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].

  • St. Francis de Sales on temptation.

    Moving on to the second in my collection of sermons by St. Francis de Sales for Lent:  "Temptation."

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    The basic thrust of this sermon is that temptation is an inevitable part of the chosen life of the Christian, and that Jesus taught us that much when he went into the desert (Mt 4:1, Mk 1:12, Lk 4:1).   The main points are as follows:

    I.   "[A]lthough no one can be exempt from temptation, still no one should seek it or go of his own accord to the place where it may be found."

    That is why the Evangelist says that Our Lord was led into the desert by the Spirit to be tempted; it was not then by His choice (I am speaking with regard to his human nature) that He went to the place of temptation, but He was led by the obedience He owed to His heavenly Father….

    If we are led by the Spirit of God to the place of temptation, we should not fear, but should be assured that He will render us victorious… Our enemy is like a chained dog; if we do not approach, it will do us no harm.

    II. "Let us… consider a little the weapons which Our Lord made use of to repulse the devil that came to tempt him in the desert.  They were none other, my dear friends, than those the Psalmist speaks of in [Psalm 91]."  Sufficient is our belief in God:

    O how divinely well armed with truth was Our Lord… for He was truth itself.  This truth of which the Psalmist speaks is nothing other than faith.  Whoever is armed with faith need fear nothing… for what can harm him who says Credo, "I believe" in God who is…our Father Almighty?  …By using the words of Holy Scripture our dear Master overcame all the temptations the enemy presented to Him.

    …Our Divine Master could not have faith, since he possessed… a perfect knowledge of the truths which faith teaches us; however He wished to make use of this virtue in order to repel the enemy, for no other reason, my dear friends, than to teach all that we have to do.   Do not then seek for other arms nor other weapons in order to refuse consent to a temptation except to say "I believe."  And what do you believe?  "In God" my "Father Almighty."

    III.  Psalm 91 refers to terrors of the night, of which St. Francis says there are three:  cowardly and slothful fear, the natural fear that children have, and the fear that the weak have.  It also refers to arrows, to a threatening "business" that takes place in the night, and "the spirit which comes to tempt us in broad daylight."  The remainder of the sermon is a listing of these attacks, so that we might recognize them and thereby withstand them.  Here are some highlights:

     

    On the fear of cowards and slothful souls:

    Fear is the first temptation which the enemy presents to those who have resolved to serve God, for as soon as they are shown what perfection requires of them, they think, "Alas, I shall never be able to do it…"   He will strengthen you and give you the grace to persevere…

    Do not be astonished, therefore, and do not do as the slothful, who are troubled when they wake at night by the fear that daylight will come very soon when they will have to work.  The slothful and cowardly …amuse themselves in thinking… more about future difficulties than what they have to do at present.

    Of course.  If you were to contemplate what you have to do at present, you would be forced to admit that it is time to do something other than contemplate.  

    "Oh," they say, "if I devote myself to the service of God, it will be necessary for me to work so much in order to resist the temptations which will attack me."  You are quite right,  for you will not be exempt from them… To whom do you wish, I pray, that the devil should present his temptations if not to those who despise them?

    …Rise from your bed, indolent one… Rise… from your cowardice, and keep clearly before your mind this infallible truth:  all must be tempted.

    Yup.  You're not as special as you think. 

     

    On the fear experienced by a "child" in the spiritual life:

    As you are aware, children are very much afraid when they are out of their mother's arms…They feel that nothing can harm them provided they are holding her hand.  

    Hold His hand and do not be frightened… Consider how St. Peter [walking on the water]suddenly began to fear and at the same time to sink down, and cried out, "Lord, save me!"  … Let us do the same…

    There are some who, feigning courage, go someplace alone at night.  When they hear a little stone fall from the ceiling, or just hear a mouse running, they cry out… Often persons who have just come into God's service are like these people. They affect fearlessness… This is what happened to poor St. Peter…. The more Our Lord expounded on the greatness of his afflictions, the more did St. Peter passionately insist that he would do as much.  But how well he realized how completely he had been deceived when he found himself, at the time of his Saviour's Passion, so fainthearted…

    Thus it happens to those young souls who testify to so much ardor in their conversion… But just wait a little.  For if they hear a mouse, by which I mean if the consolation and sentiments of devotion which they have had until then happen to be withdrawn and if some little temptation attacks them… they begin to fear.

