Light and Momentary

Silver Anniversary

Twenty-five years and three days ago, my husband and I promised to love each other for better and for worse until death should us part.

We are twenty-five years (and three days) in, and I can say with certainty that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I didn't really know what the good parts would be like, the gift of being seen clearly and known intimately and loved anyway. I didn't anticipate the gift of a secret language, in which a syllable can speak volumes. I didn't know how often he would be able to read my mind. I don't blog much about the frustrations of being married to my particular husband (because how unfair would that be?), but I couldn't really have imagined what those would be like either. Here's to leaps of faith, and to persistence.

I thought about writing this post on Tuesday, our actual anniversary. I thought about writing it on Wednesday, the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae -- the encyclical that has had such a profound impact on our lives. I thought about writing it yesterday, on the feast of Ss. Ann and Joachim, because their feast day always reminds me that a marriage can bear fruit that will change the world, even if it doesn't look quite like you expected.

But instead I am writing it on an ordinary Friday, as we get ready to make a quick trip to Chicago. Chicago is far enough away to feel like a getaway but not so far that it feels like an expedition. We are going to hear a concert in Grant Park this evening, and stay overnight near the college campus where we met in 1987. In the morning I am going to run beside Lake Michigan, and we'll have most of the day together before we need to retrieve the two youngest kids from the grandparents' house.

I am wondering what the next 25 years might hold for us, and also thinking that my guesses about where we'd be in 2018 would have been pretty far off base. Maybe the thing to do instead of speculating is to be grateful for the present, and to lean in to the uncertainty. I am thinking about the woman of Proverbs 31, who knew a thing or two about marriage and family life: "She is clothed in strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future."

A marriage in puzzles

I read a book earlier this year in which the three members of a family get three copies of the Sunday NYT delivered so they don't have to share the magazine. Here we split the puzzles. KenKens are mine; Elwood gets Puns & Anagrams. Whoever gets there first does the small word puzzle.

Most of the time if there's an acrostic I save it for him, but this morning he was in Florida with Joe, buying his own Times. I squinted at "skills displayed by funambulists" for a few minutes, and I wondered if he was also saying to himself, "The definition of that word is somewhere inside my head, but there is a lot of other stuff piled on top of it." I didn't actually draw hearts around the word "tachyon" as I thought about my former-physicist husband, but I might as well have. I wondered if he was thinking about me, too-- trying to remember which Girl Scout cookie is the shortbread one and what Dumbledore's specialty might be. (He still has no cell phone, here in the year of Our Lord 2018, which is why I was speculating rather than texting him.)

Today's acrostic turns out to be a quote about bradypus torquatus, a variety of three-toed sloth that "looks uncannily like a coconut with a mullet." This is a weird source for wistful romantic thoughts, but there you go. I miss him. I might have to go do the 8x8 KenKen to take the edge off.

Thag you very buch

Remember when Bilbo celebrated his birthday in Laketown with a dreadful cold? Perhaps this cold of mine is a sign that the year ahead will be filled with memorable adventures with new friends. And treasure. It probably means I'm going to take possession of more treasure than I can carry, don't you think?

Here in my subdued state I have been reading and knitting. Do you have The Glitch on your radar? It's about Shelley Stone, the CEO of a company that produces a piece of wearable technology called the Conch-- a little gadget that sits behind the user's ear and offers input. It reads texts and emails so the user doesn't even have to glance at them; it offers advice about avoiding traffic and identifies other Conch wearers whose names the user can't quite retrieve. But all is not well in Conch-world. The novel describes the problems that unfurl for the CEO: at work, with the product and with her colleagues, and at home.

It reminded me of Sourdough, with its fantastical skewering of the tech world, but the writing and the plotting are both better in The Glitch. I kept highlighting sentences because they struck me as so zingily perfect. The last chunk of the book raises some intriguing ethical questions that the author doesn't really grapple with, but I'm not done chewing on them.

If you read it, tell me what you think. Also: does Shelley have autism? (How about her daughter?) She's relentlessly explicit with herself about managing social interactions, perpetually talking about sensory challenges, repeatedly engaging in a painful self-soothing ritual. I found her to be a really interesting character-- more sympathetic than I expected based on Laura Vanderkam's summary. I'm still thinking about whether or not I buy the final scene.

