(h/t Althouse)
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].
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Another writer to add to Darwin’s roundup.
Willa at Quotidian Moments, I think, perfectly clinches the point that some of us were grappling with on the Ephesians 5 roundup (which hasn't gone up yet but we hear will go up soon): Paul tells women to submit and men to love because we naturally tend to go the other way.
Men, I would argue, don't have to be told to submit. It is something that comes very naturally to them. It is part of their strength, and it can also be a weakness. Sure, they will jostle for first place. But I am always struck by how on athletic fields and in other masculine areas, men are able to acknowledge the best among them, and admire the one who comes in first, without hard feelings or jealousy OR cringing servility. In the past, the best men have had no problem kneeling to a king without feeling a loss to their own dignity. In fact, the most masculine men are usually the ones who can serve nobly and faithfully. Think of the centurion who Jesus spoke of admiringly, who drew the analogy between the men who served him and then applied it to Jesus's power.
Think also of chivalry and the romantic ideal — a man naturally thinks in terms of service, I believe. Where I think he may sometimes need to be reminded is in the area of "love"– that is, a faithful and long-term drawing-together, a willingness to be perfected and completed by the other, to stay in the holistic relationship and in the true sense "husband" and cultivate his family rather than making his role a sort of stylized formality. I think that this kind of wholehearted love and commitment is harder for a man. Perhaps Adam reneged on his role when he basically took the "whatever" role when Eve set it upon him, and then laid the blame on her for his own lapse of commitment.
Women, I would argue, don't have to be told to love. They will love whether told to or no. They are attracted to the good even when it's hidden, and receptive to it. They look for completion in a relationship. But they have a harder time submitting, putting their agenda in second place. Even their service and sacrifice can be a form of control if they don't watch out. Ask me how I know, as long as you don't expect me to answer. But "sub-missio" implies making your mission wholeheartedly subordinate to that of the other. I would argue that the feminine difficulty with this goes back to Eve's seizing of the initiative in the relationship of our First Parents, and was decisively set back to rights by Our Lady's Fiat at the Annunciation.
Yes to all that, especially the bit about athletics.
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My obsessive-compulsive health tip of the day.
Pour yourself an eight-ounce glass of water and drink it straight down. Count how many times you swallow. Remember this number. Congratulations: you've just calibrated your eight-ounce glass for future use at drinking fountains.
Yes, I came up with this myself. Think it'll catch on?
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Sugar and spice.
I was wondering the other day:
How come we commonly sprinkle things like doughnuts or hot buttered toast with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar, but we rarely if ever mix sugar with other spices (say cardamom or cumin or paprika or chili powder) and sprinkle it on things? Maybe cloves or nutmeg might work — but I don't remember ever seeing this.
Can we imagine some dishes in which a different spice-sugar mix could be featured?
(On a related note, please enjoy this post at defective yeti.)
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LAM update.
At the beginning of October I wrote a post about lactational amenorrhea that broke my previous record for number of comments (30 I think).
At this point I would not use the term "reliable" to describe ecological breastfeeding for spacing. Some women are fortunate (or blessed, or whatever term you want to use) to find that amenorrhea lasts a long time; some are not. Even if that were true for most women — maybe it is — the fact that you can't tell in advance whether you fall into the "most women" category would make it not "reliable" (it would if that "most" was "all but a tiny few" but it is not). There's a significant element of unpredictability there.
Rather contrary to the suggestion that women risk selfishly doing EBF for the fertility suppression at risk of harming their babies, I'd say that EBF is worth doing for the baby's sake, and if you get some spacing out of it, that's just a bonus.
Another thing I want to throw out there: A lot of people seem to be measuring the "reliability" of EBF as a baby-spacing means with "how many months of amenorrhea did I get." I'd say that unless you're happy with lactation being your only spacing mechanism — which is fine for many families, I know — the measure of reliability has a lot more to do with whether you can detect the return of fertility clearly enough that you know when to start abstaining in anticipation of switching to NFP.
If you look at my "how many months" data, it sounds pretty good. I wasn't following the 7 standards the first time (I was in grad school and did a lot of pumping) and I still got 6 months of amenorrhea. Here I am still not cycling at 8m postpartum.
