Laughing til you cry: The perils of overly real comedy for stress relief

This has been one hell of a week in a doozy of a month in the most disrupted year of my adult life.

It hasn't been all bad... I have been making progress to reclaim my health, but it is definitely a rocky and uneven road. I have really enjoyed winter in Eastern Oregon with the sweet air, the trees, the snow, the tracks of wild animals and even the quiet, bermed streets.

But otherwise, seriously... Gods, have mercy!

I don't want to bring anyone else down and mostly it's just the same old things everyone else is dealing with--the long grind of the pandemic with all of its costs. But there are also doctor's appointments of various kinds for me or my kids at least six times a week, my daughter's ongoing crisis, my son's renewed crisis at school and at home, special education plans and meetings for both kids, my grandmother getting covid, the father of my son's best friend dying of an overdose, family conflict and scheduling... this week has just been especially rugged.

One of the things I have learned in my journey back to better health is that the severe stress I have been dealing with for the past ten or fifteen years--largely for reasons I can't control--is likely the primary contributing factor in developing my chronic health problems. And if I want to be healthy and have energy to live joyfully, I have to find ways of reducing stress.

One of the ways I do that is to exercise as soon as my son leaves for school in the mornings. These days it's about six degrees below freezing at 7:30 in the morning and my elliptical is in the unheated free-standing garage. The hardest part is gritting my teeth through the cold until I get warmed up. But I've been listening to clips of Trevor Noah on Youtube and rationing them for exercise time. He seriously helps.

I trust you've probably heard of Trevor Noah. He's one of the few celebrities I've ever loved and it isn't just because he has good politics. It's also that he really laughs at everybody--people like him, people like me, people he agrees with and disagrees with. He has a delightful way of making heavy stuff funny without belittling it.

I get out there to the garage, shivering and working out as hard as I can to get warm and I feel my muscles relax into it as I laugh. I feel the stress shedding off of me.

Image via Unsplash

Except for this morning.

This morning I clicked on Trevor Noah's compilation of videos about white people calling the cops on black people. At first they were really funny. This stuff is so ridiculous. Yes, it's hard not to feel a bit ashamed of fellow white people, but Trevor Noah is so funny that you can get over it.

Except that most of them were about incidents involving little kids. And while he kept on laughing and making jokes and making everybody except the little kids seem like complete clowns, I have two kids who aren't black but they are "of color" and in the Czech Republic, where we came from, they are "the local black." And they're both pretty traumatized by elated crap.

And when I look at those videos, I laugh at Trevor's jokes and I think about the wider social implications, but increasingly with each video what grows and grows inside me is the sense of the trauma that the kids being threatened with cursing and pointed weapons and out-of-control police officers are experiencing.

When I look at those videos, I don't just see incidents involving strangers. I can't help but imagine my kids at those ages and how incredibly fragile and vulnerable to trauma they were at that time. I think even woke white people miss this a bit when getting outraged about how the cops are chronically called on sweet-looking little black kids.

We are upset because it's wrong and unjust and racist. But there is still an "othering" going on in a lot of woke discussions on this topic. The events are presented in woke media as unjust and egregious, but I don't see much comparison to the ultra-careful way we insist our children be treated. Most white parents I know are obsessed with ensuring that no one ever even raises their voice to their child because of possible trauma.

My son is eleven. I recently had to explain to a medical professional that he had been traumatized by "interethnic conflict" in the Czech Republic. The medical professional clearly didn't get it and asked me if the symptoms of this trauma weren't "just normal pre-adolescent adjustment."

I was hesitant to elaborate because my son was present, but in the end I gave this professional a couple of snapshots--like the time my son, at age 9, was picked up by four teens and thrown onto his back while they shouted racial epithets. He had significant bruises and a teacher was watching but did nothing. Afterward. the school refused to intervene and told me I'd have to take it up with the police. And the police said it was the school's problem.

To his credit, this particular medical professional changed his tune immediately and subsequently responded appropriately to try to help. My son is hyper-sensitive to authority, criticism, being singled out and aggression because of these traumas. His response snaps to fight or flight in a split second over the tiniest rebuke. He's back to a wall with fists balled, screaming, fury snapping in his eyes over being asked to pick up his wet towel. When I imagine my son's reaction to being approached aggressively by police with guns and an inflated sense of the threat of darker skin, my blood runs cold.

I'm betting Trevor Noah knows that the incidents he's joking about are not simply unjust but also incredibly traumatizing to the little kids involved, but he doesn't mention that part, possibly because he knows a lot of little kids are watching his show and he doesn't want to retraumatize them.

But still after the sixth or seventh clip, I realize that I'm not laughing anymore. Instead I'm sobbing uncontrollably, still trying to move the exercise machine but gasping raggedly with tears streaming down my face. I don't do the common white othering of black babies that shields us from reality as well anymore.

The last clip I watched involved a four-year-old having cursing, completely freaked-outl cops pointing guns at her and threatening to "put a cap in her head" over a snatched Barbie doll. My daughter took a pack of gum from the corner store when she was about that age. This isn't somebody else. This isn't a symbol. It's a real four year old with the sensitivity, big eyes, vulnerability and lack of developed ethics of every four year old.

I couldn't keep going. This is supposed to be a standard parenting rite of passage. Your kid swipes something from the store and you take the kid back, make them return the item and apologize. For a preschooler, it's both humiliating and terrifying just enough to make a big impression. That's how they learn. Maybe not every kid does it, but a hell of a lot of kids do it around that age.

And any police officers involved are supposed to use a calm voice, squat down to the preschooler's level and give them a good lecture about right and wrong. That's their job, which I have seen them do quite well when the kid caught filching was white.

I rarely turn something off because it's too intense, but I did that time. This was no longer relieving stress. And I know that this stress is just some of the stress that black parents experience all the time. But that is why they also suffer from a very high incidence of chronic health problems a lot like mine.

I'm not going to avoid or ignore these realities. In the interests of relieving stress, writing about it is more effective than just watching and dwelling on it. I'll be back to Trevor Noah another day and I'll laugh at the hard stuff and feel the stress fall away.

The long road to "That isn't on me."

A young girl wrote wrenching words to a group I’m in. So young. A pretty, thin teen with charcoal hair, umber skin and eyes that clearly move non-traditionally. .

She said she was struggling with the concept that she would never be able to do so many things she wanted to because she was born blind: ”I wanted to drive a car, sneak out with friends, go to parties, have a sleep over… And I wanted to see and flirt with cute guys. That was the life i was excited for. Now I’m realizing it wasn’t meant for me.”