    "Oh, how miserable… I am in the Lord's service where I thought I would live in peace, and yet all different sorts of temptations have come… I do not have so much as an hour of real peace."

    There is no place where temptation does not have access… It is precisely because Our Divine Saviour is [in the desert] that temptation is found there too…

    "But I am so imperfect," you say.  I believe it, indeed!  Therefore do not hope to be able to live without committing imperfections, seeing that this is impossible while you are in this life.  It is enough that you do not love them and that they do not remain in your heart.  That being so… do not trouble yourself about the perfection you so much desire.  It will be enough if you have it in dying.

     

    On the "arrow that flies by day:"

    These arrows are the vain hopes and expectations on which those feed who aspire to perfection.  We find those who hope for nothing so much as to be Mother Teresa [of Avila] very soon… That is good; but tell me, how long do you give yourself for this task?  "Three months," you reply…  they are very often discouraged in the pursuit of the real virtue which leads to sanctity.

     

    On the spirit which comes to tempt us in broad daylight — the temptation to detest all that might distract us from the solitary enjoyment of God:

    This spirit… is that which attacks us in the fair noontide of interior consolations… at the time when the divine Sun of Justice ..fills us with so agreeable a warmth and light… that we die to almost everything else…

    [I]t cannot be appreciated enough by this lover who is always languishing for His love.  She does not want anyone to come and trouble her in her repose which, in the end, terminates only in the vain complacency she takes in it.  For she admires the goodness and sweetness of God, but in herself, and not in God.  To her, solitude is very desirable at this time so as to enjoy the Divine Presence without any distractions.  Yet she does not really desire it for the glory of God, but only for the satisfaction which she herself experiences in receiving these sweet caresses and holy delights issuing from this well-beloved Heart of the Saviour.

    Now that is something to chew on, for those of us who live in the bustle of family life.

    My dear friends, we shall never be capable of keeping company with him in His consolations, if we are not sharers of His labors and sufferings.  He fasted forty days, but the angels brought him something to eat only at the end of thattime.

    These forty days, as we said just now, symbolize the life of the Christian, of each one of us.  Let us then desire these consolations only at the end of our lives, and let us busy ourselves in steadfast resistance to the frontal attacks of our enemies.  For whether we desire it or not we shall be tempted….

    Let us fear neither the temptation nor the tempter, for if we make use of the shield of faith and the armor of truth, they will have no power whatsoever of us.  Let us no longer fear the three terrors of the night.  And let us not entertain the vain hope of being or wishing to be saints in three months!

    As I finish this reflection, it strikes me that it isn't so much about temptations themselves, but about the fear and discouragement that comes from temptation.   Temptations are particular things; he suffers from one kind, while she is not bothered at all by what troubles him, but is continually assailed by a different one; the man in this vocation is often tempted one way, the man in a different vocation is tempted another way.  What tempts me does not tempt you, and vice versa.

    But while our particular temptations may differ, the fact that we are tempted does not; and so we're all subject in one way or another to the struggle with them.  So this advice, though it was addressed to a group of Visitation sisters in 1622, still applies to us now no matter our state in life. 

     

     

     

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  • Mortification through daily work: St. Francis de Sales again.

    This isn't from my book of Lenten sermons, but from Introduction to the Devout Life.

    In the chapter on "Mortification," the saint first encourages fasting "a little" more than the minimum:

    If you are able to fast you would do well to fast a little more often than the Church demands, for besides elevating the spirit, subduing the flesh, practising virtue and acquiring greater merit, this serves to maintain our mastery over greediness and to subject our bodily appetities to the law of the spirit… Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays are the days on which the early Christians most often practised abstinence, so you may choose some of these days as fast days… according to your confessor's advice.

