I wish I was wrong

This past fall Pinkie Pie decided to try high school.  She missed what would have been her grade 9 year with the pandemic, but she wanted to try again.  I had thought it wouldn't work at all, but it is now almost four months in and it looks like she will get full credits for the term.  My parents set high standards for my marks and results in school, but Pinkie Pie has struggles that I never did - we will be happy if she passes.  

One thing that has been making school more challenging is an educational assessment.  It is a process where psychologists and learning experts evaluate kids for all kinds of things including behavioural problems, learning disabilities, etc.  It costs a few thousand dollars, which is the barrier for many people, but with some family help on that front we decided to try it as school started.

I was quite sure what the result would be.  Pinkie Pie has been through the mental health system for years now, and I knew this educational assessment would result in them saying "Pinkie Pie is a clever kid with high anxiety and executive function problems.  She needs extra help, flexibility, and time to complete her work."  However, we decided to go for it anyway in the hopes that I was somehow wrong.

The process was much more of a struggle than we had thought.  It involved numerous sessions of tough academics and doing it caused Pinkie Pie to miss a whole week of school due to exhausion.  Making school even worse is not was I was hoping for out of this.

Still, just maybe I will be wrong?

I was not wrong.

After several months of appointments they sat us down and told us in big words that my kid is bright but has big struggles with anxiety, energy, and organization.  They recommended doing exactly what the school was already doing anyway.

I was ready to write it off as a perfect prediction, but they added one thing at the end.  They told us we could go for parent coaching to try to help with this process.  If there is one thing I need at the end of paying people hundreds of dollars an hour to tell me stuff I already know it is a recommendation to pay someone else hundreds of dollars an hour to tell me *different* stuff I already know!  It would be great - I would describe my situation to them, and they would tell me that Pinkie Pie needs a good sleep schedule, healthy food, and for us to tell her to go to school in a firm voice.  Somehow they would imagine that I didn't get this advice from one thousand other sources.

It isn't as though I think these people are all incompetent.  Probably parent coaches mostly give good advice, and I am sure the people evaluating Pinkie Pie knew their stuff.  They just had absolutely nothing of value to give us at the end.

What I know for sure though is that I have read and listened to endless parenting advice when Pinkie Pie struggled and it was not helpful.  It was always stuff I already knew, had already tried, and which totally failed.  When I got this advice I always responded that I had tried that exact thing and it did not work.  Mostly they would give me blank stares, no doubt being sure that the advice was good, so clearly I had screwed it up.  

Fact is, you can be as good a parent as you want, and there are some things you can't fix.  No strategy will suffice, no route to victory can be found.

I wanted so much to be wrong, for them to find something, anything, that would give her an edge to deal with her current struggles.  Unfortunately I was right, and we will just have to continue to muddle through.

Fitting in nowhere

The next book in my 'recommended to me' series is Surviving the White Gaze.  This book is beyond the reach of the initial set of recommendations and is part of my new section 'people keep hearing that I am taking recommendations so they shove books at me'.  Surviving the White Gaze is simultaneously easy and hard to read.  It is a series of short, well written anecdotes and stories about the author's life focused around her experiences of race.  She is a biracial woman who was raised in a town where she was the only person who wasn't white.

While the writing is clear and smooth, the stories are harsh and jarring.  She had a tough childhood, being raised by white parents who didn't understand her struggles at all, and being surrounded by people who were constantly racist towards her.  As she got older she found her way into black social groups and communities but this often didn't help at all, as she was too black for the white people and too white for the black people.  I had realized academically that this is a serious struggle for biracial people but these stories brought that experience to life and made it real and visceral.

The stories of racism vary wildly.  Some were outright tales of outright discrimination that I found hard to stomach, and others revealed struggles that aren't necessarily obvious.  For example, black hair is different from white hair.  If no one in your town knows how to deal with your hair, then it can feel like you are inferior when in fact you are simply lacking in expertise.

If you are curious about what racism feels like, or how it plays out, this is a good book.  The author does not attempt to portray herself in a perfect light, and her many mistakes and issues are on display.  You get to see a flawed person struggling in a world that makes it extremely difficult for her, and through that struggle you will get a glimpse into humanity.

The author was adopted by a white couple and mostly raised by them, though she spent some time during her teenage years and adulthood with her birth mother.  All three parents did things wrong and made her life more difficult, though certainly her birth mother was the worst.  (Taking your eleven year old daughter to a bar and leaving her alone, and then blaming her when an old man tries to convince her to have sex with him is beyond the pale.)  She blames all three parents for many of the things she suffered, quite justifiably.  However, she also lays blame in ways that I don't accept as reasonable.

Blaming parents for their children's misbehaviour or suffering is something I see a lot.  My instinct is that this is more of a modern phenomenon, but perhaps that isn't true.  Parents often do this to themselves of course, asking themselves what they did wrong.  Sometimes they did do things wrong, of course, but often had they chosen differently it wouldn't have helped, or it would simply have created different issues.  I don't like blaming people when we can't even be sure that different choices would have improved outcomes.  If you would have been angry even if a different choice were made, then you are giving the target of your anger no right choice, no way out, and I don't accept that.

I am happy to blame parents for bad behaviour, but only if I can see a better way.  I don't toss blame if they just made the best of a bad situation.

For example, blaming her adoptive parents because they didn't give her exposure to black culture, or help her find ways to work with black hair seems quite reasonable to me.  They should have worked harder on that.  Blaming them because they didn't uproot their entire lives to move to a big city from their country residence to put her nearer to black people isn't reasonable.  It was hard on her, of that I have no doubt, but parents don't have an obligation to relocate in the world, especially when they have other kids too.  I understand her feelings, but I don't accept the allocation of blame.

When Pinkie Pie struggles, I worry.  I wonder if I could do something to help her, to fix her problems, to make things better.  I think about the choices I have made in the past.  However, I don't accept that all of her issues are on me.  I have to continue to try to help her, but I won't make it all about me, nor drown in misplaced blame.  No matter how perfect a parent you are, your children will screw up, suffer, and struggle.  You do what you can, but they have to go through things to learn how to cope with them, and you can't entirely avoid that.  Heaping blame on parents in no win situations isn't productive or fair.

