Fighting Terrorism at Home and Abroad--Toddlers

George Bush has become one of the most polarizing figures in the years since 911, but no matter what you think of his goals or methods in " the Global War on Terror," no one can deny he spent most of his time as the President of the United States, especially after 911, fighting terrorism at home and abroad. Although I enjoy considerably greater popularity abroad than old "W", as we call him in Texas, I do have a lot in common with the forty-third president of the USA. I too am from Texas, and I too have spent the last eight years fighting terrorism at home and abroad with what we Texans call "Texas Justice." I guess the main difference between W and I (besides my incredibly high popularity rating abroad) is that the opponents in my war are much fiercer than the jihadists that threaten western society. If my opponent went head to head with Osama Bin Ladin, I think the Global war on Terror could be ended in about fifteen minutes. Who is this fierce opponent, you ask? What could strike fear into a hate-hardened, fanatical, would-be martyr in a thousand-year religious war? Good question! Read on.

A few days ago I went to the grocery store. I had the car, so I took Micah Jade, my constant companion, with me to acquire the groceries that our family would need in the following week. Micah Jade wore in a cute, little, pink dress, her short, honey-colored curls framing her smiley impish face. She looked adorable; I should emphasize the word "looked". As I was checking out, Micah Jade began to play on the chrome grocery gate. I was busy trying to pay, so I did not notice her mischief until she began to bang the gate against its post again and again. Clank! Clank! Clank! I turned to correct her, calmly requiring that she cease and desist the loud banging. For a moment, she looked like she was going consent, but only for a moment.

As I turned back around to the credit card machine, I heard MJ say, abruptly, in a forceful voice, not unlike the voice of Cookie Monster, "NOOO, ya don't tell MEEEE what to DOOOOOO!" The challenge was thrown down, right there in the grocery store. MJ was confident that I was not going to make her mind with an audience of fifty people. Like the jihadists, her main weapon of choice is not force, but fear. At two and a half, she had weighed the shop and the people and had sized me up, in an instant determining that I was not brave enough to take her rebellious self down.


But what MJ didn't know was that I had been fighting terrorism at home for half a decade before she even came along. I had tamed two terrorists, even before she existed. She thought she could take the battle abroad to the grocery store and win it there, because she thought I would be afraid of what that store full of strangers would think of me and of her, but little MJ had made a serious miscalculation.


In an instant I snatched her naughtiness up and over my shoulder, and in the time that it took me to flip her over my shoulder, she commenced shrieking like a banshee. I frantically punched in my pin number in the credit card machine, flung the groceries into the cart, and hastily bid the cashier goodbye, as MJ, still screaming, began to kick the air in front of me. All 100 eyes were upon us, and the people within six meters of us began to put their fingers into their ears to protect their hearing. As we walked out of the store, the horror of the situation overcame me and I began to laugh out loud, my mad cackling adding to the audio-mayhem created by MJ's super-human lungs. All the way to the car, she continued to belt out high-pitched screams, the kind of screams that Jamie Lee Curtis screamed in those 80's Wes Craven films.


I held my naughty, air-kicking toddler over my shoulder and I pushed the trolley to my car in the parking lot with one hand, walking with ease through the channel through people and cars that we had cut with our sound waves. When we reached the car, MJ received a well-needed disciplining, and a short speech on obedience before I buckled her in her car seat and closed her in the car alone. Her rebellion lasted about a minute more, but she was only able to deafen herself, since the car could now contain her voice. After that, she found her thumb, and calmed herself down on the five minute ride home. By the time we arrived home, she was back to Dr. Jekyll, and her Mr. Hyde personality stowed away for another day. She was smiling and laughing like the cute little toddler she appears to be.

Toddlers are amazing creatures. They paint with poo and eat dog food, at least MJ does. They routinely bite and hit beloved family members and close friends, even while kissing and cuddling. They are unashamed to be naked in public, and occasionally refuse to brush their teeth, despite having dog-food-breath (again MJ). The average toddler will proudly proclaim his toilet habits and demand lollies for not making a mess in his own pants. I love to watch toddlers as they discover the world. Each one is as unique as a snowflake, flawlessly designed to hold within herself every bit of potential wrapped up in a single life. Toddlers are equal parts sweetness and raw ambition, both adorable and insufferable, simultaneously. Toddlers are so much more exciting to me than infants; but, in my experience with my children and the children of my family members and friends, I have continually found that toddlers are terrorists almost by definition. They are hell-bent on imposing their vision of reality on the world and will use fear to accomplish their sinister goal, (though a world where the loving rule of a parent is replaced by the anarchy of toddler is a scary place, especially for the toddler herself.)


The prevailing wind of popular parent psychology, the stuff you read in the magazines and most popular books, seems to declare that if you just wait out the toddler years and accommodate or ignore tantrums thrown in selfishness for a few years, that a sweet school-age child will emerge, magically reformed and reasonable, just by aging; but I don't believe it for a second. I guess I know too many people that have never outgrown selfishness, people who have never learned to care for the good of others or to submit to any authority outside themselves. No, character is not reformed by time, but by consistent and kind intervention, starting during the toddler years.


The cost of refusing to confront terrorism in someone I love is too great to postpone or ignore. A little child who pouts when she doesn't get her way can be funny and outrageously cute, but a pouting adult is intolerable. In life, we don't always get to drink from the pink cup. Sometimes we are lucky to have a cup at all, even a blue one or (horror of horrors!) an orange one. Often in life, we don't get another ice cream cup if we throw ours on the ground--on purpose. Sadly, in real life, throwing tantrums sometimes means the loss of a relationship, and as adults, we all experience the lasting consequences of our own poor choices, even when we are sorry afterwards. Though toddlers don't yet know it, a life, well-lived, is not about making the world conform to one's self, but in loving others, in living out honesty, thankfulness and kindness. For me, the most important parts of parenting (though also the most difficult parts) are teaching global truths in the mundane moments of everyday life.

