The Hope Speech

When I was in high school in Lexington, Kentucky, my mom would look for competitions for me. Anything that had to do with science, essay writing, or speech making. She believed I could win anything the way only a mom could believe. It turned out I could win a lot of the time. I had pretty good smarts. My parents gave me more encouragement, financial support, and guidance than any other parents I knew of. While most kids from my school worked behind grocery store counters after class, I was at a table with a calculus tutor or pipetting DNA samples into a PCR machine at a laboratory or reading Tolstoy. The other reason I won so much was that sometimes only one or two other students showed up to the competition. You start to recognize the five other kids in the state with parents like yours. If you show up enough, you’re going to win something. A certificate, a plaque, a trophy, two hundred dollars, a trip to Pittsburgh.

With this one extemporaneous speech competition, it seemed like there was nothing to lose but a couple of hours of our time. No preparation needed, it’s off the top of your head. My mom and I drove to the location – an American Legion Post not far from our house. I hadn’t really thought much about it beforehand. I spent my whole life in the South. I was almost always the only Indian in the room. Almost always the only person of color wherever I went. So even when I walked into the hall and saw that it was full of old white men, I didn’t blink. Only one other student – a white male – showed up to the competition. Like I said, if you go to enough of these things, your odds are pretty good. I was ready. Ready to extemporize.

The hall really filled up with veterans. We’re talking World War II GIs. The greatest generation. Children of the Great Depression, victors over the Nazis. A man gave me and the other student a piece of paper with the topic spelled out. It said – the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. My first reaction was relief that I knew all the amendments to the constitution. And the thirteenth amendment – that’s a really important one, the first of the three post-Civil War amendments to free American slaves. I was thinking, at least I have a grasp of what the topic is. But after that second of relief, I really felt my brown skin sticking to my skinny body. What was I to say about slavery to old white men in Lexington, Kentucky, a city that sided with the Confederates, a city that was Jim Crow when these men were kids?

There was a coin toss. Or maybe it was by alphabetical order. The other student had to speak first. I was sent off to a back room so I would not be able to hear and have an advantage by being able to respond. Even so, I could hear little bits of what the other student said. He clearly did not know what the thirteenth amendment was. He never mentioned slavery. Never mentioned the Civil War. He was just ranting about Bill Clinton. He said Clinton was a Nazi.

When they called me out, I stood silently for a few seconds and looked at the audience. The stony-faced aged warriors staring back at me! Then I gave the speech of my life. I will never be that good again. I said, the United States has a stain on its history. I said, slavery was a travesty of justice. I said, inequality and oppression were enshrined in the founding document of our nation. That we should feel shame that the founding fathers, who spoke out against tyranny and created the great institutions of democracy that we still benefit from, failed to stop slavery. That they agreed to count slaves as three-fifths of a human being. That the injustices slaves faced were of the very worst kind. So bad that we might ask if it is possible to rise above that past.

With a few minutes left in the allotted time, I shifted tack and said that the thirteenth amendment was perhaps the most important of all the amendments. The greatness of our constitution, I said, and the greatness of our country is the capacity to change. Even though that amendment alone was not the end of discrimination and inequality, I said we should celebrate the incredible sacrifice that went into changing the law of the land and abolishing slavery. The very ability of this country to rise out of its slave-holding past, I said, was proof that we could rise above any challenge. That was what I said. I didn’t realize how much hope I had until I spoke about it to those old white men.

The MC who had run the competition said we should wait for the results. There were three judges at a table and they needed to confer. Well, we waited. And waited. More than thirty minutes passed. Finally, the MC announced that the other student won. My face got hot. I wanted to go home, but my mom – I think it was her not me – wanted to find out what happened. So she kept asking the MC questions until he gave us the actual results from the three judges. It turned out the competition was designed for a multitude of contestants, not just two. Each judge gave a score out of 100 for each speech. Two of the judges gave me the higher score. The third judge gave me a zero and the other student a 100. When they added the scores up, the other student came out on top.

I went home thinking about the irony of the whole damn thing. I was asked to speak about the end of slavery and what I got in return was mathematical proof for the continued existence of hate and discrimination. My mom and I talked about appealing. We could write letters to the national headquarters of the American Legion, but we gave that idea up.

This whole memory was buried away for years. A blip in my comfortable life. With the Obama campaign, it started to resurface. I heard that belief in hope expressed with stunning eloquence in his Iowa victory speech. And again when he conceded the New Hampshire defeat. MaGreen and I saw Obama with 20,000 other people in an arena when he came to Houston. And I thought, the country has changed. It is ready for the Hope Speech. Ready for a consensus about the grave injustices of our past and ready for the possibilities that come of reconciliation. But when the Wright videos surfaced and the TV people heaped scorn on Obama, I remembered the American Legion experience the way it happened. That judge, the one judge.

The consolation I speak to myself is that if the winner of that extemporaneous speech competition had been chosen by an up-or-down vote, I would have won. Won, you hear. As in the bigots would have gone home crying. I say to myself, the not-so-great of the greatest generation are almost all dead along with the great ones. I hear Will.I.Am singing in my head, singing yes we can.

Baby Steps to Green Parenting

After dinner last night, BabyG walked for the first time. That is, in my opinion, she walked for the first time. It has been a longer process for her than for her toddler friends. She has taken steps before. She has pushed her stroller for blocks. She has traversed without assistance the distance between the couches, but that’s not “walking for the first time.” We always had to get her started and encourage her. This evening I took BabyG to the Rothko Chapel. There’s a large paved area between the Broken Obelisk and the chapel itself. At first, I held BabyG’s hand as we walked around this area together, but then she let go of her own accord. She walked towards the pool around the obelisk. When she fell and whined, I offered my hand and she said, “No!” Then she got up, brought her feet closer together, and began walking again. She fell and raised herself up. She walked for some twenty minutes occasionally asking to rest on a bench. A couple of time, I took off her shoes and let her dangle her feet in the pool.

