It's Going To Be All Right

By John McDonnell

My daughter is graduating from college in a few days. She’s happy, of course, but also a little scared at the prospect of going out in the world and starting a career.
My words of wisdom to her? “It’s going to be all right.”
Maybe that’s not the most profound statement a father can make, but I still think it’s valuable.
In fact, it’s a constant thread running through my role as a parent. It’s a phrase I told my daughter when she was a little girl and fell and bruised her knee. It’s a phrase I used when she came home disappointed because she got a failing grade in a test. It’s a phrase I used when she had a bad game as a college soccer player. It’s a phrase I used just last month when she called about something that went wrong in her internship.
Even though she’s 22 and a grown woman, she still seems comforted when I say, “It’s going to be all right.”
I believe in positive thinking, and that your words can change things. They can certainly change your mood, your outlook on life, and that can make all the difference. I don’t always know that things are going to turn out all right, but I believe that if you say that phrase often enough it will create a positive outcome.
I also believe that it’s one of a parent’s chief jobs to say, “It’s going to be all right.” After all, there are plenty of people in the world who are ready to tell you that things aren’t going to turn out all right. Read the headlines in any newspaper, and you’ll see enough gloom and doom to make you think the world is heading downhill fast, and nothing, but nothing, is going to turn out right. Sometimes the most radical thing you can do in the face of all that is to say, “It’s going to turn out all right.”
If you can say that phrase to your child their whole life, and they believe you, and it helps them to keep a positive attitude about their life, I think you’ve done a pretty good job as a parent.
THE END

Goodbye To A Priest

Father Hanley was a priest who taught me in high school, and I hadn't seen him in a long time. In fact, I hadn't even thought of him in years, although when I got the email invitation to his memorial Mass, a flood of memories came back to me.

High school for me was awhile ago, and I'm reminded of that when I run into my classmates at reunions. They have gray hair and they talk about the 1950s and 60s with a great deal of familiarity. We all have vivid memories of JFK's assassination, the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, miniskirts, Woodstock, the moon landing, etc.

I share all those memories with my classmates, but I also have something most of them don't have, even the ones on their second marriages -- a 13 year old daughter. I got married late and had children even later, so while some of my classmates have grandchildren, I still have teenagers.

At my last reunion a couple of guys mentioned they were already retired and had moved to South Carolina. I said, "I have a kid who's not even in high school yet. That retirement place on the beach is a long way off for me."

When Father Hanley died I realized that he was probably the last surviving teacher I had in high school. The little Catholic high school where I went has a cemetery in a field out back, and most of the priests who taught me are buried there. About ten years ago, on a visit to the school, I took a walk through the cemetery and read the headstones. When I saw the birth dates I realized that most of them were only in their 30s and 40s when they taught me, and now I’m older than that.

I wanted to go to Father Hanley's Mass, and I marked it on my calendar. I envisioned myself going back to the little chapel where I attended Mass in high school, seeing some of my classmates, perhaps walking through that cemetery again. I would revel in the memories, thinking back to the good and bad of high school.

The tough guy poses we struck, the machismo that was as thin as a haze of cigarette smoke. Talking about girls. Playing basketball in a gym that throbbed with teenage hormones. Thinking about girls. Wondering how my life was going to turn out. The cutting humor that teenage boys have, where everything was unprintable but so funny it made your sides hurt from laughing. Thinking about girls. Talking about life, morals, religion, sports, and a million other things with the priests during and after class, with blazing honesty. 

I went to a Catholic grade school and was taught by nuns. Eight years of stern-faced women in black habits made me feel like a prisoner by the time I was 13. When I got to the all-boys high school it was a relief to have male teachers. They didn't mince words, they didn't wheedle or scold you the way the nuns did. Some of them had served in World War II or the Korean War, and they had the grit of life on them. They told it to you straight, and we boys were grateful for that. They didn't take any nonsense, but at the same time they had a kindness you could sense under the gruff exterior. They cared about us, and we knew it.

Father Hanley taught a religion class. I don't remember the specifics of what he taught me, but I do remember a lot of passionate discussions in class. I remember talking about real world situations, challenges we faced every day, and how to handle them. It wasn't a pie-in-the-sky philosophy, or the rote memorization we had in grade school with the nuns, but a nuts and bolts discussion about real life morals.

