What Else I'm Reading

I don't just have a strange and unQuakerly passion for the British Navy of two centuries ago; I read other stuff, too. I've read a few thought-provoking books lately; thought I'd do some short blurbs. (I don't get as many comments on book posts as I do on others, but I have a couple of readers who say they like them best, so I persist.)

Portfolios of the Poor, by Daryl Collins et al.

Researchers followed families in Bangladesh, South Africa, and India that live on the equivalent of $2 per person per day, or less. Using interviews and detailed financial logs, and following families for periods of a year or more, they were able to build a complex picture of how people with such limited means, and often very unstable incomes, manage their finances using a mix of lending and borrowing from various sources, saving, and pooling of resources. The book is very detailed and ultimately more technical than I needed--it is aimed at helping shape microfinance programs that fit well with how people are already using money--and I ended up skimming the second half, but I learned so much from what I read. One thing that came through very strongly was how smart and knowledgeable people are; reading an interview transcript as a woman talked about how she decided whether to meet an unexpected need for a lump sum by borrowing or by spending down savings, I was struck by how familiar the argument was from my own financial decision-making. One of those books that gives me what feels like a meaningful glimpse into the lives of people I otherwise mostly know only as stereotypes.

A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

A reprint of a memoir about the author's soujorns in European monasteries during the years after World War II. I was sometimes irritated by Fermor, sometimes charmed by his descriptions; every once in awhile his tone-deaf reactions to monastic life reminded me of the Humbug in The Phantom Tollbooth, who could swim all day in the sea of knowledge without getting wet. My own experience with monks is of going on retreat at a small monastery, only seven monks, only a few decades old, so I did find his descriptions of visiting larger, more ancient European monasteries very interesting. I think the thing from this book that will stick with me longest is how shocked I was that the monks were not exempt from military service in WWII; when he visited, many of the monks he met had served. I would like to find some writing or memoirs about or by these fighting monks.

Patience With God: Faith for People Who Don't like Religion (or Atheism) by Frank Schaeffer.

Frank Schaeffer is an interesting guy; the son of a well-known evangelical preacher, as a young man he followed in his father's footsteps and was already a nationally-known speaker when he found himself changing in his faith and practice. He's now Catholic. One thing I like about his writing is his insider view of what it's like to be someone like, say, Rick Warren. He has a great passage I wish I'd copied about his belief that a preacher who gets to that top, public, money-rolling-in level simply cannot help but become a hypocrite; it's much deeper and better than that and perhaps someday I'll re-read enough of the book to find it again.

I really enjoyed his humor-filled yet rigorous takedown of the recent Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins style of militant atheism, and the book would have been worth reading just for the kitschy joy of finding out about the gospel walnut, a witnessing tool Schaeffer's mother used to carry and accost people with on subway trains.

The latter part of the book is essays on various writers; I found this section much less interesting. It felt padded, and thematically out of sync with the rest of the book.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction by Gabor Mate, MD.

Mate (I am ignoring the accent in his name because I don't trust blogger to cope with it) is a doctor who for twenty years has been the house doctor for a residential program for addicts in Vancouver. The interesting and controversial thing about the program is that it's not rehab; it's just a home for people who have nowhere else to live. His book is a surprisingly fast read for all that it is 439 pages long (not counting the appendix and index), and includes stories of his patients, his own theories about addiction and why he has come to believe what he does, and his policy wishes for treatment of drug addicts. Mate discounts the genetic element that may be present in addiction in favor of a belief in the impact of early environment. In addition, he believes that addictions are extremely intractable. For these reasons as well as more pragmatic cost/benefit type reasons, he believes in compassionate care for addicts; he wishes (and I keep saying that because he says right up front he doesn't believe the kinds of programs he would like to say will ever be accepted on a wide scale) for programs that would go beyond even needle exchanges to, say, places where addicts can actually shoot up on site, in clean, sanitary places and with medical support for overdoses nearby. He is a big fan of one such pilot program in Vancouver, which would have been closed down by now except that the BC Supreme Court ruled that it fell under the necessary medical care Canadians are constitutionally entitled to, and of a similar pilot program in England that resulted in dramatic reductions in crime, improved social relations, reduced incidence of injury and disease, and increased housing and job stability among people who nonetheless continued to be addicted to heroin. These programs are examples of the kinds of "harm reduction" programs Mate would like to see become widespread.

Mate advocates for a level of compassion and respect for addicts that most of us would find challenging, especially since he asks us to have that compassion and respect even for addicts who choose to continue using. It's dramatic, really no small thing he's calling for, hard even for someone like me who is pretty good at compassion, I think. Harder still for most; in debates when Mate mentions that the safe injection site program I mentioned above had probably saved 25 lives the previous year through prompt medical attention in the case of overdose, he has regularly gotten the response that saving the lives of addicts is nothing to gloat about, that they are better off dead and we are better off without them. But Mate shows you the full personhood of some of the addicts he's known, the parts of their lives that are worth saving.

