There's Beauty in the Bellow

My son is set to turn 2 before the end of the year. He's developed rapidly over the last few months after several slower-paced months of growth since he started walking in February. It really is marvelous that one's body can knit together another human being totally apart from one's own willpower. But amidst the awe, I've only seen one person acknowledge that bearing a child subtly changes a mother. (I don't remember whom, unfortunately.) Not just the physical changes or that a child "made me a mother" (a sentiment I don't embrace). Childbearing is a surrendering. Perhaps that's why so many fight against motherhood and why Shulamith Firestone believed that only surrogacy -- to a machine -- could make the sexes equal. Childbearing is a superpower too, but it is more of a surrendering. Sleep and sleeping positions, range of motion, energy, appetites, activities, perceptions of this or that body part, and time have all been circumscribed by a bein...

I won a Persian rug off eBay. It arrived a week before Hurricane Michael hit the Florida coast -- only 50 miles east of us. As I cleaned up our little house, two truths lay before me in tension. The first is simply this: do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust and mold destroy, where thieves break in and steal, and where hurricanes ravage. The second is that the good man lays up an inheritance for his children's children. My momma has a Persian rug that her grandparents bought through the Sears and Roebuck catalogue when they married. She remembers dancing on that rug as a child, and I danced on that rug ... picking out step patterns by choosing which geometric element to step on next. So I bought a rug from the same region in hopes that my children and grandchildren will dance on it too. The rug by itself might not be that valuable. But more significantly, I hope that it becomes a tangible reminder of love. My paternal grandmother, although not a...

We recently watched a TEDx presentation on the stigma attributed to stay-at-home moms. The presenter pointed out the absurdity of defining someone almost exclusively by their place of work. (We don't refer to the stay-at-desk accountant, for example.) I have had a myriad of doctors appointments, what with all the usual yearly or half-yearly visits to the dentist, eye doctor, neurologist, and hormone specialist, finding a new neurologist with the retirement of my previous one, accompanying my husband to his appointments as an extra pair of ears, and with expecting another baby. (YAY!) To all of these (except the dentist --just doesn't work), I've brought my busy and curious toddler son. What better way to let the world know that you are a SAHM (as the acronym goes) and judge how you use that time, than to bring your child to a doctor's appointment. A "good" child would sit quietly in a corner with the toys selected for or by him. I'm pretty sure our boy...

Let's talk about virginity. #eyeroll I don't like our language of "losing" one's virginity. Rarely does one unintentionally misplace one's virginity. Just saying. If one truly cannot remember the circumstances of "losing" their virginity, then very probably those circumstances were lamentable, if not horrific. Usually, virginity is given . Maybe unwillingly, maybe carelessly in haste, perhaps without regard to deservingness of the recipient. In hookup culture, virginity is a liability to be dropped off in the nearest gutter. In this case, it's thrown away, but it wasn't misplaced. Optimally, one's virginity is given to someone who values it -- but cherishes the giver far more than the virginity itself. It is supposed to be given away , not kept in the original packaging with the tags still attached. This is what chastity is. Appropriate celibacy and appropriate hedonism. The gift of virginity isn't an heirloom vase to be kept ...

The media outlets featured an early foray into activism by the Duchess of Sussex, then a ten-ish year old Meghan Markle. She called out a company for advertising dish soap to women. The company in question acquiesced and changed its campaign language to "millions of people ." Fair point: women aren't the only ones who wash dishes. In fact, humans aren't the only ones who use dish soap either. One brand advertises that its users include needy marine life. I have an uneasy relationship with "Activism". It seems too close to "lobbyist." Moreover, it seems synonymous with "busybody." I do fervently believe in being active  and actively useful . Maybe some might deem "useful" as demeaning but I would retort: not nearly as demeaning as use- less . But I should hope that one's activity would result in the noise of industry and not the noise of scolding. At any rate, that's an aside and I know that the Duchess intends, wit...

While bagging for one of my fellow cashiers last week, we met a very interesting person. She is the mother of Patrick Warburton and an abstinence advocate and activist, beautiful, elegant, and passionate. She told us that she is always looking for young people to talk about abstinence and encourage parents to talk to their children: "they'll listen to you, they won't listen to me." But as a cashier in a grocery store, communication in families is frequently rude, ungracious, impatient and tense in very small matters like "what are we doing for dinner?" "did you get everything on the shopping list?" If grace and courtesy have become alienated from everyday discourse, why should it be any better in more serious matters? If I did do a talk for Ms. Warburton, I could say "Talk to your kids," but I'd also have to say, "Go to church, get right with God, improve your communication with God, else why should they listen to you?" Jus...

