Author: simchajfisher

“Consider this your life’s library,” says Good Housekeeping in 50 Books Every Woman Should Read Before She Turns 40.

As a worn out, dried up, almost totally useless and indescribably ancient 41-year-old, I always get a little itchy when age 40 is presented as a drop dead lady deadline for anything the world considers useful, meaningful, or good. Here I am, a good 17 months past my expiration date, and yet my brain hasn’t completely fossilized into immobility. Also, I just recently figured out how to use eyeliner. Cut me some slack, jack!

Well, here’s their list, along with my microreviews:

“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” by Judy Blume

Yeah, I’ve read Judy Blume. She’s not a writer. She’s a third-grade-level word assembler with some masturbation sprinkled on the top. Pass.

“A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan

Never heard of it.

With the last breath in my uncomfortably exposed bosom, I agree wholeheartedly with every last word in this essay from a few years ago in the Huffington Post:

Moms, Put on That Swimsuit. The writer (who, in the picture, is not at all fat! But she feels like she is, and that’s what counts) says:

I refuse to miss my children’s high-pitched, pool-induced giggles because of my insecurities.

I refuse to let other women’s judging eyes at the pool prevent me from exposing my kids’ eyes to the wonder of the sun glittering on the water.

I refuse to let my self-image influence my children’s.

I refuse to sacrifice memories with my children because of a soft tummy.

I want them to remember twirling in the water with their mom.

I want them to remember splash fights together.

I want them to remember jumping off the edge of the pool into my arms.

I want them to remember that their mom was there, with them.

This attitude resonates with me so much more than all those body positive slogans shrieking: “YES! YOU DEFINITELY HAVE A BIKINI BODY! ADORE YOUR BODY, NO MATTER WHAT! YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL BECAUSE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY WOMAN NOT TO BE BEAUTIFUL!”

As one of my friends pointed out, kids actually do kind of notice if you’re fat. They just don’t care, because you are at the beach and the beach is supposed to be fun. So, whatcha gonna do?

More than once last year, I just felt too damn fat to put on a bathing suit. Just couldn’t do it. So I would moodily schlep to the pond, and the kids would beg me to take them in the water and do that swooshing thing, or catch them when they jump off the big rock — and I couldn’t, because I didn’t have a suit on.

They were crushed. It didn’t make any sense to them. Why would you not wear your swimsuit to the beach?

And they were right. Yeah, there are skinny, perky teenagers at the beach. Yeah, there are other moms who are frolicking around with their kids, and they’re wearing the same size bikinis as their toddlers. Not even with stretch marks! How do they even do that? And here I am, weighing more than I did when I was nine months pregnant with the youngest kid, who is now a toddler. How did I even do that?

More to the point, who cares?

This year my motto is: Feel fat? Hide in the water. Unlike when you’re lurking unhappily on the sand, no one will see you, and you can feel light and graceful for once. Why would you deny yourself that?

If you insist on wondering what other people think about how you look, just enjoy feeling gracious and generous about how skinny they feel when they behold the massive twin craters you left behind in the sand when you struggled to your feet to join the cannonball contest. What a nice person you are! You just made their day so much better, bless their size 4 hearts.

But seriously. It’s not about making excuses for not being healthy. It’s not about being mediocre. It’s not about body positivity or normalizing obesity. It’s about letting the beach do what it’s designed to do: reminding you that there’s something bigger than you.

Sitting on the sand getting gritty and trying to tug your shorts and tank top over your flabby bits while the kids beg you to jump in? That is a great way to have a lousy afternoon.  If you want to be attractive, have fun. Laugh and be happy. That’s attractive, even when you’re fat.

***

[A version of this post first appeared in 2014]

Last weekend, a dream came true.

We live on an acre and a quarter of land. To the south of our house is a little lawn and the road; to the west is a field and a grove of aspens and pines; to the north is the back yard, garden, swing set, trampoline, and a gorgeous little stream. And to the east, really really close to our living room windows, is a big ol’ apartment house.

