Light and Momentary

Incomplete Information

I am waiting for the schools to close down again. Every day we get more messages from the district about new COVID diagnoses in students and staff. Our community, like all the communities in the Midwest, is seeing the surge. Two of the metrics they're using for making decisions about in-person versus virtual school, though, are lagging indicators. Is that a bad idea, using lagging indicators to make the calls? Is it smarter to pull the kids out now? They say, in the news stories, that they're not seeing in-school transmission -- people are contracting COVID elsewhere and the schools' prevention measures are stopping the spread. They say.

Joe has a couple of weight-lifting goals he wants to hit by the end of the year. I am not excited about the idea of visits to our local gym, where the mask policy is "we encourage you to consider wearing a mask." I haven't been to the gym since they stopped holding outdoor classes. But tonight at the CSA pickup I was talking to a physician acquaintance. We used to run on adjacent treadmills when our now-college-aged kids were in karate classes. She's still hitting the treadmill, even though her specialty brings her into daily contact with people for whom COVID would be particularly risky. "You just have to go when it's not too busy," she said.

It's probably just as healthy for me to get my heart rate up reading about Republican legal fictions, don't you think? 

The women's retreat team is planning to keep meeting in person through the winter, in preparation for a retreat that can't happen until after the pandemic ends. I am not going to the November meeting. The idea of being inside with 20 other people for 2 hours stresses me out. I am considering an email to the leadership team to say that I don't think it's a great plan given our current COVID explosion. If I do, am I being that paranoid lady or that sensible lady? Unclear.

A writer named Jennifer Margulis has been posting about the costs of excessive COVID concern recently, arguing that COVID doesn't kill that many people, and it's getting under my skin more than it ought to. In her past work she has been an advocate for out-of-hospital birth, and one of the reasons I generally support this form of advocacy is that it significantly reduces maternal morbidity. It's dangerously incomplete to shrug about the overall death rate for COVID, because it makes a significant slice of people seriously ill -- some of them for a long, long time. Morbidity matters too.

One possible form of long-term COVID-related morbidity appeared in my Twitter feed today: 

My 12yo just lost an adult front tooth and his other teeth are loose... it turns out from vasculature damage 9 months after Covid.

Omg. PLEASE... I beg of you, take this seriously. For you. For your kids. For everyone.

— Diana Berrent (@dianaberrent) November 10, 2020

Obviously, we should all be careful about giving too much credence to the assertions of people on the internet. But also-- YIKES.

I've been feeling for a long time now that my yikes-o-meter is inadequately calibrated for this particular era. Maybe permanent teeth falling out doesn't need to be an all-caps YIKES? Maybe Mike Pompeo's assertion that we'd proceed smoothly to a second Trump administration is only a one-exclamation-point YIKES? 

Who can say? Not me. I am weary of making decisions with insufficient information.

Totally changing the subject

I said I would keep you posted about Cheech and then I did not keep you posted. Cheech was our least successful foster dog. We wound up seeking another placement for him and we are still a little ambivalent about the whole thing.

Cheech came to us with a couple of red flags: his first foster family wouldn't take him back (it's because the cat would be too mean to him, they said, which I did not find 100% persuasive) and his adoption fell through after he broke a leash on a walk. But I met him and talked to the first foster family, and I decided we'd be okay. We know how to walk a dog by now.

Except-- I did not quite know how to walk this dog. Mostly he was a pleasure to walk, but every now and again he would take it into his head to seize the leash in his teeth, tearing at it and snapping at the hands of anyone who tried to redirect. 

The thing that made me more concerned was that the kids weren't happy. Stella was a little scared of him: she had told him to get out of the trash and he growled at her as if to say "you are not the boss of me, kid." Pete didn't love the way that Cheech wanted to play-scuffle with him. A 35-pound dog is on the big side for play-scuffling, and Cheech was too nippy. Not aggressive, not scary for Pete, but definitely annoying. (And painful, Pete adds.)

A couple of days after Cheech came, I asked the foster agency if they'd help us find a placement for him without kids. They were great about the whole thing, and Cheech went to a new place pretty quickly. He seems to be getting along beautifully there.

One lesson learned is that people who really love dogs don't always describe problem dogs in language that is easily interpreted by the rest of us. The first foster family said "Yes, he is house-trained! Except! You should take a belly band for him, because sometimes he marks his territory inside the house." (In my view, dogs that pee in the house are not house-trained.)

