Light and Momentary

Cooked out

I wrote a post at the end of October about the weekend that I spent immersed in Halloween costumes + fancypants birthday cake baking, in which I was going to be done making things for a while.

Today I made a very similar cake, except that the flavors were almond/saffron/orange/orange flower water. Dinner for 10 feels like a substantially bigger undertaking than our normal dinner for 6, even though I'm not sure that makes sense mathematically. I also cast on and finished a cowl in the past 24 hours.

I am tired. I might serve frozen waffles for dinner tomorrow.

Twenty years later

Twenty years ago at this time I was heading into my forty-fourth hour of labor; my oldest son would not make his appearance until hour 51, in the small hours of December 30. He arrived in considerable distress and was whisked off to the NICU, where he was ventilated and X-rayed and respiratory-therapized.

These days he is tall and handsome and opinionated and hilarious. I am going to spend a chunk of tomorrow making him a spectacular birthday cake. In two more hours I will cease to be the mother of three teenagers, at least until 2018. Instead I'll be the mother of a boy entering his third decade.

Sheepish but obsessed

If I hurry, I can hit my book-per-week target for 2016. I'm at 49 books finished so far; I'll read the last 4 chapters of Malachi tomorrow and add the Bible to the list. Four days is plenty of time in which to read two more books, right?

My accounting is always a little goofy. I finished reading The Hobbit aloud today, snuggled up in between Pete and Stella, but re-reads only get counted in selected circumstances. I included L.M. Montgomery's Emily books on the 2016 list since I'd last read them in 1986; I've certainly read many chunks of the Bible more recently than I've read The Hobbit. And yet-- the Bible will go on the list and The Hobbit will not.

Do you keep a reading log? Paper or electronic? What does it include and exclude? Mine dates from 2000; it is paper. The rule is that I can only write down a book if I finish the whole thing. This is a little silly, I know, but I do it faithfully anyway.

The year in obituaries

We've had a pleasant quiet Christmas here, just the seven of us. Today brought the last NYT magazine of the year, the one that's always filled with the stories of people who died. This year there were so many deaths that took me by surprise, like Scalia and Prince and Alan Rickman -- and I just found out that George Michael died as well. 

Here is the thing I am wondering: is it just an inevitable part of getting older, that every year's obituaries make you say "You too? Gone already?" Or is 2016 unusual?

I'm hoping it's Option B.

Rules

My kids have strong ideas about the One Right Way to do Christmas Eve.

1. The tree cannot be decorated until Christmas Eve.
2. It is better if the tree is not purchased until Christmas Eve, but sometimes a little flexibility is required on this one.
3. If you don't cut the tree down with your own hands, it doesn't really count. It might look like a Christmas tree and quack like a Christmas tree, but it is not a Christmas tree. (What do you mean, your Christmas tree doesn't quack?)
4. There must be fish for dinner. We are not even remotely Italian, but we still make Italian cookies and eat fish for dinner on Christmas Eve. It's an appreciative sort of appropriation.
5. After dinner on Christmas Eve it is time for one round of presents.
6. Presents are always to be opened in rounds: you plan your sequence, you take turns opening so everybody can ooh and aah, and then you pause. (Tonight's sequence: reverse alphabetical by shoe size, so that the boy with size twelve feet was followed by the girl with size thirteen feet and then the boy with size 10.5 feet. There was a contingent in favor of reverse alphabetical by favorite painter, but shoe size prevailed.)
7. Small sisters who lobby to open more than one present on Christmas Eve must be told in kind but firm big-brotherly tones that the other presents are for tomorrow.
8. Midnight Mass is the best mass.

Merry Christmas, friends!

Birthday in the Life

My daughter turned 8 today. She had said, a little wistfully, that it would be nice if I didn't have to write any letters of recommendation on her birthday, so by gum I plowed through all the rest of them yesterday. Freedom! Oh! Delicious freedom!

You might remember that we have two late December birthdays at our house: Stella on the 23rd and Alex on the 30th. Their actual birthdays are always a mellow family event, and then their half-birthdays in the summer are when they can plan a more conventional birthday celebration.

