Light and Momentary

A Dangerous Combination

In my inbox right now I have an email from the designer whose sweater I just made, saying she'd love to have me test-knit for her again. She has a whole slew of pretty feminine designs and she looks for test-knitters regularly. I have an email from KnitPicks telling me that their luxury yarns are on sale for one week only. All kinds of yummy: alpaca and silk and merino and...

...I should delete both of those emails right this minute, shouldn't I?

Peer Review

More than ten years ago an idea came to me in a flash. I was reading about the long-term effects of breastfeeding and I gasped. What if breastfeeding played a role in a mysterious disorder (we'll call it MD for short) in my own field?

I emailed the professor who researched MD at the school where I got my master's degree, along with his research associate. I said, "You guys should check this out!" They were unenthusiastic. It turns out that their lack of enthusiasm was a good thing, because that out-of-nowhere idea became my early research project when I returned to grad school to get my PhD.

It also turns out that their lack of enthusiasm was widespread. Again and again people said, "You're researching what??" It was as if I had proposed astrological predictors for MD: no one, but no one in my field, found it plausible.

But do you know what? My data show a significant inverse relationship between MD and breastfeeding duration. In other words, the longer a child nursed, the less likely he was to have MD.

(It was a little funny, going through this project with so many friends in the breastfeeding support community. For them, it was obvious that breastfeeding would protect against MD. Doesn't breastfeeding protect against everything? Studies that conclude otherwise must have been funded by formula companies! Covariate control, schmovariate control! I was a little worried they'd ride me out of town on a rail if I tried to report a null finding.)

One of my big tasks for the fall semester was writing up my findings for publication. I submitted the manuscript in December and got a decision a few weeks ago. (Fact #1 about peer review: it is usually slow.)

I was aiming for the flagship journal of my professional organization, half-expecting to be rejected outright. I had heard so many times from people in the field that this was an implausible association -- I wasn't sure if my data would be enough to overcome the bias. Victory #1: I did not get rejected. I got a revise/resubmit decision, which means I am welcome to send it back when I incorporate the reviewers' feedback. Even better, I got a personalized note from the editor encouraging me to keep plugging.

Victory #2: there was not even a murmur of skepticism -- in any of the reviews (two reviewers, one associate editor, and one subject editor) -- about the rationale for investigating this association. Hurray!

Victory #3: the reviews themselves were mostly very encouraging. My mentor told me that it's unusual for reviewers to be complimentary; usually, she says, they just dive right into the list of concerns. So I'm delighted to have received this feedback: "I've reviewed a number of papers on [MD] in recent years, and this one stands out for the clarity in writing, the engaging writing style, and careful attention to editing details. The authors are to be commended for this."

(I've been dithering since I got the email about whether that's too braggy to post on my blog. I hope it doesn't rub you the wrong way. It was such a pleasant surprise to get a comment like that in what can be a bruising and ego-deflating process.)

The negative feedback was pretty narrowly focused, centering mostly on one paragraph -- and to be honest, that paragraph warranted some criticism. They also are suggesting that I throw a little metaphorical napalm on the mama wars by raising questions about how breastfeeding mothers might interact differently with their children than formula-feeding mothers, but I am going to exercise my authorial judgment and decline to speculate. I've proposed two perfectly plausible mechanisms already, and I'll tell them the best evidence points in that direction. We'll see if they buy it.

The biggest changes I'll be making are to the length of the paper. I am resubmitting it as a different manuscript type, and so it needs to be shorter. It's not my favorite thing, taking a document that I labored and sweated to expand and hacking out a sizable fraction of its guts. But I can do it anyway. That's what I'm up to this week. Wish me luck!

The Return of Sunday Night Strategizing

All right, I'm back in town after a safe and reasonably sane trip to my parents' house. It's been a couple of months since my last SNS post and I'm ready to get back into the groove. Those posts were great for my productivity and we could certainly use a little productivity around here. This week I am catching up on some of the things I let slide during the sweater craziness. On my list:

• clear off the piled-up desk and dresser
• clean this house
• finish The Winter's Tale, finally
• revise manuscript
• write a first-quarter follow-up post about resolutions

