Blessings of a Full Sink

On a recent morning, as I was standing in my kitchen thinking, Dirty Dishes, how I hate you, I had a kind of epiphany. A small one, but it helped. How does our kitchen get to this point: dishes piled in the sink and on the counters, no room to clear the table from the most recent meal? As a fairly competent person overwhelmed by the realities of full-time parenting and domestic engineering, I felt like a failure.

Just a couple of weeks earlier, I had attained what I had imagined was a 'normal' kitchen: cleared and clean counters, empty and shining sink; the dishwasher, with just a few dirty items inside, lay in wait for the next meal to end. And from this oasis of clean in the whirlwind of chaos that is life with two boys under the age of four, I reached Dishwasher Level: Maven. With clean counters, it was possible to unload the dishes in half the time! Instead of contorting myself around precariously balanced towers of baking dishes and cereal bowls waiting their turns to be washed, trying to reach the coffee mug shelf, the pots and pans cabinet, the cooking utensils caddy like some kind of mad octopus playing a nightmare game of Tetris® -  I could stack like items together: dinner plates, plastic containers, sippy cups and lids, then make one trip to each location to put everything back. It took two minutes to unload and less than a minute to put away. Plus, with newly found space and flat work surfaces, preparing the next few snacks and meals was a breeze! I was amazed. I started fantasizing about a blog post titled “Keva and Kavanah in the Kitchen” wherein I would describe my transcendent dishwasher-unloading experience in terms of the Jewish principles of  Keva (mastering the mechanics) and Kavanah (expressing heartfelt devotion.) That sense of pride, the blog fantasy, and my clean kitchen had all lasted about thirty-six hours.

And now here I stood, surrounded again, doing a mental inventory of the past couple of days. Had I gotten lazy? Had I gotten bored? Perhaps. How did we make such a big mess again?

Then I stopped and looked at the objects of my derision: a large mixing bowl was soaking in the sink, previous home to the from-scratch macaroni and cheese I'd made, to the delight of both my kids. One box of ditalini pasta, Smart Balance® , cheddar and American cheese, milk. Slightly healthier than the powdered orange kind, but more important: we'd had all the ingredients in the house after we'd run out of the prepackaged stuff, and I was able to please at dinnertime. I looked to the counter: the cutting board, dotted with crumbs from a multigrain bagel, a few cucumber peelings dried and stuck, and a ringed stain that I  knew to be raw egg that had dripped over the side of the glass bowl I'd used to make sure I didn't get any eggshells in the scrambled breakfast. There were nine or ten sippy cups, some with spouts, some with straws, some with rings of watered-down orange juice  in the bottom.

I looked further, to the dining table where evidence of yesterday lay: a blue plastic bowl with blue plastic spoon soddered to the bottom with cottage cheese, because three-and-a-half-year-old son is a stickler for matching flatware, if not for finishing his lunch; slivers of crusts from whole wheat toast with cream cheese;  an impressively almost empty bowl of applesauce that the younger child had fed to himself. Next to my own breakfast dishes was a notebook and the children's Passover Haggadah I'd been vetting for possible use at our seder this year: evidence that instead of unloading the dishes while drinking my tea and eating my toast, I had taken a few moments to actually sit down at the table to multitask. Also everywhere were empty mugs with spoons sticking up out of them: warning signs of possible caffeine abuse by the adults in the house. I laughed at this thought, and the following one: we need it. It's part of the job to stay alert.

