Battle Hymn of the Bunny Mama

by June
That Tiger Mom has certainly stirred up a conversation, has she not? As an American mother raising daughters who were born in China, I am alert to cultural differences between western and eastern ways of teaching or parenting or... I haven't yet dipped into the book (though I am eager to read it cover to cover). I have read the Wall Street Journal column written by the author. A Yale law professor and devoted mother of two, Amy Chua wants her daughters to succeed. Her approach to their success involves a rigorous dogma (that she says reflects Asian expectations in general): No playdates or sleepovers or school plays. No tv. No being number two in any subject except gym or drama. No choosing their own extracurricular activities.  No playing any instrument but piano or violin.


I am riveted by the window Amy Chua gives onto her family's life. She recounts how she coerced her seven-year-old into learning a complicated piece on the piano. Her daughter shredded the sheet music, only to have her mother tape it up and put it in a plastic sheath. The mother withheld food, water and bathroom breaks until the daughter learned that piece. In the end, the daughter was thrilled with her accomplishment. Mother and daughter snuggled in bed, laughing.


Because of Amy Chua's articulate argument, I understand and even sympathize with what she's trying to do—instill in a child a belief in her own capabilities, a belief that will remain steadfast whatever life brings. But I'm just not a Tiger Mom. I'm more of a bunny really. For instance, I begged my daughters to give up the piano.

Fern and Blossom, age 7, at the piano in their footie pajamas

Blossom and Fern started taking lessons when they were four. They loved their teacher. They loved learning. They worked at it diligently, and they progressed. But, as the years passed, they began to approach the piano with dread. They hated when they made any mistake. Each one couldn't help comparing herself to her sister. Every practice involved tears, theirs and mine. The bitter tone of those practice sessions was seeping into all the learning that was happening in our home. And they never ever ever sat down to play the piano for the joy of it. Never.

I just couldn't ignore a deep discordance between their struggle and what I believe is the point of playing the piano, which is music. Music has always been something I cannot accomplish myself but which moves me deeply. Listening to a wonderful composition is akin to reading a grand passage of literature. It transports me beyond the moment in which I am living and gives me a glimpse of something beyond myself, something greater than myself. I was a terrible piano student (unlike my daughters), but I did come to recognize that I too could transport myself beyond the moment in which I was living—through reading and writing. Writing became my work, and by that I mean it became the thing I cannot not do. It requires discipline and rigor. It requires me every day to overcome frustration and impatience with myself. Yet every day it brings me joy. It is my music.


No one ever made me do it. My parents read constantly. I remember standing at my mother's knee as a very young child.  I watched how still her face was as she read. Her lips weren't moving, and yet I understood that words were spilling into her awareness and filling her with the emotions that showed in her eyes. I spent summers reading. In third grade, I got in trouble for reading under my desk when I was supposed to be learning grammar. Later, I began to write radio plays and stories. As a young child, I began the work of my life, the work of making my own music through words on a page.


That's what I want for my daughters, I want them to find their music. I want them to find what awes them in the world, what they cannot get enough of. And I want each of them to feel that inner upswelling of necessity, that bursting sense of realizing that it's all up to her. Only she can make her own music.


Years of homeschooling have changed what I believe about success. I no longer believe that success comes from a GPA or class ranking or a professional title or a tax bracket. And I'm saying this as someone who was valedictorian in high school and had  a 4.0 in college and who grew up to work where I always dreamed I would work. But, truly, I now see that my dearest successes can't be quantified by anyone but me. My greatest accomplishment has been to pinpoint what I want and to make that my life (regardless of what success others would have me seek). Amy Chua probably wouldn't recognize my life as a success. Some days I don't either. But I cannot imagine living my life for any greater reward than my own deep sense of fulfillment.

By this measure, my daughters are already successful. They design their days around their passions: They love math and go to Khan Academy when they need more help. They play with Vi Hart's ideas. They do science experiments with Robert Krampf, the Happy Scientist. They study Mandarin and study it and study it. And what they don't like about the world, they find a way to change.