Miscellany

1. The shirt is wrong, the ends are unwoven, a single sleeve is pinned haphazardly to the corresponding shoulder, and the picture is a little out of focus. BUT. I am finished knitting the Sweater of Crazy. I have a smidgin of blocking, two sleeves' worth of seaming, and an ocean of end-weaving to finish, and I'll be D-O-N-E done at last. I still don't know what it was about this sweater that made me say, YES! I would love to knit that in three weeks! It was a nutjob thing to do, but I think I'm going to get it done. Unless I die in a fiery crash.
2. Tomorrow I'm driving south to my parents' house with all of the kids. I've never gone on a long-distance car trip with five kids and no other adults, but that's what I'm doing. Prayers for safety and sanity appreciated. I had a great time three years ago on the trip to my nephew's baptism with my two oldest, but the dynamics are more complicated with five. (Oh, yeah, and the toddler is not a fan of long car trips. I see a McFlurry in her future tomorrow, doled out by the oldest, spoonful by slow spoonful. I bet he can make a McFlurry last an hour and a half, don't you? That leaves us a mere 5.5 hours to fill.)
3. Assuming I don't die in a fiery crash, I've had a couple of posts kicking around in my head: one about peer review and one about fear. I am posting this because sometimes that's a useful kick in the pants for me, to post that I'm going to post. Probably a little meta for anyone who's not me.
4. On the subject of peer review, I just sent off a revision of an article draft to my mentor. Getting it to this stage is almost as much of a relief as getting the knitting finished. (I didn't Sign A Contract to finish the article draft by today, which is why the knitting is a bigger relief. Or perhaps my priorities are just whacked.)
5. PSA: mucus and mucous are both words. Mucus is the noun. Mucous is an adjective (meaning "full of muc," obvs). You have mucous membranes in your mouth, for instance. The stuff that a person observes is mucus, sans "o." (Prompted by the comment thread following this post.)
6. My stats program inserts a pair of quotation marks or parentheses or brackets whenever I hit the key the first time, so that the right parenthesis or whatever is always right there waiting for me when I am ready for it. I have started feeling a little indignant when I hit " in another program and then have to hit it again to close the quote. Might have been spending a little too much time with the stats program. (See above re: new draft.)
7. I am not done packing even though I planned to leave first thing in the morning. Oops. Should probably get cracking on the packing. Or maybe get cracking on the sleeping.

This one is a little ranty

Stella woke up sick on Sunday.

She fussed and clung and looked out at the world through defeated eyes. You know that look kids get when they feel just crummy? She had it in spades.

So I held her and rocked her and nursed her (and nursed her and nursed her and nursed her -- no solid food for her, TYVM) and dosed her with Tylenol and stroked her hair and thought she'd probably be better in a day or two. Yesterday she was no better through the morning but she perked right up in the afternoon. She wanted to sit at the piano and sing Old McDonald ("Mama, panno! EIEIO!"). Her sleep schedule was all catawampus and so she took a late afternoon nap.

When she woke up I nursed her again and stroked her hair again, smoothing it away from her face, and I was AGHAST to see a pale yellow crusty ring around her right ear canal. It suddenly seemed logical: she'd perked up earlier because her eardrum had ruptured and eased the pressure. Here I was thinking she just needed rest and fluids and Tylenol and meanwhile her middle ear was EXPLODING.

I had dealt with a ruptured eardrum before, when Joe was 7 or 8 months old. He'd had a similarly miserable clingy defeated day, and that night he was nursing in my lap when suddenly a rivulet of yellow-green snot came snaking out his ear. He couldn't talk but you just knew what he was saying when he sat up: "That's better!"

I hit Stella with more Tylenol and ran through speedy dinner options with the middle boys, leaving them home together so I could race to the evening clinic. We were seen almost instantly and I explained my concerns. The doctor said her right ear looked fine, actually, but her left ear was infected. Then came the part that made me grumpy.

He said the pale yellow crust was just earwax. You guys, it was not earwax. It was completely the wrong color for earwax. Maybe she smeared cream cheese around her ear canal and it dried a pale yellow color, but it definitely was not earwax. I decided that as long as her eardrum was intact, it didn't really matter which foreign substance I had failed to clean up.

"So what do you recommend?" I asked, still awash in relief that she did not in fact have an exploding middle ear. "Antibiotics right away, or can we wait and see if she can fight it off?" (It's probably useful to know that she had never once complained of ear pain or tugged at her ear.) "Antibiotics," he said. "She has a fever and she's two." (Don't two-year-olds get fevers (100.8, taken 20 minutes after her Tylenol dose) because their immune systems are responding?)

"She hates to take medicine more than any other child I've ever seen," I told him. "What antibiotic do you recommend?" He said amoxicillin and I cringed inwardly. Ten days of repeated droppersful, each milliliter a battle -- no, thanks. "Isn't there something else we could do instead, something with fewer doses?" I asked him. I was thinking Zithromax, but I didn't want to be That Patient's Mother demanding a particular prescription.

He smiled a smile that I can only label smug, and said, "That's the fewest doses I can do."

The more I thought about it, the more it vexed me. I hate that kind of thinking: there's one right way to handle this, and don't push me to think of alternatives. If she's clearly perkier and not complaining of any pain, can't we see if the trend continues? If I tell you she will fight and scream about every.single.one of those 100 milliliters of amoxicillin, why would you tell me that's the only option available?