I am also reading Educated, the memoir of a woman raised by Idaho survivalists. It's like a Rocky Mountain version of The Glass Castle, which I read and loved last summer. In both books, the younger kids in big families are hit harder when parents won't deal with their mental health issues. I'm only a quarter of the way through Educated, but I'm finding it gripping and thought-provoking. Some of the questions it raises are ones I've thought about before as a homebirther and former homeschooler-- what are the boundaries of parents' rights to make decisions that will influence a child's well-being? Some of the questions it raises are especially timely in our increasingly polarized culture: how should one respond to people who think that their political opponents are necessarily blind and foolish, or that education outside the home is a force for evil? The author's father has some choice words about college professors, for instance.

My fever-addled brain just barfed up "boundary's" as an acceptable substitute for "boundaries," which suggests to me that I should put it to bed pronto. Good night, friends! Let me know if you spot my Arkenstone.

208

This is the last night on which I will ever be 47 years old, and with this post I am hitting my goal of blogging 4x/week (averaged across the year). Thanks for reading, friends!

Do Better, NYT

This morning's New York Times includes a letter in praise of fruit juice that reads like an industry-authored encomium. It took me 15 seconds of googling (Robert Murray sweetener honorarium) to discover that the author had indeed accepted money from juice giant Welch's along with multiple other big names in the food industry. It took me a further five minutes of googling ("Robert Murray MD" disclosure) to discover that he is part of the advisory panel for Facts Up Front, an industry-driven labeling effort criticized by nutritionists for its efforts to make less nutritious foods seem like sensible choices.

In those same five minutes I learned that he was a speaker for a Mead Johnson-funded continuing medical education offering and, furthermore, that he accepts money from Abbott. I need to acknowledge my own professional bias here, but I am always and forever going to give side-eye to pediatricians who attempt to offer nutrition advice after taking money from infant formula manufacturers. Everybody loves to think that accepting industry dollars won't affect their perception of that industry or of the impact of that industry's products, but science says otherwise.

And now we have his industry-funded words presented as expert opinion in the newspaper of record. Seriously, NYT, take five minutes and google it yourselves next time. Don't give free advertising to industry shills.

Autonomy, the golden key

Months ago my friend Angela asked me about managing screen time with my kids, and then recently Jody asked about college applications and the angst they cause, and it occurred to me that my responses to those two questions would be closely related: I am all about age-appropriate autonomy.

With screen time, the long-term goal isn't to get the internet usage down below some target number of minutes. The big-picture goal is to help kids manage their own computer use, because you and your timer will not be going to college with them. I have found it useful to emphasize habits and frames, so that if a kid came to me and said, "May I play xyz?" I could respond, "I don't know the answer to that question -- you tell me." Computer time doesn't happen before a certain number of things get done in the morning (generally including a morning offering, putting away clean dishes, eating breakfast, and getting dressed). People know not to goof around on the internet until they have done their share of the dinner dishes. Nobody gets computer time after a certain (age-dependent) cutoff time at night. Phones stay downstairs overnight. You'll notice that a lot of hours remain for possible computer use, but kids can exercise better judgment (really, everybody can exercise better judgment) when they are fed and rested, and I have more brain-space available to teach them good habits if I am not shrieking like a harpy about the full dishwasher.

This part is squishier, but I also think it's important to emphasize courtesy and detachment in addition to rules. Courtesy: you have to be able to respond to a human being in the same room with you using a conversational voice. I am not going to yell for my kids' attention. Detachment: there is nothing on YouTube more important than saying, "Yes, Mom, happy to help." I'm not opposed to an occasional "but would it be okay if I helped you in 58 seconds when this video ends?" but the default setting should be an understanding that the real needs of the real people in your actual house are more important than internet goings-on.

When my two oldest children were small I imposed rigid structures for computer use. They set timers. When the timers beeped, they were done, period. I was always worried about how much time they were spending on the computer and what exactly they were doing. These days, for better or for worse, I am a lot more relaxed. At the beginning of the summer I asked my 13-year-old how much time he thought was prudent to spend on a screen in a day. I asked him to track his actual usage on the dining room white board to see how it compared to his target. I did not harangue him when the reality exceeded the target, because that happens to me too. He has been monitoring his own behavior, and strategizing about things he can do instead of playing brainless games. Do I want to do the monitoring? Nope. Do I want to come up with a list of potential non-screen activities, which will almost certainly be shot down one by one as too boring or too hard or too silly? I absolutely do not. So this is a win-win for us: he gets low-stakes practice with identifying and responding to internet-induced sloth, and I don't have to micro-manage his decisions.