I learned a couple of things about drug abuse I hadn't known before. One is that the American War on Drugs has exerted so much pressure on other nations that even countries that used to have more progressive policies have backed off on them (this is apparently especially true in England). Another is that narcotics withdrawal is worse for a developing fetus than it is for a newborn baby; for this reason, Mate and his colleagues often counsel pregnant women who hope to stop using during their pregnancy to stop cocaine and its related drugs, but not to dramatically reduce their intake of narcotics. Usually he tries to switch such women to a methadone program, and then the baby can be withdrawn from drugs after birth. A couple of stories he tell of women who hoped to get off drugs during pregnancy and then keep their babies are heartbreaking.

I don't know how much to believe of Mate's model of addiction, which is very different from the widely-accepted disease model. I am intrigued by a model of treatment that focuses on harm reduction rather than on abstinence. And even though I found Mate grating sometimes, I think anyone who can work with a population this disenfranchised for two decades and maintain his commitment and compassion is worth listening to.

Which it contains spoilers, don't it?

I am melancholy, for I have just finished--for maybe the fourth time--the 20th complete novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. I think it is one of the great disappointments of American literature that O'Brian died before he could tell us whether Christine Wood is going to accept Stephen Maturin's proposal of marriage. (Though I admit that little note she sent him from Woolcombe right near the end of Blue at the Mizzen is very promising.)

And, no, I'm not going to read 21, the unfinished novel, again. It's too depressing.

I think that Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are among the literary characters who are the most real to me, and one reason I grieve O'Brian's untimely death is that Jack and Stephen died with him and never got to live the rest of their lives. I love so many things about them: the way their friendship develops over the years, their deep affection for one another, their tenderness, the affectionate jokes they perpetually make at each other's expense. This blogger posted a long quote from The Surgeon's Mate that shows what I'm talking about--the moment when Jack interrupts Stephen to say, "You are far too modest," is a joke, for not only has Stephen been at sea for a decade without learning the difference between latitude and longitude, he is astonished at another point that Jack can tell him when the dark of the moon will be, and gets stranded on an island when the outgoing tide beaches his boat. "The tide has gone out?" he says in astonishment, and Jack (who has swum over from the ship to fetch him) says, "I hear it happens twice a day in these parts."

But of course Stephen is what the hands call "a right learned cove" and he has his moments of quiet mirth at Jack's expense as well.

I also love O'Brian's patience. Characters have a conversation on page 12 that sets up a joke on page 30; the death of a major character is foreshadowed a whole book in advance; Stephen's courtship of Christine Wood takes so long that for an entire book its only progress is in letters Stephen writes to her, and one short note he gets in return.

On this reading, though, I found myself thinking a lot about O'Brian's women. These books are full of cheerfully competent women of whom anything can be asked: Mrs. Broad, Stephen's landlady at The Grapes, who is equally comfortable whether Stephen brings her two little girls to raise (rescued from an island where they were the only survivors of a smallpox outbreak), an orangutan, or the corpse of an orphaned child he means to dissect; assorted admiral's wives, including of course Jack's childhood friend Queenie; Poll Skeeping, Stephen's loblolly-boy after Padeen stays behind on land to care for Stephen's daughter Brigid. Even Sophie Aubrey, the books' most conventional woman and the one who leads the quietest life, rises to the occasion over and over as Jack and Stephen rescue various women from assorted scrapes and cheerfully send them off to live with Sophie with not so much as a by-your-leave (that Sophie believes one of these women--falsely, in this case--to have been Jack's mistress shows both her strength of character and how very much she had to put up with).

On the other hand, the women we spend the most time with are all broken in some way, most of them sexually. Sophie has a terror of both sex and childbearing, having been introduced to both only through the shock of having them happen to her (I love it when Diana and Clarissa finally sit her down to tell her the facts of life. Diana writes to Stephen, "I am only afraid she took me too literally when I said that what she needed was some experience with a gentler man than Captain Aubrey." Heh.) The abuse Clarissa Oakes suffered as a child left her unable to have normal sexual feelings or pleasure, and yet at the same time to see the sexual act as no more significant to her than a sneeze, so she causes all sorts of trouble by having sex with men because they seem to want it and it's no trouble for her at all. When Christine Wood and Stephen fall into the stinking mud in a mangrove swamp, she matter-of-factly strips naked so he can find and remove the dozens of leaches that have attached themselves to her, and she performs the same service for him. But when he first proposes to her, she rejects him because her first marriage to an impotent yet brutal man has left her with a horror of sex.

Diana Villiers, for many years Stephen's hopeless passion and eventually his wife, has a healthy sexual appetite; so healthy that monogamy is a perpetual challenge to her. But she is an unnatural mother, and one of the many times she deals with the challenges of her life by running away is after the birth of Brigid.

