Grandma Falconer makes sand castles with Peter and his sister on Lake Michigan. c 1987 B.F. Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune

Sunday, September 27, 1987

“Move,” said Peter. “I want to get by.”

My mother looked up from her book and gave my 6 1/2-year-old a hard look.

She was sitting on her sofa, in her house, feet up on her coffee table.

Reluctantly, she moved her feet to let Peter by. He squeezed wordlessly past.

Something was wrong, very wrong, with that exchange, said my gut.

But what? The chilly glare my mother threw at my son? The pleases and thank yous he left unsaid?

It isn’t easy to think clearly after a few days under the same roof with one’s mother and father. When I was a young career woman living in New York City, I discovered the three-nights-and-four-days-at-home rule.

That was all I could take of living eyeball to eyeball with my mother. I could be her kid again for four days, max. After that, it was flight – or fight.

I broke my own rule last summer and inflicted myself and my children upon my parents for an unprecedented stay of eight nights and nine days.

It was not until I was safely home under my own roof in the Eastbay, my feet tucked up on my own coffee table, that I could see what had gone wrong during that exchange between my mother and her grandson.

Peter had no respect.

It was more than a mere forgetting of his pleases and thank yous. It was downright presumptuous of him to think his grandmother should interrupt her reading to accommodate him at all. He should have walked quietly, respectfully, around the table the other way.

Had it been another child, a peer, in Peter’s path, squeezing past with a quick “excuse me” would be okay.

But around grandparents, children should show some respect.

Respect. The very word sticks in my craw. Question authority was the motto of my young adulthood. Challenge it.

There was no place for blind respect for one’s elders during the ’60s. We were equals under God and the U.S. Constitution. Every creature – adult, child, rhinoceros or whooping crane – was to be treated with respect.

Children, the clean slates of the future, were held in especially high regard in those days. As innocents, they possessed a unique wisdom lost to their time-sullied elders.

And today, the young child, the person of the future – not his parents and grandparents, the person of the past – continues to command unusual respect, even awe.

This small bundle of nerve endings is a miracle of creation, the child-rearing books coo. It has needs and feelings that deserve our utmost attention.

Little Samantha, but a fetus, can hear in utero. We should play her Beethoven.

She has feelings in utero. We should think nice thoughts about her as we experience morning sickness.

Unless, of course, we are planning to abort this particular fetus, in which case it is better not to think.

Through all of this, a stubborn something deep inside me has persisted, insisting that it is the grandparents, if anyone, who deserve the extra measure of unconditional respect.

Not because our elders have earned it. And not because our elders are in any way better, smarter or kinder than their descendents.

But because they are the elders.

Peter dotes on his grandmother these days -- and she on him. This is Christmas 2007, twenty years later, and I'm pretty sure he excused himself as he squeezed between the coffee table and my mother's knees. c 2007 B.F. Newhall

My mother deserves Peter’s esteem because of the life she has led as a mother and wife. Because of the potatoes peeled, the casseroles baked, the dustballs chased and the corporate VIPs entertained.

Because she holds the office of grandmother. Because she has done her do.

Peter won’t even clean up his room and he thinks he is on a par with my mother, who has cleaned up his bottom?

My friend Claudia sends her two small children to Chinese school every Saturday morning. “I want them to learn about their culture. I want them to learn that respect,” she explained.

“Your parents live in Michigan,” she went on. “So far away. I would never want to be that far away from my mother.”

The Chinese culture, thousands of years old, venerates the people of the past. It is not unique in this.

The elderly are held in high esteem in her native Belize, according to my friend Miriam.

“Old people are the root,” she explains. “If grandparents come to your house, they don’t sleep on the floor. You give them your bed or your hammock.”

Today’s Western culture, with its silicon chips, videocameras and interplanetary probes, venerates what it still to come.

It stands in awe of the future and its citizens – our children – as though our children possessed a hot line to the truth or, as the Chinese ancestors of yore, to Heaven.

The fact is, we and our forebears created the world into which our children are being launched.

We have done our best, sorry as it may be. We have done our do. And for that we deserve some respect.

By gosh.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

The Oakland Tribune, September 1987

“What does Christina have on today?” M.J. wanted to know.

M.J. and Christina are friends. They ran into each other while shopping for tutus.