In my ideal world they would spend less time playing dumb phone games, but I am a product of the Pong years so I should probably hush up about dumb games. (Also I harbor a secret love for Super Methane Brothers. I cannot put it on a device I own because I would huddle before the screen, twitching, in pursuit of a new high score. So! I should probably hush up about dumb games, huh?)

We have never owned any kind of video game system, because that's an easy way to encourage more engagement with the closetful of board games and other real-world activities. The downside of this decision is that tween/teen neighbor boys are less interested in hanging out at our house. Once they outgrow (or think they've outgrown) the Lego room, they prefer greener pastures, perhaps the ones in Fortnite. This is a disadvantage of our approach, but I am still not buying a video game system.

Hmm, now that I've typed all that up I fear it is obvious. But hey-- free advice, you get what you pay for.

Next, Jody. FIRST OFF, Jody, please be patient with yourself. I am dealing with one college applicant every three years, and you are dealing with three in one year. YIKES! I'm stressed out just typing that sentence! Also, your milieu is different from mine, I expect -- the kids in my orbit are mostly applying to state schools or regional Catholic universities. I have been pretty hands-off about college applications. I share this only as a data point, since you seem to be immersed in a hands-on parenting culture, and not as any kind of edict.

My logic, part 1: I am not going to be hands-on about test scores, because I do not want my children to tie their value to a test score ever, at all, for any reason at any time. I would rather be a little too mellow about a test score than a little too enthusiastic, because I have some baggage about test scores.

My logic, part 2: financial reality dictates that our children are probably going to attend one of a very small pool of schools. We're not going to tour the Eastern Seaboard in search of a just-right campus, because it's pretty painful to pay for higher education right here in the Midwest. So it's fine for them to apply to a couple of fancypants schools, but we let them know up front that the stars would have to align JUST SO for them to attend. I haven't felt the need to put hours and hours into editing their essays, because they don't need lapidary prose to get into the state universities.

My logic, part 3: if the college application process is about assessing students' suitability for college, it would be a little weird for me to put myself in the middle of it. Like, if my kid can't meet a December 1 deadline this year, how's he going to prepare appropriately for his October 1 midterm the following fall? I will help whenever I am asked to help: organizing campus visits, editing essays on request, brainstorming about which teachers might write letters of rec, offering low-level accountability IF my applicant is on board with it. But so far (two down, three to go) my strategy has been to wait for them to tell me what they need.

None of this would feel very helpful to me if I were surrounded by parents who were like BUT HARVARD OR AT LEAST COLGATE, so please accept my sympathies if that's what you're dealing with. Good luck! It's temporary!

Not normal

Hi, this is a reminder (in case you needed one) that things are really weird right now. Although I was just writing yesterday about embracing weird things, I didn't mean these weird things.

The President of the United States is not supposed to treat the UK or Canada like hostile foreign powers.
The President of the United States is not supposed to treat hostile foreign powers like pals.
The existence of NATO has not traditionally been controversial among US political figures.
The existence of facts, ditto.

Where do we go from here?

Embrace the weird

Remember how I was knitting a mystery project? Clues 1 and 2 left me with this big right triangle. Its unexplained appendage is dangling down behind the chair.  

Clue 3 instructs us to break our yarn and unearth another size 6 needle, and construct a long and pointy V. We are talking super long and pointy. Like, wrist-to-shoulder long, ending in an itsy-bitsy acute angle. 

This had better not be the bottom center of the shawl, my friends, because it would be like a large and blinky sign saying BEHOLD MY BUTT. 

My butt needs no beholding. 

My Clue 3 might need some beholding, though:   

It is possible that she is planning for the first piece to be the left "wing" and the second piece to be the closely related but slightly asymmetrical right "wing," and that we'll start knitting the fabric to join them tomorrow.

It is also possible that she has some bananapants next step up her sleeve that hasn't even occurred to me. 

