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].

  • An update on a long-ago prayer request.

    Because I hate to leave people hanging.  A little more than a year ago I posted this:

    [Prayers requested] for longtime online friends facing an uncertain future and the prospect of uprooting their young family after a completely-unexpected denial of tenure, which means having to look for another job quite soon. The field is not one with lucrative alternatives in the private sector, so they face considerable hardship and a difficult job search. They are shocked and unprepared.

    (Just so nobody gets confused, the person I was posting about is *not* anyone who frequently comments on this blog.)

    The day I posted it, the professor friend started a Hail Mary tenure appeals process.  They kept friends updated on the twists and turns through Facebook, so I've been able to follow along for an entire year.   Let me just say that the word DRAMA does not begin to describe it.  According to my friend, one particular departmental colleague, apparently for personal reasons, had worked behind the scenes to subtly torpedo the  application.  

    The decision to appeal was a difficult one because it reduced the energy available to spend looking for a new position.  The husband and wife constantly worried that they were making the wrong decision to press the appeal forward.  But they were very concerned about the effect on their family of uprooting them again.  It was an awful year in many ways, one in which their faith in basic human goodness was severely challenged.

    However, today my friend was able to publicly announce the news:  success!  The appeal went through and the letter for tenure recommendation is now in. 

    So, if any of you saw the original post last May and spared a thought or a prayer:  thanks.  

    —

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    2 comments on An update on a long-ago prayer request.

  • Empty spaces.

    The feast of the Ascension is transferred to the following Sunday in this diocese, and that was yesterday. Mark was not home, so I was bouncing a baby on my lap while trying to keep my four- and seven-year-olds from making too much noise grabbing MagnifiKid!s from each other. The oldest boys were serving at the altar.

    The Ascension is one of the stories that sticks in my mind, possibly because of that enigmatic, “He will return in the same way that you saw him go” bit. One reads the description of how they saw him go, and imagines it unspooling in reverse, and wonders how that is supposed to work. But it’s curious for other reasons, too.

    For one thing: why couldn’t, or didn’t, Jesus send his spirit right away? Or “send” it at all: couldn’t he have handed it over while they stood around him? Why leave like that, then string them along for ten days till Pentecost?

    I know, I know: he didn’t really leave them; I am with you until the end of the age. In his departing, I suppose, he was making himself more present, because ubiquitous; instead of localized in a body whose feet pressed his weight into the earth, he is outside of it all somehow, everywhere in general because nowhere in particular. But why the gap?

    They waited, prayerful and perhaps frightened, in Jerusalem for a promise, and a few days later it came true. But why the empty space in between?

    + + +

    Not much later I was sitting in the rocking chair in my living room, nursing the baby and juggling the iPad, and sipping from a cup of hot coffee. All was quiet; lunch was over, and the four bigger children had scattered to play Minecraft and watch movies in other rooms. I had just finished exchanging texts with Mark, who had been traveling for several days.

    Possibly it was the combination of a bit of self-pity mixed with the general positive effects of caffeine on my sense of well-being, but as I sat there I felt an odd sensation that I can only describe as the purest bittersweetness I remember having.

    I was lonely. I missed my husband. (And I knew it was really missing him, and not just wishing he were here to help me with the kids, because they weren’t asking for anything at that moment; I was perfectly content.) I would have liked to share the Sunday afternoon with him, me in the rocking chair, him lying on his back on the living room rug with his head propped on a pillow — he will never sit on a chair when there is a perfectly good floor to sprawl on. I would have liked it, but I was alone. I felt that sensation: a hollowness, a wishing, deep inside my chest.

    But at the same time, the very sensation of loneliness, of missing, seemed to spread wings and reveal something else within it: a glowing coal, an ember of pure gratitude at its core. Longing for my love hurt, and the hurt was a proof that I have love. I would not feel this “missing,” this hole, if no one had left it behind. In the keenness of my sensation of emptiness I knew that I am ordinarily in possession of fullness and great beauty. Maybe it has been a while since I knew it, or acknowledged it. At any rate, I overflowed with thankfulness that I should enjoy such abundance every day, so as to create real longings. I have something to long for, and that is something exquisite.

    I wrote on Facebook:

    Discovering now that an interlude of absence can truly be sweet; an empty space that is *felt* is a reminder and an evidence of the blessings that ordinarily fill it to overflowing.

    I don’t know if there is a connection; but may be, may be.

     

    —

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    1 comment on Empty spaces.

  • Indecision.

    Mark wasn’t going to be around yesterday evening and I’ve been a bit burned out, so I hired a sitter for the other kids and left with the baby for a few hours. I parked on a residential street at the edge of Uptown, put the baby in a carrier and slung a bag over my shoulder, and headed off on foot.

    I meant to sit at a patio table in the shade, and drink a glass of wine or a margarita, eat a nice dinner, nurse the baby and read a book. After that, I thought, I’d walk around the lake. But as I wandered around the district (a few square blocks of shops, restaurants, and bars, surrounded by residences, and near the lakes), I couldn’t decide what I wanted to eat.

    After a while I worked out that I was not hungry. So instead I just meandered around. I stopped into The North Face and bought a practical sun hat, because it was hot and sunny and I didn’t have one. I stopped into Lunds and bought a small tube of sunblock, which I smeared on the baby’s chubby arms and legs dangling from the carrier, and a bottle of cold lemonade. I stopped into John Fluevog and admired the spring styles, looking for something that might go on sale in late summer and be comfortable for walking around in Rome in late September, while not being sport sandwals. (What do you think of these? In the burgundy and black?) I stopped in Goorin Brothers and tried on sun hats of the slightly less practical, but perhaps more Roman-holiday-appropriate, packable straw sort.

    I headed toward the lake but changed my mind because my bag (why did I pack Bleak House?) was weighing down my shoulder. So I waited twice at the intersection for the light to change — the second time, next to a man portaging a canoe — that’s Minneapolis for you — and went back to wandering, indecisively.

    In the end I settled into a deep sofa in the corner of my favorite coffee shop, with a packet of hummus and pretzels for dinner. Also a large coffee drink which the barista gave me after I specified “Something cold — abd decaffeinated — and BIG — with, um, calories — but not a flavoring.” I believe it was a 32-ounce iced decaf cold press with about a half cup of half-and-half in it. And also my iPad, which I surfed mindlessly a I nursed the baby, who smelled of sweat and coconut. And you know, that was a fine way to spend my time, even if it wasn’t what I imagined Myself enjoying,

    And what is the point of the story? Right now it feels like a metaphor for my slow blogging in this season. I only have a vague sense of wanting to write — to have the experience of writing. Ideas occur to me here and there, but I am not hungry enough to dig into them. And I only have enough time to write a few posts, so I want my few products to be good ones, and am unwilling to waste my rare “meals” on something insubstantial. Which leaves me writing nothing, only wandering.

    I need a comfy chair to fall into.

    —

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    3 comments on Indecision.

  • “Strive for perfection; encourage one another.”

    Occasionally I manage to get back into the habit of praying one or more of the Hours — rarely regularly.   Office of Readings one day in the morning; the thankfully short and repetitive Compline another day when I've already stayed up too late and am really too tired to concentrate.  Sometimes on a feast day I manage the daytime hours.

    Office of Readings is my favorite because it has something new for me every day, even though it's long and I feel like I'm cheating by doing it instead of Lauds, which I feel like I "should" be doing.  

    (I've been a little more inspired lately thanks to this book, by the way.  Highly, highly recommended, and not just for "beginners."  Will probably write more about it another time.) 

    So, anyway, one really great thing about praying the Liturgy of the Hours is that you sink right into the Psalms.  Each one comes around again every couple of weeks or so (less often if you come to the Hours all haphazardly like I do), which over the course of months and years gives you plenty of time both to be exposed to lots of psalms, and to let the repetitiveness gently impress them upon your mind and heart.  There's always something new there.  

    Today in Ps. 31 we encounter the fairly-common-psalm-theme of "I'm surrounded by enemies who are out to get me!" which sometimes seems a little overwrought to comfortable and fattened moderns as ourselves.

    In your justice, set me free, hear me and speedily rescue me….

    Release me from the snares they have hidden…

    In the face of all my foes I am a reproach, an object of scorn to my neighbors and of fear to my friends…

    I have heard the slander of the crowd… as they plot together against me…

    And I'm a little leery of sinking too deeply into this theme of "enemies."  Possibly a bit risky, lest we start thinking of "people who merely disagree with me" or "people who mildly annoy me" as "enemies who are out to get me" in our prayer.   

