bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • To use the church nursery, or not? What it means to be fed.

    Melanie has a rambly, thoughtful post with a lot of things to chew on, about "getting fed" spiritually as a mother. 

     I was rather surprised when two mothers of my acquaintance were in favor putting their children in the nursery when they are between the ages of 18 months and three and a half because, they argued, that's when they are at their worst behavior and because when you have three or more children it becomes impossible to control them all and even if you do control them you spend the entire mass distracted. Six days a week I give give give, said one mother, on Sundays I need to be fed.

    … What I want to focus on is the question raised by our friend: What does it mean to be "fed" at Mass?

    …The way I have come to see it is that this is a sacrifice that I will make for only a brief period of my life and I'm making it for the very best cause: so that my children can be in the presence of God and come to know Him and love Him and serve Him. I have confidence that in this area of life as with my personal prayer time, the act of showing up faithfully to Mass and the attempt to give as much of my attention as I have to Him is what he will reward. He is my Father and He will feed me what I need to be fed.

    There is a lot more there – read the whole thing.

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    1 comment on To use the church nursery, or not? What it means to be fed.

  • No fair!

    First time I've ever been nominated for a Catholic blog award of any kind, and I'm up against Danielle Bean.

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    2 comments on No fair!

  • Seven things to teach your children so they can clean up after themselves.

    Here is an encore to my "seven ways to clean up after yourself" post.  With my kids ages 2, 5, and 8, it has so far not worked to have regular "chores" in the sense of tasks that are completed independently, without direction, each day.  Instead we have a sort of family cleaning time, a couple times a day, in which I send them on mini-missions.  

    It occurred to me that young children need specific instruction in certain tasks before you can expect them to be able to do them without help, let alone without being asked!

    Seven Cleaning-Up-After-Yourself Skills that must be taught

    1. How to make a bed
    2. How to hang clothes on a peg, hook, or hanger 
    3. How to pick up everything from a given area and put it in a single bin or basket, to be sorted and put away by someone else
    4. How to pick up one class of items from the floor in one room (e.g., given a floor with all kinds of things on it, to be able to find and pick up "all the crayons" or "all the blocks") and put it in a single basket 
    5. How to clean up spilled liquid or crumbs
    6. How to put a book away in a bookshelf, using a bookend
    7. How to scrape a dirty dish into the garbage (or pour out a cup into the sink) and then put it in the dishwasher or sink

    A child who knows how to do these seven things is ready to be taught to make his own bed, to look after dirty and clean clothes, to pick up books and toys, to clean up his own or others' dishes after meals, and to clean up many of his own accidental spills.  It's not everything you need, but it's a start.

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    1 comment on Seven things to teach your children so they can clean up after themselves.

  • A long-term running goal.

    I've written before that one of the joys of having been a dumpy, fat, sedentary young person is that, at least for a while, it's truly possible to get better as you get older.  While everyone else is declining, I am improving, getting stronger, leaner, and faster as the months go by!  It's like time is running backwards for me right now.  Very rewarding.  

    Of course that can't go on forever.  The only book about running in my personal library has this to say about aging:

    "Women distance runners typically hit their years of peak performance before the age of 40.  Runers who start training later in life, however, can expect years of improvement, no matter what their age.  Mary Kirsling, for example, continued to get faster well into her seventies after starting at age 64; Diane Palmason experienced 8 years of improvement after beginning to run at the age of 38.  In general, from the day you start running, you can expect 8 to 10 years of improvement before your times begin to slow."

    Well.  I began running at the age of 34.  No fanfare of trumpets or anything, but I've quietly marked this in my mind:  Suppose I try for the goal of continuing to run faster until I'm 44. 

    Push my peak back past my 44th birthday.

    It's a little more than nine years out.    I can't control everything about those nine years.  I will have to make allowances if pregnancies, injuries, or illnesses set me back.  But I can make choices along the way that make this more likely.  Let's see if I can celebrate my 44th birthday on the up side of the learning curve.

    UPDATE:  More on running times and aging.  The Fair Model is a way to take aging into account when comparing current times to times you've run in the past.  It provides a lookup table of coefficients (two tables, actually — one for 10Ks or shorter, one for longer-than-10K races) to weight your running time based on age.

