Homesick

by Ward, Sela

  The most dangerous part of trying to raise kids in a place like Hollywood—it’s the biggest occupational hazard of show business, but I think it’s equally popular nationwide—is something pretty simple: self-absorption. We Baby Boomers are an unusually intense lot. We work hard, desperate to make something of ourselves, to fulfill our ambitions and creative dreams, to provide for our families and put enough away for our retirement. We also play hard, sometimes as hard as our kids; as much as we try to save money, we’re just as eager to spend it on new gadgets, SUVs, endless computer upgrades, meals at fabulous new restaurants, home improvements, and all kinds of other indulgences. And there’s nothing wrong with any of this, not really: it’s the American dream, after all, to work hard and then enjoy what you’ve earned.

  But all of that time spent at hard work and hard play can come at the expense of something else: time. With all the extra hours we put in, trying to provide a better life for ourselves and our kids, too often we’re forgetting that the only really important thing we can give them is time together. Our kids are supposed to have us around as much as possible. We’re their earliest playmates, their first and best teachers, their role models. In a way that’s hard for adults to remember, children are exquisitely attuned to the signals we send them. They’re looking for affirmation, for comfort, for reassurance that we care about them. And even if we have the best caretakers in the world for our children, every moment we spend away from them is a missed opportunity to remind them of our love, and marvel in their uniqueness.

  Among the gifts my parents gave us, perhaps the richest was time together as a family. With that, I realize now, came the unwavering awareness that we were loved, not just by our parents but by the extended family that was constantly within reach. My parents always loved having their brothers and sisters around; for us kids, that meant a reliable source of laps to sit on, and cousins to play with. There wasn’t a need my parents had that they couldn’t find some family member to help with, whether it was picking up the kids or making Sunday dinner. And, like their own before them, my parents realized that taking care of the older generation was both a blessing and a responsibility. “My grandmother,” Uncle Joe remembers, “when she got old and frail, came and lived with my family when we three boys all got called in the Korean War. Then my mother, as she got older, you know, came and lived with you, Sela, and your family.” Having such close contact with the generations was a family tradition—and though it would be harder to do from California, it was one I wanted dearly not to break.

  Raising kids in a two-career family is hard, as Howard and I know all too well. Howard’s work keeps him at the office till the middle of the evening, and when I’m working—which has been pretty much constantly since I got the role on Sisters—I usually come in that late or later. When I started work on the series Once & Again a few years ago I negotiated a promise from the producers to grant me more time with my kids during filming. But it worked better in theory than in practice, and too often I found myself leaving for the set before they woke up and not returning until they were off to bed. This is no way to live—certainly not for extended periods. I don’t want my children to reach adulthood with their most vivid memories of their mother being images they remember from television. And I’ll admit to a selfish motivation, too: I don’t want to wake up one day and realize I’ve missed my children’s childhood in a haze of 6:00 a.m. calls and late-night retakes. As the saying goes, nobody lies on their deathbed wishing they’d spent more time at the office.

  I’m also concerned about making sure my children have enough direction in their lives, and enough discipline. After a long stretch away from home, I have a tendency to play the good cop when I come back, because I want Austin and Anabella to like me when they have me around. There’s a strong temptation to overindulge them, to let them get away with things even when I know it’s not the best thing for them, because I don’t want to be the Big Mean Mommy. I think about laying down stricter rules for them, but they’re both so well behaved that it’s easy to carry on assuming that everything’s going fine. In Austin’s preschool years I started worrying about whether he’d become one of the overindulged children TV seems to promise us all, yelling and screaming, ignoring his parents, inhaling candy, and talking pop-culture trash. Will my kids turn out that way? I wondered. I don’t think they have—at least, not yet. But how can I make sure they stay that way?

  One day when I was at a dinner party I found myself talking about all this, and I discovered that the brilliant woman seated next to me had made these very issues her calling. Wendy Mogel, a local psychologist, had come to realize that the problem many families were suffering from wasn’t a matter of psychology, exactly, but of something much simpler: character. Wendy herself had begun feeling that she was failing her girls and her husband, that she didn’t have enough time for them and wasn’t raising them as responsibly as she should, until she began to explore elements of the Jewish faith and moral tradition—a legacy her secular Jewish parents hadn’t endeavored to share with her. When she began integrating traditional religious approaches into her child and family counseling—and into her own family life—she found it brought about surprisingly effective results.

  This sounded intriguing, so I asked Wendy to send me a copy of her book, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee. And when I read this passage, early in the book, I nearly gasped:

  Unsure how to find grace and security in the complex world we’ve inherited, we try to fill up the spaces in our children’s lives with stuff: birthday entertainments, lessons, rooms full of toys and equipment, tutors and therapists. But material pleasures can’t buy peace of mind, and all the excess leads to more anxiety. . . . In their eagerness to do right by their children, parents not only overindulge them materially, they also spoil them emotionally. Many parents have unhappy memories of their own childhoods, of not being allowed to express their feelings or participate in decisions. In trying to undo these past violations, they move too far in the other direction—they overvalue their children’s need for self-expression and turn their households into little democracies. But the equality they maintain at home does not give their children a sense of self-esteem. Instead, it frightens them by sending the message that their parents are not firmly in charge. By refusing to be authority figures, these parents don’t empower their children, they make them insecure.