    But then the rest of the chapter is a caution against overdoing it.  In particular:

    …[W]ant of moderation in fasting, taking the discipline, wearing a hair shirt and so on, renders the best years of many people useless in the service of charity…

    The flesh is subdued both by fasting and by work; if your work is necessary and useful to God's glory I would rather you suffered the labour than the fasting, as more in accordance with the mind of the church, for our duty to God and to neighbor dispenses us even from fasts of obligation.  One has the hardship of fasting, the other of serving the sick, visiting those in prison, hearing confessions, preaching, helping those in need, praying and so on; all of which are more valuable than fasting, for they not only subdue the body, but also bear excellent fruit.  In general, it is better to over-strengthen than over-weaken the body; we can always curb it when necessary, we cannot always restore it when we want to.

    I read this not so much as a caution against fasting — because excessive fasting is rarely a problem today, although excessive scrupulosity and overthinking about fasting often is, if my FB feed is any indication.    The saint does recommend fasting "a little more often" than required, after all, "if you are able to fast."

    No, I read this more as an encouragement to consider the ordinary performance of one's duties as an opportunity for fasting, a chance to "rend your heart, not your garments" and do one's daily work in a spirit of mortification.

    Those of us whose primary work is the care and education of children will have no problem seeing that our work is "necessary and useful to God's glory."  We know that such work is inherently dignified.  

    Those of us who work for a paycheck probably have a variety of experiences.  Some occupations are obviously ordered as a whole to the good of the human person, even if certain individual tasks seem to take away from it.  Laborers in other occupations may find it harder to see the channel by which their labor may be made useful to God's glory, but (with the exception of inherently harmful work — work that aims to degrade and damage the human person) there is some good to be harnessed in even the smallest and most menial tasks, if we can only put our hearts in the right place.

    Today I'm going to eat when I need to, but I'm also going to try to do my work without complaint and without wasting time.  This doesn't mean no online recreation, but it does mean I'm going to set a timer on it.  

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  • St. Francis de Sales on fasting.

    First in a series for Lent.

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    The first of the Lenten sermons of St. Francis de Sales treats of a fairly typical Ash Wednesday topic:  fasting isn't virtuous in and of itself, but to be salutary must be done in a particular way.  

    Here's the structure:

    Introduction:  Fasting profits some and not others, because some do it well and some don't.  Jesus instructed his disciples on how to fast fruitfully.

    Three principal conditions (among many) for fasting well:

    I.  Fast with our whole heart, all our senses, and our understanding, memory, and will.

    II.  Never to fast through vanity but always through humility and charity, not in one's own way but in the ways prescribed and recommended, neither more nor less.

    III.  Do everything to please God alone, for his reasons, not trying to rationalize the reasons for them nor to improve on the prescriptions by substituting one's own.

    Summary and conclusion in the name of the Blessed Trinity.

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    I'm just going to pull out some quotes.

    I.

    "The first condition is that we must fast with our whole heart, that is to say, willingly, whole-heartedly, universally and entirely."

    [St. Bernard] says that fasting was instituted by Our Lord as a remedy for our mouth… Since sin entered the world through the mouth,  the mouth must do penance by being deprived of foods prohibited and forbidden by the Church…

    But [he] adds that, as it is not our mouth alone which has sinned, but also all our other senses, our fast must be general and entire, that is, all the members of our body must fast.  For if we have offended God through the eyes, through the ears, through the tongue, and through our other senses, why should we not make them fast as well?  And not only must we make the bodily senses fast, but also the soul's powers and passions — yes, even the understanding, the memory, and the will, since we have sinned through both body and spirit.

    This seems fitting.  We know that in the description from Genesis of the first sin, the act of eating is an outward and efficacious sign.  It is the concrete act that enacts a deeper reality, a total interior act of self-will, rationalization, and disobedience, a suicide of the spirit.  Because of the mythical language of the type of inspired story of Genesis, we can also take the small, singular act as a representation 

    The mere act of eating even a forbidden fruit in the absence of certain interior dispositions (such as knowledge of its forbiddenness, or total freedom to choose) would not enact such a reality.  

    And so it is for us:  The act of fasting is an outward and efficacious sign of a kind of interior fasting, if and only if we have the appropriate interior dispositions.  And it's all looking forward to a different act of eating that is itself an outward and efficacious sign — the anti-apple, so to speak.

    How to fast "universally and entirely?"