One lesson I am still processing is that kids and dogs need time to adjust to each other. I think Cheech might have been calmer here if we'd had another dog for him to nibble on and wrestle with. Since we don't, he tried to nibble on Pete instead. By the time Cheech left, both Pete and Stella were genuinely sad to see him go. Should I have waited a little longer to make the call? Unclear.

We laugh a lot when we talk about Cheech, who wanted to be in someone's lap at all times despite being too big to be a lapdog. We call him Gravity Dog, because he wanted to lie stretched out on the couch, with his head by our knees and his tail by our hips. But his body was so long, and his head was so big and heavy that he slowly s-l-i-d off the couch onto the floor. He looked so indignant, every single time. "Gravity! Again! What is it with this gravity thing?" he seemed to be saying. The picture here is Gravity Dog in action, determined that he WILL TOO defy the laws of physics this time. Or -- whoops, maybe next time.

The kids don't seem stressed out about his stay here, and they don't seem stressed out about his departure. So I guess the outcome is okay, even if it wasn't quite how I thought things would go.

Reset

Oh, you guys, that was a WEEK. On Monday, I finished all of my revisions for manuscript #2. Go me! At lunchtime I went to Adoration and prayed for the nation, because it seemed like we needed it.

On Tuesday I knew I would be distracted. I planned a picnic lunch with a friend. I set low expectations for productivity. I went to bed at a reasonable hour.

On Tuesday Part Two I woke up feeling like an anvil lay on top of me, and I scraped my sad weary self out of bed. It is extremely unusual for me to check the headlines before Morning Prayer, but that's what I did on Tuesday Part Two. It was a bad idea. 

On Tuesday Part Three I continued to click around from WSJ to NYT, from 538 to Twitter, in search of answers and updates. I found no answers or updates, but I did observe a noxious miasma emanating from my armpits. "Huh, I showered on Tuesday and it's still Tuesday," I said to myself. I took a shower anyway. If a day is going to last for more than 60 hours, it requires more than one shower.

On the morning of Tuesday Part Four the WSJ flipped Pennsylvania to pale blue and I took a deep breath for the first time in a long time. I get it that a lot of Catholics are worried about what comes next, but on Friday night Elwood and I toasted to the future. Whatever that future looks like, it will not be governed by the least competent, most dangerous president we have ever seen.

It's time for another Facebook break for me (although with the Trump supporters heading over to Parler it may be a calmer place from here on out), and it's time for a return to uninterrupted writing blocks that start by 8:15. I am not sure I would want to know how many times I clicked refresh on my NYT/WSJ tabs last week, but it seems like a good time to be done with that.

How about you? How did it go last week? What's next?

BRISK CLAP

OK, US Catholics, we have our work cut out for us. We have spent decades walking down an increasingly untenable political path, driven by strident voices calling abortion the Most Evil of All Evils and saying Effective Pro-Life Political Action Equals Laws Against Abortion. But--

It is my highest priority to live a life of joyful obedience to Jesus Christ in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. I believe every word of the Catechism. And I do not believe those strident voices within the Church are right. In fact, I believe them to be responsible for deepening divisions and driving people away from the faith. Let’s do better.

An increasingly polarized political landscape has left too many Catholics thinking that it is A-OK to sneer at the libs, or to wear a PELOSI SUCKS T-shirt, or to call anything left of center “socialism.” Can we just stop with that? It's unlikely that on Judgment Day Jesus is going to be like, "wrong, socialism is when the workers control the means of production," but I tell you what: he is the guy who said it was the same as murder to call one's brother a fool. I don’t think he will look kindly on use of the word “libtard.” (Obviously, I likewise condemn schoolyard insults aimed at Trump and his fellows.)

This political landscape has also left too many Catholics thinking that all left-leaning political positions are self-evidently wrong. Medicare for all? Laughable. Ending fracking? Wishful thinking from ignorant dreamers who fail to see it’s not economically feasible. Subsidized high-quality childcare? OhohoHOOOO, it is a PLOY to allow the government to indoctrinate your children!

What if we didn’t do that?

My opinions are unchanged since I posted about abortion four years ago: just as in parenting, if you want people to make different choices, you smooth the path toward those choices. If your two-year-old is lying in the floor screaming for Halloween candy, then one option is to repeat “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.” But probably the better choice is to say, “Huh, it’s 10:00 and he didn’t eat breakfast. Scrambled eggs and toast, coming right up.” If your teens are fighting all the time, then sure, you can ground them and yell “NO RUDENESS AND DISRESPECT” at them (using your most polite and respectful bellow). Or you can figure out what the obstacles are between the situation you’ve got and the situation you want, and tackle the obstacles.