Tune in next week for a further installment of "Jamie Invests Many Hours of Her Life in a Thing That Might Be Really Hideous But She Doesn't Even Know Yet."

Slippery Slopes

We belong to a gym that has two locations in town: one is older and grubbier and more family-friendly; the other, newer and shinier, requires kids to stay in childcare. At the family-friendly location, the policy had been the same ever since we joined in 2007 or so: kids 8 and under needed to be supervised by a parent or else be in the childcare room. Once a kid turned 9, he had options-- shoot hoops while a parent was working out, sit and read a book until yoga was over, take the swim test.

It's been a while since I was at location #1. If I know I'm going to the gym, I'll usually choose the option with more treadmills and more parking. But this morning our group run was canceled at the very last minute when thunderstorms rolled into town. I wanted to get my 4 miles in early without getting struck by lightning, and I was right by location #1. So I headed over there.

There's a new sign posted, saying that kids now require direct parental supervision until they're 11 years old. It's only been a couple of weeks since we were talking about how many of us were responsible for other people's smaller children when we were 10 and 11, but apparently these days kids can't even manage themselves at that age. If you find yourself wondering, at some point in the future, when we decided that 10-year-olds were too immature or too delicate to be on their own for 30 minutes -- the answer is 2018.

Back in the (shank's mare) saddle

I signed up for that half-marathon training group again. Feels like a bit of a leap since I haven't been running much lately. Plus the race they're targeting is the morning after my return from a conference. But here goes...

That way lies madness

Do you guys know that I am going up for tenure this year? Have I blogged about that?

It should be fine. It should be a medium-sized hassle to get the materials together, and then a medium-sized exercise in patience to wait for the decision. I'll hear from the college in January; I won't get the official letter from the provost until May. But my university doesn't like for people to get surprised by tenure decisions, and the institutional culture reflects that preference. I've been reviewed favorably every year by the committee that will make the all-important recommendation to my dean. I've fulfilled my service obligations responsibly; my teaching evals are all fine except for that one sad class; I am comfortably ahead of the game on publications. It doesn't make sense to freak out.

And yet. I'm going up for tenure with the same people who did their mid-probationary reviews with me two years ago. I learned today that the two of them have been meeting every week to work on their applications. As I did two years ago, I'm finding their stress level contagious. One of my colleagues today showed me her 33-page in-progress application to the provost. Dude. If mine is a third as long, I will be surprised. She was worried about providing artifacts for the service portion of her application. I don't even know what that means. Meeting agendas? I can't imagine. Who would want to review a pile of old meeting agendas? Is there a big problem with tenure applicants fudging their service commitments while their departmental committees fail to notice? I think not.

But...I'm having that same reaction I did two years ago. Maybe they are right and I am wrong? Maybe I should empty out my folder full of cards from students and scan them all for the teaching artifacts section?

My mid-probationary report from the departmental review committee said "We appreciate the conciseness of your materials." They said up front that we should keep it streamlined; they thanked me afterward for doing so. Anxious Brain is wondering whether that was actually code for "Gosh, you didn't put much effort into this, did you, Jamie Gladly? Be wordier next time!"

Girl Scouts/Boy Scouts

At Girl Scout camp these days each girl is supposed to carry her sunscreen and insect repellent around at all times in a small bag brought for that purpose. The Girl Scout camp packing list suggests three towels: two beach towels and a shower towel. The Boy Scouts at my house all hooted derisively at this, as if perhaps the people making the list thought the girls might need to bring along their own personal ornithomimus as well. "Three towels!" they said. "When you pack for Boy Scout camp you're supposed to bring one little camp towel! That's ridiculous!"

They won't let you in the door at Girl Scout camp until they've checked your head for lice. Probably at Boy Scout camp they just enter any head lice in the nature center's critter-finding competition.

Before you can drop a girl off at Girl Scout camp they want you to complete Counselor Questionnaires, on which the parent rates six or seven different traits ("my daughter expresses her opinions") and the child rates them separately. There are three separate waivers to sign. There are no Counselor Questionnaires at Boy Scout camp.

At her brothers' urging Stella did not take a pillow to camp. ("A pillow! Is this camping or the Ritz?!") She did not take 10 pairs of socks, even though the packing list said "MUST BRING," because she does not own ten pairs of socks. I am curious about how she is faring. I miss her.

