Light and Momentary

Seven Quick Takes: Vegetarian Haggis Edition

1. It's the feast of St. Andrew, patron of Scotland! We always celebrate: we hang up a Scottish flag and eat (vegetarian) haggis and neeps and tatties. The younger kids do not love vegetarian haggis. This morning I asked the boy whose feast day it is if he might rather have some nice Scotch broth. "It's a tradition to have vegetarian haggis," he said staunchly.

Part of the tradition is that he doesn't eat much dinner, I guess. But he was enthusiastic about the shortbread afterward.

2. Don't forget to start your St. Andrew novena today if you're a St. Andrew novena-er. I am praying for the same intention for the third or fourth time running. Third (or fourth) time's the charm?

3. If I were completely anonymous I would have to tell you about the plagiarism issue I am dealing with, because it's a doozy. It's probably more prudent to leave it to your imagination, though.

4. It caused me to tell Elwood that I'd be revising my syllabi for next semester to include the following: "If you plagiarize in my class, I will find you out and kick your ass."

I hate plagiarism.

5. This will be a quick post because it may be a long day tomorrow. I am going to Henry's funeral.

6. Do people say "died" less than they used to? I remember reading Freaky Friday, where the narrator talks about how strange it sounds to her when people say "passed on" or "passed away." I remember thinking, "Who says THAT?" Everyone, really. I wonder if I just hadn't come across it at the age of 8 or whatever I was, or if we've become more euphemistic.

7. One more week of classes, and then finals, and then break. I can't believe how quickly it's gone by.

7.5 OH! I almost forgot to tell you that I submitted an application today for a tenure-track job. Prayers appreciated.

7.75 AND! It's the end of NaBloPoMo. Phew!

More quick takes at Jen's.

Haiku

Tomorrow is the
last day of NaBloPoMo.
Hurray! tree grass frog

(My brother told me once that you can't call it a haiku unless it's about nature. So look! It's a haiku even though it's mostly about me having blog-posting fatigue.)

Carla and Henry

I've posted a few times about Carla, my first internet friend to become a real-life friend. We connected in 2000, when she had three children and I had two, and as our families grew we shared ideas on keeping them healthy and holy and working a little and dealing with difficulties and running a household and all of the things that mothers talk about.

In early 2011 we were planning to meet up at the Behold conference. She sent me an email: "I have news to tell you when I see you!! And no, I'm not pregnant!" She had seen a little face on Reece's Rainbow. "That's my baby," said something deep in her heart. She shared it tentatively with her husband. Given some time to discern, he said, "Yes, that's our baby."

They raised money to finance an international adoption. They pushed paper and cleared hurdles. They brought Henry home in September of last year. What you need to know about Carla is that she always leaves you feeling like she's positively delighted to see you, like there's nothing she'd rather be doing than spending time with you. I can't tell you how much I love the fact that Henry came home from that grim orphanage to a mama who delighted in seeing him every single morning, who let him know that there was nothing she'd rather be doing than spending the day with him.

I was teaching about one of Henry's diagnoses in the spring and again in the fall, and Carla was gracious enough to Skype with my students in each semester. She was unflinching about the ugliness of orphanage care for children with disabilities, and she was clear about the difficulties Henry was facing because of his diagnosis, but she left my students with the certainty that she loved being Henry's mom. Student after student said to me, "Thank you for setting that up."

She is a joyful person, even when scary things are looming. Henry was going to Philadelphia for major and uncommon surgery. They landed in Philadelphia shortly before Hurricane Sandy did, but Carla made it sound like an adventure to be hunkered down while the wind was howling. They spent more than three weeks in the hospital and they were both elated to be home. A week later they were back in the local ER: Henry was hurting and feverish.

It was a raging infection, around the VEPTR rods and in his bloodstream. Carla stayed upbeat: they had the pain under control, they were working on the infection.

Henry died this afternoon.

Denial is a weird thing. There were some worrisome Facebook updates, and then silence. A post came through on our email list from a woman Carla's known most of her life: Henry was gone. My brain just flat rejected this piece of information: Shut UP. Get OUT. Not POSSIBLE.

I went to the Adoration chapel while I was waiting for CCD to end, and at first I couldn't even pray; I could only cry for my friend. When the words started coming they were not very spiritually mature words. I said, "Why did you do this to her when she is so brave and so loving and so joyful? Why did you go and break her heart? I DO NOT approve."

