# TMH 4 — Heelers & Bledsoes *See notes in Freeform* ## Heelers In the mornings, before walking to daycare, Corvid liked to watch cartoons on his iPad. The two he enjoyed most at that time were *PJ Masks* and *Bluey*. While it was ultimately his choice what to watch, my wife and I greatly preferred *Bluey* to *PJ Masks*. Without digressing too much, *PJ Masks* was a show about kid superheros that is written with a rigid plot formula, trite dialogue, cheap voice acting, and as much recycled animation as the studio could manage to keep it as cheap to produce as possible. Junk food, in other words, but I grew up on *Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers* and *Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles*, so who am I to judge? Maybe kids need to have repetitive exposure to three-act structures and characters who overtly learn something by the end of each adventure to drill in the notions that crime never pays and teamwork is always more successful than going it alone. *Bluey* was different, not just from *PJ Masks*, but also from most other story structures. Rather than an inciting cause, an obstacle, allies, a battle, and a resolution, *Bluey* was focused more on the ephemeral everyday drama of children at play. Its short, ten-minute episodes usually focused on some play-pretend game Bluey and her little sister Bingo (both Blue Heelers) were playing together and the ways they learned to play better together. The show modeled attentive, active parenting, often featuring the kids' parents, Bandit and Chili, joining in the play or coming up with new games for them. While characters often had goals and conflicts, there were no villains, and what morals the show chose to express were shown, not told. There was one episode, though, that broke the format. It went for a full thirty-minutes and took on a full five-act structure centering around a critical disruption to the Heelers' lives: they were going to move. It would have been shocking to watch unfold on television (we'd been streaming episodes on Disney+, and the show may never have had a proper serialized broadcast run) because every episode of *Bluey* thus far had been self-contained and independent of the others. Their house was a background character; their neighbors, school, and playground as familiar as the family at the center of it all. For them to move would represent a major transition—something kids' shows often seek to avoid. Even Mister Rogers lived in the same house and visited the same Kingdom of Make Believe for his show's thirty-year%%check the math—and compare to Rose City Day Nursery's tenure%% run. (He didn't even tell the kids he was leaving after the episode when he retired because he knew PBS was going to continue reruns in the same timeslot the next day.) In the episode, Bluey (who is six, by the way,) experiences a lot of apprehension about leaving all their friends and neighbors—and the familiarity of their house—behind as they move, while Bingo, four, doesn't seem to really understand what's going on until the very end, when they're loading in the car to say goodbye to the house for the last time. While she knew they were moving to a new house, it had never occurred to her that they would no longer have access to their *old* house, that it was a permanent exchange, and once she realized this fact, she exploded with all the same anxiety and disappointment on display from her older sister. Why they were moving seemed to be a question on the table for the characters as well. The material cause was that Bandit had gotten a new job in another city, one that paid better, and so the parents had decided to move for the prospect of providing a better life for their children. Chili was obviously more reserved about it, but ultimately agreed that doing what was best for their kids was the most important part, and quite possibly worth the cost of losing access to their friends, their familiar neighborhood, and the way of life to which they had become accustomed. The facts that change is hard, change is sometimes necessary, beyond our control, and sometimes ultimately an improvement are all valid and valuable lessons for kids to learn. I saw a lot of myself in those little pups agonizing over the separation they were about to endure and their bafflement at the apparent arbitrariness of the decision. Meanwhile, in our real life, a family friend of ours whose daughter went to daycare with our son had announced to us *their* plans to move. We have become friends after the young girl wanted to walk Corvid home from school one day, and since the mom stayed at home like I did, we had nothing else on the schedule to preclude it. Liz and I got to be fast friends since our kids got along (she also had a two-year-old in tow) and our daily availability was so similar, and their family was the first in our neighborhood to host us for backyard play dates just to hang out and have fun. They were moving because Liz's husband had gotten a new job in another city, and since it would pay more money, they expected to be able to provide a better life for their kids. Never mind that Liz's family was all here in Oregon, along with the smattering of friends she'd managed to make despite being relatively housebound looking after two kids, or the fact that she was a special needs educator making inroads to return to work and would now have to start the process of networking over someplace else—a "better life" was just over that mountain, just around that river bend, just past the second star on the right, where the grass is always greener and the wind is always to your back. I was not convinced by either Bandit or Tony that a hypothetical "better life" was worth the early childhood trauma of moving%%have I written here about the trauma of moving, or am I referencing a digression that I'll have to find someplace else?