Yes, you can!

I used to think of calling my reps as a Big Deal, an intimidating prospect. I am here to tell you that it is not actually a big deal. This is the script I always use:

Hi, thank you for taking my call today. My name is Jamie Gladly, and I am one of Congressman/Senator Lastname's constituents in Gladlyville. My zip code is 12345. I am calling about [issue], because [reasons, sometimes tailored to his/her political leanings]. I would like to ask the representative/senator to [co-sponsor legislation / introduce legislation / vote yea or nay on a bill / issue a statement]. I [would appreciate / do not need] a response from the representative/senator. [pause for aide to say something pleasant and non-committal and to confirm my address] Thank you again for talking with me today. 

Boom, you're done. I can usually make all 3 calls in less than 5 minutes. No one has ever been anything but impeccably courteous to me, even when I am feeling a little rant-y. The last time I called about family separation at the border, I joked with my kids that if they had been listening with a "Mom calls her legislators" bingo card in hand, they would have had an easy blackout.

Today I was feeling more than a little rant-y, and I expanded the [issue] and [reasons] sections of my script accordingly. I am going to post a version of them here, in case anybody who reads here might be feeling cautious about making calls.

I am calling about the front-page story in today's New York Times, reporting a sudden and unexplained shift in a position that has received longstanding bipartisan support. US officials inexplicably opposed a World Health Assembly resolution in support of breastfeeding, and did so by bullying and threatening smaller countries until the Russians intervened to stop them. This behavior is nothing short of bizarre: it flies in the face of decades of research on the importance of human milk as a low-cost means of protecting mothers and babies worldwide. Protecting and promoting breastfeeding is pro-life and pro-economic responsibility [I emphasized this first for the R side of the aisle] as well as pro-science and pro-women's health [I led with this for the other side]. I am especially concerned about the HHS response to the NYT reporter, which clearly reflects the influence of infant formula industry marketing strategies. The only possible explanation I can think of for these events is lobbying by the infant formula industry, which will have serious adverse effects on the well-being of babies and mothers if it continues unchecked. In the wake of the recent scandals at the EPA, I am concerned that HHS has also been the target of hidden industry lobbying efforts.

I would like to ask the senator/congressman to consider doing two things: first, to issue a statement in support of our policy of protecting and promoting breastfeeding in time for World Breastfeeding Week, which is August 1-7. Second, I'd like to ask the senator/congressman to consider calling for an investigation into donations by the infant formula industry that may have influenced delegates to the World Health Assembly meeting and representatives of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Let me know how it goes!

Ignorance is strength, war is peace, and biological specificity is totally overrated

The New York Times reports today that the US government actively opposed a recent World Health Assembly resolution on breastfeeding. Before the vote, widespread consensus was expected; the resolution acknowledged the value of human milk and expressed concern about unethical marketing practices for breastmilk substitutes. Under ordinary circumstances it would have passed with little debate. The story makes clear that these are anything but ordinary circumstances. It's astonishing, even here in the post-astonishment era. Highlights:

• Not only did the US oppose the resolution, its representatives threatened supporters from smaller countries with economic retaliation and withdrawal of military support
• This bullying behavior stopped only after Russian intervention
• The US did, however, succeed in watering down the language of the resolution
• The HHS, when contacted by the NYT reporter, spouted a script that comes straight from the industry playbook

I used to write a lot about breastfeeding in this space, but not so much lately. This is where I'm coming from:

Human milk makes a modest but statistically robust difference in health and neurodevelopmental outcomes across a surprisingly wide array of domains and disorders. Both parts of that assertion are important. Because the differences are modest, I fully support the right of an individual woman to make the infant feeding choices that work best for her and her family, free of side-eye and second-guessing. The world will be a better place when we give each other the benefit of the doubt more regularly. At the same time, because the differences are statistically robust and affect so many different kinds of outcomes, effective individualized breastfeeding support is a non-negotiable public health imperative. If a woman wants to breastfeed, let's find a way to help her make it work. No one reading this post should feel guilty for any reason, unless she is a Nestle or Abbott Labs executive.

