The game of global domination

No matter what one is doing in life, there are people who know what one ought to be doing instead. Once people give up on talking you out of having so many kids, they will change tactics and try to talk you out of having kids when you're old (unless, of course, you have no kids and are old; then it is still OK for you to have a kid and actually not really OK for you not to). 

Since we are very knowledgeable nowadays, the reason old people with kids should not have kids is that it's dangerous for old people to have kids. All your kid making components are rotting (and so are his, even), so you're going to have rotten kids, and having a rotten kid would be really bad and actually even selfish and pretty much almost immoral.

This is basic eugenics, and we are all naturally eugenicists in our own ways. It's just one of those things we have to recognize and learn our way out of. Here are the basic lessons for dealing with this particular line of eugenic thought:

--God puts an end date on each woman's fertility. When she's too old to have kids, she can't. If she can still have kids, she's not too old. (I mention this just to help us keep from mixing biology with ethics or morality.)

--Every human life is worth living, no matter how miserable it looks to the strong, the healthy, the gifted, the intelligent, the rich. To consider another life and say that it is not worth its own cost is nothing but prideful condescension. This judgment does not happen in a vacuum. To say, "You shouldn't risk having a Down's baby" is to look at a living person with Down's and say, "There should not be another person like you." There is only one person of whom God ever said, "It had been good for that man if he had not been born," and it wasn't because that man had a genetic defect.

--There is no person so un-rightly made that he does not show forth the image of God. There is no human so poorly endowed that she cannot receive the gift of forgiveness and salvation. There is no one so ugly, so weak, so sick, or so empty that he is beyond our risen Lord's power to make all things new.

--You don't know what baby you're going to have until you have it.

To avoid the increased risk of genetic problems or whatever other harms to which the children of older parents are more subject is to take the wrong gamble. So here is the general answer I have on hand for the caring people who want to make sure I know there's a bigger chance now that a baby I have could have something wrong with it:

"Thank you for telling me about that risk. I read an article about it too. If our Lord sees fit to give old people like us another baby, the greatest likelihood is that that baby will be healthy and well."

Practice it in your head so you can say it instead of what you're really thinking.

Where's the baby?

Some months back we ran into someone we hadn't seen in a while. He asked, "Where's the baby?" "There," I said, pointing to the one-year-old running around. And then, "I guess she's not much of a baby any more."

Even less on this day, when she is exactly as old as our firstborn was the day our secondborn was, um, born. To our knowledge, there is no one else on the way.

So much for this. There's not much to say about it and even less to do about it.

Name it and claim it

I spent the first seventeen years of my life meeting only three people with my name. Then in my first week at Seward I met about 35 other Rebekahs and Rebeccas, in addition to a huge surplus of Rachels and Sarahs. Apparently the matriarchs were the baby girl names to be had among families with a heavy investment in LCMS culture from 1975-1985.

I bring this up because if families with a heavy investment in LCMS culture are still sending their kids to Concordias 10 years from now, I think the places will be overrun by Anastasias, Marys, Evangelines, and Lilys.

Nobody withstands the machine

In falling back the house of babies surely does not sleep an extra hour, yet it feels the pang of each minute over which it must spring in March. I could not ask less rhetorically: where did the time go?

Daylight Savings Time

Teach your children well

Makes no sense

I would like an explanation as to why a two-year-old of diabolical calculation, stealth, and capability develops by the age of four into a blubberbawling incompetent.

Stillwell Angel

One thing I've never read in any article about childhood obesity is how there is some portion of the child population which is easiest simply to feed constantly rather than employ, entertain, or discipline.

Especially since bludgeoning has fallen out of fashion.

College

Here are the thoughts I have on college right now. This is kind of a time capsule post for me.

My top priority is that none of my children, male or female, become debt slaves. Ideally, none of them would marry debt slaves. :P

I think the advantage of a large secular university is being able to tell my kid, "This place is full of people who don't believe what you believe. You must know that the things they think and say and do are not OK for a child of God to think and say and do. Be much more careful than you think you need to be."

