Children and Imaginary Friends.

I wrote this piece about 14 years ago, when my daughter was about 9 when I was just starting Tai Chi.   She's 23 now.  Her mom and I have since divorced, but we remain friends.

 DOG EATING LIZARDS

            “Idiot.  Stupid dog!”  The words pierced the veil of my unconscious and I bolted upright in bed.  My daughter, age 9, was cursing at our dog.

            “What is it Claire?” my wife and I yelled running into her room, hearts pounding.

            “Freckles got into the bog terrarium and got mud everywhere in my room.”  Freckles cowered in the corner.  “Then she attacked my lizard collection and chewed the legs of my tuatara!”  “Bad dog.!” Claire shouted at her.

            For those of you wondering, a tuatara is a very primitive lizard from New Zealand.  It is the closest living relative to the dinosaurs.  And Freckles is the dog we recently adopted from an animal rescue organization.  Her wiry hair indicates part fox, part Jack Russell terrier, but her short squat legs recalls a Basset.  Like all terriers, she loves to chew and for the third time in our marriage, my wife and I found ourselves child-proofing the house for small items left lying on the floor or on low tables that could easily end up in an immature digestive tract or, worse, chewed to pieces.

            The night before, Claire had shown a friend her science project, a bog terrarium she’d made last year by scooping up mud and moss and ferns from a local wetland.  She’d left it on the floor.  Claire had also had taken out every specimen from her rubber lizard collection, which consists of 40 odd lizards ranging in size from one to 18 inches.  She’d them on the floor, too.

            My wife and I stared at the carnage in Claire’s room.  The carpet was smudged in at least a dozen places with the bog mud.  Mixed in with the mud were the roots of the ferns.  Plastic and rubber lizard and amphibian parts lay strewn about amidst the mud.  Here there was a tadpole tale.  There, the claw of an iguana.  Freckles had single-handedly (single-pawedly?) made Claire’s room look like a Louisiana bayou roadkill.

            In her book, Bonnie Bergin’s Guide to Bringing Out the Best In Your Dog, the author states that human and dogs can feel happiness, sadness, anger love and joy.  Where we bipeds and our canine kin diverge is our ability to think about the past and the future.  It makes no sense, therefore, to call a dog over long after having done something bad and punish it.  The animal will feel it’s being punished for coming (since it won’t remember the past event) and you just end up training it not to come.

            Still, I think I speak for all of us when I say we all wanted to kill Freckles.

            My wife offered to get a bucket and start cleaning up the mud.  I decided just to run out too the local mega-hardware store and rent a carpet cleaner.  When I returned an hour later, I heard a strange noise coming from Claire’s room.  I listened.  It was the sound of Scotch tape being pulled off a roll.

            “Claire,” I asked.  “What are you doing?”

            “I’m putting bandages on Hot Dog.”

            “Who?” I asked entering her room.

            “The lizard Freckles chewed.  Look.”

            She sat on her bed.  Next to her, she had placed a green cushion from the living room sofa.  On the cushion, she had spread a paper towel.  Her rubber lizard lay on top of the towel.  Claire had carefully shred and folded pieces of toilet paper into small pads which she taped around each of the three stubs of the missing limbs of the lizard.  She had gotten some red food coloring and squeezed big drops of it onto the bandages.  The effect was quite realistic and grisly, to say the least.  She stroked the lizard’s head and cooed words of consolation to it.

           I have wondered if her preoccupation with her lizards is completely healthy.  She has given names to each lizard—names like Taco, Hot Dog, Hamburger, Cappuccino and Tiger.  She’s fussed and fumed when I, finding them lying about the house, have picked one up and thrown it into her room.  “Dad,” she yells.  “How would you like it if someone bigger than you picked you up and threw you into your room.  You could have hurt her.”

