5.25.12

One morning last week I came downstairs to hear my kids arguing.

My son (almost 4): “Yes, I can.”

My daughter (almost 7): “No, not really. Not outside.”

My son: “Yes, I can. Can too.”

My daughter (whining): “Nooooo, N — people would make fun of you!”

My son meets me in the hallway. “What’s up?” I ask him.

“Mama, can I wear a dress if I want?”

“Of course you can,” I tell him.

“See?!” he says to his sister.

“But Mama!” my daughter exclaims, “if he wears a dress outside the house, people will laugh at him!”

Oh cripes. Today is Gender Stereotypes Re-Education Day? Nobody sent me a memo! I could have read up, or prepared some notes.  Can I get a cheat sheet? Can I at least have breakfast first?

“Mama!” Apparently not.

I turn to my daughter. “Sweetheart, that is rude. No one ever tries to shame you out of wearing something you like to wear.”

“But he can’t wear a dress outside, Mama! Boys don’t wear dresses! Everyone will laugh!”

Jesus — when did my robust, soccer-playing, emotionally generous daughter turn into the Gender Police? Just the other week she dressed her brother up in her old ballet outfit and twirled with him around the house. Now that he wants to take it on the road, suddenly she bucks?

“I don’t think people would laugh, sweetheart. And what if they did? Would that mean that your brother is wrong for wearing a dress, or would it mean that whoever laughs is acting like a bully?”

“I don’t know!” Pout. Snort. She crosses her arms and stomps over to the window.

Okay, then. That theoretical discussion can rest for a minute. I go to the kitchen to get a banana. “Kiddos, we’re leaving to take H to school in five minutes. Let’s get ready, please.”

My son follows me. “Mama?”

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Can I wear a dress now? To take H to school?”

Now?

Oddly, the entire previous interaction has done absolutely nothing to prepare me for this next, very logical request. In the millionth-of-a-nanosecond-long pause that follows, I scroll back through decades of feminist theory and gender myth-busting, before gathering my wits to say:

“Sure, honey.”

He breaks out in a huge, excited smile.

In my mind, I slap my head. What the hell was that millionth of a nanosecond about? Was I, when faced with it in the moment, actually considering refusal? I would love to unpack this, maybe write a paper about it, but we have to go — I have only two minutes to find a dress for my son to wear and figure out how to field my daughter’s renewed complaints about it before we are late for school.

I run back upstairs and rummage through my daughter’s old clothes, mentally kicking myself that we just gave away a bunch of her dresses. I finally dig out a dress that my daughter recently grew out of. My mom had asked her health aide to buy it for H three years ago when we came on a visit. My mom was by then wheelchair-bound and almost completely paralyzed; she asked me to arrange the two new dresses on her lap so that when my daughter walked in, my mom could “give” them to her. We joked with my daughter that presents grew out of Grandma’s lap.

“Here, sweetie.” I pull the dress over my son’s head, thinking how pleased my mom would be that we were getting continued wear out of it.

He beams.

Two minutes after we arrive at H’s classroom, H comes over to me with a scowl: “Matthew asked about N’s dress. He’s making fun.”

“Sweetheart, asking is not the same as making fun.”

“He IS making fun! He said why’s N wearing a dress!”

“It sounds to me like he’s curious. You could just explain that this is what N wanted to wear this morning.”

Clearly, I’m getting nowhere with her. She walks away, scowling.

*                *                *

That night, for their bedtime story, I tell my kids about their Great-Aunt Lois, who was the first girl to wear pants to her high school in the 1950s. She got suspended for it, but the school administration backtracked after my grandmother marched down there and raised hell. At least, that’s how my mom liked to tell it.

“Can you imagine?” I ask my kids. “Living in a time when people got upset if girls wore pants?”

They both shake their heads.

“I would not like that,” says my daughter. Pause. Then: “It’s kind of like telling N he can’t wear a dress to school.”

