For every story about clueless, entitled parents allowing their unruly brats to terrorize the ushers and throw jelly beans at the pastor, there are ten stories about dour parishioners sending exhausted parents a very clear message: that the Church has no place for families, and that God can only be worshipped in tomblike silence. And guess what? Parents get the message, and they and their kids leave for good. Tomblike indeed.
So. I suppose you’ll go ahead and tell your sad stories in the comments section anyway, but it won’t be a good use of your time. I’ve been a Catholic all my life, and I’ve seen it all. I’ve been annoyed and outraged and scandalized at the things some parents let their kids (and themselves) do at Mass. Some people really do behave badly. It happens.
One of my daughters turned ten last week. She is a girl of sophisticated tastes, so here’s a treat we came up with together: cookies topped with cheesecake dip topped with chocolate-covered strawberries. Why? Because I’m not pregnant, and actually have a bit of energy for nonsense like this!
We made 36 strawberry bites*, and is a nice little, no-bake, kid-friendly, cheer-you-up project (or would have been, if I hadn’t been so crabby from trying to cut down on sugar after a week-long binge) that requires almost no cooking skill.
When working in the kitchen with kids, I recommend deciding ahead of time if your main goal is to end up with tasty, attractive food, or to let the kids have fun. They do not go together. You have to pick one or the other. In this case, I did part myself, and didn’t let the kids help, and then turned the kitchen over to them, went in the other room, and plugged my ears.
*I’m sorry, I hate that word “bite” to describe a food. It shows a lack of respect for the parts of speech, and the vagueness of it makes it sound like there is something to hide. But I don’t know what else to call these food items, other than maybe “treats” or “desserts.” And I do recommend biting them, so there.
You will need:
36 sandwich cookies (like Oreos) – or brownies, or graham cracker crust, or phyllo dough, or whatever you want
3 packages of cream cheese
10 oz. sour cream
confectioner’s sugar to taste (1/2 cup or more)
2 tsp. vanilla
36 strawberries
16 oz semisweet chocolate chips
2 Tbs shortening
Chocolate-covered strawberries:
Cover a pan with wax paper.
Wash the strawberries and dry them thoroughly (the chocolate won’t stick to wet things).
In a double boiler, melt the chocolate chips and the shortening, and stir until it’s smooth. You can use just chocolate, but the shortening makes the chocolate smoother, and it dries harder.
Dip each strawberry in the melted chocolate and set them on the wax paper-covered pans.
Chill strawberries for 20 minutes or more until the chocolate is hardened.
Cream cheese topping:
Using an electric mixer, blend together the cream cheese, sour cream, confectioner’s sugar, and vanilla until smooth.
Then:
Put cookies in cupcake papers, and put a dollop of cream cheese mixture on top of each cookie. Top each one with a chocolate-covered strawberry.
And just like that, you have a Wednesday post. These would actually work well for a Valentine’s day treat, too.
with every additional kid born, the other siblings are more likely to suffer from lower cognitive abilities and more behavioral issues, and have worse outcomes later in life.
As the mother of a tenth child — a child who started walking at seven months, could say four words at 8 months, and who can beat the pants off her older siblings on Just Dance (as long as “It’s Raining Men”) — I have the luxury of sniggering at this article. I know that my older kids had a different experience from my younger kids, and that life changes for everyone when a baby is born . . . and that there is some good and some bad in their life because of our large family size.
That’s what life is like: some good and some bad. If we’re holding out for an experience that is 100% unmixed good, I suggest finding a comfy chair, because it’s going to be a long wait.
But what if you’re a young parent, just starting out, and you’re feeling unnerved? Should you consider limiting your family size based on the findings in this study?
Well, even my untrained brain can spot tons of red flags in this article. Please note that I’m only responding to the article’s presentation of the study, and not to the study itself. The media notoriously distorts scientific findings beyond recognition; but it’s the article that’s getting all the media attention, and people are responding to it, so I will, too.