    But one modern interpretation came to me, an idea of "enemies" that works (for me in this season of life at least):  All those chattering faceless voices that bring distasteful news into my home, that peddle outrage and Schadenfreude.  The tearing of hair out over petty matters not worthy of attention; and, more insidious, the repeated indignation over grave matters, murmuring the conscience to sleep, spending outrage in cheap declarations of position, ever calling to action, never acting.

    There are real people on the other side of those combox handles and bylines.  Let's not forget that.  Some of them may not know what they do.  If they met us in the street they might be perfectly pleasant.   Some of them claim to be allies, fellow believers.  But make no mistake, they are out there, enemies and quislings.  

    Release me from the snares they have hidden, for you are my refuge, Lord.

    Snares of despair and outrage.  

    O God of truth, you detest those who worship false and empty gods.  As for me, I trust in the Lord; let me be glad…

    Let me be glad; not angry, irritated, snide, or superior.

    You have seen my affliction and taken heed of my soul's distress, have not handed me over to the enemy, but set my feet at large.

    We are not, in fact, in prison to the unhappy state of the world today (nor the state of the country, nor the state of the Church).  We are at large.  We are free to act real acts, in our seemingly tiny sphere of home and work and friendships, where each act and word can have unimaginable consequences.

    I have heard the slander of the crowd… but as for me, I trust in You, Lord…

    My life is in your hands, deliver me from the hands of those who hate me.

    Look, some of the voices you encounter out there… the ones that make you feel shame… they really do hate you.  Hate you for not buying enough stuff.  Sneer at you for having too many children.  Tear you down lest you feel pleased in the decisions you've made that are different from others.  Mock you so you'll feel inadequate without the snakeoil they're selling.  Nobody does negging like someone who wants your money or your vote.

    How great is the goodness, Lord,… that you show to those who trust you in the sight of men.

    You hide them in the shelter of your presence from the plotting of men; you keep them safe within your tent from disputing tongues.

    I often wonder what it means to "trust in the Lord," which we're so often told to do without much practical advice on how to do it, and I think there might be a bit of a clue here in this description.

    In part:  

    To trust in the Lord is, perhaps, not to let "the plotting of men" worry you; to remind yourself constantly that the advertisers and the policymakers are not, actually, in charge.  

    To trust in the Lord is to draw strength and protection from His Presence (his ever-present Presence) rather than be damaged by "disputing tongues."  

    (I don't think this means we always have to leave every dispute; some disputes are worth having, after all.   Truth has to be spoken and sometimes it's us who has to speak it.  But we don't have to come to every argument we're invited to just in case.)

    Love the Lord, all you saints.  He guards his faithful but the Lord will repay to the full all those who act with pride.

    The bit about "acting with pride" is maybe a clue as to when we might not want to join in with those "disputing tongues," lest we reduce ourselves to one.

    "I am far removed from your sight," I said in my alarm.

    Yet you heard the voice of my plea when I cried for help.

    In other words, what to do when we realize we've gotten in over our heads.

    Be strong, let your heart take courage, all who hope in the Lord.

    What is the world coming to, anyway?   It is coming to the same end it has been coming to for two thousand years, and today's viral video will not change it, nor tomorrow's.

    + + +

    Good advice from Augustine in the second reading, too:

    Rejoice in the truth, not in wickedness; rejoice in the hope of eternity, not in the fading flower of vanity.

    Look out for that "rejoicing in wickedness" bit.  The invitation is everywhere, isn't it?  Let's not pretend that "rejoicing in wickedness" means "doing wicked things and enjoying it."  

    It also means "hearing about wicked things and enjoying a sense of smug superiority over those who participate."  

    Or "hearing about certain people doing and/or saying wicked things and enjoying a sense of satisfaction that they are behaving as I expect them to."  

    Or "passing along news of wickedness and enjoying the recognition I get for having raised the alarm."

    When you catch yourself rejoicing in wickedness, for heaven's sake, stop.

    + + +

    And one more thought from Augustine:

    Wherever you are on earth, however long you remain on earth, the Lord is near, do not be anxious about anything.

    That's right, anything!

    Don't sweat the small stuff.  But don't save your anxiety for the important things!  Just… don't be anxious.  Be not afraid.  Really.  That's what all this means.  

    How are we supposed to do that?  We're imperfect.  We will feel anxious. We will feel unable to rejoice.  But:

    Rejoice, brothers:  Strive for perfection; encourage one another.  

    That's today's responsory to Augustine.

    Encourage one another.

    Encourage one another.

    Encourage one another.

    Remember that, next combox.  Strive for perfection… by encouraging one another.

    + + +

    This is why I love the Hours.  Ancient and ever new.

    —

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  • “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité.

    One of my Facebook friends posted a bit of clickbait that was headlined, "If You Can Pronounce Every Word In This Poem, You Will Be Speaking English Better Than 90% Of The English Speaking Population."  He apologized for the stupid headline but praised the poem's "nerdy fun."

    I recognized the poem on the other end of the line (see end of this post for the full poem).   It had been republished on the clickbait site with a few misspellings and deletions and (what is much more irritating) without any attribution of the author.  

    You may have seen this poem before.  It's very long, not exactly literary, but cleverly constructed out of a large number of word-pairs (and occasionally triplets) that illustrate the crazyquilt that is English spelling and pronunciation.  It begins, 

    Dearest creature in creation
    Studying English pronunciation,
       I will teach you in my verse
       Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

    and it continues on through

    Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
    Right! Your pronunciation's OK.
       Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
       Friend and fiend, alive and live….

    The lack of attribution made me want to know more about the author, so I googled and found this short article about him, which appeared in the Journal of the Simplified Spelling Society in 1994.  His name is Gerard Nolst Trenité; he was a Dutch schoolteacher, author, and columnist with an interest in linguistics.

    The first known version of "The Chaos" appeared as an appendix (Aanhangsel) to the 4th edition of Nolst Trenité's schoolbook Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen (Haarlem: H D Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, 1920). The book itself naturally used the Dutch spelling current before the 1947 reform (see JSSS 1987/2, pp14-16). That first version of the poem is entitled "De Chaos," and gives words with problematic spellings in italics, but it has only 146 lines, compared with the 274 lines we now give (four more than in our 1986 version). The general importance of Drop Your Foreign Accent is clear from the number of editions it went through, from the first (without the poem) in 1909, to a posthumous 11th revised edition in 1961. The last edition to appear during the author's life was the 7th (1944), by which time the poem had nearly doubled its original length. It is not surprising, in view of the numerous editions and the poem's steady expansion, that so many different versions have been in circulation in so many different countries.

    The Chaos represents a virtuoso feat of composition, a mammoth catalogue of about 800 of the most notorious irregularities of traditional English orthography, skilfully versified (if with a few awkward lines) into couplets with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes. The selection of examples now appears somewhat dated, as do a few of their pronunciations, indeed a few words may even be unknown to today's readers (how many will know what a "studding-sail" is, or that its nautical pronunciation is "stunsail"?), and not every rhyme will immediately "click" ("grits" for "groats"?); but the overwhelming bulk of the poem represents as valid an indictment of the chaos of English spelling as it ever did. Who the "dearest creature in creation" addressed in the first line, also addressed as "Susy" in line 5, might have been is unknown, though a mimeographed version of the poem in Harry Cohen's possession is dedicated to "Miss Susanne Delacruix, Paris". Presumably she was one of Nolst Trenité's students.

    Readers will notice that The Chaos is written from the viewpoint of the foreign learner of English: it is not so much the spelling as such that is lamented, as the fact that the poor learner can never tell how to pronounce words encountered in writing (the poem was, after all, appended to a book of pronunciation exercises). With English today the prime language of international communication, this unpredictability of symbol-sound correspond-ence constitutes no less of a problem than the unpredictability of sound-symbol correspondence which is so bewailed by native speakers of English. Nevertheless, many native English-speaking readers will find the poem a revelation: the juxtaposition of so many differently pronounced parallel spellings brings home the sheer illogicality of the writing system in countless instances that such readers may have never previously noticed.