Uh huh. I am a brilliant parent. And thank God for my brave Aunt Lois.

*                *                *

The following morning, from the top of the stairs, I hear my daughter quietly imploring her brother near the front doorway: “N, this morning, could you not …”

“What?” he asks, excitedly, “have too much fun?!” He is echoing the refrain I leave him with when I drop him at day care: “Whatever you do, do NOT have too much fun!” To which he always replies, “Oh yes, I will!”

In this moment, though, my heart aches; I know how far from that sentiment his sister’s request is about to be.

“No,” says H quietly, “could you not … wear a dress today to my school?”

Backslide. I know she’s feeling equal parts embarrassment for herself and protectiveness of her little brother. But if I don’t intervene, her attempt to talk him out of it will ultimately wither a part of him – and her.

“H,” I admonish from the top of the stairs, “come here.”

“Mama?” She sounds genuinely surprised. “How did you hear me?” 

“I hear everything. Come up here, please.”

She comes up the stairs, into my room, and sits on my bed. I continue: “I thought we’d established that people are allowed to wear what they like, and it’s rude to make them feel otherwise. Would it have been right to ask Great Aunt Lois not to wear her pants to school?”

She shakes her head, then asks: “Did the kids make fun of Great Aunt Lois?”

I have no idea. So I guess: “I’m sure some of them were pretty confused at first. Others may have made fun. But that doesn’t mean they were right to make fun, does it?”

She shakes her head.

“And isn’t it our job to challenge the bullies, not the people they’re making fun of?”

She nods her head. But her furrowed brow shows me she is not completely convinced. 

That day I stay at my daughter’s school to teach music. My son is with me, proudly sporting his dress for the second day in a row. Several kids come over to me individually and ask if my son is a girl, or if this is his “wacky clothes day.” “Nope!” I explain cheerily, “He just wanted to wear a dress today! Doesn’t it look great?” They all react the same way: They look confused for a moment; then they nod.

Hmm. I wonder to myself if I put too negative a spin on the whole thing earlier with my daughter. To bring the issue right to bullying don’t accurately describe the curiosity and openness to change that I see in these young kids. I think, maybe I should talk more with my daughter about it – explain to her that answering positively helps everybody to see N’s dress as positive, too. So when I am alone with her after school I raise the issue, recounting how I answered the kids’ questions today about N’s dress.

“I know!” She interrupts me with a tone that I am beginning to understand means I’m explaining too much. “I heard you say it!”

Of course. She watches my every move. She rejects very word out of my mouth, but not a single action of mine goes unnoticed. At seven, she may not feel entirely empowered to act as I do, yet. I have to learn how to just be and do, and not talk so much.

I feel for my older child. She is the family experiment; each new phase of hers holds as big a learning curve for me and her dad as it does for her. I do not understand her seven-year-old mind, with all its attendant insecurities. And I’m not a practiced enough parent to always present with confidence the world I want her to inhabit – a world in which, for example, dresses on boys is normal. At best, she gets to see me fighting to establish that normality in my own mind, and blundering around figuring out how to field others’ reactions to it. 

I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got.

Maybe that’s enough. This morning we are all upstairs, dressing to go downtown. My daughter is helping my son pick out clothes. 

“N,” she asks him, “do you want to wear just pants today or a skirt, like me?”

“A skirt!” he replies.

“Okay.” I hear her say. “Here, you can try on one of mine.”

Last week, my three-and-a-half year old son (technically he’s almost three and three fourths, but ever since I turned forty-four and five-twelfths, I’m less particular) — my three-and-a-half year old son watched several SEPTA service trucks roll down South 49^th Street in West Philly. He asked why they were there and where they were going; he observed that we don’t see that many orange trucks on the other streets and queried as to why that is (49^th St hosts several trolley lines); he then wondered whether they were called flatbed trucks or something else (beats me); he asked what did I think they were going to fix (I guessed trolley tracks); and he quizzed me on how they were going to fix them (ok, I really don’t frigging know) and why were they carrying that hose (how many hours until naptime?). After about five straight minutes of questions, he was silent for a moment. Then he had the following comment:

“It musta been hard for the people to make the whole world. They would haveta work work work, and rest; and work work work, and rest — a hundred times. Then they haveta pick a house to live in. Everybody in the whole world hasta pick a house to live in. We already picked one.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The Old Testament. In five sentences.