I realized I would not have approved of the crucifixion if I had been offered advance notice. Maybe my stamp of approval isn't all I imagine it to be.

The way that Carla and Paul loved Henry reminds me of the way that God loves us. I've been thinking about the way they came to him while he was imprisoned (with well-intentioned jailers, but imprisoned nonetheless) and said, "We've prepared a place for you." The way they had a hope for him, and a future for him. The way they offered him healing, one step at a time, and loved him through the painful parts of it. The way they gave him patience and tenderness after he had only known brusqueness. The way they made a home for him in a big boisterous family, full of noise and action and affection.

It reminds me of God's love too in its extravagance -- it chokes me up to think about how willingly they gave what they had for Henry, and trusted God to provide the rest. Henry's needs were pretty intense -- more so than they realized at the outset -- but Carla never seemed stressed about providing for them. "His will, his bill," she said once in a post.

"And that's IT?" I thought about saying to God. "All of that love and struggle and money and effort and now a heaping pile of heartbreak on top because it's OVER? Excuse me?"

But of course it's not over. I was trying to think of ways to get to the funeral, and thinking that it will probably be so packed full of people who love Carla and crew that it's not as if my personal presence will provide any solace, when I remembered the last time I went to a jam-packed funeral Mass in November. My friend Deanna's mother died seven years ago and I still think about her funeral all the time. I never met her mom but she is still inspiring me. This is how great our God is, that he can use death itself -- ugly, heartbreaking death -- to draw us toward heaven. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

If you are moved by Henry's story, please consider a donation to Reece's Rainbow. Doesn't every little boy like Henry need a mom like Carla?

More on Montgomery

Gosh, who knew people would be so happy to talk about L.M. Montgomery?

Bearing asked about boy-friendly LMM books. My first thought was...maybe Rilla, but maybe not either. My second thought, though, was that it's a funny divide: girls read books about boys all the time, but boys don't do books about girls nearly as often. I am basing this in part on my sample of 4 boys (see my firstborn's reaction to Rilla here), but also on my experiences of watching boys read and talking books with men. What do you think? Seems to me that girls read the Hardy Boys but boys don't read Nancy Drew nearly as often.

Lissa asked if I'd read any LMM short stories, and the answer is yes. I read Further Chronicles of Avonlea as a kid, and perhaps one other story collection as well. (I think I've read Akin to Anne, but I wouldn't swear to it.) I remember enjoying them a lot -- I love story collections in which the stories loop around each other, showing you new little facets of characters you've seen elsewhere. Like a Robert Altman movie, only wholesome and pleasant.

I had no idea that she'd written so much! I've read 16 of her books, I think, and it looks like that's less than half of her oeuvre. Who knew?

Sarah in Ottawa probably knew, actually. Sarah (who wins the Biggest LMM Fan In This Batch Of Comments award) asked if I had read the Silver Bush books and the answer is no. Off to Amazon, as soon as I post my spoilery comment on yesterday's post.

Quickly

Hi, internet, I am typing in haste because I must go devour the rest of Jane of Lantern Hill. I loved-loved-LOVED L.M. Montgomery's books as a kid and this year I've had the pleasure of reading 2.75 of them for the first time. Lissa Wiley recommended The Blue Castle in June, and then I saw Kilmeny of the Orchard in our used bookstore. This most recent purchase was spurred by another Lissa post. I love having internet pals who write about books.

Has anyone out there ever read Kilmeny of the Orchard? I'd never heard of it. (But look -- the Kindle edition is free!) Would love to chat in comments but I'm hesitant to put spoilers in the post. And I have an uber-spoilery comment that I've been itching to share, so jump right in if you've read it.

Anyway. Fleece pajamas, flannel sheets, down comforter, and the ending of an L.M. Montgomery book I've never read before. It sounds too cozy to be true, doesn't it? Murphy's Law suggests someone will puke upstairs as I'm putting my pajamas on, and I'll have to do laundry instead of settling in. Which means I'd better hit publish quickly, so I can wring maximum satisfaction from the minutes remaining to me. Good night, all!

Not the answer I was hoping for

I was directing traffic after dinner tonight: I was sending two kids off for baths and a third kid off for piano practice and a fourth kid off to wash dishes and rolling my eyes inwardly about the fifth kid, who thinks that having to pray vespers with the family is surely a Geneva Convention violation. I said to Elwood, "When do we get to the point where they say, 'Thanks, Mom, for helping me cultivate habits like good personal hygiene and consistent prayer and cleaning up messes promptly and general diligence?'"