%%—at least not a "better life" as defined by higher income. Material security is great, don't get me wrong, but if you *have* that security already, then there comes a certain point of diminishing returns when it comes to increasing it—and a series of clarifying definitions. %%I feel like the following discussion about the merits of where you live affecting how you live don't really support the emotional thesis of the piece, so I'm going to leave the below digression in place for the time being and forewarn the Editor that it will be abandoned suddenly, marked by a different escaped comment%% It's always important to define terms at the outset of an inquiry, and if I was going to disagree with the Heelers and the Bledsoes about what was a good reason to move—what constituted a better life for their kids—I needed to be able to account for my own answers to those questions. What does *where* you live have to do with *how* you live? I have a basic utilitarian understanding of the human need for shelter. Shelter is, at its barest necessity, a place that offers protection from natural elements where you can reliably store your property and where you can safely sleep through the night without having to fend off attack. A tent in the woods might be shelter, depending on how many dangerous predators call those same woods their home. A house in Northeast Portland certainly fits the bill, but the question admits of degrees. "Protection from natural elements" might be simply a roof to keep the rain off your head, walls to keep out the cold, and windows to cool off during the warm season—but if the walls don't actually keep the cold at bay, and the windows are insufficient to cool the house because the warm season regularly peaks above 100ºF, isn't that shelter faltering? The Murder House always felt safe as a place to sleep and store our property, but my ongoing battle with the elements made it feel insufficient as a shelter. During peak heat of our summers, I could not get the house cool enough to offer relief from the day, even leaving windows open throughout the night. During the peak cold of our winters, we were one power outage away from having to seek emergency shelter elsewhere. To provide my child a "better life" would mean securing shelter that provided adequate protection from the elements. Moreover, while I could imagine there coming a time when the house would not need such seemingly constant attention, the five years that we lived there felt all but consumed by endless restoration and repair projects. Painting the porch, rebuilding the fence, renting someplace to live for the two weeks it took to have the siding removed and the bare wood stripped, then spending another month with paper over the windows while the exterior was repainted, insulating the attic, finishing the basement, the repetitive attempts to troubleshoot the HVAC system, and the miles of wood trim we had to oil had all amounted to my primary job (after being a parent) being a handyman. I went to work almost every day to address some need presented by the house, and the stress of that toil meant it was never really a home for me—it was always a job site. To go beyond the basic material definition of shelter, a home should be a restorative, rejuvenating place to recover from encounters with the outside world and reflect on our engagement with it. Compartmentalization, whether spatial or temporal, is possible with remote work—work lives on the computer, work only happens between certain hours or on certain days, work happens only in a certain room—but when your job is fixing the house you live in, you *live* at work. You raise your child at work. You cook, eat, and sleep at work. That was an unsustainable lifestyle. Unless I could accurately predict when the house restoration project would be complete, it would continue to be an unbalanced worklife for the indefinite future. Access to community, both neighbors and public assets like parks, libraries, and schools, was something I certainly valued about the Murder House, and would be a strong counterargument to leaving unless I could be assured that we would still enjoy those elements in our new place. %%This is where I realized this digression wasn't going anywhere, so I'm going to return to the Bledsoes and the Heelers%% While our definitions of a better life attained through moving may differ, one thing I did notice about both the Bledsoes' and the Heelers' experience was that the kids under six seemed not to be bothered by the move. I'm not sure six is the magic number, but in my own life, I know when I felt the trauma of moving especially acutely, and I know when the memory of moving is almost entirely absent from my organic recollection. ## Bledsoes Liz and Bianca Bledsoe were the first friends Corvid and I ever made together. I was home alone with him 3–4 days out of the week starting in late 2020 and lasting until he started daycare in earnest sometime around September 2022. Despite spending as much free time as we could in parks and playgrounds, they were far enough from home that we never went regularly enough to make friends with other families. The pandemic, so early in his childhood, conditioned us to keep our distance from the people we did meet, largely precluding any sort of bonding. I thought that might change once Corvid started going to daycare and spending more regular time around his peers, but he was certainly the youngest person in the room. The first birthday party he was invited to really hammered home the social and physical differences even just a few months could make at his age. The kids toward whom he gravitated were those closest in proximity, whom we might encounter leaving daycare because we shared the majority of our walks home, but they were older boys, more interested in the kids they already knew (who were older still) than this small, user newcomer. But then, one day in the summer, Bianca asked to follow Corvid home when Liz and I went to pick up our kids at the same time. I knew they had been playing together—Corvid had told us about Team Corvid and Bianca—and I remembered Liz being cordial at drop offs. She was always pushing a stroller with her second child, Lucian, and her family reminded me of an inverted