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].

I give you permission to tell me how much you enjoy your kids.

Amy Welborn linked to this wonderful opinion piece in the Guardian, by a mother with four children under two (she had triplets) who is — gasp! — enjoying her children:

No one wants to hear that we are having a lovely time with our babies, who have started to smile all at once this week, and are sleeping in blissful four-hour chunks all of a sudden, and are so bright-eyed and lively after their bath that we feel like cracking open a bottle of champagne just to give them the party they seem to be up for. It’s not what people want. They want to hear how dreadful we feel, how exhausted and depressed we are, how it’s the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone, ever.

She hits it right on the head — already I hear this kind of remark from people when they see me out with my five-year-old and two-year-old boys. Two children — two! — and daily it seems I hear "Wow, you’ve got your hands full" from cashiers and the like.

I don’t understand what it is that makes people constantly denigrate their own young children, sometimes in earshot, sometimes not (he really keeps me on my toes *eye roll*) (she has been driving me crazy with that thing today) (more kids? oh gosh no I can barely handle *these two* as it is) (oh my god I can’t wait until school starts). I know people must love their kids, but it’s as if it is unseemly to admit it.

And if you’re allowed to admit delight in your children, you aren’t allowed to delight in the experience of parenthood of young children. New mothers are allowed some oohing and aahing, but still we expect, after a couple of weeks, that the story is we’re coping, we’ll survive, not — this is amazing, I can’t believe we waited so long, every day she takes my breath away, I could just hold him and hold him all day long.

Is this — "isn’t parenthood a drag" — just acceptable small talk, like complaining about the weather? (Then maybe that explains it, because I never could get the hang of small talk.) Or is it true that most people really don’t like it? If so, why is their experience so different from mine?

Because I love my kids. I love throwing myself into the mothering life, every morning. I can’t even call it "work!" It’s too much fun. Yes, I have rough days from time to time. But I’m the grownup — it’s not like it’s their fault if I spend a whole morning stomping about grumpy. (Maybe when they’re older.) Most of my days, I have a wonderful time.

I’m happy! I loved being pregnant, giving birth (yes) and having tiny babies who nursed all night and all day. I want more kids. That makes so much sense to me on a gut level that, e.g., when I heard a young pregnant mother say to another last week in the kids’ music class, This is the last, we’re done after this one: my first impulse was to feel terribly sad for her, to say with all the sympathy I can muster Oh, I’m so very sorry, because my first thought was that some tragedy must have befallen her family, like horrible postpartum depression or complete financial ruin, that forced her to renounce childbearing.

This happens a lot. Usually I come to my senses in time, and remember, Oh yes, more than one or two children just isn’t ‘done’ anymore. But I still cannot imagine that. What a poverty to feel that one must say, No, to babies. Maybe it’s better, maybe worse, to actually not want them.

I wonder about all the couples who long to conceive and bear children and literally can’t. What is it like for them to hear friends complaining about the babies they have, and paying good money to have their sleek, smooth, glisteningly healthy tubes sliced and cauterized, their abundant seed diverted and thrown away?

But most days I feed the children breakfast, I do some shopping, I teach Oscar to read, I take them for a walk, I listen and watch and smile. Milo turned two yesterday, and I gave him a little box of plastic figurines of birds. He lined them up on the table, put them back into the box, carried them around, lined them up on the table again. Bird bird, he said over and over. This morning I left him with Mark so I could take the computer to the coffee shop, and when he said to me I go, I said, You and Daddy can play with your birds. As I quietly opened the door and headed down the stairs I heard him: Bird bird Daddy. Bird bird.

I like my Saturday mornings, breakfast out alone with a book, the coffee shop with my computer, my little weekly retreat. But every week I almost can’t wait to get back.

Oct 22, 2005

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The wages of sin is tilth.

Dinner has been served. Grace has been said.

Mark, spooning up helpings of fish and potatoes: “Quite often, when I sit down to dinner, I am thankful that we can afford to pay people to provide us with a variety of good food. People worked in dangerous conditions for many hours to bring us this fish. People toiled in the hot sun so that we could have these potatoes.”

Oscar: “We know who brought us the peppers. Grandpa did.”

Me: “Yes! Grandpa toiled to grow the peppers for us.”

Mark: “No, that doesn’t count. You don’t toil when it’s a hobby farm.”

Me: “Good point. Grandpa probably enjoys growing the peppers.”

Mark: “Unless he secretly hates growing peppers. And the hobby farm is actually some kind of harsh, self-imposed penance.”