Surviving the White Gaze is a powerful book that can give you a visceral understanding of the struggles of biracial people.  However, I do suggest that you take the criticisms of some of the author's family with a grain of salt.

Wrong measurements

Pinkie Pie has been talking about going back to school in the fall.  She is eager to try this out, largely because she wants to spend time with her friends.  She has enjoyed a great many books and shows about high school in her time, and I wonder if she has the wrong idea about what high school entails.

I have grave doubts.  Some of those doubts surround her ability to cope with high school and the workload, as her mental health struggles have made it extremely difficult for her to do the education we are doing at home, and I can't see how she could cope with a full courseload.

My other doubts surround the way school operates in general, particularly the way grades work.  I found a youtube video talking about many of the problems with grades and educational structures and it resonated strongly with me.

The youtuber in question leads off with a story about a kid who gets straight As but who is crushed by the school system because it encourages them to focus entirely on grades instead of learning and inquiry.  That is a negative consequence of our system to be sure, but kids that get straight As but are bored aren't the biggest trouble with the system.  The kids that can't cope with the structure and end up falling through the cracks are much more of a concern.

Still, the main point that grading takes over everything certainly stands.  We are stuck in a situation where parents and governments demand to have education measured.  It is extremely difficult to measure learning, so we rely on test scores as a stand in.  As is so often the case, we end up building the whole system to maximize our results on the metrics we made up, so we end up trying to raise test scores instead of trying to teach more effectively.

Some people will of course argue that we need test scores for university admissions.  There are schools that don't give marks and mature students that don't have standard marks and we make that work, so I don't think we need marks at all.  Still, if we had a bunch of tests for university admission at the end of grade 12 I would be fine with it.  However, numeric marks for younger kids is just a plague with no redeeming value.

We don't need to carefully rank children's learning.  We need to spend our time teaching them more, not working on giving them a number that isn't useful.

All this makes me not want to send Pinkie Pie to high school at all.  Sure, there are lots of things she will learn, but she will also spend way too much time grinding out pointless crap just so the high school can give her a number at the end.  I don't need any damn numbers, and neither does she.  She needs to learn, and to feel like the things she is doing are relevant.

Just like I did in high school, Pinkie Pie sees marks as pointless, and that will sour the entire experience.

Schools have been designed as a training ground for obedient cogs, setting them up to take their place in the machine.  Education is part of the mandate, but the structure is primarily designed to keep them under control and rigidly evaluated.  We are slowly changing this over time, and Ontario is gradually making progress, but it is at a glacial pace.

This shouldn't be taken as an attack on teachers - naturally, there are terrible teachers, but the vast majority I have encountered in my life or through Pinkie Pie have been dedicated to education and wished they could stop wasting so much time on standardized tests and marking.  Unfortunately when you work within the system, there is only so much you can do.

We need a huge rethink of what schools are for.  Unfortunately it will come too late for Pinkie Pie in any case, but if we want a society of creative problem solvers we need to stop spending their entire childhood telling them the thing we want from them is precise regurgitation of particular facts on one particular day.

I don't want a boss, employee, friend, or citizen to be ranked by their ability to score highly on a test, so let's remove that nonsense from our schools.

The Prime Directive

Star Trek's Prime Directive is a law that forces the Federation to not interfere in societies that are starting up and have not achieved some specific level of technology yet.  I have a similar sort of thing with Pinkie Pie where I won't directly interfere with her friendships and social groups.  I want to give her general advice and then let her figure stuff out on her own.

This came up recently when she was involved in a Minecraft group.  There are tons of Minecraft servers out there, and they seem to come paired with voice chat groups where people chat constantly while playing the game.  Minecraft seems like a fine thing for Pinkie Pie to be doing as entertainment as it involves a lot of creativity and thinking, but sometimes the social scene is not ideal.

Pinkie Pie was in voice chat and I was near her doing some chores, overhearing only her side of the conversation.  Initially it was innocuous, but she began to get more and more upset and agitated, eventually starting to plead for the people in her chat to stop fighting.  She began to have an extreme emotional reaction, crying over and over that they were upsetting her, that they needed to stop, begging them to cease their fighting.

Listening to her be so upset that she was wailing and grovelling in an attempt to get other people to stop their conflict was so upsetting for me. 

My emotions were swirling and I struggled to stay out of the mess.  I wanted to just grab the mic away from her and yell at them to shut the hell up, and I wanted to yell at her to leave the damn server if it is making her so upset.

You don't have to put up with friends screaming at each other all day.  You can move on!  MOVE ON!

I didn't yell at anybody, but I knew this had to stop.  Even if she could cope with it, I can't, and for her sake I hope she never feels like this is the sort of 'friendship' she needs to accept.

I totally understand why this is a struggle for her.  She is making friends online, and when you find people you like it is tough to just drop them when the situation turns toxic.  This is a good lesson though - begging people to stop being awful to each other isn't productive.  If that is the environment, you need to find the people you like, tell them you would like to continue playing with them but this environment has got to go, and then leave without a backward glance.  There are places in the world that aren't full of this sort of aggravation and you need to find them.

Thankfully Pinkie Pie eventually figured it out on her own, as I had hoped.  She told her friends on the server she was leaving, and they left together to find someplace else to play.  They ditched the people they hated, and while the new place has its own struggles, they have never resulted in the mess I saw in the first one.

I suppose I should be glad that my technique (assuming you think 'do nothing' is a technique) worked.  She moved on, and she learned.

But DAMN sitting there listening to my kid beg for other people to stop hurting her was hard to do without leaping in to stop it.  Having your emotions be so easily wound up by someone else's issues is the cost of being a parent, I guess.

Learning about the world for real

Pinkie Pie is continuing to work away at her online learning course to get her first high school credit.  I had big hopes for the course at the outset, even though it led off with a bunch of stuff leaning on Learning Styles, which is actually just a thing people made up.

