Those boys of mine

Us on Christmas morning

It's been a long time since I've posted anything about the kids.  I guess it's because there are two of them.  When there was just one, I used to put him down for a nap and immediately want to think about him, write about him, or look at pictures of him because I missed him.  Now that there are two and one of them doesn't nap, if I am lucky enough to get a minute to myself, I don't really want to be too absorbed in kid stuff.

And there's a certain sense in which I feel I've passed through that stage of motherhood where you can't think of or do anything non-kid-related.  (I expect this stage recurs with each new baby.)  I find myself more and more wanting to branch out, try new things -- even completely non-baby-related things.  And I'm happy about that.  The kids are content, I don't feel I'm failing in my duty, and it's healthy for me to have lots of interests.  I hope that's a comfort to anyone looking down the deep hole that is motherhood, wondering if they will EVER be able to do anything they like again.  The answer is yes.  It just takes time.  How much time depends on you and on your kids, but it's not like you have to wait for them to be in college before you're allowed to write poetry, plant a garden, participate in politics, or read Greek.  You can fit that stuff in, provided you can be realistic about how much you will accomplish on the side of your real job.

Anyway.  The kids.

Marko is two years ten months, Michael ten months.  Their birthdays are coming up in April!

Marko is such a joy.  I love two, love love love it.  Every day our conversations get more and more like conversations and less a simple matter of communicating needs.  A year ago, he could say "You want blue shirt."  Now he can say, "What is that man doing, Mama?  Maybe he's working."  Or, "That's a triceratops.  I can tell because he has three horns."  Or, "Is Daddy coming home at dinnertime today?"  He can tell me a story he remembers from a book, and include all the important details.  And yes, he is almost always using pronouns correctly!  He's gone from parroting the things we say to actually communicating his own thoughts.

Is it just me or does he look like a rock star?

He does parrot a bit when he's trying to learn something new.  I've found he has an easier time in social situations if I give him the words to say: "You can wave at that man and say hello if you want to."  I used to think prompting kids to say the polite thing was pushy, but for Marko, it's something that makes him a lot more comfortable, so that he's not put on the spot wondering what to say.  Teaching him to shake hands was also really helpful for overcoming shyness when meeting new people.  I never force him to do it, but we practiced it at home and now I suggest that he might like to shake someone's hand.  He's always eager to do it (though he uses his wrong hand half the time).

Being polite to him has paid off in him being very polite himself.  For instance, today he cleaned up a pile of rags that he had dumped out.  I said, "Thank you for cleaning up those rags, Marko!"  Not ten minutes later he came into the kitchen where I was finishing up sweeping and said, "Thank you for sweeping up all those crumbs, Mama!"  It might seem like a small thing, but I had tears in my eyes.  I've been sweeping up his crumbs for almost three years now, and it never occurred to me he would one day start thanking me.

At home he is always busy, always full of life and energy and ideas.  Outside the home, as always, he becomes a lot quieter.  I think he is too busy taking things in to do much.  For awhile he had a very anxious phase that worried me a little.  He would cry if strangers talked to him, and at home he would keep obsessing over strange fears.  He kept repeating "You don't want Mama to fall off the toilet" -- my guess is this is something he dreamed, because it never happened and no one ever said anything to that effect -- for WEEKS.  He was so incredibly literal that he would freak out at every idiom we used.  I happened to say in his presence one evening, "I would fall apart if someone said that," and for the rest of the night he kept bursting into tears, saying he didn't WANT Mama to fall apart.  Words like "kill," "hit," "fall," "break," or "die," no matter how casually said in his presence, made him cry.  Bad things couldn't happen in books ... I learned to skip the page in Hop on Pop that says "Dad is sad.  He had a bad day" because he would howl so frantically he couldn't breathe.

This phase worried me a lot -- to say nothing of how much work it was trying to explain to him that "diet" doesn't have anything to do with dying and that no actual looking glasses were harmed in "Hush Little Baby."  It started around when we went to visit family for Christmas, so maybe the stress of the trip was coming out in that way.  In any event, it's mostly passed, though he's still kind of particular and I do still skip the scary parts of The Best Nest.

Have I mentioned that he is completely potty-trained now?  I think I haven't because I didn't want to jinx it.  But yes, since Christmas he hasn't worn diapers except at night.  Sadly, he is still too short to use the big toilet by himself, so I do still have to go in with him and help him out.  But it sure beats changing diapers.  He isn't quite perfect.  If he's really absorbed in playing he sometimes gets caught short.  That's when he gives me an alarmed look and says, "I need to go potty!" while hobbling in that direction in wet pants.  Ah well.

He sleeps through the night more often than not.  I wish it were always.  Generally he sleeps through the night UNLESS he's worried about something or the day was super stressful or it's too cold at night or I forget to put his nighttime lotion on him.  (More on this lotion in another post; it is MAGIC I tell you.)  He finally does go to sleep in his own bed.  We just have to stay in there until he's asleep, or else he follows us out of the room.  I don't mind spending ten minutes listening to him yawn and drift off, so it's not a big deal.

He is remarkably well-behaved for a kid who isn't spanked... well-behaved enough to put the lie to the idea that spanking is necessary, I think.  I think a lot of it is his personality, though; he's very eager to please and very upset if we are unhappy with him, so punishing doesn't even seem necessary most of the time.  It's funny, because originally we stopped punishing because it did no good, and now it is not needed at all.  However, there are some things he just can't or won't do: be quiet in the car, be quiet while Michael is napping, and NOT touch everything in sight.  If he's specifically told "don't touch that," it's one thing, but if he's let loose in a random room, he'll touch everything.  He's getting very interested in helping do grown-up things like cooking and cutting.  (I give him a butter knife and some bread or cheese and let him have at it -- though I have to repeat almost daily that no, he is still not old enough to touch Mama's sharp knives.)