That's when it hit me: the mess wasn't the enemy; the mess was part of the job. This utter and almost immediate demolition of the neat, clean, 'normal' kitchen, this constantly encroaching chaos: it represented the care and feeding of my family. These hated piles of dishes were tangible proof that I had managed to feed every hungry mouth in my midst. I had peeled grapefruit, sliced cucumbers, mashed turnips, microwaved dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets - and the result was two healthy, happy, growing children, and two adults who were fueled enough to get through another day of taking care of our family. The reason I was standing in the middle of the kitchen drinking tea from a mug that is not one of my favorites, stirring the sugar with a soup spoon is because I love my family and work hard to make sure we have everything we need to get through the day, and sometimes   - a lot of times - that means letting the dishes pile up while I go tend to some more immediate need - of which there are many. Like any other job well done, perhaps it is worth taking a moment to acknowledge, to even take a bit of pride in, the effort and the results that are often overlooked on our way to check the next thing off the to-do list. Is life easier when the kitchen is clean? For a few moments, yes! Will I keep trying to recapture that little bit of peace on my countertops? You betcha! But as spring gets more real and the outdoors beckon with mud and worms, and chalk that somehow survived the winter outside...I will try to see the mess not as representative of failure, but as quite the opposite: evidence that heartfelt, devoted work is going on in our home.

Breastfeeding.

If you had asked me before I had children how long I thought it was appropriate for a mother to breastfeed her child, I probably would have given a diplomatic answer along the lines of: that's really up to each mother. But if I had been given an anonymous and confidential survey that asked me to explore my knee-jerk reaction to mothers who breastfeed toddlers, or preschoolers, a more honest answer may have emerged. I'm not sure exactly what the line would have been, but given the range from "Not Attempting To Breast Feed" to "Lysa Tully in Game of Thrones" I'm pretty sure my comfort zone would have fallen closer to no breastfeeding at all than breastfeeding a small and imperious six-year-old. 

Whatever my answers would have been to this hypothetical exploration of my previous feelings, my recent experiences with breastfeeding --- both the frustrating, why-am-I-torturing-us-both journey of partial success with Jonah and the equally anxiety-provoking, personally constraining, though much more successful past 21 months breastfeeding Elliott --- have changed my tune and my mind.

First of all, my new, slightly less diplomatic but equally cagey answer to any questions involving my opinion of other mothers' breastfeeding decisions is this: it's none of my fucking business. This is meant to imply, also, that it's none of your fucking business either. That applies to casual observers, other mothers, partners of other mothers, partners of the mothers in question, pediatricians, grandparents, lactation consultants, authors and editors of popular magazine articles, members of La Leche League, directors of hit TV series, teenagers, and people you only stay in touch with through Facebook.

If I sound angry, please understand that it is only because my Breastfeeding For 21 Months Gold Medal seems to be on back order, and has yet to arrive. This outward sign of my triumph over the greatest obstacles to breastfeeding - hospital interventions, nosy strangers, poor seating, tortuous and expensive nursing bras, and exhaustion - would go a long way to cheering me up right now, and probably allow me to take the f-word out of my pre-recorded response without compromising the true expression of how I feel. But since I can't have my medal yet, I'll just have to settle for a longer and slightly more thought-through expression of how I feel about breastfeeding.

10 Reasons that are NOT WHY I am still Breastfeeding My Child at 21 months:

10. NOT to make a statement about my rights to breastfeed as long as I want to. If this was just about what I wanted, all mothers would be granted free weekly spa days, regardless of breastfeeding status.

9. NOT as his main source of nutrition or calories. He eats everything, including cow's milk, cheeseburgers, and hummus. He also likes cottage cheese, canned pineapples, and Scooby Doo cookies.

8. NOT because I enjoy wearing a nursing bra. In fact, rather than continue to let my spine curve and my back go out, I gave up wearing a nursing bra after 12 months. Now I wear a regular bra and take it off to nurse. This means there are fewer places I am able to comfortably nurse my child, because wherever we are as a society, we're not quite up to my going out in public without a bra, or sticking my child in a booster seat at Starbucks while I reach around behind my own back to take my bra off.

7. NOT to make a political statement about breastfeeding. To make political statements, I re-post sarcastic breastfeeding memes on Facebook, and write lists like this one.

6. NOT because it feels good. For me, breastfeeding ranges from physically constricting, through annoying, to painful. I know the gurus at La Leche League claim it's not supposed to hurt, but from the occasional chomp, to the constant neck and arm soreness, to the lack of sleep I still get to experience, I have not found it to be a physically liberating or enjoyable experience.

5. NOT because it is the only way for him to be comforted. My child comforts himself just fine by watching Netflix on my iPad.

