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Habits to try for the new year.

It is resolution season, folks, and this is post two in a series...

Yesterday I wrote a post about distinguishing desirable habits from interventions, that is, from temporary deprivations. Habits are like puppies: if you like them and can live with them, you adopt them for the long haul. "Compensatory deprivations" are like spare furniture you get out only when necessary. They can be useful temporary fixes, but they are not something you want to live with permanently.

I think a lot of people slip up by resolving to deprive themselves permanently or indefinitely of something they really enjoy that is ordinarily harmless, or at least it is harmless in moderation. It would be better to identify habits that are really desirable, and try to set yourself up to fall into them, so to speak.

As for me, my biggest problem right now is that I have slipped into an indulge-gain-deprive-lose cycle, and I really need to get out of it and into a more balanced pattern. That calls for a look at habits I would like to re-establish for the new year: permanent changes that I really want to have.

So I made a long list of potential behaviors, and then I carefully considered each one. If I found it appealing, I put it on my list of "habits to try." If I didn't, I put it on the list of "compensatory deprivations" -- and I don't intend to touch those except on rare occasions, such as the morning after a day full of bad food, or as a needed kick start.

The habits list is surprisingly short. Remember that yours are not the same as mine...

I. Well-established habits I want to be sure to keep.

- One egg is enough eggs for breakfast. I wrote about this and other "mantras" here.
- Keep the gym bag packed at all times. It has been a little trickier to juggle the schedule lately such that I get to the pool or treadmill, and so it is even more important now that I remain always ready to take the opportunity when it comes.
- The right-size plate is 8-1/2 inches, which means the inner rim of a larger one. Switching to "luncheon plates" has been the easiest way I've tried to fight mealtime gluttony -- it has totally been worth the cost of replacing our family dinnerware. Full-size dinner plates are do-able, though, because they often have an "inner" plate that is 9 inches or so; I just pretend the decorative rim is not there.
- A "normal" plate has four quarters: two vegetables, one protein, one starch. I don't mean to say that I always divide my meals up like this; I don't, for example, dissect a portion of lasagna. It's more of a mental habit for eyeballing the relative proportions of the main dish and the side dishes. I do follow it pretty frequently at lunch.

II. New habits I am excited about, to begin trying immediately.

- "Half a sandwich is enough sandwich for me." This is potentially a new mantra to add to the ones at the link I mentioned above. I won't go into it now, but I actually have a lot to say about how I came to this one and why I am excited (I know, weird word to use) about trying it. I will write a whole post about half sandwiches coming up soon.
- A "normal" portion of sweets or dessert, for me, is a two-thumbs-sized slice or 1/3 cup. I would like to have sweets every day if I want them, and that only works if I keep the portions small, which is fine with me. I would rather have a little ice cream every day than a giant bowl on the weekends. This habit is not exactly new, as I also used it when I was losing weight in 2008, but I think I would like to make it permanent in order to eat ice cream more frequently (I have been cyclically denying myself dessert, and I am tired of it).
- If I have alcohol with dinner or before dinner, it should be only a little: half a beer, or a quarter glass of wine. I can have more after I have finished eating and the plate is removed. I don't want to give up wine or beer with dinner, but I have to face reality: alcohol makes me eat more. Keeping the amount small until the food is gone may just be the habit I need to establish to let me enjoy both in moderation.

III. Habits to try later on.

- Refuse to eat quickly. Everybody knows the conventional wisdom, that eating slowly and being sure to savor your food is good for portion control. I have never really mastered it -- I am usually the first one done with any meal. This is a direct challenge to gluttony, so it's a habit I really want to try -- but I am saving it for later because I expect it will be rather difficult to establish.
- Skip bedtime snack as normal practice. I had this habit before, but have fallen out of it. It needs a trial period; it might not be right for me at this time.
- Notice my hunger level at the start of the meal, and adjust my plate accordingly. Up till now, I have tried to load plates consistently, each dinner about the same size, because for so many years my hunger signals were not reliable. I think they are more reliable now, and the way to test that is to carefully try serving myself larger helpings if I am hungry and smaller ones if I am not.
- Strictly practice "no seconds" to see if it becomes a comfortable habit. I more or less eschew seconds at meals, but it is not really a habit; I feel a little deprived by it. I want to give it a good continuous try for a while to see if it can become something I can get used to.

- Reinforce the "no seconds" habit by serving dishes in the kitchen. This is something that might or might not work; because we have small children who cannot serve themselves, I will have to go back to the kitchen anyway, which could backfire. Maybe I will think of a way to set this one up so that it works in our family.

- Portion grains, soups, and breads to moderate carbohydrate intake. It isn't sustainable to measure them every time, but maybe I can use a handy comparison to keep myself relatively honest, the way I use "two thumbs" to set the size of sweet desserts -- perhaps stay below a fist-size volume of bread and grains or a two-fist volume of soup.

Containers.

Thursday I met up with my good friend Kim from high school to wander around a mall for a few hours as a pretext for catching up. Just as it did back in junior high and high school, browsing around window shopping, in this case searching noncommittally for possible after-Christmas deals, is a perfect setting for having an hours-long conversation that ranges over all the various news that sums up "life in the past year."