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    2 comments on A long-term running goal.

  • “So was it fun?”

    I don't know.  What is fun?    Sitting around with friends on a back porch on a warm night with cold beers and good conversation — that's fun.  Reading a good page-turner with nobody to bother me — that's fun.  Going out for sushi is fun.  I don't know if running for almost half an hour can be fun.  I didn't enjoy the sensations, exactly.  

    I'm glad I did it.  It was satisfying.  I would like to do it again.  I don't know why I would like to do it again.  I feel like I ought to know why if I'm going to.  Is that crazy?

    "Look," says Mark.  "You're going to have to re-evaluate your image of yourself.  You've been writing a lot about developing a self-image of an athlete — about convincing yourself that you can be an athlete, to motivate yourself.  You've been telling people to fake it till they make it.  You're going to have to face the reality that you've made it.  You aren't just 'developing a self-image as an athlete.'  You are an athlete."

    "I don't know," I say.  "Does one race make me an athlete?"

    "Look at the numbers, Erin," he says.  (Oh yes, he knows how to get to me.)  "Our results aren't in yet, but we can extrapolate.  Last weekend was the Get in Gear race.  One thousand fifty-four women ran the 5K.  Where do you think your time yesterday would have placed you?"

    "Um, right about in the middle maybe?"

    "One hundred twenty-first."

    I was silent.

    "There was a 10K too.    If I convert your 5K pace to a likely 10K time — it's not just twice the time, it allows for the fact that everybody runs a 10K slower than a 5K — where do you think that would place you?"

    "I don't know."

    "People don't do 10Ks as a fun run'n'walk.  The 10K runners are serious runners."

    "Where would that place me?"

    "Out of 1,768 women, that would place you at number 660."

    "Better than half?"

    "Better than half."

    "I just can't believe it."

    Mark went on, "Face it, Erin, you are going to have to start to see yourself as a person who is generally athletically competent."

    The truth is, I'm deeply unsettled by this.  It's like I'm a person I don't know.   Swimming never did this to me because, well, it was something entirely new that I learned as an adult.  I've learned lots of new things, so there's nothing weird about one more.  I've lifted weights in the past and seen myself get stronger and been pleased by it.  Nothing terribly upsetting about that.  But running?

    "The difference is that with swimming and lifting, you're unburdened by memories of past failure," chuckled Mark.

    I guess so.  I tried to explain to Mark, and it took a couple of times before I think he really believed me, that running or performing in any way feels worse, not better, in front of a shouting crowd.  It is so hard to see it as cheering and so easy to see it as jeering.  Not a rush of adrenaline but a flush of embarrassment — I have to remind myself that I am not, actually, embarrassing myself.  I am still the sixth grader who couldn't run even once around the track.  Close my eyes and I'm easily back to the longest sixty seconds in ninth grade, trying to make just one free throw so I won't fail the basketball section of P.E., all the other ninth graders standing in a grinning arc on the three-point line, watching me throw and miss and retrieve the ball and throw it again.  The worst part was chasing down the ball in between throws.

    So I am not really sure who I am now.  Am I a runner?  Already?  If I never run 5K again, am I still a runner?  Must it be a who I am or a what I do?  Do I do something else?  Do I keep running?   Do I try to run farther, or do I try to run the same distance faster?  Do I try a swim race next, see how that feels?  All of it is wrapped up in not understanding why I think I would like to run in a race again.  I know I would like to do it, but I do not know why, and that leaves me feeling odd, like I don't understand myself at all.

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    4 comments on “So was it fun?”

  • What went through my mind in the 5K.

     At the beginning you're just in a big crowd of people.  I was chatting with another runner whom I had known briefly in college.  I asked her how long she thought she'd take, and she was telling me she thought somewhere between 30 and 35 minutes, and while she was talking we heard "Go!" and we said, "Well, here we go," and that was the end of that conversation.  I thought, If she wants to take more than 30 minutes, I need to be going faster than her.  So I did.

