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].

  • Teaching young children to use knives.

    Jamie asked me to write a bit, in the Sane Mom Revolution tradition, about training toddlers to use real knives.   Jamie was thinking about this post from when my 9-y-o daughter was about three and a half, which featured this shot:

    6a00d8341c50d953ef01310fd8d5a6970c-800wi

    In that picture, my daughter is using a serrated knife with a rounded tip to strip collard leaves off the stems for me.

    + + +

     When I was a young mother with my first child and all my theories were new and untested, I was very fond of a book called The Continuum Concept, by Jean Liedloff.  

    (You thought attachment parenting was crunchy?  Meet something crunchier.)

    I foresee someone raising their eyebrows that a person like me would find something to like in TCC, a book which has been roundly criticized by a large number of people across the spectrum of parenting philosophies and social positions, for a number of reasons.  I'm still fond of it.  If you should decide to pick it up, my advice is to consider it a philosophical memoir rather than a work of scientific anthropology.   The key takeaway concept:   humans thrive best in an environment which contains those cues which our nature evolved to expect* from its environment.

    [*N. B.  You can substitute for "evolved to expect" the phrase "was designed by God to expect" if you want, it works just as well.]  

    That goes for surroundings (sunlight, mother's milk, a certain cycle of seasons of hunger and plenty, earth beneath our feet) as well as social cues from others (language, interaction with siblings, adults with work that can be imitated).

    So, Liedloff is writing informal observations of a group of people living in the South American rainforest among whom she resided for a time, and she commented about how the young children are surrounded by real dangers and yet rarely (note: not "never") are seriously injured by them.

    One of the most striking [dangerous situations] is the omnipresence of machetes and knives, all razor sharp, and all available to step on, fall against, or play with.  Babies, too young to have learned about handles, picked them up by the blades and, as I watched, waved them about in their dimpled fists.  They not only did not sever their own fingers or injure themselves at all, but if they were in their mother's arms, they managed to miss hurting her either…

    The boys, from the age of about eighteen months, practiced archery with sharp arrows, some enthusiasts carrying their bow and arrows about most of their waking hours.  Shooting was not confined to designated places, nor were any "safety rules" in effect.  In my two and a half years there I saw only the one arrow wound I have mentioned.

    …And there are the rivers, in which … a child swimming farther out in the current than his strength and ability allow has a good chance of being smashed on the rocks or… branches…. The children who bathe and play in the river every day must gauge their ability accurately under all conditions.

    The operative factor seems to be placement of responsibility.  The machinery for looking after themselves, in most Western children, is in only partial use, a great deal of the burden having been assumed by adult caretakers…. The continuum [by which Liedloff means our human ability to adapt, with limitations, to our environment] withdraws as much self-guardianship as is being taken over by others.  The result is diminished efficiency because no one can be as constantly or as thoroughly alert to anyone's circumstances as he is to his own…

    + + + 

    Mind you, I am not leaving razor-sharp knives and machetes about for my children to step on and for my babies to pick up.  This is, fundamentally, because I do not live in an environment where that works, where everyone is used to the omnipresence of razor-sharp knives and machetes and treats them accordingly.  I live in an environment where knives are kept out of the way, on a magnetic strip (see photo above) where no one will accidentally step on one or slice their hand by mistake when carelessly reaching for a whisk.

     And so I work with my children and knives in a way that makes sense for that environment: the environment where knives come out when it is time to cook, and are put away when the cooking is done.

    But I still can use the takeaway here:  I prefer my child to take some of the responsibility for keeping herself safe from knife wounds.  If I take all of the responsibility, keeping the knives safely locked away — well, that only works until I make a mistake, or until she enters an environment that I cannot control.  If I teach her to use a knife correctly and carefully, and step back so she knows she has to be careful, then she can protect herself even if I forget and leave one lying about.

    + + +

    I've had the knife shown above since my first child was pretty small.  It began life as a combination knife/cheese spreader that came with a picnic set we received as a wedding present.  When I wanted it to become a child-sized knife, Mark cut the handle shorter with some power tool or another, and used a Dremel to ever-so-slightly blunt the serrations, which had been quite sharp.

    I mention this just to note that the most important thing for starting to teach a small child how to use a knife may well be to choose a "starter knife" that doesn't strike fear into your heart.  You're not going to be very confident in your child's ability if, every time he picks it up, you visualize him falling off the stepstool and landing on the point of the knife.  Choose a knife that you're going to be comfortable letting your child actually use, holding it with his own two hands.  

    The non-pointy tip of this knife means I don't worry about death-dealing stab wounds.  And that was important for me, personally.  YMMV.

    + + +

    Although the tip is rounded and the serrations have been slightly blunted, the edge of this knife is still sharp.  Sharp enough to cut most vegetables, and — crucially — sharp enough to cut your fingers, too.  Probably not a maiming, stitches-requiring wound (with blunted serrations, you'd have to saw at your thumb a little bit) — but enough to hurt and bleed and need a Band-Aid.

    And that brings me to the next point about teaching kids to use knives.  It's good for them find out that careless knife work can hurt them.  I don't particularly want to run to the ER, so for early knife work I chose a less-than-razor-sharp knife.  But I welcome that first moment when a child tries to cut the zucchini while holding it, instead of having it flat on the board, and –zzzing — she has a minor, painful cut on her palm.   And then while I'm bandaging her up we can talk about why that happened, and how she can prevent it from happening the next time.

    + + +

    Here are three types of knives that can work:

    IMG_1677

    Top:  My child-sized knife, the one my daughter is pictured using in the first photo.  Middle:  a piece of toddler cutlery from IKEA (not as sharp; will cut butter and zucchini and avocado).  Bottom:  a spreader (the tip is curved, which makes it less useful for cutting, but is good for learning how to use a knife to spread).  

    I've also heard good things about the knives that come in a pumpkin-carving set (take note!  those might still be on sale somewhere!), the plastic "lettuce knives," and a wooden-handled "crinkle-cutter" like this one.   

    (Montessori suppliers, like the one at the previous link, often have tools sized for children — here is a plastic knife that would work for a child, here is a hand drill for woodworking, here is a saw.  Although my husband, who does more woodworking than I, prefers to teach children to use a coping saw, and to saw with a miter box.)

    + + +

    Once the knife is selected, you are mostly teaching children to observe the same knife safety guidelines that the adult cook should observe.  Familiarize yourself with these!  Articles can be found all over, and some comprehensive cookbooks will include an introduction.

    See, e.g., here, here, here.

    + + +

     The next thing to do with small children who are first using knives is to prep them for success.  Some things are hard to cut; some things easy.  Some things start off hard but get easier after they have been trimmed.  

    Don't give a toddler a butternut squash or a whole carrot.  How about a peeled banana for her snack?  How about a stick of cold butter that needs to be added in pieces to the pastry flour?  How about a zucchini, halved lengthwise and placed flat side down so it can't roll, and the ends trimmed off?  

    Later, if the knife is sharp enough, the vegetable can get harder; children will be able to slice a potato, for instance.  But keep trimming the vegetables (halving the potato, for example, or cutting the cantaloupe into peeled wedges for her to cube). They may as well not deal with vegetables that will roll until they've really mastered slicing.  You're modeling a practice that's good for grownups to use too:  mise en place.  After a while  you can teach how to trim an onion or a zucchini to get it into that no-roll, easy-to-chop form.

    + + +

    Early on teach them always to put the vegetable on a cutting board, never on the counter or on a plate (a stray stroke down onto the turned-up edge can flip it), and certainly never to hold the vegetable in their other hand.  (You may have to refrain from using a paring knife to peel apples in the child's line of sight for a time, or they are sure to copy your apple-in-hand technique.)

    At first teach them how to hold the handle of the knife with one hand and place their flat palm on top of the blade, and push down to cut a large, not-too-hard vegetable.  (This works with any knife, and the crinkle cutter is particulary good.)  With one hand's fingers wrapped around the handle, and the other hand's fingers flat and above the blade, a finger cut just won't happen.  Watch, and correct the child if she bends her fingers down, or tries to cut with one hand while repositioning the food with the other hand.  

    You're not teaching a useless skill here.  This flat-hand-on-the-blade technique, with a bit of rocking added to it, is the same one that adults use to mince garlic or dice onions with a chef's knife.   

    + + +

    Advanced knife work does involve putting the fingertips more in harm's way.  We do often need to hold food in position with one hand while cutting it with the other.  This bit is tricky even for grownups sometimes, but the most fingertip-safe way to hold a vegetable while cutting it is to curl your fingertips under slightly so that the part that protrudes the closest to the blade is part of the knuckle.  Yes, you might graze your knuckle, but (unlike a fingertip) you can't actually sever it.  And it's a slightly unnatural way to hold a vegetable (until you are used to it), so while you are learning it forces you to be attentive.

