Light and Momentary

Old: A Manifesto

I think I raised some hackles by suggesting that women in their 50s might be old. But I propose that "old" can only be an insult in a culture that has lost its way.

Young women are valued for a few different reasons: they are viewed as more fertile, more pliant, more full of potential, and more attractive in a very specific way. Do we care about any of that stuff, my middle-aged lady friends? I suggest that we mostly don't care. Let us form a united and apathetic front about ALL that stuff (even the more-attractive-in-a-very-specific-way stuff)! Let's discuss.

Less fertile. This one has an evolutionary origin: like any animal, we're wired for attraction to probable propagators of the species. At almost-53, it is extremely unlikely that I will bear more children, but my life is many flavors of fruitful. I hope to have grandchildren sooner rather than later; I think I might make an awesome grandma. (Alex, sweetheart, are you reading this post? xoxo) But my ultimate value is not measured in the number of humans I can add to this world. I reject any suggestion that I should be ashamed or regretful about my plummeting fecundity.

Less pliant. I have opinions; I have earned them. I understand how the world works in a way I just did not when I was 22 years old. So yes, I am less pliant. I like it that way. Anyone who might have preferred the less experienced version of me is out of luck. I reject the idea that I was somehow better when I was easier to silence.

Less potential. I have fewer possibilities ahead of me now because I have been given so many good gifts: marriage, children, career. There's less potential, more actual. The omnipotentiality of youth is fleeting, and some days I miss it. But I also found it a little daunting at the time-- with so many options open to me, how could I be confident about choosing wisely? I remember feeling wistful when I read Ps. 119:45: I will walk freely in an open space. Many of the paths I considered when I was young are closed to me now, but the path before me right now is clear and I will walk it freely.

Less attractive. This is the tough one, right? This is the one that makes us think thoughts of hair dye or Botox or fillers or personal trainers or going keto or or or. And every person reading this post should OF COURSE feel free to do what works best for her. I only want to say that in every phase of my life I have reflected the image of God, and that is as certain today as it was when my forehead was unwrinkled. My aging face is telling a true story about who I am: a person with some wisdom and experience to share, a person whom time has made more trustworthy. Also: I do NOT miss getting catcalled. Bleh.

Even if it weren't impossible, I wouldn't opt to be young again. I have noticed that when I say, "Oh, she's young," the unspoken second half of the thought is generally "...and inexperienced, which is why she's doing the [dumb] thing I'm commenting on." If I talk about something that happened when I was young, I'm always emphasizing how much the world has changed since then. I was young a long time ago. I'm okay with that.

Old is the goal, because the alternative is dead. I am doing my best to steward my body and mind and soul in preparation for a healthy and happy old age, but I can't change what old age is: the age at which I will be old. I think the Proverbs 31 woman was probably about our age (the text doesn't say "she rises while it is still night because sometimes the hot flashes are Just Too Much," but a person can reasonably infer that, right?), and my favorite thing about her has always been that she laughs at the future. 

I may never own a distaff, but I am going to do my best to adopt her joyous and open-hearted outlook on the years ahead.

Way back in my archives there is a poem I wrote when I turned 37. (Birthdays have always made me a little thoughtful, I guess.) It begins like this:

I will never be any younger than I am today.
Let me never be any less patient,
Any less wise, any less kind.
Age is inexorable; growth is not.
Let me grow.

That's how it goes, isn't it? You grow, and you grow, and you grow, and you turn around and realize you've grown-- old. And what if-- (you should of course label yourself in the way that seems sensible to you but) WHAT IF-- we as a culture saw that process not as something to fight or flee or fear, but as something profoundly good and right? What then?

An underrated driver of the obesity epidemic

If you search Google Scholar for "obesity epidemic causes," you get the same tired stuff you've been hearing for years: we're eating too much hyperpalatable calorie-dense food, exercising too little, and creating a dangerous spiral as we slowly strangle our pancreatic function and bork our bodies' capacities to respond effectively to glucose in the bloodstream. Maybe you'll see some speculation about mysterious environmental factors that we don't understand. Could it be something in the water?

The thing I did not see when I searched "obesity epidemic causes" was a thing that seems painfully obvious to me after reading Intuitive Eating: our go-to remedy, a short-term fix, is exacerbating the medium-term problem. It seems plausible to me that it is significantly worsening the long-term problem. Where's the science on that?

Because it is something in the water, so to speak. Virtually every woman who is currently alive has been hearing for her entire life that maybe she would be better, happier, more pleasing to the fellas-- if only she were a little trimmer. What's on the cover of every woman's magazine? Diet advice. What does every social media algorithm serve you up reliably if you are a middle-aged woman? Diet ads.

But what if mainstream approaches to dieting are the problem, not the solution?

Something like 80% of the time, people who go on diets regain the weight they lost -- often with a few bonus pounds on top, often with a panoply of hidden changes in the hormones that regulate weight. We don't want to think it's true; we certainly don't want to think it's true for us. Because we're going to do our diet RIGHT; we are embarking on a new slim-and-trim life! And yet, statistically speaking -- take it from your friendly neighborhood PhD -- 80% of people are going to fall in the 80% of people.

If we're concerned about obesity, maybe we need to stop recommending a behavior with the potential to worsen it. If the effect of the large majority of mainstream diets is that people wind up at or above their starting point, with metabolic changes that will make it harder to lose fat in the future, it's time to consider some different ideas.

Some time ago I posted a link to Casey Johnston's mind-blowing avocado post on Instagram. If you haven't seen it, it's worth your time -- not just to glance at, but to think deeply about (she has a longer blog post here in which she tells more of her story). As a society, we are pushing women and girls toward a mode of being that is ferociously bad for them. We are telling them to eat less food than their bodies need. A 1200-calorie diet is appropriate for a small child, but it is not enough food for a grownup! Why is Noom raking in a gazillion dollars a year telling people to eat like small children? We tell women to disregard their hunger signals in the name of "self-discipline," and we normalize this to such an extent that even MEDICAL DOCTORS proclaim themselves STUMPED about why their bodies keep taking over and demanding to be fed. I read that Jen Gunter piece when it came out, and I thought, "Oh, that does sound puzzling." I read it again this year, and now it reminds me forcefully of those nights when I have fallen asleep on the couch even though I really meant to get more work done: sometimes your body says, "If you keep refusing to listen to me when I tell you what we need, I'm just going to seize the wheel." A world in which a best-selling diet book suggests that women should tape their mouths shut to keep themselves from tasting the food they're cooking is a world with some serious issues about women and food. (The book, if you are curious, is Bright Line Eating; please don't read it, because it's terrible.)

It gets worse: our most "successful" diets erode muscle, because the pace of sustainable fat loss is too slow to attract clicks and adherents. Which further slows metabolism, which makes future weight loss even harder, which makes a sizable subset of women think they need an even more extreme regimen of low calories/lots of cardio.

We know that the bodies of Biggest Loser contestants were still in "OH NO, FAMINE LOOMS!" mode six years after their bouts of unsustainable public shaming disguised as health promotion. We know much less about what it is like to be an ordinary woman in this deeply messed-up culture, one who has spent literal decades saying, "I just need to lose ten pounds. Wait, twelve. Ugh, now it's fifteen. No, twenty." It seems likely to me that as lifelong dieters approach the last third of their lives, they face a number of added risks. Their fall risk is higher because muscle protects us against falls, and waving 5-pound dumbbells around doesn't allow a person to rebuild muscle effectively. Their hip fracture risk is higher, because appropriately sized muscles are important for maintaining bone density, and because "successful" weight loss in their youth may very well have contributed to disruption of the hormonal milieu in the years when they should have been building bone. Given the morbidity/mortality stats on hip fractures, we should regard this particular risk as a hair-on-fire emergency for aging women. Aaaannnnd because rebound weight gain may lead to more visceral fat storage, which is worse for you than subcutaneous fat, they may be looking at even more health risks connected to cardiovascular disease, the #1 killer of post-menopausal women.

So if long-haul dieting has the potential to raise a woman's risk of multiple life-threatening outcomes, why are women still getting the message that we should diet? It all makes me want to stand up on a soapbox and shout: WOMEN of the WORLD, let's RECLAIM our metaphorical AVOCADOS.

Strength training has made me rethink everything I thought I knew about fitness. It started as a fun summertime thing to do with Joe, and then it changed my perspective on a bunch of stuff. After a year of not-always-diligent work, my scale tells me I am now 40% muscle. (The internet tells me that the average value for someone my age is 30%.)

On the one hand, it's pretty cool. On the other hand, I don't think you can live a half-century in this bizarro culture and not have some body-related baggage as a result. I feel a measure of ambivalence about the new shape of my body. It makes sense, on the one hand, that I would need larger shirts to accommodate the delts and lats and traps I have painstakingly built up over the past year. It does not make sense for me to (1) want to be able to do a pull-up and also (2) feel uncertain about having enough muscle to do a pull-up. 

And yet here I am.

I have also acquired some fat this year, as the avocado diagram suggested I might, and the idea of a programmed cut (planned careful fat loss for a period of time that's short enough to avert compensatory metabolic changes) doesn't sit quite right with me at this point in the process of reconfiguring my relationship with food. So I am trying to practice body acceptance after a lifetime of telling my body that its current shape was not quite acceptable to me, and it is slow. But here is one thing I know for sure: I would rather be this shape and feel at peace with the ice cream in my freezer than go back to my former certainty that I needed to avoid all sweets every day in order to keep myself from eating ALL ALL ALL the ice cream.

