Sept. 9, 2011: First day of school a finale of a series

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

When the waiter hands us our menus, my best friend and I simultaneously reach into our purses for our reading glasses and then laugh at each other as the cases pop open. When we started this tradition in 1999, we both could actually see.

That was the year we dropped off our babies for their first day of kindergarten and met for lunch somewhere or other to console each other. Since then, we've met for lunch on the first day of school every year.

No doubt, if we cared to check the photographic evidence, we'd discover that we both had horrific perms in 1999. This year, we're both sporting defiantly uncolored gray, and it takes three pieces of cheesecake between us to make this somewhat sorrowful day sweeter. 

Because this first-day lunch will be the last. 

My baby is now a 240-pound offensive lineman senior at Broughton High, and hers is an actor driving a 342-pound wheelchair at Enloe High. For all of us, it has been quite a ride.

Through the years, our lunch chatter has always included worries on navigating a new school year with our sons who have some special needs (about 20 percent of schoolchildren in Wake County fit that category). Could I have ever anticipated trying to get "lies in floor while chewing candy for fourth-grade writing test" added to my son's Individual Education Plan to accommodate his Sensory Processing Disorder? Could Cindy have known that fifth grade would bring a child so exhausted from his deteriorating condition due to spinal muscular atrophy that she would have to pick him up at noon for weeks?

For Cindy, fifth grade also brought a frantic search for a magnet middle school after the principal at her assigned school refused, once it was ascertained that there were no suitable electives for her son, to let him just go home and rest. He could sit in the library, the principal said. For me, that year brought a battle with the student assignment office, which found it difficult to believe that, yes, indeed, I wanted my two middle school children at separate schools because my son needed to be at a smaller school. 

Sixth grade was the year my son won a spot in his school's geography bee, an honor he nearly missed because the fellow student who graded his paper had marked half of his right answers wrong. She couldn't read his writing, illegibility being a hallmark of his fine-motor disorder. His teacher thankfully noticed.

For Cindy's son, it would be hard to top seventh grade - the year he spent his 13th birthday trapped on the second floor of his newly renovated school because the brand-new elevator was broken for the zillionth time. Five firefighters showed up, not to carry her son, who trusted only the 6-foot-5 special ed teacher to carry him, but to carry the electric wheelchair. Cindy had central office on speed dial that year.

High school brought, for me, an honors science teacher who thought it would be better to move my son out of the class, with its high concentration on lab drawings, than to work with his issues. 

For Cindy, it brought bureaucratic insanity as she tried to bypass a state law requiring all students to take P.E. and health to graduate. Her son, who has never walked, can barely lift a spoon to his mouth, and the state was willing to pay a teacher to give him one-on-one P.E. just to meet this requirement. After much aggravation, she has gotten a waiver. The same year, her son was unable to take the one acting elective he wanted because the physicality of the class was too much for him. Oh, the irony.

As a salve for the most maddening moments, we have the sweetest stories. The teacher of a physically challenging elementary elective who would tell me with tears in her eyes how much my son's earnest hard work touched her. The middle school drama teacher who cast Cindy's son in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and made King Oberon in a wheelchair work. 

Or the eighth-grade social studies teacher who called me unbidden, literally crying, to apologize after she handed my son a map he had colored on the first day of school and told him to do a better job. The stricken look on his face had her check his IEP, and she was devastated at her mistake. The school system physical therapist who showed up at Cindy's house this summer just because she wanted to better understand the process of his getting a new $28,000 wheelchair. 

Or the Broughton principal who truly listens and sounds all of the right notes of concern. The Enloe English teacher who encourages Cindy's son in his writing.

Next up for us is getting these boys, now young men, into college. During the process, we may rid ourselves of the gray hair simply by tearing it all out. The soothing comfort of a forever friendship and the cheering power of cheesecake, however, await.

Aug. 19, 2011: Nursing as child's play

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

The young girl in the Breast Milk Baby doll ad is smiling brightly, happily anticipating the fun of nursing her doll once the halter sporting the two hot-pink flowers is tied snugly into place.

When the doll's mouth touches a flower, sensors will bring on sucking sounds and motions. That the flowers resemble pasties is unfortunate, given the hullabaloo over whether the doll, a product of Berjuan Toys of Spain, oversexualizes children.

Any woman who has returned to work from maternity leave only to sit horrified as a leak devours a nursing pad and spreads across her blouse during an important meeting knows that breast-feeding is about as sexual as toothpaste.

But when Berjuan recently began U.S. sales of the doll, a best-seller in Europe that the company said millions of American women had begged for, let's just say that not everyone was waiting with a warm receiving blanket. One Fox News guest expert, in fact, was outraged, saying the doll further blurred the line between little girls and adult women and would only encourage pedophiles.

What more reasonable people might legitimately find outrageous is the doll's price tag: $118 on amazon.com and an $89 "Limited Time Offer!" on the Berjuan website (thebreastmilkbaby.com).

Despite the cost, Josee Meehan, a Durham mother of three, might buy a doll for her daughter because she thinks it will help alter society's view of women's breasts as strictly cosmetic. 

"People are so uncomfortable with the motherhood slice of womanhood but are perfectly happy to promote the sexualized version of women," she said. "They teach their little girls about the most superficial aspect of womanhood and ignore the most important parts."

The fact that the setup isn't anatomically correct makes the company's claims about its advocacy intentions hard for Kim Spicer, a labor and delivery nurse for 25 years, to swallow.

"I think it's a little over the top," said Spicer, a mother of three in Knightdale. "I guess they tried to make it more appealing to kids, but make nipples that look like nipples, not flowers, if the purpose is to promote breast-feeding."

Erin Tew of Garner wavers between being appalled by the doll and thinking it's just silly. "I'm all for breast-feeding," said the mother of six children, ranging in age from 10 to 7 months. "But that doll's a little ridiculous for kids. That's something they need to experience when they're grown, not when they're 3."

Even 17 years after the birth of my second child, my heart always fills with sadness for a new mother who can't seem to breast-feed or has chosen not to, knowing so well the unbelievable bond and life-altering experience she's going to miss. Anything that promotes breast-feeding, which the CDC calls a national priority, I want to welcome.

But any parent who would buy The Breast Milk Baby is a parent who would influence a daughter to breast-feed anyway. 

And, more important, a lot of children already watch mom nurse the new baby and then pretend to breast-feed their dolls. Or their stuffed animals. Or the dog.

The Breast Milk Baby is just one more toy that robs our children of chances to use their wonderful imaginations - a far greater thievery than even its $118 price tag.

Aug. 14, 2011: 'The Help' – Two views of a controversial film

Originally appeared in the features section of The News & Observer:

By Burgetta Eplin Wheeler

Staff writer

The college professor teaching my freshman music appreciation class circled the word three times in red, adding a couple of exclamation points for emphasis. The grade on my review of a Lionel Hampton Orchestra performance is lost to time, but my mortification over my ignorance in referring in it to black people as "Negroes" stings to this day. 