There was a lot going on in the world. The Civil Rights movement. The Vietnam War. The hippie movement. Old values were being questioned, and people were anxious for change. Father Hanley and his peers didn’t shy away from those tough questions, and they taught us how to look at them honestly and try to find the moral path amid all that turmoil.

I realized the night before Father Hanley's Mass that I couldn't go. My wife was out of town visiting our son in college, and I had two teenagers to look after, with a full schedule of activities the next day. It was impossible to do it all and still drive 25 miles to get to my high school in time for the Mass.

So, I had to say a silent prayer for Father Hanley, and hope that he's in Heaven now. I wish I had gotten to see him at some point in the last 40 years and thanked him for what he did for me. I'm sure he didn't get nearly enough thanks from the thousands of students he taught in a long teaching career. He was one of many priests who taught me, men who gave up the comforts of family life to teach other people’s children, who lived in a community and had no salary, no house or car to call their own.

People like him, who don't have children of their own, have to live on in the lives of the people they taught. I know that he influenced me in profound ways, and he did that with thousands of other men. All those discussions about what's important in life sunk deep into us, and helped to mold our later lives. I would not be the person I am today without the Father Hanleys of the world.

Many thanks, Father. May you rest in peace.

Does Birth Order Matter?

By John McDonnell

I never believed that birth order plays a role in a person's life, until I became a parent. As much as parents try to deny it, we do treat each child differently. Sometimes that’s because they have different personalities, but it also has something to do with birth order.

Parents change over time, and that’s the main reason birth order is important. You just don’t raise your youngest child the way you did your oldest, especially if there’s a big gap between them. I’m not saying that the oldest children get the best parenting, or that the youngest do. It’s just different, and here’s why.

. The first time is a charm. The first time you experience anything as a parent is always a small miracle. Hearing your baby cry for the first time. Watching them take their first steps, say their first words. It doesn't matter how inane or stupid, the first time your kid does something it’s the most amazing event in the universe. This is not to say that it's less amazing when your other children have the same experiences. A miracle is still a miracle the second time, but it just doesn’t have that same slap-in-the-face freshness to it.

. You take more pictures in the beginning. There is no clearer way to analyze the birth order question than to add up how many pictures and videos parents have of each of their kids. In most families, the number of images is inversely proportional to the birth order. When my mother cleaned out her house before moving into a retirement home, she presented each of her children with envelopes full of childhood photographs. For me, the oldest of six, there were several manila envelopes bulging with photos, some that were glossy studio portraits. My youngest sibling got one letter-size envelope with a handful of Polaroids in it, and no studio shots.

. You start out with more energy. I used to wonder why my Dad only played catch in the backyard with me as a little boy, and didn't do it with any of my brothers. Now I know. When my oldest daughter and son were young I'd often play basketball with them in the driveway. Now, I look at the basketball net wistfully, and remember the days before back pain. If I ever went out in the driveway and challenged my youngest daughter to a game of hoops she'd probably tell me to put the ball down before I gave myself a heart attack.

. You relax your grip over time. Here is where things get better for the baby of the family. With your first child you are involved in every aspect of their life. This makes for some ugly scenes during the teen years. With each additional child you relax your grip a little until with the last one you basically give them the car keys when they're 16 and tell them just to stay out of jail.

. You stop trying to be a puppet master. With their first child parents often mistake themselves for God Almighty. They feel they can mold the child like clay, starting when the child is still a toddler. "Look at the way he throws his peas from that high chair," you say. "He's got a great arm. That's a future baseball star there." You have a template you want them to follow, and you fully expect that they'll become an all-star athlete, a millionaire before they're 30, and President of the United States (making sure to tell the whole world in their inauguration speech that you’re the real reason behind their success).

With time comes disappointment, however, and the scaling back of your grand plans. By the time the youngest child comes along you just want them to stay off welfare and not do anything to embarrass the family. A humble job and the ability to meet their mortgage payments are quite enough.

Children are the greatest timepieces ever invented. They grow up so fast that parents find themselves butting up against the reality of Time’s rapid pace. The other day my youngest child, who is now a teenager, found our wedding album in a closet. "Dad, you were actually handsome," she said. "And you had hair."

