Skyla the Social

When Skyla Parris Frauenheim was 2 ½, she and I took a walk late one night to soothe her nerves. She had been on a crying jag, and my wife Rowena and I didn’t want to keep up her 4-year-old brother. Skyla was nestled into the scarlet red sling we would carry her in. And while we breathed in the brisk San Francisco air and looked at the starry sky, Skyla had a striking thought.

“Maybe everybody in the world is on a walk with us,” she said.

That comment gets at a cornerstone of Skyla’s spirit. She sees herself as fundamentally connected to those around her. And her vision that night reminds me of an old lesson: we human beings are ultimately one interdependent community. Recognizing that truth allows us to solve problems and satisfy our souls.

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Skyla is a second child. That might explain the way she experiences herself as so deeply woven into a tapestry of “persons” -- as she often calls people. My friend Raul recently made this observation about second-born siblings: “They've always lived in a complex web of family relationships and bonds. First borns began with a one-to-one relationship with parents, second borns have only known one way.”

For Skyla, that has translated into a dear relationship with her older brother Julius. For the first four years or so of her life, she frequently ended her sentences with “right, Julius?” As in, “It’s sunny out today, right Julius?” or “We’re going to go swimming at Grandpa Carl’s pool in Arizona, right Julius?” It was if her observations and thoughts extended to include him. Making meaning for her was a social activity.

Skyla has gradually outgrown the verbal verification. But she’s hardly less linked to her brother. I recently overheard her tell Julius that she loved him the best in our family, followed by Mommy. I brought up the rear.

But even with my low ranking, Skyla shows me her affection constantly. Hugs. Kisses. A certain head-leaning-against-me, that you see her doing to Julius in the photo above. And requests for time on my lap--as she gets dressed in the morning, while I’m working in my home office and at the dinner table after we’ve eaten. Often, she’ll just climb on without asking. A human lap dog.

Skyla expresses her love for many people besides me. And has done so since she was a baby. “Mama, I love you so hard,” she said a few years ago. And the phrase captures the fierceness of her devotion to Rowena. When Rowena and I have argued and I’ve raised my voice, Skyla has bravely intervened. “Stop it, Daddy!” or “Leave Mommy alone!”

Skyla came up with the phrase “sleep-hugging” to describe a bedtime hug, a sign of how much she adores those evening embraces. While cuddling with her in the morning a few years ago, I told Skyla I was going to wake up. "You can't wake up,” she responded, while rolling on top of me. “You're getting bulldozed by a flower."

That line reflects her personality: assertively sweet and sweetly assertive. The quote also reveals her aesthetic. She is all about flowers. Flowers and hearts. Flowers, hearts and persons dominate her paintings and drawings. And her clothes. Half her shirts and pants have hearts on them. Her latest pajama bottoms read: “All we need is love.” Yes, most of the time grown-ups give her these items. But she’s choosing what to wear herself now. At her recent six-year-old birthday party, she picked a dark-pink turtleneck dotted with rows of white, pink and red hearts, over which she wore a pink dress with pink flowers.

Skyla isn’t alone in being a child full of love. Many kids have a similar sensibility. Her best friend Simone, for example, came to the birthday party dressed almost as a mirror image to Skyla, with a dark blue turtleneck peppered with light-blue hearts. Simone and Skyla met in pre-school, and no longer go to the same school. That caused Simone some trepidation at the start of the party. She clung to her father Nico at the foot of our stairs, worried about not knowing the rest of the guests, who were from Skyla’s kindergarten class. But Simone soon made friends at the party with a sweet girl named Althea. The two of them ultimately shared a seat for cake.

Here’s how Nico described the party aftermath for Simone: “On the drive home she told me that she was so happy that there were tears in her eyes.”

In other words, kids like Simone and Skyla wear hearts on their sleeve that are very real.

That’s not to say children are only about connecting. They can be plenty hateful. And teasy. And they can demand their personal space. Skyla, for example, went through a phase last year where she rejected hugs and kisses. At school, she has been cautious about making new friends. And she certainly has independent and selfish impulses. But most of her tantrums are less about self-indulgence than they are about fairness in the social fabric. Julius got an extra candy treat. Daddy got a Rockstar drink while she didn’t get an equivalent juice or chocolate milk. A promise by one parent was denied by another.