On your birthday at our house you get to pick all the food. This morning Stella asked for chocolate chip pancakes, which were followed by a piano recital for the two youngest kids, after which we went for a birthday lunch at a Chinese(-ish) buffet place. 

On the way home we stopped at the grocery store so I could get ground almonds to make a surprise cake. (This has turned into a thing lately, with the kids saying "Surprise me!" when I ask them what kind of birthday cake to make.) The grocery store on the afternoon of December 23rd was not what you'd call a haven of serenity. I was hanging in there with the crowds and the 4 kids going in different directions and the emptied shelves, but the Christmas music just about did me in. One of my boys turned to me when a particularly regrettable version of O Holy Night came over the speakers and said, "Mom, I think my soul is being sucked out through my ears." "Mine too," I told him. 

I was looking for a goose. We love to have goose on Christmas, but I am a little too frugal to pay full price for goose. If you buy it at the last minute, sometimes you can find it marked way down. Or sometimes you can discover that all the geese are gone already. I was trying to determine which kind of a year this was going to be, but O Holy Night was so distracting that I actually could not figure it out. Wait, that sounds ridiculous, for me to confess that I could not decide whether there was or was not a goose in the frozen poultry case. But I'm telling you, it was an absolutely intolerable rendition of O Holy Night. All of the real estate in my brain that might ordinarily be devoted to the goose question was too busy recoiling in horror from the auditory onslaught.

So I put my fingers in my ears, just for a minute, in which I was able to see (finally) that the frozen poultry case was -- alas -- gooseless. Apparently in that minute another shopper in that aisle was saying "Excuse me" to me, only I couldn't hear him because I had my fingers in my ears. I guess most people don't plug their ears in the poultry aisle. Maybe that explains the look he gave me?

Phew, I am re-experiencing the relief of getting out of the grocery store and into the chilly rain where there was no O Holy Night playing. Home we went, to bake cookies and a surprise Bakewell cake and to make ribs and fat potato fat fat for a birthday dinner. We sat in the floor and played with the guinea pigs, and lingered over dinner to talk of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cake was served with a small trombonist playing an enthusiastic Happy Birthday. Presents were opened and exclaimed over, and there was happy Lego-building in the dining room floor. Happy Lego-building led to a relaxation of the usual bedtime rules; let us hope that a 9pm bedtime for Stella tonight will not bite me in the butt tomorrow.

I am trying to decide if stelline d'oro are too weird to give away. The recipe I linked up above has a little mistake in it, I think. It looks like it was originally the same one I use, from Tomie de Paola's book Jingle the Christmas Clown, but that actual recipe calls for 1.5 tablespoons each of orange flower water and saffron steeping water in the icing. They make the most beautiful golden fragrant cookies and my kids love them and look forward to them-- but I'm afraid they might be weird to give to neighbors. I have iced a bunch of them with plain vanilla frosting, but there's still orange flower water in the cookie dough. What say you? Weird or pleasingly unexpected?

Alas

I

am

awfully

awfully

awfully

tired 

of

writing

letters

of

recommendation.

Just in case

"What should I send to [girl on shopping list]?" I asked my 17-year-old in exasperation. 

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner!" he answered, as if there could be no more obvious response. 

I wound up reading it to Stella last night in between cookie-baking tasks. It was new to her. She loved the engravings and she loved the story and she was captivated by the language even though she was frequently puzzled by it. (The very best part was when my 17yo was eager to tell her all about it so that she could love it too.) She went back to it today, soaking in the illustrations and trying to pick her way through the text. I expect it will be in heavy rotation for a while here in the House of Geeks. 

So if you are buying last-minute gifts for families that might enjoy a kid-friendly edition of some really excellent Coleridge poems, you're welcome. I wound up going with some of my favorite hair products for the girl on my list, who would agree with me on the pitfalls of life with curly hair even if she might disagree on the merits of Romantic poetry.

Vowels and more vowels

Hi, everybody, should we talk more about vowels? I vote yes.