I’ll just skim my way down the article, and make comments as I go.
The study was done by economists, but it’s being presented as a reliable measure of quality of life. Economists also did a study that, as it was reported, implied that it doesn’t really matter if you put kids in car seats. This is not because economists are liars or monsters, but because economists see the world like economists, ask the kind of questions that economists ask, and draw the kind of conclusions that economists draw. They are looking, in short, at numbers, and assuming that if you connect those dots, you’ll get a picture that looks like actual life. Which it does not.
The article says:
The paper builds on older research that claims that families face a trade-off between the quantity of kids they have and the “quality” of each kid — an awkward term that refers to things like how much education the child receives, whether they are employed when they grow up, and whether they end up with a criminal record. The research also supports now-popular ideas about early childhood development, that the time and resources that parents devote to young kids have lifelong impacts.
“How much education the child receives” — What does this mean? Graduating vs. not graduating high school? College vs. no college? Or does it mean “Small families have the time and money for Gymboree class and taking violin lessons, but big families just spend time bouncing off each other in the living room and singing songs”?
Also, is more education an unqualified positive? I want my kids to go to college and grad school if that’s what they’re called to; but I won’t consider them doomed if they opt out and end up happy and successful anyway. Families with a few children are probably more likely aggressively focus on their children “doing it right” with college and prestigious careers; families with more kids are probably more likely to realize that there are plenty of ways to be happy and successful. So the lower push to “succeed” may be a result of larger family size, but that may not be a bad thing.
“Whether they are employed when they grow up” — Is employment an unqualified positive? I know women (and some men) who are eminently employable, but they’ve decided to be stay-at-home parents for the time being. In this study, parents like that would be called “less successful” compared to someone who’s employed in a menial, unpleasant job.
“Time and resources that parents devote to young kids have lifelong impacts” — Does it compare time and resources that come directly from parents to time and resources that come from older siblings, or does it assume that a busy parent = a neglected kid (i.e., only parents can provide what kids need)? The article mentions “how often parents read to children or help them with their homework.” When I had few kids, I read to them once or twice a day. Now that I have many literate kids, I read out loud most days, and the older kids also read out loud once or twice a day, sometimes while I’m still sleeping in the morning, or after we’ve put them to bed. The same goes for homework: the older kids get a kick out of showing off their prowess. Parents aren’t the only source of “time and resources.”
They also measured “the resources (including money, books, clothes, etc.) [the parents] devoted to each child.” Well, I will admit that I don’t buy an entire new library or an entire new wardrobe for every child. They pass clothes down, and they share books. Guilty as charged.
When the article compares small families with large families, who is included in the “large family” category? “Large families” includes families like mine, with two married, monogamous, well-educated, stable, committed parents who have similar goals for childrearing.
It also includes single parents.
It also includes blended families.
It also includes families with many siblings and many different fathers.
Some of these “large families” may mean there are four or more parents involved, who may or may not agree on how to raise children, and where kids may be suffering from the demanding effects of having to split time between households, or having to deal with the divorce or living with kids they’re not related to, or having only one parent.
The only thing all these families have in common is lots of children, but the actual home life may vary widely and significantly.
Does it include families who have adopted several kids with special needs? Many large families I know are large because they include biological and adopted children; and many of the adopted children have been added to the family specifically because they have special needs. Are these kids showing up as “not succeeding” due to family size, when they may not even have been alive if they hadn’t been adopted in a family that is happy to have plenty of kids under one roof?
Some of the bad effects the study uncovered are truly worrisome: more teen pregnancy, more criminal behavior.
Here comes my biggest question of all: does the study or the article confuse correlation with causation?
There may indeed be a link between large families and worrisome outcomes for children. But is the large size causing the worrisome outcome, or is it just that certain types of parents tend to both have lots of children and raise their children in a less-optimal way?
People with lower socio-economic standards tend to have more children, and those parents tend to raise kids with more problems, because duh. If those same less-well-educated parents had few children, would those few children suffer the same disadvantages?