Growing up in the 1970s in an all-white West Virginia subdivision, in an all-white town, I lived in an isolated world that held exactly two African-Americans: the one black girl who briefly attended my high school with 1,300 white students and the one lovely black woman who occasionally led my mother's charismatic Christian women's fellowship. No one called April "the black student." No one called Myrna the "black woman." They were just April and Myrna. 

So I didn't know how black people were referring to their ethnicity. In high school, I had written a research paper on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, having sat transfixed inside the area's largest library as I listened to scratchy recordings of his powerful words - words that included "Negro."

I just didn't know the times had changed. It wasn't malicious. It was ignorance. 

And that's part of the beauty of movies and books like "The Help." Among the heart-stirring characters and laugh-out-loud-funny dialogue lies a sobering education in the realities of the Jim Crow South. It's a lesson we still need, given that the farther we get from the 1960s, the harder it can be to believe that this horror actually occurred in our country. 

As I watched a special screening of "The Help" - a superb movie in nearly every way - I kept thinking that its real power lay in leading us to the empathy a functioning society requires. My eyes welled up the first of several times during a scene in which black people were streaming up the steps of a restaurant, dutifully following the path marked "Colored." That sign, the cruelty and indignity of it, never fails to affect me this way. 

That I was a white person sitting among a mostly African-American audience made my usual disgust over that sign especially acute. That the vast majority of the movie's white characters were reprehensible (and no doubt historically accurate) left me cringing. That the black characters were so real, so complex and so likable had me wondering why some African-Americans have so vehemently assailed the book the movie is based upon. 

In an essay in Entertainment Weekly, writer Martha Southgate said that "The Help" to her is just another story in which a white person plays the hero of the civil rights movement, relegating blacks to bit players. 

But even Skeeter, the white protagonist who is gathering up the stories of black maids working in white homes for an expose-type book, says when another character asks how she feels: This isn't about me. It doesn't matter how I feel. 

And that's how the movie felt to me. That it wasn't about her. It was about looking beyond the ubiquitous maid's uniform that apparently made black women invisible (when they weren't subhuman) in certain upper-class homes of the South in the 1960s and seeing them, acknowledging them and their pain, knowing them, empathizing with them. And loving them. 

"What does it feel like to be me?" asks Aibileen, the courageous star of this story, somewhat in wonder after Skeeter tries to draw from her the stories of being a maid in a hideous white home. Aibileen invokes the agony of losing her beloved son, who died when a white foreman at a lumber yard threw the severely injured worker into the back of his pickup truck and dumped him at the black hospital across town with only a honk. 

"Every year on the day of his death, I can't breathe, and to you all it's just another day of (playing) bridge," Aibileen says. 

No one who sees "The Help" can leave it without acknowledging the real cruelty and indignities that so many African-Americans endured in this country. No viewer can later say, "I just didn't know."

July 17, 2011: Where swimmers meet: Neighborhood competitions make sports and summers memorable

Originally appeared in the Arts & Leisure section of The News & Observer:

My right thumb is twitching, unaccustomed as it is to my hand's emptiness on a summer Tuesday night. 

There's no stopwatch to click inside my curled fingers, and my ears aren't straining to hear the horn that will send swimmers sailing off the blocks to the whoops and whistles of their neighborhood teammates and sweat-drenched parents.

For the first time in 13 years, I'm not standing on concrete in the heavy heat, not holding a clipboard and not timing a Planter's Walk Piranha in my lane during the first summer meet of the season. My daughter, now 19, has aged out of the sport after donning her first pair of goggles at age 6, her front teeth missing and her happy eyes chlorine-bloodshot in a 1998 snapshot during her first season.

But more than 10,000 other Wake County children on 78 Tarheel Swimming Association teams have been churning up the water every Tuesday this summer. A few elite teams recruit year-round swimmers to increase their chances of winning, but, for the most part, these neighborhood teams are wonderful little worlds of everything we should want a childhood sport to be.

Some teams have 150 or more swimmers, girls and boys, ranging in age from 4 to 18 - and there ain't no bench. Everybody swims. And the competition, more often than not, is between a swimmer and herself. Did she swim that backstroke a second faster than she did last week? She's a winner!

At a meet, 6-year-olds mingle with 15-year-old mentors they wouldn't otherwise have known in a neighborhood with hundreds of homes. 

Parents who had never met before swim practice began stand together, some with tears in their eyes, and clap in unison when an 8-year-old finally touches the wall after flailing down the lane, eyes shut, his wayward goggles around his neck.

At a meet, this child, and several more like him, can clamber out of the pool in last place, smile widely with Ring-Pop-stained lips and ask a mother earnestly, "Did I win?" And she can say honestly, given that he finished the race, "You did great!"

It's a sport that inspires team spirit when scores of prepubescent screamers of both sexes jump up and down and nearly faint from the exertion when their 15-to-18-year-old boys' freestyle relay team out-touches the other team by a second. It's a sport that bonds kids who go their separate ways during the school year. Four-member relay teams on our neighborhood squad routinely are made up of swimmers who go to four different schools.

It's a sport for which the sting of losing lasts only as long as the ride between the pool and the closest ice cream parlor, where the team is gathering to stretch out the camaraderie for as long as possible.

It's a sport that inspires such devotion that one gregarious guy has manned the grill at our snack bar - his barker call of "Hotdogs! Hamburgers! Get your hotdogs, hamburgers!" always eliciting  laughs - even during years he couldn't talk one of his three children into swimming.

Letting go of my own devotion has been difficult. 

I can take some comfort, I guess, from knowing my feet won't ache for days now after standing four solid hours behind the blocks with a stopwatch in my hand. My heart, however, is going to ache for a good long while.

April 29, 2009: The N&O's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Thirty-one newsroom colleagues are leaving today. That's a number those of us remaining can't even process really, especially when you add in the number of those we've lost already in earlier rounds of job cuts.

Used to be when a news staffer left, there'd be cake in the newsroom, a few kind words - or many kind words if that someone had been here a decade or two - words that included a recognition of the appreciated contributions.

As far as I know, there's no cake today. And I don't know whether there will be any words at all. Because finding any that are a comfort at this point is nearly impossible.

Sitting where I do, as the gatekeeper to the letters to The N&O, I've read plenty now from people downright gleeful about the "demise" of The N&O. I'm not sure why some people still don't understand that many newspapers, The N&O included, are doing just fine circulation-wise, thanks. It's the toilet-swirling advertising revenues and the amount of debt our parent company holds that have brought us to this incredibly rotten day at The N&O.

Good people and amazingly talented journalists, not agenda-pushing liberal demons, are headed out into the unknown - many of them unknown to you, the reader, but integral parts of what you see.

These are people who felt a calling, much like nurses and doctors and teachers, who do their jobs not for the money (heaven knows) but for the public, for you and for themselves, because they understand the critical role a newspaper plays in our democracy. Many of them toiled at night - till midnight, 1 or 2 a.m. - for years and years to bring you a morning paper.