And even as she cultivates her individuality and demands her share, Skyla continues to define herself in terms of her relationships. Not long ago, for example, she woke up in the morning and began chanting: “Daddy, Mommy, Julius and me.”

These words embedding her in our family structure had a physical parallel. She, Julius and I all were lying in Julius’ top-bunk bed--I’d been summoned to the kids’ room by one of them in the pre-dawn hours. Julius and I lay on either side of her as Skyla declared our family-hood and her place in it. “Daddy, Mommy, Julius and me.” Her sing-song voice conveyed complete contentment. And it was contagious--I experienced joy rivaling any I’ve ever felt.

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We adults are too quick to discount intense feelings of solidarity and affection. When we see them in children, we might call them adorable but usually in a patronizing way. We tend to be hyper-vigilant of sentiments that could veer into the sentimental. That could be cloying.

We know on some level that children possess a deep wisdom, but we’re terrified of appearing childish and overemotional. We ought to work harder to embrace a childlike mindset. A childlike heartset, of seeing ourselves as inextricably tied to others.

For one thing, it is surprisingly scientific in nature. Despite our Western beliefs in autonomous, rational individualism, we are more mutually dependent than we care to admit. New York Times columnist David Brooks is among those who have called attention to the way research in brain science and other fields has made clear that we are profoundly “social animals.”

“The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives,” Brooks wrote in the New Yorker earlier this year, “one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q.”

Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers shows that success in a variety of fields, ranging from law to computer science to professional hockey, has much to do with social circumstances and connections that we have tended to overlook. In one of the most intriguing anecdotes of the book, Gladwell highlights the way impressive health statistics in Roseto, a small Pennsylvania town, could only be explained by the strong community bonds there.

Despite such reminders, we Americans remain stuck with an unbalanced ideology. By overemphasizing “personal responsibility” and the power of “individual initiative,” we have failed to set up an economy that works for all. Squint at our society from afar, and you can’t help but ask how we could allow an unemployment rate of 9 percent--representing nearly 14 million workers--to persist this far along into a so-called recovery.

And that official figure fails to capture the full extent of U.S. unemployment or the dramatic rise in long-term joblessness. As of March of this year, 46 percent of those considered officially unemployed have been without work for 27 weeks or more. That figure had stayed below 30 percent from 1948 to 2009. In effect, we are allowing a minority of millions of people to bear the full brunt of the recession, with many of them falling through the cracks of a flawed social safety net.

And graver threats loom, especially when we widen the lens to consider the entire world. Nuclear annihilation remains a real possibility. As does the prospect of climate catastrophe.

Over the years, our wisest leaders have urged us to view all humans as one family. “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said. Buckminster Fuller spoke of “Spaceship Earth,” with its implication that we are all in it together.

There are signs that we are hearing those calls. In the book I’m co-writing about the future of corporate social responsibility, my co-authors and I document a rise in “ethical” consumerism. People are more concerned that the products they buy are not made by exploiting workers or trashing the environment. We also found found that people are increasingly likely to identify as global citizens. The Millennials are a “civic” generation. And the social media tools they helped make popular encourage connectivity and magnify its power. It seems, for example, that Facebook and Twitter played key roles in sparking the remarkable wave of political protests in the Arab world in the past several weeks.

Those protests and their success so far in Egypt and Tunisia serve as reminders that people can come together to solve apparently intractable dilemmas. And who cannot be moved by the generosity of the human spirit revealed by those demonstrators? They not only risked their lives but they see themselves as part of a wider liberation movement. “We are setting a role model for the dictatorships around us,” Khalid Shaheen, a 39-year-old Egyptian, told the New York Times. “Democracy is coming.”

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With such inspirational examples, why is it so hard for us humans to remember our fundamental ties and common aspirations? Part of the reason, of course, is that we are unique individuals and rightly resist being forced to conform to others’ visions. And we can be so awful to one another, making us distrust people and limit our love to smaller circles.