Elwood said, "Probably at your funeral."

The sad part is, he wasn't joking.

Boys will be...

You know what I need to remember? I need to remember that intransigent gloomy feelings are more likely to reflect the state of my immune system than the state of the universe. That post I wrote earlier this month about feeling physically exhausted by the torrent of verbiage from my youngest children? I was coming down with a stomach bug. That post from last night about hurtling toward decrepitude? I've been coughing bronchitically all day. (Stella is better, by the way. Thanks for your concern and suggestions; she has bounced right back. In fact, she is running laps around the house as I type.)

In my enervated state I've been rereading parts of Curtis Sittenfeld's book Prep. I love that book. It makes me squirm and it makes me laugh and it makes me remember things I thought I had forgotten about high school.

One thing that nobody forgets about high school is that many high schoolers are a little bit crazy, and that girl-flavored crazy is different from boy-flavored crazy. Having a high schooler of my own has brought me up close and personal with certain elements of boy-flavored crazy. Thank THE LORD, it's nothing too alarming. But I have this observation to offer up: boys are weird.

Have I posted about this before, about the strutting/smackdown cycles? I find it physically uncomfortable to listen to my son talk to the kid next door. There's nothing profane, nothing really out of line -- it's just that boy conversations seem to include a lot of "I'm really awesome; too bad you're such a dork."

This is true of his conversations with Scouts (and these are good kids, let me stress -- I am really impressed with the older Scouts in his troop), with brainiacs, with band kids -- there seems to be this unrelenting need to dig at the other guy. Of course it's not the sole focus of the conversation, but it usually seems to be lurking.

I would lose my mind in a hurry if my friends talked to me like that. Some kids, I think, come pretty close to it.

Last night Elwood and I went out for a chat, and we were sitting near a TV showing an Anderson Cooper special on bullying. One pompous man was saying with certainty that bullying happens because parents are falling down on the job. "These kids are witnessing this behavior at home," he said emphatically, "and they're bringing it to school."

And I thought...yeah, maybe? sometimes?

Four years ago an unhappy parent came knocking on our door. Her son had been walking to school with our son and a neighbor kid. She felt that they were bullying him. We were appalled. We talked at length with him. His side of the story was more complicated. "He dishes it out," our boy said indignantly, "and then complains to his mother when we give it back to him. His mother babies him! He laughs about how she believes everything she tells him, and then he makes up more stuff to tell her."

I didn't know then, and I don't know now, how to intervene in a situation like that. I do police conversations that take place in my house, because there's a different power dynamic with an older brother than with a peer. "Be kind!" I say, more often than I want to admit. "If you can't say something kind, than shut up already!" (Jamie Gladly: Providing Quality Mothering Since 1996.) Jumping into peer relationships is not so straightforward. I'm sure that mother from four years ago thinks we handled the situation badly. Did we? I still don't know.

An acquaintance of mine feels strongly that weapon play is a bad idea. She feels so strongly about it, in fact, that her children are strictly forbidden to play with weapons: no toy swords, no pretend guns, no weapons ever. Guests in their home are not allowed to have pretend battles, even mutually agreeable no-contact battles. To me this seems -- not to put too fine a point on it -- crazy. I used to confiscate all the guns that entered my home. My boys would nibble their grilled cheese sandwiches into gun shapes and pretend to fire them across the lunch table. I am persuaded, little as my pre-children self would want to agree with this, that interest in weapons is pretty hard-wired for young boys.

What I don't know is whether the conversational jockeying for prominence is the same kind of thing. I am feeling a little shy about posting this, because maybe nobody else is noticing this phenomenon? I hope not. Tell me what you think, ladies. And gentlemen, too. If you are one of the approximately three men who reads this blog, I'd love your perspective. Did you jockey jocosely? Did you outgrow it? Did your mother try to make you have tea parties and did it scar you for life? I'm all ears.

Getting old is overrated.

I used to have the metabolism of a shrew, and now I have the metabolism of a sloth.

I used to think I was slow when I ran a sub-6:30 mile.

I used to be free of weird aches and pains. I didn't even know what plantar fasciitis was. If pressed, I would have guessed it was a petunia fungus.

I used to get annoyed because people told me constantly how young I looked and DERNIT I didn't want to look young.

