Parents, are you willing to learn about your actual schools?

In his characteristic charming, self-deprecating manner, Tom Hoopes explains in Why We (Still) Home School that he was drawn to home schooling for all the wrong reasons — “irrational emotional fears,” he says. But he says that his wife, April, had sensible, rational reasons for wanting to keep the kids out of the classroom.

I don’t know the Hoopses personally. I admire their evident dedication to their kids, and their family life comes across warm, playful, and solid, truly enviable. I’m only responding to what Hoopes wrote here. I understand his fears perfectly, because I’ve had them myself . . . and his conclusions annoy me immensely.

Hoopes says that he hated school when he was young, but that his wife April enjoyed school, herself. But, he says:

It was what school did to her relationship with her sister that gave her pause. The way April describes it, she and her older sister had a warm, playful relationship with its healthy give and take just as the Irving Berlin song describes. But then came school.

Her sister was almost three years older. The elementary school put a three-year chasm between them as absolute as the one between Lazarus and the Rich Man in the afterlife. The lower and upper grades rarely mixed, and when they did, her sister treated April exactly the way she treated every other person in her grade: she ignored her.

What had happened? School had happened.

No. What happened was that particular school had happened.If she had gone to a different school with a different philosophy, her experience might have been entirely different.

I know, because my kids do go to a school with different policy, and that chasm didn’t happen.

I had the exact fears that Hoopes described. I didn’t want my kids’ relationship with each other to be disrupted. I didn’t want them to be forced into artificial boxes. I didn’t want them to be segregated, and I didn’t want them to start thinking of home life as something foreign and oppressive.

Imagine my delight, then, when I learned that our school made a deliberate effort to encourage people of different ages to mingle with each other. There are regular school-wide projects and activities — plays, gardens, concerts — and the older kids read to and mentor the younger kids, and kids from different classes can invite each other over for lunch. They work together and play together, and they are openly encouraged to learn from each other.

They also constantly invite the kids to share the culture of their homes with the rest of the class. Familyfamilyfamily is a constant theme — so much so that it’s almost obnoxious how much the kids are applauded for simply having a home life. There’s something to be said for all this talk about “tolerance” and “multiculturalism.” In our case, at least, it translates into kids thinking and talking about their home life, and being told that they should be proud of it.

We also spent a year at a frankly mediocre regular public school, which we left when we could, because the academics were not great. But guess what? They had a similar policy: encouraging mingling between ages, and encouraging kids to bring their home life into the classroom. The same goes for my older kids’ public high school: more and more school administrators are realizing that it benefits everyone when there isn’t an artificial segregation by age. They encourage the kids to see themselves as whole people with a life outside of school,.

So why was I so afraid? Because my own school education was much like what Hoopes says he and his wife went through. I remember how wonderful it was to be in second grade and to be able to jeer at those babyish first graders. They fostered competition between grades with constant contests and tournaments. I am sure many schools still operate this way, because it’s just easier.

Hoopes clearly remembers a similar experience, saying:

The artificial environment of the modern school in each case created pressures that worked against the little versions of Tom and April. The model offered no in for socially challenged little Tommy, and it offered no out for the socially adept April and her sister — no way to meld the social identity with the family identity.

By the time we showed up, schools had ceased being places that complement home life. They had become places that contravene home life. John Dewey and his followers did that purposely.

So, yes, I know what he’s talking about. But here’s the thing: I’m not sending my kids to the public school of my own childhood. I’m sending them to the public schools that exist now, in our area, with the teachers that are teaching now, under the authorities who are making decisions now. If I assumed, as Hoopes seems to, that my childhood school experience is the school experience, I’d still be home schooling, and we’d all be miserable.

Hoopes says:

I hated school. I hated sitting still. I hated being forced to negotiate the politics of 8-year-olds’ social relationships. I hated having to figure out what version of an answer a teacher wanted. I hated feeling ripped in an untimely way from the world I knew and placed in an artificial world I knew not.

I would invite Hoopes to visit our school, and see the bin full of “fidgets” the kids can play with while they work, or to see the list of activities posted in the hallway, where kids can take a few minutes to blow off steam by crab-walking up and down when math or geography gets too oppressive for their little monkey brains. I invite him to sit with any of our teachers as they explain the various adaptive teaching styles they use while seeking the best match for each kid’s learning style. They’re doing a much better job than I ever did when I was the teacher, and they’re more patient with my kids, too.