I feel hugely relieved that she's walking. It's one of those montage moments in a syrupy movie, flashy through scenes from the beginning - MaGreen moaning in the delivery room, BabyG rolling over in her Grandpa's house, BabyG learning to toss her wrist from Uncle Chuck...Who was I two years before BabyG was born, back when we started this blog? I'm astonished by how much we've changed. Astonished, and a little self-congratulatory. Also, I recently read Christine Gardner's post called Baby Steps to Green Parenting on Gristmill, which got me thinking about making a list of steps. So here we go. In honor of BabyG's steps, I offer five baby steps to Green Parenting.

1) Seek Complementarity

Consider what ideals or principles you have besides environmentalism. For us, gender equality in our own household over the long term is a must. So is living joyful, creative, and expressive lives. That means for everyone – MaGreen, BabyG, and me. Amartya Sen’s capability approach and Martha Nussbaum’s working list of core capabilities helped me think more completely about just what our goals are. Then, when we considered our lifestyle and our choices as parents, we looked for things that matched up with all our hopes, i.e. complementarity. For example, buying our food at the local co-op and at nearby farmers’ markets means tastier and cheaper food, a stronger sense of community with our neighbors, and a lower impact on the environment. If you find yourself consistently using words like “trade-off” or “sacrifice,” you may not be on the right track. I think looking for complementarity is the best way to begin.

2) Baby Proof Grandma Style

Every handbook on parenting says that you should go through your house and lock up your poisonous cleaning supplies. Why just lock up your poisons? Why are there poisons in our houses at all? The more MaGreen read up on what our cleaning supplies were made of, the more horrified she was. Then she started to have fun making cleaning supplies from vinegar and baking soda like her Grandma used to. I’ve learned from MaGreen’s playful experimentation. I never thought cleaning supplies could take on so much meaning. Check out MaGreen’s guide to cleaning supplies. I think this is another good example of complementarity. Your wallet wins, the health of your whole family wins, the environment wins, and you don’t have to commit much more time than “non-Green Parents” do to baby-proofing.

3) Celebrate Often

Every day I hear about some innovative way to celebrate holidays, birthdays, achievements, recoveries, or whatever else in environmentally and socially responsible ways. The reason I think that celebrating is central to Green Parenting is that it can build communities of love and support around you, it can reaffirm your identities, and it can transform your lifestyle, all while you enjoy yourself. For example, check out our gift giving guide and MaGreen’s compilation of 1st-year birthday cake recipes.

4) Try Lazy Composting and Incompetent Gardening

One of my favorite schools of environmentalist thought is permaculture. I’ve never read a permaculture book, attended a permaculture class, or joined a permaculture society, but I think I understand its central tenet – tap into the ecological systems around you. What I like is that it sounds like an advanced form of laziness and stinginess to me. For example, when we wanted to compost, we didn’t buy an $80 bin from Home Depot. We just started to bury our peelings in the backyard. I found digging the little holes strangely satisfying. Then we became more confident, so we leaned some shipping pallets we found in a lot against each other and we piled all our yard waste, along with our peelings, in this make-shift bin. The compost didn’t get hot. No teaming masses of red worms. We didn’t even turn it regularly. But just about anywhere except the desert, if you leave out a pile of clippings and peelings, it turns to black gold in a few months.

Once you have compost, no reason not to start gardening. I didn’t have any experience gardening, so I really messed up most of my plantings. But the few plants that have defied my incompetence gave us wonderful food and an intense feeling of satisfaction. Between the decay of composting and the birth of gardening, there’s a good chance you might find what you need as an overburdened parent. I hope you can hear complementarity bells ringing. If you want to read more, check out our collection of writing on composting and gardening.

5) Join Collective Actions

Hate to say it, but your own actions and those of your family will not save us from environmental collapse or propel us into a utopic world of social justice. One of the main reasons to systematically green your lifestyle is that your choices connect you with other people. Half the friends we have, we met through activism. And networks of individuals can change social norms. We can, as groups, force governments and multi-national institutions to change the rules of production, trade, consumption, and waste. Sierra Club and Avaaz.org online petitions count, but a meeting in the park with your neighbors who support light rail is better. Avoid caustic activists, but don’t give up on activism.

These five points are not exhaustive, of course. I’m just suggesting some initial steps. Start with what’s easiest and most obvious, then go step by step. I’m completely amazed by how much we have changed since MaGreen became pregnant. BabyG has motivated us – not to “sacrifice” or “give up luxuries” – but to actually pay attention to our well-being. We haven't arrived, but we're walking.

A Problem with Natural Parenting

I imagine that many folks who come by this blog think of us, and themselves, as natural parents. It’s a popular category. At least two major parenting magazines use the term “Natural Parenting” or something like it. There’s Natural Parenting and Mothering Magazine: The Magazine of Natural Family Living. There’s also the term “Nature Mom,” which I associate with a mother who is against circumcision, vaccines, pesticide-laden food, and products that use synthetic scents. I also think of nature moms wearing their babies in slings, co-sleeping, breastfeeding at Starbucks, cloth diapering, staying at home, home schooling, hiking, and hiding their TVs in the closet. I’m very, very sympathetic with many of these positions and practices, but not all of them. One reason we have called this blog Green Parenting is to develop new kinds of language to explore some of the difficult decisions where we don’t end up falling in the natural parenting category.