4. NOT because it is the greatest form of bonding for us. We bond over hide-and-seek, taking his blankies out of the dryer, and the spinning airplane game.

3. NOT so I can lose my baby weight faster. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

2. NOT to make other mothers feel guilty for not trying to breastfeed, for not wanting to breastfeed, for not enjoying breastfeeding, for not being able to breastfeed, for not breastfeeding for as long as they planned, for not breastfeeding exclusively, for not breastfeeding as gracefully or boldly as they would have imagined themselves doing it when they imagined themselves as mothers. Nor to make other mothers feel less-than for being affected by raised eyebrows in public spaces and ugly opinions on public online forums, for not breastfeeding because they had to return to work, or had other children who needed attention and care, or because they were damn tired and needed someone else to feed the baby once in a while. I wish for every mother that she could feel supported and lauded for breastfeeding or not, in peace and with pride, however, wherever, for as long as she and her child see fit, without apology or need for explanation to prudish in-laws, nosy co-workers, or well-meaning friends.

1. Finally, the reason I am still breastfeeding my child at 21 months is NOT because I am a huge Lysa Tully fan, nor because I want to appear on Toddlers and Tiaras. And, even though she is my superhero, and it really, really helped that she did, I am not still breastfeeding because Mayim Bialik made it all okay by writing her blog post on saying goodbye to breastfeeding with her four-year-old.

There is only ONE reason why I am still breastfeeding my child at 21 months: because three or four times a day, he grabs his blue blankies, hands them to me, and says, “Here. Want milky.” It sounds like “Hee-wah. Waht mokee,” but it's clear what he means. And as long as he wants it and I'm able to let him have it, who on earth else has a right to have an opinion about it? 

Jewish. (Part 1.)

When I Was Fifteen

When I was fifteen, my friend Jimmy called my grandparents’ house, looking for me. I was staying with them for the weekend, having escaped briefly back to the city from the northern suburb my parents had removed us to a few months earlier. To be completely honest, I had been nursing delusions of moving back to stay with my grandparents until I finished High School - at my old school, with my friends, at home, in Brooklyn. So the behavior of my grandparents that weekend, and the depth of the disappointment caused by this behavior may have had something to do with how high my hopes had been that they might save me from my current predicament – lonely, lost, outnumbered, failing gym.

Jimmy called when I was still sleeping. It was Sunday, the Jewish Sabbath safely over, so he hadn’t completely ignored my instructions, but he had been supposed to let me call him. Jimmy was just-a-friend, but you would have thought, by my grandfather’s interrogation, that the poor boy had come by the night before, wielding a cross and a plate of pork chops, asking for permission to court me for marriage, thereby single-handedly destroying Jewish Culture as it existed in the United States in the late nineteen-eighties.

***

Ever since I could remember, there had been two sets of rules for being Jewish: one for our house and one for my grandparents’ house. My father’s parents were orthodox Jews. They belonged to an orthodox shul, sent their three children to yeshiva, and were only slightly relieved that my mother had turned out to be Jewish at all, resigning themselves to a war of subtle disapproval for her Reform Jewish family, insisting my parents keep a kosher home, or else they would never come visit. My mother’s own  parents’ tongue-in-cheek retort: if my parents did keep a kosher home, they would never come over. After a year of this, my mother called them all over with an announcement of her own, and they pretty much shut up. 6 months later, I was born. By the time my brother came along, my parents had a well-established and comfortable household that no grandparent would refuse to visit. We ended up with a lot of pots and pans, dishes and flatware; no one could say for certain whether they should be used for milk, or meat – so we used them for both, often at the same time. We used paper plates and ate no meat when kosher relatives came over.

The rules of our house concerning being Jewish went like this:

• Mezuzot¹ hung on every doorway to keep the bad spirits out. On Friday nights we lit Sabbath candles, said prayers over candles, wine, and bread, and ate delicious challah bread from the bakery. We got dressed up to go to Temple, to show respect to God, who cared about patent leather shoes. We had religious school on Sunday mornings and then got taken to McDonald’s for lunch, if we didn’t also have little league, in which case no, we were not allowed to wear our baseball uniforms to Sunday School² because God did not like little league baseball uniforms.