version of mine growing up. Bianca and Lucian are the same difference in age as my sister and I, only I’m the eldest in my family, and it was our mother who went to work while our father managed household. (This history is a little revisionist as I realize I’m conflating several different Hayes Family historical periods, but the point is that raising Corvid has led to a lot of reflection on my own upbringing, and drawing comparisons to other families in similar situations was unavoidable.) The first time we were invited to go play at Bianca’s house, she and Corvid played together for four hours while Kerry and I got to make friends with Liz. It was exactly the sort of situation I’d hoped for when we decided to enroll Corvid in daycare in the first place—Corvid was branching out to make friends, and his friends’ parents were cool people we wanted to spend time with as well. %%Worth putting this goal earlier? And mentioning the decision-making process that led to daycare?%% There was a period growing up when my friends were largely determined by my *parents’* friends, and when I started making friends independently, I don’t remember my parents getting along with any of theirs particularly well. I knew what we had was special, if not particularly rare, and that it was, above all, pleasant. %%This whole passage on the Bledsoes is awkward as hell so far. Why is it so silted?%% I took one move particularly hard—when we moved away from all my elementary school friends in Decatur, Georgia during the summer of 1996—and one of my long-term goals for Corvid was that he be able to sustain long-term relationships with his childhood friends should he choose to. With the Bledsoes, I thought we were on track. Then, in November, Liz dropped the bomb that the Bledsoes would be moving to California in June, 2024. She said her husband Tony had accepted a job in Oakland, near his parents, so they were selling their house and moving. It hit me hard, in a perplexingly profound way that confused me even at the time. %%So awkward! Why is the writing like this?%% I mean, we didn’t know each other *that* well, and although our kids went to the same daycare, we’d only seen each other outside of pickups and drop offs a couple of times. But staying curious about my emotions and inquiring into their roots revealed the symbolism that was provoking them. %%Supes awks. Makes me want to stop and do something else. This particular sentence is telling rather than showing, and I feel like it would be better to recount the experience of discovery rather than the fact of it.%% %%[[2026-06-03]] I guess the reason I put that sentence there was this was originally stemming from an essay about my Year of Curiosity & Inquiry, and I wanted to keep it on theme, but that’s so no longer the focus that it feels strange and out of place now. How will I remedy? Deal with that later.%% Emotions are reactions to impressions, whether those impression are grounded in sense-perception or other imagined stimuli, and they respond just as powerfully to mere impressions (such as symbols) as they do to sense-impressions, because sense-impressions are processed in terms of impressions. [[20231009-N2 The Philosophical Baby|The Philosophical Baby]] and [[20240219-N2 Thinking, Fast and Slow|Thinking, Fast and Slow]] clued me in to the observation that my emotional reaction to stimuli are informed by my childhood experiences, subsequent reinterpretation of those experiences, and analogous experiences in adulthood. Bianca and Lucian were the age my sister and I were when we moved to Decatur, Georgia from New Haven, Connecticut—a move of which I have little to no organic recollection—so I got the sene they might be relatively unaffected. I remember the name of Worthington Hooker, my elementary school, but none of my classmates there, and I never got in touch with my friends Dylan and Giles once we left. All of the friendships it pained me to lose were on the other side of that move. I did my best to shield the Bledsoes from my projections, but as the process drew on, I came to understand that Corvid and Bianca were at just the right age to be largely unaffected by this severance of their friendship. It was th perfect time for them to lose each other %%my marginalia indicate this might be thematically relevant to the forthcoming essay on parenting for mental welfare%%—a few more months and they’d be leaving most of their acquaintances from daycare behind as the rising kindergarten matriculated to their respective school districts—but for me, I faced with the prospect of losing what may have been a lifelong friend at a moment of great transition. That may have been what bothered me most. My major life transitions have left the majority of my friends behind every time I’ve changed states, schools, or jobs. With the coincidence of the [[20200319-N2 COVID-19|COVID-19]] pandemic and my Corey into parenting (the first among my core friend group)%%*what* core friend group?%%, I had lost nearly all social contact with anyone I might consider a peer. Liz was already a parent, our kids already got along with each other, and they were slated to start school together. If neither of us moved, we could have had five, ten, fifteen years of watching our kids grow together, supervising play dates, throwing parties, and getting involved in the community together. Liz was a special education teacher, which was very compatible with my interest in developmental psychology, and starting to suspect ADHD in herself. %%Relevance? We are really going to have to clean house with this essay!