Where the wind comes sweeping down the -- whoa!

Arson. Knife fights. Attempted assault. Vivid nightmares. Relentless jokes about promiscuity.

And I thought a film from the Golden Age of Broadway would guarantee some wholesome mother-daughter bonding time for Holly and me.

Quick, what are the images that come to mind when I say “Rogers and Hammerstein’s ‘Oklahoma!’?” The surrey with the fringe on top, right? A box social? A square dance scene full of swinging skirts and prancing feet? A cowboy singing to the blue sky amidst waving stalks of corn?

It turned out there was a lot I’d forgotten. I lost track of how many times during the two-and-a-half hours that Holly and I spent huddled under a comfy afghan on the couch watching the DVD together I said “Is this too scary for you?” She just shook her head; the truth is she’s seen worse, thanks primarily to Tim’s affection for the entire Star Wars sequence and a few slightly graphic video games.

But still, this wasn’t the Oklahoma! I remembered at all, which makes me think maybe I’d never actually watched the film from beginning to end. In fact, it’s quite likely that my familiarity with this musical, as with many others of its ilk, may have come primarily from attending a high school performance of it when I was about twelve years old. And that would have been the stage version, of course; it might be that this was my first screening of the film.

I thought I knew the story fairly well, but what Holly and I viewed last night bore so little resemblance to my memory that it made me think twice about just how I knew the details. When I was growing up, my grandparents had an extensive collection of Broadway musical soundtracks on vinyl; when we visited them in the summer, my sisters and I would spend a fair amount of time playing the records. I think I probably read the liner notes to Oklahoma at some point and confused that with seeing the film.

So just in case any other parents of nine-year-old girls get the same urge I did to spend a cozy evening taking in an old-fashioned flick together, let me remind you of a few forgotten highlights of Oklahoma: there’s an attempted date rape in a carriage (which is thwarted when the horses bolt and take the carriage on a terrifying ride that ends in a near-collision with a train), a villain who tries to trick the hero into stabbing himself in the chest with a switchblade, a couple who nearly burn to death when the haystack they’re standing atop is intentionally set on fire, a predatory Peeping Tom, a scene where a man encourages his nemesis to seriously consider suicide, and a female character whose love of physical attention from men is the source of constant joking but who by today’s standards would likely be labeled both mentally challenged and co-dependent.

The film also includes the heroine's nightmare, which appears to be induced by hallucinogenic bath salts, about being taken prisoner in a bordello while a twister forms in the background. It occurred to me my daughter might be the first kid her teacher had ever heard complain that she had slept poorly because her mother made her sit through a Rogers and Hammerstein production.

Introducing our kids to timeless classics of stage and screen is one of the pleasures of parenthood, but next time I think I’ll pre-screen the production before we cozy up for a mother-daughter movie night. Either that or we’ll just watch Star Wars, where Holly already knows all the scary parts even if I don’t. This time she can tell me when to close my eyes or block my ears.

The honeymoon period: I've written the book, but no one has read it yet

I keep reminding myself that these few short days are the honeymoon period for my book.

The book is in print, the publicity effort has been launched, the order button on various websites has been enabled. The book exists.

And yet, and yet, no one yet has the book in hand. The earliest the printer could promise it, via the fastest shipping available – which I have no reason to think anyone but me opted to pay for – was later this week. No electronic version of my book exists publicly. Both draft copies are in my possession.

So what that means is that my book is completed but there’s no one in the world with a copy of it in hand right now. No one is actually reading it at this moment. Most likely no one will read it tomorrow either. Not until the end of the week…and that’s only if someone were to read it the moment it arrived in the mail, which not only modesty but reality forces me to admit is highly unlikely.

Hence, the honeymoon period. Right now, I get to float along on the victorious sense that my book is done – after more than three years of work, it’s done – and everyone who knows me seems happy for my success. My success in completing my book, that is. No one is congratulating me on my success in having written a good or readable or worthwhile book, because no one has read it yet.