• Santa Claus did not exist, but we had to pretend NOT to possess this knowledge when playing with Kari across the street, because it wouldn’t be nice to disappoint her. When we played dead, we shouldn’t put our arms out straight to look like the cross hanging in the Santos’ house, next door, because that was a Christian thing to do, and we were not Christians.  

• On Rosh Ha Shana and Yom Kippur we ate dinner at home on the fancy dishes. My mother baked round challahs and we dipped apples in honey. We went to Temple in new shoes. On Passover we had huge Seders and then for eight days didn't eat leavened bread or anything with corn syrup in it.

• On Hanukkah we did not celebrate Christmas. Trees were not for Jews, no matter how pretty the tinsel or the balls wrapped tightly with satiny thread, no matter if Andrea’s mother called it a Hanukkah Bush. We lit candles on a menorah, sang blessings in Hebrew and got presents every night, but mainly these were small presents like coloring books or, yes, socks and underwear. There were a few years’ of Hanukkah parties at our house, with dreydls and songs and gambling for pennies and all of my cousins from both sides of the family, and chocolate gelt and fresh, hot, fried potato latkes with applesauce and my mother in an apron and my father and my uncle playing chess on the floor of the living room, and beautiful candles that we waited until the sun went down to light. But these parties ended abruptly after a year when, my mother exclaimed, the grandparents had turned it into a contest about who could spend more money on toys, which disgusted my mother, who muttered something about Hanukkah not being Christmas --- which we did not celebrate because we did not believe in Santa Claus even though there was not a lot of proof on either side of that debate. 

Obviously, our Jewish-ness existed alongside, or maybe within, our American-ness. We went to public school and were encouraged to do well. We had play dates and birthday parties with children from every culture and religion. My best friend was Puerto Rican-Italian-Catholic and we had much more in common than I did with my Orthodox Jewish first cousins who always wore long skirts and asked me if I was a boy, because I wore pants. I was in love with the Golden-haired Irish-Italian-Catholic boy in my class. My mother discouraged this, not because he would never love me, and not because, at eight years old, it was doubtful I had found the boy I was going to marry, but because we came from different backgrounds, she explained, and Jews married Jews.

The rules at my father’s parents' house were more complicated. Still, by the time I was five or six, I had absorbed them completely and was able to switch back and forth easily between the two worlds.

• My grandparents kept a kosher home. This meant that when we were with them, we did not eat non-kosher foods, nor did we discuss the fact that we went to McDonald’s at least once a week. Milk and meat could not be consumed together at the table, and certain meats could not be consumed at all. 

• From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, and during Jewish holidays, the rules increased. Shabbos was the day of rest for everyone except for my grandmother. The rules had been interpreted for the modern age. Since there was a law against making your horses work³, there was a new law against driving a car, or traveling by any other means than your own two feet. We lived 11 avenues and 10 streets away from my grandparents’ house: they knew we drove over there. But on shabbos, we parked around the corner and walked up to their front steps because to do otherwise, my father explained, “would hurt their feelings.”

• Since there was a law against striking a match, there was a new law against using electricity to turn the lights on, light the stove, or use any other device that relied on this modern match-striking. This meant that my grandmother left one burner on her stove lit for the duration of the Sabbath so she could provide everyone with a hot meal on Saturday afternoon, and that she washed the dishes by hand, because of course, even the automatic dishwasher was entitled to a day of rest.

• We didn’t spend a lot of holidays at my grandparents’ house, but I remember my grandmother, as I was leaving her house to go home after an unusual visit, post-Temple. It was the first day of Rosh Ha Shana, and we had not had to go to regular school. She asked me if I wouldn’t rather go to a yeshiva, instead of the public school I attended. “Then you’d get two days off for Rosh Ha Shana,” she coaxed. The thought of leaving my friends horrified me. I smiled weakly and let her button up my sweater.

