I was woken out of a sound slumber by a 4 ft, 7 year old telling me that I was supposed to go downstairs and turn on the TV for her. It was still dark.

We were in Dallas with the in-laws and the kids had decided that sleeping was for losers. My wife was attempting to get our younger girl, H, back to sleep and had sent, F to watch TV in order to get her out of the room, as she was keeping the younger one awake and exasperating my wife.

I wasn’t in all that bad a mood but I was sleepy and wasn’t really inclined to jump at her command. So she barked a whiny “c’mon- mom said you’d turn it on!!” I didn’t snap at her, but I did wonder out loud if perhaps yelling at me wasn’t the best strategy for getting me to do her bidding. At this she stomped out of the room to get a pillow from the other room- the one that her mother was trying to get her sister to sleep in. Let’s just say she didn’t go all that gently into the room, and that she happened to ask her mom at full volume where her sweater was.

For her entire existence F has been… difficult. For the first 3 months of her life I spent the hours of 3 am to 6 am walking around the kitchen table with her to stave off the wailing that would pick up if I slowed to below 5 miles an hour. When she was 2 and a half she led an insurrection during nap time at her daycare that led to the assistant quitting. Last year, 1st grade, had seen a robust flourishing of defiance and anxiety. She has powerful emotions… and charisma. She can charm the pants off most people, but she has decided that she didn’t need to bother using charm on her parents or sister. Instead she relies on brute force. By the time she woke me up in Dallas I was pretty sick of it. So was her mom.

A few minutes after she re-woke her sister with her full volume sweater request we had a family meeting to discuss the proper way to handle these difficult situations. One of the reasons that the kids didn’t sleep so well was excitement. The big plan for the day was to go shopping at Toys r Us. In our little family meeting I brought up the idea that I wasn’t so sure that going shopping for toys was the best idea since the girls were already fighting viciously over the new toys they had gotten. When this discussion turned ugly I couldn’t exactly lose face by letting her go that day. I made it clear that she might get to go in the future if she figured out how to treat others with respect. I made it clear that she wasn’t going that day.

Desperate is probably the best adjective to describe her subsequent behavior. For the next hour and a half I was treated to exasperated begging coupled with alternating promises of a new improved girl. Even if I had wanted to let her go, if only to shut her up, I knew that I couldn’t. It would only empower her. After I calmly explained to her that if she brought it up even one more time she wouldn’t be going at all on the trip she got a look of steely determination on her face and glared at me. I knew what was coming but wasn’t sure how to stop it, so I didn’t.

We were sitting at the dining room table, which oddly enough sits on a pristine white wall to wall carpet. F picked up her cup of hot chocolate (which was only luke warm) with a cold deliberateness and walked the three steps over to my seat. I ignored her as she slowly, and without passion, poured it on my head. The grandparents were reading the paper at the same table and didn’t even notice as I slowly backed off the carpet towards the kitchen carefully containing the drips with my hands to make sure they didn’t sully the brilliant white rug.

I succeeded in saving the carpet, but my sweater was soaked. My daughter was waiting for an explosion, but I wouldn’t give it to her. “Go to your room”. She vaguely protested but one powerful look sent her scurrying.

I had a dog that was a bit territorial. More than once he peed on another dog that wasn’t even worth fighting. I had the sense that my daughter was trying to establish her dominance. I saw it coming and I knew that it was an opportunity to turn things around. F went to the room but immediately started hard core lobbying to still go to Toys R Us. She was wailing but I left her in there. It was kind of shocking that she would even consider asking after what she had done, but I also saw a light at the end of the tunnel in her desperate behavior. When she had failed to get a reaction out of me she panicked because she knew that something different was going on.

The grandparents were pretty freaked out by the whole situation, and they split. My wife and I gathered up the kids and headed out to lunch on the way to go ice skating. The walk to lunch was a little shaky. F was still wailing a bit about how awful her parents are etc etc. However, about halfway through lunch things turned around , and we actually had fun ice skating at the mall.

She never did get to go to Toys r Us, her grandparents think we need counseling (they’re probably right), and things have slowly improved over the last few days. This morning F was nice, responsive, and sweet. she ran into school calling, “I love you”, and I felt better about things than I have in years. A little hot chocolate on my head wasn’t such a high price to pay.