But they, my friends, can go right ahead and feel guilty. The infant formula industry has done immense damage to breastfeeding relationships around the globe. You've seen this picture, right, taken the day before faulty information about milk supply resulted in a child's death? We can argue here in the developed world about exactly how important breastfeeding might be, but those discussions are entirely out of place in the developing world. Human milk saves lives everywhere; it is a particularly critical component of efforts to protect maternal-child health in poorer areas. The World Health Organization has been instrumental in responding to unethical formula marketing practices. The idea -- the very idea -- of the WHO Code as some kind of optional frippery that we've moved beyond now -- oh, man, I'm having a little Screwtape-centipede moment here.

Let's talk about that quote from the HHS employee, who said:

"The resolution as originally drafted placed unnecessary hurdles for mothers seeking to provide nutrition to their children." The hurdles involved are pre-existing hurdles, placed decades ago to prevent industry from sabotaging breastfeeding. I am relying on news coverage of the incident because I can't find the text of this resolution on the WHO site, but WHO resolutions focus on public policy recommendations -- not mandating individual behavior. I cannot imagine how this could be an accurate assertion.

"We recognize not all women are able to breast-feed [sic] for a variety of reasons." True, and yet infant formula manufacturers have moved a lot of product over the years by making breastfeeding seem harder, more complicated, more awkward than it actually is. The research on this highly effective strategy goes back at least 25 years.

"These women should have the choice and access to alternatives for the health of their babies, and not be stigmatized for the ways in which they are able to do so." The situations in which equivalent amounts of infant formula* are better than human milk for a baby's health include the following: infants with galactosemia and other inborn errors of metabolism, moms receiving chemotherapy or other genuinely dangerous medications, moms (in the developed world) with HIV, and...um...not a whole lot else. Infant formula companies have tried for years to persuade us that their product can save women from the uncertainties of breastfeeding (how much is my baby really getting? are there EVIL TOXINS in my milk?) and from the indignities of contact with the nipple nazis, but it is new and startling to hear their marketing strategies in the mouth of a representative of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. 

*Phrased that way to acknowledge that formula supplementation can be immensely important when appropriate quantities of human milk are not available. I see you, moms with supply issues. I am also never going to stop being mad at the industry that creates supply issues in some women to foster dependence on its product.

There is no new science driving this change in US policy. There is global scientific consensus on the importance of breastfeeding for mothers and children. We can disagree on the magnitude of the odds ratios, but the body of evidence in support of breastfeeding is staggering. The only possible motivation I can imagine here is behind-the-scenes industry lobbying.

If they get what they want, babies will sicken and die. They will die preventable deaths-- of diarrheal illnesses in Bangladesh, of SIDS here in the US. 

This is not okay.

Tomorrow morning I am going to call my reps. I am going to ask them to issue a statement in support of the government's role in protecting and promoting breastfeeding in time for World Breastfeeding Week, August 1-7. I am going to ask them to call for an investigation of formula industry lobbying, because it seems clear that money is doing the talking here. The US position at the World Health Assembly was anti-science, anti-maternal/child health, anti-common sense, anti-economic responsibility. Did you know it's estimated that every dollar invested in breastfeeding will generate $35 in economic returns? 

Let's push back.

Summer knitting (you can just go ahead and delete this one, Veronica)

Recently I was talking to a pal about my blog. "I'll read anything you write," she said, "but not the knitting posts. I just delete those." If you are also an anti-fan of knitting posts, this is your cue to go read about the World Cup or ketogenic waffle recipes or whatever floats your boat.

Ysolda Teague is doing another mystery knit-along, and I bought some yummy fingering-weight Malabrigo yarn for it. After the first week -- and even through most of the second -- I was a little worried that it was going to be a big boring right triangle. But she threw in a funky twist at the end of week 2. Will she have us make a sort of kite shape? Or a festival of mitered decreases? I won't know until Monday. Who knew knitting was such a suspenseful hobby?

Joe wanted me to knit him some socks, but he wasn't quite sure what they should look like. He found some yarn he liked, black with brightly colored neps. "What about socks with cherries on them?" he wanted to know. Cherries, check. I started knitting in some Fair Isle cherries, but he looked at them with a pained expression. He was hoping for more entropic cherries, as it turned out, and Fair Isle cherries were too orderly. Because I love him, I ripped them back and told him I could give him cherry entropy via duplicate stitch. The first sock needs one more cherry plus stems and leaves; the second sock needs a looser bind-off in addition to its cherries. I was going to give these to him for his name day a couple of weeks ago, but maybe I'll manage it by Pete's name day next week. 