Maybe I don't sound like a person who is quiiiite ready to be offering advice. (I suggest Fit is a Feminist Issue and the Progressive Strength blog if you're looking for online conversations about fitness -- this post was prompted by some thoughts from Marjorie last month. And oh! How did I forget Casey Johnston's Substack?) But if I were to offer advice to women in my age range, this is what I would say: let's normalize weight-lifting for middle-aged women; let's protect ourselves from falls and fractures. Let's keep showing up to lift heavy things even though change is slow. Let's make normal eating normal again -- the kind of eating in which we listen carefully to our bodies and make choices that are both sensible and satisfying.

Maybe the heart of the message I would want to share is this: it does not make us in any way "better" to chip away at ourselves with unsustainable New! Food! Strategies! that boil down to "eat less food than you actually need." No one is "better" because there is less of her. Oh, my friends, let's be less afraid to take up space.

Where we go from here

Today I asked a person interviewing for a job at Gladlyville U what kinds of changes she envisioned in higher ed as a result of the pandemic, and she pretty much brushed off the question. But I have been thinking a lot about this question, and I am going to muse in your direction about it for a bit here.

We have offered students a lot of flexibility over the past two years. We have wanted to treat them humanely, compassionately, as they go through something unprecedented. It was the right thing to do, and they appreciated that flexibility. And now...I'm ready to be a bit less flexible again. If I put a due date in the syllabus and I remind you about the due date in person and you write to me to say, "I did not know if the thing would be due because it was snowing," I am going to have a facepalm moment before I reply politely to say that the posted due date was in fact the date the thing was due. It used to be a big part of our department culture that dates and deadlines mattered, and I would like to move in that direction again.

It is not a massive colossal hassle to allow students to attend via Zoom, but it's definitely a hassle; there are a lot of things to think about if I'm going to make a class work in two formats at the same time. Students have seized enthusiastically upon the idea that there are alternatives to attending class in person. I am ready for fewer alternatives. I'm tired of having in-class work submitted in multiple formats (sometimes on multiple days). It's not totally unreasonable for a group of students to ask me if I would record class for them on a day that they're attending another university's grad school open house, but it is not a request they would have made two years ago. (Oh, and would you like to hear about the student who ANSWERED A FACETIME CALL DURING CLASS yesterday? Because that is a thing that happened, and I attribute it at least in part to shifting norms.)

Our enrollment is up, which is both a good thing and a problem. My undergrad classes are >50% larger than they are supposed to be. One of them is a writing class. This, my friends, creates some difficulties. I cannot give thoughtful feedback on student writing if they have packed the class with 75% more students than it is supposed to contain. Can't do it. I think we have to decide: are we going to chase the tuition dollars, or protect the original purpose of the class? It has to be one or the other.

We can't just dust off our hands and declare that we're done with pandemic flexibility RIGHT NOW, any more than we can dust off our hands and declare that we're done with the pandemic. I can imagine that well-intentioned people will come down on different sides of questions like "Where does higher ed go from here?" If one of the most important things about higher ed is making strong connections in a classroom, maybe we push back harder against adjunctification. If one of the most important things about higher ed is ensuring access for all kinds of learners, maybe we put more energy into making technology more available to more people.

I do not have a road map for the next phase of the pandemic, any more than I have had a road map for the past two years. But I am tired. And I have a lot of questions.

A Cautious Defense of Ezekiel Emanuel

Ezekiel Emanuel is getting a lot of hate these days, ostensibly for an article he wrote for The Atlantic six years ago, but really, I think, because outrage is contagious and reading long-form articles requires effort. Do I like the ableism and the utilitarianism in that article? No, I do not. Is it appropriate for people to be freaking out because a EUTHANASIA ADVOCATE has been appointed to the COVID PANEL and it is MORE PROOF that Biden worships Satan?

No. No, it is not.

To my eye, that article is an exhortation to think seriously about your own preferences for end-of-life care, and to have the hard conversations up front with your loved ones. It is a distortion of Catholic teaching to suggest that maximum lifespan should be the goal in managing end-of-life care. If an 80-year-old woman is diagnosed with advanced cancer, she can absolutely refuse the chemo that might give her three more months of retching and brain fog. If I get seriously ill with COVID, I want to be treated aggressively. I have a lot of living left to do. But I might be less willing to be mechanically ventilated if I were 25 years older -- it's hard on anybody to be intubated, it's especially hard on elderly people, and the last time I looked at the numbers on post-extubation recovery for elderly COVID patients, they weren't very encouraging. I'm not obligated to consent to a highly invasive treatment that's not very likely to help.

Far too often, this kind of risk-benefit analysis turns into accusations about DEATH PANELS and KILLING GRANDMA (although, weirdly, many of the people who were yammering the loudest about DEATH PANELS in 2008 are now loudly asserting that Grandma's had a good run so let's protect the economy). Let me be clear: direct action to end a patient's life is gravely immoral. But Emanuel seems to agree with me about that: he says, "Since the 1990s, I have actively opposed legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide."

Making good decisions about end-of-life care is hard work, and we often do a rotten job of it in this country. I cannot say enough good things about Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, which treats many of the same questions Emanuel considers in his article. (Seriously, read it. One of the best books I've read in the last ten years. The usual reminder applies: if you click my affiliate link and purchase the book, Amazon will pay me a few cents.) When I worked in long-term care facilities, I was often a part of these conversations: your mom is dying, and she can't eat safely, so let's talk about the options. This stuff is never going to be easy, but it is a whole lot more straightforward if the family is in agreement and confident that their decisions align with their loved one's wishes. If the loved one has just had a massive stroke and you can't tell whether they're asking for water or quiet or a bedpan, it's significantly more complicated to have a conversation about DNR orders.

It is a core truth of our faith that we cannot be ruled by fear of bodily death. We see this in the writings of St. Paul, looking with equanimity at his prospects of living and dying. It's kind of weird that St. Francis called death our sister, but I am not going to argue with him about it. It seems very odd to 21st-century eyes that the Mother Superior at the Carmel in Lisieux required St. Thérèse to forgo pain medication, but it is another piece of evidence that refusing medical treatment is compatible with living a holy life. We cannot deliberately speed death's arrival, but we don't always have to fend it off vociferously.

I dislike much of the reasoning that undergirds Emanuel's thinking. His distaste for disability is problematic, for one. (Although-- he is making an excellent point when he writes about how seldom people understand that disability can be an unexpected side effect of medical treatment. We want to believe that a recommended treatment will make us all better. Sometimes it makes us worse.) His emphasis on productivity as a metric of human worth is also problematic; my value as a human being is unrelated to the number of papers I wind up publishing. But his conclusions seem correct to me: end-of-life care in this country is a mess, and we can make it better by approaching it thoughtfully. Furthermore, he is not saying that his decisions should be your decisions. He says explicitly that he provides concrete assistance and emotional support to elderly people who want to pursue medical treatment that he would decline for himself. I think we do him an injustice when we assume that his thoughts in a personal essay will translate into egregious policy errors. There is nothing in this essay that makes me think he will be sneaking into hospitals, holding pillows over the faces of elderly COVID patients in order to free up intensive care beds for younger people.

When it was just people ranting on Facebook about the evils of this appointment, I wasn't too fussed. But today America published an article that I find weirdly alarmist. I was braced for the worst when Emanuel started talking about policy recommendations in his Atlantic article, but I'm 100% comfortable with his policy recommendations. He suggests that we rethink our emphasis on lifespan as a metric of healthcare quality, and that we put more money into researching the disabling conditions that affect the elderly, such as Alzheimer's.

I am open to other perspectives here, but I do think that if a person says, "I have reached this conclusion about my own personal decisions, but other people are welcome to conclude differently," we should not infer that he is SECRETLY PLOTTING to MAKE everyone do what he would do for himself. If he has other published writings I should know about, I'd be happy to read them. (I'll let you know up front that I don't think being more deliberate about end-of-life healthcare spending is evil, as implied by the America writer.) If your work with dying patients is more recent than mine (I haven't worked in long-term care since 2003), I'd be very interested in your point of view. If you just want to share some thoughts about end-of-life decision-making, I'd love to hear from you too. [Wonders briefly if it's a bad idea to write about euthanasia on the internet; pushes "publish" anyway...]

Gracefully

It's easy for me to see the loveliness of God's design at the beginning of the lifespan. Those patches of hair at a newborn's temples, the ones that fade away mysteriously within a couple of weeks? I love those. The variations in baby coiffures, the way that some of them are born with full heads of hair and some stay bald for a good long while? I love those. Three of my kids lost all the hair on the tops of their heads at 26 days old -- like, whoosh, scissors-free tonsure on day 27. Weird, right? But after the first one it also felt to me like an identity badge: here I am, bald and vulnerable and entirely yours.

I have a harder time seeing the loveliness of God's design further on. It's the same idea, right? Some of us saw our first gray hair at 25; some of us are catching up more slowly. Some of us (okay, this one is me) have, like, the Eyebrows of Dorian Gray. I don't have much gray hair on my scalp, but my eyebrows bespeak the hard-living years of my youth. Or something like that. I believe that gray hair can be a crown of glory but maybe, just possibly, my coronation could take place a little further in the future.

One of my friends messaged me tonight, feeling that she ought to accept the gray gracefully but also not feeling at all graceful about it. And you know, there's something to be said for pushing back against the cultural message that gray hair means it's time for a woman to be put out to pasture, but also we need to tackle that message on fronts that transcend the tonsorial. Like, perhaps the beast of burden imagery is a bigger problem than the chemicals or the vanity or the support of the beauty industry. Perhaps the core issue is a culture that equates aging men with bottles of wine (they improve with age), and aging women with cartons of milk. (After their sell-by dates they get lumpy and sour.)