I should have reached for the stone tablets right then and there. But we were crossing a busy intersection. So instead I uttered the same sage words with which our ancestors have responded over the centuries to the revelations of their cherished prophets:

“Uh huh. Feet in the stroller please, sweetie.”

My son thinks SEPTA created the world. And why not? They’re always out there, tending to their inventions – they put down tracks, they fix stuff. They dig deep and go up high — they rule over heaven and earth. And they drive us everywhere. They are certainly a more hands-on deity than that other dude.

So sure, SEPTA for God.

One problem with this regime change, though: Sundays. If SEPTA is God, then the Jews have it wrong: Except for a few token trains at inconvenient times, the Sabbath definitely falls on Sunday. It also falls, by the way, on occasional weeknights after nine p.m. in the Westbound tunnel.

The whole Sabbath on Sunday shtick could put a serious crimp in Jewish theology – we’d have to re-think some things. But we could adapt – we’re good at that. The hard part would be admitting that the Christians were right.

But the more I think about it, the more I see real benefits to SEPTA Almighty. Imagine huge donations from Evangelical millionaires being re-directed from megachurches and Republican candidacies over to public transportation! All we have to do, really, is hold an election and vote SEPTA into the Eternal Office. Then those rich Evangelicals would HAVE to fork it over!

So it’s decided: We’ll hold an election for God. Oh, but wait — how will we guard against voter fraud? Hey, here’s an idea: Let’s pass a law requiring every voter to show a photo SEPTA TransPass in order to vote! Why, you ask? To make sure that the people who might vote against our God aren’t faking their addresses or voting twice. Well no, that kind of fraud isn’t really a problem now — but it was rampant in 1903, you know. With our new law, we can be sure to disenfranchise many of those who might vote against us – in fact, it pretty much knocks out anyone who drives a car! That will definitely eliminate our voter fraud problem. Just as it has in other forward-thinking states who’ve adopted this kind of law.

Whew. I feel great. Who knew it would be so easy to steer things our way? But I guess if my son is right and SEPTA created the world in a hundred days, our state can certainly dismember the 14th, 15th, and 19th Amendments of the Constitution with a mere stroke of the pen! Nice work, everyone — drinks are on me! In fact, let’s take the day off tomorrow!

And on the 101^st day, the Governor rested.

*Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority

A couple of months ago I was chowing down at my favorite falafel restaurant when a young Israeli woman walked in. She waved a hearty greeting to the young guy behind the counter – also Israeli – and introduced him, in Hebrew, to the older woman accompanying her: “This is my grandma.”

“HELLO, GRANDMA!” the falafelier shouted across the counter in exaggeratedly slow and loud Hebrew.

The wiry, firey little Israeli grandma did not miss a beat.

‘Why are you calling me Grandma?” she railed at him. “I’m not your Grandma. What the hell is this, a nursing home? I can hear you just fine; stop shouting.” And with that she sat down at a table. “Ayelet, order me a shnitzel.”

Two feet away from her, I giggled into my falafel. Grandma looked over at me and grinned. “Right?”

I love Israeli Grandma. I’m saying it here: If one more frigging pediatric healthcare provider calls me ‘Mom,’ I will plotz. What is this weird conflation of function and nickname? Does anyone ever address a patient with, “So, Paitch, what are your symptoms?” No; they look on the chart and read the patient’s actual name – without shortening it. But us they call ‘Mom ’ – all of us. Simultaneously impersonal and over-familiar.

It makes me feel like such a John. Worse: A John’s Mom.