    As I said, I've encountered it before.  Some notes:

    • I find that it's very hard to read aloud, even though I know how to pronounce most of the words.  For example, in the company of "finger," "ginger," and "linger," I keep wanting to pronounce "singer" with a hard G ("sing-ger.")
    • The poem incorporates British standards of pronunciation and spelling.  The British spellings are obvious on a visual read of the poem; the expectations of pronunciation don't always make themselves known until the reader tries to recite them.  For example,

    Is your r correct in higher?
    Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia.

    and

    Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
    Timber, climber, bullion, lion,

    and

    Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,
       Rhyming with the pronoun yours;

    • I'll bet, however, that even most quite-literate English-speaking people encountering the poem will learn something new.  As for me, I was not aware that the word "victuals" is, in fact, pronounced "vittles."  I knew that "vittles" was a dialect spelling of the word "victuals"; it's pretty common in printed dialogue in American literature (Twain puts it in Tom Sawyer's mouth in Huckleberry Finn).  But I had always assumed it was a dialect pronunciation as well, and that somewhere, someone was talking about the fine "vic-tu-als" that had been set out for their afternoon tea.

    Here's the full text.  Do you learn something new from it?  What lines twist your tongue?

    ___

    "The Chaos"

    by Gerard Nolst Trenité

    Dearest creature in creation
    Studying English pronunciation,
       I will teach you in my verse
       Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

    I will keep you, Susy, busy,
    Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
       Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
       Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

    Pray, console your loving poet,
    Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
       Just compare heart, hear and heard,
       Dies and diet, lord and word.

    Sword and sward, retain and Britain
    (Mind the latter how it's written).
       Made has not the sound of bade,
       Say–said, pay–paid, laid but plaid.

    Now I surely will not plague you
    With such words as vague and ague,
       But be careful how you speak,
       Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak ,

    Previous, precious, fuchsia, via
    Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
       Woven, oven, how and low,
       Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.

    Say, expecting fraud and trickery:
    Daughter, laughter and Terpsichore,
       Branch, ranch, measles, topsails, aisles,
       Missiles, similes, reviles.

    Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
    Same, examining, but mining,
       Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
       Solar, mica, war and far.

    From "desire": desirable–admirable from "admire",
    Lumber, plumber, bier, but brier,
       Topsham, brougham, renown, but known,
       Knowledge, done, lone, gone, none, tone,

    One, anemone, Balmoral,
    Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel.
       Gertrude, German, wind and wind,
       Beau, kind, kindred, queue, mankind,

    Tortoise, turquoise, chamois-leather,
    Reading, Reading, heathen, heather.
       This phonetic labyrinth
       Gives moss, gross, brook, brooch, ninth, plinth.

    Have you ever yet endeavoured
    To pronounce revered and severed,
       Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
       Peter, petrol and patrol?

    Billet does not end like ballet;
    Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
       Blood and flood are not like food,
       Nor is mould like should and would.

    Banquet is not nearly parquet,
    Which exactly rhymes with khaki.
       Discount, viscount, load and broad,
       Toward, to forward, to reward,

    Ricocheted and crocheting, croquet?
    Right! Your pronunciation's OK.
       Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
       Friend and fiend, alive and live.

    Is your r correct in higher?
    Keats asserts it rhymes Thalia.
       Hugh, but hug, and hood, but hoot,
       Buoyant, minute, but minute.

    Say abscission with precision,
    Now: position and transition;
       Would it tally with my rhyme
       If I mentioned paradigm?

    Twopence, threepence, tease are easy,
    But cease, crease, grease and greasy?
       Cornice, nice, valise, revise,
       Rabies, but lullabies.

    Of such puzzling words as nauseous,
    Rhyming well with cautious, tortious,
       You'll envelop lists, I hope,
       In a linen envelope.

    Would you like some more? You'll have it!
    Affidavit, David, davit.
       To abjure, to perjure. Sheik
       Does not sound like Czech but ache.

    Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
    Rachel, loch, moustache, eleven.
       We say hallowed, but allowed,
       People, leopard, towed but vowed.

    Mark the difference, moreover,
    Between mover, plover, Dover.
       Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
       Chalice, but police and lice,

    Camel, constable, unstable,
    Principle, disciple, label.
       Petal, penal, and canal,
       Wait, surmise, plait, promise, pal,

    Suit, suite, ruin. Circuit, conduit
    Rhyme with "shirk it" and "beyond it",
       But it is not hard to tell
       Why it's pall, mall, but Pall Mall.

    Muscle, muscular, gaol, iron,
    Timber, climber, bullion, lion,
       Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
       Senator, spectator, mayor,

    Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
    Has the a of drachm and hammer.
       Pussy, hussy and possess,
       Desert, but desert, address.

    Golf, wolf, countenance, lieutenants
    Hoist in lieu of flags left pennants.
       Courier, courtier, tomb, bomb, comb,
       Cow, but Cowper, some and home.

    "Solder, soldier! Blood is thicker",
    Quoth he, "than liqueur or liquor",
       Making, it is sad but true,
       In bravado, much ado.

    Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
    Neither does devour with clangour.
       Pilot, pivot, gaunt, but aunt,
       Font, front, wont, want, grand and grant.

    Arsenic, specific, scenic,
    Relic, rhetoric, hygienic.
       Gooseberry, goose, and close, but close,
       Paradise, rise, rose, and dose.

    Say inveigh, neigh, but inveigle,
    Make the latter rhyme with eagle.
       Mind! Meandering but mean,
       Valentine and magazine.

    And I bet you, dear, a penny,
    You say mani-(fold) like many,
       Which is wrong. Say rapier, pier,
       Tier (one who ties), but tier.

    Arch, archangel; pray, does erring
    Rhyme with herring or with stirring?
       Prison, bison, treasure trove,
       Treason, hover, cover, cove,

    Perseverance, severance. Ribald
    Rhymes (but piebald doesn't) with nibbled.
       Phaeton, paean, gnat, ghat, gnaw,
       Lien, psychic, shone, bone, pshaw.

    Don't be down, my own, but rough it,
    And distinguish buffet, buffet;
       Brood, stood, roof, rook, school, wool, boon,
       Worcester, Boleyn, to impugn.

    Say in sounds correct and sterling
    Hearse, hear, hearken, year and yearling.
       Evil, devil, mezzotint,
       Mind the z! (A gentle hint.)

    Now you need not pay attention
    To such sounds as I don't mention,
       Sounds like pores, pause, pours and paws,
       Rhyming with the pronoun yours;

    Nor are proper names included,
    Though I often heard, as you did,
       Funny rhymes to unicorn,
       Yes, you know them, Vaughan and Strachan.

    No, my maiden, coy and comely,
    I don't want to speak of Cholmondeley.
       No. Yet Froude compared with proud
       Is no better than McLeod.

    But mind trivial and vial,
    Tripod, menial, denial,
       Troll and trolley, realm and ream,
       Schedule, mischief, schism, and scheme.

    Argil, gill, Argyll, gill. Surely
    May be made to rhyme with Raleigh,
       But you're not supposed to say
       Piquet rhymes with sobriquet.

    Had this invalid invalid
    Worthless documents? How pallid,
       How uncouth he, couchant, looked,
       When for Portsmouth I had booked!

    Zeus, Thebes, Thales, Aphrodite,
    Paramour, enamoured, flighty,
       Episodes, antipodes,
       Acquiesce, and obsequies.

    Please don't monkey with the geyser,
    Don't peel 'taters with my razor,
       Rather say in accents pure:
       Nature, stature and mature.

    Pious, impious, limb, climb, glumly,
    Worsted, worsted, crumbly, dumbly,
       Conquer, conquest, vase, phase, fan,
       Wan, sedan and artisan.

    The th will surely trouble you
    More than r, ch or w.
       Say then these phonetic gems:
       Thomas, thyme, Theresa, Thames.

    Thompson, Chatham, Waltham, Streatham,
    There are more but I forget 'em–
       Wait! I've got it: Anthony,
       Lighten your anxiety.

    The archaic word albeit
    Does not rhyme with eight-you see it;
       With and forthwith, one has voice,
       One has not, you make your choice.

    Shoes, goes, does *. Now first say: finger;
    Then say: singer, ginger, linger.
       Real, zeal, mauve, gauze and gauge,
       Marriage, foliage, mirage, age,

    Hero, heron, query, very,
    Parry, tarry fury, bury,
       Dost, lost, post, and doth, cloth, loth,
       Job, Job, blossom, bosom, oath.