Unfortunately it isn't getting much better.  We finished the section on Learning Styles and then spent a bunch of time on the theory of multiple intelligences.  It is presented as some kind of serious thing, but it lists 8 intelligences and then tells us that there are many more and we should feel free to add any we think of to the list.

'Just add on more stuff if you feel like it' does not have the ring of well researched material.

It seems like the course may be trying to teach us that people have many ways to learn and excel, and hoping to get us to accept all these various ways.  That goal works for me, and if they said that explicitly I would be behind it.  Unfortunately they dress it up in all these half baked theories that are supported by conjecture and guesswork, and I don't much like trying to teach that to kids as though it is settled fact.

I don't want to try to force feed Pinkie Pie theories that aren't solid.  I won't try to lie to her and tell her that it is actually super important that she determine what her best intelligences are.  Unfortunately the way the course is structured the marks are largely based around questions like

"What is your strongest intelligence, and how can that help you in your career?"

Pinkie Pie sees this question and just stares at it.  She struggles with perfectionism and she simply doesn't know what to say to this.  She hasn't settled on a career, and the tool to help her figure out what her strongest intelligence is was pretty much just 'pick your strongest intelligence from a list' form.  I know this is a waste of time, and so does she, without me having to tell her anything.

So she is learning sketchy science in order to make up stuff about herself so she can get marks.

It is tricky for me to navigate.  On one hand there is something I can teach her here - I can teach her how to give bullshit answers to bullshit questions.  After making up some stuff about her strongest intelligence, I got her to think about what her second place intelligence might be, and talk about how that might also influence her career.  I was sure that even though the question didn't even hint at this, that the teacher marking it would love it.

They loved it.  I am good at figuring out how to get marks.  I just have to work on the 'caring about marks' thing.

I don't quite know what to do.  Figuring out how to get marks is actually a hugely powerful skill in the world.  It can take you places!  Of course it is worthless and silly, but if you want more opportunities or just a bigger slice of the pie, knowing how to get marks is a good way to start.  I have tremendous reservations about spending a lot of time and effort teaching Pinkie Pie this skill though.  Do I want to spend time teaching her how to work the system?  That isn't the parent I want to be.

The more I see about high school through my kid the more I remember why I was so disenchanted with education by the time I finished it myself.  It seemed like a small amount of actual learning sprinkled into a giant vat of pointless busywork dressed up as something important.  I think my teachers were divided between those who truly tried to do the best they could, and those who just put in the time, doing what they were told they had to.  No matter how dedicated they were though, they were stuck teaching a standardized curriculum to a ton of kids in order to generate vast quantities of marks.  I think the learning itself is important, and marks are a way to serve businesses in order to facilitate employee training and sorting.  That isn't a thing I had respect for back when I was a teen, and my attitude certainly hasn't shifted now.

The internet is not for learning

Pinkie Pie has been doing a lot of homschooling these past months.  She is doing a lot better these days than in the past, though unfortunately she still isn't doing much in the way of getting any official accreditation.  It turns out that a teacher doing things in person is a vast improvement over online learning.

Right now Pinkie Pie is doing math and french with Wendy, and I am teaching her pretty much everything else.  She enjoys my random forays into a vareity of subjects, and she is progressing well in both the more structured learning Wendy is providing and the mishmash I am responsible for.

She is also taking an Learning Strategies course online for high school credit, and that isn't going nearly so well.  I struggle to figure out how to apportion blame for this.  On one hand, teaching a course through a website is hard.  Even if it were perfect, that is not an easy thing to do, and when you add in the requirement to produce documented work and marks it makes things much worse.

If only we had a learning system devoted to learning instead of a system devoted to producing marks!

Regardless of the challenge level though, this course has some issues with the way it is written.  It taught us about learning styles (Kinesthetic, Auditory, Visual) even though the theory about those learning styles is mostly made up.  It tried to use a quiz to tell Pinkie Pie what her learning style is, and the quiz was laughably bad.  Even if learning styles was a real thing the quiz would have totally failed to evaluate it.

The course also has issues with being unclear on what your answers are supposed to look like.  About half of the time Pinkie Pie asks me what the answer is supposed to look like, and much of the time I have absolutely no idea.  I understand the topic, but I cannot fathom what we are supposed to be writing in the answer box.  We end up looking at the sample answers, but then her responses end up looking just like the samples.

I just don't think that this is actually teaching her a lot.  Again, part of that is the format - you can't just let people be creative and do their own thing when you are trying to mark their responses en masse.  We are paying $40 for a course, and therefore I cannot expect much in the way of teacher oversight.  Filling in boxes and getting a mark at the end is the best they can offer at that price.  Still, they could be doing much better with what they have available.

The last section we did had her learning about scheduling.  They provided an app to help with this, and the app let you build a weekly schedule.  Unfortunately it would only take entries in single block hours, would not permit overlaps, and the interface was extremely clunky.  What Pinkie Pie learned from this was that scheduling apps are useless, hard to interface with, and much worse than just keeping it all in your head.

Not what they were aiming for, I am sure.

Learning from a website just isn't going to be good.  Websites can provide direction and facts for a dedicated learner, but they aren't even close to the standard set by a good teacher.  

I wonder if online math would be better.  Learning about something as wide ranging as learning strategies seems tough online, and perhaps math with its right/wrong answers and more linear teaching would work better.  I don't know, but the more I see the way online teaching goes the more I lean towards never subjecting Pinkie Pie to official schooling again.

Getting better, but not all the way

Our stories about illness often do not reflect the reality.  Too often when we talk about disease we try to put it into convenient buckets - sick, healthy, cured, infected.  The reality of illness is that a huge proportion of health struggles wax and wane over time becoming more or less of a struggle but never completely vanishing.  Even when we are discharged from the care of doctors and people talk as though we are cured we often have to deal with the illness for a great time to come.

Pinkie Pie is a great example of this.  When she was young she had serious kidney problems that led to a four day hospital stay many years ago.  We spent years being careful about diet, water intake, bathroom usage, and other things and still ended up in the hospital or doctor's office many times.  That hasn't been an acute struggle for five years or so now, and in the minds of many people I imagine Pinkie Pie is cured.

