Parenting on the fly (yet again)

Ever since she was a baby, we've taken SB to art museums--mostly Portland Art Museum, where we have a membership, but we also try to visit them when we're in other cities. She's a pretty observant kid (read: she likes to stare at things and people) and also loves drawing and doodling; the other day, she told me she was an "artitect."

Anyway, so we stopped in at MOMA when we were in SF last week and when the guy in the ticket booth said, "Do you want to buy tickets to the Frida Kahlo exhibit?" without thinking, I said, "Sure," and shelled out a few extra bucks. After all, when she was about a year old, we'd dressed her up as Frida Cow-lo for Halloween, complete with the unibrow, so it seemed fitting in some way.

But that was because we'd forgotten about some of Kahlo's more disturbing paintings. Once we'd made it past the relatively innocuous self portraits, we got mired in the throng of visitors and SB quickly spied the more gruesome pieces, including A Few Small Nips and Henry Ford Hospital. Anyone ever have to explain to a not-quite-four-year-old an image of a woman lying on a bed covered in small wounds, or perhaps one of a woman attached to a fetus and a snail? We cruised by those as quickly as possible, but our kid's eagle eye didn't miss a thing. At one point, I asked her why she liked those images more than, say, the still life images of fruit, and she explained, "I like stuff with people in hospitals." Seems a little, I don't know, specific, but okay.

Alex gave me dirty looks through most of the exhibit, but I didn't want to make a big deal of the whole thing because I knew she'd be even more intrigued. So instead we explained that the paintings were "pretend" and then took her to see the black and white photos of Kahlo and Diego Rivera and explained that those were "real." (Leaving out the "real" part of their troubled relationship, natch.)

At the end of the exhibit, the nice people at SFMOMA set up a gift shop where SB found a set of tattoos that included the aforementioned disturbing images. I tried to talk her out of them and offered up some harmless photo postcards, but she insisted. Her fascination was persuasive, so I bought them for her, but then promptly hid them away. She's asked about them a couple of times, but I tell her that I haven't unpacked them yet and try to distract her: Today, we biked to a nearby street fair where we made paper hats, ate grilled corn, and drank root beer--unambiguously kid activities. I also bought her a new puzzle and one of those necklace and bracelet making kits. Denial, deception, and overcompensation: the hallmarks of excellent parenting.

This kind of parenting on the fly, which is really the only kind of parenting I know how to do, was easier when SB was younger and more of a passive, slow-moving creature. Now that she's a part of the world--alert and inquisitive and observant--it's harder to avoid these edgier encounters with the world. I watch many of my friends struggle with this, too, whether explaining (or avoiding explaining) to their kids why some people live under bridges or why some people have only one leg. Maybe there should be some sort of chart, like those milestone development charts for infants, that recommend when a child can handle hearing about life's harder truths: "At age eight, explain that life isn't fair and that some people don't have homes. At age ten, explain that some people have accidents and lose their body parts. At age twelve, explain that war has always been, and will likely always be, a part of the human experience."

But, of course, our kids are all so different from one another. They're each on their own paths that, while certainly influenced by parental steps and missteps, also seem to have built-in twists and turns. My "artitect" kid likes paintings of people in hospitals? Good to know.

House-hunting season

I'm exhausted from a week of fun, frolicking, and not sleeping in my own bed (yes, this could be a rather risque list, but I'm a mom, so you know what it really means--borderline insomnia, tossing, turning, etc.). Instead of a witty and insightful post, here, instead, is a gratuitous photo of a Lake Tahoe beach where we whiled away a few hours and also another few paragraphs from my thesis project. This is the opening section of Chapter One: A Piece of the Rock:

When we headed out in the evenings after work or first thing on weekend mornings that spring, we assumed classic drive-by positions: Alex behind the wheel and I riding shotgun, in charge of holding coffee cups and half-eaten jelly donuts. With the Thomas Guide open on my lap, I navigated us through the more affordable sections of Portland and kept my eyes peeled for “For sale” signs dangling from hangman-style posts. At promising houses, we pulled over and I jumped out to grab flyers from their flimsy plastic holders. On each I wrote the date and quick notes—“busy st.” “cute!” “backs up to parking lot”—then organized them in an expanding folder so we could pore over them at home like trading cards.