    Faugh, oppugnant, keen oppugners,
    Bowing, bowing, banjo-tuners
       Holm you know, but noes, canoes,
       Puisne, truism, use, to use?

    Though the difference seems little,
    We say actual, but victual,
       Seat, sweat, chaste, caste, Leigh, eight, height,
       Put, nut, granite, and unite.

    Reefer does not rhyme with deafer,
    Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
       Dull, bull, Geoffrey, George, ate, late,
       Hint, pint, senate, but sedate.

    Gaelic, Arabic, pacific,
    Science, conscience, scientific;
       Tour, but our, dour, succour, four,
       Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

    Say manoeuvre, yacht and vomit,
    Next omit, which differs from it
       Bona fide, alibi
       Gyrate, dowry and awry.

    Sea, idea, guinea, area,
    Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
       Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean,
       Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

    Compare alien with Italian,
    Dandelion with battalion,
       Rally with ally; yea, ye,
       Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, key, quay!

    Say aver, but ever, fever,
    Neither, leisure, skein, receiver.
       Never guess-it is not safe,
       We say calves, valves, half, but Ralf.

    Starry, granary, canary,
    Crevice, but device, and eyrie,
       Face, but preface, then grimace,
       Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.

    Bass, large, target, gin, give, verging,
    Ought, oust, joust, and scour, but scourging;
       Ear, but earn; and ere and tear
       Do not rhyme with here but heir.

    Mind the o of off and often
    Which may be pronounced as orphan,
       With the sound of saw and sauce;
       Also soft, lost, cloth and cross.

    Pudding, puddle, putting. Putting?
    Yes: at golf it rhymes with shutting.
       Respite, spite, consent, resent.
       Liable, but Parliament.

    Seven is right, but so is even,
    Hyphen, roughen, nephew, Stephen,
       Monkey, donkey, clerk and jerk,
       Asp, grasp, wasp, demesne, cork, work.

    A of valour, vapid vapour,
    S of news (compare newspaper),
       G of gibbet, gibbon, gist,
       I of antichrist and grist,

    Differ like diverse and divers,
    Rivers, strivers, shivers, fivers.
       Once, but nonce, toll, doll, but roll,
       Polish, Polish, poll and poll.

    Pronunciation-think of Psyche!-
    Is a paling, stout and spiky.
       Won't it make you lose your wits
       Writing groats and saying "grits"?

    It's a dark abyss or tunnel
    Strewn with stones like rowlock, gunwale,
       Islington, and Isle of Wight,
       Housewife, verdict and indict.

    Don't you think so, reader, rather,
    Saying lather, bather, father?
       Finally, which rhymes with enough,
       Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??

    Hiccough has the sound of sup…
    My advice is: GIVE IT UP!

    ___

    —

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    1 comment on “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité.

  • First Holy Communion.

    Wait a minute… didn’t I just write a post about her baptism?

    That was then…

    …this is now:

    After my coffee, I went into her room in the morning to wake her up. She was all alone in the double bed she shares with her next younger brother; he had come into our room in the night. I still had my pajamas on, so I crawled into bed next to her and put my arms around her. She turned over sleepily and murmured, “Today seems too good to be true.”

    Here is what I want to remember:

    Buckling the tiny ankle straps of her shoes for her.

    Arriving early and stopping in the adoration chapel for a moment. I thought for sure that there would be other children with parents in there, but there were only a couple of regular adorers and a visiting priest (probably a relative of one of the first communicants, come to concelebrate). And then I thought, they will look at us and smile; but none did, all stayed lost in prayer as if we were not there. So I felt as if I was in a safe cocoon of solitude as I knelt and waited for my daughter to make her little benison, whatever it was, and said my own prayer.

    Snapping the picture above, inside the elevator on the way down to the church basement.

    Finding her seat, one of forty-four children receiving first Eucharist.

    Taking too many pictures, I guess.

    A crowd of chattering children, however attractively dressed, however sweet, is just a crowd of children… until you are a mother and it is a crowd that contains your own particular child.

    Then wherever she is, there is a center, somewhere, and it draws you.

     

    At the last minute before I went up she said suddenly, “I don’t want you to go!” and clutched at me, impulsively. I didn’t know what else to do, so I prayed a Hail Mary over her, kissed her hair, and went to go.

    On the way out she had disappeared in the crowd.

     

    We were assigned (by lot) a pew in the back, so I caught only a glimpse of her veil and a glint from her hair as she trotted by during the procession.

    The pastor said to us in the congregation: think back to the innocence of our own first communions, and pray to recapture it. “Have to go back a long way,” said an elderly man seated behind me, and his wife chuckled softly. And my mouth turned up in a little smile, because I had made my first communion at age eighteen. My husband, now on the opposite end of the pew so he could take pictures of our daughter, had been there for my first communion too, in a time before cell-phone cameras. We had been dating about six months then.

    I was on the wrong side of the church to get a good picture. I prefer not to watch my family’s big moments through a camera screen. I tried to get both: a quick picture and a glance. I saw her upturned chin, her standing and turning. She caught my eye and I smiled.

    At our parish, altar boys who are brothers of first communicants get to assist at the moment their sibling receives. Her two older brothers (along with three other pairs of brothers) had to play rock-paper-scissors in the sacristy to find out which one would get to hold the paten for her. The ten-year-old won. She complained later that he poked her too hard with it.

    Even though I didn’t get a good view, I feel good that her two big brothers did.

    Afterward, there were more pictures, then pizza and egg rolls with family and friends. She spent most of the rest of the day sitting on the porch with her best friend. The sun came out for us. In the evening, a walk to the park to play Frisbee with her dad and grandpa.

    A beautiful day.

    —

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    2 comments on First Holy Communion.

  • Differences in the mirror.

    My daughter's First Holy Communon will be this morning.  

    My intention?  Besides all the usual ones, that I don't let my hurry-up-and-don't-be-late demeanor, business as usual on any school day, show quite so much.  It's a special day.  It should feel like one.

    + + +

    Mothering a little girl can seem so different from mothering a little boy, especially through the milestones.  For instance, this never happened on the eves of my older sons' First Holy Communions:

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    You try not to make it all about the dress and the veil and the shoes.  You really, really try.  

    (Check out that little foot kicking up so she can admire her shoes, the ribbon trim on which matches the dress Grandma made perfectly.)

    + + +

    This is not, of course, entirely anyway, a Boy vs. Girl thing.  They are all individuals with personalities of their own.  Surely some boys would be too eager to wait to check out themselves, looking like Dad in a real necktie and shiny shoes, and who would be sure to try it all on the night before just to make sure it will all go together right.  

    And I know darn well there are many girls who won't be able to wait to get out of their scratchy, stiff dress and back into their jammies so they can eat pizza back home, the shiny shoes kicked into a corner without a thought except when she reaches down absentmindedly  a week later to pick at the blister on her little toe.

    But you know, when we look back at them, we can't help ourselves from projecting what's inside of us.  

    (I know, I don't speak for everyone.)

    Sons and daughters make us feel… differently, don't they?  I think when we watch our sons play and our daughters play, we say to ourselves "Boys and girls are so different, it's true!" and a lot of the time (not all of the time) they aren't actually doing anything all that different, certainly not Representative Of Their Respective Classes, but we the watchers overlay our own interpretations on them.  

    She does X and her brother did Y when he was that age; boys and girls are so different!

    (I wonder if it's worse for kids who grow up with exactly one sibling of the opposite sex:  if they end up, by default, being the sole Representative of Their Class.  Having four boys gives me a chance to see up close some — a tiny fraction — of the many different ways there are to be a boy.)

    The interpretations we project don't have to be the traditional ones — boys with their trucks and girls with their dolls, athletic boys and bookish girls, the "tomboy" trope.  They can be the pressures to rail against traditional constraints; we feel those pressures differently for sons and for daughters.  Since each of us parents is an individual, the spin we put on "raising boys is different from raising girls" is individual; but we all have that spin, I think.  

    Maybe it would be better simply to note that "raising Jack is different from raising Jane."  It would certainly be safer to mix it up a bit.  No kid should be made to feel that they have to be a representative of their class all the time.  

    More importantly:  being a girl, or being a boy, is part of each child's identity, and that identity is unique.  They should get to figure out how they live out femininity and masculinity, how it's expressed uniquely in their own personalities.  I'm not sure how best to encourage that, but it's a goal.