He loves Michael.  Sometimes you wouldn't know it, because he freaks out if Michael touches something he was playing with or grabs at his food.  I've had to teach him to say "Please come get Michael" instead of just shoving.  He does okay at this, but there is still some pushing sometimes.  Considering Michael tries to climb up his pants, grab his toys, break his buildings, and bite his face, I can hardly blame Marko for getting a bit frustrated.  So I sometimes try to separate them, or encourage Marko to be quiet with the notion that maybe we will get Michael down for a nap and have some special time just for us -- but that always backfires because Marko doesn't want to spend a minute of his life without Michael.  Sure, he wants the lap all to himself, but Michael should at least be in the room.  I console him with "special reading time" during naps, but it's exhausting trying to keep him entertained during naps.  It's only when the nap is over and they get back to playing together that I can get anything done.

To those who wonder "how I do it all" -- it's amazing how much time opens up when you redefine "clean"

Michael is growing so fast.  No sooner does he master one milestone than he's on to the next.  He can walk now, though he still crawls for actual locomotion.  Walking is for fun, not to get anywhere in a hurry.  He just teeters around like a drunk.  He never falls, because long before he took his first step, he learned to lower himself carefully to the ground and to stand up again.  That's quite different from Marko, who had to climb the couch to get to a stand and could only get down by face-planting.  Michael is also the earlier walker, at about nine and a half months rather than eleven.  I think the lack of diapers has made moving around easier for him.

He likes to eat -- like Marko, he likes meat best.  I've introduced pretty much every food but gluten.  He'll happily eat sardines or cranberries or smoked oysters; he's a pretty adventurous eater.  But since he still spits up a LOT, I tend to avoid giving him sardines anymore.  I still haven't gotten the smell out of my favorite sweater.

He is FINALLY beginning to take real, hour-plus naps.  I think the secret is burps.  He's always been pretty impossible to burp, and since I have an oversupply he's always pretty gassy.  I think that he sleeps for half an hour or so, and then the burp wakes him up.  So the trick for naps is to nurse him, have him NOT fall asleep (Marko is great for this), and then, once he's been playing for a bit longer and had a chance to work out those burps, nurse him again on the same side so he doesn't take in enough to get gassy.  If he gets one really good hour-and-a-half or two-hour nap, he doesn't need another one.  If Marko wakes him up halfway through ... you get a day like today, where he's tired and crabby and decides to take a second nap at four or five p.m.  Not fun.

He uses the potty pretty well.  I have started just keeping him in pants with no diaper underneath.  He does have accidents, but keeping pants on him helps him remember that he doesn't want to go on himself and get wet.  We were doing really well a week or two ago, when he was going about every hour and rarely missing, but then we took a trip last weekend and he seems to have forgotten all about it.  Maybe in a few days we'll be back on track.

This was where we were on our trip.  All of John's family in one place for the first time since our wedding!

I love watching them play together.  Of course they're twice the trouble.  Together, they get into trouble neither of them could do on their own.  For instance, Marko can open the toothpaste, but knows not to eat it.  Michael can't open it, but would love to eat it if given the chance.  Once I found them in the bathroom closet, Marko cheerily feeding Michael a container of cocoa butter.  Marko often leaves the toilet open after going potty, and Michael loves to splash.

Michael had it first

But as long as they're together, neither of them is ever bored.  My role has switched from entertainer to referee, and I like it.  In the morning when Michael wakes up before Marko, or in the afternoon when Michael's napping, I realize how much more work one child is than two.  All the demands!  All the clinginess!  All the need for you to be everything for them!  (Of course it was different when Marko was used to being an only child.)  But together, they're content.

I can't believe they're about to be one and three.  Time flies when you're having fun, and my boys and I are having SO. MUCH. FUN.

What I do know

Yesterday's post was very hard to write.  I've been going over these thoughts and feelings for months, but it's hard to come right out and say publicly, "I've been praying all this time and I still don't really know who God is."  I was afraid my Catholic friends would judge me.

Instead, I have had quite a few people contact me saying, "Me too!  I feel just the same!"  There is nothing that could be more comforting to me than that.  Having a relationship with an infinite, all-knowing, all-powerful being who doesn't talk back is really, really hard.

This post is to summarize those things I do know about God.  Some of them are things I know by instinct; others I have to remind myself over and over again, because there's a part of me that can't quite wrap my head around them.  I find myself just defaulting to Jerk-God because the real God is just too puzzling to understand.

What do I know about God?

First, I know his definition.  He is the creator of all things.  That is what most people mean when they say "God."  I tend to explain by saying that all things we know of in this world have a temporal beginning and a cause.  But we know, because the universe is here at all, that something had to come behind all these causes -- something different, something that didn't have a temporal beginning or a cause.  Atheists or agnostics will sometimes agree with me this far, but say this mysterious something isn't a person.

It seems clear enough to me -- though I know there are counterarguments -- that God IS a person with intelligence, because the universe is so very rational.  And I don't just mean, "Oh, how convenient that I have bacteria perfectly adapted to my gut to digest beans for me" (which, don't get me wrong, could be a proof of God too), but the unchanging laws of physics and thermodynamics.  The universe is a place that makes sense.

And when I look at the created world, really look at it, I feel like the person who made all these things is someone I would very much like.  I mean, think about it.  He could have created us like the plants, just needing some sunshine but never having to eat.  But he made us able to bite into a juicy steak or crunchy apple.  We could have reproduced by budding, but he gave us sex, pregnancy, birth -- things so weird and wonderful I sometimes imagine the trouble I would have explaining them to aliens.  He didn't paint everything with a broad brush; every detail of creation is worked out perfectly, so that no microscope can see the infinitesimally small but absolutely organized structure of everything.

This comforts me more than anything.  I know that Jerk-God could never create this wonder.  Jerk-God would have had the world be so much less fun.  Real God gave us a place we could really delight in, because he wanted us to be happy.