We filled the prescription and stashed it in the fridge, in case I was wrong about the direction things were going. But she had a more peaceful night and she woke up hungry for her breakfast. I'm grateful that I could see a doctor quickly, grateful that my initial supposition was wrong, grateful to live in a part of the world where I can pick up a bottle of amoxicillin and pop it in my working refrigerator just in case.

But the next time I have to go to the evening clinic? I hope there's a different doctor on duty.

The Yurt Effect

There comes a moment in the knitting of a sweater when the knitter realizes she has been misled. She is not making a sweater; she is making a yurt. A double-wide extra-tall yurt. She bought the pattern with the intention of making a sweater. The picture on the front looks like a sweater. But really? Yurt.

Have you missed me? I have been knitting like a crazy woman. Remember when I signed a contract saying that I would knit a sweater by the 24th of March? This was a crazy, crazy, FULL-OF-CRAZY idea. So crazy. What was I thinking?

I was thinking it was a really cute sweater. I forgot about the Yurt Effect.

Remember when I said blithely, "Oh, it's a cropped sweater"? Yeah, but I skipped over the part about the gauge: 6.25 stitches and 8 rows per inch. Crazy. Remember when I chirped that it had flirty little lacy ruffly cap sleeves? I was six different kinds of delusional: I am here today to remind you (though you probably didn't forget in the first place) that lacy means extra knitting time, and ruffly means extra stitches and thus even more knitting time (that's how you get the ruffling, by increasing with abandon), and there are THREE LAYERS to each sleeve. Triple crazy. Or perhaps crazy cubed. It would be faster to knit a full-length plain-vanilla stockinette sleeve, I'm sure of it. If I were making it just for fun I would knit the top layer and call it done, but I can't do that. It's in the contract: I agreed of my own free will to knit the garment as designed.

I've been having some pain in my right arm and I emailed the designer apologetically, offering to pay for the pattern if I couldn't finish on time. She sent me a sympathetic email in reply, saying with many exclamation points that I should not knit if knitting is painful. She said I should finish it when I could. So why am I still knitting obsessively?

[...crickets...]

I have finished the left front and the back (oh my HECK the font-of-super-crazy BACK) and three of the six sleeve pieces. The right front is on the needles, and I am optimistic about getting the body seamed by this weekend. Right now I'm not going to think about the remaining ruffles, or the edging, or the ultra-hyper-oh-so-crazy picot bind-off.

In my more disturbed moments I imagine families of Mongolians bending their minds to influence Western women who like to knit. "Make us a yuuuuuuurt!" they call across the miles. "We need a yuuuuuurt!" My husband may be unhappy because the vacuuming has been sadly neglected, and the designer may be unhappy because she took a chance on a new pattern-tester who then pled gimpiness. By golly, I hope those Mongolians are happy. There can't be too many apple-green polka-dot yurts in the world, but theirs is coming right along.

Post-Mortem

Decision: black slacks, plain black shirt under a sage green cardigan, black flats. I have moderately crazy hair because it is raining AGAIN. I had to pause in my attempts to restrain it to say, "Do you want to work for someone who might refuse to hire you because of your hair? No. You do not."

I have this habit of tearing myself apart after important conversations. I was walking to my car thinking "WHY did you say pathogenesis instead of etiology? Why??" I have enough perspective now to say that I don't think that's going to be a deal-breaker. But here's the thing I did screw up: I let the specialization monster get to me. The thing about grad school is that it shows you how little you know, and it's sobering. I used to think I was smarter. Then I got a PhD.

They were asking me if I could teach classes that are pretty different from my dissertation focus. Right answer: you bet! I can teach that class! I can teach that class with both lips tied behind my back! 

That's not exactly the answer I gave. I mean, I said yes, but I also told them I'd have some brushing up to do. I could have used a little of my pre-PhD braggadocio.

Sad wakeful toddler so I am hitting publish. Prayers much appreciated.

Fashion Consult

Tomorrow I'm having lunch with the chair and the associate chair of the department in town where I'd really really really really really love to get a job. I have no idea what to wear. It's not a formal job interview; it's a getting-acquainted meeting. A suit would be overkill, I think. The yoga pants and sweatshirt I am wearing at this moment would also be a bad idea. But what?? I need some advice, please.

Penetrated

I read Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts last month. It was a hard read. At first it was hard because I don't read her blog and I kept tripping over her style. Then it was hard because I kept tripping over tough truths.

Ann Voskamp is taking some heat for the last chapter of the book, in which she talks about making love to God. It's appalling, says one blogger. (See Elizabeth Esther's post here for more details.) We should just study our Bibles like nice Christian ladies, says one of the concurring commenters. Another commenter scurried away from the combox to go scrub her brain, she said. I haven't followed the comment thread since about Thursday, but I think that's an instinctive reaction and maybe pretty widespread.