More to the point, I invite him to go to his own local schools and find out what they’re actually like. Maybe he already has, and maybe they really are terrible. Maybe they’re sterile warehouses where the teachers apply mental clamps to the kids’ pliable psyches. Maybe they begin each morning by pledging allegiance to John Dewey and vowing to repudiate faith and family and apple pie, or they get no pudding. Some schools really are like that.

But some are not. They really, really aren’t; and the only way you’ll find out what your local schools are like is by going into them, talking to the teachers, watching a classroom in action, and talking to the parents of other students. Make your conclusions based on what is actually happening now, not what you remember, what you’ve heard, or what you’re afraid it might be.

If you’re home schooling and it’s going well, then great! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But if you’re unhappy home schooling and yet feel sure that all the alternatives are going to be hellish — or if you’re in the business of telling other people what all public schools are like — maybe think again.

If you’re going to be in charge of teaching your kids how to learn, you have to be willing to learn yourself.

Confession book winners!

Thanks for entering the raffle, everybody! The winners of A Little Book about Confession for Children by Kendra Tierney are . . .

Julie Fico Weyant and Corita Ten Eyck!

I’m emailing the winners using the email addresses provided to Rafflecopter. If you don’t hear from me today, please email me (simchafisher at gmail dot com) with your physical address, and I’ll have your books sent out to you.

Congratulations!

 

 

What’s for supper? Vol. 25: More 2 Life than flavored rice

Here’s the deal:

SATURDAY
Meatloaf, FANCY rice, Brussels sprouts

Not bad for a meal I threw together at the last minute, somehow having not realized until 5:00 that I would be making dinner that day. I more or less used Fannie Farmer’s meatloaf recipe, but I cook it on broiler pans, not in loaf pans, so the grease drains off.

The fanciness of the rice is just chicken broth instead of water. The kids think this is the best best best, which makes me feel kind of like I felt when the upstairs neighbor’s ice machine broke and flooded the duplex, and the kids woke up to see pots and bowls all over the place to catch the drips, and they said, “Mama . . . is it a party?” No, children. You really can expect more than this out of life.

SUNDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, chips or something, broccoli

I feel like we were busy doing something on Sunday, but I don’t know what. There was some of this:

[img attachment=”92862″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”mask” /]

which set the tone for the week.

MONDAY
Homemade pasta! Homemade sauce! 

My mother-in-law ordered something from a catalogue, but they sent her a pasta maker in error, and they said to just keep it, so she gave it to us. Good thing, because this was vacation week and we ended up being sick all week and the van was (still is) in the shop, and we didn’t do an-y-thing.  So turning the crank was pretty much the peak of our excitement.

I chose a pasta dough recipe from a site that sounded authentically Italian. But I’ve been to Italy, and I don’t remember the spaghetti being a bunch of scaly, greasy chunks. So we scrapped it and started over with this more reasonable recipe. The secret ingredient is enthusiasm:

[img attachment=”92863″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”pasta sophia” /]

plus rapt attention:

[img attachment=”92864″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”pasta lucy” /]

a hearty helping of anticipation:

[img attachment=”92865″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”pasta irene” /]

and triumph:

[img attachment=”92866″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”pasta hoorah” /]

and then Benny needs a turn:

[img attachment=”92867″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”pasta benny” /]

Gosh, I’m enormous.
Note: when you turn the crank slowly, you get a sheet of pasta with lines on it, rather than actual separate spaghettis.  Just shoo the kid out and run it through the machine again.

Since we made a recipe times twelve and I had forgotten that it was a radio day, we were rushing like anything, so I didn’t run the dough through the machine 6-9 times as recommended. So the final product was a little less compact then it might have been. Still, homemade pasta!

[img attachment=”92868″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”handmade pasta” /]

Clara made the sauce from scratch, too.

The pasta-making was fun, time-consuming but not hard, and we’ll definitely be making ravioli one of these days when we have more time. It’s probably only worth using the machine if you’re planning to make some special recipe, like mushroom-stuffed ravioli with basil-infused dough or something, or if you’re hoping to build happy kitchen memories. It is a lot of work, and spaghetti is spaghetti.

TUESDAY
Chicken pesto pasta, garlic knots

[img attachment=”92869″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”chicken pasta pesto” /]
I briefly considered transferring my food to a real plate for the photo, but decided life is too short.
We used up the rest of that miraculously cheap chicken from last week. This isn’t real pesto, just chopped up basil and garlic and olive oil, with a little salt and pepper and lots of Parmesan cheese. Mix together with chunks of poached chicken and farfalle. Not thrilling, but pretty good.

Garlic knots because pizza dough was on sale.