There's Moe, whose name you've seen only in 7-point type under some graphics, but who among 1,000 various graphic-related things makes sure your weather map and all its various parts are in your paper correctly. There is not a kinder, steadier, more unflappable, knowledgeable person at this newspaper. In my 22 years here, I have never seen the man angry, and that's saying something.

There's Van, who would be in a tight race with Moe for steadiest and kindest. Van, who always believes the best of people, who sees them with only good intentions. As an editor, Van is the person in the building who always, above everyone else, put the reader first. You've lost your best advocate.

And Lou, one of the best headline writers we have here. If you've seen an excellent headline on a Durham-datelined story, chances are it was written by Lou or Bill, both lost in the last round of buyouts.

And Josee and Laurie, hard-working, creative and smart moms working part-time on the Copy Desk. We lost every part-timer, which only diminishes our diversity of backgrounds and life experiences.

And Winston, who as the Night Editor for years and years trained innumerable young reporters who always seemed to start on the cops beat and reported to Winston. I can't imagine there's anyone else here who has had a larger hand in training up the cubs in the ways they should go.

And Rob and Eileen, who came with a wave of California folk in the mid-90s who wanted to call our front page "the cover" (heresy!) but whom you had to forgive for it when you discovered what amazing journalists they were. It would be hard to count the number of 75-word New York Times sentences that Eileen has saved you from over her years here as a copy editor.

And Ned, whom I haven't really ever worked with but whom I have heard called at least 20 times since we heard he'd be leaving "the best newspaper editor The N&O has ever had."

There's Jane, who with grace and enthusiasm always was willing to take on a new role for the good of the whole.

And Peder, of course, who was able to tell you goodbye in one more excellent Sunday column. Peder, my fellow conservative-leaning colleague who never shied away from coming to debate the issues with the Editorial Department, a healthy thing for any newspaper. We had already been forced to mourn the passing of his brilliant book columns; now we must mourn the death of Peder's ideas among our pages.

And there's Wade and Joe and Joyce and Marti and Bonnie and Becky and Colline and Paul and the many others who were holding up their ends of our daily offering.

Tomorrow, when this terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day is over, the rest of us at this amazingly wonderful newspaper will carry on with the calling, but with holes in our hearts.

Feb. 25, 2006: Not ready for raunchy

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

With its parental-advisory label warning of "explicit content," the latest Blink-182 CD isn't one I would have let my children buy. It showed up in my house as a present, a bootleg birthday bonanza of bona fide filth.

The fellow eighth-grader who gave it to my daughter also was kind enough to include some of Blink's previous delightful ditties, one of which was titled, "[Penis] Lips."

If you are a parent who thinks it's fine for middle-schoolers to be hooked up to MP3 players dispensing such gems directly into their ear canals, I have to ask:

What are you thinking?

My 11-year-old son recently was invited to a birthday party for a girl turning 12. The invitation requested that I drop off my child at a movie theater and pick him up later at the girl's house. There was no mention of what movie was on the agenda. I -- gasp -- called and asked, because my children don't see a PG-13 movie unless I have seen it first.

The girl's mother said they'd be seeing "Cheaper by the Dozen 2" because it was the only movie showing at the time that was rated PG. I was ecstatic. Another mother was actually on my parenting page.

Or not. The highlight of the after-party at the house was a deejay playing all the latest hits, which included, among other tasty tidbits, "Laffy Taffy," a rap song that equates male genitalia to hard candy.

"It was the cleaned-up version, Mom," my son said so earnestly on the way home. "Cleaned up" in this instance means they took out the obscenities. It doesn't mean they took out all of the wink-wink, nudge-nudge euphemisms for every sexual act imaginable.

Again, I must ask, what are parents thinking?

A neighbor child, two years younger than my sixth-grade son, has been exposed to R-rated movies apparently since birth. My son routinely asks whether he can see this or that movie over at the house of the other child, who nearly always has already seen the movie in question, regardless of its rating.

I had to disappoint my son, yet again, this month when I said no to a PG-13-rated skateboarding flick. "It just has cuss words, and the make-out scenes aren't that bad," said the fourth-grader, reassuringly.

Um, no. No, no, no, no!

What are you people thinking?

Ah, but there's the problem. Many parents aren't thinking. Thinking requires energy and time and commitment and a willingness, when you act upon your thinking, to make your children unhappy. Giving in is easy, turning a blind eye a snap. Having high standards of what's appropriate -- and sticking to them -- is not.

I realize that I can't protect my children from a world gone what I consider positively insane when it comes to what we expose our children to -- and what we let them expose to us from their extra-low-rise blue jeans. How many butt cracks and "muffin tops" can one shopping mall hold? All I can do is pray that I've given my children a firm foundation from which they can grow into admirable people who make good choices. It's a tough-enough journey without other parents creating unnecessary mudholes for us to slog through.

There's a reason some music is labeled with a parental advisory.

There's a reason certain movies are rated PG-13 and R.

It shouldn't be unreasonable to expect other adults to understand that.

Burgetta Eplin Wheeler is assistant editor of The N&O's Q section, which appears on Sundays.

Oct. 19, 1996: Light dims at the end of life's tunnel

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Lured by the promise of a tickle, many a woman and child have sent their unbidden palms gliding over the glistening bristles of Grandpa's white flattop.

For years he enjoyed the attention paid to his handsome head, sparingly adorned but still irresistible to strangers who itched to see whether his hair really could be the living equivalent of a shoeshine brush.

Today, the hair is nearly gone, shaved down to the quick because his weekly trips to the barber shop have ended. The barber must be brought in now, waiting his turn among the nurses and aides who attend the infirm, some betrayed by time-worn bodies, others by deteriorating minds.

And as the ranks of the elderly increase, so do the the legions of loved ones left despairing over how to help make longevity a gift.

Grandpa is 81, felled by a series of strokes followed by a series of falls. The last one broke his collarbone and sent his 80-year-old wife sprawling, her glasses broken, her tailbone bruised. Once she struggled to her feet, she couldn't get him off the kitchen floor.

In the emergency room, the young doctor looks sorrowful as he tells Grandma he'll be calling in a social worker. She can no longer care for her mate, whose scrawny knees betrayed him years ago and whose arms are now idled by the collarbone injury.

The referral leads to a bed in a two-man room on the ground-floor of a personal-care facility. The eye-watering odor of pine cleaner emanates from the weathered, white house, assaulting visitors even as they drive up to the gravel parking lot out back.

His roommate is not of sound mind, and the aides mercifully keep him busy outside much of the day. At night, however, the man must be allowed his bed, and he frequently rouses from it to urinate on the floor.

Several exposed pipes run the length of the ceiling, and the tile floors are cold - just another reason to keep unsure feet and the rest of a weary body up in the bed.

Not that Grandpa needs a reason. He doesn't want to leave the bed.

With each new fall, and with each loss of some treasured piece of his humanity, the thoughts of suicide grew stronger until a gun was brought from its hiding place and put into service. It, too, was too old and broken down. It failed to go off.