    + + +

    I suppose I would be remiss if I didn't mention that in the workplace, frequent users of sharp knives sometimes use cut-resistant gloves on the non-dominant hand.  But I doubt these come in child's sizes, and anyway, I wonder if the awkwardness and loss of sensation might not create more problems than it solves for the ordinary kitchen user.

    + + +

    All along, the most important thing to teach children who use knives is attentiveness. You should stay close by, not because you need to hover to keep them safe, but because there are many opportunities to teach features of knife safety that they might not think of on their own.  Things like:

    • Don't climb down from your stool to retrieve a dropped vegetable while your knife is in your hand.  Put the knife down on the counter, then climb down.
    • Don't let any part of the knife stick out over the edge of the counter when you put it down.
    • Don't let any part of a cutting board stick out over the edge of the counter.  (If there's a knife on the cutting board, it could be knocked off).
    • Don't let the baby climb up onto your stool with you while you're cutting.  Call for help and I will take him away.
    • Don't gesture with the knife.  (NAG, NAG, NAG)
    • Don't let people take bits to eat off your cutting board while you are cutting.
    • Don't climb down from your stool to put the knife in the sink while your knife is in your hand.  Put the knife on the counter, then climb down, then carry the knife to the sink.
    • Don't try to watch a screen or read a book while you cut.

     Later, these lessons can become more advanced cooking lessons.  Time in the kitchen with a child is eventually rewarded — if nothing else, you may wind up with your own prep cook or even sous-chef.  And we all could use one of those.

    —

    |

    7 comments on Teaching young children to use knives.

  • A strange turning point.

     

    In the last couple of weeks, as I rushed around with Mark and without Mark trying to pull items together to help my grandmother when the relative who lives with her was hospitalized, I had the oddest impression.

     

    It went like this: This is the week when I began to grow old.

     

    Seriously: Maybe the feeling will go away, but I have taken away from it this very strange gut-level feeling that, when I am myself elderly and I look back upon my life, October 2015 will turn out to be a turning point, a hinge around which the whole neatly folds in half.

     

    It seems unlikely that I have received the gift of prophecy and that my span will turn out to be exactly eighty-two years, so something else is going on here. What is it?

     

    + + +

     

    Well, a lot went on in the past few weeks, for sure.

     

    I found myself suddenly an advocate for not one but two older relatives, my truly elderly grandmother and another, not-quite-old-enough-for-Medicare relative with a severe health problem and a lack of insurance. I wasn’t alone — I have two cousins and a brother, and the four of us passed information back and forth in a Facebook Chat window for the whole time, with one out-of-state cousin making a lot of the necessary phone calls and the other two, juggling job and other family responsibilities, stepping in where they could. And I had a lot of support from Mark and his parents, who took all the children on short notice.

     

    The transition, although it was temporary, was jarring. My primary work is usually my own children’s education, from the teenager all the way down to the toddler. I am engaged most of the time in the same sort of thing I was doing when I was about 27. Suddenly, instead of mother of small kids I became for a couple of weeks the adult daughter caring for elderly and ill relatives. Never mind that I am technically the granddaughter here. This is the kind of thing that I associate with women whose own children are mostly grown; the women in my family who have spent a lot of time concerned about their parents’ generation have done most of that in their own sixties. I got a taste of that this past couple of weeks. And I had more than a few moments of “Aren’t I too young to be doing this?”

     

    (But what else am I supposed to do, eh? My mother died twelve years ago at 54, leaving a gap between myself and Grandma, a wound that doesn’t flare up often these days but that ached awfully these past few weeks.)

     

    + + +

     

    So I nearly gave myself a plugged duct, I was away from my nursing toddler for so many hours. Trips to the hardware store, and hours scrubbing down bedframes and wiping surfaces, and moving things around in a dusty basement, standing up from time to time to stretch my back and adjust a paper dust mask that grew sweaty and moist as the hours went by.

     

    Mark and I nearly got in a car wreck on one of those trips from the hardware store. It was just the two of us in the van, the seats folded down to store a thick stack of new packing boxes, and as I drove and came past the front end of a queue of cars in the turn lane, a sports car coming the opposite direction turned left directly in front of me. I stomped the brake to the floor and felt the anti-lock system pulsing back at my foot; I saw the sports car’s rear quarter panel rotating towards me; Mark shouted, we braced for impact; and then we found ourselves still driving, unscathed, and both of us laughing nervously, genuinely shocked to find ourselves in the region of the multiverse where the collision did not happen.

     

    + + +

     

    I spent time with my grandmother, walking at her speed, seeing a room with her eyes. Is this chair sturdy enough to lean on? How far is it to the next doorway? Should we take the steps which are closer, or go around the long, no-steps way? How will we hold this heavy door open wide enough to go through together, with her leaning on my arm?

     

    I spent time explaining my ill relative’s complicated insurance history, and history of poor self-care, to the social service staff at the skilled nursing facility. Privacy laws prevented them from telling me anything about my relative’s condition, but no rule prevented me from, for example, warning them that my relative (and the relative’s belongings) had come from a house terribly infested with bedbugs. (They were visibly grateful that I told them.)

     

    In my grandmother’s living room emptied of its infested furniture, sitting on wooden chairs and at a table pulled from various other rooms of the house, I met a representative from a company that provides in-home services to elderly people: laundry, light housekeeping, errands, meals, eventually more intense care. We discussed what Grandma needs and doesn’t need. Gradually it became clear that Grandma, who knows what she wants and is completely mentally competent and financially solvent, does believe that she would benefit from having someone to come in and do her laundry, but emphatically does not want to bring in any hired helpers unless she is certain that doing so won’t hurt my other relative’s feelings.

     

    In the privacy of the car, later, I wept. I gnashed my teeth.

     

    + + +

     

    Meanwhile, my children were enjoying a last romp around Mark’s parents’ farm. Yes, a last romp: my in-laws are selling the twenty-something acres of orchards and fields and gardens and ponds, the barns and sheds and greenhouses and tractors. They are looking forward to a future with more travel, more visits to the grandchildren, more time with their three adult kids who live in three different cities. Time and attention if not love being a zero-sum game, that means less attention available for fruit trees and farmers’ markets. The weeks we stayed were also weeks of watching my mother-in-law wonder how she was going to pack up her sewing room, weeks of wondering when that appraiser was going to come through.

     

    The new house will be large enough to host us all at holidays, but there will be no farm nor field nor pond. We will miss it. It makes my heart hurt a little to think that my youngest son will not remember the old home place, nor sit on Grandpa’s lap to steer the tractor. Mark has known other homes in his childhood, but I haven’t known him or his family in any other place; it has been a home to me since before he and I were married.

     

    But even though we are going to miss it, there is no denying the sense of downsizing now while the two of them don’t actually have to, and can take the time to do it right. We have learned a lot from those two and they still have a lot to teach us.

     

    + + +

     

    Illness, hospitalization, emergency surgery, and recuperation struck in what is left of my family of origin, too, at the same time as Grandma’s crisis. My brother and I agreed: I would focus on helping Grandma and he would focus on helping in our family of origin.

     

    This was certainly the best possible division of labor.

     

    It left me introspective.

     

    Time runs short for everyone, at every moment. And nothing we do, say, or wish — not even when we happen to notice time running short — can ever change a person who does not want to change. This is what “acceptance” can mean. It can even lead to forgiveness, of a particularly silent and one-sided type.

     

    I am dead to you. This means that I am free.

     

    I highly recommend dying to sources of harm, of mockery and deceit. I am certain that I am not the first person to come up with the idea.

     

    + + +

     

    And then a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to help her start up an invitation-only FB group called “NFP After 40.” A bit more than 20 women immediately accepted the invitations, all of us with a collective “WTF are we supposed to do now with what we’re seeing here.” I have a feeling I will be enjoying this group. Nevertheless, beginning to think collectively about menopause, coincidentally or not, certainly added to my feeling of having hit a tipping point.

     

    + + +

     

    So what happened here? Why the sudden bout of wrinkly-navel-gazing? How is it that, if I feel that way now, I didn’t feel that way before? It’s not like I had been ignorant of my status among the middle-aged.

     

    I guess… This past couple of weeks, Mark and I looked the future in the eye, just a bit. We contemplated disability, decline, disease, death. Sometimes you just can’t avoid it.

     

    When I say “This is the week I began to grow old” I do not mean, the start of a decline. I don’t mean anything bad at all. Growing old is better than the alternative. I guess, it has been a kind of a wake-up call. I saw before me many different ways of growing older, this week. I think this was a week in which I grew wiser. I hope I will look back on it that way.

     

    I know two things in a concrete way I didn’t before. The wise person looks ahead with clear eyes and prepares for the future. And the wise person knows that the future can’t, actually, be seen clearly.

