A Christmas without conflict... what fun is that?

People are finding controversy everywhere from Rudolph to song lyrics this Christmas. 

This Christmas a lot of people have noticed and seem to have a problem with many of our "beloved classics"... Rudolph The Red Nosed-Reindeer has been battered for promoting bullying, while the lyrics to "Baby, It's Cold Outside" are going through a Facebook dissection that would make any deconstructionist literary critic proud. I am not here to choose a side, defend these classics or vilify them for the controversy and conflict they raise. My response is more akin to what I think most children would say: Well, yeah, duh.

Rudolph is a story about bullying. The song it was based on was about bullying. It has always been about bullying. Cold Outside is also about a conflict... to stay or to go, what she wants, what he wants, what she really wants deep down. In fact every beloved Christmas classic circulates around some conflict. Frosty The Snowman deals with the theft of a magic hat and a child's grief at saying goodbye. A Miracle on 34th Street sheds an ugly light on the way we treat our elderly at times we deem their tales to border on dementia. In It's a Wonderful Life, Violet is so shamed for her flirtatious behavior she becomes a prostitute in George's alternate vision of life. Buddy the Elf is mocked and bullied, Tim Allen's "Scott Calvin" is fat shamed as he becomes the new Santa in The Santa Clause, and little Ralphie Parker from A Christmas Story endures treatment from children and adults alike that could easily be seen as abusive. Are all these to be taken off the air and erased from our children's lives?

What we really have here is an issue with conflict in the holiday season. And yet conflict is not the problem we might think it is. Every story centers around conflict. I should say, every good story; just imagine a co-worker telling you in detail about a perfectly normal, conflict-free day. Yawner. But we all want to hear about the conflicts in people's lives and the drama that ensues. However these days it seems we can't move past the conflicts that assault us on a daily basis in the news and with politics and that seem to be heating up with no end in sight. Is it wrong for parents to want to protect their children from these things and just put on a Christmas show where everyone can be happy?

Well, no, of course it isn't wrong. Parents always want to protect their children and keep them reasonably happy as well. Everything goes more smoothly when the kids are happy. But I would argue that this is EXACTLY why we need to put shows like these in front of our children. What movies and songs (and let's not forget books!) do for our children is allow them to experience these conflicts in a safe way. They work almost as a vaccination does, for we go through the pain and emotions of being bullied, grieving, feeling shamed or abandoned, but in a vicarious way we know isn't real. As when getting a shot, there may be some tears and sadness, but this helps to build up our children as they watch the story play out. We see Rudolph and Hermey and even the toys on the Isle of Misfit Toys win out in the end! Susan gets the home she always dreamed of, George is saved from jail and bankruptcy, Buddy finds a way to fit in at the North Pole, Scott Calvin becomes proud to play the role of Santa he has "grown" into, and even Ralphie Parker finds family warmth in the holidays.

As the writer Tom Crum said, paraphrasing many who've expressed this idea before him, "The quality of our life depends not on whether or not we have conflicts, but on how we respond to them." And this is the real value that comes from children watching these shows full of conflict. Watching how that conflict is overcome. Having conversations with the children and as a family about what they might have done if faced with such a situation. Helping them to know that not everything in this world will not be fair or safe or right -- even adults make some pretty grave errors in these films -- but that there is a way to overcome any of these conflicts and be better for it.

I love that Rudolph is bringing people to conversations about bullying behavior. I love that Cold Outside has sparked conversations and parodies looking with humor and serious concern at issues of consent. I hope even those who are drawn to the first Christmas story will find in its conflict lessons to be learned about the plight of immigrants and the impoverished in our midst today. Christmas has always been about conflict... and the joy, peace and love that come from knowing that in drawing together and opening our hearts to love, we can overcome it all.

Back to School!

Five ways we all can tap into our student within

By Maggie Catchick-Houghton

For me, the beginning of the year has always been in the fall, not in January. As a teacher I never kicked the school routine, moving smoothly from grade school to high school to college to my work, always with the change of colors and cooler air signaling the beginning of a new year!