Here’s an example of what I am talking about. An article about the effects of lavender, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, made it to the headlines of major US news outlets a couple of weeks ago. (See the WebMD article about it.) I think one reason the story got so much attention is because it exposes a problem with the idea of natural parenting. The article reported that three boys who used lavender products developed breasts and when they stopped using the products their breasts disappeared. Lavender apparently boosts or mimics estrogen while hampering androgens. The findings indicate that lavender, like certain plastics and cosmetics, disrupts the endocrine system.

I don’t think this report should be a huge surprise to people who use lavender products regularly. It’s well known that lavender has a soothing and relaxing effect, which must be because of a rather sophisticated chemical (i.e. hormonal) interaction with our bodies. And it’s also associated with sexuality. So the report basically confirms folk knowledge. I still drink lavender tea. I like to feel relaxed. I guess my testosterone levels need some readjustment on occasion. But I’m not a pubescent boy. My body is not growing rapidly. My cells are not responsive in the same way as a fifteen-year-old’s. Parents have to pay special attention to both natural and synthetic products because children’s bodies are constantly in a state of transformation. If some boy wants breasts, I'm fine with him drinking lots of lavender tea. But we shouldn't fool ourselves about "natural" products.

Going natural does not guarantee good health. Nature can be toxic. Nature includes poisonous plants. Nature includes diseases like polio that cripple thousands of children every year. Naturalness should not exempt products from our careful scrutiny. I know most natural parents know this already. Most readers of Mothering Magazine are not dogmatic or inflexible. We try to be thoughtful, consider multiple sources of information, and balance our decisions. I just would like to see more discussion of how the term “natural” has its limitations.

The Capability Approach and Parenting

I have planned on writing this post for several months but never get to it, partly from being busy and also from fear of misrepresenting a complicated idea. I want to be very ambitious about Green Parenting. I don’t want to only write about planting a tree or going hiking with my baby. I don’t only want to write about swapping vinegar from Windex. I want to think about parenting in the broadest possible sense. What do I hope for my daughter? What do I hope for myself and my wife as parents? What are the parents’ and society’s obligations to the child?

When I think of these grand questions, the first answer that comes to my mind is very simple. I just want each of us to be happy. Then I have to wonder what happy means. Comfortable? Secure? Rich? Ensconced in a solar-powered mountain chalet? If I think hard about these answers, they all have problems. For example, I have known parents who sheltered their children in suburban homes and stockpiled massive trust funds, but the children did not thrive as adults. I know many sad, maladjusted children of wealthy families. That does not mean I want to abandon my questions. What is happiness? What is a dignified life? What is a meaningful life? A full life?

I think the Capability Approach can help us sort through these questions, even though it was not really developed as a parenting model. It was first conceived of by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Regular readers of this site might be familiar with Sen. He won the Novel Prize in Economics and I had the opportunity to interview him, the recording of which I posted on this blog. Nussbaum is a famous scholar at the University of Chicago, who writes about philosophy, law, feminism, and a wide range of other topics. Their collaboration has led to a burgeoning new area of inquiry and has already influenced the UN, the EU, and national governments. (Sen and Nussbaum were even married for some time and I like using a theory born of miscegenation to think about my miscegenating family.)

The Capability Approach focuses on an individual’s abilities to choose the kind of life they find meaningful. It focuses not just on legal rights, but on “doings and beings,” or outcomes and functionings. Nussbaum has suggested a tentative list of basic capabilities that we might discuss and come to a consensus about as the minimum standard for a life worth living. If you want to see the full list, check out her recent book Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership. Below is an abbreviated version of her list:

1. Life; being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length
2. Bodily health; being able to have good health
3. Bodily integrity; having one’s bodily boundaries treated as sovereign
4. Senses, Imagination and Thought; being able to use the senses, to imagine, think and reason
5. Emotions; being able to have attachment to things and people outside ourselves
6. Practical Reason; being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life
7. Affiliation; being able to live with and towards others, to recognise & show concern for other human beings
8. Other species; being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants and the world of nature
9. Play; being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities
10. Control over One’s Environment A) Political; being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life. B) Material; Being able to hold property [both land and movable goods] not just formally, but [with] real opportunity [for use].

What I like about the capability approach and this list is that the individual is envisioned as a social being whose well-being depends in part on government, economy, and social norms. Even though the approach was designed primarily to evaluate policies and statutes, I think it could be useful in many other contexts. For parenting, I think the list could be used not just to think about raising a child so that he or she has a life of dignity, but about parents as well.

This conception of parenting would be in contrast to popular theories of parenting which tend to be narrow. For example, attachment parenting valorizes the attachment between parent and child. It is often silent about the mother’s need for a fulfilling life and just about anything that does not relate to attachment. Ferber seems interested in a convenient schedule for the parent and a child who exemplifies the myth of American individualism. The American Pediatric Association guide is focused on the child's bodily health. Let’s think about well-being and about society, community, parents, and children together in the broadest and most substantial way we can.

A Recent Interview with My 11 Month Old

My Baby: Daddy, why haven’t you posted any of our conversations for the last two months?

Me: Ever since you actually started saying words, I’ve felt uncomfortable making up what you would say to me.

My Baby: Everyone knows that these “interviews” are just projections of your internal dialogue, a way of making your always-keep-it-complicated politics palatable…like when you tried to mix iron drops in my sweet potatoes. So why stop now? You should keep casting me as the Marxist Feminist, the naive radical without real experience in the world.

Me: You’re making me feel stupid.

My Baby: No, you’re making you feel stupid.

Me: Oh, right.