    It takes a while for a big crowd of people to get going.  You hope the fast people are in the front and the slow ones at the back, but in between everyone is all mixed up.  I hopped up and down a bit, looking around me and trying to figure out how to move forward.  There were people all around me, a slow, cramped jog.  And then I gradually became aware that people were passing me from behind.  How were they doing it?  I watched a tall thin man — he would jog in place with respect to the crowd, and then a spot would open up and he would sort of leap forward into it, and so on to the next and to the next.  Okay, I get it.  I waited for a spot to open up near me and then stepped forward into it.  And then to the next, and then to the next.  I was moving forward in the negative space of the crowd.

    After a while it opened up a bit and I could really run.  Pacing?  No idea.  I recalled a physical memory of the treadmill runs, 6.1 mph, and tried to match that.   "Okay then, here I am, running.  I'll just keep a steady pace."  And then I looked forward.  There were, of course, a lot of people running in front of me, a crowd that went on past the next turn where I couldn't see.  Still, I wondered if I could sort of pick them off, one by one.  Why not try?  I picked up the pace and ran past the person in front of me.  She didn't seem to mind.  I slowed back to my original pace and she didn't try to pass me.  Could I pick off another one?  I tried again, and passed the next person.  One at a time, I picked them off for a while.

    Mark had told me that the adrenaline would get me going, that it would be exciting.  I'd said to him, "What is this adrenaline you speak of?"  I didn't expect any, and there wasn't any excitement, really.  The 5K was a problem to be solved.  The people around me complicated things; they got in my way, for instance, they made noises that interrupted my thoughts.  They were also markers ahead of me, each one something I could try to pass.

    Then I got distracted because the course started to head up a hill.  Hills?  They didn't say there were going to be any hills!  Not a big hill, but I didn't much want to run up it.  I decided to pretend the hill wasn't happening.  After I got to the top and started to run down, I decided to suddenly re-discover the hill.  This is a rest!  I told myself.  You're not really running!  Just swinging your legs while you coast down.  Faster! 

    At the first mile, a volunteer was calling out the times.  "Nine sixteen, nine eighteen, nine twenty," she called as I ran past.  Okay then.  I wanted to do between nine and ten minutes per mile.  Right on schedule.  I ran a little farther and reflected:  Mark's probably about half done by now, if he's doing well.  I hope so.  He's half done, and I'm a third done.  That's about right.

    I could hear my breathing, hard but steady.

    A man passed me, hawked and spit on the ground.  Yuck.  This annoyed me.  I passed a man who was walking, and later he passed me running, and then I passed him walking again.  A woman passed me carrying a water bottle in one hand.  I thought it would be a pain to carry a bottle of water.  

    As the time passed, I grabbed at whatever I could think of that could motivate me to keep going.  The race course was supposed to go through a "Nature Area" in the third mile.  I spent some time thinking, "Gee, it'll really be nice to see that Nature Area!"  There was a turn that brought me into full squinting sunlight.  I tried to run faster because that would mean I'd be out of the sun sooner.  I got stuck behind a team of four people in matching shirts.  I thought:  If I pass one of them, I might as well pass them all.  I sped up and got by.

    There was a water station about halfway through, littered with discarded cups.  I didn't take any water because I was only going to be running for 30 minutes and I was afraid that it would make me break stride.  If I started walking, maybe I wouldn't run again.  I got hot in my fleece.  A woman ran past me struggling to tie her own fleece by the sleeves around her waist.  I thought I could take it off, but then I might break stride, and will I be able to start running again?  I unzipped it and kept running.  The flapping fleece bothered me but I consoled myself that it would be flapping more if I had tied it around my waist; this way I didn't have to worry that it would loosen and fall off.

    Off the road and onto a narrow path, only a bit wider than single file.  Okay then, I guess I just stay in place behind the person in front of me.  It's a comfortable pace.  But… I could run on the grass berm and pass that person if I wanted to.  Well, let's try it.  So.  I did.  Passed a few more that way.

    Two miles.  I began to think about what Mark had called the sprint to the finish.  I don't need to sprint, I said to myself.  This is a good pace.  I can just keep going at this pace and do fine.  But then I thought:  Mark will be watching me at the end.  He will be pleased if I really do sprint at the end.  I could do it just for him to see me trying hard.  I don't need to or want to, but I could do it, just for those few seconds.

