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].

  • Montana trip, and a “we’re not from around here” moment.

    We’re on our way back home after five days of skiing in Montana at Big Sky Resort. It is one of my favorite mountains to look at from the bottom:

    And also from the top (well, midmountain anyway — you’ll have to ask Mark to take a photo from the actual top, because I don’t go there):

     

    Big Sky is now bigger since it bought up its neighboring little sister resort Moonlight Basin. This was a little bit of a disappointment for us, because we loved Moonlight (we’ve been there twice before); it was smaller and cheaper, with a homely little vibe that said “We are about skiing, not about seeing and being seen in your expensive gear.”

    Now it is bundled with the other side of the mountain, like the one good cable channel that you cannot buy unless you also buy all the others you don’t mind watching but you really don’t need. As I was putting on my boots in the parking lot for my first day, an older man with two young men — my guess is it was his grown sons — clomped by shaking his head, on his way back from the ticket office. “Things have sure changed,” he said. “Next year I think we’ll stay in town and drive up to Bridger.”

    But all the things we love about it are still there, so we had a great time even with a bit of sticker shock.

    + + +

    Mark’s dad and mom met us out there, which was what you call a win-win situation.

    We got to visit with them, which is always a good time.

    Chip, meet old block.

    The kids all got some wonderful grandma-and-grandpa time. Especially the one member of the family who can’t ski.

    And that meant that the six of us who do ski had plenty of time on the slopes together.

    The five-year-old skied from the lift for the first time this trip. Exciting!

     

    And Mark and I even got in some time together, on the slopes and in the slopeside restaurant and in the hot tub outside on the deck with snow blowing down on us keeping our beer cold.

    Sorry, no hot tub pics.

    We chose the more expensive route of a slopeside (sort of) resort condo, instead of staying in town and driving to the hill, because that makes it much easier for me to come back and nurse the baby without it putting an end to my skiing day. While I am not usually prone to leave my nursing one-year-old behind for hours and hours in a single week — I took the opportunity to spend some time skiing with my 14-yo and 11-yo.

    (That’s them, at the top of an expert gully called “Sticks and Stones.” I took the picture, then skied around another way and met them at the bottom.)

     

    Because babies don’t keep, it’s true, but neither do teenage boys who want to ski with their moms.

    + + +

    We had more than eight hours’ driving time ahead of us from Big Sky to Bismarck (whence I am writing this morning), so we left at six-twenty a.m. on Saturday. I usually drive the first shift, since I’m quite awake after I have had my coffee, but I gladly let Mark start the drive down to the mouth of the valley as he has logged more driving hours in the mountains than I have. It was dark and a bit drizzly, with some sloppy snow on the road, but the conditions were not slippery.

    We sipped coffee from a thermos as Mark made his way down the winding mountain road. We had not yet reached the little village with its grocery store and gas stations, when Mark interrupted me to ask, “Are those cars flashing their lights at me?”

    I looked up. There were not many cars on the road, but there were more of them driving up than down. Several came around the bend, and the posts strung along the median passed between us and their headlights, causing a flickering effect. But then I thought I saw one of them flash its brights at us. Or was it just the flickering? “I’m not sure. Do you have the brights on?” I leaned over to check and he squinted at the dashboard. No.

    “I wonder if there’s something wrong with the car?” We were both thinking of the cargo container strapped ti the top of our minivan, the one with all the ski gear in it.

    “If it was loose it would be making some noise,” I started to say, and then Mark interrupted me again.

    “Look,” he said, “there’s another one flashing at us.”

    I thought I had seen it too. “That’s weird,” I said, “that guy only just came around the bend. He didn’t have time to see us.”

    “That’s what I thought, too,” said Mark.

    “The sign says there is a turnout in a quarter mile,” I pointed out, “why don’t you pull over and check the car. Be careful,” I added.

    On the mountain roads, when there is only one lane in each direction, the roadbuilders leave a turnout every so often, a place (usually on a curve) where a wider shoulder is carved out of the mountain. Slower cars and trucks can pull over there to let the faster drivers pass, so that each slow vehicle doesn’t accumulate a long queue behind it as it makes its way down the curving road.

    Mark pulled into the next one and leaned over to rummage through the glove compartment for the headlamp we keep in the car. “Be careful,” I said again, “put the blinkers on,” and he did and shut the door. I listened to the blinkers clicking on and off and watched the swinging shadows as he went all around the van with the headlamp in his hand. I watched his expression as he came in front of the car to look at the cargo container — easy to imagine an “Oh shit” moment right the — but there was no alarm, it must be fine.

    “Nothing,” he said, getting back in and buckling up. “I wonder…”

    “Maybe we were imagining the flashing,” I said. “Those posts in front of the headlights.”

    “Maybe,” he said as we pulled out and headed around the next bend, “maybe — HOLY COW!”

    I looked up and saw the leaping shadows on the road in a strange shape that resolved itself before my eyes into a big, square rock — maybe half the size of a small refrigerator — right in the middle of the single northbound lane just ahead. There was room — the next set of oncoming headlights was just coming around the next bend down hill — Mark steered into the oncoming lane and around it, then back into our own lane. It was sharp-edged, roughly cube-shaped, and almost a meter on a side.

    “Whoa,” I said. My heart pounded.

    “That was huge!”

    “Thank you, Montana drivers,” I said.

    “No kidding,” said Mark. “I was on edge and going slow because of the flashing. I knew it was something, and not a speed trap up here, but I didn’t know what it was.”

    “I’m glad you were driving and not me,” I said after a while.

    “I wasn’t going to say that,” said Mark, “but I was thinking that.”

     

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    1 comment on Montana trip, and a “we’re not from around here” moment.

  • What is normal, and what is distorted.

    In this NYT opinion piece, Josh Barro is trying to make a reasonable, if debatable, point in the argument about tax credits for child care: such a tax credit is not unfair to families who provide care for their own children by having one of the parents forgo paid employment, rather, it’s correcting an economic situation that’s stacked against families who pay for child care out of their taxable wages.

    I haven’t run the numbers or looked closely at the child care tax credit. Likely there are many families that would be helped by it. I suppose whether it’s fair or not, targeted as it is to only families with children, and only families who make certain choices — depends on whether you think that targeted tax relief is meant to nudge people’s economic choices, or only to win support from needed demographics; and if it is the former, on what economic choices we are trying to make easier. (Is it raising children in general? Or is it a specific vision of how to raise children?)

    But what I find remarkable about the article is the language, and the vision of “normal” economy vs. “distorted” economy that it belies:

    The tax code is already hugely distorted in favor of stay-at-home parenting: Labor outside the home is taxed; household work, such as stay-at-home parenting, is not.

    …[P]roductive activities within the home are not especially different from the taxable work we do outside the home. We labor, and instead of receiving a cash wage, we receive something else we value: a clean house or a mowed lawn or a well-behaved child.

    Barro has given us a great gift here. Normally when opinion writers hold a view of the human person, or some subset of human persons, as existing to serve the economy rather than the economy existing to serve human persons, they go to some length to obscure it through euphemism. Normally people shy away from directly saying that a human being — such as a “well-behaved child” — is something that can be bought, in this case with the opportunity cost of lost wages, much like a clean house or a mowed lawn.

    But Barro is comfortable coming right out and saying it. I appreciate his candor (no, really). Because now we can discuss it openly, like adults.

    I don’t have to appeal to any sort of authority other than common knowledge about the history of the human species to assert that the original human “economy” is a quite small one: either the nuclear family, or the extended family of relatives, or perhaps a larger one of dozens of individuals. All of the individuals in such a human economy have needs; some people can satisfy some of their own needs; some people provide for the needs of others; both the satisfying, and the providing, constitute “work.” In larger groups there may be a somewhat complex mechanism for pooling the fruits of work and then distributing them for the common good. In the groups that are largest, but still small enough to be governed by shared values, the pooling might have to be enforced by social pressure grounded in those values. In smaller ones, small enough to be governed by trust, the distribution of the fruits of work can be enforced by a system of favors that are expected to be returned.

    The very smallest — family — is governed by love and attachment alone (and the size of that circle, how many degress of relationships it encompasses, might even be defined as the size of the circle of attachment). I labor to feed my baby because he is my baby and I am his mother. My older sons labor to change the baby’s diaper and tote him around because they belong to each other. Mark sits down at hte desk upstairs and crunches the numbers in the family budget every week or two, for the good of all of us, because we are his family and he is our family. That is all the incentive we need.

