This didn’t happen on Father’s Day; I’m pretty sure it was Independence Day weekend, 1992. I was living in NYC on a frayed shoestring of a budget, and had splurged on a plane ticket to fly to Virginia to see my serious boyfriend of 3.7 years (that’s called ‘foreshadowing’). I landed in Roanoke and took the bus to Lexington. My boyfriend picked me up in a car he’d borrowed from a friend, broke up with me, drove me back to the Roanoke airport, slowed down enough for me to roll out clutching my duffel bag, and left me there.

Well. I had to change my plane ticket anyway. I couldn’t face going back to New York to sit by myself for the long weekend, and my workplace was closed so I couldn’t even pick up hours to make back some of the money. But USAir flew direct from Roanoke to Pittsburgh, and I could easily get a train or a bus back to NYC from Pittsburgh, so I decided: I could go HOME.

If you’ve ever been dumped like that, you know I was a wreck. Meanwhile, my lovely daddy had a long history of “putting mom on the phone” if I called with anything that smelt even remotely of difficulty. For example, when I called home to say “Thanks for the Ivy League engineering degree! Guess what? I’m going to Library School!” his response was literally, “Well………….I’m going to put your mom on the phone.”

In 1992, I never called home directly and let it ring through. I called, let it ring twice, hung up, and waited for a call back. This was by my parents’ preference and request; they were happy to pay for the long-distance calls (as a parent, I also recognize the hidden bonus of knowing that I was where I said I was, back in the days of land-lines…). So if I called and let it ring until they answered, which happened almost never, it meant Something Was Up.

I was shaking and snotty and I had a calling card and I found a pay phone and I let it ring through (mom, pick up; mom, pick up, mom, pick up), until my dad answered: “Hello?”

“Hi, it’s Michelle.”

“Hi?”

“I’m at the Roanoke airport and I need to come home right now. They can put me on a flight to Pittsburgh. Can you pick me up?”

AND WHAT FOLLOWS IS THE BEST MOMENT THAT HAS EVER OCCURRED IN THE HISTORY OF PARENTING AND I CAN ONLY HOPE THAT I GET ONE CHANCE IN MY KIDS’ LIVES TO BE THIS HEROIC:

“Sure. We’ll be really happy to see you. What time do you land? We’ll be there.”

I have had the good fortune later in adulthood to have experienced this purity of love more than once more, and for that I am infinitely grateful. But every Father’s Day, and often at other times too, I reflect on the utter perfection of that moment  — no questions, no hesitation, no sigh, no deflection to mom  (she got to do her heroics on the back end of this weekend, never fear!) — and am acutely thankful to my dad.

Happy Father’s Day.

Almost 12 years ago, now, I had to spend 18 weeks in my bed with very limited interpersonal and online interaction. I’m not here AT ALL to argue the benefits or deficits of bedrest (the mileage I got out of my extreme rescue cerclage may vary from yours, and in the end we got lucky that solid medical science and a lot of privilege got us a good outcome), but instead am here to share what it turns out is ALL ENTIRELY idiosyncratic to me about spending that amount of time in my house.

— you’re going to get to know yourself really, really, really well. Learn to love what you learn, even if it doesn’t feel lovable at first. Appreciate you. You’re doing this!

— your family may act in ways that are very different from “usual.” Be gentle. Everyone will process this whole experience differently.

— be prepared to experience sudden and unexpected severe revulsion to a room, a color, a piece of furniture in your house that you previously loved — now or at some random point in the future. Same goes for food items.

— even if you keep a routine going, be prepared for day/night reversals, non-24, and other super odd things. Know if this is something you can roll with or if it’s going to bother your mental or physical health. I roll with it, but I’m lucky, and not everybody can. Earplugs and sleep masks can help a little, if you’re able to do that.

— we’re about to overwhelm our already-fragile mental health infrastructure, but be persistent about reaching out if needed or finding an advocate to do so for you.

— if you are able, move around your space, get outside, keep moving. If you do nothing else, do squats EVERY DAY. It’s really easy to melt into the furniture, but later, your lower back will HATE you for it. McKenzie worked for me really well for PT in the aftermath.

— compression socks. consider wearing compression socks!

— this is obvious, but balance what you eat, and eat a little less. Keep an eye on your body’s solid waste output to know if you’re eating the right things and moving around enough.

