Marriage, Fatherhood, Career and Too Much Los Angeles

The main events of this seven year period, involved love and courtship, marriage and children. In 1993 and 1994 I met and fell in love with Leora Troper. We married in 1995.

We took a honeymoon to British Columbia and Seattle, foreshadowing (do real lives involve foreshadowing?) our decision to move to the Pacific Northwest in 2002.

While I was busy trying to study and write about children and pediatric health services research at UCLA, I was busy conceiving, helping to birth, and trying to care for them at home. Looking back a few years later, these seven years (1994-2000) were above all the years of child bearing (for my wife), and for both of us child care arrangements and preschool. Our son was privileged to attend Play Mountain Place in Los Angeles, "a humanistic alternative school" and a very special place. Play Mountain Place had a profound positive influence on both Leora and myself as parents, opening us up to the ideas of nonviolent communication (NVC) and nonviolent parenting.

Up until 2000 when our daughter was born Leora worked at her library job, but once our daughter was born it no longer made economic sense for Leora to work and for us to pay for childcare/preschool for two children.

In the year and a half following receipt of my doctorate I completed most requirements for a masters degree in public health at UCLA and in 1997 I took a position as the Assistant Director of the National Center for Infancy and Early Childhood Health Policy at UCLA. I liked the idea of having my first real professional job, and was willing to give up on the theoretical interests of my graduate work to pursue more practical this worldly job tasks and agendas. Because we were able to purchase a house in 1997 we were able to experience a significant rise in our net worth as the Los Angeles housing market rose rapidly. However, the dominant memory of these years is one of the tremendous joy and struggle of receiving two children into my life (my son in 1997 and my daughter in 2000), while trying to be an adequate spouse and partner to my wife and while wrestling with an increasingly difficult work environment. In these years I was sometimes quite stressed by work and my wife was sometimes quite stressed by my stress. I struggled to find a way to make a satisfying career at UCLA, and was unable to find the path forward in that institution at that time.