***

When I was fifteen, which was in 1988, my grandparents woke me up on a Sunday morning and told me that a young man had called. They said his name was James and I decoded this to mean my just-a-friend Jimmy, who I had planned to go to the movies with. “What is this young man’s last name?” my grandfather demanded. I told him and he recognized it at once as not-a-Jewish-last-name. I replied that I wasn’t sure what Jimmy was, but no, I didn’t think he was Jewish. My grandmother joined in. “As your grandparents, we feel it’s our duty to ask - you wouldn’t ever marry outside of the religion, now, would you?”

I considered my answer for a moment. Perhaps that was my mistake. Perhaps I should have just given the answer that they would have considered correct. But I’d already felt what it felt like to love a boy who wasn’t Jewish and I knew in my heart that if that feeling happened again and I had the chance to find happiness and contentment with someone who wasn’t Jewish, there was nothing, and no one - not my grandparents or my parents, not a Rabbi or Santa Claus - that was going to prevent me from being with that person. So I answered honestly. “I wouldn’t go out of my way to find someone to marry who was not Jewish, but yes, if I fell in love with someone who was not Jewish, I would have to consider marrying him.”

Maybe you’ve had occasion to witness, on someone else’s face, the particular shade of purple that occurred on my grandfather’s. If not, count yourself fortunate that you have never been in the presence of such unmitigated and focused anger and disapproval by someone (two people, for my grandmother stood beside her husband who stood beside himself) supposed to, by every law secular and religious, cultural and national, to love you no matter what, adore you unconditionally, with more chocolate syrup than was, strictly speaking, good for you and who was supposed to have imprinted as a goal in his very DNA your best interests and the most precious desires of your heart. 

When he could inhale enough oxygen to be able to form words, he told me, noting the date and the year, to make it an official decree, the words punctuated by his pounding upon the kitchen table, in approximate 4/4 time, and the slight unsticking sound made as he lifted his fist from the heavy plastic table-cover to pound out the next phrase : I tell you this here and now, as your grandfather, if you ever married a non-Jew you would never see me again. You would be dead to me and I would say the Kaddish for you as if you were dead. The last fist pounded on the word dead. My grandmother, torn between her aforementioned DNA and her long-suffering, married-to-a-bully mind pleaded with me: Don’t you see, it would be a shande – a scandal – a terrible shame if you were to do this. Try to understand and be reasonable.” I think I probably snorted. I imagine it would have been hard not to, given the extent to which I was holding back tears. I’m fifteen. I’m not getting married. I’m just going to the movies.
 

And I did go to the movies, with my just-a-friend Jimmy. I never voiced my earlier plan to move back to Brooklyn and live with my grandparents. I had spent my entire life stepping carefully around their rules, respecting their wish to keep up the appearance of being Jewish enough for them. They had betrayed my trust in them as family-no-matter-what and made it much easier for me to dismiss Judaism as a force of division, rather than one of family and community. Sometime after college, I stopped marking time with the Jewish holidays. It would be almost two decades since that Sunday morning in my grandparents' kitchen before I would hang a mezuzzah on the doorposts of my own home.

***

As it worked out, both of my father's parents passed away before I was ever in danger of getting married. The first-cousins who teased me for wearing pants as a child, I rarely if ever see. It took a long time to even have occasion to share with what remained of my father's side of the family the joyful news of meeting my match and falling in love and making a home together with him. I had kept my word: I did not go out of my way to find someone who wasn't Jewish. I simply went out of my way to find the right person and he happened to be Irish, raised Catholic, non-practicing. We moved in together in 2005 and shared our first Christmas tree that winter. We also shared our first eight nights of Hannukah. My then-fiance now-husband learned the Hebrew blessings from the English transliteration printed on the box of 44 candles, and was much more committed than I was to lighting the menorah every single night of the holiday. 

