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The new ground rules.

For a couple of years, 2008 or so, I wrote frequently about exercise and eating strategies.   Sometimes I wrote about how those intersect with theology of the body, or Thomist morality.  I returned to the topic sporadically, but not steadily, since then.  It's been a while since I've written much.

I wrote all that because I was in the midst of two major life changes.

• First, that year when my third child was a toddler, I was prioritizing regular exercise for me for the first time.  Having taken lessons before that pregnancy, afterwards I started swimming twice a week, later adding running.   In order to keep it up, I thought, I had to be obsessive and inflexible; for better or worse, I was obsessive and inflexible, and I did keep it up.  Still am doing it today.

 

• Later, after the shock of having sustained this new habit for several months, I began restricting calories, and over the course of about six months I lost 27 percent of my initial body weight.    Having thought of myself as perpetually dumpy and sedentary since childhood, I found myself now active, and also, not fat.

Note the causality:  My writing about this didn't bring it about.  I wrote because I was having what I called success, and I was desperately trying to make sense of it.  I needed to understand why it was happening, was because I was afraid that if I didn't figure out why it was happening, I would not be able to keep from going back to "the way I was before."

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Ha.  As if I could slip back accidentally to "the way I was before."   Back to my early thirties?  I am older!  Human beings are not reversible.  For one thing, my windows of possibility have shifted.  For another, I understand more.

I've learned that the effort required to track calories closely enough to override the body's own cues is seriously intensive, tends to push out other satisfying activities, and requires a constant input of motivation.   And I've learned that I don't want to live in that kind of monomaniacal relationship with myself.

It may seem odd, but motivation itself is part of the problem.  I do lift myself up with messages that are true and encouraging, and celebrate with rewards that are both pleasant and good.    That's great when they work.  But if those don't do the job, I've often been tempted to use any mental means to the end of self-control:  shame, fear, dwelling on bad memories, threats of self-punishment; contempt for my body, contempt for other bodies.    Those thoughts still pop up, even though I understand better the damage they can do.

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Sometimes I betrayed those thoughts in my writing.

Writing has been a way to motivate myself, maybe spread a little motivation to others who might enjoy it.  I think this is, in principle, a worthy endeavor.   I've always used writing to to see if my ideas make sense and to improve them, and the promise (threat) of a small audience raises the stakes enough to make it meaningful.    I feel reward when a reader comments that something clicked, gave them an idea, helped.   

But when you write, in part, as a tool to root out error.... a corollary is that frequently, the error spends some time noodling around on the page.  And one might not catch them all.    It's not inherently wrong to try to work out ideas in public that way.  But there are limits. 

First of all, I have to be clear about what I'm doing (sometimes, literally, making it up as I go along).

Second:  when the topic is one that has been as historically fraught as exercise and diet and body image and fat loss, one about which many people carry a great deal of internalized harm... I need to be selective about setting down those first drafts of my thoughts. 

Because I also carry internalized messages that have power, and maybe not just over me.  Some of my thoughts are not great, especially some that in the intervening years I've learned to recognize as intrusive thoughts.  It might help me to exorcise them by giving voice to their content, but will it help anyone else?  If I'm going to straighten myself out by writing about those, best to write them longhand on one of the yellow pads I buy by the case, at least in first draft.  And maybe just keep them to myself, or share with a therapist instead.

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It's hard for me to precisely sort my previous writing about this stuff into "definitely okay, maybe even good" and "definitely problematic."  I've considered going back and editing, but the task is too overwhelming.  I've considered deleting stuff, but I think there are kernels of insight there worth rescuing.   For now it's still all there, waiting for me to decide what to do about it.

Meanwhile:  I'm changing up my lifestyle once again.  I'm committing myself to strengthen patterns of thinking that are much more compatible with good mental health and body care.   I would very much like to clarify them by setting them out on the blog. 

But:  when I blogged about fitness and nutrition before, expressing what I was going through 10-12 years ago, I wanted to write conversationally and frankly but that really amounted to being careless:  careless about language, careless about the words I used relative to the philosophy of the human person; careless about how pouring all my unfiltered thoughts out on the page might affect people who have a history of eating disorders, or of scrupulosity, or of difficulty caring for themselves.   I don't want to make the same mistakes again.

Would it be better just to... not write about this sort of thing at all?  I'm open to that possibility.  I'm not sure I can find out unless I give it a try.

What if I could write about it without making those mistakes?  What would it look like?  

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Ground rules.

 

1.  I will not conflate weight, fatness, or appearance with health.   

It's not just that these, as indicators of health, are poor and incomplete—though they are.   

It also means no more blithe writing about "desire for health" as a nobler-sounding euphemism for desires to look better, be less fat, or weigh less.  Pretended concern for "health" has justified many rude and abusive people.   Let me call things what they are.

A crucial reason to carefully acknowledge the difference:  Fat people frequently report that health care providers become fixated on fatness as the primary indicator of their health, the sole probable cause of pain or other symptoms, and the first problem that must be "fixed" before they are allowed to access other levels of care.  (See this recent commentary by Aubrey Gordon.)

 

2.  I will acknowledge other biomarkers of general health that are better-supported by evidence.  

Anyone can self-assess the time they spend physically active, the number of alcoholic drinks they have per week, the hours they sleep, the number of fruit/vegetable portions they are able to serve themselves each day.   These behavior-based markers are much more often under an individual's direct control (although the range of available choice varies).  Hydration can be assessed by checking if the urine is consistently a pale yellow color.  Blood pressure,  lipid panels, and blood glucose testing are accessible to those who can afford at least annual basic preventive care.   

As for body-size-related markers of general health, my understanding is that neither body-fat percentage, nor weight, nor BMI work well at all as a predictor of eventual development of cardiovascular or metabolic disease.  The one exception may be waist circumference.   If I find myself casting about for a NUMBER, perhaps that one will work; otherwise, maybe I need to write something else.

(Two examples of papers with this finding; two examples don't substitute for a careful literature review, of course.  Note that adjusting the results for BMI does appear to improve the correlation.  This is possibly because it brings in a dependence of height; naturally short stature is itself an attribute that raises the risk of developing these diseases.)    

 

3.  I am not a fitness professional.  I am not a health care provider.  I am not a registered dietician.

I have my own experience.  I have scientific training; it is not in this field, but I have good scientific literacy and am able to assess the general usefulness of papers and applicability of research.   I know where to go for more information, and I know how to identify the difference between a broad scientific consensus and a matter with competing viable theories.   I also know how to take a piece of popular science writing and pick it apart, if I want to, or use it for entertainment purposes, if I want to do that instead.  All these mean that I can form an educated and reasonable opinion (you will not catch me scoffing about "Dr. Google," any more than I would scoff at public access to medical libraries), and I can write commentary about it if I like.  These are not, however, substitutes for authority.  I'm an educated amateur, not an expert in any of these areas, and I have an academic responsibility to remain clear about that to anyone who stumbles across my blog.

(This isn't a ground rule about which I really needed a reminder.  I try hard to live by it anyway.  But I thought it worth mentioning for completeness.)

 

4.  No biomarker, and few health-related behaviors, imply a specific moral conclusion.

Yeah, I know myself (imperfectly).   I might be able to tell you when I've made a poor choice, or developed a poor habit, or experienced a consequence, for lack of some virtue.   I know where I have agency, and I have some ideas where my agency has been damaged by circumstances.  I don't know that about others.  I can't speak for everyone else.

Assumptions about real people are tricky at best, and at worst they are outright bad and harmful.

Moreover, the following ought to go without saying:  there are no bad foods, there are no bad bodies, there is no such thing as cheating.  There is room for rest, and room for feasting, and room for fun, and no one else gets to tell you how much; there is room for you.

 

5.  Nevertheless, I'll stand by this:  morality, theology, charity, the philosophy of the human person, the demands of justice, aren't off limits here.

Nothing that human beings do or decide is untouched by the disciplines and philosophy of my faith tradition, and there aren't many traditions that pretend otherwise for themselves.    I hope to explore them in a way that doesn't violate the very principles I'm seeking to understand.  I'm not certain that I can, but I hope to.  

It is good to use appropriate self-discipline to strengthen virtue.  It is good to consider how to use resources prudently.  It is good to exercise detachment from outcomes.  At the same time, discipline is personal, resources are personal, outcomes are definitely personal.  So I need to take care:  if I write about my discipline and my resources, I need to make clear that they are mine and no one else's.

 

6.  I will be explicit about the limits of hypothetical situations and imaginary characters.  

Ah, the hypothetical situation.  Much maligned for good reason, sometimes useful for illustration, always a bit tricky in their execution.

I love hypotheticals, but I must be more careful with them.  It is tempting to think that if I think up a hypothetical situation, decorate it with only those details that seem to me significant, and imagining human-like actors, I can treat it as my very own creature of pure reason.   Since it is mine, I can manipulate as I please and  judge with omniscience. 

