Naomi Klein is an author whose newest book is titled “Doppleganger”. Last week my husband and I went to hear her talk as part of her book tour. I came home and read her book. I had a lot to process reading it as there were many chapters that hit a cord with me. And so I found myself writing a “letter” to her. Here it is.
I heard you speak in Cambridge MA. To be honest I was not in the mood to go. My husband has read your previous books and despite his encouragement I avoided reading them, preferring to spend my energy reading light fiction for escape, such as books by Eleanor Lipman. I was tired after babysitting my two active granddaughters (ages 5 and 2) all day and was tempted to tell my husband I did not want to go. But my husband suggested we get dinner in Harvard Square and the thought of not having to cook and clean up pushed me to step away from my computer and make the 25 minute walk that evening to see you.
Afterwards as we walked home we spoke about how nice it was to be in a room filled with others who were saying many of the same things we had been saying about the world. We are in our 60s and many of our peers, especially those who attended the ivy league college where we met, are enmeshed in the neo-liberal mindset and it has become increasingly hard to talk with them and hear them go on and on about their travel woes or remodeling projects or debate about what new car to buy. We try to talk about “Tescreal” or the threat of fascism or even the severity of the climate crises and eyes glaze over.
Afterwards I immediately started reading your book. I have been on a reading binge this summer. I am artist who has been avoiding making art after being super productive during the active phase of the pandemic. I had just completed a set of drawings about Marcescence and how nature has it’s own plan. The work was not understood by curators resulting in rejected applications for residencies so I could continue working on the project and rejected entries for shows. The rejections put me in a bit of a funk, which normally I can ride out. But I am also dealing with elderly parents who have had a disastrous move to an independent living facility. And my mother’s struggles with depression triggered by this move has only contributed to my feeling too emotionally exhausted to make art. My reading binge has made me a stronger and faster reader allowing me to consume your book. There was only one sentence about how elder-care is not really about care, yet it captured how frustrated I was by the the marketing that sold my parents on a place that looked more like a hotel than a home, provides institutional meals that seem short on nutrition and as it turned out offers limited services if one is in independent living.
So why did I hint you might be MY doppelgänger? Well I am short and Jewish and have shoulder length hair and wear similar style glasses. I am older than you and in many ways we are not at all similar. You have a public persona and brand. Despite having made what I feel is a large body of work as an artist, being praised and respected by fellow artists and mentors and even twice short listed for London’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, I am mostly unknown outside my personal circle. You have had a long successful career. I have spent the majority of my life devoted to being a “carer” for my children, husband and parents. Your father exposed you to all the nuances and details of birth. I probably did the same to my own three children as a La Leche League Leader and home birth supporter. You entered motherhood with indifference, I entered hyper focused on the desire to be a good mom convinced all children have something magical to bring to the world.
We both have neurodivergent offspring. I have three neurodivergent adult children, but our middle son is more divergent than the others resulting in us investing a lot of time and energy trying to pull him through. And now I am pretty sure at least one of our grandchildren will be neurodiverse. My children are not on the autistic spectrum. They each have a complex mixture of learning disabilities and mood disorders. It sounds like your experience and my experience of parenting a child that does not quite fit into the system led us to the same conclusions about education and the pandemic. My experience navigating K-12 education exposed many myths about education. My middle son struggled horribly in our top rated public school and barely graduated from high school. He failed Algebra five times and we ended up in a legal battle with our school system to try to get him educated. He is now a professor of mathematics at an ivy league university. As an aside when you spoke about the impact of the Individual with Disabilities Act on American special education it touched me. Larry Kotin and Bob Crabtree were two of the lawyers who who helped create that law. Larry Kotin was our lawyer when we had to take on the Lexington Public Schools to try to get our son educated. He was an amazing kind, intelligent and passionate man who is missed by many. Sadly he died of Parkinsons during the pandemic. Larry had even tried to help my neurodivergent Sister-in-Law after she graduated from law school and was floundering in her late 40s to land on her feet. He was a special person.