(Oh, that reminds me: I have seen fan pages where people pick apart continuity errors: Faster Doudle's name is spelled two different ways; a seaman dies in one book, only to show up dancing on the forepeak during the dog watches three books later, resurrected by O'Brian's faulty memory. I don't care too much about those things. But I wonder what the hell happened to Clarissa Oakes' avowed and long-standing hatred of children? She steps in as Brigid's surrogate mother without a murmur. This seems like a huge shift in character that should at least have been mentioned.)

Of course, everyone in O'Brian's books is broken in some way. Jack, a powerful leader at sea, is so hapless on land that his friends can often only stand by and watch helplessly while he brings himself to the brink of ruin by giving all his money to speculators or falling for an obvious con or making ruinous speeches in Parliament. Stephen is a drug addict, and a surgeon who often forgets to wash the blood off his hands before going in to dinner. It's one of O'Brian's gifts as a writer that so many of the characters in these books are complicated, flawed, and sympathetic. Overall, I appreciate the many women characters and how much of their stories we hear; there's hardly a more male environment than a ship at sea in 1812, and it would have been easy for O'Brian to center his stories there, as indeed C. S. Forester does in the Hornblower books.

I'm resisting the temptation to digress here and talk about Hornblower by way of contrast, because I can't imagine many people have stuck with me this far and I want to get to the thing that made me most thoughtful on this read-through: O'Brian's treatment of race.

The first time I read these books, I was surprised a few books in to realize that they were written from 1970 to 1999. They seemed older than that to me. Partly that is because of O'Brian's beautiful long, cadenced sentences: all those women trying to write Jane Austen knock-offs ought to study him closely. But partly it's because the way he writes about black people feels very dated (and maybe that's because he started in 1970--I didn't realize until I looked it up just now that he began that long ago. So I have been both surprised by how recent the books are, and by how long ago they were written--a neat trick).

For one thing, he likes to call black people "the black." As in, "the black walked to the capstan and took hold of the bar." He especially likes "the powerful black" and the "flash of white teeth in the dark face as the black smiled." *sigh*

OK, now that I know he started writing these books in the 60s, I can be a bit more forgiving. Next time I read them I'll have to pay attention to whether he gets over this by the 80s.

But I notice that he doesn't choose to bring black characters into the story the way he chooses to bring women in; his setting would have allowed him to reduce women to hands on the pier waving handkerchiefs as the ship draws out of the harbor, and it is to his credit that he didn't do that. Yet he populates the lower decks with a motley collection of men from all over the world, without making any of the black men the equivalent of a Joe Plaice or an Awkward Davies or a Faster Doudle, seamen who never get to be the center of the story but who are named and weave in and out of the action book after book.

Certainly, Jack never has to confront the possibility of promoting a black man, though several times he does promote someone from seaman to midshipman, and often one of his concerns is how to fit a working-class man into a midshipman's berth full of gentlemen's sons. One of the perpetual worries of Jack's life is how to help his protege Tom Pullings advance, Tom being a consummate seaman and good captain but not being able to "pass for a gentleman" as easily as he can "pass for lieutenant." It might have been interesting to have Jack, faced with needing to repopulate his officers after his quarterdeck is decimated by chain in a deadly action against the French, consider an able black man, even if he then would have had to regretfully decide that it can't be done.

The black character we see the most of is Sam Panda, Jack's son from a long-ago liaison. Sam is a priest, and it is interesting that the greatest obstacle to his full ordination and advancement is not his race but his illegitimacy. And we don't see Sam much; he causes much consternation and amusement by showing up, a grown black man who looks exactly like Jack, first at Sophie's doorstep (poor Sophie!), and then later on-board. He and Jack share a great affection for one another, but Sam dwindles away in the books, and once Stephen uses his influence to get Sam a dispensation so he can be fully ordained, we don't hear any more of him.

Goodness, I could write a book about these books. But this is what I have to say for now. I'll just leave you with this: Why are the two short watches in the afternoon called the dog-watches?

Say it with me, O'Brian fans: "Because they are cur-tailed!"

The Great Hair Blasphemy

Because I'm still struggling with pain and fatigue, I'm behind on a lot of things and just not doing a whole bunch of other things. One thing I am perpetually behind on is caring for Yehva's hair. Her hair is very thick and curly (at least it seems thick to me) and the best way to manage it is to put it in braids or twists after washing it. She doesn't like having it washed, even when we use the minimal-rinsing-required No Poo method, and once it's washed, she's pretty well done having it touched. So we are falling into a bad cycle in which her hair gets washed but not styled and devolves into a crazy textured Buckwheat-style sad linty mess; or I do manage to braid or twist it, but the style gets left in too long and taking it out becomes a whole time-consuming ordeal in itself, which just reinforces for Yehva that having her hair touched is a big pain, both literally and figuratively.

David and I have thought seriously about starting locks, in part because her hair seems to want to lock so very badly, but every time I get close to doing it, I lose my nerve. I'm not patient or especially dextrous, and I'm worried about starting them badly. "It's only hair!" David says, but I'm not sure there is any such thing as "only hair" where little black girls are concerned. And locks need to be maintained, too.

