Archive for the 'Family' Category

Choices, Culture, and Pressure: some thoughts on why pregnant teens make the decisions they do

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 2, 2008
in Abortion, Family, Youth and Youth ministry
. 19 Comments

This is not a post about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy, nor is it a post about the failures of abstinence-only education. It is not a commentary on the suitability of Sarah Palin for the office of vice-president.

Glendon Brown wrote a post about choice yesterday, a post in which he linked to this old piece of mine. In Glendon’s offering he makes the case that Sarah Palin needs to answer a simple question:

Given the real world experiences that have shown that abstinence-only education doesn’t work, what policies would you pursue that would actually reduce the rate of unintended pregnancies?” We could even ask, “How would your policies help 17 year old girls who don’t want to be parents?”

Worthy questions.

Glendon made me re-read my own post about choosing abortion. I was a senior in high school, and my girlfriend a year behind me when she got pregnant. I was 17, just as Bristol Palin is now. Both my girlfriend and I told our parents soon after we discovered that she was pregnant, and we asked for their support and advice. Presumably, Bristol Palin did the same thing.

The reason I write about this today is not to question Bristol’s choice to keep the child or to marry the future baby’s father. And no, nearly a quarter-century after I accompanied my girlfriend to the doctor’s office for an abortion on a warm June Saturday morning, I am not second-guessing a decision that we made jointly. What I’m thinking about today is the role that parents and culture play in shaping the reproductive decisions that adolescents make.

The Palins presumably taught Bristol she should be abstinent until she was married. She ended up pregnant at 17. My high-school girlfriend, whom I’ll call “Mary”, and I were raised by liberal parents, parents who encouraged us to use contraception when and if we chose to have intercourse. The Palins are evangelical conservatives; Mary and I were raised by atheist progressives who donated to Planned Parenthood. And the end result was the same: the daughter of the fundamentalist and the daughter of the progressive each ended up with an unintended pregnancy. No ideology, no theology, and no amount of parental love is a perfect prophylaxis against gettin’ knocked up. Human experience bears out that truth with abundant evidence.

Though I flirted with the idea of asking Mary to keep the pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption, I knew that that wasn’t what she wanted. Neither of us wanted to get married, and neither of us even considered the possibility of raising the child together. There were many reasons why abortion was chosen, but perhaps one reason among many was that we both came from families where that was the preferred option. I know that Mary’s mother would have been devastated if her daughter had put off her college plans in order to have a child; my family would have been equally upset. If we had polled our extended families (we didn’t), the consensus would have been that abortion was the “least worst” option. Continue reading ‘Choices, Culture, and Pressure: some thoughts on why pregnant teens make the decisions they do’

Laura Marie Doub, 1971-2008

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 9, 2008
in Family
. 4 Comments

My cousin Laura, with whom I often played as a child, died just over two weeks ago. Her obituary appeared today in the Charlotte Observer. She is my first relative younger than I to die, and it is a hard thing to accept. I post too many family obituaries on this blog, but cannot do otherwise when my loved ones go on.

Laura and I only saw each other a few times in adulthood, but in the late ’70s and early ’80s, we spent many summers together at our family ranch in Northern California. She was often the youngest in our group, but was spirited and impetuous and exuberant; a Leo to her core. Most memorably of all, she was never once intimidated by her elders. In the summer of 1981, when I was fourteen and Laura ten, we organized what turned into a daylong “Marco Polo” contest in the ranch pool. By cajoling and nagging and badgering everyone between six and twenty to play, we stretched that silly game — at which virtually everyone cheats — into a marathon that left us all utterly exhausted and very, very happy. Laura only quit when I, four years her senior, finally was so worn out I cried “enough!”

She had a wonderful laugh.

We are giving in Laura’s name this month to the Physicians Commitee for Responsible Medicine.

“Only disobedience is free”: my mama’s follow-up on sin, rebellion, and autonomy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 1, 2008
in Christianity, Faith, Family, Favorite Posts 2008 and Youth
. 25 Comments

Last week, I posted about the Calvinist notion of rebelliousness as the gravest of sins, quoting both Richard Mouw and Augustine of Hippo. Mouw and Augustine excoriated themselves for childish destructiveness, not so much because of the damage they did to the objects they attacked but because of their sheer glee in defying authority.