I looked at the photos from so long ago and once again asked myself where the time has gone. I realized that the father she has is not the same one that her oldest sibling had, in so many ways. But where there's a lack of hair and energy, I think there's a lot more wisdom, so that even though I don't play basketball in the driveway with her, I also don't make the same stupid mistakes I made with my older kids.

She's growing up with a saner, wiser Dad, one who hopefully will guide her through the next few years with enough grace and dignity to make up for a few less basketball games. 

THE END

Are Chinese Mothers The Best Parents?

 By John McDonnell

One thing about parenting, there’s always somebody telling you that you’re doing it wrong. Mothers-in-law are good at that, along with best-selling books like “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”. This new book by Amy Chua will make even the strictest parents feel like they’re too soft on their kids.

“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” is basically saying that Asian mothers are more successful parents because they push their kids harder. Amy Chua cheerfully recounts the way she pushed her two daughters to succeed in school by hectoring them constantly to study harder, telling them they couldn't bring home anything less than an "A" in every subject, and not allowing them to have sleepovers, play dates, or extra-curricular activities besides music lessons.

This is a mother who sat in on all her daughters’ music lessons, took notes, and then monitored their practices at home to make sure they were doing what the teacher instructed them to do. Her infamous quote in this regard is that American mothers think one hour of practice is enough. “For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It’s hours two and three that get tough.”

Predictably, this book has generated a storm of protest from guilt-ridden American parents, some of whom resent the implication that they are unconcerned with their children's welfare, that they're absentee moms, and that their children will never succeed in life because they don't know how to work hard.

My wife and I have discussed the book, and so have our four children. The consensus among our kids is that they think Amy Chua is crazy; no surprise there.

We do wonder sometimes if we were too easy on our children, and Amy's strict parenting style seems a reproach when you have kids who were not first in their class in any subject, and who we could barely get to practice 30 minutes on their musical instruments, much less three hours.

There are no instruction manuals when you bring a baby home from the hospital, and although we tried to read the latest books about parenting, when our kids were young we were mostly too busy and too tired to do much reading. We made it up on the fly, based on our own common sense and what we learned from our parents growing up. We made mistakes, in varying degrees, but we also had some successes.

Compared to Amy Chua we were soft American parents. We let the kids have cell phones, sleepovers, and play sports. We did not call them "garbage" (a quote from Amy's book) if they brought home a "B". We did not monitor every minute of their lives.

The jury is still out, but at this point it looks like we raised four kids who are reasonably smart and successful in school, and who have a good deal of self-confidence. They are reasonably independent, and they have good values. Nobody has played the violin at Carnegie Hall, and we have no Ivy League grads so far, but they also haven't made any bad judgments or gone down all the many treacherous paths they could have taken, and people tell us they are all personable, confident, polite, and fun to be around.

The Chinese style of parenting is not for everyone. It's not even for many Chinese, if you believe the reports in the Wall Street Journal that say even in China some parents are trying to loosen their grip, because the government is trying to encourage more creativity and less conformity and rote learning. It seems that maybe the Tiger style of mothering is too harsh, and creates children who grow up to be too reliant on outside forces to motivate them, instead of being motivated from within.

The one thing I know is that the Tiger style of parenting will be a fad for awhile, but then someone else will come along with another approach, and parents will all think they're doing it wrong if they don't follow that approach. The pendulum swings back and forth all the time. I've learned from parenting four kids that there is no template for raising each child, and that what works for one child may not work for his or her sibling. No matter how many parenting books you read, parenting is still a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants endeavor.

Tiger mothering may work for tigers, but it has to be modified for humans.

I Could Hear Fine If You'd All Stop Mumbling

By John McDonnell

My Dad was one of those people who loved to sing. He’d sing in the shower, in the car, around the house. He liked to sing popular songs, and he had a good voice, but he never got the lyrics right.

That was because he couldn’t hear them. He was losing his hearing.

This bothered me when I was a teenager, the way he’d mangle the lyrics to my favorite songs. Teenagers don’t have a lot of patience with their parents anyway, and to have a parent who’s hard of hearing is especially trying for their overly sensitive souls.