Let’s talk about obstacles. Women are not having abortions for funsies. Women are having abortions because they can’t afford a(nother) baby, and because they are in unstable relationships, and because their life circumstances do not seem to be compatible with motherhood. They are having late-term abortions in part because their unborn babies have disabilities or life-limiting conditions. In that incomplete list of reasons for abortion there is so much scope for bipartisan political action. So let’s commit to some bipartisan political action already.

In the UK, which is hardly a hotbed of pro-life activism, every pregnant resident of the country has access to skilled prenatal care, to her choice of birth setting, and to in-home follow-up care for herself and her baby in the weeks after delivery. Her out-of-pocket cost? Zero. If we in this country were genuinely committed to protecting the lives and well-being of unborn babies and their mothers, we could do something similar. With a coalition of Democrats and Catholic Republicans, we could make it political suicide for a legislator to oppose Medicaid expansion for pregnant/postpartum women and children under age 5. If ostensibly pro-life legislators vote repeatedly to repeal the piece of legislation that requires insurers to cover prenatal care, then we should hold them responsible for dereliction of their pro-life duty. Healthcare is a huge messy expensive issue, but the eye-wateringly expensive part is end-of-life care. In the richest country of the world, the cost of routine perinatal/well-child care is 100% a solvable problem. We just need the political will to solve it.

Similarly, the rest of the developed world has figured out better solutions to maternity leave and childcare. In fact, the entire developing world* has also figured out better solutions to maternity leave. If the pro-life community in the US acknowledges these barriers to motherhood and commits to working together on solutions, we can make a difference for the terrified newly pregnant women out there thinking, “I never thought I’d have an abortion, but I just cannot see how to make this work financially.” But we need systemic change, which will require sustained political action. And yes, it will be expensive. Remind me, though -- how many KAZILLION dollars have we sunk into deeply divisive and ultimately unsuccessful personhood ballot initiatives? All those strings of appeals in court cases that have only re-entrenched Roe v. Wade as settled law – how much did they cost, and how much good did they do?

*(excluding Suriname, New Guinea, and a few tiny countries in the South Pacific) 

As a nation we can afford maternity leave that allows women to stay home and recover after they have babies. We can afford childcare that allows them to go back to work when they need to, and know that their babies are safe and well cared for. If we want to, that is. If you are reading this and thinking grumbly thoughts like “Not business-friendly! Not fiscally responsible!” then I invite you -– gently, respectfully -– to consider how much of a priority it should be for the pro-life movement to be business-friendly rather than mother/baby-friendly. I ask you how much of the gospel is about protecting business interests at the expense of the vulnerable, and how well those priorities square with the idea of a preferential option for the poor. I note too that the Canadian economy, despite having a GDP only 8% of ours, has not collapsed under the weight of one-year paid maternity leaves.

Whoops, I just passed a thousand words. But you guys, we also need to talk about the pro-life impact of two other causes usually linked to the left. First off: we can reduce the number of babies with severe congenital anomalies, and thus the number of women seeking second-trimester abortions, if we reduce women's exposure to environmental toxins. Fracking kills unborn babies; ergo, in my view, pro-lifers should oppose fracking. Don't tell me we can't get by without an activity that nobody had even heard of 10 years ago. Don't tell the mothers with empty arms that cheap energy matters more than their babies' lives.

Second: we can use political means to make it easier to parent children with disabilities. We can insist on adequate funding for early intervention, for early childhood special education, for school systems that can then focus on access to services rather than gatekeeping to balance a too-skimpy special-ed budget. And let's not forget respite care. It's great to smile at the person at church who's caring for a child with an apparent disability. But the kinds of ongoing support that make a difference in caregiver well-being and eventual outcomes for people with disabilities -- those require political will, and public funding.

I guess if the one true pro-life political strategy were passing more restrictive laws against abortion, then seating judges sympathetic to those laws might be the one true indicator of a pro-life president [she says skeptically]. But I believe there are many, many ways to work politically toward the pro-life goals of protecting gestating babies and equipping their families and communities to welcome them. So let's get it together, and stop turning up our noses at our natural allies. Nobody in heaven is going to be awarding any brownie points for the zingiest social media post about whether Joe Biden should receive communion. But I do believe they will ask us what we did for the least of these.