My mother, a retired professor of philosophy, now in her seventies and an atheist since her teens, wrote to me with a different insight about the meaning of rebellion:

I don’t know if I ever told you this story. It is my earliest clear memory; I was only two and a half years old. It was Christmas Eve 1939, and I was in the backseat of the car. We were driving to Grandfather Roeding’s for dinner. I think I had a slight cold. For some reason I had no shoes on but I did have socks and I started to take my socks off. My mother told me not to, but as I continued to remove them, I had this sudden enormous sense of myself as a self. I could take my socks off If I wanted to! I was a separate person. I was genuinely — if only briefly — aware of my own separate consciousness. I’ve certainly never thought of it as a sin. I disobeyed in the revelation that I could disobey: A deliberate act of free will. I’m sure I had done quite a few naughty things before that but this was an act of independence rather than of malice.

Do you know the medieval theory that there can be no true love in marriage? True love involved giving freely and nothing in marriage can be giving freely since everything, according to medieval doctrine, is already owed. Similarly, in our childhood there is a sense that everything good and well behaved is already required of us. We disobey not because we are depraved but because in the tiny sphere of our capacities, only disobedience is free, only disobedience is an expression of our autonomy. I have never forgotten that moment of realization that I could choose not to obey.

The bold emphases are mine.

I am truly, in so many ways, my mother’s son! And though my mother and I disagree about a great many things, I think she’s absolutely right about the essentially healthy, life-affirming function of the kind of childish disobedience she describes here. I am not a philosopher like my parents or Richard Mouw (though I did suffer through a lot of graduate work on medieval English scholasticism). What I do believe is that we must distinguish healthy rebellion from wanton destructiveness. My mother’s defiant removal of her socks, in the face of her own mother’s stated warnings, is evidence of a desire for healthy autonomy; Mouw’s smashing of his grandparents’ plants is less positive because it is the expression of autonomy through the willfull destruction of life (however feeble and unsentient that life may have been). Rebellion for the sake of establishing independence is, in other words, only sinful when it involves deliberate harm to that which is created, good, and valuable. There are different kinds of rebellion. Continue reading ‘“Only disobedience is free”: my mama’s follow-up on sin, rebellion, and autonomy’

After 25, it’s in bad taste to blame your parents for anything: some thoughts on Rebecca and Alice Walker, feminism, and the rage of the neglected child

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 27, 2008
in Family, Feminism and Having children
. 31 Comments

Much discussion today of Rebecca Walker’s piece in the Daily Mail: How My Mother’s Fanatical Feminist Views Tore us Apart. Rebecca, daughter of Alice Walker (of the “Color Purple” and many other important feminist works) excoriates her mother in the Mail interview, done to promote (of course) her new book.

…my mother regards herself as a hugely maternal woman. Believing that women are suppressed, she has campaigned for their rights around the world and set up organisations to aid women abandoned in Africa - offering herself up as a mother figure.

But, while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfilment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

The publishing industry regularly proves right Freud’s theory about children’s murderous desires towards their parents. We have ooodles and ooodles of “tell-all” books written by the kids of the famous, in which they invariably “shatter the illusion” of the (usually same-sex) parent’s marvelous public persona. Folks never tire of buying the latest in the “Everyone-thought-Mum-was-God-but-to-me-and-my-pet-rabbit-she-was-Satan” genre, and Rebecca Walker offers us her version this spring. The hook, of course, is that Rebecca doesn’t just blame Alice — she blames feminism. Continue reading ‘After 25, it’s in bad taste to blame your parents for anything: some thoughts on Rebecca and Alice Walker, feminism, and the rage of the neglected child’

Mother’s day with Juanes

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 12, 2008
in Colombia, Family and Music
. 4 Comments

I’m a little bleary-eyed this morning after two back-to-back nights of five hours of sleep. Eating a vegan diet does enable me to cut back a bit on the number of hours I need, but I still seem to do best when I’ve had a minimum of six. Given how busy our lives are without human children, the real question we both have is how it is that we will adapt to having a kid. What does it look like when two Type A personalities who want to go-go-go 18 hours a day suddenly have a small child? No, we’re not announcing anything, folks — just musing together. Some things will have to give, and that’s a prospect that fills me with considerable ambivalence.