"I support you in dyeing or graying!" is what I told my friend, and I guess I wanted to tell you that too. We live in a time and place where we're mostly expected to modify our bodies to meet a cultural standard: trim our split ends, depilate our pits, don our anti-gravity undergarments when we go out in public. (Some people just call them bras but it's more fun if you can shout TO INFINITY AND BEYOND when you get dressed in the morning.) There's no intrinsic virtue in conforming to or rejecting any of those standards; the same is true for dyeing and graying.

But here is the thing I wish for you, my friends: I wish that you would take a deep breath and think back to when you held a sleeping baby dear to you and admired the whorl of hair at the crown of her head. Remember the rush of affection you felt as you looked at your own particular baby's very particular hair? I think that God our Father looks at us with the same affection as we trudge through our 30s and 40s and 50s-- viewing the sprinkling of gray at your temples, and the silver strands highlighting my pal Veronica's dark curls -- and also my Dorian Gray Eyebrows -- with tender love and with his everlasting appreciation of variety.

In which I wonder about Wonder

Hollywood is hoping that many of us will see Wonder this weekend, its adaptation of a YA novel about a kid with a severe cranofacial anomaly. R.J. Palacio has said that her inspiration for the novel was her own clumsy response to a child with a craniofacial anomaly, and in the novel her main character, Auggie, seems to have something like a severe form of Treacher Collins syndrome. (Go look. Scroll down. I'll wait.)

Predictably but also vexingly, the makers of the movie version of Wonder have buffed up their hero, choosing to use an actor wearing a mask that creates the appearance of mild facial differences. Be kind, they exhort us. And hey, I'm all for kindness. I was just blogging about how kindness would be front and center in my life motto if I had one. But this, my friends, strikes me as cheap kindness.

Hollywood has long made movies that reflect distorted ideas about the range of normal in the human form. Remember The Truth About Cats and Dogs, in which Janeane Garofalo was the plain one? Remember Frankie and Johnny, in which the woman who defined herself by her unattractiveness was played by...Michelle Freaking Pfeiffer? The Hollywood range of normal bottoms out at approximately the 90th percentile for attractiveness. This means that 90 percent of the women in America are carrying around baggage about having sub-normal looks, because women who look them don't appear on the big screen. But oooooh, it makes me sad that the people behind this movie had the opportunity to allow kids with facial disfigurements to see themselves represented, and they opted not to do so.

Humans are wired to notice subtle differences in facial structure. When you first learn about the features that define dysmorphia, you feel a little skeptical-- like, come on, is it a big deal to have the spacing between your eyes be outside the normal range by an eighth of an inch? And yet even minor differences leave kids more vulnerable to bullying. Earlier this week I was reminded of how forceful an instinctive response can be when a child with a particularly severe facial disfigurement popped up in my Twitter feed. I've served on a cleft lip and palate team; I've taught units on craniofacial anomalies ten times now. I know better than to flinch and look away, and still I flinched and looked away. If Auggie's problems were mild, we could chalk up his difficulties to the mean people around him. Isn't it awesome that we in the audience are better than that? Hurray for kindness! Kindness all around! The decision to feature a child actor who can remove his mask at will obscures the enduring complexity of the issues faced by people with severe disfigurements. I would like to register my objections.

It shouldn't surprise me that they went this route, I suppose. Movies are notorious for slapping quick and easy solutions on top of complex and enduring problems. Substance abuse? Have yourself a quick epiphany and visit a few AA meetings. Past trauma? Good thing your new love interest is such a good listener -- you'll be fixed by the time the credits roll. Reality is inevitably more difficult and complicated.

My biggest criticism of Hollywood is not that all of the women my age have preternaturally smooth foreheads, while mine carries the marks of 47 years' worth of worry and surprise. My biggest criticism is that Hollywood does goodness badly. Remember the creepiness of movie-Galadriel contemplating Frodo's offer of the ring? Or movie-Prince Caspian's willingness to contemplate a deal with the villains? True goodness is thin on the ground in Hollywood movies, as if might be too sappy or predictable. In reality, true goodness is an unexpected and hopeful beacon. Every flavor of true goodness arises from God who is truth and goodness, who looks at us with tender love despite our flaws.

--Oh, man, it's after 11, and I have so many things to cook tomorrow, and this post could use some editing but NaBloPoMo stands nearby tapping its watch. Here's what it boils down to. A buffed and polished movie-Auggie undercuts the gravity of the difficulties faced by kids like novel-Auggie. In doing so it denies us an opportunity to see the truth that matters most: love is still bigger than those difficulties.

On fire

In the town where I grew up a woman caught fire last month.

I say this as if she spontaneously combusted, a Mrs. Krook among her mysterious papers. This is the real story: she loved a man. He set her on fire. He tried to burn her children alive too.

She spent almost three weeks in the hospital, burns covering 70% of her body, and then she died last night.

I don't know her, but I know several of the people who are grieving her death. I clicked through to her Facebook page to see if she was one of the Belindas I knew in high school. There she is alive and smiling, enthusiastic about the fiancé who was just about to set her on fire.

**

My best friend from sixth grade lived with her mom after the divorce; they moved to an apartment far from our subdivision. The mom's new boyfriend was bad news, but she couldn't seem to break things off. I got a letter from my friend when I was 13: they had packed up suddenly and driven off to Iowa to live with family. The plan was to get away from the boyfriend who wouldn't stop drinking, even though drinking made him lose control of his temper and his fists. "Mom got tired of getting beat up every time he got drunk," she wrote. I hadn't known. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

**

In junior high I met a girl named Ruth. She and I were never close friends, but we had close friends in common. She moved away from West Virginia; she moved in with a boyfriend when we were still in high school. It's been more than 30 years since he killed her with a shotgun, but I'll never forget the way her best friend Linda wept over the news. "I told her he was trouble," she said. "I told her."

**

I was thinking about domestic violence as a plague on West Virginia in particular, but then I remembered a conversation with a dear friend here in Gladlyville. "I need to tell someone what happened," she said, and her story came bursting out. She asked me to help her in a small way with getting free. Yes, OF COURSE, I said. It took her a couple of tries, though, to make the final break.

**

I didn't know until I looked it up that half of murdered women are killed by intimate partners. I didn't know until recently about the connection between domestic violence and mass shootings.

Even across the course of our marriage the culture has changed. Do people still laugh about Ralph Kramden telling Alice she's going to get it one of these days? We've moved away from settling conflicts with fists on playgrounds and in bars. And yet we still live in a world where a man can get into an argument with his fiancée, and settle it by dousing her in gasoline and lighting a match.

Advice about advice

Dear Captain Awkward, 

I don't know how many of your readers are committed Catholic moms of many, but I suspect that the sliver is small. When you write about how a person can navigate a relationship with someone who used to be partnered with his polyamorous boss before she realized that she actually needed monogamy only now she's questioning again whether she might want to open things up and could they consider a threesome with the boss? -- in those situations I acknowledge that I'm out of my depth. (Though my short answer would be: run away. Just say no to the threesome with the boss.) But that letter you just answered, about the couple who shared a strong Catholic identity when they were married, only now the wife is an atheist afraid of becoming pregnant? That's a situation where I'd encourage you to take a broader perspective.

One of the things I appreciate about your site, Captain, is your ability to see the big picture: to recognize how mental health issues can color the whole landscape of a life, to think about ways that work problems can be partially addressed by non-work solutions. In this case, though, I think you've narrowed your focus too far, as if acquisition of an IUD (an Internal Un-angrifying Device?) will solve the problem for the letter-writer (the LW, as the Awkwardeers say). In almost 24 years as a married Catholic, I've heard from a lot of people who were unhappy with NFP. But NFP, in my experience, is only ever one piece of the puzzle.

In this case, I'm wondering about the LW's postpartum mental health. While the hazards of internet mental health diagnoses are legion, I have to say that I hope she's been screened for postpartum depression and anxiety. I hope she's taking good care of herself; I hope she's keeping in mind that pregnancies in rapid succession can deplete maternal stores of long-chain fatty acids like DHA. Babies need them for building brains, but moms need them too to help them stay on an even keel. An IUD will not address the reality that it is just plain hard to care for a passel of young kids.

Usually you have a lot to say about the importance of social connections, but you didn't really tackle that this time beyond "a friend could drive you to the clinic to get your IUD." I wonder if the LW, as a stay-at-home mom who has recently decided to leave her religious community, is feeling isolated. There's a lot of overlap between people with big families and people with strong religious beliefs, and that could make it hard for her to find mom connections who get the demands of her day-to-day life and also accept her newfound convictions. I met a ton of non-religious moms with large families through La Leche League, and it was invaluable for me to be connected to women who could help me see the many good things in my chaotic life even as they sympathized with the "but chaotic! so chaotic!" part.

Here begins the section where you might think I'm a loon, Captain, but I want to encourage you to learn a little more about NFP. It's not a single ineffective strategy for spacing babies; it's a collection of methods. Some of them work better than others in an empirical sense (for instance, anything that's based on cycle history rather than current observations is going to have lower method effectiveness). Some of them work better for some couples than other couples (for instance, some women are wigged out by the idea of monitoring daily cervical changes). I myself am a fan of the sympto-thermal method. I mention this for two reasons. One is for the LW's benefit specifically: she didn't say that she objected to the abstinence required by NFP, but to its perceived ineffectiveness. A different form of NFP could offer a straightforward solution for this couple: she doesn't get pregnant, and he doesn't acquiesce to a decision that clearly feels wrong to him.