We’ve been very busy the last few weeks - mostly focusing on Battle of Brooklyn - but also working on tv projects. It’s interesting becacuse tv and reality are so seperate. I have spent years working on the donor film off and on- a lot of it is mental. Reading, thinking, processing and trying to figure out how to put together a straightforward film from thousands of threads. Good TV, on the other hand, like good pop music, is all about keeping it simple.

Today the New York Times ran an article about two reality shows - including the new Find My Family one about adoptees finding birth parents. For it to be good TV (ie an audience grabber) it’s going to be exploitative. I use good TV loosely. I mean major network, prime time, ratings grabbing.   At the same time, it makes sense that it would be. It’s dramatic - it’s peak moment. On another level it certainly puts the debate out there about how to handle these difficult emotional situations. Similiar situations certainly extend to the donor realm. I would be very interested in working on something in this vein, but i also realize that it would be hard to keep it from being exploitative on some level.

A few weeks ago I filmed as my friend Yvette met a blood relative for the first time - her brother. It was emotional but not off the wall and both of them wanted to be filmed. They wanted to document the moment. Two days later when Yvette went to meet her birth father I filmed as she left. When she returned it felt too invasive to intrude on that meeting.

in a new report sperm and eggs grown from stem cells.

Sometimes things move more quickly than we expect. A few weeks ago Yvette found out that she had twin half-brothers. Friday morning was the first time in her life that Yvette had met a blood relative- her brother came to visit. On Saturday her brother set off for NJ to meet their father.

Yvette, her boyfriend Paul, and I waited and waited for him to return. At first there were a few text messages letting us know how things were going… at 5 “he’s heavy and a little taller than me”- and at 6 a quick one- and then nothing…. until midnight. A rush of short texts.

On the way
It was great
He wants to have lunch with you tomorrow.

Yvette nearly dropped dead. she was going to meet her father. As we waited for her brother to return from the meeting she nervously cleaned the kitchen and explained that she didn’t know if she was ready. For some time her life had been all about searching. Now the searching was coming to an end and she didn’t know how to deal with the emotions of that transition.

As a filmmaker I always try to stay out of the way. I keep my mouth shut as much as possible and hope the subjects forget about the camera. However, this is a different film for me. I’m a part of it. Yvette and her brother meeting- yvette meeting her father- these are part of the story of possibly meeting my own child- their reactions inform my own understanding of this complex mess of emotions.

So as I watched, listened and participated I constantly thought about the film that I’m making and how the shots I was making might fit into that story- and I felt compelled to insert myself.

As Yvette rushed around getting ready she and her brother discussed that she might might wear something that would make her look like one of their father’s younger daughters. Paul firmly stated that Yvette should dress like herself and I loudly agreed. I had been mostly watching the drama unfold. Both Yvette and her brother wanted to meet their father and were terrified of having things go awry. The were putting his needs in front of theirs in a powerful way and it struck me as wrong and i explained why. Her brother had a convincing response- especially given the fact that he had already met his father and felt deeply at peace about it all.

(the following is in quotes but i’m not basing it off the tape- just off the top of my head) “I’m not mad at him. I just wanted to meet him. To me it was a sales call, and i wanted to close the sale. So of course I tried to make it all comfortable for him… and I closed the sale. it was awesome. I got to learn so much about our family.”

He had a good point- he didn’t really want a relationship. He didn’t need to have another father. His social father is great, and he’s deeply connected to him- yet he had a deep desire to know to know meet his blood relative.

As we discussed all this Yvette and her brother brushed their teeth with electric toothbrushes. They are both worried about receeding gums- and have a lot of other things in common. They not only look alike, they talk alike, act alike…. are alike. It was odd to see them quickly become so comfortable with each other.

more to come….

Last week NY Times Local blogger (and friend of mine) Andy Newman inadvertently brought up some complex ethical issues when he wrote a story about a business that had decided to renovate in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The problem was that the deli that decided it needed a spiffy new facade was in an historic district and the owners hadn’t bothered to get any kind of permits whatsoever. As the blog is part of a ‘hyper-local” reporting experiment the journalist has become involved with the community he covers, in a way that he might not have in the past. In this case the commenters argued back and forth about the rights of the owner vs. the community as well as the role of the local journalist/blogger in creating a difficult situation for the owner. Andy wrote a longer story to discuss these ideas.

It all started when someone sent him a note asking him to look into the fact that the deli had taken down its historic sign. He put on his journalist hat and called the buildings department and left a message in reference to whether or not permits had been filed. Then he went to the site to ask questions. While he was there he got a call back from the buildings department letting him know that no permits had been filed but that someone had called in a complaint 6 days earlier. He was told that an inspector would be checking out the site in the near future.