She isn't cured.  She never will be. 

Although she isn't cured she is in much better shape.  A short while ago the hospital finally cleared us to stop visiting them and to continue on our lifelong program of managing her illness.  These days that is fairly easy and we rarely think much about it, but I still need to keep on reminding her to do the things that they have told us to do.

It is weird to think about sometimes.  I feel like there should be some giant emotional release of tension to finally get the news that we aren't going to be visiting Sick Kids Hospital anymore.  That release didn't happen though.  She was steadily getting better over years and years and it was clear that this sort of thing was coming.  When they finally told us to go away forever it felt like just another step along a long journey.

I am trained by media to expect a huge reveal "You are cured!" and a subsequent shift in paradigm.  Instead all I have is just a vague sense of relief that we don't have to commute downtown for appointments anymore.

I think this is a more realistic model of illness and recovery than what books, movies, and shows train us to expect.  Disease is rarely one and done, usually leaving a long, difficult trail.

Thankfully after many years and much struggle we are on the easy part of that trail.  We can't entirely relax because the trail could get rough once again, but for now the path is smooth and straight.

Running it twice

Child rearing is a rollercoaster of emotion.  Sometimes, like in my last blog post, you have to watch your kid go through wretched stuff that you wish you could defend them from.  Pinkie Pie had an adult man approach her and try to rope her into a 'relationship' on the street.  Many people messaged me or commented hoping that the police would get involved and do something, but the reality is that when I called them I got redirected to a nuisance line and left on hold.  After a long time listening to 'hit X for graffiti, hit Y for parking issues' I finally gave up.  The police do not have the time or inclination to do anything about this, in large part because no actual laws were broken.

It is tough to tell your kid that an evil predator is out there and that the people charged with protecting us from such predators will do nothing.  I don't blame the police in this case though - I wouldn't want to try to give the police enough money to be able to put tons of hours into every case of some asshole being awful to someone else, and I don't want them to have the power to smash into people's lives when they don't have any reason to think a law was broken. 

Sometimes you just have to tell your kids that bad stuff happens, and that you will do what you can to protect them... and sometimes what you can do is little to nothing.

But there are good times.  For example, today I realized that Pinkie Pie had never heard the Boot To The Head skit by the Frantics.  If I said Boot To The Head, she wouldn't understand what I was talking about!  This cannot stand, obviously, so I found it on youtube and got her to listen to the clip.

Apparently the original Boot To The Head contains an anti-gay slur by Ed Gruberman, the jackass in the sketch. Thankfully the version I found does not have that phrase, as it has been changed. I don't know if the version I first heard many years ago was the original or the new version, but I hope it was the new one. I certainly wouldn't share it with her in the same way without that alteration.

There are many hilarious things that have a wonderful first time experience.  You can't get that again, but sometimes the process of watching somebody else have that first time experience can be almost as good.  Watching Pinkie Pie giggle and twitch with joy at Boot To The Head was so good for me, and now we have another shared bit of culture we can enjoy.

I have her trained to say "Party on Garth" after I say "Party on Wayne".  She has never seen the movie in question, and indeed I can barely remember it.  Still, those little bits of shared memory are a source of happy feelings, and I like that she is happy to be a part of nostalgia she doesn't quite understand.

Parenting a teenager is not the easiest thing, but I gotta say, it is *so* much better than parenting a toddler for me.  There are still struggles, but the good parent moments are superior when the little person can actually grasp what I am talking about.

Evil in the world

This weekend I went through one of those unpleasant parental firsts.  Pinkie Pie got her first experience with sexual harassment at the hands of an older man, and I had to figure out what to do about it.

He met her on the street, managed to convince her to give him her phone number, and then proceeded to text her over the course of the next hour or so.  He told her he was in love with her, that he desperately needed her, and asked for pictures.  He ignored the fact that she isn't attracted to men in any way, smashed right through her 'but I have a girlfriend' objections, and wasn't fazed at all when she told him she is only 14.

He continued to message her with desperate and bizarre statements, making it clear that he required her in his life and could not cope without her.  He even claimed to run some sort of 'love and connection' business, for which he even had business cards.

Thankfully Pinkie Pie trusts us, and brought his messages to us to ask for help.  I talked with her about all the obvious manipulation and gaslighting, and explained what he was trying to do.  She had been feeling worried and bad about the whole thing, and was happy to block him.  As far as lessons go, I am glad she got past this one without much damage.  I think she is over it, and is moving on.  

I, on the other hand, keep having thoughts of tracking this bastard down and smashing him into hard objects until he breaks into little pieces.  I doubt that the police can or will do anything, since while it is obvious to anyone who glances at the messages what is going on, he hasn't actually done anything illegal, as far as I can tell.  In this, we are on our own.  I don't know if there is any point in messaging him myself, threatening outrageous bodily harm should he ever be near her again - it certainly isn't an idle threat, but I have no idea if that would make things safer for Pinkie Pie or not.

Making it safer for her is my only concern.  Making things safer for all the other 14 year old girls out there is important, but I can't do a lot about that.

I am not one to overreact in terms of what I will let Pinkie Pie do.  She is going to continue to have the same freedom to wander about as before.  The world isn't perfectly safe, but I won't build a cage for her.  The best I can do is teach her how to handle this sort of thing and hope that I never actually need to beat the hell out of some asshole who tries to hurt her.

Her friends, to their credit, were entirely supportive and were talking about going out to beat this dude up or try to scare him.  I made it clear that they were not to do such a thing under any circumstances.  They noted that it would be a pretty bad look for a bunch of white kids to be out beating the hell out of a black guy in a bout of vigilante justice - not an observation I would have expected from my friend group when I was a teenager.  They are way more woke than I ever was.

I don't want this to escalate to violence or intimidation of any sort, and I particularly don't want kids involved in any way.  If that sort of thing was ever called for though, it is definitely not on them - it is on me.  Here's hoping it never comes to that.