But for us, it has been a significant sacrifice to continue with lactational amenorrhea. I haven't (yet) tried to kick-start the cycles by depriving my baby of time he needs with me, but we've certainly been tempted. And the reason for that is that my pattern of return to fertility has been an early onset of fertility signs which last many, many weeks. And no, before you tell me it is probably a "basic infertile pattern," I can assure you that it is not, not according to any sort of system (CCL, Creighton, or Billings). EWM for months straight. Oh, and, three out of three times, the first ovulation has occurred without a "warning period."
I wouldn't use the term "unreliable" either for EBF — the connotations of the word are too negative. Truth is, it's useful for many couples. Many informed couples are, clearly, willing to rely upon it because of their own very subjective judgment; which is what matters for them. And again, the standards that increase the odds are good for babies and worthy for that reason. But I'm not willing to call it "reliable" under any objective standard. There's just not enough predictability.
Later, by email, Official Bearing Blog Epidemiologist ChristyP reminded me that (despite the NFP community doing a lot of cheerleading about breastfeeding being able to space babies 18 months or more apart), the lactational amenorrhea method is reliably reliable up to 6 months postpartum, and not at all reliably reliable after that.
I think maybe the best summary is this: Most people will be able to get away with LAM without a whole lot of abstinence up to 6 months postpartum. After that, as the months go by, fewer and fewer couples will be able to get away with a low-abstinence approach.
Anyway, I thought I'd post on it again just to note that we have now made it through the end of lactational amenorrhea; I am nearly done with the first full postpartum cycle. Yeah, it kind of sucks to be having periods again, but it's a relief to be, for now, coming out of the confusing season of my childbearing years.
Only now after four babies (three with adherence to LAM requirements as described in the link above) do I feel like I have gotten the hang of how to handle lactational amenorrhea. I recently described it to a questioner in an NFP mailing list I'm on, a first-time mother who was seeing so-called "fertile-quality" mucus early in the postpartum period:
I sympathize greatly as I always had a lot of mucus changes with all four of my postpartum periods. We prefer to operate quite conservatively so there was a lot of abstinence for us. With the first I was working, so couldn't trust LAM at all, and just abstained; with the other three, we began abstinence prior to 6 months pp because I started to have migraines which have always for me been a sign of ovulation.
For example, this most recent time, I had a string of migraines at 4 and 1/2 months postpartum — we began abstinence then. I didn't have many dry days and they rarely strung together into several dry days in a row. It happened once about 6 and 1/2 months pp that we got 4 dry days…Then back to abstinence. I continued to have occasional migraine. At exactly 9 months pp I detected first ovulation with temperature rise. First menstruation followed 13 days later.
…It helps a lot that both of us agree on taking a fairly conservative approach.
Like I said, we're rule people. The hard part about LAM for us has always been the difficulty figuring out which rules apply. Ignoring CM until after the first migraine OR six months pp, whichever comes first, seems like a comfortable compromise for the length of LAM. Incidentally, the "uncertain time" (read: time of very high abstinence) has turned out to last about four and a half months every time. Believe me, that's not an insignificant length of time, and as it wears on it is increasingly annoying, since it's only in hindsight that you know how long it will be; but neither is it marriage-destroyingly horrible.
Too bad I can't go back in time to, say, mid-August and tell myself that it won't be all that bad… but then, if I could perfect the Time Travel Method of natural family planning, well, we'd all be having a lot more fun, wouldn't we?
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Sore.
Monday night I dropped the kids off at the YMCA play area and headed up to the indoor track with a page of scrawled workout notes from my running clinic last Saturday. The instructor had provided us with four weeks' worth of drills. "It'll probably drive you crazy to take this time off getting almost no mileage while you're focusing on those drills," she had told the class. "I know I hated writing a big fat ZERO in my mileage notebook while I was working on my form. But winter's really the best time for this kind of work, and you're going to come back even faster."
All the superwomen had nodded their heads. Me, I was thinking: Cool, four whole weeks with an excuse to skip "running!" Actually probably more than four because I'm such a slow learner!
So, anyway, there I was at the indoor track around the top of the basketball gym — 18 laps to the mile — with the little alcove for stretching right next to the entrance. Fortunately there weren't too many people around, because I expected to either (a) look like a weirdo or (b) annoy other runners.
I started out by warming up with a gentle run around the track, but instead of my usual heel-striking lope I tried to run the way I'd learned in class. It feels pretty weird — an exaggerated high-stepping feeling at the knee, and I couldn't get over the sensation that I was running down a steep hill and might fall. Also, I couldn't go very fast.