    Today we live in a large and complex society. It is just that we pay into a pooling system to pay for the infrastructure that we all rely upon, the roads and so on; and also that we redistribute some quantity of excess wealth to support the needy. The pooling system is inevitably complex, and imperfect, and probably requires compulsion because of the impersonal distance between the producer and the receiver of the fruits, and where there is compulsion there is always griping. That is a tax economy. It is something that people can design well, or design poorly; but it’s something we invented.

    In other words, the family economy — the labor and the distribution of fruits that takes place between household members because of their attachment and sense of familial duty to one another, and for no other reason — exists before the tax economy. And so it is improper to speak of the family economy, no matter what form it may take, as a “distortion” of the tax economy — which, like all of our labor, exists only to serve families, when you get right down to it.

    Just Another Jenny, a married mother who is the family breadwinner, recently wrote:

    Since I am in the workplace, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about the purpose of work. I think all people have the obligation to provide for their family in the best way that they are able given their nature and inclinations. I believe that only in a subset of people does this obligation include having a job. More and more I realize, I might hold a minority opinion on this matter. Non-income producing work is almost totally dismissed and having employment is held as the highest good.

    On the ole Catholic Working Mothers page, there has been some discussion about mothers discerning whether they should work full time now that all of their children are in school. Some think they should work to bring in more income, not because they have to and not because they want to, but because they feel obligated to be “productive.” I am not a member of the “you go, girl” club so I actively discourage them. I do not think they should repress their natural inclination to be present for their children before and after school in order to be “productive” during school hours.


    Why should the peace of their homes and the continuity of their schedules be disrupted in order to produce income? Obligation? No. I reject it. Why are the benefits of a homemaker dismissed? Because they do not come with a paystub? What a narrow definition of contribution and benefit we have. There is dignity in creating a warm and stable home, but we don’t seem to see it.

     

    The notion that the work of parents in the home is a problem and a distortion, in part because no tax is skimmed from it, is just another facet of this same disdain.

    Two other disturbing things I noticed about Barro’s piece.

    First, rather unusually for the twenty-first century, he pays no lip service at all to fathers who might provide some of their children’s care, volunteer in their children’s schools, and labor around the house. No, in Barro’s world only females are wily enough to shield their labor from Uncle Sam in that sneaky tax shelter, the family home.

    Second, what’s up with this?

    According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, married mothers with young children at home spend 50.7 hours a week on housework, shopping and caring for household members if they are not employed outside the home, compared with 29.4 hours spent on those activities if they are employed full-time outside the home. So, stay-at-home moms do an extra 21 hours a week of unpaid and untaxed labor…

    I get what he’s doing — trying to calculate the tax penalty for working for wages, compared to working not for wages. My beef is just with the word “extra.” If anyone is “doing extra hours a week,” it’s the working mothers. Holding a 30-to-40-hour job, those working mothers are the ones who do extra work, to the tune of 8.7 to 18.7 more hours per week.

    But, I suspect, Barro wants to make it sound as if the mothers who don’t draw a paycheck are getting away with something, somehow, so the word “extra” is tacked on to their hours. It would be more honest, and rather more supportive of Barro’s point, to say that the mothers who earn paychecks pay extra taxes while having fewer hours of leisure.

    But we can’t say that… maybe because the notion that taxes and taxable hours can be “extra” is foreign to Barro and his ilk. No, the base economy, the one Barro views as normal, the one from which he measures deviations and distortions, is the one in which honest labor is taxable labor. Work in the tax-free family economy is “extra,” something we sneakily get away with because we can.

    And fathers? Traditionally male house management work (lawn care, repairs) has value too. But there’s no guilt to be generated by accusing fathers — those who get paychecks and those who don’t — of depriving the economy of the taxes from handymen’s wages, so they all get a pass. My sneaky furniture-building, drywall-fixing, laundry-doing spouse is truly the one laughing all the way to the TurboTax download site.

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    3 comments on What is normal, and what is distorted.

  • Deliberate heart-to-heart.

    Last week this article from the NYT was making the rounds:

    To Fall In Love with Anyone, Do This

    More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes…

    I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

    “Let’s try it,” he said.

    It’s a little bit scary to think that one could just make attraction and connection happen, rapidly, in such a way. On the other hand, most people trust in random interaction to bring them together with potential mates.

    We have so little time to spare once we set out into adult life; maybe it makes sense, in some circumstances, to try to speed up the getting-to-know-you process. Arguably such a series of questions might help you spot red flags as well as attractive qualities in a potential partner.

    (The 36 questions are here.)

    The story, true to the tradition of journalists writing (partly) about scientific research, has seized on the aspect of the research which makes for the best story: the one with the happy ending. I would have been very interested to hear the stories of pairs of people who answered the set of personal questions and did not fall in love with each other. Was anyone repulsed? Did anyone stand up and say “I’m not going to do this any more” and leave the room? Did any subject later go out with friends and relate over drinks the hilarious story of the loser from the psychology lab?

    I would think this is at least as important. Surely it is just as practical — and more protective — to be able to realize quickly that the attractive stranger across the table is not a good potential mate for you.

    + + +

    I find myself wondering if a similar battery of questions could be devised for a broader purpose: sparking not romantic love, but friendship.

    We are increasingly isolated from people in our physically proximate communities, turning instead for moral support to friends we’ve never met before in real life, linked by shared interest, and long-distance old-friend relationships maintained lightly via social media. These friendships by correspondence are as real and important as friendships carried on by letters have ever been, and in a way they illustrate how rapidly mutual affection, good will, appreciation, and charity can develop. With letters or emails or blog posts and comments, one can go straight to the intellect, giving and taking commentary and ideas at one’s leisure, letting one side of the conversation percolate through the mind and memory before sitting down and composing a complete, and thoroughly spell-checked, thought.

    I went out for breakfast a couple of weeks ago with a woman who lives a couple of blocks away and has two children whose ages closely bracket that of my 4th child. We’d been Facebook friends for a while, having met at a block party, and she had messaged me (weeks earlier) to ask if I had any thoughts about trying to stay connected to the neighborhood; she was feeling pressured by family to move out to the “safer” suburbs, and knew me as someone who planned to raise my family in the center city.

    I really enjoyed talking to her, and we both lamented the difficulty of finding time to nurture real friendships among neighbors. The thing is, even though living near someone is no guarantee that you’re going to hit it off or get along — especially in areas that attract a diverse population, so that you could well find yourself surrounded by people who don’t speak your language, or have entirely opposite social philosophy, or have a vastly different lifestyle — it’s incredibly useful to have neighbors who are friends and friends who are neighbors. The opportunity for mutual support, whether it’s emergency babysitting, keeping a spare key, or bringing dinner over when someone is ill, is multiplied by the ease of offering that support across the backyard fence. And it’s pleasant, too.

    And yet: there is so little time. My neighbors mostly have children in school, of course — not the same schools, since Minneapolis has many charter and magnet schools, and children bus all over town, further meaning that they aren’t brought together with each other by commonalities in their kids’ schedules. Certainly the schedules have little in common with that of my kids, who sleep till nine and stay up till eleven. There isn’t time to build the kind of ongoing conversation that brings people into a real relationship. And why would we invest the time, in the unknown stranger across the backyard fence, when we can take that conversation back to our computers and get instant gratification from faraway friends we’ve already made?

    I think the answer is to be more deliberate, to voice the wishes we have for “connection,” to take it from abstract to personal. As awkward as it may be: “Let’s try to become friends.” Once we’ve grabbed coffee with that other mom after preschool music class, or played a lunchtime chess game with the guy from the cubicle down the hall, what if there was a fast way to move from casual acquaintance to more — to “one of my good friends,” to “buddy from work.”

    There are less efficient ways, even more ludicrous ways, than a questionnaire. But even the questionnaire is just an excuse, a peg on which to hang the real act of deliberate connection: revealing your real self with honesty, possibly to be disappointed, even rejected.

     

     

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    1 comment on Deliberate heart-to-heart.

  • Update: The crash of the token economy.

    I'm having trouble writing these days because a lot of the stuff going on in my head right now is stuff I really ought not put out there, so I'm going through last year's posts looking for things to update.  