Here's the second reason, Captain: your response propagates a myth that I find destructive. There's this prevailing idea-- women's fertility is a sneaky beast that can only be wrangled into submission by Big Pharma with perhaps a side of surgery. The idea that women could observe what their bodies are telling them, and use the information accordingly to make reproductive decisions -- that idea is 100% compatible with feminist principles (more so, I would argue, than the narrative in which fertility must be subdued despite the economic and environmental costs of doing so), and yet it strikes many feminists as preposterous. I learned NFP in 1993 in obedience to the Catholic hierarchy, and it has been one of the most empowering decisions I ever made. I don't lose my ability to plan my family if I lose my insurance coverage, or my job, or if the Comstock laws return. No one can ever take that knowledge from me. Thanks, Papa!

Finally, Captain, there's one more thing. You were pretty hard on the LW's husband. And I can see how your point of view would lead you to be hard on him: in the version of the story where LARC access is an absolute requirement for optimal management of women's health, then the husband is being cavalier about his wife's well-being. As I've mentioned already, though, I reject the idea that optimal management of women's health absolutely requires us to medicate a healthy functioning system into inactivity. In my view of the world, that fuels the Women Are Inconvenient And Also, If You Think About It, Kind of Broken crap that is pretty much a hallmark of any flavor of misogyny. I am confident that fertility does not make me inconvenient or broken; fertility is awesome, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. I'm coming from a perspective in which fertility is regarded as a shared gift, and decisions about fertility as a shared responsibility. If someone is looking through that lens, unilateral and potentially irreversible decisions about contraception are highly problematic. Imagine that on my wedding day my husband said, "Here, I've got this $20K inheritance* and now it belongs to both of us. Someday we'll use it to buy a house together." Ten years later, if he said, "Oh, you know, actually I'm giving that money to the NRA and there's nothing you can do about it," I would feel betrayed. Sucker-punched. Lied to. I want to suggest, gently, that the husband deserves more of a voice in this conversation than you are inclined to accord him. (We can certainly agree, 100% super-agree, that he has his work cut out for him. In addition to better decision-making skills, he might also benefit from further catechesis.) I want to mention, gently, that lately I've been talking to a friend who felt bullied into sterilization years ago and is still grappling with regrets. The short-term fix -- let's make sure you don't get pregnant with a 4-month-old -- should also support the long-term fix -- where is your marriage going, and how can you work together to get there?

*The inheritance my husband actually brought to our marriage was a 15-year-old Dodge Aspen.

I would bet that the husband is not in great shape himself right now. Your response didn't really address the issues that come up when people think about leaving behind the faith that's shaped their identities-- the loss of certainty, solace, community, and more. I would be devastated if my husband announced that he had become an atheist. It would be hard for me to make good decisions with him until I had processed the change. And it would be pretty hard for me to process the change if I had four little kids and we were both chronically sleep-deprived.

I've read plenty of online I HATE NFP stories in which commenters have one-remedy-fits-all responses. Sometimes they're certain, as you are, that the Pill hath charms to soothe the savage ovaries. Sometimes they're certain that a better prayer life is the golden key. I'm suggesting that there might not be a single golden key here. And because you're usually on top of the fact that relationship problems often require complex solutions, I wanted to mention -- again, gently -- that I think a bigger-picture response is in order. I appreciate your concern for this woman in distress. Thanks for considering my point of view.

Yours awkwardly,
Jamie

Blessed are the affluent

The thing I never even suspected about Catholic high school is how it would shape my kids' ideas about money. You know who sends their kids to Catholic high school? It's mostly people with disposable income. To be more specific, according to my oldest son, it's a bunch of rich white people who all live in the same two subdivisions. Is that a comprehensive demographic report on the Gladlyville Catholic high school? Of course not. Do people nod ruefully when they hear it? Yes, they do.

It started in small ways, with a kid saying, "I cannot take that phone to school." It comes up routinely. "Everybody I know went to a different state for spring break." 

The first person I knew in town who sent her kids to Catholic school talked regularly about feeling the pinch. Nursing an old car through yet another repair, delaying the purchase of a larger house. "We never go on vacation," she said. "We have kids in Catholic school." I hear it from other families with kids at the parish grade school as well. But that kind of budgetary caution doesn't seem to be the norm among the families who send their kids to the Catholic high school.

The letter of James says that the love of money is the root of all evil. That sounds like a wacky assertion these days, but I believe it's true. It's all over the news in recent weeks. I'm seeing it in Martin Chuzzlewit, which prefigures Bleak House in its decrial of those who would rather have an inheritance than a living testator. It was clear in the chunk of Mark's gospel I read this morning: How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! In response the disciples said LOL WUT (the Millennials Translation, natch), so Jesus had to tell them again.

His disciples are still saying LOL WUT here in the third millennium.

I think it's hard to teach the universality of the church in a homogenous environment. It's hard to teach preferential love for the poor when a majority of school families are in the top income quintile. I am still troubled -- so troubled that I don't see us sending the younger kids there -- by the stories I hear about partisan identity trumping* Catholic identity.

*no pun intended

Poverty is the first of the evangelical counsels (joined by chastity and obedience) for a reason. When a person has plenty of money, it can be a bulwark that causes her to lose sight of the truth: God alone is our refuge and strength. When wealth is normal, it reorders kids' priorities. (And adults' priorities too.) When privilege becomes something a person thinks she deserves instead of something for which she should be humbly grateful, it warps the lenses through which she views the world.

I'm not sure it does much good to ask for our eyes to be enlightened if we're going to insist on wearing the wrong glasses.

The Surly Bonds

In the fall of my sophomore year of college I registered for an honors physics class. I had to get permission to take an overload, and then shortly afterward I was too overwhelmed to manage it. I wound up dropping the class to carry the usual number of credits, thinking I'd pick it up again in another term. Elwood's best friend brought it up at a party shortly after the drop deadline. "I should have known a girl couldn't handle honors physics," he said unkindly. "I can handle honors physics," I told him. He was unconvinced, and unpleasant about his unconvinced-ness. After some back and forth I took hold of his shirt's collar, pulling it slightly away from his body. I took my plastic cup full of beer and poured the entire thing down the funnel I had created.

Gravity in action, baby.

Except at at the time I was not AT ALL flippant about it. I was so ashamed of myself. I had lost my cool; I had been rude to my boyfriend's best friend; I had confirmed his stereotype that women ("girls") were unpredictable and other.

In high school I thought I wanted to be an engineer. In my eighth-grade physical science textbook I read a sidebar of Newton's laws and -- this sounds implausible but it is true -- it was like a religious experience. They spoke to me of a God of order, of a fundamentally comprehensible world. It was as if a bright light had clicked on inside my head, and all that day I basked in its glow. I remember playing with numbers as a 13-year-old, wondering why squares were separated by consecutive odd numbers. When I got to high school I started competing with the math team, which was both joyful and terrifying. I hadn't known until then that I could be good at math. 

In my memories of the beer-bath incident, there is an odd lacuna. I remember apologizing profusely. I have a vague memory of his saying something like, "Yeah, sorry I was rude." But I do not recall any apology for the sexism-- only for the failure to be politely sexist. It was not strange, in 1988, for a man to assert that my chromosomes left me incapable of taking honors physics. (P.S. I re-registered for honors physics two years later, when I was not carrying an overload. It went fine, TYVM.)

This is on my mind because I went to see Hidden Figures today. It made me cry an improbable number of times. I was also a girl from West Virginia who loved math and science in a world often skeptical of my capacity to handle math and science. And yet I only know one slice of the frustrations the movie describes. The racism is painful to see, but the women keep pushing back against it. It's exhausting and beautiful. I loved the glimpses of their families and their community, the things that sustain them in a workplace -- and a wider world -- where everyone in a position of power is white. (That Paul Stafford character? I should maybe not be trusted around him with a beer in hand, I'm just saying.)

There's a tense scene while John Glenn is in flight, and even though I knew how the story would end I was still biting my nails. John Glenn got to be considered a hero because he did something hard and uncertain. And also -- this part never dawned on me before today -- John Glenn got to be a hero because of an army of smart people, all striving to do something that had never been done before. It put me in mind of that prayer I love from St. Thomas Aquinas, the one that talks about God calling us out of the double darkness of sin and ignorance. This is one of the things I am most grateful for about the Catholic Church: her certainty that we can glorify God by dispelling ignorance. And oh-- when we do! When John Glenn soared above the earth I cried again, because it reminded me that human effort and determination can lead to glorious freedom. The movie makes it clear just how hard it was to put a person into space and bring him back again. The fruit of their brainpower and his bravery was that fantastic flight; their joint efforts allowed him to tread the high untrespassed sanctity of space.

It would have been so easy for the women in Hidden Figures to quit, but they persevered. I am still thinking about the laborious, repetitive nature of Katherine Johnson's work-- calculating and re-calculating trajectories by hand. Tomorrow morning I have some number-crunching at the top of my to-do list. I will sit down at my desk and fire up R and tell it to give me a batch of standardized residuals so I can see how well they perform in a different set of models. I am...a little weak in the knees at the prospect of doing that by hand, and yet Katherine Johnson spent her days immersed in much more complex equations. Coincidentally, this project has a racial justice focus. I am collaborating with someone whose research focuses specifically on the problem of over-identification of African-American kids as impaired, and their under-identification as gifted. We are looking at results for a tool that could help schools to get it right more often. 

And so tomorrow as I sift through my models, I will remember those gifted girls who grew into gifted women. I will be grateful for the progress we've made since 1961, and grateful for the opportunity to work as a woman scientist in a department full of woman scientists, with a woman scientist as my boss. I do not know how much of an impact this work will have against the enormous ugly hydra of racism, but I will do my bit and hope for the best. Because I may never travel into space, but at its very best moments my work, too, allows me to put out my hand and touch the face of God.