We did have a couple of items each to check off the list. Mine was new lingerie and a light wool sweater to replace one I put a hole in recently. Hers was shelving and racks for a kitchen cabinet, so we stopped into a Container Store that shared a parking lot with the mall.

There is a certain ironic tension about the Container Store and me. On the one hand, it is just the sort of store that I should never enter alone, because: Ooh! Bento boxes! Ooh! Pot-lid racks! Ooh! Melamine trays! They're so black and so rectangular and so plastic!

On the other hand, on the face of it, the store is absurd. There used to be a SNL skit, one of the fake commercials, that advertised a bank that only made change. Sometimes I think that 20 years ago, SNL could have made a parody commercial of the Container Store: We don't sell stuff. We sell stuff to put your stuff in. We even sell stuff to put the stuff that you put your stuff in in. There are echoes of the famous George Carlin bit, "My stuff is stuff, your stuff is s#it."

But anyway, I was walking up and down the aisles with Kim, nattering on about this tray and that box, and checking out prices and saying things like "the thing you are looking for goes inside a cabinet, so you won't want to pay extra for something just because it looks good," and "oh, I have a bunch of these, they are really great because they stack," and "don't just look in the kitchen section, my one friend uses fridge ice-maker bins to hold school supplies in her bookshelves."

We had stopped to scrutinize some sorters for racking flat things like cookie sheets and cutting boards in a cabinet and I was going on about "well, I have a metal one kind of like this, but it isn't as well made as this one, mine doesn't have the ends of the wires welded and so they get bent all the time, but look, this plastic one is less expensive, and if it isn't big enough to keep them straight you could always get a second one and put it deeper back in the cabinet," when a sales clerk came down off a ladder and tried to recruit me for a job due to my superior product knowledge.

(No way, I told her, but not before I asked to find out what the employee discount was. For the record, it is 40 percent).

Is it a puppy or is it a turkey roaster?

I haven't actually made any New Year's resolutions, but 'tis the season for reflecting on good and bad habits, no? So get ready for a couple of anti-gluttony posts, starting with this one.

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As part of marking my weight goal anniversary (three years this past November -- can you believe it?) I took a step back and surveyed my eating and exercise habits: what was working? What wasn't? Were there any good habits I had abandoned out of sloth and gluttony? Had I discovered any new ones, or thought of any potential new ones that might counteract problem areas?

It is a bit hard to tell if my anxiety is ill-founded (this being the nature of anxiety), but I still feel as if I only barely can keep my weight down. Probably I have an unhealthy obsession with it -- but, to put it bluntly, I do not wish to let go of my possibly unhealthy obsession because I would rather be obsessed than put the weight back on again. The story of the last three years has been the story of trying to externalize the obsession, find ways to live and to see myself that are balanced less precariously. I think of wrapping little packages of anxiety up in my mind and transferring them somehow outside myself, one at a time, into tidy little stacks. Turning this balance into something that is maintained by things I simply do and forget about, rather than things I turn over and over in my mind. From head to hands.

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Here is my husband's idea, which has merit: "Make a list of habits that you can add or subtract as necessary. Put them in order from the easiest and most painless to the most difficult and annoying. Then, if your weight spikes up, start adding habits in order, only one or two at a time. If that doesn't help, add more until your weight goes down again, and then you can stop the habits, starting with the most annoying ones."

The idea of ranking behaviors by annoyance level was a new one, and I thought I would give that a try. I started making a list of things like "don't eat sweets" and "keep the serving dishes in the kitchen" and "put a stick of gum by my plate at dinner" and "one egg is enough eggs for breakfast" and the like.

But as my list of former and current and potential weight-controlling strategies grew longer, I began to feel uneasy about calling them all "habits." And as I began to shuffle them around to figure out which ones I enjoy the least ("no wine with dinner" and "pre-count every calorie" are two examples of behaviors that work extremely well but that exemplify the life I do NOT want to lead), I became even more sure that "habit" is absolutely the wrong word for many of these behaviors.

What Mark is suggesting is not a ranking of habits, but a hierarchy of compensatory deprivations.

A habit is not like a toggle switch; it is more like a houseplant or a tropical fish or a puppy. It requires care. Yes-no choices do go into it, though. Choose often enough to feed it and it thrives; choose often enough to neglect it and it withers. Useful habits are habits to live with: not necessarily permanently, but for long periods. They can be tried for a while to see if they are pleasant to live with and if they have desirable effects, but this is not the same as toggling them on and off; it is more like a temporary adoption, to see if an attachment will deepen.

Compensatory deprivations are less like a companion pet and more like a spare folding table or a turkey roaster: an unwieldy, occasionally used piece of furniture or appliance that you get out of the basement from time to time when necessary. (e.g., at the holidays.)

We all know some person (a lot of us seem to be married to one) who decides he needs to take off a few pounds, gives up ice cream for a couple weeks and bam, problem solved,the lucky bastard. That is the idea we are going for. A useful compensatory deprivation is something that's at least a little painful, but is temporary and effective. If it works but hurts, the working should be enough motivation to keep going just until it isn't needed anymore. If it works and doesn't hurt (or you find you get used to it eventually), maybe it should be nurtured as a long-term habit after all. If it hurts and doesn't help, then there's no point, now, is there?

