bearing blog

Cooperating, not competing, priorities.

That put-on-your-swimsuit-for-your-kids'-sake post that I wrote about has spread its influence throughout the feminine half of the blogosphere, at least the sector* populated by mothering mothers. Elizabeth Duffy, writing at Patheos, had a good post the other day:

One of the swim coaches stood on the side of the pool in a handsome black tank, and she was as plump and dimply as the rest of us, but she stood up straight, shoulders back, making bold demonstrations of each stroke for her pupils. I remember thinking that her confidence paired with an obvious tendency not to take herself too seriously was very appealing, and not just to the eyes.

She was not slouching out of sight, and it wasn’t just because she found the right suit for her body type, or because she had memories to make. She had a job to do, an important one, and she clearly found her work fulfilling enough that she could be at peace with herself and delight in her body’s ability to do its job well.

This is really the way that I prefer to think about it; indeed, though getting in the water and splashing with your kids is important, this it's the reason behind that reason. We're raising kids, and so everything we do teaches them how to be. If we want to teach them what their bodies are good for -- doing and being, as part of their human wholeness; not just appearing and seeming, and certainly not merely things to be used and abused; well, being ashamed of the appearance of our own is only going to teach the wrong lessons.

Too, being focused on the jobs you have to do and the joys you want to have is better than being hyperfocused on What People Will Think When They See Me.

More from Elizabeth:

The irony is, that when a woman of a certain body type or a certain age decides to get thin–I count myself here–you really do end up giving everything else up as your mental energy goes into counting calories, planning meals, and incorporating strategies to prevent yourself from eating. There are many hours spent in the gym, many hours spent working on self-image rather doing things of interest to yourself or of import to other people.

Not every woman who decides to get fit loses their perspective this way, but I certainly have, and I have corroborated my experiences with female friends. When I decide to be thin, I become a very boring person, a stressed out person, someone who only thinks about food and mentally scourges herself for mistakes made when eating.

You don’t usually get to have it both ways–you don’t get to be a skinny woman, and at the same time, a woman who’s happy to sit at a bar and drink pints with her husband. You don’t get to be someone who is fully invested in being thin, and at the same time finds herself interesting enough in her own right to forget occasionally her body and its tendency to grow fat when it’s having fun.

I can also corroborate this. The year that I achieved my big weight loss was a year of absolute concentration and obsession. It consumed almost all my attention. I don't regret it, and I have found the effort to be fruitful in more ways than one -- it was an achievement I had never thought possible, and it opened up all sorts of possibilities for me as well as leading to a lot of reflection on my identity. But it was so costly. Also, I was a very boring person for a whole year except to other people who were trying to lose weight. I feel a little bad for having sucked other people into my vortex of gluttony-shaming.

But I wasn't bored.

I wasn't bored because, to put it bluntly, I am a geek, and I can really get into that which bores other people. Whatever my project, I must love it and dig deeply into it, understand it and analyze it, take it apart and put it together in different ways. This is how I cook, how I gestate and give birth and care for babies, how I educate my kids, how I approach faith. My life is a little laboratory, and it's okay if the results are not repeatable by others because they're highly tailored to my own surroundings. The year that I lost all that damn extra weight and learned to be an athlete was the first year that my own body became the laboratory for the sake of itself.

(And I do call it "becoming an athlete" for a reason. I won't call it just "fitness," it was more than that, an identity crisis was involved. I wanted not just to appear thin, but to feel like Elizabeth's swim instructor, strong and capable.)

So I wasn't bored. And if my spouse was bored, he did a good job of hiding it. We sat at the bar and drank pints together -- only we split them, and he drank more deeply than I did, for that year.

We still share pints that way. And that's emblematic of the difference.

Some friends speculated that it was possible for me to temporarily prioritize becoming an athlete in a way that it might not have been for me today, had I put it off. I was six years younger, I had only three children. And maybe that's so.

But staying an athlete, even an amateur one only competitive against herself, is a priority -- not in competition with the priorities of raising my family and accompanying my husband, but in union with them.

I am married to a person who aspires to be always training for the next goal. His sports are downhill skiing and climbing (both rock and ice); seeing as how we live in the northern plains instead of the western mountains, he's never going to be able to find the time to do either of them frequently enough to excel at either, but he can always be training for his next trip so he can have more options and have more fun. And so he tries to get to the gym three times a week if he can. And so it's something we do together -- not so much the climbing (I have an old wrist injury) but the training. Neither of us has the time to train very well or thoroughly, but it's something we can talk about over those single shared pints.

And since he's a geek too, and also since training involves chemistry and physics that neither of us has ever mastered, we can talk about it over and over and over again. That's a lot of pints.

Athleticism of a certain individualistic type is a family value for us. (It runs in Mark's family of origin; his siblings and their spouses have been runners, mountain-bike and road-cycling racers, equestrians, and collegiate-level wrestlers, along with the occasional dabbling in climbing and downhill skiing.) We are working to pass it on to our kids. That priority meshes with our other family and marriage priorities, so it isn't in competition with them (although it has to be balanced with them: I have to teach and feed the children, and Mark has to go to work). I think this more than anything else is why the changes I made six years ago have remained permanent. They reinforce, and are reinforced by, the other good things I have in my life and want to keep.