    + + +

    Later today, my girl gets her first taste of the mystery of being doubly feminine, of being a part of the Bride of Christ.  

    There's no escaping that she lives this mystery differently from the boys. Where she and her companions in their white dresses and veils are a sign of fittingness, the little boys in their blazers and suits today must be  a sort of a sign of contradiction, a masculinity that must become receptive to the life Christ offers as free gift to us.   

    Equal, yet living out the gift they receive in purely individual ways.  

    Time to get dressed, beloved.

     

    —

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    1 comment on Differences in the mirror.

  • Ramping up and focusing on what’s mine.

    Now that May has rolled around again, I am already turning my thoughts toward the next school year.  

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    To be honest, I've kind of given up on this one.  

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    After the baby was born at Christmastime, and then H.'s twins in February, and then some drastic changes in plans for our friends in the other family we co-school with —

    it became pretty clear that we were not going to finish out the year as planned.

    This happens a lot in home schools, when babies are born.

    So instead we have turned to a sort of schooling that I think of as "rehearsal for next year."    The big changes have already come.  Now we can try to get used to them, and work around them.

    + + +

    Those pictures up above are my new schoolroom layout.  I think I've finally found the best desk arrangement for the space.  I don't know why it took me so long to come up with it, other than I have been stuck inside the "rectangle" box.  

    • The extra space it creates in the corner by the windows gives me enough room to put a bassinet (or later, a playpen type thing, maybe).  
    • Students sitting in three of the desks can see the dry-erase board, and all four of them can see the windows, which I sometimes use as a dry-erase surface.  
    • The easy chair can be turned to face the desks, so a nursing mom can sit while teaching.
    • My seven- and ten-year-olds can be seated out of arms' reach of one another.

    + + +

    H. and I have been getting together to teach for a little while, once or twice a week, only for half days.  I re-started teaching geometry first, a double lesson once a week; then H. began working on English literature again.   That's kind of our limit for now; Latin is on hiatus.  We'll return to a simplified, but complete, schedule in the fall for our oldests' ninth grade year.

    Yesterday was the first time H. came to my house since the twins were born.  I cleaned up an old bassinet for the occasion, the one I kept in my office when I had my first baby while I was in grad school.  H. brought a portable one and added that to another portable one that I had set up in the living room.

    Photo on 5-8-14 at 12

    (Action shot:  nursing singleton in the foreground, diaper changing twins in the background.)

    H. arrived around eleven; we had a cup of coffee together; I taught geometry for 45 minutes; lunch (turkey sandwiches) was served by our daughters; then I worked on next year's curricula while H. taught language arts, and then we had tea.  

    The weather turned poor, so H. stayed to share in our pizza dinner while waiting out the storm.  A good day.  I think we're going to be able to make it work pretty well, and believe me, ramping back up slowly is a big part of that.

    + + +

    My house is beautifully clean, as clean as it gets, because the housecleaner just left.  I've decided that Every Three Weeks is the right frequency to get a deep cleaning, and the best way for it to happen is to hire someone else to do it.

     We all still have to work the night before to clear the floors and counters, make room in the laundry and so forth, so that we really get our money's worth.  But do the math:  it takes the housecleaner about four hours to vacuum, dust, scrub, and mop the house from top to bottom.

    Meanwhile, I teach a half day of school.  

    I resisted hiring outside help for a long time.    I finally started hiring cleaners after my now-four-year-old became a toddler.   It took me a while to get used to having some other person come into my home and clean my stuff, but now I'm sold on it.  The woman who comes in to clean now is the second regular housecleaner we have hired; the first was a young man who was wonderfully cheap — that's what finally convinced me to give outside help a try — but in the end could not keep his business afloat.  I pay more now, but since she really does a better job, I don't mind.

    I know plenty of homeschoolers prefer to save their money and put their kids to work instead.  I think this is largely a matter of choice. Yes, it's important to teach kids to care for a home, and so technically we could spend a half day or a full day on cleaning projects every month and it would still have educational value.  Yes, it's money that could be spent on other things.  I get that. 

    But specialization is not a bad thing.  We have the money, and I think it does good work when I spend it this way; it stays in our local economy, after all, and helps support another family.  She's faster than I would be, and definitely more thorough; while she was here, I was supervising math and oil painting.   And (unlike when the kids help me clean) I didn't feel the need to yell at anyone, so the money bought me a measure of emotional peace as well.  

    I've definitely figured out that next year, my duties have to be streamlined if I want to do them well.  

    + + +

    H. is making some similar changes, at least temporarily while the twins are small.  She laughs about how everything comes on a truck now:  clean cloth diapers arrive (and dirty ones leave); groceries come in a truck; clothes for the children, school supplies, everything.  Errand-running had to be trimmed back to the absolute minimum, hence, no shopping in physical stores anymore.  

    Focus will be the watchword for next year.  Both of us need to focus our energies.  She, because she finds herself in such a rare and intense kind of parenting; me, because I'm always tempted to sprawl them all out onto everything except one-on-one connection with my children, and I sense that with the birth of my fifth child I have tipped past the point of being able to pretend I have a handle on everything and everyone.

    I can outsource the housecleaning.  I can outsource some of the teaching.  I can't outsource being wife and mother.  I have always known this, but it's finally sinking in.

    —

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    1 comment on Ramping up and focusing on what’s mine.

  • First expansion of the token-for-chores system: Laundry.

    A couple of months ago I described my plan to use a token economy pour encourager les enfants to keep their rooms cleaner than they had been.  I reported some preliminary results in a subsequent post.

    Now the second month is drawing to a close.  Tomorrow I will count up the children's remaining tokens and issue allowance.  But I'm too curious to wait!  So I'm going to run upstairs right now and see how they did.

    [insert sound of me pounding up the stairs, a pause, and then the sound of my footsteps returning to the computer]

    Of the 30 tokens I put into their jars at the start of the month, assuming they keep their rooms clean tomorrow and don't lose one more:

    • My thirteen-year-old son has 28, and will receive $14 in allowance
    • My ten-year-old son has 21, and will receive $10.50
    • My seven-year-old daughter has 17, and will receive $8.50

    Meanwhile, even though they didn't all meet the standards I set every day —

    — and a reminder, the standards were "floor clean, covers pulled up, closet door shut" —

    every room was cleaner every day than it typically was before starting the system.  Before, we had periodic marathon room-cleaning sessions, one day before the paid housecleaner showed up for the monthly vacuuming.  

    So from my point of view, this system is a spectacular success.  I am doing almost zero nagging.  Once each day, I pop into their rooms for a check.  If I forget, they get to keep a token (so I'm not actually obligated to check).  

    + + +

    Only once did I use the promise of a token for something extra.  One day I needed the kitchen cleaned up really fast, so I challenged my two big boys to speed through it in under fifteen minutes and without complaining, with a promise of one previously-lost token returned to each of them if they could do it.

    They did.

    There's no way they would have done it if I'd said, "I'll pay you fifty cents."

    The psychology of gains and losses is very interesting.

    + + +

    My teenage boy still hates the system.  He explained to me this morning that it makes him feel sad and angry every single day to see his jar of tokens on his shelf.  He asked again if he couldn't start from zero and gain tokens, rather than starting from thirty and lose tokens.  "It feels like a punishment," he said, "instead of a payment."

    "I do pay you," I said, "at the end of the month, almost just like a paycheck works.  Think of the tokens as an easy way for me to keep track of what you are going to be paid for the work you do."  But he said the tokens were the same as money as far as he was concerned, and when I remove one it is like having his money taken away.

    I acknowledged that this system is probably not the best system to fit with his particular personality, but that I was going to keep it going for now because it was working pretty well for the family as a whole.  "It isn't perfect," I said.  "It will evolve and adjust as we all learn what works and what doesn't.  I will make changes to it.  But I am going to make the changes slowly.  This is a long-term project."

    + + +

    On Thursday we begin a new month, and the children will receive a refreshed jar of thirty tokens.  They will also become responsible for their own laundry.

    Now, Mark and I see eye-to-eye on most of the important issues that face today's married couples, but one of them is not "How To Tell If The Laundry Is Caught Up."   Therefore, I broached the subject with some trepidation, which turned out to be well-founded.  

    (I think the laundry is caught up if no baskets are actually overflowing with dirty laundry yet.  Mark will tell me if I have gotten this wrong, but my current understanding is that he thinks it is caught up if there is less than a full load of dirty laundry total in the entire house AND all the clean laundry is put away.)