The least of these

Voices on the left have been protesting vociferously against Myron Ebell, Trump's pick to lead the EPA transition team. Here's the thing: Ebell also presents grave concerns from a pro-life perspective. Ebell pooh-poohs the substantial body of work linking environmental toxicants to human health effects -- which include fetal anomalies as well as increased rates of miscarriage and fetal demise. Here's the reality: increased toxin exposure is clearly associated with increased rates of fetal anomalies, and fetal anomalies are a primary driver of late abortions. The EPA is thus in a position to reduce the demand for abortions. Which is a goal deserving of bipartisan support, am I right?

You may already be aware that Ebell heads up the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Center for Energy and Environment. CEI runs a website called Safe Chemical Policy (no link love here), a site in which every single page contains more astonishing assertions. Honeybees aren't dying off in alarming numbers. Banning PBDEs will kill children -- they'll be burned alive, one assumes. Pesticide regulations present a greater threat to public health than pesticides themselves.

The impact of environmental toxicants on gestating babies has been a topic close to my heart since 2002, when I first encountered ecologist Sandra Steingraber's work while 6 months pregnant with Joe. It is impossible to read the history of now-regulated environmental toxins (lead and mercury, in particular) without being enraged by the blindness of industry to the avoidable sufferings of small children and their families. If we care about babies, born or unborn, we cannot have an industry apologist calling the shots at the EPA.

You guys, good science is hard. It is made harder by the myriad competing interests at work. If you google "atrazine miscarriage," one of the first results is a systematic review denying any link between atrazine and adverse pregnancy outcomes. Because I study breastfeeding, I've read enough industry-funded abstracts to spot them at a hundred yards. When I clicked on the "author info" link, I was unsurprised to learn that the paper was funded by a grant from Syngenta -- atrazine's maker. Let me say it again: good science is really hard, and the relationship between environmental toxins and fetal outcomes is multifaceted. We need to figure out how we can best manage Zika, for instance, while balancing the risks of the virus and the risks of insecticides. Someone whose entire approach to science is based on cherry-picking and hand-waving and, above all, industry-protecting -- that person is the wrong man for the job.

I cannot overstate how important it is for us to remember that our decisions about the environment in 2016 can cast a long shadow, affecting babies -- born and unborn -- into the next century. I live in a house built in 1923, the decade in which representatives of the lead industry lied to Congress about the impact of lead paint on children's brains. It's not that eating paint makes children stupid, they said; it's that stupid children eat lead paint. Ninety-three years later, I am still dealing with the fallout: getting preparation and cleanup protocols written into every contract with painters, policing footwear and hand-washing to minimize the impact of the lead-contaminated soil that surrounds my home. While scrubbing surfaces I have often wondered: how much damage could Congress have averted if they had done the right thing in the 1920s? Let's not be so foolish again.

The idea of the EPA director as a pro-life champion is an unusual one, I know, so let me sum up my logic once more: many environmental toxins disrupt embryonic development, and disrupted embryonic development is a significant contributor to late-term abortion rates. The pro-life choice is clear: not Myron Ebell.

Poverty and Privilege

In 1997 we were a family of 3. Together my husband and I earned something like $13,500 for the year, $200 above the figure in the HHS poverty guidelines for 1997. Elwood brought home $1188 per month, 11 months out of the year, as a doctoral student. I really really really wanted to be with my new baby full time, and I mostly was. I worked a few hours here and there, about which more below.

It was not easy to live on $1200 a month, even in 1997. When I told you about baby Alex's garage-sale clothes earlier this month, I did not mention that virtually all of his clothes were garage-sale clothes. He was well into toddlerhood before I went to Target and bought him a shirt that had actual tags on it.

We ate pots and pots of lentils that year, because lentils cost 44 cents a pound on sale. At Christmas I gave the same gift to my two vegetarian sisters-in-law: two bags each of lentils (red and green, natch, because nothing says festive like a bag of cheap dried legumes) accompanied by a homemade recipe book filled with all my newly discovered lentil dishes. That year I needed to figure out Christmas gifts that cost <$3 apiece.

The experience of living near the poverty line shaped me in ways I did not anticipate. It refashioned the way I thought about healthcare and it challenged prejudices I hadn't even known were there. But only recently have I thought about the ways in which privilege buffered us during the years that we were living on a shoestring.

One key to staying solvent was that we lived in a small rental house in a crummy neighborhood. The day I watched a drug deal go down in our driveway I trembled and wondered if we were doing the right thing. I did not know -- I mean, I had NO idea -- how much my race influenced the interactions I had with the police in that mostly black part of town.

Another key to staying afloat was that we drove a butterscotch yellow 1978 Dodge Aspen, handed down from my grandmother-in-law. (In case you weren't driving in 1997, a 19-year-old car was, like, a centenarian car in those days. Doddering, palsied, slightly eccentric.) I remember feeling a little embarrassed about that car, and trying to overcome the embarrassment because I knew better. I don't remember much awareness of how lucky we were to have someone give us a well-maintained car. When its head gasket blew in December of 1997, my parents were able to lend us the car my brother wasn't using at college, and another doc student let us store the Aspen at his house until he could teach Elwood how to tackle the lengthy and complicated repair. More privilege (parents with a spare car), more connections (a grad student friend with tools, space, expertise).

I took Alex to public health for most of his well-child exams, because when I left my job our health insurance went from a BMW plan to a Yugo plan, and then eventually to a rusted-out moped plan. I remember so vividly the incompetence and contempt of the nurse practitioner who examined him there. I remember my astonishment that she did not understand the anatomy of a middle ear infection (in! a! pediatric! clinic!) and my anger at her immediate escalation to unwarranted scare tactics when I asked about treatment options. I still wonder whether she treated all of her patients so scornfully, or if she wasn't used to pushback on her (wrongheaded) recommendations. I do not remember whether I understood the privilege that allowed me to seek follow-up care at the outpatient clinic where I had worked before Alex was born, and to have my ruffled feathers smoothed by a thoughtful doctor who knew me as a fellow healthcare professional.

I did not see how lucky I was when my MA advisor called me up out of the blue to ask if I would work part-time at home for him: flexible hours, $20 an hour. I did not fully appreciate the gift of an allied health credential-- my ticket to flexible part-time well-paid work. I was poor that year, yes, but I was poor by choice. I knew it was a temporary kind of poor.

I remember that I really did not want to ask family for help, but I don't remember seeing how much help they were already giving us: the showers that welcomed the first grandbaby on both sides, the plane tickets from my frequent-flyer mom that allowed Alex and me to visit her without making the trek in our senescent Aspen, the checks they picked up and the gifts they gave us when we were together.

I've been thinking about all this because in the wake of the election I've been thinking so much about the experiences of Americans living near the poverty line. I remember feeling proud that we survived those days without racking up any debt, but I did not see how unrepresentative our experience was. It wasn't until I lived in Scotland that I appreciated how different foreign residency is from tourism. It took me years to realize that I had only been a poverty tourist. It's not my place to tell the residents how to live.

These days it takes us a lot less than a year to earn $13,500. If my 1997 self could see our current monthly savings:income ratio, she would wonder where we had gone off the rails. (Dear 1997 Jamie, don't worry; you haven't started gold-plating the non-existent elevators in your home. It's just that you have two kids in Catholic high school and one in college. And you're feeding teenagers, who will only eat so many lentils before they mutiny.) I don't ever want to forget the worry that plagued me during that year when we had so little margin. And as we lurch closer to plutocracy in this country, I hope that all of us in the middle class can remember: we don't even know what we don't know about life with no margin.

Sore Losers

Those of us who opposed Trump's candidacy are hearing that we should move on already. And hey, I've moved on plenty of times before now. I've backed more losers than winners in the eight presidential elections I've had the privilege of voting in, and I've always acknowledged the will of the people and the value of a free and fair election. (I did lament on GWB's second inauguration day, but it was a polite lament.)

This is different.

I do not apologize for holding the leader of the free world to a high standard. I do not apologize for recognizing the plain truth that Donald J. Trump fails to meet that standard. I do not apologize for expecting the president of the United States to be a person who is, at a minimum, reasonably truthful and reasonably capable of putting a coherent sentence together.

I will not back down from my assertion that someone who has not managed to learn by age 70 that adults don't talk about genitals in the public sphere -- either the size of their own or the grab-ability of someone else's -- is unfit for polite society, let alone the highest office in the land. I will never rest easy about the judgment of a man whose only metric for evaluating women is how hot they are. (I can hardly wait to hear what Angela Merkel will say when Trump comments on her derriere.)

For those of us who said #neverTrump there is a bit of a balancing act here: we must deplore violence (I do) and support the peaceful transfer of power (I do) while also steadfastly refusing to normalize this gravely abnormal election (I'm going to do that too). I have an obligation to show respect for civil authority. But I have no obligation -- quite the reverse, I would argue -- to pretend I don't notice when someone seems untethered from reality.

It is not normal human behavior to assert repeatedly that you never said something that you actually said on video. If I talked to the family of someone who did so while also demonstrating paranoid and vengeful behavior, I would recommend that they take him immediately to a neuropsychologist for a thorough evaluation. Instead he is taking his family to the White House. This concerns me.

We cannot explain this away. We can certainly hope that his presidency is not marked by the volatility and the -- I can't think of another word here -- the lunacy that made his candidacy so singular. There has been a movement throughout his campaign to explain away his errors in judgment. I will not link to the Catholics4Trump page that asserts he wasn't really mocking a disabled reporter (he was just gesturing, they assure us), but it crossed and re-crossed my Facebook feed. I decline to accept their justification for his clearly aberrant behavior. And let me be very clear: I do not apologize for doing so. 

