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Monday, June 20, 2005 ( 10:51 AM ) Elinor Dashwood He's off. As always, now that it's done I'm much better; it's the waiting that reduces me to nervous prostration. Cacciaguida and I delivered Jonathan Lee to his departure point this morning and had a briefing from the major in charge of his unit. I can't pretend I liked the part about what it means if two officers in service alphas drive up to the house, but that's life. In fact he'd be at more risk of death or serious injury if he were working in a steel plant or driving a truck right here at home, but people accustom themselves to dangers they see every day, and mostly fear the unexpected ones. I've been asked by relatives if there might not be a way I could get JL assigned to some safe administrative job. I wouldn't do it if I could, and I'm very sure I couldn't. It wouldn't break my heart if he were in such a job, but it would certainly break his. He wants to go to war, as thousands of generations of young men before him have wanted it. With the exception, perhaps, of Shakespeare's Volumnia, who in my opinion was in serious need of medical attention, no mothers have ever wanted it; but there's a difference between feeling natural maternal regrets and taking steps to keep Precious Lambkin out of harm's way, and the verdict of history has gone against the latter. It always helps me keep calm to tabulate the possible outcomes of a situation and rank them according to probability and seriousness. In this case, the worst that could possibly happen would be for him to run away under fire. The horror of that would so far outdistance the next worse outcome - his death - that it's fortunate that it's considerably less likely. (In fact it's also considerably less likely than that I'll be recruited to join the American Ballet Theatre as prima ballerina for their upcoming winter season, and that's a good thing, too.) His death would be a great and enduring sorrow, but - and here's the point that Cacciaguida makes - I have not been given an exemption from sorrow any more than any other pilgrim soul on earth. We're pretty comfortable in this splendid country of ours, and advances in sanitation, safety, medicine, and the food supply have much reduced the number of mothers who are obliged to bury a child, but nobody gets any guarantees. Whatever happens, I'll get him back, probably for the Fourth of July, and leave before shipping out, and when he gets back in the spring, but certainly sometime, even if it's delayed until we meet in Heaven. Go with God, figlio amato, and we'll see you soon. # Friday, June 17, 2005 ( 1:59 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Julia Child was right. Cilantro does taste like furniture polish. There is some in the seed mixture of salad greens I sowed in one of the porch boxes (I don't grow edibles as a rule but I thought I'd try this). I tried it this morning, and it was awful. Oh, well, I suppose it's all what you're used to, and I'm not used to noshing on resin. # Friday, June 10, 2005 ( 11:09 PM ) Elinor Dashwood Isn't that the way of the world? I buy crutches and my foot stops hurting. My gait is a bit lopsided but I'm getting around without undue pain. And this is weird - my mother-in-law fell off a pair of kitchen steps just around the time I got home from the X-ray lab yesterday, and she's got a walker for the time being. I called her this afternoon and we swapped injury stories. There's nothing like community of interest to bring people together. All my seedlings are rushing up. I take my eye off them for a few days and they're tearing the deck off the house. The people who tell you to hang onto pots of seeds and not give up on them are right, by the way. This summer I reused some peat pots that had their last go-round in 2002. To my surprise, not to say chagrin, I find that some long-forgotten Koelreuteria paniculata are suddenly disputing root space with the Hardenbergia violacea I planted last month. There is also something soft and bright green - Heaven send it's a Sparmannia - jostling for position in the same peat pot as some Cassia alata seedlings I sowed only last week. Think of it: these pots of seeds disappointed me three years ago and lay dormant on a shelf in the garage, freezing in winter and baking in summer, only to jump out of the pot at me now. Truly, the natural world is extremely complex and fascinating, and the more we learn about it the less we're satisfied with the old blind-chance model of materialist evolution we all heard in school. The notion that the dazzling panoply of life arose from random mutations of genetic material - and bear in mind that, as a general rule, mutations tend to be detrimental to survival and reproductive success - which just happened to crop up in time to take advantage of new ecological opportunities, sounds more and more hollow all the time. So far the only criticism of intelligent design I've run into is flat denial accompanied by scoffing, a response which lacks something of the detachment and impartial evaluation on which the scientific method is based. # Thursday, June 09, 2005 ( 8:50 PM ) Elinor Dashwood I'm sorry for not blogging, but on Tuesday morning I took a bad step and broke something in my foot. At first I thought it was nothing more than a