One way to begin turning your life around is to temporarily foster new habits, patiently nurturing them and giving them a chance to take root and thrive. Not all will be good matches, it is true, but you must be careful not to let the trying and discarding become the habit itself; the end is adoption, the testing only the means. Compensatory deprivations don't even need to enter the picture until a number of good habits are thriving comfortably.

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After I realized the crucial distinction between potential habits and potential compensatory deprivations, it was fairly easy to sort the items into two lists: one list of behaviors that either are already habits, or that I thought I might enjoy if I adopted them permanently; and a second list of behaviors that I thought would be helpful interventions from time to time but that I didn't want to become my constant companions... something to store in my basement, so to speak.

Which behaviors are your potential puppies, and which are your potential turkey roasters? Tune in next time and I will share my lists. Just in time for the new year.

Spatial learners are from Mars and visual learners are from Venus.

We were midway through our long winter's drive. I was reading a book aloud to Mark, who was driving. (A terrible book. We got our money's worth mocking it. I'll review it later for you.) The kids were bored but quiet, listening to music or leafing through books. The eight-year-old was scribbling on a sketchpad; he is my cartoonist. "Mom?" he asked. "How do you spell 'Indiana?'"

"I-N-D-I--" I started.

But he interrupted me, talking over my spelling, to repeat as he wrote it down, "I...N..."

"Hold on, slow down," I said. I began to invoke a spelling-learning technique I learned from somewhere. "Okay, don't interrupt me. Listen to the whole word and picture it in your mind as I say it, then write the whole word down. I-N-D-I-A-N-A."

Mark interrupted me in a baffled tone of voice. "How do you expect him to do that?" he asked me.

I was equally baffled. "What do you mean, how do I expect him to do that? I just want him to remember the letters as a whole word and then write the whole word down."

He insisted, "But what do you mean, 'picture the word in his mind?' How is that supposed to work? You can't see a word. It isn't a thing, like a screwdriver. It's just an abstraction. It can't be pictured, like it was a screwdriver or something."

Now I was really confused. It really hadn't seemed like that tough of a concept. "Um... I want him to imagine that he can see the word. Imagine a picture of it, with all the letters in order."

"All the letters? At the same time?"

"Yes... can't you?"

"No!"

I was amazed. He really couldn't imagine being able to picture a word in his mind? I couldn't imagine NOT being able to picture it. "Well... I can. It's like, um, like, in my mind's eye I can see it on a page, as if it were typed on a page."

"Typed? Not handwritten?"

"Well... I can imagine it handwritten if I want to" (here I paused to imagine the word "Indiana" in my own handwriting on a page, just to check) "but I guess the default picture is typed."

"What typeface?" he pressed.

"Uh, more like Courier than anything else. I mean, I can do Times New Roman or Helvetica if you want me to. Really it looks like an old typewriter."

He shook his head as if he didn't believe me.

"Listen, Mark, can you imagine a process and instrumentation diagram?"

"Sure."

"How about a plate-and-frame heat exchanger? Can you imagine opening it up and seeing all the parts, or maybe an exploded diagram of one showing how it all fits together?"

"Of course."

"Imagine going into our kitchen and picking up the rotary cheese grater and taking it apart?"

"Yes..."

"Okay. You walk into a room. There's a desk with a typewriter on it. You walk over to the typewriter. Pull the sheet of paper out. On the paper is typed a single word: 'Indiana.' Can you read the word?"

"No. Too many letters."

"What if the word was 'cat'? Can you read that?"

Pause. "Yes, I think I can do that one."

"But not, umm... Give me a word that's hard to spell...."

"'Necessary,'" he suggested.

"Okay, that's a good one, I always have to think about it too. Okay, 'necessary.' You can't imagine the word 'necessary' in your mind as a picture?"

"No."

"Well, what do you see when you try?" I asked, fascinated.

He paused for a while. "I can see the N and the E at the beginning, and the Y at the end, and in the middle just a jumble."

I stared at him. "How is it that you can spell anything at all?"

"Well, I just start at the beginning and take it a few letters at a time until I get to the end."

"You can't compare the word you've written with a picture of the word in your mind."

"No, I already told you that." He was getting exasperated with me. But his tone changed to curiosity: "I can imagine a pencil. I can turn it around, look at it from the end, rotate it all different directions, mentally break it in half and see the inside. Can you do that with the word 'necessary?'"

I had not considered that. I tried it. I pictured the word 'necessary' typed on a clean white page. Imagined the page rotating counterclockwise, the y-end of the word ramping up above the n-end slowly, up to the vertical. "I can still see it, all the letters in order, all the way up to ninety degrees. But if I rotate it farther it kind of collapses into a jumble. Wow, that was a good question! I never tried that before."

"Can you flip it around and see it written from the back? Like through a sign painted on a glass window?"

"Or like those animations of words they used to have on the old Electric Company shows," I said, remembering. "Let me see. Um, I can't do it with 'necessary.' I can do it with 'cat.'"

He shook his head. "I think maybe your spelling technique won't work with everyone."