But suicide toys with him still and guilt has come courting his wife - guilt from being unable to care for him and guilt from feeling relieved that she doesn't have to anymore.

At the personal-care home, his loud snoring goes unnoticed as people scurry by the open door. Privacy is not a resident here. He awakens with a start, and tears fill his blue eyes. The one hand he can move connects haltingly with his face, and he wipes at his tears, his lips mouthing his mantra.

It's hard to understand him because his teeth are in the cup on the metal nightstand, which shelters the few belongings that have followed him here: the lacquered domino set, a deck of cards and his favorite Pecan Sandie cookies.

His shoulder hurts, and he's moaning. He wants to die, and he says it over and over and over again. He talks of his head aching, and it must be a frightful pain because he's lifting even his bad arm so he can put both hands on his face as he rocks back and forth.

His granddaughter slips to the edge of the bed and gently pulls at his hands, asking where it hurts so she can kiss it for him. Her lips find his pale forehead, then linger on the top of his head as she remembers the prickly flattop of long ago. His lifeless hair now brings only tears.

His longevity remains a gift to her and a burden for him.

(Burgetta Wheeler is assistant news editor.)

Aug. 12, 1996: The aid of everyday angels

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Wearing a bright bathing suit, Kathi Korobko flits about her Cary kitchen like a butterfly, refusing to stop dinner preparations for a second to consider a suggestion that she has more in common with another winged creature - an angel.

"I love the Lord, I walk with the Lord, but I hope I'm more down to Earth than that," says a laughing Korobko, who has just come dripping from the backyard pool.

Down on Earth a few Sundays ago, she walked with the Lord into the hearts of another Cary family.

Gorgeous weather greeted Korobko as she awoke that Sunday. Her married daughter, Julie Volstad, was visiting from Georgia, and the two decided to walk home from the Cary Christian and Missionary Alliance Church that afternoon.

The women took off down Har-rison Avenue, soon passing First Baptist Church, where Julie spied a small, brunet boy tooling around the parking lot in a wheelchair.

"Hey, Ma, look at that," Julie said as Korobko stopped beside her. They paused not because the sight of a 25-pound child in a 130-pound wheelchair was unique to them but because it was all too familiar.

Korobko has a small, brunet son who has been through numerous wheelchairs in his 23 years of life.

This child, though, was only 2, and Korobko stood transfixed.

"I have to go talk to those people," Korobko told Julie. The two waited as the boy's parents chatted with other First Baptist members as he practiced maneuvering his chair.

"I felt really uncomfortable just standing there," Korobko says now, "but then I heard the boy's dad say, 'Kevin.' "

Pausing to let that revelation sink in, Korobko smiles, for Kevin is the name of her son, too.

"Here's one tiny example of how God works," says Korobko, who laughs easily and often. "He gave us this little connection to help us feel comfortable from the very start."

Korobko approached the couple, Glenn and Cindy Schaefer of Cary, asked about their Kevin and tried to offer emotional support to the mother just starting out on the path Korobko has traveled for more than 20 years.

Korobko's Kevin, one of only 23 metatrophic dwarves in the world, and Kevin Schaefer, who has spinal muscular atrophy, both have life expectancies of late teens or early 20s.

As they talked, Korobko noticed that the Schaefers' full-size van had no electrical wheelchair lift, only metal ramps they had borrowed.

The van, she was told, had put the Schaefers in a financial bind. They had left the question of a $5,000 wheelchair lift in God's hands, as they had a number of needs since Kevin was diagnosed with his genetic disorder in June 1995.

"We have a lift you can have," Korobko said nonchalantly to the stunned couple.

The Korobkos had recently bought a minivan, with a new wheelchair lift, and were planning to sell their full-size van, which had a 15-year-old lift stuck to its back.

Coincidence? "There's no such thing," Korobko scoffs. "God is so big. He's so awesome, just to see the different ways he works."

After exchanging phone numbers, the families parted, one to share an astonishing story of God's mercy with tearful relatives and friends and the other to keep what it considered its unremarkable generosity to itself.

"It doesn't feel big and wonderful to us," says Korobko. "I was raised to do what's called for ... and an awareness of others' needs is one of those things."

To the Schaefers, however, the Korobkos' act of kindness is nothing short of a miracle. They were trusting God for a wheelchair lift and He sent them one - by way of an angel named Kathi Korobko.

Burgetta Wheeler is assistant news editor.

March 31, 1996: A painful land of opportunity

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Teetering about 40 feet above the Guyandotte River, the brick-red shack looks one storm away from going for a swim, or at least it always seems that way to me when I drive down U.S. 60 in Huntington, W.Va., and find the sorry thing still clinging to the bank.

Hubcaps hang from its peeling sides and spill out onto the grass, adding a metal glint to the litter along a highway that too many boarded-up businesses and weed-choked eyesores call home.

I don't know the Hubcap Boys, as I've taken to calling the proprietors, but their little stretch of road somehow symbolizes for me why I can never go home.

In the two years it took my husband to get his electronics degree in West Virginia, there were two jobs in his field posted in the local classifieds. Two years, two jobs.

Every Sunday in The News & Observer, there are 15 positions in his field. Every Sunday.

And that's the reality of why some of the 24,000 people who settle in the Triangle every year pack up their lives, choke out their goodbyes to their friends and families, and travel the road of opportunity to North Carolina.

Bigger and better jobs entice plenty of people, but just the hope of any decent job motivates many.

Economic realities, however, do little to soothe a shredded heart when your mother-in-law talks wistfully of realizing, now that your new niece lives five miles away from her in West Virginia, how much she's missed your children.

Or when you drive to the Chinese buffet after church on Sundays and sit among strangers, knowing that your grandparents and your brother and his wife are sitting in your mom's seafoam-green dining room having her roast beef with gravy and perfect iced tea.

Or when you sit on a dusty dance floor watching the sashays of your intent 4-year-old angel child, wondering whether her grandparents will ever see her in a ballet recital, a school play, a band concert.

My husband and I were just two of the 45,791 people who migrated to North Carolina in 1987. There were more than 73,000 newcomers in 1994. In every nook of the Triangle, in each cookie-cutter subdivision, are people thankful to be basking in the myriad niceties but hurting nonetheless in their kinless anonymity.

Envy is not an emotion I know intimately, but I flirt with it routinely when one of my best friends talks of meeting her dad for bagels in Cary and the other of taking her children into Raleigh to buy shoes with her mother-in-law, who's paying.

Yes, North Carolina has brought me some friends I love fiercely, but it takes years to cultivate that "comfortability" of family, to lift the shades on all of the little windows that show who we really are. It's well worth the effort, but so few people these days seem to have the time or the emotional wherewithal to get past the weather and basketball.

When I start wallowing in my dreams of West Virginia - living where I can pop in for lunch at my mom's restaurant, where my in-laws can chuckle at the daily language hilarities of my 20-month-old instead of marveling at his height after a four-month interval, where I can drop off the kids at Dad's and go looking at wallpaper for an afternoon by myself - it's my husband's dream I cling to.