    One thing that started out giving me high hopes was getting the kids to pull their weight around the house a little more via a token economy.  Here are the posts from that experiment:

     

    I only had one more set of daily tasks that I was going to spring on them, and then — after that final set of tasks had become a habit — I was going to transition out of the token system.  To something.  I wasn't sure what.  Something where I didn't have to handle popsicle sticks every day.  I hadn't made that part of the plan yet.  But the rest of it?  It was all going according to what I'd planned so far.

    And then we went to Europe for a month, and came back and dived right into schoolwork — 

    and the whole system fell completely to pieces.

    I couldn't believe how easily the routine, built up over five months, fell apart in one month.  And the fault  definitely did not lie entirely with the kids.  It was me too — I didn't follow up on it.  I let it slide.  I forgot to check their rooms for days at a time.  I sporadically removed popsicle sticks.  The kids didn't leave time in their school day to do their jobs.  We rushed off in the morning to do errands without making sure that the bathrooms were done.  And at the end of the month, we counted up sticks and I had to pay them (because I had said I would) even though I knew darn well that they only had those tokens on the technicality of Mom forgot to make sure we did our jobs.

    (Meanwhile, the other thing that fell apart was the baby's infant potty training.  I had been taking him to the toilet about once a day since he was only a few weeks old.  I had him — at eight months — sitting on the Baby Bjorn potty and urinating on cue.  We were trucking right along.  And then we went to Europe and used disposable diapers for a month and he forgot everything.  Argh.)

    Yeah, I've done some second-guessing about that.  I should have brought the potty with us.  I should have made the kids tidy their rooms in the apartments every day.  Then they'd still have the habit.

    On the other hand, we had a nice vacation.  So there's that.

    + + + 

    So October didn't work in the sense that the kids didn't do jobs they weren't being asked to do every day, and the children's rooms got messy again.  

    It wasn't a complete loss.  They still put their laundry into the wash every week, for example, which is an improvement.  And they still do the daily post-lunch cleanup before going off to have Leave Mom Alone Until Two O'Clock time.  And they still can cook dinner, and so once a week or so one of them will make dinner for me.  And of course they knew how to do everything, so all I have to do is tell them to "do your bathroom jobs," for example, and they can do that.

    But the doing-it-every-day-without-my-asking was gone.

    I eventually took the popsicle sticks out of their rooms, and they are sitting on the cookbook shelf in my kitchen while I try to figure out what I do next.

    + + +

    I talked to Mark about it and he suggested that I consider which parts of the kids' jobs are working well.

    "Well, the part that goes the absolute best is the after-lunch cleanup," I mused.  "The 8yo and 11yo squabble a lot, and the 8yo does her level best to dawdle so her brothers do more of the work, but on the whole they get it done well and they get it done quickly.  I think it's because we do it at the same time every day that we're home, and because they know that their break lasts until two o'clock no matter how long it takes them.  

    "Also, I'm right there while they are cleaning up — sometimes I'm helping them, sometimes I'm feeding the baby, sometimes I'm using the computer — and they know I won't let them go until it's done right.   So they're motivated to get it done, so they can run off and have break time.  Usually they're done by 1:15, and that's with us sitting down to lunch around noon, but sometimes if we finish morning school early and then have lunch early, they're done as early as 12:30."

    "Well, maybe you need to schedule times in the day to do all the other jobs," said Mark.  

    "And maybe I should motivate them by promising that if they finish the jobs early, there will be break time.  With a hard stop at some clock time — like the two o'clock end of break and start of afternoon school.  If they don't finish by then there won't be any break."

    "I don't know if the kids need a break to be motivated," said Mark, "if we're going to have their allowance hang on it."

    I thought of the popsicle sticks, now gathering dust on my shelf.  "I don't know if I can keep track well enough to have their allowance hang on it."

    "Figure something out, and if you need help keeping track, tell me what I can do to help and I'll do it."

    + + + 

    Later I sat down and thought about the jobs I wanted the kids to do and the break times that are part of our day.    I like do the younger kids' school in two bursts, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with a long break in the middle of the day.   (My high schooler has a good deal of freedom in setting his own work/break/sleep schedule, since he doesn't really need my help from day to day.)  

    We're already using the 2 p.m. start of school as a "hard stop" on break time.  

    There's also the morning start, 9:30 or 10 a.m…. maybe I could use that as the end of a "morning break" that they could get if they finished a set of morning chores.

    And then, we have lunchtime.  Maybe I could tell them they had to do a small chore before they could come to the table for lunch.  

    And then, we have an afternoon snack at three-thirty or so, a little earlier on Wednesdays because dinner has to be earlier because they have to leave for religious ed.  Maybe I could have them do something before they can have snack…

    I made a little schedule and showed it to everyone at dinner time.  There was much groaning.

    But my teenage son said, "I can do a better job than that, Mom.  You should let me come up with a system."

    At first I was reluctant, but then I said…. "OK.  You come up with something."

    More on this next time…

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    5 comments on Update: The crash of the token economy.

  • Near misses and the maternal instinct.

    Amy Welborn — whose travel with her two youngest sons was one of the things that inspired our family to take the plunge and take our five kids to Europe this past September – shares a story of a "travel disaster:"

    [W]e each had a suitcase, plus a backpack.  And remember, the boys were two years younger then – Michael was seven and Joseph, twelve.  My point being that getting these suitcases in and out of trains without letting gravity pull an overloaded child determined that I CAN DO IT MYSELF under the tracks was…a challenge that required speed, negotiation skills, and balance.

    As we pulled into the station, I knew that we would only have a couple of minutes, since trains don’t spend much time at all on these stops. I also didn’t want anyone – especially Michael – to take a tumble as they struggled with luggage.

    So I told them, as we gathered near the door, that what I wanted them to do was get off, stand on the platform and take the suitcases as I handed them down to them. Sounds good.

    The train stopped.  The door slid open.  The boys got out. I handed one suitcase down.  Check.  I reached for the other.

    The doors shut.

    There was some sort of green button next to the door.  I pushed it.  Then punched it.

    The train started to move.

    I punched and started shouting. I tried to will the doors back open.

    The train sped up.  As trains do.

    And the last thing I saw as we slipped away, doors shut tight, was Joseph on the platform, arms outstretched, trying to run but being held back by someone, crying out, “MOM!”

    I had to skip to the end of this one to be assured that it all did turn out fine, because my heart was in my mouth reading it.  Oh yes, I can imagine what it feels like to be in the train and seeing your children trying to get to you and not be able to.

    + + +

    It's very interesting, being a thinking animal.  

    I remember being a child and learning about "instinct," which I (being a child) conceived of as some inborn knowledge of HOW TO DO IMPORTANT THINGS — how, and when, I guess — that animals had and that human beings did not have.  Animals have instinct to make them eat the food that is good for them, to make them mate, to make them protect their offspring. I could not feel any instinct inside me that told me how to live my whole life; I certainly hadn't, to give an example that occurred to me when I was nine or ten, figured out where babies come from all by myself.  (I had deduced that bit by extrapolating from the chapter about breeding in a book about miniature schnauzers that I found on the shelf.)

    We humans, I decided, had to do everything we do on purpose, because we are taught to, and because we know we are supposed to.

    When I was a bit older, though, it occurred to me that humans do have something that corresponds to my crude idea of animal instinct.   A thing inside us, a response to outside stimulus, that does not rely on our intellect to make sense of it for us to act.   We have pleasure – more than that, we have something transcendent, spiritual, that gives our pleasure meaning — we have joy.

     It is good for us to eat a variety of different food — and we find the different flavors and textures of food pleasurable, so pleasurable that we reward ourselves (and each other) with all the different tastes and sensations that food has to offer.  We can, of course, go overboard with it, but we can also elevate food-gathering and food-preparation and food-presentation to an art form.  To social ritual.  To reinforce relationships and have those relationships in turn reinforce the rituals.  All of it connected to that base pleasure, pleasure in flavors and textures, and the base desire for food, hunger and appetite.

    I thought to myself — Maybe this is what "the animal instinct" to hunt or to graze, to search for the right food and to consume it so that it may be digested and give health, looks like when it has been transformed and elevated into human-ness.  

    That made me look for other human glimpses inside the so-called animal instinct, such as the great pleasure we take in crawling tired under the covers in our beds and falling asleep, and the instinct I had (as a child) to stay close to my parents and to want to be with them and to fear them leaving me behind.  Much older me had an opportunity to see inside the mammalian drive to mate, and to muse on its particular transcendence as I prepared for marriage, reading the theology of the body.