Someone who would go to the trouble of all that creating wasn't going to be happy just setting us on our way and letting us go.  He wanted to have an actual relationship with us.  Now I think we all know that it's impossible to have a real relationship that's forced in any way.  God made us able to say no to him, and of course our first parents did.  But he didn't want us all to suffer for their bad choice -- he felt we should all get a chance to know him too -- so he came himself to die on a cross so we could all be with him.  He knew perfectly well that we were having a really hard time understanding him, considering he's invisible and inaudible and all, so he actually became a person so that we wouldn't have that problem so much.

This God is someone who is awfully eager to get to know us.  And, like I said in the previous post, he didn't die on a cross just so he could have something to hang over our heads every time he needed emotional blackmail.  He really did do it just because he loved us, because it was something that we needed, and because he wanted us to know just how bad he wanted to be close to us.

I was struggling internally a few weeks ago with all this when Marko started singing to himself.  He sang a song from Mr. Rogers: "It's you I like, the way you are right now, way down deep inside you."  I couldn't help but think, "If Mr. Rogers can love me just the way I am, what kind of person is God if he can't manage the same?"

It's hard to believe in this.  It is so, so hard to believe that at the same moment a person could know everything about you, and I mean everything ... and at the same time love you.  It's hard to believe that there could be a person who couldn't deceive or be deceived, who is pure unchanging truth ... and at the same time love you.

We tend to pick one or the other, love OR truth.  Either God lies and says everything I do is a-okay and I never do anything wrong, in which case he can love me, or he sees the reality of what I am and the people I've hurt and the lies I've told, in which case he can't possibly love me.  I think this is one of the mysteries of God that we'll never fully understand, how he can see us and our faults and still smile at us, the way I smile at my boys, and say, "I love you just the way you are, not later when you've earned it, but right now."

All of my spiritual life since boarding school has been a process of trying to be worthy, to be good enough.  I feel that God has made a terrible mistake by loving me, and the only way to make it right is to try to be good enough so it won't be such a mistake.  The whole thing has been one long, miserable self-improvement project, which I mainly avoid because it's so unpleasant.  I don't dare pray without a resolution, because wouldn't that be implying that I thought I was perfect, and isn't that pride?

But God isn't like that.  He hasn't asked me to run my life like a self-improvement project.  He's asked me to draw close to him, and that's what I'm going to do.  Sure, there are commandments.  But I'm already trying to follow those.  I follow them because I see the point in them, and because when I don't understand, I assume God knows something I don't and there really is a point to them.  I don't think a single commandment is arbitrary.  But I'm trying to separate out the self-improvement and the spiritual.  I want to be a better person because everyone wants to be a better person, this is a good thing to do.  But God isn't my personal trainer.  Sometimes he might want to talk about other stuff besides how awful I am.

In fact, I think that, if he's anything like all the other people who love me, he doesn't like hearing about how awful I am.  Think how you feel, if a person you love starts bashing themselves.  You want to run in and yell, "Don't talk that way about the person I love!"  Why wouldn't God be the same?

To understand God, I have to redefine my terms.

God loves me.
Old definition: God tolerates me and gives me things for no apparent reason, considering how much I suck.
New definition: God actually likes me, enjoys being with me, and sees all the good in me.

God wants me to be happy.
Old definition: I'd better do what God wants, even if it makes me miserable, because if I don't things are going to be even worse.
New definition: God wants me to be happy, and if I'm not, it isn't his doing.  He hates seeing me suffer, and though he can't always rush in to fix everything, he really does care about my struggles.

God doesn't want me to sin.
Old definition: God is so allergic to sin that if I do anything the slightest bit wrong he runs away like I'm on fire.
New definition: God realizes that when I sin, it's as if I actually am on fire.  I'm hurting myself.  Of course he doesn't want me to do that.  He hangs around as close as I will let him, in the hopes of showing me the way back.

If God is like this, I really do want to know him.  Not because I feel guilty that he loves me so much and I've loved him so little in return.  God can handle that.  He wouldn't have created mankind if he couldn't take a little rejection, and anyway I actually do love God at least to some extent, so it's not like he's actually getting rejected by me.  The reason I want to get to know God is because he seems like the sort of person I would like to know.

I don't have all the answers.  I don't have even half of the answers.  But here are a few answers that seem clear to me so far.  It's enough for a start.

Seeking God

(Novel note: I have been writing for 31 days and written 53,864 words.  Personal NoWriMo: success!  But my guess is that there's still at least 25,000 to go.  Thanks for your patience everybody.)

First I talked about how I don't know anything.  Then I talked about seeking.  This is kind of what I've been driving at: I don't feel I know God, and I want to seek him.

This has been a very humbling realization to come to.  I've been Catholic almost my whole life, obviously.  At the age of twelve I decided I had a vocation.  I left home at fourteen in the hopes of getting close to God.  I spent hours of every day for years trying to talk to him.  There were many moments when I could have sworn I heard his voice.  How could I be asking the question, "What is God like anyway?"

And yet here I am, asking it.

Since I got out of boarding school, my spiritual life has been kind of a slog.  The "highs" I used to get there, I now realize were just a drug to keep me hooked, so it's no wonder I don't get those anymore.  The problem is that I'm a little religion-shy now.  Anything that looks like a wonderful, spiritual experience makes me cagey.  As a result, the dark night is really the only place where I feel safe.

Prayer is so, so hard.  I mean, what is it even supposed to be?  What it is it supposed to look like?  Everyone gives me the same answer: "Just talk to God."  So I try.  It sounds like this:

"Lord, I want to talk to you about my day.  It sucked.  That was probably my fault.  Yeah, definitely my fault.  If I were more patient, more kind, more understanding, more hardworking, this kind of thing wouldn't happen to me.  You're probably really disappointed in me.  I want to do better, but honestly I'm not feeling a heck of a lot of confidence about that.  You know what?  Forget it.  I'm going to go play Words With Friends.  Amen."

Not exactly ... a recipe for success.