And? It's all downhill from here.

Briefly

In the fall of 2000 we hosted Thanksgiving dinner for nine and it felt like a giant undertaking. Giant. Colossal. Now I cook for seven people most nights without breaking a sweat. Still, it was funny to realize that our quiet Thanksgiving dinner for this year involved the same number of people as the one that made me think I deserved a medal for unparalleled organization and dedication to dishwashing.

Elwood was determined to serve as many of our CSA vegetables as possible, which meant a lot of vegetables. I had a bad pastry day, with the result that a lot of pecan pie filling wound up on the oven floor. (Tart pan with a removable base + cracked crust = lots of smoke.) But you can't have a feast unless you set the smoke alarm off, right?

Right?

I want a new drug

I have a sick little girl.

She's not all that sick during the day, just a little sniffly with a low-grade fever that comes and goes. At night, though, she can't stop coughing and she can't get settled. This morning I said to Elwood, "I bet she asked for me a hundred times last night." A hundred is too high, but she surely did wake me up a lot.

She's sleeping badly, and so I'm sleeping badly, and I'm missing the days when we thought that dextromethorphan did something for coughing. I've got her propped up on an extra pillow, and I have the soles of her little feet coated in generic Vaporub. She is skeptical about honey, or I'd try that too. I wish there were a better way to help her rest better.

I am dragging in a big way. How did I function when she used to sleep terribly all the time?

The emperor's new manuscript

My advisor asked me to review a manuscript written by a Big Name in our field. A Big Big Name, even -- the King or perhaps the Emperor of this particular domain. I was intimidated by the prospect. What do I, a lowly lecturer whose PhD is only 2 years old, have to say to the Emperor?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Almost a thousand words, and I'm not done yet. It's encouraging to see that even for the Emperor, a pre-review manuscript is pretty different from a post-review publication -- it inspires confidence in the peer review process and hope that I'll be able to get my own work out there one of these days.

The Emperor and I have different interests, and that shows up clearly in the differences between the manuscript I'm reading and the manuscript I'd like to see. I have no idea whether he will say, imperiously,
"But the main thing is [my interest]!" Whatever happens, it's been unexpectedly fun to go through the paper, looking for ways to make it better and to answer the big questions. It also makes me the teeniest bit gleeful to say, "Get back to work, your imperial majesty!"

This is how far behind I am

Once upon a time I was caught up on pictures. It was one of my fortieth birthday goals, to get all of the pictures into albums, and I did it. I've been behind ever since. I just stuck down the pictures from January of 2011, which means I have only 22 months to go and I'll be caught up again.

This is not my favorite job.

One of its sparse compensations is the rediscovery of forgotten treasures. This one reminds me that if you leave your Complete Works lying around, it might find unexpected readers. This is Stella digging into Titus Andronicus, back at the beginning of the Crazy Shakespeare Project. I tried to tell her that Midsummer Night's Dream would be a better place to start, but she was having none of it.

Plans

I don't have class this week, and so I have high hopes for getting things knocked off my endless list. Up for demolition:

1. Finish grading by 9:30 tomorrow morning.
2. Finish reviewing article. (This one is an unexpectedly enjoyable task that might merit its own blog post.) <-Ready to submit -- just needs one more once-over
3. Submit manuscript. <-Not even close. Progress, but this is a big job.
4. Get departmental exam questions written: 12 a day. This week they don't have to be good; they just have to be written.
5. Work a little each day on job applications.
6. Scour the bathrooms.<-One scoured, one in better shape but not sparkling.
7. Order Christmas cards.
8. Check on Advent candles and purchase if necessary.
9. Look for niece/nephew/goddaughter gifts.
10. Figure out a gift for my MIL's birthday.
11. Empty the laundry basket of craft closet materials.
12. Sort All The Paper.
13. Work a little each day on the everlasting photo backlog.<-Didn't get to it every day, but made progress.
14. Blog daily...
15. ...but don't get sucked in by Facebook and Google Reader.

Wish me luck!

Change is slow

Are you following the Feminist Breeder's Facebook battle? She posted a hilarious picture of her 18-month-old daughter, who was on the fence about nursing vs. bacon. I told my kids the story and all four of the boys burst out laughing. They've all witnessed those 18-month-old nursling antics. The Facebook folks weren't amused, though. They disabled her account.

HuffPo ran a story on the conflict and I did a really stupid thing: I read the comments.