The drills were similar to the ones we had learned in the class, and involved very little actual running. They are meant to make three corrections to running form:
- most importantly, to stop you landing on your heels and rolling forward onto the toe for push-off, and instead to get your foot striking the ground "mid-foot," which sounds like it ought to mean flat-footed (the middle of your foot is somewhere on the arch, right?) but really means more like on the ball of the foot.
- to get you straight-backed and leaning slightly forward instead of backward, vertical, or bent at the hips.
- to raise the running cadence — the number of times your right foot hits the ground per minute — above 90 or even higher.
About landing on your mid-foot — this is why I felt so weird during my warm-up jog. I think I can give you a quick demonstration of what this feels like, if you don't know. Stand up (shoes are not necessary here), face a direction with a few feet of space in front of you, and jog gently in place for a moment or two. You'll find that your foot naturally strikes the ground midfoot-first, not heel-first, though it's good if your heel comes down and sort of "kisses" the ground before you pick it up again. OK, once you've got that, gently lean your body forward ever-so-slightly — and what happens is that you move — when your body corrects to keep you from tipping over, your running in place turns into running forward — but on your midfoot, not with a heel strike. That's the kind of running I'm trying to do, only continuous. And I'm not used to it. I'm used to hitting the floor with a heel that's heavily cushioned by my running shoes.
So there were hopping-on-your-toes drills, and standing leg raises, and lean-against-the-wall leg raises. (This video gives you a pretty good idea of the kinds of stuff I was doing.)
Near the end there were just a couple of cadence drills. The instructor had recommended buying a runner's metronome for these so you could try to put your foot on the floor in time to the "dink…dink…dink…dink…" sound. I judged that the other patrons at the Y would not be pleased to have me bring such a thing into the building. What I had found instead was a set of free .mp3 files of metronomes set at various tempos. So with these loaded on my iPod I was able to run around the track keeping fairly close to the tempos suggested by the instructor.
I was seriously winded by the end of all this, despite going very, very slowly. Also, my left foot seemed to be able to "do it" better than my right, though I am not sure — that could have been from the banked corners of the running track. I don't remember ever feeling that the arch of my foot got tired before!
The drills only took about 25 minutes total (and that was with a lot of hemming and hawing and checking my notes and also counting the warmups), and the instructor had basically ordered us not to try to do any additional running beyond the drills. So I went back to the locker room, quickly changed into my suit, and had a ten-minute swim. What a relief to be doing something I knew how to do already.
So, two days later, my calves are still sore. It is not an injury-type soreness, just a "my muscles aren't used to this" soreness — I can tell it was a good workout.
But you know what is really best about this? I usually find running very, very boring. Every time I run, I wish I was swimming instead. I try to watch the treadmill-mounted TVs and forget about what I'm doing until my 40 minutes are up. The only thing that changes from run to run is maybe how fast I go or how high I set the incline. But with these drills to work on, something interesting is going on, and suddenly I am looking forward to my next time at the gym.
Learning something new will do that. Cool.
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Tagged: Ephesians 5. (Part II – Okay, but like I said, what does “wives, submit to your husbands” mean?)
So Darwin tagged me and asked that question about Ephesians 5, and I went and wrote a post of several paragraphs of, er, scriptural analysis. Which everyone knows is the easy part.
Now I’m sitting down to try to answer the hard part.
Even though I liked my fellow taggee Dorian’s ranty post about it , and I wish to validate her with a “Yeah! What she said!”, I repeat: “Wives, submit” isn’t about paid work or childcare. Sure, in a given marriage, paid work may be a big issue. So can sex, money, whether to have another child…. Ephesians 5 gives us the framework for discussing the issues, not the issue itself.
Thinking that it’s about assigning the woman the stay-at-home job (an error peculiar to our age) can even lead us in opposition to Ephesians 5. In this model we sometimes think of the husband ruling in his providerly way over the external-world sphere, while the wife rules in her nurturely way over the domestic sphere. But guess what? The wife doesn’t get to rule over the domestic sphere anyway. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so must women be subject to their husbands in everything. Everything!
And anyway, does the domestic sphere even count as subordinate to the external-world sphere? Only in the eyes of the world.
