bearing blog

We were midway through our long winter’s drive. I was reading a book aloud to Mark, who was driving. (A terrible book. We got our money’s worth mocking it. I’ll review it later for you.) The kids were bored but quiet, listening to music or leafing through books. The eight-year-old was scribbling on a sketchpad; he is my cartoonist. “Mom?” he asked. “How do you spell ‘Indiana?’”

“I-N-D-I–” I started.

But he interrupted me, talking over my spelling, to repeat as he wrote it down, “I…N…”

“Hold on, slow down,” I said. I began to invoke a spelling-learning technique I learned from somewhere. “Okay, don’t interrupt me. Listen to the whole word and picture it in your mind as I say it, then write the whole word down. I-N-D-I-A-N-A.”

Mark interrupted me in a baffled tone of voice. “How do you expect him to do that?” he asked me.

I was equally baffled. “What do you mean, how do I expect him to do that? I just want him to remember the letters as a whole word and then write the whole word down.”

He insisted, “But what do you mean, ‘picture the word in his mind?’ How is that supposed to work? You can’t see a word. It isn’t a thing, like a screwdriver. It’s just an abstraction. It can’t be pictured, like it was a screwdriver or something.”

Now I was really confused. It really hadn’t seemed like that tough of a concept. “Um… I want him to imagine that he can see the word. Imagine a picture of it, with all the letters in order.”

“All the letters? At the same time?”

“Yes… can’t you?”

“No!”

I was amazed. He really couldn’t imagine being able to picture a word in his mind? I couldn’t imagine NOT being able to picture it. “Well… I can. It’s like, um, like, in my mind’s eye I can see it on a page, as if it were typed on a page.”

“Typed? Not handwritten?”

“Well… I can imagine it handwritten if I want to” (here I paused to imagine the word “Indiana” in my own handwriting on a page, just to check) “but I guess the default picture is typed.”

“What typeface?” he pressed.

“Uh, more like Courier than anything else. I mean, I can do Times New Roman or Helvetica if you want me to. Really it looks like an old typewriter.”

He shook his head as if he didn’t believe me.

“Listen, Mark, can you imagine a process and instrumentation diagram?”

“Sure.”

“How about a plate-and-frame heat exchanger? Can you imagine opening it up and seeing all the parts, or maybe an exploded diagram of one showing how it all fits together?”

“Of course.”

“Imagine going into our kitchen and picking up the rotary cheese grater and taking it apart?”

“Yes…”

“Okay. You walk into a room. There’s a desk with a typewriter on it. You walk over to the typewriter. Pull the sheet of paper out. On the paper is typed a single word: ‘Indiana.’ Can you read the word?”

“No. Too many letters.”

“What if the word was ‘cat’? Can you read that?”

Pause. “Yes, I think I can do that one.”

“But not, umm… Give me a word that’s hard to spell….”

“‘Necessary,’” he suggested.

“Okay, that’s a good one, I always have to think about it too. Okay, ‘necessary.’ You can’t imagine the word ‘necessary’ in your mind as a picture?”

“No.”

“Well, what do you see when you try?” I asked, fascinated.

He paused for a while. “I can see the N and the E at the beginning, and the Y at the end, and in the middle just a jumble.”

I stared at him. “How is it that you can spell anything at all?”

“Well, I just start at the beginning and take it a few letters at a time until I get to the end.”

“You can’t compare the word you’ve written with a picture of the word in your mind.”

“No, I already told you that.” He was getting exasperated with me. But his tone changed to curiosity: “I can imagine a pencil. I can turn it around, look at it from the end, rotate it all different directions, mentally break it in half and see the inside. Can you do that with the word ‘necessary?’”

I had not considered that. I tried it. I pictured the word ‘necessary’ typed on a clean white page. Imagined the page rotating counterclockwise, the y-end of the word ramping up above the n-end slowly, up to the vertical. “I can still see it, all the letters in order, all the way up to ninety degrees. But if I rotate it farther it kind of collapses into a jumble. Wow, that was a good question! I never tried that before.”

“Can you flip it around and see it written from the back? Like through a sign painted on a glass window?”

“Or like those animations of words they used to have on the old Electric Company shows,” I said, remembering. “Let me see. Um, I can’t do it with ‘necessary.’ I can do it with ‘cat.’”

He shook his head. “I think maybe your spelling technique won’t work with everyone.”

“Well, how am I supposed to tell the child how to spell a word then?”

“Do it slowly enough that he can write it down as you say each letter.”