Along with football games and school busses, come new supplies of crisp paper, pencils still smelling of wood, and every other supply you can think of from markers to sticky notes; folders to paperclips. And with it all, the promise of a new beginning, new things to learn, the potential of the new person we may yet become.

As a teacher I get to join in with the kids on their excitement at the new year, but as an adult I’ve also found great satisfaction in taking a moment to reboot, so to speak, and begin again. This is a time of year when we all can take stock and consider what goals we have yet before us, what changes we can work toward, and what ways to delve into the new things we’d still like to learn!

So these are my tips for Back to School and they aren’t just for students! I hope we all can find some new energy that comes from this time of new beginnings. 

1.     Appreciate the changes in nature. We are lucky in Michigan to have the best of all seasons, and the quickest changes will take place in the next few months! Don’t forget to get outside and enjoy it all from the last days of summer to the colors of fall and the excitement of the first snows. Taking some time for nature, no matter how much studying and work you have yet to do, is always a great way to recharge.

2.     Be sure you have the tools you need. Back to school is a great time for stocking up on those little necessities. These are the items that fill our need to create and organize, to be ready for whatever comes next. Use this time to get ready for the coming school year and coming winter as well. Get organized and feel prepared with what you need… just think what you might be able to accomplish!

3.     Open yourself to learning something new. The best part of school is that we get to discover new things we never knew before. But that doesn’t have to end with our school days! Consider something you’ve always wanted to learn or learn more about and get into it! The Cheboygan Public Library website offers the free Mango Languages program if you’d like to learn a new language; there are yoga classes and sewing classes; even starting a new fitness program or joining a bowling league might be an excellent way to fire up your brain by starting something new.

4.     Get ready to read! Reading is something required in most every level of school, but it’s easy to get out of the practice of reading when it’s no longer required in your life. However reading is an excellent way to calm and quiet your mind, improve your focus and concentration, and learn something new in the process. So, this fall, commit to finding something to read. Now that you are out of school and it is no longer required, there are so many options! Visit the Purple Tree bookstore to find a new novel or book that will teach you about history, philosophy or some country you’ve always wanted to know more about. Use the library as a resource to read about memoirs or genealogy, and maybe even as the inspiration to write about your own family history or your childhood. Read the newspaper and seek out articles online to become better informed about current topics relating to our upcoming election or foreign issues in China and Iran. “Assign” yourself a topic of study and then follow your research wherever it may lead you.

5.     Set goals for the new year. Every year my students begin with setting goals for their learning and their personal lives and that’s a practice we can all take advantage of as the students head back to school. Unlike January’s resolutions that are made and forgotten by March, goals are set with an intention of reaching some place new and have measurable standards that can be monitored as we go. Your goals may involve getting healthy or spending less, but should be marked by clear guidelines you can monitor such as decreasing how many times you eat fast food or the amount you spend in certain routine situations. You can set goals for how many pages a week you will read or how many miles you will walk. Goals may extend to how much time you spend with family and friends or even keeping a gratitude journal to be mindful of your blessings each day. Setting goals and monitoring them each day or week can bring about a great sense of accomplishment. Before long we begin to find our new practices become routine and we have indeed grown and changed who we are, maybe not in a big way, but bit by bit. Just as we grew in our education each school year. It’s never too late to grow a bit and learn something new. And that’s why each fall we all need a little “back to school” to get us ready to learn again.

published in the Mackinac Journal, September 2015

My Advice to High School Seniors

My Advice to High School Seniors

 

My advice to seniors is simply this:

never listen to anyone’s advice.

Those words come from places of

experience, it’s true, but are

covered with cobwebs of regret and

longing, the caked on dust of disillusion,

they are shadowed by a life

that is not yours – nor will it ever be.

Don’t stop for advice or directions or a map

when the future stretches before you.

In fact, don’t stop for anything

unless it is to notice the way

sunbeams dance along the waters,

or trees swaying in the afternoon breeze,

the crinkles at the corners of your grandfather’s eyes

and the way your dog’s fur smells

after he comes in after an hour of

basking in the sun on the back porch.