My Baby: Let’s pick up our conversation where we left off in October. I was saying that crises can also be opportunities. We live in a world where money and goods move from one country to another so fast that all social structures, including families, are always on the verge of collapse. You think your daddy has a good job in a Michigan car factory. Boom! That factory is on the Mexican border. Slam! It’s in China. Kablooeey! Myanmar. The union is gone and the health benefits are history. Daddy has to make ends meet and asks to mow the lawn of the CEO who moved the factory, but the Mexican guy who migrated here after his factory moved to China charges less.

Me: You’re depressing me.

My Baby: No, you’re depressing you.

Me: Right, I forgot.

My Baby: What you need to remember is that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) successfully organized the janitors in Houston and that they went on strike until their employers gave them contracts guaranteeing full-time work, health benefits, and a living wage. What you need to remember is that the Democrats took control of the US Congress and although that doesn’t mean fair trade policies will automatically prevail, it does mean our demands for protection of labor rights and the environment will not fall on completely deaf ears. What you need to remember is that even if the US government doesn’t change, the efforts of Brazil, India, and dozens of other developing countries, combined with the efforts of scholars, NGOs, and grassroots activists, have already stopped the Doha Round negotiations. What you need to remember is that mommy has way more opportunities to get a good job than she would have had fifty years ago and that the Salvadoran nanny we would have to hire because the government doesn’t provide childcare just might organize the other nannies with SEIU one day soon. Remember that Barrack Obama is just the beginning, that there are going to be legions of interracial leaders who seem to defy the old rules, people who don’t even remember when the world was divided between so-called capitalists and communists.

Me: I don’t know, BabyG. You’re just telling stories. The first story made me depressed. Now I’m supposed to be elated about the messed up world you are inheriting? You’re not even a year old, how can you tell me about hope?

My Baby: Our birthday is only three days away. I’ll be one. You’ll be twenty-nine. Together we’ll be thirty. That’s how old Jesus was when he taught the world about love and hope. This is a time to be excited.

Me: You’re right, I am excited. We’re going to get lots of presents! Boogey boogey boo, tickle tickle.

My Baby: Daddy, I feel like you are not listening to me.

Me: No, I am not listening to me. Ha! Got…me?

I Love My Poetic Husband

We've had a very stressful last week or so...BabyG got strep that turned into very mild scarlet fever...and was understandably, vociferously, and persistantly aggrieved...GreenDaddy got an unknown, draining sickness and a headache...I tried to study every spare moment...GreenDaddy's hardrive crashed with an already-three-days-late joint project on it...I started making the stressed-out grimace GreenDaddy hates...it rained inside my car which smells like rotting corpse breath, now...BabyG was too sick to do her favorite weekend-at-the-pool-with-Daddy routine...

And now my comps are a week away! I study every night until 2am because I get at least three, sometimes four hours of absolute alone time.

In all this muck, GreenDaddy wrote me a poem...And I wanted to post it because my concept of Green Parenting isn't just about junk mail, overgrown gardens, and the general lifestyle of dirty hippies: it's about relationships, and supporting not only the children in the family, but the grown-ups...and I feel so lucky to have a poetic, caring, supportive husband at this juncture that I could cross the street with my eyes closed.


A Great Vibration

When I took courses in physics I learned about particles
about the resonance of benzene rings
about the supposed measurability of all things
as if a meter exists for all phenomena
and if a given meter does not exist
it will be invented.

In philosophy courses I learned about limits to knowledge
about the failure of metaphors to describe the electron
about the difference between the wavelength for red
and the lived experience of redness
as if the connection between consciousness and the world
will never ever be understood.

And yet, at midnight last night,
when I walked out of the bedroom
there was a great vibration
not in the air
but in the substratum
in the ether
in the layer of the universe that Michelson and Morely
proved does not exist
and I could sense that it was coming from your head.

Your books were spread across the table
-- the classics, the masterpieces, the cannon! --
and you had turned them into something shimmering
like a thin layer of water
spilling over a dark stone.






 

A Recent Interview with My Eight Month Old

Me: I’m not sure I want you to grow up thinking that we live in a Global Capitalist Patriarchy in perpetual crisis like you implied in our last interview. I want you to be happy. I want you to go hiking more than I have and spend less time shouting into megaphones.

My Baby: But Daddy, have you considered that another word for crisis is opportunity?

Me: I think I read that once in a Deepak Chopra book. Or did I hear that on the Oprah Winfrey show?

My Baby: I want you to be serious.

Me: OK. So you are saying that crises are openings. Ways out. Chances to create a different world. Opportunities to resist.

My Baby: Not just opportunities to resist, Daddy, but opportunities to live more joyfully.

Me: Give me an example.

My Baby: Well, we’ve talked about how capitalism tends to tear apart communities, social structures, and families. Even Sweden has elected a new government that plans on reducing state support to women and families on the grounds of making their economy more competitive in this era of globalization. It’s a race to the bottom. Families are preserved only in so far as they hide costs like childcare. On the other hand, as Rosemary Hennessey points out in Profit and Pleasure, women in paid employment can often live outside of traditional kinship ties. They can choose to refuse marriage. They can choose to be lesbians. They can choose to enter a heterosexual marriage. They can choose to leave one.

Me: So you want to be a lesbian?

My Baby: Would you be OK with that if I did?

Me: I want you to try to create the most meaningful and joyful life for yourself as possible. If that meant being a lesbian, I’d be fine with that.

My Baby: What if I think being a cheerleader for a professional American football team is the most meaningful and joyful life I can live?

Me: No.