In one sense it's true, I can do that.  But real human readers have a tendency to see in these hypothetical characters someone "like" themselves, or perhaps real people they know.  And I am not allowed to manipulate or to judge the real person based on my fan-fic. 

Even if I think up a hypothetical, and along comes a real person who embodies the imaginary one in every detail I created, I can't use my reason to reach deductive conclusions about the real person.   Why not?  After all, the hypothetical (in this hypothesis) is perfectly matched!  Well, the real human may possess every detail of my hypothetical, but the hypothetical on which I exercised my reason could not possibly possess every detail of the human.   Humans possess an infinite detail and and an infinite worth, far beyond the scope of any model problem.   So watch it.

Once again.  Watch out when you are tempted to make assumptions about real people.

 

7.  If I write about specific activities, I'll make room for modifications for different bodies, variations that make training plans more enjoyable, and goals unrelated to weight reduction.

That short wish list appears in this commentary piece by Rebecca Scritchfield.

 

8.  Athletic performance metrics are useful, far preferable to body-size metrics, but highly individual and unrelated to either value or virtue.

It's probably a step in the right direction to go from "my body's value comes from its appearance" to "my body's value comes from what it can do."   But it's still wrong.

Training is experiment, and experiment requires observation and measurement.  I can use performance metrics to evaluate whether my training is having the effect I desire.  I don't have to be clinical about everything, either:  I can celebrate when I meet the metric goals I've set, and I can express disappointment when I don't.   It's crucial not to connect the results to my value or my "good"-ness.   People do not, in fact, get what they deserve.

 

9.  "Quality of life" is a universal goal, but an individual measure:  how closely reality matches a person's hopes and expectations.

There are multiple ways of going about working for one's quality of life, too.  Much fitness writing is aimed at improving quality of life through hard work; but I also want to honor the effort to maintain quality of life in situations of increasing difficulty.  There is also the tough mirror process of re-adjusting those hopes and expectations to match an unlooked-for reality, maybe in the face of injury or illness, maybe other changes in circumstance, maybe after learning more about oneself.

 

10.  The big picture of what I'm getting at:  an authentically human understanding of self-care.  

Maybe that sounds like an overly grandiose aim.  Especially since, if history is any guide I'll probably be putting up posts like "here's what's in my gym bag these days!" and "I've discovered that it's a mistake for me to forget to eat breakfast before swimming a mile!"  I mean, some of that stuff is really just minutiae.  I might put it up because it's on my mind.

But all the little pieces add up to a bigger picture.  

The ground rules are here as a kind of checklist for the construction of those little pieces, so they're all align-able with the sort of big picture I want to have.  At the same time, there are questions that feel very open to me, so that I'm constructing that picture as I go along without really knowing what it will look like.  What boundaries are essential?  If vocation is about self-gift, what is the type and extent of self-investment that is appropriate for each vocation?  How do we write sensitively about practices that are health-promoting for many but not for some?   How about writing about practices that are accessible only to a few but might be interesting  to many?  How does a family distribute resources (time, effort, assets) among its members with different needs?   Can self-discipline be taught or only discovered?  What are the signs that health, wellness, even discipline has become an idol, or an obsession, and how can a person get their priorities back in order?

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Well, this post has been many days in the making, so don't be surprised if it takes me a while to get around to the actual writing.  But it was a necessary step to unclog the  pipes, so to speak.  I hope to follow up on it soon.

Accomplishments.

Do you ever tell yourself the story of your life, in your head?  Do you ever revise the story as you go?  

I do, all the time.  I am not sure if the revisions are a kind of erasure and rewriting of history, or if they are a kind of re-interpretation of history, an improvement of perspective as time carries me farther and farther away and I can take a wider view.

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As a girl I was told, too often I think, that I would someday do Great Things:  all the individual people meant well, or at least meant nothing serious, but the total accumulation of expectations weighed heavily.   

At the same time I heard other things, too, and I think they carried the same weight:  that I didn't know how to deal with people, that I didn't know how to make friends, that I wasn't naturally likeable, that the problem wasn't what I say but always how I say it, that I didn't know how to dress myself, that I was physically clumsy and physically lazy. 

It wasn't my sibling's fault, and I know this, but I got compared to him a lot, and the message was something along these lines:  You're pretty book-smart, but I'm a lot less worried about him than I am about you.  I know he'll do well because he's doing fine in school and he knows how to get along with people.  People like him.

(Who knows what he heard or didn't hear from the other side of those comparisons?)

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So, ultimately, I achieved some of the things I said out to do, and a lot of them were difficult and much of them were rewarding.  I haven't (yet) accomplished any of the Great Things.  I mean, plenty of Not-Too-Shabby things in that domain, but nothing world-changing.   And then of course I stopped trying in that domain entirely; I quit it.

One of the things I'm gradually editing and rewriting in my story, though, is the column labeled "Accomplishments."   And here's the reason. 

I quit that other domain, in part, because I felt myself (more than most people!  this isn't about you!) to be internally and invisibly disabled, hampered, struggling.   I'm not talking about imposter syndrome, I'm not talking about struggling as a scientist, though of course there was imposter syndrome, and of course it is challenging to be a young scientist.  I expected that, we should all expect that.  I'm talking about feeling disabled as a human being who relates to others.  I felt that I operated in a kind of impairment, that it was always going to take extra work, extra attention, extra care for me to hold my family together, or maybe to hold myself together enough.  Deep down, I did not think I could do both things adequately.  (No, not even when acknowledging that it's not just me who has to do the holding-together.)

I know and admire many parents who can, and who do; who don't just hold it together, who excel.  I didn't think I could be one of them.   A few years of parenting and sciencing at the same time only reinforced it for me.

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Weighing the opportunity cost now, I am trying to honor as accomplishments the relationships I have built.   The girl who wasn't naturally likeable has been married twenty years to a very good spouse who, by all appearances, loves her dearly.  The girl who was physically lazy is raising five lovely children.   The girl who didn't know how to make friends, well, she doesn't have a lot of friends, but she has some very, very good friends, real ones, who have made a tremendous difference; with some effort (maybe more than most people need) she's kept the best of the ones that go way back, and still occasionally makes new ones.

These are things that I have worked hard for, and not things that were laid on me like weight, like expectations; they are unlooked-for gifts that I've thrown all my efforts to,  in order to keep and steward them.  I'm grateful for the opportunity.  They will never belong on a CV, of course, but I'm telling this story to myself, and they go in.

 

Self-care with St. Francis de Sales.

(Read my other posts on Introduction to the Devout Life by following links here.)

Introduction to the Devout Life may be read online here.  Link goes to table of contents.

But if you are willing to purchase a physical book, and believe me this work is worth it because it's the sort of thing you might want to carry around with you, my recommended translation is that of Fr. Michael Day.  Look for it as a used book.

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When the year comes around to the end of January, close to St. Francis de Sales's feast day, I like to go through the method of "annual renewal and preservation of devotion" that he lays out in Introduction to the Devout Life.    

A little ways into the method there's a fairly detailed, fairly general examination of conscience.  In fact, St. Francis offers two different forms of examination of conscience, a long form in V.3-6  and a shorter form in V.7; I'm considering the longer form, which he suggests doing in pieces over the course of one or two days. 

It's quite reasonably structured, and might work well as a day-to-day examination of conscience as well:  it is divided into instructions on how to make the examination, then considerations of one's behavior towards God, towards self, and towards neighbor. 

Despite this relatively ordinary form, it's a somewhat unusual examination of conscience.  It's not a simple accounting of sins, for the purpose of making a good regular confession.  Nor is it an overview of one's faults, temptations, inclinations, and bad habits, as one does before making a general confession (you know, the type that often requires one to make an appointment and block off an hour).  It's the medium-perspective E. O. C., with an object that is hardly penitential and accusatory. 

Rather, it's celebratory, serene, and motivating.  Look at the language:

• Protest [to God] that you wish to note your progress, not for your own satisfaction but to rejoice in it for God's sake;
• not for your own glory but for his, that you may thank him. 
• Protest also, if you seem to have made little progress or even fallen back, that you will not give way to discouragement and become faint-hearted and lukewarm,
• but on the contrary that you will stir yourself to greater efforts, humble yourself and strive with God's grace to remedy your defects. 
• Having done this, consider calmly and peacefully how you have behaved up to the present towards God, your neighbour and yourself.

I want to pull out specifically a subsection from V.5, "Your Behavior Towards Yourself."  This is the very essence of self-care, now and circa 1609:

3.  What sort of love have you for your heart?  With what care do you seek to cure it in its infirmities?  It is your duty to do all you can for it when it is tormented by passions and to lay all else aside to bring it relief.

Now, the precise definition of "heart" here matters.   I took some time to search for other occurrences of the term "heart" in the book, working with an English translation (one of these days I'll attack the French, but I haven't cracked my copy yet).   