Blogger has been acting impossible and refusing to let me copy and paste. But hopefully this link will take. Before steam starts coming out. Nancy Wilson just gave a commencement address to a Christian school not too far away from me--the class was all girls. And she describes the kind of person I've been wanting to become.

From Pastor Wilson's Twitter: "Never forget that the wife is not the head, the husband is. This means the wife is higher than she is--she is the crown."

Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with one of the falsest first lines of literature; he writes that "happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." With novels and memoirs full of dysfunctional families of perverse individuals, perhaps we are congratulating ourselves in our unhappiness that at least we are not like those boring happy folks. But perversion, being parasitical, is capable of only so many permutations. Every happy family has found its own way of creating an organic being from a few vagrant individuals. "Dysfunctional family" must be a cliche by now. The "Books" section of The New York Times is probably the most boring part of the paper after "U.S. News." But I love invites to family dinners, to watch the members speak to, and listen to them speak of, one another, to see their different methods of life. Last night, I listened to a wife talk about her husband's annual spring itch to drive to Washing...

says a writing teacher to his students. Let's see. Two weddings. Two funerals (and another one coming this week). My brother getting ready to leave home; for us, a complicated process. Many friends moving away. Difficulty finding a job (along with plenty of my peers). Biblical Horizons conference. A ridiculous number of engagements. A family reunion. Grandfather with cancer. His wife with a brain hemorrhage . A wrongful arrest. A suicide. Real life is not wished, it is lived; stories and novels, whose subject is human beings in relationship with experience to undergo, make their own difficult way, struggle toward their own relationships. Instead of fairy immunity to change, there is the vulnerability of human imperfection caught up in human emotion, and so there is growth, there is crisis, there is fulfillment, there is decay. Life moves toward death. The novel's progress is one of causality, and with that comes suspense. Suspense is a necessity in a novel because it is a mai...

Well, here's some of my culinary output in the last two months or so. Baked ricotta, with lemon and black pepper. Good on bread. French lentils: beautiful itty bitty ones, mottled grey and green and even a little blue. Not the average drab dust-colored ones. I cooked them with caramalized red onions and lots of red wine, and I think cumin. They turned out marvelous, simultaneously sweet and savory. So good! Fried egg in a corn tortilla, simmered black beans from the NY Times recipe (now one of my favorite recipes---you must never never never buy canned beans again!), avocado, and paprika sprinkled over top. I love paprika; it's now one of my favorite spices, up there with ginger and cumin and white pepper. Homemade pizza with all the works. My dad especially liked this one. I think it was the little bit of sugar in the Penzey's pizza seasoning. (Usually I add the salt before I remember the pizza seasoning; and since the pizza seasoning already has salt in it, I forego it...

Passing one of the local churches here in South Carolina, the signboard says "Is it safe to die?" I don't know--I never thought of whether death is "safe" or not. And also, will the Church ever reach a point where she can emphasize the resurrection, ascension, victory and reign of Christ over the passion and crucifixion? Of course, we can only speak of the humiliation of the Christ with such complacency because of His triumph. But we also need to work harder at realizing what His kingdom should look like and how we are to emulate it. My music professor tells us we should all be interested in singing because we are going to spend eternity singing and so why not start now? My grandfather is listening to various opera arias--Madame Butterfly and Figaro's pompous trilling incredible ode to himself in the Barber of Seville.

In the last year or two, I've taken up reading recipes for enjoyment. Recipes are short, light reading, not at all taxing to the intellect, and they can appease one's creative urges when there is no time to fulfill one's creative urges. At any rate, all this week, some insistent little region in my brain has been telegraphing me chocolate and molasses , chocolate and molasses , chocolate and molasses . Surely, this is a rather unusual marriage, thought I, and it might take some convincing with others, but I think, I really think, that those two rather strong personalities could work together. Not in equal proportions, but rather that biting into a molasses cookie with a chocolate note, or a chocolate cookie with a molasses note, the passerby would have to stop and ask What was that?! Lo, and behold, it appears from scrounging around the dregs of the internet that chocolate and molasses is a classic Dutch combination. Maybe that genetic .32% Dutchness somehow communicates t...