But that will take forever! I thought, but didn’t say. “It’s just for a few seconds, just long enough to take it in and then write it down — like remembering a phone number just long enough to hang up and then dial it. Can’t you do that? ‘Indiana’ isn’t any longer than a phone number.”

“I generally write it down.”

Married thirteen years, and it seems we still don’t understand each other. Well, I will try to be more sensitive from now on.

(note: links and formatting will be updated later)

Blogger Betty Duffy and I have been lazily exchanging posts in a sort of open conversation about our Marian consecrations, which we each completed independently in the fall. I have been chewing on this post of hers for a few weeks, namely, the notion of "offering up" little joys, pleasant experiences. Catholics are accustomed to the idea of offering up our sorrows and sufferings and sacrifices; it makes sense to us, because we understand that suffering has meaning and worth, and therefore God can use ours somehow. In the Marian consecration, the benefits derived from any such sacrifices and sufferings belong to Mary to distribute; but both B.D. and I discovered early on that along with consecration came a surprising inclination to offer joys as well. Here is Betty:

My friend Irene consecrated on the same day I did, and she was laughing about how one night, she was having a glass of wine and a bath before bed, and it occurred to her to offer it, "All for!" She felt weird about it at first, but why not offer up our rest, our comfort, our blessings as well as our suffering?

I think one source of the anxiety I've felt in the past is some sense of shame about the goodness of my life. Am I undeserving of Heaven because my life hasn't led me to any significant suffering? The pleasures of having a good marriage, good kids, good friends, reading good books, eating good foods, seem to offer little in the way of salvific value. So rather than offering up those good things, I would discount them completely, choosing to focus my emotional and spiritual energy on the minute discomforts of a relatively privileged life. If nailing oneself to the Cross is the only way to Salvation–I had no idea what to do with my blessings–blessings that God, in his goodness, made it impossible for me to escape.

Offering ALL of it, the good and the bad, has redeemed the mostly good things that constitute my life. And without seeking suffering, looking for it, wallowing in it, I'm free to administer to those who really do suffer.

I should add that at this season in my life, there are far more happy moments, far more joys large and small, than sad moments and suffering. I feel a need to offer these up, if only because there is so much more to offer from that reservoir. I would have to look pretty hard to find a suffering to off that is larger than getting cut off in traffic, or maybe having a migraine. If I look for joys to offer, well, there is one every moment. And all the moments are there for the offering. So it makes sense to say, "All for you — Totus tuus!"

But I still wonder — what does it mean to offer up joy? Possibly the problem is that I am not actually very clear on how to offer up suffering either.

I asked myself the other day in the pool — I was enjoying the swim, and thought to offer it, and in the same moment thought, "But what does that mean to offer this enjoyment?" and one answer came back immediately: it means to receive it with true gratitude, understanding that this joy is a gift. To be pleased with the pleasure and to refrain from being pleased with myself; to acknowledge that even the powers I have to obtain and to choose and to accept such good things are powers gifted to me.

I asked myself again when I was on the treadmill this afternoon (yes, there is a pattern there, it hasn't escaped me) and another answer came back immediately: the obvious example to look to, the perfect example of offering up a joy, is the mystery of the Presentation. Because after all, Mary and Joseph did not offer the baby boy in sacrifice, Isaac-style, nor leave the weaned child behind in the temple like Samuel; they got to take him home at the end of the day. The Presentation was an acknowledgment that the child belonged to God.

Remember that when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple, they did not expect it, but they ran into two different people who prophesied concerning their gift. The news was not devoid of foreboding.

And so I think there is an implied willingness to relinquish the gift in such offering. If you offer something to God, there is always a risk that you will be forced to admit that the pleasure isn't rightfully yours. If I take a moment to thank God for this pleasurable cup of cappuccino, I risk that it may become obvious that I ought to finish it up and go home and help my husband with the housework instead of finishing up a blog post here in this quiet caf?.

Finally, another part of offering up a joy is a resolution to use the joy, somehow, according to God's wishes rather than our own. If I am rested and refreshed after (say) a good hot shower, maybe I need to take that happiness and energy back and use it for others, rather than keep it selfishly to myself. We all know that various pleasures are good for the soul, but the degree of good largely depends on what we do with the joy and its aftereffects.

Can these insights suggest others that can help us understand more deeply how to offer up sufferings and sacrifices? What they all have in common is that to get in the habit is to remain ready to offer each moment as it arrives, whatever it may bring.