"Well, how am I supposed to tell the child how to spell a word then?"

"Do it slowly enough that he can write it down as you say each letter."

But that will take forever! I thought, but didn't say. "It's just for a few seconds, just long enough to take it in and then write it down -- like remembering a phone number just long enough to hang up and then dial it. Can't you do that? 'Indiana' isn't any longer than a phone number."

"I generally write it down."

Married thirteen years, and it seems we still don't understand each other. Well, I will try to be more sensitive from now on.

My gym bag.

A long time ago, when I was fairly new to regular exercise, I wrote a post entitled "My swim bag" in which I described, um, my swim bag.

After I finished taking a year of swimming lessons a few years ago, and started trying to swim for fitness, I only managed to do it a couple of times a month. Part of doing it more frequently has been developing a well-stocked, ready-to-go swim bag.

I started with the bare bones. My bag had

• one lap suit from the local sporting goods store
• one ugly old beach towel (I wanted one I wouldn't miss if I kept it in my bag), big enough to wrap up in
• ordinary Speedo swim goggles from the local sporting goods store
• one ordinary black latex cap from the local sporting goods store
• my YMCA membership card

This is, I think, the minimum that anyone needs to swim for fitness. About 2 minutes into my first swimming lesson, I discovered that the swimsuit I bought a few years back mainly because it flattered my figure was no good for lap swimming; it wouldn't stay put. So I bought a proper lap suit on sale for about $45. It took a few more lessons before I finally admitted that I would be more comfortable with goggles and a swim cap (if your hair is very short, a swim cap is optional). The towel goes without saying. My "Y" card represents, of course, access to a pool or body of water in which to swim.

As I decided I needed them, I acquired a few more things to stuff in my bag. Much would be good for any exerciser, not just swimmers. Let me stress, though, that none of this is necessary -- I could get a good workout with nothing more than suit, goggles, and towel.

• A pair of "flip flop" sandals to get me from the locker room to the pool to the shower. It's safer to navigate the stairs (yes, there are stairs at my Y between the locker rooms and the pool) and shower room with something on your feet. Also, I can slip them on to pick up a child from swimming lessons without breaking the no-street-shoes-on-the-pool-deck rule.
• A second towel, one of those super-thirsty super-compact PackTowls, to help get my hair dry faster (or even to wear on my head out of the locker room in a winter hurry). I still use the ugly old beach towel too.
• A mesh hanging bag, full of all the stuff I need to shower and get presentable in the morning: shampoo and conditioner, facial cleanser, moisturizer, anti-perspirant, razor and extra blades, toothbrush and toothpaste, comb, and a handful of hair clips and a bandana for tying my hair up or back if necessary. If I was a makeup wearer, I'd have that too. None of this is actually necessary for most workouts -- a good rinse in the shower is enough to get most of the chlorine out -- but it's extremely convenient to have it, especially for early morning. Who wants to get ready twice when once will do? (A nice bonus: with all this stuff pre-packed, it's a snap to prepare an overnight bag on short notice.)
• A waterproofed workout plan:
  • The plan. It's a piece of paper on which I've written out the drills and laps I want to do in the order I want to do them. Ideally I would make a new one for each session, but it's good to have a sort of "default" plan ready to go. Mine is pretty simple and fits on a 3x5 piece of paper. Having a plan makes the workout more interesting, and more beneficial than just "oh, I'll swim for 40 minutes and stop."
  • The waterproofing. You can laminate the plan -- very effective but perhaps time consuming if you don't own a laminator. You can put it in a page protector -- not too bad but bigger than I need. You can put it in a Ziploc bag -- an excellent and easy solution. Or (my favorite solution) you can recycle old Tyvek envelopes: Cut them up and write on the scraps, wet or dry, with a #2 pencil.
• A one-touch lap counter. This little toy was a bit of a splurge, but I love it for timed workouts. I always lose count and then I don't know how far I swam.
• A combination lock.

All these things live permanently in the bag. When I get home from swimming, I take the bag right to the laundry room, where I either put the towels and suit into the next basket of laundry waiting to be washed or hang them up to dry and be re-used; the bag stays in the laundry room until the towels and suit are dry and I can repack it.

A lot of this is still true, but I thought it was high time for an update, seeing as now I am not just a swimmer but a runner, and I have been for a long time.

First of all, some time ago I upgraded the bag to a bigger one with multiple pockets. Now I also keep in the bag enough items to swim or run, so that either workout is possible wherever I go. The bag, therefore, contains:

• Running shoes. It's definitely worthwhile to have a dedicated pair of running shoes. There is a different pair that I wear with ordinary clothes for walking around (what they are, actually, is an old but still nice-enough-looking pair of running shoes). I run in cross-country flats now that I have switched to forefoot-striking.
• A complete set of running clothes, including socks, running bra, and clean underwear. I have two sets of running clothes so that one can be in the laundry while the other is in the bag, but I don't unpack one until the clean one is available; it's more important to be ready for a workout than to have freshly cleaned workout clothes.
• A set of headphones. I don't keep my iPod in the bag all the time, but I try always to have headphones. The treadmills at the gym have built-in TVs that take them. And if I think about it, of course, I can bring the iPod. Maybe someday I will have a dedicated mp3 player for the gym bag.
• Something to hold my hair out of my face. A bandana is the default choice.
• A "wrist wallet" to carry necessary items like a car key or cell phone.
• A couple of cold-weather items like a hat, a light hoodie, and a neck gaiter.