The craziest, most breathtaking part of the gospel is that Jesus desires union with us. He didn't just rescue us from sin and death so we wouldn't fry for eternity; he rescued us from sin and death so we could have fellowship with him. So we could see him as he is. So we could be wholly filled and flooded with God himself. So we could KNOW him.

Studying your Bible like a nice Christian lady is important; St. Jerome was right that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. But the inverse is not quite true: knowing Scripture doesn't mean knowing Christ. Studying the Bible equips you to know about Jesus. It's not quite the same thing.

It would be possible for me to know a lot about, say, George Washington. I could read biographies and visit Mount Vernon and sift through archives to see his letters and papers. But I still wouldn't know George Washington. [I have a vague feeling that I've read this somewhere else. LMK if you recognize it -- I'd be glad to give credit.] You can't be in union with someone you know about from books and documents.

Union with Jesus, his call to us, has a lot in common with conjugal union. Because I am writing about Protestant criticisms of a book written by a Protestant, my focus here is spiritual union, not sacramental union. In both marriage and the Christian life we say an initial life-altering yes: the two become one flesh, or the life of Christ comes to dwell within us. In both marriage and the Christian life we have the privilege of renewing that initial yes, of deepening our union. This is the source of new life -- that "life to the full" that was Jesus' reason for coming to us. And it is designed to delight, to bring joy, to draw closer together. That delight, though, is edged with danger, because union -- whether spiritual or marital -- brings with it the possibility of discomfort, heartbreak, even death (all the more so in the days before modern midwifery care and anti-hemorrhagic meds). Granting entry to another is not a casual decision. Who knows what might happen if you say yes?

Union can seem like a crazy idea, in fact. Why are we eager for something that may cost us so much? I believe we are wired for desire; I believe too that most of us are hauling around some skepticism about how those yearnings might be satisfied. Like the child who says "...is that for real?" when he learns how babies are made, we think it's a pretty wacky idea that Jesus really wants to fill us with himself. Jesus lost followers when he taught about the Eucharist and I think the identical impulse is at in us work today. You want to fill me? With you? Is that for real?

Voskamp's book is about seeing that union made tangible through thanksgiving -- thanksgiving as the source of joy and fearlessness, thanksgiving as the key that opens our hearts to the Lord. I kept getting stuck while I was reading, hung up on a painful piece of my past that has left me chronically fearful about the future. One morning I was trying to talk to my husband about it and wound up sobbing in his arms. "I just can't give thanks for that," I told him. "I can't make myself do it."

"You don't have to," he said protectively as he stroked my hair. But I think eventually I do.

It's not because I serve some sort of monster God who doles out pain and maliciously wants me to thank him for it. It's because above all else I want to live my life with open hands, to live my life with a heart yielded to a sovereign God. I can only inch my way toward that right now, asking for the grace to get a little closer to the goal. But I believe, and am consoled by the belief, that the inching can still honor God -- I am thinking of my delight in my own daughter's wobbly first steps.

Perhaps we can all take comfort in St. Paul's comment on the reality of the Church as Bride: no stranger to tricky theological concepts, he called it a "great mystery." The idea of consummation with the Bridegroom is strange, and difficult, and hey -- who'd like to have a nice-Christian-ladies Bible study instead of thinking about something so weird? Is that for real?

It doesn't get any realer, actually: he is the Bridegroom, and together we believers are the Bride. To believe in the communion of the saints is to know that our collective Yes to consummation is the sum (the product? the exponentiation?) of uncountable individual Yeses. One of the blessings of an enduring marriage is a sense of freedom born of mutual willingness to keep plowing through the quotidian struggles. I believe the same is true of our union with Christ: it is through the quotidian struggles of the will -- where forgiveness is asked and extended and received -- that we are made ready to stand before the Bridegroom, once more naked and unashamed.

SVO

I am drafting a post that is hard for me to write, and I am knitting that sweater which is actually full-on crazy, not some measly 75% kind of crazy. So this is mostly a placeholder post while I deal with my assorted crazinesses.

One of the cool things kids do between about 1.5 and 2.5 is they learn to make sentences. Most kids in that age range combine words in some way ("more cookies!" "no bed!"), but a core skill is figuring out how nouns and verbs fit together. It's a big step for them to realize that subjects can be paired with verbs, and that a subject and a verb can do something together to an object.

Stella's language development, like most of her brothers', has been on the pokey end of normal and it is making me doubly happy to hear her putting mini-sentences together. This morning she gave me her first subject-verb-object sentence ever. Unprompted, she said, "Stella sit potty!" And she did. Such a big girl she's getting to be.

I haven't posted a picture in forever. This is Pete playing the free version of Angry Birds on my iPod for an appreciative audience. Aren't they cute?