Loved this quote from Riparians at the Gate's seven quick takes this morning:

Any suggestions for good conversation starters?  Mixed company, so religion, politics and money talk are right out.  Also, education (mostly), childrearing (mostly), childbearing (mostly), because those are basically religion, politics, and money, Parenting Edition. 

That's all.  I just liked the turn of phrase.

(This is why polite, socially savvy SAHMs have so much more trouble than I do answering the "So what do you do?" question.)

Once upon a time, before I had children, I didn't really have a working knowledge of what babies and young children were like — day in and day out — at different stages.

I had seen TV depictions of families with babies, of course.  Infants on TV are often played by dolls wrapped in blankets, which quite sensibly circumvents any problems with child labor laws, but tends to give a funny impression of "baby" to the impressionable.  Babies seem to be either senselessly crying and motionless or reassuringly silent and motionless.  They convey nothing of importance.  They have no agency.

When I read in the newspaper some ghastly news item about something happening to a toddler, I vaguely imagined something babylike, only bigger and perhaps able to walk around and get into trouble.  If a twenty-one-month-old child were reported to be fatally harmed in an accident or crime, or to have gone missing, I'd make a sad face and feel sorry for the parents; but I imagined the loss of a passive, voiceless small one.  I never examined my prejudices, but it's clear, looking back, that I thought what was really lost was a potential life.  My memories don't really begin until age three or so; I couldn't really empathize with a child of two; I didn't really know any such children.  I never imagined them as having agency, or creativity.

It's really amazing how quickly you get schooled in this when you are living with a child every day, especially when — because he or she is your own — you are motivated to pay attention.  I remember being enchanted with my first newborn.  Yes, of course, he was cute and beautiful and all that — but what really enthralled me was to realize all these things he could do!  He could see a toy and become interested and grab it.  He wasn't motionless — in fact he could move surprisingly fast across a bed by wiggling and pushing with his feet, and he moved towards warmth and away from cold, and towards me and away from his dad.  He could do that cool newborn trick with mimicking facial expressions, which I had read about but really didn't believe until I had my own newborn to play with and saw it for myself.  Carried upright in a sling from birth, it was not many days before he could mostly hold his head up.  He learned within days to lift his bottom when we laid him on the table for a diaper change.

 I know now that there is nothing particularly special about this — ordinary healthy babies can do all these things and more — and so I laugh when I look back at myself, wondering at this astonishingly freaky genius baby I seemed to have.  Now I know that I was comparing my baby to my own poverty-stricken idea of what a baby can do.  I thought, I guess, that they weren't really people of any importance.

Yesterday I was making peppermint bark with my daughter, while the big boys were at church with Mark and the 22-month-old was meandering around playing with things.  I'd never tempered chocolate before and we had spent some time watching the Chocolate Tempering video at the Ghirardelli website before trying it ourselves (an aside: thanks to the video,  I now see the point of having an expensive granite countertop).  Not long after my daughter and I had finished the chocolate bark, I noticed this little assembly atop the stepstool on the floor of the kitchen, which I snapped (blurrily) with my cell phone:

Get it?  It's a "double boiler" — the saucepan is represented by a gravy separator, the melting container by a blue IKEA cereal bowl.  That wiry thing is the probe of my instant-read thermometer.

The blue plastic bowl contained bits of candy canes scavenged from the floor and countertops.

He wasn't playing — he was watching and learning, imitating, and making substitutions where necessary.  And there's nothing special about him, except in the "everyone is special" sense.  He is a full human being. He is my fourth, of course, so I have already learned this lesson a few times over — but it still takes my breath away, though mostly over the repeated realization of how clueless I once was.

It's as if we are programmed to generalize about people, and not really to know in our depths the personhood — the agency, the will, the decisionmaking capability — of "that kind of people" when "that kind of people" is one we don't have direct experience with.

 I'm sure this goes beyond young children, to every other kind of "other" there can be.  Being surprised by people —  in the unpleasant sense, instead of the sense in which I discovered my own babies' innate abilities –sets this off vividly.  Whenever we can't understand, really cannot understand, why someone does the thing they do, or when they act in a way we could not predict, and we write it off as senseless instead of trying to see the sense — that's when we ought to see that we weren't seeing them as whole and real persons, but instead a caricature, a simpler story to tell, like swaddled plastic on TV.

Dooce has a post up today that for me was timely:

Oh, hey. Hi there! Remember last week when I wrote on my Internet Website Blog Thing about suicidal ideations? Yeah. Those were fun times. No? Not really? What, did my mom call you? MOMS. We really know how to ruin a good party.