WEDNESDAY
Halmonee chicken thighs, rice

I’m not even going to include the recipe, since I screwed it up so bad. I didn’t have all the ingredients and messed up the proportions. The taste was great, but the overall effect was . . . drippy. Also, I burned the rice. Then my husband got home late, so I reheated the chicken by frying it, which improved the texture somewhat. I also fried the rice, and re-burned it. Not an improvement.

But the flavor was good! I think I’ll try again next week.

THURSDAY
Hot dogs, veg and hummus, baked beans, birthday cake

Thursday was sweet Corrie’s birthday. I haven’t made a cake from scratch in a million years, so I thought I’d give it a shot. This one-bowl recipe turned out just fine. A nice, rich flavor, and you really can make it all in one bowl. Really only minimally harder than using a mix. The only thing was that, as the reviewers warned, the layers in glass and metal stuck in the pan, but the silicone pan layer came out easily.

Corrie helped me clean the bowl:

[img attachment=”92871″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”corrie head in bowl” /]

Hello!

[img attachment=”92872″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”corrie head in bowl 2″ /]

Oh, happy birthday, you sweetheart.

[img attachment=”92873″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”corrie head in bowl 3″ /]

I used this recipe for chocolate frosting, and realized with nanoseconds to spare that that is not cocoa powder, that is your daughter’s cappuccino mix!!!!! That would have been a birthday to remember: a fully caffeinated cake for a one-year-old at 7 PM. So I just used the little bit of cocoa powder I had left, plus almond extract, and it had a pleasant flavor, if not super chocolatey. Whew.

[img attachment=”92870″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”frosting benny” /]

When I piled the light brown frosting on top of the cake to spread it, Benny asked with interest, “Is that tuna?” Okay, that would have been a birthday to remember.

FRIDAY
Just tuna, I reckon. Maybe popcorn.

Not having a vehicle all week made me realize that I stop at the store to pick up food really often. There’s hardly anything left in the house! This meal planning stuff is all a sham.

 

Ella Fitzgerald, Ephraim Kishon, and Nucky Thompson

I know I just did one of these, but I have four (4) unfinished posts that I started today that I can’t seem to finish, plus one finished one that is the best thing I ever wrote, only it is called “What To Do When a Lot of Ladies Are Mad at You on the Internet,” and it’s Lent, so I can’t post it.

[img attachment=”92782″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”tears resize” /]

 

I’m watching  . . .

Boardwalk Empire, season 2

I almost gave up on this after the first season, because even though it’s gorgeously shot and the setting, costumes, and soundtrack were a constant feast for the senses, I hated all the characters, couldn’t deal with the extraordinarily violent violence, and also had no idea what was going on. In the second season, they fixed the first and third problems — whittled the million byzantine plot lines down to a manageable five or six intelligible ones, and made most of the characters way more interesting and way more relatable, and the ones who weren’t salvageable, they just shot. It’s still uberviolent, but it earns it now.

Here’s the opening sequence, so beautiful and worth watching every time:

They also managed to have a few episodes without any ridiculously explicit sex scenes. Glad I stayed with this show! I loves me some Steve Buscemi, and I finally figured out where I’d seen the fascinatingly lovely Mrs. Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald) before: she played Evangeline in Nanny McPhee.

Boardwalk Empire is on Amazon Prime. Recommended, if you don’t mind watching HBO-type shows.

***

I’m reading . . . 

My Family Right or Wrong by Ephraim Kishon

[img attachment=”92783″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”ephraim kishon” /]

Just got this in the mail today, so I haven’t started it yet, but I have high hopes (thanks for the recommendation, Staša!). Unfair to Goliath was so crazy and funny and weird. Ridiculous satirical essays about Israel in the 1970’s, translated from Hebrew. If you like the kind of stuff I write when I’m half in the bag, that’s me channeling Ephraim Kishon.

***

I’m listening to  . . .

nothing. I got nothing. Who can recommend something for me? I was awake from 4:30 until at least 7 this morning with “I Was Doin’ All Right” playing my head.

Not a bad soundtrack, but I would rather have been sleeping.

Please just sell me a shirt

Hey, Land’s End? Hey, everybody who sells stuff? How about just . . .  selling stuff? I have money, and I want to use it to buy things. When I support a cause, I’d like to be in charge of that myself. I don’t want you to do it for me. I want to buy a shirt for its shirtiness, and nothing else. So maybe stop trying to sell me anything else, when you’re in the shirt business.

Read the rest at the Register.