In his dream, we live in a state where our children can grow up, go to fine universities - and stay when they graduate! They won't have to leave, as we did, just to survive.

So I'll let my thoughts of a red shack on a depressing highway mingle with his shiny, white dream and paint for myself a rosy, pink future of never having to mourn the casualties of distance with my children and grandchildren.

(Burgetta Wheeler is assistant news editor.)

Feb. 22, 1996: Flirting before the first grade

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Her shoes shoved haphazardly into the purple bin, Sierra scurries to the remarkably high jungle-gym and climbs in, waving at me each time she reaches a window on her hidden journey to the big slide back down.

Their Happy Meals finished, Chris and Chris whoop and climb into the plastic balls as Sierra emerges from the slide looking slightly confused. But then her 3-year-old eyes find mine a few tables away and she giggles.

Mommy, however, is now the least interesting person at McDonald's. There are boys in the ball bin, and to the bin she goes.

She stops at the entrance and gives them a quizzical look. "What's your name, little girl?" asks one of the Chrisses, who appear to be about 5 years old.

What's your name, little girl? WHAT'S YOUR NAME, LITTLE GIRL?? I glance three tables down at the other mother, who appears to be there with Christopher, her son, and Chris, her son's friend. She keeps reading her paper.

"What's your name?" Christopher asks again. Sierra drops her chin to her chest, then raises her eyes to give him a look, but still she doesn't answer. If that were Jennifer and Jenny in that ocean of balls, she'd be swimming on in.

Just as I start to suggest that she tell them her name, a ball comes whizzing from the bin, missing its target but removing all doubt.

There is flirting going on here.

I can safely list that as Shock No. 371 on my list of things other mothers failed to mention when they were doling out that 14 tons of advice when I was pregnant. Shock No. 1 was that babies poop like a car backfiring when they're first born, shooting the contents of their newly opened bowels across the room if you and your new white nursing gown aren't in the line of fire to stop it. The fact that missing a square on a waffle while dispensing the syrup is a capital offense was No. 298.

I expected poop. I peripherally expected confrontations about breakfast food. What I didn't expect was that I would hyperventilate about boys before she was 10.

Yes, I'm reading too much into this, this play of innocent children. But then another ball goes flying; a cry rings out.

"Mommy! He hit me in the nose with a ball!" Sierra cries as she stumbles out to the table.

"Christopher, don't throw the balls," offers the other mom.

Sierra, who normally would wring a good 10 minutes of crying and comfort from a ball-in-the-nose incident, returns to the bin dry-eyed for more, um, interaction.

But she's still wary of these perfectly normal boys. She doesn't talk to them, she doesn't play with them. It's so unlike her. She can tell they're different from the girls her own age she's used to playing with, and she doesn't understand.

I can see her almost shrug when I tell her it's time to go, and for a change she doesn't cry. She's tired of trying to figure it out.

She heads inside the monstrosity for one more trip down the slide.

"Get your shoes, Sierra," I say as she steps out onto the cushy walk.

The Chrisses, who are sitting on the edge of the slide after following her down, look as if they've seen Santa Claus.

Their eyes wide, they turn and grin at each other.

"Her name is Sierra," says Chris.

"Si ... erraaaah," Christopher sighs, then swoons back onto the slide.

They collapse into giggles as Sierra rolls her eyes and grabs my hand to leave.

Heaven help me.

Burgetta Wheeler is assistant news editor at The News & Observer.

Sept. 29, 1995: Knowing the worst and coping

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Fatal.

Fatal.

"Of course, when it hits so young, it's fatal."

Fatal.

The world is spinning and I'm running, stumbling away from my doctor friend who doesn't realize when I casually mention spinal muscular atrophy that I don't know what it means. Until that one, eternal, nauseating moment on a Saturday in June, I continued to believe it was a generic label, meaning little for baby Kevin, as his mother, Cindy, had said.

But Cindy hadn't known, either. She was tired from excruciating months of tests, angry hours of waiting on doctors, fearful days of not knowing what was wrong with her baby. On that Friday, the doctors had mentioned spinal muscular atrophy but offered no clue as to what it meant. Four more days until Wednesday, when she would get the final diagnosis. Four long days of my already knowing what it was.

Every time I looked at my son over those four days, I cried, sometimes hysterically. How would Cindy go on? For minutes at a time, I could forget, but a sadness gnawed at my every thought, flowed out with my every breath. Then a kick to the stomach. I remembered:

My best friend's baby has a nerve disorder that likely will kill him while he's still young and soft and doe-eyed.

I kept remembering how Cindy and I had talked haltingly of another co-worker facing a similar tragedy, how we said we'd rather be shot than to have to watch a child die. We shook our heads, unable even to find words to articulate the pain that was caused only by our imaginations. It was, at the time, an unfathomable situation to us and, with tears in our eyes, we thanked God for allowing us to remain blissfully ignorant.

But now there's little bliss for Cindy. And certainly no ignorance of how it feels to be losing a child.

Mercifully untouched, I still can only shake my head -- and then marvel at the fact that not only has Cindy gone on, she's marched on fiercely. Where once there was only intense pain for her, there is now unflagging admiration.

Within 48 hours of the diagnosis, she was on the phone with other parents of children with SMA, finding out about the disease, what she would need, what she could expect. She'd had an hourlong discussion with Kevin's pediatrician about his role in Kevin's treatment plan.

She's called innumerable doctors, clinics and insurance people, fighting to see what coverage there is for the myriad equipment she'll need. Kevin's already in leg braces with more on the way, he has a scooter to help him get mobile and other treatments have been considered and thrown out.

But in planning for a future that will involve wheelchairs and ventilators, she's discovered that she'll have to move from her house with its sunken family room and carpeted floors. The scooter is only a source of frustration now because it won't go on the carpet. And the steps are a problem that can't be solved.

It's a house she's labored over for four years, recently painting it just the right butter-colored yellow. It's just the way she wants it. Now she has to leave.

After days of frantic searching, she's found the perfect ranch. Right price. Right location. No steps. And, remarkably, hardwoods under the carpets.

Now she needs someone to buy her house at 1426 Laughridge Drive in Cary.

There currently are hundreds of people wanting to move. Few have to move. Cindy has to move for the most torturous of reasons.

If you're looking for a house, please glance at hers. It's a two-for-one sale: You get a great house and a good feeling.

Burgetta Wheeler is a copy editor.

June 28, 1996: Weighty words can leave scars

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

'Have you lost weight?" used to be the two in the one-two punch that people inevitably would use to greet me if they hadn't seen me for a while.

Few would wait for the answer to "How ya been?" before trampling on my warped weight psyche with the second question.

"No," I would answer before I had indeed lost some weight, "I'm just not as fat as you remember."

How many times have I slunk back home feeling like my weight is the one quality that defines me? Who cares that I'm rearing two delightful children on less than five hours of sleep a night; that I've managed to wallpaper a crooked bathroom, in stripes no less; that I'm always the first to arrive with chicken pot pie when someone is in need?