I am not the sort of sore loser who is going to set anything on fire or even swear at anybody. But in a narrow sense I am a sore loser: I have been heartsore since Hillary Clinton lost this election.

I do not apologize for that either.

This whole "sore losers" thing was most prominent in the Twitter feed of someone with whom I've had friendly email exchanges in the past, someone who expressed skepticism about the upwelling of violence against marginalized groups in the wake of Trump's election. (Do you follow Miriel on Twitter, by the way? She has been on fire about this election and its impact.) I didn't go to the rally on campus Wednesday because I am a bad sport. I went because I wanted to hear what minority students in my community were saying about their lives-- to say "I support you" with my presence.

This is not about partisanship. I would have had concerns about a President Cruz or a President Rubio, but I would not have quailed at the prospect of giving them the nuclear codes. I still believe in the will of the people and the value of a free and fair election. I have a duty to support the peaceful transfer of power. But I also have a duty as a citizen of this country to respond with vigilance to anything that threatens its well-being. And one of those threats, I fear, is about to occupy the Oval Office.

The courage to do the things I can

As a Christian:

1. I can be kind. I can refuse to be spiteful or sneering.
2. I can be truthful. I can call out dishonesty (kindly, persistently) when I see it.
3. I can be humble, believing that through the communion of the saints a willingness to empty oneself can bear eternal fruit.
4. I can be hopeful that virtue is both contagious and efficacious.
5. I can pray, remembering that there have been much darker days in history.

As a neighbor:

1. I can listen. The Boston Globe published a horrifying story about my hometown and I read it with disbelief. But we can't move forward together if we're not willing to listen to each other.
2. I can speak up against racism, misogyny, xenophobia. Kindly, yes, but with rock-solid persistence. 
3. I can stay away from Facebook this week. Nothing good will happen if I spend time on Facebook this week, and I will remember ill-considered remarks for far too long. (Facebook is not the place to employ strategies #1 and #2.)

As a citizen:

1. I can write letters. Even though I think I don't have time to write letters, it doesn't actually take much time. I can be like the widow in Luke 18, refusing to go away.
2. I can get involved with the New Pro-Life Movement (which is a much better fit for me than the old pro-life movement anyway).
3. I can speak up as a pro-life Democrat. We need a place at the table.
4. I can vote the heck out of 2018 and 2020.

As a parishioner:

1. I can keep trying with this new ministry to people on the margins, to let them know that they are welcomed and valued.
2. I can encourage my fellow parishioners to read the Bible with me in 2017, because a deeper acquaintance with Jesus is an antidote to evil.
3. I can speak up among my friends (again: kindly, persistently) as a pro-life Democrat, in response to the misperception that good Catholics vote GOP. I am here to tell you that you can be the kind of Catholic who reads the CCC cover to cover and who would never dream of using artificial birth control, and you can still think like a Democrat. The idea that Catholics must vote GOP regardless of the failings of the GOP candidate needs to die a speedy death.

As a professor:

1. I can speak frequently and unequivocally to my classes about the inherent dignity of people with disabilities.
2. I can encourage respect for and require awareness of the needs of patients from culturally/linguistically diverse backgrounds.
3. I can teach with conviction about the miraculous nature of human development, in utero and beyond.
4. I can continue my research into the experiences of families affected by disability, in hopes of creating a better support system for them.
5. I can reach out to first-generation students, in hopes of building bridges between the people inside the ivory tower and the people who may regard academia with suspicion.

As a mom:

1. I can be there today for my kids, who are stunned and sad.
2. I can set the example of belief in the sovereign goodness of God.
3. I can teach my sons to respect women's dignity and autonomy, and I can teach my daughter that she is strong and worthy of respect (and that if anyone ever attempts to grab her by the genitals, she should take no prisoners).
4. I can be kind. People only learn kindness if we show them kindness.

Fiats

As a mother I think a lot about creating contexts in which it's easier to say YES. Sometimes it's my job to say NO, but I believe -- and my experience so far has borne out the idea -- that if you equip kids to say YES, and build relationships in which they want to say YES, there's little need for frequent reiterations of NO. I believe, too, that elaborate plans focused on punishment are bad for parent-child relationships and the climate of the home. This is the very heart of my Croissants series: my job is to help my kids find the joy in duty.

There are plenty of parenting experts who disagree with me. James Dobson is aaaaalllll about the importance of obedience. Don't get me wrong; I expect to be obeyed. But what I am seeing in my own children is that consistent obedience can arise from mutual love and respect. I don't have to hit my kids; I don't have to instill obedience via fear.

So it's probably not surprising to my pals who read this blog that my vision of pro-life action is based on YES more than NO. And it probably shouldn't be surprising to me that there's lots of support for the NO approach. (Is it a coincidence that Dobson has endorsed Trump?)

Here's what I mean: there are two broad strategies for increasing the numbers of pregnancies that women carry to term. You can make it harder to get abortions, or you can make it easier to bear a child. American pro-lifers have mostly planted their flag in "make it harder" territory, creating a miserable mystifying mésalliance between many committed Catholics and the 2016 version of the GOP.

Why are we focused on creating barriers between women and abortion instead of removing barriers between women and motherhood? 

Do you remember the 2008 election, when that clip of Obama talking about the Freedom of Choice Act was passed around and around and around in Catholic circles? Do you remember how his presidency was supposedly going to signal the apocalypse, in which all Catholic hospitals would be required to perform abortions? Why, my friends, why why WHY are Catholics not acknowledging the pro-life value of the Affordable Care Act? I'm sympathetic, of course, to the Little Sisters of the Poor, but consider this: when insurance companies were required by federal law to cover prenatal care, a significant obstacle to sustaining unplanned and sort-of-planned pregnancies was diminished. I am remembering the frustrations of seeking out maternity coverage in 2001, when Elwood's employer didn't provide health insurance and we wanted another baby. The total premiums for a policy that covered pregnancy-related expenses would have cost us 4 times the eventual bill from the doctor who delivered Joe in our living room. How can it be a good idea to return to those days, when an unexpected pregnancy could mean a woman had to find $40,000 (or declare bankruptcy) to cover a repeat C-section? So why have there been repeated attempts by the "pro-life" party to repeal the ACA?

There are pro-life organizations that focus on meeting pregnant women's immediate needs -- I used to volunteer for Birthright, for instance, dispensing layettes and encouragement to women who wanted to continue their pregnancies. The layette is not the hard part, though. I do not know of any pro-life activist groups that also focus on maternity leave or affordable childcare. But here is a truth Catholics need to reckon with: we are sending postpartum women -- especially poor postpartum women -- back to work still bleeding and unrecovered. We shrug about maternity leave, as if this problem that the rest of the developed world (along with most of the developing world!) has addressed successfully is simply unfixable. Here is another truth Catholics need to reckon with: childcare is enormously expensive, and high-quality childcare costs more than low-quality childcare. The inequities start early, and the American pro-life movement is directing zero energy toward resolving them. Pat Buchanan, in fact, directed considerable energy toward entrenching them.

If a woman is worried about paying her doctor, and worried about affording the time off that she will need to heal after childbirth, and completely baffled about how she could afford to pay for childcare-- is it surprising, in those circumstances, that some women think abortion seems like a more reasonable choice than continuing a pregnancy? This, my friends, could be fertile ground for bipartisan pro-life action. Why is it that we seem to prefer intransigence?

One of my dearest friends from college is an abortion provider. I pray for her, of course; of course I wish she were a careful and compassionate dermatologist instead. But I also listen to her perspective, because in my little group of Catholic friends I am pretty insulated from the reality of abortion. Eight years ago she told me something I'll never forget; she said, "I see a lot of women who just can't afford that third baby." In pro-life circles there is a troubling focus on ideological purity. "So-and-so isn't really pro-life," they say, "because he supports exceptions for the mother's health." Some pro-lifers assert that exceptions for the mother's life aren't necessary, because modern medicine means it never comes down to that. This is wrong on three separate fronts: first, it is factually incorrect; second, it is unconscionably callous; and third, it is unwise strategically because it puts the focus on a tiny number of hard cases. They raise important questions, absolutely; I do not dispute the unique and unrepeatable nature of those babies' lives. But it's a truism that hard cases make bad law.

I think all the time about the mothers who just can't afford that third baby. They are not a tiny number and they do not have to be hard cases. How can we help them to say YES? How can we focus on touching hearts rather than writing laws? Because here's the thing: if the hearts change, the laws will follow. Jesus was always more interested in the state of the heart than the letter of the law.

The pro-life movement has wrecked its credibility with folks outside the movement; they do not see us as allies in a quest to support women in making good decisions -- even when that decision is to sustain a pregnancy. We have focused so much on "Go and sin no more" that we have forgotten the first part, the foundational part, the part that makes sinning no more a possibility: "Neither do I condemn you." We say "culture of life" and they hear "married white people who have seven children and think everybody else should do the same." But creating a culture of life is part of the answer-- a messy painful essential part.

In a culture of life there is space for disability, patience and acceptance and benefit-of-the-doubt-extending. There is acknowledgment of the redemptive work of childbearing in a post-Incarnation world, and acknowledgment that anything redemptive is destined to be hard -- sometimes heartbreakingly hard. (In my personal version of the culture of life there is zero room -- I mean zero room -- for social media shaming of other parents. This gig is tough enough already.) There is unquestioning acceptance of the intrinsic dignity of women, and of their capacity to respond autonomously to grace.

This is why it crushes me when my friends say they're voting for Donald Trump because they're pro-life: because a man who mocks the disabled, who views pregnancy as inconvenient, and who boasts about his violations of women's dignity and autonomy is the very antithesis of pro-life. He is advancing the culture of death, in fact. If this is the best the Republicans can manage, it's past time for Catholics to move on.

