bearing blog

Reader question.

A few days ago I posted about NFP:

Any readers who have decided to go the no-charts route, did you find that there was a development over the years of your gut-level understanding or acceptance of Church teaching on human sexuality and procreation, or do you think you already "got it" before you set off on that route?

Reader Erin in KY comments:

I am so glad you posted this question...

My husband and I have been practicing NFP for only the last 5 years of our 11 year marriage. The first 6 were contraceptive. We feel so strongly about this now that we give a talk at the Pre cana session for engaged couples. Since we give the talks about 2-3 times a year we have to sit down and discuss our talk. We have had many discussions on this very topic.

We don't have the experience of putting it all in God's hands and not charting, but we have definitely known the sacrifice of using NFP and have aligned ourselves with Christ in that sacrifice. Like you said it is something that has taken years to fully appreciate. Along those years we have also learned to more fully put our fertility in God's hands and we are hoping to conceive our fourth child soon!

Since this is something that takes time and experience to appreciate, if anyone has input that might make this message more clear for engaged couples please let me know.

I am also collaborating with the author of the training manual for marriage sponsor couple training in our diocese. Just to let you know the audience, this is a couple who most likely doesn't practice NFP having to teach an engaged couple what the church teaches. They will likely have to admit that they don't practice it. As it stands the current training manual just has a Catholic Update in the back on NFP...

I told them these couples are coming to the church for marriage, they should get the truth from the experience. Also, the sponsor couples cannot be forced to practice NFP, but if they are in the ministry of sponsoring couples in the church, I don't think it is unreasonable that they be forced to learn what the church teaches on marriage.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Personally, I think it's a warning sign when a diocese selects sponsor couples for marriage preparation who are in a state of active dissent on the Church's teaching of marital sexuality -- let alone couples who don't even know what the Church teaches.  I applaud you for your efforts to improve the catechesis situation in your diocese.

Any suggestions, readers?

Gut-level development of doctrine.

On the last post, Darwin makes a provocative comment:

When I wrote about the NFP article over at TAC I found myself arguing with a couple of fairly young guys who were upset that the Church didn't provide Very Clear Guidance on when it was okay to use NFP and when it wasn't, for fear that people would use it as just another way to separate procreation and sexuality.

Coming at the question from the vantage point of 11 years of marriage and NFP use, it seems to me that simply using NFP is in and of itself probably the best way to come to a real understanding of the intimate connection between procreation and sex. The fact that not getting pregnant means not having sex for a good portion of the time will do that to one.

That is certainly the case for me -- I intellectually understood the connection, of course, and was willing to follow the rules, but years of actually practicing NFP did give me that gut-level intuitive understanding.

What about Catholic couples who decide they have a particular call to, as some folks put it, "put their fertility entirely in the hands of God?" I am not talking about quiverfull types who believe they should have as many children as possible, nor providentialists who think the rest of us sin when we use NFP to avoid pregnancy for less-than-deadly-serious reasons, but people who have believe they have discerned a particular call to let the babies come as they may.

Do you suppose that this lifestyle, which does not call for periodic abstinence, also develops the gut-level understanding of the connection as well as the periodic abstinence does?

Or perhaps that such couples usually already "get it" or they would not have made such a decision, heard such a call?

Any readers who have decided to go the no-charts route, did you find that there was a development over the years of your gut-level understanding or acceptance of Church teaching on human sexuality and procreation, or do you think you already "got it" before you set off on that route?

A sense of distance.

Ford was very kind -- he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to keep the change.  The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford.  He suddenly shivered:  he experienced a momentary sensation that he didn't understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before.  In moments of great stress, every life form tht exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.  This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth.  On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn't very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed.  Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born six hundred light-years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse. 

The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance.  He didn't know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe.

------- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

My husband travels frequently for business, I think I've mentioned.  I often say that the frequency is just about right; he is generally gone three or four days per month.  Certainly we would like to see more of him, and so I'm glad they aren't more often; on the other hand, since he travels so regularly, the children and I are quite used to it.  "Daddy's-out-of-town" has its own peculiar routine.

