Here’s a peek at the view from my living room window a couple of days ago.

It’s Dan, with a hammer.

In preparation for the coming winter, we have been replacing some of our windows with more energy efficient ones. And by “‘we” I mean Dan.

Because I don’t do that kind of thing. He does.

When we were dating in high school, Dan once drew me a picture of a rabbit. I held on to that drawing for years because it was something he had made with his own hands — for me.

Little did I know that years later, he would go on to build me an entire house. With his own hands — for me.

Some women long for romantic gestures — flowers, candlelight, and long walks on the beach. And I guess those things are okay. But give me a guy who fixes what needs fixing, who takes care of what needs taking care of, who wrestles a toddler into his pajamas and tucks him into bed.

Give me a man who does what needs doing — with his own hands, for me.

I’m not sure where that old drawing of a rabbit is today, but I’m not worried. I don’t need a drawing. I’ve got something longer lasting still.

(cross-posted at Faith & Family Live)

(image source)

My kids fight sometimes.  Of course they do.  But I have long thought that well-meaning parents actually cause much of the sibling rivalry that worries them so.  Most parenting magazines, sooner or later, run an article for parents expecting baby #2, explaining how to guide the usurped older child through the horror and the devastation of bringing a new baby into the home.

Now, I don’t mean to be a pollyanna about what really happens.  Sometimes it’s not pretty.  Overall,  it’s about 98% good for older kids to have another sibling join the family.  But that other 2% of the time can be a little bloody.  Many’s the time I’ve had to intervene when the toddler starts out patting the baby gently, and somehow, without really meaning to, ends up rhythmically whacking the baby as hard as he can.  Nice baby, nice baby, nice baby, Nice!!! Baby!!!  Nice!!!  Baby!!!

So there are any number of books and articles about how to prepare the older kids for the newest arrival.  You  should explain in detail what to expect (newborn brothers can’t learn to play football right away), you remind them of how they’re allowed to eat ice cream and poor silly baby can’t, you make a fuss over them, you let them have private time with mom and dad, etc.

This is all fine, but I do think it goes overboard a little bit.  Angelina Ballerina, for instance, is a good example of a kid who is just being a jerk about it, and needs to be taken down a peg or two.   She trashes her room, as I recall, and firebombs Mrs. Hodgepodge’s potting shed.  Or something.  To make it up to her, they name her sister of the year and buy her a private island.  Or something.  I hate that mouse.

Anyway, the foregone conclusion in these ostensibly helpful books is that, by having a baby, you are wrecking your original kid’s world, and your main job now is to make atonement, and help them put back together the tatters of their former, only-childish happiness.

Naturally, kids pick up on this attitude.  If you are very afraid they will react badly, then they usually will. I have found it much more helpful to be very matter-of-fact about the new baby.  Of course you keep a close eye on the older kid’s reactions, and are kind, patient and understanding.  But don’t get carried away.

What is much more disturbing, however, is a new trend I’ve noticed in children’s books:  the “how to help your pet deal with the new baby” genre. I’ve seen two or three in the last few weeks, and I don’t get it.

Okay, I understand that you love your pup, and you don’t want him to be unhappy.  He’s been an Only Dog for many years, and this will be an adjustment.  Also, you want to avoid any revenge pooping, and you don’t want him to eat the new baby, either.  So it makes practical sense for there to be some guidance on how to prepare your pet for the new baby.

But … why are there children’s books about it?  Who are they for?  I do not understand.  I suppose these books are not necessarily instructive manuals, and it might be interesting for a child to read a story from a dog’s point of view.  And story books reflect whatever happens to be going on in the culture at large.  It’s become more common for couples to have a pet in the family for many years, and then, after long deliberation, they take the big leap and go ahead and buy a baby.  So, people write about what they know, and this is why there are books about it.

Echh, I don’t know, it still gives me the creeps.   I have the terrible suspicion that these picture books are for parents, who harbor some kind of resentment toward their own child, and want reassurance that everything will be okay, but don’t want to admit to anyone that they’re scared of their own newborn.

Or, or, are the adults reading these books to their dogs?  Am I making too much of this?  Just what is going on here?  Anyone?

(Cross-posted at I have to sit down)

Stumbled across this in my reading some time ago and posted about it. Stumbled across the post again this afternoon and thought it seemed apposite, in a general, universal, whatever-kind-of-day-you’ve-been-having way:

Though the Lord has established the signs of his coming, the time of their fulfillment has not been plainly revealed. These signs have come and gone with a multiplicity of change;  more than that, they are still present. His final coming is like his first. As holy men and prophets waited for him, thinking that he would reveal himself in their own day, so today each of the faithful longs to welcome him in his own day, because Christ has not made plain the day of his coming.