I dream of a world without abortion. And there's a place for NO in the public square, just as there is in my own home. But we're not going to end abortion by fiat, by a legislated NO. We can only get there by fiat, by fostering a culture in which women are free to say a fearless and joyful YES.

Curious

The interim chair of my department stopped in to see me earlier this week. The committee that's evaluating my progress toward tenure wanted me to revise one element of my dossier. "You tell us that you're curious about the things you study," she said, "but we want you to spell out why your work is important. When your tenure dossier goes to the college committee in two years, that's what they're going to want to see. So go ahead and rewrite your statement from that angle now."

Let me be really clear: I love my department, I have faith in the committee's good will, and I have known and respected the interim chair since I was a master's student. I rewrote the statement as instructed. But just between you and me and the internet, let me say: the first version was better.

I think my curiosity might be the strongest asset I bring to my department. Longtime readers might remember when I was working on my dissertation, thinking, "I'm not sure I can do this but I think I was born to do this." My research takes me to that intersection, invites me to shift the boundary between the known and the mysterious, and I find it exhilarating and joyous. It's a place I love to be, even though I am still plagued by self-doubt. It is curiosity that keeps me there, not impact factors or other measures of "importance." I don't pursue my research agenda because it's "important." I do it because it lights me on fire.

I have written repeatedly about this prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas, about how Christian scholarship means inviting the light of God into the places where the darkness of ignorance still reigns. Isn't that a crazy idea, that my curiosity can allow the light of God to gleam a little more brightly? Doesn't it make you want to get a PhD and join me?

In my teaching philosophy statement I wrote a little shyly about Chaucer's clerk of Oxford: "and gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche." (You can take the girl out of the English department, but you can't take the English department out of the girl.) I've written about it here too: joyful scholarship, fueled by genuine curiosity, is the foundation of my teaching. On my best days in the classroom I almost incandesce (she said shyly) with enthusiasm: I love what I am teaching, and it shows. I say to my students, "Here is the path to the edge of the forest -- the things we know. Let's shine a light into the trees, to get a glimpse of what we don't yet understand." And they respond. 

The day that I want to be an important professor more than I want to be a curious professor is the day I should find a new job. I can tell a version of my story that will please the administration's bean-counters and align more neatly with the new business model for higher ed; I can be more explicit about exceeding their publishing expectations. (Curiosity can motivate a person to write more papers and write them well -- who knew?) But I just want to say, friends, here on my blog where nobody is counting beans: I like the real version of my story better.

School supplies redux

Did this article show up a bunch of times in your Facebook feed too? It has a clickbaity title: Why I won't buy one extra box of tissues for my kid's school supplies; signed, a frustrated parent. Spoiler: she's not declining to buy any tissues; she's declining to stop at a single box. All the tissues! She can afford it and it's the right thing to do.

Is it really, though?

I think we should send a better message to kids. The author says that when you tell kids to clean up at the end of the day, they will throw half-used pencils and crayons into the garbage. She says this as if it is inevitable: the sun rises, the sun sets, the kids throw away usable materials because that's what kids do. 

There's a continuum of possible responses to kid destructiveness, right? On one end, a hypothetical parent is completely mellow about broken stuff ("Go ahead, Geranium, toss my extra pair of prescription sunglasses in the trash compactor too!"); on the other, s/he is super-strict about taking care of belongings ("What do you mean, you lost a paper clip, Wilfred? You are not leaving this desk until ALL 100 paper clips are back in the box! IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER!!"). We can all agree that there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle: it varies with kids' ages, it varies by family, it varies with the value of the stuff being destroyed or preserved. I hope we can all agree that there's a range of normal here within and across parents and teachers-- adults may be more focused on personal responsibility on some days or on chilled-out understanding on others. I'm fine with that. But I submit that the attitude presented in the post does not show adequate respect for kids' burgeoning abilities to steward their resources wisely.

Of course kids will need some extra crayons. The black always gets used up; maybe the lilac gets broken when you are drawing your awesome Angry Lilac Monster. I dispute the author's assertion that kids need lots of extra crayons because they can't help but throw them in the trash.

I think we should send a better message to schools. When it comes to technology in schools, we are making it up as we go along. Many school districts are spending many many dollars in hopes of educating tech-savvy kids and streamlining teachers' workloads. The thing is, any tool -- tech tools included -- must be purchased and deployed prudently. I do not know how much money my district is spending on math software that cuts down on teachers' grading loads. (I am ALL IN FAVOR of reduced grading loads, let me say that loud and clear.) But it's even easier to assign soul-crushing amounts of automated math homework. At least in 1985 if a vengeance-minded sub told us to do every single problem at the end of the chapter, she was going to have to do something with the submissions. I'm not a fan of the "more is better" approach that I'm seeing among some district math teachers -- "drill & kill" is a bad idea in both analog and digital iterations.

How much does the license for that piece of software cost? How much did it cost to buy an iPad for every kindergartner in my children's school? What if there were iPads for half of the kindergartners, and the classes took turns using them? Then perhaps, just perhaps, there would be some money in the budget for duct tape and file folders.

I think we should send a better message to teachers. The author concludes by saying that teachers do an important job for which they are "incredibly underpaid." I am not in any way suggesting that teachers should be buying their own office supplies. I am saying it is really important for us to muster the political will to get them what they need. If administrators and legislators are declining to provide teachers with the resources they require to do their jobs, then collusion with them is not the remedy. Exhorting fellow parents to suck-it-up-Buttercup in the face of lengthy school supply lists is an exercise in mutual hopelessness, in refusal to believe that we can come up with a better strategy than offloading an ever-increasing proportion of educational costs to families. Which brings me to my last point:

I think we should send a better message to families. One of the privileges of childhood in the United States of America is a guarantee of a free and appropriate public education. This is a gift worth preserving. Do we really want to continue the march toward free...ish? Of course families should absorb some of the costs of equipping their children for school, but the school supply run gets more complicated and more expensive every year. I propose that this is not the direction in which we want to travel. I am writing this while feeling a little stressed about the August financial pileup. I admit that I am experiencing a degree of resistance to the idea that I must buy yet another graphing calculator* because none of our previously purchased graphing calculators are exactly the right model. (They graph. They calculate. Who could ask for anything more?) But I think there is a bigger-picture truth underlying my personal frustration: educating our children is a burden we have agreed as a society to bear. So let's bear it already.

*You know I don't expect anybody to buy me a calculator, do you not? I would just prefer to skip some of the other stuff.

Notes from the lava pit

One night I was picking up a kid from a friend's house, a tidy ranch inhabited by the friend, his parents, and his one sibling. Two of my other boys had also had plans that evening, so there were just four of us around our dinner table. It was very different: lots of empty space in the conversation. I've never been a person who minds having space in the conversation, but dinners for seven aren't like that. We laugh. We pun. We riff. We think aloud. We say, "Excuse me, I am changing the subject right now," and feign indignation when someone says, "Well, I am changing it back." Everybody talks, but there's an approximation of turn-taking. It's a heady blend of order and chaos.

I love it. (Well, 90% of the time I love it.) So when I picked up my son at his friend's house and I mentioned how different things had been that night at dinner, the end of the sentence in my mind was "...because things were so quiet and slow-moving and BOY do I love it when my big noisy family is all together." The friend's mom finished the sentence for me, though; she said, "...because the kids got some individualized attention?"

Probably my mouth clapped shut, as I deliberately did not say, "My kids DO get individualized attention TYVM." I don't remember exactly what neutral thing I ended up saying in a neutral voice, but it was something along the lines of "Oh, we have a lot of fun when everybody's together." Since then, though, my attitude about this mom has not been neutral. My son will say, "We're playing games at E's house on Friday, Mom," and I'll instantly think, "Oh, the house where they think you're INVISIBLE because your family is TOO BIG??" I have been pushing back against this attitude, but it keeps oozing its way to the surface, like a noxious bubble of hydrogen sulfide bubbling up from a lava pit and bursting in a mephitic cloud of resentment and defensiveness. They're a nice family; she's a nice woman. I'm sure she didn't mean to hurt my feelings.

Recently she came up in conversation; my son mentioned that she grew up as one of 12 children. And inside the overheated lava pit of my psyche a little voice said "...oh." Maybe that exchange wasn't about me. (I know! Such a crazy idea!) Maybe she's got her own large-family baggage that has nothing to do with us. Maybe I don't need to feel defensive every time I see her -- perhaps I could relax it to every other time. (I know! Another crazy idea!)

It is hard to keep the balls in the air when there are 5 kids and two full-time jobs in the picture. This spring I discovered that my quietest kid, the boy least likely to complain, had been wearing outdated glasses for a year. The lab had made a significant grinding error, resulting in a useless pair of lenses. But when he told me that the new glasses seemed off and gave him headaches, I said, "Sometimes that happens with new glasses. Give it a week and let me know if they're still bothering you." In the throes of adjusting to bifocals, I thought I knew whereof I spoke. Quietly, he went back to wearing his old glasses. The new ones sat in his room until his next eye appointment, a year later. [brief pause for a moment of self-flagellation] 

This spurred me to re-do the dining room whiteboard. At the top it says, "What do you need?" and there is space for each kid to leave me notes. So far this system is working really well. The entries have mostly been things like "socks" and "trumpet lessons." No one is writing "more individualized attention," or at least not yet.

Croissant crumbs

Here's a bullet-point version of my series. It is 2015, after all.