On those days, I (instead of Mark) herd everyone into the car and get them to swimming lessons on time; I (instead of Mark) drop the bigger boys off at Wednesday night catechism class and take the younger two to buy groceries before coming back to pick them up; I (instead of Mark) sweep the kitchen and wipe down the counters when the children have gone to bed; I (instead of Mark) make the morning coffee.   Because I do those things, I lose some of my planning time, some of my blogging time; but I've been doing it so long that it is just another kind of normal.  If there is a trip scheduled for the second week of the month, I have to do double school planning on the first week of the month, or else operate a bit more on the fly.  

Other stuff that Mark usually does, I simply don't do.  It's Mark who goes in with the children at bedtime and sits with them, together saying their evening prayer; when he leaves, he reminds them to say their prayers in the evening, and we leave it to them.   Maybe I'm lazy?  Maybe I'm too busy cleaning the kitchen? In any case, bedtime prayers is Mark's "turf," and I don't have any desire to try to substitute for him, at least when he will be back in just a few days.

This kind of normal is not entirely routine, not entirely the same as usual.  If Mark is gone for more than three nights, we will probably have a pizza-and-movie evening, and sometimes we accept an invitation to stay for dinner at a friend's house.  I make dinners the children all like, because the children's appreciation is all I will get:  chili, chicken soup, tacos, spaghetti and meatballs, Caesar salad (yeah, for some reason they all love it, and so do I, so it works out).  

I admit to sometimes serving the kids their dinner and then sending them up to watch movies while I eat in front of the computer screen or engrossed in a book.  After I have been surrounded by people for enough hours, I am desperate for quiet and solitude.  I usually work some such time into the middle of my school day anyway (we call it "break time" and it happens right after lunch), and when Mark is gone I crave it in the evening too.  I don't always indulge myself that way, but I do sometimes.

The last time Mark was gone on a weekend, which is much rarer, I hired a babysitter for a few hours between lunch and dinner on Sunday, just so I could disappear and decompress.  That money was well spent.  

+++

The quote at the beginning, though -- the sense of distance?  

When I say the travel is routine, I really mean it.  We know by heart the schedules of the planes that trundle back and forth between Minneapolis and the two or three Midwestern cities he travels to most.  (He says he barely notices takeoffs and landings anymore, and the one time we went with him, rolling it into a family trip, I was startled to hear multiple hotel workers calling him by name).  

But this week he's in Italy!

It's a slightly longer trip than usual, but that's not the only reason it feels sort of strange.  There is something surreal about waking up in the morning, knowing that overnight one's husband has been whisked 4700 miles away.   I can't quite believe it in my bones; perhaps it is just not part of my evolutionary heritage to really believe that the flesh of my flesh can have been separated, teased apart, and taken so far off in such a short time.  Perhaps if he had been plodding off to New York on horseback, and there haggled prices for a berth in a merchant's sailing ship, I'd get used to the idea in the time it would have taken to happen.

We talk a couple of times a day, and the voice-Skype connection is only slightly garbled compared to a cell phone connection to Ohio or Tennessee or Indiana, and I'm still talking on my same old phone.  Nevertheless there are hours of difference between my clock and his, and there's something uniquely disconnecting about the calls -- I just woke up and you're already done with lunch?  It's midafternoon and you can't talk long because you're exhausted and it's dark and you had a lot of good wine at dinner and you want to go to bed?  

And then there's a third disconnect, along the lines of "you had the local Raboso and the veal cheeks for dinner, and we had nachos." I cannot deny there's some power that one.

But the aspect that sends me reeling the most really is the simple distance:  it's not heartbreaking, nor sad, nor frightening, just simply strange and foreign that this person who is part of me can possibly have gotten so far away, even for a few days.     I feel I ought to be there (and not just for the veal cheeks).  One of these days it may work out that I can come along, and perhaps that may make a difference.

Perhaps the "few days" is the part that is so strange, that a distance so wide can be folded up so small that it almost -- almost -- fits into the spaces of our usual routines.

 

"My Life as a Prison Wife."