Me, considering the twenty-three acres: “Hmmm. That would explain a lot.”

Mark: “The problem is that it then raises a few more questions, wouldn’t you think?”

Oct 21, 2005

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Mmmmm *smack smack*. Needs just a little bit more.

Tell me this:

Why, in a meatloaf recipe, right after the instruction to thoroughly mix herbs, spices, rolled oats, and egg with several pounds of raw, bloody ground beef, is the next instruction “Salt to taste?”

Oct 21, 2005

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DarwinCatholic.

They linked to me, so I’m linking back under Quid Pro Quo on the right.

There’s some good stuff up on the front page right now. I particularly liked this moving post. Here’s another good one.

Oct 20, 2005

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A point I hadn’t thought of: Fatherhood, Creatorhood, God.

A good reflection over at Pontifications begins with this observation:

The truth of the matter, then, is that while God was always Father, he was not always Creator or Maker.

Short, but it’s a neat point, isn’t it?

The writer includes the caution against reading too much time-sense into "while" and "was always" and "was not always" — because, of course, one of the things Created or Made was time itself.

Instead, read it this way: Creatorhood is not an essential, inherent, or defining characteristic of God. God might have chosen not to create, only to be. But Fatherhood is indeed an essential, inherent, defining characteristic of God. God has always possessed Fatherhood and Sonship and… something… that proceeds from the union of Fatherhood and Sonship. Can we call it Love?

Whatever Fatherhood means within the Godhead, we give it that name because we were told to (cf. the Gospel of John); and what fatherhood means to us on Earth, it must mean because God created it in order to give God’s Fatherhood the same name, to tell us something about it.

First Fatherhood; then creation; then fatherhood. Some people fear that the current attack on fatherhood — the devaluing of men and the celebration of boys, the fatherless children, and the like — is a recent and depressingly successful diabolical attack, meant ultimately to destroy our concept of God as Father.

But how successful can these "recent" attacks be? Earthly fatherhood, we are told, has never been what God ordained it to be. There never was on earth a father or a son until after the fall, when Adam knew Eve his wife and she brought forth Cain. We have never seen a father of the kind God intended. And yet, by the time 30 A.D. rolled around, after millennia of further decay, God expected us to see and know enough about what fatherhood should be, enough that He still employed that impossibly archaic prelapsarian metaphor.

Can fatherhood today be farther from fatherhood in 30 A.D., than 30 A.D. was from before the Fall? I don’t think so. The glass is smeared heavily, but it could not have been crystal clear two thousand years ago. This is not to say that we shouldn’t bother keeping it as clear as we can, maybe even rubbing off some of the grime. The point is, fatherhood was a serviceable metaphor then, and it is serviceable now. And it can only be so if God expects us to understand, enough, what fatherhood means to Him. He expects us to comprehend the ideal even though all our examples are woefully imperfect. Yes, they are bad now, but they always have been very, very bad, compared to the father God made Adam to be.

An important point: Although the world has seen no father of the kind God intended, it has seen one son. We have a perfect example of Sonship, if we can only sift from Him the features that are essential, inherent, defining (begottenness, obedience) from the incidental (Middle-easternness, celibacy). It isn’t as easy as you would think (male? firstborn?)

Oct 20, 2005

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Understanding the other side: SSM.

Maggie Gallagher has been guest-blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy all week, patiently explaining the legal, economic, and social case against ratifiying same-sex unions as "marriages." The first post is here, October 17th at 10:34 a.m., or (for a while anyway) you can just go to the main page and scroll around.

This is Maggie’s goal for the week:

I’ve learned from much experience that when two intelligent people cannot even understand how the other person’s can possibly believe their own argument—that’s when something really interesting is going on.

I have no illusions I’m going to spend this week persuading people to change their minds on gay marriage. So I’d like to try to do something else big and important: to “achieve disagreement”. To figure out for myself, and maybe for you too, what has changed that makes the original, cross-cultural, historic understanding of marriage literally unintelligible to so many of this country’s best and brightest. In the process, maybe some advocates of gay marriage will understand why, quite apart from any disagreement about sexual orientation, so many Americans are deeply disturbed by the idea of gay marriage.

She’s trying to get opponents to understand her position.

I read somewhere (sorry to haul out that canard) that classically, a student of debate and rhetoric first had to learn to accurately summarize the position of the other side. Unless he could state the opponent’s position clearly, to the satisfaction of the debating opponent himself, the debater was not considered fit to make his own arguments.