Then as he writes, “After taking the call from Buildings, I returned to Jimmy [the owner's grandson] and asked, again, if I could see the sign, and take pictures of it. He agreed. As we were heading toward the basement, he said, ‘Make a nice story about us. You’re not going to get us in trouble, right?’ ”

You can guess what happened next. The buildings department showed up the next day and shut them down. The truth is that they should have known better. Directly across the street a business owner had tried to renovate without basic building permits or historic preservation permits and has remained closed and stymied by the process for over a year. Across the street from our house (on the other side of this same neighborhood) an owner was trying to fix the side of his building without permits and … it fell down… oops. Some people tagged the journalist as tattle tale despite the fact that others had lodged complaints before he called to inquire.

The question then becomes how can a journalist be an impartial observer of such a small community. As my dad used to like to point out- it’s not a good idea to sh*t where you eat. Will Andy be able to write any hard hitting stories if doing so might turn significant segments of the small community against him? These issues become increasingly important as we get more and more of our news from hyper local sources. At the same time we also get more of our information from hyper-specific sources.

Earlier this week I answered some questions about our Atlantic Yards film, “The Battle of Brooklyn” for a NJ Nets fan blog, netsarescorching.com. Nets fans are interested in the Atlantic Yards story because if the project moves forward the Nets will move to Brooklyn. As the blog is focused on basketball one of the first questions was about whether or not we had interviewed anyone in the Nets front office. In this case, the point of view of the audience is basketball focused. However, our film has almost nothing to do with basketball beyond the fact that the real estate debacle we are following involves an arena. I took great pains to clarify the films point of view and our style of filmaking. What I was attempting to do was “manage audience expectations”. Our films tend to be a little different from what average people expect in a documentary. Either they expect a Michael Moore style hell ride, or standard PBS fodder. In our films we often raise questions that aren’t answered in an overly direct way. One problem that we consistently run into is that when an audience expects X and you give them Y they think that the film has failed in its goals. As such, we try to manage the expectation of the audience so that they go in knowing what to expect. In this case I explained that we aren’t activists and aren’t journalists in the traditional sense. I wanted to make sure that they didn’t expect a film with a lot of talking heads talking about facts, figures, and policy. Instead it’s a film that follows characters through a narrative structure. Like any Hollywood film we’ll take some liberties with time frame in the interest of the drama. In addition the film will largely be told by following a small number of people, so it will be from a very specific perspective.

As stories move through the world they often bubble from the real world; of people connected by place, family, and physical community, to the virtual world of community through connection. Another hyper focused blog (focused on the technical aspects of documentary), found the story (most likely through a google alert on “documentary”) and took issue with the idea that we could make a film about this complex story without it being a journalistic exercise. I wrote a comment clarifying our position and explained that I wasn’t trying to wriggle out of any kind of responsibility to the truth, but instead managing expectations as explained above. In this case, our very local story about real estate was discussed by a blog that focuses on professional basketball, and my comments were then critiqued on a documentary blog written by a journalist interested in the technical aspects of documentary. When context is a primary concern and it gets lost, ideas get knocked out of whack.

As much as my life is defined by my role as a father I will be the first person to admit that I am by no means a perfect one. In fact I’m a lot more imperfect than I’d like at times. Our older daughter is “spirited” beyond belief. Honestly she acts like a 13 year old more than a 7 year old and we struggle with maintaining balance when dealing with her. Unfortunately a lot of our strategies don’t work and we shift them more than we should. We are very aware of the idea that we want to have our daughter recognize that her behavior is unacceptable, not her when we are having issues, but that line often gets blurred.

One of the most important things that we work on is communication, but sometimes I know I don’t hold up my end. My daughter is a font of want. I’ll often point out to her that the only thing she’s discussed with me is the things that she wants. I understand that there are deeper forces at play with the intense sense of need she has, but I don’t always have the patience to calmly explain why she can’t have an ice cream at 10 am, or a donut, or new shoes, or a new backpack (this isn’t an exaggeration and all of the requests came with in minutes). As such we often slip into patterns of reward and punishment that we recognize probably aren’t the best strategy long term, but feel necessary to get a handle on our situation. There was an article in the NY Times yesterday that put these practices into troubling perspective.

After reading it, I did a bit better today. I just hope I can keep it up.