He has not made it plain for this reason especially, that no one may think that he whose power and dominion rule all numbers and times is ruled by fate and time . . .

From a Commentary on the Diatessaron by Saint Ephrem ,  hermit,  poet, and  Doctor of the Church  since, um, 1920, a mere 1547 years after his death. When a guy like this says, Keep watch, he means it for the long haul.

Warning: Video features some disturbing images and one instance of the “n” word.

This is a trailer for a new film, Maafa 21 (available on DVD).

Maafa 21 shows the connection from slavery and eugenics to birth control, abortion and black genocide today and is routinely called “stunning,” “breathtaking,” and “jaw-dropping.” Many viewers have said they were left “speechless” by what they saw and several have told us that it filled them with anger. One African-American pastor and 1960’s civil rights activist said, “I had always been suspicious about some of this stuff, but this film connects the dots in a way I never really understood before.” Another described it as “lightening in a bottle” and said that for the first time in his life he has a tool to educate the African-American community about the abortion lobby’s real agenda.

This looks to be an important film for anyone interested in learning the truth about Margaret Sanger’s eugenics agenda and Planned Parenthood’s racist history.

Learn more about Maafa 21 at their website or on Facebook.

Last week, a supermarket cashier counted the kids in my cart and pronounced me a saint.

“Wow,” he said. “I can’t even handle my three — and that’s every other weekend!”

Everyone around us laughed, but I didn’t. I don’t know what to say to people like these, people to whom divorce is so normal it is even sometimes a joke.

Ask those three kids every other weekend if it’s a joke.

I was especially moved by writer Amy Henry’s recent blog post in which she described torn feelings about her own parents’ divorce. Though her parents divorced when she was an adult, and even after she had married and become a mother herself, the hurt is still raw and real:

Divorce–and I say this with all my being–sucks. It is a ripping of the fiber of a family. A renting of the one thing that should never be rent. A betrayal to everyone involved.

You promised. Remember? In sickness and in health. Remember? Yes. But the vows never speak to the other things. The little things. The not-so-little things. The layers of misunderstanding. Of tiny hurts laid upon tiny hurts. Of things said that can never, ever be taken back. Of a love that started so strong that was, one cell at a time, rendered impotent.

I think her description of love is an especially startling one:

Love, as I reminded my little brother right after his wedding, is tender. Ever so weak, it is a sapling, reaching toward the heavens in the hopes of what the future will bring. Time, words, circumstances blow cold winds on that tender thing. It’s a miracle any of us survives.

Is marital love a tender sapling? Maybe so.

I do know that in a culture where 50% of marriages end in divorce, where everyday people consider “every other weekend” parenting the stuff that jokes are made of, more of us would do well to think of married love that way. So that we might tend it carefully. So that we might nurture it, protect it, feed it, and make it grow. So that we might never take its future for granted.

So that we and our families might wind up on the other side of those sorry statistics.

(Cross-posted at the National Catholic Register)

I happened to pick up Isabelle Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea, and now I’m sorry.  Okay, so the cover said it was “[t]he sweeping story of an unforgettable woman–a slave and a concubine determined to claim her own destiny against impossible odds.”  So I was warned.

In my defense, I didn’t expect it to be great literature, and I assumed I’d have to skip some steamy parts (right-o).  But Allende’s earlier novel, The House of the Spirits, was actually a good book — not perfect, but interesting, carefully made, funny, and original.

Island was none of these.  The author apparently felt that what the world needs now is yet another novel about a strong and valiant woman who is cruelly crushed by western culture and masculinity, yet rises from the ashes and manages to learn to support herself and have children and orgasms — but historical!

I’ve never written fiction, but I know an early draft when I see one.  Even if you ignore the loud creaking noise made by the elderly clichés  described above, you will get lost in the disorder of this sloppy work.

Major plot points are exposed so clumsily that you can just hear the author thinking, “Crap, I meant to put that in sixty pages ago!  Well, a deadline’s a deadline — I’ll just cram it in . . . let’s see, here.”

Some characters are elaborately and meticulously introduced, only to evaporate without explanation in the second half of the book; while others leap fully-formed halfway through the plot, leaving the reader to wonder, “Wait, who is this guy?  How did he get to be so important?”  Subplots are hinted at, never to appear again, and satisfyingly huge denouements are promised, but all you get is a fizzle.

There are long, confusing passages of dry historical detail (the book takes place during the Haitian revolution, which should have been interesting) which are followed abruptly by hastily sketched-in descriptions of the cruelty of a slave’s life, the cruelty of a young student’s life, the cruelty of men toward women, etc.  I kept thinking about this scene from Blazing Saddles:

In Island Beneath the Sea, whole chapters go that way.