The Left

I clicked on a Crisis link today, when I saw Mark Shea describe it as an "epic piece of false prophecy from the worst and dumbest journal of false prophecy in the Catholicosphere." I mean, how could you resist a description like that? I suppose I should not be surprised that the folks who were arguing against women's suffrage in August (for real, I am not making it up; you know you want to be Catholic so you too can go to church with folks like this) have lost the plot and jumped the shark.

One thing that jumped out at me today was the article's vilification of The Left, as if The Left were a homogenous entity in uniform opposition to Catholics. As if faithful Catholic leftists could not exist. (Dorothy Day, Secret Enemy of the Faithful.) As if nobody ever leaned left on economic issues while also embracing Church teaching on sexual morality. (My dudes, Acts 3-6 is not what you'd call a compelling argument for capitalism.)

I have a blog post in my drafts folder about moving forward after this interminable election day/week/fever dream, and at the heart of it is the idea that GOP economic policies have been accepted by many faithful Catholics as The One Right Way To Do Economic Policy. This is bunk, not to put too fine a point on it, and unusually corrosive bunk at that. I'm curious about the timeline here. I know that in the early 90s it was taken for granted in evangelical circles that Left-Leaning = Anti-Christian. For those of you who've been around for a while, was that true in the Catholic milieu as well?

Record

Four years ago I went to Philadelphia in November. My discipline had its annual convention there, at the massive convention center where they are counting votes right now. I posted about walking over to the Liberty Bell on a break between sessions (man, that quote! I forgot about that quote!). I remember feeling optimistic while I was there, like maybe it wouldn't be as bad as I had feared.

Instead it has been SO MUCH WORSE: four years of dueling malevolence and incompetence.

This week has been more painful than I expected. I thought we were heading toward an emphatic repudiation of Trump. How could we do anything BUT repudiate Trump?

Well. I do not have an answer to that question, but it is clear that plenty of folks thought Trump did not need repudiating.

Perhaps if I were further advanced in faith I would have been more serene this week, but I have been fizzing, like a bottle of diet Coke with too many Mentos trapped inside. Or like a Wile E. Coyote fuse, attached to a whopping pile of TNT.

All In

I know a woman -- let's call her Anne-Marie -- who homeschools her large family. She was raised in an unusually Catholic family in an unusually Catholic city, and she grew up steeped in a culture that said "ending abortion must be the highest priority for committed Catholics, and the most reliable way to end abortion is to pass laws against it."

When I met her mom in 2014 I was shocked almost into rudeness by her willingness to broadcast conspiracy theories as fact. I wondered if perhaps the mom was having some premature cognitive decline, because surely, surely, no one with intact faculties could believe that nonsense. In hindsight I suspect that too much talk radio was a more likely culprit than cognitive decline.

Anne-Marie and I crossed paths most often on Facebook, where I wound up hiding her posts for a while. On the day of the Newtown shooting she posted about it: she thought it was so sad that those kids had died, and she hoped the liberals wouldn't use their deaths as an excuse to take away people's rights.

In 2016 Trump was a bridge too far for her. She had voted Republican for as long as she had been able to vote, but she thought it might be better to vote third-party over Trump. 

Now, though? Over the past four years she morphed into a rock-solid Trump voter. She thinks you should have voted for him too, because he is the most pro-life president in history, and her #1 priority is to ban abortion.

A few weeks ago I thought to myself, "What we have in this country is an EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS!" And then I thought, "Probably saying the phrase 'epistemological crisis' out loud disqualifies you as a source of information in the minds of the people whose epistemology concerns you." I have so many church friends who see it as a badge of honor to eschew mainstream media in favor of Fox News and its ilk. Don't get me wrong -- I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and when Trump does something that makes me angry I make a point of reading what the National Review says about it. It's not Fox's conservative slant I'm complaining about; it's the truth dearth.

Within the US Catholic Church our Trump problem has been massively compounded by priests and bishops who are also watching Fox News. I was gobsmacked to find that Catholics were still -- still -- being cautioned that it was a mortal sin to vote for the Democrat. Did you see Mark Shea's series on this earlier this fall? It was excellent, and I think it went largely unheeded by the folks who have been hearing since the 80s that good Catholics vote Republican.

I voted for Biden with a clear conscience, because Trump is the very embodiment of a proportionate reason. If Biden wins I will weep with relief -- not because I have any disagreements with the teachings of the Church, but because Trump is a menace and we are lucky that he has only presided over the deaths of a quarter-million Americans and ravaged the norms of democracy. But if Trump pulls out a victory, Anne-Marie will celebrate, and she will be certain that the angels in heaven are rejoicing with her.

