parenting Archives | Carol L. Douglas

December 21, 2016

World’s Okayest Mom

Lonely rubber ducky in Camden harbor.

You might know my young friend Sandy Quang. She was my painting student for a long time, then my studio assistant, and sometimes my workshop monitor. Most recently, she worked at Camden Falls Gallery.

Sandy’s parents run a restaurant called Dac Hoa. It’s a small eatery on the edge of downtown Rochester, known for its fresh Vietnamese, Thai and Chinese food. Ha, Kahn and Nu know this range of cuisine because their families left China during the Chinese Civil War and settled in Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon they moved along again, eventually ending up in Rochester. I respect them for their courage, hard work, and integrity. Through Sandy, we’ve become friends.

“My parents’ restaurant,” graphite on paper, approx. 16X18, 2008, by Sandy Quang.

When I was a kid, I had a crush on an imaginary boy called Homer Price. I loved him because he was nice and could fix anything. Years later, I met him in the form of a gangling high school student. We’ve had four kids and grown grey together.

At the time, I didn’t know anything about Homer Price’s creator, Deer Isle’s own Robert McCloskey. I’d never seen his other children’s book classics. But I raised my own kids on a steady diet of his books. My youngest took Make Way for Ducklings very much to heart. The lad loved everything about ducks. “Well, that’s cute,” I thought. His obsession about ducks was just one of those things that were in the background of our collective family consciousness.

And then he was slightly older and we were at Dac Hoa during a Christmas season very much like this. He was restive and annoying, as little boys are wont to be. Looking to amuse him, I showed him the roasted ducks in the window. To this day, I have no idea why I thought this would be a good idea.

“Sandy’s parents’ restaurant interior,” graphite, approx. 18X24, 2008, by Zeyuan Chen.

He dissolved into howling, violent grief. Our dinner, obviously, was ruined. The lad cried for days.

“That boy is going to be in therapy for years,” I thought ruefully.

Last week we were in Dac Hoa celebrating the same kid’s 20th birthday. I asked him if he remembered the incident with the ducks. My husband pulled an exasperated face. Nu laughed. And my son also laughed. I’m so relieved.

I simultaneously believe that parenting is our most important job and that kids make their way somehow despite it. I guess for this youngest one, “World’s Okayist Mom” was good enough.

Christmas is the season of grace-made-manifest through the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It’s nice to know I’m forgiven.

December 8, 2016

A deadly inheritance

“Annunciation,” by Carol L. Douglas. That phone call is like a nuclear bomb, only worse.

The work I’d planned for today and tomorrow is off my slate. Instead, I’m driving back to Buffalo for a funeral. Our oldest friend’s youngest child died of a drug overdose on Tuesday night.

I’m not going to speculate on what happened. For one thing, I don’t know. But it’s a tragically common story in our age.

Parents like to believe they can protect their kids from making bad choices. To a degree that’s true, but it’s not totally true. I don’t know a single kid who never did anything monumentally stupid, including mine.

I’ve known three generations of this family. None of the usual bromides apply. When I say that the boy had “every advantage,” I’m not talking about just education or money; I’m talking about love, stability, heritage, and a sense of his place in the world.

“Female,” (detail), by Carol L. Douglas.

If you’re my age, you probably think of recreational drugs as pretty harmless. Back in the 1970s, many of us experimented with them. True, most of us aging hippies have—more or less—our faculties intact, but we’ve left a big mess behind.

We are fools when we look back on our youthful foibles through John Lennon-framed rose-colored glasses. Drugs are a curse on our children’s and grandchildren’s generations. Deaths from opioids and their synthetic analogues have skyrocketed, according to the DEA. Heroin deaths increased 248% from 2010 to 2014. Heroin is more potent and less expensive than ever. Even pot is no longer the mild, friendly drug we once knew.

In the 1970s, the annual drug overdose death rate was fewer than 2 deaths per 100,000 people. In 2014, it was 15 deaths per hundred thousand people. As a cause of accidental death, it is now second only to car crashes.

And that’s just the user side of the problem. On the other side is the violent drug war in our cities that disproportionately claim young black men.

When the Bible talks about “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation,” it isn’t talking about transferring punishment (Scripture says that can’t happen). This boy’s parents never touched drugs themselves. They were so focused on their studies that they sat out the Swinging Seventies, making them a little puzzling to have at parties.