sprain and that a day or two would see the end of it, but it wasn't and they didn't. Today it was X-rayed, and tomorrow I get crutches. Feugh. I'll look in from time to time, but I'm supposed to keep the thing elevated. # Saturday, June 04, 2005 ( 12:29 PM ) Elinor Dashwood This is really getting on my nerves. The women's magazines, from the workaday Family Circle to Vogue - which is so fashionable that there are hardly any words in it at all - all seem to be pushing the idea of pulling the plug on your comatose relatives in order to "give life" by means of organ donation. At the supermarket I ran out of time plowing through the collagen and decolletage trying find the table of contents and a page number for the article advertised on the cover under the title, "Letting Go: One Family's Decision About Life Support". I had leisure, however, to peruse the article in Family Circle (which continues, inexplicably, to arrive at the house; I can hardly suppose I'm on the comp list, considering how often I pound them), which was about a thirteen-year-old girl, injured in a car accident, whose mother was persuaded to "let go" and allow her to be broken up for parts. Several things struck me as suspicious about the situation. First, the girl was awake after the accident, and only later lost consciousness. Second, everything in her except one lung was in a condition to be donated, which seems to indicate that she was not very badly injured, except for concussion. Third, the doctors came and told the mother almost at once that they found no signs of brain activity, and it was time to start "thinking about organ donation." My reaction to this announcement would have been, "Is that so? Well, I still show certain signs of brain activity, and what my brain is actively telling me is that you'd much rather pull all the nice, juicy, highly transplantable organs out of my healthy young child than set up a program for looking after a comatose patient. And if you don't get the hell out of this room and get me an ambulance to transfer her to a Catholic hospital in no time flat, I'll sue your ass off for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Now run along like a good boy, before I get angry." # Friday, June 03, 2005 ( 10:51 AM ) Elinor Dashwood It seems that Jonathan Lee is happy with his new assignment, so I suppose I am, too. I thought all along that he would be sent to Iraq. He's going to be doing river patrols on a gunboat. The only rivers I know of in Iraq are the Tigris and the Euphrates - not, I apprehend, any longer the Cradle of Civilization - so that ought to be interesting at any rate. # Wednesday, June 01, 2005 ( 10:35 AM ) Elinor Dashwood I dropped in on Henry to see if he'd done the book game, and found a reflection on late-term abortion. I can't altogether agree with him that the infamous George Tiller's clients are victims of the culture of abortion. At least one of those interviewed in the LA Times article to which he refers knew that abortion was gravely wrong and did it anyway, which is really all that is necessary to establish culpability for mortal sin, and the availability of the means to commit the sin doesn't enter into it. They certainly, however, suffered a lot of unnecessary pain in that they agonized over whether they should abort or not, which wouldn't have happened if it were impossible to get a late-term abortion. Here is the story of one of them: In her Florida home, with her husband at her side, Becker wept and prayed for days. Conflicting emotions overwhelmed her. She was scared to carry Daniel to term — scared of how she would react to his deformities. She was afraid to abort, sure she would burn in hell. Her son disgusted her; she wanted him out of her body. She loved him. She wanted to protect him. She prayed Daniel would forgive her. She prayed for forgiveness from God as well. Becker had been taught that abortion was a sin; she wanted so to believe it might also be a blessing. In her seventh month of pregnancy she had learned Daniel had a fatal genetic disorder and his life would be brief and brutal. She wanted to spare him that. Don't ask me why it seemed right, in that case, to make his life even briefer and more brutal, but some people are very good at coming up with pretty-sounding excuses for doing horrible things to other people. The point is that if Mrs. Becker had carried her son to term, she wouldn't have been disgusted by him. That, I've always believed, is why pregnancy takes nine months, to give people time to adjust themselves. I am credibly informed that my father was rather appalled to hear that I was on the way, and I think that's not an especially uncommon reaction. He'd got used to the idea by the time I was born, however - how much harder is a seventh child, after all, when you're already supporting six? - and was extremely proud of me when I was a precocious talker and reader. Grown-up people are usually able to accustom themselves surprisingly graciously to the inevitable. The trouble with the availability of abortion is that it catches people in the moment of fear, without giving them the time to get past fear to resignation, then to hope, and finally to the entirely admirable pugnacious partiality one feels for one's children. # Tuesday, May 31, 2005 ( 11:07 AM ) Elinor Dashwood It's time to bangs