My experience left me wondering why we were not using the pandemic to rethink our prison like educational system. For a few years after helping our son through the system I was an educational advocate and I observed how widespread the problems were. It used to drive me crazy when people would tell me our son was “unique”. Isn’t every child unique? But more importantly I knew from conversations with other parents that his struggles were shared by many. When you wrote about schools and your experience as a mom of a child who is neurodivergent, so much of what you said resonated with me. And more than once when I was reading the chapter you wrote on autism, I wished I could reach through the book and give you the hug us moms give to those “get it". I found my eyes filling up with tears remembering our journey raising our kids in an upper middle class neo-liberal community, especially after your story about your son at the park playing with the “perfect child’. The community I raised my kids in was the same community I was raised in and it happens to be the same community Bill Mckibbin grew up in. My brother (Marc Pershan) was a good friend of Bill many many years ago. it was not easy having children who clearly were following their own unique path to adulthood and not checking off all the boxes expected of them. More than once I felt judged as a person by other parents because of who my children were. My husband and I would often comment on how our fellow upper middle class parents would act like their child’s achievements were their achievements and judge us for our child’s struggle. After one particularly bad day someone said to me, “Jill you are raising Diamonds”. It was the perfect thing to say to me on a day when I felt like I had coal smeared all over my face and hands. But sadly not all children are destined to be diamonds. And some parents are raising other less shiny minerals that will require them to work as their advocates and carers after they age out of the system. I have a friend who has an adult son with Smith Meninges Syndrome. Her child will never grow out of his troubles. Another mom I know lovingly cares for her adult son with intellectual disabilities. These women are lucky to have resources and money to continue to support their disabled adult children but what about the single mom working low wage jobs whose son ages out of our education system? How do they navigate a world that dismisses caregiving as being of little economic value?
Like you I wondered why we did not use the pandemic as an opportunity to give children more exposure to nature by using the outdoors as a classroom, fix unhealthy school buildings and finally address what was an already evolving mental health crises among our youth caused by a goal oriented education system that leaves little room for failure. Instead everyone jumped on this bizarre Zoom virtual learning bandwagon without thinking critically and expansively about pandemic education. I cringe when I remember how on a beautiful fall day in 2020, a mom in our neighborhood park, who also happens to be a pediatrician, tried to reign in her two very active, bright, creative twin boys so they could do Zoom Kindergarten. It didn’t make sense. The boys were zooming around the playground like Tasmanian devils. There were a few close calls when they threatened to crash into my toddler granddaughter or another small tot. But it seemed a shame to discount what they were learning about their bodies and physics that morning. I tried to convince the mom to just let them skip Zoom, but she felt they would miss something although I can’t remember what specifically. Why could the money that was spent trying to outfit low income children with technology for virtual learning be spent on staff and transportation to take them outdoors and into nature? Wouldn’t that have been healthier for everyone? The children would be out of the house.The teachers would be able to care for the children in person and do what they do best and the exposure to nature would be invaluable. Meanwhile much needed maintenance and repairs could be done on the empty school buildings making them more pandemic friendly. Instead of using the pandemic as an educational portal we stuck a band-aid on a gaping wound, turned our backs and then allowed the issue to become “food” for those in the mirror world.
I was infuriated by Emily Oster’s insistence that the covid crises had triggered a mental health crises among parents and kids and it was vital we reopen day-cares and schools well before vaccinations were introduced. Her failure to consider the health of those who work in schools including the janitors and lunch ladies, was callous, but also in her writing she indicated that all that mattered was getting the children out of the way so parents could work. I confess to being disappointed in your not mentioning Emily Oster in your book. For me she, and others like her, are a dangerous products of our neo-liberal late capitalistic system. She claims to use data to support her own neo-liberal desires while totally ignoring the larger global system she is part in. She feels comfortable and entitled to comment on public health as an economist and often ends up making claims that promotes her own economic well being and fails to consider the larger landscape. Her most egregious declaration is that it is fine to have the occasional glass of wine during pregnancy. A declaration that has the potential to do considerably more damage than good. And I understand she probably did not fit in with your doppelgänger narrative but I do think if there is going to be a conversation about Shadowlands and Mirrorworlds we need to talk about the opportunist academics like her. Increasingly there is a whole class of academics who value book deals, Ted Talks, YouTube videos and influence over actual academic integrity, such as Prof Gino at Harvard Business School.