It makes sense on two levels. First, why should you score points for arguing against a position you clearly cannot understand? Second, why should an intelligent and worthy opponent want to debate you if you cannot respect him enough to enunciate his position with your own voice?

The comments are quite hostile, but I have great hope that many regular VC readers will come away with a renewed appreciation for the arguments from "the other side."

Next week, Dale Carpenter, a proponent of same-sex marriage (and a lawprof from my own University of Minnesota), will be guest-blogging. I am looking forward to reading his arguments and hoping that through them I will be better able to understand and argue against the most cogent positions promoting SSM.

UPDATE: I asked one of her detractors, and by no means the least articulate, in the comments to try to summarize Maggie’s position accurately. He summed it as follows:

So, in her view:

1. Marriage is not marriage if two people marry who either know they are not interfertile….or have no intention of engendering babies together.

2. Use of AID, or adoption, doesn’t count. It’s still not marriage if the couple intend to adopt or plan to have children via artificial insemination.

See what I mean? He actually cannot do it. How on earth can two people argue if they mischaracterize each other so poorly?

Oct 20, 2005

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I know me some famous people.

Mark says that his high school buddy Tim Dixon will be the featured guest on NPR affiliate WITF-FM’s Desert Island Discs this Saturday at noon Eastern time, 11 AM central. On this program,

guests share the music they can’t live without. Every Saturday at noon, different "castaways" reveal what’s really important to them through their musical selections and discussions with host Ellen Hughes.

Wow! He must be some kind of local celebrity. After all,

Past castaways… have included Tom Ridge, Bob Edwards, "Auntie Anne" Beiler and Lorna Edmundson, president of Wilson College.

Bob Edwards! You da man, Tim.

Some suggestions. How about this? Or this? Or this?

(Listen online to WITF-FM here.)

Oct 19, 2005

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Extrinsic and intrinsic religious feeling.

Amy Welborn pointed last week to a concept, reported on in the Guardian, that I had never encountered before. Apparently, though, it’s been around for three decades. This is the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic religiosity.

Here’s what Amy excerpted:

A Harvard psychologist named Gordon Allport did some key research in the 1950s on various kinds of human prejudice and came up with a definition of religiosity that is still in use today. He suggested that there were two types of religious commitment – extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic religiosity he defined as religious self-centredness. Such a person goes to church or synagogue as a means to an end – for what they can get out of it. They might go to church to be seen, because it is the social norm in their society, conferring respectability or social advancement. Going to church (or synagogue) becomes a social convention.

Allport thought that intrinsic religiosity was different. He identified a group of people who were intrinsically religious, seeing their religion as an end in itself. They tended to be more deeply committed; religion became the organising principle of their lives, a central and personal experience. In support of his research, Allport found that prejudice was more common in those individuals who scored highly for extrinsic religion.

The evidence generally is that intrinsic religiosity seems to be associated with lower levels of anxiety and stress, freedom from guilt, better adjustment in society and less depression. On the other hand, extrinsic religious feelings – where religion is used as a way to belong to and prosper within a group – seem to be associated with increased tendencies to guilt, worry and anxiety.

So it seems that researchers who attempt to correlate other measures to religiosity properly should distinguish between its extrinsic and intrinsic forms.

Apparently, this distinction is not a spectrum:

Consistent with Allport’s view of mature religiosity, extrinsic but not intrinsic religiosity typically correlates with more dysfunctional psychological constructs. Many psychometric critiques and modifications of the scales have been published. The only consensus is that extrinsic and intrinsic must be treated as independent scales, not as a continuum as initially conceived.

I couldn’t find an example of the scale online (not surprising — it’s probably copyrighted), but apparently it is contained in this volume: Hill PC & Hood RW (1999). Measures of religiosity. Birmingham, Ala. : Religious Education Press.

The list of instruments in the book is very enticing! I’d like to see it. The "Scriptural Literalism" scale… the "What I Believe" scale… the "Rejection of Christianity" scale… doesn’t it sound fun? Too bad there’s no Quizilla form.

It makes me wonder whether other philosophies, community-joining, and behaviors may be called "extrinsic" or "intrinsic" depending on the reasons to adopt them. Attachment parenting, for example? Do you do it because everyone else in your circle does, because it makes you feel superior, or… because you believe in its ability to help you form a strong bond with your children, and that’s a good thing?

UPDATE. Ooo! The book is in the reference section of the local university library! And tonight’s my free night…

Oct 19, 2005

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Watch this space.

This used to be our side yard, with a lovely white picket fence. Now the fence panels lean to one side, and the posts stand alone.