     

    What I do with this new knowledge, well, I am not sure yet. I suppose it depends still on the present.

    —

    |

    5 comments on A strange turning point.

  • Debugging Grandma.

    “We really won’t have time to miss any school this year,” I remember saying at the beginning, “we’ll have to make up any time we lose.”

    Remind me not ever to say something like that again.

    + + +

    So, I am in a hotel suite just outside my hometown with my sleeping toddler and my sleeping 94-year-old grandma. I found a place with separate sitting rooms and a pullout sofa, so the baby would not disturb Grandma, and a full-service restaurant, so we could stay here all day.

    We are here in this hotel because today Grandma’s house is being treated for a massively terrible bedbug infestation. Do you know what a scourge bedbugs are? If you do not, now is the time for you to take a side trip to Google and educate yourself. I have dealt with roaches, and I have dealt with mice, and I have dealt with head lice, and I would take all of them over bedbugs in a hurry (I guess as long as the mouse infestation did not give me hantavirus; one thing that you can say about bedbugs is that they do not carry disease).

    My grandma is really a very remarkable lady. She is frail now, but has only really been frail since she was 88 or so; up till then she always seemed the same to me, although maybe my cousins and brother would tell me that my memory is off or that my impressions were poor. She moves around by herself slowly, and you think she is tottering and in danger; but as you watch her, you see that she moves carefully, and pays attention to where she puts her feet. If you walk with her and give her your arm for support, you find (because with your arm out you are thrown a bit off balance) that you are struggling a little to keep up. She keeps track of her medications by lining them up in order on the kitchen windowsill, and every morning and evening after she takes her pills she sits down and enters them by hand in a notebook log, and marks the date. (The log also records COFFEE in its proper place, between the meds that must be taken on an empty stomach and the meds that don’t have to be.) She keeps her checkbook register meticulously, paying all her bills and carefully entering them, along with $5 checks to every direct-mail charity who asks her for money and the occasional $11.49 payment to random sweepstakes contests, which my cousin had warned me Grandma thinks she’s really going to win (more on that later).

    Grandma was widowed 35 years ago; my grandpa, a plumber with his own business, died at 59 when I was five. I barely remember him, but he is legendary, and my impressions from the family stories are of a man who could be loving and exasperating, rough and gentle both. My mother often reminisced that he would shed tears whenever he saw anyone perform anything well or beautifully. There is also a story that he refused to leave a baseball game (or some other sports event?) when my grandmother went into labor, and the baby — I don’t remember which of her three children — was nearly born on the way to the hospital. I really only remember sitting on his lap, playing with him with a deck of cards marked on the back with the name and address of the plumbing business.

    After he died, Grandma became a world traveler. She took at least one trip a year throughout my entire childhood, with the same tour group. She never made it to South America, but she has been everywhere else. Stacks of photo albums prove it. She took my older cousin to the British isles, she took the next cousin to southeast Asia, she took me to the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, all when each of us were fourteen. Her last trip was to London to go Christmas shopping. I don’t remember when that was.

    + + +

    So, another relative whom I love very much, who values privacy, has been living with Grandma and watching out for her for several years now. This relative has had some health problems of late that got worse and worse over the past few months and maybe 5 weeks ago became uncontrollable and dangerous. The relative was then suddenly hospitalized, although not so suddenly that there wasn’t time for the relative to line up half a dozen of the relative’s own friends to bring Grandma groceries and check on her every day. (Everybody who meets my grandma adores her. It was not hard to get people to promise to bring her food and fix her thermostat when it went on the fritz.)

    One of my cousins who, of the four grandchildren, lives closest (same state, different city), and on whom a lot of the responsibility has fallen because of that proximity, went to visit Grandma at Grandma’s house and discovered the bedbug infestation. They had had them before, and it had been treated by Terminix twice, but apparently neither treatment eliminated them completely; and when the population grew a third time, the health problems of my relative had interfered with her ability to act promptly, and so the infestation had grown unchecked for several months.

    So my cousin contacted the rest of us, and for a variety of practical reasons, it turned out that Mark and I were the ones best able to respond. We were delayed about three days because of some of Mark’s work responsibilities. Then we piled everyone in the hastily-packed car and drove out of town.

    + + +

    The bedbugs in Grandma’s house being descended from the badasses that had survived two applications of pesticide, my cousins had selected a different kind of treatment. Heaters and fans and blowers are to be brought in to raise the temperature to 140 degrees everywhere in the house.

    Mark and I left the kids with his parents and showed up Wednesday morning with the checklist that the new exterminator (not from Terminix) had given us. We needed to remove all loose items from the rooms, take all the clothing (except hanging clothes in closets) away to be dried on high (the kill step) and washed and dried again, disassemble all the beds, empty all the drawers, take everything off the walls, remove all papers and books to be later fumigated before returning to the house), remove all outlet covers and switchplates, unplug everything, and take the wallpaper border off the upper walls.

    Since Grandma’s house, though tiny, was packed top to bottom with her collections of antique glassware, porcelain plates and figurines, photo albums, and travel souvenirs, this was a formidable task.

    It took three days. We fell into the traditional roles that seem to work so well: Mark mostly dealt with the furniture and switchplates and things, and I dealt with the clothes. There wasn’t time to sort, really, so I packed all the clothes and towels and bedding in the house into thirty clear kitchen garbage bags, tied them shut and marked each with a knot of orange ribbon, and piled them in the living room. The next day I piled them on the lawn, put them four at a time into clear contractor bags, tied those off, and tossed them in the tarp-lined back of my van. Then I spent six hours at a laundromat with wifi, although there was little waiting time. It takes so long to load that much laundry into machines that by the time the last load was in, the first load was done. I hardly stopped moving for six hours.

    One bright and pleasant spot: my best friend from high school stopped by between places she had to be, and kept me company folding clothes with me for an hour.

    Those done, I bagged the clothes back up again, this time marked with a knot of green ribbon, and hauled them back to the house, to be stored in the bug-free basement until the treatment ended.

    + + +

    Meanwhile Mark busied himself at the house. The second and third day, we brought our 15yo son to help. He moved furniture, scraped wallpaper, fetched and carried. He also spent a fair amount of time with his great-grandma, asking questions about the items he was helping pack into boxes, sorting the old foreign coins. He was delighted to discover a small container full of steel pennies from World War Two; when Grandma offered them, we gave him permission to accept these as a gift in exchange for his work.

    Mark t
    old us later, “I can tell that it was a plumber who hung that curio cabinet, with the figurines.” It had been attached to the wall bolts with the kind of nut you use to install a toilet. We assumed it had been my grandpa who hung the cabinet, but Grandma told us my uncle — also a plumber/pipefitter — had done it.

    I do not get back to my hometown very often, mostly on busy holidays. We all spent more time talking with Grandma over those three days than we had in the past several years. As the days wore on, I grew to realize that she really is still on top of everything. Mark had to ask her a lot of questions about various papers he came across, so he could store them retrievably; she carefully explained details about each insurance policy (sometimes misremembering the most up-to-date name of the insurance companies, due to mergers and takeovers across the generations, but remembering accurately the value of each policy and an overview of the coverage details). Occasionally she picked up her checkbook register to confirm dates and amounts. Wanting to know if Grandma would need to be taken to the bank to move money from savings into checking, Mark asked about her accounts, and received more details than he needed about Grandma’s system of automatic deposits.

    At the end of the third day Grandma and I decamped for the hotel, while Mark stayed to meet the exterminator.

    We couldn’t settle in until I made Grandma change all her clothes. Nope, I said, you can’t change into new pants and then change your shirt. Nope, not even your underthings. Everything off and into the bag to be sealed, and then you can have your new things out of this sealed bag of clean clothes.

    “Really?!” She gave me an unmistakeable I’m too old for this look.

    “Really.”

    That done, with minimal help, she combed out her hair, put it back up in a bun, freshened her makeup, got into the bedroom slippers I had bought for her that morning, and picked up the new purse I had bought on the same errand. I gave her my arm and we went down to the hotel restaurant.

    I tweeted a picture of smiling grandma to my cousins.

     

    And then a picture of my glass of wine, which all agreed I deserved.

    + + +

    Partway through dinner Grandma looked straight at me and said, “Now Erin, I know I’m probably not going to win those sweepstakes. I have enough money, and it’s something to do. Same with giving money to my charities. It’s only five dollars for each of ’em. I don’t have a lot of things to keep me busy anymore, and I like it. So I’m going to keep doing it.”

    I looked her in the eyes. She meant it.

    Well, okay then. She knows what she wants. I’m going to listen a little harder from now on.

     

     

    —

    |

    1 comment on Debugging Grandma.

  • The expert’s temptation.

    This year in home education, a milestone I've looked forward to:  my eldest son, now in tenth grade, begins General Chemistry.  Also precalculus — not quite as fun for me to teach as proof-based geometry was, but still, it makes me smile.

