Name a movie in which there’s a disagreement between child and parents and the parents turn out to have been unequivocally right.

I’ll wait.

The difficulty in answering this question is representative of a major cultural problem. Filial piety is miles better than whatever it is we’re doing now (just-try-to-keep-the-kids-safe-and-happy-ism?), but it stands zero chance of ever working if it gets zero support from culture machines.

Familiarity breeds laxity.

By this I mean that in my relationships with my wife and kids, I am not consistently stanced to apply the same effort toward socially sensitive demeanor and diction that I do in my relationships with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My habitus outside the family is more disciplined and sympathetic than that within. There’s a certain alertness and natural effort to fit with other people that seems to arise only outside the comfortable confines of home.

I’d like to reimport that stance back into my home life. Sure, home is for relaxation. But I sense in myself a slackness of love. Carla, Sullivan, and Éa deserve better.

I have occasionally found myself wondering whether journaling and posting as frequently as I have been is good. Doing so requires time and attention that I could deploy toward other, more directly interpersonal matters. And it’s probably sometimes a neurotic response to the fear of death. But the fact is I do feel more fully alive when I have been writing. And just now, as I was grabbing a late-morning protein snack from the kitchen, it occurred that I would pay a non-significant sum to have access to the collected written output of my parents, my grandparents, or my great-grandparents. The more voluminous and representative of their psyches I knew their output to be, the higher sum I would pay. I want to know them. It would be good for me to know them. It would be good in the way similar to how reading a great novel is good: You get to know your fellow humans, you cultivate sympathy, and you get to know yourself, all of which foster loving, harmonious, sympathetic, self-controlled interactions with others.

If I can provide my descendants with a thick account of who I was, I find myself suddenly quite confident they will be the better for it. And not because I’m a paragon. No, even if I were a scoundrel, I think they’d be the better for it.

Just re-listened to: Cusp (2018) by Alela Diane. A gentle yet sometimes haunting song cycle foregrounding self-harmonized alto vocals delivering maternal lyrics over perfectly understated instrumentation. Indie piano folk with just enough vocal reverb to make the songs feel old—which is weird because in the era these songs lightly evoke, no one made records with reverb on them because they were doing it on wax cylinders. But hey, it worked for Fleet Foxes, and it works for her, their obvious fellow Pacific Northwesterner and tourfellow.

A mid-hoc surmise I surmise will be of some encouragement to current and future fellow parents of teenagers: Our relationships with our teenage children, especially those of the same sex as us, are likely to go through an extended span of thinness. That is, it’ll seem there is no relationship, that we’re just a chauffeur and a cook and a money tree. But don’t panic. Don’t press to hard. You know what to do. Just keep doing that and be patient. The kids’ll come around.

Pretty much everything written in this book about adolescents could be written about any of us (except the course of development stuff and the added intensity and volatility it brings).

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner; to fight his impulses and to accept them… to love his parents and to hate them … to revolt against them and be dependent on them … to be more idealistic, artistic, generous, and unselfish than he will ever be again, but also the opposite: self-centered, egoistic, calculating. Such fluctuations between extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge.

Anna Freud is quoted as saying the above in 1958 in the front matters. It is good to keep in mind.

Perhaps most important, this book will ditch the dangerous view that adolescents are mentally healthy only when they can sustain a sense of feeling good. In its place, we’ll get to know a truly useful and psychologically accurate definition of emotional health: having the right feelings at the right time and being able to manage those feelings effectively (xxiv).

The above is the main point of the book. And a good one not only for adolescents, but for all people. A good corrective to some of what you hear out there, and a good corrective to how I think sometimes (although I never put it in the exact term “mental health” but rather in my constant quest for happiness).

First and foremost, we want our teenagers to regard their feelings in this important way: as data. Whether painful or pleasant, emotions are fundamentally informational. They bubble up as we move through our days, delivering meaningful feedback. Our emotions give us status reports on our lives and can help guide decision making (10).

Love the above.

Emotional pain promotes maturation Feeling the emotional impact of difficult experiences helps us to grow up (17)

Ethan? Paging Ethan? She wrote that one having heard it from you.

People stop maturing at the point when they start abusing substances…when substances come into the mix…maturation halts. Whatever else can be said about drugs and alcohol, they are very good at blocking emotional pain, and therefore the maturation that comes with it. (17)

Handy to keep in mind when interacting with anyone.

Remaining calm when teenagers become undone communicates the critical point that we are not frightened by their acute discomfort, and so they don’t need to be frightened by it either (20).

More good advice above! Read it again!

“I can tell you from both the research and my own clinical experience that emotional intensity actually peaks around age thirteen or fourteen and then slowly tapers down from there” (78).

Got it.

As for effective apologies, researchers have found that they include six components: explicitly saying that you are sorry, offering an explanation, acknowledging responsibility, promising not to repeat the mistake, trying to make amends, and requesting forgiveness.

Memorize the above! SERPAF is a good mnemonic.

[S]leep is the glue that holds human beings together (160).

Hear ye, hear ye!

Sullivan said yesterday that every conversation with me feels like an argument. That’s the sort of comment that prompts change in me, I hope!