— indulge your interests. I watched 8 seasons of Murder, She Wrote TWICE (seasons 9+ weren’t available on DVD yet at the time, and streaming wasn’t really a thing yet). I re-read EVERY Agatha Christie book, in alphabetical order by title (this is NOT a way people typically do this). I read every Nero Wolfe book on my shelf (not a complete collection at the time, but close). Waste of time???? Well, in 2014 when J.C. Bernthal issued the CFP for the first of what was to become a series of Agatha Christie (then expanding into Golden Age) scholarly conferences, edited volumes, journal issues, etc., I was READY. I have a fruitful and rewarding research agenda applying information theories to detective fiction. But even if it hadn’t, I enjoyed it immensely, so it was worth it to ME.

–use all the senses that you have. If you can, listen to sounds, smell smells. I never knew I could spend several hours watching the tops of pine and oak trees wave in the breeze, but it turns out, I CAN.

— as long as we have an infrastructure, enjoy it. looking back, if we’d had restaurant delivery via smartphone app, and ninety million streaming services, oh my! But see above — I might have frittered away my time rather than focusing on long-term projects of reading & watching, and deprived myself of an opportunity later (which also might have been just fine as an outcome — not everything has to be about production!)

— related: for those of us with resources to do so, the ability to make donations online now is awesome — rather than the exciting but later-unfortunate experience of buying a whole bunch of stuff online that you don’t need, make online donations, as you are able, to help your community.

Specifically for those with folks for whom you are caring (not just children…):

— having gone through this with our older child (he was 4 during my 18 week hiatus), I also fully subscribe to the model of “i threw him some fish sticks and by the end of the day we were all alive. success.” Did you spend all day bingeing Phineas and Ferb? Playing Uno with 4 different “themed” decks shuffled together? Taking a nap together? Super. Plenty. Did they feel loved? Perfect.

— my last ones come from the time when the kiddos were earthside, and relate to working from home “with” family: I wrote a peer-reviewed journal article, with a lit review and data and data analysis and everything, that was published in a very highly ranked journal in my field, on my phone, while nursing a baby (I also read Anna Karenina on my phone during this same time period). At another time, I worked from home for an entire year while our on-campus building was closed, while my child and an age-mate were co-babysat inside my home with all the noise that comes from vigorous play between toddlers (did I mention privilege?!?). Many of us are working “with” family right now; it’s not easy, but it’s doable, even without additional support (I’ve done that, too). Be gentle with yourself.

— and finally… oh, heck, I have no “finally.” Idiosyncratic. Privileged. But maybe useful. And be mindful of that non-24 or day/night reversal thing! It’s already happening to me again!

(I’ve been teaching online since 1997: big classes, required classes, hard classes, and the students generally think I’m pretty good despite that. My dissertation and the first 10 years of my research agenda were about online teaching & online learning community. Here are some idiosyncratic but based-in-research-and-praxis tips from me, personally, if you’re trying to ramp up quickly and/or unexpectedly.)

• Ground rules for doing this in a hurry
• Ramping up an LMS site quickly
• Synchronous sessions
• Asynchronous sessions
• Community building
• Other resources

Ground rules for doing this in a hurry:

1. If someone has offered to help you, take them up on it.
2. Don’t fret about the details now; get going and punch problems later.
3. You are the expert in your content, that’s why it’s your class: do what’s best for you and your students to get through the content, the objectives, and the semester/term!

Ramping up an LMS site quickly:

Triage (first tier):

1. Post the syllabus & make the syllabus the “home” or “landing” page for the course.
2. Set up a discussion thread/board called “faculty office” or similar; “subscribe” to it.
3. Post an announcement that you are here and, if using synchronous delivery, include the link to the site (Zoom room, Collaborate room, etc.) you’ll be using for the synchronous class sessions.
4. Make sure you find the “send a message to all students” option (in Canvas, this is in the Canvas Inbox).
5. Make sure the site is available to students (in Canvas, this is “publishing” it).

Now you can start the second-tier stuff:

1. Setting up the gradebook with assignment deadlines & grade values.
2. Adding other focused discussion boards (Q&A for assignments, café for informal conversation, topical discussions).