_______

*Yeah, I couldn't stop myself from googling just to double check that "sector" was the correct geometrical term with respect to a piece of a sphere, as I knew it was for a circle. Although it isn't quite as satisfying because the arcs that define the sectors of a circle, being one-dimensional, perfectly tessellate the "surface" (i.e., the circumference) of the circle -- cf. pie charts -- but the domed spherical sectors by necessity have gaps between. Unless, of course, there are an infinite number of them in just the right distribution of volumes, much as you can fill a rectangular box perfectly with an infinite assortment of differently-sized spheres.**

 

**Yeah, I finished writing the footnote before I went on to write the rest of this post.

 

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The dangers of having "putting places."

Look closely. There's a baby in there:

 

See him now?

I have gotten more use out of this little bassinet, bought when I was pregnant with my oldest, than I ever did with the others. This guy? He is a napper. I have almost forgotten that babies can do that, after #3 (who gave up her nap entirely at age eight months) and #4 (who readily fell asleep but was such a light sleeper that despite lots of tiptoeing we could never count on the nap lasting long).

This little person takes a solid morning nap and a solid afternoon nap and usually a few little catnaps in between. A sudden loud noise, like a shouted "Moooooooooom!" or the blender turning on, or my husband talking loudly into the phone to someone's voice mail, will wake him; but ordinary conversation doesn't, and neither does picking him up (carefully) and moving him from one place to another.

Which is good, because a few days ago he rolled out of bed ("Was it the old THUMP........'WAHHH?'" asked my FB friend. Yep) and though he was not, of course, hurt, I resolved not to just leave him up there anymore.

Hence, the little bassinet in the living room.

+ + +

For this upcoming school year, I have finally purchased an item that I swore for four babies I didn't need.

(I choose not to remember ever swearing that I "would never need" such a thing. Let's hope I didn't.)

That item is a B.F.P. (big effin' playpen) like what they used to make:

 

I am particularly amused by the brand name:

 

I need a BFP like what they used to make -- one that measures a square meter inside and thus takes up a lot of valuable real estate -- because of H's twins of course. We haven't yet stuck all three babies in there yet, in part because they're all still so young that at least one of them is nursing nearly all the time and also in part because we aren't teaching intensively, it being summer. In the fall, though -- when they're eight and nine months old -- Well, let's just say that I expect them all to be very good friends.

Since the newbornhood of our babies coincided with the wild popularity of The LEGO Movie and its assorted product tie-ins, I think I am going to be glad to have another option besides the old blanket-on-the-floor trick when I need to set someone down with a toy for a minute.

 

Never say never. Some learn it after one child, some after two. I am a slow learner, I guess.

I don't use the sling as much as I did with my first two babies. I have three kids who are old enough to carry the baby themselves. My back isn't as young as it used to be (although switching to a two-shouldered carrier, when that's convenient, has relieved the discomfort enormously). And, well, I am out of practice. The habit of putting a baby down instead of taking him with you reinforces itself. He naps. I get used to walking around and doing things with both hands and all my balance. Once I was really good at, for example, one-handed onion-chopping. Now I feel helpless unless I give him to someone else so I can use both hands. This bothers me, not so much because I feel that I must carry him all the time (he is usually being held by someone, after all), but because I don't like feeling helpless. I had a skill once; it's annoying to discover it has atrophied.

A couple of weeks ago, when I realized I was losing my ability to type accurately -- a skill I have had for 25 years -- I turned off the autocorrect on my iPad. Crutches have their place, but there are drawbacks to relying on them. There doesn't seem to be a good solution to the decline of my babywearing skills, though, because I am pretty sure that the "crutches" of handing the baby off to an eager sibling or letting him nap in a nearby bassinet are here to stay.

I will just have to force myself to carry him more often than I need to if I want to stay capable enough to carry him whenever I want to.

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Shadows. A very quick post.

Today's reading in the Office of Readings: the beginning of the tenth chapter of Hebrews, starting with

Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of them, it can never make perfect those who come to worship by the same sacrifices that they offer continually each year. Otherwise, would not the sacrifices have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, once cleansed, would no longer have had any consciousness of sins?

But in those sacrifices there is only a yearly remembrance of sins, for it is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats take away sins. For this reason, when he came into the world, he said: “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight in. Then I said, ‘As is written of me in the scroll, Behold, I come to do your will, O God.’”

I never noticed that bit about the shadow and the "very (I.e., true) image." Quite like Plato and the cave. I googled around a bit this morning to see if scholars thought that Plato had actually influenced the epistle (though obviously many people, including presumably translators, have been influenced by both), and I came upon a Google Books reference on the subject.

I can't copy the whole piece, or even read it all online, but at least part of the discussion touched on the nuances in the Greek of the relationship between the "shadow" and the "true form." Does it suggest that the "shadow" is an inferior, flat sort of copy of an original "true image" that precedes it, or does it suggest that the "shadow" is a preliminary sketch or draft version of a perfected form that is yet to come?