And they all do it – it’s like everyone took a pledge. According to the healthcare community, I have sired every pediatric doctor and nurse I’ve ever had contact with. Hmm. Maybe I should feel honored.

I am not hating on healthcare providers; they do a wonderful job and I know they are just trying to be efficient and respectful in a system that leaves little room for the individual identities of patients, let alone the parents they drag in with them.  But something about total strangers calling me ‘Mom’ because they can’t be bothered to use my actual name does not feel exactly respectful.

A minor problem? Yes, on the scale of things. After all, I am very grateful to even have healthcare; far too many don’t.

But I can’t help wondering if healthcare would be such a luxury in this country if we saw ourselves as more than generic chauffeurs who lumber into the doctor’s office behind our children. If we all were aware of our own potential power as citizens, at the local and national level. If “Mother” were actually a professional title, like “Teacher,” “Pastor,” “Rabbi” or “Doctor” — one which acknowledges the hard-won learning and experience gained by possessors of the designation.

If all that were part of our national sensibility … Obamacare? Bah. We would have upped and demanded the real universal shit a long time ago.

Circa July 10, 2011

This morning, while swinging on a handrail she was not supposed to swing on, my six-year-old lost her grip, skidded down our front steps and scraped her back on the sidewalk. After much screaming, then some cleaning, gauzing and taping, she decided she was still okay to go to zoo camp, so off she went.

She came home this afternoon in a horrible mood. I was in the kitchen when she stormed in; her dad stuck his head in after her to tell me he was working outside and our daughter was taking a break until her attitude changed.

I heard rustling on the stairs, and came to the front hallway to see her facing upstairs with her shirt off, her back smeared with Neosporin, the bandage box on the step in front of her, and one hand fumbling behind her to place a new square of gauze over the wide wound on her lower back. In her other hand she held the bank of medical tape; she was trying to rip it with her teeth.

“This won’t rip!” she complained bitterly.

“Um,” I said, “do you want help?”

“NO!” The gauze slipped to the floor while she continued to bite at the tape. She bent to pick up the gauze and again reached blindly around the back of her body to re-position it. “Can you just hold this here –“

I took the gauze from her fingers, removing a dirty piece of leaf that had ridden up from the floor on the bandage and was now sticking to her scrape.

“Do you want me to put the bandage on for you? It’s hard to see what you’re doing behind your – “

“NO!” She snatched the gauze from my hand again and smashed it against her back. It stuck precariously to the ointment as she bit again into the medical tape and yanked her mouth sideways, finally ripping off a piece. Then she reached both hands behind her and, with a little snort of exertion, pulled the tape across the square of gauze on her wound, pressing the ends against her skin.

One piece down, she reached for the tape roll to start the process again. I knew I should go away; I was useless here. But I was riveted. It was like watching a bear cub running to escape a lion on “Call of the Wild:” You can’t do a damn thing, but you can’t look away, either. You silently will the ineffectual camera crew to help that cub, but they can’t any more than you can; that would mess with the Natural Order of things and they would get fired. So it is sometimes with mothers.

Hells bells. Is there a lower age limit for “Survivor”? My daughter and I could go on together: she’d have to survive the wilderness and I’d have to survive motherhood. Never mind — she’d kick my ass.

It sounds like the beginning of a Jewish mother joke: Mom died on May 2, which will always fall twelve days or less before Mothers’ Day: “In case you should forget to call on Mothers’ Day - maybe at least you’ll remember to visit my grave!”

I wonder if Mom would have thought that was funny. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about Mothers’ Day, but she did have some favorite Jewish mother jokes (“Whatsa matter, you don’t like the other one?”). I think those jokes spoke to her about the women she grew up with. Not so much her own mother, who burned every meal and went to the office every day until she was seventy-two. Grandma didn’t really fit the homebound, guilt-inducing, Jewish mother stereotype. 