This bespeaks a problem larger than the results of the 2020 election.

Election Day

This is the weirdest election in the weirdest year I have ever lived through.

The dinner request board

"Are you doomscrolling?" Elwood asked me just now.

"No," I assured him. "I'm writing political posts and then abandoning them. Much better."

I cannot finish those posts tonight, which may mean that they remain unfinished. So instead I will answer Colette's question on yesterday's post: what is up with the dinner request section of the whiteboard?

Anyone can put anything in the dinner requests section of the dining room whiteboard. There is no commitment on the grownups' part to work through those requests in any particular order, so writing "lobster thermidor" or "galantine of turkey" is no guarantee that any turkeys will be galantined or any lobsters thermidored. But if you think of something that sounds tasty, you are welcome to write it down for menu-planning consideration. If a new recipe is a success, someone will usually write it on the whiteboard to request a reprise.

Lately I have been polling the kids for food ideas at the start of a week. Stella makes two meal requests, Pete makes two meal requests, and I think of two things I'd like to cook or eat. (Elwood will eat anything. He's like Mikey from the 1970s Life commercials. I've known the man since 1987 and I just learned this fall that he loves deviled eggs. Think of all the deviled eggs I would have made him if I had only known!) This affords me some flexbility -- I can make pizza one night to fulfill a Stella request, but it can be slow pizza or quick pizza (jarred tomato sauce on frozen naan with pre-shredded cheese, very speedy) depending on my level of motivation. And if I don't want to make pizza at all, I just choose another option from the list.

I find that at 4pm decision fatigue often weighs me down. I ought to cook something. It should be appealing to everybody, and nutritious, and it should use the things in the fridge that need using. Somehow it seems like there are too many options and too few options at the very same time, and so...maybe I should just refresh FiveThirtyEight one more time. But if I narrow it down on Sunday to exactly six options that at least one person especially wants to eat, then I have a pleasing mix of structure and flexibility.

November 1

Today was mostly a lovely start to November. I have learned to go to bed at my usual time on the night of the fall time change, even though no one will wake me up at 5am the morning after. This makes the morning feel luxurious, since you can sleep until you wake up and it will still be early according to the clock.

Cheech and I took a long walk through the quad. The trees there have been good for my sense of perspective all through the pandemic. A few of them were planted before the Civil War, and they have seen worse years than this one. One day all of this will be behind us, the trees assure me. And they are glorious right now, their last leaves lifted up in a golden hosanna.

Cheech thought we should read Jeremiah together (Jamie's thought bubble: You weigh 35 pounds, you goober; you are not a lapdog.)

Then he thought he would attend Mass:

No part of the sentence "so the dog went to virtual Mass" would have made sense in 2019, but here we are.

Sundays are Zoom chat day for my college roommates and me, which has been a pandemic silver lining. All Saints' Day is also known as Bargain Chocolate Day in this household, so the kids and I walked together to CVS to scope out the bargain chocolate offerings. I usually make a point of keeping my work email closed on Sundays, but I accidentally looked at it today and got a piece of unexpected good news: an R&R (with freakishly gentle comments from the reviewers) for paper #2 of the semester. That puts me at 3 R&Rs for my 3 submitted manuscripts, one easy revision, one average revision, one brutal (but mostly finished) revision.

We played a game of Wingspan that involved lots of laughter and a little help from the dog--

--and ordered in calzones for dinner.

But in between the board game and the calzones I talked to Alex over FaceTime. These days he is my calmest kid, the one who takes everything in stride, and he was talking about whether we might be able to make it work for him to come home for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or both. I've been assuming that this is just a non-starter -- there doesn't seem to be a safe way to manage a quick trip when we can't count on spending much time outside. And although I might be willing to risk COVID to have my family together, I feel a responsibility to help keep the numbers down instead of helping to drive them up.

I had been telling myself sensible mature things like "All large families find it harder to get everybody together for the holidays as the kids get older" and "It's one Christmas. You can handle one weird Christmas." But the idea that Alex is sad about being away from us for the holidays is like an anvil falling on my fragile good intentions. Part of me just wants to tell him, "Get on a plane! It will probably be fine!' 

Scaled up across many sad moms, though, that reaction is pretty much the direct route to things being not-at-all fine.

So here is another pandemic snapshot, I guess: glorious autumn sunshine streaming across an empty quad, the strange new normal of virtual Mass and virtual conversations, dining room table hilarity that morphs into dining room table tears-dripping-into-my-calzone. This is the weirdest year.