    For a long time, I didn't expect to teach General Chem at home, even though I'm entirely capable of it.  Because:  labs.  Mark may be quite handy around the house, but I didn't expect him to construct me a fume hood.  And how to dispose of used reagents safely?  And —  all that glassware!  I knew, of course, that one can buy a fully-stocked chemistry kit for homeschoolers; all the catalogues have them.  But I guess I have been a bit snobbish about chemistry:  I never really thought a home-grown chemistry lab could be adequate.  I wanted a proper laboratory experience.

    I mean, good enough if you don't have other options, sure.  But we do have other options.  Here in Minnesota, high school juniors and seniors can take courses for credit at a number of local colleges and universities for minimal cost.  (The program's also open to high-scoring sophomores who attend institutional high schools, but not to homeschooled sophomores.  Go figure.)  I have been telling people for years that I intended to have my kids take chemistry in their junior year through the college-credit program, especially so they could take a course in a "real" laboratory.  I figured that we could do physics at home instead.

    And then as sophomore year approached, I found myself thinking:  How involved is a first-year high school course anyway?  

    I personally racked up a lot of time working with laboratory equipment in high school, it's true.  But now that I think of it, some of that was in the second-year course (yes, I had two years of high school chemistry — also two years of physics).  And a lot of it was extracurricular activity, such as setting up demos for the summer elementary school chemistry camp, and hours of prep for inter-scholastic science competitions, and sometimes just messing around in the back prep room that joined the two chemistry classrooms.  (Was there really a glass jar half full of mercury on the bottom shelf, glistening dully through a thick layer of dust? Or have I manufactured that memory?  It seems that by 1990 such things should have been long gone.)

    Anyway — what labs do first-year students really do at the lab bench?  Flame tests (not the stupid kind involving methanol, but just putting saltwater-damp probes into Bunsen flames).  Weighing a precipitate to find how close you came to theoretical yield.  Calorimetry — in practice, this consists of known masses of ice and warm water mixed in a Styrofoam coffee cup with a thermometer thrust through an insulating lid.  I remember the most difficult lab, in the sense of being easy to screw up so that you had to start over and risk being late for English class, being acid-base titration with its impressively towering buret and frustratingly sticky stopcock.  I vaguely remember doing one thing that required a crucible.

    Anyway, I spent some time researching, and I found a microchemistry lab kit and manual that began to make me think that we could do an adequate job with the laboratory at home.  Microchemistry:  why didn't I think of that before?   Tiny quantities means less waste, mitigation of safety hazards, and next to no disposal issues.   And after all, there will be a chemistry lab in college.  It's not like this is the last chance the kids have to experience laboratory work.  The fundamental skills of observation, meticulous direction-following, keeping a good notebook, writing detailed laboratory reports are the same everywhere.  

    It's the perfect example of how to play to the strengths of this homeschool while mitigating its weaknesses (like no fume hood or convenient hazmat disposal.)

    IMG_1004

    Paper chromatography lab, one of the first in the manual.  With a toddler in the house, the safest place to work is a relatively inaccessible upstairs room with a large table.  A pitcher of tap water and a plastic dish tub serves as a portable sink.  Distilled water comes in plastic jugs at the grocery store.  I purchased a plastic eyewash-station bottle (green-lidded bottle) and sterile eyewash solution from an occupational safety supplier.

     

    IMG_1005

    Microchemistry lab supplies use small quantities, measured dropwise from calibrated dropper bottles and reacted in the tiny wells in plastic reaction plates (there are 96 wells in the plate at my son's elbow).  The reused glass yeast jar contains fruit juice from the kitchen — one of the liquids subjected to the chromatography lab along with bromophenol blue, copper nitrate, and assorted household dyes.

    + + +

     I'm not just teaching my own son, but two other teenagers.  We meet twice a week for 45 minutes, and if you're thinking, "That's not nearly enough lecturing to teach high school chemistry," you're right.  I wish I had time to teach the teens by lecture 4 times per week.  

    If we took two years to get through general chemistry, I could do it; that's exactly how I taught proof-based geometry, which went swimmingly and was a lot of fun too.  The kids studied geometry at half-speed with me for two years, and on the other days of the week they studied algebra at half-speed for two years.  At the end of two years, they had one credit of geometry and one of algebra, just as if they'd done them sequentially.

    (It occurs to me now that for future cohorts of children, I might be able to do something similar with science:  Chemistry at half-speed in a full lecture format, while the kids study some other thing at half-speed the other two days of the week:  biology or physics, perhaps.  Two years to do two credits of science.  It could work, perhaps.  H. and I will have to talk about it.  I already have a fully written evolutionary biology curriculum that has no labs, so… it could work.)

    As it is, though, instead of following a lecture format, I am following a reading-recitation format.  I am more tutor than lecturer.  With only the barest introduction from me at the end of the previous class meeting, the students read a few sections and work assigned problems (I assign the ones with the answers in the back of the textbook, so they can check their own work).  Then when we meet around my kitchen table, I uncap my dry-erase marker and ask, "Any questions?  Did you have any trouble working any of the problems?"  We work some of the problems together, and then I tell them things like:  The most important thing to remember from this chapter is such-and-such.  Or I tell them a nifty mnemonic (how do I know it's nifty?  My high school chemistry teacher taught it to me, and I haven't forgotten it) to remember which of the gaseous elements are always found as diatomic molecules.  Or I give them a list of ions and molecular formulas that they have to memorize because they are going to come up again and again, and set them quizzes on it until they stick.

    + + +

    I'm enjoying something about this that I also enjoyed about plane geometry and am (mostly) enjoying about my son's precalculus work:  Having already set up the schedule so that I know what they are studying each week, I can walk into my class sessions cold.  There are, it turns out, a few consolations for the stay-at-home geek, and one of them is finding out twenty years on that you've still got it,  or at least can fake it in front of newbies.

    + + +

    So here's the temptation:  After a few weeks of high school mathematics and science going so well, having put a fair amount of work into designing a course that is rigorous and emphasizes the strengths of the homeschool while mitigating the weaknesses, I sometimes start to think:  Gosh, it's a good thing I've got such an extensive background in this material!  Otherwise how would I ever make sure that my kids learn this?

    It's an understandable temptation.  Who doesn't want to justify our past decisions (such as devoting years of our lives to study a field in which we never wind up employed)?  Who doesn't want to feel essential?

    But it's one that I am compelled to reject as contrary to my philosophy of education.  Not that it's bad to arrange it so that one's children can learn a subject directly from an adult who's specifically trained in that subject.  This is a great choice!  But — contrary to what many people imagine — it is not an essential choice. Being an autodidact has merits too, such as the training in self-discipline, self-examination, and resourcefulness required to find out what one does not know and then to track down the necessary resources to learn it.  Sometimes what's learned on one's own sticks better than what's drilled into one by others.  Probably the optimal mix of an education is one that includes some training by experts along with some mix of self-directed study — with the exact recipe varying quite a bit from family to family and from student to student.

    Even less essential is that the parent specifically be the expert.  Not for nothing am I teaching chemistry and geometry to two other families.  I'm their non-parent expert, brought in in an informal brain-bartering arrangement.  In return, I call on H's skills and (to me) astonishing patience and resourcefulness teaching writing and language arts to all our offspring over the age of four.  Yes, yes, I can write, but can I teach writing?  If I had to, I'd try, but I'll tell you one thing — I don't enjoy it much at all!

    I've also paid money to bring in experts (as in:  music education) and — admittedly my favorite solution — I've taught myself subjects so I could turn around and teach them to children.  I'm a quick study, but in principle anyone can do this.  One of the great advantages to this method is that the learning process is fresh in the mind.  Having just learned something presents some surprising advantages to the teacher.

    (Something I learned in engineering school:  when a graduate student is not entirely sure that he or she understands a topic, it is a normal occurrence for the student's advisor to assign the student to teach the unsteady topic to undergraduates.)

    So, yeah, we subject-experts have to watch how we talk about our expertise to other people, even to other homeschoolers, lest we plant the seeds of the idea that self-teaching is impossible, that experts are always and everywhere necessary.  The answer to "But what qualifies you to teach your own children?" always and everywhere has to be:  I am their parent.  I am motivated to give them whatever they need to see them succeed.   We often look outside ourselves for those resources, but the fundamental resource that powers it all is the resource of self-gift that resides in the very fact that we relate to them as parents are meant to relate to their children:  as mentors in all of life, and education is not really separable from that.

    The confidence that learning of some kind is out there to be grasped by anyone with the drive, whatever their immediate limitations, is a fundamental assumption of home education — and I would say, a fundamental assumption of humanity.  You can do it, if you want, and if your priorities can be so arranged.  It's an optimism that one can never have as long as one is dependent on experts.