I am not sure if a small liberal arts college, "Christian" or not, has a particular advantage. It concerns me that a college with a Christian affiliation may appear to be a safer moral environment than a secular one, when it is only more muddled.

The one advantage I think a Concordia might offer is a higher concentration of potential spouse selection. But the main things Concordias produce are debt slaves, and sometimes also ministry-guilt slaves. I am certain we will tell our kids, "You cannot go to college to become a Lutheran teacher, DCE, DCO, Deaconess, or other made up LCMS-only position." Having attended a Concordia, I also know that they are not "safe" moral environments in dorm, classroom, or professorial office.

Regarding girls, I have no program. At this time, all I can see doing is helping each of our (three) girls consider the question as it applies to each individually. I think it is wise for women to have some kind of training or credential which would enable them to be gainfully employed. NO DEBT SLAVERY.

Laetare. Mom's orders.

I, for all practical purposes, do not have a mother church. The church where I grew up is no longer a place where I can go on Easter to sing "I Know That My Redeemer Lives" with each verse rising a half-step to a thundering, golden finale of impossible height. It breaks my heart, for there is a sense in which there is no church like one's home church. I want that glorious Easter back. It's not just that I personally can't get there. It doesn't exist.

That's not good, but it has helped me understand the obvious fact that part of growing up is being able to leave Mom. I have to be able to love someone else's pie if I'm ever going to be happy eating pie again. Is my stubborn insistence that only my mom can make a good pie worth never enjoying ANY pie? Of course I will always love my own dear Mom's own dear pie, but she would be the first to tell me I was an idiot to mope every time someone else's dear mom put a piece of pie in front of me. The truth is, lots of moms are really good at making pie. Mom would also be completely disgusted with me if I didn't know it was beyond rude to mope if someone is kind enough to make a pie and give me a piece, even if it's not the world's best pie.

So as I approach another Laetare feeling a bit orphanish, I am glad that the place that was my mother church was not really my mother. I haven't even had my real mother's pie yet. One parish is not the Church. One building is not Jerusalem. One hymn is not the Song. One pastor is not the Shepherd. Each little Easter, wherever I happen to be for it, brings me closer in every way to the big one. God grant me the grace to receive what I am given, however modest, with thanks and rejoicing.

Fakest thou until makest thou

Every time we add a new one, I am afflicted for a while with a subliminal panic. It's the same feeling I remember from stepping up to speak in front of a big room jammed with people, or being handed a test on which the only English words are "translate" and "parse." If it could talk, it would say, "Oh no. I can't do this! HELP HELP HELP!"

How many babies do we have now? How can I possibly keep track of them all? HELP HELP HELP!

But the task is at hand. Start the speech; I know what I have to say. Answer the easiest question; then do the one before and the one after. Settle this one down, pull that one up, ask the next to bring me the book, start reading like nothing has changed. They'll never know. Ignore the panic as well as I can, and before long my part will be just like last time when the room was small and nearly empty, or when the questions were about the alphabet. But--if I nail it--there will be more laughter and clapping, and more satisfaction in a hard-earned good performance.

(And as we all know, the only way to nail it is to crash 9000 times during practice. :P )

Perspective

With my first baby, I thought, Babies are like this.

A few more babies and I thought, My babies are like this.

Now I think, This baby is like this.

One of the biggest problems

with having more than three or four kids is that there's nothing unfamiliar left to get the newest one-year-old when his birthday rolls around.

For you, son! Just don't spend it all in one place.

The silent epidemic

(Names have been changed to protect privacy.)

"At first I just thought it was because he was a baby," remembers Rebecca. "He did the stupidest stuff. He poked himself with forks and ate cakes of soap. These weren't one-time things. I mean, how many cakes of soap does somebody have to eat before they realize it's completely disgusting?"