For instance, they wanted to live in a world of animals. Turning this dream into a reality would be a major accomplishment because they were living in my world, a world from which I had carefully carved away the allergens that made it hard for me to breathe. In New York City, I'd found a way to live without asthma because I lived largely in a world without animals. In Maine, because of my daughters' careful engineering, I now live with a cat, sixteen chickens, and two goats. My daughters earned those animals by first earning my trust and respect—and the money to make it all happen. Having their animals is no small accomplishment, nor is it any small amount of work. Last night, it was sixteen-below-zero at our house; this morning, Fern and Blossom got up and fixed warm oatmeal for their friends out in the barn. They pulled on their Carharts, and out they went.

For now, goats are their music. And they are willing to work at that music until their fingers and toes are numb from the cold...until it hurts. The work fulfills them because it comes with joy and awe and laughter. They cannot not do it. Around here, that is success.

Christmas-morning watering (in their footie pajamas)

Dream goats!

by June

It's beginning to look a lot like Heidi around here...only without the spectacular mountains and the gruff old grandfather. But we do have goats and two young girls who love tending them. Buttercup and Clover are —at long last— home!

At first there was some crying. The doelings cried in their new pen, and Blossom and Fern cried because the doelings missed their mama and their old home. But we all sat in the grass and talked about patience and giving the babies some time, along with lots of love and fresh grass.

The love abounds now, thank goodness. The goats only cry when the girls walk away from them. Not that the girls walk away from them much. They pretty much run out in their jammies and stay out until the fireflies are flittering in the meadow.

While we were waiting for the goats, we spent a lot of time soaking up all things goat-y. We've joined up with the fun family over at Jump into a Book for a Heidi summer-reading adventure (along with Treasure Island and Swiss Family Robinson).  And we loved finding the latest version of Heidi on film (with Max von Sydow as the grandfather). It's a beautiful version that made us ache for the mountains and some curious goats to clamber about in the green grass.

It may not be the Alps around here, but the view...it is now splendidly goat-filled.

Twin-twin: Grace Lin has a new book!

by June

Blossom and Fern are twins. Sometimes this is a deeply comforting fact. Sometimes it is very, very annoying. Whenever something eerie happens -- such as when they say something at the exact same moment -- they are as likely to sigh in exasperation as to marvel. "Twin-twin," they grumble.

Blossom and Fern at age five

When they were little, they went through a phase in which they only wanted to wear the same thing. Since I bought them different outfits (and they wore a lot of hand-me-downs), they sometimes had to improvise. Most memorably, they divided Blossom's red pair of shoes and Fern's green pair of shoes down the middle. They created matching pairs. Down the street they would go: red-foot, green-foot, red-foot, green-foot. Their puddle boots were the same: They each had a frog on one foot and a dinosaur on the other.

Back then, it was fun to be so much alike.

Because the girls attend a wonderful Chinese School, our family met the author Grace Lin when Blossom and Fern were five. The school's children were performing the world-premiere of The Ugly Vegetables as adapted for the stage. It was a terribly rainy Saturday, and we were Grace's escorts. She spent a lot of time in our soggy van.

We never forgot the thrill of having her show the school kids how to draw a giraffe. She read to them, and her applause was the warmest and most supportive in the room when the children were singing or making her book come to life. The thrill stayed with us.

And she remembered a little something too -- or two little someones. She later told us Blossom and Fern had helped inspire an early-reader book she was working on about twins; she was fascinated by how they each ate a cookie but in different ways. This past fall, she came to our Chinese School again -- and this time she brought the galleys of her soon-to-be-published book about twins. She presented the unbound, signed pages as a gift to "the original twins."

Fern and Blossom see the galleys for the first time

Ling & Ting: Not Exactly the Same!is more than one kind of gift to our twins (and all twins). Blossom and Fern now chafe at being considered the same, and yet it is so hard for them to tease apart in a "showy" way how they are different: They both like the same food, both adore caring for their chickens, both prefer math and science. But somehow perceptive Grace Lin was able to see right through all the similarities; she focused her creative brilliance on their differences. She wrote a whole book about all the ways twins can be different even as they love being always together.