    —

    |

    1 comment on The expert’s temptation.

  • Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap: or, How to get a dozen kids to eat their vegetables, courtesy of the USDA and some of that mayo-vinegar-sugar dressing.

    You guys!  Believe it or not, this sandwich wrap (in which broccoli slaw figures prominently) was just proclaimed unanimously a hit by three families' worth of homeschooling kids.   And also their moms. 

    I adapted it from the USDA school lunch recipes by taking the 50-serving quantity and, approximately, quartering it.  The filling is gluten-free, so have a corn tortilla option for the GF kids.

    Our kids, oddly enough, thought it was a little too sweet.  It does have a lot of sugar — but I thought the sweetness was perfect.

    Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap  (12 generous servings)

    Dressing:

    • 1/2 cup       mayonnaise
    • 6 Tbsp        white vinegar
    • 1/2 cup        sugar
    • 1/2 Tbsp    poppy seeds
    • 1 Tbsp        garlic powder
    • 1 Tbsp        chili powder
    •                     Salt to taste

    Also:

    • 2.5 lb         frozen, boneless skinless chicken breasts, cooked and diced
    • 12 oz          bagged "broccoli slaw"
    • 6 oz            bagged julienned/matchstick carrots
    • 5 oz            baby spinach leaves, chopped
    • 20 oz        canned crushed pineapple, drained
    • A mix of burrito-sized and taco-sized tortillas

    Combine dressing ingredients with a whisk.  In a large bowl, combine broccoli slaw, carrots, spinach, and pineapple.  Fold in dressing.  Chill. 

    At mealtime, serve about 2/3 cup of for a burrito-sized wrap, less for smaller taco-sized wraps.

    It took me about ten minutes to throw the filling  together in the morning before school (with chicken I'd cooked ahead of time). I served these with peas and with string cheese on the side.  We all agreed that a bowl of honey roasted peanuts would have been a nice topping for added sweet-and-salty crunch.  Some of the kids requested a side of beans to make it more "taco-like."  

    Definitely going in the permanent rotation…

     

    —

    |

    1 comment on Crunchy Hawaiian Chicken Wrap: or, How to get a dozen kids to eat their vegetables, courtesy of the USDA and some of that mayo-vinegar-sugar dressing.

  • Poetry for high school Brit Lit.

    Our high schoolers are attacking British literature this year.  H. chose the novels and asked me to choose the poetry.  I knew all too well I had to choose a concise list, which meant being rather cliché about it — or canonical, take your pick.  I ended up selecting about three dozen poems.  You decide if it's adequately represented or not — and if you would put in something else, tell me what you'd take out!

    The kids have already studied some pre-Elizabethan poetry in earlier grades.  They've read Beowulf, for instance, and parts of The Faerie Queene, and more.  (They've also read The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar.)  So I begin with…

     Elizabethan Courtly Poetry

    • "The Passionate Shepherd toHis Love" — Christopher Marlowe, pub. 1599, but written earlier.
    • "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" — Sir WalterRaleigh, 1596, a response to Marlowe. 

    Hamlet, 1599–1602 and The Tempest, 1610–1611, this year's two Shakespeare plays, fit chronologically into this section.  

     

    Post-Elizabethan poetry comes in three strands:

     -Metaphysical Poets: inventive conceits, speculative about love,religion

    • "Song" (Go and catch a falling star);
    • "Holy Sonnet X" (Death be not proud);
    • "Holy Sonnet XIV" (Batter my heart, three-personed God) –all by John Donne, pub. 1633.
    • "Easter Wings" — George Herbert, included as a sample of a "concrete poem" aka "shape poem," 1633.
    • "To His Coy Mistress," Andrew Marvell, 1649-1660.

     - Cavalier Poets, mostly courtiers in a time when Charles I supported the arts; Herrick, not a courtier, matches them in style.

    • "To Celia," Ben Jonson, 1616
    • "On My First Sonne," Ben Jonson, 1603
    • "To the Virgins, to MakeMuch of Time" — Robert Herrick, 1648
    • "Upon Julia's Clothes" — Robert Herrick
    • "Cherry-ripe" — Robert Herrick

     - Admirers of Spenser (e.g. Milton).  I skipped these.  I think they might have encountered Milton before.

     Then we have …

     Restoration poets (e.g. Samuel Johnson, Pope,Bunyan).  I skipped these too; I believe they have run into some of them before.  

    (Personally, I'm rather fond of Pope, though, and had I more time I'd have included an excerpt from The Rape of the Lock.)

    Sentimental, nature-themed poems of the later 18th century:

    • "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" — Thomas Gray, 1751
    • "To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough" — Robert Burns, 1785 

     

    Then come the

     ENGLISH ROMANTICS (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Keats)

    • "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
    • "The Lamb" (fromSongs of Innocence,1789)…
    • …and "The Tyger" (fromSongs of Experience,1794) — both by William Blake.
    • "The World is Too Much With Us"– William Wordsworth, 1802
    • "I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud"– Wordsworth, 1804
    • "Kubla Khan" — Coleridge, 1816
    • "Ozymandias"– Shelley, 1818
    • "On the Sonnet" — Keats1819
    • "Ode on a Grecian Urn" –Keats 1819

    The novel selection Pride and Prejudice, 1813, fits in here. 

    Victorians

    • "My Last Duchess" –Robert Browning, 1842
    • "Pied Beauty," …
    • "The Windhover," …
    • …and "Spring and Fall" — all by Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877.
    • Bab Ballads (e.g. "The Baron Klopfzetterheim") by W. S. Gilbert of "Gilbert and Sullivan" fame, 1864. 
    • "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"– Oscar Wilde, 1897.  

    Here go three novel selections for this year:  Bleak House (1852–1853),  Silas Marner(1861), and The Moonstone (1868).

    This brings us up to

    The 20th century.

     The final novel selection is The Man Who Was Thursday (1908).  Following come these poems, beginning with the master Eliot:

    • "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" T. S. Eliot, 1910

    Three borrow their themes from WWI:

    • "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" (with thelast line) — W. E. S. Owen, 1918
    • "The Second Coming"W. B. Yeats, 1920
    • "The Glory of Women" Siegfried Sassoon, 1918

    Another, prescient, has to do with the state and corporations peering into every aspect of the modern citizen's life:

    • "The Unknown Citizen" W. H.Auden 1938

     I included this Auden poem too, purely because I am fond of it: 

    • "Funeral Blues," Auden, 1938

     There is one WWII-themed poem:

    • "The Naming of Parts" Henry Reed, 1942

    And finally, 

    • "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," Dylan Thomas, 1951

    All these fall chronologically before our two twentieth-century plays:  A Man for All Seasons,Robert Bolt (1960), and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, 1966.

    —

    |

    2 comments on Poetry for high school Brit Lit.

  • Handwriting and script.

    A perennial lament about modern education:  kids don't write in script or learn cursive anymore.  Must be all that texting!  

    Here's an article from The Atlantic that argues, indeed, new technology had something to do with the decline of cursive — but it was technology of a couple of generations ago. It's entitled, "How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive:"

    The ink used in a fountain pen, the ballpoint’s predecessor, is thinner to facilitate better flow through the nib—but put that thinner ink inside a ballpoint pen, and you’ll end up with a leaky mess. Ink is where László Bíró, working with his chemist brother György, made the crucial changes: They experimented with thicker, quick-drying inks, starting with the ink used in newsprint presses. Eventually, they refined both the ink and the ball-tip design to create a pen that didn’t leak badly. (This was an era in which a pen could be a huge hit because it only leaked ink sometimes.)

    …

    The ballpoint’s universal success has changed how most people experience ink. Its thicker ink was less likely to leak than that of its predecessors. For most purposes, this was a win—no more ink-stained shirts, no need for those stereotypically geeky pocket protectors. However, thicker ink also changes the physical experience of writing, not necessarily all for the better.

    I wouldn’t have noticed the difference if it weren’t for my affection for unusual pens, which brought me to my first good fountain pen….Its thin ink immediately leaves a mark on paper with even the slightest, pressure-free touch to the surface. My writing suddenly grew extra lines, appearing between what used to be separate pen strokes. My hand, trained by the ballpoint, expected that lessening the pressure from the pen was enough to stop writing, but I found I had to lift it clear off the paper entirely. Once I started to adjust to this change, however, it felt like a godsend; a less-firm press on the page also meant less strain on my hand.

    My fountain pen is a modern one, and probably not a great representation of the typical pens of the 1940s—but it still has some of the troubles that plagued the fountain pens and quills of old. I have to be careful where I rest my hand on the paper, or risk smudging my last still-wet line into an illegible blur. And since the thin ink flows more quickly, I have to refill the pen frequently. The ballpoint solved these problems, giving writers a long-lasting pen and a smudge-free paper for the low cost of some extra hand pressure.