May you come to something… unexpected!

Motherhood: The Greatest Balancing Act in the World

Mother’s day approaches each May, and across the country children of all ages turn their thoughts, count up their quarters, and put crayon to construction paper all to honor that most important person in their lives.

She is the one who kisses their bruised knees and constructs dinosaur-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for their lunches. She is the one cheering loudest at the soccer games before whipping out homemade all natural frozen fruit pops for the team at half time. She supervises homework and schedules play dates, music lessons and tutoring. She presides over arts and crafts time, reading circles and thank you notes written on cut-out tracings of their hands and feet for Grandma.

She is the one canning organic baby food, washing out cloth diapers, reading up on gluten-free diets, scheduling doctor and dentist appointments, finding new ways to bleach hockey equipment, sewing the preferred purple sequins on gymnastics leotards, meeting with teachers for conferences, constructing mini models of the universe for the science fair, selling candy bars for new track warm ups, and more! Always, always, there is much more.

The sad truth is that our society demands so much of our mothers, and parents in general, it is no surprise that so many find themselves doing more than they ever imagined and still feeling like a failure at the end of the day.

But as a daughter, mother, aunt, teacher and observer of mothers in general, I’d like to suggest that there might be a better way for all of us. Mothers are amazing, it’s true, and it seems like our society not only puts them on a pedestal for all they do, it demands they build that pedestal higher and higher. It demands they give the proverbial “one hundred and ten percent,” for what could possibly be more important than the job of a mother?

From my observations, however, motherhood best achieves its true goal when it is not done perfectly. You see, being “the perfect mother” is not really about being perfect as a mother... it is about raising a healthy, well-adjusted and independently capable child. And, in my opinion, this is best accomplished by the “sort of okay” mother; the B+ mother; the not-so-perfect-all-too-human variety our society seems determined to make feel like a failure.

This is the mother who values not only her child, but also her sanity. This is the mother who teaches her child to overcome failure by overcoming her own mistakes with grace and a sense of perspective. This is the mother who allows her child to find his own sense of pride in a crooked project he made himself; who allows her child to realize she plays soccer for the joy of the game and her connection with her teammates, even if no one is there on this particular day to cheer her on. For our children, we are the example of balance in an increasingly demanding world, and by presenting them with a world where everything is taken care of for them, we do them a great disservice.

So my intent on this Mother’s Day is not to add one more level of stress to the overburdened mother who now might worry, Am I doing too much?? Rather, I hope we can give to ourselves the permission to laugh a little and lower the expectations that may not be doing anyone much good anyway.

When a mother can’t make her child’s T-ball game, she is still doing the best for him. When she wakes up late because the alarm didn’t go off and has to throw on some sweats and a baseball cap and rush the kids to school with pop tarts and a cold chicken leg from last night, it’s a great chance to teach them to smile, relax and do what you can do when life happens.

So to all the mothers out there doing laundry, cutting out stegosaurus sandwich stencils, baking gluten-free brownies and managing a five color coded calendar complete with fold out color key, know that you are doing great things for your children. But know also that on the days when you have to rinse out the football jersey in the sink and let it dry flapping out the window on the way to practice, or send him to school with two bananas, a cold pork chop and the left over chicken fried rice, or forget her oboe because you packed the ballet shoes and left her school project sitting next to the door on the back porch where it was left for the glue to dry faster, know that even on these days you are doing great things for your children.

Mothers try to do what is best for their children, but doing what is best for them often requires having the patience, trust and faith in the universe to let them do for themselves. Mistakes will be made, knees will get scraped, bugs, dirt, germs and other unknown substances will be ingested, but success in life comes not from never falling down, but rather from learning how to get up again.

published in the Mackinac Journal magazine for Mother's Day weekend, May 10.

Just Say the Word: Don't underestimate a word's power

          

  It’s funny how much controversy can be brought up just by saying, or not saying, one little word. Is any word really so important? Could a word change anything or make any difference in events of a hundred years ago?