That verse says that sin itself, unless repudiated, will keep on reappearing. Our generation’s casual attitude toward drugs has morphed into a scourge ravaging our young people. Both the middle-class kids who overdose and the ghetto kids caught up drug violence are its victims.

When I argue for a closed border, it’s not to keep undocumented migrants out of the US; it’s to seal off the major heroin routes into the US. But even that won’t work as long as there’s demand.

“Chris in Pink,” by Carol L. Douglas.

Since my own misspent youth, my generation has cheerfully torn away at the underpinnings of our culture. Marriage, work, faith and family have all been tossed into the great maw. They’ve been replaced by self-actualization and sensualism. Is it possible that this leaves our descendants feeling unnecessary, marginalized and devoid of purpose?

To a degree, parents can counter those messages, but the larger culture has a profound influence on our kids. That’s why there are so many upright old ladies in urban churches mourning the loss of their sons and grandsons in the drug war.

For now, kiss your children and tell them you love them. One never knows what one’s tomorrow will bring. And pray. Pray like crazy.

As for me, in the words of my former gangbanger friend, I feel like punching them drug-dealing m—rf—rs in the throat. Nobody expects a left hook from a little old lady.

September 26, 2014

Creativity

Maternity, Mary Cassatt, 1890. Cassatt never married nor had children. It would have been impossible in her era to mix her career and a family.

Sorry about the delayed post. I was busy caring for a baby.

Actually, I’m not all that sorry. After all, all other creativity derives from this fundamental beginning of life. The word “create” derives from the Latin creare: ‘to make, bring forth, produce, beget,’ and is related to crescere: ‘arise, grow.’ My etymology dictionary also links the latter to the Greek kouros (boy), and kore (girl), but I’ll take that with a grain of salt.

Most of the artists I know are childless, and the ones who do have children struggle to resolve the demands of their careers with the demands of parenting. Not that this isn’t true of all careers, but there’s something about the creative impulse that seems to channel in one direction or another. I’m an outlier because not only do I have kids, I have a lot of them.

Breakfast in Bed, Mary Cassatt, 1897.

My daughter had a difficult delivery and I’m back in Pittsfield helping her until I’m sure she’s recovered.

We Americans have a weird attitude toward parenting. In trying to give women equal access to the marketplace, we’ve relegated parenting to the status of a hobby or a part-time job. Done right, it’s difficult work, demanding high levels of organization, energy, intelligence and time. My daughter is a well-paid professional, and I don’t want to see her dump her career to stay home. But having worked through my own parenting years, I also don’t want to see her wandering around in a fog of exhaustion, either.

But enough of this. Junior needs changing and his mom needs her meds before we start the round of doctor’s office, visiting nurse, visiting specialist. This baby stuff is a lot of work.

Baby Reaching For An Apple, Mary Cassatt, 1893

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September 10, 2013

Desperately seeking the Immaculata (and other things)

Summer Sky, by Marilyn Fairman, oil on linen, 9X12. It’s another entry in Rye Painters on Location’s silent auction, and a darn lovely one, too! If I had more time, I’d see Marilyn more than once a year, right?

A few weeks ago I talked with a wonderful New Hampshire-based painter who is busy raising two daughters, ages 10 and 12. He struggles to have time to advance his career. I sympathize; I have four kids myself. And yet, I told him, I would not change the choices I’d made.

I like to think it’s easier now that my kids are older, but all I need to revise that opinion is to commit myself to reaching a goal by Friday. This week’s goal is in itself parenting-related, since we’re expecting out-of-town company for my daughter’s wedding shower. My family has been outstanding at keeping the house up, but a lot of clutter and grunge accumulates when the mom is gone as much as I am.

I foolishly believed I could devote four hours a day to cleaning and four hours a day to painting. Hah. I haven’t even got the receipts from my summer travels off the dining room table, and I’ve been at it for two days.

Today I met with a gallery director at a local college to finalize plans for a show next spring. The show will be about the relationship between God and man in the natural world, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to do something so dear to me.

The lesson in this is that I do not have the luxury of procrastination. There are so many interruptions in a busy life, one must grab the time one has. March is just around the corner.

Interested in my Where the Sea Meets the Sky Workshops? October 2013—the last session with openings in 2013—is selling out fast. Or, let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information, or email Lakewatch Manor!