The author of my favorite book on black hair care blogged awhile ago about having to shave her daughter's head because of head lice (something I hadn't thought of: those nit-combs will not go through most African-American hair); she and her daughter both cried about it, but she ended up thinking her daughter looked really adorable with a TWA, or "teeny-weeny afro." And it made me think that Yehva, with her very elegantly-shaped head, would also look adorable with a TWA.

But you don't cut a little black girl's hair. Culturally, it's just not done. I was interested in the comments on Cherie's blog post about the lengths other Black moms had gone to not to cut their daughters' hair when they came home from school with lice. When I asked on the Adoption Hair and Skin Care Yahoo group about doing a short cut for Yehva, I only got a handful of replies--and they all told me not to do it. One woman said she's taught for 17 years in a predominantly Black school and has never seen a little black girl with short hair. Other people suggested that if I couldn't come up with a better plan, I either pay someone to braid Yehva's hair, or get one of my friends to learn how to do it (I am sure I have many friends who would love to give up their Saturday afternoons to come to my house and do Yehva's hair). In googling around, I found one website (warning: auto-play sound) with this question and answer:

My child's hair is so thick, very, very tight kinks, and it is always a battle to comb it. Should I cut it in a cute, short style?

And the answer is:

NO, DON'T CUT IT, if you do she'll be considered ugly and you a bad parent by all the African-American adults and many of the AA children you meet!

I'm not sure why not cutting black girls' hair is so important, culturally. But it does seem to be. Moreso than for little white girls, although as I've been thinking about this today I've been reflecting on the fact that I don't know a single young white girl with short hair, either. Chin-length pageboys and blunt cuts abound, but I don't know a single white girl with hair cut above her ears, for instance. No pixie cuts in this generation. So there's a girl thing there that is separate from the black thing, but I think the black thing goes deeper than the girl thing.

I honestly don't know what to make of it, for me and Yehva. On the one hand, I think I do get the cultural stuff. I mean, I don't fully get all the reasons behind the specific taboo about cutting girls' hair, but I do get that this really matters to black people, and I respect that. On the other hand, I think people should do whatever they want with their own hair. And, as I said in a discussion about this on my Facebook page, "Yehva hates having her hair washed and cries the whole time; short hair would not only be easier for me until I feel better, but it would be way easier on her. Who am I supposed to respect more, my own child or 'black culture'? Am I supposed to torture her in service to some cultural ideal?"

To complicate things for us, I cannot use any scented products. As far as I've been able to find, there are no unscented or fragrance-free product lines for African-American hair; this means that what I use on Yehva's hair is the same fragrance-free conditioner I use, which may not be right for her hair, and whatever I can cobble together from my kitchen: coconut oil, my own mix of leave-in conditioner made with water and olive oil. I don't know for sure because I can't try them, but I am told that products like the Carol's Daughter line make managing thick, nappy hair like Yehva's much easier. But we can't use them.

(This also makes the suggestions I've gotten to have her hair done at a salon not very useful; not only can it cost $70 and up to have hair braided, but hair salons are like Stinking Pits of Death for me.)

I'm not sure what my point is. Except that one reality of adopting a black baby girl is that a seemingly simple thing like, "Maybe it would be better for her to have a short haircut until I'm back on my feet" is not simple at all. It's tremendously fraught. As I jokingly said to David, "I am not allowed to cut Yehva's hair. All The Black People In America say so."

The Answer isn't Always What You Expect; Neither Are the Questions

Many of you know that I have been on hiatus from my Quaker meeting since late last May, when someone gave vocal ministry that described a Quakerism I didn't recognize at all, and in response, God whispered in my ear, "You don't need to be here for awhile." I'd have gotten up and left at that moment, except that the kids were getting their annual gift of books from the meeting, and I stayed to collect my kids' books.

I've still been acting as treasurer, but many months I have gone to business meeting just long enough to give my report. This was partly because of health problems that required me to carefully decide how to use my energy--I had, for about a year and half, not even enough spoons to stay awake and out of bed for a whole day, and sitting through business meeting was just too costly. But it was also because I found it hard to be with that group of people.

The reasons I took my hiatus feel complicated and, in some cases, petty. It has been hard to talk about (though I do talk about it an awful lot!) and it has often left me confused. Certain irritations had been growing on me for a long time, and a big handful of painfully offensive conversations I'd had with specific members have stayed with me, unresolved. For a long time, I was cheerfully able to accept that people come to Quaker meeting for different reasons, and that if some people were there to get something different from what I was looking for, that didn't mean I couldn't also find what I needed. But I began to feel that the Quakerism I was looking for was being crowded out by, for instance, liberal politics and a small but vocal number of Friends who were openly hostile to the idea of talking about God.