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Darwin writes:
It makes sense and seems true to me, and yet I can’t think of specific rules as to what “headship” means in our household, much less formulate some sort of universally applicable principle which must apply in all circumstances.
I think it’s hard because the only universally applicable principle is apparently “in everything,” which either means nothing or it has to be applied uniquely and individually to almost every point of contact between the spouses.
I think it’s hard because it’s exquisitely intimate. When I try to write about specific ways I think “submit” in marriage applies personally to me, I feel unacceptably laid-bare — I am not writing about sex, but it feels as if I am trying to write about something equally interior and private. I don’t have the right to explain how it is between us.
And I think it’s hard because we’re both trying to think of things that we should do. I think that submitting is more about things that we should not do.
So I come back to this idea that it must mean something that sets us apart from the “pagans” around us, from those who haven’t internalized the Christian message. Does he order Christian wives to submit because it’s natural and right to submit…. or does he have to order us to submit because it does not come natural to us? Does he perhaps have to tell us to submit because to do so is not natural, but supernatural?
It’s within the domestic sphere that this matters, when wife and husband are together, and so perhaps he’s warning us against becoming the petty ruler of the home, treating our husband as if he were an intruder or worse, one of our children. Haven’t we known women to say things like this?
It’s like I have three children instead of two.
or
I can’t get it together on the weekends when he’s home, he messes up all my routines. I don’t know how I’ll stand it when he retires.
Yeah, we want to be avoiding an attitude like that.
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So what is “not submitting” like?
One way would be to undermine his authority with the children: denigrating him in any way in front of them, or colluding with them against him.
Another would be to undermine his standing outside the family: denigrating him to your friends. I know. Many of us do this. It’s a cliche of the culture that women complain about their husbands. Especially in a group, it’s extremely difficult to avoid joining in on the husband-bashing. Maybe there exists some fine line between husband-bashing and confiding your troubles to a trusted and close friend. Maybe it depends whether you’re trying to find an answer, or whether you’re just complaining. I’m not exactly sure about that. But it’s definitely something to be cautious with.
Yet another would be, ironically, to demand he take a more assertive role in something. Erm, to put it another way, don’t top from the bottom. “I want you to assert your spiritual headship of this household more forcefully!” Doesn’t really work.
I once tried to make Mark be more “involved” in the homeschooling decisions. It didn’t go well. I finally had to accept that I have been blessed with a husband with a very hands-off managerial style, who trusts me to make wise decisions in this area. Homeschooling (at least right now, with these not-yet-big children) is delegated very firmly to me, and in this case, submitting means I don’t get to pass the buck to him on day-to-day operations.
And then there’s decision-making. Often we discuss submission in terms of the hypothetical Big Decision That You Discuss And Discuss And Can’t Come To An Agreement On. Someone has to give, the theory goes, or the marriage can’t survive; and if marriage is to survive, the “who’s gonna give” must be pre-decided. Might as well be the guy, for reasons explained in Eph 5.
But how often does this happen in a marriage? Three or four times, maybe? A dozen, if one or both of you is exceptionally dramatic? But aren’t there daily or weekly tiny decisions where the wife gets to decide if she’s going to do things the way her husband has asked her to or if she’s going to do it her own way? Don’t we all do little things that drive each other crazy? Can we not actually try to stop doing that small thing that we know bugs him so much? Would it be so hard to try?
But how about when it’s the other way around, when there’s something we really think he ought to do that he’s not doing? Demanding that he change is apparently right out. Is there then nothing we can do?
On the other hand… “men ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies…” We can, I think, ask to be loved and provided for in the way we wish to be loved and provided for.
I remember a disagreement Mark and I had in the past year, one of those situations where I was absolutely, positively sure I was right and he was wrong, and looking back on it I can see how I tried to put my foot down about it and how uncomfortable and awful and wrong and upsetting that felt. How much better it would have been had I simply … asked for what I needed, and trusted that he would want to find a solution that would work for both of us.
(Even without my asking, he did find a solution. So.)
So what have I come up with?
- Don’t be bossy about how to interact with the house or the kids.
- Take all his suggestions seriously.
- Don’t undermine his authority with the children.
- Don’t undermine his standing outside the family.
- Try not to do that thing that drives him nuts.
- Ask for what we think we need.
Yeah, that’s a start. And the next part is to notice how something very close is mirrored, interdependent with, equal to: Husbands, love your wives.