We knew exactly what we wanted—a pre–World War II house with at least two bedrooms, hardwood floors, original fixtures—but what we didn’t know, what we never asked each other, was why. Neither of us had lived in an early-1900 house, though we somehow had a shared longing for one. Alex grew up in a ranch house in a suburb of Denver. I grew up in a series of rentals—none of them architecturally distinctive—in Hawaii. And the house we’d owned together in Eugene—the first for both of us—was a simple ranch with wood floors and a yard that went on and on.

Where did this love of nine-foot ceilings and crown moldings came from? This need for period light fixtures and glass doorknobs, honey-colored wood floors and leaded glass windows? We wanted all of this on decent-sized lot on a quiet, treed street in a good neighborhood near parks and shops and restaurants, all for well under $200,000. And a fireplace and porch would be swell. Our realtor, Brad, stifled a yawn when we gave him the list. We were, after all, describing 90 percent of the housing stock on Portland’s inner eastside, which was steadily and efficiently developed, borough by borough, over the late 1800s and early 1900s. Bungalows and Craftsman houses line up, one after another on every street on the grid, with handfuls of Colonials, Tudors, and Victorians thrown in for good measure. Brad tried to talk us into looking at a “tricked out” ranch he’d seen up in Cully, complete with finished basement, hot tub and a wet bar, but our minds were made up. We should have felt more at home in such a house, but instead, we spent weeks looking for those telltale period details that comprised what we imagined as the perfect house.

Seattle architect Grant Hildebrand says that Americans are innately attracted to these homes built before World War II when development was small scale and craftsmanship was inexpensive. What this means is that though many of these houses look alike and have many of the same characteristics, they were, for the most part, designed and built individually, unlike the rapid-rise of suburban homes, described by singer Malvina Reynolds: “Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.” Reynolds’s song critiques not only the architecture of these houses, but also the lives of the people who choose to live them, as homogenous and uninspired.

The early 1900s American bungalow has come to represent a strange combination of individuality and mass-market appeal. Diane Maddex, author of Bungalow Nation, says that bungalows allowed middle class Americans to have “an affordable paradise of their own,” and between the early 1900s and 1930s, bungalows became the most popular house style in America, exceeding the number of other types of cottages built in 125 years. She explains that the form was a kind of rejection of and response to Victorians, which were seen as ostentatious. Bungalows, on the other hand, were simple, artistic, and democratic—altogether more reflective of middle class values. She writes, “The lowly bungalow in fact became America’s first national house type. Inexpensive, simple to build, modern, and sited on a private plot of land, it was architecture for a democracy as envisioned by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1910: ‘America, more than any other nation, presents a new architectural proposition, her ideal is democracy.’”

The suburban ranch house developments that followed at mid-century were created in a similar spirit of democracy but more so in appreciating the needs of the American family to be away from the “ills” of the city in a home that came complete with a two-car garage and fenced back yard. But the bungalow and its craftsmanship, no matter how simple and inexpensive, still evokes a deeper and more respectable history to middle-class Portlanders, who, compared to their counterparts in other urban areas across the country, are more inclined to buy old houses within miles of downtown.

Knowing Portland had entered the new millennium at the peak of a booming sellers’ market, where the best of these period houses were selling within days at tens of thousands of dollars above listing prices, I asked Brad, “Are we completely crazy? Do we even have a chance?”

“Oh sure,” he said, doing his best to sound sincere. “But you’d better be ready to jump.”

We were ready. We’d been warming up for weeks. By May, we knew the neighborhoods as if we’d platted the eastside ourselves: Humboldt, Boise-Eliot, Kenton. King, Concordia, Beaumont. Richmond, Sunnyside, Buckman. We knew where to look. We knew what we wanted. But what we didn’t really know was why, not only “Why a period house?” but “Why now?” Why jump into fray when one of us was newly out of grad school and in the first years of a new job and other was working part-time and cobbling together freelance work on the side?