    …[M]y own writing morphed from Palmerian script into mostly print shortly after starting college. Like most gradual changes of habit, I can’t recall exactly why this happened, although I remember the change occurred at a time when I regularly had to copy down reams of notes for mathematics and engineering lectures….[I]f joined handwriting is supposed to be faster, why would I switch away from it at a time when I most needed to write quickly? 

    I loved this article, not least because it describes a wonderful example of how technology changes daily life right under our noses without our even noticing.  

    Here, the argument is that the older technology — low-viscosity ink —  caused our "traditional" script to develop ligatures between letters.  It was natural, the kind of thing that happened unless you were being especially careful, and so standard scripts, in which the joins proceeded from letter to letter in a repeated, predictable way, made it so we'd all still be able to tell one letter from another.  It was possible to print separate letters that did not have trails of ink joining them, but it took extra care and attention — and took longer.

    Viscous ink of the kind used in ball point pens does not make accidental ligatures, any more than it typically bleeds all over a paper — yes, we've all known a pen to leak in our bag or pocket from time to time, but I'm willing to chalk that up to a defective pen — do you notice all the pens that don't leak?  This state of affairs would be a miracle in the days of fountain pens only.  Since it doesn't make accidental ligatures, standardized ligatures are no longer, technically needed.

    (Yes — an individual, today, still needs to be able to recognize them, because many people choose to write in joined script.  But now, it's a choice to write in joined script, whereas in the days of fountain pens, it was a necessity.)

    Furthermore, modern pens (because they require at least some pressure to roll the ball and make the ink flow) strain your hand, especially if you're pushing instead of pulling the pen, as lefties do.  So — more ligatures means more ink to force out, and that means more strain.

    + + +

    There's a lesson here to learn (ha) about pedagogy, too.

    My second-grade classroom had a big poster on the wall showing the proper way to sit while writing and the proper way to hold a pen, the barrel angled far back and cradled by the right hand — much less upright than I held it.  I have a memory, too, of there being a picture showing how left-handers should write, with the pen-hand a mirror image of the normal writers' hand, and paper turned at an odd angle that wasn't even close to the angle I turned it.  I still suspect that no actual left-handed writers were consulted in the creation of the latter picture.

     I always thought the difference between how I hold a pen and how they told us to in school came from my being left-handed.   It never occurred to me it was because schools were still insisting in the 1980s on a grip that was developed to manage the quirks of fountain pens:

    Sassoon’s analysis of how we’re taught to hold pens makes a much stronger case for the role of the ballpoint in the decline of cursive. She explains that the type of pen grip taught in contemporary grade school is the same grip that’s been used for generations, long before everyone wrote with ballpoints.

    However, writing with ballpoints and other modern pens requires that they be placed at a greater, more upright angle to the paper—a position that’s generally uncomfortable with a traditional pen hold. Even before computer keyboards turned so many people into carpal-tunnel sufferers, the ballpoint pen was already straining hands and wrists. 

    …I wonder how many other mundane skills, shaped to accommodate outmoded objects, persist beyond their utility. 

    + + +

    I predict the Atlantic will get a LOT of letters about it, particularly angry handwritten ones.

    I have never held a fountain pen — the experience that gave the author the insight to suggest the real cause of the decline of ligatured handwriting – but other than that  my experience with my own handwriting is similar.

    Engineering school forever altered my script.  Today it is a mix of block capitals and sometimes-joined lowercase, with the "weird" cursive forms jettisoned in favor of r's that look like r's (and can't, for instance, be mistaken for the Greek letter mu).

    Photo (8)

    Three representative samples of my handwriting.  Using a gel rollerball pen, my preferred tool, although I'm also fond of a super-sharp pencil.

     

    Although I taught my kids to read script, I stopped bugging them to write in it when it occurred to me that the point of handwriting is to be legible, rapid, and non-injurious to the hand, in that order. My observation is that flowing script is none of these — unless you use fountain pens, I guess!

    I've moved my homeschool over to teaching Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting, a flexible print that can be joined, not-joined, or sometimes-joined however the student desires.

    Photo (9)

    There's a lot less grumbling about this; it's legible; and we can move on to other things.

    + + +

    I don't actually have any vitriol towards cursive, and I'm always charmed to receive a piece of real handwriting that's been written with great care.   It is a lovely art form that can bring grace to mundane occasions.  And I've experienced many times the fleeting sense of encounter that comes from picking up some scrap of household litter and discovering on it a slip of a loved one's writing.  If the loved one has been gone a long time, it is almost as if they live again, for the instant it takes your eye and mine to register it.

    What I don't like is the suggestion that lack of cursive is Another Thing Wrong With Kids These Days. It would be like shaking your head that I buy bedding for my family instead of laboriously piecing together fabric scraps from their old clothes, because quilts are pretty.

    Anyway, reading this essay is definitely going to help me move forward with a casual approach to handwriting — without guilt.  Legible, rapid, and painless.  Those are my criteria.  If one of the kids wants to, we can study Palmer script or even calligraphy — in art class.

    —

    |

    6 comments on Handwriting and script.

  • Aylan Kurdi.

    In the past few days, a particular Reuters photograph has gone viral, as they say:  a small boy in a red shirt and blue shorts, eyes closed, head turned to the side, knees tucked slightly under him, face down in the surf on the sand of a beach, dead, drowned, lost.  We are told now that his name is Aylan Kurdi, that his brother and mother also drowned.  That his father lives, distraught.  The family fled Syria for Turkey, and then attempted to reach Europe in a smuggler's boat, hoping to reach Aylan's aunt in Canada.  The boat foundered, and the father lost his children, and little Aylan in his blue velcro sneakers washed up on the beach.

    I saw the photo, and I did not linger long over it, but I did not stop seeing it all that day.  Four times I have had little boys of my own.  I have pulled little red shirts over their heads and helped them into their little blue shoes to prepare for going out.  I have seen them curled up, still wearing their shoes, with their knees tucked under them and their bottoms in the air, tired out.  

    Yesterday I drove to a doctor's office, to a pharmacy.  I listened to Aylan's aunt giving an interview to the press, telling her brother's story.  I wept behind the steering wheel.  I stopped at traffic lights, I stood in line at the pharmacy.  Everywhere I saw small boys, holding the hands of their mothers, begging their fathers for candy in the aisles.  I closed my eyes and I saw the same small boys, this one in his yellow shirt and cartoon sneakers, that one in his plaid shorts with his shock of blond hair, face down on the beach.  I can still hear Aylan's aunt speaking to the English-language broadcasters, how Aylan's father would bring home a banana for his sons to divide between them, how he says now he wants only to sit by his sons' grave, and to buy a whole banana every day to bring there, to place on the earth.  

    + + +

    Some people have asked why the photo matters.  Why did people like me not really pay any attention, or not much attention, to the Syrian refugees (to any refugees in particular), and then all of a sudden this one child has the fortune to be snapped by a Reuters photographer and everyone is talking about them?  If Aylan matters then don't they all matter?

    Why are we upset by the sight of this one boy?  We should be more upset by the thousands upon thousands who die every day of hunger, of trauma, of violence, no?  

    Some of the voices are angry.  It shouldn't be this way.  It shouldn't matter that there is a photo.  You should have cared without having to see the photo.  The facts are all there in the newspapers.

    + + +  

    There's no point in being angry at human nature.  "It is what it is," a cliché if there ever was one, but well suited for the situation.  We are creatures who evolved in close societies, not global ones.  We evolved to come forth out of still tinier societies, that is to say families; to form new ones, and to raise up our young ones within them.  We are designed to respond to the sight of a lost child before us — because (being members of a species born in families and of close societies) if we find ourselves in close proximity to a child in desperate need of help, the long experience of the generations is that the child is probably one of our own.  The sight of a lost child triggers a sense of "one of us," of belonging, and a desire to reach out and draw the child out of danger.  Stories, too, like Aylan's aunt speaking to the English-language press in her own broken voice with no translator in the way, telling about the half-banana Aylan begged daily from his daddy, do this.  For stories have also been with us from the beginning; if your voice tells me a story in my language, then the chances are good that we belong to each other, somehow.

    No newspaper report can reproduce this kind of primal trigger.  The numbers can get larger and larger.  The adjectives, more and more florid.  We can learn to understand the numbers, but we aren't wired to have a physical response.  We can't make ourselves be wired that way, unless we devote time to carefully meditating upon the numbers, upon the sobering facts, to turn them into imagined individuals.

    (And notice that the facts and numbers are "sobering" — rather the opposite effect of Aylan's half-submerged face — the photograph raises passions we sometimes forget we have; the numbers suppress them.)

    + + + 

    In the photograph, Aylan is beyond our help, and we know it, if not from the position of his body, then from the caption.  In the next photo, if we can go on to the next photo, a uniformed man tenderly cradles the boy.  And then, maybe we stop looking, or wish we had, later, when we pick up our own sleeping child.