M.J., who is 4, was wearing a dress.

She looked pretty.

Christina, newly 4, was wearing dungarees.

She looked OK.

Christina in her brand-new dungarees, ready for preschool.

My sister-in-law Alice had warned me about this. I bought a raft of back-to-school overalls for Christina in August and showed them to her. “Are you sure Christina is going to wear them?” she cautioned as I snipped off the price tags.

Her daughter Julie, who is 5, won’t wear anything but dresses. And neither will most of Julie’s friends. It happens when the girls turn 4, said Alice.

Pink dresses, powder blue dresses. Dresses with nosegays, kitty cats and sunbursts. Dresses that show the calf, the knee and the shoulder.

Little girls, it seems, are the last stronghold of prettiness in today’s society.

Their mothers and grandmothers go off to work dressed for success in man-tailored suits in shades of ecru and khaki.

Their only concession to femininity is a wisp of lace at the wrist or throat.

Those moms who don’t hold outside jobs schlep about in denim skirts and loafers. If they are pretty, it is because their cheeks are still flushed from the morning workout.

If you want to see something pretty these days, you have to be quick. For, by the time a girl reaches the third or fourth grade, she has changed her look to tough.

She wears her Levis or jeans skirt tight, suggesting that, yes, she does own standard equipment thighs and knees.

But anything else that might be construed as pretty is hidden by high-top sneakers and an oversized sweatshirt.

A hank of hair, brutally chopped, falls forward to conceal what was, when last seen, a pretty face.

Pretty has become an embarrassment for women and older girls.

Like the Arab woman anonymous in her chador, a girl must cover her beauty, lest it tempt and torment the male of the species, causing him to banish her – or try to – from the workplace back to the boudoir.

But the littlest girls are still blessedly ignorant of the politics of gender.

Truly sensual, they paint their fingernails purple with marking pens. They dot their cheeks with rainbow stickers.

They gather up the leftover stick-on bows at the birthday party and press them to their bodices.

Out shopping, Peter wants to buy yet another Battle Beast to wage war on his bedroom floor. Christina is satisfied with a roll of that gold ribbon with the red hearts on it, please, Mommy.

She cuts a piece off and winds it around her neck. Thus adorned, she looks into the mirror and beams, enormously pleased. She is a fairy, a ballerina, a queen, a gloriously beautiful lady.

Christina is pretty. No, let’s be precise, Christina is a knock-out.

Jon and I are careful not to mention this in our daughter’s presence, however.

What if she grows up to be a fluff ball, a beautiful nothing? Christina is pretty enough and demure enough to get away with it.

Instead, we tell her at every turn how clever she is, how strong, how witty, all of which is true – but not as true as how beautiful she is.

Miriam de Uriarte, director of the Berkeley Child Art Studio, shares our bias.

She notices a difference between boys’ art and girls.’ Boys’ drawings are spare and functional, full of action, spaceships, combat and competition. Girls tend to draw houses, flowers, people.

“I used to think it was purely social,” says Miriam. Girls’ drawings, baroque with sunbursts and daisies and often nice to a fault, were strictly the result of conditioning, she thought.

But after 22 years of teaching children art, Miriam has changed her mind. “Now I think girls are naturally more process-oriented, more experimental, more in touch with fluids and textures. They tolerate more decoration in their work.”

Trouble is, Miriam adds, girls are “praised for drawing the house and flowers, for being a nice girl. They become stuck in this groove.”

Miriam encourages girls in her art classes to make ugly pictures, to express anger and fear. “I get some really power drawings.” She also gets, “Oh, yucky. I’m not going to draw a monster.”

Christina (second from right) and her ballet class. Photos c 1987 B.F. Newhall

Christina needed a leotard and ballet slippers for her ballet class. M.J. and Annie would be showing up at class with tutus over their leotards. Christina, I resolved, would also have a tutu.

She tried on the peach leotard.

Too sallow.

Then the lavender leotard and black slippers.

The colors didn’t pull together.

Next, the pink leotard with a great white cloud of a tutu.

Christina was delectable. All in pink and white, my daughter looked like a dish of ice cream, a swan lady, a fairy princess.

She was pretty as only a 4-year-old girl knows how to be pretty. I told her so.

© 1987 The Oakland Tribune