Grace Lin is launching her gorgeous twin book on June 19 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you're in New England, it would be a fun day-trip. And if you and a friend dress alike, you'll get a special hand-made prize. Maybe you could mix-and-match your shoes with someone you love. That's very twin-twin.

Shall we shimmy?

by June

This morning, we woke to an April shower. It was a S.N.O.W. shower. We did the only sensible thing; we stayed in bed with our books and trusted that even snow showers will bring May flowers. Early signs already abound...Full-bloom spring is shimmying this way.

new grass

bare-tree shadows

eager peas

kale that made it through the winter

a star magnolia

a bee finding the first blossoms

our favorite spring snow: the weeping cherry

Just in case you're in need of a good book to keep you cozy and happy during April showers, we recommend the ones that kept us happy this morning. I'm reading Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. Oh, how delicious it is! Fern is gobbling up The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs. Blossom is savoring every moment of Cheaper By the Dozen (even though her sister blurted out some of the highlights when she read it first).

Birch? you ask. What was he reading? He got up and made the coffee and ginger scones. Somebody had to!

A good read: Lucky Girl

By June

Part of my Mother's Day pampering was time to read. I stretched out in the lap of Ruby Comfort (my big red chair). The girls tucked themselves around me with their own books. Ah...

As serendipity would have it, I was reading the perfect book, Lucky Girl, by Mei-Ling Hopgood. Mother's Day is one of the occasions when I think especially of the mother on the other side of the world who made my motherhood possible. Her loss has been the great blessing of my life, yet I know nothing of her. And so I read, trying to create for myself at least the texture of her existence. I read Chinese history, fiction and memoirs. I read fairy tales and poems, websites and blogs. Rarely, though, have I read anything as enlightening as Mei-Ling Hopgood's memoir.

Mei-Ling Hopgood grew up knowing precious little about her birth parents in Taiwan. And she didn't much feel the urge to know more. "As soon as I was poured into the arms of Chris and Rollie Hopgood one April afternoon in 1974, these two midwestern teachers became my real family. They read me bedtime stories, attended my recitals, helped me build homecoming floats, and took me on vacations to Florida," she writes. Mei-Ling doted on her two younger brothers, both adopted from South Korea. She had a crush on Fonzie as a preschooler, became a pom-pom girl and rushed a sorority at the University of Missouri. She did not dwell on questions about her origins. She writes, "Some people spend their whole lives trying to uncover, understand, or escape from their pasts. Mine rose up like a dragon..."

Mei-Ling's Taiwanese birth family found her. And, at age 23, she was enthusiastically swept into an acquaintance, then intimacy with her birth mother and father, with her sisters and brother, and also with the complexities of male superiority in Chinese culture. She had grown up "feeling appropriately infuriated when I read the books and heard the sayings: No sons, no happiness. A family with daughters is only a dead end. Geese are more profitable than girls. Girls are maggots in rice.... I had every right to feel personally aggrieved by this belief, but thanks to the careful nurturing of my American parents, I

thought I had risen above the whole Chinese male superiority thing. It did not come to life for me until the day I met my sisters." One of her seven sisters has a Taiwanese nickname that means "no more girls."

It is the sisters who help translate the complicated circumstances of the family Mei-Ling left as an infant. Her father showers her with gifts but comes to disturb her more and more as time goes on; her birth mother tugs at her heart yet remains an enigma. But her sisters gather her in: "The enchantment...of sisterhood seduced me, made me stay when otherwise I might have fled." Her sisters teach her to make dumplings. They take her shopping for wedding jewelry and lingerie. They compare bra sizes and giggle over the fact that they all have the same split toenail. They lie in bed and talk in simple English late into the night. Through her sisters, through the years, Mei-Ling confronts some truly terrible truths.