I've had a very hard time sorting out what things have to do with individuals, and what have to do with the meeting. For instance, one reason I've been uncomfortable with the meeting is the sense that, overall, we are affluent and highly educated, and not especially willing to be aware of our privilege, or think about what it means. And I still think that's true. But when I think back over things people have said that seemed absolutely clueless or hostile or offensive on class issues, it is primarily one person. So, is this a problem with the meeting, or a problem I have with this one person?

Similarly, we have an awful lot of college professors, lawyers, and doctors in our meeting. On the one hand, this creates a certain meeting culture that I wish we were more aware of: for instance, when a grad student comments in Joys and Sorrows that she's taking comps this week, the collective groan of sympathy that passes through the room really says something about who we are. We also tend to use language that goes beyond merely middle-class to--having trouble with words here, a little short on spoons today--erudite, academic, almost jargony. If we want to be a diverse and welcoming meeting, it would be good to be aware that when someone makes a joke about capital gains tax in business meeting and most of us laugh, or someone says about a recent trip to Europe, "I just can't relax unless I'm on another continent, that's just how far away I have to get," and a non-zero number of listeners chuckle in recognition of the sentiment, we are sending powerful signals about who we are. And believe me visitors for whom capital gains tax and trips to Europe are not on their list of active concerns will pick up on those signals. (Full disclosure: I was the one who made the joke about capital gains tax. And then immediately wished it back. But this is why I say "us, us, us," and not, "them, them, them," when talking about social class and my monthly meeting.)

None of that makes us bad people. It makes us who we are, and I only wish that, as a group, we were willing to think more about that. But it's mixed up in my mind with hurtful interactions I've had with specific people: for instance, only two people in my whole life have ever patronized or condescended to me because I am a housewife. Both of those people are college professors who are members of my meeting. I cannot always tell where the line is between "some people in my meeting are like this," and "my meeting is like this."

I don't want to slip into my Litany of Complaint here. The short version is that I often find myself not sharing specific values that seem to be taken for granted by many in the meeting; that I am interested in pursuing a possible call to a ministry that is not supported in liberal Quakerism; that I want a more religious religion than many Red Cedar Friends seem comfortable with; that I am troubled and discouraged by vocal ministry that draws on NPR and The New York Times for inspiration, or is what the British call "daffodil ministry" ("I saw daffodils blooming on the way to the meetinghouse this morning..."). The specific vocal ministry that inspired God to let me take a break from my struggles was so different from my own understanding of Quakerism's historical roots and influences that either the person offering it was sadly misinformed, or I need a refresher course.

The problem is that not attending meeting didn't end my struggle. It just gave me a short break from it. After some months, all the questions started rising up for me again, but my thinking is no clearer--I rehearse the same old complaints, questions, and doubts, but don't find movement. I took God's message very seriously--that "for awhile" implied to me that I would be back at Red Cedar someday. But the months passed and I was not led to return. Last month, inspired by the Lenten reflections of my friend Pastor Julie, I decided to try going back as a Lenten discipline. I went twice. It was horrible both times. The second time I found myself so wounded and angered by something that happened during the social hour that I cried in the car on the way home.

Now, I find myself considering the possibility that I may never go back. My term as treasurer ends in May, and I am supposed to serve on the Adult Religious Education committee. This seems like a good fit for me, something I should be excited about. The meeting is going to experiment with regular ARE activities twice a month, now that we're in our own meetinghouse. I love leading study and discussion groups, and book groups. I spent the first few months of my hiatus reading deeply and widely on religious subjects, and have many ideas for materials that might be of interest to the meeting. I have been bitching for years about the Gospel of The New York Times; this is a chance for me to put my money where my mouth is and join with other members of my meeting in religious reading and discussion.

But, right this minute, my heart is just not in it. I was actually considering last week whether I ought to let the meeting know they should find someone else to fill my spot. And then, yesterday I got a nice e-mail from the Worship and Pastoral Care committee telling me that they would be providing Connecting Kids to Quakers money for my children to attend FGC Gathering: a total of $720 for my three kids. I found that I wasn't sure I felt comfortable accepting the money; David says I should, he says it's premature to think of myself as no longer part of the meeting or undeserving of the services it provides. But I feel a pang, and think it's possible I accepted David's argument so readily not because I feel he's right, but because without that money, the kids and I can't go to Gathering, and I want to go. The fact that my reaction to the message was to feel uncomfortable about the money tells me something important, I think, about my relationship to my meeting and where it might be going.

God said eight words to me, and I thought I understood them perfectly well: You get to take a break, and then you come back. But what if I'm wrong? I've been waiting for way to open, and for that way to be a door back into Red Cedar. I thought it would look like one of those internal shifts where you find yourself able to transcend the pettiness, accept things as they are, open your heart so wide that people who used to hurt and disappoint you are objects of sympathy and affection. Or maybe, I thought, God would give me a word to speak, a clear leading about how to be different in my meeting, a ministry that could be heard there; God might transform me from a whining, self-pitying, over-sensitive complainer into someone with something meaningful to offer, an agent of grace.