It blocks out the sky, and it’s kind of weird that it’s jammed up so close to our property. I don’t really mind seeing it right out the window, even though their porch is peeling like crazy, there are miscellaneous broken toys, barrels, and scraps of cardboard strewn around the grass, and a mildewed couch is hulking in the weeds. Hey, live free or die. As I’ve mentioned, we ourselves haven’t graced the cover of House Beautiful lately.

However, we have this dog.

[img attachment=”105852″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”boomer” /]

This picture was taken three years ago, when he was still a little puppy.

As you can see, he loves our children very, very much. So much. So very much that, whenever our kids are threatened by outrageously dangerous things like a nice lady carrying a baby into her apartment house right outside our living room window, Mr. Protective does his best to murder them to death with the sheer murderforce of his frenzied superbark.

The barking was bad enough; but along with three sweet towheaded children, the neighbors also have a bitsy little dog-like creature of their own, and this foolish creature is bound and determined to go pee in our yard. Because he is just longing to disappear down the gullet of our dog.

The obvious answer is, of course, to put up a big fence. But unless your name is Drumpf and you’re a sociopath, you’ll realize this is prohibitively expensive.

Lo and behold: on Memorial Day, the neighbors did it for us! I’m so happy. So now, when when we look out the living room windows, we see this:

[img attachment=”105837″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 10.23.54 AM” /]

Which might as well be this:

[img attachment=”105845″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”small-easel-with-a-blank-canvas” /]

Oh, the possibilities!

So, hit me with ideas. What do we do with our side of this big, beautiful wall? Plant climbing vines? Paint regrettable murals? Establish beehives? Make a sundial? Start training one of those crazy flat fruit trees? Hire Wile E. Coyote to construct a portal to another world? I’m willing to consider anything, because the only thing cheaper than making the neighbors build a wall is talking about what do to with it.

***

Image: public domain

And so are Bert and Ernie. Do you see where I’m headed with this? That’s your warning. Don’t read this if you just want to enjoy children’s books, and don’t want to know too much about the authors.

The New Yorker has a short piece about Arnold Lobel, one of the greatest children’s authors and illustrators of all time. He’s most famous for the Frog and Toad books, but Mouse Tales, Mouse Soup, Owl At Home, and Fables are all great favorites at our house. We also love Pigericks, Ming Lo Moves the Mountain, and others.

So, it seems Lobel was gay, and he died of AIDS at age 54, in 1987. The article says he came out to his family in 1974.

Revelations like this used to disturb me very much. I only recently found out that Tomie dePaola is also gay, despite his obvious love for at least the stories and aesthetics that accrue to the Catholic Church. He’s the author of many books involving the Church indirectly or directly, and of many books about saints — “not a one of them has any proselytization in it,” he says. “I did it because they were good stories.”

So there it is. They are good stories, and he is careful only to show and tell the things that he still sees as true and universal, whether that means historically true, as with St. Benedict and Scholastica, or existentially true, as with St. Christopher — despite the fact that there are many aspects of the Church that he rejects. I admire this attitude immensely. Too often, we’re exhorted in the name of cleanliness to throw out the baby, and the bathwater, and the whole idea of tubs in general, just because there’s some aspect of one particular baby we don’t like one time.

Can we not do the same with Arnold Lobel, albeit from the other direction?

The New Yorker makes a medium-to-mildly obnoxious attempt to “proselytize” with the biography of Arnold Lobel, via the words of his daughter:

Adrianne suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are “of the same sex, and they love each other,” she told me. “It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.” In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, Lobel came out to his family as gay. “I think ‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out,” Adrianne told me. Lobel never publicly discussed a connection between the series and his sexuality, but he did comment on the ways in which personal material made its way into his stories. In a 1977 interview with the children’s-book journal The Lion and the Unicorn, he said:

You know, if an adult has an unhappy love affair, he writes about it. He exorcises it out of himself, perhaps, by writing a novel about it. Well, if I have an unhappy love affair, I have to somehow use all that pain and suffering but turn it into a work for children.

