bearing blog

Argh.

I had to drive about half an hour from my in-laws' place to find a cafe (a Panera) with free wireless internet access.  Now that I'm here, Earthlink is apparently down and I can't check my e-mail.

Oh well, the sourdough bread is good.  Off to Borders to spend my gift certificates!  And a merry Christmas (yup, it's still Christmas) and a happy new year to all.

"I suspect the desire to control things without conforming to the facts is at the root of all irrationality."

That comment posted by Joe K. in response to this great post by J. D. at Math And Text.  J. D. writes:

[C]ontrol, in education, is almost always placed before truth, no matter what good comes out of the system. Withholding or curtailing the truth and nothing but the truth is a time-honored strategy of gaining control and power across history and across the globe.

Am I being hyperbolic? Here is a ridiculously mundane example:

About a year or so before my line segment battle, I was riding the train home from Boston (on the Newburyport line--last stop). Across from me I watched and listened to a man and his young daughter (about 6 years old, I would say). The daughter asked incessantly about the bathroom on the train. The father insisted over and over that there was no bathroom on the train and that she would just have to wait. Not having children at the time, I made what seemed like a ridiculous gesture. I leaned in and told the father that there was indeed a bathroom on the train and that it was in the front car. He whispered, "I know."

Control. If you're a parent, it can be adopting ridiculous positions that are essentially lies in order to gain the upper hand. If you're a teacher, an administrator, a student, it doesn't matter. Control.

This really hit home.  Come on, parents --- isn't the temptation huge, sometimes, to out-and-out lie to your kids so that (a) they'll obey you (b) they'll stop bothering you about whatever it is (c) they'll stop asking questions....  you name it?

I'm guilty of the following lies:

• "No, you can't have another one.  There aren't any more left."
• "I don't know."  OR "No reason."
• "I am going to sweep the floor in five minutes and if there are any toys left on the floor I am going to sweep them right into the dustpan and they will go in the trash."  [N.B.  This is usually true of some of the toys, but not all.  I guess I'm only lying about being non-discriminatory.]

I' m sure I could come up with more.  And of course this Christmas season, who can forget the power of Santa?  (We don't do Santa.  Never have, never will.)  My mom loved the ability to make kindergarteners in her classroom behave by invoking Santa; she told them she had his home phone number.

Good post.  I hope that commenter Joe's astute observation stays in my mind and helps me be tempted less often.

Toddler neologisms.

At finslippy, and in the comments.   New words include "plander" and "jetinate."

One of my favorites has always been "prinklepined," which was Oscar's word for the itchiness he got from hiding up in the juniper tree.  I got all prinklepined.  Doesn't that sound exactly right?

Groggy.

Sorry for the nonexistent posting for ten days.  PC in the shop, and I've been groggy and sick.  More later, I promise.

Some bloggers are lucky...

... to have LOTS of really amazing commenters, instead of just a few.  Amy Welborn cites an example of one of hers.

Keep it up, thou few and faithful readers! 

"How I regret not going uptown to be among the people who openly mourned John Lennon!"

Ann Althouse has a moving and personal post about December 9, 1980.  There's more there than meets the eye, for those of you who don't particularly care about the anniversary of John Lennon's murder, because it meant something very important to her.  Looking back on it, it is a story of conformity and nonconformity, of insecurity, and something a little universal in modern womanhood:

On the day I heard that John had died, I was a law student at NYU. I remember dragging myself in to the law review office and expecting everyone there to be crying and talking about it, but no one was saying anything at all. I never felt so alienated from my fellow law students as I did on that day. I was insecure enough to feel that I was being childish to be so caught up in the story of the death of a celebrity long past his prime. I didn't even take the train uptown to go stand in the crowd that I knew had gathered outside the Dakota. What did I do? I can't remember. I probably buried myself in work on a law review article...

How I regret not going uptown to be among the people who openly mourned John Lennon! How foolish I was to think I was foolish to care and to put my effort into blending in with the law review editors who, I imagined, were behaving in a way I needed to learn!