I just thought I would like to draw attention to this specific kind of distinction between two ways of viewing the same sort of concept, that the material world is an inferior or "flat" version of a higher reality. I have always thought of Plato's cave as a proto-Christian concept; but I really like the notion that one kind of inferior-image-of-a-greater-reality is a shadow or copy cast by an original, and another kind is a prefiguration or draft that is to be fulfilled by its perfected form.

We can, of course, go all meta on the subject by suggesting that Plato's concept was itself a shadow of the Christian version. And that the directionality of that relationship gives us a hint, embedded in the universe of human culture, to the direction we should assign to the relationship of image-and-reality.

Now I feel like rereading Anathem and Flatland and The Last Battle and drawing directed graphs.

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How those resolutions are going, and a nifty to-do trick.

I have been writing about a few resolutions I'm making in the wake of bringing a new baby out into the world and into our lives. (The series starts here).

Yesterday, although I am not quite done writing them out yet, I decided to bite the bullet and actually follow them.

In a way I cheated. It was Monday. Mondays are usually the days I spend entirely at H's house, co-schooling and then shuttling kids to scouts and AHG. However, for the last couple of weeks and for a Very Good Reason, we have not been doing school together. So Mondays and Thursdays have been freed up, and I have been using them to catch up on resting, thinking, and once in a while doing a neglected chore or two. Monday's task list was a clean slate.

So. The first thing I did was make a to-do list. Nothing new there. Except that it was a very SHORT to-do list:

(Actual to-do list from yesterday, taken near the end of the day)

I thought to myself, "I only have four hours to do tasks. What tasks should I do?" And that is what I came up with. I used an index card on purpose; it's like eating dinner off a smaller plate. I felt "full" with fewer tasks!

When I was making the list I tried to include some work from each of my four categories:

• Work for school (prepare a Latin translation; buy some curriculum; send an email about history homework)
• Work for the family (buy a gym bag; sort laundry till I find my daughter's AHG uniform; make the kids shovel snow; grocery list)
• Work for others (read some bylaws that I have to vote on this week for an organization that I help lead; remind Mark to move forward on a family service project)
• Creative work (okay, I left that off, but what it amounts to is this blog post that I am writing now).

And look! It is almost all crossed off! I actually got most of that done yesterday.

This felt good.

Here is another thing that felt good: During learning time -- what I really call "school time," I guess, but I am trying to change its name -- I forced myself not to try to do any of the tasks on my list. Instead I sat down and stayed with my kids.

I watched a video about Frederick the Great of Prussia with my 10- and 13-year-olds. I watched the whole thing. And when my 10-y-o had questions about the video, I was right there to hear them, and I wrote them down and afterward we looked up the answers.

I got out the nine-note recorder book and the recorders for my daughter when she suddenly decided it had been too long since she practiced, and let her use them freely all morning.

I let the boys make lunch and clean it up.

I read a picture book to my four-year-old for the first time in weeks.

I led a handwriting lesson and a spelling lesson for all three school aged kids, and I wasn't rushed so I didn't yell at anyone.

I watched another video with the kids about Roman cities (one of those PBS David Macauley ones).

I helped my daughter get ready for her AHG awards ceremony and drove her across town, and took her and her friend out to dinner before the ceremony.

I visited H at her house for a little while before coming home.

It was a good day.

I am in the middle of another day that is so far good, too. I will report back on that one later.

+ + +

 In the comments, a reader pointed me to this post at Amongst Lovely Things. It's a homeschooling blog, which is why I don't read it regularly, but this post suggests a different way of thinking about the to-do list that I rather like. She calls it "looping:"

The concept is simply this: instead of assigning tasks to certain days of the week, list tasks and then tackle them in order, regardless of what day it is.

Looping can be used wherever there is work that needs to be done regularly. ...Right now I use a looping schedule in our homeschool, for my housework, and for my writing.

Right now this is how I schedule our morning time read-alouds. For example, we're reading All the Swords in England, St. Patrick's Summer, and various plays by Shakespeare. Those are looped during our morning read aloud time (with Shakespeare having a more prominent place on the loop- twice for every once that we're reading the others). Next term I expect that loop to change because I want to read Father Brown, Bible stories, and Our Mother Tongue during morning time.

Another way you could use a looping schedule is to loop various activities within a subject. For example, many homeschoolers have "Fine Arts Fridays." Picture study, composer study, crafts, art instruction, and poetry could be looped to offer a little variety while still making headway through a particular book or curriculum.

Basically, take anything you would otherwise be inclined to schedule into certain days of the week (Monday: history, Tuesday: science, Wednesday: literature.... etc.) and put them on a loop instead. Now instead of feeling behind when the baby gets sick or you are running around putting out life's fires, you still make progress across the curriculum.

I could see this working pretty well for me for household tasks, younger kids' school subjects, and maybe for readalouds, if I ever get back to doing them again. I will think about it. Maybe you will too! 

More resolutions next time.