We’ve had some of my wife’s family in town, and last night, my wife, brother-in-law, and I took their mother to see Juanes at the Nokia Theater downtown. Juanes is, as most of my readers will know, one of Colombia’s two most famous rock stars (the sublime Shakira is the other). We’ve been fans of his for years, and even though I have only a limited understanding of his lyrics, I’ve always found his pop hooks to be particularly infectious. It was a delight to see so many multi-generational groups in the audience last night; though my wife and I brought her dear mother, I saw several grandmother-daughter-granddaughter pairings enjoying a Mother’s Day evening out together. The audience was, of course, overwhelmingly Latino, but not exclusively so.

When Juanes dedicated one number to the Afro-Colombian people, my wife and mother-in-law exploded with delight. My mother-in-law was born into an African-Colombian family in Santa Marta, on the northeastern Colombian coast; she bequeathed to my wife that marvelous mixed heritage of West African, Spanish, and indigenous American influences. Too often in Colombia, “whites” ignore or malign the sizable Afro-Colombian minority. To have Juanes, the consummate Colombian rock star and perhaps, after Juan Valdez, the nation’s most recognizable male export, celebrate the African influence on his country and his music was welcome indeed.

I danced in the aisles. While my wife and in-laws moved their hips with easy and rhythmic abandon, I danced in that traditionally self-conscious white boy way. When it comes to distance running, I know how to center myself in my core. When it comes to dancing, however, my center seems to be located in my trapezius muscles, and I scrunch my shoulders and rotate them while shuffling my feet. I was teased good-naturedly by my family and by others around me, but I was happy as a clam. The fact that I understood about 50% of what Juanes said from the stage struck me as a special triumph.

Some thoughts on teens, driving, and helicopter parents

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 1, 2008
in Family and Youth
. 32 Comments

Back in February, the New York Times ran a story that jived well with what I had already begun to notice: Fewer Youths Jump Behind the Wheel at Sixteen. The opening of the article summarizes the reasons:

For generations, driver’s licenses have been tickets to freedom for America’s 16-year-olds, prompting many to line up at motor vehicle offices the day they were eligible to apply. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

Reasons vary, including tighter state laws governing when teenagers can drive, higher insurance costs and a shift from school-run driver education to expensive private driving academies.

To that mix, experts also add parents who are willing to chauffeur their children to activities, and pastimes like surfing the Web that keep them indoors and glued to computers.

I turned sixteen in 1983. I took the test for my learner’s permit promptly at 15 1/2, took the (free) driver’s ed course in high school, and got my license within weeks of hitting my 16th birthday. As I will turn 41 later this month, I am rapidly approaching a quarter-century of licensed driving. (I tried to calculate last week about how many miles I had driven in those 25 years. These days, I average only 12,000 miles per year, which is low by Southern California standards. In earlier years, when I had a longer commute, I drove easily twice that. I’d guess that I’ve logged somewhere around 400,000 miles so far in the USA and Britain.) When I was in high school, as virtually any American adult over 30 will tell you, a driver’s license was a much-longed for rite of passage, a crucial demarcation line for adulthood. The only people I knew who didn’t have their license by their 17th birthday were those who had either repeatedly failed the test or those whose visual disabilities made it impossible for them to drive.

But it is not so today. The Times notes that rising insurance and gas costs have played a part, and I don’t doubt that economics are a factor. Many states have placed onerous restrictions on teen drivers, limiting when and with whom they can operate a motor vehicle. When I got licensed 25 years ago, there were no such restrictions. In the early ’80s, a teen in California could load up a car with a dozen friends and drive them around at midnight. No mandatory seatbelt law, either. Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on teens, driving, and helicopter parents’

“Fly, you fools!” A simple answer to the question about where to go to college: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2008
in Academia, Family and Teaching
. 20 Comments

I’ve been getting emails and calls and visits this week from various students who, having been accepted to at least two colleges to which they have applied for transfer admission, are now trying to decide where to go for school.

