Daily Distractions

What I've been thinking about lately:

1. Baptism: We started talking about godparents for the new baby the other day. We have some good options amongst our family members, but soon we have to make a decision. Decisions are very hard for me, so I always appreciate when we have limited options. Fortunately and unfortunately we know a lot of practicing Catholics who would be wonderful godparents. We have always stuck with family members because we want our kids to know their godparents and you never know which friends you'll keep in touch with for the rest of your life. Sadly, a few of the kids' godparents have fallen away from the Church as they've grown older, so we've grown more cautious.  Is it possible to pick new godparents? I have a little superstitious fear that my children's faith might be weakened by the lack of praying godparents, but rationally I know that's silly. I really appreciated the import that the role of godparents received in Guam -  godparents were expected to help raise the child not just in the faith but financially.  I wonder if this commitment made godparents more hesitant to accept their responsibility.  Did anyone ever say, "You know, my faith isn't really that firm right now; I appreciate the honor, but why don't you choose someone else?"

Also, it is interesting to me the way each parish has a different number of hurdles to leap before receiving this sacrament. I talked to the deacon yesterday about what this parish requires: an interview, application, affadavit that at least one of the godparents is baptized Catholic, confirmed, and in a regular marriage, attendance at a class, and a copy of the birth certificate. After all this, you can sign up for one of two weekends a month when community baptisms are held. Of course, in emergency and special situations, exceptions can be made, but the deacon made the point that baptism is an opportunity to welcome young families back into practicing their faith if they haven't been active.

Or it could scare them away.

At the other end of the spectrum: at my parents' small church where three of our kids were baptized, we just had to call in and find out if the weekend we wanted was available. Showed up at the Church, received the sacrament, went home and had a party.

Our first two kids were baptized during Mass on Easter Sunday at two different churches. Both of these pastors loved the idea of having an infant baptism as a part of the ceremony.  One of the parishes had a brand new baptismal font, so our son was the first to be baptized in it (no adult baptism's the night before at the Vigil).  The priest wanted to fully immerse him nekkid, which scared me - what if he polluted the water!! - but my fears weren't realized.  I had to leave Mass to get him dressed and nursed afterwards, but it ended up being a beautiful experience. All the church ladies came up to us afterwards to tell us how much they loved it.

2. College: Everyday we get new fliers in the mail for our high schoolers. Some - many? - of these places I've never even heard of. We did just get an ad for summer school at Harvard - thanks but no thanks! But the endless barrage makes me aware of how many options there all - that and the 1000 pages of the Peterson's college guide. (Picked up the 2011 version for $1. Mostly the same info as the $26 2014 version, right?) My mom sent the ISI Guide to colleges for "conservatives and old-fashioned liberals."  PSAT scores just came back and our junior will take the SAT soon.  The school the boys go to always has a counselor's page in their monthly newsletter devoted to listing scholarship opportunities  (from lots of $500 options to $40000 from the GE-Reagan Foundation and Edison International.) and upcoming visits from college reps. This month there were 4 pages of counselor notes. 'Tis the season for making decisions about where to apply.

This is somewhat terrifying to me. On the one hand, you have my husband who applied to one school, got in, got a full ride from ROTC, found a wife and a career and a passion for architecture and his faith, and never looked back. On the other hand, I am haunted by visions of thousands of indebted, faithless, hungover, STD riddled, poorly educated, unemployed, directionless recent college applicants. Choosing a college may be one of the last big decisions I get to help my sons make.  What if we make a mistake?

I know in my heart there isn't necessarily one perfect place for each kid. Many colleges would nurture their hearts, minds, and souls, or, if they choose a secular school, many places have  Newman centers or church communities that would feed their souls while they learn.  And the tuition? I'm still optimistic about aid. Maybe blindly so.

This topic is sure to occupy more of my attention as the year goes on.

3. Our first parents: We've been going to a small group meeting on the Catholicism series by Fr. Barron at our parish.  Every other Saturday we meet to watch a part of the videos, have wine and cheese, and talk about the questions in the study guide. Last Saturday's session was about Aquinas' proofs from God, and one of the questions led to a discussion of Genesis and evolution. I said something about reading the Genesis account figuratively. I'm no creationist, and it seems to me that the order of creation in Genesis seems to correspond with roughly the story of creation told by secular scientists: light and darkness, land and water, fish and birds, land animals, people. But one member of our group declared, "Well, you have to believe in the Adam and Eve" and referred to Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII's document from 1950.  Both his tone and positivism irked me a bit, so I did a little research.