Color me skeptical. I have no doubt that the poignance and melancholy that flicker in and out of the Frog and Toad books spring from Lobel’s personal life, whether that was associated with his homosexuality or not, whether he was in the closet or not.

But was Frog and Toad “ahead of its time” for portraying friends who love each other? Not unless you want it to be. These are books about friendship, about love, about human nature, about complementarity; and they have so much more in them that is good, true, and beautiful, never mind hilarious and touching, than almost any other children’s book I’ve ever read. (And if you’ve ever tried to write an easy reader story, you’ll recognize his almost superhuman talent for using short, simple words to tell a concise and polished story with surpassing wit and charm.)

I think we can and should take a page from Tomie dePaola: if he, as a liberal gay man, can take what seems valuable to him from the wisdom and culture of the Church, and if he can decline to waste any time publicly griping about what offends him, then we, as parents and as readers, should take what seems valuable in the work of Arnold Lobel, and decline to waste any time papering over what is good and true with extraneous information about the author — which, in the context of his stories, truly is extraneous, even meaningless.

Can we not learn to do this in general, not just with children’s books?  Can we not look for the good, the true, and the beautiful and hope to find them all together, even in unexpected places? “Test all things; hold fast that which is good.” There really isn’t any other way to live.

But achieving this world-turning forgiveness is not really a matter of figuring out how to sit in that spot where you care just enough, but not too much. It’s not a matter of finding a spot where you can be attracted and repulsed in equal measure. It’s something else, something that would never work if you were dealing with physics (or even physics as I imagined it as a child). It depends on having an inexhaustible source of energy.

Read the rest at the Register.

***
Image: Norman Rockwell – Downloaded 2009-06-29 from Popular Science magazine, Vol.97, No.4 (October 1920), Bonnier Corp. New York, ISSN 0161-7370, front cover on Google Books

At the Cincinnati Zoo, a four-year-old boy snatched his hand away from his mother, spurted through the crowd, defeated four separate barriers, and then, horribly, plunged into a pit with a giant gorilla, a silverback. The gorilla picked the kid up and started to drag him away. The zoo knew that a tranquilizer would take too long to stop the 400-pound creature, and experts agree he was very likely to kill the child — so they shot the gorilla dead. The boy was rescued.

You know, or can guess, what the internet, foolish, bloodthirsty, and foul, had to say. There are already too many boys, anyway, and not enough gorillas. Darwin wins. Now let’s shoot the parents. And so on.

And then, from those who don’t openly despise children, but who still think the mother (not the father; he gets a trophy just for putting pants on) was clearly to blame:

The parents should never have brought the kid to a dangerous place like the zoo.
The only safe way is to have one adult caregiver for every child.
You should never take your eyes off your child for even one second during any activity for any reason.
She should have trained her kid better.
She should have known what he was going to do.
She should have tried harder.
She was clearly, outrageously neglectful. She was on her phone; she was overwhelmed by too many children; she loved photo ops more than her own baby.
She is clearly a horrible parent in every way. We demand that CPS investigate that home.

Angry mobs aren’t new. It’s an old, old story that fear leads to anger, especially when children are involved.

Understandably, we are all afraid — especially we parents. We love our kids so much, and the world is so fraught with peril. We want to believe that a horror like this could never happen to us. When we turn on the news, and we picture it happening to our own little, sweet ones, we always imagine what we would have done instead — conveniently forgetting that each of us, including sinless Mary and perfect Jesus, will eventually fall into improbable, dangerous situations with kids.

We would have held on tighter, we tell ourselves. We would have trained the kid better. We would have reacted sooner. We never would have been in what we would have recognized as an obviously dangerous situation in the first place, because we’re not like that. We’re good parents, and good parents have safe kids. So my kid will be safe as soon as I figure out how this mom was at fault.