    We ran across a parking lot and along a garage and I was pretty sure that we were near the end, one more turn.  And there was Mark up ahead waving.  I thought he was going to be at the end with the camera?  I waved a little bit but stopped because I thought it might make me break stride.  I turned the corner and he was calling, "Go!  You've got it!  You can do it!"  And that got me thinking about how dumb the things are that people yell when they're cheering.  Of course I've got it, does he think I'm going to pass out between here and the chute?   Of course I'm going to "go," does he think I'm going to stop now?  Of course I can do it, look, I'm running faster and faster and passing three more people and my shoe with its hidden RFID tag is landing on the carpet and now I'm done, so there!

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  • 28:24.

    The only picture you get, though, is the one of me looking indignant because Mark elected to cheer for me (which I asked him not to do) instead of take pictures of me (which I asked him to do) as I approached the finish line.

    Later, after I get the card back from his camera.

    (Mark ran 19:38.  Yay us!  We both met our goals.)

    UPDATE.  This experience has sparked more introspection than I expected.  I will post  about this (and about whether I had fun, I promise) after I have a chance to organize my thoughts.

    But here I am.  Don't I look indignant?

    SANY0887

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    7 comments on 28:24.

  • I just came down from the attic, and I have an announcement to make.

    This is difficult for me.  Hold on a minute.

    (sound of me steeling my will)

    Okay.  I'm ready now.  Ahem.

    Until further notice, I am going to get rid of two books for every new book that enters my house.

    There.  I said it.  

    What are you looking at?  It's so hard to tell "I'm so proud of you" from "Yeah.  Sure you are."

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    3 comments on I just came down from the attic, and I have an announcement to make.

  • Milk.

    Christy sent this along with a warning:  "Your heart may melt."  Okay, you've been warned.

    From the Mining Journal:  "Women step up to breastfeed motherless infant."

    Charles Moses Martin Goodrich was born at 3:26 a.m. Jan. 11 at Marquette General Hospital. Eleven hours after giving birth, his mother Susan Goodrich, 46, died of amniotic fluid embolism – a rare obstetric emergency that is not age-related, Goodrich said. Moses is the Goodrich's second child – Julia was born in 2007 – and Susan's fourth. Still in shock over his wife's death, Goodrich realized he had to figure out a way to feed his newborn son…

    "I wanted the baby to be nursed. That's something that Susan would have wanted."

    One thing led to another when family friend Nicoletta Fraire of Marquette began organizing a group of women who may want to help feed Moses.


    Read the whole thing.  I bet there are a lot of women who would step forward in a minute to help volunteer to feed a baby whose mother couldn't nurse him, if only they were asked.  I know I would.  

    I do wish milk banks and such were better supplied, with better distribution, so that human milk was available to any baby whose mother can't feed him.  But even though that was the first thing Moses's dad tried to get, before turning to the community, I can't help but think that this very human, very personal, community response is better in many ways than anonymous bottles of government-approved, pasteurized and screened, donor milk obtained for a fee or paid for by insurance.  Little Moses isn't just getting real human milk (though even that is a vast improvement over artificial milk); he's being nursed.  Poor baby, to lose his mother.  Lucky baby, to receive so much human kindness.  

    UPDATE:   Here.

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    2 comments on Milk.

  • Number five subdivided.

    A couple of weeks ago Jen posted a link to a list of 7 things to do to keep your house running smoothly.  Here is what Jen wrote about it:

    I thought this was a great list of a few very simple things you can do to keep your house running smoothly. (Although I thought #5 wasn't quite as solid as the others. If I that were easily doable for me I wouldn't need to be reading lists like that in the first place!) 🙂

    Well, I love lists, and I love tweaking my systems, and I wondered what this mysterious #5 was, so I took a look at the original article, from a site tantalizingly named "Totally Together Journal," whose author apparently has a book coming out in which all of the magic seven things (presumably including #5) are spelled out in detail.

    Here are the seven:

    Number 1: Make Beds Right Away
    Number 2: Do One Complete Load of Laundry
    Number 3: Empty All Garbage Cans
    Number 4: Keep Your Kitchen Sink Empty
    Number 5: Clean Up After Yourself and Help Children Do the Same
    Number 6: Bathroom Wipe-Down
    Number 7: Before Bed 10-Minute Clean Up

    Ah, I see why Jen's troubled by number 5.  It's not quite as self-contained as the others, is it?