  Wendy goes on to say that parents these days often “fetishize their children’s achievements and feelings and neglect to help them develop a sense of duty to others.” Moms and dads are so worried that their children are going to be hurt emotionally or physically that they shelter the kids, protecting them from the everyday scrapes with reality that help them build character (hence the book’s title). What’s more, well-meaning parents set their children up for anxiety and failure by overloading them with unrealistic expectations, whether academic, athletic, or artistic—inadvertently turning the kids into “emblems of their parents’ success,” rather than allowing them the breathing room to lead their own lives.

  Did this strike a chord within me? I’m afraid so. And the truth is, despite whatever romantic illusions I’d like to preserve in my own mind, even the South hasn’t escaped this phenomenon. “We get a lot of the same thing here now,” my brother Berry tells me. “Kids don’t have any respect anymore. Their parents spoil them rotten.

  “Used to be when we were kids, if we got in trouble at school, or our grades were down, Mama would go in to see the teacher, wanting to know how she could help us improve,” he says. “Nowadays, if you can get the parents to go in at all, they show up wanting to know why the school is picking on their child. You don’t think kids learn from that? They come away thinking the world owes them. It’s a shame to see it, because you know our generation wasn’t raised that way.”

  My Aunt Nancy says the same thing. She sees it as a loss of Christian values among newer generations of Southerners, but for all practical purposes she’s talking about the same thing Wendy Mogel
is. What I take away from all their perspectives—Wendy’s, Berry’s, Aunt Nancy’s—is that we have to find a path back to a more balanced, considerate, sane way to raise kids. Whether the inspiration comes from Jewish tradition, Christian values, or our shared human awareness of the difference between right and wrong, the effect we’re all looking for is the same. We want to be good to our children—not overindulgent, not overdemanding, but nurturing and helpful and gently encouraging. We want them to learn the best qualities from us—to give them the tools to grow up and become good and fulfilled and happy people themselves.

  Wendy Mogel talks about three core principles that have guided her down this path: moderation, celebration, and sanctification. In a nutshell, she means that if we want to have happy, healthy homes, then we have to learn—both individually and within our families—to practice self-discipline, to cultivate a genuinely grateful spirit, and to get in the habit of recognizing the sacred in our daily lives. After all, she says, the more our kids are aware of a higher power, the less likely they’ll be to think that they rule the world.

  This sounds wise and good, but it is hard to do in a world where all the people seem to be out for themselves, and there’s little shared moral understanding among parents in any given community.

  What a far cry from the world of my mother’s generation. Aunt Nancy told me once, “When I was raising kids, and we saw other people’s children doing something bad, we wouldn’t have hesitated to correct them. There was more of a community feeling then. Those children knew they’d better not act up, because an adult was watching them. My kids knew better, because they knew I’d back up any adult who disciplined them.”

  For me, there’s nothing that crystallizes this cultural shift better than what I call the Yes, SirNo, Ma’am dilemma. In my childhood—whether you were four, fourteen, or forty—it would have been unthinkable to address your elders as anything other than “sir” or “ma’am.” But a Southern-born parent raising kids elsewhere today faces a tricky little challenge: Do you teach your children to use the more respectful Southern form of address when speaking to grown-ups, or to follow the manners of the society in which they actually live? I know of a Louisiana woman living in Santa Monica whose daughter was regularly corrected by a teacher—and mocked by her classmates—because she addressed the teacher as “ma’am.” When the mother asked for an explanation, the teacher responded that the girl’s polite little habit was threatening classroom order—not to mention drawing a lot of negative attention from the other kids. Realizing how little choice she had in the matter, the mother gave in.

  But it wasn’t a happy experience—and I know how she felt. My son, Austin, attends a good elementary school in California, where he’s getting a wonderful education from dedicated teachers. But there’s one rule they practice that will always sit wrong with me: The children call their teachers by their first names. It’s hard to describe the sense of defilement—that’s a strong word, but I think it’s the right one—that native Southerners feel when they observe children addressing adults this way. And when it’s your own children doing it, it’s like feeling you’ve sent them out into the world with dirty faces.

  But the alternative—insisting on a code of manners from a place not their own—is cruel. That’s something I’ve simply had to accept. Still, I’m trying to teach them to switch languages, so to speak, when we go down to Mississippi.

  One Christmas not long after Anabella was born, the four of us were down in Meridian for the holiday, and I made a trip to a local Wal-Mart to buy Christmas presents for kids I didn’t know. It was my habit to drop off gifts at the local shelter for abused children, where kids who have to be removed from their families stay before going to foster care.