But what if God is cutting me loose? Can it really be true that God no longer wants or needs me to be a Quaker in a monthly meeting? Is there someplace else I'm needed? How would I know? I thought I'd have answers by now, but all I have is a new set of questions I never thought I'd be asking.

Well (she said briskly, dusting her hands) they don't have to be answered this minute. This minute, there's a Yehva-related mess in the kitchen that needs to be cleaned up, a shower to be taken, a worryingly sick cat to be taken to the vet, a grocery list to be written, bills to be paid.

Rambling about Spirituality and Parenting with Denise Roy

Someone recommended My Monastery is a Minivan to me recently, and I ordered it from the library. When it arrived, my heart sank--seeing the cover, I remembered that I had tried to read it before and disliked it so much I didn't finish it.

I told the clerk about it, and said, "I feel so guilty when I use MelCat to have a book delivered to me from across the state and then I know I won't read it."

She said, "Oh, don't think of it that way. Think of it as improving our circulation stats."

I laughed, and then said, "Well, maybe I'll like it better this time. Sometimes that happens."

I'm reading it today, and I can see why I gave up on it before. The author, Denise Roy, doesn't lead with her strongest material. It's 35 short pieces on motherhood and spirituality, and the first couple essays settle for some pretty well-worn Hallmark-card insights, and on page 13 she actually capitalizes a short sentence and then ends it with three exclamation points, for emphasis. I would bet money that when I tried to read it before, this is where I slammed the book shut and tossed it disrespectfully into the library bag.

I stuck with it today because just before the incident of the exclamation points, she told a story that made me laugh out loud. "Eh, it's free," I thought, "and I'm not very busy just at the moment. I'll see how it goes."

How it goes, as many collections do, is unevenly. One piece makes me nod with recognition; the next makes me wince. One annoys me by making too much (in my view) of the daily challenges of child-rearing, going for cheap laughs at the kids' expense; the next invites me to face an uncomfortable truth.

I honor Roy for doing what she is doing: trying to find a spiritual practice among the mess and chaos of child-rearing. I think I picked up her book in the first place, several years ago, because I was so irritated by religious memoirs that purported to describe a path and a practice, but that were written by people with no children, or whose children were grown; people who owned large, well-kept homes, so they could have a little dedicated corner or even room they retired to for their morning devotions, or a little arbor overlooking their pond. People whose time was so much in their own control that they could recommend spending at least an hour on your special time for you every morning, with perhaps some shorter time in the evening for your practice of examen.

Heh.

(These books aren't just annoying from a parent/non-parent perspective, but from their unchallenged middle-class or upper-middle-class perspective. I remember one book that talked about how much of a relief it was for the author when, after much prayer and discernment, she and her husband decided to stop renting out their second home in Tahoe, because doing so was so stressful. It's not that I don't want people to pray about what to do with their second home in Tahoe; it's that I want them, if they decide to write a book about that, to seem to acknowledge their social position in some way, rather than writing as if their readers necessarily share a similar class position: The Parable of the Second Home in Tahoe.)

Two quick anecdotes: I felt a little overwhelmed this morning. I felt, as sometimes happens, that I could face the challenges of the day better if I could just have five minutes of quiet to myself with no one saying "Mom!" and asking for something. As the morning went on, I re-set my mental clock over and over after changing a diaper, or cleaning up a spill, or dismembering a Lego mini-fig for Carl, or slicing a bagel and putting it in the toaster, or pouring some cereal, or washing some berries, or finding a show, or remembering for someone where he left his kite yesterday, or ...

This went on for several hours before I gave up and accepted, as gracefully as I could, that I was not going to get my five quiet minutes before anything else.

(It's almost 2 p.m. I'm sort of having it now. But I'm not sure where the last four hours went.)

My other anecdote is that I look back on my young, serious writer self (and her young, serious writer friends) and how we used to sit around and bitch about not having time to write, when the only demand on our time was a full-time job. Had we only known what wealth we possessed in the form of free expanses of minutes and hours!

I'm also thinking about parenting and spirituality because I came across another study today that purports to show that people think having children will make them happy, but they're wrong. I dislike these kinds of studies because I think they are part of a pernicious cultural practice of Bitching About Children.

At the same time, I recognize that raising kids is stressful. Oh, my heavens, how I recognize it. There's a paradox in my life that I often find the days challenging or stressful, but I am extremely happy with my life overall, and I wonder if something like that isn't being missed in Unhappy Parent studies. Parents report in these studies that they find caring for their children less satisfying than, for instance, taking a nap. Well, of course they do! Caring for small children practically guarantees you'll spend a sizable chunk of your time thinking, "Damn, I could sure use a nap," while cutting up cheese chunks for the afternoon snack. All morning long I have found caring for my children worlds less satisfying than Just Having Five Damn Minutes to Myself For Once.

That doesn't mean I'd be happier spending my life napping then raising my kids.