Which is why I should have more sympathy for my own teenage children, because now the situation is reversed. I’m the one who can’t hear.

I don’t mangle song lyrics because I don’t sing in the shower. In every other way, however, I’m like my Dad. I’m constantly telling my children to “Speak up!”, I’ve decided that most actors these days are intentionally mumbling their way through their movie dialogue, and it’s amazing how bad the acoustics are in my church because I can’t hear more than a fraction of what the priest is saying every Sunday.

In my rational moments I can admit that it’s not the fault of poor acoustics or mumbling actors, but I’m the one to blame for the world getting quieter. After all, hearing loss runs in my family. My father had it, and so did his mother, who was almost totally deaf and had been that way since she was in her 40s.

I should not be surprised that I am losing my hearing.

I’m not surprised, but I am furious.

I joked about it when my hearing started going ten years ago. “It’s selective deafness,” I’d say. “I just can’t hear my wife nagging me about doing chores.” Or, “I can’t hear it when the baby cries at night, unfortunately (wink, wink), so my wife has to get up with her.”

The situation has gotten worse, though. My kids will crank up the decibels when they want me to hear them, or stand in front of me and act out what they want to say, like I’m stone deaf and can only read lips or facial expressions.

Hearing loss is no fun. I notice the same exasperated tone from my kids that I used with my father when he couldn’t hear what I said. They tell me every day that I need a hearing aid. My wife pleads and cajoles with me.

I keep refusing.

It’s a matter of vanity, I guess. I don’t want that little brown button in my ear, but more than that, I don’t want to acknowledge that I’m getting older and I have flaws.

I read once that Bob Hope refused to wear a hearing aid, and it ruined his career after he got older. His pinpoint comic timing deteriorated when he couldn’t hear other people’s lines or the audience response. I also read, however, that Thomas Edison was stone deaf by middle age and said it was a great blessing because he could concentrate on his work, and shut out all the noise of people yakking at him.

I try to tell my kids the Edison story, but they more likely think of me as Bob Hope -- flubbing my lines every day because I can’t pick up what my costars are saying.

I know I should break down and get the hearing aid. There are advances in technology every day and the newer models are so tiny you can barely see them. And Bill Clinton famously got two hearing aids at the tender age of 51, which helped to make it more acceptable among Baby Boomers.

It’s so 21st century to have something sticking in your ear, right? I’ll just look like one of those people who is so important they walk around all day talking on the phone attached to their ear.

I know all those things, but in my heart I still can’t get used to the fact that I’m now my Dad, getting all the lyrics wrong, saying “Pardon?” even when the speaker is right in front of me, and having my kids scream at me in frustration when I don’t understand something they said to me.

Then again, I guess I should remember that my Dad refused to get a hearing aid for many years also, and that if I really want to be just like him I could go on for another ten years like this, until my loved ones are ready to clobber me because I can’t hear a thing they say.

Maybe I’d better Google “hearing aids”. I think I’m ready.

THE END

Soccer Memories

 By John McDonnell

In a few weeks my daughter’s soccer career will be over. She plays for a college team, and this is her senior year. Her school is a six hour drive away, so my wife and I have only seen a handful of her games in four years.

We will be driving down to see her play the next two weekends, and it will be an emotional time for us.

Whenever I sit in the stands and see her playing at the furious, physical pace of college soccer, I can’t help but think of the little girl in a ponytail who started playing at four years old on a coed team where the boys wouldn’t pass her the ball, and she seemed more interested in picking dandelions than in playing her position. The ball would routinely pass her by while she stared at cloud formations, and the adults would try to refocus her by jumping up and down on the sidelines and screaming.

Has it really been 17 years since then?

I’ve seen a lot of soccer in the intervening years, and it’s a sport I never played or really cared about before. My high school didn’t even have a soccer team when I was there, and it was a sport I thought was only played by people with names like Reinhard or Carlos.

When your child likes a sport, though, you dutifully learn everything you can about it, and become the world’s biggest fan. I coached my kids in soccer when they were little, trying to hide my ignorance with a few insider terms I learned from books. “One touch!” I’d yell, not really sure what that meant, but it sounded good.

I stopped coaching when the kids were old enough to raise their eyebrows at some of my strategic moves, which was usually when they hit 9 years old.