Let’s hear it for my mother-in-law!

Why? No particular reason. I just realized on a Tuesday afternoon in February, nearly twenty years after I first met my mother-in-law, that she’s one of my favorite people. Let me introduce you to Nana, with a few of her choice Nana sayings:

1. “You don’t have to step in it to know what it is.”

Pretty self-explanatory, immensely useful. Sometimes it’s the right time to formulate a precise, well-researched argument about how you’ve formed your opinions; but sometimes, life is just too short. Sometimes you can trust yourself to identify a steaming heap of no-thank-you-please without having to put yourself right in the middle of it.

-But have you read Donald Trump’s book? How do you know it’s so bad if you haven’t even read it?
-Hey, I don’t have to step in it to know what it is.

2.”Where’s your facade??”

This is for when you’ve just come away from dealing with a bunch of people who are miserable, grasping, venal, self-serving, petty tyrants, and that’s fine, that’s fine . . . but they don’t even bother to hide it. Don’t they realize that a false verneer is what makes society operate smoothly? In the name of all that’s decent, my fellow crapweasels, strap on that mask so we can get something done here!

3.All girls are “toots”; all boys are “kiddo.” If you’re too distracted to know if it’s a girl or a boy frantically tugging at your pant leg, “sugar booger” will do. I know who you are! I just don’t happen to know what your name is. Handy for people who love their children very much, but haven’t slept in four decades.

4. There is no such thing as too many chocolate chip cookies. Not a direct quote, just an unstated truth. And no, it’s no use getting her recipe and trying to make them yourself. It won’t be the same.

5. “What is this, a cruise ship for kids?” This is the standard comment when you’ve trained your children to enjoy the finer things in life, like lying around on their ears watching Road to Rio and eating raw ramen out of the package. You suddenly notice that it’s almost dinner time and civilization is crumbling around your ears. What is this, a cruise ship for kids? For crying out loud, at least put pants on.

6. “There’s no such thing as a coincidence.” Uttered with a quiet menace that will make your blood run cold, especially if you’re a kid who just happens to be standing around holding a golf club which is completely unrelated to the enormous, angry welt forming on your brother’s forehead.

7. “That’s how the man from New York lost an arm.” Mysterious in origins, surprisingly effective. One time, we were sitting at a baseball game and there was rowdy bunch of obnoxious little boys behind us, no parent in sight. They were throwing stuff and punching and kicking us in the back and about two inches away from making something awful happen. My husband turned around and informed them quietly about the man from New York. For whatever reason, that did the trick. Model citizens until the seventh inning at least.

8. “They spell ‘culture’ with a K, know what I mean?” Actually, I have no idea what this means. I think I’ll go to my grave not knowing what it means.

9. Drink whole milk, not skim milk. Don’t you want to be big and strong?

10. Come stay with us; there’s plenty of room. Remember that scene in Lewis’ The Great Divorce where he sees a gracious, glorious women coming toward him, surrounded by hosts of frolicking spirits and devoted children singing, scattering flowers, and doing her honor?

“Is it? … is it?” I whispered to my guide.

“Not at all,” said he. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith and she lived at Golders Green.”

“She seems to be … well, a person of particular importance?”

“Aye. She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.”

[…]”And who are all these young men and women on each side?”

“They are her sons and daughters.” “She must have had a very large family, Sir.” “Every young man or boy that met her became her son-even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.”

“Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?” “No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”

“And how … but hullo! What are all these animals?

A cat-two cats-dozens of cats. And all those dogs . . . why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.” “They are her beasts.” “Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.”

“Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love….

Yup. That’s Nana.

5 things I’ll never do over February vacation (and three I just might)

The other day, I mentioned to the lady at the post office that we were starting February vacation. She said, “Ooh, where ya going?”

Going? We don’t go places. We spend all our non-vacation time going places. Going, going, going. Vacation is when you get to stay home. Vacation is when you get to get up at five forty-arghhh o’clock because the baby is hitting you in the face with the collected works of P.G. Wodehouse, rather than because the alarm is going off, and you feel like some kind of degenerate hedonist because of it.

Still, I don’t want vacation week to just slip by in an undifferentiated miasma of Netflix and afternoon corn flakes. So far, I have managed to take one (1) shower and get most of the way dressed (upper front quadrant, I haven’t forgotten you!). The kids are watching something odious on Netflix and the dog is eating corn flakes out of the garbage. But it isn’t dark yet! There’s still time to make a pointless list.

