a la mama

Over the past few years I’ve become keenly aware of the social fragmentation in our society. What began as a personal experience of feeling somewhat isolated as a parent trying to make my way quickly evolved into a full time examination of family, community and social structures in our society.

As a psychotherapist in private practice, I also noticed that an increasingly high percentage of my clients were having similar struggles. In many families both parents had to work, which meant that they had little time left for grocery shopping and preparing family dinners, or carpooling their kids after school to soccer practice or ballet, or reviewing homework at night, or getting that house project completed. Most of the parents I talked to felt overwhelmed by their responsibilities, and didn’t know how to improve their situation. They had to work long hours to make ends meet, and they often had no family nearby to help with the kids. I recognized these to be modern challenges that needed new solutions.

Beyond the economic difficulties of social fragmentation, I was concerned about child development. I worried that many children were not getting what they needed from their parents or our society. They needed their parents to be consistently present to form secure attachments from an early age, and to feel that they belonged to something meaningful. Whereas being present with our children used to be the norm, it now seemed like a luxury, reserved for those with enough income to fund a nanny, gardener, and perhaps a home chef or trainer. Parents with these luxuries were certainly not your average Americans trying to raise a family.

I continued to read and write about the topic of social fragmentation, and out of it came a manuscript, a workshop, and Alloparent.org, a social networking website for parents that provides a forum for parents to exchange services and support. The idea behind Alloparent.org is ancient: the idea that communities help each other raise their children. As humans we are wired to parent together as a result of millions of years of evolution. But the industrial revolution, among other events, left the modern family isolated—left to fend for itself in an increasing expensive and fragmented culture.

With Alloparent.org, parents can create a group in their city, or a sub-group on their street. They can also create groups for specific needs, such as childcare or carpools or meal exchanges or gardening. And it’s free. Some parents will be interested in forming on-going groups, and others will choose the a la carte option, where they initiate an exchange on a one-time basis. Alloparent.org is there to help serve the individual needs of each parent and family.

More than anything else, I think Alloparent.org represents a mind-set and an awareness that parents need more support in our society. When people join Alloparent.org, they feel that coming together as a community and wanting to collaborate as parents and families is acceptable. They are not embarrassed as they might otherwise be, because the culture of Alloparent.org supports and advocates for community collaboration.

Lisa Nave is a psychotherapist in private practice in Mill Valley, CA. She is also a writer, speaker, and the mother of two boys.

We have Tree.

I have gone back and forth with the Yule tree dilemma. Buy a sustainably harvested tree? Buy a tree that you can plant? A (apologies to Martha Stewart for my cheeky usage of the following term) faux bois, aka fake tree? 

I don’t know about you, but trees are loaded for me. I have memories. My late Grandma Marie’s very cute, 2-foot fakey, that sat perched atop her heavily consoled color television (you know, decorative carving, lots of wood polish residue, tweed-covered speaker screens), Christmas cards strung around it via string stapled to the ceiling molding (and I could do a whole ‘nother post about holiday greeting cards). All those awful stories about peoples’ houses burning down because they chopped up the tree and put it in the fireplace. The tree at Rockefeller Center. The time my mom and stepdad decided to buy the cheapest tree in the lot, and got one that looked as sparse as Charlie Brown’s–worse, in my teen perspective, than no tree at all. The tree I bought next to Tompkins Square Park when I was 27, and walked home with it lashed to my vintage yellow Schwinn bike that had a name (Heloise). Peter and I carried it up 3 flights of stairs and decorated it with my costume jewelry, as I, so recently a solitary urban chick, had no ornaments. The first tree I got as a mother…Honorée was four months old and my brother and I drove to a big box store and got two–one for my mom and him, and one for my house. Everyone stared at us–I think they seriously thought that WE were the family unit–a teen boy, a pushing-thirty woman, an infant, in a beater car, buying two trees…the judgment vibes were thick, or so I imagined, postpartum and identity-wobbly. 

A few years ago, my dad visited Santa Fe, when I was still married, and Peter and I were having some seriously snipey moments. “I think it’s hard to decorate a tree sometimes because we remember those who used to be with us, and now aren’t,” my dad said. Including love, I think, looking back. It was excruciatingly hard to decorate the tree after the love was gone. Not that I put my finger on it at the time, or could bear to.

But wait! There were good tree memories, too. They’re in my head somewhere. The time when I was four and there was a bicycle under the tree–my first two-wheeler, a Radio Flyer, which I told people actually did fly when I rode it. The tree that had a Cabbage Patch Doll under it, when I thought my folks would think I was too old for one, but I still wanted one anyway. Good memories are a bit harder to hold on to than bad ones, criticism burns deeper than praise, you know how it goes. I read that it’s an evolutionary brain thing: it’s more important to our survival to remember threats than neutral to good things. 

Two years in a row, I’ve bought a plantable tree, and both trees have died on me before I got around to planting them. Hello, guilt! Call it too long frozen ground, not being in a place where I could commit to literally putting down roots, an intermittently green thumb. 

This year, I bought a 7.5 foot fake tree, pre-lit, with pine cones on it. I will have it until it fails (and I can’t really imagine that happening). That’s the kind of tree I can commit to. Portable, re-usable, in perpetuity. We got it on the spur of the moment, and the kids and I decorated it on the fly. I didn’t have to fuss with balancing the lights perfectly (I can be a bit psycho about that), because someone else did it for me. Nathaniel donned the Santa hat, and we danced to Burl Ives Christmas songs while placing sentimentally precious ornaments on the branches. I lifted Honorée up, my arms around her coltish calves, and she, wobbly, proud and intrepid, placed the angel on the topmost branch. It was not solemn, nor was it entirely irreverent. It was doing the thing without it having quotes around it. A relief. Afterwards, they went to bed and I sat in the darkness, staring at the totem.

It is a “good” holiday memory Christmas tree year, but this is one thing I realized: every year, no matter the circumstances or the emotional tenor, I have been unable to do anything but succumb to that moment, that spell, when the tree is up, glowing, festooned, and I feel soothed, satisfied and enchanted.