There's a lot more to this story of my being Jewish all by myself, and on top of that to my being Jewish and married to someone who is not. We had a wedding. Who officiated? Who attended? Did we serve shrimp at the cocktail hour? We have two children now - both boys. What kinds of rituals and milestones have we and will we celebrate? What do our children think about Santa Claus? I spent a year teaching at and a subsequent year directing a religious school. How did that happen? And how did that work out? But that's why this part is just Part 1. I hope to get back to writing the next part of this story as it unfolds, and as I make sense of it. But I don't think this story will ever really be finished until my own children can sit down and write a moderately sarcastic bullet list of what it meant to be Jewish, growing up in their family.


 Footnotes - (Really just my solution to what would other be embedded parentheticals; some with parentheticals of their own.)
 

1 A mezuzah is a small box containing prayers. You will find them nailed to the doorposts of many Jewish homes, as well as many Brooklyn apartment buildings where Jewish families used to reside.

2 On Saturday mornings we were allowed (even encouraged, so as not to wake up my parents) to get ourselves cereal and milk and eat on the floor in front of the television. Early in the morning there was a program called Davy and Goliath, a claymation boy and his faithful dog who talked about morality and bible stories. Recognizing many of the characters and lessons mentioned in the Old Testament, and hearing Davy talk about going to Sunday School, I was temporarily convinced that being Jewish and being Christian were really the same thing, and that the adults in my life had simply not discovered this yet.

3 This may be a child’s muddled interpretation of the rule. The combustion engine might just go against the match-striking rule.

Smoking. Guns.

By the time I was four years old, my mother had lost both of her parents. My grandfather to a heart attack; my grandmother to metastasized breast cancer. They had both been smokers- my grandfather until an earlier heart attack, my grandmother, until she was in the hospital dying, still asking for a cigarette. My mother, who was 23 when her second parent died, and had two small children, drove the point home so successfully that to this day, I have never smoked a cigarette. At 40, I'm unlikely to start. When I dated, smoking was a deal breaker. I married a recovered smoker. There is no smoking in my home or in the daily lives of my children.

Growing up, there was no smoking in my home. Period. Smoking was not just unacceptable: it was an impossibility. This law also covered candy cigarettes, and was extended to include neighborhood friends. Smoking is not a game; cigarettes are poison, I remember her removing the lovely pack of chalky-sugar-covered cylinders of gum from my Halloween loot one year, and breaking up a clandestine backyard moment where the neighborhood grade-schoolers stood with a pack of the colorful round "cigarettes, " posing like older siblings, one hip jutted out to the side, one hand on waist, puffing at the sugared dust to make "smoke." Smoking is not a game. Cigarettes are not good toys.

I don't know if I can possibly do as thorough a job terrifying my children into never smoking, or if such a level of certainty that smoking leads to premature and tragic death is even necessary to promote their future well being. We don't smoke. Gone arethe days when preschoolers came home proudly wielding ashtrays made and paintedin arts and crafts class; characters in kids' movies never smoke unless theyare villains, and even then pains aretaken to point smoking out as a trait associated with the rude, the cruel, the inconsiderate. When I taught first-year studentsat Brooklyn College several years ago, the class admitted to being uncomfortable with thecasual smoking of several characters in a 1960s novel. In short, the message seems to besinking in: smoking is bad. It's a bad habit that compromises good health, and good standing in polite society. Cigarette companies have been sanctioned. Studies show that smoking rates are decreasing among teens and other minors, which will hopefully cut down on the number of life-long smokers in future decades. I am so very glad for these things. Parents now have a network of institutional support to help discourage our kids from smoking, and to help counteract the advertising power of cigarette companies. Smoking is no longer glamorized in the media; smoking is no longer the norm.

If only we could get to this place with guns.

My personal philosophy when it comes to giving gifts to children has always been: no Barbies, no guns. My husband and I have agreed that no guns of any kind will be allowed in our home. This means no toy guns, no water guns, no ball-shooting Emperor Zurg dolls. We have, fortuitously, watched The Iron Giant as a family approximately 752 times. One of the messages of that film: guns kill. Our message: guns kill. Guns are not good toys.