Little debts

Pinkie Pie was put in a difficult situation the other day.  She went out to find bits for a Hallowe'en costume for herself with a friend.  We gave her $40 to buy the bits, and told her this was half of her birthday present.  She was happy with this.  When she arrived at the costume place, they didn't have what she wanted.  They had something her friend wanted though, and her friend had no money.  Pinkie Pie wasn't too sure what to do about this, but eventually agreed to buy the thing for her friend.  This got extra complicated when they arrived at the register and the stuff ended up costing a lot more than she had thought, and used up almost all of her money.

These sorts of situations aren't easy to navigate.  How much do you loan to friends?  How hard do you lean on them to get the money back?  What do you do when you have the money... but it kind of isn't your money?  Are you able to say "Never mind, I am not buying that" once you get to the register in a store?"

Lessons like this aren't ones they teach in school.

Pinkie Pie ended up paying for the stuff.  She came home and talked to Wendy, and Wendy decided that this counted as Pinkie Pie's birthday present still, but if Pinkie Pie could manage to get the money from the other kid to repay us all that money that was loaned, we would buy her another birthday present.

This didn't sit well with me.  I didn't do anything for a while, but eventually decided I needed to speak up.  The other kid had paid back $8 by then, and we were recording the money owing on the fridge.  I did not like looking at that recording of the debt, and it made me uncomfortable.  Pinkie Pie has to learn how to deal with debt with her friends, especially friends who have different ideas about how to manage money than she does.  I can't fix that.  But Pinkie Pie's friends owing *me* money... that doesn't sit right.  The extreme imbalance in our power levels in the situation combined with me not actually signing on to this whole debt situation is a mess.

I don't want to put Pinkie Pie in the position of enforcing a debt between me and a kid.  That isn't fair to her, and I know how much being caught in other people's debts upsets me when I have no control over the situation.  I think if you are the one enforcing a debt you need to be the one who can forgive the debt if you choose to.

We talked about it and decided that we should give $8 back to Pinkie Pie and tell her that she doesn't have to pay us back.  She lent the money to the other kid, and she is welcome to collect it or not as she sees fit.  We are removing ourselves from the situation and that $40 is entirely Pinkie Pie's problem, not ours.  That doesn't make it easy for her necessarily, but at least she isn't caught between her friends and her parents now.  She can write it off, or try to get it back, or whatever, but it is only her that is involved in the situation.

Lending money to friends is messy.  We all have to learn that, one way or another.  If she ends up learning how to cope with this and it only costs her $32, then it was money well spent.  

Linking it up

Part of teaching Pinkie Pie is basic school stuff everyone recognizes and most people hate.  We do math workbooks and french workbooks and grind through a lot of the rough stuff as we teach her and her friend.

However, it isn't all grind and solve.  I have been spending a lot of time watching random educational youtube videos trying to find interesting topics to show to the kids.  Sometimes I just show them some cool astronomy thing, but sometimes I manage to tie stuff together in ways that make me feel clever.

The other day I sat them down to watch a video about how life transfers and uses energy.  It talked about ATP and all the systems life has evolved to make use of it, starting from single celled organisms right up to humans.  Then I showed them a video about the Kardashev scale for civilizations, ranking them based on the amount of energy they have access to.  For example, humanity is currently at .75 on the scale, where 1 is using all of the energy that earth has to offer, 2 is using the entire sun, and 3 is the entire galaxy.

The common thread?  The laws of thermodynamics of course!

Body heat is one result of the use of energy by our systems.  This is due, in part at least, to entropy.  You always get waste heat when you transfer energy around.  This waste heat is also an issue if humanity ever achieves type 1 civilization status because we will rapidly boil ourselves to death using that amount of energy on the Earth itself.  Going further than that and building megastructures like Dyson spheres also must account for this problem - dissipating heat is a huge issue when you talk about far future technology like this.

For kids struggling in grade nine science teaching about thermodynamics may be a bit ambitious.  Still, I quite enjoy the challenge of finding disparate subjects that I can link together in some ingenious way, so I take whatever opportunities are available to me.  

The videos typically are only about 10 minutes in length but it usually takes me a solid half hour to get through them.  I constantly stop and check to see if the kids understand the language or concepts being used, and then talk about stuff until they are up to speed.  I don't know if they have noticed that I use youtube as a way to keep them interested in an endless set of mini lectures, but that certainly seems to be what I am doing.  I do like to have graphics and guidance for my teaching, and using videos to give me things to talk about and places to go works well for me.

I don't think I can keep my two pupils on track to learn all the stuff the school expects them to learn.  On the other hand they are going to know a little bit about all kinds of stuff, and there is some merit in that.

A successful bid

One of the best predictors of how long a relationship will last is the way the people in it respond to bids for attention.  These bids are usually small things like pointing out a funny thing to a partner, asking a question, or a request for assistance.  Most of the time all we need to do to respond positively is acknowlege the bid, pay attention to it, and respond in some reasonable fashion.  You don't have to respond to every bid of course, but if you consistently ignore them to stare at your phone, shrug and move on, or otherwise lack engagement, your relationship is likely to either end or be miserable.

I put a large emphasis on responding to bids from people.  My romantic relationships get a lot of attention here for sure, but it also applies to child rearing and friendships too.  I think I may actually respond to bids so much that it is unhealthy for me, though I presume that the people I respond to like it.  

The way this plays out is that I am doing something on my computer with my headphones on, absorbed, and either Wendy or Pinkie Pie talks to me.  I can't tell what they are saying (because headphones), so I stop what I am doing, say "Wait, I can't hear you", take the headphones off, put them down, turn around to face them, and say "Okay, go ahead".  This is a positive way to respond to a bid.  I set aside what I am doing, make it clear that I prioritize their feelings and communication, and make sure I am prepared to engage in whatever it is they have for me.

Sometimes that is a good thing.  Maybe it is time to make dinner and I was being reminded, or maybe there is something interesting we can talk about.  Unfortunately a lot of the time it is something totally trivial that I do not care about at all.  It might be Pinkie Pie wanting me to look at the cat that she made in The Sims, or Wendy saying "Oh, never mind, I see it now."  In both cases it is frustrating because I tore myself out of my flow to respond to the bid, and now I have to get myself back into it.  Often what I *want* to say is "Not now, busy" but I don't.  It is important to not respond in that way, and everyone makes it clear that how I respond to these things is crucial for them.