I was also going to give a knitted half-birthday gift to my oldest, but maybe he will get a gift for Pete's name day too. He wanted a slouchy beanie, with a star on its crown. 

Back in February I cast on a sweater with the Mason-Dixon ladies, who invited their readers to bang out a Carbeth. I zipped along up to the sleeves, but I lost momentum with a few inches to go on the first sleeve. I came back to it in May, but when I cast on the second sleeve I forgot which size I had been knitting and accidentally made it smaller than the first one. Whoops! I hadn't taken notes because this was going to be a quick knit, so it required some head-scratching to figure out what was going on. It's a whisker away from finished. I have to weave in a bunch of ends, and close up the underarm gaps you always get with a raglan, and then I will have myself a lovely bulky-weight funnel-neck sweater. It will be just the thing for the Midwest in July.

Summer reading

I do not know why I am finding Pickwick Papers slow going this time around. Maybe I'm missing the May magic this year-- the June 1 deadline zoomed on by while I was still on about page 45. I've been stuck on page 284 for a week. But dernit, I am going to get into the Pickwick groove here. Really. 

I have another "ought-to" book in the swim bag: I'm halfway through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I am not sure how I got an English degree without ever reading Sir Gawain. Don't alert my alma mater, please. 

There's a library book on the coffee table that's been awaiting my attention for most of the summer. I pulled Code Girls from the shelf impulsively: it's about the American women who helped to break German codes during WW2. I thought it would be right up my alley but it has mostly been collecting dust. I either have to read it or return it in the next couple of weeks here, though, since I can't renew it again.

My Kindle right now looks like my good intentions and my mediocre time management skills got together one night and made an ugly baby. I'm a quarter of the way through NeuroTribes, which is fascinating and horrifying in equal measure. I'm not quite a quarter of the way through The Ambition Decisions, which is more annoying than anything else right now: privileged sorority women attempt to ease their first-world angst by classifying their friends while also observing that their classifications are fairly inconsistent. Let's hope it gets better.

I bought Laura Vanderkam's Off the Clock, because I always find her books thought-provoking even though she is another privileged woman talking to privileged women about their first-world angst. The writing in this one is strong and the ideas are worth thinking about.

Inspired might be the best Rachel Held Evans book I've read yet. It's about coming back to the Bible after an evangelical childhood and an uncertain young adulthood. Thumbs up so far, although Kindle tells me I'm basing that judgment on 18% of the book. I've also read 18% of The Shallows, about the cognitive costs of internet addiction. I probably stopped in the middle of reading it to tell Twitter what I thought about it, and never returned.

OH YOU GUYS, I kept swiping across the Kindle screen and I am feeling a moment of frugal-person guilt at the number of unfinished titles. This would be a long (and embarrassing) post if I kept telling you about them. I am going to do some catching up here, by gum, before I buy any more books. But hey, if enough of you click these affiliate links, Amazon will send me a gift card with which to buy more titles to recommend to you. We can have a perma-spiral of frugal-person guilt. How's that for a blog mission statement? 

Home again

Three years ago I was driving us back home after a weekend trip when we hit a belt of storms. It was awful, you guys -- the worst conditions I've ever driven in. Visibility was terrible, so bad that I was afraid to pull over to the shoulder. I could easily imagine someone drifting over the white line without realizing it, and smacking into our van as we attempted to wait it out by the side of the road. I was also afraid to get off of the highway. We were driving through an area that had experienced persistent flooding that summer, and I didn't know what I would find if I left the interstate. It seemed worse to exit into a potential flash flood than to keep crawling forward on the interstate. There was another van a bit ahead of ours, and I kept her taillights in sight. Selfishly, I thought, "If there's flooding on the interstate, she'll get to it before we will and maybe I can keep from driving into it."

I kept thinking the worst would end soon. How wide could this band of storms really be?

It must have been pretty wide. It went on for a long time.

Let me reiterate: it was awful. Four of the kids were in the car, and the weight of my responsibility to keep them safe in those conditions felt immense. Alex was doing a summer internship away from home, and I was thinking about him too. Would he look back on 2015 as the year his whole family died in a flash flood?