Well, maybe the guilt-inducing part; now that I think of it, the young Grandma was, I’m told, a master of The Silent Treatment. According to my mom, once my grandma got angry she was capable of not speaking to her daughters for weeks. Whether those were temporal weeks or felt weeks remains unclear. Either way I’m glad I missed growing up in that household.

By the time I knew my grandma, she had softened into a doting bundle of unconditional love whose grandchildren could do no wrong. She once allowed an eight-year-old me and my friend to tie her to a tree in an extended game of cowboys and Indians, prompting a passerby to ask her if she needed help. Gasping with laughter, she explained that no, it was her granddaughter who had tethered her to the dogwood. In retrospect, I fear for her – I have no recollection of my eight-year-old brain having any concern at all about tying a seventy-year-old woman to a tree. I do recall that at one point she said she had to go to the bathroom; I do not remember how that ended.

I guess many folks are different people for their grandkids than they were for their kids. The two biggest things I remember about my mom’s mom were her vast, bottomless love for us kids, and my mom’s fights with her. All their fights seemed to consist of Mom yelling at Grandma about one of a set of age-old grievances that had been triggered by, but had little to do with, something my grandma had just done or said.

That’s how we roll with mothers. My mom once told me that she always felt she and her mom had a great phone relationship – they could talk for hours about all kinds of things - but in person they would always fight. Mom wanted it to be different with her and me.

She told me this over the phone.

I try, I really try, to figure out which of the things I’m doing will later drive my daughter to drugs, therapy or lacrosse. I want to correct them before they happen. I don’t want my daughter to spend her early adulthood hating me, because let’s be frank: that’s as much time as I’ll have with her – if we’re lucky. This is the downside of having had her at age thirty-seven.

There is another downside: A month away from six years old, she is done with me being hip.

“Mom,” she says, “Don’t dance where people can see you.”

So much for the mooney-eyed days of mommy-worship. Not fair. I swear I thought my mom was cool until I was at least ten. She had me when she was twenty-six; this must have scored her at least a few more years of hip than I’ve had.

I’m not sure at which point my mom got cool again. I started needing her in a different way when I switched careers and was suddenly following her path. And as she became less and less able to help, I had to rely increasingly on my buried knowledge from years of watching her do her thing: directing choirs, leading singing, teaching, counseling people.

After she died, I called the people she’d taught. And I made things up. Sometimes stuff seemed to pop out of nowhere.

Here’s the thing I miss most about my mom: my mom. I miss having her here, outside of my brain. I’m tired of having to conjure her all the time. I’m tired of having to make her voice in my head say the thing I think she would have said or the thing I need her to say. I’m tired of knowing how much she is inside me. I want her to be outside me, where I can see her.

“Mama, I want to see you,” says my two-and-a-half year old, who has descended the stairs to find me in the kitchen, even though he knows I’m coming up in five minutes to put him to bed. “Where are you, Mama? I want to see your face.”

We used to sing a song in the women’s choir that roughly translated to, “The day is not right when I don’t see my mother.” My mom was sick at the time and I couldn’t sing it. I couldn’t admit that once she was gone, no day would ever be right again.

Meghan O’Rourke writes of her second motherless Mothers’ Day; “Am I really she who has woken up again without a mother? Yes, I am.”

That is a hard me to accept.

This is easier: Last week, after one of her occasional visits to the choir I now direct, my daughter says, “Mama, I have an exercise for your choir! I’ll divide them into groups, and then you teach them ‘put your finger on your finger on your finger’” — she sings the Woody Guthrie line, then repeats it, modulating up a half step, and another half step, like we do in vocal warm-ups, her pointer fingers touching and climbing the air with each modulation. “But don’t do it until next time I’m there, okay, Mama? And I’LL divide them into the groups. Okay?”

“Okay, sweetie. Great idea.”