We tell ourselves “I would have done better” because we want to assuage our own fear. It’s not noble, but it’s understandable.

But there is another, more sinister phenomenon playing out here . . . and I’m going to call it “the contraceptive mentality.”

Wait, come back! I know how that phrase is misused. It’s misused to mean “avoiding pregnancy without sobbing in anguish over the missed opportunity to create an immortal soul.” It’s used to mean “My sister claims she’s too poor to have a baby this year, and yet she has a working telephone.” It’s used to mean, “These folks in the pew behind us are technically obeying the Church, but I don’t like it, so I think they’re cheating, and I’m going to go ahead and call it a mortal sin.”

The phrase “contraceptive mentality” has lately been tortured into a combination of scrupulosity and nonsense. But John Paul II, when he coined the phrase, put his finger on a dreadful truth, first in Familiaris Consortio in 1981, and then in Evangelium Vitae in 1995.

If you read his words in context, you’ll see that he’s definitely not talking about NFP, and he’s not even talking only about contraception. He’s talking about an approach to human life in general. He says that the “negative values inherent in the ‘contraceptive mentality'” lead you to do terrible things. What kind of things?

Abortion, for one, when your contraception fails. The Guttmacher Institute (which is Planned Parenthood) says:

Fifty-one percent of abortion patients had used a contraceptive method in the month they got pregnant.

So if you’re already using contraception and a baby slipped through into existence anyway, chances are very good that you’ll just go ahead and shove it back, unmake it. Burn, scrape, chop, slice, crush, suck, whatever it takes — because it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. You did everything right: you used a condom, you went on the pill or the patch or got a coil or an implant or a little copper T. You were responsible. You were “safe.” You took control, so there’s no reason you should be having a baby right now. And so  . . . you don’t. Get out, baby. I have a right not to bear you, because I was in charge, and they told me I had every right not to expect you. It’s only fair.

This is what happens when we tell ourselves it’s possible to be completely in control of life. This is what we get when we wire up our relationships like an impartial power switch: on or off, and it’s up to us which way to flick it. Swipe right if you accept the existence of another human being, swipe left if you don’t. You bought the app; you’re in control.

You’re in control.

You’re in control.

This is what the world desperately wants us to believe.

And once it becomes obvious that we’re not in control — well, there are ways of dealing with that, too. Suddenly you find yourself considering the thing that once would have seemed ugly, horrendous, beneath you. Because what else can you do? Divorce. Euthanasia. Eugenics. Slavery. Ethnic cleansing. Even date rape: you believe you’re in control, and when it turns out you’re simply meeting with another human being who has other ideas, you go ahead and take what’s yours anyway, because dammit, you were supposed to be in control. It’s only fair.

You allow yourself to do these things because you told yourself you were in control of life and death, and you behaved as if you were — and then life finds a way of showing you that you are not in control. Never were.

So here you are, out of control, and suddenly your choice dwindles to only one reasonable thing: kill. Get rid of it, whatever it is, whatever you never signed up for. You choose extinction. Extermination. Do not want. Abort. Unvow. Unplug. Unmake a human being. Swipe left.

Life means risk. Life means danger. Life means hard work, and life means that you still won’t be able to anticipate everything that might happen. Weird things happen. Terrible things happen. Astonishing things happen. We fail. We betray each other, we are eaten up with disease, we fall apart. We let our little children plunge into the pit. This is what life is like. It’s not fair!

This is why it was called original sin: because the snake told us, long ago, that we could be in control, but the snake knew that we could not be in control. The snake knew that, once we realize what we have done, we will always choose to blame someone else, always choose death for someone else. It’s an inverse, a parody of the Incarnation: given the chance, having eaten the fruit, we will always refuse to carry our cross, so that others may have death eternal.

Life says, “Be it done to me.” Control says, “Do it to Julia.”

You never will be completely in control, and if you don’t make yourself accept this fact, then you are perfectly primed to snatch control anyway by unmaking another human being. And when you do it, you will not be stronger. You will not be in charge. You will just become fodder for that insatiable mouth who first told you that damnable lie — the lie that you can be in control.