Fascinating.  Inspiring.  Perspective-producing.  This short guest piece by Nicki Stapleton on the "Dear Wendy" advice column is worth a read.

We got married on April 4th and just over a month later, on May 13th, my husband was arrested for armed robbery of two pharmacies. He didn’t take any money — just pills (and he didn’t actually have a weapon). I knew that he had a prescription drug problem but had been clean for over three years (he got clean about six months before we started dating) and I thought he was still clean. I was livid that he broke the law. I was livid that he didn’t come to me for help, but he said he was worried I would leave him because three things I don’t tolerate are abuse, cheating, and drugs.

I was a criminal justice professional (I lost my job because of my husband’s arrest and conviction) and have a Master’s degree in criminal behavior. In four years of working with offenders, I have seen relationships survive prison but I have seen many more fall apart. If I had known that he was going to be arrested a month after our wedding (or at any point), I wouldn’t have married him. I love him, but love isn’t always enough. Less than nine months after he was arrested, and eleven months after we were married, my husband was sentenced to prison….

The main question I get all of the time is “How do you remain faithful?” I used to take offense to this question, but I realize people are just curious. The answer is simple for me: I meant my vows. 

Read the whole thing.

An interesting clarification about her job loss from the comments:  

I worked in a halfway house for sex offenders and had worked there for over 4 years. After he was convicted, I filed a fraternization exemption request (one of our policies was no one was allowed to be in a relationship with/live with/be involved with anyone who was under the supervision of the Department of Corrections) and they basically told me that they refuse to make any exception to the rule and told me either I had to not live with or speak to my husband or I had to leave. Thankfully I was already working elsewhere full time and was only working there on weekends.

The rest of the comments are worth reading too.  I wish her and her husband well.

Obedience in dissent, with cultural notes.

Simcha has a great post today.  

(Beginning to think I should just have a category called DIRECT LINKS TO SIMCHA FISHER AND MARK BARNES.)

A reader asks her, 

I feel that I am a faithful Catholic- attend Mass, pray regularly, try to follow the Church in all things. But I fall short on this with one issue- I do disagree about the Church’s stance on homosexuality and gay marriage. My beloved sister is a lesbian...I cannot/ do not look at what my sister is doing as wrong. I’m happy she found someone she loves to spend her life with. I love her children, and I’m so happy that they exist. My sister and her partner are raising them wonderfully...

Sometimes conservative Catholic bloggers will talk about how they struggled with a Church teaching, but the post always ends with how they changed, and saw the light, and saw the truth and beauty in the Church’s teachings. But what are you supposed to do when that doesn’t happen?

There's more than one question wrapped up in that post, of course.  Let me pick one excerpt from Simcha's answer:

Sometimes people think that the Church requires us all to be prophets with bullhorns, or prissy grand inquisitors — that the only way we can ally ourselves with the Church is to be thoroughly obnoxious.

Or perhaps we believe that believing something means feeling good about believing it.  These ideas are actually very handy temptations, courtesy of the devil.  They make excellent obstacles to obedience.

So what is the reader supposed to do?  Certainly not shun or treat her sister, the partner, or the children with disdain; certainly not wish them misery, wish that they hadn’t been born.  Certainly not pick over their house, hunting for evidence of degeneracy.  Depending on the situation, the Church may or may not want the reader to even speak to the sister about her lifestyle, now that it’s so firmly established.

Read the whole thing.  The main thrust of the post is that we are all dissenters about something or other, to one degree or another, and because of that this is really a universal problem of the human heart.  If we value obedience --to legitimate authority within its legitimate sphere, of course -- sooner or later we must come up against some principle we haven't taken to heart.  How do we deal with that?  How do we recognize it?

But there's also another question here:  The question of how faithful Catholics are to live in a world, and sometimes in families, with a broader definition of "marriage" than we can parrot back.  It is still an open and vague one.  

For the time being, the official work of the Church in this area is to work to preserve, one way or another, our freedom to assert what we believe to be true about it.  The Church hasn't quite given up the hope that the larger culture can be steered back to an acceptance of something closer to that same truth.