    The funny thing about such instinct (as it is with grace) is that it never appears until one needs it.  So, of course I hadn't figured out where babies come from all by myself at age nine.  It's funny to me now that I thought, if something is inborn, then it would be inborn as knowledge.  That I should understand it from birth, rather than carrying it within me as a sort of vegetable embryo to blossom (and not as knowledge either) when needed.  

    So it is that I looked forward to becoming a mother, in part, because I felt that it would answer the question of What is this like — this human form of the instinct to lay down one's life for one's offspring?  Because even as we hoped for our first baby, it was almost impossible for me to understand this concept.  I had been told that mothers "instinctively" love their babies and would do anything to protect them.  I understood that, as a mother, I would be supposed to protect my baby at the cost of my own life.  But I really didn't, you know, grok it.  I couldn't imagine putting myself in danger on purpose for anyone, really.  I certainly couldn't imagine wanting to.

    So I waited, part of me wondering if I was some kind of monster for not having figured it out in advance (even from books), and part of me hoping this "maternal instinct" thing would turn up when necessary.  

    I was pretty confident (from books) that the easy desires — to feed the baby, keep it warm, and cuddle it — would show up right after birth.  And they did.  

    I was still not so sure about the willingness to lay down your life for the child bit.

    But eventually, after having had a few frightening scrapes of the completely ordinary type — as parents and children together are wont to do when they are learning how to be in the world —

    — like sitting up all night with a wheezing, coughing baby and finding that, tired as I was, it was not difficult because I wanted to sit up with the baby more than I wanted sleep —

    — I figured out what that looks like from the inside.  At least for me.

    And what it looks like for me is a terrifying empathy, the dark side of the self-protective "instinct" I had as a small child, the one where I wanted to stay near my parents and not to be left behind.   The power to lay down my life for my child is the mental image of  my child reaching out to me for help and being left behind.   The thought (the image) fills me with a stark, animal horror, and rehearsing it in nightmares and idle thoughts that turn dark, I know that in that situation my life would be worth nothing to me, nothing at all, in comparison with doing everything in my power not to leave a child behind, not to leave the call unanswered, not to have the child realize I am alone and in danger; My mother will not help me.

    Such visual replay comes to me again and again after near-misses and even not-so-near ones. Like the time that my second son, aged three, started to slip down a slope on a family hike and was caught by the trailside fence, put there exactly for that purpose; I might never have thought of it, but there was a gap under the fence a few feet away, and for months after that my brain happily played vivid reels in which the three-year-old slips under the gap and, calling for help, slides down and down and down.  

    My brain also likes to play such reels for me even when no near-miss happens.  Riding ski lifts with a small child (the kind where the cable soars over the tops of the pines and carries you over steep cliffs) is a particularly fertile ground for the maternal visual imagination, I find.  I avoid news articles about people being swept away in hurricanes and about children being removed from their parents by social services.  I find them… not pleasurable.

    + + +

    So Amy's description of the scene in the train station as being "one of the worst moments…of…my life. Second worst, I’d say. Yup. That bad" rings true.  It's literally the stuff of nightmares.

    The stuff of being a thinking animal.  Which is nightmarish, sometimes.

    + + +

    When I sat down to write this blog post I thought it was going to be about me wondering if we, taking our five children to Europe (ages 14, 10, 8, 4, and 8 months) had done enough to prepare them for the possibility of just such an accidental separation.  Or, as Amy puts it, the thing that gave her some confidence was having rehearsed:

    What do you do if you all get on the train, and I don’t?

    We get off at the next stop and wait for you.

    What do you do if I get on the train, but you get left behind?

    We stay where we are and wait for you.

    So I knew they’d stay there. Well, that’s comforting. They’ll stay! In Padua! Italy! By themselves!

    We hadn't done much train-riding, and there being two parents on most trips we had gone with the one-parent-in-the-front, one-parent-bringing-up-the-rear method of child-herding, plus the 8- and 4-year-old were usually held tightly by the hand.  We probably should have worked something out with respect to Roman buses.  

    Maybe we did tell them something like that, and maybe I only don't remember it because no one ever got separated and so our emergency plans never got seared  into my memory.  Mostly we relied on our cell phones:  the older kids carried cards with the numbers, and how to ask for help,  in French and Italian; the younger kids had the same information on a strip of masking tape inside the hem of their tee shirts, with instructions written in the appropriate language to a hypothetical helpful bystander.  Not long ago, doing laundry, I peeled the remains of one of those pieces of tape, well-washed, from a summer shirt, and thought of those rehearsals fondly (not with horror).

    + + +

    A terrifying empathy.

    Those are the words that come to mind when I try to put words to the feeling of loving a child, really loving him to the point where you would, in fact, lay it all down to answer a cry of terror.  It is an instant of seeing the terror through the child's eyes, so that even if (I, the grownup) can see "The child is mistaken, there is no real danger," I must respond, must not let this small person remain terrified.  It's unbearable.

    The psychologists tell us that some people are born without such a thing, or maybe it is killed in them at a young age, an adaptation to a fearfully bad environment that is protective and yet maladaptive  to normal human relationships.  

    I can believe that.  This is a supremely uncomfortable feeling.  I can believe that, faced with its unbearableness, perhaps combined with a kind of fear or powerlessness, some people become hardened to it rather than becoming driven to act.

    I am grateful for the discomfort, even for the nightmarish visual imagery that seems to be part and parcel of motherhood.  (Do fathers get this, I wonder?  Are all mothers like me?  I don't know, I can only see inside myself.)  It is a rehearsal, an emergency procedure:  an internal one that keeps me (I hope) ever ready to act without thinking if it becomes necessary.  And it helps me to know — without having to trust in books — that I do love my children, deeply; that I can (and do, many times a day if not every time I get the chance) set aside my own selfishness for their good.  It is a grace, one that I did not earn, and one that I intend to safeguard. 

    Pity those who lose that pain and terror and fear, that empathy, or who never have it in the first place.  

    —

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    3 comments on Near misses and the maternal instinct.

  • Deliberately vague.

    When I'm really in the habit of regular blogging, I find that I look at the world around me and at my regular, ordinary, lovely life with a journalist's eye.  I compose in my head.  I analyze my experiences, and thereby enjoy them twice.  I thirst for feedback — checking the "comments" tab throughout the day — wondering if people will enter into discussion with me.  I've met some wonderful people that way, some of them in real life.  Blogging is like letter-writing:  real connection, only with the advantage that you can throw it out scattershot and have a chance of "catching" some new interesting people that you might never have met.

    Sometimes, though, the openness and the publicness of a blog makes us hesitate, doesn't it.

    I know that a few bloggers have made their niche in the brutally-honest, tell-it-like-it-is genre. 

    I am not one of those, I think.

    + + +

    It's open.  It's public.  This isn't an anonymous blog, although I don't put my name on it in a prominent way.  Many people who know me in real life read it.  It's a way for me to keep in touch with them, and I appreciate that.  Also among my readers are a number of people that I hope someday to meet in person, but haven't had the chance yet.  I am so glad for the chance to trade thoughts with them.

    Google Analytics tells me that I get a lot of pageviews from Moscow.  (Russia, not Idaho).  What's up with that?  Spam bots?  Dunno.  I guess I won't worry about those.

    + + +

    One thing to keep in mind, when my writing trails off from time to time… is that I don't choose to publish here everything that I am thinking intensely about.  

    (Please trust me for a moment to be up front with these facts:  Neither I nor anyone in my immediate family or support network is ill or in danger.  My marriage is happy, loving, and safe.  My children are well.  I am not in a spiritual crisis, nor a financial one.  If anything, the things that are on my mind have recently improved my outlook significantly.  So:  put worry for me out of your mind, if you have any.)

    I have something on my mind that I prefer not to share.  I almost wrote "that I'm not free to share" — but that's not quite right; I'm completely free to write what I want.  I believe it would not be right to share it, so I choose not to.  

    And yet, I wish I could.  I'm bursting with a sort of epiphany I recently had.  I understand something that I didn't understand before, or, at least, I have a new interpretation of the facts.  And that interpretation has changed so much.

    + + +

    Did you ever see the movie The Sixth Sense?  (Spoilers ahead.)  

    You know how — at the very end — unless you figured it out along the way — the viewer suddenly realizes that the way that she has been interpreting every scene in the movie was basically wrong?  The film suddenly offers an alternative interpretation — and thinking back over the film, the viewer realizes that it changes the entire meaning of every scene.