Here's the thing.  In boarding school, we did have a recipe for prayer.  In fact, our morning meditation consisted of kneeling down in the chapel while a consecrated sat in the back with a portable microphone and "directed the meditation," i.e. said the things they thought we should be praying.  It went something like this:

"Lord, I'm in your presence right now.  I know that you're right here beside me.  I know you see me, that you love me.  I'm overwhelmed by your love for me.  You died on the cross for me.  You would do it again, just for me.  I don't deserve that.  What's worse, I don't return that.  I let you bleed on the cross for me, and I give you so little in return.  I sin so much.  And every time I sin, I jab those nails a little further into your hands."

And on and on, for half an hour.  There would be "points" to reflect on, and at the end of every prayer, EVERY prayer, there was a resolution.  I have trouble praying without a resolution.  I feel like I must not be doing it right if I can't think of some way to change my life in response to the prayer time I just had.  But that makes prayer really scary, because if I have to think of something to change EVERY time I pray, I end up overwhelmed with all the stuff about me that's wrong.

Which brings it back to guilt.  I know Catholics are famous for guilt, but I never had any of this growing up, nor did I ever hear about it in church.  I DID hear it at boarding school.  Not the hellfire guilt stuff, but more the emotional manipulation kind.  God has done so much for you, and what have YOU ever done for him?  Oh, you think you did something for him?  Did you die on the cross?  Didn't think so.

Obviously this isn't right.  God is not trying to have a one-up "who loves more" contest with me.  But I do not need more answers about what God is not.  Every time I start to try to pray, I think of another thing I have been told God is not or does not do.

God does not just want to be asked for things.  He's not Santa Claus.
God does not just want to be talked at all the time.  You have to listen too.
God doesn't talk so you can be sure you heard him.
God doesn't say what you would want him to say.

So, what exactly IS God like?  So many people claim to know.  Usually it's people who I think probably know better than I do.  People who spend hours in prayer instead of truncated five-minuteses.  But some of what they say ... just seems wrong.

God is pleased with the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, and my favorite current military action.
God wants you to donate to X cause.
God hates gays.
God would totally be okay with this slur I just dropped because that person deserved it.
God punishes the wicked.
God loves you, BUT he is disgusted by all your sins.

Someone is probably reading and saying, "But God does punish the wicked!"  And they're running to my combox to tell me so.  Please don't.  First off, I am not trying to debate so much as reflect, and I admit to feeling kind of fragile about this whole thing.  And second, you know how God punishes the wicked?  By respecting them enough to give them what they ask for, which is to have nothing to do with him.  Imagine you've just divorced your husband in the most insulting way you can think of.  And in response he says, "I'm very sad that you don't want to be with me.  So sad I'm going to punish you by moving out of your house.  But here's my number and if you call me back I'll move back in with you before you've hung up the phone."

I mean, you can call that punishment, but it's not really very punishy.  Sure, eternity without God really is the worst thing imaginable.  But if you don't want God, what else can he reasonably give you but eternity without him?  And I do think that, being so very merciful, he finds ways to reach those people who WOULD want to spend eternity with God if only they really knew what God was going to be like.

Anyway, I found myself in a bind.  To know who God is, I would have to spend time with him, i.e. pray.  But I couldn't very well pray with no idea who God was.  First off, that's very unpleasant, trying to spend time every day with someone you don't know and are kind of afraid you might not like.  And second, I think prayers like the one I wrote down above prove that maybe I haven't been praying to God at all.  I've been praying to someone I call "God" who actually is kind of a jerk.

It's a test I'm trying to apply, when I ask myself a question about God.  Is this something a jerk would be or do?  If so, that's not God.  That's a creation of my own mind, whom I've named "Jerk-God."  (My apologies if that sounds irreverent.  Since it's a made-up being in my head, I don't feel the need to be polite.)

My brain finds workarounds for all the explanations of God.  Take this one: God loves me.  Simple, right?  But then I add in some other bit of information which I find myself believing: When God sees me, he is unhappy and disappointed.  Conclusion: Love is something that involves unhappiness and disappointment.

The worst thing about this is that you become like the one you love and spend time with.  During the many years I've spent worshiping Jerk-God (part time, I do believe I have prayed to the real God too), I've become like Jerk-God.  When I was in boarding school and immediately after, I was a judgmental jerk.  No one was good enough for me.  I had some reason to dislike everyone.  And yet I convinced myself I "loved" them, in the same way God "loved" me.  You see, new definitions for words can bring you a lot of grief.

It was only when I stopped praying so dang much, with my printed Regnum Christi meditation and my journal of self-hatred and resolutions, that I stopped being such a jerk.  I'm beginning to realize that the years I've spent doing more or less the bare minimum have actually been absolutely necessary.  I had to stop listening to Jerk-God if ever I wanted to know the real God.

The one thing I have kept, in which I have total confidence, is the Mass.  I go to Mass every Sunday.  I listen to the words and I realize, "This is true.  This is real.  This I can be sure is the real God."  Sometimes I have to cover my ears for the homily though.  Last Sunday it seemed to be on the topic of, "Why aren't you giving up more for Lent you shameless heathen?!  You're only giving up ONE thing?  Jesus died for you!  Also, give to the Bishop's Lenten Appeal please."  Sometimes I find that talking to atheists leaves me feeling firm in my faith and listening to other Catholics makes me want to run off and join Hare Krishna.  It isn't always that they're wrong (though sometimes they totally are).  Sometimes it's just that I have heard the "God did so much for you, what more can you do for God" spiel so many times I've developed an allergy.

So here I am, seeking God.  Finding the way has been difficult.  It involves no journalling, no rosary, and a minimum of spiritual reading, because all of these have issues for me.  I try to pray, but only sentences at a time, not minutes and certainly not hours.  When I do, I try to run things past a "decent person" test.  If I said to John, "I had a bad day," he would not reply, "It's your fault."  If I said to my mother, "Here's a present for you," she wouldn't say, "Is that ALL?  I gave birth to you with NO DRUGS, I'll have you know!"  So I try not to assume God would say things like that to me.  I'm also on the lookout for the kind of spiritual reading that ISN'T just trying to get me to do more, mortify myself more, examine myself more deeply and find more that's bad.  Those things might be useful in some seasons, but right now they are only hurting me.  I want something that's straight up "All About God," or something like that.