This is being an adult. My mother is dead a year now. A 20-year-old around the corner has been shot. His blood is on the sidewalk. His mother, who lives in the building, comes out in her bathrobe. Five police around him but no one touching him until she comes out. She holds his head. She talks to him, and he talks back. She holds his head and talks to him while the medic finally arrives, puts on her gloves and gingerly pulls down the back of his pants – we can see his backside and we know he has been shot there, but we cannot see his wounds. We cannot not see his wounds because it is night. When we got there, running from our kitchen, he was lying on his side. This was before his mom got there. He rolled a bit so we knew he was alive. We saw the blood that had spread beneath him, silvery in the streetlight like puddles of water. We could not see that it was red.

His friend jumps around madly – on the sidewalk, up to the porch and back down. “Oh shit. Oh shit Oh shit.” Neighbors spill out of houses. Another friend walks up. I recognize the second friend. He deals. He knows everyone on the block.

“Who was hit? Is that Zoo?!”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s Zoo!” the first friend answers.

“Oh man!” the second friend exclaims, “That kid never hurt no one!”

I turn to the young women on the porch of the corner house, the house that Zoo’s mom came out of. One of them holds a baby.

“Are you related to him?”

“No, we live in the same building.”

“That’s his mom?”

“Yeah.”

The ambulance team arrives last. They take a long time to lift him and carry him away, an oxygen bag attached to his mouth. Once they leave, a homicide suit talks with the mom, tiny notebook in hand. The mom goes inside, re-emerges dressed, with her purse.

“My other son is coming to get me from South Philly,” she explains to us on the porch. We tell her we will pray for her son. We ask his name. She thanks us and tells us his name, then walks down the stairs, stepping around the silvery pools of her son’s blood on the sidewalk.

I think of my son, sleeping. Of my daughter, awakened by the gunshots, and no doubt kept awake by the helicopters hovering. Her father is with her, while I stand on the neighbors’ porch in the night, watching and watching. What will we tell her? I wonder.

What will we tell ourselves? Tomorrow? In a week? Tomorrow I will bake something and leave it for the mom. Tomorrow we will walk our children the other way to school, avoiding police tape and dried blood. Tomorrow, the blood on the sidewalk, what is left of it, will be red or brown. Not silver.

This is the adult part: being on the front line of this knowledge; no cushion. We ARE the cushion. Only we stand between our children and this. And not for long.

Here’s a recent song of mine, “Ohr,” performed at the Jewish Folk Arts Festival of Greater Washington 2011. It will be on the upcoming CD from that concert, along with music by many other musicians, my sister among them! Special thanks to Deb, Danny and Ben for adding their magic to this arrangement!

Ain’t no shame in the mama game. Below is the product of, yet again, way too many hours spent at the computer sometime between the 8:00 p.m. nurse and the 4:30 a.m. nurse. Yes, I did send it.

Dear [DIRECTOR’S NAME] and [LIASON’S NAME],
 
First of all, I want to tell you how much I am enjoying teaching the Monday music class at [ORGANIZATION’S NAME]. It makes my week! The kids and caregivers seem to really be enjoying it, too.
 
Secondly, I write in the spirit of open discussion. [LIASON’S NAME] brought to my attention yesterday that a couple of parents from the music class complained about my nursing my son after class was over. As a solution, [LIASON’S NAME] offered me the use of alternate, more private rooms in the building where I could breastfeed if I wanted to.
 
From the sound of it, breastfeeding has never happened before in the several years you’ve been running a music class for 0-2 year-olds. I find this surprising. Just since I began teaching the class in September, there have been four different participating mothers (besides me) who have nursed their children before, during or right after music class. When you run a class for infants and small children, breastfeeding comes with the territory. In fact, it has felt important to me to have the class be a safe place for mothers to nurse when they need to. That can mean the difference between having to leave in the middle of class because a child is hungry, and being able to simply duck to the side of the room while still benefiting from the class which the mother has paid for. And to be able to breastfeed right before or after class can be what makes it possible to come at all with a small child; for women who breastfeed, it is so hard go anywhere when they have to worry about getting to a private place in time for each feeding.
 