Now, I don't wish to question the wisdom of this approach heavily, because I am not an expert in pastoral techniques of any kind, let alone large-scale culture-steering.  Cynicism is a fault of mine.  

But:  I tend to believe that this particular horse has already left the barn, and that it was my fellow heterosexuals who drove it out foaming at the mouth.  I think we are already in dire need for pastoral assistance in dealing charitably and truthfully with the world around us here.  It is NOT easy, as Simcha's reader's situation (and countless others) demonstrate.

 In many ways it's not new:  Families everywhere have always hosted an endless stream of intra- and inter-familial messages along the lines of "If you do not take steps to demonstrate your approval of my actions, that is the same to me as a demonstration that you do not love me."  If there is any difference now, it's that much more often the "approval" runs against values that transcend the merely cultural or habitual.   We expect family members to get used to a "black sheep" who merely dressed embarrassingly unconventionally, or pursued a career different from the expected one, or joined the "wrong" political party, or married a person from a different class or ethnic group, or wanted to move too far away or stay too close to home.   But -- and this is still a strong, widely held value in the United States -- it's entirely different to expect people to "get used to" being asked to deny, explicitly or implicitly, publically or privately, their religious beliefs.  

Don't we all get impatient with the bishops sometimes?  I think we're long overdue for some real pastoral advice on how to live, and how to love others, in a world where regular denial of our religious beliefs is expected of us -- both through public economic acts and through ordinary social rituals.

It's love and truth.  They are never in conflict -- not really.  One without the other is impossible.  But we ordinary, foolish humans can screw it up royally, trying to carry them both like a burden, and end up delivering neither.

Couple's success story.

Rachel at grasping for objectivity in my subjective life tells a story of a most effective friendly competition between spouses.

Six short months ago, two people sat on the couch.

One, a woman in her late 20s, two kids down the road, feeling antsy about how to get rid of the baby weight.

The other, a man in his mid-30s, who had been stuck in a continuously yo-yoing range of chubby to walrus since the 2nd grade [his words not hers].

She asked about Lose It, one of the tools he had used on the downhill side of the waistline roller coaster in 2009. He acknowledged its usefulness and potential for success.

Inspiration was born.

A bet was made.

Fat was in the crosshairs of competition.

 

Teaming up with a partner to lose weight may not be for everyone, but it sure seemed to work for these two.   

 

(Rachel's blog is great.  If you've never read her two "Mom Jeans" posts, you should:

two Mom Jeans posts, you should:

• Mom Jeans and the Dreaded "Long Butt"
• New Studies Prove that Replacing Mom Jeans Can Result in Surgery-Free Liposuction

You'll thank me.)

"Complicate my life with technology, please."

Jennifer Fitz has a fresh take on the "how-is-NFP-different-from-contraception" thing.

No no no.  NFP is not contraception.  It is not like contraception, it does not do what contraception does, it has nothing to do with contraception.   Ask a happy contraceptor to use NFP, he’ll quickly confirm this for you.

NFP is a form of abstinence.  It’s a method for not having sex. 

I realize that doesn't make it sound very fun, but go read the whole thing.  

Readers of mine who are not even Catholic may find it very bizarre that, among Catholics who are aware of and accept Church teaching against contraception, there is a substantial contingent who are deeply suspicious even of couples discerning that they ought to use NFP at all.

Yes, it's a fringe group.  But Catholics-who-are-aware-of-and-accept-Church-teaching-against-contraception is already a fringe group.  So the fringe group within the fringe group can seem fairly substantial.

 And if you're firmly within the larger fringe (as in my position, which is that we can have interesting hypothetical discussions about "sufficiently serious reasons" all day, but when it comes to real couples in real marriages, it is their own damn business whether to abstain from sex today or not) it is exhausting to keep having a public debate over and over again about what is essentially a matter of private discernment.  Nevertheless, I soldier on.

Anyway, I like Jennifer's take.  Worth reading.

Reunion.

I really should be using Google Maps to find a Mr. Tire that's open early on Saturday mornings within walking distance of a coffee shop, but I'm putting it off just a few minutes.

Everyone else is at the Minnesota Catholic Homeschooling Conference and I'm not.  I would make a frowny face except that the reason I am not there is that my husband is actually HOME tonight.

