Exercises in futility

As the Borg would say: "Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours."

Truth in advertising

So, some of the exercises in futility with which I occasionally entertain myself:

Sweeping the kitchen floor (Mopping? Surely you jest!).

Repeating, “Your sleeve is not a Kleenex.”

Telling brothers not to fight.

Working on a floor puzzle when the baby/toddler is awake.

Putting a clean shirt on the three-year-old.

Putting clean pants on the three-year-old.

Putting anything clean within a five-foot radius of the three-year-old.

Yours?

Usage you can use: relative pronouns

The relative pronouns are who, whom, and whose; that and which; and where.

--Use who and whose in reference to persons.

He's the clown who preached for 35 minutes.
The person to whom I complain about long sermons is my 6-yr-old.
DPs are the guys whose sermons are always too long.

NOT: The pastor that preached forever also talked about himself the whole time.

--Use that and which in reference to objects or animals.

The Athanasian is the creed that no mother of a 1-yr-old ever confesses in its entirety.
The gun on the lintel is for untethered dogs which enter my yard.

--Use where in reference to places.

That's the rest stop where we had to get the world's nastiest diaper out of the car.

Why I'm not an Organic, Attachment, or Otherwise Superior Parent

Many moons ago when I was pregnant with Baby 1 my dear friend Gauntlets sent me Dr Sears' The Baby Book so I would be a good mom. I learned that I should nurse the baby, wear the baby in a sling, nurse the baby, sleep with the baby, nurse the baby, etc. Ok, I thought. The marvelous Mrs Sears was there too to provide inspiration: need some milk and don't have a pump? No problem, just manually express 8 ounces over your lunch break! I was so ready.

Then the baby was born and I had Nursing Problems. I couldn't have an eight pound baby smashed up against my shredded self all day long. I couldn't wear a sling. I couldn't wear a shirt. I absolutely could not feed the baby on demand cue. Next thing I knew, I wasn't an Attachment Parent. Just as well, as I've learned since then that it wouldn't have worked out anyway. (Incidentally, my baby-slinging, sleep-sharing, homeschooling friend Gauntlets, some of whose kids have long out-nursed any of mine, still claims to like me.)

This is yet another weird thing about CSPP. Many people who have a lot of kids are also highly evangelical members of various organic/Attachment Parenting lobbies: homebirth, babywearing, co-sleeping, cloth diapering, extended breastfeeding, homeschooling, anti-vaccination, etc. There are people with lots of kids who make these things work. But they don't work for everybody, and I'm not prepared to consign the many people for whom they don't work to the ranks of the irredeemably lazy, selfish, worldly, and/or mentally pliable.

No hard feelings here. But in general, my impression of the hard-core organic parenting community (and by hard-core I'm referring to those who come at it with a Reformed obsession with Law, or a liberal religious devotion to Earth, for whom there is no Christian or any other kind of freedom) is that they take the appeal to nature fallacy as their starting point and extrapolate from there. This comforts me when I see how much organic milk costs.

Attachment parenting is a fine thing, but it is ultimately a personality style restyled as a lifestyle. Some people, men and women, have an exceptional ability to be close to children. They have a gift which enables them to scrub bathtubs in a child-nurturing way. I think they are wonderful people, truly. But I just don't have the gift any more than I can prevent a conversation from getting awkward or land a single salchow. I can affect preschool-teacher perkiness or Romantic-era maternal tenderness for 75 minutes, but it leaves me exhausted, snappy, and unable to come up with what to fake next--and it's only 9:25, and nobody washed the breakfast dishes.

The good news is that I practice my parenting a lot more than I practice my salchows, so there's hope for improvement there. But call me an introvert, a choleric, a thinking type, a firstborn, whatever Boomer-conceived psychological category explains it: I'm just not drawn the attachment parenting way. I'm not a cuddler, a dancer, or an imaginer. But I am a mom. I carry my baby in my arms, I make rules for my prickly self to ensure that everybody gets their warm fuzzies (and you'd likely be horrified to learn the kind of rules I've had to make), and I often keep my distance so that I can keep my temper.