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And another one from the “other people’s weight loss” department.
From Tobias Buckell: How I lost 30 pounds while eating a donut every day. He sounds like the same sort of trial-and-error type person that I am. Some excerpts:
The nitty gritty is, I’ve come to believe after eight years of reading weight-lifting books, nutrition books, and eight years of self-experimentation and logging the results in detail on excel spreadsheets, that you have to figure out how much your body can take in calories a day without gaining weight, and that becomes your upper limit. You also need a lower limit, your ‘base metabolic rate’ so that your body is getting the calories it knows it needs to move you around for the day. These are rough calculations, based on large populations, so logging helps one refine and test one’s own upper and lower bounds (which also change with body composition.)
Using a BMR calculator sets my lower bound (about 1,800 calories a day for me). If I eat less than that, there are chances my body will slow my metabolism down because it thinks its starving. That’s also good because it stops me from falling into the trap that might lead to a failed diet: trying to simply starve yourself of calories. That leads to people who look ‘skinny fat’ and to bouncing diets. But those are the calories my body would like to have.
The same calculator lets me ballpark how many calories it will take before I start to gain weight, right now that’s ~2,500 calories a day.
So that’s my window: more than 1800 calories a day, less than 2500….
What’s missing here? Kinds of foods. After all the reading, everyone insists that eating a certain kind of food will cause weight loss. Vegetarians on one side. Atkins dieters on the other. I followed some of these carefully, but after reading about BMR, I quickly came to believe that the reason high protein diets helped slim me down weren’t magical science-y sounding justifications, but just simply that 300 calories of a steak fills you up and takes longer for your body to process than 300 calories of chips that leave you hungry again in half an hour. And stripping that bread off the burger gets rid of calories, often by a half. Tracking my calories in 2005 correlated this fairly effectively, I was eating 30% fewer calories by going high protein, and I was losing weight as a result….
I know that I can eat four apples for the price of one donut, and that I’m full to bursting after just two full apples.
But I also no longer deny myself *any* kind of food I like. I said I have achieved this weight loss and had a donut every day. I’m not half kidding. Every week day, at the coffee shop, I have a donut (creme-filled, 360 calories). If it doesn’t put me over the daily limit, I’ll have it. Three days ago I had one of my favorite high-calorie foods, a Li’l Debbie Nutty Bar (500 calories). There was no guilt. I really enjoy and love the good foods now, because I know exactly how much they cost me in calories and know that they’re not hurting me. However, I do steer clear of ‘high cost’ foods that would bloat the calorie budget for no reason.
Thought that might interest.
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Comfort zone, smashed.
A while ago I subscribed to a local women's running list, but I never got around to going to any of the weekly workouts held at a high school outdoor track. So the week before Thanksgiving when an announcement went out for a four-hour running clinic to work on form and prevent injury, I thought, "That sounds kind of fun." I decided it would be a good Christmas present to myself. So I dropped a check in the mail.
Today Mark took all the kids to swimming lessons and I headed out in the other car to a gym on the west side of town. I was wearing some of Mark's clothes as well as my own — it had snowed last night, we were supposed to run outdoors for taking video, and I didn't have much stuff to run in the snow.
Seven other women and one man arrived for the clinic. They looked suspiciously … buff. "Let's all introduce ourselves and say what our goals for today are."
Well.
Three marathoners hoping to improve their endurance. Three longtime triathletes hoping to use their bodies more efficiently in the running segment. One woman still sore from an Ironman a couple of weeks ago. And one kickboxer, wearing a well-used Israeli Defense Forces tee shirt, who said she hated running but was going to try a marathon this year just for the heck of it and didn't want to hurt herself more than necessary.
We got about halfway through the introductions when I suddenly felt an urge to hyperventilate and my mind was filled with one thought: OMG I paid $65 to take a gym class with these people.
I'm Erin. I'm a beginner. I just want to learn to run the right way so I don't become one of those people who just 'goes out and runs' and gets hurt."
(Mark scoffed at me later for the "beginner." "You've run three 5Ks!" he pointed out. "Yes, but I don't know what I'm doing. And you should have seen these women." )
(I just cannot wear a ponytail like that.)
Calm down, I told myself. You are here to learn.