In my opinion, what St. Francis de Sales means by "heart" is the seat of affections, inclinations, attachments, and emotions.  It's not, to him, the only part of the self, but a component that's closely linked to the body and to relationships both human and divine.

I love St. Francis de Sales's tender regard for the human self, not a kind of disappearance of the self in favor of the divine, but recognizing the value of the human person as a creature that can be taken up to participate in the divine.   

Amy Welborn wrote about this on the feast day, last week, and it's really closely related:

In an empty, meaningless universe, if we can start there – you matter – well,that’s where we have to start. It may strike me as solipsistic and goopy, but if you have been formed to believe that your life means whatever you want  which means, in essence your life means nothing –  to learn that: your life has happened because the Creator of the Universe wants  it to…

….is, indeed, transformative.

But here we are, back with St. Francis de Sales. And he won’t let you rest there. He won’t let you rest with I’m okay, I’m loved, I’m here for a reason, I have amazing gifts and talents. 

Nope.

Traditional Catholic spirituality – as expressed by today’s saint – is not about resting on our laurels and delighting in our unique gifts and talents. It’s about honestly looking at ourselves, seeing what trash we’ve allowed in, and sucking it up, embracing hard discipline, and moving forward.

We post-Vatican II babies were raised to look back at this type of spirituality and shudder: Scrupulosity! God loves you just as you are!

The basic difference has been:

• Salvation = understanding and accepting that God made you and loves you as you are
• Salvation = cooperating with the grace of God to restore the you he made. 

And this is why St. Francis de Sales is so wonderful. He bridges this gap, he is realistic on every score, reminding us that we are not perfect and that we should be striving for perfection, but warning us against unrealistic expectations as well...

I think I'd like to add that really, this vision of the human person and their relationship to God can be totally sufficient for conversion of people in 2019 -- as long as we remember that it's not just ourselves for which we bridge this gap. 

• We need to accept that other people, our neighbors, aren't perfect, but that they're not hopeless either, they're capable of striving for perfection, and it's appropriate to their dignity that we mentor those in our care to do so.
• We must be warned against unrealistic expectations of those other human persons as well.
• God made our neighbor, and loves our neighbor as they are.  Really!
• Our neighbor is capable, is wanted, cooperating with God to restore the one he made.

And if you read into St. Francis you'll see that there's constantly this tenderness (and realism) about the soul's relationship with other human beings. 

I keep telling people that it's ahead of its time.  It feels like a modern book.  This is why I prefer the most contemporary-sounding language possible in the translation; anything with a scent of antiquity about it tends to obscure the frank and clear voice, the way a black-and-white photograph feels more distant from us than one in color.   It's the best manual I've found so far, at least for myself, because (I think) it was truly written, four hundred and some years ago, for someone like me.

Repost: The lack of checklists.

This is a repost from October 2014.

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Recently a friend of mine asked me if I could recommend any books for someone who was struggling with scrupulosity -- in particular, the Do I Have A Sufficiently Serious Reason To Delay Pregnancy sort of scrupulosity, mixed with depression and struggles with anger and being overwhelmed. I wanted to help, so I put some thought into it.

Longtime readers will know of my irritation with the tendency of some corners of the Catholic internet, lacking any actual lists of rules from the Magisterium, to write their own rules for what constitutes a Serious Reason and then disseminate them.

My position is that those entrusted with the teaching authority of the Church, as well as the inspired writers of Scripture, knew what they were doing when they didn't, for example, add "subclinical depression isn't a good enough reason to watch your fertility signs" or "if only one spouse is sure that it's a good time to try for another baby, the other one should get in line." The fact that the Church has declined to give further guidance beyond generosity and the good of the family, is itself a kind of guidance: a signal that discernment about family size and childbirth timing belongs not to theologians and pastors, nor to doctors and therapists, nor to social media friends and Twitter, but to a well-formed married couple themselves -- and no one else.

I couldn't think of any books that I could recommend through experience, although I found some promising titles via Google. I know of a number of web-published articles and blog posts that make the case for backing off from pressuring others with the so-called Grave Reasons and minding yer own business, but as it was of course web-published articles and blog posts that helped convince my friend's friend that her own struggles were not bad enough -- that she was not good enough, and if she could only be better she could handle everything, and maybe the first step towards being better was to take on more and more and more -- well, I wasn't sure that piling more websites, no more authoritative than the others, would help.

So I suggested working on recognizing scrupulosity in general, and left it at that.

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Later on this week it occurred to me that there is another sort of commandment -- one that is much, much more fundamental to the Christian life than anything having to do with married life, since it applies quite strictly to everyone of any age and state of life -- that, despite its importance, is similarly light on the details.

We all know we've got to do it. In a very real sense our salvation is said to depend on it. But no one -- not Christ's words in scripture, not the Catechism, no papal teaching document, no synod -- has ever told us exactly how to do it, or how to know when we've done it, or given us a checklist of features of successfully practicing it. And yet this virtue, this activity, is not something that is purely spiritual or invisible; like generosity in the service of life, it plays out in the arena of real contact between real human beings, and if we invite it in, if we practice it, somehow (but no one will tell us how, exactly) it will change the course of our days.

I am speaking of forgiveness. We know it's always necessary: Jesus said himself that we can't be forgiven unless we forgive. We know it must be offered again and again, without practical end; that, at least, is what the exegetes tell us that "seventy times seven" times means to say to us.

But beyond the teaching that we have to do it, and that we are never allowed to give up doing it -- we are not told what we have to do to be forgiving.

How can we ever forgive enough? There is no "enough," because our model of forgiveness -- just like our model of life-giving generosity -- is God Himself.

There is only what we are called to do. And because it is a matter of a call, no one can figure that out for us. We have to discern on our own.

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Let's talk extremes: Almost nobody (unless they are trapped, themselves, somehow) believes that the injunction to forgive means that a physically abused person must go on putting himself or herself in danger of more abuse. We don't say that there is a limit on forgiveness; rather, we advise that forgiveness doesn't require the risk of being harmed by a dangerous person.

And yet... all forgiveness means some level of risk and vulnerability (otherwise we wouldn't have to remind people to do it). And so there is always the open question of how much vulnerability we can create before we have forgiven.

The question is open. There is no checklist.

"If your neighbor commits such-and-such a crime against you, and then he apologizes and makes restitution, forgiving him means declining to press charges. But if your neighbor commits such-and-such a different, particular, crime, and then apologizes and makes restitution, forgive him some other way while you still press charges." Nope. We don't get advice like that.

"If you lend money up to $X and the borrower never pays you back, forgiveness means that you stop demanding the money and you should be willing to lend to that person again. If the unpaid amount is between $X and $Y, forgiveness means that you stop demanding the money, and don't think of it again, but probably you should not lend to that person again. If the amount is between $Y and $Z, it is permissible to take the borrower to court for the money, while forgiving the borrower in your heart..." Nope. We don't get advice like that.

"If a family member hurts you in such-and-such a way, forgiveness means that you tell the person of your hurt and then never speak of it again, and not gossip to other members of the family, and keep going to visit the relative who hurt you, and send Christmas cards, and the like. If a family member hurts you in a different way, forgiveness means that you keep silent about the hurt, keep visiting with that person, and learn to change the subject when necessary to avoid the topics that lead to people saying hurtful things. But if a family member hurts you in such-and-such a different way, it's okay to separate yourself completely from that person and quietly work on your own anger issues without subjecting yourself to further mental abuse, and that is what forgiveness means in that case." Nope. No specific advice.

Look in the encyclicals all you want. Read the Bible as much as you want. There is no algorithm.

But isn't this dangerous? Aren't some people going to feel trapped by the injunction to forgive, trapped in cycles of self-hatred, trapped in abusive relationships, trapped by toxic family members demanding what they have no right to demand?

Yes. It is dangerous. And people are trapped in this way.

And yet it would be dangerous in a different way if we were given such an algorithm, because we would none of us have any room for discernment -- for working out the best way to forgive in a specific situation, with specific human beings.

We have a Church, not a clinic; we have a Teacher, not a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual; we deal with disordered human persons (including ourselves), not with disorders. We have to judge the situations that we are in by looking at the needs of the people who are affected by the situations. We as individuals are the only ones who can see the details of our surroundings. A predictive, exhaustive flowchart (if P then Q) would, I presume, hobble us; leaving no room for a flowering of authentic human forgiveness, it would tempt us to go just so far and yet no farther.

It might serve as an excuse to limit forgiveness, by telling us when we had forgiven "enough."

Forgiveness comes in different shapes, and we have to see the shape it will fit into, in our hearts and in our relationships, and work over and over again to more fully fit it into its place. But it isn't ever done and isn't ever enough. The nature of forgiveness, like generosity, is a nature of readiness-to-serve; never saying "I am done," but instead always ready to be called to do something more.

What that something may be, we apparently have to figure out on our own, for it to be forgiveness and not some other thing -- maybe, a good thing, but something else.