I want to be a good partner and a good parent.  I want to be there and responsive when the people in my family ask for my time and attention.  I just don't know how to cope with some interruptions being necessary and worthwhile, and some being for things I absolutely do not care about at all.

The pandemic turns this from an occasional frustration to a serious struggle.  What I need is the ability to focus on things without being dragged out of my zone.  Unfortunately we have a tiny space and everyone is on top of me all day every day.  I am the one responsible for the vast majority of chores and work, so Wendy and Pinkie Pie need to constantly talk to me about groceries or dinner or cleaning or appointments etc.

If I could just go to work for a few hours and do things without anyone else around it would be wonderful.  I get a bit of that late at night after other people are asleep, but then I need to tiptoe around so as to not wake them up, so it doesn't quite do the thing I am hoping for.

I really like the idea of all of us interacting casually, being open to little conversations about nothing important.  I want to be receptive to people talking to me, even when it isn't something momentous.  I like the idea of talking with them about random stuff that popped into my brain too.  I just desperately need that separation at times, that ability to sink deep into a headspace without being interrupted.

The struggle goes the other way too, no doubt about that.  Pinkie Pie spends all day in her room, and she won't take care of any basic life functions without constant harassment, so I constantly have to be knocking on her door and barging in when she ignores the knock.  I am sure this is difficult for her too, but because she is always behind a closed door and won't respond to messages I literally cannot wait for a good moment to communicate with her - I have no way of knowing what time would be good.

Wendy works in our living room, so she has the same sorts of struggles.  I can't easily tell when she is engaged with her work or not, so if I need her attention I have to either wait, which might take hours, or just interrupt her.  Working at home is difficult for her even if I am leaving her alone, especially with difficult work where she needs to be in flow to do it properly, and me needing input on stuff ratchets up the challenge.

Having only a kitchen (where I am on my computer, usually), and a living room (where Wendy is on her computer, usually) as our living spaces is driving us a bit batty.  What I would give for an office space with a door I could close!  The ability to go and do something for a couple hours with a door between me and casual interruptions would be a wondrous thing.  

But, you know, money.

I don't have good answers here.  I would like to respond to bids less, but I can't know which ones are the ones I want to filter out until I have already responded to them.  I could put up a little flag that says 'go away' on it, but that doesn't actually work that well in practice.  It is weird and uncomfortable to not chat about little things to someone who is *right there* in a way that wouldn't be weird or uncomfortable if they were in an office ten meters away.  You just walk to the office if you have a thing worth saying, or don't bother if your thing isn't worth saying.  A 'go away' flag simply doesn't create the same social environment.

I am so profoundly ready for the pandemic to be over so people can get out of my space and I can drill down deep into something, knowing that I have hours of time where I can focus and nothing shall distract me.  Trivial or important, all distractions break my creativity and flow.

Murder school

Wendy and I have been homeschooling Pinkie Pie for a month now.  We didn't want to risk sending her to school in person, and the virtual school would be a nightmare for her.  She can't learn by watching a teacher on a screen for hours and hours.  We aren't sticking to any kind of fixed curriculum though, because it works much better if we just teach whatever comes up.  Of course we find things to bring up during lessons, but at least half of any given lesson is just answering odd questions that Pinkie Pie asks.

For example, during a history lesson the housing crisis of 2007 came up.  Then questions about the Great Depression got asked.  By the time the tangent was resolved I had talked about mortgages, the stock market, erosion, housing, banking regulation, and a bunch of other things.  Pinkie Pie isn't going to get the kind of focused education you get in school, but she sure is going to learn all kinds of stuff.

The best question so far though came up during a Math Walk on Friday.  (Math Walks are where she and I take a half hour walk and practice math as we go.)  Pinkie Pie asked "So, where would you stab someone if you wanted them to die really fast?"

This is the kind of parenting question I live for.

She clarified that she wasn't planning on murdering anyone.  She had a story in mind and wanted a character to be some sort of assassin or something, and to write a character that knows how to efficiently kill someone, the author needs to know how to efficiently kill someone!

My teaching fu was strong that day.  I lead off with the general observation that many wounds can be eventually fatal, but is it the brain, heart, and lungs that will kill you extremely rapidly if they are damaged.  I talked about the way the lungs take in oxygen, covered the gas composition of air, touched on photosynthesis, discussed blood flow and heartbeat, explained the heart - lungs - heart - body system, and explained the defensive purpose of the skull and ribcage.

In the end I summed up by telling her that any large amount of trauma to the centre torso is likely fatal, but that if you want to kill someone easily you can just stab them in the neck.  Necks are easier to attack than brains are, most of the time.

She seemed quite happy with the detail of my response, and presumably spent a bunch of time over the last few days writing scenes of mayhem and murder in her newest fictional world.

Either that, or she is going to stab me in my sleep someday soon.  

Probably in the neck.

A runaway

 Pinkie Pie ran away from home for the first time a couple weeks ago.  She is back and all is well, don't fret.  It was the sort of event that starts from the smallest sort of conflict and blows up for no good reason.  I asked her to clean the bathroom sink, she was in a high anxiety state where she couldn't do it, and I took her electronics away until she got the work done.  This led to her grabbing some things and sneaking out the door to a friend's place for the night, returning the next day. 

When we found that she was missing Wendy and I had different reactions.  Wendy was panicked and started searching the building and streets for Pinkie Pie.  I sat at home.  I figured that things were not at all dangerous, but even if they were we had no way to find her so there was nothing much to do about it.  I messaged the parents of her friends and sat back to play some video games.  We needed one parent home in any case and it was clear that it would be me.  This is definitely the pattern that Wendy and I have had over the years - she needs to *do something* and I coldly calculate that doing things isn't worthwhile, so I  ignore the problem and goof off.  