To illustrate: all marriages are different. Some couples are moony, some like to hassle each other, some keep their spheres separate, some tell each other everything, some thrive on spontaneity and some need schedules. What works for them is their business. And parent/child relationships are different too. You don't have to be Attached to be attached. I'm even willing to entertain the common yet impossible to prove assertion that Attached children are better cared for. I wish I had it in me naturally, but I don't. Somehow, though, my kids and I get through the day and still wake up basically liking each other.

What this all comes down to is that parents do what enables them to survive. For some people, the hallmarks of attachment parenting are the easier route (as they love to tell you). For other people, a baby in bed means at least one adult doesn't get any sleep, homeschooling means a houseful of miserable people (and illiterate kids) at the end of the day, babywearing means a pile of expensive slings wadded up at the back of the closet, etc. Not every "attachment" is net beneficial for every family--simply breastfeeding is a huge challenge for a lot of people, and that's one of those things that scores pretty darn low in optionality. It's foolish to force oneself and one's kids into a lifestyle choice (to the extent that any of these things are choices for any family, which also varies) that makes everyday life torture.

To all y'all who have no exersaucers or foreskins in your house: congratulations, really, because those decisions come at a respectable price (unless you married a hippie and had all girls :D ). We'd also do well to remember that God didn't mention sleeping arrangements or total wastes of $40 Maya wraps when that multiplying business came down. The procreative faithfulness to which he calls all husbands and wives does not mean that we have to join La Leche League, subscribe to Mothering, or keep a pesticide-free-grass-fed milch goat in the yard (not that there's anything wrong with that!). We take the kids he gives us, learn patience and sacrifice, and live out the daily details as they work for our families.

The life of a sinner has enough guilt built into it. Let's not let anxiety and animosity over diapers drive people to dreary isolation or desperate contraception. The fact that we make different choices shows nothing more than that we're different people with different priorities, abilities, and options. The choices a person makes do not indicate of themselves that she has or has not done her homework.

CSPP has room for girls from all points on the maternipolitical spectrum.

(I can't promise to respond to ignorant and/or argumentative comments. All comments suggesting that victims of any particular sort of parenting club are more sick, happy, psychopathic, insecure, polite, agile, etc., will be laughed at.)

How to find movies the whole family can regret watching

I'm a shrill harpy* and don't tolerate naked women in my house. This means we miss out on a lot of REALLY AWESOME movies and shows. Alas.

It can be tricky figuring out what's safe to queue up, though, particularly if your tastes are kind of obscure, or if your husband is driven by nostalgia to revisit bizarre shows he watched on Saturday afternoon TV when he was a kid. He didn't realize they were made by the Beeb, which makes sure an ugly Brit nudie finds her way into everything. The poor girls got edited out by American censors back in the 80s, but not by Netflix. Ha ha ha ha ha. >:(

We've tried various online family movie reviews, but they tend to focus on new and popular releases and often don't have reviews of the unique crimes against filmography that for some reason people around here want to watch. A lot of them also have annoying formats (charts, colors, blah blah blah). So don't waste your time with those and head over to IMDB. Find your movie, scroll past the cast to Additional Details, and click on the parental advisory. They're user generated, and we've found even our weirdest whims efficiently assessed.

*My husband has never suggested this, but I get it from both females who "don't care" and "aren't that insecure," and males who "aren't watching it for that." If it's not rated X, it's not pornographic. Duh.

Ecclesiastical calisthenics

I'd like to revisit a topic that appears here from time to time just long enough to observe:

Yes, dragging all your kids to and through church does get easier/better/more conducive to actual worship over time. I really want to believe that. Sometimes I do believe that.

Then I actually go to church with my kids.

Truth: the wrangling does get better. Six months ago, worship was on many occasions actually worship-full for much of the service. But then sometimes it gets worse again (like, oh, just for instance, if your BabyBoy's toddler personality is defined by incessant and determined motion).

That's all. While these struggles sometimes move us here at CSPP to hymnody and poetry, this morning was just...exhausting.

But don't despair: the evidence shows that despite the many peaks and troughs, the overall trend is upward progress.