Living Small

I'm not a habitual ranter, but I feel one coming on. The New York Times ran an editorial today with the title, "Sinful Second Homes." The piece derides those environmentalists who keep second homes – most notably Al Gore, who actually has three homes if you count his family farm.

I not only have a problem with people who keep second homes, I have a problem with people who have a single home. MaGreen and I live in half a home – a two-bedroom apartment. Granted, we own the place and there's a yard, but it is still a two-bedroom apartment, a little unit in a building split down the middle. Every baby book I've read has a section on preparing "the baby's room." Our baby does not have a room. Why does she need a room? She's only seven months old. I don't even have a room. There's the living room, the office with a spare single bed, the bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen.

Why don't we move to the suburbs where we could easily get a four-bedroom place for the same price? I couldn't bicycle to work. We couldn't walk to our friends' places. We couldn't walk to the Gay Pride Parade or to restaurants, grocers, bars, and schools. We just couldn't walk. The more I walk and ride my bicycle, the more strongly I hate the car-centered lifestyle that I grew up in. It's a prison. The most stunning aspect about my life on bicycle and on foot has been how social it is. I meet people.

I want gigantic house owners to feel bad. MaGreen and I spent the last three days cleaning our apartment. It's hard to keep a place clean when you're packed into it. All space is at a high premium. There is no room – as in physical space – for nostalgia. You can't keep all the ragged shirts of your childhood or the ridiculous collection of knickknacks you've accumulated. You have to pick two or three and chuck the rest. I feel like wealthy people have squandered all the world's resources on creating giant storage spaces. We air-condition formal living room sets, formal dining tables, and closets full of completely useless junk like battery-powered polar bears that clap to the tune of jingle bells.

When I was in Utah with MaGreen and BabyG, we spent the day in the hospital with MaGreen's step-mother. In the evenings, we packed up MaGreen's parent's house, because they had just sold it and needed to move out within the month. My job was to go through the basement. As I went through box after box of porcelain turtles, I couldn't help but think of a lack of space as a saving grace. Having a giant basement and five extra rooms encourages junk collecting. At the hospital, I saw all the new equipment for America's increasingly obese population. This wheelchair was stationed right outside of the hospital room. BabyG's body in that gigantic wheelchair – it just set me to thinking about living small.

Maybe one day soon, our family won't fit into our half-house even more than we're not fitting into it now. Maybe MaGreen will get a high-paying job. The house will start cracking from the pressure and we'll move to a country home with a staircase just for show. But in the meantime, I'm going to lord our lean, green apartment over all the hypocritical environmentalists who have whole houses.

A Recent Interview with My Six-Month-Old Daughter

Me: I'm glad we could sit down to talk again.

My Baby: I'm not going to talk unless you hold me…eeeeee…eeeeee…

Me: Upsy-daisy!

My Baby: OK, that's better. In our last interview, you said that you read depressing books about how childcare isn't valued so that you can work for change.

Me: That's right. It's important to be informed without becoming paralyzed by anger.

My Baby: Well, I know now how society could change so that it would be easier for us to be a happy family.

Me: Really how?

My Baby: First I have to tell a story. See, all the goddesses up above decided to have a contest among all the nations, a race. The nation that could get the farthest – not just a few individuals but all the people – would win. When the race started, one nation jumped to an early lead. All their people ran as fast as they could. Their fastest runners were way ahead. The children and old people tried to keep up. After a bit, though, the children and old people couldn't run at all. The fastest runners eventually got exhausted too and the nation as a whole clearly wouldn't win.

Another nation took the lead. They had set up a division of labor ahead of time. The men would do the hardest running and in return they were in charge. The women were expected to take care of the men, children, and elderly. Even though they were not ahead at first, they were able to move forward as a nation at a relatively fast pace. But the men did not put enough resources into supporting the women's caring labor. The women became exhausted and stifled by the work. If a woman wanted to become a full-time racer, she had to do the same amount of caring as always. As more women became dissatisfied, more energy went into crushing their voices and keeping men in charge. The second generation of men didn't want to be like their fathers always racing without spending time with family. The second generation of women refused to participate entirely.

Eventually, the goddesses noticed a third nation that had kept a steady pace and even gained momentum as the other nations slowed down. These people talked openly about taking care of each other ahead of time. Everybody's voices were given consideration including the elderly, women, and advocates for children. Men and women ended up sharing caring labor. Some women didn't do any caring labor. Some men did caring labor full-time. After several generations, this nation ended up winning the race, like the turtle that beat the hare.

Me: I like that story.

My Baby: The moral is that our society should be like the turtle nation.

Me: You should mention that you didn't make up that story. I think I must have been holding you in my lap when I was reading Nancy Folbre's book, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. You have to credit her with coming up with that story.

My Baby: I didn't think stories and ideas belonged to anybody. I thought they belong to the world. Just because someone gets a story published first, does that mean they own it? I don't think that's how the turtle nation did things.

Me: Nancy Folbre would probably encourage you to think critically about intellectual property rights, but it doesn't hurt to give people credit.

My Baby: Anyhow, I'd like you to put me down on my play mat so I can critically engage with those wooden toys over there.

A Recent Interview with My Five-Month-Old Daughter

Me: Your mom and I have been having a hard time balancing childcare, work, and taking care of ourselves. I feel like I’m failing.

My Baby: Daddy, you’re not alone. The problem is structural, not one of your own personal failure. Capitalism has turned time into a series of opportunity cost calculations. You and Mommy have to “spend” time on me by not making money through market labor. Mainstream economic models assume that any time “spent” outside the market is leisure. Although I know that you enjoy my cuddly goodness, much of the childcare you and mommy do is not leisure. It is unpaid and unvalued work.