Many years ago Wendy was coming home from a work trip and I thought she was coming home on Friday night.  She arrived home Saturday night to me saying "huh, you sure are late".  I had just spent the day playing video games despite her not being home.  She couldn't figure out how I could have been so calm, but the way I saw it if her plane had crashed and she was dead in the Atlantic there is nothing I could do about it, might as well play video games.  If somehow I had got the flight info wrong and all was well, I should also play video games.  So I played video games!

We had to debate what to do about all of this.  Some parents would instinctually want to punish and yell, but neither of us had much interest in that.  Honestly if a kid is so upset that can't deal with being at home anymore I think running to a nearby friend's home to spend the night is a reasonable reaction.  It can't be the default response to a simple chore, but sometimes stuff gets overwhelming, I get that.  We made it clear that the problem was not telling us what was going on, talked about how she felt, and moved on.

I certainly made her clean the bathroom sink the next day though, you can be sure of that.

I remember running away when I was little.  Much younger than Pinkie Pie for sure.  I grabbed some stuff and headed off into the snow, and ended up sitting at the sawmill in the back field.  My parents eventually showed up and talked to me, and then went back home and waited for me to calm down and return.  I had intended never to return, but naturally I sat in the cold for a few hours and then came home.  I recall the incident that started this and while it is a small thing in retrospect, it was a huge deal to me at the time.

This is the sort of way I want to handle things.  My parents didn't scream at me or punish me - they discussed the incident, agreed that everyone hadn't handled it all that well, and reassured me.  They accepted that I was upset, but made it clear that there wasn't any choice in coming home... but I could do it on my own time.

That was a great way to handle it, I think, and I tried to emulate that with Pinkie Pie.  I hope I succeeded.  In any case we all agreed that we hadn't done things perfectly but that we would try to improve.  We acknowleged each other's feelings and needs, and moved on.  Nothing has come of it since.

Dealing with small people's feelings with empthy and understanding is a damn lot of work.  It is a lot more humane and effective than yelling, but geez it isn't easy.

How to covid

There are degrees of doing social distancing.  Some people have to go to work and wear face shields.  Some people stay home all day and only leave to get groceries.

And some people work in home offices at their dining table surrounded by cubicle walls made of toilet paper.

This wasn't even done for comedy's sake.  Wendy needed walls to separate out the rest of the place from her work zone, and we didn't have anything else that would make such an appropriate makeshift wall.  The wall needed to be opaque, light, easy to set up and move, and unlikely to fall over.  There is literally nothing else in our place that would do.

Pinkie Pie even made a new Do Not Disturb sign for the wall, but unfortunately our printer is dying so we couldn't print it out effectively.  However, here it is, an example of Pinkie Pie's new proficiency with her graphic design program.

This size of condo seemed ideal back when it was just two people living here.  All the space we would ever need!  But nowadays I am cursing myself for not having invested more in a place with just one more room in it.

So much poop

When I bought my condo there was pigeon netting covering the balcony.  It was ugly, but I figured it must be necessary if everyone had it up.  Over the next few years it decayed, and finally I tore it all down.  Never once did I see a pigeon.  For ten years the balcony stayed happily free of both pigeon netting and pigeons.

But not anymore.  This past month pigeons have taken up residence on my balcony and made a gigantic mess of the place.  We have constantly heard their cooing noises and rushed out to the balcony to yell at them.  Being hardened avian citizens of Toronto they are used to humans fussing at them and we had to get awfully close to make them run away.  Apparently they are quite sure that fussing does not lead to actual danger.

After a few weeks of this the balcony was covered in bird poop.  I got increasingly frustrated by seeing a place I love to hang out become coated in it, and realized that the fussing was worthless.

Today I went outside and the pigeon wouldn't move even when I got right up into its face.  When I came within centimeters of the creature it finally flew away, and lo and behold I found the reason for its incredible courage.

Not only am I running a dorm room for pigeons who make a mess and never clean up, I am also apparently running a pigeon factory to produce more of the pests.

Time to fix this mess!

I realized that the pigeons must be on my balcony for a reason - they are hunting for nesting areas.  They clearly want to be secure from the elements and hidden from the birds of prey that hunt them, so I yanked everything off the balcony.  The bike we had stored out there for years is now given away, the chairs are packed into corners or our storage locker, and the balcony is empty, except for the spattering of bird poop stains everywhere.  I will clean those up properly once it isn't freezing out there.

I also have to figure out what to do with the pigeon egg.  Pinkie Pie was sad at the prospect of tossing it out, I don't know if eating a pigeon egg is a good idea, and while I wanted to get rid of it with extreme prejudice, maybe a 'kill em all' approach isn't the best behaviour to model with a kid.  Children make simple things more complicated!

And then I will put up some new damn netting.  We had a good ten years there with no pigeons, but I guess the wheel has turned round again.

Big scary man

I sometimes have daydreams or fantasies about fighting people.  They are mostly banal revenge fantasies where I beat up a group of teenagers threatening my daughter or somesuch.  I assume that such an occasion will never come to pass, and certainly it would be best if the opportunity never arose to test my mettle in such a way.

Today seemed like it might be a day where I get to find out if I can fight as well in person as I can in my imagination.  Thankfully no fighting of any sort occurred and the question of my martial capabilities is as yet unresolved.

Pinkie Pie called me up to say that her friends were being chased and harassed by a group of teenage boys from the local high school.  She and her friends needed to get somewhere, but they were worried about what would happen if the big kids found them.

An opportunity to be big and scary and yell at teenagers?  I am in!

I put on my usual outfit, which is pretty well suited to this cause.  It is a leather jacket, black leather gloves, and sturdy boots.

Also a knitted rainbow striped hat.

When I got to the elevator and looked in the mirror I realized that although the rainbow hat is a fine fashion statement usually, it really did not help me at all in the 'looking scary' department, so I stashed it my pocket.  If I really wanted to rock the scary biker man aesthetic I should invest in some facial tattooes I think, but thus far the call for that look has been lacking, so my tattooes are all under cover.