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New baby's resolution three: Know how much time I have in the day.

Continuing a series that starts here.

+ + +

I figured out in the last post that there are about six basic ways I can slice up the hours in my day.

1. Rest and sleep
2. Meals
3. Self-care
4. Learning time
5. Activities
6. Work

"Work" encompasses a lot of different things, but I found one easy way to figure out if a thing is "work:" might I put it on a to-do list and then procrastinate it, possibly for days, while feeling guilty about not getting around to it? If so, it is work.

I do not tend to do this with, say, taking a shower or eating lunch or going to the gym. That is how I know that showering is not work, but self-care; and lunch is not work, but a meal; and going to the gym is not work, but an activity.

I do tend to do this with housework or school planning or home improvement projects or even many hobbies that I enjoy, such as writing blog posts. So they all count as work of one kind or another.

I suppose instead of "work" I could call that category "My To-Do List." That isn't a bad idea. I will consider that.

Anyway, it's all the stuff in "work" that tends to dog me.

I. Cannot. Do. It. All.

I need to let some of it go. But how much to let go? Do I even know how much time I have to do these things?

 Let's figure it out, roughly.

 + + +

 "Roughly" is the best I can do right now. I have a 6-week-old baby and my efficiency is consequently unusually low, plus it swings widely from day to day depending on his nursing pattern. ( I am taking advantage of the resulting low postpartum schooling and housekeeping standards to write these blog posts while the kids play poker downstairs.)

If I was in a more stable pattern, I might try another time study like the one I did a few years ago, only with the time categories chopped up a little differently. That was a lot of fun, and I recommend the exercise to anyone who is curious about how they spend their time. But that measure takes a week, and I need something a little more quick and dirty -- just an estimate.

+ + +

 We start with 24 hours in the day. I estimate generously that I should sleep for about eight hours -- about 10:30 pm to 6:30 am. That leaves sixteen hours.

Meals -- this does not include real cooking, just serving and eating and putting away -- are variable. Breakfast is fairly self-serve and not messy, so let's say I spend half an hour on that (including unloading the dishwasher from the night before). I take longer, maybe an hour, for lunch and post-lunch cleanup -- that's because I have helpers. The same for dinner. Then we have two snacks in our day that probably add up to a half hour. That's about three hours in a typical day at home. Remaining balance: Thirteen hours.

A day's bathing, dressing, grooming, and getting ready for bed -- let's say 45 minutes. I think that's pretty generous. Remaining balance: Twelve and a quarter hours.

+ + +

Let's pause here to notice that activities, learning, and work -- plus any extra rest I might need -- have to fit into twelve and a quarter hours. From day to day, the allocation of that time among those three categories probably fluctuates quite a bit. But I am looking for a reasonable, realistic estimate of how much time I have for the to-do list. So let's truck on with estimates of time spent on activities and learning.

I allot about five hours a day (9:30 to noon, and 2 to 4:30) that at least one of my children is doing schoolwork, and I really should be engaged with them for most of that time. So let's say that I am busy that whole five hours with "learning time." Remaining balance: seven and a quarter hours.

That time gets divided up between work and activities (unless it's used for extra rest). Sometimes there isn't any special activity at all, of course, leaving the whole 7.25 hours free.

(Did I say "free?" Ha. It is telling that I am now beginning to think of the "knock-things-off-my-to-do list time" as "free time." Can we say, "workaholic?" Can we say, "defines self-worth in terms of accomplishments?")

Anyway, typical evening activities are swimming lessons at the Y, or religious education classes at church. The swimming lessons take us about two and a half hours when you count travel time, changing, and showering. Religious ed is two and a quarter. So let's estimate generously and say that two and a half hours go to activities, when there are any.

Remaining balance that I can count on having for "work" on this typical, imaginary day:

4 and three-quarters hours.

Well, now. That isn't so bad. It is less than I would like, and it's true that it needs to be broken up throughout the day -- a half hour here, an hour forty-five there -- but it isn't like there is no time at all. And when there isn't a scheduled activity, or if I get out of it for some reason (say if Mark volunteers to take the kids to RE) -- there's bonus time. And any time I don't spend that time working, it could be used for resting.

+ + +

That calculation being finished, we come to the resolution part of the post: to accept that those 285 minutes in each day are what I can expect to use for work, give or take a little.

 So here is resolution three, in full. I resolve

• to stop pretending I can somehow stretch those 285 minutes out;
• to value them, and try not to waste them;
• to quit berating myself for not doing more than I could reasonably have done in those minutes;
• to decide what tasks to use them for, and then to delegate the rest or let them go.

Easier said than done, of course, but by counting them up (roughly) I am at least a bit closer to having my eyes open.

 

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New baby's resolutions: Resolution zero.

New Year's resolutions are so passé.

Especially in February, she said. But I digress.

If you have messed up your New Year's resolutions already, you could wait till Lent starts, of course. Lots of people try new things then. I do think Lent can be a good time to try new self-disciplines, so to speak, though unfortunately many of us attempt to turn it into a diet plan. That can be counter-productive, when you consider the reason for the season.

