullying and its effects. “I’m working very hard at teaching her to not be critical and to be accepting of others who are different but she gets frustrated with me.” In fact, she later shared our conversation with her daughter, admitting to her own daughter that she’d been a mean girl all those years ago. She wrote that the revelation left her daughter speechless.
And, just like that, more than 30 years after Jane had made me last cry, she did it again.
My parents are Tea Party. I’m a liberal. My husband is to the left of your average communist. Dinners together walk a tightrope of small talk — none of us wanting to veer too far in either direction, frightened we’ll go careening into a political abyss. Our daughter, Lizzie, is always a safe topic. She’s our Switzerland.
But I’m not sure how much longer that will last. Lizzie, at 12, is becoming politically aware.
She’s always been well informed. Not that she had much of a choice. After the 2000 election and before her first birthday, she participated in her first protest. I stuffed her in her bright green baby backpack and headed to Times Square. There, she grinned and drooled as tourists in fanny packs and white tennis shoes yelled mean things at a dozen of us who were demanding that votes be counted. They weren’t, thanks to the Supreme Court, and George W. Bush was sworn in — thus assuring that Lizzie’s formative years had ample opportunities for protest. Her favorite was the huge antiwar rally in Central Park, when she was 3. There were balloons and face painting — and the playground near the park was more exciting than the ones back in Brooklyn, N.Y., where we then lived. Riding the train home, she waved her small paper flag like a sword and chanted, “No Twar! No Twar!” Then she yawned and asked for her sippie cup.
I don’t want to indoctrinate my child into the cult of my political beliefs. I want her to make up her own mind. But, since she’s a kid, she mirrors our beliefs, as her friends do their parents’. If I were a neo-Nazi, a Know Nothing, or a Glenn Beck-watching right-winger, she would probably share my misguided views. But I’m a Prius-driving, composting liberal — and therefore so is Lizzie. (Except the driving part — at 12, she doesn’t yet. Thankfully.) It’s not like we sit her down with Karl Marx flashcards or whisper Howard Zinn to her as she sleeps, but we talk a lot at dinner, discussing politics and what’s going on not just in our neighborhood or city, but in the world. (We recently chatted about climate change and chocolate eclairs — and, because my husband is a historian, she probably knows more about Alger Hiss than any other kid her age.) But how to balance the way we view the world with how other people do? How to show her both sides of the political picture?
Our family dinners are very different from those when I was a kid. Back then, we didn’t discuss politics at the dinner table — or anywhere else. Our household was more of a dictatorship, with my dad’s conservative beliefs reigning supreme. There was no room for dissent and none encouraged. When I was in second grade, I made up my own mind about an election. Our teacher gave us each a copy of the Weekly Reader, which still smelled of fresh newsprint. One story was about the ’72 election and we got to vote! I’d checked the box next to McGovern’s head. It was a nice head, I’d thought. He looked so kind compared to that Nixon fellow. I skipped to our house, no doubt wearing an outfit like a plaid jumper with a bow affixed to my hair, something that would have fit in more in, say, 1964 Omaha rather than 1972 San Francisco, where we lived at the time. I have no way to prove this scientifically, but I’m pretty sure we were the squarest family in San Francisco. While other kids were singing along to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” we attended an Up With People concert.
Dropping my plastic school satchel on the ground, I proudly pulled out the secret ballot to show my parents. “No one in our house votes Democratic!” my dad scolded. He was joking, of course, but I still felt ashamed, like I’d just admitted I loved macrame plant holders or hippies. How could I have been so wrong? I should have voted for Nixon! My parents later did, and he won. Meanwhile, I slunk off, feeling like I’d committed a crime — as the man my parents voted for soon would. I have no idea if I crumbled up that Weekly Reader or if my mom eventually stuffed it in the trash. In my mind, I picture myself crumbling it up, my first foray into politics a horrid mistake.
But do my husband and I truly encourage dissent with our daughter? What if Lizzie decides she wants to volunteer for whomever runs on the GOP ticket in 2012? She’ll be in eighth grade then. Would I drive her to help with that campaign? I happily drove all over eastern Pennsylvania when she wanted to canvass for Obama. She held pamphlets as we meandered door to door, encouraging registered Democrats to vote. Would I do the same quite as cheerfully if she supported Michele Bachmann or Mitt Romney? I don’t think so. But I honestly can’t see Lizzie embracing a Republican candidate. For her, politics is all about values, and for now, at least, she values fairness and the environment.
And how to explain “values” and the coded semantics of political language to a kid? During a recent local election, Lizzie and I trawled the voters’ guide, which was filled with names and photos of candidates and blurbs about their positions on various issues. One candidate had written she supported “family values.” I muttered, “Uh-oh. I’ll stay away from her.”
“But Mom, aren’t family values a good thing? Our family has values,” she said, puzzled.
I tried to explain that those “family values” were often quite different from what our family values.
If she someday embraces “family values,” the Tea Party or other right-wing agendas, could it damage my relationship with her? Although I try to understand my parents’ political beliefs, I don’t. When I see what Newsmax “article” or Wall Street Journal editorial my father “likes” on Facebook, or glance at a photo, taken a few years back, of my folks dressed as McCain and Palin for Halloween, I feel physically sick. Sometimes it’s hard to even have simple conversations with them. Even the most innocent pleasantry, like “Nice weather,” could spiral out of control if I don’t watch what I say. (For the record, they are loving grandparents and are far more gracious than I am about not bringing up delicate topics.) If my dad says, “I bet you guys are happy you’re not back east this winter. All that snow in New York.” I’m tempted to mutter something about climate change, but instead I bite my tongue and say, “Yes, in Portland we don’t have to shovel rain.”