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Here’s a crooked view of the lot from the street. Off to the left you can see our existing duplex. To the right is a tree with leaves turning yellow…

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It’s the river birch. I like to put my hand on its smooth, cool, translucent bark.

Sadly, it’s not long for this world. That’s because it is growing in my future dining room.

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Oscar and Milo don’t mind. They like the wooden stakes with pink flags that the surveyors put in.

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When you get your land surveyed, you sometimes learn interesting things about your neighbor’s houses. This fence is actually a couple of feet inside our property line. The addition to the neighbor’s house, a little bit wider than the red door that enters it, goes right up to our property line. Not only do we own their sidewalk, we own the grime on their siding.

It’s not the neighbors’ fault. They bought the house with the addition already there. Mark talked to them yesterday and they struck a deal where we would let them keep a strip wide enough to get from front yard to back yard, and they would let us cut down one of the trees.

Sorry about the placeholding dots. I’m still trying to figure this out.

Oct 18, 2005

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Go see…

…what’s up at the 52nd Catholic Carnival, hosted this week by Our Word and Welcome To It, another great Minneapolis blog.

I volunteered to host the Carnival in a couple of weeks. Will let you know!

Oct 18, 2005

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Dressing, for dinner.

We had a rare date on Saturday, since the grandparents were visiting; they took the kids. I put on a dress I’d been saving for an occasion that didn’t require breastfeeding. Hurray, a night out.

Mark said to me over dinner that when we get around to electing a female president, he won’t be able to stand reading all the media reports that gush on and on about what she’s wearing.

Something occurred to me. "You know, I always thought that the press’s obsession with prominent women’s clothes only showed how shallow they are, and how they don’t take women seriously, but maybe there’s more to it."

"What do you mean? There’s no point in going on and on about what the President’s wife is wearing. It’s annoying."

"The president’s wife maybe, because she’s not the politician we’re interested in. But clothes are used to send messages, and those messages might be important."

"Oh, come on. They can’t be worth all the space they’ll be given. And why would it be different with men?"

"Well, men’s clothes aren’t as variable. The suit is a sort of uniform. You can only paint with a very broad brush. Like, for instance, don’t the press always mention when at some public appearance, say in an auto factory, the President takes off his jacket, rolls up his sleeves? Isn’t he trying to send a message with that, and don’t they report it?"

"Well, sure, but it probably just says in shirt sleeves. You don’t have to go on and on about it."

"Right, because there’s not much to describe. But it makes a point. And that’s not the only thing," I went on. "Remember back when that one country had a popular revolution, and their banners were orange — "

"The Ukraine."

"Right, the Ukraine. Well, there was a bit of a buzz once when Bush was thought to be wearing an orange tie, in some speech or something, around then. And then later Cheney did. That was an obvious message."

"Well, sure."

"And don’t you remember Condi and the boots?"

"What? Was this something only the blogs cared about?"

"No, no, everybody wrote about it. Condoleeza Rice, right after she was named Secretary of State, appeared somewhere — some other country, I forget why — in this amazing, sexy, unexpected ensemble. Black skirt, a trench coat sort of thing, showed a lot of leg. But the main thing that everyone noticed was the boots. Tall black leather boots, spike heels."

"Um, that seems unusual."

"Yeah, that was the thing. We’re so used to women politicians trying hard to appear understated. This was an outfit that was calculated to get attention and to get the media talking about it. Everybody compared it to The Matrix. It said a lot."

"Like, what did it say?"

"Well, to me it said I am going to kick some serious ass. It might also have been saying, I am not going to be your run-of-the-mill Secretary of State. Anyway, my point is that the press spent a lot of time discussing it, and I think that was justified, because that outfit was meant to send a substantial message. Or rather, it was what she wanted them to do. She exploited them perfectly."

"Okay."

"And my point is that if we do have a woman president, what she wears will probably be very, very carefully considered, for that reason. There are a lot more messages that can be sent with women’s clothes than with men’s. And an evening gown is a bigger banner than a tie."

"Well, I still contend that the press will probably expend a lot more energy reporting on a female president’s clothes than the message warrants."

"Undoubtedly. I’m thinking of having the panna cotta. How about you?"

"Mmm. Flourless chocolate torte."

Oct 17, 2005

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Can I do this? Photoblogging?

Testing, testing.

Milo, trying to grab the new itsy-bitsy, cheap digital camera I bought just for this kind of thing.

What do you think? Still blurry, I know, I know.

Oct 17, 2005

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