...Hold it, hold it, I am squeezing my skull tightly in hopes that my head will not explode at the memory and it's going to be a near thing...

So. In between DIY cranial repair this evening I have been wondering again about why people are not getting any less weird about breastfeeding. I've been listening to people talk about public breastfeeding since 1996. Things have changed a lot since then. In 1996 there was no state in the US in which a man could marry another man, and the idea didn't seem likely to gain traction any time soon. In 1996 the Unabomber was still on the loose. In 1996 the impeachment of a President was ancient history. The world has changed a lot since then and yet people are still talking about public breastfeeding as a plot for corrupting the youth.

Almost makes me want to dig up all the pictures I have of my little ones nursing and put them in rotation as my profile pictures anywhere that I have profile pictures. Almost but not quite -- a comment along the lines of some I've seen ("you're going to make that child into a sex offender!") would further imperil my delicate cranial sutures.

I stumbled across this cool blog post in my indignant state -- it's about the history of public breastfeeding.

Seven Quick Takes: Dead Leaves Edition

1. I have discovered a new snack to fuel my grading: dried cherries with chocolate chips. I've never been a fan of dried fruit in, say, gorp, but this combination is delicious.

2. We were driving home the other night, negotiating a pizza order, when Stella said, "Noooooooooo! I don't WANT any vege'bles on my pizza!" Later, presented with black olive pizza, she was not pleased. "Noooooo! Clean pizza! Clean pizza!"

3. I cast on a new sock. I was feeling the need for some brainless knitting, because everything I have on the needles right now requires a bit of concentration. I've had some yarn in the sock bin for a long time that I picked up on clearance at KnitPicks -- green and purple and blue. It turns out to make an approximation of vertical stripes with 60 stitches on a size 2 needle. Late at night I was knitting brainlessly and watching this pseudo-striping action unfurl. "What," I wondered to myself, "will happen when I get to the heel? And what if I do a short-row heel instead of a flap heel?" And then I thought, really and truly, "I don't know if I can handle that much excitement!"

4. I might need to get out more.

5. Not tonight, though. Tonight I'm on my own with the kids until late and I'm trying to think of something fun we can do together. There are lots of advantages to spacing kids three years apart, but it does make it harder to find a game everybody can play or a movie everybody wants to watch. Any ideas?

6. Joe and Pete have been listening to the Chronicles of Narnia on CD. It's a set produced by Focus on the Family, and I had a moment of pique when I realized they'd done a little bowdlerizing. Lewis wrote "ass," and they rendered it "idiot." What say you? Would it bug you more to have "ass" in a CD for children, or to realize they'd sanitized C.S. Lewis?

7. I was thinking about how it might go in the other direction. I've certainly seen "bugger" in American children's books, and that would have to be edited right out before they could be sold in the UK. We think of "bugger" as meaning "mildly annoying little thing that's also kind of cute," but a Briton thinks of it as one of the most vulgar things that can come out of a person's mouth. Putting "bugger" in a children's book would be like reading this book at a public library story hour in the US.

More quick takes at Jen's.

My least favorite part of the job

I am grading grading grading. Well, actually, I am writing a blog post at this exact moment, but I am thinking unhappy thoughts about grading as I write. Which totally ought to count as grading, if you ask me.

When I first TA'd for my advisor in the semester right after Stella was born, I was astounded -- truly flab.ber.gast.ed -- at the time it took to grade their work. And then! I returned the assignments I had labored over (really, I might have preferred to deliver another baby) -- and they complained. It's not fair! Can't I get partial credit? How was I supposed to know?

Um, because it was spelled out clearly in the instructions?

I suppose I have improved a lot since 2009, but that's not saying much. I've been thinking over the past couple of weeks about why it plagues me so.