Roy talks about trying to be attentive and ready for the unexpected moments of connection and satisfaction, and she's right about that. I even agree with her that parenting has things in common with monastic practice: the repetitiveness, the boredom. If parenting is a spiritual practice, it also has in common with monastic life that you can't easily walk away from it. You may be trying to pray every morning when you get up, but it's easy to skip if you're tired and want to sleep in a little more, or just don't feel like it this morning, or would rather have a snuggle with your sweetie.

On the other hand, kids force you to be in practice with them. The diaper needs changing, the food needs to be prepared, no matter how you feel today. One of the things I miss most about my pre-parenting days are colds. Colds that you can spend on the couch watching movies, drinking tea, and wiping your nose with ultra-soft tissues. Now, there are some things--many things--I just can't put off until I feel better.

Staying in practice is good, when you're trying for spiritual improvement, because the process is so unpredictable. I have a metaphor for spiritual knowledge: it's like a tea kettle that only boils sometimes. Scientifically, if you put so much water in the kettle, and it starts at a certain temperature, and the burner is set to a certain level, you can predict the moment it will break into a boil. And it will boil every time.

Spiritually, you can put the kettle on a hundred times, and it might only boil once. Kids force you to keep putting that kettle on, and the result is that you can be right in the middle of the shittiest part of the job--10,000 Legos have just been spilled on the floor, which was already sticky from juice, and the boys have just been fighting, and Yehva is demanding another snack even though she's been eating steadily for almost two hours, and something smells bad and it's probably something you're going to have to get up close and personal with--and then there is some tiny shift and the room fills with light and you think, "This is the happiest moment of my life. This is what I was put here to do."

Damn, that sounds like a Hallmark Card insight: "Kids are hard but they are worth it, amirite?" I was trying for something better. Denise Roy is also trying for something better in the pieces in her book, and sometimes she finds it.

It's Not the Homeschooling

Some of my close friends took their son out of school in December; both his parents work, one of them as an instructor at the University of Michigan, and he spends the two days each week that she has to be on campus with us. I usually pick him up in the mornings; it's about an hour each way, and I find the drive a pleasant chance to drink my coffee and listen to music, or think about stuff. I-96 to M-52 to Territorial: that's my me time.

This morning I was thinking about a long note I wrote on Facebook a few months ago, about how we homeschool. When I posted it, I knew that there would be at least a couple of people who would not be able to resist posting a comment or sending me an e-mail about "this one homeschooling family they know" and how wrong and neglectful and abusive they are, and how terribly their kids are turning out, and this is why they just don't support homeschooling. "I'm gonna de-friend anybody who writes me about that," I said to myself. And I did. I de-friended two people who were guilty of the "this one homeschooling family I know" fallacy.

I could counter with the "this one family I know with their kids in school" fallacy, but I don't think people would necessarily get my point. In my experience, people are more likely to blame the kids for not being able to accommodate themselves to the school, even in situations where it looks to me like school is, at least in part, the problem: a kid is too introverted to spend 30 hours a week in a busy classroom with no downtime and no privacy; a kid is expected to demonstrate competence in a very specific way that sets her up for failure, instead of being offered an alternative; active kids, perhaps especially boys, are expected to sit still for lessons despite recess times dwindling, down to zero in some places; kids who grasp the lessons quickly are expected to "learn to cope with boredom" (an old therapist of mine, an expert in child development, told me this as if it were a universal truth gifted kids just had to accept); a teacher is widely known to be bad at her job in some way, but it's the kids' responsibility to cope with that (and the parents' job to "just hope," as a friend of mine said to me recently, "that she'll have a better teacher next year.")

This is not an anti-school rant, though. It's about how quick people can be to blame homeschooling if something is going badly with your kids--or anybody's kids. School is so widely accepted that individual kids' problems with it are seen as just that: individual problems that ought to be addressed within the school system. But individual homeschooled kids' problems are seen as a problem of homeschooling per se, and sometimes as an indictment of homeschooling altogether. It reminds me of this great xkcd cartoon that so perfectly captures the "girls can't do math" problem: people in a minority are somehow seen to represent the entire minority.

The problem for homeschoolers--other than having to listen to people who want to tell you about this one family--is that we make this mistake, too. On the mailing lists I read, it's not uncommon for a parent to post about a problem their child is having, and wonder if maybe the kid would be better off in school, if maybe they've created this problem by homeschooling. Often it's an academic problem, like a kid reading below "grade level" or not knowing as much math as the parent thinks he ought to; sometimes it's behavioral, or boredom, or lack of motivation or excitement about things that used to be interesting.

Of course, they're asking this question on homeschooling, or unschooling, lists, so people usually don't think putting the kid in school is a good idea. Unschoolers actually have a saying for responding to these situations: "It's not the unschooling!" That is, whatever is going wrong is probably not being caused by homeschooling; there's no guarantee your kid in school would not have the same problem, and certainly no guarantee that putting her in school will fix it.