And tertiary items come next:

1. Adding your own profile picture.
2. Adding in rubrics for graded items.
3. …and so forth, as needs arise.

Synchronous sessions:

1. Make everything as lightweight and low-bandwidth as you can: people will be attending by phone. No images in the slides unless mission-critical!
2. Don’t use video unless absolutely necessary and dictated by the learning objectives/outputs; if video is necessary, consider a way to move it asynchronously into your LMS by posting recordings there.
3. Set ground rules: Everybody mute your mic unless you are talking! No video unless you have to! If you want the mic, raise your hands! It’s okay to participate in the chat during lecture, but only if it’s relevant (questions, links/citations to sources of fact, real-life examples).
4. Make sure you CAN and DO watch the chat while you are talking so you can incorporate that into what you are saying. This takes practice but has a huge payoff in making the classroom a warm and inclusive space.
5. Breaks! an online class is not like a f2f class — it’s harder to pay attention and breaks are good.
6. Lots of pauses for questions and feedback: ask all students to enter a “!” or hit the Thumbs Up icon or some other cheerful acknowledgement of presence and understanding. It’s vital that this is an affirmative option “Give me a Bang ! if you are good for me to move on” rather than a negative option “Any questions? No? Well, seeing none, I’ll move on.” If you see a lot, you’re good to continue (tell those few who are not feeling confident that they can ask on the discussion board in the LMS or email you, don’t leave them hanging, but don’t hold up the whole class if everyone else has indicated they are good to go) ; if you only see a few, you need to re-explain!
7. Use virtual field trips where students go off by themselves to to a guided activity someplace else online (for example, students go off to explore how disambiguation works in Wikipedia, or how name control works in IMDB), then come back and discuss what they found/encountered.
8. If you’re using Zoom: ignore Zoom’s little lack-of-attention clocks — they go off even if the student is just in another application taking notes on your lecture/class
9. Allow alternatives such as asynchronous discussions in the LMS…

Asynchronous discussions:

1. This is an opportunity to have richly collaborative learning without the onus of group outputs and shared grades!
2. Groups are great for this, as long as no one person’s mark depends on anyone else’s performance. Bigger groups can work very well (I’ve gone as big as 17 with success).
3. Do not use “discussion prompts” where every student is responding to the same questions(s) and are then expected to “discuss.” Instead, consider alternative such as…

• Giving them a wicked problem and asking them to share techniques for solving it
• Having them contribute and discuss things related to a larger output they are working on (share and discuss sources for a paper, creating a shared bibliography; share thesis statements and constructively improve their clarity and purpose)

Community building:

1. In that first class, unless you have a HUGE number of students, let everyone “introduce themselves” by video/audio/text (just this once, and depending on their bandwidth — and yes, this is contradictory to advice I gave above to “never use video” — which is another key point: maintain a VERY high tolerance for ambiguity!) — I like name, pronouns, and where they’re joining from (I explicitly tell them to share location only if they are comfortable doing so). Even if your students already know each other, this gives them a chance also to test the software/system :-).
2. Stress is high. Allow a little bit of chit-chat and then enforce a bit of structure as that will likely add comfort.
3. Group work in class would be good, if your class is structured that way. Zoom, for example, supports breakout rooms — not well, but it does. The chance to talk in smaller groups oriented around a specific task will help form community also.
4. Add an asynchronous component via Canvas discussions, if that works for your class; that way people who struggle with the pace and/or technology of the synchronous class can still be a part of the team, but they can’t be lone voices there either, so if you add asynchronous options, make sure they have someone to respond whether it’s you or other students.
5. After the first class, use structured icebreakers for community building — at the beginning or in the middle of class — but be sure they are accessible/equitable (e.g., “what is something you recently read/watched/listened to?” instead of “what book are you reading right now?”; “what is a great place you have been or a place you’d really like to go?” instead of “where did you go on your last vacation?”)

Other resources:

Vanessa Dennen: “What to expect as colleges and universities move classes online amid coronavirus fears: 4 questions answered” https://theconversation.com/what-to-expect-as-colleges-and-universities-move-classes-online-amid-coronavirus-fears-4-questions-answered-133334

Rebecca Barrett-Fox: “Please do a bad job of putting your courses online” https://anygoodthing.com/2020/03/12/please-do-a-bad-job-of-putting-your-courses-online/

For many years, I thought “We Can Work it Out” was a song by Tesla — the band, Tesla. To this day, I can sing along with every note on the Tesla album Five Man Acoustical Jam, and I often still do so. And it’s all because of technological determinism.