    No, there's no point in being angry at people for caring when they see one lost boy.   You might as well be angry that we salivate at the sight of food or recoil at the sight of a scorpion.  It's a reflex for the survival of our species, and we've never developed the reflex to weep at the sight of newsprint.  We might be able to muster the will, but it is not a reflex.

    + + +

    What the governments involved decide to do about the Syrian refugees — this is a question of the newsprint sort.   I'm not saying it isn't important.  I'm not saying that the governments involved, which are after all made up of human beings, can't make their decisions from a place that is affected by photographs of lost children as well as by lists of numbers, facts, quotes.  It's possible that ordinary people (people responding to photographs of lost children) can nudge these decisions — there are ways of sending messages to the decision-makers, after all, in all but the most repressive regimes.

    There is nothing, though, that I can do for Aylan Kurdi, and not just because he is already lost, in the photograph.  It is, of course, true that the uniformed man has already tended to his body and delivered him into the hands of his grieving, remaining family; they will do for him everything else that it is fitting to do.  There is nothing I can do, and I know it at the instant that I behold the lost little body, and yet I cannot stop the leaping of the heart that would power my arms to reach out to him.  If I look at the photograph again, I feel it again.  It is physical.  I can't believe the strength of it.  And it is entirely impotent.  Not just because the little boy is dead and beyond help; it arouses me to a physical drive to rescue, and there is no object of rescue, primarily because the little lost boy I can see is not really here with me.  The photograph has tricked my deep brain.  

    It has presented me with an illusion that here is a child, that we are together, that the child is in need, and because I am the one who is near and who sees him lost and alone, I must reach him before it is too late.

    The physical response to the nearby child, the child who must be (reflexively) held dearly, remains and the higher mind cannot entirely overrule it.  Even though the higher mind has to know it's an illusion.

    + + +

    It isn't bad or wrong that we should have such a reaction to a photograph when we haven't had a reaction to mere news articles — and it shouldn't surprise us, either.   It is what it is, human nature.   Some are arguing that the lesson here (now that we've finally been touched by the previously-ignored Syrian refugee problem) is that we should channel our reaction into communications with the relevant governments, in some way that will help other little boys and girls and their parents, keep them from washing up on the beach.  And perhaps that is true.  At least the people who are closest to the refugees and can reach them, those who can make a difference — maybe they too will be moved to act, one at a time, and help.

    As for me, an ocean away:  I'm left wondering what it is that holds back the reflex, every day of my life, as I walk among the wounded who are still breathing and within my reach.

    —

    |

    No comments on Aylan Kurdi.

  • Changing room, II.

    I wanted to highlight this beautiful comment on my post Changing room, about the mixed feelings I had on putting away the diaper-changing table.

    Monica wrote:

    Wow, I'm having the same issues now that my fifth is walking.

    I nearly died after he was born, so we're thinking no more, although we always acknowledge the fact that God is in charge and may have an alternate plan.

    I read somewhere else that all the work we do to be open to life really does make us open to life (by the grace of God, of course), which means that it's hard to get to the end of the child bearing, no matter what the reason is.

    Maybe the solution is to focus our openness-to-life skills in other areas?

    There are so many ways, like being open to the life God is unfolding for my older kids, for a simple and practical start…

    This is really, really smart, and beautiful, and the last bit is exactly what I needed to hear right now.

    "Open to life" has a specific meaning when we Catholics are talking about marriage, one that we can't gloss away or substitute.  It means, rather bluntly, that we do not attempt to render our sexual intercourse sterile.  It can't mean less than that.  But it also can mean more than that, and (in my experience) it usually does.  Something different for everyone.

    Being "open to life" in the specific, ordinary way is sometimes, well, terrifying.  A few elite souls may get off lucky, and traipse through the fertile years exulting about the joy of just letting things happen as they will.

     For most of us, though, I'll bet — sooner or later comes an encounter where — forget "lie back and think of England" — you'll be lucky not to be thinking (as your newborn sleeps not far away) of that one friend you have who has two babies eleven months apart.  Or of the tone in the doctor's voice when, as you swelled near the end of your last pregnancy, she described the stress that another one could put on your circulatory system.  Or of that last, terrible grief that you don't think you can face again.

    We have our own version of morning-after regrets, too.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but probably we should have waited another day.  I'll try not to think about it for, er, ten days or so.  

    + + + 

    And what is it all?  Acts, and consequences, sometimes sad, sometimes joyful.  Something that we cannot control — no, that's not quite right — something we deliberately choose not to pretend we can control.  

    Life, in other words.  All of it.

    (This doesn't mean we can say "we are open to life" and still leave room for the sterilizing, you understand, in the guise of being generally open to the different things life can throw at us.  It just means that Monica is right, we can apply what we've learned.)

    We can be properly terrified about everything!  Not just getting pregnant.

    OK, I didn't mean that.

    No, actually, I did.  I did mean that.  

    We can have the healthy fear — the awe — that inhabits the knowledge that our lives have meaning — all the time — whether we want them to or not.

    But we can also acknowledge that our control of the situation is limited.  And that the people under our care and surrounding us are individuals with their own right to be regarded as full human beings, independent of their utility or of their demands.  And we can choose every day to treat them as such, and to be thankful for what they bring us.

    Love.  It's risky.  It's terrifying.  It's … what we do.

     

    (edited to fix missing "do not")

    —

    |

    No comments on Changing room, II.

  • What can I write in 10 minutes?

    I have 2 minutes to drink my coffee before it is 30 minutes before Mass. Slurrrp.

    The last time I stopped in before Mass the guy behind the counter said, “Free refills!”

    I said, “No thanks, I barely have time for one.”

    “Give it to you in a to-go cup,” he suggested. I just said no thanks. Probably someone who was a little more awake would have used it as an opportunity to give a reason for her hope, so to speak. I hadn’t had the coffee yet. It isn’t in my skill set anyway. Settled for a smile.

    + + +

    I am the only morning person in my family, except maybe for the 11-yo, and one of the sacrifices I make week after week is pretending to go along with the idea that the eleven o’clock Mass is just as good as the nine o’clock Mass, or the eight o’clock or seven o’clock that we could all be going to if we went to different parishes where there are more morning people.

    Today I had a bunch of stuff to do in the afternoon, like make 24 portions of chicken salad for the homeschooler’s picnic, and we have been spending church apart for the last couple of months anyway, taking turns hiding in the basement with an extremely cheerful but loud toddler. I announced that I was going to an early Mass and my husband was going to take the children (minus the toddler) to the regular one. And what do you know, I was up early enough to grab a coffee first.

    + + +

    Yesterday I posted a mild comment on FB about not being humble or kind enough to submit to playing nice with baristas at Starbucks who are required to ask me if I want “tall, grande, or venti?” I always say, “Twelve ounces.” The result was that I was gently mocked on FB for wanting to go to Starbucks at all, cf. crap coffee and unethical business practices.

    I am in my neighborhood local independent coffee shop this morning. The dark roast is, I believe, decent, although it is a bit more high in acidity than I prefer. The environment is nice and there is reliable wifi. You know, I have no idea what the owner’s personal ethics or business ethics are like. I suppose I could go up and ask him to fill out a questionnaire before I deign to buy coffee from him. I understand that in some circles it is popular to punish business owners and companies medium to large for their politics, unrelated to the stuff they sell. Suit yourself, but I can’t really get behind that attitude.

    + + +

    17 minutes to go. It is a short drive to the parish I am going to Mass at. Time to get going.

     

    —

    |

    2 comments on What can I write in 10 minutes?

  • First week back.

    A partial week, anyway, and only a partial schedule. Many years have taught me that it doesn’t pay to go from zero to one hundred percent overnight. I won’t start up with my co-schooling partner till September 14th, so till then we’ll work three days a week; and this week, we are only covering some of our subjects.

    Yesterday (Tuesday) we began by practicing waking up on time. Everyone out of bed by eight-thirty. That was hard for some of us.

    And then, eating breakfast. New thing we are trying this year: My daughter-who-can’t-face-food-till-later officially has permission to skip regular breakfast and get herself a snacky breakfast later in the morning. She has a limited set of things to choose from, though, because if you’re going to choose to eat in the middle of the morning, I want you to do it quickly and get it cleaned up. She can have Uncrustables, cold cereal, a packet of instant oatmeal, yogurt, or one of her best-beloved snacks, a mini-can of tuna. So far, so good.