• Be compassionate. It's hard to be a kid. It's hard to be the mom. You both deserve patience. While being compassionate is the right thing to do, it will also make your job easier. (More details in the sixth paragraph of this post.) (Use of the phrase "sixth paragraph" is a dead giveaway that I am not really a 2015 kind of blogger.)
• Pay attention. Put down the phone, the book, the knitting, the worries, and perceive. You and your child will both feel the difference. (More details in the seventh paragraph (oops) of this post, but you can also CTRL-F for "Stella hates" if that's easier.)
• Emphasize autonomy over compliance, flexibility over rigidity. Create a context in which your child makes as many of his own decisions as he can. Push back against a culture that says he's too young for that. Self-direction is essential for self-discipline. And if you model flexibility, you will see it in return. Eventually. I promise it's true.
• Build good habits. You can set up routines that will make almost everything easier, for them and you both. If you have a problem, habit formation is probably part of the solution. Establishing the routine will take longer than you think. It will be worth it. (More thoughts here.)
• Set high standards; enforce them kindly. See my ZETZER post for details.
• Own your authority. You don't have to bellow. You don't have to threaten. You're the mom. Your authority is the lever that can move the world, or at least your apparently immobile child as he lies in the floor wailing. (Some details in the sixth paragraph of this post, or CTRL-F for "motherly authority"; more specific details in this post.)
• Take the long view. You have 18 years with this child in your house, God willing. It wouldn't take that long if they could learn things the first time you showed them. Keep at it. Don't let the naysayers get you down. In 80 years, when your child remembers your kindness tenderly, the naysayers won't matter. They don't really matter today. It will get better; truly it will. And if it doesn't get better fast enough for your liking, you can rest assured that it will get different. (This is the point that kicked off the whole series, so it's a fitting place to end.)

Good luck! I am pulling for you! If you want to read the whole thing, here you go: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Resources for you: Barbara Coloroso wrote the book that revolutionized my parenting; Haim Ginott is really helpful; try Alfie Kohn too. Lissa Wiley wrote a beautiful post about her own journey. I'd love to hear what's been helpful for you in learning to parent your children with gentle authority.

Croissants: from apprentice to master baker

Okay, everybody, this is the last installment.

Almost five years ago, after my defense but before my graduation, I presented my dissertation results to a mix of students and faculty from my department. I wrote about it at the time: my deliberate decision to aim the presentation at the master's students, the eruption of rude and hostile questions from the organizer during the Q&A, the audible gasps from other faculty when my advisor told the story at a gathering two weeks later. That hour marked a change for me, from nestling to fledgling. His final question was prefaced with "There must be a literature on this," which flicked a switch inside me. I realized, "He knows nothing about this topic. Nothing. And I don't know everything, by a long shot, but I know a lot."

In that moment I stepped into my authority as a scholar. I did it with my body, when I squared my shoulders and stood up tall. I did it with my voice, allowing a hint of frosty steel to surface. I did it with my words, shifting into researcher-ese to show that I could in fact speak that language competently. I did it with my attention, purposefully saying, "Who else has questions?" and shifting my focus away from him. Most of all, I did with my inner certainty: I have poured my brainpower and my heart into this project, and in consequence I am the expert on this question. I was polite to him, but I was also clear that I was not there to be steamrolled. 

"You handled it beautifully," my advisor told me afterward. It was hard, you guys. It was really hard. It took me a long time to feel at peace about it. In that post from a month later I was still fretting about what I might do if it happened again.

I see a lot of parallels with my authority as a mother. It was hard to own that authority. It took me a long time to feel confident about it. One of the most striking scenes in Bringing Up Bébé is the moment when another woman urges Pamela Druckerman to say no like she means it, to say it with confidence that her son will listen. He listens.

Motherly authority has the same constituents as scholarly authority. Part of it is in my body, whether I draw myself up or kneel down for a face-to-face chat. Part of it is in my voice, which might range from tender to stern. Part of it is in my words, which can convey much more than a casual observer would hear. A big chunk of it is my attention, about which more below. But the heart of it is in my inner certainty: I have poured my heart and my brainpower into mothering this child, and in consequence I am the expert on him. He is hard-wired to love me and respond to me, and I am not here to be steamrolled.

I want to go back to the issue of attention, because just last night I was reminded about how much of a difference it makes. Stella hates having the earliest bedtime. I was knitting in the floor while she played with Jenga blocks next to me, and she was unhappy when I told her to pick them up and put her pajamas on. Drama loomed, but I did not need a magic wand to defuse it. I needed to put down my knitting. With my eyes on her face, I could read her better. With my face relaxed from its knitting scowl, I could set the mood for the interaction. With my hands free, I could offer to fasten the ziploc bag she filled. She had to pick up the blocks herself, because six-year-olds need to clean up after themselves, but I was available to help her with the hard parts. I could have said the same words while I kept on knitting, but they would not have had the same effect. (Another bit of this interaction that might be useful to somebody is this: I said, "If you briskle, we'll have time for a story." This offers a measure of autonomy to a frustrated kid, because I don't care if she goes fast or slow, within reason. This teaches real-world time management skills: if you dawdle, you might miss out on something fun. Bedtime is coming at 8:30, and you can decide how to use the minutes leading up to it. As it played out, we didn't have time for Curious George but we could squeeze in Good Night Gorilla.)

I think if I had read this post as a young mother I would have been skeptical. "You're telling me I'm not paying enough attention to this kid?" I might have said. "I have never paid as much attention to anybody as I pay to this kid." I'm talking about a particular kind of attention, though. Have you ever felt someone staring at you? It's the same idea, without the creepy: your focused attention has a perceptible weight. For kids it's like a mantle: comfort when they are sad, warmth when you are proud of your achievements, authority that's not yet theirs -- but that they're growing into slowly -- when they're misbehaving. It says something really important; it says, "You are worthy of notice," and that opens a kid right up to hear you say, "...and I know you can do what I'm about to ask of you." 

Rachel asked about what I would have done if Stella had pitched a fit about leaving the childcare room. My answer, I'm afraid, is "it depends." If it were an ongoing problem, I'd be thinking about context. Is this child getting enough rest? Do I need to send myself an automated reminder for next week, to bring a cheese stick to avert a blood sugar crash? Does this child hear me say, "Okay, I can be flexible about that" with some regularity? Does this child have plenty of opportunities to exercise autonomy, to say no? (For instance, I am really laid back about what my children wear to school. If it doesn't have holes in it, it's probably fine. If she puts her T-shirt on backwards I will point it out, but she is free to leave it that way.) Does this child have plenty of happy interactions with me, in which she can see that I genuinely enjoy her company and see the best in her? These are guilt-free questions, Rachel, because I know how hard it is to keep the balls in the air.

Even in a supportive context, though, some kids will continue to push. They may need to see that you are strong enough for them to push against without knocking you over. Even if it gets loud, you can still scoop them up and take them out. I might position a fighter with his back to my chest, flexing his legs all the way up in front of him to minimize flailing limbs. In those circumstances I would do my best to keep absolutely calm, to keep stating my expectations clearly, and to avoid looking at anyone else who happened to be around. I don't need to worry about judgment -- I've got enough to do. Afterward I would be clear that the behavior was not acceptable, but belaboring the point is a bad idea. Kids need space to feel the weight of a bad decision. A typically developing kid will know that other x-year-olds don't act like that. If it doesn't even work to get them what they want, they can decide to pursue other options...especially if you give them room to make the choice freely. This is pretty much my ZETZER approach: set a reasonable standard, and enforce it with absolute consistency and unrelenting courtesy (while making sure you have supportive adults around you to whom you can complain later). Drama only sets you back.

I do want to say very clearly, though, that just as I cannot be authoritative about someone else's scholarship, I cannot be authoritative about someone else's children. I can only determine what works for us. One last example: this is my fourth year in the classroom and this year I am feeling comfortable at the lectern. My evals are pretty consistent. Most often they say, "This class is really hard, but Dr. Gladly is kind and patient with us." They're not all favorable; for some students the "really hard" is "ridiculously hard, so hard that I don't care if she's nice because I'm never registering for one of her classes again." Regardless, I am pretty comfortable with that identity. (When my chair heard me stewing about my fall semester evals, she said, "It's supposed to be hard.") That's what I hope to be like as a mom, too: high standards, yes, upheld with kindness and patience.

The competence curve for academics, I think, looks something like an inverted U. Novices struggle, because presenting complex information is a hard and unfamiliar task. At the other end of the age spectrum, I have seem professors near retirement who are totally phoning it in. They're not meeting the needs of their students, because they're no longer engaged. Parenting can be the same way. Kathy asked me if my younger children picked up on my authority more rapidly, and the answer is both yes and no. Rachel Balducci wrote a post that resonated with me, about how it's easy to let things slide with the youngest kids in a large family. The confidence that kids will learn over time can get tangled up with the reality that a person gets tired of teaching small people to sit on their bottoms and close their lips around their food, every bite every time. Sometimes I have to herringbone myself up from the wrong side of that U-shaped curve.

I don't blog much about parenting these days (except for, you know, the odd 6000 words here and there), mostly because I am figuring out the teen thing as I go. How can I communicate effectively about the hazards of substance abuse when I have SO MUCH BAGGAGE about substance abuse? How can I send a kid out into the world when his bathtub-scrubbing skills are so far inferior to his coding skills? This series has been really helpful for me to write, my friends. I have been down on myself as a mom for years, because teenagers, and it has been encouraging to think, "I can learn useful things and apply them!" I was full of self-doubt as a young scholar, and full of self-doubt as a young mom. But I know that impostor syndrome is a treacherous waste of time. And I have been thinking about the promise of 2 Peter 1, that God has given us all we need for life and godliness. It leaves me feeling grateful, and hopeful, and quietly confident.

Thanks for reading.