Those of you who know me at all in my research life know that I believe in technological determinism about as much as I believe in eating oatmeal with cinnamon and fruit (that is, NOT AT ALL NEVER EVER NO WAY NO HOW). But then I find myself in the car, listening to Five Man Acoustical Jam, and I have to question this life choice. (Not the life choice to listen to Tesla, which is obviously always the right choice — but interrogating the genesis of this choice, because really, my life has come to that.)

Almost 30 years and several iterations of myself ago, I was an undergraduate student in New York City dating a cadet at Virginia Military Institute. VMI is located in Lexington, Virginia (also the home of, among other things, Washington & Lee University and the stuffed cadaver of Stonewall Jackson’s horse, Little Sorrell). At the time, and I don’t know if any of this has changed (there is NO NEED at all to let me know), one couldn’t really get from NYC to Lexington, Virginia. One could fly to Roanoke [and then what, really?], or one could take the train to Staunton (home of Mary Baldwin University), or one could take a Greyhound bus from Port Authority in NYC to Washington, DC, and then change for a Greyhound “local” bus that made, many, many, many stops across Virginia and had a stop right outside Lexington. This bus also went on to Memphis, so it was always about three-quarters-full of people from all over the northeast making their weekly/monthly/yearly/once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimages to Graceland via Greyhound bus. An aside: this was by far the best aspect of the trip, that the bus was always full of Elvis impersonators, and women dressed head-to-toe in Elvis memorabilia, and university students from the northeast, all making their way to Graceland by the cheapest and most accessible means.

Anyway, the Greyhound station “in” Lexington moved several times during the couple of years I made this journey regularly, so it was often a mystery where I’d get dropped off and how I’d get to my motel in Lexington. Because a “weekend” for the VMI cadets went from noon on Saturday to late afternoon on Sunday, I usually left NYC late on Friday afternoon. The bus would arrive in Washington DC in the late evening, just before the only restaurant in the bus station (Hardee’s) closed, and arrive in Lexington anytime between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. (the bus journey could be a trifle unpredictable). Luckily, one could *usually* catch the taxi driver in Lexington before he and his wife went to bed. Or after they got up. Either way. They were lovely and accommodating people, and I remember them fondly.

Most of the bus trip was at night, so one couldn’t really read (no iPhone! no Kindle!). And I learned quickly it wasn’t such a good idea to sleep on this bus. Doing the homework problem sets that were due on Monday for whatever engineering classes I was taking that semester was right out. All this left me with many hours to fill listening to music. Radio reception, much like the sleeping situation, was sketchy. And no iPods! no MP3s! No iTunes, no Spotify, no Tidal! Just me, and as many cassette tapes as I could carry, and my trusty GE portable personal cassette player with auto-reverse capability (infinite loops, or one side only, or PLAY BOTH SIDES THEN STOP).

PLAY BOTH SIDES THEN STOP was perfect! I carted a number of cassette tapes around (AC/DC’s Back in Black, the original Broadway cast recording of A Chorus Line, Cat Stevens’s Footsteps in the Dark) but the best tool in my kit for this long bus ride was Tesla’s Five Man Acoustical Jam.

And this is where the technological determinism comes in: That cassette had pride of place in my bus trip playlist because it was LONG. A little over 67 minutes (A Chorus Line comes in at 51 minutes, Footsteps in the Dark a bit under 48). An hour and seven minutes to sit without jostling the people around me. An hour and seven minutes not to have to risk dropping a cassette on the floor of the bus. An hour and seven blissful minutes made available to me because my GE portable cassette player would “play both sides then stop” and because the longer-than-60-minutes cassette tape existed in the world.

Because of my GE portable personal cassette player with auto-reverse capability, and the limitations of the passenger rail and interstate highway system, and the long-play cassette tape: An hour and seven minutes and almost 30 years later, if I am on a road trip, I call up Siri on Apple CarPlay and ask him, in my best Strine (MY Siri is an Australian male), to “please play Five Man Acoustical Jam.” And I sing along, every syllable, including that great tune that someone once tried to tell me is NOT a Tesla song, although you can’t prove it by me. TRY TO SEE IT MY WAY! DO I HAVE TO KEEP ON TALKING TILL I CAN’T GO ON?

