Teenage Wasteland

Over a decade ago it was the Columbine shooting in the USA.  Timothy McVeigh.  Angry young men murdering innocent people.

Now its young Muslim men.  Arid Uka.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.  Angry young men murdering innocent people.  (Or trying to.)

Can we blame radicalized Islam for the former any more than we could blame popularized violence on TV for the latter?

I don't know.  But words hurt.  Sarah Palin telling her followers it was time to reload.  And one of them doing just that and shooting a congressional representative.

These are kids.  They are confused young men.  Man, I was angry all the time as a teenager.  Remember the Pet Shop Boys? "Everything I Do, It's a Sin" was like my own personal logo.  The Who.  AC/DC.  Heavy Metal.  Mosh Pits.  We are angry young people, bursting with hormones.  And who did we blame?  Our parents.  The status quo.  And we were going to take our anger, channel it, and do exactly the opposite.

I think this is called healthy adolescence.

What is not healthy is when adults infiltrate the adolescent psyche and manipulate it for their own purposes.  Man, for a religion that reveres the past, radical Muslims certainly have embraced the internet.  How easy for a lonely, shy, confused young man to become part of a group.  How easy to find purpose. 

Arid Uka grew up in Germany.  And while I do have my issues with that country, it is not a bad place to live.  He got to go to school.  His family had a home and work and food.  They are allowed to practice their religion.  And they aren't in danger of being slaughtered.  Life is NOT easy, but it really could have been a lot worse too.

As for the Americans, they stepped in and saved Kosavan ass when noone else in Europe really wanted to.

Dare I say that this isn't at all about religion, or nationality or race?  It's about angry CHILDREN being manipulated for an evil purpose.  How easy to pull the trigger and yell 'Allahu Akbar.'  I'm guessing his girlfriend dumped him.

So what can we do?  How can we keep these young men from destroying themselves - and others with them. 

Does it really get back to mom and dad keeping on eye on what their kids are reading and watching on the internet? 

Or can we get an international campaign mounted - Muslim and non-Muslim alike - telling these children that they are being used?  Telling them WE care.  Telling them there are other options.

I know.  Let's get everyone listening to The Who again.   Because, after all, the lyrics go like this:

I don't need to fight
To prove I'm right
I don't need to be forgiven

Teenage Wasteland.  If only it were as simple as running over a few mailboxes, like they did in my day.

Family Size - Whose Business Is It?

Germany is not a child-friendly place. 50% of college educated women have no children at all. The average family size is 1.3. The government is paying women to stay home with a child for a year AND pays monthly "child-money" - per child - to encourage families to procreate.

Sure, some families do the responsible thing and have their two kids. There are even some LARGE families with three children. And, to be honest, my town has at least 3 German families beside mine with 4 children, and I know of one German family in a neighboring town with 6. But see, I can count them. And I know of them because they are pointed out to me - as one fellow freak to another.

I actually have it very easy. First of all, I have the twins, spaced four years apart from Andrew. Still totally respectable, in terms of family planning, to go for that last baby at a decent time interval apart from the first two. A little crazy, that number three, but still "done." That baby number three turned into three and four is a source of amusement and some pity. But at least it isn't my fault that I had four.

I'm also American. Which excuses me (in a manner I do take laughingly, but is actually rather condescending) in the same way you'd excuse someone from a developing country from sending their boy to kindergarten with a girl's pink backpack. "Well, see, they just do that where they come from. They just don't know any better." When we were visiting the castle in Ludwigsburg this summer, and people didn't realize we spoke German, I began to feel like a cultural example of a backward country. "Oh my goodness, look at that poor woman with all the kids." Like I had to beat out all their clothes by hand on a rock by the river.

That poor woman. That silly woman. That obvious religious fanatic. The last is for my friend Maria, also an American living in Altdorf, who is expecting her fourth child in what will be six years. "I wonder what they think of me," she says. And I know it exactly. She goes to church regulary, as in EVERY SINGLE SUNDAY. She dresses modestly. And she wants a large family. She's obvioulsy been brainwashed by some cult, church, same thing.

Her German neighbor, trying to be supportive and understanding of a primitive tribal value system, told Maria that her daughter has asked her why Maria kept having children. Which is already a pretty sad thing, and tells you a lot about German attitudes towards children, when this is asked by a child. (I had one 8 year old tell me they admired me for all the hard work I must be putting in with the twins. Well meant, but my goodness, do their parents teach them nothing about JOY?!) Maria's neighbor told her daughter that when you come from a large family, which Maria does, then you often also wish for a large family yourself.

Okay. But why does there have to be an explanation? What is the obsession with the size of someone else's family, someone else's truly personal decision? And wouldn't a better explanation be simply that Maria loves children? That she WANTS to have children?

It honestly doesn't occur to people that we have a choice in the matter knowadays. We DO know about birth control and we DO know how to use it. We aren't forced by our in-laws to produce a male heir or enough children to run the farm. We aren't held back by primitive beliefs. We actually WANT these children.

They don't get it. I have a lot of friends with only one child. That was enough. Life altering. Hard work. And enough. And while it would never be enough for me, anything less than four for me just wasn't half chaotic enough, it doesn't occur to me to question them. It's not my family. It's not my choice. Or friends who have chosen to have no children. My guess is they get as much crap as I do, but again, who is it for me to decide how another woman is to fulfill her journey, reach her potential, be happy?

