Daria Doering

Christmas 1999

 

Dearest Family & Friends,

Greetings from the Doering family, bent but not broken!  This has been an intense year for us, to say the least. It’s been a year of disasters that miraculously turned out well, and a period of working about the hardest we ever have in our lives, which we hope will soon subside!  This is also that difficult time of year for me again, when I have to write a couple of pages instead of a book!  You noticed?

We began the year still in the midst of the basement fiasco. The first contractor had overturned a tractor, excavated in a dangerous way that undermined the house, and ripped us off before we removed him from the job.  The second contractor said our two-story house was in imminent danger of falling, that he would save us, and then proceeded to do nothing other than procrastinate, weave lies and demand more money.  He didn’t get the house shored for over two months, during the rainy season, and then he walked off the job.  Dealing with him was such a nightmare that it was actually a relief.  However, he had shored the house in such a bizarre manner that we couldn’t get anyone else in town to touch it.

We called everyone we knew that was remotely connected with the construction industry, and then companies from the phone book, and finally referral agencies.  But four months after starting the project, we had yet to receive a single bid on the job.  Who in their right mind would want to put a basement under an existing house?  Especially after two contractors had started the job, screwed it up, and then abandoned it.  Or did they look at the job, mentally calculate the cost, look at us, and decide not to waste their time on a bid?  We were looking at our house being up on temporary beams for a long, long time; maybe until the next construction downturn when prices would get lower?

We spent months in an emotional pit, battling a feeling of utter defeat.  Our house was suspended in mid-air on steel I-beams, surrounded by a moat-like partial excavation, covered with plastic, that Mike had to pump out when it rained.  The yard was excavated and barren.  Meanwhile, we had to keep functioning, myself in an intensive college program.  I was so stressed and sleepless that I would find myself, during my daily teaching practicums, literally nodding off as I tutored some poor child.

Finally, we were snatched from the jaws of hell by our next door neighbor, who turned out to be le contractor extraordinaire.  He had a masonry subcontractor, a Hungarian immigrant trained as an engineer, who came up with a brilliant and original method of doing the job from the sides, despite the crazy shoring.  In nothing short of a miracle, they finished the job swiftly, competently, impeccably, and reasonably.  We even got our area’s “building inspector from hell,” whom we’d heard countless horror stories about.  Our neighbor managed to placate or hypnotize her or something, and she signed off on almost all the numerous inspections the first time.  Our new downstairs turned out looking like a living room, not a basement; and is divided into garage, Mike’s new office, and storage room.  Now we only have to cope with rewiring the house, plus our yard, which looks like a bombed out crater.

 

Other highlights of the year:

Entering the fascinating world of homeschooling!  Having always thought that homeschoolers were a bunch of nuts … having often said “If I were going to teach, I’d just as soon teach a whole classroom of kids,” where did I find myself at the beginning of this year but following my beloved seven-year-old son Jake’s badgerings and agreeing to homeschool him?  Once I started researching homeschooling, however, I found myself fascinated, compelled by and obsessed with it; in fact uninterested in graduate school or anything else!

Homeschooling grabbed me on so many fronts.  Academically, I got on some    e-mail lists, and was amazed to find moms from all over the country trading creative ideas on everything from how to teach fractions with graham crackers, to children creating “century notebooks” for history, to “lasagna (layered) gardening,” to the benefits of Latin … not to mention lists of favorite books, and time management tips … I realized that with total freedom to teach any subject in an way, the results can be incredible.

I started learning about some fascinating educational philosophies that are virtually unknown outside the world of homeschooling.  My favorite is the Charlotte Mason Method, named after a turn-on-the-century Christian educator.  It emphasizes using “living books” (books written by one person who has a passion for the subject) rather than dead textbooks; learning by “narration” (orally summarizing what’s read); the old-fashioned practice of “copywork;” afternoons spent in nature study, walking outside and sketching the plants and animals seen; and lots of art and music study.  Another popular movement is “Classical Education,” with its roots in the middle ages, in which children study the “trivium” of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.  On the other end of the spectrum there are many “Unschoolers,” who don’t believe in formal instruction at all, but use the community and life experiences to learn from.