I grew up in a makerspace. My mom was, and still is, a maker. Left to her own devices and ingenuity, she makes things. Lots of moms do, and dads too, and plenty of other random people, but I grew up with my mom and dad and this is my essay. Everything here is filtered through my memory and my feelings, so ties to objective reality are tenuous, but you’ll get the gist, and it’s pretty close to correct. I think.

My mom’s approach to a problem, or really anything even if it’s not a problem at all, is: “I can solve that. Let me think about it, find some instructions, get the right tools, and work carefully. I can do this!”

My remembrance of growing up in the 1970s and 1980s was a series of my mom getting the needed instructions and equipment, figuring out how to do it, and then making stuff (or making stuff happen). Macrame trend? Mom got yarn, and glue, and a book, and we had a hanging plant holder. Crewel embroidery? Sure! But Mom quickly tired of following packaged patterns, so she’d figure out how to transform something I drew, or a picture I liked out of a coloring book, into wall art. Everybody’s crocheting an afghan? No problem: a book, some hooks, some great yarn, and we still have the afghan she made. It’s fabulously warm and has held up beautifully. Altra luggage kits? I still have the garment bag, tote bag, and dopp kit she made. They work great.

Ballerina Barbie coloring book image, rendered by my mom in crewel embroidery.

I went away to college. I called home: “Mom, it’s COLD here.” The first stop on my next trip home was the chain fabric store, just for patterns (it’s hard to get great fabric at a chain store). I found the pattern I loved (ankle-length, with slash pockets and raglan sleeves). Next stop: a fabric store in a mobile home, where they had gorgeous remnants and remainders and who knows what all, where we bought yards of stunning, thick, teal wool. I went back to college leaving my mother to find and procure this amazing lining fabric that was windproof on one side and satin-y on the other (making the coat easier to put on and off, and warm like Thinsulate but with even less bulk). Perfectly matched buttons? You bet! Add an inside pocket that’s not on the pattern? Of course! I wore that coat all the time, including one night I spent standing outside the bus station in Lynchburg, Virginia, watching the temperature drop from 43F to 23F, waiting for a bus that was 5 hours late. I live in Florida now, but I still have the coat.

I loved going to the fabric store as a child: I could pick any pattern I wanted, even if it was marked “plus difficile” in the Vogue pattern catalog. I learned really early how to understand what fabric would work for what design. And there was never a problem if I couldn’t find a pattern for exactly what I wanted: we could buy different patterns for different features and my mom could make them come together. If I wanted Those Sleeves on That Bodice with a Different Skirt, my mom would help me evaluate the plausibility of how they’d work together and then she’d just… do it.

My mom’s college degrees and avocation (as surely you’ve noted) are in clothing and textiles. She made her own wedding gown, and she made mine. We were in NYC in July 2001 to visit the Jackie Kennedy exhibit at the Met, and I saw some unusually-set sleeves: “Mom, can you…?” Sure! We went to the garment district and bought cream-colored velvet and she designed the dress (including those fabulous sleeves), made me a muff to carry, and turned her attention to millinery to duplicate the design and construction of a velvet cap I found in a thrift store. Ta-da! A flower-hating, crew-cut, February-in-the-midwest bride.

I was happy and lucky to have both parents walk me down the aisle.

And it wasn’t magic (she can do magic, don’t get me wrong: she can balance a Barbie doll standing on its own two feet with no support) — it was skill, and work, and perseverance, and willingness to re-do and re-do as needed. Speaking of Barbies, though, and weddings…if I wanted a white dotted swiss bride gown for Ballerina Barbie and a pink dotted swiss bridesmaid gown for Fashion Photo PJ, lucky me, because mom would buy the pattern (yes, Barbie dress patterns), rootle through her scrap bag, and sew up some eyelet-trimmed dotted swiss bridal wear. With matching headwear.

Having a house to decorate and maintain let Mom expand her skills substantially. Patterned wallpaper in the 1970s? SURE. Mom bought this fabulous booklet at Wallpaper Warehouse in Bridgeville, PA, for 50 cents. Take a look: I scanned the thing (although not very well, sorry, and PLEASE check out how self-efficacious the woman in the booklet is). As a result, we had wallpapered rooms where the patterns matched exactly at every seam and lined up perfectly around every switch plate and outlet cover. Want ceramic tile to replace the old vinyl flooring in the powder room, and a tiled backsplash in the kitchen? No problem. Buy a book, buy the equipment, and we had tiled surfaces that impressed even the contractor who did the kitchen remodel (yeesh, even my mom drew the line at in-depth kitchen cabinetry and serious plumbing, although she did cedar-line a closet once).