A lot of people wrote back, telling her to believe in herself, not to set limits on her dreams. “Blindness doesn’t have to define you…” But others admonished her for appearing to ask for sympathy, even though this was a support group for blind people, not exactly mixed company. “Don’t fish for pity…” Yadda yadda yadda….

But I read her words over again and sat lost in thought. This girl wasn’t limiting her dreams. I don’t hear her saying she can’t be a scientist or a professional athlete or president. I hear her saying some very real things. Yup, driving a car is out for us. We learn that early on.

But then there are the other things—the social life, the little crowd of friends, the parties, the giggling under the covers when a friend spends the night, the staying out ‘til the streetlights come on or sneaking out afterwards.

Image via Pixabay - Two girls with arms around each other’s shoulders pumping their fists with a bleak gray background.

That isn’t a girl limiting her dreams. She has a couple of friends, kids of her parent’s friends, who have known her since before her difference was “weird.” But they also have their crowd and the cost of inviting along one’s geeky blind childhood friend with the creepy eyes is steep. There may be someone out there who would do it, but most blind kids aren’t lucky enough to have a badass, social daredevil for a friend.

This girl isn’t limiting her dreams or fishing for pity. She’s just expressing sorrow over coming to grips things that are denied to her. She’s young and she has probably been told she can do “anything, even if you’re blind” by people who mean well and who also don’t want to feel uncomfortable emotions. And she’s starting to find out that it’s not entirely true.

If she is making a mistake, it is only in lumping the social things together with driving a car, as if they too were a natural consequence of blindness. They aren’t. But I didn’t know that when I was that age either.

I remember being fourteen and noticing the blurry sunlight in my bedroom window turn orange, signaling the end to another solitary Saturday in June, listening to the happy yells of teenagers in the alley through that open window. That day—for the first time—I knew where the party was. Someone had let it slip within my hearing at school. I didn’t know who lived there, but it was just a couple of blocks over.

I put on my jean jacket, which had once been fashionable back when I went through a phase of studying fashion and trying really hard to be “with it.” I put my hair in a scrunchy and walked the two blocks to the place where the party was happening. I put a smile on, carefully rechecking it internally—not too big or obvious but enough to be friendly. The door was open with music blaring out, so I walked up the steps past a couple of guys sitting out front.

No one acknowledged me. I couldn’t see their faces. But my little bit of residual sight and their breathing and low conversation told me they were all guys. They might not even really know me, but I could tell they were my age, not grownups. I slipped into the doorway, which was festooned with streamers. The bold, cheerfully brash tones of the 1980s screeched from speakers and the sound inside was so loud that most of my skill at echolocation was wiped out.

There were girls dancing just inside. I could tell by their dim silhouettes and their giggles. There was a burst of laugher and someone slammed into me, pushing me against the wall and sloshing a drink across my chest. The girls erupted into gales of laughter. Then they were gone, scurrying away into the crowd of amorphous shapes.

I looked down and sniffed. Sprite. Well, at least it was clear and only a bit of my shirt was wet. I was used to rough and tumble with two brothers, so I wasn’t immediately sure that I wasn’t welcome. I stood against the wall for a long time, observing as best I could and trying to look friendly and “with it.”

I could hear the occasional voice I recognized from school. I didn’t know the names to go with those voices. The other kids were only ever introduced at the beginning of the year and then they only said their name out loud once in home room. That wasn’t enough to capture the voices and put names to the kids nearest me in school. But after a few months I did know when kids from my class were close by from their familiar voices.

Even so, no one spoke to me. A few dancers stepped on my toes or pushed me aside a bit with gradually increasing force. But no one directed so much as, “oops!” to me.

Finally, someone whose face I couldn’t see came up and took my shoulders, steering me toward the door. And I went. I made sure I was steady enough to keep them from pushing me down the steps, but I didn’t resist. I walked home along the sidewalk, my head up, pretending I didn’t care.

It wasn’t the first time I experienced that kind of cold shoulder and rejection, and it wasn’t the last by a long shot. But it was the last time I tried just going to a party put on by my classmates that I had heard about. And it was the only private party for teens I went to during high school.

Nope. No one ever invited me. There were a couple of kids I was friends with at the three different schools I attended during my teens, but they weren’t either the partying type or in a position to throw a party.

Is not getting invited to parties the worst thing in the world? Of course not. I lived in a sheltered, nice small town. I didn’t have to worry about hunger, violence or familial abuse. A lot of teens have terrible problems that I didn’t have. But when I crept out my window on Halloween to roam the streets, I did it alone, a real ghost walking in the dusk with kids speeding by, shouting and laughing in their own pursuits.

I wanted so badly to be part of a happy and inclusive crowd, to feel friends’ arms around my shoulders from either side, to share my excitement with someone, to laugh at their jokes and to know that if I fell behind they’d reach out pull me along because I was one of the pack.

All these years later, I know what the pretty teenage girl is talking about. I listened to well-meaning adults back then. I went to a self-esteem building program called “Wings” and I chanted affirmations before going to bed every night. All those messages from adults warned me that the worst thing a person with a disability can do is to complain or elicit sympathy from others.

Now, with the experience of an extra thirty years, those people telling this girl not to “put limits on her dreams” or “fish for pity” make me want to gnash my teeth.

Instead, I wrote to her: “I hope you know that you can do all those things as well as anyone, with the sole exception of driving a car. The problems you have doing these things are what we call a ‘social construct.’ It isn't ‘meant to be.’ It isn’t God or biology or your body that has taken those things from you. I snuck out of a windows as a teenager. I was quite good at it in fact. But no friends ever did it with me because I had eyes like yours. These things were ‘off-limits’ only because of social constraints.”

“As for putting limits on one’s dreams, I have been a war correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, a major international publication. I have published ten books and travelled in 35+ countries. I am raising two kids. I have built rock walls with my own hands. I have fed my family by farming the land. Believe me. I am not a blind person who puts limits on myself or spends time in self pity or in fishing for other people’s sympathy.”

“But society does put limits on me. For years, I beat myself up mentally because I wanted what you want and I thought it was me that was the problem. I thought I should learn to accept it. That’s what my mentors told me. And they didn’t blame me exactly but they implied that the exclusion was my fault, or at least a consequence of being visually impaired. I thought I just needed to try harder.”