So I’m fully immersing myself in this lull, this brief time before I have to get down to the serious anxiety about what people think of it. Soon enough – within a matter of days – there will be people actually reading my book. Even if they don’t rip it open the minute the mail carrier drops it on their doorstep or in their mailbox, within a few days they’ll be scanning the opening pages, flipping through, checking out the back cover or the acknowledgments. Right now is the only time I get to bask in the pride of having finally finished this long-struggling project, without having to confront any actual criticism.

Because the fact is, there will be criticism. It’s a provocative book on a controversial topic: how I challenged my 9-year-old to run a mile or more with me every day for a year. On the most basic level, that plan was controversial from the outset, as I explain in the book: when I went to an online discussion group for runners, expecting to find other parent/child combinations attempting to maintain a long running streak, I found no endorsements at all, only anonymous posters saying they thought my idea was an awful one.

But that’s the easy part of the controversy, the part about whether or not it’s okay to encourage a nine-year-old to run a daily mile. What’s harder is that the thoughts about parenting I’ve so candidly shared in the book are themselves divisive in some ways. I had about eight friends and family members read the manuscript during the revision process; most liked it, but one or two warned me that it was simply too harsh; that by being so judgmental in some ways and downright negative in others, I was creating in myself an unsympathetic character, a mother who was far too critical of her own child.

So the revision process, for me, was mostly an effort of toning it all down, stage after stage. I removed one adjective after another, finding ways to be ever less caustic in my parental observations. Too much, some of the readers had warned. Too much negativity, too much anxiety, too many questions about what constitutes good parenting.

In other words, I’ve already had a taste of the mixed reactions my book provokes. And that was among just eight readers. In another few days, ten times that many people might be reading it and judging me.

But after three years of work to get this book completed, I honestly believe I’m ready. I understand that some people will be taken aback by the raw honesty with which I depict the less joyful aspects of parenting and family life. Just as people asked us how a mother could submit her son to the physical rigors of a daily mile while we were doing the streak, people have asked me how I can be so candid about both the positive and negative aspects of my life.

My children have seen this book. They know what I write about and how I write. My parents and my husband do too. They accept it for what it is: my best attempts to give literary expression to my most authentic feelings. I know that some readers of my book won’t really like it all that much. Others, I hope, will like it a lot. But of course, I don’t know. And in the end, all I can really hope for is that everyone who reads it respects the fact that I took the time to write it.

Time will tell. But right now, I’m just enjoying the lull between publication and availability. I’ll never have these few days again, when the congrats-on-publishing are pouring in but there aren’t any how-could-you-say-all-of-this to balance it out. The time will come, but for right now, I’m happy to be in this buffer zone, this post-publication, pre-printing cone of serenity.

Sailing solo at 16; running daily at 9: The risks we allow and the risks we reject for our kids

I’ve been thinking about 16-year-old California teen Abby Sunderland ever since she was in the headlines earlier this month for aborting her solo sail mission, but I’d resisted writing about her because I kept asking myself why anyone would care what I thought about this story. Weighing in seemed to me like a perfect example of blog-abuse – just because you have a (self-bestowed) platform doesn’t mean you need to use it.

But the story stuck with me despite the fact that I know almost nothing about sailing and my children are (or seem to me) still very far from sixteen. Today while out running, I listened to a podcast of NPR’s Talk of the Nation that featured a debate about this very same story, and finally I understood why it resonated.

Specifically, it was when Outside Magazine contributing editor Bruce Barcott, who was arguing in favor of the Sunderlands’ decision to let their daughter sail solo (while Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald represented the opposing view), said that “the Sunderlands are…extreme examples of what I call brave parenting. But I think that they help us reflect on the boundaries that we put around our kids.” Barcott went on to talk about how the Sunderlands represent the opposite of helicopter parents, those prototypical peers of mine who worry about the size of hot dog slices versus the diameter of a child’s trachea and who fear abductors around every corner. Leonard Pitts then responded, “I agree with the idea that we are in era of helicopter parenting and parents who are too eager to wrap their kids in bubble wrap before they send them out into the world. But I think that there is a little bit of a gulf between…over-parenting and sending a child out on to the middle of the Indian Ocean. It seems to me that there's a happy medium somewhere in there that is being lost.”