The prose (it can’t all be the translator’s fault) is also clunky beyond belief.  Wade through this if you can:

He was amazed by his ardor, renewed every night, and even at times at midday, when he arrived unexpectedly, boots covered with mud, and surprised her embroidering among the pillows of her bed, expelled the dogs with one sweep of his hands, and fell upon her with the jubilation of again feeling eighteen.  (271)

I knew a guy who surprised my embroidering once.  It wasn’t pretty.

So, to sum up:  Women damaged by rape and oppression, healed overnight by a tender lover who’s not so grabby?  Check.

Women controlling their fate through choosing when and where to be slutty?  Check.

Swooning approval of loathsome behavior as long as it’s done consensually in the name of lurve?  Check.

Catholic priest who’s a good guy mainly because he says that voodoo is basically the same as Catholicism, so you go right ahead and bite the head off that chicken?  Check.

Writing whole chapters in italics to show that certain characters are deep souls who speak interiorly? Check.

Dreadfully predictable switcheroo with an inexcusable number of various mixed-race babies?  Check, check, and check.

Railing against the senselessness of racism and sexism while shamelessly exploiting both in lieu of character development?  Check.  (For a quick reference guide:  dark skin=good; female=good.  Light skin=bad, male=bad.   Black female is double plus good; white male double plus ungood.)

Throw in some tutti fruity quasi-lyrical nonsense about surrendering to the power of the drums and the dance, and, according to Allende, you’ve got yourself a novel.  For a more insightful and entertaining exploration of race, just go ahead and watch Blazing Saddles.  It’s twoo, it’s twoo!

(Cross-posted at I Have to Sit Down)

Back in the summer — it already seems like a hundred years ago — my teenager went to one of those college programs which promise the motivated high-school student an entire liberal-arts education distilled to a two-week elixir. She had a great time and came back talking about Flannery O’Connor, which I’d been trying to get her to do for, oh, ever or so.

One night over dinner with her twenty-six new best friends,  the talk turned to the subject of what everyone wanted to be when he or she grew up. The girls, one by one, announced that they wanted to be lawyers. One girl said she wanted to go into politics, maybe. A few other girls thought they’d like to do some corporate kind of job.

At last my daughter’s turn came.  “Well,” she said, “I want to be a mom.”

There was a silence. Finally someone asked, “Then why are you here?”

“Because I think the basic unit of society ought to be educated,” my daughter said.

*

When people ask what you want to do, unless they’re your parents or, say, your wife and the mother of your children, to whom you’ve just proposed your plan to ditch your job and get a Ph.d, they’re not really asking you to explain your strategy for not winding up under the viaduct with lawnmower parts and a plastic Ninja-Turtles wading pool tied to your purloined Dollar Tree shopping cart. Or maybe they are. These days that’s an eminently reasonable question. But I think what people really want to know, although they may not know that they want to know this, is what you think education is and why you value it. Why are you bothering to pay all this money and do all this reading and lose all this sleep? What do you hope to get out of it, at the far end, which will have made what you put into it worthwhile? What kind of life, what kind of finished and polished and actualized self, is worth this level of investment?

Of course, you never know. Maybe  you’ll wind up with a polished, actualized, employed self, in the field of your starry career dreams, but then again, maybe you won’t. My husband, for example,  got a Ph.d and then went to work for  a time as a very highly-educated security guard. When he started the Ph.d, people asked him what he planned to do  — it was a Ph.d in theology, so that was a fair enough question — and his answer was never, “What I really want to do is guard a warehouse full of digital televisions  for twelve hours every day.” When it transpired that guarding digital televisions was what he was going to do, I don’t think he said to himself, “Well, there’s a lifetime of education down the drain.” He just took a lot of books with him to work. Ten thousand digital televisions not plugged in are very quiet company, giving a person plenty of time to think.

We’ve already learned, on the rollercoaster of the housing market, to rethink the way in which we value our homes, not as investment, but as where we live. It’s an exercise in reigning in our imaginations, which want to go dashing forward into the future where, so we thought, we’d have built up enough equity to buy a small nation-state and spend the rest of our lives playing Parcheesi in utter contentment, which was why we bought this house and not that one in the first place. Now, as it turns out, we might as well get out the Parcheesi board and be thankful that what our educations prepared us for — we hope — was to know how to make contentment, even happiness, out of what we have at hand. Which is never easy at the best of times;  the good thing about a downturn is that it makes us practice more.

*

Meanwhile, Betty Duffy has been thinking about mothers and daughters. Also, on a related note, the daughter of friends here has given up an appointment at the Air Force Academy after a year as a cadet to be a postulant with the Nashville Dominicans. You never know what future the now is shaping . . .  I’m still remembering her radiant face, the last time I saw her at Mass. If you’re so inclined, please remember Sister Nora and her intentions in your prayers.

Cross-posted

Jill Stanek asked an interesting question over the weekend.

