Hey, I'm an American

A recurring theme in this blog, or maybe just in my head: the many and various ways that motherhood, particularly the seemingly perpetual motherhood of young children, is so very, wrenchingly, good for the soul. Our American*-steeped psyches, being as they’re also sin-sick, get to thinking that those individual rights we treasure so dearly apply universally and in family life. We do so love our rights.

And I am as slow and as sin-steeped as they come. For me, at least, it took the continual demands of motherhood to understand that looking not only to my own interests, but also to the interestsof others, might mean doing so on a schedule other than my own—not just sometimes, but every day.  Or that counting others as more significant than myself might require actual (gasp!) sacrifice! And that those others might be diaper-clad, with an astonishing amount of tyranny packed into a ridiculous stature, relentless, and thankless.

As Rebekah pointed out awhile back, there’s nothing like motherhood to make a body realize that even introversion, for instance, is a privilege, not a right.

I was just thinking of a few other privileges that I formerly assumed to be in the category of unalienable rights, e.g.:

The right to determine how a day should start. I love a peaceful morning; a new beginning; an orderly commencement of the day’s tasks. Realizing that I had to awaken with, and likely immediately feed, whichever little ‘un(s) woke at whatsoever time, was an adjustment. I got kind of used to that. I harbored no illusions about, for instance, my chances of meditating over a devotional book with an uninterrupted cup of tea to the sweet chorus of morning birds. And yet I used to think that I was at least entitled to some semblance of order in the waking and breakfast process—especially if I worked hard enough to earn a little law and order in the way things went down. As it turns out, I have a kid who wakes up like he’s been shot from a cannon into britches full of fire ants. And his morning just won’t feel complete till he’s dragged his siblings through the anthill too. So. Farewell to my “right” to order the day’s beginning and the breakfast table as I please. (Heck, I can’t even get them all to EAT the same thing for breakfast…) 

 What, your breakfast table doesn't look like this either? (Kids obviously sold separately too...)

Also: the right to three uninterrupted minutes to deal with necessary matters of personal health and hygiene. No need to elaborate here, eh?

Suffice to say that the battle I must wage against my desire to have my rights is a daily one, and the list could go on and on. And on. But I will end it here with a small pang in my heart and a tiny wistful sigh, as I remember the days in which it seemed to me that the opportunity to enjoy a piece of chocolate at whatsoever moment it pleased me was indeed as unalienable a right as if it had been John Hancocked all those 236 years ago.

*America is great. I love this country. Happy Fourth, everyone! I’m just noting that, like any other culture, America’s has its own particularly soul-endangering notions and tendencies.

Awkward

Explaining to someone, "I don't like your friend because she's so uncharitable." :P

Peter and Joan

They were the happiest couple in that country, because

they always understood each other, and that was because

they always meant the same thing, and that was because

they always loved what was fair and true and right better,

not than anything else,

but than everything else put together.



George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie

Semo: a publisher's search for sales

For Father DMJ's forgotten Lutheran classics.

The 70s, man. It was a crazy time for all of us. 

St Bernadette says, "Yeah, the Lutherans published it, but how did it get into our parish library?"

66% of Christian symbols are marine, and 50% are dolphins.

Semo: A Dolphin's Search For Christ is archived by the Northern Illinois District of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Office of the President.

Your big chance: from the CSPP inbox

From a deaconess student doing a research project on mercy:


 I wondered if you might have any insights or suggestions of things you wish the church offered to you! . . . I would love to hear any ideas you had, or if you'd even want to pose the question to your readers, of how the church/a deaconess/other women in the church could help and support moms like you both spiritually and in day to day needs. 

What would you like to tell this lady? I'll leave my comments in the, um, comments.

Zuke the world

In the summer an aging housewife's fancy turns lightly to thoughts of zucchini and what the heck she's going to do with the 837 pounds of it sitting on her counter and her porch and her desk and her bed. Girls, I finally figured this one out.

You cut it all up and cook it in a big pot until it reaches the sludge stage. Add some water first so you don't have to take it back out of the big pot and pick out all the scorchy pieces on the bottom. :P

Drain it and puree it in the blender and then treat it like canned pumpkin. Or freeze it and treat it like canned pumpkin later. Or can it in your pressure canner (pressure canner only) and treat it like canned pumpkin later. The point is, treat it like canned pumpkin. Never buy canned pumpkin again.

WOW that's an ugly pie.

Not that I haven't used canned frosting

Have we really fallen so far that we must buy remedial cans of glop to make our food look like what we remember food looking like back when we ate food? There is a whole job about making sauce. And yet: Philadelphia Cooking Creme. Creme!

In case you run out of sawdust.

Canned frosting has somehow been made even more horrible. Well done, Duncan Hines.

Be smart

Many effects of the gender-free playworld we've fabulized are silly or stupid, but some are downright dangerous. Read any old-timey book and you will find a population of people who understand implicitly that a male and a female who are not related to each other (and some who are) should not be alone together in private. It is dangerous to both. One may accuse the other of having said or done something inappropriate, or anyone at all may make the same accusation because there are no witnesses. A damaged reputation is nearly impossible to repair, as anyone who has suffered one knows.

One or the other may actually say something inappropriate, which is even worse.

But worst of all is that one of them may do something inappropriate. Or one of them may even do something horrible, and this is where it becomes clear that the danger to women is much greater. They have so much more to lose, and so much less ability to defend themselves.

There is no law, no rule of etiquette, no Scriptural injunction, no cultural memory that tells us a male and a female who are not related to each other should not be alone together in private. But they shouldn't--even if they are coworkers, even if they are friends, even if they are not friends, even if it will save on gas, even if everybody's wife and husband are OK with it, even if it's just for a little while. It's a bad and dangerous idea. It is a courtesy to both parties to find an alternative, however inconvenient, to this situation.

Things I haven't said:


All men are or want to be rapists
Pastors shouldn't counsel women or hear their confessions

Here again, why we should promote motherhood

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstances they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.

Middlemarch, George Eliot

More mysteries

Why is it that appearing in public with five children while pregnant is so much more embarrassing than appearing in public with six children while not pregnant?