I still have it always packed with a complete set of toiletries, and because of this it doubles as an overnight bag -- I can even sleep in the workout clothes, or wear them the next day if I'm really in a hurry!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What's a Christmas dinner that's still relaxing for the cook?

Red at ...and sometimes Tea has a great reader bleg up.  I'm interested in it myself and I know some of my readers have interesting solutions so I'll send you over there to discuss the "Christmas Dinner Dilemma" (which isn't really a dilemma but never you mind).  I'll reproduce most of the post here to encourage you:

One of the problems for us Americans is that we've had Thanksgiving a month before. Some families find it extremely important for Christmas dinner to be Thanksgiving Mark II, complete with turkey, dressing, cranberries, traditional sides, fine china and glassware, and all the panoply of the Thanksgiving meal, with, perhaps, a few unique Christmas touches (such as, perhaps, a real Christmas pudding, though that is not something I've ever tasted myself). Other desserts may be anything from the much-maligned yet under-appreciated fruitcake to the same sorts of pies one might serve at Thanksgiving; and the whole scene is supposed to convey the rosy glow of a Norman Rockwell painting.

But I have to be honest: I find the idea of cooking what is essentially a second Thanksgiving dinner a month after Thanksgiving rather difficult. On Thanksgiving Day the cook or cooks have the whole day to prepare and cook the meal; on Christmas Day the cook has considerably less time, and unless he or she absolutely loves cooking a huge meal and finds it a relaxing and enjoyable hobby to do so he or she is possibly going to be a bit cranky by the time the family troops in to eat. And, let's face it: preparing what is essentially the same "Holiday Meal" twice in a month is a bit boring. Sure, you could change the main course from a turkey to a ham or vice versa, and you can tinker with the sides and desserts a bit, but you're essentially doing the exact same sort of cooking.

Now, I know that lots of people skip the "Second Thanksgiving" type of Christmas dinner. There are all sorts of other meals that individual families embrace as their own family tradition. For instance, my sister's late mother-in-law reportedly made Christmas a day for a deli spread (which would be great in Texas in years when it's 70 degrees at Christmas). Around here, it's traditional for some people to order tamales for Christmas (or for New Year's). Many cultures have traditional Christmas foods which are very far from what is customary in our culture.

So, my bleg is this: I'd like to hear from readers who have Christmas food traditions that go beyond a second round of Thanksgiving fare. What do you cook and serve? Is it a family custom, a cultural tradition, or some combination? Is Christmas a day to pull out all the stops and go gourmet, or is it a day for a sort of glorified snacking?

As for me, I've only been the matriarch of Christmas day twice.  The first time, I was nearly eight months pregnant, and if I remember correctly we had Christmas Eve dinner with friends, then went to Midnight Mass on the way home with our sleepy kids.  It snowed us in in the morning.  I made cinnamon rolls for breakfast; we didn't eat lunch (just more cinnamon rolls); and I'm not sure what dinner was, but I vaguely remember it being chili or something equally simple.  Since Mark and the kids spent the whole afternoon building a snow fort, they were good and hungry.

The second time, our whole family got sick and we were unable to travel to our families in a different state (although almost all of our presents had been shipped there... that was a singular Christmas).  Christmas Eve dinner was certainly chicken soup, that year -- I don't remember what we did for the big day.

Both times we had a few different kinds of Christmas cookies, which is EXTREMELY UNUSUAL for me as I hardly ever make cookies of any kind.  (I had baked and frozen them ahead of time).   When we were sick, my father-in-law sent us a gift basket from the local posh grocery store, with fruit, cheese and crackers, and chocolate, and that was a big part of Christmas.  

Personally, I liked the pattern of festive Christmas Eve dinner with friends, Midnight Mass, cinnamon rolls for breakfast,  and a simple but hearty soup with fresh-baked bread for dinner (plus cookies all day and who really needs lunch?).  Since you're home all day, the soup doesn't have to be crock-potted -- it can burble along in the oven or on the back burner, and can even be the sort of thing that you have to Do Something To every couple of hours, which is sort of unusual.  Christmas might be a good day for boeuf bourguignon, perhaps, or ratatouille, if you can take care of some of the prep ahead of time.  But good old homemade chicken noodle or minestrone, as long as everybody loves it, is also pretty special.

Anyway, shoo, don't comment here -- go over to ...and Sometimes Tea.  Then if you want you can come back and copy your comment.

Don't tell anyone else how to grieve.

Katie Granju has an excellent piece about respecting grief, after the media buzzed for weeks with nasty comments about a grand multipara who had the temerity to hold a memorial service for a child miscarried in the second trimester and to have photographs taken of the child (which were then leaked to the public via a tweet).

 I’ve blogged before about how hypocritical I find it that so many other women who would go to the mat to defend my right NOT to have children are so nasty in their criticisms of another woman’s choice to have lots of children.