    About thirty minutes later, we were ready to discuss the new laundry system for kids.  My teenage son also participated, strenuously insisting that it would be inappropriate to treat him exactly like his younger siblings, since he is already in the habit of putting clothes in the wash when he's about to run out.  After some discussion, we decided that he was correct, and modified the system accordingly.

    We made our plan based on the answer to the question, "What problems do I want this system to solve?"  

    + + + 

    Number one, I don't want to hear, "But I don't have any clean clothes!"  On Sunday morning, I want there to be clean clothes for church.  If there's a Scout or AHG meeting, I want each child to have a clean uniform.  If it's swimming lesson day, their towels and suits should be ready to go.  No one should run out of clean pants and shirts.

    Number two, I don't want clean clothes to accumulate in the laundry room.  We have room on the shelves and counter for about five baskets full of clean clothes.  Occasionally we will stack towers of clean baskets, but I don't like that because the dirty bottoms of the baskets sit on clean clothes.  Also, we risk losing items that fall behind the washer and dryer.  So five baskets is really the capacity.

    That's basically it.  I don't have high standards.  I just want the kids to make sure they don't run out of clothes, and I want them to keep moving items OUT of the laundry room as they move their clothes IN.

    + + +

    Today, two days before the month starts, we had a dry run.  I distributed to each child two brand-new square black laundry baskets, labeled with names.  And I pointed them to a brand-new sign posted in the laundry room, headed "Kids' Laundry Responsibilities."

    It said:

     

    Your clothes (uniforms, church outfits, etc.) clean when you need them (3 tokens)

     

    You may have 1 black basket of your clothes in this room at a time (1 token)

     

    In other words:  If ever they don't have the clothes that they need clean when they need them, they'll lose three of their tokens.   And, if ever I find more than one basketful of a particular child's clothes in the laundry room, he'll lose one token.

    There's more to this.  Such as, when must laundry be done?

    I am allowing my oldest to decide when he needs to put his laundry in; but the younger two, I expect I'll have to micromanage just a bit more to start with.  So for now, my daughter is required to wash her dirty clothes on Tuesday mornings, and my second son is required to wash his dirty clothes on Wednesday mornings.  Each of them pays a penalty of one token per day that the weekly load is delayed.  

    Once those younger kids are in the weekly laundry habit, I hope to lift the specific-day requirement.

    + + +

    It seems a bit too fussy for our family to insist that each person wash his own clothes, dry his own clothes, and then remove his own clothes from the laundry room and put them away.  We have one washer and one dryer, conveniently located on the same level with the bedrooms, and laundry is a continuous operation.  So instead, the ideal we've always had in mind is "one load in, one load out."

    Whoever wants to put a load into the washer mus first:  

    • make room for a new basket on the shelves by delivering at least one basket of clothes to the correct part of the house
    • move dry clothes from the dryer to a basket on the shelves
    • move wet clothes from the washer to the dryer, and start the dryer

    In this way, we are all helping each other get the laundry done.  But everyone has the responsibility of putting his own clothes into the system (and dealing with the basket of clean, dry clothes that he might find awaiting him on his bed at the end of the day).

    Now I just have to confer with my husband about whether to raise the value of a token along with the increased responsibility.  I'm inclined not to raise it until I find out how well they take on their new jobs.

    —

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    2 comments on First expansion of the token-for-chores system: Laundry.

  • “By means of images.”

    From today’s Office of Readings, the second reading, from the Jerusalem Catecheses:

    When we were baptized into Christ and clothed ourselves in him, we were transformed into the likeness of the Son of God. Having destined us to be his adopted sons, God gave us a likeness to Christ in his glory, and living as we do in communion with Christ, God’s anointed, we ourselves are rightly called “the anointed ones.” When he said: Do not touch my anointed ones, God was speaking of us.

    We became “the anointed ones” when we received the sign of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, everything took place in us by means of images, because we ourselves are images of Christ. Christ bathed in the river Jordan, imparting to its waters the fragrance of his divinity, and when he came up from them the Holy Spirit descended upon him, like resting upon like. So we also, after coming up from the sacred waters of baptism, were anointed with chrism, which signifies the Holy Spirit, by whom Christ was anointed and of whom blessed Isaiah prophesied in the name of the Lord: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor.

    The bit that I have underlined is what struck me this morning.

    Sometimes I wonder where Western Civilization got the idea of reading so much into everything (and, I suppose, writing so much into everything). It reminds me of English class, sometimes, sifting through a novel or a poem, looking for this or that object that serves as a symbol or a totem. I remember in an essay in a college literature class, writing something about one character playing keepaway with another’s keys; a violation, I wrote, because the keys were “symbols of autonomy.” I remember students teasing one of my high school teachers as she tried to squeeze a little extra meaning out of the discarded fruit rinds being carted away on the mornings after Gatsby’s parties. The habit of looking for hidden meanings in the words and objects that we find in our books is one I enjoy, a bit of a game I play with an author (but be careful; some authors bite). Certain books yield up new shoots every year if we read them regularly, so we’ve learned.

    + + +

    In any case, we have these tools of literary analysis, and we are willing to use them even on fruit rinds, so by gosh we are going to use them on the Bible too, no? So, you see, when the Israelites passed dry shod through the sea, it was a kind of foreshadowing. All that bit with the scapegoat, too. And the Ark is a type of Mary, and that bit about the snake-crushing means that Mary is to be another Eve, and…

    Water. Oil. Fire. Snakes!

    Is it possible that we read the Old Testament a bit too much as we would read a modern novel? Do we come to it with a habit from English class? Is that really the right tool, or is it only the tool we have and therefore we wish to use it? Or is it that the notion of symbol and hidden meaning is common to both? Or is this literary habit something we inherit from an older tradition? Why should it be so?

    + + +

    Lines like the one I highlighted above, which date probably to the fourth century, reassure me a bit that we are still on track. Because I’m really confident in the idea that human beings are made “in the image of God,” and that we are meant to become images of God-in-flesh-made-manifest, of Christ. God made us to look a certain way — like an animal — but carry something unseen and intangible, yet real — intelligence, and will. We have meaning. Each of us looks like a thing but what each of us is, is a person.

    We do not look like gods, we are not gods, but we represent the God. We can do something that is like what a Creator does, in a smaller way; we also craft artifacts that bear meaning. For instance, we can assemble a pile of vegetable matter, clay, and blackened bits into something that tells a whole story to anyone who has time to curl up with it on a lazy afternoon. And we can tell the story too, and put into it shadowy people who represent real people, and pasteboard props (like keys, or fruit rinds) that represent real virtues or vices, and in the moving-about of these characters and props, transmit secret messages. Indeed we could have saved time by merely writing out the message; but where would have been the fun in that?

    And of course, when one remembers (in the middle of a blog post, say) that Jesus spoke in parables, one has another reason to have confidence in symbolic readings.

    If we are made an image, then we should be able to speak the language of image.

    How fun to think, reading over this, that we have such pasteboard props in our real, physical lives. We have water that looks like water, but when we put on a certain washing-up play with this water as a necessary prop, it enacts a real (though unseen) rebirth:

     

    This baptism is no removal of physical stain, but the pledge to God of an irreproachable conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter — today’s first reading in the Office)

    The same with our oil, and our wine, and our bread.

    It’s because we are images that we make these transitions best by means of images, say the Jerusalem Catecheses. If nothing else, the materials of the sacraments provide us with a means of feeling confident that we have done, at least in this area, what God requires of us. They are a balm against the constant fear that we are not good enough to attain God’s mercy: of course we are not good enough, cannot make ourselves good enough, but we can do the things He has asked us to do as signs of our interior commitment — as a pledge — and we can trust in the promises He has made regarding them, not because we are good but because He is trustworthy, and he asks us to do no more than what we can do… which is to put on these little plays with intention to do His will.

    I like to think that the sets and the props and the scripts were carefully designed so that the hidden messages are passed onstage exactly the way they need to be passed in the unseen reality. Baptism requires water, and (crucial if you ask me) it requires one other person who need not himself be a baptized person; it is not possible, even in the direst of emergencies, for a person to baptize himself, but any other willing person can do it; the one to be baptized can even instruct his baptizer. Somehow this sacrament — which is the only method on earth by which we are permitted to feel sure we can enter heaven — requires two to be gathered together, and a few drops at least of a substance we cannot live without. Somehow, maybe, that kind of life is really — not just in the play — propagated only from human contact.