I was especially sensitive about fitting in, because I was six months pregnant with my first child, and I worried that this experience was tearing me away from the career I had spent the last two and a half years studying to begin. I was 29 years old, older than most of the other law students. I doubted any of them had studied fine arts, my undergraduate major. With my age, my art school background, and my pregnancy, I was imposter, constantly threatened with exposure. I couldn't walk out on these people and go be with the mourners. I only watched the mourners on television and felt doubly sad.

I can relate to the "imposter" feeling, "constantly threatened with exposure."  And the almost embarrassing obviousness of a pregnancy in a place where pregnancies are not often seen.  I was in an engineering program, not law school.  I went a different way from Ann --- my pregnancies and children did, eventually, tear me away from that career I'd sought --- and I'm not sorry, for myself.  But I do feel a certain warmth towards people like Ann, whose success hasn't managed to tamp down their humanity.   

You'd think I'd always be the cheerleader for ditch your career!  stay home with your kids!  I don't know any details about any particular person's decisions, how they affect her kids, etc.  Anyone who asks me knows how much I worry about children who spend a lot of time in day care and other institutions.  But I admit to a certain amount of pleased pride in a woman who (a) doesn't let a desire/calling for a career prevent her from raising a family (b) braves that feeling of impostership, that fear of exposure, that Ann writes about, and manages to overcome it.

It's not so much that I am pro-supermom or anything.  That's hard, and rarely worth it for long!  It's more that I am so pleased when those glassed-in, walled-in worlds that can pretend they are so remote from families, from love, from babies, from children --- are forced to bend a little from the weightiness and import of families, love, babies, children, where the real work of humanity takes place.

That, and that I am one of those, or she is one of us.  I went home, after a while.  But oh, how I remember what it was like for those brief (or were they long?) years of living in two worlds, going to graduate school, coming home to my child, lugging the pregnant belly back and forth.  Trying to figure out where my real home was, or whether I was some kind of dual citizen.  In the end I chose for my children, but by that time the same choice was also for me.    I finished my degree, and that was enough for me of a certain measure of success:  that me, the imposter, and the pregnant belly that gave me away, had come up against the university and won.

Closed for Xmas.

Amy Welborn has a series of posts sparked by the news that a particular mega-church in Kentucky decided to close for Christmas to give its staff the day off.  Here's her first post about the KY church.  Here's a second one, in response to a post by a Canadian Presbyterian who blogged his disappointment that his own church would have no Christmas Day service.  Here's a third, highlighting commentary by an "excellent Scripture scholar."

When I first read these posts and the news articles that accompanied them, I was immediately sympathetic to the Protestants who criticized the churches for not having Christmas services.

Then I realized that the criticism was not so much because they weren't having Christmas services, but because Christmas happens to be on a Sunday this year.  The criticism was mainly:  "Hey, they canceled Sunday services because of a holiday!"  And certainly that is a problem.

I thought that was weird.  Don't Protestants usually go to church on Christmas Day, whatever day of the week it falls on?  Or is that just a Catholic thing?  (Late Christmas Eve services count as Christmas Day services, btw, under the same logic that lets us go to Mass on Saturday evening to keep our Sunday obligation.)

Let me tell you, even after thirteen years, I still have a lot to learn  about being a Christian in the United States.

No guilt allowed.

Good post on guilt at Family Scholars Blog:

For a long time in our culture we have focussed on adult rights and freedoms, which strangely enough carry new burdens of responsibilty for the child. The wise, resilient, and oh so competent children of divorce, are expected to cope and take responsibility for “looking after” and protecting the feelings of the oh so vulnerable adult against a bad conscience. And to remain silent about their own experience. Or to put it another way, there is a role reversal of responsibilty between the adult and the child.

Guilt is the card that out trumps any other. There is no greater social sin than to raise issues that makes someone, somewhere feel guilty. And the moral focus then shifts to the question of the words that create guilt, rather than the actions, which created the guilt in the first place. It also changes the spotlight from the social problem to the person who raises the issue- shooting the messenger.

Mourning, but not IRL.

For years --- first on Usenet, now even more easily with e-mail list services like YahooGroups, we've seen the proliferation of Internet support groups and communities.  People united by nothing more than a common interest and a common language can meet, discuss, learn from each other, lean on each other, no matter how far apart they live.  We get to know each other in an abbreviated fashion:  we know the writing style, we know what subjects amuse and infuriate them, we understand the sense of humor.  All this never hearing a voice or seeing a face or meeting in person. 