... But when it comes to pregnancy loss near or after the time of viability, which is where Michelle Duggar lost her baby, I don’t know anyone who’s been through that particular hell who didn’t see it as losing a baby. Nasty online critics can demean losing a child five months into pregnancy, as the Duggars did, by referring to this family’s dead child with the technical and cold terminology of “miscarried fetus,” but that doesn’t reflect how the mother who birthed that tiny child, held her and laid her to rest feels. To parents who lose a baby in the second or third trimester, they just HAD A CHILD DIE. It’s as simple as that.

If those photos of Michelle Duggar’s dead baby’s foot offend you in some way, why not take that negative emotional energy and turn it into something good. Why not grab your own camera, and go take a photo of your own healthy, beautiful, living child. I’ll bet that as you look through that viewfinder at your own good fortune, manifest in every breath your beloved son or daughter, grandchild, niece or nephew takes, you’ll have a new perspective on this whole thing.

I can understand people (particularly the childless) not understanding the grief that comes from a miscarriage.  You would think that people would not, at least, need to be told that it takes a very small, mean kind of person to mock grief of any kind, but apparently this is not the case.

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A note:  

The Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep Foundation exists to provide, free of charge, remembrance photography to parents who have suffered the loss of a child or who expect their child to die soon after birth.

From their site: “For families overcome by grief and pain, the idea of photographing their baby may not immediately occur to them. Offering gentle and beautiful photography services in a compassionate and sensitive manner is the heart of this organization. The soft, gentle heirloom photographs of these beautiful babies are an important part of the healing process. They allow families to honor and cherish their babies, and share the spirits of their lives. The NILMDTS mission statement is to introduce remembrance photography to parents suffering the loss of a baby with the gift of professional portraiture. We believe these images serve as an important step in the family’s healing process by honoring their child’s legacy.”

The link goes to the “about” page, but be aware that the rest of the site contains beautiful but sensitive photos.

Offering up joy.

(note: links and formatting will be updated later)

Blogger Betty Duffy and I have been lazily exchanging posts in a sort of open conversation about our Marian consecrations, which we each completed independently in the fall. I have been chewing on this post of hers for a few weeks, namely, the notion of "offering up" little joys, pleasant experiences. Catholics are accustomed to the idea of offering up our sorrows and sufferings and sacrifices; it makes sense to us, because we understand that suffering has meaning and worth, and therefore God can use ours somehow. In the Marian consecration, the benefits derived from any such sacrifices and sufferings belong to Mary to distribute; but both B.D. and I discovered early on that along with consecration came a surprising inclination to offer joys as well. Here is Betty:

My friend Irene consecrated on the same day I did, and she was laughing about how one night, she was having a glass of wine and a bath before bed, and it occurred to her to offer it, "All for!" She felt weird about it at first, but why not offer up our rest, our comfort, our blessings as well as our suffering?

I think one source of the anxiety I've felt in the past is some sense of shame about the goodness of my life. Am I undeserving of Heaven because my life hasn't led me to any significant suffering? The pleasures of having a good marriage, good kids, good friends, reading good books, eating good foods, seem to offer little in the way of salvific value. So rather than offering up those good things, I would discount them completely, choosing to focus my emotional and spiritual energy on the minute discomforts of a relatively privileged life. If nailing oneself to the Cross is the only way to Salvation--I had no idea what to do with my blessings--blessings that God, in his goodness, made it impossible for me to escape.

Offering ALL of it, the good and the bad, has redeemed the mostly good things that constitute my life. And without seeking suffering, looking for it, wallowing in it, I'm free to administer to those who really do suffer.

I should add that at this season in my life, there are far more happy moments, far more joys large and small, than sad moments and suffering. I feel a need to offer these up, if only because there is so much more to offer from that reservoir. I would have to look pretty hard to find a suffering to off that is larger than getting cut off in traffic, or maybe having a migraine. If I look for joys to offer, well, there is one every moment. And all the moments are there for the offering. So it makes sense to say, "All for you -- Totus tuus!"

But I still wonder -- what does it mean to offer up joy? Possibly the problem is that I am not actually very clear on how to offer up suffering either.

I asked myself the other day in the pool -- I was enjoying the swim, and thought to offer it, and in the same moment thought, "But what does that mean to offer this enjoyment?" and one answer came back immediately: it means to receive it with true gratitude, understanding that this joy is a gift. To be pleased with the pleasure and to refrain from being pleased with myself; to acknowledge that even the powers I have to obtain and to choose and to accept such good things are powers gifted to me.

I asked myself again when I was on the treadmill this afternoon (yes, there is a pattern there, it hasn't escaped me) and another answer came back immediately: the obvious example to look to, the perfect example of offering up a joy, is the mystery of the Presentation. Because after all, Mary and Joseph did not offer the baby boy in sacrifice, Isaac-style, nor leave the weaned child behind in the temple like Samuel; they got to take him home at the end of the day. The Presentation was an acknowledgment that the child belonged to God.

Remember that when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple, they did not expect it, but they ran into two different people who prophesied concerning their gift. The news was not devoid of foreboding.