A happy medium. That’s what rang a bell in my mind. Because when I first heard about the Sunderlands, my initial thought was “Oh good, parents who make me look vigilant.” A happy medium. That’s where I was, I thought to myself as I ran. That’s what I was doing in late summer of 2007 when I asked my then almost 9-year-old if he wanted to take on a challenge: run a mile or more every day for a year.

He did, and in a story I’ve recounted many times since then, Tim and I ran a mile or more every single day for two years. Running a daily mile is not one whit like sailing across the Indian Ocean, but there were parents who thought was I was doing was crazy too, just as many people (including me) now think about the Sunderlands. When I posted about Tim’s and my running goals on a message board dedicated to runners, other posters accused me of fostering obsessive-compulsive disorder in my son. “You’re setting up an impossible standard that he’s forcing himself to meet just to please you,” more than one of them wrote in some form or another. “A nine-year-old should not be running every day,” wrote another avid runner.

Despite the fact that my husband, myself and our pediatrician saw nothing wrong with this goal as long as it was Tim’s choice, some parents reacted as if I was, well, sending my son out into the Indian Ocean.

And I did worry about whether it was a reasonable thing to do, just as I’ve worried throughout both of my kids’ entire lives thus far because I tend to be a little less anxious than other parents. I let my 7-year-old play at the playground all the way across the ballfield when I’m watching my son play baseball. I allow the kids to walk together to the general store while I’m at the library across the street. Earlier this spring on the bike path, two different sets of adults admonished me that I was letting my daughter bike too far ahead of me. So there’s no doubt that I’ve taken my share of flak for my un-helicopter attitude over the years, most notably when my decision to let my two-year-old sleep in a (locked) car while I walked 300 yards away to pick up her older brother at school inspired a passer-by to call 911.

So I’ve learned to question my own judgment. With the daily running project, which Tim kept up for a total of 732 days – two years, one of which was a leap year, plus one extra day for good measure – I was vigilant about never urging him to go. The running had to be his choice, every single day, every time we went out. But again and again, he chose to go. He seized the challenge. And yes, he was the only 9-year-old we knew who was committed to a daily running streak. But it didn’t hurt him any. It wasn’t as tough as sailing across the ocean, but it wasn’t easy either. He ran on frigid days and in heat waves, in thunderstorms and blizzards. But it was a challenge he found satisfying, for every day of those two years. And it was something I never once told him he had to do for anyone else’s sake. It was always his choice.

I worried that if anything were to go wrong, I’d have to live with the guilt as well as the grief. When I was in college, a 12-year-old in our town went running on a summer day, then collapsed and died of heart failure at the end of his driveway. If something like that happened to Tim, I’d have to cope not only with the overpowering grief any parent would feel but the knowledge that it was undeniably my fault.

Abby Sunderland’s parents must have had thoughts similar to these. As Leonard Pitts stated on Talk of the Nation, the sailing venture was in a league of its own in terms of the danger it incurred upon her rescuers as well as the expense it caused. Nothing about the running streak included either of those factors.

But the story reminded me too that every parent makes decisions about risks. My decisions seemed extreme to many of my peers; the Sunderlands’ choices seem one hundred times more extreme to me than anything I’ve ever done. Parenting is about judgment calls, from the first time you let your infant sleep on his stomach because it’s the only way he can fall asleep to the day you let your teen go on a ski trip with a friend. Making those decisions is part of how we learn and grow as parents, and teaching our kids to evaluate the risks and benefits of any decision that concerns them is one of the lessons we pass on by our own example every time we do.