Noted #13
lucky number 13
Being a mother in the Internet age is weird. How are you supposed to manage the well being of six souls entrusted to you and still feel things about anything else? The conundrum is that being a mother makes you care more about everything else, but then the caring becomes overwhelming. I could write cynical, sad, or angry thoughts here, and probably most of you reading would echo them. There’s a lot of awfulness being spread around. It’s quite clear that the world is not our home.
Sometimes I am scared, other times I realize that my sense of safety was ripped apart several decades ago and that gives me a strange sense of peace. On other days I’m so preoccupied with my minute problem du jour that I couldn’t see past the end of my own nose if I tried. Do you remember when everyone liked to talk about “unprecedented times”? Now we roll our eyes at the phrase because increasingly the unprecedented is just today. But perhaps it’s just our spoiled luxury that we don’t know what riches we have. For most of history people have lived lives that varied in degree from hard to horrific. If we threw away our blessings in our arrogant stupidity, we wouldn’t be the first, but I hope we don’t do that. I hope you and I lean into the words spoken long ago and take them to heart:
I have told you this so that you might have peace in me. In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world.1
Purity culture
As a millennial who grew up evangelical, I have my fair share of damage incurred by purity culture, but I agree with a few thoughts I’ve seen this week that name the movement as well intentioned. This, from Katelyn Beaty, and this from Samuel D. James address some of the excess and danger it was pushing against. I think purity culture meant well in the same way I think low fat yogurt was supposed to be “healthy”.
Did you ever eat artificially sweetened Yoplait? As a child of the 90’s I regret to say that I remember the various versions of this “yogurt”, some with air inflated into them — “whipped!” — to make you think you were eating more. When you make “fat-free”, “sugar-free” simulacrums of food you have to add in chemicals and artificial junk to make it taste good, otherwise there’d be nothing left.
Purity culture was pedaled as a “fix” for sexual excess in the same way Splenda laden Yoplait was going to magically allow you to lose weight. The end result when both failed was a heaping dose of shame. We reduced sexuality to simple equations in the same way weight loss was supposed to be a matter of calories in and out2. Who cares if the fundamental framework is flawed? Just replace the missing substance with enough “flavor” that you can choke the sickeningly sweet substance down!
I suppose if you were to take the yogurt analogy to its fullest, the fat — the flavor, substance, sustenance — was the virtue of chastity3, which was never once mentioned. Purity culture was all over continence — manage that behavior! But without positive formation towards virtue, you get shame, legalism, and broken or rebellious spirits, when the weight is too heavy.
So, to that end, I suggest also giving this piece by The Rev. Michael Rennier a read:
Piano playing
I took two years of piano class in college as a requirement for my Music Education major. Our class met in the piano lab where rows of electronic keyboard stood in lines, decked out with individual headphone sets. We’d shuffle our bulky Alfred Piano books out of backpacks and long-suffering graduate students would sigh deeply as us undergrads4fumbled through chord progressions. I wanted to be good at piano, and sometimes it was even more fun than my violin, but I had a scholarship to keep and a professor to please5so practicing violin always came first. I’ve sat down to play occasionally over the last decade or so, but it turns out that the way to prioritize something is to make it necessary. Despite best efforts to find an accompanist for our rehearsals, the accompanist6 for our children’s choir has ended up being…me. Ha. You never know when you’ll be dusting off that old set of skills. It’s honestly been wonderful to have a reason to sit down and play on a regular basis, without it feeling frivolous. Practicing music for something makes it much easier to prioritize. It feels a lot like how gardening became my guilt free ticket to spending much more time outdoors. I’m not saying everything you do has to be productive, but I do think having things be enjoyable and productive helps ease some of the “Should I even spend time doing this?” conundrum. And, as a side effect of actually practicing, my piano skills are improving7.
Homeschool thoughts
I am regularly assailed by the “I am failing them” thoughts, but inevitably I’ll talk through things with my husband and we’ll arrive back at the same thing we’re already doing, give or take a few tweaks. I think I just need to own the fact that I have an educational philosophy, a lot of ideals, my particular children and my own set of limitations. I will see a “problem”, and then I turn around a bunch of solutions in my head only to find that I’m doing a pretty good job with the constraints I have. It occurred to me that I could just stop pretending I think I should do what everyone else is doing if it’s not what I actually think is best for our family. There is absolutely nothing wrong with so many other educational choices AND they don’t work well for us. I always appreciate the wisdom offered in the The Bad Moms Homeschool posts, and while perusing the latest, it was nice to realize that I anticipated and planned for the chaos-school of this year8, and while each child has pain points, I think we’ll be okay. It’s figureoutable.
Suffering & entitlement
As my children have recovered from this epic virus, we’ve had our fair share of growing pains. I find the recovery period after illness to be very tricky to navigate. Is the meltdown because they truly still don’t feel good? Is it because they didn’t eat for too many days and are getting hangry easily? Or is it a delayed reaction to being given anything and everything at whim to assuage discomfort? Balancing between giving plenty of grace and holding the line on non negotiable (yes, at some point we have to stop the movies) is a tricky parenting act. It occurred to me that it’s not all that different from the insult of re-integrating into life after a period of suffering. We can become so myopic when we’ve been through something difficult that being asked to suffer in an ordinary way feels cruel. But perhaps beginning to shoulder the ordinary weight of suffering after an acutely difficult period is a sign of health and growth. This essay from Sharon Rhyne treads along similar lines, in that she names the tendency for grief to make us believe we’re special:
The thought process, if you paid attention to your mind, would sound a little like this:
“I have experienced a special level of pain, and this has made me special. I have exercised a special level of faith, and this has made me special. Here I stand in the midst of ordinary Christians caught up with ordinary sins and loves, while I am special. I think I need to go find people who are and who see my own specialness.”