            The first time I heard the word Armenian we were at the table and I didn’t want to eat my vegetables. My father said, “Think of the starving Armenians!” and when I asked, “What’s an Armenian?” he shocked me by responding, “We are.”

            Over time I’ve learned that being tied to the word Armenian (our name used to be Khachigian but became Catchick in America) means many different things. For one, I was connected to a rich cultural heritage in that tiny country to the east of Turkey. It also meant I am part of the Diaspora of Armenians living here in America, on the East Coast, in the Detroit area and in L.A. Most of all, it meant the entrance of that other oh-so-controversial word into my way of thinking: for we Armenians are survivors of genocide.

            Before you can even finish typing the word Armenian into the Google search bar, it prompts you with that other word, genocide. This word has become a part of being an Armenian, as much as we associate Holocaust with the Jews. The Armenian genocide occurred during World War I when over a million and a half Armenians were rounded up by the Ottoman Turks and marched off to die.

This Friday, April 24^th, marks the 100-year anniversary of these events, and just last week Pope Francis called what happened to the Armenians the first genocide of the 20^th century. His use of this word has caused controversy with Turkey, as that country, its leaders and others, including our own president, will not use the word genocide to describe these events, despite so many survivors’ reports.

Which brings us back to the original question, is just saying a word really so important? Nothing can change what happened 100 years ago or bring back the lives that were lost. Most of the people with first hand knowledge of this tragedy are dead now. So what does putting this label on those events do to change anything for those of us who are already one or two generations removed?

But there is importance in it. Saying the word, demands full recognition of what was done in the name of Muslim-Christian disputes and desire for land. Saying the word acknowledges the full extent of the atrocities that took the lives of unarmed women and children. Saying the word requires that we look back with unflinching stoicism at the truth of the darkness that lies within mankind’s heart.

Pope Francis did not reference the Armenian Genocide of 1915 because it was the only time such things have happened… he called it the first of its kind. Today with ISIS waging war on Christians in the Middle East, and tribal conflicts causing devastation among many countries in Africa, we can surely recognize it is not the last time we have seen such ethnic cleansing.

Now, more than ever, we must look to our histories and learn from the lessons they will provide us.

The poet Dylan Thomas says, “And you, my father, there on the sad height,/ 
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
/ Do not go gentle into that good night.
/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Remembering our dark pasts is indeed both a curse and a blessing. It may seem gentler and more polite to let the dark work genocide slip from our memories of the Armenians. But we cannot let it go. We must rage against the pain of our past with every word we have, for only then can we turn with wide-open eyes to what will be demanded of us to prevent such cruelty in the future.

published in The Cheboygan Daily Tribune April 25-26 issue

Never tell me the odds...

It's a funny thing about playing the odds, paying attention to statistics, and gambling on a million-to-one prospect in hopes that you will be that one: I believe none of these extremes in itself can show us the right path to take.

We run the risk with any of these extremes of allowing numbers and the actions of a great many others who've come before us to control our destiny. And
despite what anyone says, I do not believe our individual destinies are able to be looked at as a mathematical formula.

Rather, I am reminded of that scene in Jurassic Park when Dr. Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum) attempts to explain chaos theory by showing the unpredictability of determining which way a drop of water will roll off a human fist. There are simply too many variables from air, to movement, to surface irregularities, to the size of the drop to make any kind of prediction. Life is just like that. All the odds and statistics in the world will still mean nothing when that next drop is placed and follows its own unique set of circumstances to the right, left, front or back.

Yet time and again I see my students in their senior year trying to work out the formula as they face the wide open future before them. They look at numbers because they believe these hold safety for them. They consider what schools will offer them the most money, what the rankings of schools are, which career path is listed as "up and coming", what the average test scores of freshman are, and how much the median salary of those employed in various fields is now and is predicted to be in the future. They look at numbers and statistics, working out the magic formula which will lead them to = success.

Are they wrong to do so? Not at all. I often provide, post and encourage my students to consider these numbers and statistics as they are looking at their future path. I am certainly not so naive as to say that these numbers don't matter and aren't part of helping them determine their path. They certainly are and should be. My concern is when decisions are made on an equation built of these numbers alone.