Returning to parenting a child who is different. We were very lucky to land in the office of a unique child psychiatrist who said to me early on, “Nothing you did could have caused this. Even the worst parenting does not result in this.” Unlike most child psychiatrist this doctor believed it was important to treat the whole family and not just the child. Over the years he became a marriage coach, parent coach, mentor and somebody we consulted anytime we were prescribed any new pharmaceutical. He himself as you will see later on in this email made a diagonal move as a doctor. But this diagonal move was one that the entire psychiatric world should make. Sadly in my years volunteering for the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance I saw how insurance companies had made it almost impossible for most parents to get the sort of psychiatric care we were receiving.
I suppose since our son did not have autism we fell into a different category in terms of hope about “fixing” his challenges. I knew from my own experience as an ADD/Dyslexic that there were better ways to learn and I did not want him to be limited by his disabilities. I had spent years as a LLLI leader having mother’s call me in tears after their doctors failed to diagnosis simple things like Thrush or Mastitis or the doctors would confuse the two and make the mom worse by treating the wrong illness. Turns out most doctors are only given 1/2 a day of education about infant feeding in medical school. And this has resulted in a whole new industry of lactation professionals who are able to charge for their services. As a La Leche League leader I read about birth and by the time I gave birth to my third child I did not trust the hospital system to give me a birth that respected me and my vagina. I had a home birth with the midwives who founded Seattle Midwifery College and had no episiotomy and almost no tearing. I felt normal after just a few days. With my two previous births it took months to recover. This experience resulted in me having a healthy dose of skepticism and distrust around modern US medicine and extra sensitive to how it puts profit over patient..
So when it came time to seeking help for our son after trying conventional medicine for a few months and reading about the medications the doctors wanted to use on our son (my husband and I both have math backgrounds equipping us to evaluate the clinical data and probabilities) we came to the conclusion that given the state of pediatric psychiatry our son was better off untreated than treated. Thankfully we were here in the Boston area and the doctor did not boot us out but instead suggested we contact her professor from Harvard who was also the founder of the Journal of Child and Adolescent psychophamarcology. Apparently he was researching a micronutrient treatment that seemed to help children like out son. And even if we decided to not use the treatment she felt my husband and I would get along with him. And we did and the rest is history. We worked closely with him and he helped us pull all three of our children through to adulthood. It was not easy but we did it. During that time many who believed the only thing that would help our son was conventional pharmaceuticals felt we had become alternative medicine hippies and expressed skepticism about our “little experiment” (as one person called it). Meanwhile this doctor and his fellow researchers who were in Canada were struggling to get clinical trials up and running. Their goal was to make it so doctors could prescribe these micronutrients as they might prescribe a pharmaceutical. But neither government wanted to set a precedent for treating supplements as pharmaceuticals lest they take away from the huge supplement industry. And so despite working closely with the FDA Dr Charles Popper and others were simply never able to get enough money and resources to run a clinical trial and make the treatment which helped all three of my kids available more widely for use in clinical settings. I always cringe when I hear people go after the supplement industry because although the supplement industry is filled with quacks and scammers the division between lab made products and supplements has created a landscape where doctors claim pharmaceuticals are more powerful or better than they are and those who sell supplements make dangerous claims. But the reason for this division has nothing to do with patient health and everything to do with extracting capital from those who are in need.
Right around the time Trump was elected in the US we were in London and saw “Angel’s in America” at the National Theater. We also saw a talk balk with Tony Kushner the author of the play. After that talk back I desperately wanted to sit down with him at a pub. If only to commiserate and share how unsettled we felt. And that is a bit how I felt after reading your book. I just want to sit and have coffee and commiserate. I lost one of my closest mom friends who said she found I exaggerated the climate situation too much and she did not want to be friends anymore. I want to scream as I watch all my peers fly all over the world to make up for their lack of vacations during covid. Why must everyone suddenly feel entitled to a vacation in Italy suddenly? Can’t they see the world is burning?