Here's what I found:
A summary of a priest from Berkeley's thoughts.

The Catechism: "How to read the account of the fall

390 The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.²⁶⁴ Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.^265"

Here is a nice summary from Catholic Answers that corresponds to how my thinking on the topic has been formed.  In summary, it suggests that Catholic teaching allows that the human body could have developed over time, but that the human soul was and is created immediately by God.  Still posits the First Parent argument, without which, the doctrine of original sin is called into question. So to me both science and faith leave open any definitive explanation of the coming into being of humanity. We receive our physical traits from our parents but our souls come from God. So at what point in history did God create the first human soul?

Fr. Longenecker's more vernacular explanation.

If I think about this too hard, my head begins to spin. And to what extent does the timing of creation really matter?  Sometimes I wonder if my faith suffers from a tendency to de-personalize God, to make Him into a metaphor.  I don't hesitate to believe that God exists, but I struggle to identify with or to feel the loving language of relationship with God that some writers use, as is the idea that "God wills" certain events. I prefer "God allows." But "I prefer" sounds so ego-centric.  Humility in this: "I don't know."

4. Downton Abbey: I think I'm done with this show. We watched the first episode of Season 4, and then I read spoilers about the 2nd. I don't think I want to commit any more time to watching. I'd rather read a good book.  And then the high schoolers have gotten into watching BBC Sherlock Holmes episodes, which are pretty fun, too.

5. Interesting articles about literature I came across lately:  http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletters/2014/01/the-contemporary-novel-of-belief-part-2/
http://dgmyers.blogspot.com/2014/01/academe-quits-me.html

Both of these are two part posts.

And now to get back to work on more pressing things, like dishes and laundry.

Parenting dilemmas

It used to be that I had to do background checks on high school girls for babysitters. Now I'm doing background checks on high school girls for homecoming "dates." Eek.

Last weekend was homecoming for my teenagers - the school week had dress up days and class contests. The football game and crowning of princesses was Friday night. And the dance was Saturday. A weeklong festive brouhaha, which to my cynical self seems rooted in a desire to inculcate school spirit in teenagers in order to elicit future donations when these teenagers are middle aged alumni, but to my kinder self is a welcome diversion in the middle of the fall term that seeks to inspire a feeling of community and good will. I had my first job as a substitute last week, and thoroughly enjoyed observing the teenagers rally, while at the same time I thought they probably shouldn't be distracted from their studies. On the other hand, thinking back to A Separate Peace, I wonder if the school tames something in the teen heart by sanctioning a week of theatricality.

The week made me realize we're at another challenging stage of parenting - navigating "relationships."  I was hoping maybe the issue of dating wouldn't come up until college. My older son went to the homecoming dance with a group of friends - one is from a family of five with a kid at Thomas Aquinas College, one is another former home schooler, another is in all the same AP classes. My son asked this last girl to go to the dance with him, but her parents won't let her date, so she bought her own ticket. Great! The tickets were way more expensive than I thought they should be, so I was glad we didn't have to finance another one. While nothing is certain, I felt no hesitation about approving oldest son's request to go out to eat with this group of kids.

My second son asked a girl whose parents we have met several times. They are at church every Sunday and seem like a nice family. But then her friend invited them to go in on a limo ride to the dance after a dinner party at her house beforehand.  This friend has a brother who is a senior who was going in a different limo with his friends to the dance.  Hmm - riding in a limousine sounds like a pretext to drink from flasks. I was hesitant to give permission. I emailed another person whose opinion I trust as well as you can trust someone you've known since August, and this person loves that family and was going to be at the dinner party with her daughter. That made me feel better, but it's no fun to be in the position of making a decision about trusting teenagers. In the end the sophomores did not ride in a limo, but in their parents' Suburbans. And I picked them up at the end of the evening - they said they had a good time, no one appeared disorderly, and the week ended with me realizing my anxiety had been useless as usual.

Parenting is a catch-22. In some regards, it seems like you're doomed if you do, and you're doomed if you don't.  Practice attachment parenting, home school, guard your children's purity, and they rebel against you.  Try to be attentive, attuned, engaged, and they wonder why they aren't happy all the time when they are adults. This article from The Atlantic, "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy," about how young adults who should be well adjusted and satisfied are seeking therapy because they feel anxious about not feeling happy and being unable to make decisions, got under my skin.  The author concludes that these young adults had parents whose focus on ensuring their kids' happiness has backfired by making their grown children less resilient.  It made me question whether we shouldn't just put this next baby in daycare and public school, and I'll work 50 hour weeks and ignore the kid so he'll develop resiliency and learn to suffer.