Don’t look at me having just had my wisdom teeth removed; look at the outlet/switch plate.

I didn’t learn patience and perseverance and resilience and creativity from all this, but I should have…well, maybe I did, a little: I never sit down to sew without having a REALLY GOOD seam ripper at hand — I know it’s almost always better to re-do it if it’s wrong, and trying to cover up a mistake rather than acknowledging it and fixing it is a recipe for disaster. I also know that, from the fun of picking out a pattern and buying gorgeous fabric, there are MANY steps of prep that are easy to skip…if you want to produce something terrible.

Yes, it’s hard on an impatient kid to cut the pattern pieces, press them flat with a warm iron, pre-shrink the fabric, straighten the fabric, fold everything correctly so the grain of the fabric is lined up, pin the pattern carefully and following the layout directions (yes, including the eons it will take you to match the patterns on a figured fabric!), cut slowly and carefully including the notches you’ll later use to line up the pieces, and use a pencil or washable marker to mark every line and dot. If you don’t do all that, you’ll still put in a lot of time, but wind up with a product that isn’t very good.

Anyway, since I am by nature an incredibly lazy person, I don’t have the maker urge. Thanks to my mom, though, I CAN make things, and I know how to learn how to fix, or make, a new thing, and I occasionally even do so. When my kid’s wizard costume for halloween — yes, we bought it, although when I was a kid NEEDLESS TO SAY I never had a bought costume — was too long, I got a needle and matching thread and I hemmed it. (And wouldn’t you know I can still do a completely invisible hand-hem?) When the turn signal bulb on my car burned out, I found some YouTube videos, got out my socket set, identified and bought the correct bulb, and changed it. But I’m not the real maker in my house — I know a good characteristic when I see it, and my dear husband works very much like my mother does. How would we make a removable and reusable PVC-pipe-and-bird-netting cage for our blueberry patch? Let’s just say we have one now. It works great.

I made the dried-bean wall hanging…well, yeah, I did, but LOOK AT THE SWITCH PLATE COVER. LOOK AT IT!

Recently, my dear spouse asked me for suggestions for movies to watch with our kids (11 and 7). We’ve run through what we can access easily through our streaming services. “What movies do you remember from your childhood that we could watch?”, he asked. I laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

This isn’t an essay about movies (if you want to learn about movies there are many people FAR more knowledgeable than I am, Kevin Smith comes to mind as your required first stop). This essay is about my dad. I’ll write another one later about my own experience of film from high school forward, but this one’s about my dad and his ideas about “movies for children.”

“Talkies Uptown Video” independent rental store incorporated in 1984 in my hometown. I reckon we got our VCR around the same time. My dad had something like membership number 3, 13, 37? (you can ask him). My parents were high school teachers. During the school year my dad averaged a movie a day; in the summer, two. I wasn’t always invited to watch with him, and I had my own activities later on, but watching movies on VHS with my dad was a huge part of my childhood.

We saw stuff on the big screen, too. Looking at “top movies of 70s 80s lists” prompts me to remember amazing movies we (my dad, mom, and I) saw in the theatre. Imagine a kid at these ages, rapt in these films:

• Terms of Endearment (1983; I was 12)
• Crimes of the Heart (1986; I was 15)
• Grease (1978; I was 7)
• Kramer vs. Kramer (1979; I was 8)
• On Golden Pond (1981, I was 10)
• Educating Rita (1983, I was 12)
• Gandhi (1982, I was 11, we saw it in the theatre and then I asked my dad to rent it for me during a no-school “in service” day so I could watch it again by myself. Which I did. But I DID see ET in the theatre as well as Annie, that year)
• Amadeus (1984, I was 13 and I saw it in the theatre twice)

In 1984 (I was 13) I started to exert my own wishes: I saw Ghostbusters AND Beverly Hills Cop AND Temple of Doom AND Gremlins AND The Karate Kid AND Footloose AND Romancing the Stone AND Splash in the theatre as well. In those years of early teen-hood it was a good mix: I saw Out of Africa AND The Color Purple AND Mask in the theatre, but I also got to see White Nights and Back to the Future and Rocky 4 and Jewel of the Nile.