Things that will absolutely not happen:

1. Finish sewing that cloak. Most of my kids have homemade cloaks that I’ve sewed over the years, a project which severely strains the limits of my seamstressness, because unlike curtains, cloaks have some curvy parts.  I should have sat contented with the miracle of actually making the darn things; but recently, I foolishly promised to take them to Jo-Ann so they could pick out trim that I would then sew on. This we did, and I got as far as pinning the trim on with many pins, bundling the cloak up, stuffing it in a bag, and hanging it on the wall, where it now remains like a prickly punching bag of guilt. I’d like to get it done sometime before the kid realizes he’s kind of old to be wearing a cloak, but I’m afraid that if I open the bag, the pins will fall on the floor and the baby will eat them.

And I just love my child too much to risk it.

2. Put the Christmas stuff up in the attic. This would be fairly easy. I just don’t want to, okay?

3. Finish painting the dining room. I started stripping the wallpaper three years ago, and I started painting eight months ago. It is now about 80% of the way done, and that’s the way I like it, apparently. Sure, it would be great if my husband could take a photo of a birthday party without me knocking the camera out of his hands and screaming, “Nooooo, you can’t have that wall showing!” but on the other hand, if I get to the end of the project, something something something. I will probably die, apparently.

4. Get caught up on correspondence. I already used up most of my life force by clicking on the little “star” button every time I get an important message. What more do you people want from me?

5. Do something about this feature of my kitchen counter:

[img attachment=”92414″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”paper pile” /]

so I can find and organize all those unpaid bills I lost track of, and also throw away all the pictures me four-year-old drew of her and me holding hands, because I can’t save all of them. And Straighten Out the Insurance Situation. Oh, hoop de doo, I will get right on that and not cry at all. *sob*

Well, that’s about enough of that. Here are some things that actually might happen this week:

1.Make homemade ravioli. This is not a realistic goal, but I did tell the kids that we would do it, so now we have to.

2.Finally, finally call the church and see about volunteering, because our pastor has that look on his face again, and someone has to do something. Actually, my real goal is to worm my way into the inner circle where the real influence is, and then I can get them to find another spot for that bucket of rock salt in the foyer, which Corrie wants, with all her heart, to eat.

3.Go ice skating. We’ve done this twice so far, during previous February vacations, and it was actually far less horrible than I expected. The first time, I was eight months pregnant, and they told me to get off the ice. The second time, my son fell and sprained his wrist, so we got had to leave. Don’t ask me what I was expecting, but it was worse than both of those.

In conclusions: Why do they even have vacation in February? Why don’t they just skip it altogether? February, I mean.

More than Milk: The Moral Lives of Mothers

Greg Popcak has written a stunningly nasty post against mothers who feed their babies formula: The Myth of Optional Breastfeeding & Why You Might Not be Breastfeeding Long Enough

Popcak’s post is largely cut and pasted from an article by “Dr. Darcia Narvaez … a moral developmental psychologist at the Univ. of Notre Dame.” The thesis of Popcak’s post is that breastfeeding is so vastly superior to formula-feeding, in so many ways, that there is no doubt: women who breastfeed are doing the moral thing, and women who don’t are not.

Before we go any further, I’d like to sit for a moment with Narvaez’s title, “moral developmental psychologist.” Kind of a Dagwood sandwich of a title, ain’t it? (Does she ever hang out at the Museum of Science and Trucking?) In general, I’m wary of people who call themselves specialists in several different fields at once, especially when they synthesize all of that expertise into something absurdly reductionist, like mandatory breastfeeding.  I am more likely to trust people who acknowledge the limits of their field.

My therapist will do the same thing. When I ask him for advice about something that isn’t in his purview, he’ll make it clear what are the boundaries of his expertise, and will be very cautious about wading into unfamiliar waters. He’ll remind me, “This is just a theory I’ve formulated, based on my experience. You may want to read so-and-so — that’s more his field.” This is the kind of humility that we see in learned people, who truly understand the scope of their authority. In people who are concerned mainly with promoting an agenda, though, we do not see this humility.

Keep this in mind while you read Popcak’s insistence that breastfeeding is a moral issue.

Now, we do care about making moral choices as parents, right? Of course we do. As an expert in nothing but typing, I always give the same advice: for moral teaching, we go to the Church. The Church has the authority to tell us which actions are moral and which are immoral.

The Church gets specific in some things (Not just “be pure,” but “don’t fornicate or masturbate”); but in other things, she gives us the latitude to discern on our own the best way to follow broad moral principles.