Lacrimosa

What humble handmaidens are our tears. They do not manufacture themselves in advance of our need, self-importantly assuming the need will arise. We are not forced to purge ourselves of any surfeit outside of their normal application. But when sadness musters them, they report immediately as if they had been standing on diligent watch for the moment. They flow to give dignity to our animal grunts and grimaces. They do not disgust us like other substances of our bodies' production. Without tears, we would heave and roar but never weep.

Perfect acquiescence

Amy Carmichael intended the following little convo as admonition/comfort for invalids (including herself, since she suffered from sporadic poor health and was mostly bedridden for her last two decades of life after a chance accident). This little interchange strikes me as also applicable to certain seasons of the CSPP life—actually, as applicable to moments or years in the life of just about anyone who seeks to deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Christ.

A Voice [God’s] speaks within you:

“Things will never be as they were before? That is true; for they will be better.

“You will never do this and this again? That also is true, for I have other things for you to do.

“They are not what you would choose? But they are indeed the best that Love can choose for you.

…And yet—O Lord, forgive; the things I cannot do are looking in through my window now, and beckoning me, and calling me.

“But I am here in the room with you: I am nearer than those beckoning, calling things. I come between them and you. You have nothing to do now, but to please Me.”

Elsewhere in the same book, Carmichael observed,

This, then, is the call to the climbing soul. Expose yourself to the circumstances of His choice, for that his perfect acquiescence in the will of God.

Are you reading your Treasury?

Clement of Rome's writing today in the TDP:

Let the strong not despise the weak, and let the weak show respect to the strong.

...Let the wise man display his wisdom not by words but through good deeds. Let the humble not bear testimony to himself but leave someone else to witness about him. Let him who is pure in the flesh not grow proud of it and boast, knowing that someone else bestowed on him the gift of self-control.


Let us consider, then, brothers, from what matter we were made--who and what matter of beings we came into the world, as it were from a grave and from utter darkness. He who made us and fashioned us, having prepared His bountiful gifts for us before we were born, introduced us into his world. ...

These things therefore being known to us, and since we look into the depths of the divine knowledge, it is necessary to do all things in [their proper] order, which the Lord has commanded us to perform at stated times. . . .

Invidia

My husband has never expressed any interest in the famously transcendent maternal experience. If he wonders what it's like to sustain a human life with only the power of one's own by the grace of God, he hasn't mentioned it (to me, anyway. Maybe he talks to the vicar about it).

What he mentions often is how much it annoys him that I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want, and either not have to worry about the weight gain because it's supposed to be happening, or actually lose weight. :D

It can be hard on a marriage, though. Our family motto for a number of years now has been "Gluttony loves company." It's such a downer when your partner in eating is seized by a fit of temperance and says he's not coming to the ice cream party you've been planning all day.

Blessed are the frustrated

One of my really great excuses for the feral detritus of my life in general, and my floor and counters in particular, is that I’m a perfectionist of the worst sort*: a failed one. I can’t decide whether my recipes should be organized alphabetically, by genre, or by ingredient—so instead I have some recipes on index cards, some online, some in a binder, and some spilling out of a huge manila folder that I waste countless minutes sorting whenever I need to make apple bread.

Laundry room (delusional edition)

Laundry flummoxes me, not because of its sheer volume, but because I can’t figure out a system that accounts for not only clean and dirty clothes, but also the items that are too-clean-to-wash-but-not-quite-clean-enough-to-put-back-in-a-drawer. So miscellaneous articles of clothing in varying degrees of cleanliness end up strewn here and heaped there. Worse: I’ll miss a day or two of devotions and be tempted to throw over the whole endeavor as hopeless. Or I’ll determine to keep patience with the three-year-old for an entire day…OK, an entire hour…OK, I might as well just give up on that one too...

It hardly needs saying that the presence of multiple small children is antithetical to perfectionism. Children are antithetical, in fact, to most petty delusions of control, and therefore quite helpful to this humbled self who’s still working, every day, on that very first commandment. There is a God, and I am not He.

*I can sympathize with the argument that a successful perfectionist, who can be quite annoying to the population in general, is in fact the worst kind of perfectionist. But a frustrated perfectionist seems particularly prone to anger, despair, and other great shame and vice.