It is perhaps in light of this that our City Fair Practices Ordinance is very specific about the right to breastfeed, in an un-segregated way, in any area that is open to the public, whether publically or privately owned. It even specifies that this right holds whether or not the nipple is covered or incidentally showing. And it specifies that this right applies to the employees of any workplace; that is, to ask a breastfeeding mother – visitor or employee - to remove herself to a more private space is as egregious as asking someone to segregate herself because she is gay or black.
 
I raise this not for the sake of being litigious with you, which is not my intent at all; my goal is to raise awareness of the fact that in situations like the one this week, it is actually discrimination to privilege the discomfort of the complainant over the right of the breastfeeding mother.
 
I appreciate that it was awkward for [LIASON’S NAME] to be in the position of bringing the complaint to my attention yesterday; it certainly wasn’t his fault that people complained. However, after thinking about it, I’ve come to believe that this complaint never should have reached me at all. It is the responsibility of [ORGANIZATION’S NAME] to support a breastfeeding patron or employee in the face of such a complaint. That means explaining to the complainant what the law is, not placing the onus on the breastfeeding mother to change her behavior. All legality aside, I can guarantee you that in a class for 0-2 year-olds, you will make more friends with this practice than you will lose.
 
I have no idea if the complaint was about me specifically because I am the teacher - the professional in the room - and breastfeeding may seem to some people unprofessional. Or if it was because my child is a toddler, and breastfeeding him may have seemed to them inappropriate. Either way, the reason this language is in the law is specifically to challenge commonly-held, but nonetheless discriminatory, notions about what is professional or appropriate when it comes to breastfeeding.
 
I will mention here that I do not ever breastfeed during class. Nor immediately after class, while I am still interacting with kids who want to touch my guitar or caregivers who want to ask questions. The few times I’ve breastfed my son have been well after class, with just a few people, often other breastfeeding moms, left in the room. I mention this only because it makes the complaint about my breastfeeding seem even more random and strange.
 
I hope that this has provided you with food for thought and discussion, and I look forward to hearing your response.
 
Thanks!

It is fascinating to FB post a photo of a blinged-out toddler in his jammies and watch as, second by second, the “like”s start pouring in. In the eleven minutes since I posted a(n admittedly very cute) photo of my son, six people have responded. (Okay, so that’s a lot for me – a little tolerance, people.)

Most of the time, I post to the ether. No one (except Eden) responds right away; usually no one responds at all. I’m not ruffled by it; folks must just miss my posts … I post at weird hours. Yeah, that’s it.

And then Cute Toddler Portrait #800 lays bare the truth: People are ON LINE and they see shit RIGHT AWAY. Okay, fine.

Unsurprisingly, the posts that have generated the most response have been the ones with no words — just photos of my kids. The lesson it seems I should learn from this is to shut up. And post more kid pics.

There was one exception: the post about the mom who brought her kids to the neighborhood playground with a whip and a slingshot. That, I think, generated the largest number of responses, not least because it sounded like the beginning of a Marx Brothers joke.

BTW, cute child post 37 minutes ago: 10 responses.

I feel like I need a Philip Cohen data graph here to chart all my FB response rates and illustrate, in a brilliantly understated way, what exactly can be learned about the art of FB posting. Alas, I am way too lazy to graph this. Which is why I am a poet, not an academic. So, based on nothing but my spurious, incoherent observations and the meanderings of my rambling mind, here are a few things I’ve learned about said art:

FB learning curve #1:

People like photos of children. And bizarre juxtapositions of children and 15th century farm weapons.

FB learning curve #2 (this was actually learning curve #1):

Don’t write long shit, don’t write humorless shit. One of my first posts to FB was some unbelievably self-righteous rant about I don’t even remember what, no doubt something political. When I hit the character limit with my intro, I was incredulous. How dare they limit my expression? What, after all, was the point of FB if you couldn’t bore everyone with a long, smarmy diatribe?

