Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Catherine Palmer
Over the years I've had
a number of parenting theories in the hopes of achieving my parenting goals.
These theories are not based on data and I frequently abandoned both my theories
and my goals, but the one goal I was dedicated to was that my two sons would
grow up to be individuals who were comfortable and confident in new
situations. My obsession with this goal is simple: I am rarely comfortable or
confident in new situations. In fact if it were up to me I would never go
anywhere new and I would not meet new people, but as a college professor it's
rarely up to me and I go new places and I meet new people all the time and I
secretly dread every minute of it. I'm good at what I do, but I have to
force myself to do these things and my goal for my boys is that they would grow
up to be people who welcomed new experiences and didn't secretly dread
every minute of it. So the working theory was that I could create confident new
experience-seeking adults by modeling confident behavior even though I wasn't
actually confident myself. I had their entire childhoods to test this
hypothesis. So I started by moving my family to China.
When the boys were 5 and 8 years old. I figured if I could fake confidence
traveling to and living in a foreign country that bore no resemblance to our
life back in the States, I would have succeeded. So the key to
faking confidence is planning, leaving nothing up to chance. So I plan and I
check my plans and I recheck my plans until I drive everyone around me crazy.
a=And I knew a move to China would require the highest level of planning I had ever
attempted. So my two sons and my husband and I flew from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
to Beijing and then on to Chengdu, China where we would be living. And as I got
off the plane I immediately was aware that nothing was familiar, not the sights,
not the sounds, not the smells. So far mission accomplished.
So we settled into Chengdu and I found I was very content to be picked up every
morning by a driver, driven to my teaching assignment, and then delivered
back to our apartment in the afternoon. I was very comfortable teaching, but when I
would get back to the apartment my boys were ready for a new adventure in their
new city, and on the weekends these adventures often included trips to the
art market. Now back in the States I only shop for food because you have to
shop for food. I don't shop for other things like gifts and clothes because
that usually means going somewhere new and having to interact with new people.
The beauty of grocery stores is the people who work there don't care what
you buy and they leave you alone. So I don't enjoy grocery shopping but I am
very very good at it, if you judge success by time in the store. I've made
my boys very efficient shoppers. We only go to one grocery store and we know
where everything is. I actually time myself when I grocery
shop. It's as if I'm working towards some sort of qualifying trials for the
grocery store Olympics. but it was clear that in China we would
be shopping for things other than food, and the art market became the place our
go-to place for doing this. The first time we went to the art market I quickly
realized that very little English was spoken there and our Mandarin is not
what it should be. I was immediately overwhelmed by the bargaining that was
going on and the vendors calling to us trying to get us to buy all things
Chinese. These are situations I dread, all the noise and commotion and I alternate
between wanting to scream to just make it all stop or wanting to run from the
noise. These are not good options if you're trying to model confident
behavior, so on that first visit to the art market when I really thought I
couldn't tolerate any more, a man appeared out of nowhere. He was ageless
but clearly old and his English was impeccable and he quickly integrated
himself into our shopping that day, giving us advice and helping us
negotiate. He would become our shopping guide for our art market excursions,
guiding our purchases and being reimbursed by the vendors, and just as he
would appear out of nowhere when we arrived at the art market he seemed to
disappear the same way, giving my boys the sense that he was magical. I thought
he was magical as well because unwittingly he'd become part of my plan.
Not only did he make shopping tolerable, he made me look like a confident shopper
in a foreign country. So it turned out while we were in China my husband would
have a birthday and my husband was born in the year of the rooster, so what
better more culturally appropriate gift than a statue of a rooster to celebrate
his birth year. So I waited for a day when he was busy so the boys and I could
go on an art market shopping adventure. By now I had a zone of comfort in
Chengdu, to work and back with a driver to the grocery store and back with a
card that said very specifically in Mandarin where I was going and to the
art market because of our shopping guide. So as we left that morning the boys did
not realize that we were looking for a gift for their dad, they just knew that
we were looking for a statue of a rooster. Young children are not good at
keeping secrets related to surprises. They just don't get the timing of when
you should tell the secret. So my solution to this was to tell them that
we were never going to tell their dad about this trip and I really emphasized
that he could never know. So as the boys and I left we fully expected to see our
shopping guide when we got to the art market and honestly I wouldn't have
attempted the outing otherwise, but he was nowhere in sight. I had no way of
contacting him so this was not something I could plan, and my first reaction was
to turn around and head back to the apartment, but I stopped myself. I could
do this and the boys were my motivation. After all the vendors had always been
very kind to use whatever English that they knew to help us with our purchases.
We were only looking for a statue of a rooster, how hard could that be? So the
art market is outdoors and it's organized in long rows of open-air
stalls. I brace myself and I approached a likely vendor and I saw that he had a
chart of all the animals of the Chinese years and suddenly I felt very confident.
I would point at a rooster and then I would show with my hands that I wanted
to statue of a rooster and not a picture. And I did this fully aware that my boys
were witnessing my incredibly calm approach at bridging this communication
gap. And the vendor watched me and the next thing I heard was "No cock for you."
And then without taking a breath he yelled down the long road stalls "The
white lady needs a cock. Who has a cock for her?" Needless to say I hadn't planned
on this, and suddenly I was surrounded by well-meaning men holding various sized
statues of roosters, all calling to me "I have a better cock, I have a cheaper cock."
But the focus seems to be on the size of the cock that I want, with lots of calls
of "You want big cock or little cock?" I am now awake in my worst nightmare. And the
nightmare is not being bombarded by this word or having the boys exposed to it
and the nightmare isn't even the noise and commotion. The nightmare is that the
boys are witnessing the panic and completely lose control of this
situation. I feel like I'm literally drowning and pulling them with me. it
would have been hard to model s confident behavior as I grabbed their
hands announcing "I don't like any of the cocks" and bolted from the art market. On
the ride back to the apartment I wondered what I could possibly say to
lessen the impact of this fiasco, but I stayed silent. I'm originally from New
England and this is a common strategy.
We we pretend something hasn't happened by not talking about it. Yeah so we got
to the apartment and my husband had already returned and he greeted us with
"I didn't expect you back so soon." Evidently this can't go unanswered so my
younger boy says "Mom was looking for a cock but couldn't find one she liked." Always
a fan of new words, he's adopted this vocabulary. This is followed by his
older brother admonishing him saying "You weren't supposed to say anything, mom
said to never tell." At this point my husband and I are both laughing. I'm
laughing because the trauma of this event has been lost on the boys. The only
thing they've taken away is that I'm a discerning shopper and would not settle
for the wrong item. You never know what you're modeling for your kids and I'd
like to tell you that back in the States that I'm more confident but I continue
to be uncomfortable in a variety of everyday situations and I continue to
cope with this by over planning. When my older boy was ready for high school this
included insisting that we take the public bus and practice getting to his
building and when I offered to write it all down for him he turned and said "I
found my way around Beijing on the subway, I'm pretty sure I can find my
high school." And I smiled because after all that had been the goal all along.
Thank you.