“Since all his visits were beneficial, his step or holler through a doorway got a bright welcome“ (Toni Morrison, of her character Stamp Paid in Beloved).

I’m very rarely Stamp Paid with Sullivan. I need to change.

I like retelling the events of the day with the kids and Carla. It is enjoyable. Plus, it helps me remember later.

Sullivan: Mom, can you snuggle me?
Carla: I already snuggled you.
Sullivan: But that one didn’t take.

Mom, why is mama’s milk discontinued?

— Éa

[five minutes after bedtime lights out]
Sullivan: Mom?
Carla: Yes?! [long pause]
Sullivan: Why, when, or how did burritos originate?

Éa: So when I was on my way home from the park, and old man and an old woman were walking on the path and they said, “Are you all by yourself?” So I told them, “Um, no my mom said my brother and I could go to the park and she’s just right over there,” and I pointed to my house.

Carla: But I didn’t know you were going to the park. You didn’t tell me.

Éa: I know. It was just the easiest way to get a worried old man and and old woman out of my way.

What could be better than co-ambulation with your mother?

— Scott, suggesting to Carla that she join Sullivan on a midday walk

One thing that pleases me—well, two: First, Mommy and Daddy snuggles. And second, rock dust on my hands.

— Sullivan

Carla and I sat through our first foster care preservice training class session this evening. I wasn’t surprised by anything the CYS folks said. It was heartening and entertaining to hear from the guest lecturing Pollock family, who have six kids right now. Carla and I thought we disagreed about whether we could proceed, but further conversation revealed that we agree: While she is on Council, we will stick with respite foster care only. She thought I wasn’t even OK with that; I had forgotten respite was all she wants to do at the moment.

The only other notable thing, besides the gratis Smartfood popcorn bags we snagged for the kids’ lunches tomorrow, was that I think every one of the candidates, plus the Pollocks, are motivated by their faith in Jesus Christ.

I need not fear the prospect of my children deciding against following Christ. It may happen. But it should not cause fear, apprehension, or anxiety. Sadness, yes, but even that the sadness of someone who can’t share a specific joy with someone else, not the sadness of a man robbed of his heart and soul. I will still be Christ’s, and Christ will still be mine. And the Christ I know these days doesn’t bar people from eternal life on the basis of their professions of specific faith, anyway.

But if I do experience such emotions, as yesterday after Carla pointed out that I answered a question Sullivan had not asked (Sullivan: “I wish the Lundins came to our church.” Me: “Well, they don’t go to church. Tom doesn’t believe in God.” Sullivan: “Really? He doesn’t believe in God?”), I need not be ashamed of them. It’s my shame about those feelings that causes me to clam up and act out rather than speak plainly about them.

Another Saturday, another end-of-day ambivalence about how I spent my time: Today is the kind in which I wish I spent more time accomplishing things and less time socializing. Often it is the reverse.

But at least the kids got to ride ponies.

The kids’ first job should be selling programs at Penn State football games. Then pedicab driving.

A slight feeling of stomach-drop creeped into me this evening as Sullivan came out of his bedroom after bedtime to talk through the disappointment he was feeling about how his “splat ball” that he had earned during this “cookie dough” fundraiser at Lemont Elementary was only intact for about an hour and a half this afternoon before it burst or leaked or something. He had worked relatively hard to get that splat ball, and he was sad, either that he had abused the ball so as to break it, or that it was of such poor quality as to break so easily. Carla handled his disappointment with aplomb, as you might imagine.

What is this feeling? It’s like I fear he is not going to be able to handle his disappointment and thus somehow let them lead him to despair and religious doubt.

I also felt it last night when Éa offered at the end of A Picture Book of George Washington, where it mentions Washington’s death, that our first president is now alive again. I replied that some people think so, yes, in heaven, while other people think his soul is asleep, to be resurrected by God at the end of time. The fear here is that this will sound preposterous to her, and she’ll reject Christ because of it.

The feeling comes because in the face of death, disappointment, grief, and unanswered deep questions, I fear my children may, like many in this world, come to the conclusion that knowing God isn’t worth the mental effort, and that it’s much easier to simply believe that everything is random.

But that’s why I have my list. God, I trust You; help me in my lack of trust.

The family couldn’t get enough “Hayloft” as covered by Nickel Creek today. (Well, that and Éa liked Dave Edmunds’ “I Hear You Knocking.”) This made me uncomfortable.

I enjoy watching my family do things I suspect other families do not but which I consider healthy. In this photo, all three of them are leaning out or about to lean out past the boardwalk rail in searching of jewelweed pods ready to pop.

It turns out the seeds are edible!

A locus of my anxiety about my religious doubt is my children. I have previously been so sure of God that I never worried about passing my faith on to them; I had what was in my mind a 100% sure platform on which to stand and call to them to join me. The thought of not being able to pass on to them something I know is true makes my stomach drop.

Doubt has humbled me and made more sympathetic. I could also swear it has made me more patient and loving with my family.

I am very proud to walk town with my children. Among several reasons that came to mind this evening, Éa insisted we take this photo of this 150-year-old magnolia tree planted by Fred Waring, the northernmost species of magnolia—because she loves her friend whose middle name is Magnolia.