heads against walls. For preference, these would be the heads of people who conduct asinine and one-sided studies, and also of women who say they want opposite and irreconcilable things, and want other people to pay for them; but in a pinch my own will do. From Zorak comes a link to The Motherhood Project's "Executive Summary" of the highly predictable results of The Motherhood Study. The big news: women want more and better subsidized daycare, and they want the culture to change so they can have challenging and rewarding jobs which pay more and demand less of their time and enable them to spend more time working to decrease all forms of family violence, increase their external validation as mothers, and improve their family relationships. In short, women - at least, the 2000 women interviewed for this survey - are idiots. To wit: What Mothers Say About Their Lives Whatever their backgrounds, wherever they live, whatever their life circumstances, mothers today have much in common. Regardless of age, race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, geography, or employment status, mothers agree to a very large extent on their perceptions of the importance of mothering, the satisfactions they derive from their lives as mothers, their concerns about the negative forces that threaten their children, and their wishes for a culture that would make the work of mothering less challenging. There was no significant evidence in this study to support what media sometimes refer to as the “mommy wars,” supposed conflicts between mothers who are employed in the workforce and those who are not. In a pig's eye there isn't. You want day care, honey, you pay for it. We've made enough sacrifices to enable our children to have their mother at home, and we're very ill inclined to make more so you can warehouse yours. In contrast to much of the popular discourse that typically emphasizes the stress and strain of motherhood, mothers reported strikingly high levels of satisfaction with their lives as mothers. Although levels of satisfaction appear to increase with income and education — and to be higher for married mothers and those with high levels of religious involvement — satisfaction was generally high for mothers across the entire sample. Certainly mothers also expressed many concerns for themselves and for their children. Duh. How much did this survey cost? Mothers’ passion is strong for their children and for mothering — a job most mothers see as unique and extraordinarily important. At the core of mothers’ powerful feelings appears to be a new and intense kind of love women experience when they become mothers. More than 93% of mothers responding to our survey said the love they feel for their children is unlike any other love they have experienced. Nearly 93% agreed that a mother’s contribution to the care of her children is so unique that no one else can replace it. Nevertheless they want to dig still deeper into my husband's paycheck to pay for day care. I mean, they love their children and all that, but doing the work and exercising the self-discipline to get by on one income, so they can be with their children, well, that's just unreasonable. What Mothers Would Change in Their Personal Lives Although nearly all mothers expressed satisfaction with their lives as mothers, fewer said they receive external validation as a mother. Fewer than half of the mothers (48%) reported feeling appreciated most of the time and nearly one in five (19%) said they have felt less valued by society since becoming mothers. In qualitative interviews and focus groups, mothers called for greater appreciation and recognition of the importance of caregiving — within families, communities, and the society as a whole. Welcome to Grown-Up Land - we're all unappreciated. That's life. And why are we less valued for being mothers? Because jobs you can pay people to do are valued differently than jobs you can't pay people to do. The former are recompensed financially, and the latter with reverence. Take your pick, but you must be satisfied with one. The trouble is that all the women who decided to outsource their principal responsibilities and get paying jobs have queered it for the rest of us. Now hardly anybody really regards motherhood as fine self-dedication to a noble duty, and think of it as drudgery that any sensible woman would hire somebody else to do, or as a hobby, suitably supported by nannies and cleaners, for women who caught rich husbands. There is a striking gap between mothers’ current work status and their ideal work arrangement. Currently more than 41% of the mothers we studied work full-time. However, only about 16% of mothers across the entire sample said they would prefer full-time work if they could choose their ideal work situation. One in three mothers said they would prefer to work part-time and about 30% said they would prefer to work for pay from home. Overall, a majority of mothers today would prefer to be employed — but in positions that do not demand so much of their time. Once again, that's just human nature. I'd like to be paid to potter with my plants and knit baby clothes, and Cacciaguida would not object to being given a handsome salary, with no strings attached, to sit at his desk and think Great Thoughts. Does anybody have an ideal work arrangement? What