We went outside and ran for the camera, then came back in to review the footage. "We're looking for a slight lean forward in the body, foot striking the pavement midfoot and not at the heel, a short time in contact with the ground, and no long legs out front or in back," the instructor told us. I felt a little better when she started pointing out everything that the other people were doing wrong. And then it was my turn and ….
….whoooooah. Take everybody's mistakes and put them together and you have me. I was like five inches shorter than the next person in the class, and I STILL had a longer leg out in front and in back than any of them.
Then she had us do a bunch of drills, most of them designed to correct the errors in heel strike and body lean. Some of them were not too hard: hop around the room landing properly on the midfoot, for example, or snap one leg up (stamping and pawing like a horse, I thought) so the knee came forward but the heel kicked up at the butt.
But then there was one where we were supposed to jog back and forth across the gym, only every fourth time we picked up a foot we were supposed to kick it high back — kick ourselves in the butt — and I was sunk. You may think I am pretty good with numbers, but I tell you I cannot count and do anything physical at the same time. I tripped and skipped around a few times until the instructor finally told me that the point wasn't to get the rhythm right, it was to kick the foot up once in a while. Randomly would be fine. I was better after that.
Until the jump ropes came out. Oh man. I had to remind myself that the other students didn't pay their fees for the purpose of watching me screw up. They were too busy paying attention to their own feet. Actually, I wasn't the only person who had trouble with the jumping rope. It takes a surprising amount of coordination to run and skip rope at the same time. At least, I think so; hard to tell, since I can't even properly jump rope in place. To run and skip rope at the same time, you have to turn the rope once per step; no matter how hard I try, even in place, I jump twice and turn once.
"The point of the jump rope is to shorten your strides," the instructor told us. "If your stride is too long, you'll trip over the rope." Well, I didn't have any trouble tripping over the rope with a stride of zero, so clearly I have a ways to go.
Then we did some fun (but socially exhausting) drills in pairs. One person stood in front of the other and leaned forward, her hips pressing into a giant rubber band held by the person behind her. Then the front person started running in place, against the resistance band, while the person in back braced herself and held her back. Then with a "Three–two–one–go!" the rear partner let go of the rubber band, launching the runner forward into a full run across the room. That was very fun. I found myself wanting to try this with Mark sometime. A similar drill had a partner standing in front, bracing the in-place runner with hands on her shoulders, then stepping aside to let her take off. You would think you'd get tripped on, but actually there is enough time to get out of the way. I still was worried I would not do it right, but I guess it went okay. (Except for that one time I went "Three–two–go!" I told you I couldn't count and do anything at the same time.)
At the end we all went out in the street again to take more video and then compare to see our improvement. Everyone had shortened their stride at least a little bit — even me. And I had corrected my backward lean and was even leaning forward ever so slightly. I left with four weeks of "homework" drills (it'll actually take me eight weeks, as I can only run twice a week) and a feeling of real accomplishment, plus a lot to tell Mark back at home.
I'm still utterly exhausted — some of it undoubtedly from moving around in ways I am not used to moving, but I think most of it is from the strain of going back to "gym class." Watching myself run on video is uniquely horrifying. Being around these "real runners" — well, it has been a long time since I had this feeling at the Y, but I had such a palpable sensation of I do not belong here. I know better now though. I do belong here. It was not an "advanced" running class, it was an ordinary running class, and I am someone who needs to learn. And I was there to learn. And I did learn. So there.
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From the “other people’s weight loss” department.
Sci-fi author and blogger John Scalzi has a post up (with info-graphics!) describing "The Incredible Scalzi Weight Loss Plan." It might interest.
Thought this point was very relevant:
3. I didn’t freak out when I slipped because I knew it was a long term project. Which meant that on the occasional days I ate more calories than I was supposed to, I didn’t get OCD about it. I just kept to the schedule after that. Alternately, while I did make a general effort to eat better, I didn’t feel guilty about ice cream or other empty calories when I had them. I just tried to keep the portions from being stupidly gargantuan, and compensated later with better, healthier foods. Over time everything balanced and I lost weight on a fairly steady basis, as the chart suggests.
I expect there will be some interesting stuff in the comments.
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Tagged: Ephesians 5. (part 1 – general considerations)
Darwin tagged me yesterday morning, along with several other married women bloggers, in a post asking opinions about Ephesians 5. For context, read his whole post — but the main question is, what are we to think of "Wives, be submissive to your husbands?"
Here are a few points, in no particular order.