“Now I’m almost forty-five and I want to tell you that that is bullshit. Certainly, avoid putting limits on your dreams. But your words don’t sound like that to me. I was a nice, friendly girl with a ton of interests and a good sense of humor. But I didn’t get to go to parties and I had precious few sleepovers, almost entirely with the kids of my parent’s friends. I didn't limit myself. Society and prejudiced people did. I was outgoing and friendly. I got kicked down, told ‘Oh, it's just for us and a few close friends!’ or ‘Maybe sometime!’ or just given a cold shoulder so many times there is no counting. That's society. That's prejudice, even bigotry. Call it what it is. Don’t blame yourself and I hope the people telling you to try harder and implying you are fishing for sympathy are reading this too, because putting this on you is abusive.”

“I wish I could give you a hug. I hope you will find your own dreams and follow them. But I’ve also got to tell you that this crap that is social exclusion has nothing to do with you. It’s all on them. I’m sorry to say that it isn’t likely to change soon, but you will find the occasional person who is open-minded and a real friend. Value them and give them your best side. Try not to let the negativity of bigots make you bitter, so that you can still turn around and be a good friend to those who are ready. But don't blame yourself because it just isn't about the blindness. It's about the same old sickness of our society that brings racism, sexism and all the rest of it.”

That may seem harsh, calling kids “bigots” because they don’t invite the blind girl in their class to a casual party. But that is actually putting it mildly and with a large dose of emotional distance.

I did meet a new friend that same year—when I was fourteen—who was ready to be friends with the blind girl next door. At least a little. Like a lot of friends, she didn’t act like she knew me in public. That was okay with me. Or at least it was worth the price. She was a good friend and we shared real interests, like the medieval history club.

Life happened and even though my life took me away from that small town and around the world over the next couple of decades, circumstances brought that friend a lot closer and into the circle of my family. There have been a lot of times when social things were tough, and I’d think of the handful of people I could really count on—my friend from that old neighborhood among them, even though thousands of miles lay between us. We’ve supported each other through some very tough times.

This past year, divisions split many friends in the US and while we agree on almost everything, there were some things we didn’t see eye to eye on. There came a moment when my friend was so angry that she lashed out at me in text.

As happens with a lot of arguments, my friend made it personal. But instead of just calling me argumentative or selfish or closed-minded or insulting my sources—all things that could at least be rationally argued—she went for my disability and my writing about my experiences, accusing me of making up the social difficulties related to my disability in order to “manipulate people and get sympathy.” To be clear, the argument wasn’t even vaguely related to disability or social exclusion.

I know my blogs have increasingly become about disability issues and maybe it bothers more than just this friend. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read my blogs, whatever your reasons. And I can see that it might seem like I obsess about this stuff, if you go on what I write here.

But the truth is that I rarely talk about these things in offline life. Last night, I mentioned something about my vision to a local friend because I had just spent the day seeing a major eye specialist in the city, and I was surprised at her shock. Then, I realized that I never talk about this stuff in person, even something innocuous like saying that I went to the eye doctor.

I spend most days thinking about kids, chickens, gardening, teaching students, preparing lessons, cleaning, cooking, doing the dishes, making crafts and now homeschooling. I don’t have a lot of time for disability issues, even being socially isolated enough that Covid lockdown barely changed my life at all.

Maybe that’s partly why I write about it, because it is an otherwise neglected part of my life. But I know it is also because these are issues I don’t hear anyone else talking or writing about. Or at least very little. And yes, while I don’t focus on the social impacts of disability every day, they underlie my whole life. They are defining factors that I have to take into account, like gravity or Covid. But unlike universal restrictions, that social exclusion is something I observe only affecting me and other people with disabilities.

So, I write because it is needed and silence hurts.

I don’t write this stuff to garner sympathy, and that’s fortunate because I haven’t received much sympathy since I started writing here. Instead, I have developed some great connections with people who experience similar things or who want to understand reality better. But even that isn’t really the point. The point is that I am a journalist. I write the things that need to be told and things that the world needs to hear. That’s just what I do.

If you’re a reader who came to my blogs for the general social justice stuff or to see what it’s like to live in the Czech Republic or to get books or to learn about herbs or earthy spirituality and you find my posts about social exclusion, disability and societal prejudices to be uncomfortable and out of touch with the reality you know, I hope you’ll bide a moment with your discomfort. It is okay to feel uncomfortable.

When someone tells about social injustice that they experience, the rest of us often feel an obligation to do something. And that is why it can seem like they are complaining or trying to manipulate others. But the fact is that there is no specific action I am asking for. It is really the understanding and the awareness that will help. If anything, share a post that opens you up to a new and uncomfortable reality.

But mostly just be open to the perspective. That openness alone will create the change we all need in this troubled world.

It is a stereotype like any other negative stereotype, that people with disabilities—or at least some of them—are “fakers” and “complainers.” Partly that stereotype comes from the (often-subconscious) fear abled people have of the inevitable disabilities of old age.

Partly it comes from the kind of jealousy my children have of adults. “You don’t have to do chores and homework!” They can’t see how much adults do have to do. Abled people see disabled people getting a few little curb cuts in life, and many think we have it easy and enjoy a little mooching… or that SOME of us must be faking or exaggerating just to get the bennies or at least to garner a little sympathy.

Just like I explain these things to my kids, you have really got no idea. The only breaks disabled people actually get are things that society has figured out will make us cost society a lot less because they allow us to deal with our own lives by ourselves better. That’s it.

Frankly, the only time I ever got “sympathy” for being blind was one time when I was a kid and some lady at a bus station prayed over me and it was a distinctly strange and uncomfortable experience. Most people with disabilities avoid “sympathy” like the plague for precisely that reason. It might feel moderately good from the giving end, but it is usually really weird and unrewarding on the receiving end. And that’s real sympathy, not even the toxicity of pity.

More than anything, if there is one thing I do want to try to manipulate people into it is to refrain from making abusive and prejudiced remarks that hurt people with disabilities. It doesn’t really matter if you once somewhere heard about a person faking a disability to get something or an actually disabled person trying to manipulate people’s sympathy, please don’t use that stereotype as an accusation or an automatic way to discredit a person with a disability in a disagreement.

That accusation is exactly like using racial epithets or calling a woman the slang equivalent of “sex worker.” If you go there in an argument, it isn’t about the argument or the person you’re arguing with. That’s on the person using the bigoted remark. It is a sickness that is within those fostering prejudice.