Mothers Would Change About Society Mothers seem to hold values that differ in significant ways from those of the larger culture. Ninety-five percent agree that they wish American culture made it easier to instill positive values in children. . . and 86% agree that childhood should be a time when children are protected from large parts of the adult world. Bully for mothers. Now do it. There's only one way to instill positive "values" - I hate that word - in your children, and to protect them from premature scarring by the adult world, and that's to bring them up yourself, all day, every day. You've got to know the people they know, to hear what they talk about together, to be in the room and click off the television when necessary, to know where they are at all times, to listen to everything they tell you about their day, and to correct the bad things and encourage the good things they see and hear. It's the only way. You can't hire it out to somebody else, because nobody else is going to do it right. # Saturday, May 28, 2005 ( 11:44 AM ) Elinor Dashwood Guess what I'm reading? Cacciaguida found The Mysteries of Udolpho in the Dover catalogue and got it for me. This is the book which the superlatively silly Catherine Morland is given to read by her friend Isabella Thorpe, in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. It was an early classic of the Gothic romance which Austen parodied in that book, a genre that featured talking statues, ghosts, mysterious murmurs of old servants, carriage breakdowns before sinister castles, long-forgotten manuscripts, secret passages, and Virtue Triumphant. This one, however, is an exceptionally well-written example, and was a great favorite of Austen's. (I found Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto - Italy was a popular setting for these effusions - very hard going.) Check it out online here at Project Gutenberg, which I found through the unutterably glorious, unfathomably various, never-to-be-sufficiently-praised Online Books Page of the University of Pennsylvania Library. # Wednesday, May 25, 2005 ( 10:21 PM ) Elinor Dashwood A couple of random thoughts brought about by watching The Santa Fe Trail this evening. First, the Confederacy was winning the public-relations war around the middle of the twentieth century. John Brown, who was presented to us in our Lies About American History classes in grammar school as a hothead, but essentially just and a martyr to the cause of Abolition, is here depicted as a murderer under the influence of religious mania. (Chesterton, in the Father Brown story called "The Broken Sword", points out perceptively that these self-anointed Scourges of God always feel more at home in the Old Testament than in the New.) Second, Olivia de Havilland was much more talented, and a great deal more beautiful, than she's generally remembered to have been by a generation that knew her chiefly as Melanie Wilkes. She had quality, that hard-to-define air of distinction and self-possession, and in stark contrast to many of her contemporaries, she looked as if she had brains as well. Third, Ronald Reagan was also a better actor than he's often given credit for. Despite the odd way their relative heights switch around in the film (Errol Flynn was sensitive about being shorter and insisted on standing on a box, but Reagan was continually outmaneuvering him), he and Flynn play beautifully against each other. I was surprised at the way a very unpretentious movie touched on the strained loyalties and mixed emotions surrounding the slavery issue, and the looming conflict that was to divide all these comrades-in-arms into two hostile forces. Today's hamfisted directors and screen writers could take a lesson in lightness of touch from this picture, and in the great principle that not stating a thing explicitly is often much more powerful than putting it into words. Altogether, I call that a pretty good evening's enjoyment for a DVD I picked up at the drugstore for two dollars. # ( 1:39 PM ) Elinor Dashwood The book game: 1. Total number of books I've owned. Fewer than you'd think. We were a library-going household when I was child rather than a book-owning household, so I got a late start. I probably own a couple of hundred of my own, and read some of Cacciaguida's and a lot from the public library. 2. Last book I bought. I don't know. It was probably one of a bunch from the local used book store. The last new book was Zoe Mellor's Fifty Baby Booties To Knit. 3. Last book I read. Last book that I'd never read before? That's a poser. It may have been Tony Hillerman's The Sinister Pig. 4. Five books that mean a lot to me. Hm. Brideshead Revisited, of course. I'll lump all of Jane Austen together for another, or they would crowd all the others out. The Age of Innocence would be on the list, certainly. If meaning a lot to me includes books I self-medicate with, then the classic Bertie-and-Jeeves novels - Right Ho, Jeeves, Thank You, Jeeves, and so on - would be included. The fifth would have to be Chesterton in general, with special emphasis on his books about divorce, contraception, the United States, and the history of the Church. 5. Most bloggers have played already, so I'll tag Jonathan Lee, Henry, SAM, Kari, and Dave. # |
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