I walked the kids three blocks out and three blocks back, and absolutely nothing whatsoever happened.  We were on busy streets the entire time so even if the troublesome teenage miscreants had been about nothing would have happened, but I am glad I could set their minds at ease.  I remember being scared of other kids when I was young, so I don't mind providing moral support.

I wasn't looking for a fight.  Much as my fantasies would like to be fulfilled, real fights suck.  You can get punched in the face, and getting punched in the face sucks.  What I really wanted was a chance to go all Scary Man on some evil teenagers and make them regret harassing smaller people.  Scaring smaller people is ethically sound when it is in retaliation, right?

Right?

But no intimidation was required, just walking.

Much like the rest of parenting, there was hope for excitement, worries about danger, and then a whole lot of tedium.

I did learn to not take my rainbow hat out when my job is to be a big scary man though, so at least I am practiced up for when it happens for real.  I wouldn't want to screw that one up!

The cost of a child

The last time I had a beard was 13 years ago.  I had just gone on parental leave from work and I was excited about not having to look corporate, so I let my hair and beard grow out.  It worked for awhile, but eventually Pinkie Pie got enough coordination to seize on my beard and yank.  Having my tiny person pull herself up on my facial hair was extremely unpleasant, so the beard came off. 

While I was bearded back then, this is how I looked.

Just recently I grew a beard again, though this time the reasoning was different.  This time I was getting into a cycle where I didn't shave until it *really* itched, then finally got grumpy and took the facial hair off.  After a few cycles I started to get comments about how terrible the constantly disreputable thing looked, so I let the beard grow out again.

This is how I look today.

I have a lot less hair, that is for sure.  Both in the 'I cut it short' sense... but also in the 'male pattern baldness' sense.

But what stood out more is the grey in the beard.  What a difference in look.

This is what having a kid around for 13 years will do to you!

Pinkie Pie thinks it is funny that I blame my grey hair on her.

I don't know that I will keep the beard for long.  One of the big reasons to have one is to save myself the annoyance of shaving, but people seem to think that I need to shave under my jawline to make the beard look better.  Shaving a bit less area just isn't accomplishing the No More Shaving thing that I want.  If I am shaving at all, I would rather just have the goatee because I think that is what works for me best.

I do find it amusing though that now when I have a cat on my desk while I game it is me who is grey, and the cat who is pure black.  Before it was me having the pure dark colour, and a cat with lots of grey.

Evidently somebody around here always has to be grey, one way or another. 

False alarm

A short while ago I wrote a post about how Pinkie Pie is doing better.  School was going better, though not great, and she was really up from where she was in months past.  Things were really improving.  I got lots of people telling me how happy they were that her mental health situation had finally improved.  Yay!

And then everything fell apart.  It isn't surprising, as it was just this exact time of year two years ago that her challenges first arrived.  Darkness and cold are not good for her.  She has fallen back from school being a challenge, but basically working, to just lying in bed all day every day.

It tears me apart.  I have to be available, there to try to get her up for school, try to get her to school in the afternoon, try to keep her life going.  Despite being there, I just can't *do* anything to make it happen.  All I can do is watch.

There is some extra frustration in having so recently written that things were going well.  I don't want to be going back and forth, cataloguing every change, but after several months of improvement I felt like there was real reason for optimism, and it was worth telling people about.  Then, without warning, it all collapses in a heap.

Now I have to face a ton of conversations where people ask after her, expecting more good news, and I have to tell all of them how much of a catatrophe I am facing.

Giving out news about health is such a fraught, messy process.  I don't like it.

I know that doing it via blog posts isn't ideal, and has its issues.  This is more than a news source though, it is therapy for me, so I write here as much for myself as for informing the world.

I just want to tell all the doctors to stand aside, I am going to fix this shit myself.  No more waiting for their slow, ponderous processes to make decisions.  I also know they won't put up with that, because they have to protect kids from parents who don't know what they are doing.  I get that in general putting an administrative wall between parents and treatment options is a useful thing.  But I can see so clearly what needs to happen, and I can't make it happen.

All I can do is sit here, wait, and feel helpless before a thing I can't argue with, or fight, or fix.

A big meeting

This Christmas The Flautist is going up to spend four days with my parents along with me, Wendy, and Pinkie Pie for the first time.  Having my girlfriend and wife both be part of family holidays is a thing I have wanted for a long time.  It is partly that I want that to be a normal and accepted thing to do, but this isn't just a move for the sake of advocacy; I actually think that everyone will have a good time together and get along well.

I know a number of people in nonstandard relationships who have tried this sort of thing and usually it has not gone well.  Mostly this was due simply to family members refusing to acknowledge or respect the relationships in question rather than any real incompatibility.  I don't think this is likely to be an issue for me though as my family ranges from wholly supportive to uncertain and concerned, but I expect everyone to conclude that the best thing to do is just grin and carry on.

After all, they all know that telling me not to do this is going to accomplish exactly nothing aside from making me grumpy, so might as well just accept it.  My parents have never made even the slightest attempt to control who I am involved with and I don't expect that to change now that I am on the latter side of 40!  This is something I really appreciate, as even though they noticed that Wendy was a great fit for me long before I did they said nothing and waited for me to figure it out.

I will never forget when I told them "So, yeah, Wendy, who I am renting a room from, and who just got divorced two months ago... she and I are dating now, while her ex husband, my buddy, is also living in the same house."  I figured I was going to get a lecture, and instead the reply was "What took you so long?" 

The funniest bit so far was when I mentioned this to a friend and she asked why I would do this at all.  I started explaining about poly dynamics and treating partners well and she cut me off with "No, no, I get that, but why would you inflict your family on someone you like?"

I actually like both my girlfriend *and* my family!  I enjoy family Christmas!  I guess this is not something everyone assumes is true.

Honestly I think the trickiest part is just going to be food.  The Flautist is a vegetarian with gluten intolerance, and that means that 90% of the meals at my parents' place won't work.  It is going to take a bit of adjustment, no doubt about that.

Really though, if the hardest part of the whole thing is that I have to cook a lot to make sure the meals all work for everyone, that is a pretty small challenge to overcome, all things considered.