No, I don't think this represents a "high" or symbolic or unearthly ideal. This is a piece of pragmatic advice to husbands and wives living out their relationships in the world. As evidence I point to the context of Ephesians 4-6: "Be humble and gentle and patient," "give up living as pagans do," "if you are angry, do not… let sunset find you nursing your anger," "have done with spite and bad temper, with rage, insults and slander," "no coarse, stupid, or flippant talk," no "fornication and indecency of any kind…"
No, all these injunctions are about Christian conduct in a pagan world, the same in which we largely find ourselves today. So it is with "Wives, be subject to your husbands." He is calling Christians to live differently from the wider culture around them. If it didn't manifest itself in distinctive behavior of some kind, it would not be the uniquely Christian life.
Any relevance to working inside or outside the home, acquiring or eschewing advanced education, or taking responsibility for child care is a red herring. These (yes, even the child care, when we speak of how its duties are to be divided) are economic activities. We live today in a vastly different economic system from the one in first-century Ephesus. The meaning of "men's" versus "women's" work, the boundaries of "the home" with respect to the economy, the nature of education available to people of each gender — totally foreign system. If
I may go so far as to interpret the text, it is a practical instruction in Christian conduct, but it is not really speaking of economic activity — it is giving us no instruction in how we ought best to support our families. Again, it's telling us how to distinguish ourselves from the pagans: avoid the sinful excesses that are common among the pagans, and have Christian relationships — that is, relationships that are marked with the special features unique to Christians. Husband-wife, parent-child, and servant-master relationships are to be palpably different in Christian households than in pagan ones.I want to stress this because I see a fair amount of confusion between these two concepts. Yes, there's probably a big overlap between "people who take this passage seriously" and "people who believe wives, or at least mothers, should minimize work outside the home." Yes, there's an undeniable tendency to connect the two emotionally, as for many of us the decision to change our lives in response to Ephesians 5 and the decision to abandon a career or an education in the service of our marriage are intertwined in time and in intention. But they aren't the same argument. No, Ephesians 5 has little if anything to say about who should bring economic value into the home from outside and who should generate economic value from within it.
That said, I agree with Darwin that casting the wife in the "primary-provider" role probably creates some tensions because it runs against some of the nature of husband-hood and wife-hood, of fatherhood and motherhood. A stereotypical example of this might be the perennial complaint that working women have to pull a "second shift" of child care when they get home, a workload that seems never to fall on Dad in quite the same way. But if they exist, these tensions arise because the family's choices (however prudent and correct) run up against the natures of fatherhood, motherhood, and childhood, not because they demonstrate lack of submission on the part of the wife.
Besides, casting anybody, husband OR wife, as the primary provider creates tensions when either spouse is still very invested in the equality/sameness model of marriage rather than the reciprocity/complementarity model, or when either spouse is still very invested in a vision of one's economic work or education as being largely about self-fulfillment and not about serving the best interests of the family.
The triple-dipole structure of the chapter is obvious and important. The three paired injunctions must be taken in the context of each other. Wives, be subject to your husbands; husbands, love your wives. Children, obey your parents; fathers, do not goad your children into resentment. Slaves, obey your masters; masters, do not threaten your slaves. Is it irksome to see "wives" set in parallel with "children" and "slaves?" Sure. Doesn't mean we can ignore it. I think the reason these are set parallel to each other is that these are the three hierarchical relationship-pairings within a household. Paul is calling for Christian households to be radically different from their pagan neighbors, transformed from within because of their vision of the purpose of human life — not least because of an equality they know they possess in the eternal sense.
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The specifics of what "Wives, be subject to your husbands" means is worthy of another post, which I'll get to later. UPDATE. Here is the second post.
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Not what I was looking for, but I like the way you think.
ME: …so, in all of your pulley experiments, we find that you needed a larger amount of force to lift the weights than you expected from the calculations. Why do you think that is?
TEN-YEAR-OLD: I don't know.
ME: Well, what's the difference between an ideal imaginary pulley and a real experimental pulley?
TEN-YEAR-OLD: …
ME: Something the real pulley has that the imaginary pulley doesn't. We talked about this, remember?
TEN-YEAR-OLD: …
ME: One word. Starts with "F."
TEN-YEAR-OLD (desperately): Flammable!
ME: …
TEN-YEAR-OLD: Real pulleys are flammable, you know.
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