    —

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  • A new birth story. (A few months after the first draft disappeared.)

    I hope I never forget the last part.

    I have given birth five times now, and one thing I have noticed is how quickly the sensations fade from memory. Probably some protective evolutionary feature: I joke that if women did not forget the pain of labor, none of us would ever want another pregnancy. But it's true; it fades. Already it is hard for me to remember exactly what it felt like to be heavy and lumbering, even though the weight of a swollen abdomen was (must have been) the dominant sensation for months. Already it is hard to find the words to describe the pains of early and active labor, although they occupied all my attention at the time. Even the fear and worry that marked almost every moment of the last week of my pregnancy — even that has faded into the background, and what seemed so urgent now seems foolish, as if it was a foregone conclusion that all would end happily.

    I hope I never forget the last part.

    Because when the pushing force flooded me, I knew instantly that it would all be over soon, and it thrilled me. I stood, leaning on my fists on the children's bed in our room, gasped all I could ("Here we go…!"), and pushed. I don't remember (damn!) if I expended any conscious effort or if my body just took over, but I do remember that I felt the baby's head descending through me already, and I could tell it was moving fast and I was opening up, and that it would be only a moment.

    I didn't bother to warn anyone or to worry about catching. Two midwives were behind me somewhere, and one of them would catch. Mark seated on the bed, several feet away, watching but staying out of the way; three times we've had dystocia, this is what midwives are for.

    Three shoves. Down, and down, and… Out. No burning, no moment of crowning; the baby's head filled me, and then the sweet release; and the second thrill was to feel all the rest of him following, bumpety-bump, no sticking place at all, and despite all the other sounds in the room — the whir of the space heater, the shouts of children downstairs, the murmuring of the two midwives — I heard over all that the tiny gasp, the first breath, and it rang in my ears. And a moment later I held him in my arms, gasping myself:

    "You're… you're beautiful."

    + + +

    This story starts a week earlier, when I was waving goodbye to Mark and the bigger kids as they finished loading the minivan with skis and boots and helmets, headed to the local hill. I was not quite 36 weeks along, and as I turned to close the door, thinking about making a snack for my three-year-old, a gush of fluid soaked my pants.

    I opened the door, called to Mark: "Can you come back in for a few minutes?" And when he came back in: "I have to call the midwife. Because, um, I think my water just broke."

    + + +

    How to describe the week that followed… It is very hard now. Because now I know that the ending is good, that we stayed in my warm house, that he was born quickly, that he breathed. But then, I didn't know. When I was waiting for the midwife to call me back, going over the facts in my mind —

    — it isn't 36 weeks yet

    — that fluid coming out of me is definitely not urine

    — labor usually starts within 24 hours of membrane rupture

    — this baby is not ready yet. I am not ready yet

    — anytime after 34 weeks the standard medical advice post-rupture is to induce labor to avoid infection in the sac, and let the NICU sort the babies out

    — the midwives typically don't attend labor at home before 37 weeks

    — if I go to the hospital they WILL do a manual check of my cervix, and that is what will start the Infection Clock and therefore the It's-a-good-idea-to-induce-labor Clock, but I'll also get IV antibiotics which will most likely solve the infection problem, while creating others, and the baby will likely be taken to NICU because of being born preterm

    — if I don't go to the hospital I can improve my chances of never getting an infection, but I can't eliminate the possibility, and I'll be saying no to antibiotics, and if against the odds there is an infection, I will know my decision played a part in the outcome —

    When I was waiting all this flickered from one to another in my mind in an endless loop.

    The midwife called, and agreed that labor was likely in the next day or two, but that Mark and the kids could go skiing since it wasn't very far away and since the midwife was only a few minutes' drive away. So they went. I stayed home and fretted. Labor did not start that evening. Mark came home. And then the long vigil began.

    + + +

    Days went by, punctuated by leaks and gushes. Each time I froze in place, waiting to see how much would come out of me. Is that "the rest of it?"

    The midwives said, "Sometimes it seals back up."

    I did not seal back up.

    No choice seemed good.

    I could go to the hospital if I wanted; it's less than two miles from my house, one of the best NICUs in the state and a labor and delivery ward steps away.

    But if I went there it would be an induction before term, and I feared for the baby.

    I could stay home if I wanted, and wait and let the baby mature, which everyone said would be reasonable as long as I had no signs of trouble.

    But although the midwives and Mark and the few friends I confided in assured me that it was reasonable, I still hated that idea too; because I always tell people who express worries to me that of course I am confident in home birth… because I am low-risk. Everything in my pregnancies has always been in conformity with Being A Good Candidate For Home Birth.

    Now I was pushing the envelope of the obstetrical paradigm, which holds that avoiding infection is better than avoiding preterm birth, that the womb with ruptured membranes is a dangerous place for a baby to live and grow. Even though I know that the medical paradigm is based on the idea that immediate preterm birth problems can be solved by applying more medical paradigm in the form of NICU, and also on the blithe idea that those obstetricians won't be the ones to deal with the long-term problems that may occur, even though I really do know all these things; the obstetrical paradigm has sunk into my psyche anyway.

    I felt:  I am a dangerous place for my baby to live and grow.

    I felt:  I am an open wound that at any moment might fester.

    And I kept thinking:

    …Right now my baby is fine. His heart beats, he moves. I can walk out the door and I can be in the hospital in ten minutes. And if I go there they will (eventually) give me my baby, whole and breathing. Probably.

    And if they don't it'll be on them, not me.

    Right?

    No, I know the answer to that, too.

    + + +

    Here is what one does if one is a ruptured-waters mother and one does not want to fester:

    — Immediately swear off putting anything in the vagina.

    — Stay home. Avoid having visitors.

    — Take oral temperatures at least twice a day to be sure there is no fever.

    — Stay out of pools and bathtubs. Take a lot of showers.

    — Have a bathroom all to oneself, a bathroom kept scrupulously clean.

    — Take megadoses of vitamin C.

    — Have the midwife come every day to listen to the baby and palpate to see that some fluid is still in there. (That last part was my idea, not theirs.)

    — Pay attention to the color of the fluid.  Be suspicious if it ever turns away from clear.

    I did all these things. It had been the Fourth Sunday of Advent when Mark dressed the kids for the ski outing and my water broke. We would not go to Christmas Mass this year. We would not see the trees lit in the sanctuary at all that season. We stayed home.

    We did have visitors once. H. and the rest of her family came to keep me company one evening. We ordered from the local taqueria and feasted, while I confessed my fears over and over.

    Day after day I broke down in tears, those tears alternating with fragile hopefulness, only to have the hopefulness shatter when I would feel another gush of fluid.

    One midwife said, "This is the longest I have seen someone go without going into labor after a membrane rupture."

    The other midwife said, "I have seen people wait as long as a month."

    They both said: "Right now you're fine. Right now there are no signs of trouble. You can keep waiting. It is your choice."

    Mark said: "If you decide you want to go in, we can do it. But if you are comfortable waiting, I am comfortable too."

    I fretted.

    + + +

    Eventually we made a plan. Full term for me — 37 weeks — would come on Tuesday, December 31.

     I would hang in there, monitoring all the signs, until then (or until the signs went bad). Only on the 31st would I consider going in to the hospital. When I was at term.

    On second thought — I would wait till the holiday was over. Who wants to be induced on New Year's Eve?  With all the people trying to get their tax deductions and clock-watching doctors wanting to get to the holiday party?  

    Not me.

    I pushed my interior deadline to Thursday, January 2.

    Once I had the "deadline," as I thought of it, I felt a little bit better.  I had a plan.  I could change it if I wanted.  But I had a plan.  Knowing there was an "end" in sight helped me wait out the days and hours.

    + + +

    In the middle of the night, about 2:30 in the morning on the last Saturday of the year, I turned on the bathroom light to check the color of the fluid on the pad, and found it was no longer clear.  It was pink.  

    In previous pregnancies I might have fretted about whether to call about such a small thing or whether to wait till morning.  Not anymore.  I picked up the phone and I called the midwife.  

    First she took a minute to wake up.  (Even midwives have their limits).  Then she said:  Maybe something is getting ready to happen.  No contractions?

    No.

