Wednesday, March 07, 2007
STAR SYSTEMS
Do you ever have a 5-star day? You know the kind I’m talking about – a fresh croissant with raspberry jam for breakfast, your favorite pair of jeans warm from the dryer, sun-kissed air that whispers past your skin implying every kind of possibility for your future. Perhaps you meet with someone and engage in an enlivening conversation, the kind that makes you feel like you’re finally figuring things out. Maybe you have a piece of satisfying work to do. Maybe you do nothing more than putter around your house all day, turning over this and that, replete with the comfort of familiar objects.
I’m not having a day like that today. In fact, this has been a 3-star week so far. Nothing really wrong, but nothing awe-inspiring either. A bit more house-work than I consider ideal (but isn’t there always), fewer activities than last week, and a rather extended patch of PMS, which has the tendency to gradually sour my mood like a puddle of milk left lingering in the sun. But still, I wake each morning and am tempted to meet the day by my persistent hope that with luck and the proper attitude, today could be a 5-star kind of day.
As you can tell, even 15 years post-college and 8 years post-grad school, I’m still obsessed with rating systems. I think we all are. It’s one of the chief diagnostic tools we use to determine whether we are doing it right, whatever it happens to be. We all still long to “make the grade”, “make the cut”, and prove our self worth by doing things better, faster, and with greater ease than those around us. Even those of us who claim not to be competitive still compare our present self to past selves, continually looking for signs of improvement. I don’t know if it’s a first-born thing or a raised-to-go-an-Ivy-League-college thing or a I’m-as-good-as-a-boy thing, but I have been a praise junky my whole life. My self-worth meter lights up like a Christmas tree whenever someone compliments me or tells me what a good job I’m doing. It’s like oxygen. I don’t know if I could live without it.
The depth of my addiction to external validation was driven home recently in humiliating fashion. I called up my favorite professor from grad school – someone who I’d always considered a mentor – allegedly to ask advice about my ongoing career shift from quasi-artist/non-profit slave to university professor. We chatted for awhile, and I was really getting the warm fuzzies from having this grown-up conversation about being artists who are making strong life choices, when he said rather abruptly “Well, is there anything else? I’ve got to run.” And there wasn’t anything else – he’d given me the contacts he had to share – he’d listened to me blather on about who I am and what I want in my life – and now he needed to get back to his own life – one through which many many students have passed and will continue to pass. And I suddenly realized that I’d really called him to get an “A” on my life, and I felt like a total dipshit.
This is all on my mind today, because I am just about to prepare a “star chart” to use as a behavior motivator with my 2 – ½ year old. This is a tried and true method for encouraging toddlers to excel in life’s less enticing activities like tooth-brushing, pea-eating and staying in bed at night. The deal is the little tyke gets to put one sticker on the chart for each loathsome life-task he accomplishes, and when he gets 10 stickers, he gets a toy or treat of some kind. Essentially a complicated form of bribery outlined in colored marker, this approach is endorsed by Super Nanny and nearly every mother I know who has survived the toddler years. I think Gman will love it, and I expect it to help us gain some traction on the daily tasks that are causing headaches right now. And yet, there is a way in which I feel like I’m about to introduce my son to crack. Don’t get me wrong – he’s already sampled the sugary delight of pleasing others. At music class he sticks to the teacher like glue, following her every move and demanding more than his fair share of her attention. At home, he knows exactly when a “look at me Ma!” will distract me away from my personal pursuits and cause me to extol his virtues. He is an alpha male through and through – built to elbow his genetic competitors out of the way for any biological or social advantage he can glean.
But in the back of my mind, I know that we are standing at a cross-roads. Will we as his parents make choices to further hard-wire his brain and ego to achieve, compete and succeed, or can we find subtle ways to subvert biology and culture to show him that “being” has as much value in life as “doing.” Oy. You’re thinking too hard is probably what my mother would say to me right now. But I wonder. Will Gman grow up to be like me? Do I want him to be? Or do I want to fashion him a boat of reeds and leaves and push him away from the shores of prosperity into the river of self-love – a river I have eventually learned to drink from, but after many long and painful years in the desert. Maybe he can lie on his back in the boat and look up at the real stars – the ones that continue to live and die with no thought of us and our frantic scratchings on the earth. Maybe he can tell himself stories about before he was born – beautiful, complicated tales with no real beginning or end, full of language the rest of us have forgotten how to speak.
Labels: Family Life, Mamahood, time