But Rebecca's son didn't outgrow these lapses in intelligence. Although he gave up on eating soap and injuring himself with pointy utensils, he developed new idiotic habits. He chewed his toenails. He looked deep into Rebecca's eyes and then wiped his mouth on his shirt. He asked her to look for his "lost" pajamas in the same drawer where he'd hidden fossilized Easter candy. "Finally, I knew," Rebecca says. "My kid was stupid."

Childhood stupidity isn't a fun topic. No one wants to admit that her son or daughter is stupid. The evidence is embarrassing, and stupidity is a stigmatized condition in our society. It's also hard not to assign blame--can child stupidity really be an accident? But the problem is more widespread than anyone wants to admit. It's not rare or isolated, and parents need to know that they are not alone in dealing with stupid kids.

Becky, a mother of three, confesses to being horrified when she realized all of her kids were stupid. "They were SO DUMB," she says. "I was terrified all the time that other people would find out. They would leave their shoes right next to the shoe organizer instead of putting them inside. They put clean shirts in the laundry and dirty shirts back in their drawers. They used my hand lotion even though I'd explained to them 75 times that I could smell it on them when they did it and they'd get in trouble. I was afraid to go out in public. There was no way I could hide how stupid they were."

Becky was also afraid to tell her doctor about her suspicions. As it turned out, she didn't have to. Her kids acted stupid everywhere, and the doctor's office was no exception. But although it was obvious the doctor had noticed how dumb Becky's kids were, he didn't have a suggestion, a prescription, or even a visible reaction. "At that point, I really didn't know what to do," she says. "My six-year-old licks her shoes in front of a medical professional and everybody acts like nothing is happening? I felt so alone."

Finally, Becky confided in a friend. "The floodgates just burst," she remembers. "My friend told me that she busted her kids for trying to make strawberry milk with ketchup three times in one week, and they had a spitting contest off the balcony while she was cleaning the floor below, and her baby consumed something so vile that she wouldn't even tell me what it was. It almost sounded like her kids were as dumb as mine."

"The key to living with childhood stupidity is having realistic expectations," says Dr. Timbo Blogworthy, a father of seven and leading researcher in the field of childhood stupidity. "If you have a dumb kid, you have to know that your kid is going to do dumb things all the time and there's nothing you can do about it. Sure, tell him what's going to happen today and practice how he should act. But don't expect it to go right, because with a stupid kid it just won't. That's the nature of stupidity. Your life is going to stink until your kid gets less stupid or moves out. What the **** is oozing out of my Aldens?"

Rebecca, like Becky, has also found comfort in camaraderie. "After my sister had a baby, she called me with a lot of questions. One of the first questions she had was, 'If he has to nurse to live, why can't he nurse?' I knew exactly what to tell her. It's hard to hear, but childhood stupidity is a lot easier to live with when you know you're not the only one."

For infant and childhood stupidity support in your area, talk to the first parent you see.

At-home kids

Sometimes I get the feeling my kids think they'd be better kids to me if they left the house for 8-10 hours a day to do things they were good at and be with people other than parents. You know, they'd appreciate our time together more that way.

Stir occasionally and keep track of the water

Here's something that seems weird to me about babysitting/day care: the kids get attention paid directly, exclusively to them all the time. That's not how it works at home (mine, anyway). At home I spend as much time as possible picking up, cleaning up, cooking, doing laundry, and whatever else I can to keep this place operational as long as the kids are operational without my direct involvement. They usually kind of follow me around while I do these things and find things of their own to do in the same vicinity (I wear the baby or park her where I'm working). Eventually I get tired enough and/or they whine enough that I will sit down and read books to them for a while (I almost never "play"--I am a grownup, and they can knock down blocks without my help). Then I feed them something and we go back to our semi-interactive businesses for a while. This cycle repeats throughout the day.