Correlation does not equal causation. This phrase ought to be engraved on the keyboard of every writer who reports on any study of any kind. It’s so basic, yet so often ignored.
Here’s the funny thing: On the same day that the “kids from large families are doomed” article started popping up on my Facebook feed, Facebook suggested I check out a “memory,” an article I posted several years ago on this date. It was a Slate article: It’s Better to Be Raised By a Single Mom: Kids Get That Magical Quality: Grit.
It’s a personal essay by a single mom, who argues that, while it’s true her kids have many disadvantages because they have no dad in the home, they are actually going to come out ahead because of those disadvantages. They learn, she says, teamwork, independence, the value of a dollar, the value of work, and “the power of the negative example.” She says:
We are surrounded by huge homes and the other accouterments of wealth. Kids here, and in similar bubbles of affluence, find gift-wrapped cars in the driveway when they turn 16, as well as one of the greatest predictors of success: support. In the recently published How Children Succeed, author Paul Tough argues that rich kids get the encouragement and poor ones get the grit, and he claims that one without the other gets no one very far … I would maintain that children with a single parent get the winning combination.
Really, all she’s saying is that she’s been dealt a crap hand, and she’s tried hard to turn it into something good. And I’m not going to argue with her. That’s a great way to approach parenting, and one which every single parent can imitate in one way or another.
The fascinating part was that the essay was published in response to a study that said that children of single parents fared worse than children of married couples — and Slate magazine was soliciting “testimonies on why being raised by a single mother, or being a single mother, has its benefits and might even be better than having both parents around.”
At the time, I was irritated. “Humph,” I thought. “As soon as science says something that the progressives don’t like, they make this naked bid for emotional testimony and call that a rebuttal. Shameful.” But now I think that it was actually a reasonable response. The truth is, statistics almost never give us a clear, accurate, and comprehensive picture of what real life is like, but personal stories can give us a better idea of what is possible, or of what is likely, or at least of how complicated life can be.
It’s not just that there are exceptions to whatever rule a study seems to show; it’s that people aren’t numbers, and there is no such thing as following a magic formula that will guarantee the outcome you want in life.
As anyone with eyes can see, there are ways you can increase your odds of raising happy, successful kids (building and maintaining a stable marriage, for instance); but there’s no secret formula to guarantee that your kids will turn out well, and anyone who says there is is probably trying to sell a book to help for their own kids’ therapy and child support.
So don’t sweat the studies. Use your common sense, listen to the advice and follow the example of people who seem wise and experienced, and don’t let the latest social media headlines fool you into thinking they know something you don’t.
In conclusion, here is Corrie, surrounded by the siblings she’s dragging down:
Shh, don’t tell them they’re doomed! They think she’s just what we needed at our house.
There was a man who could read people’s souls, and who would sometimes deliver messages from God. It sounds fishy, but if you saw his face, especially his eyes, you’d believe it. For some reason, he visited my house when I was a teenager. When I came in the room, his dark eyes pooled with pity, and he asked, “Is there anything you would like to ask?” There wasn’t. I was on an ugly, dire path, and I knew it, but I wasn’t ready to turn around yet. So I walked out of the room. Fled, really. I could see that he was very close to God, and I couldn’t stand being that close to him.
It is not enough, you see, to recognize the presence of God. You can identify holiness, but it won’t do you any good if you’ve been living in a way that doesn’t prepare you to endure it.
Herod, for instance, recognized the Christ. Or at least he was well-versed enough in scripture to know that something big was coming, something that could change the world. But when he found Him, his whole thought was to extinguish that light, because it was a threat. Not to be endured.
The magi, on the other hand, also found and identified the Child Jesus, and had (what an understatement!) a different response. Before they ever appeared in the Gospel, they had spent years studying scripture and anticipating the arrival of the Savior. But their studies clearly brought them beyond some academic knowledge of the coming king. Isaiah spoke of glory and brilliance, a “Hero God” — and yet when the magi found Him in Bethlehem, just another poor baby Jew, they still knew who He was — and they rejoiced, and adored, and gloried in His light.