It's hard for me to think of any problems that might come up that wouldn't be exacerbated by the structure and expectations of school. For my own Eric, for instance, I can think of a couple of challenges we've had. One is that he really really does not like to be told what to do, and can be pretty inflexible once he's made up his mind. There have been rough stretches when he was younger during which we were having so much conflict between us that I sometimes thought, despairingly, that it might be better for him to be in school, if only so he and I could have a break from each other.

On the other hand, schools need kids to submit to authority if they are going to function. Eric hates being told what to do so much that I can only imagine, if he were in school full-time, that he would be "a discipline problem." (He does well in his groups at Quaker gatherings we attend, but they're much more active and less rigid than school, and it's only for a few days. And even so it takes a lot out of him.) I often lament our lack of a "control Eric" we could send to school, because not having a comparison makes any conclusions we make about Eric-in-school unscientific, but I wouldn't be surprised if the parallel-universe Eric who was sent to school had been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder by now. Poor parallel-universe Eric; how he suffers. While the one in our universe--and our living room--thrives.

A favorite version of the This One Homeschool Family I Know fallacy is, "...and the kids are really weird." Well, I know a few weird homeschooled kids, too (and a lot more I'd call "quirky"), and my reaction when I meet them is not, "Wow, homeschooling really turned those kids weird." It's: "Thank God those kids are being homeschooled. Sending them to school would be like tossing a bleeding puppy into a tank of starving sharks." Some kids are just weird, and homeschooling can give them room to be weird while letting their wonderfulness show, too.

I've drifted a little bit. I meant this to be another post in my ongoing series on Advice To the New Homeschooler, and it turned into more of a rant than I intended. But there you go. I don't have time to make it perfect: I have to go put kitchen towels in the wash; and remind Noah he wanted to take a break from his video game and read for awhile this afternoon; and make sure nobody is starving; and swab down the bathroom real quick because oh-so-very-many-boys; and read up on some projects and games I want to try with the kids before too long; and have my afternoon snack and read a few more pages of The Thirteen-Gun Salute; and do the hand dishes, which I don't like to do so they pile up; and make some lists, because I love making lists.

Please Peruse my New Book Catalog

The other week, I succumbed to an impulse of the moment and ordered a copy of I Am Learning All the Time, a self-published picture book about a 5-year-old bear who is homeschooled. I was overall pleased with it: it's a simple compare-and-contrast story ("My friend who goes to school does this...I do that."), well-written and with quality illustrations. It's printed on good-quality paper and seems well-bound. If it does well enough, the author hopes to write and publish more books about homeschooled kids, and that seems like it would be a good thing.

This morning in the car, though, having lots of thinking time during the 2-hour round trip to fetch Noah, it occurred to me that homeschooling is the only community I've been part of that hasn't produced its own collection of self- or small-press published genre fiction, usually badly written. The lesbian community poured this stuff forth in the 80s and 90s, with everything from romance novels to detective series (some of them quite good) to utopias to the occasional science fiction novel. Quakers are less prolific in this area, but should I be so moved, I could enjoy a Quaker mystery novel or Joan Slonsczewski's story of Quakers in space.

Homeschoolers, on the other hand, have not produced genre literature for their community's pleasure and amusement, that I know of. Sometimes it seems like every homeschool mom in the world has written a book about homeschooling, but bad novels? Alas, no. Probably they're all too busy, but just in case anyone is waiting for inspiration, I offer this short catalog of imaginary books for homeschoolers in several genres:

Mysteries

Death in the Co-op: When the president of the P-CUG (Perfect Children Under God) homeschooling co-op is found dead, there are more potential suspects than slugs in the body: the former president she ousted in a coup two years ago; the member expelled for lying in her statement of faith; even her own teenage daughter, who just wants to wear her hair down and unbutton the very top button of her shirt for once in her life.

Romance 1: The Romeo and Juliet Story

Sam and Annie: Can the unschooled son of atheist intellectuals find love with the modestly-dressed daughter of a QuiverFull wife? Can these two divergent communities find common ground in time to save their children from tragedy?

Romance 2: The Coming-Out Story

The Well of Homeschooliness: When two women meet to plan the annual Catholic curriculum fair, they have no idea that their new friendship will blossom into sexual attraction. Is it love, or sin?

The Post-Apocalyptic Tale

Panic for the Peaceful Parents: When absolutely incontrovertible evidence is discovered that early, structured phonics-based instruction is really the best way for children to learn to read, a Radical Unschooling community must face its deepest fears and darkest demons. Will they come out stronger on the other side, or will the shock destroy them?

Science Fiction

SpaceSchoolers: In the year 2060, all instruction has been replaced with PLUGs--Personal Learning Universal Gadgets--that are implanted in children at age 6. But are the children just learning--or being controlled by a sinister unknown force? A plucky group of tweens, who've been secretly homeschooled, set out to learn the truth about the PLUGs. It is a journey that will take them to places they've never imagined, and rock the very foundation of the society they live in. (Soon to be a major motion picture directed by James Cameron.)