1. I have to think, and keep thinking. Concentration (I sound like that ill-fated Barbie) is hard. There are so many tasks I can do on autopilot that sitting down with something that (a) I have to think about and (b) I'm less than thrilled to think about is a recipe for procrastination.
2. Google is making me stupid. Dude, the internet is the scourge of my existence. You know, when it's not the best thing ever. Sometimes I have the attention span of a brain-injured fruit fly, and it is far too easy to click away for "just a minute" from my online grading.
3. I have impostor syndrome. I worry that I didn't make the instructions clear enough. I worry that it wasn't a good assignment. After-the-fact worrying is useless, but I do it anyway.
4. I am a perfectionist. Consistent grading is important, but I spend too much time thinking, "This is a little better than the other assignment that had some of the same problems. Are they going to talk to each other and demand to know why they got different grades? Am I being fair to both of them?"
5. I am a pleaser. This one is embarrassing, you guys, but it's an obstacle. I think, if I give this paper the grade it deserves, it will displease the student. And then I hesitate to press the submit button. Some of this concern is practical: Will that disappointment translate into nasty eval comments that might affect my future? Much of it is abstract: I am wired not to displease, even when my job requires displeasing.
6. There are few hard deadlines. It is so easy to procrastinate, with the result that it hangs over my head for days and days as I slowly nibble away at it. I don't take a crazy long time with grading -- the batch of writing assignments I will return tonight NO MATTER WHAT was submitted eight days ago and it's an unusually busy time for me -- but I wish I had given them back at the beginning of the week and not the end.
7. It is almost entirely a thankless task. More than 99% of the feedback I get about grades is of the "ur doin it rong" variety. The undergrads need good grades to get into grad school. The grad students are accustomed to getting good grades. (That's how they got into grad school.) Nobody wants to hear that her writing needs work. I did get one student comment in May along the lines of "I've really appreciated your high standards this year." But...mostly they think I'm a leetle uptight about writing. ("A leetle uptight" = "crazypants usage-Nazi chill-out-about-semicolons-already-Dr.-Gladly obsessed.")

SIGH. I was in the Adoration chapel and the thought popped into my head that I could think of grading as my version of foot-washing -- a yucky task that can be a service to my students. Have you ever had your feet washed? I had it done once as part of preparation for a retreat, and it made me very uncomfortable even as it blew my mind. I can't spend too much time worrying about making my students uncomfortable in the line of duty. Now I just have to communicate that message to my fruit-fly brain.

I still think it's condescending.

Over the weekend I was alone with the two youngest kids for a day, and towards the end of it I was walking upstairs feeling weirdly physically worn out by the torrent of small voices. I was thinking back to 2001 or so, when I spent most of my days alone with two small children. I remember how much I craved the quiet at night. I remember those days as hard work.

Despite my post from Monday night, it still bugs me when people say "Little children, little problems." Do you know why I'd pick toilet training over driver's ed? One reason is that no one ever died of wearing diapers for longer than grandpa thought he ought to, of course. The less obvious reason is that I know that I can get a child out of diapers now. I'm not especially efficient, and I don't exactly love it, but I can get the job done.

Driver's ed, on the other hand, is stirring up my generally latent impostor feelings. (My maternal impostor feelings are usually pretty quiet, that is. My professional impostor feelings plague me all the stupid time.) This is the part where I say, "Excuse me, God, did you mean to put me in charge of these children?"

The question of toddlers vs. teenagers came up on one of my email lists perhaps a year ago. The mothers on the list were almost unanimous that they thought teenagers were harder to deal with. We didn't know how good we had it when they were small, they said. My friend Katy chimed in to point out, wisely, how much we have forgotten about those days. It's easy to remember those slobbery kisses fondly when you have a teenager who rolls his eyes so often that you wonder if he somehow severed an eye tendon (perhaps at a Boy Scout campout? and they just didn't tell you?) and that's why those eyes have begun wobbling in their sockets with such alarming frequency. It's easy to forget the moments when you just.could.not.deal with any more of anybody else's body fluids, even if they accompanied a kiss, even if you hated yourself in the moment for getting bent out of shape about a show of affection.

I have turned into a person who is pretty calm about getting vomited on, or pooped on, or drooled on. It wasn't an easy transformation, but I don't really remember the hard parts these days. Now I need to become a person who is pretty calm about those bigger risks kids take as they move into a bigger world. I need to become a person who decides serenely whether a tone of voice is something worth taking on or something to let go graciously. I need to lose the inner drama and hurt feelings, just as I lost the freakout reaction to someone else's excretions in my personal space and on my personal clothing.

Just today I ran across a link to an old LMLD post full of advice that applies to my teenagers as well as my 3yo. To the mothers of little ones who read this blog, I am not thinking of your troubles with condescension. If someone in your life is saying "Little children, little problems" in a smug voice when you talk about your difficulties, I am totally available to ambush her with a Super Soaker for you. Let's pray for each other, so that we can all do our jobs with competence and with joy.