    What's more, that new interpretation almost instantly provides the protagonist with the answer to the problem that has haunted him from almost the beginning of the film to almost the end. 

    That's the kind of thing I mean.  I have an alternate interpretation of many scenes from the past.  

    Experiences that were baffling, now are grounded in a coherent theory.  In that light, the scenes make sense, fit together.

    And in that light, a problem that has been gnawing at me for years has seemingly withdrawn, lifted off, and… just blown away.

    + + +

    I can't know if the interpretation — the theory — is correct.  No, really — I can't know.  There is no fact-checking in my power that can confirm it.  On the other hand, there's nearly no likelihood that any facts will arise that can controvert it.  This hypothesis is testable, but it is not likely to be tested, and if it were I would not be permitted to know the outcome.  

    But the new idea suggests to me a certain plan of action that I hadn't thought of before.  If I am right, it is, I believe, the best plan.  So if I assume that I am right, I know what to do now.

    But the brilliant bit is that this newly conceived plan of action is also an acceptable plan, possibly even an excellent one, if I am wrong.

    Hence:  the lightness of heart.  The lifting of a weight.  Long have I struggled between conflicting duties and desires.  Suddenly the waveforms coalesce and I have all the  information I need.

    + + +

    But at the same time I have some grieving to do.  Because certainty comes always at a cost, and here the cost is the death of a particular measure of hope.

    Not Hope but a hope, a garden-variety ordinary one.  The kind of hope one can place in a human being.

    That hope out of the way, I can leave more room for the capital-letter kind to blossom.

    I have a sorrow, but it's better than what I had before.  I am grateful for it.  I am grateful for clarity, for sorrow — because I know what to do with sorrow — and for hope that is finally placed where it belongs.

    + + + 

    And I choose not to go into more detail. 

    But it's not because I don't have anything more I would like to say.  

    It's just… not what I choose.   Not right now.  

    So, yes, I'm deliberately vague.   I am not anonymous.  I could have written nothing, but instead I wanted to write something.  So I wrote this.    After weeks and weeks of constipated writing, jammed up inside with The Post I Want To Let Out But Won't. 

    I have a name, and them's the breaks.

    + + +

    To reiterate:  I am well.  My family is well.  My work is satisfying.  My health is good.  I see more clearly than I had before, and I am — in a way I wasn't before — free.

    But you'll just have to take my word for it.

    —

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    7 comments on Deliberately vague.

  • Direction of intention according to St. Francis de Sales.

    Having time for just a quick post this morning, I thought I'd return to my series on the very practical body of Salesian spirituality, in particular, St. Francis de Sales's Spiritual Directory.  There's a quite short, but useful, bit in it that I want to highlight.

    I had just gotten started on the series about the Salesians  before our family's month in Europe, and then I started trip-blogging and lost the thread.  Here's a quick recap of the series:

    Salesian spirituality: Four examples.  Why Salesian spirituality resonates with me; introductions to St. Francis de Sales, to St. Jane Francis de Chantal, to St. John "Don" Bosco, and to Elisabeth Leseur.

    Francis de Sales:  The patron saint of to-do lists?  In which St. Francis sanctifies the act of making one's daily to-do list by turning it into the Morning Offering.

    The Salesian preventive system, or:  How to not punish kids.  John Bosco's philosophy as an antidote to the spank 'em and show 'em who's boss strain of Protestant-influenced American Catholic parenting.

    + + +

    In the second post up there, the bit about "to-do lists," I dug down into the Spiritual Directory:

    It's sort of a rule of life for the religious he supervised — only instead of specifying so mant hours of work, so many of sleep, so many of prayer, etc., he specifies little acts of devotion and intention to be performed throughout the day, connected to rising, worship, work, meals, bedtime — the whole cycle of an ordinary day. They are, so to speak, spiritual exercises, not for a novena or a retreat but for every day.

     "It is true that the Directory proposes many exercises," Francis writes,

    "Yet it is good and fitting to keep one's interior orderly and busy in the beginning. When, however, after a period of time, persons have put into practice somewhat this multiplicity of interior actions, have become formed and habituated to them and spiritually agile in their use, then the practices should coalesce into a single exercise of greater simplicity, either into a love of complacency, or a love of benevolence, or a love of confidence, or of union and reunion of the heart to the will of God. This multiplicity thus becomes unity."

    I like this idea of patiently developing little habits that "coalesce" over time into character.

    I went on in that post to describe Article 2, "Meditation," which is the bit about making your to-do list — okay, Francis doesn't call it that, he calls it "the exercise of the preparation of the day."  

    There are other articles:  how to enter into the praying of the hours, notes for how to properly prepare themselves interiorly for Mass, examination of conscience, meals and recreation, night prayer, and so on.  But it's not neatly organized, and tucked into Article 1 with "Rising" is a little bit called "Direction of Intention" that I think exemplifies what he is trying to get at in the introduction, about making each day a single exercise of greater simplicity.  Because it has to do with sanctifying every action of the day.

    Here's how it goes, with paragraph breaks added by me for emphasis.

    They who wish to thrive and advance in the way of Our Lord should,

    at the beginning of their actions,  both exterior and interior,

    ask for his grace

    and offer to his divine Goodness all the good they will do.

    + + +

     

    In this way they will be prepared to bear

    with peace and serenity

    all the pain and suffering they will encounter

    as coming from the fatherly hand of our good God and Savior.

    His most holy intention is to have them merit by such means 

    in order to reward them afterwards out of the abundance of his love.

    + + +

    They should not neglect this practice in matters which are small and seemingly insignificant,  

    nor even if they are engaged in those things which are agreeable and in complete conformity with their own will and needs,

    such as drinking, eating, resting, recreating and similar actions.

    By following the advice of the Apostle, everything they do will be done in God’s name to please him alone.

    + + +

    I think "the advice of the Apostle" refers to Paul's letter to the Colossians, cf. Col 3:17, or possibly First Corinthians, cf. 1 Cor 10:31, but could also be a general description of Paul's advice.  

    + + +

    So, I guess this is the gist of the direction of intention:  

    You're about to do something — anything.  

    (Really, anything.  Start your work, start your coffeemaker, wake the children, change a diaper, eat a sandwich, begin a blog post, take a nap, walk up to receive the Eucharist, make that phone call you've been putting off all day, go to bed with your spouse, step on the treadmill, meet a friend for drinks.  Anything.  Something you're looking forward to or something you're dreading.  It doesn't matter.  Anything.)

    Do this (quickly, silently, or it will never do for all your actions):

    — Ask God for grace

    — Offer God all the good that comes of it

    — Try to intend in the doing of your action what God intends:  That you may gain merit through patiently bearing any and all suffering (however minor!) that comes via that action.  

    + + +

    The whole rest of the Spiritual Directory is this advice writ larger and more specific.  The exercise of the preparation of the day is a longer and more formal way to ask God for help and to offer God all your intentions.  The exercise upon rising is an offering of all affections and resolutions, and asking God for help and blessing.  So is the exercise before the divine office.  St. Francis suggests a variety of meditations and prayers for the variety of "checkpoints" in the day, but they all boil down to asking for help, offering God the good one does, and uniting one's will to God's will — that is, to his will specifically for you and your benefit, which should be an easy exercise even to those who are used to doing things for their own will alone.

    + + +

    The direction of intention "before all your actions" is the stuff for which the little prayers called "ejaculatory prayers" have been invented.  I imagine that each person could easily set down their own version.  As for me, I am fond of taking these two bits from Psalm 69/70:

    O God, come to my assistance… Let all that seek you rejoice and be glad in you.

     

    An alternative formula from the same psalm could be,

    Let all that seek you rejoice… You are my help and my deliverer.

     

    Or you could use "the advice of the Apostle" (1 Cor 10:31) as an ejaculatory prayer:

    Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.

     

    It's up to you.  The point is to form the intention.  Whatever you can come up with that will quickly orient the mind and heart will do.  Maybe put it up on a sticky note in the places where you tend to do things, and see if you can turn it into a habit.

     

     

    —

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    1 comment on Direction of intention according to St. Francis de Sales.

  • Sickness and wellness.

    We meant to spend Monday putting things in order after a long vacation, and Tuesday starting bright-eyed and refreshed, with newly cleaned desks and sharpened pencils, back to our schoolwork.  