Me: This is exactly what your mommy and I were afraid of. That you will think we always want to be doing something else besides taking care of you and that you have to compete for attention.

My Baby: Don’t worry so much, it’s probably good for me to have the need to compete for attention hardwired into my brain. Odds are that the world I have to navigate on my own will be at least as competitive as the world is right now. Our society and economic system take unpaid, caring labor for granted. We’re supposed to believe the market will magically solve every social problem, but what’s really going on is that women are expected to do childcare, breastfeeding, eldercare, housework, and civic work. Since you’re committed to sharing responsibilities with Mommy and you want Mommy to contribute to the family income, you’re getting a taste of what working women have experienced for decades. The double shift. Watching you and Mommy struggle is a good education for me.

Me: Where are you getting this from?

My Baby: You know how you like to use me as a book holder? Do you think I’m just looking at my chin or something?



Me: Oh baby, my moochie foochie poo, you can’t take what those books say as statements of immutable facts. If I knew you were reading them, I would have talked to you about why I read depressing things. Writers try to document problems so that we can work for change. You’ll see when you get older, all the knowledge you develop will help you effect change. Government policies can change. Social norms can change. The structure of the family and whole communities can change.

My Baby: You’re such an idealist Daddy. I love you.

A Recent Interview with My Four-Month-Old Daughter

Me: Do you like having green parents?

My Baby: Green parenting is not a static, achievable state of being. I question the stability of the very term "green parents." What I appreciate about this blog is that you conceive of raising me as a process. Green parenting is always coming into being, always undermining and rebuilding itself. You and mommy are constantly striving for and playing with a notion of greenness. You are not yet, and never will be, green parents.

Me: Well, do you like green parenting as process? You like it don't you?

My Baby: I inhabit a state of theory, perception, joy, discomfort, and discovery. I need. I learn. I enjoy or don't enjoy. I formulate worldviews. However, I cannot pick among possibilities. I have figured out how to put my foot in my mouth, but other than that you and mommy interpret my expressions and define my experiences. In short, I'm not yet accustomed to thinking in terms of choice, of like or not like.

Me: Choochee moochee poo! A choochee moochee poo…see I knew I could make you smile.

My Baby: You're funny daddy. I'll always smile for you.

Me: I'm really anxious about being your daddy. Sometimes I smile at you to cover up how worried I am about failing you.

My Baby: Daddy, I can see your smile, I can see the anxiety behind it, and I can see the oceans of dreams in which your fears are specks of sand. You should always remember that my well-being does not depend solely on you and mommy. There is also the world. The winds. Social norms. The laws of the nation. Parenting is the convergence of basic human concerns like love, resentment, food, and sleep; pre-capitalist constructs like religion; and modern developments like nation-states, global warming, and time becoming a series of opportunity cost calculations. This context is beyoond your control and you should not assume responsibility for what you cannot control.

Me: But isn't it my responsibility to understand as much as possible so that I can help us as a family to negotiate the world? Like you said, besides putting your foot in your mouth, you're not used to thinking like an agent, somebody who has to make choices that have long-term consequences.

My Baby: Get mommy. I'm hungry. Now.

A Blackspot Birth

My wife gave me new shoes on the day our baby girl was born. It was also my twenty-eighth birthday.

"Open your presents," she said between contractions. She's a show off, my wife.

In short, my daughter was born the same day I was, the same day I opened my Blackspot shoes.



Adbusters, the organization that makes the shoes, claims that they are "one of the world's most environmentally friendly shoes." The organic hemp fabric fits the contour of my foot snugly. The recycled tire soles are firm. They don't bounce and cushion like the gel-filled shoes I wear to run or walk long distances. I wear the Blackspots to work. I pedal in them down Dunlavy. Last week, another bicyclist called to me.

"Are those Blackspots?" he said. He had some on too. "You're the only other person I've seen wear them," he said. Now we greet each other whenever we pass. Maybe we'll have lunch. Become friends.

It's fitting that my wife gave me the shoes on the day our girl was born. Like our baby, the Blackspots were made by a union. That is, a unionized factory in Portugal that operates with decent labor conditions. Neither the shoes, nor our baby, were made by a corporation that maximizes profit at the expense of human well-being. Also like our baby, the Blackspots are vegetarian. No leather. My Blackspots seem to be growing too. The loose ends of the thread running down the center seam are fraying, getting longer by the day, like our baby's astonishing hair.

As a final comparison, note that in my family's culture we put a black spot on a baby's face to keep away bad luck. The black spot, or najar as we call it, is meant as a mark of imperfection so that evil spirits do not linger around those we love.

Last Three Weird Green Things (Mystery, The Obvious Boob Thing, & The Most Obvious(ly Cheesey?) Weirdly Green Thing of All))

4) Mystery: I'm still thinking about number 4.

5) The Obvious Boob Thing: My breasts make milk. After living so many years with my breasts fulfilling certain functions (like attracting...bees and... bouncing around during softball games) they have suddenly become utile in a much less abstract way. I have this very, very fat babe wholly due to the boob milk.

Related, very weird question (I actually have a lot of questions, but this sort of encapsulates all of them.): If I was on a desert island with scanty food sources, with a handful of people, would I be able to feed them all if I ate all the food and breastfed them? Or at least, would they live a little longer than they would if there was no breastfeeder?

6) The Most Obvious(ly Cheesey?) Weirdly Green Thing of All:

Something Like This:
Turned Into This:

If Your Mama's Belly Were the Globe

Today is Miah's due date, but still no signs of real labor. We're waiting eagerly. Mehul says that Miah should eat spicy food and the baby will want to come out. Well, while we're all waiting enjoy this silly poem I wrote for our baby.