Bearing commented on yesterday's post to say that she produces an "ee" as the second vowel in the toy/boy/soy diphthong. Here's a weird thing about vowels, though: sometimes what you judge perceptually is different from what is measured acoustically. Let me show you what I mean. Here's a recording of me saying "see sit soy boy toy saw-ee," so you can hear that I'm speaking garden-variety Midwestern American English. Here's an annotated acoustical analysis of that recording: 

If you are new to spectrograms, the speedy explanation is that they represent the patterns of acoustic energy in speech. For instance, if I were a standard-sized male saying "ee," I'd produce characteristic bands of energy at about 2300Hz and 600Hz every single time I produced the "ee" sound. My own "ee" is pitched a little higher, because I have a smaller frame and thus a smaller larynx than an average-sized man, and so my vocal folds vibrate more rapidly. Vowels sound distinct to us because they have distinct formant relationships: your brain parses the distribution of acoustic energy in a speaker's speech stream and translates it into sounds and words and thoughts. (Here, I will pause for a moment so you can flip the circuit breaker on your blown mind. It's amazing, isn't it??)

If you look at the horizontal red line in the image above, you'll see that it marks out a band of energy that's absent in "ee" and present in "ih." If you look at the ends of soy, boy, and toy, you'll see that there's energy there in all three of those words, in the spot where the "y" is representing the "ih" sound that finishes off the "oy" diphthong. But it's not there in the last word, where I very carefully conjoined an "aw" and an "ee."

The four arrows are aimed at those four diagonal lines. They are a visual representation of my tongue moving from a low back position ("aw") to a high front position ("ih"). If you look carefully at the fourth line, you'll notice that its angle with the vertical is more acute. To get all the way to "ee" position, at the top of its range, my tongue followed a steeper trajectory. The software lets me see the difference in movement patterns after the fact. Does that sentence cause anybody else to geek right out? Just me? Okay, then.

I used a software package called Praat to make this spectrogram -- it's free to download and reasonably straightforward to use. If you want to make some spectrograms of your own (I'm mostly looking at you, Bearing, but I'm an equal-opportunity spectrogram viewer), I'd love to see them. If there's anything I can clarify about this post, I'd be delighted to do so. This is much more fun than talking about Archduke Ferdinand or the electors.

Let's talk about vowels

So-- there's hasn't been much gladly in recent weeks here at mostgladly.net-- more like "most miserably" and "most weepily." Let's talk about something fun tonight. Let's talk about vowels! It's been years since we've talked about vowels.

Lynne Murphy shared a Twitter link to a Mental Floss article on vowels. This sentence made me say "hmmm": "Depending on the dialect, and including diphthongs, which are combinations of two vowel sounds, English has from nine to 16 vowel sounds." I couldn't imagine a dialect of English with only 9 vowels. The author tweeted a clarification.

@lynneguist @mostgladly Ah confusing wording. Sense is "if you include diphthongs can be up to 16"

— Arika Okrent (@arikaokrent) December 18, 2016

I'm still thinking about the range of possible vowel tallies in English.

English vowels are defined primarily by tongue height (high or low or in between) and tongue position (front or back or in between). If you want to say "eee" as in "see," you'll need to move your tongue forward and lift it up close to your hard palate. Try it and see. To say "ih" as in "sit," keep it in the front of your mouth but move it down a tick. The next notch down gives you "ay" as in "say," the next gives you "eh" as in "set," and the lowest position gives you a short "a" as in "sat." That makes five front vowels, and I'm not acquainted with any American English dialect that omits any of them.

Next let's do a similar thing with your tongue in the back of your mouth: the topmost position gives you "ooo" as in "suit" (if you round your lips); moving downward we get "soot" and "so." Then there's some variability: lots of American English speakers have two low back vowels, because the vowel in "sought" is distinct from the vowel in "sot." Some of you, however, are scratching your heads at the very idea of a difference between those two vowels; they sound like the same vowel to you.

I'm wondering if this is where the lower figure came from: many AmE speakers have five front vowels and only four back vowels. But! But but but! We all have central vowels. Many phonetic systems classify postvocalic "r" as a vowel, sometimes known as a schwar (schwa + r, see?). And every single AmE speaker uses the non-rhotic central vowels, because that's how you say "uh." There is no American English dialect without an "uh," I feel confident. I propose that the barest baldest minimum number for American English vowels would be 10.