Many parenting issues fall into this latter category. The Church tells us, for instance, that we have a serious obligation to educate our children, both academically and in the Faith. She does not, however, tell us that we must send them to Catholic school or public school or private school or that we must home school. She says, “Here’s what you’re trying to achieve. Now you pray about it, and then, using prudence and being the expert in your own life, go do that in the way that makes sense to you.”

In the same way, the Church tells us that we have a serious moral obligation to care for the physical, emotional, and psychological needs of our children, even if that means making personal sacrifices. We have a serious moral obligation not to neglect them, and to do our best to care for them according to our abilities and circumstances.

But the Church does not tell us we must breastfeed. The Church does not tell us this, because breastfeeding is not always the best way to care for babies’ physical, emotional, and psychological needs, which are bound up intimately with the physical, emotional, and psychological needs of the mother and the rest of the family.

In my case, breastfeeding was and is the best way to nurture my babies, both physically, emotionally, and psychologically. I’m a healthy woman with healthy babies, and my lifestyle meshes well with the pleasures and demands of breastfeeding. I’m cognizant of the existential chorus of significance that carols around me as I nourish my child with my own body, feeding her with my food, breathing with her, relaxing with her, passing back and forth unspoken communication of a million kinds. Breastfeeding is easy and natural for me — so much so that when my one premature child was failing to thrive at my breast, I made gargantuan sacrifices to work through it with the help of experts, and to establish a good nursing relationship. I did this not because breastfeeding was always the only moral choice, but because breastfeeding made sense for me and my family then, and was therefore the moral choice.  For someone else in other circumstances, switching to formula may very well have been the moral choice.

I have friends who are on medications for physical medical reasons, and can’t breastfeed. I have friends who are on medications for psychological medical reasons, and can’t breastfeed. I have friends who must work, and can’t breastfeed, or can’t breastfeed full time. I have friends who have psychological difficulties regarding their bodies, and so they don’t breastfeed. I have friends whose babies have such byzantine allergies that the mother cannot keep her milk allergen-free and also eat enough to stay alive and care for her other kids, and so they don’t breastfeed. I have friends who adopt orphans, and never even considered breastfeeding, even though it might be possible to induce milk production with drugs. They just didn’t feel it was necessary. They showed their love in so many other ways.

I have friends who don’t breastfeed, and I don’t know why they don’t. I never asked, because it’s none of my business. I can see in ten thousand other ways that they love their babies, that they care for them, are attached to them in every meaningful way, and want the best for them.

I don’t assume, like Dr. Darcia Narvaez, that these women who feed their babies formula would probably just tell me some “make-my-life-easy story.” I assume that they’d say, if I dared to ask, “We decided that this was the best way to care for my baby.” And I would believe them, because there are many, many good and moral ways to care for a baby.

I do not believe that we are required to move mountains, turn our lives upside down, or be willing to go through enormous upheaval to produce milk, even if it would be possible to do so. It may even be the wrong choice, if all that mountain-moving and upside-downing bleeds into the rest of a mother’s life (as how could it not?). Women are more than the milk they can make. Their mothering is more than the milk they can make.

And what about children? What about their needs?

Being devoted to your children is what is valuable to them. That’s what gives them a shot at growing up happy and moral and grounded. What’s damaging to children, short-term and long-term, emotionally and physically and psychologically? Being raised a mother who breastfeeds because she is terrified not to — because she can’t trust herself to make the decision that it’s time to try something else, something that will make life run more smoothly for the entire family. When we make parenting decisions based on horror stories and threats of imaginary sin, then that is not an act of love — and never doubt, that aura of fear makes its mark on a child, breastmilk or no.

Mercifully, Popcak does interject one joke into his essay, saying:

Baby will usually stay alive with infant formula.

That was a joke, right?

Because I laughed. I looked around, utterly failed to see heaps of baby corpses pickled in nasty, loveless formula, and I laughed, and annoyed my one-year-old, who was attached to my breast as I read. I was nursing her because I wanted her to be quiet, the noisy thing. I was, dare I say it, trying to make my life easy. Trying to keep her occupied while I pursued my feminist career path as a writer –just like I was doing when I left my husband with breastmilk and formula and flew across the country to speak to other Catholic moms. Everyone was cared for. Everyone was fed. Everyone was fine. And my sons and daughters got to see my virile, conservative, bread-winning husband caring for his beloved baby girl ’round the clock, and that was good for our family, too.

I haven’t the energy to go through Popcak’s entire piece and take on all the nonsense, all the sloppiness, all the sneers and scaremongering. He ends with this paragraph:

The science is there for those who are willing to look at it.  Breastfeeding is a moral issue. God gives moms breastmilk to hold in trust for their babies.  Don’t take away your baby’s inheritance.