 He has been on business travel for 16 out of the past 33 nights.    He will be leaving again soon for another series of trips.

I could have looked at it this way:  I've been doing a lot of single-ish parenting over the last month, and there's more coming up, and I could use a break.  And I could have headed off to the conference and left him with the children for a little breathing space.  And that would have been fun.  And totally understandable.

But it's also kind of nice to spend the afternoon having lunch together, and tidying up the house together, and doing the giant quarterly nonperishable-goods shopping trip together, and taking everybody to the gym together, and going out to  the kids' choice of restaurant together (The new Asian buffet!  The one they've been begging to go to for months!  Where 3 out of 4 of my offspring decided to pile their plates with pepperoni pizza!), and looking forward to maybe having a drink together at the end of the day, after we send the kids to bed. 

Yeah, I think I could go for that.

 

Claws.

Jamie at Light and Momentary writes an excellent post.  It's about self-censoring in blogging, to avoid feeling "naked;" and it's also about self-censoring, of a sort, in public discipline of one's children, the feeling of being judged.

I'm glad she put them in the same post, because I hadn't ever seen the connection between the two -- but they are connected. 

An advantage of blogging freely is that you can speak your mind at length without interruption, and that lets you get all the words in that you need to make your point clearly.   I'm not very good at arguing face to face, and don't have the gift of diplomatic speech that gets across what I want to say; I'm opinionated, strident, and I don't know how to modulate my tone except by shutting up, which is more of a coping mechanism than a skill. (And not one that comes naturally to me -- I didn't learn to shut up at all, let alone the strategy of shutting up when necessary, until late in life.) My fear in difficult conversations is rarely that I will be well understood.

So, in a way, blogging frees me up.  If I have a difficult point to make, even one that will shock or alarm people who know me in real life, I don't have to shut up about it.  I can close my mouth before I say something undiplomatic and then go home and write the same thing I wanted to say, and then I can edit it until it says exactly what I want it to.   Blogging lets me argue at length, so that if I'm misunderstood, it's my own damn fault.  And I'm happy to take responsibility for that.  

But, of course, there are things that require shutting up anyway. For one thing, you have to be careful with telling other people's stories, or stories that belong jointly to you and to others.  Also, people in certain professions or positions must exercise certain discretions. And yet, other things we aren't allowed to hide.

+ + +

Appearing in public with my children in tow is an "outing" in more ways than one.  There they are, these little people who don't know how to censor themselves, don't know how to put up the shields, don't know how to be other than themselves; or else the shields are up but immature, transparent but distorting, so that the shields themselves amplify, project, alter  what's behind them.  Some of what's behind them is me.

Jamie says,

...[T]he certainty I had ten years ago about my parenting philosophy has been eroded by the reality of mothering my children. ... The reality is that the research on long-term attachment parenting outcomes is not as clear as Dr. Sears likes to say it is. The reality is also that Alfie-Kohn-esque discipline strategies can leave you up a creek in the short term. I continue to believe that it is worthwhile to teach children to do the right thing for its own sake, but OH do I see the utility of an occasional threat or bribe.

Ten years will do that to you.  I have a similar philosophy to Jamie's; I don't want to threaten, bribe, or even punish my kids.  (Often that works pretty well for me, though my short temper gets in the way.)  But I know how crummy it feels, this sense that the outside world expects you to swat them and get it over with.  This choice between the long term and the short term.

The nature of the short term situation (that seems to beg for a threat or a bribe) is kind of a clue. If you're just trying to get out of Target before you collapse, that's one thing, chin up; but some of the short-term situations have to do with safety (in which case, do what you have to do) and others have to do with being kind to the people around you -- a much tougher nut to crack. Because, yeah, sometimes my kids are ruining someone else's day.  And that calls for stopping it -- quickly.  Our children may be our first and highest responsibility, but we also have some responsibility to our neighbors. 

Why does that situation feel so difficult?  Why do we feel so judged, and defend ourselves with judging, all the time?