     All right.  Go back to bed.  Call me in the morning, or if there are any contractions, or if the fluid changes again.

    Across town on the other side of St. Paul, she was writing in her notes:  

    "2:30 AM call — concern about fluid color  – after talk determine some pink — this is good — perhaps labor close"

    I went back to bed.  You might think that I would have had trouble sleeping, but exhaustion overtook me. 

    + + +

    It was still dark when I woke up with a strong, painful contraction radiating from under my belly, at the crease between belly and lap.  I reached up to the shelf and found my phone, checked the time:  five-something in the morning.  Dozed off again.  Another contraction woke me; I still had the phone in my hand, and I checked the time.  This went on for a while; I thought about waking Mark, but it was close enough to morning that I waited; and while I waited, the contractions slowed and stopped.  I fell back to sleep.

    + + +

    We woke up together much later.  I felt rested and glad to be spending a Saturday at home.  As we puttered around the kitchen, making breakfast and getting the coffee started, I had a few contractions, similar to the early-morning ones, but stronger and still irregular.  As they went on they started to get my attention more and more.  

    I got some paper and pencil for Mark to keep track of the time between  them (I never can do it myself; something about having contractions makes me incapable of managing numerical data).  

    Sixteen minutes.  

    + + +

    Twelve minutes.

    + + +

     Six minutes.

    + + +

    By now I was leaning on the arm of the rocking chair, unable to speak during the contractions.

    "Let's wait to call until we've timed them for an hour," suggested Mark.   

    At an hour they were five minutes apart.

    + + + 

    The notes say:

    11:00 AM — Talk with Mark — he is feeling this is it — not sure ready for us to come — he will call [the other midwife, who lives closer]

    11:12 AM — Mark calls — Talked with [the other midwife] — they have asked her to come to check in.  Share — "Well, I think I will just come also".

    11:21 AM — [the other midwife] calls — she is almost there — I share will be getting in my car shortly.

    I have the other midwife's notes too.  They are in a fluid hand, on a sheet of notebook paper she took from my bedside table.

    11:25 am  she is walking when I arrive — restless — some cntx stronger than others — [first midwife] on the way

    11:35  fht 144-156 baby ROA, lower in pelvis leaking clear fluid cntx strong

    Around this time we left the older children downstairs with strict instructions to clean up the kitchen.  As I climbed the steps I remembered climbing the same steps the last time….before I had my now-four-year-old… and wondering then whether I would come down them again before I had a baby in my arms.  

    That time?  Nope.

    And now here I was climbing the same steps and wondering the same thing.

    + + +

    I knelt by the side of the bed and labored there for a while.  The contractions were intensely painful and entirely low under my belly, and each brought a whisper of a suggestion of opening, of descending.    Someone brought me a glass of orange Gatorade and a glass of water; in between contractions I picked up a glass of one or the other and swigged it.  The second midwife arrived and did a little quiet bustling around.   Mark was at my side; I needed space, space to move, urgently, and I told him, "Don't touch me!"  

    He removed himself to the other side of the room.  

    In my memory the room is darkened with the shades down, but I'm not sure that it really was.  In my memory the two midwives are seated on the floor watching me, and Mark is on the bed, watching.  I felt sleepy and said so.  Contractions are tiring.

    + + + 

    Somewhere in there, H. arrived.  Heavily pregnant herself with twins, she greeted me, but soon got to work keeping my very curious four-year-old downstairs.  

    After a while I wanted to try a supported squat, so I got someone to help me assemble a sort of birthing stool out of a half-dozen purple yoga blocks that I'd bought for this exact purpose some weeks before.  (Last time, my legs had given out and couldn't squat anymore just before delivery.)   I settled myself down on them, my black knit maternity dress tented over my knees.  It wasn't the most comfortable position for my sitting apparatus, what with the yoga blocks digging into either side of my glutes, but it was a pretty good approximation of a squat.  

    Ugh, though, it didn't make the contractions any easier.  And what an awkward position.  My sit-bones were slipping off the blocks, my back leaning against the end of the bed, the closet doorway a couple of feet in front of me.

    The senior midwife came over in front of me, stepping over my ankle and into the closet.  She was holding a glove, and asked if she could do a vaginal exam.    I assented, feeling pretty darn sure that birth was imminent — but after a week of obsessing about not contaminating my birth canal, my "yes" seemed to come from far away outside of me.  

    At least I didn't have to move, because of the yoga blocks.  She put on her glove.  She was gentle.  I watched her eyes turn up and to the side as she felt, and thought.  She withdrew.

    "Six, I think," she said to me, then to the other midwife.  "The floor is a little puffy, there's a bit of a lip."

    FUCK THE FUCKING LIP.   I doubt that I said that out loud, but I  assure you I was thinking it.

    "Why don't you try another position?" suggested someone.  "Maybe lie on the bed a while, take the weight off your pelvic floor through a few contractions."

    The yoga blocks were still hurting me, after all.  I crawled up onto the bed and stretched out on my side.  "Yes," I said thoughtfully, "this is what I need to be doing."

     And then the next contraction started — low under my belly — and I immediately said, "But WOW that really, really hurts.  Lying here really hurts.  I mean — " I went on talking, gasping — "I think I need to be here, lying here on the bed right now, the rest of me — the rest of me feels good — tired — but — OH my gosh this position. Really. Hurts."

    + + +

    Sometimes, when I am running, when my legs are tired, I can think to myself:  it's only the legs; the arms and the breathing and the chest and the shoulders and the neck, they are all fine; they can relax and I can breathe deeply and comfortably; the legs pump away but I can pretend they are not really part of myself, and their soreness and pain don't actually matter.

    I did this now; concentrating on the lovely rest that so many parts of my body were getting; the pressure of the mattress against my temple, cheek, shoulder, hip, thigh; the weight of my body sinking into it; the whirr of the space heater, the drowsing of the lids half over my eyes.  It only helped a little; I managed to feel both the waves of pain and the good stretching rest.

    I spent ten minutes there.  I must have had four contractions or so, each time remarking on how very painful they were.  And then someone suggested I go to the bathroom.

    I don't remember getting up and being helped to the toilet, which is just a few feet away from where I was lying; I do remember sitting on the toilet and thinking:  I need NOT to be on the toilet right now.  I came back to the edge of the bed, the children's bed, and leaned on it.

    Blood spattered onto the paper pads under my feet.  I closed my hands into fists.  I leaned forward. 

    "Here we go," I gasped.

    I have not forgotten that last part.

      DSCF1247

     

    —

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  • Shadows. A very quick post.

    Today’s reading in the Office of Readings: the beginning of the tenth chapter of Hebrews, starting with

    Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of them, it can never make perfect those who come to worship by the same sacrifices that they offer continually each year. Otherwise, would not the sacrifices have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, once cleansed, would no longer have had any consciousness of sins?

    But in those sacrifices there is only a yearly remembrance of sins, for it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats take away sins. For this reason, when he came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight in. Then I said, ‘As is written of me in the scroll, Behold, I come to do your will, O God.’”

    I never noticed that bit about the shadow and the “very (I.e., true) image.” Quite like Plato and the cave. I googled around a bit this morning to see if scholars thought that Plato had actually influenced the epistle (though obviously many people, including presumably translators, have been influenced by both), and I came upon a Google Books reference on the subject.

    I can’t copy the whole piece, or even read it all online, but at least part of the discussion touched on the nuances in the Greek of the relationship between the “shadow” and the “true form.” Does it suggest that the “shadow” is an inferior, flat sort of copy of an original “true image” that precedes it, or does it suggest that the “shadow” is a preliminary sketch or draft version of a perfected form that is yet to come?

    I just thought I would like to draw attention to this specific kind of distinction between two ways of viewing the same sort of concept, that the material world is an inferior or “flat” version of a higher reality. I have always thought of Plato’s cave as a proto-Christian concept; but I really like the notion that one kind of inferior-image-of-a-greater-reality is a shadow or copy cast by an original, and another kind is a prefiguration or draft that is to be fulfilled by its perfected form.

    We can, of course, go all meta on the subject by suggesting that Plato’s concept was itself a shadow of the Christian version. And that the directionality of that relationship gives us a hint, embedded in the universe of human culture, to the direction we should assign to the relationship of image-and-reality.

    Now I feel like rereading Anathem and Flatland and The Last Battle and drawing directed graphs.

    —

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