She realizes she has been given a gift usually reserved for movies or fiction: the gift of exploring "what if?" She knows what her life is like. She can compare it against her sisters'. With warmth and generosity, she observes it all, braids all the strands into a new, deeper sense of self. With beautiful, clean prose, Mei-Ling Hopgood manages to evoke her experience for all of us who have reason to wonder, What if?

Ancestral lights

by June

The poetry of Deborah Digges entered my life the week my grandmother left it. I still have the yellowed copy of The New Yorker; the poem is there on page 44. It is called "Ancestral Lights." I recognized something of my jagged self in her words and not just because she wrote about loss (of belief, of those who came before) and not just because she knew what it was like, as I did, "to lie there, whole, myself, safe in the coarsening grass of a Missouri August."

I was in my last year of college. I was preparing myself to let go of what had defined my life and to find what would be. Her words glimmered with all I hoped was true: that the familiar and beloved would illuminate what was to come.

And though I know now that Heaven may be

only the mind's fear of the wonders it imagines,

the way our best thoughts surprise us

and seem not to be our own, I like to believe

we turn into light around those we love,

or would have loved, had we known them,

and warn them through the blood

by ringing in their ears.

Deborah Digges is gone now. If you have not read her poetry or her memoirs, go. Do.

I will always think of her on summer nights, especially in Missouri, especially when families sing old songs and fireflies rise.

Blossom and Fern with a firefly; Missouri, 2007

Kindling: HOME, a novel

by June

I love books. My favorite act of anticipation is running my thumb along the rippling texture of the pages all pressed together, waiting. I love smelling new paper and ink; in old books, I love breathing in the smell of time accumulating. I even like watching those tiny cream-colored dots that are some kind of insect who spend their lives in a book. I call them metaphor bugs: how many lives have I lived inside a book? So my new Kindle 2 filled me with ambivalence. I mourned the idea of not having a book on my lap even as I embraced the idea of never again being without a good read.

But would it be a good read?

To be fair to my Kindle on its first outing, I saved back a novel I was wild to read. Marilynne Robinson wrote my favorite contemporary novel, Housekeeping, and I had liked her Gilead. I knew Home: A Novel would be a perfect test of whether I could lose myself in Kindle text as I lose myself in words on a page. I lost myself. At one point, it was way past midnight, tears were running down my face, and I was so present in Gilead, Iowa, that I could smell the chicken and dumplings that Glory was cooking as a balm against all the heartache coursing like a current among her father, her brother and herself. I reached up to turn the page. But there was no page to turn. I had forgotten all about the fancy screen and the buttons that called up the next “page.”

Whether by Kindle or book, Robinson’s latest is a must-read, a literary distillation of what home means. A prodigal son returns to his father's house, where his youngest sister has recently arrived with her own unspoken disappointments. Together, brother and sister attend to the needs – physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual -- of the failing father. The three of them share an effort extreme in its delicacy: how to make acts of kindness turn out to be truly kind but not somehow cruel as well. The invisible layers of meaning upon which families must engineer their inextricably shared lives, this is what Marilynne Robinson explores. To do so, she conjures up small-town America with its weedy patches and thriving gardens, its attics filled with useless remnants too dear to give away, its cow barns turned garages. The past is present in the novel, in the small town of Gilead – an expression of what it is to be a family. Here is the old father, a Presbyterian minister, who has loved his eight children in ways that nurtured them but sometimes tormented them too: “Her father hung his head. ‘All of them call it home, but they never stay.’”

I would have stayed longer in Gilead if I could have. But though I may actually never have

turned the last page, I did, inevitably, come to the end. What I missed most then was looking back through the book for favorite passages. The Kindle provides for this with a book-marking function. Clicking and dragging is not the same as penciling a little asterisk in the margin. I do miss my asterisks and the metaphor bugs and the pages all pressed together and waiting; but I don’t miss them enough to give up the comfort of knowing that the next great book may be a mere sixty seconds from landing in my hands. With a press of a button, I bought Away: A Novelby Amy Bloom.

And Away I went.