After all, most of the economic news in 2002 was bad: Interest rates were dropping but housing prices were creeping up. Oregon boasted the highest unemployment rate in the country as well as having some of the highest home prices. Nationally, the recent period of record home sales was the same period of record mortgage foreclosures. But there we were, caught up in the frenzied spring ritual of open houses and drive bys, ready to jump into the offers-clauses-counteroffers-exclusions-inspections-exceptions fray. On TV, Fannie Mae’s commercials reminded us that they were “in the American Dream business.” Neal Conan on Talk of the Nation discussed the rising costs of houses and asked listeners, “What are you willing to give up to afford your piece of the American Dream?” Newspapers reported that home ownership was at an all-time high—68 percent of Americans had their piece of the rock. We didn’t want another day to go by without having ours.

Home Away from Home

Later this week, we're heading out of town for several days--to Tahoe for a wedding and then driving over to Berkeley and S.F. to visit old friends. In Tahoe, we'll be sharing a vacation house with the friend who's getting married, her daughter (who I've known since she was an adorable, inquisitive middle schooler and who is now a beautiful, brilliant 20-something), and their friends and family. In Berkeley, we'll be taking over the living room of my BFF's new house and generally wreaking havoc on her family's daily life for the good part of a week.

In both cases, it'll be tight quarters and awkward in the way that is part and parcel of traveling and staying with loved ones. Hotel rooms, though sterile, are easily commandeered and made into some facsimile of home--on a family trip to Astoria, I remember setting up a decent mobile office in our hotel room bathroom in the middle of the night during a bout of insomnia. Same with cabins, tents, condos, and other vacation rentals that are rented solo: family swoops in with bags of stuff, drops stuff everywhere, and proceeds to figure out a system of living in a temporary dwelling. Family unfolds and fills up the space around it.

It's harder to swoop in and unfold in the borrowed spaces that belong to our others. A different thing happens here: rather than shaping a space into an image of ourselves, we assimilate, as best we can, into a home's rhythms and systems. It's an unusual kind of on-the-fly homemaking that shows up in things as small as how to hang a roll of toilet paper or whether to use a sponge or rag to wipe up spills in the kitchen, and as large as whether a family eats meat or how parents discipline their children. Traveling and staying with other people, no matter how well you know them, can be a small-scale anthropological experience--and good practice in testing the rigidity of our boundaries, expectations, and values.

But travel also reminds us that our ideas of home are portable, even though our dwellings generally are not. I remember one incident that made me realize how complex SB's (and, I'm willing to bet, most children's) understanding of home is. When she was not quite two, we rented a rustic two-room cabin in Silver Falls State Park that was really nothing more than two closets: one with a bunk bed and double bed squeezed in together and another with a counter top, fold-down table, and futon. The bathroom and shower were through the woods and up the road a bit, perhaps 100 yards away. This is a picture of SB and her dad enjoying a campfire in our "living room."

SB loved being able to roam the grounds around the cabin, digging in the dry dirt with a stick, climbing the slightly bent fir in front of the deck, collecting rocks and gravel and pine cones and putting them in a paper bag. The cabin was one of three on a cul de sac where cars sometimes wandered, lost and misguided, looking for the campground proper or another set of cabins. We had to show SB that, unlike in the city, the road wasn’t separated from the “not road” by a curb—that the two blended together and she needed to be careful. It’s funny how quickly she learned the geography of that new place. When she wandered toward the road that first afternoon and we called to her, she turned, faced us, pointed to the cabin, and said, “Home,” before moving back toward us.

Though she'd identified the cabin as "home," she really only accepted it as such because Alex and I and all of our stuff--green blanket, sheep, toys, food, clothes--were there. Home, to her, could be both a place and a set of people and things. In many ways, it's simply the relative center of the world on any given day, in any given city, which is a nice way to think of things when you're on the road.

Happy travels, everyone.