I do not find it a very persuasive minimum, however, because it is the minimum for monophthongs and we also have three phonemic diphthongs. In plain English, that means there are three cases in which you have to smush two vowels together into a single entity to produce recognizable English words. "Sigh" is an "ah" plus an "ih"; "soy" is an "aw" plus an "ih"; "sow" (the mama pig kind, not the planting kind -- I am trying to avoid phonetic symbols and feeling the pain) is an "ah" plus the short "oo" in "book." These are not universal -- you've heard Southern US speakers say "Ah see Dr. Pal" where you might say "I see Dr. Powell." But I'm not acquainted with dialects that monophthongize all three of those diphthongs. I don't think you can produce consistently comprehensible American English without 11 vowels (10 monophthongs plus at least one diphthong), no matter what region you hail from.

We've also got two non-phonemic diphthongs. In plain English, that means that most of us employ two additional two-vowel combinations, but you can still understand a speaker who doesn't do so. Omission of the phonemic diphthongs creates perplexity: a person who wants to ask for a toy for Christmas but instead requests a toe is going to garner some funny looks and the occasional Hannibal Lecter comparison. The non-phonemic diphthongs don't cause confusion, but they're an important part of sounding like a native speaker. (On a related note, they are partially responsible for the problems you have sounding like a native speaker in languages that don't use them; see item 3 in the Mental Floss article.) When an American English speaker says "say," there's an "ih" blended in at the end of the word -- it's not like when a Spanish speaker says se using a monophthong. When an American English speaker says "so," there's a short "oo" added on. If you say it aloud I bet you can feel your jaw and tongue and maybe your lips move as the vowel shifts. Again, I don't think there are many American English dialects that omit these diphthongs, so I vote we count them.

Are you with me or you have gone off in search of eggnog recipes? (This one looks yummy, doesn't it? Except it's like the anti-Whole 30 beverage, so no coquito for me this week.) Let's count: five front vowels, five back vowels (or four if you merge sought/sot), two central vowels, three phonemic diphthongs, and two non-phonemic diphthongs, for a total of 17. And I'll just mention that IPA distinguishes between stressed and unstressed "uh" and "er," using different symbols for them. So there's a case to be made for a total of four central vowels: stressed and unstressed "uh," stressed and unstressed "er." (I don't say it's a fabulous case, but I am pushing back against the Danes here with their umpty-zillion vowels. (<-Guess who does not study comparative phonology.)) This would give us 19 vowels, even if two of them are kind of cheaterpants vowels.

And you learned there were only 5. Life is full of surprises, is it not?

Blades of Wheat Redux

Recently I had an interesting Facebook discussion with some West Virginia friends about organ donation. It was fun to disagree civilly with thoughtful people, to think through some of the nuances. It occurred to me afterward that it's not actually accurate to think of them as hometown friends, because they've all left our hometown. 

All the smart kids left.

It sounds stark and maybe elitist to put it that way, but I can't think of a single person from, say, the math team who's still in the small town where we went to high school. There must be somebody from AP physics who still lives there, but I don't know who it would be.

Pretty much as soon as we moved there (I was starting sixth grade) I was planning my departure. At age 10 I knew I was going to college far away and I was not coming back. I've posted before about my angst as a misfit smart kid. I didn't know at the time how many of my friends were also going to leave and not come back.

What happens to a community when the smart kids mostly want to leave?

I've been thinking since the election about the class divide that propelled Trump to victory. I've been thinking more recently about the lessons I carry with me from half of a childhood spent in a coal-country small town.

The issue came up during The Awful Conversation on Thursday, when this other mom wanted me to know that despite my condescending self-important presumption to the contrary, she was a smart person too. With a graduate degree, she'd have me know. This was one of several moments when I wondered if I had slipped into an alternate universe, because in my real life I am super-cautious about how I present myself. I am vague about what I do (you might be surprised at how often "I work at the university" translates into "she probably does secretarial work; she has five kids, after all" in a small-talk setting); I am evasive about my qualifications (I spent my whole doctoral program talking vaguely about being back in school-- not graduate school, not a doctoral program, not unless the listener persisted in asking questions); I am careful about the words I use. Thirty years after I went to junior high in small-town West Virginia, I still don't want to stand out as overly smart.