It sometimes seems my parents and I are as divided as Congress, neither side understanding the other’s point of view. But when I’m around them, I’m somehow whisked right back to adolescence. I morph into a sullen 16-year-old with no power, whose views are considered childish. I want to engage, to discuss topics calmly with them, but my emotions knock any possibility of cool-headed debate out of the way. All my facts and statistics — the cornerstone of rational debate — get gummed together in my mouth by raw emotion and I only manage to get out incoherent raw ravings. And if history is any indication of the future, I’m doomed to repeat myself.
I wish I could calmly debate issues like my husband does. Or maybe I should take a lesson from Lizzie. The truth is, she can teach me a thing or two about politics. Instead of getting scorched by the heat of the moment, like I do, she’s cool and collected. She listens intently. Then a question she asks will sum up the prejudice of the other side quite succinctly. “Why don’t Grammy and Grampy want Charlie’s moms to get married? That’s not fair.”
And she’s right. It’s not.
“Mom, did you ever smoke marijuana?” my 11-year-old daughter, Lizzie, asked as we pulled up in our driveway, gravel crunching under the car’s wheels. Her question wasn’t totally out of the blue — we’d just passed a passel of teenagers hanging out on our town’s main street, a smoky cloud hovering over them like a mass Schleprock, and my husband and I had commented about the local drug problem — but I was still caught off guard. My husband muttered something unintelligible and darted from the car to let the dog out of the house. I sat, frozen with panic. Do I answer honestly? Or lie? Spinning possible answers like a roulette wheel in my mind, I opted for truth.
“Yes, I did. A long time ago, in high school.” I unclasped my seat belt and turned around to face her.
Lizzie actually gasped. “Why?” she asked. She’s the type of kid who likes rules, the more of them the better. There are hints of the adolescent rebel lurking inside her. But for now, she uses words like “marijuana” instead of “pot.”
And why indeed? I’d been curious, of course, but I also wanted, desperately, to escape my social awkwardness, the discomfort of living in a small Southern city. That town fit me as well as the Chic jeans I wore back then, so tight and claustrophobic that I had to lie down on my bed, exhale, close my eyes and will myself smaller to zip them up. I guess I also wanted to see what I could get away with. (Quite a lot, it turned out.) Pot was forbidden and illegal — and sure to horrify my straight-laced parents. But mostly, it was a social lubricant that greased my rusty social skills: The ritual of rolling a joint and passing it around a room of kids my own age was something I could spend hours doing. Plus, it made my eight-track tapes sound great.
Of course, I wasn’t going to tell Lizzie all this. I wanted to bare my soul, but not get naked. I wanted to be candid with her, but I wanted my candor to be rated PG. So I simply told her I’d been curious. I admit, I gave it a little spin. I told her that way back then, during my own personal stone age, marijuana wasn’t as strong as it is now and drug laws were different. I explained that kids can ruin their chances of getting into college or attaining a scholarship if they’re caught with drugs. And Lizzie already takes college, the concept, very seriously. She plans to study writing and cooking. This week, at least. (Not long ago, she wanted to be an elf.)
Shocked, Lizzie rushed into the house and raced over to her dad, shouting, “Did you know Mom smoked marijuana in high school!”
He did.
Like so many other parenting challenges, this one thwacked me in the face. I’d been meaning to talk with Lizzie about drugs, I really had, but just never got around to it. Sure, I’d read articles about what you’re supposed to do. Then I’d forget, or get busy folding laundry, or my email would “ding.” Then again, maybe waiting for the perfect opportunity, the right teachable moment, to present itself is just another way of saying I was sunk into my cocoon of denial and avoidance. Teachable moments have a way of playing hooky.
Later that night, after Lizzie and I had snuggled together and talked a little more about drugs — I’d asked her if she had any more questions, and she did — I trawled the Internet, searching for parenting advice on various websites. And I discovered I’d apparently done everything wrong. I was supposed to bring up the subject of drugs way back when my sixth grader was still in preschool, finger-painting and sorting colorful plastic toy bears into muffin tins. I should have discussed “good drugs” versus “bad drugs”with her when I gave her a Children’s Tylenol or Motrin for her fever. I briefly berated myself for not reading more parenting books when Lizzie was younger. See, I’m not a big fan of “experts” telling me what to do — a residual and healthy distrust of authority from my adolescence — but I do believe these guides have their place: as kindling. When newly pregnant, I was given a popular book that forewarned me of all the things that could possibly go wrong with the baby I was carrying, arranged in a helpful trimester format of pure terror. I think it was called “What You Expect to Go Wrong Will.” But in bypassing this publishing industry of fear, had I missed on the basic steps of parenting? Was I simply Doing It Wrong?
I closed the parenting website and opened Facebook. It was time to lean on my most trusted source of parenting advice: my friends. And so I posted a status update, a query, asking how other parents talked to their kids about drugs. The postings poured in. Most said they favored being honest about their history and discussing the legal and health ramifications. They warned me off any “Reefer Madness” fervor or any hard-line demand of “don’t ever do it.” Back in high school, I’d been on the receiving end of “don’t ever do it.” I can personally attest that approach didn’t work. I didn’t “don’t ever do it,” quite a lot.
All of which confirmed what I already knew: that it was better to trust my friends — and myself — than nefarious “experts” for common-sense parenting dilemmas. Besides, there seems to be a new expert or parenting philosophy every time I flip open the newspaper or log on to my computer. I won’t always discount what they have to say. But as parents, we have to trust our guts when we talk to our kids. Because you can’t plan for every question, and the questions come fast.
The other day, while I was having lunch, Lizzie came into the dining room, face furrowed, and asked, “What’s a virgin?” Choking on my seltzer, I asked what she meant. She went into the kitchen and came back with a container and pointed. “It says right here: virgin lemonade.”
(Credit: John Michael Weidman via Shutterstock) 