That isn’t on me. It isn’t on us.

Do people who are bullied really turn into bullies?

There is a vicious, traumatizing and stigmatizing rumor going around about my son and kids like him on social media and even in the mainstream media.

I have run across the remarks and assumptions at least ten times in just the past two days, and I wasn’t looking for them or even aware that such a stereotype existed until very recently. This vicious, hateful and potentially deadly myth has it that people who were bullied as kids become bullies, anti-social adults and/or violent criminals.

A few real-life examples do exist and psychologists call them “bully-victims,” but they are far less common than the popular stereotype assumes.

Creative Commons image by Carolyn Langton

I have recently rejoined the world of social media after a nine-month hiatus prompted partly by a serious incident of online bullying (yes, it happens with adults too) and partly by the exhaustion of homeschooling kids with special needs during successive Covid lockdowns.

And this is what I found on my return. This vicious rumor against people like my son and like me, a stereotype painting people who were bullied as potentially violent and liable to lack empathy. It’s a myth often spread even by those who previously claimed to be allies.

Maybe the myth started with an incident or incidents of violence in which the gun lobby decided to make excuses about how the shooter was once called “wimpy face” as a child and thus the quick and easy availability of semi-automatic weapons had nothing to do with it. Or maybe it was just a way of blowing off steam about empathy-impaired people during the U.S. election. Either way, it is now a pervasive stereotype.

The comments are things like an acquaintance on Facebook posting under a story about a violent police officer, “No excuse for it! He was probably bullied as a kid and this is how he takes it out on others.” Someone else referring to white supremacists as “a$$holes who were bullied in high school." And a passing reference on the television news about the need for bullying intervention to prevent “victims” from becoming mass shooters.

The overall assumption is that a direct link exists between being a target of bullying and future perpetration of violence or cruelty. And that assumption is everywhere these days to the extent that admitting you were bullied as a kid is now more likely to result in distrustful glances than support and empathy.

My first reaction was hurt and irritation, when I heard about this myth. I was a target of bullying and social ostracism as a kid because of my vision impairment, my strange-looking eyes, my secondhand clothes and my family’s alternative spirituality and lifestyle. I had a lot of strikes against me. My son just has being a member of a locally high-profile racial minority, the only non-passing representative of such in his school. But that is plenty to get a kid knocked down and chanted at by groups of bullies.

I have overcome a lot of my past, but it is still hard to see my son going through it for something equally beyond his control. And now he’s saddled with yet one more stigma. Not only is he “a young brown male” and an ESL learner, he is now categorized as a potential perpetrator of violence and cruelty in the popular imagination because of something that was done TO him.

He’s ten and he’s at the tender and naturally open age where he reminds me to include our two cats when I tell someone how many “people” are in our family. Empathy isn’t something he’s lacking.

So, the comments hurt. But then my rational brain kicks in. OK, but maybe there is some significant statistical correlation between being a target and becoming a perpetrator. I sure have had enough rage at times to be able to relate. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge people who spread this stereotype. So, I go look up the stats.

The National Bullying Prevention Center has a page on bullying statistics. While the site says as many as one in every five kids is “bullied” at some point, there are a lot of things that they call bullying. Name calling and exclusion are considered bullying along side physical attacks. Those who experience pervasive and repeated bullying are a bit more rare, but still more common than most people like to think. Kids with disabilities and those who are identifiable as belonging to a minority race or religion at a given school experience much higher rates of bullying.

There is also a section on the effects of bullying. Unsurprisingly, kids who are bullied end up with increased risk of “depression, anxiety, sleep difficulties, lower academic achievement, and dropping out of school.” Kids who are both bullied and bully others are mentioned but only to note that they have increased risk of emotional and behavioral problems. So do kids who blame themselves for being bullied.

Another researcher, Tracy Vaillancourt, a professor at the University of Ottawa who focuses on “the bullying cycle,” claims that less than 10 percent of bullies can actually be considered bully-victims. Although she contributes to the stereotype somewhat by completely ignoring other bullying targets in her “cycle” theory, Vaillancourt, offers no guess, educated or otherwise, about what percent of targets actually turn into “bully-victims.”

The statistics don’t mention anything about being bullied making one more likely to bully others or more likely to become violent or anti-social in adulthood. In fact, despite a lengthy search, I could not find any study that hinted at this. Given the pervasive stereotype, the lack of any hard evidence makes me think the opposite is more likely true.

I do know from my own experience that being bullied has made me less likely to be a nice, quiet bystander who enables bullies. Hell hath no fury like getting a little light-hearted bullying in and then being hit crossways by a hurricane that was once an ostracized child.

But turn me to bully those even more vulnerable than myself? Not likely.

There was only one moment in my life where perhaps I stood on that precipice. I was huddled in an out of the way corner on a stairway during lunch in seventh grade when someone landed on top of me. I was bruised and my precious colored pencils were broken. I leapt up and grabbed the body of the intruder and started wailing away at his back with my fists. It turned out to be another bullied kid who had been thrown bodily down the stairway onto me.

I wish I could say that the two of us became friends and held out against the bullies together. I did let go of him and stop pounding on him when I heard the bullies laughing and I got a bit of a look at him. But he ran away and never went inside my short visual range again. It’s a story too often played out. Those who suffer from oppression and bullying are driven against one another to ensure that they remain powerless against their assailants.

But even in those worst years of terror and rage, I was never tempted to actually pick on someone else. There is an ingredient missing that I would have needed to make that even slightly appealing. One would have to feel that bringing someone else down or pushing them even further down would somehow raise you up. I know the theory, but none of the emotion behind it resonates. I never felt even a little tempted.

My son was in a tussle in preschool in which a friend grabbed a toy from him and he pushed the other boy. The boy lost his balance and fell over a bench and onto a pile of legos, which scraped his back. Because my son was the only child of color in the preschool and a member of a very controversial group in our area, some of the teachers and parents immediately labeled my son as a dangerous. There was even a petition to have him expelled, which failed without our intervention because there were also honest teachers who reported that my son was no more disruptive or violent than any of the other boys.

Since then, he has been the target of bullying by older boys in school, but otherwise he hasn’t been involved with fighting at school. I believe that after his experiences, he wouldn’t participate in bullying or harassing another kid.

I can’t be so sure that he would have the confidence to stand up to bullies on his own behalf or on behalf of another. Unlike me, my son has the temperament to be a follower or a bystander, but he also is the kind of kid to quickly empathize with another human or creature.