Just as each drop of water will find its own way, through its own unique circumstances, each student too is unique and what is right for one, or forty-one, or a hundred and forty-one students who went before them does not guarantee it will be right for this one. There are other variables which must be considered as we chart our path into the future, and they are much more difficult to "nail down" in a report or with a number. Students must consider which environment will allow them best to grow and what fields of study appeal not only to the logic of their minds but also the passion of their souls.

These are scarier questions for students to tackle because they require knowing oneself and honesty in the face of many many expectations of others who all have their own opinions on the matter. Here, once again, we face the risks and rewards of letting go of all the expectations and advice of others and forging an individual path onward. The students who go forth after their passion, despite the odds, run the risk of a barrage of "I told you so's" and the insistent pull of self-doubt. They remind me of another movie hero… Han Solo (played by Harrison Ford) from Star Wars who faces not only the doubts and fears of his shipmates when he plans to fly into an asteroid field, but also the ready statistical odds, spouted by the robotic calculations of C3PO who informs him his odds of success are 3,720 to 1.

"Never tell me the odds!" says Han Solo… and perhaps this is advice we all should take to heart. Han is not unaware that the odds are against him. He can see that as plainly as anyone else. But a decision must be made, and in his heart he feels this is the way to go. Talk about taking on a risk! Would it be the right choice every time? For every pilot? Probably not! However there is no time to sit back and weigh every option to the nth degree. There comes a time when a decision must be made and the very best we can hope for is that when that time comes we make a choice with head, heart and confidence all in tow.

As my students go forth this spring to new colleges, programs, cities, jobs, military commitments and destinies, I will never be that robotic voice repeating the odds in their ears. I will hope to instill in them rather the hopefulness expressed by our family's motto: "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!" ~ Henry David Thoreau.  Their paths may take many twists and turns, stops and starts, but truthfully the confidence to move forward is what is most necessary. For, in the end, the success I wish upon all my students is also not something that will ever be defined by the numbers of salary calculations or advanced degrees or bars and stars on a lapel. The success I wish for them is as different to define for each as the curves and tunnels in the human heart. It is success that for each drop may go right or left, back or forward, and may never even know the extent of its reach, as ripples created by one drop grow outward wider and wider than even the individual can see.

This spring as our students step forward to begin their lives on their own, never tell them the odds. That time has come and gone. Rather applaud and encourage their confidence to go in the direction of their dreams, and believe in their courage and passion. Our optimism for their future is truly the best gift we can give them.

From parent to friend

The toughest thing about being a parent is that long after our children are grown and no longer need "parenting," we are still their parents.

They say the best sign of good parents is to raise a child who no longer needs them, but what does this look like from the parents' perspective? How does it feel to be no longer needed?

Even more to the point: who does a parent become when he or she is still a person's parent, but must no longer do what defines the role, namely, parenting?

The trick is to walk a new path… one where the parent and child -- always a parent and child yet no longer the parent of a child at the same time -- learn to know and accept each other as people.

These two souls have shared so much, yet there is another birth that comes from the recognition of this younger soul as a person in their own right. There is no guarantee they will agree with each other or even like each other, but there is also no way to know unless each tries.

It is this stage in life where liking may be even more important than loving. The bond of love between parent and child is instinctual and instant… the bond of friendship and mutual admiration that comes from truly knowing one another takes time and slow steps. It is a conscious choice made after one looks for connections and builds upon true respect which comes from choice and not simply adherence to the formalities of age.

Nothing will change the connection of love between a parent and child, but the connection of friendship can be something even greater. It is a scary prospect to enter into for both sides as there are no guarantees… perhaps avoiding the possibility of rejection is why so many parents refuse to give up parenting, denying their children a place as real people in their world, and so many children refuse to give up rebelling against and fighting the authority of their parents, afraid to see the adults who raised them as the flesh and blood, flawed beings they are.

It is a different path to walk to accept each other as full people. But in the end, the rewards just may outweigh the risks.