    How many sins have entered into the soul through the eyes…?  That is why they must fast by keeping them lowered and not permitting them to look upon frivolous and unlawful objects;

    the ears, by depriving them of listening to vain talk…

    the tongue, in not speaking idle words and those which savor of the world…

    We ought also to cut off useless thoughts,

    as well as vain memories

    and superfluous appetites

    and desires of our will. 

    …In this way interior fasting accompanies exterior fasting.

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    II.

    "The second condition to be met is never to fast through vanity but always through humility."

    A.  To fast in charity is to fast in humility.

    St. Francis first turns to the famous discourse on love ("charity") from 1 Corinthians 13 as a set of criteria here.

    (I wish I would remember more often to run my actions and intentions through 1 Cor. 13 as a check on them.  They are truly generally applicable, and so St. Francis freely asserts that they apply to Lenten fasting.)

     

    St. Paul in the epistle that he wrote to the Corinthians… declared the conditions necessary for disposing ourselves to fast well during Lent.  He says this to us:  Lent is approaching. Prepare yourselves to fast with charity, for if your fast is performed without it, it will be vain and useless, since fasting, like all other good works, is not pleasing to God unless it is done in charity and through charity.

    When you discipline yourself, when you say long prayers, if you have not charity, all that is nothing.  Even though you should work miracles, if you have not charity, they will not profit you at all.  Indeed, even if you should suffer martyrdom without charity, your martyrdom is worth nothing and would not be meritorious in the eyes of the Divine Majesty.

    For all works, small or great, however good they may be in themselves, are of no value and profit us nothing if they are not done in charity and through charity.

    … It is almost impossible to have charity without being humble and to be humble without having charity…. the one can never be without the other.

    So, one check upon our humility is to look at the discourse in First Corinthians.  Are we impatient? unkind? envious? boastful and proud? easily angered?  etc.

    B.  "Now how can one fast through vanity?"

    According to Scripture there are hundreds and hundreds of ways, but I will content myself with telling you one of them…

    To fast through vanity is to fast through self-will… It is to fast as one wishes and not as others wish; to fast in the manner which pleases us, and not as we are ordered or counseled.

    …On this matter… we find ourselves confronted with two groups of people.   

    Some do not wish to fast as much as they ought, and cannot be satisfied with the food permitted (this is what many worldly people still do today who allege a thousand reasons on this subject)… 

    The others… wish to fast more than is necessary.  It is with these that we have more trouble. 

    We can easily and clearly show the first that… in not fasting as much as they should, while able to do it, they transgress the commandments of the Lord.

    But we have more difficulty with the weak and infirm who are not strong enough for fasting.  They will not listen to reason, nor can they be persuaded that they are not bound by it [the law of fasting], and despite all our reasons they insist on fasting more than is required… These people do not fast through humility, but through vanity.  They do not recognize that… they would do much more for God in not fasting … and using the food ordered them, than in wishing to abstain through self-will.  For though, on account of their weakness, their mouth cannot abstain, they should make the other senses of the body fast, as well as the passions and powers of the soul.

    Yes, I think we've seen that.

    C.  On the apparent contradiction between "let your fasting be done in secret" and the Church's practice of public penance, e.g., ashes.

    This is always a necessary topic in an Ash Wednesday homily, isn't it?  I like St. Francis's take on it:

    Our Divine Master did not mean by this that we ought to have no care about the edification of the neighbor.  Oh no, for St. Paul says [Phil. 4:5]:  Let your modesty be known to all.  

    Those who fast during the holy season of Lent ought not to conceal it, since the Church orders this fast and wishes that everyone should know that we are observing it.  We must not, then, deny this to those who expect it of us… since we are obliged to remove every cause of scandal to our brothers.  

    But when our Lord said:  Fast in secret, He wanted us to understand:  do not do it to be seen or esteemed… Be careful to edify them well, but not in order that they might esteem you as holy and virtuous. Do not be like the hypocrites.  Do not try to appear better than others in practicing more fasting and penances than they.