Transcript number 1.

This week my oldest son, now a homeschooled high school junior, needed an "official high school transcript" for the first time.   

(He's applying for PSEO programs next year -- that's "post-secondary enrollment options," i.e., earning college credit and high school credits simultaneously -- and  one local university that's rather selective about its PSEO applicants required it.)

I knew this was coming, and of course I am going to need it for college applications in the fall anyway, so I have been pulling together materials for a while.  

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I feel much more excited and confident about guiding my offspring through the high school years than I ever did about dealing with elementary school or early middle school.    Perhaps it mirrors my own feelings at those ages:  I struggled a lot with fitting in, and with not being able to control my own environment, when I was younger, and don't have many happy memories, but in high school I began to find subjects to delight in (chiefly chemistry and physics, but also French and literature) and what's more significant, people who also liked that sort of thing. It was then that I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.  

Now that I write that, it doesn't seem a particularly unusual story and so it can't possibly be the sole explanation for why I find a lot of elementary school stuff tiresome and boring compared to some of my colleagues who seem to have an endless, envious capacity for crafts and reading aloud and seeing the world as fresh and new all the time.  Perhaps I am the tiresome one!

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The institution whose application we are mailing today, wisely in my opinion, does not wish to see grades issued by a student's parent, so my transcript has no grades.  

To this I say:  Excellent.  

Not only is it a pain to calculate and assign grades to your own child, it's stupid.  Why on earth should a university believe what I have to say about my own child in an application for admission to anything?  Presumably the obvious conflict of interest would be enough to say "you know what?  Just:  no.  We're going to go off the test scores and maybe an essay."  And then there's the question of how meaningful grades can be when there are literally no other students in the class to compare this one to. 

You would think that all the colleges would see the essential worthlessness of grades produced by a homeschooling parent and actively discourage the student from sending any grades issued by a parent.   But I'm here to tell you that, at least as of last fall, several of the colleges which my oldest is thinking of applying for as a freshman not only encourage homeschooled students to submit a transcript with grades, but they require them.  

I will issue those graded transcripts if I have to, but I really would like to include a disclaimer that says, "You know, I essentially made these grades up.  On a rational basis, of course, me being who I am, but a truly rational basis would mean that you and I should both admit that I could give any grade I wanted to this student. And by the way, so could everybody else who chose to go the non-umbrella-school route."  

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So:  this time anyway, no grades.  Don't even send 'em! says the university (good).  But they do want to know what the student's coursework was like, and in particular how challenging it was.  So:  "Home School transcripts should include a narrative of the material a student has covered and a listing of courses they have taken, if appropriate."

So I pulled out all my records for the various subjects that my oldest has worked on for ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade, and I made lists of the textbooks we used and the material we covered.  I asked H., who has run pretty much all of my kids' English literature and composition, for a course summary, and she provided me a nicely detailed one.  I wrote up a set of end-goals for each area of study (e.g., in Mathematics, one of my oldest's goals is "advance to differential and integral calculus by early in Grade 11 in order to apply them to the study of Physics I").  And then I sorted it all out first by topic and then grade level.

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So, not everyone chooses to do it this way -- lots of homeschoolers have a free-form, holistic, or interdisciplinary philosophy of education, where the boundaries of the different areas are soft or nonexistent, and that is fine -- but I am naturally a put-it-all-into-boxes sort of person, and so from the very beginning I set up my son's high school years with discrete courses and credits in mind.   There would be a chemistry class, and we'd do these chapters from this book.  There would be a civics class, and we'd have three meetings a week for thirty-four weeks.  There would be a Latin class, and we'll work through this syllabus published by an umbrella school.  Physical education?  Each session of the indoor climbing team is thirty hours of instruction, and at 120 hours = 1 credit (the Carnegie unit), that means 1/4 credit each session.

When you start off thinking this way, there is definitely a tendency to get boxed into rigid ideas about the boundaries of disciplines.  On the other hand it is pretty straightforward to add up credits at transcript time.

Another reason I have thought this way from the beginning is because of my co-schooling arrangement.  I set up physics and chemistry for a few high school students to learn in a group, facilitated by me.  Their parents weren't watching me do it (at the time, for example, H. was busy at the moment, teaching language arts to 3 of my other children and 2 of hers).  They trust me but they still need a record of what the students learned; after all, I'm not their "official" teacher; more like a tutor to which they've delegated some of the physics oversight.  So from the very beginning I had a weekly schedule for the whole year, and I kept careful records of what we did and didn't cover.  At the beginning of the year I write a course plan with my objectives; at the end of the year I write a new one where I write how I actually wound up making it all work.  And I do give grades, which is not so hard to do objectively with the kind of coursework I facilitate.  (Whether they are representative or not of what the student would be getting in an institutional school, I don't know.  I hardly ever give anyone an A.  I have a deep suspicion that it would depend on the school.)

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 My son and I went to an informational session last week on campus, where you could ask questions of the full-time PSEO advisors and the program admission staff.  I hung back to ask my question at the end while everyone was filing out -- "What exactly are you looking for in a homeschooler's 'narrative transcript?'"

The staffer explained that the point was so that they could understand the scope of the material the student had covered in his classes, and in particular, whether he demonstrated the ability to do college-level work; it is very important to them that the PSEO students do not overextend themselves.

"So," I suggested, "you would want to see a list of the texts he read in his English classes, that sort of thing?"

"Oh my goodness, no, you would not need to go into that level of detail!" he chuckled.  

I looked at him levelly for a moment.  "Supposing I did go into that level of detail..." I said carefully, "would that be a problem?  I mean, would you all hate me if I sent you, er, a rather detailed transcript?"

He assured me that this would not be a problem either, and I went away hoping that if the transcript was an outlier, that it would not at least be the sort of outlier that the office would laugh at.  Because I wasn't about to delete all that stuff I'd written (although I did cut it down).

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One of the things that feels weird about writing out the transcript is that it feels like my son should be writing it.   I rather don't like stories of helicopter parents (and I have enough friends who are college professors that I have heard such stories).   I have a great distaste for filling out parts of applications for my student.  He should do the application himself!  You don't want your parent filling out an application for you, not for anything.

But:  Transcripts are never made by students for themselves.  They are made by institutions for students.  They are sealed in smooth blank envelopes to be transmitted cleanly and with no signs of tampering from one institution to another.  

 I am not the student's educational institution.  I am a mother, the original alma mater.   This identity feels positively warm and sticky compared to the cool, blank, efficiency of the transcript.  And so there is no way I can produce this document and be wholly comfortable with it.  I know the institution is used to a column of numbers, and that from me the column of numbers is no good, so instead they get a document which I can't help but see as smudged all over with maternity.  And that is something that I have never been comfortable with sending out into the world.  I feel I want to run after the transcript with a corner of my skirt and dab it off, except that to do so would give away the truth.

But still, he can't do this part.  I have to do this part, because I am the school.  So I write the damned thing anyway.

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Deep breath.  I open up the transcript file again and read my own deathless prose from the introduction to the Science section.  I want it to be as much like a column of numbers as a narrative description can be:

The student chose to fulfill the biological sciences requirement with a non-laboratory course in evolutionary biology. Introductory college textbooks on evolutionary biology are supplemented with additional textbooks, videos, and assorted readings covering necessary fundamentals of biology and touching on the historical context and social impact of evolutionary theory.

Physical sciences are taught directly by the parent, who holds a PhD in chemical engineering, in a small group of high school students. Because texts are college-level and syllabi are modeled after AP^Ⓡ courses, we have designated these as honors courses.

I am second-guessing myself already (why did I mention the doctorate?  does it make me sound like the sort of person who insists on being called Doctor all the time?  does it make me sound insecure?  will they look up my thesis?  oh no) but at least I am sure have properly formatted the registered trademark symbol.  

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Here's the thing.  It's ... not about me.  There is a temptation to look over it and think that it is, at least a little bit, about me, or at least about me-and-this-kid's-wonderful-dad.  It's not about me.  It's about our son, this particular young man, this bright and earnest and funny young man, and about demonstrating that we all have good reason to expect he won't fall on his face when he takes his first college classes.

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In any case, it's done.  They certainly will have an idea of the applicant's coursework.    Probably several ideas.   I'm glad I had a chance to do this, my first one, under relatively low stakes.   I might be less detailed next time.

As I have five children, however, I must say that I am already wondering if high school transcripts, like baby-picture albums, get progressively less detailed as one moves through the younger children in the family.  You know the trope:  your first child has a beautifully kept scrapbook, your third has a stack of photos in a manila envelope, and -- did you even take any pictures of that fifth child?

I would bet there was a correlation.  

(Except that I never managed to make any baby albums.)

Children, safety, and the sixth commandment.