I followed the reading of that article with Simcha Fisher's article-response to Matt Walsh's rant about public school. More food for thought. I tend to side with Fisher, with experience of private, public, and home school. None of the options are perfect. And every child has different needs. My kids have had some great teachers in public school and Catholic school.  My now eighth grader had a wonderful 7th grade year in public school after being home schooled for 5 years and going to Catholic school for 2 years. His trip to DC for winning the ecybermission competition was the feather in his cap, but he also excelled in drama and band and at the science fair - all things we didn't do at home.  He just got back Iowa test scores and did fabulous, like his two older brothers.

Meanwhile, the three youngers had terrible math scores.  Their language arts scores were fine, which perhaps reflects the fact that they were taught at home for the last 2 years by a teacher who majored in English and doesn't really like math and who was just worn out enough to say, "All right, you can be done with math for the day" when a little more drill or corrections should have been done.

I know, test scores don't assess a child's true gifts, and I'm not really that worried about them. But I see it as an indication that home schooling longer was not a good choice for me or for these kids.

Walsh brought up the history of public schooling in his argument. I've read about John Dewey's crusade for mediocrity. I also know that Catholic schools don't protect kids from bad choices any more than public schools.  But I also see that they offer my kids other opportunities, including that of learning to make good choices. My two oldest wouldn't have signed up to be peer mentors for the confirmation classes if they weren't invited to the high school Bible study by a friend from their school.  Maybe they are making good choices now because I home schooled them for five years or maybe because they went to public school the last two years and saw a lot of kids make bad choices.  Or maybe it's God's grace.

When I assess our parenting style, I see us in the middle of the road. We aren't like the author of the Atlantic article: offering choices about food and shopping and activities hasn't happened often around here - people with a bunch of kids can't please them all, nor can they be arbitrators all the time. We are protective about friends and activities, but I don't think we've sheltered our kids from death, disappointment, disease, deprivation. The Navy has made sure they've felt a little pain. I can be a little bit of a tiger mom about school work and reading, although no where near so much as an Amy Chua; my husband can be a slave driver about keeping the house, yard, and cars clean.  He's not as demanding as his dad was, but we both have tried to drive a message about the virtue of hard work and delayed gratification into the kids' brains.

So I'm hoping my kids won't have to go to therapy when they are older. I hope they won't lose their faith either.  But no school choice comes with guarantees, nor does any parenting style.

Back to The Atlantic article: Aside from making me question my own parenting practices, a regular occurrence, the article raised a bigger question that the author didn't address at all -- why do these people think they should be happy all the time?  Why are they seeking therapy because they don't feel satisfied all the time?  Isn't it normal to feel a little disappointed or melancholy at times?  As a person of faith, that sense of longing for something more and better is the God-shaped hole in the human heart that can only be filled with faith, not a cause for seeking therapy.  It's a human condition, not the result of over-attentive parents. Maybe these attentive parents gave their children misplaced expectations, but isn't it rather a universal experience to find that your childish vision of adult freedom and happiness is an illusion?  So perhaps it's not as important whether we send our kids to school or educate them at home, as long as we teach them that our purpose in life is not earthly happiness, but to know, love, and serve God and be happy with Him forever in eternal life.

Perhaps those therapists mentioned in The Atlantic article will help those young adults learn to recognize the benefits of a little bit of suffering and longing rather than blaming their parents for trying too hard to make them happy.  And I pray that my own kids will learn to recognize the need for faith to guide them in a world filled with choices good, bad, and ambiguous.

Diversions

1 . For people interested in words, here is a charmingly illustrated list of words that are untranslatable into English. Be sure to read the comments for more.

2. Here's another page sure to please people who like words: a defense of English majors. Not terribly different than the one from the Chronicle, this one is from the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik. My favorite line: "A good doctor said to me, not long ago, “You really sort of have to like assholes and ear wax to be a good general practitioner”; you have to really like, or not mind much, intricate and dull and occasionally even dumb arguments about books to study English."