If you're like me, you know that when you walk away, the first thing people discuss is not what a great person you are but how big your butt looks as it disappears around the corner.

This month, columnist Ellen Goodman wrote about how disturbing she finds the current anorexic chic among supermodels, and she cited the relationship between advertising and weight disorders among young women.

Although I am certain that such visual assaults have filled other normal-looking women with the desire to be less, it is the verbal wounds that have brought me to this place where my body is the enemy of my mind. I remember the boy in eighth-grade who took up half a yearbook page with his huge, curly musings about not being able to get around my behind in the hallway; the former girlfriend of a military boyfriend who sent him letters at boot camp, delightfully pointing out how my rear end was as wide as she was tall, in case he had missed that fact himself.

I did have a really great body, once, for about two weeks the summer before I turned 14. The barrel formerly known as my torso had somehow transformed itself into a recognizable female shape. Unfortunately, the fat grams from that year's birthday cake were the shot that started the decade-long stampede for my thighs.

An editor at Ms. magazine has said that weight is an underlying obsession of white women.

Me? Obsessed? Only if you call a bulimic stint in 11th grade (I only managed to make myself throw up twice), a bunless hot dog diet in 12th grade (some misguided notion about high-protein/low carbs) and a bladder infection that nearly wiped out a kidney because I didn't want to go to the doctor and face the scales an obsession.

Many people lay the blame at the plastic feet of Barbie, but I don't remember yearning for her 42-12-36 figure. Others will fault the glorification of the supermodels and of the naked and ubiquitous Demi Moore. Demi looks like a 12-year-old boy with strategically placed cantaloupes, if you ask me.

No, it's words that have done this to many women. It's your dad watching every bite of food you put in your mouth and telling you that you don't need it; it's your brother pinching your thigh and asking your husband how he can stand the sight of it; it's your size 4 friends and relatives always talking about how fat they are, leaving you to wonder, then, how disgusted they must be by your size 14.

It won't be the platoon of Barbies she owns that will chip away at the self-esteem of my daughter, who at 4 already receives uninvited comments about her shapeliness.

It will be the day she under-stands what "chubby" means that will be the impetus of the next generation's obsession.

For the sake of my daughter and yours, be aware of the weight of your words.

(Burgetta Eplin Wheeler is assistant news editor.)

May 25, 1995: Outfit by my child

Originally appeared in The News & Observer:

Smug in Pamperless ignorance, the childless stare open-mouthed at crusty-nosed children - their shorts dirty and two-summers too small, their laceless shoes flopping - and vow to never, ever let future young ones out of the house looking like that.

But they will.

One day they'll have a Lion King pantie day and the full weight of enlightenment will smack them between their baggy, bloodshot eyes.

On this Monday, Round One is over the juice. I get the red cup down from the cabinet. Sierra wants the blue. Round Two? The butter on her toast melts before she sees it, which means, to my 3-year-old anyway, that it never existed and has to be reapplied.

Without comment, I slather more butter onto the limp bread. She thinks she has scored a technical knockout, but I'm merely gathering my strength for Round Three: The clothes.

The book says give your child some control, a choice between Outfit A and Outfit B, and everyone will have lovely self-esteem. Sierra, of course, prefers Outfit None-of-the-Above. She wants to leave on her Beauty and the Beast pajamas.

But then she races to her bedroom and grabs the purple shorts and the purple T-shirt from the floor. This would be the purple shorts she has worn during her nap every day for a week because she always changes her clothes the minute I shut the door. And the purple T-shirt, a gift, has one of those tacky sayings on it that I avoid at all cost when buying children's clothes.

Lovingly, yet firmly, I tell her not in this lifetime. The wailing begins.

I wrestle off the pajamas, then notice the panties - panties she has had on since her Saturday night bath. After two days of "Did you wipe?" and "Uh-uh," the panties must go. Unfortunately, this is the last pair in the new three-pack Lion King panties - the other two are in a wad on top of the washer.

I get out the Bugs Bunny. No dice. Tweety Bird? Uh-uh.

Lion King! Only Lion King will do!

Armed with the Tweety Birds, I plan my attack on her flailing legs as she screams. A battle I should have waived? I don't know. Dirty panties won't kill a child, but a mother might die from the shame of it should they be discovered.

I innocently reach for her T-shirt, another post-bath relic. It has Sunday-grab-what-you-can food all over it. She insists as only a preschooler can that the dirty one is the only T-shirt that exists in the universe.

More wrestling. The T-shirt lands with the dirty panties.

Yet nothing has prepared me for the tragedy of the socks. Not those socks, she wails, as I pull out a plain, white pair from the drawer. Those are yucky!

Clutching my last shred of sanity, I pack up the 24 pounds of paraphernalia having two children requires, Sierra's shoes and socks, my 8-month-old son and clomp out to the van. Sierra stands in the doorway, perfecting her screaming technique. When I return for her, she sticks out her arms and whimpers through her tears, "Mommy, hold me." I willingly oblige, then bury my face in her shoulder, joining my tears with hers. After a quick trip to the bathroom to wash her face, I carry her, barefoot, out to the car.

With Sierra conveniently restrained in her booster seat, the shoes and yucky socks go on without incident and we head to Kmart in search of 30 percent-off bathing suits. She wants the bright purple one with neon fish. As she gleefully chatters about showing it to Mamaw, I smile and put it securely in the cart, glad we can put the morning behind us.

Infused with new perspective, I didn't even blink on a cold day several weeks later when she emerged from her nap in a gold shirt and incredibly small yellow shorts, her freshly laundered Lion King panties hanging out, and announced that this is what she would be wearing to the baby sitter's.

I had a fleeting thought that I would need to get my own stupid purple T-shirt. Mine would say, "I'm with her. She dressed herself."

But as Sierra strutted to the door dressed in her current monochromatic obsession, I realized I need to stop caring so much what others think about how she looks. More accurately, what others think of me for allowing her to look how she looks. Children of the advanced age of 3 are becoming their own persons, and Mom shouldn't control every facet of their little lives. Even at 3, they can learn the consequences of their own choices.

It was a sermon I hadn't quite grasped to my bosom, I realized, when we got to Ms. Jerri's and I felt compelled to tell her that Sierra had dressed herself.

I needn't have bothered. Parents who have had Lion King pantie days will already know that.

Burgetta Wheeler is a copy editor with The News & Observer

May 27, 2009: Cross about no crosswalk

Originally appeared on The Opinion Shop blog of The News & Observer:

If plans haven’t changed, today is the day the Town of Knightdale is going to see how many of its residents are crazy enough to attempt to cross the nine lanes of traffic on Knightdale Boulevard (formerly U.S. 64) on foot.

There is no crosswalk there. The idea is to see how many people are attempting this feat without one so we can see whether a crosswalk is warranted.

Everyone who thinks this is absurd, raise your hand.