I am now thinking that a really great time for a resolution -- a shaking up of the old routines and a turning over of a new leaf -- is several weeks after the birth of a new baby.

Because you know what?

There's no going back to the way things were before.

I might as well formalize it.

+ + +

Even before we decided to invite a new little one into our lives, I knew I didn't really have room for one more along with everything else I do. I knew, I really did, that something was going to have to give.

That didn't stop me from trying to hang onto everything, even as I struggled to stay awake through the first trimester and to keep up with everyone during the second and the third. It didn't stop me from trying to keep up what I had been doing and hang on to all my commitments, and that is probably good because I really have to try and FAIL before I am okay with giving up.

Early on, I figured out that I wasn't going to be able to keep up with school by advance-planning everything on the weekends (including copying and printing, getting books to and from the library, writing new worksheets, composing emails with instructions to my "independent" students, and writing answer keys) and then sticking to my preplanned work on weekdays, keeping careful records of what everyone accomplished each day.

Up till this last year, that has worked pretty well. It isn't going to work anymore. I have now hit the point where if everything were going to be preplanned and prepared by me to my own exacting standards, I would have to spend my Entire Weekend on that work. And this is not good for my family, even if -- maybe BECAUSE -- I kind of enjoy holing up in a locked room with a computer and a curriculum catalog and no human interaction for 12 hours at a time.

Something has to give.

And that is just one area of my life where I was overindulging in productivity. We haven't even talked about things like housekeeping, or dinner, or the few volunteer commitments that one or the other of us has made.

It's the same way there. Something has to give.

I warned my partner in co-schooling, H., before I warned anyone else, not long after I found out I was pregnant, that my standards were about to slip, and I didn't think it would improve matters by trying to plan out exactly how they would slip, so I was just going to LET them slip and see what happened.

+ + +

H. didn't really have a chance to give me much feedback before she found out she was pregnant too, and then that she was going to have twins, so, you know, any plans we had for the year were going to go out the window anyway and be replaced by ... Something.

+ + +

So what are the new baby's resolutions? I think I am going to spread this post out over several days because I still have to process some of them, and I have been having a damnably hard time blogging for the last few months.

Which might have something to do with my foggy brain. Though the causality could really be going either way.

But the first resolution... No, wait. The zeroth resolution, really, since it has to underlie all the others... Is to recognize that I have priorities. Priorities with names. Values.

It's like this. We need these things in our lives (no particular order here):

• Connecting with God.
• Resting.
• Showing love to, and taking delight in, each other.
• Connecting with people outside our family.
• Resolving conflict and encouraging generosity, particularly among the children.
• Helping each other work, and learn to work, with diligence.
• Caring for our bodies (and that extension of our bodies, our clothing).
• Meals.
• Physical activity.
• Order in our environment.
• Learning.
• Creative work.
• Work that serves others.

Resolution zero is to recognize and honor these priorities so that I can somehow use my time (and help the rest of the family use their time) in a way that gives each of these their due.

 

+ + +

 

So much for new directions. I only know one way to start anything, and that is by making a list. I have written and rewritten and re-rewritten the list over and over for a week, moving the bits around, and yet nothing has changed yet.

 

Sooner or later I will have to put down the pen and get out of my chair.

 

But not yet.

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Some new reading to bookmark about alignment and fitness.

I don't read a lot of fitness and outdoor activity blogs regularly, but I do follow a couple. One of my favorites is Mama Sweat by Kara Douglass Thom, who writes about living an active life "in the chaos of motherhood." She has four children, including a pair of twins; she lives in my area, which is handy for me since when the streets here are buried in snow, she is writing about snowshoeing instead of about outdoor bicycling. She is also the author of Hot Sweaty Mamas: Five Secrets to Life as a Fit Mom, a book I am happy to recommend (nifty trivia: she quoted my blog in it!)

I have always liked Mama Sweat since a friend sent me to it a few years ago, because even though Kara is the type of active person who describes herself as addicted to exercise, and used to run endurance events, her attitude is positive and encouraging, not shaming. You don't have to be a marathon runner. You don't have to work out every day. If you have a bunch of kids, it can take creativity, effort, and sacrifice to find a way to make movement part of your life; but it's worth it to take care of yourself physically and sets a good example for those same kids (especially daughters).

I read her blog for ideas and inspiration, especially in the area of including kids in activity, something I don't do as much as I ought to. She has some really cute articles about her kids running 5ks and doing yoga with her. (But then, I guess one way I motivate myself to move is by using exercise to give me some of the "alone in a crowd time" that I naturally crave. I suppose that is part of my personal style as a Fit Enough Mom, and maybe I shouldn't second-guess it too much since it works pretty well.)

Some time ago Kara had to shake up her routine due to musculoskeletal pain, and had to cut back on the running and the really intense workouts in favor of a regimen of alignment exercises. This post on what she learned from her "exercise detox" is a great summary, and I think I am going to bookmark it as well as the links she recommends from Katy Says "Alignment Matters!"