Why Is Abortion Googled More in Pro-Life States?

This question comes from a Boston Herald article that reports on a recent study that found that “abortion” was Googled more frequently in states with conservative abortion policies than in states with easier access to abortion.

The problem is that the doctors who conducted the study were not content to simply report facts. They needed a reason. And without one they could prove, they opted for conjecture. Conjecture that supports their pro-legalized-abortion agenda, of course.

“In places where abortion access is readily available, people can go to their mainstream health care providers,” Reis suggested. In areas with more abortion searches, he said, “people may be going on the Internet to find alternate routes.”

He said the pattern was found in every state and country studied.

“We were actually very surprised. There is a very consistent, strong relationship,” Reis said.

Of course! People in pro-life states are researching abortion online so that they can figure out how to perform one on themselves! That’s the most logical explanation.

Or maybe not.

Maybe … as commenters on Jill Stanek’s post are quick to point out, people research “abortion” as a means of keeping up with important news, learning about our nation’s laws, or educating themselves about fetal development.

In my Google account, I have a news page set to the keyword “abortion.” And it’s not because I am desperately trying to figure out how I can get myself one.

To me, this “study” and the doctor’s conjecture sound desperate. They need to keep coming up with ways to frighten people into believing we are a hair’s-breadth away from coat hangers and back alley abortions in which innocent pregnant women imperil their own lives in their determination to destroy their unborn children.

Come on. Give us more credit than that.

(cross-posted at the National Catholic Register)

(Simcha here)

Oh, oh, speaking of glamour:  I heard this song, “Jolene,” on A Prairie Home Companion, and groused to my husband, “That girl doesn’t have the voice to sing that song!”  But I couldn’t remember who did sing it well.  It turned out, of course, to be a Dolly Parton song.  I always forget how good she is.  Take a listen:

Man!   That nylon hair, that tight polyester suit!  And that’s just the guy who introduces her.  I dithered a bit about whether to post a clip with just audio, because that spangly, hairsprayed, honky tonk insanity can be pretty distracting.  But, you know, it’s Dolly Parton — that’s how she does it.  Just put on your grown-up ears and listen to one of the great voices of the century.

You see, The Anchoress?  Garrison Keillor.  Dolly Parton.  Danielle Bean handing out gum.   This is what you walked away from when you got that passport stamped.

(this is really Sally Thomas, but if you want to call me Anchoress 2.0, that’s okay)

I think Danielle, Simcha and I are having an unofficial contest:  who’s the . . . what was that word, Simcha? The Gummo? I think each one of us is convinced that the other two are Superwoman Glamourpusses, while we ourselves are having this interesting dream in which we got invited to stand in for The Anchoress, and any minute now we’re going to wake up and discover two feet of standing water in the bathroom.

Actually, what I also keep thinking is that we sound like the beginning of a joke. Simcha, Sally, and Danielle walk into a bar.

And their collective twenty children stand outside shouting, “Stop it, you’re embarrassing us.” Or else, “Let us in! If we all stand on each other’s shoulders, they won’t card us!”

All joking aside, I too am beyond thrilled to be here. My own blog is a modest little thing, mostly daily this-and-that, but some bigger thoughts have been knocking around in my head waiting for a reason to become prose.  What better reason could I think of to try and make them smart thoughts, and the prose good prose, than that I’m trying to wobble around in Elizabeth’s shoes for — she says it, and as a daily observer, I think it’s true — the best readers on the internet.

All the same, just because I’m putting on the big-time shoes, I shouldn’t get the big-time head. We’re two weeks into our homeschool year, and I realized today that my first-grader thinks her last name is spelled Thomes. I mean, the other day she wrote chlorophyll, so all is not lost, but still. On the other hand, I have a senior in my house this year — as in high school, not citizen;  that would be me — who wants to go for walks and tell me all the reasons why Dorothea, in Middlemarch, is a twit, which is far more delightful than it sounds. When you’re a senior in high school, you think lots of people in books are twits, even when you can’t get enough of them. And your mother, who has loved you more than her own life since before you were born, and who realizes that after this year you are gone, baby, into a whole new life, can’t get enough of whatever you think about Dorothea, or of the long walks in the dark with the dog. And for the mother-figure, all that’s kind of humbling, too.

Anyway, as Danielle says, we can’t all be in Rome. On the other hand, who says you have to leave home to find adventure? I’m looking forward to the collaboration, the conversation — and if there’s some glamour going begging, I could always use a little of that, too.

P.S. My husband has just asked me a trivia question:  Who was the first woman to cross the threshold of the Great Hall at Peterhouse College, Cambridge?

Answer:  Southern novelist Eudora Welty, in 1955.

Facts to relish, remember, and repeat.  Anyone else got a good trivia Q-&-A?