But what I remember the most *without any prompting from lists or anything else* was sitting with my dad watching wonderful things, like:

• Sleuth (1972, Laurence Olivier & Michael Caine)
• Psycho — which I saw the way it was meant to be seen, without having ANY idea where it was headed or who the “psycho” was. DELICIOUS.
• Rear Window (still easily one of my top 5 faves)
• Rope!
• The Trouble With Harry
• Taxi Driver
• Raging Bull (YOU go back and look at a list of top movies from 1980 and pick some to bring home to show your child — I bet this isn’t what you’d pick, but you’re not my dad)
• Harold and Maude (which among other things gave me a lifelong love for the Cat Stevens tunes featured in this movie)
• The Exorcist (long story I’ll share later)
• Stand By Me (1986, this is later, I was 15, so it’s time to pause this list)

Plus, my dad was a Woody Allen fan, so we flew through ALL of those (I no longer watch Woody Allen films; I wouldn’t now, anyway, but I stopped before many people, because of what I feel to be intellectual dishonesty in the lack of explicit acknowledgement of James Thurber’s The Catbird Seat in Curse of the Jade Scorpion, but I digress). I was particularly blown away by The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), which I used to sneak downstairs and watch over and over while my parents slept, and Broadway Danny Rose (1984).

Much of my experience of movie watching with my dad is tied to one of two introductory phrases: “let’s go to the movies this weekend” or “I watched a movie today, maybe you want to watch it with me tomorrow before I return it.” Each of those meant magic was going to happen. My dad liked to be really, really low-key about setting my expectations — I think he was fascinated to see my reactions to movies when I came in cold, so…. I’d be prepared for a film like this (titles are at the end, in case they’re not obvious to you):

“I saw a movie today. It had fans. Maybe you’d like to watch it tomorrow afternoon with me before I return it.”

“You like Moonlighting, right? Maybe you’d like to watch this film later tonight.”

“You liked The Elephant Man [we saw it in the theatre in 1980; I was 9], there’s another movie by the same guy…”

“You think you might want to be a lawyer someday?”

“You dance.”

“Want to watch a movie with a computer?”

And at some point we began binge watching before that was even a thing, grabbing everything we could and gobbling it down:
Apocalypse Now
Papillon
The Graduate
Silkwood
and, and, and…

But it wasn’t completely out of control! — I didn’t see A Clockwork Orange or The Deer Hunter or Deliverance until I was a little older. And there were other gaps: my dad didn’t really love “old” movies so favorites such as Double Indemnity came later, when I found them on my own. He also dislikes Cary Grant and isn’t huge on musicals, so I missed a bunch of wonderful films that I didn’t see until later.

But later will have to come later. For now, I’m still wrestling with my husband’s question: “what movies did you watch as a kid that we could watch again now?” I’ll take a page from my dad’s playbook and ask: “you liked Roy Scheider in All That Jazz, right?**

*Blood Simple (1984)
*The Last Picture Show (1971)
*Eraserhead (1977)
*The Paper Chase (1973)
*All That Jazz (1979)
*2001 A Space Odyssey (1968)

**We need to watch The French Connection. Obviously.

And here’s a picture of my dad. You can tell it’s taken at the time my story is set, by the paneling. And the orange chair….

Okay, that title is intentionally mis-leading. I have two kids and I breastfed for a total of 7.5 years, and I trust you to do the math and determine my credibility, or lack, for yourself.

For context: the second one was a breeze. Baby latched on, slept, weaned in 4 years. The first one would have been a nightmare except nobody, not even the cat, was sleeping through that mess. 13 weeks, 5 lactation consultants. Trytrytry to nurse, fail horribly, cry, bottle, burp, cry, sing, pump, cry, and it’s time to trytrytry again. Who was crying? All of us, including the cat. After 13 weeks I gave up. Baby and I both burst into tears every time we got near each other, which is no way to live. We gave him a bottle of the Best Possible Formula. He HATED it, and the look on his face was priceless. He nursed okay from then on and we went for 3.5 years (should’ve tried the formula earlier, but who knew that would work? plus All The Advice About All The Things indicated that everything we were doing was completely wrong but that anything else we could try would be equally wrong. Pleh).