It’s been a grand adventure, as every part of parenting has been. I’ve had to learn skills I never dreamed I’d learn, play roles I never thought I’d play, speak a language I never knew before.

There have been injuries, games played in the pouring rain or freezing cold, games that were won or lost in the last seconds, stubborn coaches and mean-spirited opponents, medals and trophies won, friendships forged, tears and laughter in abundance. I put thousands of miles on our car shuttling my kids to tournaments, stayed in budget hotels and ate too much fast food. I gave up weekends to man the hot dog stand when our team hosted tournaments, pushed my creaky joints to the limit in backyard workout sessions, shelled out thousands of dollars for uniforms, team fees, equipment, cleats and whatever else my soccer players told me they absolutely had to have.

I’m sure I’ll reflect on that sitting in the stands this weekend. I’ll look at that woman who’s flying down the field with the smile on her face, the same one she had when she was five years old, and I’ll cheer her and wonder at the mystery of time, that it seems like only yesterday when she was picking dandelions in the middle of a soccer field.

I’ll probably shed a tear too.

It’s been a great ride.

The Lost Art Of Conversation

By John McDonnell

My wife has cousins in Ireland, and they came to visit last week. We did some sightseeing, went out to a few restaurants, took them shopping.

Mostly, though, we just talked.

The Irish have a gift for talking. Words flow out of them with the ease of a river flowing downhill, and if you stop and ask directions of a stranger in Dublin, like we did last April when we visited, you’ll probably get a story along with the directions. Indeed, the cab driver who took us to the airport was as glib and expansive as a standup comedian.

Last week we spent a lot of time with the Irish relatives just sitting around the kitchen table, drinking tea and talking.

It reminded me of how little we do that in America these days. I don’t remember the last time my family sat around the kitchen table with anyone and just chatted. We’re always too busy to sit down, there are too many deadlines to meet, schedules to keep. My children don’t know what it’s like to talk without purpose, to simply talk for the sake of talking.

It wasn’t always this way. When I was a child in the 1950s and 60s my grandparents, aunts and uncles would regularly stop by our house and visit for awhile.

They would sit in the kitchen or the living room and talk. Conversation was something that was valued. The children sometimes took part, sometimes not. Even if we were too busy to sit and talk, we could still hear the conversation from wherever we were in the house. I remember many times being sent upstairs to do my homework, but instead sitting on the floor in the hallway listening to my aunt tell stories about her pals in the Notre Dame Subway Alumni, or my uncle and father talking about playing stickball in the street in South Philadelphia when they were boys during the 1930s.

There were arguments, too -- during the Vietnam War years there were raging arguments about whether we should be involved in that war, and during the Watergate years there were many heated discussions about Nixon’s crooked machinations. When John F. Kennedy died there was anger and sadness, but the conversation was a way for them to vent their feelings at a time of tragedy.

I learned a lot listening to those conversations. I learned about history, I learned about morality, I heard a few secrets that I wasn’t supposed to, I learned how to be part of a family, a community, how to be a human being.

I worry that my children are not learning those things.

Where is the art of conversation today? Is it flourishing through text-messaging, Facebook postings, e-mail, instant messaging? Technology lovers will tell you these social networking tools are a good thing, that they’re helping people to make connections, to stay in touch with folks who live far away, to reestablish ties with friends from long ago.

In a way that’s true; through Facebook and e-mail I’m reconnected with high school friends I lost touch with 25 years ago. It’s nice to chat with them online, but these short, truncated messages, a few sentences on a screen, are not the same as sitting down across from someone and talking with them for an hour or two. Social networking is good for short bursts of information, quick hits, an update or two. An in-person visit with someone is different. When you have time to relax and just chew the fat you never know where the conversation will lead. It can twist and turn, loop back on itself, strike off in new directions. You have time to tell a story that everyone’s heard before, without the fear of someone impatiently looking at his or her watch.

The Irish know this. They pay no attention to the world and its busy rush when they have a chance to talk. A story or an anecdote is worth taking time out of your day for. A visit and a chat are important things. Talking, just talking with no particular point or sales pitch or punch line to deliver, is a good thing in itself.

I miss those days in America.