***
“Adam and Eve Swipe Left” image by Natalie Coombs

When’s the last time you read the Gettysburg Address? It’s the best reading I’ve found to answer the complex emotions of Memorial Day.

In this compact speech, Lincoln looks back at the country’s founding, and then he looks around at the rubble and the blood-soaked ground of his present. He is there to honor those who have died, and to honor the families still alive, mourning.

And then, after he looks back at the past and acknowledges the present, he does something extraordinary: he looks forward. He says,

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

That’s where we are now. We’re standing on a battlefield. This election has revealed that we’re engaged in the most dreadful thing a country can do: fighting itself. In the literal Civil War, it was obvious that that’s what we were doing. Now we are being told that liberty means the freedom to choose between would-be tyrants. If my child were interested in joining the military, what would I say? Could we trust any candidate to value their lives even a little bit? Is there any grounds for hope for our country?

When we look to the past, and when we survey the present, it’s hard to do anything but grieve — for the unthinkably many lives lost, and for the honor and majesty slipping away from our nation.

But we can hear the Gettysburg Address and take courage. We can see the struggle and grief of our country, wrestling with itself as it now is, and we can look forward. We must look forward. If our ancestors could recover from the fearful, shameful bloodshed of the Civil War, then we can recover from the strife and division we’re enduring now. Those of us who still love the Constitution are the living whom Lincoln is exhorting. We’re the ones who understand that our country is faltering, it’s struggling, it’s wounded — but it’s not over yet. It is still, as Lincoln said, “unfinished work.” And when a project is still unfinished, then there is still hope.

This country is unfinished work. The battle isn’t over yet. If we are here to honor the dead, then we must look forward. We pray for the souls of the dead. We humbly thank their families. And we honor them by redoubling our faith and hope for the future of this country that we all love.

***

Image: Sunrise over Shiloh National Cemetery by Shiloh National Military Parks by (license)

This essay is a modified excerpt of a post that ran at the National Catholic Register in 2013.

[img attachment=”98244″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”whats for supper aleteia” /]

Before we launch into this week’s menu, I have a question: What do you do with a microwave? I finally bought one the other week, mainly so my husband and daughter can heat up dinner when they get home late. But other than that, we are definitely not fully exploiting it. The kids are trying really hard, kind of like this:

They are, like, putting a piece of bread in until it is hot, and then they take it out and butter it. I bought some microwave popcorn because I wanted to be loved, and it worked. But what else? Main courses, side dishes, snacks, desserts, science projects?

Here’s what we ate this week:

SATURDAY
French dip roast beef sandwiches, baked potatoes

Deli roast beef is 40 million dollars a pound, but big cuts of beef were on sale. My husband seasoned and cooked it up in some way and sliced it thin, while I fried up a bunch of mushrooms and onions. When the meat was done, I put the drippings in a pot and added a few cups of beef broth and a few glugs of Worcestershire sauce, then ground in some fresh pepper, and let it simmer for about half an hour.

We piled the meat and onions and mushrooms on onion rolls with some bottled horseradish sauce and slices of provolone, and put them under the broiler until the cheese melted, then served the sandwiches with dill pickles and the jus (which was also wonderful on the baked potatoes) on the side.

[img attachment=”104475″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”roast beef sandwich” /]

The theme of this meal was “Down South America Way.”

The marinade for the shish kebab, I made the night before, using this Filipino recipe. I forget which ingredient did it, but at some point, a nice inert bowl of marinade (garlic, soy sauce, lime juice, ketchup, ginger ale, brown sugar, sea salt, and pepper) turns into a third grade science fair foaming volcano. Whoopee! So use a bigger bowl than you think you need.

We were too exhausted to drag the tarp of the grill, so I put the shish kebabs under the broiler indoors. The flavor was nice, but the meat was dry. Boo. Yes, I soaked the skewers in water beforehand.