When a town allows the construction of a strip mall with dozens of fabulous stores across a highway from a subdivision with nearly 700 houses, new apartments by the hundreds and yet another subdivision, a crosswalk should be a given, not an afterthought.

Knightdale periodically sends out a survey to see what residents think would make the growing town even better than it is. On the last one, I emphatically (with underlines and exclamation points!) said we need a crosswalk on Knightdale Boulevard. My nearly 15-year-old has begged repeatedly to be allowed to walk to Dick’s Sporting Goods by himself. But there is no way — none — I’m going to let him do that without a crosswalk to get him there.

Now it’s nearly summer break for traditional-calendar students, and Knightdale teens by the dozens will be looking for things to do and places to go. How many are going to be dangerously dashing across a major highway with Target in their sights?

But to see whether a crosswalk is warranted, the town is going to count pedestrians today from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., when most of the people who attempt that crazy crossing are in school. Or when most of us who have often thought a bicycle ride that had at its end a reward of a Chick-fil-A dream cup would be heaven are at work.

I understand a crosswalk would slow down the light cycles on Knightdale Boulevard. But that’s what crossings with push buttons are for, to allow enough time only when someone is waiting to cross. And people are going to cross any way. It’s better to be proactive now than to wait until someone is hurt, regardless of how many people do or do not cross that road today.

Towns everywhere in the Triangle should want to be able to tout walkability — to keep us out of our cars as much as possible. The fact that this far into the 21st century planners (whether Knightdale or N.C. Department of Transportation) didn’t put a crosswalk there to begin with is nearly inexcusable, and it’s time to paint those lines and put up those boxes. Now.

May 4, 2009: Smells of beer, sounds of God

Originally appeared on The Opinion Shop blog of The News & Observer:

You could tell pretty easily Saturday who had walked north on Hargett Street to get to the Raleigh Rescue Mission’s annual open house and street festival. They were the festivalgoers, many pushing strollers, wearing puzzled expressions because they had just passed fenced-in Moore Square with its garden of huge white tents and black stages and its snaking line of people waiting to get in.

Had the Raleigh Rescue Mission expanded its usual offerings of booths of fun and food along two blocks of Hargett to include Moore Square this year as well?

The overwhelming odor of beer wafting over the square and the mission festivities was the first clue that the answer was no.

I discovered later that Moore Square was the site Saturday of the sold-out World Beer Festival. Hundreds of people paid $40 apiece (some of which went to “benefiting charities”) to sample 300 beers from 150 breweries.

Of course, the disconnect worked the other way, too. More than a few happy beer patrons — one group wearing Carolina Tar Heel T-shirts and pretzel necklaces, no lie — clomped down the sidewalk through the Rescue Mission festival toward Moore Square, looking around as if they had landed on Mars.

It seemed to be a pretty sad coincidence  -- that beer smell and the loud roars of revelers hanging over us -- given how many people living at the mission are there because of alcoholism or addictions. The first item on the mission’s Web site, in fact, says: “Children grow up in alcoholic homes. It’s a hard reality and a story we hear over and over from men and women who enter Raleigh Rescue Mission’s recovery program. And the sad consequences are often a repetition of their parents’ mistakes.”

That’s not to cast aspersions on Saturday’s beer tasters. It’s not their fault the Raleigh Rescue Mission’s festival was scheduled the same day.

Once the church band* performing at the mission cranked up, though, sending up some loud lyrics about God and grace, we couldn’t decide whether the day’s dual festivals were the result of horrendously bad planning — or divine.

Maybe a few folks under those white tents could use a message of mercy.

*full disclosure: this band included me.

June 20, 2009: The serious business of swimming

Originally appeared on The Opinion Shop blog of The News & Observer:

Relieved is what I was when the man finally left the pool with his three beautiful children dragging along behind him. Relaxed is what I had wanted to be, but I had spent two hours neglecting my Kaye Gibbons book and keeping my eye on the man’s middle child.

Within minutes of her arrival, she had jumped right into the pool while her daddy attended to the younger girl, putting the floating device over the small head, making sure it was snug. While Daddy fiddled, the middle child had reached a spot in the pool that was over her head, and she struggled over to the side, frantically grabbing my friend, who stood at the side facing out, talking to someone in a chair.

Daddy never noticed.

But the lifeguard had his eye on her. And every 20 minutes, when a new guard came out to take his or her post on the stand, I got up and whispered a word of warning. Watch that girl.

Watch is what lifeguards do. Scan. Look. Scan again. Chances are, every time the post changed today, the lifeguard taking the post had already been warned by the one leaving to watch that girl. Because that’s what they do. They scan for the people who struggle, who hug the wall, as this girl did. They warn each other. Watch that girl.

But a lifeguard can’t spend her whole shift watching one child when there are 50 other people who need some attention, too. And no matter how vigilant the guard, things happen. Bad things. In the beat of a heart.

Ever since a 6-year-old drowned this summer at a Raleigh pool, a pool at which four guards were on duty, my stomach has clenched every time my 17-year-old daughter has headed out to her lifeguarding job. The lives of those four guards will never be the same. The lives of their parents will never be the same. The lives of the child’s family, I can’t even imagine.

Lifeguarding is serious business. Just think about the actual title for a second. Someone is guarding lives. It’s not whistle-twirling and sun bathing, as the story on today‘s front page about swimming safety made pretty clear. The class required for certification is no cupcake affair, either. My daughter had to “save” a 300-pound classmate, dragging his girth from the bottom of the pool and out. Numerous students in her life-saving class couldn’t cut it, in fact, and dropped out.

The summer my daughter was 15 and so many of her year-round swimming friends were going to be guarding, we decided together that she should wait another year. The responsibility, we realized, was huge. But that’s who, for the most part, is being entrusted with this huge responsibility: teenagers on their first jobs, many as young as 15 because they can guard in their own neighborhoods and walk to the pools.

But the largest responsibility has to fall to the adults, to the parents and the guardians who should understand how incredibly dangerous it is to take a child who cannot swim to a pool, how unfair it is to these teenage guards, who even when they’re doing everything they’re supposed to are still only teenagers and who put forth Herculean efforts at some of these large pools scanning and watching and scanning for the struggling kids who really shouldn’t be in the pool to start with. My daughter could name several such children from her small pool, a fact that keeps me scared.

And I say this as someone who has been on the receiving end of lifeguard help. When my son was toddling what seems like 1,000 years ago, we visited a Cary pool with my best friend and her children. My child was standing beside me in the baby pool in less than a foot of water, patting his hands on the side, watching the water splash this way and that. The next thing my friend and I knew, a tidal wave overtook us as the lifeguard did a belly flop into the shallow water, grabbing my child, who had fallen onto his butt weighed down by his 30-pound diaper and couldn’t get back up. I had my back turned for fewer than 5 seconds.

But that’s the way of the swimming pool. A momentarily distracted parent, a lifeguard’s turned head, a baby sitter drawn into a chat she hadn't planned. Things happen in a split second. Sometimes really bad things, especially when children who cannot swim well enough are allowed to jump into the big pool and spend their time there alone, clinging to the side, going under, struggling back.