    Anyway, I took this as a sort of challenge and decided to break #5 into seven things, too.  My criteria were that the seven things were not to include anything covered in Nos. 1-4 and 6-7.  (So, even though making your bed is arguably a sort of cleaning up after yourself, and wiping down the bathroom afterwards is too, I didn't write it down.)

    Here is what I came up with.  I actually came up with more, but restricted the list to seven.  No reason.  Seven's a nice number.  Thanks to Mr. Covey, it's now got an almost religious-numerology-type association with "effectiveness."

    Now "cleaning up after yourself" is not the same thing as "cleaning."  As Jen perceptively noted, "cleaning" is something you have to do periodically because you or other people in your household have failed to "clean up after themselves."  The basic concepts in cleaning up after yourself are pretty simple.  (These are not the seven things.  These are concepts I used to try to develop the seven things.)  They are:

    • if you're going to use a thing or an area again, you should make it ready for use.
    • if you're not going to use it again, you should discard it (the meaning of "discard" varying with the thing,  encompassing concepts of recycling, trash, putting in the laundry, and charitable giving)
    • take steps in advance to reduce soiling stuff or transferring mess or dirt to more things
    • clean soiled stuff as you go through a task 
    • include "cleaning up" as an integral part of doing any task at all, so that (for instance) you allow enough time for it 
    • never assume that someone else will take care of the mess you've made if you don't either do it yourself or delegate it immediately.

    Does that cover everything?  

    So these are the seven things I came up with.  (Note:  I do not do any of these things regularly, even though I ought to.)  As a bonus feature, the three kitchen things will also lessen your risk of food contamination and subsequent illness, no?

    1. Clean up after dressing and undressing.  If an item is clean enough to wear again, hang it up or put it folded away immediately; if it's not, put it into the laundry stream.  Commit to one or the other, don't just throw it on a chair.
    2. Clean up after going somewhere in the car.  Take everything out of your car every time you come home, except stuff that is supposed to stay there permanently (maps, emergency kits) and stuff that's ready to go for the next car trip (which should be well corralled).  Encourage habits that make this easier, like kids keeping their stuff in bags, having a trash container, etc. 
    3.  Clean up each item on your to-do list as you finish it.  Paying the bills?  Don't save a pile of stuff to be filed, file each item as you finish it.  Doing schoolwork?  Put away all the materials you used for each subject before you start a new one.  
    4. Clean up the office, desk, schoolroom, or wherever you do your paperwork after the work session is done.  Sweep up pencil shavings, clear the surfaces, ready it for the next use.  Homeschoolers, get that schoolroom ready for the next day.
    5. Keep the kitchen surfaces clean while you're cooking.  Don't put dirty spoons on the counter or balance the whisk on the edge of the pot where it will fall and spray beaten egg everywhere.  Put it on a plate that can be washed, or sometimes disposable stuff like newspaper/foil/wax paper. 
    6.  Begin cooking with these seven items ready for use (not hidden away in a cabinet):  (1) apron (2) empty dishwasher (3)  sink full of hot-but-not-scalding soapy water (4) trash can (5) dishrag (6) clean dry towel for dishes (7) clean dry towel for your hands.   You'll be able to quickly clean things, including your hands, rather than let them spread gunk all over the kitchen.
    7. Plan to use kitchen workstations so you move around less with messy stuff.  Crack eggs within reach of the trash can, work with raw meat next to the sink,  chop vegetables for sautéeing right next to the stove with the pan ready.

     I'm inspired to try some of this, aren't you?  (The eighth one was going to be NEVER LET YOUR KIDS HELP YOU COOK so I'm glad I stopped early.)

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  • Feeling fear.

    I've never had trouble with the concept that Jesus felt physical pain, that He physically suffered.  Seems obvious to me:  If you have a body, it hurts sometimes.  And that doesn't feel good, even if you know the pain is necessary and a sign of something good.  Anybody who's given birth knows this.  Pain is more bearable if you understand where it's coming from, but it is still pain and it would be nicer if there were less of it.  Right?