  When I got there, I saw some of the newest arrivals: a pair of brothers, African American boys, ages eight and nine. They had been taken out of their house in part because their father had been prostituting their eleven-year-old sister. Those boys had been through hell, but they still had such sweetness and promise in their faces. If they were lucky enough to be placed together, immediately, with a foster family who loved them and would take care of them, they might end up safe and happy. But it looked as if they were about to be split up and dumped into the overtaxed and dangerous foster-care system, where they would probably come out the other end cynical, angry, and maybe even destructive.

  I thought: I’ve got to save these children.

  I called Howard back at the farm. “We’ve got to adopt these two little boys,” I told him, choking back a flood of tears.

  “What?” he said.

  These children had nobody, I told him. We had it within our power to save their lives, and I thought we should try.

  “Sela, we struggle the same as everyone else to put love into that bucket-with-a-hole-in-it called our children,” Howard said. “No matter how much love you put into it, it’s never filled up. With our work schedules, and everything we’ve taken on in life, we don’t have room to adopt two kids.”

  I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to hear it. “There has to be something we could do for kids like this. We can’t just walk away, can we, Howard?”

  “Well, why don’t we see if there’s something we can do?” he said. “If the problem is that these kids don’t have a permanent home to go to, then let’s create one.”

  And that’s what we did. First of all, atop a grassy hill in Meridian, we discovered an abandoned building that had once been an orphanage. I contacted my “angel,” Lisa Paulsen of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, and she helped me broker a deal with Kentucky Fried Chicken to do an ad for them in exchange for money to buy the home and surrounding land. Within months renovations began on the building, and our dream had a home: Hope Village for Children, a permanent refuge for abused and abandoned kids.

  Howard, who’s not just a venture capitalist but a visionary, came up with the idea to make Hope Village more than just a safe and comfortable place for kids to live until they reach the age of majority. He suggested that we make it a “campus for the care of children.” We could teach the kids all kinds of practical skills—the kinds of things more fortunate children learn from their parents. We could help them with their checkbooks, with college applications; then, after they leave, we’d still be available to offer them advice and guidance. What’s more, we decided to document everything we were doing; if the model works, we intend to create Hope Villages across the country—a nonprofit franchise dedicated to rescuing children from a failing system.

  Though we’re still taking small steps, Hope Village is now a reality, and we have our first residents living there. As I write this, we’re putting the finishing touches on an emergency shelter to house the littlest children, from newborn babies to twelve-year-olds; this will complement the services already under way in our permanent home, which serves six- to eighteen-year-olds. Every time I come home to Meridian I stop by to see the boys and girls in residence, and I end up feeling so small (in a good way), and useful, for once. The kinds of horrific things those children have seen and borne in their few years on this earth are things most of us spend a lifetime without encountering.

  It might have been unrealistic, even unfair, for me to try to adopt those two little boys—or any of the millions of other vulnerable children living in our world today—and make my home their own. But through Hope Village for Children, I hope to do something more: to give them a home. Not an institution, not an orphanage, but a home.

  7

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  They say you can’t go home again, but for the sake of our kids and the peace of my soul, Howard and I do the best we can. These days we travel down to Meridian five or six times a year. The city itself is mostly quiet now, its stately old buildings abandoned by shoppers when the malls started to open at the edge of town—just around the time, I realize, when I was heading north for New York.

  It wasn’t always this way, of course. At the turn of the twentieth century Meridian was a
major regional center, with five railroad lines passing through town carrying forty passenger trains per day to what was known as Mississippi’s Queen City. Two generations later, my Aunt Nancy remembers, the city was still hopping.

  “Downtown was the heart of the whole community,” she recalls. “This was mostly an agricultural area then, and Saturday was the day all the farmers came into town for their shopping. That was the whole commercial district then, and you got to see everybody on the street on Saturday. It was very exciting. I can remember my mom taking me shopping to the nice department stores to buy clothes. It was such an event we would dress up for it.”

  In the last quarter-century, though, the streets and storefronts of Meridian have emptied, as new generations shifted their attention from the city to the suburbs. This is what James Howard Kunstler is writing about in The Geography of Nowhere: that the abandonment of downtowns, where everything you needed was pretty much within a ten-minute walk, has made us a nation of loners, craving connectedness but having nowhere to find it. Postwar suburban living, he writes, has “done away with the sacred places, places of casual public assembly, and places of repose. Otherwise, there remain only the shopping plazas, the supermarkets, and the malls,” he writes. A town like Meridian, in other words, was a better place when there was a drugstore with a soda fountain downtown.

  Aunt Nancy left Meridian and for many years ran a clothing store in Atlanta. She hates what the malls have done to the social experience of shopping. “You go to the mall, and you could be anywhere in the country,” she said. “There’s nothing distinct about it, and the service is horrendous. See, Sela, that’s why people would go to the old downtowns. Here in Meridian there’s Harry Mayer’s, the quality men’s store that’s still downtown. His dad started that business years ago, and they always give great service. People long for that personal service you get from knowing who you’re dealing with.”