Maybe I should have told that daddy today that.

Aug. 2, 2009: Bank fees and a tale of timing

Originally appeared on The Opinion Shop blog of The News & Observer:

Reading the Work & Money story today about bank overdraft fees revved up my ire all over again regarding a recent bump in my banking road. Let this be a warning about how the timing of transactions can get you into trouble, too -- and about how no struggling (which one isn't struggling?) company you employ these days is letting grass grow under your payments, lemme tell you.

I recently had siding put on my house, a home-improvement extravaganza that required writing three checks at various times over a week to the siding company. The second check was not one we were expecting, having been told there was a before and an after payment, but my husband wrote it out when the company's owner asked for it and then headed to the bank to make a deposit to cover it.

Idling in the bank's drive-thru, my husband glanced over, and lo and behold, there was the siding company owner in another line, apparently depositing the check my husband had written about seven minutes earlier. Because it was after 2 p.m., we didn't worry about it, thinking the deposit and the withdrawal would be made the next day.

Um, no. Naturally, the bank took the money out of our account that day and didn't make our deposit until the next day, despite the fact that both transactions were made at nearly the same moment.

So we got "overdrawn."

I've decided that the $2.73 I'm having to pay in interest on the line of credit that the bank so graciously extended to me is not worth fighting about and certainly not worth the 17 minutes that navigating the telephone customer service jungle would cost me.

But when customers who can ill afford it get charged $30 in fees for overspending on a $3 item in the sort of environment we're living in (did you hear the one about 4,800 bank officials getting at least $1 million each in bonuses?), some new rules might be in order.

May 6, 2011: The Opinion Shop: John Rosemond

John Rosemond visits N&O: When will women get it?

Originally appeared on The Opinion Shop blog of The News & Observer:

If you're a reader of John Rosemond's parenting columns, which run in The N&O on Tuesdays, you might expect him to be strident in person. Not so. He's actually pretty soft-spoken and subtly funny, in that two-beats-later you get the joke kind of way.

Rosemond was at The N&O this week at the invitation of Executive Editor John Drescher, who wrote a column in April (read it here) about a recent firestorm Rosemond caused when he told the mother of a girl whose boyfriend's "response to almost anything my daughter says is a cut or put-down, a dismissal of her accomplishment or mocking" that the young man was a "find." How's that? "He's not into partying, playing video- and online games, proving that he can drink more beer than his friends and still remain conscious, and dressing in oversize, ill-fitting clothes that make him look like a 6-foot toddler. From your description, he's a find! Do everything you can to keep him!" is what Rosemond said, calling the verbal denigration "one annoying habit."

That particular column made me absolutely livid, although, in general, I'm probably one of exactly three people in The N&O newsroom, given how many times I've heard the man's name used in vain there, who can say she agrees with Rosemond at least half the time. Most detractors, Rosemond said,  react to him emotionally, which gets in the way of their ability to actually think.

Rosemond, whose columns appear in 200 newspapers, spent an hour talking off the cuff, or rambling as he said, and taking a few questions. He tours the country giving speeches, having spent 150 nights away from home last year. His mission? "I’m doing two things: women's liberation and marriage restoration."

He has quite a lot to say about women, in fact, or "the modern American mother," as he referenced repeatedly. Why focus on women and their parenting? The brain of "the modern American mother" has been polluted by parent babble, he said. "No man in America has come home and said, “Honey, has the new issue of Parenting magazine come yet?' ”

My notes on some of the thoughts Rosemond shared, many of which you will be familiar with if you read his column. This is NOT verbatim, by any stretch:

Today’s parents are not thinking in terms of children’s character. Parents used to have a long-range view. Our parents were trying to raise good citizens. (This was the subject of his most recent column. Read ithere.)

My mother insisted I do my best and in conjunction with my teacher determined what my best was. If my best had been Cs, my mother would have been perfectly satisfied as long as I did my best.

Fifty years ago, parents did not help with homework. It was rare if they asked whether you even had homework. They expected you to be responsible. If a teacher had called my house about my behavior, my mother would have thanked her and said she’d take care of it. Teachers today are reluctant to call home. They call with great trepidation because more often than not the parent becomes defensive, becomes the child’s advocate and attorney. Teachers ask me, “What’s going on? Why can’t parents accept that children misbehave?" Parents believe parenting produces the child. Parenting is an influence in a child’s life, an influence that is high when a child is small and as the child grows that influence wanes.

My mother knew the greatest human quality is free will, a person’s own decision-making capability. My mother knew a child is capable of making decisions that have no bearing on how the parents behaved in the past. My mother knew no matter how well she parented, I was capable of leaving her and making a decision that was "depraved, degenerate and disgusting."

In the confusion of the current parent babble, the female anxiety level concerning child rearing is at an all-time high. The next day, it will be even higher. And the next day, it will be even higher. A terrible, terrible thing has happened to the American female. Today’s mother is obsessed with detail. My mother was willing to let the little details fall where they may.

Today’s mother is a micromanager, obsessed with detail, in a state of high stress and anxiety, and she drives other people crazy.  Women have managed to let their authority over children slip away. They have all of this authority now in the board room, in the military, in politics etc, but they let their authority over children run through their fingers.

When a child is born, a woman backs right out of the marriage and leaves the man standing there. She gives in to peer pressure to conform to this ludicrous standard of good mothering.

I always ask audiences whether they believe children today are happier than they were 50 years ago. Nobody ever says yes. Depression in children today has increased by a factor of 5 or 10.

Funniest moment: This is the new posture of parenting (he says as he bends down, hands on knees, face at an invisible child’s eye level). “We haven’t talked in 30 minutes. Have you had a feeling in the last 30 minutes that you need to talk about?”

Before, if a woman had a parenting problem, she’d go to mom or grandma or an aunt, somebody older than her. They’ve stopped doing that. What does Grandma know? She doesn’t have a Ph.D.

Raising children has become bad for the mental health of women in America. When are women going to get it?

Mothers put the child before the husbands. Children need to see that those two people are in a relationship, that they pay more attention to each other than to me! They need a demonstration that a marriage is operating here, and that’s lacking in America today.

Men come home from work and get down in the floor and play with their children. Why? They say because the children haven’t seen them all day. Well, neither have their wives. Today’s family is more a relationship between mother and child than husband and wife. And men compensate for the relationship of the (ex)wife and children (that little ex was the joke ...  see? subtle!) by accepting the new ideal to be a child’s best buddy.

So the American child today is being raised by a micromanager and a buddy. What they need is leadership. Somebody with complete confidence in his or her authority has a calm leadership. Parents today have no authority.

Parents need to teach children manners before academics.  They need to be told what their obligations are to other people. Today, it’s all about the obligation to the child. A child needs an education built on a solid foundation of character.

And for the record: Rosemond, who has been writing the column since the 1970s, said he’s been wrong and admitted it exactly three times.