I came away with a bigger appreciation for movement and the distinction between movement and exercise, health and fitness. Movement... is the meal. The work necessary to keep muscles at an optimal length and joints mobile are the vitamins. Exercise is the dessert...

if you had told me 15 years ago I would be swapping 15-mile runs and 80-mile bike rides for walking, Pilates, yoga and alignment videos I would not have believed it (nor would I believed it if you had told me then I'd someday be the mother of four). One thing Katy says... is: "Exercise does not need to be hard or vigorous, it just needs to be different." I'm one of those people who likes being sore, which might be one reason I gravitated toward the hard and vigorous. But now I've discovered that moving muscles in ways they are unaccustomed--even stretching--is a challenge...

I like what I'm doing for now. I spent more than 20 years putting my body through incredibly tough challenges. I can say with satisfaction that I pushed my body beyond what I ever thought it was capable. Those experiences were incredible and I am amazed at what my body has accomplished. When you go to those extremes you start believing that "hard" is what you have to do in order to be satisfied. I don't believe that anymore. My body doesn't need hard to be and stay healthy, it just needs different movement to adapt and activity to maintain cell-turnover.

Read the whole thing.

It should make good reading for my postpartum recovery period, while I am itching to get back up and moving again.

As a matter of fact, this might be a good time to create a new category of fitness and outdoor blogs (especially of the "fit it into your real life" subgenre) in my feed reader. I never really have done that, but it probably would make fine reading to keep myself thinking about how to make sure movement stays in my weekly priorities, even as we shift things around to make our new life with five kids.

 

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Six weeks or so.

One of my midwives came to my house for a prenatal today. Mark wasn't able to come to the last couple of them, so he made sure to come home from work for this one, which was nice.

Things are looking very good. My blood pressure is great, something that I am trying not to take for granted. The baby is head down and has got his body out of the posterior position; he still hasn't rotated his head properly or tucked his chin yet, so he hasn't descended much. Accordingly I am measuring a precocious 40 cm.

(H. and me on Monday, matching.)

I described having difficulty sleeping and was advised to drink tea made from hops. ("Wouldn't a nice IPA work?" I asked. Indeed it will, but I guess it is more advisable to binge on hops via a herbal infusion.) I described having difficulty consuming green vegetables and was advised to blend extra spinach into my V-8. "A pregnancy speedball," says Mark. "You could put hops and liverwurst in it too."

All I want to eat are liverwurst sandwiches and ice-cold grapes and apples. And ice cream.

+ + +

While we were going over the birth supply list it occurred to me what we home birthers should be saying to the hospital birthers that is the equivalent of "But if you give birth at home, who cleans up the mess?"

It is this:

"But if you give birth in the hospital, who will make all the frozen herbal compresses?"

+ + +

I had a lot of anxiety prior to my last two births, throughout the whole of the pregnancies. I have not had much this time around, but I can't escape it entirely. Now that we are coming down to the last six weeks or so, the "I am going to have to do this thing again and it might really suck" is starting to throb in the back of my mind.

The midwife says cheerfully, "Well, you are committed, and it's going to happen and you're going to do it, so you might as well not worry about it now."

Mark says, "Wait till after Christmas to think about it. It will still be there to think about after the holiday is over."

Then I start worrying about when I am going to find time to put up a Christmas tree.

+ + +

I am grateful to my oldest child for having basically figured out how to keep up with his schoolwork with only minimal interaction from me. I am grateful to my second child for making bread, shoveling snow, and cleaning the kitchen as well as having an insatiable appetite for science and history documentaries. I am grateful to my third child for being able to read well enough that she can do lots of math independently via khanacademy.org and lots of other studying via Quizlet. I am grateful to my fourth child for entertaining himself happily with Legos and toy cars and blocks for hours on end.

Sometimes it all comes together really well, and when that happens, I get to take naps. This has been a slow season for schoolwork. Mark sternly instructed me to prioritize gestating over formal schooling, and i have obediently focused on eating, sleeping, and pelvic exercises while letting a lot of other things slide. I think we are hitting the minimum, though, and I am really pleased by how well my eldest has stepped up to the plate and independently kept up with his subjects. It maybe will turn out to be a good dry run for the start of high school work next year.

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Elisabeth Leseur's "An Essay on the Christian Life of Women," IV. Responsibility to society.

Continuing a series on the writings of Elisabeth Leseur, which I started here and continued here.

Working our way out through her presentation of the Christian's duties, we began with the intellectual and continued to the familial. Now on to societal.

Elisabeth Leseur on the societal duty of Christians

Just as important, every Christian woman has a responsibility to society. Because of your education, you will be able to accomplish more and must work with all your strength to improve the material and moral condition of others, especially of the dispossessed masses that, though often deceived and taken advantage of, are, nevertheless, still good hearted and are the great reserves of the nation and of the church. You see, we must never forget the tender words spoken one day by Jesus on seeing the crowd gathered around him, "I have compassion on the crowd" (Mark 8:2).

Like him, let us be compassionate, and love these people...

Two notes here:

(1) Elisabeth mentions here a second, practical purpose of education ("you will be able to accomplish more").