    Instead, we all got sick on Monday, everyone but the baby at about the same time.  Maybe a bug we picked up in our travels.  Maybe there was contamination in the deli meat that was Sunday dinner for everyone but the baby.  It doesn't matter.  Mark came home sick early from work to find me already shivering and groaning in bed, with the 14yo minding the baby and the 11yo having been sent to the store for Gatorade and canned chicken soup.  Six hours later the kids were sick too.  Mark slept with the 4yo, I slept with the 8yo, and we each got up to rinse out their buckets more than once.  The 14- and 11-yos fended for themselves.  It was a long night.

    + + +

    Today there was no question of school; we were all in recovery.  Mark stayed home, alternately napping and doing quiet work on the computer.  I let the children watch movies most of the day.  As for me, I rested, but I also tried to keep things running; I put bread in the bread machine, started some chicken soup on the back burner, and began the long process that is Washing All The Bedding.  

    Hours later the bedding is almost finished.  All day long, whenever I judged that the washer and the dryer had both stilled, I trudged up the stairs to process it.  Hot, fresh sheets and towels out of the dryer; wet, sopping ones pulled from the washer and stuffed into the dryer; stinking crusty bedding from the mountain on the laundry room floor, gingerly loaded into the washer with detergent and turned on "Hot."  And then (after washing hands) I would turn to folding the warm, fresh towels and putting them away, stretching the fitted sheets over the mattresses.

     I do not enjoy laundry as a rule, but this particular work satisfied me.  My family was in need:  drained, empty-stomached and grimy; I fed them, cleaned up after them, made dry, warm beds for them one after another, mother's work if ever there was such a thing.  And being tired out myself, it took most of my time and energy; I had to sit and rest, or take a nap, in between loads.  

    (This being a modern story, I should note that Mark did a fair amount of laundry-processing while I was resting, too.  This being a modern story, I also spent an hour or two of my in-between-laundry time removing malware from the laptop.   It doesn't quite fit with the cliché of motherly nurturing work, but I assure you, it was both necessary and satisfying.)

    +  +  +

    I wasn't able to do much else besides that minimum, but important, work restoring the household to basic hygiene and health, because I myself was impaired.  I'm behind in other things I'm supposed to do this week, and that is annoying, but at some level it's got to be accepted:  I can't do everything, and I have my priorities.  They are at home.

    +  +  +

    This almost serves as a little fable to me, coming on the heels of some difficult work and difficult revelations that happened in my personal life in the last ten days or so.   

    I do not write about it often, but:  I don't come — originally — from a very whole place.  

    I live in one now, thanks to a good partner, good friends, all the information I need to ground myself, and a fair bit of determination — to seal up, to heal up, the cracks wherever they might appear.

    I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I have zero regrets about concentrating all of my efforts on running a family and educating our children.   I had to confront some of the broken places in the past ten days, and it's only strengthened my resolution.

    This is not — not at all! — to say that other people can't successfully arrange their lives in many different ways.  I see it happen.  I admire it where it works.  

    But you, they, are not me; when I look at myself I know:  Me being who I am, it really does take all my efforts to make a home, to mother a family, that is whole.  I come to the job just a little bit broken, weakened, and so I have to prioritize.  I am far too efficient, far too adept at compartmentalization, far too schooled in the arts of sealing-off, to divide my attention so that some of it would be directed outside and away.  

    If I had to, I could do it.  In a way it is a strength, a latent one, one I hope I won't have to call on.

    The better way, since I don't have to rely on that particular plan B (God willing), is to use all my powers where they count, in the place that it is most needed, which is simply being present every day, growing this family.  Drawing a line in the sand and saying It stops here:  all the crazy, all the meanness, stops right here.  Believing every day that the difference I make is a good and right one, and making it come true, one loaf at a time, one day at a time, my life's work, ripping out poor stitches to weave something whole.

    —

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  • Happy new year! Let’s look at last year’s resolutions.

     

    Here we are, with one day left in Christmas and the first Monday in January upon us.  

    I didn't blog over the holidays, and I'm ready to start up again.  I decided to dig back into my past year to look for old posts that I can update.  Why not start with last year's resolutions, and see how I did?

    + + +

    In February last year, my baby was about six weeks old.  It was too late to make New Year's Resolutions, so I decided to make New Baby's Resolutions instead:

    I am now thinking that a really great time for a resolution — a shaking up of the old routines and a turning over of a new leaf — is several weeks after the birth of a new baby.

    Because you know what?

    There's no going back to the way things were before.

    I might as well formalize it….

    Mostly, this post was about how I realized I needed to cut back the amount of work I do — lowering my own standards for productivity — while I was pregnant and with a new baby.  I started in that post with New Baby's Resolution Zero, and continued through a few others.

    New Baby Resolution 0:   to recognize and honor all my priorities.  (I identified thirteen).

    New Baby Resolution 1:  to keep in mind the priorities that don't fit into a schedule:

    I drew a vertical line down a sheet of paper. To the right I made a list of the things "There's A Time For." Meals and chores and the like, a rough schedule marked out by hours.

    But to the left, outside of the schedule, I made a list of things to strive for "All The Time:"

    • Serving God in everything
    • Showing each other LOVE, INTEREST, & DELIGHT in one another
    • Anticipating/resolving conflict by modeling KINDNESS, GENEROSITY, & REASON
    • Helping each other work by teaching DILIGENCE

    These all have to do with keeping a certain intentional attitude while taking care of all the busy-ness of the day.

    Resolution one is to keep these in mind as all-the-time intentions, and find ways to do each thing — to spend each "time" — that honors these priorities all day long.

    I hope to revisit these a bit.  I had a bit of success with intentions, but less of that came from this resolution than from some reading I did from the works of St. Francis de Sales. 

     

    New Baby's Resolution 2: Simplifying the list of things that there are "times" for.

    Better to re-formulate the categories and condense them, without micromanaging the details. Mother Teresa's rule for her sisters famously included time blocks that were simply labeled things like "Work for the poor." It wasn't subdivided into individual tasks. I need the same generality categories, because in this season of life, I need to stay flexible. At a particular time in the afternoon, I may need to spend some time homemaking, but I don't want to say "laundry at this time, bed-making at this other time, return phone calls from then until the next time." I need the flexibility to do whatever household task is most important and then let the rest of the to-do list go when I have to move on to some other activity.

    So what I came up with was this list:

    Things we make "times" for 

    • Rest
    • Taking care of body and clothing
    • Meals
    • Learning time
    • Work
    • "Activities"

    Much simpler, isn't it?

    …Rest, meals, learning, work, self-care, activities. To everything there is a time. And each of these to be met, all the time: in a spirit of service, loving one another, peacefully, diligently.

     New Baby's Resolution 3:  Know how much time I have in the day.  I subtracted off time for rest and stuff, and calculated that on a typical day at home I have 4 h 45 minutes to knock stuff off my to-do list (not counting teaching).  Then I resolved 

    • to stop pretending I can somehow stretch those 285 minutes out;
    • to value them, and try not to waste them;
    • to quit berating myself for not doing more than I could reasonably have done in those minutes;
    • to decide what tasks to use them for, and then to delegate the rest or let them go.

    I think all these still stand pretty well.

    New Baby's Resolution 4.  This was a pretty nebulous resolution, "Don't get bogged down in scheduling specific tasks."  At the time, I resolved to think of tasks in broad categories, and planning to "schedule" the categories instead:  work for schooling, work for the family, work for others, and creative work.  The problem I was trying to solve with it is my tendency to beat myself up over departing from my specific plans, even when I do so for a good reason.

    Back then, commenter Jenny sent me to a blog post at Amongst Lovely Things called  "Looping:  Task Management for the (Recovering) Type A Mom".  That post helped me a lot as I planned out the rest of my school year, including this year:  several of my 3rd- and 5th-graders' subjects are arranged this way, and it's worked out great.  I think maybe this coming year I will try to figure out how to use it for some of my other recurring tasks, and for my sadly-neglected creative outlets.  I'm going to revisit it soon.

    New Baby's Resolution 5.  "Quit multitasking."  

    Somewhere, I know, there is a homeschooling parent with the opposite problem who is resolving to learn how to multitask.  I can be quite effective, it's true.   BUT I can't multitask like that AND demonstrate love, interest, and delight.  Rather, such effectiveness tends to give me Resting Bitchface.  Not a good look on a mom.