At home we say that my six-year-old, who will turn seven in January, is in first grade. He is an outgoing and cheerful child who loves to meet people. So I was really looking forward to starting him in religious ed at our parish this year, because that is one of the first "classroom" experiences our kids tend to have. Meanwhile, I looked forward to starting him slowly at home with memory work from the St. Joseph First Communion Catechism, as I have done for all the other kids. I have a little personalized copybook printed just for him, and we take two years to work through memorizing and copying the answers to the questions:

Who made me?

"God made me."

Did God make all things?

"Yes, God made all things."

Why did God make me?

"God made me to show his goodness and to make me happy with Him in Heaven."

It is not just memorizing and copy work, although I find it is a good vehicle for practicing handwriting and for stretching the child's memory. As I introduce each one we talk about it: what it means, why we use some words and not others, sometimes different ways to think about the answers, which of the answers seem easy to grasp and which answers are so difficult that grownups still argue about them when they go to college and other grownups write whole books about what they mean. Six- and seven-year-olds, I find, are proud to be learning about things that are so important and difficult that grownups argue about them.

We add one or two of these per week, and to get through the whole First Communion catechism it takes about two school years, so I start in first grade. By the time second grade rolls around and the parish sends home the packet of things To Be Learned before First Confession and then First Communion, our children have hardly balked at learning the Ten Commandments and the Act of Contrition and the Five Steps To Prepare For Making A Good Confession and the like. I have rolled it right into their copybook and each year it has become part of the memory work.

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But as I have said, I look forward to enrolling our kids in our very good parish religious ed program in part because I like them to have a classroom experience with other kids and a teacher, just that little experience of collegiality and being a school-kid, complete with chairs and desks and chalkboards, evenings in the parish school.

So I was more than a little disappointed when my 6yo arrived for his first day and there weren't any other first graders in his class.

Demographics, the religious ed director told me. The recession. There are only about 15 six-year-olds among all the families registered in the parish, and the others go to the school and so they don't need Wednesday night religious ed. There just were not a lot of kids born in 2009-2010. My ten-year-old daughter in the same parish had 43 First Communicants in her cohort, maybe a dozen of whom were in religious ed classes with her.

The school was willing to devote a first grade teacher to my one little boy, but in the end -- he will turn seven this year -- we decided to send him to second grade, and so everything is accelerated. It is the better option for him under the circumstances, but I wanted for him to get a year older first. I wanted to have time to teach him my way for a little while.

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I was talking with a good friend over coffee the other day. She wanted to pick my brain about sex education for children and teenagers, something that I thought was kind of funny because she seems like the sort of person who would have absolutely no difficulty talking about anything at all with anyone. But as we talked it became clear that she is thinking hard about how to thread the needle between a healthy sex-positivity and anything goes, between encouraging moral behavior and fueling shame (or worse, shaming others), between a culture of chastity and the dark side of what she called "purity culture" (the notion that purity can be lost and afterwards you are permanently worth less; cf. comparing human beings, usually girls, to used wads of chewing gum and the like).

I am not sure I added anything to that idea other than "back to the Theology of the Body for you!" Because that is what authentic and sex-positive Catholicism looks like. But we talked a little bit about our different styles and how she is very assertive ("let's sit down, son, it is time for us to talk about Internet porn") and at least for young children I tend to be watchful about questions and respond to them instead. I don't want to burden them, too early, with things that they might not be ready for, I said. But as they grow older I try to spark the questions when it seems time, mostly via artful curriculum choices. So, for instance, my 10yo daughter and 13yo son are both getting Life Science this year with human reproduction included. I tend to stick to the clinical and academic, and I surround it with the social and moral context to it as we go, as it seems necessary.

I called that a "retreat" compared to her style, but she didn't think so. "The other Catholic homeschoolers I run with, it seems like they are afraid to teach their kids about the biology, because it might get them interested in sex." She felt social pressure.

"But what did you mean, specifically," she asked me, "about 'burdening' them too early? Like, what specific knowledge is a burden to a child who is too young for it?"

And that question really gave me pause. I realized I had been saying that for a long time, without ever articulating something specific to myself. I ended up telling her that I remembered a deep sense of revulsion, something not quite shame or fear, but a desire to get away, at the ages of eight-nine-ten if ever one of my parents wanted to speak to me about sex or puberty or any such thing. I have heard it said that this is a natural impulse, possibly self-protective, that many children have; I have also wondered if I felt unusually unsafe in that territory because that was around the time that my own family broke down around me, and there was no context in which it would have been safe to discuss morality or justice or consent. So I don't know, but the memory of that feeling of horror has made me reluctant to impose the feeling on my own kids. I "retreat" (at least in theory -- we shall see if I managed it, I guess) to a clear and age-appropriate explication of biology and a clear and age-appropriate explication of our duty to act justly to other human beings and never to use them as a means to an end, and draw the connections when I get the chance.

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From that conversation I discovered at least one thing that I think can burden a child too young for it, and that is a certain way of looking at the sixth commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."

My six-year-old, the one thrust a bit too soon into the first-communion-prep program, is supposed to memorize the ten commandments because of the first-confession-prep which precedes it. Memorizing the ten commandments is completely fine with me. I get that the ten commandments can also be used as a handy memory aid when one is examining one's conscience. But I have always been a little bit bothered by the "child's ten commandments" they offered to us to make it easy for the kids.

"God comes first" is fine. "God's name is holy" is fine. "God's day is holy" is fine. All of them are fine until you get to number six, and then the children are offered as an alternative to "Thou shalt not commit adultery,"

"Be pure."

And -- I don't want to teach a six-year-old that this is what the sixth commandment means.

For one thing, it isn't accurate.

For another thing, none of the real ten commandments are about what you should "be" -- they are about what you should "do." Breaking one does not change you from who you are -- a human being, a child of God -- into something else.

For a third thing, "thou shalt not commit adultery" is a call to acting justly towards others, whereas "be pure" sounds like something you do within yourself, without reference to anyone except yourself and God.

I know where this comes from. It comes from the commendable practice of using the ten commandments as a sort of mnemonic for examinations of conscience, or possibly from the way that the Catechism organizes its discussion of the moral life around the structure of the ten commandments. All the possible sins against chastity are gathered together in section six.

And the teachers are trying to come up with a way that they can teach the children to start obeying the sixth commandment right away. They think "Be pure" is a child-sized version of it.

"Be chaste" would be better, I think.

But even better would be to teach the seven-year-olds this: Seven-year-olds cannot violate the sixth commandment.

The sixth commandment is for their sake. It is meant to protect them. But it is not aimed at them.

When they get older, they will need to incorporate it into their own behavior.

But right now, it is not aimed at them.

The St. Joseph First Communion Catechism pointedly reassures its readers that young children do not commit mortal sin. Before going on to explain that grownups do commit grave sins, and sometimes so do even big boys and girls, it says about young children: God protects them in a special way. They learn about both venial and mortal sin now for completeness, and because later they will have to wrestle with both kinds; but for now we reassure them that they cannot endanger their own souls at the age of seven.

I like this formula, and I think we should adopt it for the sixth commandment.

I don't think seven-year-olds need to be burdened with the worry about whether they are "being" pure.

I think seven-year-olds should understand clearly that if they are exposed to unchastity in their families, if someone inapproriately sexualizes them, if they come upon explicit materials or media -- it is because someone else has sinned against them.

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This post turned out way more rambly than I thought it would, but it has been helpful.

I always have taught the meaning of "Thou shalt not commit adultery" to my young children like this: It exists to protect children and families. The sixth commandment means that mothers and fathers should work hard to make a safe home for children. It means, "Do not find another person who is not your husband or wife to be with," because children need to grow up with their mother and their father.

I have always felt confident about teaching that. In part because kids get it: They know that their parents, and other adults, are supposed to take care of them and keep them safe. And also because as they get older, they can come to understand that all of chastity serves justice for children. Chastity exists to put the needs of children above the desires of adults. I want my kids to know my marriage as a mantle of safety wrapped around them, and I want them to remember that mantle when they grow up and know where it came from, and what that means for their own decisions.

 

Will they be safe people for children?

Not "be pure" but "be safe."

"Be safe," in the sense of "be a person who offers safety to others." Especially children, I think I will be more purposeful about rejecting the "be pure" formulation, starting today. Even when we are well-meaning, we take serious risks when we teach simplified versions of the words of Scripture or of sound doctrine. It may be more difficult, but it is always safer to stick with the original.

 

 

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Love is patient, love is kind. Yes, yes, and other stuff.

Sometimes I feel like I still need a basic how-to of the Christian life.  Love is such a difficult concept for me.    I think it's because even though I know better, I constantly slip into the error of mistaking the word as a kind of feeling rather than a kind of act, a choice, or a way of life.  It's a common error, maybe one of the fundamental American social errors.  And I'm kind of embarrassed to fall for an error so common.  Which is itself a problem, I suppose.