This is a quirk of mine that you probably would not predict if you know me only from the blog, because this is my space to be who I am. I didn't talk about the Crazy Shakespeare Project to anyone outside my family, I don't think, because I quake at the thought of sounding pretentious. Some people have blogs that describe their secret lives as swingers or what have you; I have a blog where I rhapsodize about my secret love of Dickens and Trollope and use whatever words I please. Stridulation flocculent howdah orchiectomize! Wheee, freedom!

So it might sound a little weird to you to hear that I worry about this issue to the extent that I do. I still think about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, where the tallest blades of wheat had their heads snicked off. This is a mixed-up jumbly post, and I was on the point of giving up on it when my 17yo read the draft and said, "You should post that, Mom, because it's important to talk about anti-intellectualism." So here's what I'm thinking, I guess. 

1. I feel unreasonably wounded by an angry person's accusation that I think I'm smart, as if my failed efforts to fly under her smartness radar are also a moral failing. This does not make a lot of sense. It is not a good use of emotional energy.
2. Six years later I am still looking for a fitting-in strategy, in which I can be the person I am while also being sensitive to the people around me. That need to balance honesty and humility is tricky.
3. In the bigger picture: Anti-intellectualism is a cancer. Remember when I linked to that article about West Virginians leery of Hillary Clinton's guillotines, the ones she was planning to use on Christians and Second Amendment supporters? I can't say that there's a causal link between the creation of a culture in which the smart kids plan to flee and the existence of a culture with pockets of Bartholomew Cubbins-level tinfoil hattery. But I can say that the association does not surprise me.

The hits just keep coming

Elwood and Pete were in a car accident tonight. They're not hurt; neither was the other driver. I have a friend who says that a problem you can fix with money isn't a genuine problem. That's what I'm telling myself.

Battered

You guys, I had the most miserable bruising phone conversation this afternoon. It was purely awful. It started off with someone yelling at me, someone I would have characterized as a friendly acquaintance. I probably deserved about 30% of the yelling. But only 30%.

And then it got weird. Weird Mommy Wars stuff. Weird and inappropriate advice that went on for a long time. Weird attempts to fix me, because she is concerned that I am failing to meet my children's basic needs. (My children heard a redacted version of this story later, and they were like "...What? We're all okay on the basic needs front, Mom.") Because of that 30%, I didn't feel able to say, "You know what? I am done with this conversation now. Goodbye." But wow, did I want to hang up that phone.

I try to be a person who sees both sides of a story. I try to be a peacemaker. So it is strange for me to say that I do not see a way back to anything other than the most distant cordiality after this conversation. You guys, it was bad. If you're a pray-er, I'd appreciate your prayers tonight.

Speedily

This time of year isn't just busy because of finals; it's also letter of recommendation season. To work in this field you need a graduate degree, which means we have lots and lots of students applying to grad school. This year I am writing for 30 of them.

That is a lot of letters of rec.

It's a lot of judgment, screen after screen after screen of judgment. Are this student's interpersonal skills excellent or merely good? Have I complained about this task before? I must have. I don't have time to search for old posts, though, because...

...one of the schools in my region changed its deadline to December 15, in the same year that a calendar quirk is pushing finals deeper into December than they've ever gone during my time here. If anyone on that admissions committee is reading my letter before next week, I will eat one of the manila envelopes sitting next to me. I will munch it up with my very own teeth, because that is ridiculous.

Even more ridiculous: the online application service they use is telling me I can't submit a letter on December 15 for a December 15 deadline; I have to submit it on December 14 instead. 

I didn't mean to push it down to the wire like this. It's been a crazy crazy day: meeting 9-10, final 10-12, search committee work until 1, final 1-3, late ravenous lunch at 3, loose ends until 4:30, and then a work dinner that lasted from 5:30 until 9. Nine o'clock, I ask you.

Then I came home to find a teary kid in need of some re-assembly. It wasn't enough to have one kid do something dumb this week, I guess. 

All day people were asking me what I was going to do over break and I could only tell them one thing: I'm going to take a nap. Maybe even two naps.