Children’s Literature Corner
“Can we listen to Ramona?”
It’s a constant refrain from a couple of my children. A few years ago I purchased the entire Beverly Clearly Ramona series on Audible9, and my five and seven year old have spent many afternoon quiet times playing LEGO’s or drawing while they listen to the antics of the Quimby family. I find it funny how different children latch on to different book characters, but for younger siblings who may occasionally be cast as “the pest” I think Ramona has a special appeal. She is so delightfully, wonderfully, human. There are certain authors that I’m certain remember exactly what it was like to be a child. I don’t think every adult does. I have quite vivid memories of the indignities or confusions of childhood — things like how I was absolutely certain the word misled was pronounced “mEYsled”. It was obviously the past tense of the verb “misle” which for some reason I’d never seen used. So Ramona’s “Dawnzer Lee Light” and “sitting here for the present” ring quite true to my memory of what it is like to be a child. So many things that the grownups just brush right on by! Now, as a mother listening to the bits and pieces of the story that filter through the wall, I feel deep kinship with the long-suffering Mrs. Quimby and even poor Beezus. Being in a family is just so hard sometimes, isn’t it? I don’t know if Beverly Cleary was into the four temperaments, but I strongly suspect that Ramona would be a melancholic-choleric, and as such a temperament myself, I can say that the indignity of being thought difficult when you’re just principled is quite an injurious pain to bear10 ;) Perhaps if you have a child resembling this description the whole family could benefit from a trip back to Klickitat Street. Ramona isn’t exactly a role-model, but she definitely makes you feel seen!
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Lately:
Reading: Any spare moment where I’ve had brain cells has been used planting seeds, scrambling to organize music, or putting my house back together after the shambles of illness. I haven’t even caught up on Substack articles, which is just the reality of life right now I think.
Listening: I have enjoyed some podcast episodes — I kind of go on kicks with certain topics, and right now there’s been a lot more health related stuff. This episode of Healthy as a Mother was just such good info about basic hormone health. And this little update where the host got teary about the challenge of managing toddlers and frustration actually made me want to laugh and cry. I think there’s such a wide variety of types of toddlers, and having had both sorts, I just need you to know that your experience with a table-climbing, crazy pants who just will not stop IS different from the child who’s content to meander around and casually take things from place to place. The intensity level of temperament matters so much when it comes to a mom’s sanity levels.
I’m halfway through this one about Till We Have Faces, and it’s interesting to hear about someone who immediately identified with Psyche. If you want to hear my thoughts on the book I talked about them with Tsh Oxenreider right here!
Planting & Farm Life: I got most of my cold-hardy things in the garden last week in a few fits and spurts. My cabbage seedlings appear to have survived a very rude frost that caught me with the tops of their milk jugs down! Gahhh! There’s one more dip in the forecast and then I think I’ll take my chances and plant more flowers since I’m direct seeding them. We are hoping to get potatoes, onions and beets in next week. There’s about a million and one projects that need done, and of course the husbands from both families11 are fitting these in between their day jobs and other craziness. It’s a good life, but I think if you want to homestead you just need to be prepared for the farm to be your hobby, because you won’t have much time for anything else.
I hope you find a patch of sunshine, good coffee, something to laugh about and someone to hug! Until next week…
John 16:33
If you’d like to take a tour on a totally different soapbox (I contain multitudes!) this piece about hormones and stress is just a tiny window into all the intricacies of female hormones, which were literally never mentioned as a factor in every stupid health magazine I read. You.need.more.than.1200.calories. That is toddler food.
Also the sacrament of Reconciliation… also Theology of the Body… also a lot of other things, but this was a Note, not an essay. And no, I’m not saying it was easy… and nope, also not saying that the Catholics didn’t do their own version of Splenda Yoplait.
Some of them… (a lot of them) … voice majors. IYKYK ;) Let’s just say the pianists practice by themselves a lot and the voice majors are vocalists?
My professor was incredibly kind, but so demanding. I cried after so many lessons and would get a knot in the pit of my stomach every week. There was a distinct down hill to the week after a lesson, only for the cycle to begin immediately as soon as I realized I was already behind. I actually babysat for her family quite a bit, and at one point she told a story about her mother crying when she got a 34 on her ACT because she was so ashamed. It gave me a little insight into my own lessons.
Oh my gosh, I use this term loosely, it’s a trial by fire of embarrassment, but it’s still better than no piano. If you’re reading and you want to come play piano for us, please do.
Please don’t comment on this if you were at rehearsal lol
This planning looked mostly like realizing I’d be in full “minimum effective dose” homeschool mode and assigning more workbooks than I normally prefer, because I needed as many people to be independent as possible.
Purchasing the treasuries for 1 credit is such an Audible hack
I truly do think that this is a very difficult thing for both parent and child — for the child to learn how to relax and sometimes do things that don’t make sense, and for a parent to understand that your child is probably not just trying to make your life horrible.
I always want to be clear that we don’t do everything we do on our own — there’s a lot of hands around these parts!
My children love the Ramona series as well. I have one child who would listen to it every moment of every day if I let him.
Will need to try Ramona! And I was chuckling the whole way through the yogurt analogy. I appreciate your thoughts in that area!