Moms, your baby’s inheritance is the love of his parents. Don’t take that away. Do consider breastfeeding, because when it works well, it’s very nice indeed. But most of all, make your decisions based in love, not in fear of bullies, no matter what their title is. Look for the best way to love your children, and be at peace.

 

Raffle! Giving away 2 copies of A Little Book about Confession

A Little Book about Confession for Children by Kendra Tierney is one of the best confession prep books I’ve ever seen. It’s short and to the point, approachable but thorough. It also has a fold-over flap on the sturdy front and back covers, so you can easily find a quick examination of conscience or act of contrition. Great for kids, and also really serviceable for teens or adults who are preparing for their first confession or looking for a refresher about the sacrament.

Just because I’m swell like this, I’m giving away two copies of this great little book. To enter, use the Rafflecopter form below (there are several ways of entering). If it’s not showing up, click on the link that says “a Rafflecopter giveaway.” I’ll announce the winner later this week.

Good luck!
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The day I bought steak with my food stamps

I cried every night, the week before I finally applied for food stamps. I was so ashamed. Food stamps are for losers, people who make stupid, irresponsible choices,people who want to live a life of luxury while other people work hard to pick up the slack. This I knew.

We were homeschooling, because the schools in our town were wretched. We were in that town because we were renting a house from my brother-in-law, because we had been evicted from our previous apartment, because the landlord had sold the duplex, and nobody else would rent to us because they thought we had too many kids for the size of apartment we could afford.

So there we were, in a dead end town. But we were getting by. I budgeted like a maniac, playing Scrooge with the precious hoard of toilet paper, detergent, and apples we could afford. I once bought a used linen toddler dress for four dollars and blushed the whole way home, nauseated with the extravagance of my purchase. It wasn’t a great way to live, but as long as my husband could get enough overtime hours and WIC kept us in cheese and Kix, and as long as the kids could stomach a rotation of pasta, hot dogs, bananas, and tuna noodle casserole, we were okay.

Then my husband’s employer cut the overtime hours, but still required everyone to hand in the same amount of work. No, it’s not exactly legal, but there weren’t any other jobs to be had that year. His schedule still varied wildly and unpredictably from day to day, and we couldn’t find any jobs that would make up the lost overtime income and allow him to show up at either 8 a.m. or 11:45 p.m., depending on what else he was doing.

Now the kids got hot dogs for supper, and the adults got a hot dog bun with ketchup. We figure and figured and figured, and discovered that, no matter how hard we squeezed, we were always going to be about forty dollars short of being able to eat and pay our basic bills. Just forty dollars — something that, five years ago, when the economy was better, I would have spent on odds and ends at Target without thinking twice. But it was forty dollars that we didn’t have now, at all.

So off to the welfare office I went. And they granted us $800 a month for our family of seven. I couldn’t believe it. So much money! Boy oh boy, I thought. They were right about food stamps: you can live like a king on this stuff. No wonder people just sit back and let the free checks come in! I knew we weren’t like that, though, and I decided we’d just use what we needed, and let the rest sit there, so at least we won’t be part of the problem. I’d put money in the bank as a down payment on an apartment in a better city, and I’d only use my benefits to make up the slack that I had found in our budget, and no more. We’re no freeloaders.

And we followed this plan for many months. I salted away savings, and I strolled past the meat freezer in the supermarket, lusting after the trays of meat, scorning the shameless slobs who stopped and filled up their carts on the taxpayer’s dime. Freeloaders. Scum. Oh lord, look at that steak. Stop looking. Now go get some spaghetti.

You know what? I was still ashamed of myself for being on food stamps, even though at this point I was working, too, tutoring and then delivering Meals on Wheels while still homeschooling, while my husband worked what amounted to swing shifts at his job. I was obsessively drawn to arguments about food stamps online, and, feeling extraordinarily defensive, belligerently or pathetically pled my case to strangers over and over again. It wasn’t our fault. We didn’t mean it to be this way. We’re really trying. We’re not worthless, truly not!

And they hated us anyway. Oh, man. They told us everything I had been saying to myself: freeloaders. Not willing to work. What’s wrong with America today. Culture of dependency. And all the while, we went around the house with winter jackets and three pairs of socks on, because we couldn’t afford to turn the heat above 60 degrees when it was below zero out. My kids never got a new toy, never got new clothes. They learned never to ask for a popsicle or a box of crayons. We cobbled together a bizarre school curriculum out of whatever books were 25 cents at the thrift store. My husband’s glasses were taped together at the nose, we had no auto or health insurance, and I chose my driving routes according to how many hills I could coast down, to save gas. We prioritized bills according to how threatening they were.