    St. Francis goes on to say, essentially, "By the way, don't talk to me about St. Paul the Hermit or St. Simon Stylites; they were acting by special inspiration and we're not supposed to imitate them."  But we must move on to…

    III.  "The third condition necessary for fasting well is to look to God and do everything to please him…"

    We must not make use of much learned discussion and discernment to understand why the fast is commanded, whether it is for all or only for some.  Everyone knows that it was ordered in expiation for the sin of our first father, Adam… Many have difficulties on this subject… No one is ignorant that children are not bound to fast, nor are persons sixty years of age.

    Lots of people are not satisfied by the simple idea that the fast is ordered in expiation for sins.  This is too mystical for them and they bring in lots of other reasons which seem to them more rational.  ("Solidarity with the poor," anyone?  "Treading lightly on the earth" with environmentally friendly meatless Fridays?)

    And lots of people, oddly enough, argue about who is and isn't supposed to fast.  The church is clear on it.  We don't have to make up our own rules just because we don't like the Church's.  We shouldn't drop hints that healthy and robust 62-year-olds really would do better to fast, for example, laying a burden on someone they do not have to carry.

    St. Francis gives three examples to back this up:  

    • Adam and Eve discussing why it was okay to eat the fruit (Genesis 3:1-6);
    • Jesus's disciples who discussed and questioned the notion of His giving of His flesh and blood for them to eat and drink, and were rejected;
    • and an episode from the life of St. Pachonius in which the saint rebuked a cook for imposing extra discipline on some young religious, contrary to orders.

    Conclusion

    This is all that I had to tell you regarding fasting and what must be observed in order to fast well.

      The first thing is that your fast should be entire and universal; that is, that you should make all the members of your body and all the powers of your soul fast:  

    • keeping your eyes lowered, or at least lower than ordinarily;
    • keeping better silence, or at least keeping it more punctually than is usual;
    • mortifying the hearing and the tongue so that you will no longer hear or speak of anything vain or useless;
    • the understanding, in order to consider only holy and pious subjects;
    • the memory, in filling it with the remembrance of bitter and sorrowful things…
    • keeping your will in check and your spirit at the foot of the crucifix…

    The second condition is that you do not observe your fast or perform your works for the eyes of others.

    And the third is that you do all your actions, and consequently your fasting, to please God alone…

    That, with the sign of the Cross, is the end of the sermon.  It's simple and direct, and like most of what St. Francis de Sales writes, very practical.

    The next sermon, which I think I will try to look at on Friday, is on the subject of temptation.

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  • My Lenten reading/blogging: That other Francis, again.

    For Lent this year I picked up a copy of The Sermons of St. Francis de Sales for Lent, part of a series of the saint's sermons published by TAN.

    ZI won't be giving up the Internet at all for Lent this year — not Facebook, not Twitter, certainly not blogging.   (Though as usual, I'll stay off it on Good Friday.)  I can see myself setting a timer so I don't overdo it, but I'll still be here.

    If anything, I might try to blog more.  This little corner has been sadly neglected, and it's probably (for me personally) the most fruitful writing I do.

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    There are twelve sermons in this book, and I am going to try to read them and blog them all, approximately on Wednesdays and Fridays, which should take me to Holy Week. 

    Today, without sneaking a peek ahead to the first Lenten sermon, I looked at the book's preface, written by Rev. John A. Abruzzese, S.T.D.  Here are a few quotes from it.  All emphasis is mine.

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    "As a young priest and preacher St. Francis was consumed by a burning desire to proclaim the love of God to all people, regardless of social class or intellectual distinction.  Therefore, he chose in preaching to adopt the homily as his style, long out of vogue in his day.  From his experience in hearing the popular orators of Paris churches, St. Francis saw that if he were to be an effective preacher he would have to speak in a manner which the people could understand clearly, devoid of the accustomed elaborate rhetorical devices and seemingly endless Latin and Greek quotations."

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    "In doing so, he risked his reputation and even prompted the following criticism from his father:

    [Y]ou preach too often… In my day it was not so, preachings were much rarer; but what preachings…!  They were erudite, well thought out; more Latin and Greek were quoted in one than you quote in ten; everyone was enraptured and edified; people used to go to sermons in crowds.  Now you have made preaching so common, this will no longer happen and no one one will think very much of you!"

    (Anybody catch a little whiff of "Your sermons are so popular that no one will want to listen to them?" Yogi Berra, pray for us!)