Then when I started getting homeschooling catalogs, it was like going to a candy store!  One of my major problems with public school has always been the vacuousness of many of the books and texts, and the lack of meaning or values at the center of the whole enterprise.  In other words, crummy curriculum and lack of values.  But through homeschooling, I’ve found so many great books, both literature and curriculum. And talk about character education!  I found that many people homeschool for that exact reason.  Finding this whole group of people with the same concerns I have, and curriculum to match, has been like getting a new lease on life.

Another major attraction concerned child rearing.  Various books pointed out that in order to be around your children for 24 hour a day, they have to be obedient, and you have to like them!  I soon realized that these homeschoolers seemed to have solved some basic issues here … I started reading some of the Christian child raising books I found in homeschooling catalogs, everything from Catholic to Fundamentalist to Amish, and decided that these are the first books on child raising I’ve ever read that make any sense to me.  They all talk about obedience, which has become practically a dirty word in our PC culture.  A Catholic book called Building Character said it all when it stated that the important qualities to emphasize in the first seven years are obedience (Yes, do it because we said to!), order (pick up your damn toys!), and sincerity (how about shocking us by telling the truth for once!).  Otherwise, “it will be much harder to teach these things later on.”  Oh, really?!  Tell us about it.

At any rate, I had read all the popular child rearing books, and taken the classes, and they never helped me one bit.  I mean, zero.  All this “better communication, be more loving” stuff … please!  Have you met our kids?!  And all the “set limits” stuff, without ever stating what those limits should be, the lack of knowledge of which is our whole problem!!

Homeschooling is like a whole world unto itself, and entering it kind of boggled my mind.  But that turned out to be the least of it!  I also entered the world of people of religious faith, both Catholic, Mormon and fundamentalist Christian, the likes of whom I’d never run into before.  I mean, these are moms with eight kids, who homeschool them all, do an incredible job, attend daily mass and/or have lengthy family prayers and devotions, participate in a meal co-op and run a cottage business on the side!  The women on the Catholic Charlotte Mason e-mail loop in particular have been so honest about their daily lives and so inspiring to me, it’s hard to adequately describe.

Check out www.onelist.com to find hundreds of thousands of these e-mail communties.  Also I do finally have a child raising book to recommend: Changing Your Child’s Heart by Steve Sherbondy, available from Amazon.com (also see my review there).  It is an awesome book, dealing with children’s attitudes. The other lifesaving book I found is called When Love is Not Enough: A Guide to Parenting Children with Reactive Attachment Disorder, by Nancy Thomas.  Which leads me to:

Attachment Disorder.  Through the attachment parenting groups, I had come into contact with some people whose children are the opposite of attached, and are called attachment disordered, or RAD (“Reactive Attachment Disorder”).  These are incredibly destructive kids, many from Romanian orphanages, poorly handled adoptions or multiple foster home placements, who are full of rage from a pre-conscious-memory stage.  They act charming with strangers, but at home go around lying, stealing, setting fires, killing animals, and wreaking complete havoc on any environment they are in.

I became very interested in this syndrome and, and found that reading books on how these types of children have been successfully dealt with gave me the best information I’ve found on how to deal with kids in general.  When Love Is Not Enough was written by a remarkable woman who has been a foster parent to hundreds of RAD kids and has an 80% success rate with them; almost unheard of.  It is a guide both to how to be loving (importance of daily cuddle time, hugs, eye contact, etc.), how children should show respect, exactly what limits parents should set, and a range of tools with which to enforce the above.  I don’t know if my children initially appreciated the more “boot camp” approach that this book helped me take toward parenting, but I feel it has  helped immensely!