I guess the friend plantain recipe I used is Puerto Rican style. Boy, that does not . . . sound right. I mean, I know you can say that, but what do I call it?

I had green plantains, so I sliced them into thick sections, fried them in a few inches of medium-hot oil, fished them out, squashed them flat, and then fried them some more until they were crisp. I was delighted to see that the hot oil transformed them from a dull greenish gray to a crazy bright, almost neon yellow.

[img attachment=”104476″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”fried plantains frying” /]

I sprinkled them with sea salt, and the kids dipped them in ketchup. They were quite starchy, like a cross between potato and butternut squash, but they were tasty. Not sure if I will make them again, but at least now I know what they taste like.

I also had this giant papaya, which turned out to be not quite ripe. Gorgeous, though.

[img attachment=”104477″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”papaya split” /]

Geesh, look at that. Georgia O’Keefe, call your office! I call this one “Sappho and a Half-o.”

[img attachment=”104479″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”papaya seedless” /]

The whole meal was a little weird, but very bright and pretty.

[img attachment=”104482″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”pork shishkebab fried plantains” /]

***

MONDAY
French toast casserole, sausages

All the sammiches we’ve been having lately means there’s tons of old bread, so out comes the french toast casserole recipe again. Somehow I still made way too much egg mixture, which gave it a kind of baked custard taste. No complaints from me.

***

TUESDAY
Hamburgers, chips, sautéed asparagus

This is the first time I’ve sautéed asparagus, rather than steaming it. I just used olive oil, nothing else. Excellent! Definitely using this method from now on.

***

WEDNESDAY
Chicken Not-So Nachos, guacamole

Wednesday really hammered home how important it is to do at least a little bit of meal prep early in the day. Wednesday was here to tell me, “Do not start cooking dinner at 5:30, and do not take a long break in between to harangue the kids about what kind of person it makes you to just throw boxes in the corner, rather than breaking them down and putting them in the basket. This room is my work space, do you understand? I know you don’t think twice about it when I put a hot meal in front of you every day, but at least your own self-interest should dictate that you’d get your food faster if I didn’t have to be wading through garbage in my work space! and so on.”

You’re thinking, “She’s lost track of her quotation marks, there,” but I haven’t.

And finally, Wednesday gave me  . . . Rasputin Chicken.

Let me back up. I had this idea of poaching chicken thighs, shredding them in the standing mixer, and making some nice nacho trays. Instead, I discovered that Wednesday was only 11 minutes along, and as soon as I finished putting on deodorant, it was time to make dinner. I somehow thought it would be faster to roll the chicken in seasoning and fry them. After a good 25 minutes of frying some not-very-large thighs, I realized that I had  . . . Rasputin Chicken, which is chicken that will.not.cook. You fry it, you bake it, you broil it, you crank up the heat and bake it some more, you drown it, you shoot it, you douse it with water and stir it with a stick, and look at that! The joints are still all bloody.

Finally, after wading through garbage and pausing to harangue the kids, you drag the evil chicken out onto a tray, throw some cold, bagged cheese at your hangdog family, and everyone sits around gnawing at the bones and nervously making puns about not-so-nachos.

And I made some terrible, salty guacamole.

Hey, screw you, Wednesday.

***

THURSDAY
Pizza

I’m actually writing this on Thursday, and haven’t made the pizzas yet. Like Mr. Incredible, I’ve still got time! I just need to learn to be a little more . . . flexible.

***

FRIDAY
Pigsnetti

***

It occurs to me that someone is surely going to say, “Why didn’t you just put the silly chicken that wouldn’t cook into the microwave?” There is a good reason for that. The reason is that it did not occur to me until this very moment. Dammit.

Maybe the phrase “self care” has a bit of an odious pop psych stink about it; but it’s really just a form of humility, which means treating yourself like you’re no more and no less precious to God than anyone else.  That’s not only good and just for you, it’s good and just for everyone you love.

Read the rest at the Register.

***

Image via Pexels