    The first school-thing I do in the morning is set up checklists for the 9yo and the 11yo. On the first day they only had a couple of things: take a math test to see how much they needed to review, read for 25 minutes (9yo: Witch of Blackbird Pond; 11yo: Lord of the Flies — hey, he liked Hunger Games, so why not?), and meet me for 30 minutes to discuss the Acts of the Apostles, which we’re going to study together this year. Today was similar, except for math review instead of a test, and no Bible study. Instead I gave them each an “extra” — the 9yo was to spend time playing the recorder, the 11yo to spend time working through a drawing lesson from a book.

    My high school sophomore sat down with me to work on precalculus. I won’t be able to do a full lecture for him this hear, but I can spend ten minutes or so previewing each of the upcoming lessons. We are using an older Dolciani book, Introductory Analysis, which starts out pretty straightforwardly with set theory and logic. It’s the perfect sort of book for us because it has all the odd-numbered answers in the back, meaning I can assign the odd problems and he can check them himself, and then I can use the even problems to see how he is doing. Four lessons per week.

    This year, I have finally been pushed by time constraints to a set weekly lunch menu. Tuesday will be pizza and fruit. Wednesday will be bagels and cream cheese with cucumber slices. Friday will be either quesadillas, or (if I happen to have leftover pasta) macaroni and cheese. I will continue to rotate through this until the kids stage a hunger strike.

    (Monday and Thursday are co-schooling days, so that menu is a little more variable. H often makes salmon cake, and I often make spaghetti and meatballs, so let’s just say that’ll be the default menu.)

    The most fun part of my week was working with my brand-new kindergartener, who is excited to have his own school desk right next to my easy chair.

     

    I didn’t make him get out of his pajamas, which suited him just fine. Whereas all the other kids are ramping up slowly, I started right away with the full schedule for this 5yo.

    It feels marvelous to him. He has never had so much one-on-one time with me. Ninety minutes every day! A math lesson with a real worksheet! (He took it so seriously, and colored his squares so carefully, telling me all the while how he was working very hard to color very neatly.) A pre-writing exercise with a dry erase marker! Practice reading words! And — this never happens — half an hour to cuddle in my lap and listen to stories.

    We shall see how long the novelty lasts… but for now, it feels good to work with him.

    + + +

    Tonight: date night at the cheap family restaurant around the corner, thanks to a gift certificate from a friend!

     

    —

    |

    4 comments on First week back.

  • Changing room.

    After a few weeks of working on it, I decided that our 19-month-old was toilet-trained enough to be sure we weren't turning back.  

    So I pulled all his clothes off the changing table shelves in the laundry room, carried them downstairs, and hung them in the first-floor closet.  

    IMG_0890

    I asked Mark and my 15-year-old to carry the changing table downstairs to store it in the basement, and when that was done they carried up an old kitchen cabinet and put it in the place of the changing table.  It took some cleaning up and a cloth to hide the wood-glue stains on the laminate, but now it's another clothes-folding surface, and a place to stow the trash receptacle and some baskets for sorting outgrown clothes and lone socks.

    IMG_0893

    Today I gathered up all the cloth-diaper covers and put them in a tub and snapped on the lid, and carried it to the basement, where I left it on the changing-table shelf.  In another tub, I packed up all the infant cloth diapers, and in yet another, threw some more baby items (bibs, the bag of jumbled pieces of the manual breastpump, receiving blankets).  Down they went.

     While I was at it, I carried down the infant car seat and stowed it next to the changing table.  Then I boxed up some infant clothes in good condition, clothes that had been lying around waiting for me to do something with them.

    IMG_0894

    I hesitated with the box.  Take it out to the car, to deliver it to charity?  Or set it aside to be stowed in the deep recesses of the attic?

    + + +

    It's a matter of probability, I tell myself, not so much a matter of plans.

    Very soon I will be forty-one years old.  I have three to seven years left, perhaps, in which Mark and I might decide to try for another baby, or in which we might find ourselves surprised by one.   I've not had a surprise yet, not in seventeen years of NFP, so I count that probability low; and I don't expect that we will try for another baby, certainly not the way I expected it when we had one, two, three children.  I didn't exactly expect it when we had four; I hoped, though.  

    I'm not sure if I hope or not now.  Five is lovely, and my most recent pregnancy was hard.  

    And we talk about the future differently these days.  "Three years from now," we say, "four years from now, perhaps we can do such-and such," and we've mostly stopped adding "if we don't have another baby."

    + + +

    "We can get rid of these things," Mark pointed out, "because if it turns out that we need them again, we can afford to buy new ones."

    Yes.  I've already gotten rid of a number of things.  And on the other hand, I saved all the maternity clothes that I really liked, on the grounds that if I needed them again it would be sad not to have the good ones.  Those clothes take up  just a box or two.  And it's really only for a few years.  When I'm forty-eight I will have no reason not to toss the sealed box in the car and tote it down to the crisis pregnancy center or the charity thrift store.  It's not like I risk keeping it around for the next twenty years because I won't know if I need it or not.

    And the same for the changing table, right?  And the diaper covers?  And the last box of baby clothes?  It's just a few more years that they might come in handy.   And then I can get rid of them.

    + + +

     Probability:

    "By age 40, a woman's chance is less than 5% per cycle, so fewer than 5 out of every 100 women are expected to be successful each month. Women do not remain fertile until menopause. The average age for menopause is 51, but most women become unable to have a successful pregnancy sometime in their mid-40s."

    It's nothing you would want to count on if you were intent on avoiding pregnancy for some terribly serious reason.  And I have plenty of friends who had babies in their early-to-mid-forties.  

    Still, I also have plenty who didn't.

    + + +

    Then there's this:  If I lived as long as my own mother lived, I would not see my youngest, now a toddler, finish high school.   If I had another baby, and lived as long as my own mother lived, I wouldn't see that new one start high school.

    I can't help but be troubled by this one.

    + + +

    Packing all the baby stuff up felt awfully final, and not in a good way, even though I'm not actually getting rid of it yet.  Somehow I'm reluctant to say, "Probably we won't have another," even if that is, literally, true.   Which leaves me reluctant to do the things that one does when probably one (two, really) won't have another, like give away the favorite baby clothes and the good maternity jeans.

    I'm not sure whether the reluctance is based on a desire to mother a baby again; or on the very practical consideration that (probably) to do so would never be regretted while to choose not to do so might well be regretted, or being slow to accept this first limitation brought on by age and age alone; or simply the bitterness that always accompanies the closing of a door to the past.

     I remember feeling something like this when I was finishing college, getting ready to move on to new things, and some small part of me wanting to stay, knowing to do so wasn't possible.

    In other words, I don't know what I'm trying to hold onto here.  Is it a gift of life I desire to give?  Or is it clinging to a notion of myself as a life-giver?

    + + +

    It's a frightening freedom we enjoy.  I am healthy, Mark is healthy; we could go for it again, play the fearful and wonderful game.  We are completely aware that we could.  If we were sure we desired it, or sure we were called to it, we could rise to the challenge.

    At the same time, not being called in particular, without a particular desire (only this empty feeling at the boxing up), we are also aware that we can go on as we are, shouldering our bags and hiking off into the sunset with these five.

    Love is not a zero-sum game, but energy can be; and I sense a need to direct greater energy to my older children than I have had since the youngest first fluttered to life.  My last pregnancy was hard:  not dangerous to my life and health, just hard, as pregnancy often is.  Mothering this youngest one from babyhood into toddlerhood was beautiful, and I feel at the top of my powers; but all along I felt a pull towards those older children that went unsatisfied, and heard my voice saying "no" what felt like far too much.  "No, we can't do that because of the baby."  "No, I need you to do this instead because of the baby."

    I had to push them all away, just a bit.  My arms were full, my energy went to produce milk, the hours of the day slipped by.  I'm not saying it was the wrong thing to do; they learned to sweep the floor and cook dinner and clean their rooms, they learned to take the bus.  They learned that I wouldn't always be there for them.  Which is true.  I won't.

    But I'm not saying I liked that part of it.  And looking at my five beautiful children, one of whom I have to look up to now, I wonder if there really is enough of me to go around.   I think there is, barely, now.  But I know what it would take to push that over the edge.  Not that I'd do a bad job.  I would keep it together.  I always do.  

    But I do want my kids to remember a mother who had time for each of them.  And — looking back on the last two years — I have not.

     It was for a good cause.  A great cause!   The youngest will be there for them far longer than I will.   I'm not sorry.  

    But … which to choose in the future?  Let's just say it is not obvious.

    + + +

    "Three years from now," we say.  "Four years from now."  We think of places we'll go, things to show each other, things to experience with the growing children.  We have a vision of a new phase of our lives, the phase with no little children in it, the phase where even our youngest walks on his own two feet.

    None of it is a guarantee.  None of it is ever a guarantee.  

    I've never put the changing table away before.  I guess that is different.  I guess this is the first bifurcation between what might be and what else might be.  It feels important.  

    And at the same time it's just housecleaning.

    —

    |

    9 comments on Changing room.

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

…more to come later