(2) This is an important reminder not to look down on the masses, the crowd, what we often call today the "mainstream." We often mistake "deceived" and "taken advantage of" for "stupid", "hopeless," and "bad."

Let us go to them as brothers and sisters, not as superiors or benefactors, and show them

• that real equality is found only in the teachings of Christianity, which recognizes the same human dignity in all people, assigns to them the same end, and promises them the same happiness.
  
• ...that the church alone carries out the ideal of fraternity and imposes it as a law upon her children, and
• that she alone, according to the sayings of Jesus assures us true freedom: "You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free" (John 8:31).

(Yeah, I see what you did there. Liberté, égalité, fraternité.)

Quite soon... you will be able to share to a greater degree in the social action that is emerging everywhere, choosing those [activities] that are at the same time the most spiritual and the most practical....Never be one of those who want to be the command and not an ordinary soldier, who want only to participate in the good projects they create and only recognize as good anything that is done in their particular way according to their own procedures. Here, as elsewhere, you should have a broad mind and generous heart; put up with the contradictions and difficulties that are the price of success; work day by day without looking for results, but be confident that God will make something of your efforts.

This is all quite practical advice about working with and for others on visible things out in the world. Don't be a control freak; be broad-minded and generous; expect hardships to result even from successes; don't get discouraged if the payoff is smaller than you wish.

Remember, however, that... during this period of transition through which we are passing, in order to work to bring about a new Christian social order, you must prepare yourself by making a serious study of these very difficult problems, bringing to any attempt at their solution very great prudence together with Christian courage.

I confess I am not exactly sure what "period of transition" she is referring to exactly. At the time, there would have been public controversy and debate that several months later would culminate in the 1905 "Law on the Separation of Churches and the State." I suspect (based on some cursory Wikipedia research) she is writing to counter a notion that French Catholics must be monarchists á la Action Française. Wikipedia says: "The Dreyfus Affair gave some Catholics the impression that Catholicism is not compatible with democracy." But Elisabeth says:

Catholics are not afraid of democracy; they know that the church baptized, transformed, and civilized barbarians, and that the masses of our people still retain a rudimentary seed of Christianity, capable of growing and developing into a tree with spreading branches. Catholics love these sister souls and long to make them Christian.

Even if they make themselves liable to be thought to be socialists or revolutionaries by their embittered opponents,

-- and here, my amateur analysis makes me think Elisabeth is thinking of opponents who would be right-wing monarchist Catholics, not the left-wing anticlericals (her husband Félix included) which were angling to get rid of the establishment Church --

they would continue their work of social progress, saying to themselves that after all they are content to be socialists in the company of Saint Thomas Aquinas, or revolutionaries with the fathers of the church,

Love that! Elisabeth seems here to be outing herself as a political progressive -- progressive not in spite of her orthodox Catholic beliefs (which are at this time popularly associated with the French right wing) but because of them. She invokes Aquinas and the church fathers and implies that Catholic tradition is -- or at least can be interpreted as being -- on the side of democracy.

(At the same time, don't forget that she earlier urged her niece "to bring about a new Christian social order." Maybe she foresees the defeat of antidisestablishmentarianism*, and already envisions a transformed French church, no longer protected by the state but also no longer in thrall to it. If that's the case, maybe she would say to those faithful Catholics who are disappointed with the political situation in the U.S. today, Take heart.)

Repeating myself for clarity,

after all they are content to be socialists in the company of Saint Thomas Aquinas, or revolutionaries with the fathers of the church, and that only the people who do nothing at all can hope to avoid being called unpleasant names.

At this cost, what Catholic worthy of the name would want to avoid such epithets?

Sounds to me like Elisabeth subscribes to the political doctrine that if you're pissing off both the left and the right, you must be on the correct track. I can drink to that.

+ + +

The very next letter in the collection is written about a year after this one, and to a young man -- "A Little Essay on the Christian Life." Like the one we've just gone through, this letter was composed by Elisabeth for the occasion of a god child's first communion. This time the godchild is her oldest nephew, André Duron. The editor has noted that although Marie was Elisabeth's only niece, she had several nephews, and she intended to further develop the thoughts in the latter essay as her other nephews came of age.

The second letter is not called "on the Christian life of men," but simply "on the Christian life." I think it clear that in the later letter she meant to give general, non-gendered advice; and indeed the letter contains good advice for either men or women; but it still has a masculine sort of tone, a frankness to it, which I appreciate very much. I will take a look at her letter to André next time.

____________________

*It's taken me a long time, but I finally managed to use this word in a blog post.

 

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Elisabeth Leseur's "An Essay on the Christian Life of Women," II. The threefold duty, and advice concerning education.

Continuing my series on the writings of Elisabeth Leseur, which I started here.

This is the life of faith, understood not as passive acquiescence on the part of the mind, but as an active acceptance, a lively assimilation of truths that surpass the mind and which constant experience, suggested and directed by grace, impresses upon us. You will possess this life, and it is now going to begin in you... You will be a link in the long chain that Christian tradition is slowly forming and that will last to the end of time. You will, in a greater or less degree, enrich the collective consciousness of Christianity by your effort, energy, and sacrifices.