He is now in the period of childhood in which superheroes play a large role. He loves to fantasize about being a hero and stopping the bad guys. In our discussions and in our choices of bedtime reading, the topic is often real historical heroes who fought to protect the vulnerable.

I am not worried that my son may become a bully because he has been bullied. I do worry that he may follow others into unhealthy habits, including exclusion of others, because of his temperament and eager desire to make peace and be part of the group. But this is something that has been part of his nature since long before racist adults went after him in preschool.

Whether it is my tendency toward quick anger or his bent to go along with the crowd, neither of these are a result of. our experiences as targets of bullying, but rather natural characteristics which come from temperament. In the end, it is empathy that prevents people from becoming a bully and lack of empathy that may cause someone to become a bully.

There are actually life experiences which can impair a person’s empathy. Extreme rejection of a child by family, complete isolation from human contact and being raised in an institutional environment have all been linked to dysfunctions of empathy.

Even though I know some experiences can lead to disruption of empathy, I would not willingly participate in labeling those who have suffered such terrible abuse. Where there is real concern the focus must be on healing. The one thing science knows about redressing an actual dysfunction in empathy is that the only treatment is lots more empathy.

But there isn’t even a real concern when it comes to a link between targets of bullying and the perpetration of violence and bullying. There is no such link. Perpetuating such a stereotype is nothing more than piling on with the bullies to rain more blows down on vulnerable kids and the survivors they become.

Please stop it. Don’t make statements based on such an assumption. Don’t joke about it. Don’t speculate based on this stereotype. It does real harm.

ADHD, brain regulation and guided meditation: An actual parenting tip from Arie

I think my readers might tend to cringe, when I mention parenting. No one has told me they do. I’m just guessing because my posts about parenting tend to fall into three categories: 1. how blind people parent, 2. how not to parent and how miserable it can be, or 3. sarcasm and snark.

I really have read dozens of parenting books, actually implemented their methods, found them to work great with 90 percent of kids and occasionally to fail entirely. That has led to a lot of my cynicism.

Creative Commons image by Seattle Municipal Archive

It isn’t that the methods don’t work. If you are a frazzled parent and you don’t know about counting in an ominous tone, time outs, making everything out to be your kid’s choice when it actually means you are in charge, avoiding power struggles and teaching through your own example, by all means, go read the experts. I specifically recommend:

Parenting by Temperament,

Pick Up Your Socks,

Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline,

and depending on your circumstances Attachment in Adoption

However, my posts tend to assume you are like me—a parent who is obsessive enough to research and read books before the kid can even walk (or let’s be honest, before the kid is even born). That’s why I don’t generally go on about the methods in these books, which you should most definitely read and practice.

It’s the five percent of the time when they just plain don’t work that will kill you, cause premature hair loss and end your marriage or partnership. And I usually don’t have much beyond commiseration to offer those of you who have run into that wall with me.

But today I do actually have something worth sharing, a technique I have NOT found in any expert parenting book, which actually worked wonders on my out-of-control, neuro-diverse kid.

Bedtime is often a nightmare for parents of neuro-diverse kids. Some kids don’t run on the same schedule as the school bells or even the sun. Some kids can’t just tell their brains it’s time to calm down and go to sleep. Some kids don’t know what to do with exhaustion and instead of winding down, they amp up.

I have kept a very strict routine with my kids, ever since the day we brought them home. Routine helps. Like a train on rails, my daughter will often stumble from one part to another—with hissing steam and screeching noises but in the end shunted from the teeth-brushing track, to the pajamas track to the story track to the bed track. On a good night, the routine takes only an hour and a half, now that she’s ten.

But not every night is a good night. At age ten, my daughter still has frequent meltdowns and needs the kind of supervision usually reserved for the under-three crowd. By the end of the day, whoever has been dealing with her—and her load of homework assigned by the school in hopes of keeping her somewhere in the ballpark of grade level—is staggering on their feet.

There are nights when after all of it, after the hours of one-on-one attention and the lengthy, carefully designed bedtime routine, she won’t go to sleep. She is up and around the house after bedtime. She wants snacks and she shrieks in protest. Getting her into bed is a literal physical battle that we still win by main force but only just. And then nothing can hold her there and no one can sleep with the racket.

This strife goes on anywhere from one to two hours on those nights and they averaged about once a week, up until recently.

I want to be very clear here about what directly preceded this bit of creative parenting. That is I had two full days and two nights at home alone. My husband took the kids on a skiing trip, returning so drunk with exhaustion out of a snowy night that I shuddered to think of how he managed the two-and-a-half-hour drive.

I sent him straight to bed and prepared to do battle alone, well rested as I was.

I got both kids out of their tight, damp skiing clothes and fed them. My eight-year-old son was blinking and crying, he was so tired. I knew I couldn’t physically handle both, so I got his teeth brushed and let him fall into bed first. He was literally asleep within seconds.

Then I tackled the more difficult kid. My daughter was exhausted too, lashing out randomly and swinging wildly from glee to rage. Her entire body hummed with tension. I could feel it as I helped her undress and brush her teeth. I told her a brief story and settled her down with her audio book in hopes that physical exhaustion would do its magic.

But no such luck. Not that night.

Thirty minutes turned into 40 minutes beyond bedtime and even my two-day reserve of regenerated energy was starting to flag. She wouldn’t even stay in bed to listen to her story and when she was up, she was into everything, requiring constant supervision and making nerve-rattling shrieks every one to two seconds. A hand on her shoulder told me that her body still thrummed with pent-up energy.

On most nights, this would have been the point where I started laying down the law and rolling out consequences, “You can choose. Either you stay up and keep me up and you won’t be able to have audio book tomorrow night or you lay down and relax and go to sleep and you’ll still have audio book tomorrow.” And so forth. It only occasionally works anyway.

Many nights the chaos continues for another hour and finally ends in her being locked in her room until she wears herself out—not a stellar parenting performance.

One of the more helpful things I had recently gleaned from rereading a few of the expert books was to focus on the concept of addressing the child’s deeper need. Clearly, my daughter needed sleep. She was exhausted, but she had no idea how to calm her dis-regulated brain and win some peace.

As a high-strung creative person, I do know what it is like to be exhausted after a long day’s work and to lie in bed with nerves jangling, a thousand thoughts whirling around my brain. Prominent among those thoughts is often the desperate need to sleep, in order to be ready for the challenges and trials of the next day.

So, I asked myself, how I get to sleep when I’m in such a state?