And so I think there is an implied willingness to relinquish the gift in such offering. If you offer something to God, there is always a risk that you will be forced to admit that the pleasure isn't rightfully yours. If I take a moment to thank God for this pleasurable cup of cappuccino, I risk that it may become obvious that I ought to finish it up and go home and help my husband with the housework instead of finishing up a blog post here in this quiet caf�.

Finally, another part of offering up a joy is a resolution to use the joy, somehow, according to God's wishes rather than our own. If I am rested and refreshed after (say) a good hot shower, maybe I need to take that happiness and energy back and use it for others, rather than keep it selfishly to myself. We all know that various pleasures are good for the soul, but the degree of good largely depends on what we do with the joy and its aftereffects.

Can these insights suggest others that can help us understand more deeply how to offer up sufferings and sacrifices? What they all have in common is that to get in the habit is to remain ready to offer each moment as it arrives, whatever it may bring.

Religion, politics, and money.

Loved this quote from Riparians at the Gate's seven quick takes this morning:

Any suggestions for good conversation starters?  Mixed company, so religion, politics and money talk are right out.  Also, education (mostly), childrearing (mostly), childbearing (mostly), because those are basically religion, politics, and money, Parenting Edition. 

That's all.  I just liked the turn of phrase.

(This is why polite, socially savvy SAHMs have so much more trouble than I do answering the "So what do you do?" question.)

Agency and personhood, more.

I wrote in my post about babies and young children that before I lived with and loved babies of my own, I didn't really see them as full persons -- couldn't have, because I couldn't imagine that they had agency of their own.  But of course, they do; their world may be limited, there are tools yet to be acquired -- but they can use the tools they have to shape their environment as much as they can according to their needs to respond to it.  

(Even if that means building a toy double boiler to meet their need to imitate, all part of the drive to attach to a parent or other loving figure, itself a survival skill.)

I tossed off a little note at the end of that post about other "others" --

It's as if we are programmed to generalize about people, and not really to know in our depths the personhood -- the agency, the will, the decisionmaking capability -- of "that kind of people" when "that kind of people" is one we don't have direct experience with.

 I'm sure this goes beyond young children, to every other kind of "other" there can be.  Being surprised by people --  in the unpleasant sense, instead of the sense in which I discovered my own babies' innate abilities --sets this off vividly.  Whenever we can't understand, really cannot understand, why someone does the thing they do, or when they act in a way we could not predict, and we write it off as senseless instead of trying to see the sense -- that's when we ought to see that we weren't seeing them as whole and real persons, but instead a caricature, a simpler story to tell, like swaddled plastic on TV.

I know of at least three really good posts out there that attempt to explain certain kinds of "otherness" from the inside, to people who don't understand it because they haven't had to deal with it, to people who might blithely say, "Well, if I was in that situation, I'd..."

First off, the "spoons theory of illness."  A young woman living with lupus tries to explain to her friend what it's like to go through your day with a debilitating illness:

As I went to take some of my medicine with a snack as I usually did, she watched me with an awkward kind of stare, instead of continuing the conversation. She then asked me out of the blue what it felt like to have Lupus and be sick....

I quickly grabbed every spoon on the table; hell I grabbed spoons off of the other tables. I looked at her in the eyes and said “Here you go, you have Lupus”. She looked at me slightly confused, as anyone would when they are being handed a bouquet of spoons... 

I explained that the difference in being sick and being healthy is having to make choices or to consciously think about things when the rest of the world doesn’t have to. The healthy have the luxury of a life without choices, a gift most people take for granted....

I asked her to count her spoons. She asked why, and I explained that when you are healthy you expect to have a never-ending supply of “spoons”. But when you have to now plan your day, you need to know exactly how many “spoons” you are starting with. It doesn’t guarantee that you might not lose some along the way, but at least it helps to know where you are starting. She counted out 12 spoons. She laughed and said she wanted more. I said no, and I knew right away that this little game would work, when she looked disappointed, and we hadn’t even started yet. I’ve wanted more “spoons” for years and haven’t found a way yet to get more, why should she? 

...I asked her to list off the tasks of her day, including the most simple. As, she rattled off daily chores, or just fun things to do; I explained how each one would cost her a spoon. 

The name of the website that I found this on is "But You Don't Look Sick."  That's a great name for a general problem:  If you don't understand that people may have obstacles or ensnarements that aren't apparent to you, you're going to have trouble developing empathy (or sympathy) for anyone.  

"Be kind, for everyone is fighting a great battle."  

Next, Megan McArdle writes about poverty, and the folly of non-poor people saying, "If I was a poor kid" (actually in the piece she's responding to  it was "if I was a poor black kid") "...I'd do this and that..."  basically assuming that they could teleport themselves, with the skill set that they developed to adapt to middle- and upper-class society, into someone else's situation and use it to escape, so why doesn't everyone?  

 Yesterday, I was writing about an argument for an environmental intervention (more jobs) that was supposed to be a "silver bullet" for the problems of educating poor kids.  And when people have proposed such silver bullets for obesity (menu labeling, sugar/calorie taxes, restrictions on fast food restaurants), I've made approximately the same argument as I did yesterday: heavy people are choosing to eat because they want to, not because there aren't enough carrots available at McDonalds. 