They turn sticks into guns, is the familiar, patronizing refrain from other adults, especially those who had children before I did. But for anyone who wonders whether we are taking this too far, whether it's plain futile to take a stand against what seems like an innate tendency, whether it's silly to take the trouble to find non-gun water-expelling playthings for the summer - there are such things, we have several, and they could still be construed as guns -consider this: when we buy our children play food sets and play tea sets, we don't expect (and would likely be horrified to find) pretend ashtrays and cigarettes among the pieces. And until the same is true for toy guns, for heroes with guns, for cartoon characters with guns of any sort, I don't see a better route than parental vigilance, bordering on psychosis, to drive home the message: guns kill. Guns are not good toys. Even toy guns.

After the most recent gun massacre, the discussion has come again to the forefront. Is anyone else struck by the insanity of that phase? The most recent gun massacre - because we haven't learned anything from the ones that came before. But the chilling statistics are not the ones that came out of Newtown, Connecticut. According to the numbers cited in this Huffington Post article:

"In 2011, guns were used to murder 8,583 people living in the U.S..... Among those murdered by guns, there were 565 young people under the age of 18, and 119 children ages 12 or younger -- the latter number nearly equivalent to six Newtown mass shootings. And these figures include only homicides." 

What stuns me is that we don't treat the out-of-control gun situation like the national health emergency that it is. We were able to draw the connection between smoking and death, and curb the powers that saught to make cigarette smoking attractive to our children. And though the illness and death of a smoker certainly has a ripple effect on those around her, as well as our national healthcare system, no one is bursting into a kindergarten classroom to murder our children with second hand smoke. There are no drive-by second-hand smoke attacks. Yet we were able, as a society, to declare: smoking is bad for us, collectively. We don't want our children to start smoking. Stop making toys and children's characters that encourage smoking. In case the opinion of a former English teacher and current mom isn't enough to get you thinking, take a look at this conversation with Harvard researchers who recommend approaching gun control as we did smoking and car safety.


Jonah, who is three and a half, wants a toy gun. I can't remember when he started asking for one in earnest, but it was sometime after his third birthday. Sometime after he asked for and got his Buzz Lightyear toy with the flashing red laser light arm. Sometime after he reluctantly agreed to a haircut and was rewarded with a Woody doll, too. It is to his credit that Joss Whedon created a cowboy toy character with no gun, and that he explicitly emphasized in the first Toy Story movie that Buzz doesn't have a laser: he has a flashing red light. My hat, as usual, is off to Joss.

But it was probably at the Disney store that Jonah became interested in adding Emperor Zurg to his collection. When we drew the line there, his asks became an all-out campaign for a few weeks. But toy guns are just toys, so they don't kill anyone; they're cool, he explained to us quite charmingly. Guns kill, we repeated to him, and guns don't make good toys. Even toy guns. He resorted to making a gun with his fingers. I told him that was his right, to make or build or draw things, that I wouldn't try to stop him,  but I repeated what was becoming our mantra: we don't have guns in our house, even toy guns; guns kill. Guns are not good toys.

I know this is just the beginning. Already, when we visited Poconos, PA for vacation last summer, we were confronted with the rifles mounted on Safari video games at several local "family" restaurants and ice cream/mini-golf places. Play dates are starting in our life, and there are already friends with Emperor Zurgs and older siblings and video games. The years of Sprout and Caillou and our kids needing us to change the channel for them will soon come to an end. I can only hope our message sinks in. We will keep repeating it through every level of video game ask, and every birthday and holiday: guns kill. Guns do not make good toys. We don't have guns in our home.

It is my hope that corporations and retailers like Disney and Toys R Us, businesses that depend on consumption by children, the aisles of which children wander through, marveling at the wonder of toys, will eventually take a stand and declare similar rules: no more guns of any sort. I'm guessing this won't happen very soon, especially given Disney's 2010 decision to begin selling toy wooden guns at their parks again. Maybe I should hope smaller to begin with: I would love to see my supermarket take the cap guns and other toy guns off its shelves. Wherever it starts, I hope it starts soon. Guns do not make good toys. Please stop encouraging guns in my home and in the hands of my children. It's a small step, and needs to be taken in conjunction with stronger and saner gun laws, but until it is taken, I will continue to hold my ground.