A child care arrangement is designed solely around keeping children occupied/entertained. No adult there has to make supper or straighten the bedrooms or keep up with laundry. While I am very aware that it is my job to care for my children and teach them what they need to know, this does not mean that I spend every minute of our shared day crawling around on the floor and providing them with structured activities. My caring for them includes providing an acceptably livable house and decent meals, and that means they don't have my undivided attention all the time. I am always with them, but I am not always singularly engaged with them. I have more jobs here than just child care--thank goodness, because I (like many women and nearly all men) would go completely insane if talking to babies was all the day held for me.

The babies are not a Crock Pot, but they are definitely not a wok. They're more like a double boiler.

Fantasy Baby

I have often fantasized about what all this would be like with an imaginary baby, the one some other mom always has, the kind that sleeps and doesn't cry and knows how to nurse from minute one. I have had babies who possessed each of these attributes singly, but never all together.

It happened. I got my Fantasy Baby. Dad and I realized one day that we had a two-month-old and somehow were not miserable. Wonderful wonderful wonderful baby.

It took us six to get here and a few of them have been doozies. Postpartum was still double plus uncool because I am still double plus uncool. I don't know if the Fantasy Baby is a species or a fluke, so I don't know if there's any encouragement here for anyone else. I just wanted to tell you--I got her. I got my Fantasy Baby. I feel like our whole family got a huge pass on this one. I feel like I won the lottery.

Verily, verily

Babies are a syntactically backwards race. They remember the last word of a familiar phrase or sentence and that word comes to function as a sort of synecdoche for the whole meaning. A small child's Lord's Prayer sounds like: "Father. Heaven. Name. Come. Done. Heaven. Bread." Etc. But a very small child's prayer is always, actually and effectively, "Amen."

This cup

Sometimes, my heart breaks for the child who ran outside today, shockingly shoeless at first, to capture the first snow of the season.

Cup outstretched, he spun in the rain, the sleet, dashing between drops in his pursuit of the precious white stuff. Wads of snow clumped thickly downward in the mix, bright against dark wet bark, incongruous over lingering autumn color-collage.

But the snow he was so earnestly after—it disappeared even as he touched it. His cup was filled not with the abundance of magical flakes he hoped for, but with a scant spattering of dreary drops. A small disappointment, perhaps—but my mother-heart in that one moment ached under the weight of many moments, heavy for this child of mine to whom many things come hard.

But when he turned and saw me where I’d stepped out to snap his picture, his face was flushed with wet glee. “Look!” he shout-chortled joyously: “Your back has snow on it!”

And then he drank impossibly deeply from what appeared to me to be a woefully meager cupfull, and was satisfied beyond words.

I ducked back into the house to ponder these things, and to treasure them in my overflowing heart. He returned a bit later, soaked, glowing, and unusually quietly contented of spirit.

When I want a heap of snow, and I get a spattering of sleet instead, can I too drink and be satisfied—even unto quiet contentedness of spirit, even unto overflowing joy?

This is grace: our daily cup. We spin madly about, waving our tumbler heavenward, trying to capture only what we want from the mix, demanding the refills we think we need—but our Lord knows that too much can be deadlier than too little. We pray, “Lord, take this cup from me”—but our Lord knows that heavy luggage can be His revolutionary prescription for weary souls. For each of us, He lovingly mixes the bitter and the sweet, titrating with a precision we could never even approximate.

Lord, teach me to pray: Take not this cup from me—only teach me to drink from it deeply, to find even in its dregs an impossible satisfaction, a contentment surpassing words, a joy glowing strong.

To the person who donated these pjs to the CSL Resellit Shop nigh on ten years ago

I just wanted to let you know that six babies have worn them. Thanks. :)

Internet doula

Big thanks to Pastor Weedon for saving me some one-handed typing. :D She's here, she's great, and we didn't have to use the carbirth preparedness kit. How can we thank thee, Lord?