But when people blithely say "They're fat because they're lazy/greedy/insert bad character trait here", I point out that the people making the accusation have a much easier time making "good choices".  Their bodies are not insistently demanding food in the same way that obese bodies are, so of course it's easier to pass up that big helping of pasta.

 

I'd say the same thing about people who are poor.  They could be middle class if they made a series of hard choices.   But those choices are really hard--much harder than they are for the people who are already there.  Chances are, you would also have a hard time making those choices.

 

 

Ms. McArdle then goes on to list 16 "constraints that strike [her] as powerful."  I would urge you to read the whole thing.  I think she argues very effectively that some of the "constraints" that keep people out of the middle class are difficult to root out not because of lack of values or poisoned culture, but because they are adaptations to life outside the middle class, or, ironically, because they come from strongly prized virtue (such as being unwilling to save money for college because of a felt need to be generous to others, or being unwilling to move away because of loyalty to friends and duty to family).  

Finally, Ta-Nehisi Coates (like Ms. McArdle, writing for the Atlantic's blog) responds to Megan's piece, adding some more points of comparison to the struggle against obesity, and finishes up:

 

Culture is a set of practices which people adopt to make sense of their environment. I was raised in a house where the memory of going hungry had not faded. I never went hungry, but I was raised around people who'd grown up with that. Moreover, all of my friends and relatives were raised the same way. Everyone I knew for the formative years of my life was raised in the culture of "Finish Your plate." And given the environment our parents had come up in, it made perfect sense. As Megan says, I didn't know anything different. Moreover my peer group didn't know anything different. I would actually go further then Megan and say that there wasn't even a sense that we were making "bad decisions"--even if objectively we were.

"Culture of Poverty" is a poisonous phrase, mostly because it's employed be people who are being glib and attempting to duck a difficult conversation. But, as I've maintained, surely there are practices which may save you on the block, but could also keep you from getting a job. And then there are practices which are, in fact, neither, which time and circumstance have rendered irrelevant.

The point here isn't that rich white people are culturally superior. It's that there was something in a particular set of practices which I found valuable. (I assure you that there are many elements in the culture I was raised which they would also find valuable.) And that value is not an Absolute Good. It's something that worked (and continues to work) for me in a specific context. It is not a Great Moral Truth. It is set of practices which yield great results in one context, but could yield disastrous ones in another. 

 

I find all of these points very thought-provoking.  I think it's important to note that the tendency to "If I were in your shoes, I'd..." is not endemic to one side of the political spectrum or the other. Some social conservatives might identify the failure to raise oneself out of poverty as a "values problem" and blame a bad culture of values, or blame individuals for being lazy or sexually promiscuous or otherwise morally shallow.  This is inadequate.  Is it a moral failure to have trouble saving because you're always spending your money helping out family members?  Is it a moral failure to choose caring for your own baby over using government child care so you can hold down a job that pays enough?   Is it a moral failure to buy a car you can afford, but that keeps breaking down and requires constant maintenance?  

 Some progressives might fall into an equally inadequate error on the other side, imagining that individuals are merely passive victims of their environment, or  assert that government intervention in the form of education is the ultimate solution such that, if it's not working well enough, what's needed is always more of it.

(As Ms. McArdle put it in her fourteenth point, "Not everyone likes school," 

 

...the mania to get more and more people into college is the brain child of people who think that school is fun, and that anyone who doesn't go is being deprived of something like a trip to Disneyland packaged with a job guarantee.  

Lots of people think school is rather miserable, and they wish to leave as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the "school is fun" crowd has made an education a virtual pre-requisite for a stable and well paying job in this century.  If you don't like school, and aren't good at it, what do you do?  Spend the rest of your life popping chicken tenders into the deep fry at Popeye's?  Or deal drugs?)

 

A better step towards dealing with poverty is to assume that people in general are, in most cases, acting in their own best interests given the situation that they live in and have lived in -- sometimes not only their own best interests, but the best interests of those around them.  That the "bizarre" or "anti-social" behaviors of people who live "somewhere else" are adaptations to an environment.  The occasional rare individual excepted, human beings neither pull themselves up by their own bootstraps nor submit passively to the culture around us.  Culture and environment shape us and we respond and shape it to the best of our ability.  

The obesity comparison rings true to me.  There is this constant false dichotomy between "dieting and exercise don't work, so don't bother, just learn to be happy with yourself as you are" and "why don't those greedy fat people just take a daily walk and lay off the chips."  The reality is that it's possible to permanently lose weight, but it's very, very difficult.  And there's also this weird assumption you find from time to time, that fat people are only fat because they don't know it's bad for their health or because they don't know that vegetables are good and cheeseburgers are bad (this is the "more education will solve everything" theory).  

If you really distill the "education solves everything" theory down, I fear you will find an assumption of "those people are different from me because they don't know as much as I do, and if they only knew more, they would choose to be more like me."

You don't honor a struggle by denying that it should be a struggle and suggesting that only moral failure keeps the strugglers from success.  Nor do you honor a struggle by denying that there's any point in struggling.   Reality is so much more complicated that I would even oversimplify by stating "Reality is somewhere in between those two extremes."  It's on a whole different plane.

But we are so addicted to simple stories we can tell about others.