     So here's resolution five:  Decide what I'm doing, and do that one thing.  

    Leave room in my attention for that love, interest, and delight.

    Leave room in my attention to be reasonable, to be kind, to be generous.

    Leave room in my attention to stop and guide a child back on task before the urge to yell sets in.

    Leave room in my attention for …intention.

    This is a great resolution. So great that, I, um, need to make it again.

     

    Bonus Nifty To-Do Trick.  I started making my to-do list on an index card instead of a whole piece of paper, to force myself to keep it short. 

    Guess what:  This mini-resolution has stuck, probably permanently:

    0105150810-00

    That's from this morning.  As you can see, I'm still on task #1.

    On the left side of the index card, by the way, are some notes about what I can expect to happen today (especially things that might derail me) and a short list of faults I am hoping to avoid (anger, irritation, procrastination).  I think I'll revisit this soon, too.  

    I do keep a longer, running to-do list on Wunderlist and also schedule time-sensitive things on my calendar.  The index card is just for daily concerns.  I can throw it out at the end of the day, whether everything on it is done or not.  Works great.

    + + +

    I have to say that although the details didn't work out exactly as I'd planned, the past year — particularly the school-support-work part of it — has been going astoundingly well. 

    Practically every time I sit down for end-of-the-day tea with H, with our three babies toddling around at our feet, we look at each other and say:  "I can't believe how well this is going."  The two of us really scaled back our expectations for what we can accomplish with babies underfoot, and — lo and behold — we seem to have actually set realistic, achievable ones.

    In my own home, I pushed most of my weekly schoolwork prep (including recordkeeping and grading) to Saturday afternoons, resolving not to let it bleed into Sunday.  I gave myself a deadline, and I found that I can get the essentials taken care of in two or three hours of focused work.  

    (Mind you, I used a lot of the summer to put together a whole-year, big-picture plan for each subject.  So this isn't all my planning, just the setup and takedown of each  week's work:  making photocopies, writing out assignments, grading papers, and the like.)

     I lowered my standards — and life is better for everyone.  

    Maybe you should resolve, in 2015, to lower your standards too!

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    3 comments on Happy new year! Let’s look at last year’s resolutions.

  • The costs and benefits of accountability.

    I knew it was coming, because they asked me last year and I told them then that, sorry, it sounded fun but the notice was too short, and anyway I had a new baby. Maybe next year, I said. And then next year turned into this year, and they called again.

    Nothing big, a small thing, really: an idea that attracted me, though. A homeschooling co-op had started up in one of the outlying suburbs. They wanted someone to facilitate high school general chemistry, in 90 minute sessions, once a week, on Tuesdays. One of the other parents must have known of my background and suggested my name.

    It was a paid position — I don’t know exactly how much it would have been, because it depended on the number of students who signed up: the fees came directly from each student to the tutor (“not ‘teacher,’” it was explained to me; I get it, the idea is that the students do most of their learning independently, and then meet once a week for feedback or discussion or something like that.) On the order of a couple of hundred dollars per student for a semester. There was a science lab space available, apparently, which is more than I have at home. I would be free to choose the curriculum, even design my own, as long as it helped the students acquire the equivalent of a high school chemistry credit.

    I have a high school student of my own who plans to study chemistry next year, so that was another point in in its favor — some of the work of curriculum preparation, I would be doing anyway. The money made the offer attractive not so much for its buying power, but that it turned the gig into an actual — you know — job, relying on some of my professional knowledge and experience as well as some of the skills I have enjoyed developing behind the scenes, so to speak, over the past ten years.

    I had a lot to think about, so I started researching available high school chemistry curricula and lab kits, and also musing about exactly why the offer attracted me.

    + + +

    I have zero regrets about walking away from the paid workplace in order to concentrate my efforts on running a family and educating our children. Sometimes, however, I consider a hypothetical future in which I decide I would like to return to it, and I wonder what I might put in motion now in order to help that happen more smoothly.

    The missing piece, at least in a tight job market, is really experience that has measurable accountability.

    I measure much of my own work against more-or-less objective criteria, of course. Over the years I have grown more and more efficient at setting out a syllabus for the year and more and more disciplined at following it, while also figuring out how to adapt it to make room for interruptions. I have learned what to look for in a textbook, and how to work with what I have available when the only texts are flawed. I have taught myself in a few weeks a years’ worth of an unfamiliar technical subject, in enough depth to write a week-by-week guide for a student to work through it on his own. To different extents, I have taught myself three languages. I have spent many hours of trial and error figuring out how to present material to young people who learn in a style vastly different from mine, and to measure the learning of young people who express their acquired skills in ways vastly different from my expectations. I have learned how to give a mathematics lecture on the fly with a quick glance at the book — let’s see, what are we supposed to do today? Oh, that. Well, here we go. I have developed my patience and my flexibility. I know that all this is happening, because every year it gets easier and runs more smoothly, at the same time as it seems I should have more and more tasks to do in less time. This basic sense of growing competence — at least in the parts where I organize time and environment, write curriculum, and teach willing students — means that every year I enjoy my work more.

    But none of this belongs on a résumé.

    Do not bristle about this showing that the work of parents in the home is not valued. The difficulty is that work of parents in the home is not measurable. Home educating develops skills that may be measured; but it doesn’t, itself, measure them.

    This is inherent to its genius. There is wonderful freedom in home education, which is one of the things that makes the work so satisfying to me. I have no supervisor, and rely on my innate desire to see the children succeed — plus my desire for order and peace in our home — plus my own pleasure at digging deeply into a subject — to motivate me to excel. I know from talking to numerous other home educators that this same freedom can, to others, be intimidating, which is one reason why there is such a big market for school-in-a-box curricula. “I want accountability,” they tell me. Whether one wants it or not is a matter of self-confidence and working style; it’s absolutely true that, in homeschooling, freedom is free and accountability is something you have to pay for if you want it.

    Not being accountable to anyone who is paying us — trading economic value for economic value — means that we can’t verify these particular skills and strengths for the purpose of selling them. We cannot demonstrate having had to perform to external standards, because the standards we keep are not external. There are no professional references that may be checked to confirm our fitness as an employee. It is a bit like being self-employed, except that even the self-employed can point to the successes and struggles of a small business in a market of other people and the constraints of budgets and regulations, all of which are external and, in principle, verifiable.

    This is not something to take personally. It’s not about whether parents’ work in the home is valuable; it’s about whether parents’ work in the home is ever capable of demonstrating to a particular potential employer that the candidate in question has something of value in the immediate future to offer to that employer. You have to own the fact that it usually cannot. You have to be satisfied with internal accountability, because there is no other kind. I cringe when I read nonsense like “I’m employed as a Domestic Engineer” or (what is infinitely worse) listing children or spouses as the “employer” on a FB or LinkedIn profile. Even as a joke, this cheapens us all.

    + + +

    So I thought seriously about the challenge of having accountability — with cash on the line — to other people for a change. I bet I would enjoy it for its own sake, and then, I imagined it could come in handy later; a thing that produces references, and a line on a hypothetical future résumé, a line that combines the professional interests I used to enjoy with the practical skills I have developed doing my, shall we say, undocumented work.

    In the end, the attraction to hypothetical future benefits was not enough to overcome the immediate costs. I would have had to drive forty minutes each way; and the subjects that my younger kids could be doing at the same time were not ones I really wanted to outsource; and this particular co-op, it turned out, didn’t offer any onsite activities for preschooler siblings. If I weren’t already co-schooling two days a week with H, taking one day a week for a co-op day might fill a social void without cutting too much into our schedule. But — I am, and those co-schooling days are far more valuable to me.

    This year things are running more smoothly than ever, and — when you get right down to it — adding accountability might strengthen my résumé, but it would weaken my real, day-to-day performance at my primary responsibility. The ultimate end of all work (including work done for personal development and enjoyment) is the support of the family; judged by that standard, this particular work at this particular time would only undermine mine.

    Some other year.

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    2 comments on The costs and benefits of accountability.

  • Spicy placebo.

    Sick MrsDarwin posted her hot toddy recipe a few days ago in between coughs:

    [MrsDarwin's] Hot Toddy

    In a large cup, combine 1 spoonful honey, juice of ¼ lemon, 1 cinnamon stick, small dash tabasco (optional but recommended) and the tea bag of your choice. Stick 3 cloves into 1 small lemon wedge and add to the cup. Pour in a slug of bourbon, as much or as little as you like. Fill cup with boiling water, stir well and let steep 5 minutes. Savor slowly; repeat as necessary.