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    St. Francis "reminded him [his own brother, also a bishop] of his duty and emphasized that preaching must be accessible to all:"  

    We must not be like those little trickles of water that spring from artificial rocks in the garden of great folk and to which one scarcely dares approach… To fulfill our office we must be like the great and open fountains from which water is taken in abundance, not only for men, but also, and even more frequently, by beasts — everything, even snakes, having free use of it… We must never repulse anyone, even though our peace and comfort may have to suffer a little.

     

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    "The charism of his personal holiness broke down all resistance… St. Francis stated it … simply, 'To love well is sufficient for speaking well!'"

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     …[T]he disposition of the hearer is equally essential in the 'heart to heart' communication on which St. Francis based his preaching…  According to an incident which is said to have taken place during the Lenten series preached at Annecy:

    The Saint had the habit of pausing at the beginning of a sermon and looking across the assembly ranged before him for a few silent moments.  A member of the cathedral chapter ventured to ask him what his silence signified.  "I salute the guardian angel of each one of my audience," he answered, "and I beg him to make the heart under his care ready for my words.  Very great favors have come to me by this means."

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    It has always been controversial, the question of which is the better preaching and teaching style:  the learned, or the populist.  

    I am of the mind that the style must be adapted to the audience, or conversely, that if we have evidence that the speaker or writer is competent, that we may judge who is the audience by considering the chosen style.  

    A populist, simple way of speaking, however, intended to reach everyone, is at its most effective when the speaker is in fact quite personally erudite, personally holy, personally learned.  He has more fruits to pick from in his quest to offer the juiciest morsels to the hungry crowd; a deeper well to draw from,  the better to give the masses of thirsty to drink.

    St. Francis de Sales, according to this book's introduction, is a patron saint of writers and journalists, as well as of the Catholic press.  

    I think he makes a fine patron saint for Catholic bloggers as well, and a decent one for those whose task is to educate the young.  We ever have to gather up a complicated, sprawling, reality, part the tangled mat of fibers in order to display that which is essential, in words that can be understood by everyone; and yet, not pretend that the simple essentials are all that is, but remain true to the complications.

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    But the point is well taken:  "Heart speaks to heart," says St. Francis, and that means that it takes two hearts for a connection to be made.  The speaker cannot take full responsibility for the hearer.   Yes, the speaker has a responsibility to be as clear as possible, and speak in a language that the hearer is capable of understanding.  But none of us can force another's heart, it isn't possible; there is always a will; and the hearer may choose to hear or to not hear.  

    There is such a tendency to blame the messenger, or at least the messenger's style.  But the hearer has control over the channel too — if not over his own intellect, or his language, he does have command of his attention, his capacity to ask questions, his capacity of reflection and self-examination.

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    Come on along and we'll see together what this Francis, that scandalously simple preacher, has to say to us.

    MMPOWHC

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  • The same three places.

    Saturday morning, and I am at The Bad Waitress again.

    This is a medium-sized restaurant in Minneapolis at the corner of 26th Street and Nicollet, a stretch of avenue known as “Eat Street.” A couple of blocks south of here, Nicollet’s run of restaurants, ethnic markets, and coffeeshops is interrupted by a featureless, vast wall: the back of an enormous K-Mart. The K-Mart and its wide parking lot, awash in taco trucks and gulls picking its broad expanse for discarded fast-food bags, faces the lower-rent neighborhood where I live. Eat Street, and the downtown area with the convention center and the Hyatt at its southern edge, is thus protected, slightly, from my immediate neighbors. One can almost imagine the city planners sketching it in, and pausing as an afterthought to add the White Castle and the Popeye’s next door, hoping to distract any peckish South Siders who might consider going the long way round and find themselves on the other side.

    In the last five or six years the corner of Nicollet and 38th has sprung a tiny cluster of restaurants and coffee shops. A new co-op/grocery is being constructed on 38th. I think critical mass has been reached. I predict that someday, the traffic patterns will change, and Eat Street will reach all the way to where I live. I predict the eventual demise of the K-Mart.