I've had a lot of good things happen already on this search, but it's going to have to wait until another post.

Goals and a word for 2013

I kid you not, I started writing "2012."  That year went by really fast.  So did January, which is why this is getting posted on the 30th and not the 1st.

Last year, I heard about the idea of choosing a single word to define what you wanted the next year to look like.  I chose "understanding."  I felt that if I sought first to understand rather than assume, judge, or leap into action, I would make fewer hasty mistakes.  Particularly I was thinking of understanding Marko, who was aggravating me constantly at that age.  I knew that most of his actions weren't motivated by intentional rebellion, but were coming from feelings he had that I was failing to understand.  When I would lose my temper at him, it was because I was making assumptions instead of asking myself why he did those things.

Working on understanding was very fruitful.  When I took the time to try, it was usually very easy to see what was going on.  He would spill an entire gallon of juice on the floor ... because he desperately wanted to be a big boy and do it all by himself, and didn't realize that it was too heavy for him.  He would melt down every day at 11 a.m. ... because breakfast was too small to last him till noon.  Trying to understand these things made me a lot more gentle and patient with him.

But it ended up going much further than Marko.  I tried to understand my husband, and realized (yet again) that he is his own person with his own issues, and that most of the time the things he did that offended me weren't about me at all.  I tried to understand liberals, and atheists, and traditionalists, and pacifists, and veterans, and I found that all of these efforts made me more kind, more open-minded, less quick to judge.  To paraphrase the Moody Blues, whenever I was angry, or knew hurt, or felt fear, it was because I was not understanding.

The trouble is that this will only take you so far.  Enbrethiliel has an absolutely gorgeous comment on the previous post about the dangers of putting yourself in other people's shoes.  The fact is that not all ideas are equal, and just because I understand where their advocates are coming from doesn't mean I should adopt all those ideas wholesale.

This year, and the past few months in particular, I've been feeling a kind of anxiety about the things I think and believe.  I'm beginning to realize that I don't know nearly as much as I think I know.  Especially this has affected my faith.  I have had an extensive religious education, more than most people ever get.  I read a good chunk of the catechism by the time I hit high school, went to a boarding school that spent more time on religion and related topics than all the other subjects put together, and then went to Christendom, which makes you take three years of core courses in theology AND philosophy.  I know a LOT about Catholic dogma.

But this knowledge has given me a kind of pride, as if I know God because I know about God.  The fact is that I don't.  God himself, what he is like, what he might say to me if he were sitting across the room for me right now, is a big puzzle.  It's not a puzzle I expect to have all figured out in this life.  But it's a puzzle worth working on, not worth shoving into a corner of my mind because my ignorance is so uncomfortable.

This is a long wind-up to telling you what my word for 2013 is.  The word is "seek."  I want to seek God.  I want to seek the truth.  I want to move on from open-mindedly considering viewpoints, and start sorting out the good from the bad and really finding out, to the extent my limited intellect can, what the truth is about everything.

Ambitious, no?

Meanwhile I have some really practical resolutions:

1.  Finish my novel.

2.  Finish my children's prayer book.

3.  Launch my home business.

4.  Grow more of my own food.

5.  Improve my physical fitness.  (Not by exercising per se.  But increasing my overall activity level and perhaps throwing in some squats or stretches when I have a moment.)

Not on the list, for the first time since I got married, is either "get pregnant" or "have a baby."  But you never do know.

What do you want to do in 2013?  (That is, in the other eleven months of it, yikes!)

The problem of human knowledge

Well, I've already written 3,000 words and started a civil war today, so I think it's okay to call it good and write a blog post now.  I admit I'm bragging.  Back in the day, 5,000 words was a good day and I could have a day like that several times a week.  But back in the day I didn't have two small children, so pfffff.  I call a 3,000 word day a big achievement.

I've been thinking a lot lately about knowledge.  What, exactly, is it safe to say that we know for sure?

When I was younger, I thought the world was flat.  That puzzled me, because how did the sun get back to the east after setting in the west every day?  Finally I decided that it was a new sun every day, and that just as the world went on and on forever, there was an endless line of suns marching along, 24 hours apart.

When I was a little older and knew the world was round, I was confused about how the moon could be visible both during the day and at night.  Didn't that mean the people in China and Australia never got to see the moon, since it was always over Seattle?  I wanted to read a book by someone in those places, so I could see if they really didn't get to see the moon, and what that was like.

When I was in college, I took a course called Philosophy of Human Nature, which really should have been called Thomistic Anthropology, because St. Thomas Aquinas was our only source.  We spent weeks talking about the soul and how it was really indivisible but also had parts and these parts were something like the Trinity and OHMYGOSHSOCONFUSING.  I think I got a B in it.  But really there were only short moments during that class when anything made sense at all.

For instance, the proof for the immortality of the soul.  It went like this (advance apologies to anyone who DOES understand Aquinas, because I'm sure I'm doing this wrong): The human intellect can understand any material thing.  Because of this, it can't possibly be composed of any material thing.  Just like an eye can only discern color because it has no color (think of the pupil here, obviously); if it were yellow, it would only be able to see yellow, but since it has no color, it can discern any color.  Further proofs explain how if the soul is immaterial, it can't die, and QED.

I'd be stuck asking so many questions.  If being composed of something means you can't sense it, how come we can also comprehend immaterial realities?  Didn't St. Thomas know that your retina is actually red if you shine a light on it?  The same for any of the stuff we learned, like the process of intellection which is crazy weird.  How, I wondered, did we KNOW this stuff?  Were we actually learning anything at all, or simply learning the vocabulary that St. Thomas used for things that could just as well be explained differently?  (This last question got even more pressing in PHIL 202, Metaphysics.  Mainly I remember passing notes and getting a headache.  I was not cut out for philosophy.)

But there were moments when everything would come together and I would think, "Wait a second!  I actually GET this!  I KNOW now that the soul is immortal!"  Then I would read over the proof and think, "Wait.  I don't get it."