I had someone write to tell me to stop whining, and I'm not going to complain about that criticism. Because I get it. I understand it…

… I own two cars, a large home, and a business in a free market economy. My family enjoys excellent access to healthcare. My daughter goes to school. I get paid to write about my feelings on the Internet. Am I seriously going to whine about aimlessness?

Yes, I am…

And why shouldn't she?

I do not suffer from chronic or recurring depression, but I woke up this morning feeling remarkably blue for no apparent reason at all. Actually it started last night, on our way home from a fun family activity. No reason that I could see at all to be sad.

You know, I don't have a clotting disorder, but occasionally I find a bruise on my knee or arm, from some trauma I don't remember. I don't have chronic joint pain either, but sometimes I wake up with a stiff neck for no good reason. So I figure it has got to be possible to wake up with something — just off — in my mental health, something that will pass and leave me normal in a day or so, if a little frazzled from trying to catch up from a day in a mild fog.

I am practiced at compartmentalizing. I stand a little aside from myself and examine the heavy feeling in the chest and the sense of being a bit out of control, and run down a checklist of sorts. I haven't had a disagreement with my husband. The house isn't bringing me down with any particular messiness vibe. The children are in ordinary temperaments. I didn't generate the dark mood by reading a bunch of political blogs before I could finish my coffee. I *have* coffee. I have not recently been forced to confront any feelings of inadequacy. All is, objectively, well. Thus reassured, I am mostly able to get on with my day, without letting the sad feeling *worry* me. The way I could get on with a stiff neck, once (by looking for other symptoms and finding none) I satisfy myself it isn't the onset of meningitis or a heart attack. I am confident that, like a run-of-the-mill stiff neck, the blue feeling will pass and leave me healthy again soon.  

But I still have to *endure* it until it has run its course.

I give myself a little extra leeway on days like this. I take it for granted that I will not be able to summon the energy for a full day of school. I do something different. Today instead of spelling and music, we attempted to make peanut brittle all morning, an excuse for me to talk about boiling point elevation. The peanut brittle failed miserably: crystals nucleated and grew before my eyes after forty minutes of watching a hot sugar syrup bubble away. "Quick, throw the peanuts in before it all hardens!" exhorted my eleven-year-old, so I did, and we wound up with stuff that looked like freezer-burned corn niblets. It tasted pretty good though, so maybe I will use it for an ice cream topping. I can't really be sure, but it is tempting to diagnose the problem. Maybe if I had oiled the pan better, or scrubbed it harder, the syrup wouldn't have crystallized.

   Is there a point to these recriminations? I learned what I wanted to learn: it is not feasible for the kids and I to make pounds of peanut brittle for Christmas presents this year.

The same with my mental state. Do I feel like this today because I ate too much junk food yesterday? Does it have something to do with that migraine in the early afternoon? Hard to say. But again, it doesn't matter much.

This much is true: even if everything is fine, no amount of reminding myself that it is fine will make the sad feeling go away any faster. It is still there, and it takes time to fade, just as bruises and stiff muscles do. It just is. Most likely I will feel better tomorrow, but that does not change the feeling of today. 

Perhaps the compartmentalizing leads to that belief. I really think of this occasional sadness as a brief disruption of brain chemistry, kind of like my migraines. It isn't my fault, and the feelings don't necessarily reflect the reality outside myself, but they are part of the reality inside me. Thus it is best to deal with them as a piece of reality.

Heather of Dooce, writing about those who would accuse her of "whining" when she writes candidly about depression:

…and that's where I invite anyone who agrees with the valid criticism above to sit here with me and let me have it. I will listen to you curse me. I'll nod and offer you a tissue when things really heat up. I'll let you talk about your friend who died or the job you lost or the meals you've had to skip, and then I'll fix you dinner and invite you to stay the night.

Like I said, even if you know everything is fine, even if it is utterly obvious that your feelings are irrational…. The rational thing to do is to accept that irrational feelings exist and that they cannot be rationalized away.

Heather:

Sometimes the only way to quantify our own suffering is to compare it to what we think is the happiness of others. It's human. As human as reflexively wincing when hearing the chorus of a song you once played over and over in your bedroom because of two blue eyes.

So I offer up my humanness if, instead of a place to stay for the night, you need to hear that even with everything in its right place it's okay if you still don't know why it doesn't feel that way.

Note, in that last paragraph, the usage of the term "to offer up." She means it differently from the Catholic jargon… but maybe, on second thought, not so differently.