C. S. Lewis wrote something in Mere Christianity, in defense of the husband being the head of the family, that has rung more and more true to me the longer I have been a married mother.

The relations of the family to the outer world--what might be called its foreign policy--must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just [fair and just] to the outsiders.  A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world.  Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims.  She is the special trustee of their interests.  The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head.  He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife.

I like this, and I think it's quite true (whether I like it or not).  "She is the special trustee of their interests."   Mothers are naturally inclined to face inward toward the family, concerned with the kids' well-being and not giving a hoot about the rest of the world, while fathers are naturally inclined to mediate the interactions between the family and the outer world. I think there's something to it, and maybe that's why we feel so judged as mothers when we -- by ourselves, with dad nowhere around -- attempt to discipline, or sometimes even cope, in public. I've not noticed many dads who've had a problem with it; they tend to get on with it, like some unpleasant business best forgotten.  Anyway, I think it might give us a context for thinking about why mothers who aren't especially intimate with each other often struggle so much with judging.  We are bound to look out for our own.

Such a paradox, because some of us can be like sisters to one another, no?  How can that be?  I think it's more a proof of Lewis's suggestion than a refutation.  It's possible for families to pierce and fall through the invisible barrier that surrounds the family against the world.  We have a gift for adopting each other as sisters, becoming aunties to each other's children, when love requires it.  We can become each other's special trustees.  But this power, if it is to retain itself, can't be spread too thinly.  For those outside the circle, I think the claws are always exposed.

Oblivious.

Ann Althouse comments on a NYT fluff piece about families, in the same room, disappearing into their own devices.  She begins by quoting the NYT article:

"While it may look like some domestic version of 'The Matrix' — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely separate planes of existence through technology — a scene like this has become an increasingly familiar evening ritual. As a result, the American living room in 2011 can often seem less like an oasis for shared activity, even if that just means watching television together, than an entangled intersection of data traffic — everyone huddled in a cyber-cocoon."

It's a NYT culture article.

Is there a problem here? If a family of 4 were sitting around together reading books, it would seem better than if they were all watching the same show on TV. And yet, with books, you wouldn't be able to IM stuff to each other.

With either books or computers, if you're with other people, you can easily read something out loud to the people in the room and start a conversation. My grandfather used to do that with the newspaper, and I've come to think of it as a kind of proto-blogging.

I'm actually on Ann's side with this one.   As long as everybody shuts the things off when it's time to sit down around the family dinner table, as long as people respond to each other, as long as there are other things you can do as a family -- I think there's something rather cozy about everyone being in the same room together and enjoying what they do.  It reminds me a lot of when we used to get the newspaper and pass around the sections over our morning coffee.

Last weekend, I came home from my Saturday morning outing and told Mark about something I'd seen while I was having breakfast alone in a neighborhood cafe.  "There were groups there, and young families with children, but also there were several couples sitting across from one another -- older couples, younger couples too -- each person using their own laptop."  He smiled knowingly as I went on, "They were all sitting there in the booth together, drinking their coffee and staring at their own screens.  And I thought --"  I sighed and delivered the punchline:  "It was so romantic."

I made him laugh, but I was serious!  

Not that it isn't romantic that he will take care of the children any Saturday morning I wish while I run errands and get a little quiet time inside my own head.   But sometimes when I am sitting by myself having coffee and eggs Benedict -- and by the way, I do really love sitting by myself in a restaurant, it's one of the great little pleasures of my life -- I wish there were some way to share my lovely solitude.  

And there's something about the casualness of it that I envy a little bit:  Those couples, maybe, get so much uninterrupted time together that they can afford to squander it just sitting together with their laptops.   It's not as if I'm going to hire a babysitter just so I can sit in a cafe across from my husband, snickering at blogs while he shops online for carabiners, taking each other's presence for granted. 

No, gosh darn it, if we get some time alone out together, we have to make the most of it!   Reservations at fancy restaurant, check!  Get all dressed up, check!  Conversation... must have conversation... ummm.... quick, don't waste it, come up with something! 

So, yes, a little envy there.  I banish it for now, and remind myself that chances are good there will be time to ignore each other when the children are grown.