And we were thoroughly, thoroughly stuck in a neighborhood where everyone was on parole for beating, cheating, or molesting someone else on the street. They set the actual street on fire once. I remember staring at the green catfish we kept in a tank, a leftover from our old life when we could consider buying luxuries like pets. He would swim around and around, and I would have these cartoonish, drooling fantasies about how delicious he would be, fried up in a pan with a little lemon juice. I’ve told stories about these things as if they were funny, but they were not funny.  My kids were not safe in their own yard. I would let them play in the rain puddles only after checking for used condoms.

I couldn’t stay away from comment boxes about food stamps. And every single one told us that we were shit, because we needed help buying food.

So I went out and bought a freaking steak. And pop tarts, and ice cream, and chips, and asparagus, and mangoes, and all the things that we had trained ourselves to stop even looking at. And with the cash I saved from using food stamps, I bought a giant carton of cheap beer.

Everything else in our material lives was completely awful. There was no hint of luxury anywhere, no wiggle room, nothing simple or easy. Everything was dirty and sour, and everything was a struggle. Everything we tried to accomplish was impossible because six other impossible things had to be fixed first. The one and only expansive thing was the food budget. So I bought a freaking steak, and it was so juicy and good.

Not everyone has a story like ours. But not everyone has our advantages, either: the advantage of knowing that life isn’t supposed to be like this, that fresh fruits and veggies are important, that debt isn’t normal, that work is normal, that reading books is important, that family can be depended on, that kids need structure and order, that marriage and monogamy are normal.

Not everyone knows how to maintain a car. How to show up on time.  How to file taxes, make photocopies, save paystubs, request forms, and fill out the reams and reams of paperwork necessary to keep the welfare office from cancelling your benefits — or, as happened to us one month, to keep from despairing when the welfare office makes a mistake and gives you too many benefits, and then, when they discover the mistake, it turns out you owe *them* money, which you pay off with the money you’ve been saving in the bank until you run out of money, which means you have to go back on food stamps because you can’t buy food.

It may very well be that the ratty, vulgar, freeloaders you see with their L-shaped leatherette couches, their flat screen TVs, their tattoos and yeah, their food stamp steaks are in the same position. They may be stuck. They may have been stuck for generations, and they may not even have anyone tell them that there is supposed to be more to life than getting as many benefits as you can. They may have been shrieked and sworn at, neglected and molested since they were babies. They may have lead poisoning and FAS. The may have been numbed and dimmed by being told from day one that they’re retards, so go watch cartoons and drink your orange soda, retard, and leave mommy’s boyfriend the fuck alone. They may never have seen anyone cook in an oven. They may spend their lives on waiting lists for another dank, foul, dim, narrow subsidized apartment with a yard of dirt and broken bottles. And all of this may be the only thing they can imagine, because everyone else they have ever known lives exactly the same way.

They may have tried to get ahead by getting a second or third, minimum wage job working overnight at a gas station, or sweeping floors at the tampon factory, and discovered that their food stamps are immediately cut by exactly the amount they bring home.  They may hear that they’re not going to get any more benefits until they sell their cars (because that’s a great way to find a steady job) or get rid of their phones (because teachers, employers, and the welfare office itself really appreciate not having any way to get in touch).

They may hear that they should somehow miraculously vault over a lifetime of the degradations of generational poverty and just . . . be better. Be self-sufficient. Be a completely different kind of person out of sheer will power. That if they don’t do this, they are pathetic, and have no one but themselves to blame. Look how they live! Such luxury, on the taxpayer’s dime!

And they may get their monthly benefits and think, “Screw it, I’m gonna get something I want for a change.” They may buy themselves a freaking steak. And they may not care if you think they deserve it or not.

***

UPDATE: Several people have expressed concern about our financial state. I appreciate this very much, and would like to reassure everyone that this essay describes what we went through several years ago. Thanks be to God, we have been off WIC and food stamps for several years. I wrote this essay mainly to get  it off my chest, and my husband encouraged me to publish it — so I did so assuming it would only reach my normal audience, who are already familiar with our family. If I had known this essay would get as much attention as it has, I would have made it more clear that we are doing (more or less) fine now, thanks!

Image by Michael Berch via Flickr (Creative Commons)