Mistaking "love" for a kind of feeling leads some souls to mistake the ephemeral for the lasting, and so endanger themselves.  It leads others to mistake the surface for the substance, and so fail to deepen.  Me, it tends to tempt me to despair.  I have feelings, but not many of the kind that one can mistake for love.  So sometimes, in forgetting, I go a long time wondering if I actually have any in me.

Oh, there are exceptions.  I'm human, and a mother, and I live in the experience of biological attachment -- something that nearly knocked me over with its power, because the sense of wanting to love, of having physical desires that aligned with total self-gift, was so alien to me.   It gave me much food for thought -- can I harness this power? I wrote in 2007, about real love, "Attachment is the natural way that we become disposed to love.   The other way, the supernatural way, is through the sacraments."  Sometimes, if you know something (intellectually) about what love really is,  you wonder how people get so snookered by its substitutes.  One reasonable hypothesis:  We mistake feelings not so much for love itself, but for attachment, love's natural source of power.

I've gone to the writings of St. Thérèse and listened to her explain the merits of "doing little things with great love."  Daily life is a string of such little things, the ordinary duties of marriage and motherhood, citizenship and community; how to swing this "love" thing?  Can I transform my tasks?  Can I transform me?

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 I'll tell you right now, trying to generate feelings of love whilst going about the tasks of the day works imperfectly at best.  It's not a bad exercise:  one considers why this task is here, for example, that the laundry pile is so high because I have many children, for whom I am truly grateful, and try to convert it into being grateful for the laundry itself.  St. Francis embraced Death itself as a beloved sister:  perhaps laundry could be a sort of affable nephew or something?  But I never quite get there, although I can fake it to myself for a while, sometimes even long enough to get it all sorted into baskets.

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This week I went back to 1 Corinthians 13, always a corrective when one has forgotten what love is.  

I did get sidetracked somewhat by a sudden fascination with a translation problem*, but managed mostly to focus -- as I swear I've done over and over again -- on the attributes.  Love is patient, love is kind, and then some more stuff.  Rejoices in the truth.  There's a list there of what love is not, as well as what love is, but honestly I could stand just to pick a couple of these things -- patience, kindness -- and work on that.  For me, "doing small things" with a love greater than I usually can muster might simply be to do them with patience and kindness.

And neither are things that you have to feel in order to do.

(Yes, even patience.   Certainly we can feel impatience, but we can do, or at least try to do, patience despite it.   Who hasn't snapped at a whining child, "Be patient!"  Why ask for patience if we don't mean a behavior change?  What we really mean is "Stop whining and wait."  Surely we can ask the same of ourselves.)

I foresee a time of muttering to myself, "Love is patient, love is kind," as I go about my day.  Seriously, those two attributes alone are enough effort to keep me occupied, never mind all the others.

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I do think ahead with some foreboding.  Even if you actually get a handle on the intellectual meaning of "love" as an interior disposition, you still have to reach out to others with something that is sensible, i.e., available to their senses.  "The body, and it alone, is capable of making the invisible visible" -- that is St. John Paul II -- and wherever our vocation has placed us, we have a duty to communicate love.

A love that is known by nature.  By how it seeks to be felt -- sensed.

We have to try to generate those feelings -- in others!  (Feelings that are true -- feelings of being-loved -- that are safe, not dangerous, because we really do love and desire to love the ones who feel them: we know they are worthy, that they are persons, knowing and bearing with them and beholding always an image of all creation and all the Uncreated too.)  We create the space where it is safe to feel love, and then it is our job to fill that space so love can be felt.  Not so easy for those of us who don't "feel" very much, or who don't trust "feelings;" who prefer to take the easy way out, reasoning and thinking about everything instead.  

 I wonder, too if the comparative dearth of "feeling" might not turn out to be a sort of gift, in the end.  I hope, maybe, it makes it easier for me to rejoice in the truth, because the reason I'm naturally suspicious of "feeling" is because "feeling" tends to obscure.  Still, conscious acts of patience and conscious acts of kindness -- or at least, squelching urges to vocalize impatience, to react with unkindness -- cannot hurt, and might spread outward, even if they don't penetrate inwardly as much as I would like.

 

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 *Because I can't let it drop.  NAB:  "love is not rude."  But Latin Vulgate:  "non est ambitiosa."  Rude or ambitious?  Quick survey of various English translations reveals a split between the two. The Greek received text is ἀσχημονεῖ, which everybody seems to translate as "acts unbecomingly," so more "rude" than "ambitious."  What did Jerome have in mind, exactly?  A mystery for another day.

A strange turning point.

In the last couple of weeks, as I rushed around with Mark and without Mark trying to pull items together to help my grandmother when the relative who lives with her was hospitalized, I had the oddest impression.

It went like this: This is the week when I began to grow old.

Seriously: Maybe the feeling will go away, but I have taken away from it this very strange gut-level feeling that, when I am myself elderly and I look back upon my life, October 2015 will turn out to be a turning point, a hinge around which the whole neatly folds in half.

It seems unlikely that I have received the gift of prophecy and that my span will turn out to be exactly eighty-two years, so something else is going on here. What is it?

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Well, a lot went on in the past few weeks, for sure.

I found myself suddenly an advocate for not one but two older relatives, my truly elderly grandmother and another, not-quite-old-enough-for-Medicare relative with a severe health problem and a lack of insurance. I wasn't alone -- I have two cousins and a brother, and the four of us passed information back and forth in a Facebook Chat window for the whole time, with one out-of-state cousin making a lot of the necessary phone calls and the other two, juggling job and other family responsibilities, stepping in where they could. And I had a lot of support from Mark and his parents, who took all the children on short notice.

The transition, although it was temporary, was jarring. My primary work is usually my own children's education, from the teenager all the way down to the toddler. I am engaged most of the time in the same sort of thing I was doing when I was about 27. Suddenly, instead of mother of small kids I became for a couple of weeks the adult daughter caring for elderly and ill relatives. Never mind that I am technically the granddaughter here. This is the kind of thing that I associate with women whose own children are mostly grown; the women in my family who have spent a lot of time concerned about their parents' generation have done most of that in their own sixties. I got a taste of that this past couple of weeks. And I had more than a few moments of "Aren't I too young to be doing this?"

(But what else am I supposed to do, eh? My mother died twelve years ago at 54, leaving a gap between myself and Grandma, a wound that doesn't flare up often these days but that ached awfully these past few weeks.)

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So I nearly gave myself a plugged duct, I was away from my nursing toddler for so many hours. Trips to the hardware store, and hours scrubbing down bedframes and wiping surfaces, and moving things around in a dusty basement, standing up from time to time to stretch my back and adjust a paper dust mask that grew sweaty and moist as the hours went by.

Mark and I nearly got in a car wreck on one of those trips from the hardware store. It was just the two of us in the van, the seats folded down to store a thick stack of new packing boxes, and as I drove and came past the front end of a queue of cars in the turn lane, a sports car coming the opposite direction turned left directly in front of me. I stomped the brake to the floor and felt the anti-lock system pulsing back at my foot; I saw the sports car's rear quarter panel rotating towards me; Mark shouted, we braced for impact; and then we found ourselves still driving, unscathed, and both of us laughing nervously, genuinely shocked to find ourselves in the region of the multiverse where the collision did not happen.

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I spent time with my grandmother, walking at her speed, seeing a room with her eyes. Is this chair sturdy enough to lean on? How far is it to the next doorway? Should we take the steps which are closer, or go around the long, no-steps way? How will we hold this heavy door open wide enough to go through together, with her leaning on my arm?

I spent time explaining my ill relative's complicated insurance history, and history of poor self-care, to the social service staff at the skilled nursing facility. Privacy laws prevented them from telling me anything about my relative's condition, but no rule prevented me from, for example, warning them that my relative (and the relative's belongings) had come from a house terribly infested with bedbugs. (They were visibly grateful that I told them.)

In my grandmother's living room emptied of its infested furniture, sitting on wooden chairs and at a table pulled from various other rooms of the house, I met a representative from a company that provides in-home services to elderly people: laundry, light housekeeping, errands, meals, eventually more intense care. We discussed what Grandma needs and doesn't need. Gradually it became clear that Grandma, who knows what she wants and is completely mentally competent and financially solvent, does believe that she would benefit from having someone to come in and do her laundry, but emphatically does not want to bring in any hired helpers unless she is certain that doing so won't hurt my other relative's feelings.

In the privacy of the car, later, I wept. I gnashed my teeth.

+ + +

Meanwhile, my children were enjoying a last romp around Mark's parents' farm. Yes, a last romp: my in-laws are selling the twenty-something acres of orchards and fields and gardens and ponds, the barns and sheds and greenhouses and tractors. They are looking forward to a future with more travel, more visits to the grandchildren, more time with their three adult kids who live in three different cities. Time and attention if not love being a zero-sum game, that means less attention available for fruit trees and farmers' markets. The weeks we stayed were also weeks of watching my mother-in-law wonder how she was going to pack up her sewing room, weeks of wondering when that appraiser was going to come through.