As you will have deduced, we avoided the flash flooding. I followed that other van's hazards out of the rain and into watery sunshine, and made it home safely, thanks be to God. 

I was kind of traumatized by the experience. The following summer I had been planning to meet up with my roommates in Chicago, but when the day drew closer there were severe thunderstorms in the forecast. Nope, I said, have a nice time without me. Last year my parents were planning to come for Stella's First Communion. THUNDERSTORMS, I said. It's going to storm the whole way. I didn't even want other people driving in bad weather.

Last night my mother was looking at the weather forecast for our trip today. Scattered storms, she said. The first 85% of the trip was totally uneventful: no traffic, minimal construction, no kid squabbles. I got into that long-distance driving zone and cranked out the miles. And then I noticed that the clouds looked forbidding enough for me to flip on the radio. Were we about to drive into a tornado warning? 

There was no tornado warning, but there were buckets of rain accompanied by lightning and thunder. When my windshield wipers couldn't quite keep up, I stopped for gas. I was prepared to hang out at the gas station until the storms blew over, but when the rain slowed down we hit the road again. Fifteen minutes later we hit another bad patch, bad enough that we pulled off the interstate to join a line of cars with their hazards on, also waiting it out on the exit ramp shoulder. (No services close to the exit, low visibility on the interstate.)

As you will have deduced, we lived to drive another day. And maybe, I hope, my not-entirely-rational fear of driving in thunderstorms has abated. We are home, gratefully.

Oh, help

My 18yo has been learning Esperanto via Duolingo for a while now, but it didn’t really pique my interest. Then we came to visit my parents. My mother is learning Spanish, German, and Vietnamese. My sister is learning Spanish and Turkish. “Jamie,” she said, “if you study Spanish too the three of us can have a CLUB!”

I mean. A CLUB! Who could say no to a CLUB?

This could be a little dangerous, friends. There’s a just-one-more quality to the modules that sucked me right in. My sister and my mother have elaborate notebook systems; my sister color-codes hers. 

I do not think I have space in my life for an elaborate color-coded notebook activity. But I miiiight have time for another quick German test...

Prudence or patriarchy?

Long ago, when I was in college and mental health treatment was still highly stigmatized, I heard a speaker talk about her experience with depression. She explained that she and her therapist had traced the root of the problem to an episode from her early childhood. Her mother had gone away, and as a toddler she lacked the ability to understand that the separation was temporary. She assumed her mother was dead, and the buried grief caused depression 35 years later.

A few years after that I read a book called The Fragile Bond, in which a different woman asserted that her depression had also been caused by an early separation from her mother, who went away for a week without her.

I believed their explanations; I accepted it as received wisdom that a mom taking a solo trip could scar her toddler for life. When my own kids were small I was very cautious about leaving them, because what if I scarred them for life?

Just recently I realized that this idea warranted some additional scrutiny. 

Why weren’t people developing depression after being raised by traveling salesman dads? Why would it only matter if the mom were traveling?

if toddlers are too unsophisticated to get their minds around “Mom is coming back in a week,” how could they get a handle on “Mom is dead, and dead is permanent”?

Wasn't it more likely that those cases of depression were actually caused by midlife fluctuations in brain chemistry?

Was this just one more way for people to blame 1950s moms for their children’s struggles? Was it one more place where the patriarchy needed smashing?

i turned to Google, expecting to find that the idea had been debunked. But the actual story seems to be more complicated. It looks like the theory of maternal separation as a causal factor for mental illness was controversial even in the era in which I was hearing it put forth as fact. It also looks like animal studies suggest that early separation can have long-lasting neuroendocrine effects. It looks like there are some associations reported in recent human studies between early separations and later behavioral concerns. 

I am still at my parents’ house, googling (and typing this post) on a small screen, skimming abstracts instead of tracking down full texts. I’d love to learn more. Is this an idea that you absorbed too? What do we know about the real story?

PS I drafted this post thinking about optional separations in which kids stay with loved ones, not the recent barbarism at the border. That seems likely to be a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

I’ll be here all week

Do you know what you call someone with strong and cranky opinions about state flags?

...wait for it...

...

...

A vexed-illologist, that’s what.