The Christmas letter I am not really going to send

Dear friends:

I always try to send a cheery Christmas letter: a little bit funny, a little bit hopeful. But oh, this year I am not feeling funny. I am not feeling hopeful. I am feeling a little like a beached mudskipper. I don't quite know how to maneuver in my new environment.

I keep wishing I could move on, you guys. When Obama said we should give Trump a chance I knew he was right. I said, "Okay, I'll give him a chance." I pray for Trump regularly and I try not to resent the obligation to do so. But we're five weeks in and he has given us no indication that he is going to step up and act presidential. He is, instead, lunging up out of the muck, grabbing at the "presidential" standard in an egregious effort to pull it down into his (undrained) swamp. If he does it, it must be presidential. He's the president-elect, after all.

Holy cow, that's the saddest sentence I've ever put in a Christmas letter.

The world seems so unpredictable now, though: will today bring further destabilization of the US-China relationship? More bombers in the South China Sea? More human siege engines rolled into position, ready to take aim at the republic in the new year? Huh, I am sounding dramatic even to myself. But what else can we say, when the Environmental Protection Agency will be directed by someone who doesn't actually believe in environmental protection, and when climate science is about to be supplanted by climate fantasy as a basis for decision-making, and when a Friend of Russia with massive global business entanglements is the nominee for Secretary of State? What good things happen when >20 million people lose access to health care? I'm waiting for answers. I suspect I'll be waiting for a while. 

I wake up in the middle of the night and think about it. I walk to work every morning and my footsteps beat a tattoo on the pavement: EIGHTy perCENT of WHITE evanGELicals VOTEd for DONald TRUMP. SIXty perCENT of white CATHolics / VOTEd for DONald TRUMP. Five weeks in and I still can't get my mind around it. It's weighing on me. It's like I've been saddled with an oversized howdah, and my uncertainty steers me this way and that, day in and day out.

(Huh, mudskippers do not usually wear howdahs. Pardon my mixed metaphor. I blame the existential despair.)

I've been frustrated for a long time by the conflation of GOOD CATHOLIC or SERIOUS CHRISTIAN with REPUBLICAN. This year, though-- this year is an object lesson in the perils of single-issue voting. I am increasingly impatient with partisanship masquerading as GOOD CATHOLIC-NESS or SERIOUS CHRISTIAN-NESS. The climate at my kids' Catholic high school is driving me nuts, I have to tell you.

Huh, people don't usually talk about money in their Christmas letters either, just like they don't talk about politics. Taboo, schmaboo. Let's talk about money. Education is far and away the biggest line item in our family budget. This year we will pay ~$15K to send two kids to Catholic high school. Education expenses are the reason I drive a 16-year-old car that sounds like it has automotive emphysema. They're the reason that we buy secondhand clothes and that nobody has a phone worth more than $25. Because the idea that my kids can spend most of their waking hours in a place that's consciously creating a Catholic culture -- that idea is worth a lot to me. And yet. And yet.

One of my boys gets called a Social Justice Warrior anytime he opens his mouth with a radical assertion like "It's problematic for police to shoot unarmed people in the back." One group of boys throws around "Jew" as an insult routinely: "Hey, Jewbag, I want to sit there."* This month there were persuasive speeches, plural, asserting that the scientific consensus on climate change is an elaborate hoax.** 

Oh, friends, it sounds like I'm sending my kids to Alt-Right Academy. I just want to say, Hey, if Catholic social teaching is at odds with the preferences expressed in your usual news sources, you might want to consider some alternate news sources.

*I complained to the principal. He says he can't do anything unless my kid divulges a list of names and contexts. Can't. Do. Anything.***

**I'm drafting a letter about that. But I'm not going to send it until grades are in, because I am not optimistic about the response. 

***I know, we don't put footnotes in Christmas letters either. What other conventions of the genre shall I defy?

I keep looking for solace, hanging out in the prophets and the plaintive psalms. But the divisions among people of faith are crushing me as much as the uncertainty I was telling you about earlier. It's like my howdah has a Volkswagen Beetle on top of it. I am looking for goodness, trying to savor my lovely quirky family. Maybe in a different sort of Christmas letter I would find a way to tell you about our dinner conversation tonight, where exclamation-point-y talk about the election morphed into the St. Andrew prayer for the Electoral College (seriously, electors, who do not usually appear in a Gladly Christmas letter either: do your job on Monday. Anybody but Trump. Anybody.) which slid into a discussion of imported plurals and a riff on Manamana: "phenomena, do dooo do do do." But we are none of us laughing much lately.