3. I wish there were such a thing as a grammar major. I guess that would be in the composition department, or perhaps I should go back to school to a get a foreign language degree so I could do translations and think about grammatical forms and phraseology. I've been pleased lately that my sophomore is doing grammar, which he hasn't done for 2 or 3 years at his other schools. I get sort of excited about talking about gerunds and participles or reflexive pronouns. I have to prevent myself from doing his homework. I particularly like when he gets a tricky example.

4. That New Yorker article is a pat on the back to people who like to read. No one is likely to be offended by it. The article from the New York Times Magazine that my sister linked to is irritating and on the edge of being offensive because it's divisive.  "The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In" by Judith Warner is yet another gauntlet thrown into the stay-at-home moms vs. working moms battle.  Why is this a battle? Because authors like Warner make it sound like an all or none choice.  She is deliberately stirring up discontent and anxiety by encouraging moms to worry about whether or not they can find employment after staying home for a few years.  Did the women interviewed think they could step right back into the workforce after 10 or more years of absence and earn the same amount?  Aside from the fact that they might have expected to start back at reduced pay, they don't give much attention to the fact that we're in a recession and many people are earning less than they used to. How many of these women would have "risen to the top" if they had stayed in their professions? There is only so much space up there. There is also only a brief mention that many of the women didn't like the jobs they left, and they get more job satisfaction from their new jobs. Additionally, how many of them are working the same number of hours?  Even if their kids are in school, their kids still have a lot of needs that limit the amount of working hours moms can reasonably carry without hiring help.

This article also bugs me because it promotes the "what about me?" attitude, which I know we all suffer from.  I hate sweeping floors, too. I hate doing laundry.  But someone has to do it. And when we do it as an act of love and service, it's easier to get past the poor me's.  When you love someone, you want to make them comfortable and happy. When you love yourself, you want to make yourself comfortable and happy and admired and well compensated.  I'm not saying all these women are selfish. But the article is definitely not written from a perspective of Christian community.  Why is it that the volunteer jobs mentioned all have to do with fundraising for elite private schools instead of soup kitchens or literacy programs or Meals on Wheels or beach clean-ups or whatever?

The article obviously got under my skin because I still struggle with the desire to do something besides just be a stay at home mom, and I'm having trouble finding that something here in California, partly because of my health condition and partly because of the schedule at the kids' schools and partly because of availability. I'm one of those unemployed English majors. In my day, English majors were legion.  So now there are no open positions for English adjuncts at the three closest branches of the community college.  And because I want to be available to volunteer at my kids' school and help them with their homework, I really don't want a full time or full attention job. My teaching and volunteer work in Guam satiated a desire to feel useful and to practice doing things I loved. I don't care that I'm not making thousands; I just want an outlet for my desire to teach that wasn't fulfilled by home schooling. So now I'm looking into other options for English majors that won't earn me millions and will allow me to continue to be present for my kids in the afternoons and to make them cookies and muffins or at least get their laundry washed during the week.

5. Finished another YA book that my 11 yr old just read: Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan. Recommended. Kind of a cross between Caramelo and The Grapes of Wrath for the preteen. The story of a young Mexican girl whose family loses its wealth when her father dies, so she and her mother have to immigrate to California with their servants and work as farmhands. Simply told - the suffering described in The Grapes of Wrath is minimized and the value of family and friends is heightened without the drama of Caramelo.  My daughter loved it, and I'm happy she read something about a difficult period of history with a heroine who struggled against selfishness and learned to work hard for pennies to help her family survive.

6. We also both read Al Capone Does My Shirts by Gennifer Choldenko. Another unintentional California read, this time set in San Francisco. A likable story about a boy living on Alcatraz whose life is complicated by his sister's special needs.  My quibble: sometimes books that are semi-historical fiction seem a little forced when contemporary issues are appended.

7. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/02/seamus-heaney-last-words-funeral  Seamus Heaney's last words: "Noli timere" texted to his wife.  Love it. Requiescat in pace.

Advent links

Yesterday we played on this website:

http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/stories-legends/

Today we are looking at this one:
http://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/interactives/adults-teachers/the-christmas-story

Worthy distractions from grammar.

A good link

My aunt shared this one, by George Weigel, on the continuing HHS debacle.  Glad to see Fr. Jenkins do the right thing.

Link

I wasn't going to post any more before Christmas, but I loved this article in the Wall Street Journal: Can Tolstoy Save Your Marriage by Alain de Botton.