Another book post

I'd had Come Rack, Come Rope on my TBR list for a while, but it was Melanie B's enthusiastic review that spurred me to download it. And then it sat on my Kindle for a long time: I found the beginning a bit slow-moving. Late last week I started it again and wound up tearing through it.

It reminded me first of all of the importance of the sacraments, the tremendous gift they are to us. Reading about the sacrifices that the recusants made to hear Mass highlighted for me the degree to which I take the availability of the sacraments for granted. In my town there are five places where I could get to Mass on a Tuesday. One of them is a five-minute walk from my office, beginning right after my office hours are over. And yet I hadn't been there in weeks. I got there today, and invited my across-the-hall colleague to come too.

It reminded me of the gift that we have in this country in constitutionally protected religious freedom. No one can charge us money if we don't go to a particular church on Sunday. No one can require us to profess allegiance to a particular faith, or to forswear another. No one can forbid a person to answer a perceived call to ministry, or torture and execute him because he disregards the proscription. I can wear my crucifix everywhere I go and keep a sacred vessel in my home without fear that I will go to prison if it's not hidden well enough. (Honestly, this book makes the HHS mandate look like small potatoes. It's not, you understand, that I don't see the need for conscience exemptions; it's just that in the scheme of things we're pretty fortunate.)

It emphasizes the evil of torture. I think we have a tendency to see torture as something remote, something that happens to other people far away. Without grotesquerie the author makes plain how hideous it is to torment another human being to bend him to your will. In 2008 I said, "I'm looking for a presidential candidate who acknowledges that both abortion and torture are wrong." Why, internet, why is that so hard?

Finally, it points up the gift of the priesthood. Here I wonder if I am being a little inconsistent, saying that Hilary Mantel's agenda grates on me while Msgr. Benson's doesn't. In both books, there are moments in which the hand of the puppeteer diverts attention from the actions of the puppets. But Benson's book filled me with gratitude for the priests who stand in persona Christi, channels of grace despite the costs. And its portrayals of the English martyrs, particularly the brave and joyful Edmund Campion, left me eager to be a little braver, a little more joyful myself.

Little children, bigger children

I used to think the phrase "little children, little problems" was SO condescending. I thought these older mothers had just forgotten what life was like in the trenches. Didn't they know how exhausting it was to get a kid out of diapers who really, really didn't want to be ousted from diapers?

Now I have two teenagers of my own, and do you know what? I'll totally take the diaper-ousting. I say this fresh from a summer of diaper-ousting, so it's not like I've forgotten and it's really not like I'm good at diaper-ousting. (I blame Alfie Kohn. Might have been easier if I offered M&Ms, but I never did.)

Alex is in driver's ed, a reality I have been avoiding. Whenever friends say it will be nice to have another driver, I find myself saying something morbid along the lines of "Well, yeah, but it's the thing most likely to KILL HIM before he reaches adulthood."

I try not to say this in his hearing. Or at least not too often. I want him to know that I have confidence he can become a good driver. But oh, the becoming can be an unforgiving process.

This morning I got an email from one of my students. Her brother, only a little older than my Alex, was killed in a car accident over the weekend. Pray for them, please.

A book post

Not quite a year ago I posted about A Man For All Seasons and both Rachel-who-needs-a-blog and Linda recommended Wolf Hall to me in the comments. I downloaded the Kindle sample immediately but I didn't actually get the book read until summer.

I really enjoyed the beginning of it -- maybe the first half. There's a scene near the beginning of the book in which Cardinal Wolsey casually breaks the seal of confession and I must have gasped audibly. I can still see that scene in my mind's eye, actually, with the cardinal's house an island of luxury in the miserable London darkness. As the book progressed, though, I became increasingly impatient with it. There are certainly plenty of good bits -- I found the death of Cromwell's wife moving, and the Anne Boleyn character is well-drawn. But I couldn't shake the feeling that Mantel was pushing an agenda. There's a scene in which a member of Cromwell's household says something like "I don't need to go to church to see a piece of bread." It rings false to me -- those are more plausibly the words that a 21st-century writer would put in a 16th-century youth's mouth than the words he would utter spontaneously.

Melanie B. posted unhappily about this book, especially its character assassination of St. Thomas More. I am glad I finished it, but I won't be reading the sequel.

Just today I finished another book about religion in 16th-century England, this one a Melanie B. recommendation. I was going to write about it as well, but I am being summoned from upstairs by a wakeful 3yo. Watch this space...