 

But enough of that.  Lest I get too caught up in my latest theories, I always have my husband to, well, “balance me out.”  As I champion keeping the TV turned off, there he is, renting the latest violent movies for his and our children’s viewing pleasure.  As I try to steer our children away from trashy popular culture and toward classic books and games, there he is, buying them Pokemon cards, Star Wars books, and Playstation CD’s.  As I lovingly cook gourmet, low-fat, organic meals, he asks for Hamburger Helper.

Luckily for the health of our marriage, we seem to have arrived at an uneasy truce.  Whenever I leave the house in the evening, the TV goes on, all the food is fried, and I no longer care.  I do realize that he is half of our family, and while I do go around muttering (or screaming and making scary faces) about him sabotaging all my efforts, I also realize that I never have to worry about my “being too extreme” with him around.

 

I took a two-week trip to Boston over the summer, to attend the opening colloquium for an Internet-based Masters of Education program I was starting.  The good part was the couple of days I spent sightseeing at the beginning.  I remember driving through a beautifully tree-lined town of cape cod style houses called Salem, thoroughly enraptured.  Then I noticed a striking gothic structure with a gold leaf sign that said “Salem Witch Museum,” and practically choked.  Yes, it was that Salem!  But I had a wonderful time visiting the witch museums, New England Pirate Museum, etc.

Unfortunately the colloquium didn’t go well, and the rest of the trip was miserable.  The couple who ran it turned out to be into “general systems theory” (you mean what I was so excited about 30 year ago when I read Buckminster Fuller’s books?), “dialogue” (like Encounter Groups?), and lots of touchy feely stuff.  It was like a bad flashback to the sixties.  Not that I would knock the sixties; it’s just that these people were presenting all this stuff as if it was new and they just discovered it!  The worst part was that I had weaned my daughter to attend this torturous time-waster!  Fortunately, when I got home I was able to resume nursing Nina.  And again, after much agonizing about what had gone so wrong and wasted money, I dropped out of the program, to continue graduate school at USD.  That turned out to be very fortunate, because it gave me time for my:

Great job!  I’m working for the first time in many years, for the Julian Charter School, a charter school for homeschoolers.  I’m an Educational Facilitator, or EF, with 20 students now.  I visit them monthly, give assignments, recommend and order curriculum, and write reports.  I’m amazed at how well it’s worked out, because I’m still able to be with and homeschool my own kids, bring them with me on fun visits to my students, and do my paperwork in the evenings.  I have students in every grade from K-10, and of every ability level; parents of every different homeschooling philosophy; so I’m learning a tremendous amount.  Plus, I get to do what I love to do anyway: obsess over curriculum and teaching methods, write a lot, and order things from catalogs!  Only now they’re curriculum catalogs instead of housewares, and I get paid well for doing it!

 

Family news:

Nina started wanting to stay home with Jake, so we withdrew her from the beloved Unitarian Cooperative Preschool where our kids had been in continuous attendance for the last seven years (another tough decision!), and she’s homeschooling too now.

Scenes from Nina:

Nina: (full of pride) “I know my phone number: 294-6577!  (She repeats it several times.)

Mom: “That’s fantastic, honey!  How did you learn that?”

Nina: “Sosie’s mom.”  Mom and Dad got a good laugh out of that one, as it seems to sum up our life: we can’t even manage to teach our own child her phone number.  She has to learn it from a neighbor!

 

Then one day at a Chinese restaurant:

Mike: “Where is Nina’s pork?”

Daria: “Nina’s pork?” (like it’s going to go anywhere)

Mike: “Yes!”  Daria obligingly looks around the table, searching for some stray piece of   pork that may have somehow jumped off her plate … glancing at Mike to see if     he’s finally gone insane  …

Daria: (above the din) “Nina’s pork?”

Mike: (getting more and more impatient) “Yes!”

Finally Daria notices Mike reaching across the table for a fork.