I learned quickly that on FB there is a very particular, SHORT type of diatribe with which you are supposed to bore people, when you are not boring them with the details of your lunch. You can be political, but if you take longer than six words to do it you start to sound desperate. Not cool.

Which leads me to FB learning curve #3:

Be cool. Flaming on e-mail is obnoxious; flaming on FB is just, well, you look like an idiot. The latter is way worse. Maybe because it’s in front of all your friends - past and present - instead of on some anonymous gardening list-serv. Or maybe it’s because your picture is suddenly attached to your dumb assertions. Whatever it is, that’s the nature of FB: The world is your high school. You really don’t want to look like a jackass.

And that’s a good thing.

In short, I may have been a dweeb in high school but from FB I have learned the following invaluable life lessons: post kid pics, edit my ass, and be cool. As for all the other crap, I save it for the blog.

Cute child post 1 hour ago: 14 responses.

Thank God for Facebook; without it, I’d never emote. That thing where you laugh so hard you start crying, but really crying? Nowadays, that happens to me every time I laugh really hard. Every single friggin’ time. Without fail. It’s like being pre-menstrual all year. So every time I see something really funny on Facebook I end up bawling.

Here’s the thing about laughing: It gets you unawares. Here you are guffawing merrily at some friend’s stupid joke, and then bam! Your body can’t tell the difference between mirth and grief and suddenly your whole life is spilling out of your gut.

Don’t get me wrong – sad things make me cry. But sad things in real time; not sad things on Facebook. Super sad on line just doesn’t quite reach – I read, acknowledge, but even if it hits exactly on my saddest thought it won’t bring me to tears. Most of the time, sad on the computer doesn’t fully, well, compute.

But funny? That’s another story.

A friend’s kid sneaked onto her dad’s Facebook account and typed, supposedly in his voice, something hilariously damning — particularly hilarious because the kid’s post exhibited exactly the same irreverence that defined my friend 26 years ago when I knew him. So I’m reading, and as the joke dawns on me I start laughing – and laughing, and laughing, and tears are flowing, and my belly contracts, and suddenly I am remembering a night in 2004 with my sister and a different, beloved friend who is now dead – sitting in our beds, cracking jokes about the end of our lives and laughing uncontrollably until we were – yep - bawling. I start thinking about all the funny things I wish I could tell my dead friend, and then, bam: Five minutes after logging onto Facebook I am a heaving, sobbing puddle.

Here’s the beauty of it: I do that for about twenty minutes. Then I check my e-mail. And I feel pretty relieved. Tired, but relieved. I forgive myself for not getting much done for the rest of the day.

Think of all the money I’m saving on therapy.

In college I lived across the hall from a woman who would lock herself in her room once a week, mist her plants, and cry. The first time I passed her door, I was mystified by the sound: psss, psssss, ahee hee hee hee; psss, pssss, ahee hee hee. I knocked, asking if she was all right. She didn’t answer, just continued: psss, pssss, ahee hee hee …

Later she explained to me what she was doing. The weekly catharsis cleansed her, she said, made her feel good. I thought it was weird but also kind of genius. It takes a lot of intentionality to work that into your routine.

The great thing is, checking Facebook takes no intentionality; it is a DIVERSION. I go in for pleasure and I get my emotional workout as a bonus. Brilliant, Zuckerburg. You have not given me a community, but you have provided enough of the illusion of one that when the occasional really funny thing comes along I feel safe enough to laugh hysterically — which, in turn, paves the way to expressing other emotions. Of course, I do all this emoting alone, at my computer. Which is pathetic. But let’s face it: Some crying has to be done alone. Just ask my college hallmate.

Damn you, Zuckerburg. The thought of all the money you’re making off my mid-day catharses makes me want to plotz. I cringe to think of all the manipulation necessary to make your project run. But here I am, using your platform, again. Just knowing there is a crowd out there of fellow whateverers motivates me to write to them. And sometimes, what they write sends me, by detour, to the deepest places.