Once, after my mother died, a woman I'd "known" from email for seven or eight years looked me up and called me on the phone.  It was unexpected and such a strange sensation --- the voice wasn't right somehow.  I'd "heard" her in my mind for so long.  Her voice is pixels, a sig file and a wink ;) at exactly the spot where I know it will go.

Our language hasn't caught up with these relationships.  Are these people friends?  "Online friends?"  Did we "hear" a rumor or read it?  "I was saying just yesterday..." or typing?  How long have we "known" them? 

What happens to our sense of community and of empathy when we have close emotional ties, or think we do, to people we have never seen, touched, or heard --- people we likely never will?   It's surely a challenge that our social natures have never really known. 

This past week, a woman I have known through an internet email list for at least five years suffered a terrible personal tragedy --- a childbirth went horribly wrong.  Her baby died and she herself was near death; perhaps she will never bear another child.  As the details came out, passed from computer to computer along a long chain that somewhere included a telephone and a human voice, I felt such a strong longing to do something.

Deep within all of us there is an urge to comfort the grieving.  Grief cannot really be comforted with words, in my experience, although everyone wants to say something.  So our primal instincts are to touch, to give, to be present.  We do things like bring casseroles because we know it is so hard to remember to eat when the world seems to have stopped.  We go to funerals and memorial services because we know that presence is something that comforts mourners.  We reach out and touch hands.  We come and mow the lawn.  I remember my father-in-law washing the car for me before my mother's funeral, so that it would look nice in the procession, and also he shined our black shoes.  These physical things might not even be noticed in the midst of grief, but they will help, in real ways.  And they are what we crave to give.

But if we are not friends "IRL," as they say (and isn't it telling that Internet-only must mean... not your Real Life?), especially if some anonymity separates us (understandably), all we can offer is words, and words are pretty empty and sad little things in the yawning maw of grief. 

People manage, anyway.  A knot of supporters from one of the lists has started a Paypal fund to buy her a laptop she can use during her convalescence.  Some of them are planning to drive or fly hundreds of miles to be with her at the funeral --- they have decided to tear down the odd wall of Internet-only communities, entering into her real life. 

I won't be doing that, for a variety of reasons... but it does leave me with this strange sadness that has nowhere to go but here.

The forgotten Christmas carol.

Today at Mass during the Offertory (inexplicably; this is Advent) we sang Lullay, lullay, thou little tiny child, a.k.a. "The Coventry Carol" after its tune.

You don't hear that one very often outside of church, and not really very much in church, as lovely as the tune is.  (Here's a link to the tune at Oremus.org --- link plays music.)  I sing it only with great difficulty, myself.  How strange and haunting:  the lullaby of the grieving mothers of Bethlehem, on the day that Herod slaughtered the Holy Innocents:  the carol that accompanies the Flight into Egypt, and is its dark other side.

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.

O sisters too, how may we do, for to preserve this day / this poor youngling for whom we sing?  Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Herod the king, in his raging, charged he hath this day / his men of might in his own sight, all young children to slay.

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.

Then woe is me, poor child, for thee!  And every morn and day / for thy parting nor say nor sing 'Bye, bye, lully, lullay.'

Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child, bye, bye, lully, lullay.

I remember hearing the carol as a child and not really absorbing anything other than the refrain.  I always thought it was a lullaby for the Baby Jesus:  what other "thou little tiny child" is there to sing about at Christmastime?  I didn't know about them, and they have disappeared these days from our Christmas story, but... some fifteenth-century English tune-smith did remember the mothers of the forgotten little ones of Bethlehem, and we should be thankful for him.

The Christmas story is indeed a joyful one, but in the midst of it there is a great terror and sadness.  December 28th is the Feast of the Holy Innocents:  remember it, and sing Lully, lullay.

(Matthew 2:13-18:  Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the Child and His mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you: for Herod is about to search for the Child, to destroy Him." And he rose and took the Child and His mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, "Out of Egypt have I called My Son."Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:"A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation:  Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they were no more.")

UPDATE:  It's possible that the Coventry Carol was chosen because this upcoming weekend, in honor of Our Lady of Guadelupe's feast Monday, our parish is hosting a special pro-life Mass.