It is such a huge task to be responsible for the developmental years of someone I love, and I guess that is why I think a lot about what I am working toward, while I am in the thick of grocery store tantrums and playground assaults on friends. I'm sure I'm not a perfect parent. Anyone who knows me could tell you that. I get frustrated sometimes, and often I am not as consistent as I should be, but I know what I am working toward and what is not important to me. I am not interested in having the best behaved children on the playground. I don't aim to make friends of my children; (Why would anyone want to have friends that are two or six or eight years old?) I may not always find agreement in parenting with my peers, with the current mags, or with my children's school; but if I am parenting for the good of my children, worrying about those things is not worth my time. No, I care most about my girls, about encouraging their inherent strengths, and about confronting and disciplining ugliness in their hearts every single time that I see it, so that they grow integrity and character instead of selfishness, pride, and deceit. I care about building their trust in my love and protection until the time when they can see clearly to make their own wise choices, until the time when they are ready to take from me, the responsibility for their lives.

I don't know how much progress George Bush made in the "Global War on Terror" during his eight years as president. I guess time will tell, but no matter what happens on a global scale, in my own little corner of the world, even after the eight years I have already served, I know that I will continue to fight my micro-war on terror both at home and abroad in the hopes that one day soon, I will make enough progress with MJ for the folks at the grocery store not to have to endure the ear-piercing shrieks of a terrible tantrum from my toddler. I'll keep on bringing "Texas Justice" to MJ, like I have to Jordan and Meryl before her, because it is in the best interest of building her character that I win my authority-war with her. Judging from my battles with other temporary terrorists in my family, I think I probably only have eight months or so left between now and the time when I can declare a tentative victory. In the time between now and victory, though, if any of you counter-terrorism-agent-types need help in breaking Osama, please shoot me a facebook message. My resolve is sure, my cause is just, and thus, MJ's days as a terrorist are numbered.

Surrendering to the Rain

The air was hot with sunshine and heavy with humidity, and biking to school on this particular day had felt a lot like riding through a warm sponge. The kids were safely in their classes after morning drop-off, and I had stopped to talk to my friend before tackling what I though would be another parching drive home. We were deep in conversation, talking about things that mattered, about the baby she is expecting soon and about our faraway families, about our kids and our hopes. It was the kind of conversation that I'll probably look back on as being important in our friendship, one that was honest and caring on both sides. It was the type of connection in friendship that makes time seem to slow for a few minutes.

Suddenly, without any consideration for our friendship moment, a cool wind blew in, and the clouds, which were approaching above the gentle, green mountains to the south, loomed large and charcoal gray. My friend and I were both car-less, and the storm was coming fast. We said our goodbyes and both took off. She hoofed it to the train station, harbouring the hope that she would be sitting under the shelter on the platform during the downpour, and I buckled little MJ into the trailer and started my 4k ride back to my house.

Since I have been biking, and outdoors so much more, I am noticing how I am much more affected by the weather than I used to be. I tend to dread biking on super-hot days, or rainy days because of how the heat or rain interferes with my plans to be comfortable. If I let my moods be determined by how I feel about the weather and how it affects my bike ride, (which usually consumes about an hour and a half or more each day), the weather could totally and completely predict my mood. But, I said, "If."

I peddled hard against the wind up the hill to the train station, and past the tracks down the big hill on Blaker street, towing Micah Jade behind me, but I couldn't outrun the rain. In my mind, I guess I'm Lance Armstrong, but my body? Well, my body is just me, no traces of Lance anywhere that I can find. I'm just not fast enough to outrun weather. The rain came down through the warm air and splashed in big cool drops on my hot skin. I had traveled about 1.5 k when I finally came to terms with the fact that there was just no way for me to make it home dry. So there I was, biking in the rain with a habitually ornery toddler in tow. I stopped to tell her that the rain was going to cool us off, and that we would be home soon. Surprisingly MJ, who has no qualms about screaming in the trailer all the way home, or really anywhere, seemed, after receiving my explanation, surprisingly willing to bounce along behind me in the rain without a single sound.

The explanation I had given to MJ soaked into me as well, and as I wrapped my mind around the fact that I would be riding in the rain, the expectation of comfort washed off of me with the heat. I rode the narrow streets with little, wooden postwar houses on stilts and the rain poured down on me. I crossed the big road, and then passed the other elementary school on my way to the greenbelt. Everywhere I looked, the rain drops were drop-drop-dropping on the hot, black bitumen (asphalt) of the road, and on the warm, gray sidewalk in front of me. The air that had been yellow with Sunshine and humidity was now cool blue-gray with rain.

While I continued my journey, the rain came down so hard and in such intensity that the water rushed through the vents on my helmet into my hair. By the time I reached what is my favorite part of my ride in any weather, I was completely drenched and totally refreshed. As I rode past the duck pond, I heard the memory of my children yelling, "sorry duckies, no bread right now. Maybe later." The ducks quacked noisily above the pitter-patter, and turtles poked their heads out of the water to see what the commotion was all about. The bull rushes swayed in the gentle breeze, bowing to the rain, and at the dam, cheerful muddy water peacefully trickled over into the creek, making its way from my house to the Pacific. The mountains that encircle my neighborhood rose protectively before me, the rain quenching the dry, green thirst of their gum trees. As I made the last turn toward my home, I listened to the wind; I listened to the trees dancing happily around me, to the ducks and the bull rushes, to the constant, rhythmic peddling of my bike, to the sound of the raindrops on my skin and on the road; and I cherished the memory of the morning when I surrendered to the rain.