Maybe this class is a bad example, because I soon lost all confidence in the professor the day he told us that women possessed less of the image and likeness of God than men do because we have less of the rational faculty.  I date my identification as a feminist to that moment.  Thanks, Dr. C!  So perhaps the reason I couldn't fit this stuff in my head was that it just plain wasn't true, or not as true as it was presented to us.  Aquinas was a smart guy but (sneaky whispers) he wasn't exactly the last word on everything.

But it's happened in other classes too, other subjects -- when my brother tells me about string theory or I get going on physics problems.  While I'm doing it, it feels like it makes sense.  But an hour later I can't even wrap my head around it.  I don't know if I was right when I understood it, or right later on when I thought it was bosh.

We read stories of scientific discoveries, and there's always a moment when the scientist has a blinding flash of inspiration and hits upon the answer.  What we don't see is the moment when he wakes up the next morning and tries to redo his math.  And it may happen that he can't duplicate it, or he discovers that wonderful revelation was really that he dropped off a zero and he's going to have to start all over from scratch, and he doesn't get the Nobel for ten more years.

Have you ever stayed up late at night pondering reality and come up with a wonderful conclusion that explains everything?  And then the next morning you remember the conclusion, but when you think of going back through the steps that got you there, you think, "Ugh.  Work.  I'll just assume I was right the first time"?  States of mind have everything to do with what we know, or what we think we know, or what we have confidence that we know. 

It has been a habit of mine to re-prove the existence of God to myself from time to time, so that I know I can do it, and so that I don't get into the lazy habit of believing something without really understanding why.  But what if you're plowing through the various proofs (some of which make sense to me, and others of which don't, and I don't bother with) and you just don't feel like finishing?  And not because you are so sure of the existence of God that you don't need to, but because pressing through it is hard and you just don't want to?

I try to keep an open mind about everything.  That is to say, I have my opinions, but I try not to let them get so entrenched that I can't be convinced otherwise.  In the interests of this, I've lately been reading up on global warming, and it really seems to me that it's a real thing.  But who wants to do the research?  Most people I know don't.  They say, "These scientists seem to know what they're talking about, so it must be right," or, "I don't trust those quacks!  It's a hoax!"  I can't know for sure, not being a climatologist, but it seems worthy at least to try.  But it's much easier, and much more in tune with human nature, to let your emotions, your biases, and the opinions of those you surround yourself with to speak for you.

It bothers me that my mind is so fallible.  If I believed something firmly at six, and believe the opposite at twenty-six, how do I know I won't believe a third incompatible thing at forty-six?  When I met him, my husband was a firm monarchist who never attended any Mass that wasn't in Latin.  Now he prefers the plainest English Mass he can find, and he's a libertarian who rails against monarchists.  (He is railing against them now, in a debate about the French Revolution.  That man loves his debate society.)  I think he is closer to the truth now than he was then -- after all, my political beliefs have changed little in ten years, and he's come much closer to them -- but how does he know he's right this time?

On issues where everyone agrees, it's no problem.  On matters of controversy, it's much harder.  Let's list: vaccines, GMO's, evolution, the ideal human diet, child discipline, how common it is for a woman to lie about having been raped, whether gun control increases or decreases crime rates, global warming, whether a planned economy produces more prosperity than an unregulated one.  Mind you, these are all FACTS, facts that should be provable.  But I've researched all of these and the best anyone can give me is a really good guess.  Scientific studies are more fallible than most people think.  The best they can do is point toward a likelihood, and suggest further studies.  You can chop the data one way and get one answer, chop it another way and get a different one -- and that's with the same batch of data.

We do our best.  I tend to lean toward disbelieving those whom I know to have an ulterior motive, but in some ways pretty much everyone has an ulterior motive.  Is this person pro-vaccine because of science or because she would destroy her career as a doctor if she said differently?  Is this person anti-vaccine because of science or because he wants something to blame for his child's illness?  I also tend -- as most people do -- to believe things that are believed by people who share my other opinions.  That's part of why people's opinions are so clearly demarcated, why people who believe in gun control also usually believe in climate change, even though these two things aren't remotely related.

The scary part is that we have to actually make decisions based on our rather shaky knowledge.  Whether an embryo 28 days old is a person or not is a really vital, life-changing question.  We owe it to the truth to try to find it before acting ... but we can never be as sure about anything as we would like to be.  Because of this, I try to be humble about my beliefs.  I know that I have been wrong before, and may be again.  Of course I always think I am right, or I would change my mind.  But this means the other person might be wrong, and obviously being wrong is painful, so that even if I do convince them, they might pretend I haven't because they don't want to admit they're wrong.  So humility goes a long way.

There are some things I believe with a bit more certainty.  I believe that the world exists and that my senses are credible.  I personally have great confidence in my senses, and less confidence the more abstract something gets.  I also believe that nature makes sense on a fundamental level, and the more I learn about biology and the other sciences, the more convinced of this I become.  I believe that loving is a good thing, and that hurting others is a bad thing.  I believe in the ability of my gut to tell me when something is wrong or right. 

I do believe God exists and the Catholic Church is the true one, but after this it gets difficult.  God exists, but what is he like?  A lot of people, Catholics included, seem to think there's a book somewhere that holds "Church teaching" and it's infallible and everything in that book is the stuff you have to believe.  It's actually way more complicated than that; there are defined dogmas and the ordinary magisterium and all kinds of levels from "you really have to believe this or you're not Catholic" to "most saints and theologians and Popes thought this, so it's almost certainly true" down to "St. Padre Pio said it, but you don't actually have to believe that."  If you are a Catholic, that research is up to YOU.  You can just trust some priest to interpret it for you, but what if later you find he was a sociopath who founded an entire order just as a cover for abusing little boys?  (Not to name names, ahem ahem.)  You have to start all over.

I'm not trying to write another 3,000 words here, but I want to know.  How do you live with this level of uncertainty?  Or is everyone else more sure of things than I am, and I just am more of a doubter than most?