Let me make it simple: all things being equal (and Berkeley and UCLA are pretty equal in most programs, as are Cal State LA and Sacramento State), go to college as far away as possible from your friends, family, and everything you have known. I don’t know if anyone has copyrighted it yet, so call it the Gandalf theory of higher education. When in doubt, and if you can possibly afford it financially, move away.

So much of a good college education takes place outside of the classroom. Disconnecting from loved ones, if only for a time, is a vital part of becoming an adult. Not everyone has the luxury of making such a choice, but if my advice is asked, my answer is essentially the same as that uttered by Gandalf the Grey in his last words before the Balrog drags him down.

I do understand that some students must live at home for financial reasons. Though I think debt and independence are preferable to solvency and enmeshment, that’s a personal cultural bias on my part, a bias others may not share. I do think that there is much to be said for spending as much time as possible in another corner of the state or country, exposed to different weather, different media markets, different social values.

And for what it’s worth, as someone with an undergrad degree from Cal and a Ph.D. from UCLA, I can say that I loved Berkeley with every fiber of my being. My attachment to Westwood never rose above the tepid. But as they say, your mileage may vary.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from the comments section. Daisy at Our Descent offers the exact opposite advice in a lovely post. I’d like to note that my wife shares a view closer to Daisy’s; she graduated from high school in Glendale and headed off to USC, living at home the entire time. She wouldn’t have changed that for the world.

In the end, I acknowledge that giving advice about going to college is like giving advice about whether to have sex at a young age: the right answer is contingent upon a unique set of circumstances surrounding the needs of the particular person inquiring.

I’d point out, though — and this is clearly for a future post, maybe soon — that the desire for autonomy is not evidence of a lack of devotion to family. As I’ve argued before, WASPy families in which men never do more than shake hands to show affection to each other, and where children leave home at 18, never to return, are no less intensely loving for their commitment to formality and personal autonomy.

More on that to come.

Ecofutures and big, green houses

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 28, 2008
in Environmentalism and Family
. 0 Comments

My second cousin Eric Doub lives in Boulder and is the principal behind Ecofutures Building. He just got a very nice write-up in the New York Times yesterday. Cousin Eric shares some interesting tidbits, including the little-known fact that it is harder to have a “zero net-energy” small house than a big one.

Entirely coincidentally, I just spent a few minutes chatting with one of the WAM work-study employees, an MIT undergraduate majoring in civil engineering. She’s also interested in “green building.” I may have to do some email exchanging.

Anyhow, hurrah for Eric, and hurrah for Ecofutures.

Easter Report

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 24, 2008
in Family and Holidays
. 6 Comments

I’m in the office early on a Monday morning after a brief and happy Easter weekend visit with my family in Northern California. Details on the holiday below.

Mine is a deeply secular family. A few of us became serious Christians as adults, but the bulk of the clan tends towards a vaguely benevolent agnosticism, often expressed in a deep affection for the liturgy and the traditions of the Episcopal church. I don’t talk much about religion with my loved ones, not because to do so would be to invite a quarrel, but because it tends to expose a gulf that, most of the time, we enjoy pretending isn’t there.

Certain rituals have been part of my life for as long as I can remember, chief among them the dyeing of eggs the day before Easter. The fact that my wife and I are now vegans has in no way diminished our enthusiasm for coloring the shells of what we will not eat! This past Saturday, as on so many countless Easter eves before, we set up a large folding table on the porch of the “old house” at the family Ranch. We covered the table with newspaper, and placed the bowls of bright blue, yellow, red, green, pink, and orange dye (food coloring and vinegar) about. The youngest dyer this year was a mature ten; the oldest (my mother), an immensely experienced seventy. My wife, celebrating her fifth Easter in the bosom of my large and eccentric family, brought a certain elegantly Latin flair to the otherwise WASPish proceeding. Continue reading ‘Easter Report’

A Cuppe of News

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 11, 2008
in Family and Links
. 4 Comments

My brother has a blog, of a sort: A Cuppe of News. It’s a bulletin board for information about upcoming talks in early modern studies throughout Southwest England. My little brother is senior lecturer at Exeter, father of three, and one of the men in the world whom I admire most.