With this Elisabeth Leseur makes a transition from the introductory part of her letter to the meat of it: advice and instruction to an adolescent niece about to make her first Communion. In the beginning, she described how the faith of a Christian enriches and transforms the natural human life -- itself something worthy and full -- into a new life that is invisibly and immeasurably valuable, because animated within by new motives and intention. Now she turns to counsel.

From now on you ought to prepare yourself for this great task that is required of each of us... All Christians have the same aim and ideal, in every age... But circumstances require them to adapt their mode of action...

As a matter of fact, our Christian duty appears under a threefold aspect--

• intellectual,
• familial,
• and social.

And indeed, the counsel that Elisabeth will offer Marie is neatly divided into a description of the Christian woman's duties in these three spheres.

Before visiting each one, though, let's look at the next sentence, because of what it reveals about Leseur's philosophy:

I do not add its spiritual dimension because the other three [that is, the intellectual, the familial, and the social] are only different forms of the religious responsibilities imposed on us all.

An interesting definition of the scope of the spirit, to say the least!

 

Leseur on a Christian woman's intellectual duty

You ought to be a woman of real worth, well educated, with your mind open to every argument from outside. You ought to know how to discern among incoherent and varying ideas and systems that which is true or fruitful in each.... In this patient search for the truth and a habit of fairness that we ought to have towards others and their ideas, we need integrity of mind, clear judgment, and solid learning.

These are the words of a woman who is completely confident in the reasonableness and attractiveness of her faith -- and in the reasonableness and good will of the young lady who will read her letter! Elisabeth has no fear that any outside argument, system, or idea will tear her niece away from her proper destiny. This is not cautionary advice about keeping away from dangerous notions or dangerous people. This is encouraging, ennobling advice to get out there and fight the good fight -- with the sharpest of weapons.

Consequently, you need a serious education; there should be nothing superficial or mediocre, not only in your literary and scientific studies, but also in the intellectual knowledge that you ought to have of all things Christian.

I am sometimes shocked to see how completely ignorant most women are of the religion they profess... its living and imperishable dogmas are to them a dead weight that they drag around, and their appalling narrowness in matters of doctrine shows how completely they fail to recognize the heart of Christ beating for them under the veil of rituals and symbols.... a woman who 'practices' her religion, but who has nothing of that nobility of spirit, that interior beauty and liveliness of soul that every Christian woman ought to display.

...Devotional practices ought never to be anything other than the manifestation of what lies in one's depths. We must first thoroughly grasp the truth that such practices help to enliven within us. So, too , we must grasp the harmony of the Church as a whole, the vitality and power of Christian teachings, and the moral and social value of Catholic doctrine.

I hope... that... you will be a thoughtful Christian and that you will understand the reasons that undergird your faith and the grounds that you have for hope and worship. Then, when you will have matured.... you will bring a real spiritual and theological awareness to your religious practices, and you will reject all that might lead others... to suppose Christians to be eccentric and narrow-minded.

Here is a vision, not of spirituality coexisting with intellect, but of spirituality AS intellect. Human understanding of the theology under worship, plus the light of faith that is a gift from God, plus attention to devotional activities, plus maturity, equals a fully developed Christian spirit.

You must also make every effort to increase your depth of human learning; I should like you to be very well educated or even learned...

A woman is responsible for her intellectual development... so as to be capable one day of simultaneously fulfilling her role as a mother and her duty toward the society in which she lives. For it stands in need of illumination, faint though it may be, from all of us.

When we work not for trivial satisfactions but to strengthen our minds so that others may benefit from our work, we can be sure that it will be fruitful, and that God will bless it....

Once more let me remind you that none of our disinterested or generous efforts is ever lost.

Here is another echo of this threefold religious duty. This time she places one in primacy over the others. For Elisabeth, the intellectual duty -- the interior transformation of the self -- comes first. It prepares the way for the exterior manifestations that are the familial duties (motherhood, for women) and the social ones.

(Much as, in the previous paragraphs about religious education, Elisabeth insisted that devotional practices must be grounded in a thorough understanding of the faith.)

Here we find out a little of why Elisabeth believes in women's education. The education of Christian women is not to fit them for making money, or to give them better parenting skills, or even so they can teach the next generation. No, it is vastly more important than that! The education of Christian women is to make them into sources of "illumination" -- or, rather, channels of an illumination of which the true source is God. The illumination comes from the interior, invisible development of the self, and cannot help but transmit outward to fall upon the family and on the society through her actions.

No one with Elisabeth's conviction that every human action has incalculable value and consequence, could ever dismiss the worth of a woman's education.

So here is a summary of Elisabeth's program of the intellectual duty of Christians:

• Acquire the best education you can
• Be open to listening to all kinds of ideas
• Thoroughly understand the doctrines and teachings of the Church, and understand the reasoning behind all your devotional practices
• Work "not for trivial satisfactions but to strengthen" your mind so that others may benefit

Next time, we'll revisit what Elisabeth advises about these external duties.

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