            At times like that, I wonder whether a typical 9 year old should still personify inanimate objects.  What would the great child experts say?  Of imaginary friends, Spock says: 

“...if he is spending a good part of each day telling about imaginary friends or adventures, not as a game but as if he believes in them, it raises the question whether his real life is satisfying enough...If children are living largely in the imagination and not adjusting well with other children, especially by the age of 4, a psychiatrist should be able to find out what they are lacking.”  (Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, 1985)

Of symbolic play, Piaget says, not limiting himself to any age range:

“It is indispensable to his affective and intellectual equilibrium therefore that he have available to him an area of activity whose motivation is not adaptation to reality but, on the contrary, assimilation of reality to the self, without coercions or sanctions.  Such an area is play, which transforms reality by assimilation to the needs of the self, whereas imitation (when it constitutes and end in itself) is accommodation to external models.  Intelligence constitutes an equilibration between assimilation and accommodation.” (The Psychology of the Child, 1966).

            If I listen to Spock, my Claire needs counseling.  If I read Piaget correctly (no easy manner as the quote above illustrates) Claire’s fantasy play helps her negotiate reality as she recreates her own that corresponds to the outside world.

            What strikes me odd in Claire’s case is that long ago she decided she was a tom boy.  When she did, she rejected, with extreme disdain, even contempt, all her Barbie dolls.  But as this incident shows, she treats her lizards as if they are real, living, sentient beings.

            My wife later told me that one time, she overheard Claire carrying on a conversation with two of her lizards.  It involved some conflict the two of them were having.  It was obvious that Claire was working through some conflict she was having with another child at school.  My wife pointed out that often child psychologists use puppets in a similar way to get children to talk about events and feelings.

            Like everything that happens to my daughters, this incident triggered intense memories.  At the age of 6 or 7, I received two plastic 1950’s space men.  Shortly thereafter, my best friend in first grade, Jerry Morton, moved away.  His father, a Methodist minister, was transferred to another town.  I was devastated by the loss and remember pretending that the silver space man was me and the green one was my friend.  The green man was telling the silver that he was leaving and said goodbye.  The silver man began to cry and begged him not to go. 

            Later, in the 7th grade, a turbulent year form me—a new school and what seemed like older, meaner teachers—I invented an invisible pet zebra, named Herman.  I knew he really wasn’t there but acted as if he were.  I would talk to Herman in front of other kids and try to convince them that he did exist.  What I do remember is wishing I had someone real, like Herman, who I could talk to.

            I feel proud that Claire already knows how to heal herself.  But I also feel proud that she also is practicing caring for others.  Her ideal jobs, she’s told me, sums up her wholeness and sense of balance:  she wants to be a doctor, a musician, and an artist.  Helping others; creating works of beauty for herself; interpreting works of beauty for others.

            What more could a parent ask for?

.
PS:  I raised two children who were 3 years apart.  Can you imagine raising Quads?  Check out this family's blog: http://www.murraycrew.blogspot.com/

Wind and the Way Home

With but a small understanding
One may follow the Way like a main road,
Fearing only to leave it;
Following a main road is easy,
Yet people delight in difficult paths.
(Tao Te Ching, verse 53)

It has been a cold and windy week here in Washington, DC.  My apartment supposedly has thermal windows, but the wind has been howling through them all week.  That sound disturbs me.

It disturbs me because of what happened on Palm Sunday, in 1965 when I was ten years old.  That day, my father drove my mom, my brother, Ken, my sister Joan, and me from our home town of Mishawaka, Indiana to West Layfayette, where my two older brothers, Al jr. and Bob, were studying at Purdue University.  It was unseasonably warm, and puffy, cottony clouds hung in the blue sky.

On our return, the sky began to darken.  About 20 miles south of the town of La Paz, my dad told us to look, because there was a tornado.  We kids in the back seat looked forward and were stupefied by what we saw.  Above the horizon, the sky was divided into a white and a black band.  The black band was a layer of low-lying clouds that formed a sharp squall line.  On the underside of those clouds, three funnel clouds had formed.  We watched as the middle one grew larger and descended all the way to the ground, and then the two smaller one merged into the larger one.