“Badly,” came quickly to mind. But also “quietly.” On such nights, I often lie awake in silence after it is clear that no audio book is going to help. I do relaxation exercises, deep breathing and progressive muscle contraction and release, which make me feel virtuous but don’t make me sleep. And then, more than anything I descend into a childhood fantasy and rehash versions of the adventurous and purposeful life I once dreamed of.

And that usually does help.

With that thought and the understanding that much of my daughter’s difficulty comes from an inability to regulate her own brain and do such things for herself, I came and sat on the edge of her bed and began to make up the fantasy for her.

At first, she was too jittery even to listen or lie down. I had to grab her attention mercilessly. I know what she obsesses over after all—preteen YouTube celebrity girls with shopping infomercials and flaunting conspicuous wealth. There isn’t much beyond kinky sex and hard drugs I would less like my child to be delving into at this age but desperate times call for desperate measures.

“Imagine you’re at the most beautiful park you’ve ever seen with all your friends from school and Everly, Ava and Jojo Siwa are there too, just to see you…”

She stopped jerking around and actually settled back on her pillow, her eyes wide and staring. I could still feel her muscles pulsing with nervous energy through the blanket but at least she was in the actual bed.

“It’s your birthday party,” I continued, “and everyone is there to wish you a happy birthday and play with you in the warm sunshine. There are fun things to climb on and the most beautiful cake you can imagine.”

The way my words came out made me think of those relaxation exercises I had so little luck with. I was originally taught those by an eccentric French teacher in my tiny rural high school in Oregon. She had the five kids in her class, me and four ranch kids, lie on the floor of loose wooden boards and do relaxation exercises.

She had also done guided meditation, which the boys had interspersed with rude comments. I had been cooperative but more because I felt a bit sorry for the teacher than anything else. I never did like guided meditation. I encountered it again at a handful of workshops and events over the years.

It didn’t work for me because my brain is entirely capable of paying full attention to the audio meditation, doing the visualizations and thinking of one or two other complex things at the same time. It isn’t relaxing because it doesn’t overwhelm me enough. It is not that other thoughts intrude on the meditation. They simply occur in a different place and the meditation continues without a hitch.

I did eventually find a form of meditation that consumes enough of my consciousness to work as intended but it requires memorized recitation along with practiced movements. Once the words and movements became automatic to me, the meditation worked because it was difficult enough that it took all the excess brain activity with it.

My daughter’s brain is probably the opposite of mine. That has been a large part of our miscommunication. For me, directing my mental attention to something or doing several mental things at the same time is no problem. The only significant problem is prolonged lack of mental activity.

So, it occurred to me that while guided meditation might be boring and insufficient for me, it might be immensely relaxing and freeing to her. Released from the need to try to control her brain, she could coast to sleep on a ready-made fantasy.

I could tell right away that the fantasy I had constructed for her, while successfully capturing her attention was too exciting to induce sleep. Slowly I shifted the focus of the words, describing more the surrounding natural environment and less of the celebrities and then even gently removing the other people from the picture.

“Your friends step into little boats on the lake and start to drift away over the waves. They float slowly up and down, up and down. And they wave back to you calling, ‘Good bye! We love you! Have a good rest!' As they drift away you sit down under the big oak tree. You can feel the warm, smooth bark on your back. You slide down to feel the soft, dry moss under the tree and lay your head on a soft, moss-covered root.”

I could feel her miraculously relaxing. Even her breath was calming. I included some deep breaths in the story and almost magically she took deep breaths as suggested, something that is usually impossible for her

Finally, I concluded the story with my daughter drifting into sleep in the beautiful park by the lake. The entire guided meditation took only about eight minutes. When I stood up, she made one drowsy noise but subsided again. I left the room and didn’t hear from her for the rest of the night.

Since then I’ve used guided fantasy to calm her several times in situations where she used to be unable to calm. Certainly children are as diverse as different species of animals. Just as this type of meditation didn’t work for me, it may not help many children. But what is universal in the technique is the parenting tool of looking at what the child needs on a deeper level and designing something that fits the child’s specific temperament to reach that goal.

How you get the exhausted child to sleep or the frustrated child to calm enough to complete their homework is not that important. We get stuck on having a specific way that such things should be done. There is a standard way that works pretty well with most kids, but not with all neuro-diverse kids.

“Do what works,” a fellow disability rights activist used to tell me. “Just do what works, regardless of how it looks.”

I hope someday my daughter will be able to learn to use guided meditation tapes to steer her own brain and gain a sense of self mastery. I’ve gained a new respect for a technique I previously rejected as too simplistic and manipulative. We all need different things.

On parenting, as usual, don’t judge other parents and do what works.

How to be a good-enough parent

”This kid was whining, saying his mom’s name over an over again. She couldn’t even get him to stop.”

All it takes is one of those comments, usually about the bad behavior of kids or families with children getting in the way and a flood is unleashed. Whether the person making the original comment was judging the parent or not, most people jump to the conclusion that the child’s parent is to blame.

Parent shaming is more popular than fat shaming. It’s the most socially acceptable form of public shaming in our society.

If you’re like me and not made of dried rawhide, you probably want to avoid it pretty bad. Fortunately, I’ve read just about every parenting book on the market, and according to some flatterers, I have quite a few parenting tricks up my sleeve.

So here is my fool-proof guide to avoiding parent shame and winning the coveted twenty-first-century “good enough” parent medal.

Creative Commons image via Pixabay

Before you start

• One of the main reasons parents are shamed is because of overpopulation. Before you start, consider whether or not you should. Our world is suffering from population explosion and ecological collapse. It could be argued… and in practice will be argued that you are selfish for insisting on procreating your own special genes.

• The easiest way to avoid parent shaming is not to become a parent. Sure, we need to have a next generation to keep the economy going while those virtuous adults who choose not to burden the earth with their off-spring get old, but you might want to leave that up to someone else.

• Another way to avoid the overpopulation and ecology shamers and still be a parent is to adopt. But you’ll be shamed for adopting too. There are stories about adoptive parents exploiting poor people in other countries and buying children. Even though you personally might not have done that, you can be sure that every time the subject of how you adopted kids is brought up, this issue will be rehashed and you’ll be publicly shamed about it.

• If you either already have kids or still think you can have kids and avoid shame too, read on.