Women in combat

I don't know when I've felt more conflicted about a news item than I do about women being allowed into combat.  I've been reading debates on the topic since the story broke (which, by the bye, is a waste of time, no one has anything new to say) and I don't feel any better about it.

On the one hand, since I was about seventeen and actually considered the topic, I've been strongly opposed to women in the military.  I think all the Tolkien and Lewis had rubbed off on me, and I was getting annoyed at how fantasy novels always make their heroines take up swords and be as tough as any man.  It felt -- counterproductive.  If the best thing a woman can hope to do is beat a man in single combat with swords, we're basically all screwed because 99% of us can't do that.  I preferred fantasy novels in which women were mages, clerics, wise women, healers.  Those were things I felt I could identify more with.

Here, let me embarrass myself with an excerpt from a novel I was working on in college:

            “Why must I stay while you go?” she demanded. “I am not the weaker for being a woman.”

            “It is not a matter of being weaker.”

            “Then what is it?”

            Rademard paused. “War is not about fighting alone; it is also about killing. I have killed men before, and I will kill men again soon. It is a soldier’s duty to deal death and to put himself in danger of death. It is this that I fear for you.”

            “I am not afraid of dying,” she said, bitterly.

            “Dying could not hurt you as killing could. Don’t you see that killing someone else would be killing your own heart?” He paused a long moment, then said at last, quickly, “For it could be tender, if it would, and to weigh it against your sword would be to weigh gold against dust.”

Eek.  Embarrassing.  My worship of Tolkien is kind of obvious.  Anyway.

I do believe that war dehumanizes.  I believe that getting yourself into the mindset where you could kill someone else is bad for you as a person, that it reduces your compassion and gentleness.  You can't simultaneously be a ruthless killer and have that affect no other aspect of your life.  Obviously I don't want women to undergo this.

The trouble is, I don't want men to, either.  Men rock babies to sleep.  Men kiss boo-boos.  Men need to take compassion into account when making decisions from deciding wages for employees to voting.

The argument "but women are MOTHERS and we can't deploy mothers away from their children!" is a good one also.  I firmly agree.  On the other hand, who says children don't need their fathers?  Being a military child myself (though my dad was in the reserves and not deployed at all for most of my childhood), I know a lot of military families, and I think every single one of them has suffered through having an absent father.  We already know that absent fathers are bad for children when they're growing up.  The fact that they are killing people in far-off lands doesn't have some mysterious ameliorating effect.  It's also incredibly hard on their wives, who have to do and be everything for the family -- while also handling military red-tape, being available to Skype in the middle of the night, and worrying themselves sick about their husbands.  No wonder many military couples divorce.  It's a wonder to me that not all of them do, and a sign of the amazing relience and inner strength of military spouses.

I would not join the military myself.  I also would not encourage my husband to do so.  In fact (and I'm going to catch flak for this for sure), I told him when we were dating that if he had any dream of joining the military, he should tell me right away so I could find a different guy.  I wanted an actual FATHER for my children, one who would BE THERE.  The military would not have allowed him to do that in the way I felt my children would need.

My kids are both very attached to their dad, and they now BOTH cry at goodbye almost every morning.  When John is gone for a week, the atmosphere suffers.  Marko whines a lot and asks for his dad many times a day.  He demands to be "took wif" and insists that Daddy is coming back not on Friday, but tonight.  I am sure if John were gone for six months, he'd get used to it ... but I doubt the relationship they have now would still be the same when he got back.  Kids need you when they need you, not six months from now.

But -- I can hear you saying -- someone's got to defend our country.  And yes, this is so.  (I personally believe a much smaller military that focused on defending our borders rather than policing the globe would defend us just as well, with less hardship on individuals and families, to say nothing of all the money it all costs.)  But let's stop pretending that nonstop warfare is good for men and bad for women.  It's bad for everyone.  It can only be justified by extreme need.

I am tired of being told that a term in the military will "make a man" of a boy, that you learn all these "manly virtues" there.  What virtues can you learn in the military?  Hard work?  Send the boy to work on a farm.  Courage?  Send him to Alaska to fish; he'll earn good money and face danger on a regular basis.  Self-discipline?  Self-discipline is something you can only teach yourself.  What you learn in the military is externally-applied discipline which will wear off once the young man gets out of the military.  Obedience to authority?  This is a nation that believes in self-government and personal responsibility -- I want my sons to disobey unjust laws.

I'm not sure I believe in the concept of "manly virtues" at all.  Virtue is virtue.  There may be some virtues which come more easily to women and some which come more easily to men, but if so, it seems we'd better learn from one another to acquire all the virtues we can.  If courage doesn't come easily to Sally, she shouldn't shrug and say, "Well, I'm a girl so I'm not supposed to be brave," but just screw her courage to the sticking point and go kill that spider or mouse or whatever it is.  If it's not easy for Dan to put himself in someone else's shoes, he shouldn't say, "All that sympathy crap is effeminate anyway," but instead take a long look at his mother or his wife and figure out how to be as compassionate as she is.  There are no cop-outs for virtue because of gender.  I think that's part of what St. Paul meant when he said "In Christ there is no male or female."

The absolute worst arguments against women in combat are those complaining that our whole nation will be "feminized" if women are allowed into the male-only zone where men can be REAL MEN and get muddy and cuss and ... whatever it is they think women shouldn't be doing.  If you want boys to grow up to be real men, make sure their dad can be around while they're growing up.  Sticking a rifle in their hands and shoving them into a trench isn't going to magically do it, even if there are no women around.

Okay, I take that back.  The worst argument of all is, "Women have periods, and there is no possible way to reconcile this with trench conditions."  Dude, they have pills for that now.  I am not interested in taking those pills, but then I am not interested in joining the military either.  Neither issue is one I feel needs to be legislated; it's a matter of individual choice.