And an archive of my little sister’s writing at the Santa Barbara Independent is here. She is 29 today, which is a splendid age to be.

Almanzo Wilder

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on February 18, 2008
in Family and Mass media
. 0 Comments

My cousin, Dean Butler, who played Almanzo Wilder on Little House on the Prairie, has a preview of his documentary about the husband of Laura Ingalls.

Dean’s Youtube site is here, and his blog is here.

And the Almanzo-Laura romance is nicely edited together here.

Passings, passings

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 13, 2008
in Family
. 2 Comments

The obituary for Chuck Chumrau, my adored father-in-law, is in today’s Los Angeles Daily News.

George Douglas Albert’s obituary is in the San Francisco Chronicle today as well. Doug’s wife, my cousin Muffie, preceded him in death by just weeks. Dying so soon after a spouse is so often the case with those who have been married a very,very long time, and we can only count it a blessing. Doug, who was 90, was a beloved fixture at family gatherings my entire life; a proud Stanford man, he clearly waited to die until after the Cardinal had retaken the Axe. Usually in a minority at holidays, he gave as good as he got in friendly arguments with his many Old Blue relatives. Cousins by marriage are true cousins to me, and Doug was my oldest living cousin.

Both my father-in-law and my cousin Doug wanted any donations made in their name to be given to dog rescues, DELTA of Glendale and Northern California Beagles, respectively.

Sigh. 2008 is off to a bittersweet start.

Men, mortality, stewardship, love

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 2, 2008
in Age, Body, Family, Father, Favorite Posts 2008, Men and Masculinity and Veganism
. 8 Comments

It’s not a conducive time for posting ’round these parts. We leave for the Philippines on Saturday night; we’ll be back on Friday, January 11. I have lectures to prep and packing to do.

My father-in-law died early Sunday morning, and we have been busy with taking care of family and with funeral arrangements. Sunday afternoon, my wife and I spent several hours dealing with the cemetary, the mortuary, and all the minutiae that come with death. I’ve gotten too familiar lately with all the details that survivors cope with in the aftermath of a loved one’s passing.

My Dad died eighteen months ago, at 71. My father-in-law died three days ago at 63. Over and over again, the words “much too young” echo in my head. My father’s father died at only 44 (in a car accident); my mother’s father died at 62. Both of my wife’s grandfathers died relatively young as well. Though the causes were all different, we both come from families where there are plenty of older women — and too few older men. The statisticians tell me that men in America and Europe should live to see at least 72, but for my wife and for me, neither our fathers nor any one of our four grandfathers made it to that age. Meanwhile, all four of our grandmothers made it to at least 80, and most well beyond.

So in addition to the grief over losing a loved one, I’m feeling this week an acute sense of fragility. Some of that is just the reminder — of the sort we always get when we’re confronted with death — of our own mortality. But in my personal experience (and the experience of my family), dying “too young” is a largely male phenomenon. Though some of these deaths were due to poor lifestyle choices, the emotional impression I am left with is that men are somehow more vulnerable than women. Continue reading ‘Men, mortality, stewardship, love’

Charles Thomas Chumrau Jr., 1944-2007

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 30, 2007
in Family
. 29 Comments

My father-in law, Charles “Chuck” Chumrau, died at 2:00AM today at Sherman Oaks Hospital following a brief illness.

Chuck was a kind, funny, warm-hearted man, and his passing is mourned by his three surviving children, his stepchildren, and his large extended family. He and I spoke last on Christmas day; we argued politics good-naturedly. Two days later, he suffered the heart attack that would eventually take his life. My wife, her brother, and her sister were all at his bedside at the end.

My wife and I have each lost our fathers in the space of eighteen months. Both dear men died much too young, but they died in the certainty that they were deeply loved. That is a comfort in this difficult time. We’ll be busy with funeral arrangements the next few days, so posting will not resume until later in the week.

My father-in-law…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 29, 2007
in Family
. 2 Comments

… is in hospital, in very grave condition. His name is Charles, and your prayers and good thoughts for him — and for my wife’s family — are very much appreciated.