We often talk in December about praying for peace, but my prayers for peace this year have a fervency they have lacked in the past. We talk too about preparing for the birth of a baby in December, and I keep thinking about how birth means suffering. It's been almost exactly eight years since my youngest child was born, but I don't think you ever forget how hard it can be to see past the waves of suffering to the joy on the other side. I believe in a sovereign God and so I will choose to believe in good things on the other side of this December. But maybe it's like birth: you have to lean in, and breathe deep, and know that it will get worse before it gets better.

Love and peace and the few specks of hope that I can assemble tonight,
Jamie

Uncertain Compass Revisited

"We need to talk," my husband told me last night. One of our kids had done something dumb. I'm 20 years into this mothering thing, and it is not news to me that kids do dumb things. But this-- I wasn't sure how to respond to this. I was furious. I knew that fury wasn't going to do anybody any good, but I was furious nonetheless.

I woke up at 3:00 this morning and tossed and turned and fretted. I stewed about it all day; I kept having to yank my thoughts back to the oral finals I was listening to. And then tonight my husband and I sat down with the kid in question.

Ten years ago I was on the other side of this situation with a different kid, and it did a lot of damage to our relationship with the other family. I was on the other side of this situation myself as a kid, and I knew objectively that my own experiences were a big part of the fury. I didn't want to get it wrong. I didn't know how to get it right.

For a chunk of the conversation I just sat there and prayed: Come, Holy Spirit; come, Spirit of truth. And I think, as I sit here and reflect on the situation, that it went better than I had dared to hope. I think we know the truth; I know the kid is repentant; I am pretty sure we have a plan.

After the dust settled my husband and I were talking about it. "This parenting thing is hard," he said. "We're twenty years in," I told him. "Shouldn't we have it mostly figured out by now?" "I'm not sure about that," he answered, shaking his head. "I'm not sure."

Mostly when I write about my kids I want to tell you that they are terrific and funny and bookish and delightful. Mostly when I write about parenting I want to tell you the things I have figured out over the years. But sometimes I need to tell you that this is a tough gig. Sometimes you do the very best you can and it still feels crummy. Sometimes all you can do is pray, and hope for the best, and tell them that you love them anyway.

Reset

Christmas Eve is two weeks from tomorrow. Plan for the next 15 days: 15 workouts + Whole 15. Who's in?

Bright Spot

Here is one small thing I miss from my Protestant childhood: I never quite reach CSP (Carol Saturation Point) these days. For most of December it's all O Come O Come Emmanuel at church and all Little Drummer Boy in public spaces and in consequence there is just not quite enough Hark the Herald Angels Sing in my world. HtHA = the best best best Christmas carol. And there's no HtHA on the radio once the calendar turns over on December 26.

But! If you volunteer to sing with the choir, you can belt out Christmas carols when it is still Advent because you have to rehearse them. You can belt them out in three-part harmony, even! Those HtHA words are balm to my soul: mild he lays his glory by, ris'n with healing in his wings, veiled in flesh the godhead see. My soul needed some balm this evening.

Q&A

Dear Jamie,

Please write about work-life balance. How do you combine an academic career with the demands of a large family?

Signed,
Curious

***

Dear Curious,

How do I do it? Badly, that's how.

Yours in end-of-the-semester frazzletation,
Jamie

Things the Bible probably meant to say about grading

Each day has enough grading of its own.

Woe to you, scribes and scribe-wannabes, for your cup and platter are the same stupid cup and platter I just saw at Wikipedia. (Wikipedia, I ask you.)

Yea, verily, though I walk on my hands to the airport [lots of airports in the Bible, don't you know], I cannot escape the weight of my grading. Though I travel to the depths of the earth, my grading is there.

Sufficient unto a day is its own grading. But you are going to be BURIED in unhappy email tomorrow, girlfriend, so you'd better get to bed tonight.