Other terrible arguments include this one: "Any woman of reproductive age could be pregnant at any time.  We have to treat her as potentially pregnant at all times, and she has no right to bring innocent people into a war zone inside her uterus, therefore women should never be in war zones."  By that logic, women should not be allowed to drink, receive X-rays, or ride in motor vehicles.  The fact is we now have the ability to find out pretty darn quickly if a woman is pregnant.  Pregnant women are always sent home if they request it.  And in any event, care for her unborn child is the mother's responsibility, and no one else's.  No one may restrict her rights of free movement or medical care to protect her baby.  A mother is a person first, and not merely a vessel -- and I say this as someone who is unabashedly 100% pro-life.

Or this one: "When women start coming home in body bags, maybe people will rethink this."  Guess what?  Women have already come home in body bags.  Men are dying over there all the time.  Kids--even babies, female babies if that matters--are turning up as "collateral damage." What is it going to freaking take before we say, "Enough, we are not going to win this one and it isn't worth the cost"?  Who is the one coming home with no limbs or no heartbeat isn't the point ... the point is that we are sending off the "best and the brightest" and even those who come back aren't coming back the same.  WAR IS BAD.  Is this one justified?  Why are we not asking this question?

Here's the deal.  Women are already dying in combat.  They are already being captured by the enemy and brutally raped (and so are men, if you didn't know this).  They are already being deployed away from their babies -- even single mothers.  They are already getting raped by their comrades-at-arms.  They are already suffering permanent damage to their health (and so are men).  The only thing that has been held back so far is the ability to serve in the kind of combat situations that get you promoted.  That just seems a little sexist to me!

Mind you, I don't want to see women in the front lines.  I don't want to see them in the military at all -- it's not really a friendly place to women.  I also don't want men to be on the front lines so much, because I don't want this nation to be at war so much.  But preventing women from serving wherever they want to and are qualified to on the grounds of "their nature is different" or "we're afraid they'll get hurt" is just paternalistic.  Set the standards as high as you like, and if the work is really such that women can't do, they won't make it in.  But if they do make it in, you're just going to have to adapt.

And that's my two bucks on the subject.  (Price raised due to inflation and my inability to be brief.)  What do you think?

The ideal breakfast

Awhile back I decided I needed to make actual breakfasts every day instead of just handing the kids and banana and trusting them to whine at me if they wanted something else.  That just left me at 10 a.m. trying to figure out something they (I mean Marko really) could eat RIGHT NOW, and it always ended up being PBJ.  Without PBJ my family would probably have starved waiting for me to get my act together.
So I made a schedule of seven good breakfasts that don't take too long to make.  (For the curious: pancakes, hash browns, french toast, bacon, eggs, oatmeal, and "John makes it" for Sunday.)  I stuck to it for ... a week?  Maybe two.  I hit Tuesday and thought, "But I don't WANT hash browns, they are too much work, and I don't even like them that much."  So I put it off and made nothing and there I was making PBJ at 10 a.m. because bananas (Marko's wakeup food -- he must have it as soon as his eyes open or wailing ensues) just don't cut it.

This recipe is the cure.  You can make it every day.  I know because I do make it every day.  It's sourdough English muffins.  I know you could BUY English muffins, but I'm sure these are healthier and I don't think we could afford to buy a dozen English muffins a day, which is about how many we eat.  I got the recipe from here but have changed it a lot to make it even simpler.

You have to have a sourdough starter that's at least moderately active for this.  Of course if you make it every day, that works out great.  You make the dough and then just feed it the same amount as you took out, or a bit more so you can have some for other projects.

Start the night before.  In a bowl, mix together 2 cups flour (white or wheat -- both are great) and 1/4 teaspoon salt.  Then pour in 1/2 cup sourdough starter and roughly 3/4 cup milk.  (Experiment to see what's best.  I use about 7/8 cup I think.)  You can also replace the milk with some other liquid -- water, kefir, rice milk, basically anything.  Experiment.

Mix together until it forms a dough you can handle.  If it's more of a batter, add more flour.  If it won't pick up all the flour, add more liquid (just a tiny bit!).  The exact consistency isn't important.  If it's softish or stickyish, it doesn't matter.  Cover with a lid or plastic wrap.  (I use the same piece every time cause I'm Scottish like that.  (Is that an ethnic slur?  I'm 1/4 Scotch Irish and I do fit the frugal stereotype.))  And just leave it overnight.

In the morning, heat up your skillet or griddle.  I use a cast-iron skillet and set the burner to 2 (it goes low-sim-2-4-6-hi), which is the temperature I use to brown ground beef and a little higher than what I use for eggs.  You're just going too have to experiment.  Pour a little oil on a clean cookie sheet, silicone mat, or counter, and oil your hands.  Get the dough, which will be spongy after rising all night, and pull off little golf-ball-sized globs of it.  Smoosh each one between your oiled hands into a flat disk, and plop it in the pan.  I used to lay them out for a few minutes to rise, but they seem to do fine going straight into the pan, so why add a step?  It should take 5-10 minutes for them to get brown on the bottom; if they are browning too fast, turn the pan down.  They'll also puff up a bit.  Flip them over and get the other side brown, and then they're done and you can do the rest of the batch.  I can fit four in my pan at once, so I just do three rounds.  I start eating as the first ones come off, though!

You can jazz these up all kinds of ways.  You can add pretty much anything to the dough you like -- flax seed, sesame seeds, nuts, raisins, different flours.  And once they're done you can top them with anything you like: jam, butter, cream cheese, lox, sour cream, smoked Gouda, ham, savory cranberry chutney*, cinnamon sugar, poached eggs and hollandaise (for Eggs Benedict), sandwich fixins.  You can cut them in half like storebought English muffins, or just blob the toppings on top.  We usually eat about half the batch for breakfast and then use the rest in our lunch.

So easy.  So good.  And there are two left still ... I gotta go.

*Savory cranberry chutney: equal parts raw cranberries, celery, and onions, whizzed in the food processor.  Add ginger and red pepper to taste, and 1 tablespoon salt per quart.  Pack into a jar and ferment for 2-4 weeks.  This is best with sour cream or strong cheese, atop an English muffin.  Michael eats it straight though.