The new house will be large enough to host us all at holidays, but there will be no farm nor field nor pond. We will miss it. It makes my heart hurt a little to think that my youngest son will not remember the old home place, nor sit on Grandpa's lap to steer the tractor. Mark has known other homes in his childhood, but I haven't known him or his family in any other place; it has been a home to me since before he and I were married.

But even though we are going to miss it, there is no denying the sense of downsizing now while the two of them don't actually have to, and can take the time to do it right. We have learned a lot from those two and they still have a lot to teach us.

+ + +

Illness, hospitalization, emergency surgery, and recuperation struck in what is left of my family of origin, too, at the same time as Grandma's crisis. My brother and I agreed: I would focus on helping Grandma and he would focus on helping in our family of origin.

This was certainly the best possible division of labor.

It left me introspective.

Time runs short for everyone, at every moment. And nothing we do, say, or wish -- not even when we happen to notice time running short -- can ever change a person who does not want to change. This is what "acceptance" can mean. It can even lead to forgiveness, of a particularly silent and one-sided type.

I am dead to you. This means that I am free.

I highly recommend dying to sources of harm, of mockery and deceit. I am certain that I am not the first person to come up with the idea.

+ + +

And then a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to help her start up an invitation-only FB group called "NFP After 40." A bit more than 20 women immediately accepted the invitations, all of us with a collective "WTF are we supposed to do now with what we're seeing here." I have a feeling I will be enjoying this group. Nevertheless, beginning to think collectively about menopause, coincidentally or not, certainly added to my feeling of having hit a tipping point.

+ + +

So what happened here? Why the sudden bout of wrinkly-navel-gazing? How is it that, if I feel that way now, I didn't feel that way before? It's not like I had been ignorant of my status among the middle-aged.

I guess... This past couple of weeks, Mark and I looked the future in the eye, just a bit. We contemplated disability, decline, disease, death. Sometimes you just can't avoid it.

When I say "This is the week I began to grow old" I do not mean, the start of a decline. I don't mean anything bad at all. Growing old is better than the alternative. I guess, it has been a kind of a wake-up call. I saw before me many different ways of growing older, this week. I think this was a week in which I grew wiser. I hope I will look back on it that way.

I know two things in a concrete way I didn't before. The wise person looks ahead with clear eyes and prepares for the future. And the wise person knows that the future can't, actually, be seen clearly.

What I do with this new knowledge, well, I am not sure yet. I suppose it depends still on the present.

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The expert's temptation.

This year in home education, a milestone I've looked forward to:  my eldest son, now in tenth grade, begins General Chemistry.  Also precalculus -- not quite as fun for me to teach as proof-based geometry was, but still, it makes me smile.

For a long time, I didn't expect to teach General Chem at home, even though I'm entirely capable of it.  Because:  labs.  Mark may be quite handy around the house, but I didn't expect him to construct me a fume hood.  And how to dispose of used reagents safely?  And --  all that glassware!  I knew, of course, that one can buy a fully-stocked chemistry kit for homeschoolers; all the catalogues have them.  But I guess I have been a bit snobbish about chemistry:  I never really thought a home-grown chemistry lab could be adequate.  I wanted a proper laboratory experience.

I mean, good enough if you don't have other options, sure.  But we do have other options.  Here in Minnesota, high school juniors and seniors can take courses for credit at a number of local colleges and universities for minimal cost.  (The program's also open to high-scoring sophomores who attend institutional high schools, but not to homeschooled sophomores.  Go figure.)  I have been telling people for years that I intended to have my kids take chemistry in their junior year through the college-credit program, especially so they could take a course in a "real" laboratory.  I figured that we could do physics at home instead.

And then as sophomore year approached, I found myself thinking:  How involved is a first-year high school course anyway?  

I personally racked up a lot of time working with laboratory equipment in high school, it's true.  But now that I think of it, some of that was in the second-year course (yes, I had two years of high school chemistry -- also two years of physics).  And a lot of it was extracurricular activity, such as setting up demos for the summer elementary school chemistry camp, and hours of prep for inter-scholastic science competitions, and sometimes just messing around in the back prep room that joined the two chemistry classrooms.  (Was there really a glass jar half full of mercury on the bottom shelf, glistening dully through a thick layer of dust? Or have I manufactured that memory?  It seems that by 1990 such things should have been long gone.)

Anyway -- what labs do first-year students really do at the lab bench?  Flame tests (not the stupid kind involving methanol, but just putting saltwater-damp probes into Bunsen flames).  Weighing a precipitate to find how close you came to theoretical yield.  Calorimetry -- in practice, this consists of known masses of ice and warm water mixed in a Styrofoam coffee cup with a thermometer thrust through an insulating lid.  I remember the most difficult lab, in the sense of being easy to screw up so that you had to start over and risk being late for English class, being acid-base titration with its impressively towering buret and frustratingly sticky stopcock.  I vaguely remember doing one thing that required a crucible.

Anyway, I spent some time researching, and I found a microchemistry lab kit and manual that began to make me think that we could do an adequate job with the laboratory at home.  Microchemistry:  why didn't I think of that before?   Tiny quantities means less waste, mitigation of safety hazards, and next to no disposal issues.   And after all, there will be a chemistry lab in college.  It's not like this is the last chance the kids have to experience laboratory work.  The fundamental skills of observation, meticulous direction-following, keeping a good notebook, writing detailed laboratory reports are the same everywhere.  

It's the perfect example of how to play to the strengths of this homeschool while mitigating its weaknesses (like no fume hood or convenient hazmat disposal.)

Paper chromatography lab, one of the first in the manual.  With a toddler in the house, the safest place to work is a relatively inaccessible upstairs room with a large table.  A pitcher of tap water and a plastic dish tub serves as a portable sink.  Distilled water comes in plastic jugs at the grocery store.  I purchased a plastic eyewash-station bottle (green-lidded bottle) and sterile eyewash solution from an occupational safety supplier.

 

Microchemistry lab supplies use small quantities, measured dropwise from calibrated dropper bottles and reacted in the tiny wells in plastic reaction plates (there are 96 wells in the plate at my son's elbow).  The reused glass yeast jar contains fruit juice from the kitchen -- one of the liquids subjected to the chromatography lab along with bromophenol blue, copper nitrate, and assorted household dyes.

+ + +

 I'm not just teaching my own son, but two other teenagers.  We meet twice a week for 45 minutes, and if you're thinking, "That's not nearly enough lecturing to teach high school chemistry," you're right.  I wish I had time to teach the teens by lecture 4 times per week.  

If we took two years to get through general chemistry, I could do it; that's exactly how I taught proof-based geometry, which went swimmingly and was a lot of fun too.  The kids studied geometry at half-speed with me for two years, and on the other days of the week they studied algebra at half-speed for two years.  At the end of two years, they had one credit of geometry and one of algebra, just as if they'd done them sequentially.

(It occurs to me now that for future cohorts of children, I might be able to do something similar with science:  Chemistry at half-speed in a full lecture format, while the kids study some other thing at half-speed the other two days of the week:  biology or physics, perhaps.  Two years to do two credits of science.  It could work, perhaps.  H. and I will have to talk about it.  I already have a fully written evolutionary biology curriculum that has no labs, so... it could work.)

As it is, though, instead of following a lecture format, I am following a reading-recitation format.  I am more tutor than lecturer.  With only the barest introduction from me at the end of the previous class meeting, the students read a few sections and work assigned problems (I assign the ones with the answers in the back of the textbook, so they can check their own work).  Then when we meet around my kitchen table, I uncap my dry-erase marker and ask, "Any questions?  Did you have any trouble working any of the problems?"  We work some of the problems together, and then I tell them things like:  The most important thing to remember from this chapter is such-and-such.  Or I tell them a nifty mnemonic (how do I know it's nifty?  My high school chemistry teacher taught it to me, and I haven't forgotten it) to remember which of the gaseous elements are always found as diatomic molecules.  Or I give them a list of ions and molecular formulas that they have to memorize because they are going to come up again and again, and set them quizzes on it until they stick.

+ + +

I'm enjoying something about this that I also enjoyed about plane geometry and am (mostly) enjoying about my son's precalculus work:  Having already set up the schedule so that I know what they are studying each week, I can walk into my class sessions cold.  There are, it turns out, a few consolations for the stay-at-home geek, and one of them is finding out twenty years on that you've still got it,  or at least can fake it in front of newbies.

+ + +

So here's the temptation:  After a few weeks of high school mathematics and science going so well, having put a fair amount of work into designing a course that is rigorous and emphasizes the strengths of the homeschool while mitigating the weaknesses, I sometimes start to think:  Gosh, it's a good thing I've got such an extensive background in this material!  Otherwise how would I ever make sure that my kids learn this?

It's an understandable temptation.  Who doesn't want to justify our past decisions (such as devoting years of our lives to study a field in which we never wind up employed)?  Who doesn't want to feel essential?