The tornado moved slowly from West to East, crossing the road severals mile ahead of us.  In my mind's eye, now nearly 45 years later, I can see it hitting barns and watching them explode.  It was god-awful, and we were amazed that my father didn't slow down the car to stop.  Instead he continued driving straight for it.  He was a volunteer fireman, and of course he wanted to get to the scene to see if he could help.  We switched on the radio, and emergency weather announcements said that many tornados had been spotted.

We watched the tornado as it continued along its inexorable path, eventually going out of site.  I found a map of the tornado's route.  This map shows the path of the tornado that destroyed La Paz, which started in Hamlet and travelled all the way to Dunlap, just south of Elkhart.  Some websites say it was a category F3 and others say it was F4, with maximum wind speeds between 207 and 260 miles per hours.


In the town of La Paz, an overpass takes the road above a set of railroad tracks.  At the bottom of the overpass, a sheriff had parked his car in the middle of the road to block traffic.  My father pulled up and rolled down the window to ask what the matter was.


"We've closed the road."


"Is it passable?" my dad asked.


"Yes, but you don't want to drive it.  There are people smashed in cars.  You don't want the kids to see that."


"How are we going to get home."


"You'll just have to wait, or find a place to stay."


My Dad rolled the window back up and said something like "forget that."  He turned the car around and when he got out of sight of the trooper, he turned down a side street that lead out of town towards the East.  Mom asked him what he was doing.  Dad said we had to get back for work and school on Monday, so he was going to have to take back roads home.


"It's crazy," Dad said.  "If he had let me go straight up route 31, we'd be home in less than an hour."  


And that started what for me was the worst part of the trip.  We continued to listen to the radio.  They broadcast reports of additional sightings of new tornados.  Many times my father would exclaim "that's where we are right now," and we would look out the windows frantically, expecting a funnel cloud to descend on us and carry us away.  My brother ken, who was three years older than me and well-read on disasters, would chime in from time to time with some fact about tornados.  


"Did you know," Ken asked, "that the winds in a tornado are so strong that they can take a piece of straw and embed it into a bark of a tree without bending it"  Later, he told us the story of how, during a tornado, some farmer was running with his son in his arms to safety, when the winds from a tornado peeled off a piece of corrugated steel from the roof of a shed, carried it through the air and brought it down between the arms of the farmer, slicing his son in two.


I was so scared by this point, that I crawled into the back of our Studebaker station wagon, and pulled a blanket over my head.  We were goners, I was sure, and my Dad was taking hours to get home.


We passed barns that had been reduced to a pile of kindling and houses that had been broken in two.  They looked like doll houses with the furniture intact in each of the rooms on each floor.


After what seemed like an eternity, the rain started and with it hail as big as peas.  By this time, we had fallen into a caravan of cars who were inching along the back roads.  We were not far from my Uncle Earl's house and about 15 miles from our own home.  The lead car turned into the parking lot of a large, brick school that was near an intersection where some friends of my parents lived.  Dad followed the suit.  The lead driver dashed from his car and tried to open the door of the school.  It was locked.  He picked up a rock and smashed the window and opened the door.  He turned to give a signal and all of us jumped out of our cars and dashed through the rain and hail into the school.  We found our way to the basement and huddled there for a while.  Eventually, the rain stopped and when we emerged from the school, the squall line had moved on to the East and the sun was shining again as it started to set in the West.


We went home.  The next day, the President declared Indiana a national disaster area.  We heard from my grandmother that Uncle Earl's house had been spared as the tornado had slid behind his house narrowly missing his barn.  Unfortunately, his brother, Carl, who lived across the road, had not been so lucky, and the tornado had hit his house squarely, killing him.


The pictures of the devastation in the newspapers were stunning.  Here are two pictures of the tornado Pic1 and Pic2 and an aerial shot of the devastation of La Paz.  According to reports, 31 people died in La Paz and 252 were injured.  In the state, 138 died and over 1200 were injured.  The outbreak of tornados that day also hit Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, killing a total of 261 people.