The loving foundation

• Most people at least claim that they believe the most important part of parenting is love. It all starts with love and the worst shame any parent can have is to be accused of not loving their kid enough, or heaven forbid, loving one kid more than another. There should be nothing your kid could do that would cause you to stop loving him or her. Well, a school shooting, yeah, then you should stop loving them but other than that. Be unconditionally, unendingly, inexhaustably loving.

• But not too loving. Don’t smother. Don’t be biased in favor of your kid at public events. Lots of shame comes to those parents who cheer too much or protect their kid from criticism or favor their kid over others.

• Be loving but know precisely when your child doesn’t want to be kissed or hugged anymore. Physical affection is essential. Just because your child pulls away or shouts obscenities at you doesn’t mean they’ve grown out of the hugging phase. They still need loving hugs, up until the point that they don’t. You have to know where that invisible line is. Stop hugging too early and you’re cold and creating needy sociopathic monsters. Too late and you’re a pathetic cliche.

• Be loving from a distance when they decide they don’t want to have anything to do with you as young adults. Be loving but have no emotions. Love but don’t expect love back. Be immune to screaming, hateful diatribes. Accept them with equanimity.

Balancing parenting and career

• Provide for all of your child’s physical and emotional needs. Make sure you have a job that pays well, so that your child never has to be exposed to black mold, a leaky roof, a dangerous neighborhood, cheap and unhealthy food, bully-target clothing or unsafe, cheap toys. Financially poor parents are among the first to be shamed everywhere. If you didn’t have good job prospects, you never should have had the off-spring, so buck up and make money.

• Moms, be especially sure to have a prestigious job, Set a good example for your daughters. It is unforgivable to give girls the impression that their options are limited. And boys need to see women as powerful and prestigious providers too. Feminists are great at shaming moms who break ranks and don’t get a career. Half-time and place-holding jobs don’t cut it. You’re sending a message that women are limited by their biological childbearing function.

• Not only must your job be prestigious and keep you out of poverty, it must guarantee a stimulating environment for your child, including expensive educational toys and legos, toddler foreign language and music classes, memberships to sports, arts and crafts clubs and courses, and vacations to exciting places. If your child lags in academics, you clearly missed some of these requirements and it’s all your fault.

• At the same time, you must be present and attentive to your kids pretty much all the time. If doing this while satisfying the points above requires breaking the space-time continuum, tough beans. Nannies are a lazy-parent trick. Parents who rely on nannies for more than emergencies deserve the shaming they routinely get.

• Make sure you are home with your kids for at least the first three years of their lives and that you are there when they leave for school and when they get home. In fact, while exercise is good, not driving your kids to school is shame-worthy if you live within a 200-mile radius of any historical child-kidnapping incident, which defines every inhabited place on the planet, except maybe some remote cabins in Greenland.

• What your kids need more than anything is your constant, reassuring and playful presence. It is the single most important factor in the development of their self-confidence and their educational success. Of course, their day at school needs to be as short as possible and not lengthened by after-school programs, so that you can selfishly work longer hours. They are just children after all and their growing brains cannot handle long days the way adults can. You know who those whispers at pick-up time are about.

Tackling the housework

• If you were thinking that you can game the previous section by working from home or running a business out of your home, this point is specifically for you.

• Embrace the mess. Kids are naturally messy and it is unnatural and harmful to deny them the right to be messy or to force them to live in too sterile an environment (defined as spaces in which more than 50 percent of the floor area is walkable). When social workers enter a home on a child-abuse tip, a too-clean home is one of the red flags they are looking for. Shame on those clean-freak parents!

• Also cleaning does not count as being present and attentive. You need to be playing with your kids, engaging in child-led activities (such as being the evil queen, lady’s made, monster or bad guy running from miniature cops). Cleaning must be kept to a minimum and done only when the kids are asleep, which rules out most home businesses.

• Ensure a hygienic and stimulating environment for your child. Those same social workers are also looking for cluttered and dirty homes. That goes right on the form. Parents who are slobs and have clearly not washed their floor since it was puked on and who have clutter covering a lot of grime will certainly get shamed.

• Also clutter doesn’t count as a stimulating environment. If your kids can’t find their educational toys or the pieces to all those games or the wheels of their lego sets, they won’t get the advantages those toys provide.

The care and feeding of littles

• Ensure that your kids get good nutrition. Processed and prepackaged foods are the worst. Restaurant foods are also highly salted and sugared and full of harmful GMOs, white flour and trans fats. The harm these foods do to a child’s body and brain is truly horrific, including the development of allergies, neurological disorders, obesity, immune disorders and lifelong risks for diabetes and heart disease. (In fact, if your child already has any of those conditions or autism or ADHD, you are pretty much sunk on avoiding parent shame. You will inevitably be told that all they need is a better diet.)

• You really need to cook from scratch. Bake whole-grain breads, but make sure you test for gluten sensitivities and learn to bake the gluten-free kind, if necessary. Note that cooking, like cleaning, doesn’t count as being present and you’ll need to do it while the kids are asleep or at school.

• You’ll also have to satisfy both the vegetarian shamers and the “kids need a lot of protein to grow” shamers, but I’ll leave that one up to you.

• Always keep in mind that sugar and nutrient deficient simple carbohydrates like rice, white bread, noodles and fries must be kept to a minimum. Did I mention that ketchup is mostly sugar? A lot of bad parents around you will be feeding their kids pretty much only these foods—right in front of your kids unless you keep them locked away from society. Because these foods are specifically designed to be attractive and biologically our bodies crave simple carbohydrates, your kids will beg for them. The shame is so easy to slide into.

• And the most important rule about food is that you must never ever force your kids to eat something. You must provide healthy food, while they watch other kids both in person and on TV consume junk food and fast food. But forcing your kids to eat is one of the easiest things to shame parents about.

• Food can never become a point of controversy in your home, or you will be “creating eating disorders.”

Fostering education and self-confidence

• Children are the future and even people who don’t have children will rely on your children’s economic activity when our generation is old, so education is a hugely important part of parenting—the most important part according to many. You must ensure not just adequate but excellent education for your child, if he or she is to have any hope of surviving in the competitive economy these days.

• As a preschooler, your child needs bright, fun, educational classes in foreign languages, brain development, music and art, and you should be present or right outside the door at all times.

• You should carefully choose your child’s school. The only consideration allowed when looking at cost or transportation times is the child’s comfort, not yours or your selfish work schedule. You must get your child into a high-quality school or all the rest is your fault.