But it's one that I am compelled to reject as contrary to my philosophy of education.  Not that it's bad to arrange it so that one's children can learn a subject directly from an adult who's specifically trained in that subject.  This is a great choice!  But -- contrary to what many people imagine -- it is not an essential choice. Being an autodidact has merits too, such as the training in self-discipline, self-examination, and resourcefulness required to find out what one does not know and then to track down the necessary resources to learn it.  Sometimes what's learned on one's own sticks better than what's drilled into one by others.  Probably the optimal mix of an education is one that includes some training by experts along with some mix of self-directed study -- with the exact recipe varying quite a bit from family to family and from student to student.

Even less essential is that the parent specifically be the expert.  Not for nothing am I teaching chemistry and geometry to two other families.  I'm their non-parent expert, brought in in an informal brain-bartering arrangement.  In return, I call on H's skills and (to me) astonishing patience and resourcefulness teaching writing and language arts to all our offspring over the age of four.  Yes, yes, I can write, but can I teach writing?  If I had to, I'd try, but I'll tell you one thing -- I don't enjoy it much at all!

I've also paid money to bring in experts (as in:  music education) and -- admittedly my favorite solution -- I've taught myself subjects so I could turn around and teach them to children.  I'm a quick study, but in principle anyone can do this.  One of the great advantages to this method is that the learning process is fresh in the mind.  Having just learned something presents some surprising advantages to the teacher.

(Something I learned in engineering school:  when a graduate student is not entirely sure that he or she understands a topic, it is a normal occurrence for the student's advisor to assign the student to teach the unsteady topic to undergraduates.)

So, yeah, we subject-experts have to watch how we talk about our expertise to other people, even to other homeschoolers, lest we plant the seeds of the idea that self-teaching is impossible, that experts are always and everywhere necessary.  The answer to "But what qualifies you to teach your own children?" always and everywhere has to be:  I am their parent.  I am motivated to give them whatever they need to see them succeed.   We often look outside ourselves for those resources, but the fundamental resource that powers it all is the resource of self-gift that resides in the very fact that we relate to them as parents are meant to relate to their children:  as mentors in all of life, and education is not really separable from that.

The confidence that learning of some kind is out there to be grasped by anyone with the drive, whatever their immediate limitations, is a fundamental assumption of home education -- and I would say, a fundamental assumption of humanity.  You can do it, if you want, and if your priorities can be so arranged.  It's an optimism that one can never have as long as one is dependent on experts.

Changing room.

After a few weeks of working on it, I decided that our 19-month-old was toilet-trained enough to be sure we weren't turning back.  

So I pulled all his clothes off the changing table shelves in the laundry room, carried them downstairs, and hung them in the first-floor closet.  

I asked Mark and my 15-year-old to carry the changing table downstairs to store it in the basement, and when that was done they carried up an old kitchen cabinet and put it in the place of the changing table.  It took some cleaning up and a cloth to hide the wood-glue stains on the laminate, but now it's another clothes-folding surface, and a place to stow the trash receptacle and some baskets for sorting outgrown clothes and lone socks.

Today I gathered up all the cloth-diaper covers and put them in a tub and snapped on the lid, and carried it to the basement, where I left it on the changing-table shelf.  In another tub, I packed up all the infant cloth diapers, and in yet another, threw some more baby items (bibs, the bag of jumbled pieces of the manual breastpump, receiving blankets).  Down they went.

 While I was at it, I carried down the infant car seat and stowed it next to the changing table.  Then I boxed up some infant clothes in good condition, clothes that had been lying around waiting for me to do something with them.

I hesitated with the box.  Take it out to the car, to deliver it to charity?  Or set it aside to be stowed in the deep recesses of the attic?

+ + +

It's a matter of probability, I tell myself, not so much a matter of plans.

Very soon I will be forty-one years old.  I have three to seven years left, perhaps, in which Mark and I might decide to try for another baby, or in which we might find ourselves surprised by one.   I've not had a surprise yet, not in seventeen years of NFP, so I count that probability low; and I don't expect that we will try for another baby, certainly not the way I expected it when we had one, two, three children.  I didn't exactly expect it when we had four; I hoped, though.  

I'm not sure if I hope or not now.  Five is lovely, and my most recent pregnancy was hard.  

And we talk about the future differently these days.  "Three years from now," we say, "four years from now, perhaps we can do such-and such," and we've mostly stopped adding "if we don't have another baby."

+ + +

"We can get rid of these things," Mark pointed out, "because if it turns out that we need them again, we can afford to buy new ones."

Yes.  I've already gotten rid of a number of things.  And on the other hand, I saved all the maternity clothes that I really liked, on the grounds that if I needed them again it would be sad not to have the good ones.  Those clothes take up  just a box or two.  And it's really only for a few years.  When I'm forty-eight I will have no reason not to toss the sealed box in the car and tote it down to the crisis pregnancy center or the charity thrift store.  It's not like I risk keeping it around for the next twenty years because I won't know if I need it or not.

And the same for the changing table, right?  And the diaper covers?  And the last box of baby clothes?  It's just a few more years that they might come in handy.   And then I can get rid of them.

+ + +

 Probability:

"By age 40, a woman's chance is less than 5% per cycle, so fewer than 5 out of every 100 women are expected to be successful each month. Women do not remain fertile until menopause. The average age for menopause is 51, but most women become unable to have a successful pregnancy sometime in their mid-40s."

It's nothing you would want to count on if you were intent on avoiding pregnancy for some terribly serious reason.  And I have plenty of friends who had babies in their early-to-mid-forties.  

Still, I also have plenty who didn't.

+ + +

Then there's this:  If I lived as long as my own mother lived, I would not see my youngest, now a toddler, finish high school.   If I had another baby, and lived as long as my own mother lived, I wouldn't see that new one start high school.

I can't help but be troubled by this one.

+ + +

Packing all the baby stuff up felt awfully final, and not in a good way, even though I'm not actually getting rid of it yet.  Somehow I'm reluctant to say, "Probably we won't have another," even if that is, literally, true.   Which leaves me reluctant to do the things that one does when probably one (two, really) won't have another, like give away the favorite baby clothes and the good maternity jeans.

I'm not sure whether the reluctance is based on a desire to mother a baby again; or on the very practical consideration that (probably) to do so would never be regretted while to choose not to do so might well be regretted, or being slow to accept this first limitation brought on by age and age alone; or simply the bitterness that always accompanies the closing of a door to the past.

 I remember feeling something like this when I was finishing college, getting ready to move on to new things, and some small part of me wanting to stay, knowing to do so wasn't possible.

In other words, I don't know what I'm trying to hold onto here.  Is it a gift of life I desire to give?  Or is it clinging to a notion of myself as a life-giver?

+ + +

It's a frightening freedom we enjoy.  I am healthy, Mark is healthy; we could go for it again, play the fearful and wonderful game.  We are completely aware that we could.  If we were sure we desired it, or sure we were called to it, we could rise to the challenge.

At the same time, not being called in particular, without a particular desire (only this empty feeling at the boxing up), we are also aware that we can go on as we are, shouldering our bags and hiking off into the sunset with these five.

Love is not a zero-sum game, but energy can be; and I sense a need to direct greater energy to my older children than I have had since the youngest first fluttered to life.  My last pregnancy was hard:  not dangerous to my life and health, just hard, as pregnancy often is.  Mothering this youngest one from babyhood into toddlerhood was beautiful, and I feel at the top of my powers; but all along I felt a pull towards those older children that went unsatisfied, and heard my voice saying "no" what felt like far too much.  "No, we can't do that because of the baby."  "No, I need you to do this instead because of the baby."

I had to push them all away, just a bit.  My arms were full, my energy went to produce milk, the hours of the day slipped by.  I'm not saying it was the wrong thing to do; they learned to sweep the floor and cook dinner and clean their rooms, they learned to take the bus.  They learned that I wouldn't always be there for them.  Which is true.  I won't.

But I'm not saying I liked that part of it.  And looking at my five beautiful children, one of whom I have to look up to now, I wonder if there really is enough of me to go around.   I think there is, barely, now.  But I know what it would take to push that over the edge.  Not that I'd do a bad job.  I would keep it together.  I always do.  

But I do want my kids to remember a mother who had time for each of them.  And -- looking back on the last two years -- I have not.

 It was for a good cause.  A great cause!   The youngest will be there for them far longer than I will.   I'm not sorry.  

But ... which to choose in the future?  Let's just say it is not obvious.

+ + +

"Three years from now," we say.  "Four years from now."  We think of places we'll go, things to show each other, things to experience with the growing children.  We have a vision of a new phase of our lives, the phase with no little children in it, the phase where even our youngest walks on his own two feet.

None of it is a guarantee.  None of it is ever a guarantee.  

I've never put the changing table away before.  I guess that is different.  I guess this is the first bifurcation between what might be and what else might be.  It feels important.  

And at the same time it's just housecleaning.