So how does this mom lose her nursing credibility? I’ll tell you, but it’s going to take a minute, and I need you to clear your mind.

Imagine you’re out somewhere: restaurant, airplane, what have you. You’re minding your own business when a baby starts throwing food at you. Hmm. No, it’s not at you — it’s hitting other stuff, too. Other people, tables, chairs, walls. That’s kind of annoying. Shouldn’t somebody stop that?

This isn’t oaty-owes or pabu-crunchies. It’s sticky. And sweet. And greasy. And it smells kind of gross when it dries.

So you look. And you realize the baby isn’t throwing food. No, every time this kid looks away from its food, even for a second, the MOM is throwing food. And it’s going everywhere. You watch for a minute and you realize, worse yet (possible? YES) that in addition to throwing food everywhere, she’s even chucking it AT THE BABY. Bam! Food in the hair. Bam! Food in the ear. Which makes the baby cry. Plus all this food-chucking is really, really wasteful. Maybe mom should STOP throwing food?

Great idea! I agree. But my letdown* was so strong that anytime, day or night, for the whole 7.5 years, if a child latched OFF suddenly, to turn to look at a bright light or a loud noise or an interesting motion or just to wave HEEEYYYYY to the world, I involuntarily shot milk all over the whole universe. All over everything. I could get people sitting in the next booth in a restaurant (over the table, over the people sitting across from me, over the back of the seat, onto the head of the person on the other side). I could hit the TV from our couch. Strangers sitting in front of us on an airplane. And so on. It’s hard to clean up after that mess every time, plus it’s wasteful. And people often** find it kind of annoying to be sprayed with milk coming from the breast of a stranger. So I covered. Yep, I admit it. I covered. Me and baby, with anything I could use. Sheet. Blanket. Coat. Shirt. Purse. Scarf. Shawl. And finally, The Poncho.

At home. In bed. On the couch. On a chair. In the car. In my office. On the plane. In the airport. In the hotel. In a work meeting. I nursed those kids EVERYWHERE I went for 7.5 years and they were covered Almost Every Single Time.

No breastfeeding mother should ever, ever, ever have, or be expected, or be asked, to cover unless she and baby(ies) mutually desire it. Many (probably most) babies don’t like it and won’t eat well. For me and my little ones, covering was mutually AWESOME. I’m always (always!) cold, so being covered kept me from freezing to death while they munched away. Being covered kept my little ones from getting distracted, and made it easier for them to focus on turning into big, giant, roly-poly healthy happy babies and toddlers. I liked to eat while they nursed (I like to eat anytime), and they got a lot fewer crumbs in their hair this way. They loved to play peekaboo with the cover before they got started or after they were done. And both of them thought it was FANTASTIC the way they felt like they had this cool little face-time with Mom once I got The Poncho. The Poncho had a hood and a zippered neck, so I could pull up the hood and pull down the zipper, and baby and I could both see each other but no one else, and no one else could see us. We’d giggle and coo and get downright silly in our little tunnel. And nurse!

The Poncho was great — giant, made out of grey fleece — and I could wear it over top of wearing the baby in his wrap or sling, keeping us both warm. Plus it made a great blanket.

But…it meant I couldn’t go to nurse-ins where only uncovered breastfeeding “counted.” It meant moms who weren’t covered gave me sad (or worse) looks because I wasn’t brave enough to do the right thing for my baby (I actually got the best of both worlds in terms of catching negative looks: because my little pteranodons belonged to the Loud Eater Club, people who didn’t like me breastfeeding “in public” even though I WAS covered also gave me grief, because they didn’t like the Really Loud slurping noises!).

I said this once but it bears repeating: No breastfeeding mother should ever, ever, ever have or be expected or be asked to cover unless she and baby(ies) mutually desire it. But we shouldn’t assume that a covered mom is doing something wrong, either. I worked hard for those 7.5 years of nursing, and I enjoyed every second of it (AFTER THE FIRST 13 WEEKS). So this mom is reclaiming my credibility: Covered breastfeeding counts! Shooting milk all over the room, while a really cool ability, is kind of messy, can be wasteful, and in my case, tended to annoy the baby. Plus I still have a super-spiffy poncho.

*You can look it up. I’m not calling this “overactive” or “oversupply”; it was just how my breasts worked while lactating.

**I’m not going to address the cases where strangers were not annoyed by this. You do you, I say.