Skyla herself has wrestled with how broadly to share her affections. The same morning she chanted “Daddy, Mommy, Julius and me” she also sang this: “I love every person.” When I asked who she meant by that, she clarified that she meant just our family. That’s not surprising, given that she’s been warned that strangers can hurt her and that she should be wary of them.

There’s more to the story of our anti-social impulses. The pain of losing each other also plays a role. If we let ourselves feel how much we truly care about others, it can overwhelm us to lose them. Lose them to a new job in a new city. To a different school. To death itself. So we harden our hearts a little to dull the ache of departures.

Once again, Skyla shed light on the subject for me recently. I had just finished telling Julius and her the latest in a series of stories I made up about a group of bugs living in the San Francisco Bay Area. After having “Crackey the Cricket” and his ladybug and butterfly buddies take trips to China, the White House, the Egyptian Pyramids, Alaska and the San Francisco Zoo, I figured they had about reached the end of their lifespans. So I had Crackey marry and have kids, had the the ladybug and butterfly couples have kids as well, and said the older generation died.

I tried to cushion their passing by saying the next installment of the stories would be about their kids, and I spoke a little about the cycle of life.

Still, the deaths hit a nerve with Skyla. “Daddy don’t die,” she said as we hugged goodnight. “Mommy don’t die.”

“I make magic spell so Daddy don’t die and Mommy don’t die and brother don’t die.”

In protesting the future loss of her beloved family, Skyla declared openly how much she cared for us. Her child heart was beating, bleating loudly.

Even so, the voice she used suggested that she too is “maturing” into someone a little more guarded. She adopted a toddler’s tone and syntax--“I make magic spell”--as if only the youngest of children can safely admit intense love and anxiety at the prospect of separation. By cloaking her emotion in the language of a younger self, she in a way shielded herself from attacks that she was acting like a “baby.”

Yet her sentiment is spot on. Yes, our different spiritual traditions help us make sense of dying. But are any among us immune from soul-wrenching grief when we lose parents, mates, siblings, children? If only we had spells to keep those loved ones alive.

***

Maybe sometimes we do.

A few weeks ago, I almost lost Skyla. We all almost lost Skyla, but for what seems to me a miracle. It was early evening, when our home street of 18th Street becomes a thoroughfare for commuters. Skyla, Julius and I were on 18th Street crossing Guerrero Street, mere yards from our apartment door. As she approached the far side of Guerrero on a two-wheeled scooter, Skyla started heading into 18th Street to get to a curb cut. Into the lane of 18th Street that is normally safe for people because cars are parked there. Just as she did so, an SUV switched from the central lane of 18th Street to that outer lane. It was headed right for Skyla.

“Skyla STOP!” I yelled. She did, and the big vehicle missed her by inches.

It amazes me she didn’t die there. I happened to be watching her rather than Julius at that moment. I managed to yell. She stopped, out of some combination of obedience and self-preservation.

Even so, I couldn’t fully appreciate what had happened right away. I was in shock. It was too much, initially, to contemplate losing her. Little by little it sunk in, in excruciating fashion. Because I realized that to lose Skyla would be to lose part of me. Part of my heart.

When I let myself imagine her dying that day, I suddenly appreciated the way the death of a child sometimes breaks up a marriage. Putting myself in that horrible hypothetical place, I wanted someone to blame for her death besides me and the SUV, and my thoughts turned to Rowena. It’s also hard for me to think about how our marriage could survive with Skyla missing from our family puzzle. Rowena and I have strong, healthy bond. But our littlest one would leave such a large a hole.

My appreciation of Skyla is not just existential. It’s practical. Mundane even. Most days when I come home from work, Skyla greets me with a smile, like so many other children do to their parents. “Hi Dad, look at the fort Julius and I made.” Or “Don’t come in yet, Dad, we’re making a surprise.” Or “Dad, can we play Tiger?” That’s our idiosyncratic game of chase where I’m the tiger in pursuit of Skyla and Julius.

In other words, she almost always brightens my day. Soothes my soul when it is less-than-sunny. Just as I calmed her the night we took a walk some 3 1/2 years ago.

She was right that night. In some sense, we all were out on a walk together then. We still are.

Photo by Pak Han