 

Jake is doing well in all areas.  He performs a daily science experiment called “How low on your butt can you wear your pants without their falling off?” (to look like a cool skateboarder) … His thought-provoking questions have included, “Mommy, are you a bimbo?” (I wish, at my age) … Then there was the field trip to the tide pools in which Jake insisted on lagging behind.  I finally got mad and pulled him along by his collar, whereupon Jake started crying and loudly berating me about “choking my own child” in front of the whole class …  But really, the toughest part of parenting him is feigning enthusiasm or even interest when Jake comes bursting into my office, yelling with excitement, “Mom, I got a Charzar*!!  I got a Snorlax*!!!” (*Pokemon characters).

 

Nick is his usual enterprising self.  One day after church, we were proudly enjoying his playing the piano and entertaining the seniors in the church parlor, until Mom walked over to talk to him, and noticed that he and a friend had placed a box marked “tips” prominently on top of the piano.

Nick still loves Harborside School.  His class, with Dad as a chaperone, took a field trip to Sacramento last year, where they saw the legislature in action and visited famous sites from the Gold Rush period.  Great except for the 100º plus temperatures.

 

My mother moved from our neighborhood to Hawaii, with my autistic sister, Nicole.  This was a very sad event for me.  But she has actually pulled this whole thing off, at the age of 70.  I don’t know how she can live with an autistic person, but she loves Hawaii, and is certainly a shining example of loyalty to loved ones, never giving up, and never thinking you’re too old!

 

Mike has had a succession of interesting and high-profile OSHA cases.  He did what even I could tell was an unbelievably thorough and brilliantly written report on the Tosco oil refinery in the East Bay area.  My fair and independent minded husband withstood considerable pressure by demonstrating that this plant (in contrast to the other Tosco plant that blew up) was doing an outstanding job in its safety program.  Usually, Mike is the one to cite and fine companies and stand up for employees when there is pressure to claim that an accident was the worker’s own fault.  But sometimes it’s the other way around.

Mike’s travels have included going to Seattle, where he gave a well-received talk on an ammonia poisoning incident at the annual conference of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.  And most recently he gave some influential testimony to a group that is considering setting a heat-stress standard for OSHA.

 

All in all, I think what’s given me the greatest joy this year is doing more family reading.  We’ve been reading Little Britches by Ralph Moody, sometimes billed as “Little House on the Prairie for boys.”  But it’s so much more than that; a fascinating, “gallant from first to last” (as another reviewer says) book about life in the Midwest at the turn of the century.  Luckily, there are another five books in the series!

The other book that blew us away was Ditchdigger’s Daughters by ­­­Dr. Yvonne Thornton, which we listened to on tape in the car.  It’s another true story, about a poor black couple who had six daughters, and the dream for them to become doctors.  They learned to play musical instruments as children, and ended up financing their dream through becoming a top musical act.  Again, it’s a can’t-put-it-down, inspiring story about extraordinarily hard work (especially studying), values, music, and achieving the seemingly impossible.

Our movie picks are “Big Daddy” and “The Ref” (contains some adult language and themes, if you care; we’ve given up).  As far as more active recreation goes, well, we’ve still only used the beautiful pop-up trailer we bought a couple of years ago once.

 

I think about the only thing that’s kept us from losing both our physical and mental health under the stress of this year has been major use of herbs.  At the first hint of illness, we take Solaray’s “Under the Weather,” a combination of about 20 herbs including Royal Jelly.  This has kept us virtually illness free, while other herbs didn’t work.  I also take both St. John’s wort (mood lift) and Kava (relaxation) twice daily.

 

With great love, we wish you a joyous holiday season.  Our prayers are with you as we enter the new millennium.  Also, remember to send us your e-mail address if we don’t have it at doeringsx5@home.com.  And I haven’t even mentioned my new website for “Parents United for Sane Homework.”  Check it out at http://www.sanehomework.com.