%% But no, that wasn’t the worst part. Moving is hard enough with kids who understand what’s going on enough to be able to help, but with the added complexity of simple day-to-day life small children introduce, I couldn’t imagine the difficulty of trying to *move* when your oldest child is four. Corvid stopped taking naps two years ago, and it seemed there was no project so small he couldn’t completely derail it. And I knew Liz would bear the brunt of the labor because Tony was still working and she was the stay-at-home mom (like me). It seemed like a lot of undue burden, unnecessary change, and for what? It wasn’t even a very good reason, which I didn’t realize mattered to me until a very moving double episode of *Bluey*. —but before we get there, I need to log a thought about the overarching epiphany of this piece—Shadowmoor was the only home I’d ever known, life in Decatur the only one I could remember. I *knew* we lived in Connecticut, but I don’t *remember* anything about the home we left there. The reason the Bledsoes’ move was such a wake-up call for me, especially amidst the storm windows debacle, was that (1) I knew we could not stay in the Murder House much longer and (2) if Corvid was much older when we moved, he would have to face the trauma of being the losing the only home he’s ever known when he did, and I thought I might *spare* him that. If we had to move (and the storm windows taught me that yes, unequivocally, we would have to %%spoliers!%%), there was every reason to do it sooner than later. For the good of us all. %%This next handwritten section goes into a synopsis of the *Bluey* stuff I feel like I’ve already described. It would be great if I could look at different sections of what I’ve already written on some kind of digital cork board, like Obsidian’s Canvas purports to offer, but in the meantime I’m just going to have to stomach some redundancy.%% ## Bluey In *Bluey*, the nuclear family also closely resembles mine growing up, which exacerbates the potential for comparisons. The kids are aged up—four and six years old—and they’re both sisters, but their parents alternate going to work and staying home wth them, and they generally have a pretty good time together. The show is consistently great, eschewing the familiar there-act structure common to most serials and instead footing a more open-ended episodic approach focused on the girls’ imaginative play. While the show makes an effort to deliver some grounded moral lessons, their organic approach means they seem to grow out of the story rather than the story being structured around them. In what appears to be the final episode of the series, the show bucks its own conventions and tells what could easily be understood as the final story for the Heeler family. All the other episodes follow the traditional sitcom rules of leaving things mostly how they found them by the end of the episode so audiences aren’t disoriented by missing key plot developments, but “The Sign” promised permanent change: the Heeler family was putting their house up for sale to move to a new city. *Bluey* pays equal mind to the parents’ experience grappling with the wright of the decision as it does the kids’, even though theirs are widely divergent due to their age. Bluey, the titular character, is six, so she is acutely aware that they are leaving behind her childhood home, their school, their neighbors, and all of their friends, possibly for good, and probably forever. It’s the only home she’s ever known, and all the uncertainty is understandably distressing for her (and the audience, to be frank—we’ve spent three seasons getting to know the other dogs in the Heelers’ orbit, growing attached to them in their own right, and the show was threatening to take them all away from us). But Bingo doesn’t seem fazed at all. For a four-year-old, *every* day brings with it the possibility of discovering something she’s never encountered before and which she expects she may never see again. I’ve seen this in my own four-year-old, where I can tell his reluctance to leave a place is due to him not being able to grasp when or if he’ll be able to return. There isn’t much of a meaningful distinction between “real” and “play”, so throughout all of Bluey’s worry, Bingo just continues playing little pretend games she makes up for herself. By the end of the episode, the show walks back the change by having the home sale fall through at the last second, but that’s only possibly because their whole reason for moving was largely elective in the first place—Bandit, the father character, was taking a new job in another city that paid a lot more, which was desirable because he wanted to “give you kids a better life.” “But I don’t *want* a better life!” Blue whines. At once we can empathize with both characters—and see a reflection of all our inner cognitive process. Kahneman characterizes [[20240523-N2 System 1|System 1]] as largely preferring sameness to change unless there’s a present threat to make transition the more compelling option. [[20240523-N2 System 2|System 2]], who can strategize (and do math), can make predictions about future prosperity and direct a course of action in pursuit of those goals. Of course, both perspectives are true, I realized, in thinking about moving a child of Bluey’s age. I would’ve been nine years old during our major move, and I confess there was something traumatic about moving away from the only home I’d ever known and my only childhood friends, regardless of the benefits such a move would eventually confer. That’s an inherent tension of the present versus the future—we can feel what happens to us *now*, but we can’t yet see the ramifications our decisions will have in the future. %%see emotion theory above%% Bandit may well want to provide a better life, but I disagreed that having more money necessarily equated to that (I think the science would back me up here, too—happiness increases the closer annual household income gets to something like $75,000, but once it reaches that point, it plateaus and might even decrease at higher levels.) And I disagreed with the Bledsoes’ reasons for moving on much the same grounds. Given the trauma moving might inflict on a young child and given that I thought “more money” wasn’t necessarily going to lead to an improvement in the child’s life, I was left to ponder what would become the pivotal question of my whole year.%%The passages cuts off there, paragraph 173—but good news! Paragraph 174 picks up into the Parenting for Mental and Physical Welfare essay%%