• Teachers will expect you to devote several hours to your child’s education every evening, to keep all records and projects in perfect order, to go through backpacks and school materials and replace anything lost in the classroom jumble and to ensure that homework is completed and that the child actually understands what he or she is doing, rather than just parroting answers you gave.

• Remember while average academic success on an assignment gets a C, which implies that most kids will get that kind of grade, you must make sure your kid isn’t one of them. C students can’t expect professional or academic success and parents of C students are lazy slouchers.

• Oh, and never pressure your child about academics. The most important thing you can do for your child’s academic success is to boost his or her self-confidence with lots of praise. Praise your child’s every effort and reward good grades but not to the extent that any other child who is not so successful will suffer low self-confidence. Excessive praise would be as unforgivable as pressuring your child to succeed.

• If they don’t succeed academically, it is your shame, not theirs.

Screen time, consumerism and socialization

• If a child has social problems at school, it is the parent’s fault. Usually the parent has not provided the right kind of or new enough clothing, school supplies, accessories or toys. That or the parent is extreme and doesn’t allow the child to watch the popular entertainment of the day or play the current video games. Such a child cannot keep up with what the other kids are interested in. Kids will often be unpopular or even experience bullying when they come from extreme households that don’t allow these modern influences.

• But of course you shouldn’t allow your child to be indoctrinated by consumerism either. There is nothing worse than a whiny, consumerist brat, constantly demanding this and that and thinking only of themselves. You need to identify the exact amount of toys, clothes and consumer items your kids need to survive socially and yet not become spoiled brats. It’s up to you and shame on you if you miss the mark!

• You’ve no doubt seen the studies about the harmful effects of too much screen time on kids. You must carefully limit your child’s exposure to television, movies, video games and social media. Fifteen to thirty minutes per day might not be harmful but you have got to shut it off after that.

• Also make sure the experience of shutting off the screens isn’t traumatizing to your child. That’s another reason parents get shamed.

• And make sure that the denial of this forbidden fruit doesn’t result in your child being obsessed with screen-based entertainment. One more reason.

Morality without forced religion

• Instead of consumerism and entertainment, make sure your child has a spiritual grounding and a healthy desire to help others. Involve your child in groups and communities which are focused on spiritual values. And above all teach your child right from wrong. This is one of many areas that parents are shamed for neglecting when their children get into trouble.

• But never ever force a religion or spiritual beliefs on your child. Spiritual abuse is real and often turns kids away from spirituality entirely, which is also the parent’s fault. You can take them to a place of worship a couple of times, but don’t force them to go once they are old enough to wish to play video games instead. They will have to develop altruism and ethics without the structures that every previous generation of humanity relied upon for their spiritual development, and it’s your job to make sure they do (without the help of clergy).

The big one: Behavior and discipline

• When it comes to separating right from wrong, it is important that you understand the difference between discipline and punishment. You must ensure that your child is disciplined but never punished. Punishment destroys self-confidence and thus higher brain functions.

• You must teach your child how to behave well, or you will certainly be shamed. But you must never be harsh or punitive. You’ll not only be shamed. You could even be investigated by the authorities, the ultimate shame.

• There are truck-loads of parenting books about how to ensure respectful and responsible behavior without harsh measures. They all rely on the idea that if you approach your child properly, they will inevitably respond reasonably and logically. Any childish lack of logic or other abnormality that causes your child to misbehave despite the expert strategies. reward charts and carefully phrased respectful reminders is probably your fault too, possibly something you did during pregnancy.

• You may remind your children of the rules, ask them to sit in “time out” if they become too upset, ask them to ‘do over” whatever they did with poor behavior and provide positive reinforcement when they do behave well.

• You will be held personally, legally and morally responsible for each and every one of your child’s misdeeds, but you are never allowed to punish them for it. You must be consistent with your rules and guarantee their sanctity, but you must never physically force or confine your child. You can gently remind them of the benefits of following your hard-and-fast, but punitively revoking privileges is no different from punishment.

• You must at all times treat your child with the same respect you accord to well-behaved adults, even while your child is screaming insults, throwing food in your face and poking his or her siblings in the eye for fun. Respect, say the parenting rules of logic and reason, begets respect, and if it doesn’t, you must have done it wrong.

• Don’t be a helicopter parent. Allow your child to take risks, so that they understand natural consequences. Natural consequences are the key part of non-punitive discipline. Instead of your punishments, your child should incur the natural consequences of their actions.

• Of course, you should not allow your child to incur any of the consequences on the following list, or you are a criminally neglectful parent: physical harm, cold, dangerous heat, sunburn, tooth decay, malnutrition, allergic reactions, exposure to dangerous organisms, illness, exposure to dangerous substances, consumption of unhealthy food and its long-term health effects, sleep deprivation, educational failure, social ostracism, emotional trauma or public shame and disgrace. The public shame must be all yours when you fail at parenting. You must protect your child from all of the real consequences while not punishing and not helicoptering.

• When your child does something even mildly annoying in public, you will be shamed. You need to ensure that your child does not annoy others. After all, you cannot impose your life choices to have a child on those who chose not to have children, even if they are counting on the next generation to keep the Social Security system ticking when they’re old. If your child whines, repeats annoying words, pesters you for attention, fidgets, taps things or otherwise is seen or heard in an annoying fashion, it is clearly because you failed at the point on discipline. You must be attentive and stop the annoying behavior one way or another immediately. However, you must remember to never be punitive or harsh. Otherwise you will not only be publicly shamed but reported to the authorities.

Keeping it all together

• If doing all this, while working a sufficiently lucrative job, cooking from scratch and making sure your kids’ homework gets done, sounds tough, have no fear. Today people also shame parents for not doing self-care and taking time for their marriages.

• You must take time for yourself. Go away for at least a couple of days per month with your spouse to ensure your family is rock solid. If your marriage falls apart, your kids will suffer and you’ll never live down the parent shame. (While planning this mandatory self-care, remember what happens to parents who hire nannies and sitters.)

• If you’re stressed out, harried and gray-haired as a parent, your tone of voice will not be loving enough. Get enough sleep after the kids are in bed, the cleaning and cooking that you can’t do when they’re awake is done and the bills are paid. That’s the only way to avoid the shame of being willfully sleep deprived. You’ll need to use your skills with physics to stretch time in order to make time for reading novels, massage and other quality me-time activities. Remember there’s no excuse for not taking care of yourself, so you can be a good-enough parent.

My best tip is that the next time someone parent-shames you, make them read this.

Good luck! You’ll need it.