    That will be good for me, I suppose. Maybe not for the current K-Mart shoppers who live near here and can walk there or get there easily on the bus. (I go there too, myself, to pick up the odd bit of school supplies or sunblock.) Neighborhoods change, and it is not always easy to tot up what is for the better, for the common good, and what is not.

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    That was quite a digression.

    So I am sitting here in The Bad Waitress on a Saturday. I nearly always go out by myself on a Saturday morning. For a few years I made a point of trying lots of different breakfast spots. I have had some outstanding breakfasts, some of them memorable. After a while, though, I found that I settled down to a pattern of going to the same three places, unless an errand took me elsewhere. All three are open quite early, all three have wifi, all three will sell me caraway rye toast with my breakfast, and there the similarities mostly end.

    This morning I was driving back from the southern end of town, having dropped off my sons and H’s at an outing for Scouts, and I thought of a breakfast place I had never tried and keep meaning to try, that I would pass on the way. I didn’t know when it opened, but it was 8:45, later than I am usually out. I decided to try it if it was open. But when I arrived at the parking lot, it was still shuttered, probably one of the many restaurants around here that opens at 9 am.

    As I pulled out, I realized that I felt relieved. The Bad Waitress was where I had wanted to go all along.

    + + +

    Some mornings — this morning is one — I feel an anxious desperation to be here. I actually have a craving, not so much for scrambled eggs with kale and goat cheese and buttered, toasted caraway rye, but just for sitting here at this table, in this space.

    I do not know why. Seriously. I cannot put my finger on anything particularly special about this restaurant. Nothing wrong with it either. But I want to be here. Sitting at one of the tables by the big windows. Looking out them, at the fairly nondescript view: the parking meters, the bicycle racks, the pizza restaurant across the street, the payday-loan place on the opposite corner. The people hurrying past, extra fast today to coax a little warmth from inside themselves to fight the frigid weather.

    This is a place where you write your order on a card and bring it to the cashier, and later a server brings it. They do fresh squeezed juice and coffee, and also pots of tea (I am having one now, after having finished my food, to stave off the guilt of occupying a table as people begin to come in for the late-morning breakfast rush). The tea is good — it’s pure, intense ginger, with a shot of honey, my favorite infusion, but it is not the reason I crave this place either.

    I can’t figure it out. The best I can do is that here I feel anonymous. I could be anyone. I could be no one. I am not alone, exactly. I am surrounded by people — hipsters and elderly couples, people with dreadlocks and piercings and people with utterly conventional dress, parents with children, clusters of young women, people with newspapers and people with smartphones, solo breakfasters chatting with each other at the counter stools. I am surrounded by people, by noise and laughter, the clink of silverware and the hiss of steam, the radio playing oldies (actual oldies from before the 1980s). I hear many conversations but no words.

    I am the forty-year-old woman all by herself in the far corner booth, in the white fleece and brown knit cap, typing away on an iPad as she finishes the last cup of tea, hoping not to attract glares from the queue of people who are still waiting for a table.

    Something about this place makes me feel like nobody or anybody in a way that feels delicious, luxurious. I have to get up and go. Errands I have to run, and by the way my tea is gone, and with it my excuse to go on occupying the table. Nevertheless my heart will be sitting here in this booth all week. It’s crazy. I don’t know why. I keep coming back.

     

    —

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  • The crash of the token economy, part II.

    The last time I wrote about the crash of the token economy, in which the experiment of using popsicle-stick tokens to link the children's chores to their allowance appeared to have stuttered to a halt, I ended thusly:

    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 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."

     

    And everybody in the comments thought that was a great idea I had and they couldn't wait to hear what my son came up with.

    OK, well… that was funny, because I didn't realize I was setting you up for the Narrative In Which The Young Person Comes Up With The Great Idea That Works.  

    I should have set you up for the Great-Sounding Idea That Doesn't Work (At Least Not Right Away).

    + + +

    My 14yo's idea was this:

    • The three big-enough kids should each have a list of jobs they had to do every day.
    • They could do them at any time of the day that they wanted.
    • They could ask for the job to be checked, so that they could get "credit" for it, as soon as it was accomplished. 