     

    I confess I'm bemused by the combination of caffeine and booze, Irish coffee notwithstanding.  But hundreds of miles away, I have been coughing and sniffling and sipping my own concoction, the one I always go for when I have the latest creeping crud.  

    I leave out the tea, because I want to sleep, and I leave out the alcohol, because it rarely makes me feel healthier.   The rest of it is borne out of a mix of vague theoretical herbalism (I heard that the allium family is supposed to have anti-viral properties, and isn't honey a natural cough suppressant?) and desire, after several days of my nose not working, to sip something — anything — that I can taste. 

    I give you Erin's Spicy Placebo:

    Into a mug place:  

    • 2 slices lemon
    • 1 slice orange
    • Several thin slices of fresh ginger
    • 1 fat clove of garlic, crushed with the flat of a knife
    • 1-4 thin slices of fresh jalapeño chile

    Pour boiling water over and steep for several minutes.  Stir in a generous dollop of honey and sip slowly, breathing in the pungent steam.

    People generally look at my drink with alarm.  I have no idea whether the contents of the cup are, in fact, therapeutic.  I only know that they make me feel better, as the tingle of the chile penetrates my sinuses and the pleasant ginger-scented vapor settles my stomach.   This is good enough to keep me coming back to it time and time again.  

    When I run out of lemons and oranges, I substitute a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar to keep the mixture tangy; I can't smell the citrus anyway, so one acid is probably as good as another.  If I close my eyes and picture lemons and oranges, I can almost fool myself.

    If you happen to know for a fact that garlic's antiviral properties are exaggerated and that honey is no better than plain hot water at suppressing coughs, I only ask you to keep it to yourself.  This stuff is working for me, better than anything else this nursing mother wishes to take, and I would hate for anything to happen to the web of belief that keeps it that way.

    Last night my father-in-law offered me a slug of brandy for my mug and I tipped just a little in.  It wasn't bad.  I haven't decided if I want to modify my recipe or not, but I do want to note something Mark told me he read once:  the more expensive that people believe a "medicine" to be, the more likely they are to experience the treatment as successful.  I suppose I might be willing to add some booze to my brew, but if so, I'd better be prepared to stick to the top shelf.

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    5 comments on Spicy placebo.

  • The best you can do with what you have.

    "Doing the best you can with what you have" sounds like a disappointment; people who talk of "doing the best you can" imply that disappointment, a settling for secondhand wishes.

    It doesn't have to be, though, does it? The first step is acceptance of reality: I live in certain circumstances, not others. I don't have to let visions of wishes stunt me, unable to use the resources I actually do have, stuck in unhelpful comparisons to others.

    The second step is a clear-eyed questioning: What can I do with this?

    If the comparison game is too strong a habit to break, you can always turn it around and ask: Well — what do I have at my disposal that other people don't? What story are we telling with our lives, here?

    + + +

    I think and write about this theme a lot with respect to homeschooling, because nobody plays the comparison game better (or worse, I suspect) than home educating parents do. It is sociable and frequently helpful to share our successes and our best ideas with each other, but the dark side of that is the unending list of Super Enriching Lessons And Experiences That We Are Not Giving Our Children. Add that to the felt pressure to somehow "make up" for the great yawning hole that the mainstream culture imagines we have scooped out of our children's weekdays between 7:30 am and 3:30 pm. It can get overwhelming.

    But the answer to the Great Yawning Weekday Hole fallacy is the reminder that institutional education is just one way of life, not the only one or even the default; our days are filled, and the "hole" exists in minds. The closeness of siblings and parents is not an absence. The home and the wider community of libraries, shops, streets, and work is a real environment, not an artificially designed one: soil and sun and rain, not fluorescent lighting and bell-timed treatments.

    There is no vacuum here. There is always something. Embrace the something you have.

    I have an urban postage-stamp of a yard and no close access to parks or other green space; schoolday nature study, Charlotte Mason style, is not available to us. I have five children across a wide age-span; I have to say no to some young-child activities because of my older kids' needs, and to some activities for teens because I have younger children. I don't have room for a piano, and we've ruled out team sports because of the huge time commitment. Our co-schooling schedule means that 40% of community activities designed for homeschoolers (anything on Mondays or Thursdays) are already ruled out.

    But notice! The things we don't have are all not there because of the things we do have instead. We live in a city, walking distance from the library, right on half a dozen bus lines. My children have siblings across a variety of ages, and each of them, in their own niche in the family, lives out a different experience of that sibling group. We didn't put in a music room because we put in a basement climbing gym, an attic space for playing board games and Wii, and a guest room so Grandma and Grandpa can stay with us and visit as much as they want. We don't do team sports, but we go to the gym as a family two or three days a week, for swimming, aikido, track running, and using the fitness machines. And co-schooling — well, it may keep us from signing up for plenty of one-offs, but week in and week out it has set the rhythm of our lives, revolving around relationships that have grown and strengthened over years.

    It's okay if you don't have these things. Undoubtedly you have something else, and that something else is a place where your family can thrive.

    + + +

    Recently a neighbor, who has two small children, asked me via FB,

    How are you feeling about living and raising kids in our neighborhood? Have you all decided to continue raising family here or is moving to a "family friendly" neighborhood something you all consider?

    … We are financially in a spot where we could "move up" and are considering other neighborhoods. But we love our house and think we could better use our money for other things…. but we wonder if our kids would be "happier" kids in a different neighborhood.

    I realize it's a deep personal decision… but we do get the family pressure of "when are you all moving to a better and safer neighborhood." The pressure to assume we deserve better. Whatever that is.

    And I thought about that… and how it's not so much a "better," but simply a "different."  We've made a point of trying to exploit the things that are great about where we live.  

    I wrote back (edited slightly to remove specific details):

    I think that living in the city, kids "launch" into safe independent wandering a little bit later than they can in a suburb with no busy streets and homes on cul-de-sacs, but once they do launch there is quite a bit they can do — it is a different sort of independent activity.

    At 14, my oldest now takes the bus downtown to buy his own clothes, and to the mall to go to the movies alone; he and my 11yo took the bus into the next suburb over to go rollerskating recently.

    (Since I have five kids I am eager to get them to the point where I don't have to drive them everywhere).

    They walk half a mile to the main drag through our part of the city.  There they can buy chai at a coffeeshop, or walk to the Y for their swimming and aikido lessons; we can send them to the hardware store and to the Mexican grocery.  We are looking forward to when a new food co-op goes in even closer to our house.

    As little kids, my children haven't been allowed to go to the playground and play by themselves, and there don't happen to be any neighborhood friends they can walk to and visit, and that is too bad; but there are things to do that are interesting for older kids and teens, things that kids in the suburbs can't always get to until they can drive.

    + + + 

    Now that my oldest is getting older, I feel that our neighborhood is starting to … bloom? … with possibilities for us.  Yesterday the homeschooling co-op had a tour of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, led by our parish priest, who pointed out details in various pieces of sacred art in the permanent exhibits.  It was for high school kids only.  Rather than bundling everyone in the car to drive my high schooler there and then again to pick him up, I gave him bus fare and he went on his own, met up with the group, took his tour, and then schlepped back to the bus stop.  He didn't  even have to change buses, and his return trip was on the transfer from the outbound trip, so he saved one fare.

    This is like a revelation.  The same 14yo is just now, I think, comfortable watching his younger siblings (minus the baby) while his dad and I go out for a little while.  Because we live where we do, we can walk to get a beer together (with the baby) on a weekday evening.  We have the phone, the teen has the phone, and we're literally close enough that Mark could sprint home if there was a problem.

    I admit I don't take the kids to the playground as much as I like; but yesterday afternoon Mark came home early (after a week of late nights and early mornings) so I went to the pool for a quick swim before dinner.  "Can I go?" asked my four-year-old, so I took him with me and he went to the Y's child care for an hour and a half, running around and playing with other children and having a grand old time (he burst into tears when I showed up to take him home).

    Most of my friends live in the suburbs, and they do have some nice things, like un-busy streets where their kids can ride their bikes, and lots of neighbors who also have kids of the same age (granted, occasionally that's not always wonderful), and big yards.  We have some nice things too.  You just don't always see those opportunities flower until kids are old enough to use them much.

     

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    2 comments on The best you can do with what you have.

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