My German friend gets it the worst. Nikki also has 4 children within 6 years. But she, apparently, should know better. Her eldest son, now 8, has started to take offense at the number of comments they receive on the streets of Stuttgart. Obviously not well-intentioned. "Are those ALL YOUR children? Are you the day-care provider?" Philipp has started telling people that there are families in the world with even more kids than they have. Poor kid, defensive at 8. (It is HARD to be different in Germany.) When we visited the other day, and later all trooped out to the car, the only other minivan on the street besides theirs, I heard him counting off the kids. "One, two, three, FOUR." He ran back into the house and joyfully announced to Nikki, "Mommy, they have just as many kids as we do!" Phew - he fit in at last.


There are so many ethical issues surrounding family size. Octomom. IVF. Welfare families. World poverty. Although, maybe to salve my conscience, I see this last as a matter of redistribution of wealth and of education and opportunities for women. In Haiti, most women I knew would CHOOSE to have two children. They just need a means of birth control. Given the choice, I truly believe most families would have two to three children, some none and some more, all evening out in the end.

My message is just one of joy. Crazy, religious, American, uneducated (or worse yet, educated and raised PROPERLY and should know better), sending-your-kid-to-kindergarten-with-the-wrong-backpack, scrubbing-your-clothes-by-the-river JOY!

When you find joy in yourself, you will see it in others, regardless of what color they are, where they come from, what language they speak, or even how many children they are - or are not - towing around behind them!

ENJOY!

Dark Child

"Those definitely aren't all YOUR children." This from the lady at the entrance to the indoor children's playground we were visiting for Andrew's 7th birthday last week. But yes, they were - all four of them. As the lady glanced at me with mistrust - she wasn't sure she wanted to give us the free entrance for a fourth child that the family promotion promised - I patiently explained that, although they weren't identical, Aidan and Matthew were, indeed twins, thereby trying to alleviate the confusion with having two children so close in age they couldn't possibly both be mine.

I've been getting that more and more recently; unless I dress them identically, Matthew and Aidan look like siblings maybe, but not like twins. Except they are obviously very very very close in age - closer than many suspect. Twelve minutes close in fact. A lot of people assume I am taking care of a friend's child. This doesn't bother me at all, why should it, but I was beginning to get annoyed at having to prove that all my children are indeed mine.

And then I saw her glance suspiciously at Ryan, before sighing and giving me the discount, as if she couldn't force the truth out of my and had to reluctantly relent. My dark child. So it wasn't about the twins after all. It was about Ryan again. Fortunately Ryan was already excitedly talking to Andrew about which play station to hit first, so she missed the exchange - and the look.

I used to laugh but this time I couldn't find it funny. It's been happening more and more often.

Let me explain. Ryan looks EXACTLY like her father; spitting image in feminine form. Friends of his still freak out when they see even just photos of her. She's a perfect mini-Damon. Beautiful long brown hair, big doe-brown eyes, lanky limbs. She's by no means dark, or at least by American standards, but her looks belie the melting pot of America - maybe Italian, possibly Albanian, but just as likely Irish or German - my father has dark hair too. (But blue eyes.)

The boys - and I - are blonde. Andrew has brown eyes. Aidan and Matthew have blue and green - please don't ask me which has which right now. But they are blonde. I don't know that they look like me any more than Ryan does, in fact I think Matthew also resembles Damon, but they do match - me and each other - colorwise.

Last week I caught the tail end of a conversation where Ryan was defending herself from two girls her own age who refused to believe that she was part of our family. (Before we go there, the girls were actually dark themselves and were not German.) "Those are not your brothers," they said. "And where is your mother really?" When I stepped in - because Ryan looked really hurt - their eyes grew really wide. This blonde lady was actually telling them the dark haired child was hers.

Even before the twins were born, strangers have wondered aloud about how odd it was that two children from the same two parents could look so unlike one another. Chinese tourists have taken photos. And once a complete stranger asked me, in front of the children, if they had different fathers. Or rather, stated that it was obvious that they had DIFFERENT fathers. In front of my children.

I explain about the American melting pot and the wonderful variety of genetic combinations. But really it's getting old.

This week I spoke to a Chinese-American mother living in Germany who told me how tough it had been for her Chinese-American son to grow up looking different from everyone else. And I constantly hear - and see - how tough it is to be just a little darker than everyone else in Germany. This is not America; a LOT of us are blonde. Sure, we have our influx of eastern Europeans, Italians, Turkish, and every so often an African- American serviceman or even an African. The face of Germany IS changing, but it is still light years behind America.

I know that racial relations in America are far from perfect. But I see the ideal realized on the U.S. military bases here in Germany. - an institution I am less than comfortable with embodying the vision of a unity I love. 1/3 white, 1/3 Hispanic, 1/3 African-American. Hispanic women in positions of authority. It takes a while to get used to the unifrorms - and the weapons - but the dream of a melting pot is realized, at least on the surface, on a U.S. military base.

But how can this be about racial relations? My children aren't even mixed race. It's about looking different- and about having to prove WHO you are - and validate your basic being - because of how you look. So maybe it is about race after all.

These are ALL our children. They have survived flood and famine, corrupt regimes and civil wars and crippling poverty. Haven't they been through enough without us questioning the color of their skin?