Tween? Not Buying That!

I despise the term "tween." Did we honestly need another designation for a period of childhood? Back when I was a kid (my boys know to tune out NOW), at 12 years, one was a preteen. Nothing more, nothing less. "Tween," it seems, refers to kids from 8 to 12, or nine to 14, or the 10 to 14 set, depending on the user. Eight? Really?!? My eight-year-old is a kid. Early elementary, if we must use school labels. He's no where near teen, and, therefore, certainly not a "tween".


My 12-year-old son is no "tween" either. Sure, he's on the cusp of adolesence, at least by the numbers. Aside from his odor, he's decidely prepubecent physically. He still loves stuffed animals, Pokemon, and building forts with couch cushions. He's also a Rachmaninov fan, a TIME magazine reader, and Google Earth devotee. One moment, he's logically discussing mathematics and then next he's making annoying random sounds. He's transitioning, gradually, in fits and stops, from childhood to adulthood. It's a long process, one, according to brain maturation studies, that continues until at least age 25. By that point you've theoretically been "adult" for 7 years. Or perhaps then one would be a twadult? Hmmm.

The term is widely used by the marketing folks who discovered a niche for a wide variety of products. This is my main objection. The tween term seems to have it's main use in marketing. I'm strongly against marketing to children, who, after all, still are developing their critical thinking skills and have less ability to see the line of garbage they're fed by those who see them with dollar signs only. Am I angry? You bet.

According to Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, a tween is a hobbit between the ages of 20 and 32. Better origin, but still not particularly useful when describing my boys. I'll stick to kids, thanks, and you can hold the advertising.

What We Learned Today

Here's a sampling of what the boys and I learned today.  Feel free to guess who learned what.

Complement means "that which completes something".  Compliment is something nice we say to another.
The subject complement takes a noun, adjective, or subjective pronoun.
In Spanish, there are eight articles, as opposed to the three in English.
Complementary angles are two angles which add up to 90 degrees.
Supplementary angles are two angles that add up to 180 degrees.
Tofind the area of a rectangle, multiply the length time the width.
To find the perimeter of a polygon, add up all the sides.
Aedifico (Latin) means "to build".
In "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes," Sadako contracts leukemia after exposure to radiation from an atomic bomb.
Plant cells have chloroplasts.  Animal cells don't.
How to play measure 73 through 76 in "Hopak" by Modest Mussorgsky on the piano.
It's hard to read the Encylopedia Britannica.
The pretzel with the bong (bo staff in Korean martial arts) is tricky and takes flexibility. 
How to spell "blew".
How to beat mom at "Settlers of Catan."
Trimming rear claws on kittens is harder than cutting front claws.
The letters "s" and "b" in cursive aren't really that hard.
Acorn squash makes great yeasted bread.
Kittens can  be a bit gassy.
Yellow Tail Shiraz is still okay after a week in the fridge.
Encouraging a friend is uplifting.
Refusing to unlock the house until the garbage is taken out is an effective method of delegating chores.
We can get ready for Tang Soo Do in 5 minutes.

We're really all learning all the time.  Nice to know, huh?

Universe in a Shoebox (Part II)

In the end of “Life as a Strategy for Life,” we were asked to look back on life as an experience and consider how we want to be eulogized. While I haven’t thought of it those terms, I have thought about my goals of living, and they step from my sense of connection to humanity as I discussed in Part I.

I want to have loved deeply, not just when I feel like it, not just when the other pleases me, not even only when I truly know the other person. I want to feel the compassion that goes alongside love for those with whom I share the planet. After all, we have all either been mother, we’ve all loved and lost, we’ve all laughed with delight and wept in sorrow. We all experience what it is to be human, what it means to be alive. Loving others, feeling compassion, deepens our connections to humanity, and, I believe, brings peace to ourselves and others.

This is a goal, a strategy to life. Working for that goal is work, and I miss the mark every day. As a bit of a perfectionist, examining my life for my shortcomings is second nature (and loving myself can be quite difficult, although as the cliché goes, it’s the place to start). As human, I constantly fall short. As human, I continue to strive for growth and that currently popular business term, “continuous improvement.”


Included in the sermon is this poem:
Adrienne Rich: Transcendental Etude
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
—And in fact we can't live like that: we take on
everything at once before we've even begun
to read or mark time, we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.


— Adrienne Rich, 1984.


So I study my life, make gradual if stuttering progress, loving the life this earth contains.

Universe in a Shoebox (Part I)

A recent sermon by Rev. Alex Riegel left me thinking back. At the start of the sermon, Alex asks the congregation to remember moments of our youth when we felt in sync with life and taken with the mystery and wonder: to recall our natural philosophical disposition. A few points came forward in my mind. First, I remember wondering often about my uniqueness in the universe. After I understood just how many people inhabited this planet but before I knew anything about genetics, I mulled over what the chance was that I was the only one with my name, at my age, with my physical appearance, likes, and dislikes. Was there another me? What would the chances be that mundane me could really and truly be unique? I don’t recall judging whether having a duplicate would be a plus or a minus, only the recurring thought.


My second preoccupation as I’d lay in bed waiting for sleep was the uniqueness of the universe. Could the universe I knew be simply in a shoe box in the corner of someone’s closet, and could that closet-containing universe be in another box? Could the pattern, perhaps, never end in either direction, universes upon universes contained and containing this one, like an infinite set of nesting dolls? These were my early philosophical meanderings of the mind when young.

Honestly, they’re not too different than my meanderings now. I return to my shoebox theory of the universe when the thought of a single universe with nothingness beyond me seems either to simple or too distressing. It doesn’t keep me up nights anymore – that honor is reserved for so many distracting and usually uncontrollable minutiae in my life. And while I no longer wonder if my double resides in some small town in Iowa, I instead see the commonalities I have with the rest of humanity. I am a mother, thus share “mother” to greater or lesser extents with all mothers that are, that have ever been, or that ever will be. I have loved and lost, and share that experience with most of the world as well. I have known joy and sorrow and recognize these emotions as far from unique. They are, in fact, part of the human condition. These shared experiences ground me and connect me to the humanity.