If Your Mama’s Belly Were the Globe

You would be the deep inner core
the hidden center of all the world.
You would be the force of gravity
you would be the source of magma flow.
Your kicks would be earthquakes
crushing whole city states.
You would cause a sky-high geyser
each time you kick your mama’s bladder.
You would make a great big mountain
by pushing out her belly button.
You the goddess Mahabhumi to whom we pray
with the soles of our feet each and every day.
You the yearning burning fearsome churning
six billion trembling waiting for your coming.
Om bhur bhuvah swah: come now at this twilight hour
earth air fire water may this planet turn inside out .

Who’d Want to Be Gandhi’s Child?

Last weekend, anti-war activists in Houston were abuzz with activity. Dick Cheney was to speak at a fundraiser for Tom Delay at a luxury hotel in town on the coming Tuesday. The opportunity to create media coverage of the terrifying mélange of corruption, scandal, lies, and policies of war, economic exploitation, and torture that Cheney and Delay represent was very enticing to the activist community. Local groups that often refuse to work together converged. Moveon.org spurred its Houston area members to action. By most accounts, the protest was a huge success.

Miah and I, however, did not go to the protest. She could go into labor anytime and I’d had bronchitis for two weeks that was beginning to abate. It was not the time for us to stand in the cold with a sign as the police circled us on their horses. I still made a little contribution to the organizing effort by writing and designing a feature about the coming protest on a local news website.

Our parents were in town that weekend and they were a bit upset with my participation. “It’s not inconceivable that you could be locked away for this type of activity,” they said, “and now you have to think about your child.”

My response was that repression grows strongest when people are silent and that it is our duty to our child to speak out so that she does not grow up in a society that locks people up for voicing dissent. Still, I took my parents’ concern to heart. At what point does the parents’ obligation to keep their family safe outweigh everything else? I don’t know the answer to that question. I’m not sure there is a single answer. Clearly, parents in 1938 Germany faced a different set of choices than parents in 2005 Texas.

I actually don’t think safety is my biggest concern when it comes to activism and parenting. I’m more worried that the rigidity and inflexibility of belief that is required for activism – how else can people be sure enough of themselves to stand up to authority – is contrary to what is called for to parent well. Unqualified commitment to a set of ideals, whether its Evangelical Christianity or Green Anarcho-Feminism, is sure to create distance in families and rear children who are more perceptive of their family’s hypocrisies than their family’s love.

Gandhi’s eldest son, Harilal (pictured above), had an estranged relationship with his father for, what seems to me, legitimate reasons. For example, Gandhi opposed his son’s remarriage after his son’s first wife died on the grounds that he opposed marriage for the sake of sexual gratification. Though I admire Gandhi and read his writing closely, I would not have wanted him as a father. Not because I would have missed my father if he was in jail, but because I would not have wanted my childhood to be defined by my father’s uncompromising experiments with truth.

Green Parenting Starts in Bed

Beds in the United States are soaked in flame retardant chemicals called PBDE's, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers. Studies have shown that these chemicals build up in people’s bodies and are found in breastmilk. Baby mice that are exposed to PBDE’s suffer from disrupted brain activity, memory, hearing, and learning ability. Even low doses cause higher rates of hyperactivity in the mice. The European Union has banned some PBDE’s, but the United States has not. Here are a couple of articles on the subject: mindfully.org and LA Times repost.

After MaGreen found out how toxic regular beds in the US are, she started looking for alternatives. Our mattress was already old – I bought it when I was in college – and giving us back aches so it needed to be replaced anyway. You can find all kinds of alternatives if you do an internet search under “natural beds” or “eco beds”. However, we didn’t have a huge budget. Some of these natural beds go for over $2000. Initially, we decided to go with the nicest foam bed from IKEA, which at least meets the European standards on chemicals, but when we got to the store we found out Hurricane Katrina destroyed their bed warehouse.

Then MaGreen found a deal on eBay for a natural latex foam North Star mattress that was used for a few months as a display by The Savvy Sleeper. It was made by Amish people in Ohio. Here are the links about the process: treehugger.com and northstarbed.com. Basically, someone who lives near the equator collects sap from rubber trees. The Amish people froth it up and pour it over a mould. We bought a frame with wooden slats from IKEA to support the mattress.

Sorry this information isn’t as sexy as the title and picture suggest, but I think it’s a good example of complementarity. The bed is not toxic, less devastating to the environment than a regular bed, not made by anonymous workers in sweatshop conditions, and…hopefully a place where we will enjoy love and passion.

Principles of Green Parenting – Complementarity

Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote in his book Development as Freedom about how capabilities often reinforce each other. When he uses the word capabilities, he’s talking about what a person can be or do, like have bodily health, earn a decent income, and be able to participate effectively in politics. Sen gives a number of excellent examples of capabilities complementing each other. For example, if a person has a decent income, she will be better able to make healthy choices and buy medicines. If a person has bodily health, she will better able to earn a decent income.

I’m trying to think about Green Parenting in terms of complementarity too. Green Parenting, for MaGreen and I, has been and will be the intersection of several efforts: detoxifying our home; creating a family life that is environmentally friendly; working towards gender equity through pregnancy, birth, and childcare; making socially responsible choices as consumers; and living playfully and joyfully. An example of complementarity in Green Parenting would be that cooking fresh organic food cuts toxic pesticides out of our diets; helps the environment; improves working conditions for farm workers; and tastes good. If we have a healthy, well-adjusted daughter, there's a whole host of other capabilities that will be enhanced for her, MaGreen, and me.