It turns out the sheriff had not been overly alarmist in wanting to shield us kids from the destruction.  Here's a picture of a car that was smashed by a tornado.  

My father will be 95 years old next month and we had to take away his car in 2008 because he was starting to get confused and we feared he'd get lost or put himself or someone else at risk.  He had always been a good driver with an amazing sense of direction.  I now know he earned that reputation, because of what happened that Palm Sunday. He was able to get us home safely by taking back roads that he'd never been on before.  That journey bonded my family together, and every time I return to Indiana to visit Dad I end up driving past the school where we hid.

Resting and Clearning

"Who can make muddy water clear? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear.  Who can secure the condition of rest? Let movement go on, and the condition of rest will gradually arise."  (Tao Te Ching)

One of my goals for 2010 is to deepen my understanding of the philosophy behind Tai Chi.  This is to help me become a better teacher of Tai Chi Chuan, of course, but it is also to help with my own personal development.  This morning, my wife and I threw the oracle coins to do an I Ching reading.  For more on what the I Ching is, click here to read the Wikipedia entry.  Basically, it is one of the oldest texts that forms the basis of Taoist philosophy, in which Tai Chi Chuan has its roots.  My coins resulted in the hexagram 29, "mastering pitfalls," with a moving line in the second position that results in an 8, "accord."  I was surprised because their meanings seemed to mesh with my goal of personal development.

For many years, I have struggled with managing anger effectively.  You name it, I've tried it: meditation, medication, yoga, swimming, deep breathing, and a host of other activities to try to reduce stress and make me a nicer person.  I can, but won't, recount how I learned to express anger unhealthily.  Suffice it to say that knowing the root cause didn't solve the problem, it only exacerbated it.  Feeling victimized, powerless and resentful gave me the legitimacy to "dump" my anger on other people.

When writing down my goals for 2010, however, I saw how my anger was poisoning my relationships.  And for the first time in my life, I had clarity around my anger.  Perhaps it came from a line in one of the goal setting books I was reading.  It basically said, "you are living the life that you have created or imagined.  If you change how you think about your life, it will actually change what things will happen in your life."  This is not so much different from what cognitive behavioral psychology or the new positive psychology movement tells us.

However, for some reason today it clicked.  I realized that when I felt angry or put upon by someone, it was not because of what they were "doing to me," it was because I was projecting my unhappiness onto them.  Moreover, I was seeing myself as an unhappy person.  Believing my thoughts--that I was an unhappy person--would make me angry, and that would lead me to react in a negative way in my relationships.  My personal development goals for 2010, especially around relationships, is to develop the talents and skills that I have (and do more of them) so I feel less angry and then stop blaming people around me for my unhappiness.  It is about taking responsibility and being accountable for my own feelings and actions.

In this morning's I Ching reading, Hexagram 28, "mastering pitfalls," seems especially apt.  Now that I know what my pitfalls are around anger, I can go about overcoming them.  Doing that internal work will allow me to improve my relationship with others.  I can't be an effective Tai Chi Chuan teacher if I haven't mastered the form and understood the philosophy behind it.  As I improve myself, it will improve my relationships with others and result in the "accord" of Hexagram 8.

I like the quotes at the beginning from the Tao Te Ching.  You can't force clarity.  You have to be still and meditate and practice improving yourself.  Only then will the natural forces be allowed to operate and we will understand.

How many people have written about having revelations, finding the answer to a problem, or coming up with a great idea only after they stopped thinking about it and let their mind work it out on its own?  These people have done the ground work and been self-disciplined enough to study the problem, but the "aha" moment comes when they got out of the way.  We need to balance the inward with the outward.  We need to live in harmony with nature.  When we impose our wills too much or make others the excuse for justifying our own behavior, well, we end up with a world like we're living in right now: terrorism, global warming, pollution, poverty, ignorance and needless suffering.

Tai Chi Chuan is an inward, soft martial art with a strong meditative component.  It is all about bettering oneself and beginning a dialogue with one's body.  It will lead us to find peace within ourselves, which is the only way we will ever find peace with those around us.