    But the fear?  How does that work?  How on earth can the omnipotent and omniscient and eternal "fear" his own willed temporal suffering?  Fear comes from a lot of places — not knowing, for example.  (But God knows all.)  And being out of control.  (But God is in control, even in the person of Jesus who submitted to others.)  And the threat of annihilation.  (But God is eternal.)  Isn't fear something that is fixed by knowing, by control, by the promise of continued existence?  Well?

    I wasn't thinking about that when I began the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary yesterday, when I arrived at the story of Gethsemane.  I was thinking about Amy Welborn's meditation on the resurrection of the body and her quote of a post by Fr. Longenecker , about the resurrected body being "the soul in every cell," that she said helped her feel relieved:  "I could not begin to parse it philosophically or theologically, and nor did I have any desire to. Something within got it, and I was able to trust." 

     Of course, I took that to prayer thinking I would try to parse it philosophically or theologically.  A lot of what Amy writes about difficult-to-grasp assertions of our faith resonates me. I have a very cerebral, historical approach to the Catholic faith, and aspects that can really only be approached so far with the intellect, further progress having to be made obliquely or with intuition, leave me with a permanent sense of unease.  So that's what I was trying to understand.

    What came to me was something that happened to me years ago.  Have you ever had a genuine panic attack?  I have.  I had a string of maybe five panic attacks over a period of about six months when I was in college.  I never knew why they appeared, and I never knew why they went away again — I've never had any since.    I remember it vividly though, one of the most surreal things ever to happen to me.

    It was surreal because at every moment I knew exactly what was happening to me.  I recognized the sensation as a panic attack.  I knew I was, in fact, safe.  I knew there was no thing that could have triggered a legitimate fear response.  And yet my body was behaving as if I was in terrible danger.  My heart was pounding, my skin was sweating, the prickly hairs were standing up on my neck and arms, my blood was dumping adrenaline into my muscles, my breath came swift and panting, the lights brightened as my pupils dilated.  

    I suffered.  Not because I knew fear but because I felt it in my body.  My physical response created an unbearable restlessness — my very cells shrieked, Run! Fight!  And in a way that made it even worse, because I knew there was, in fact, no point in running and nothing to fight.  And yet my body urged me to do something — I kept having this urge to leave the house I was in, to run away into the night.  But since I knew I was safe, I had to bring all the strength of my will to bear against the irrational urges of my body to flee.   I told myself "This is a panic attack, it will pass," but the one thing I did not know was how long it would last.   In the end I sought help, called a friend (to my embarrassment, waking up his parents in the middle of the night) and begged him to keep me company on the phone until the terrible sensations passed.  I didn't feel wholly better until after I had fallen asleep (completely physically exhausted) and awoken hours later.

    So I remembered that, and then it made a little bit more sense to me how Jesus could know all and yet suffer from His fear, as we believe He did in Gethsemane.  I'm not saying that I know how it works, I just say that I see now a way that it could work.  Because He could certainly have willed His body to yield the fear response, just as He could (and we know, did) will His body to experience pain, to send distress signals to His brain.   If a panic attack can feel physically even worse to one who knows there's nothing to fear, because of the constant effort for the wiser mind to suppress and overrule the wild urges from the body, the urges of muscle and bone — then I don't doubt that the fear response generates real suffering even to the omniscient.

    * * *

    That permanent sense of unease, about things that can be grasped only so closely by the intellect — it is not a bad thing.  For me, "to trust God" means above all else to accept "I can not understand this except when You decide to gift me with insight."  The habit grows easier with time, but the unease remains, part of that restlessness that belongs to this life.  St. Augustine wrote:  Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.  It doesn't make sense — that's a kind of restlessness, an urge to do something, to find out something, to write and write to try to figure it out, to read and read, to argue and understand.  And restlessness isn't always made easier by knowing that there's really nothing more that can be gained by action.

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    1 comment on Feeling fear.

  • What the heck are the “Catholic Cannonball Awards?”

    I need to know, because, like, I've been nominated for one.

    In the "Susan Boyle" category.

    I am not sure how to take this.  Which one of you is responsible for this?

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