My Unborn Daughter's Desire

I have a friend who, when he found out from the ultrasound technician that his wife was carrying a girl, immediately began to worry about boys asking his daughter out to the high school prom. Even now when he talks about it, he runs his hands through his hair and rubs his forehead.

When MaGreen and I found out we are having a girl, I didn’t quite have that reaction. But I am worried. If I try to raise a daughter who doesn’t want a Barbie doll, I know the first birthday gift she’ll ask for will be a Barbie. I don’t want to try to control my daughter’s desire. But I don’t think it’s wise for me to ignore desire either, fooling myself that I don’t play any role. I don’t want to leave the formation of her desires to the shallow and commodified notion of sexuality that permeates our culture.

I have this other friend who tried to convince me that walking around the house naked and taking showers with my daughter is the key to life without shame. I just don’t think it is that simple. Pretending to live without any boundaries could be as bad as erecting big, puritanical walls. Something has to be mysterious and out of bounds. Doesn’t desire begin with transgression? with curiosity? She should feel safe at home, aware of all the violence in the world, and in charge of her body.

Here is a poem I wrote in which I try to imagine what I should do as a father, at least metaphorically…

My Unborn Daughter’s Desire

The top dresser drawer
will be hard for her to reach
and I will stuff it with objects
she should not see.
I will fill the drawer with stones
from the beds of great rivers,
postcards from Khajuraho,
bangles and payal made of 22 karat gold,
verses of Sappho embroidered on satin,
a biography of Phoolan Devi,
and a book on Mayan astronomy

Principles of Green Parenting – Impurity is OK

Well, the week started off relatively green. I switched to using those weird little crystals for deodorant . MaGreen transferred her squash seedling from a little pot to our new square-foot, organic garden outside. We picked up MaGreen’s bicycle from the shop with new pregnancy-friendly modifications. I put screens up, opened our windows, and turned off the airconditioning. So far so good, right? Doing the green thing, reducing our energy footprint and having fun at the same time.

Then Tuesday, we discovered that an animal dug up our garden. I think it was a squirrel, a deceptively cute one that I’ve watched grow from a baby in our backyard. Betrayal! I wanted to hurt the squirrel, which would not be very green I suppose. Then it got hot again and MaGreen was feeling ill. We also got in a big argument. So I closed all the windows and revved up the central air-conditioning. Wednesday, after we had made-up, we rented the second season of Six Feet Under and basically watched four straight hours of television on the dvd player in MaGreen’s computer. For about two days, I felt like taking back all of our idealistic proclamations about green parenting.

I don’t feel bad about these “lapses”. We aren’t trying to reach some kind of pure state of greenness. Although we have hidden the television and stopped watching it, renting some dvds and vegging out – that’s part of life, at least in Houston. We pay a little extra money to get our electricity from a windmill company called Green Mountain Energy, but we’re not going to keep the air-conditioning off and suffocate on a hot Houston day by our own volition. Purity is not the objective. I think pure anything ultimately hurts people. If you read Gandhi’s autobiography, you get the sense that his wife suffered for many of his experiments with truth. Righteousness is a clumsy weapon.

Recently at a party, MaGreen and I were telling some friends and acquaintances about our green parenting plans. Some people were intrigued, others were aghast. It was when MaGreen told them we will try the diaper-free method that people kind of freaked. One woman who has two grown kids basically said we didn’t know what we were getting in to and implied that we would hurt the baby. I think she doesn’t understand us. She thinks we will be dogmatic, as many people are about parenting choices. That said, we are basically setting ourselves up. I’m not sure what it will be like when MaGreen delivers and we have a real baby to deal at 2 am. But we figure the greener our plans, the easier it will be to laugh at ourselves down the road.

Principles of Green Parenting – Understanding Your Fears and Transforming Them

We have focused much of our green parenting energy on removing toxins from our house, which is fear-based action. We are afraid of hurting our child and ourselves, so we get rid of the Windex. But green parenting, in my opinion, shouldn’t be the conglomeration of fears. If I focus on protecting our baby, keeping her safe, and making our home secure, then I am just reproducing all the fear in our society. I’m not saying that we can be fearless. That’s for off-road bikers. “Extreme Parenting Dude!” No, I’m all about fear. While the pregnant mother bears the overwhelming physical burden of pregnancy, I actually think the partner bears a huge psychic burden. My fears as an expectant father are as overwhelming as they are normal. I just don’t want to be trapped in a green prison of our own making. Our quest is to search out our fears and transform them rather than react to them.

What MaGreen has done with our cleaning supplies is a good example. It’s all about process. Researching the way people cleaned before the Windex era put us back into touch with traditions and with the chemicals we use. Mixing the ingredients ourselves is more engaged, not to mention cheaper and less toxic, than buying the latest spray with some new mystery chemical additive. But again, as MaGreen has written, it’s an ongoing process. The homemade dishwashing detergent didn’t work, so she bought the Seventh Generation brand. We went from being uninformed to fearful; but instead of stopping there, MaGreen is taking the time to find alternatives. That process of understanding our fears and transforming them is, in my view, a basic principle of green parenting.

Why We Started This Blog

MaGreen and I are going through something many expecting parents do. All of sudden, what were rather vague concerns about toxins, diet, and lifestyle now seem urgent. We do not want to raise a baby in a home full of poisons if we can help it. More than that, we want to raise a happy kid who understands the world around her and learns how to thrive in it. We want to be green parents. And we want to be socially responsible so our child inherits a better world. The only problem is that we do not know how to do this, especially since we have a limited budget and we like a clean house, tasty food, and time to relax. This blog is about our experiments, the ridiculous ones that fail and the ones that work. Hopefully, readers will pitch in with comments and experiences.

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