    (The last bit had been a sore point for my 14yo because he felt it was incredibly unjust that his room might be cleaned perfectly at 9 am but if I didn't get around to checking it until 3 pm it might have become messed up by then.  He definitely has a point.  I had set an alarm for 11:05 am to check the rooms, but I often silenced it because I was busy and didn't check till later.)

    I said, "We can't do the last bit.  For one thing, I cannot promise that I will drop whatever I am doing instantly and run upstairs to check someone's room just because you or the 11yo or the 8yo happens to b ready at that exact time.  I might be trying to teach the 4yo, I might have hot things on the stove.  I promise you that the last bit will not work."

    "Oh… well, can you at least check it at the same time every day?"

    I thought about that.  The random checks really bugged him.  And I couldn't blame him for that, either.  They say — reasonably — that kids do best when their expectations are predictable.  Although it seemed to me a predictable one ("Just keep your room clean all the time and it won't matter when I check it") I had unwittingly created an unpredictable expectation, and all three of them hated it.

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

    I suggested to the 14yo, "Suppose I had Dad check your jobs as soon as he gets home.  Then if you do them in the afternoon, they won't be entirely destroyed, and we won't have him expect perfection."

    "Yes.  That'll work!" he said.

    I cautioned him:  "Dad WILL NOT remember to do this on his own.  You HAVE to remind him when he gets home.  Otherwise he will forget, at least until it becomes a habit."

    He said he would.  

    + + +

    So I made a new schedule.  I still required the kids to make their beds in the morning, put their laundry in the wash if it was their day, and clear their breakfast dishes before starting school.  I suddenly had the brilliant idea to add "Brush Teeth" to the morning list of jobs (why didn't I think of that before?)  And they'd still have to help me clean up the kitchen right after lunch in order to earn all of us the precious break time until 2 pm.

    All the other check-able jobs went onto a list entitled "Anytime before Dad gets home (Unless making dinner)."

    I figured that if a kid was making dinner, he or she could be exempted from all these afternoon jobs for the day.

    For example, my 11yo's afternoon check-able jobs included:

    • Downstairs ("guest") bathroom – wipe up, clear the floor and counter, make sure there is enough toilet paper, soap, and hand towel, empty trash
    • Basement climbing room – remove clothing and trash, make sure there's a path from the stairs to the pantry so I don't trip, check for safety hazards, put clothes and DVDs on shelves
    • Bedroom – clear floor of his stuff, put clean clothes away and dirty clothes in basket, close closet and drawers

    We drew a dark border around the set of jobs that Mark was supposed to check each day.

    I stuck the schedule on the wall next to the computer where he would be sure to see it.

    I told Mark about the plan and he agreed to it.

    And then (to make a long story short) none of us ever remembered to remind Mark to check the jobs, so he never did, and we let the whole month go by with no accountability whatsoever.

    Discipline!  It starts with the self.

    + + + 

    But there are some bright spots in all this.  My 11yo had been impressed with the importance of keeping the downstairs bathroom clean enough for guests, and — I noticed.  That room had been basically clean enough almost all month.  And it had never run out of toilet paper.

    I kept thinking to myself, "Must write this down or something" but not doing it.  But still I noticed.

    The same child had been told about the basement, "I know there's a lot of stuff to do down here, but the most important thing — the thing that I notice every single day — is whether I trip over anything when I go down to the pantry to get a can of tomatoes or something.  Please, if you do nothing else, keep that path clear."

    And — he did!  I don't remember whether any of the other jobs were done, but I noticed that I hardly ever had to kick a toy or struggle with a foam mat to get to the pantry and to open the pantry door.

    I think he actually understood that his jobs were important to our family.  And somehow it actually motivated him to do the part that really mattered.

    I also knew that my 14yo had done a reasonably regular job of tidying up the game room (because he always announced it to me:  "Well.  I had a good day.  Got the game room cleaned up, too.")  

    My 8yo had been more spotty about it all, but the two of us had spent a lot of time in her room working to get it from Utterly Destroyed to Manageable, and also things had been rather shaken up by the introduction of a bunk bed and a new bedtime routine so that her 5yo brother could effectively share the bedroom with her.

    So we just paid them all a flat allowance for January and called it good.

    This month, more tweaks.

    —

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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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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  • 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.

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