It’s not enough to identify God when you find Him. It won’t do you any good unless you’ve been living in a way that makes you ready to want salvation.
Several years ago, I had a little glimpse of Jesus. He was in the form of another man, someone who served God with every moment of his life. When I walked into the room, he was on his knees on the floor, binding the ankle of a boy who had hurt his foot. The boy was not grateful, not at all. He sulked and pitied himself, but the man radiated love. His posture was a living expression of love. The room shone.
This time, when I saw holiness, I didn’t run away. I stayed and watched, because the light of charity that shone in that room had something to say to me: “Be like this.”
In the first reading at the Mass of the Epiphany, Isaiah says:
Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem! Your light has come, the glory of the Lord shines upon you. … Nations shall walk by your light, and kings by your shining radiance.
This is a light that may reveal all kinds of things. It’s not enough for those “nations” (and we are the nations) to recognize and identify God. It’s not enough to be able to realize what holiness is when we see it.
How are we preparing, before that light appears? The magi knew it was coming, and they prepared themselves to welcome and adore it. Herod knew it was coming, and he made plans to extinguish it. Herod acted like exactly like Herod when His savior appeared, and so will we act exactly like ourselves when we meet God.
Just being in His light will not be enough. If we live like Herod, we will respond to Him like Herod, with fear, with loathing. We will see the light, and we will want to put it out.
When the glory of the Lord comes to shine upon you, what will that light reveal?
Last Friday was, of course, Christmas, so I skipped the food post. I then spent the next seven days doing little else besides eating; but I didn’t try a lot of new recipes or (YOU’RE WELCOME) take a lot of pictures. So I thought I’d start the new year with a little round-up of the most successful recipes from this series so far.
But first, I do have one new one to share: Mexican braised beef, which my sister Sarah made for us yesterday:
[img attachment=”86430″ align=”alignnone” size=”medium” alt=”food blog braised beef” /]
Oh, my stars and garters, this is some very fine beef. We just rolled it up in tortillas with some lettuce and sour cream, and it was divine. Medium spicy, maximum savory, tons of flavor. We’ll be adding this to the rotation.
Oh, the youth of the heart, and the dew in the morning. You wake, and they’ve left you with this miserable, misbegotten, hope-squandering, pointless excuse for a sandwich:
[img attachment=”86431″ align=”alignnone” size=”medium” alt=”food blog monte cristo” /]
An immensely flattering photo, believe me. The “double crunch” crust tasted like the french toast chef had come back to work too early and should have spent another week convalescing; and the inside was just cheese and chiles, hoop de doo. I was way more disappointed than anyone should be over a sandwich, but there it is.
Okay, on to the good recipes! Here are the best new recipes I discovered in 2015 — plus some old recipes that are staying on the list because we’re not tired of them yet:
No, really! Still, I am better than I used to be; and, as I always tell my kids, you can’t ask for more than progress. Here are a few things that help me from behaving too shamefully when discussing important topics (especially religious ones) online:
Remember there’s a person on the other end. When things get intense, I sometimes mention something personal to bring the conversation back to a human level: Instead of “I’ve wasted enough time with you, thickhead,” try “Gotta go throw that meatloaf in the oven now.” Someone else is likely to say, “Hey, we’re having meatloaf, too!” and everyone suddenly remembers that, if we were sitting around the kitchen and smelling meatloaf cooking, we wouldn’t be talking to each other so nastily (even if the other person really is a thickhead).
“Be gentle, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” You’ve arrived at your point of view through pure intellect, but they’ve arrived at theirs through pure malice or stupidity, right? Yeah, probably not. People who disagree with you are using their brains, but also their experience—which may have been nothing like yours. We are all kind of a mess inside, and won’t see ourselves or anyone else clearly until the Second Coming. Remember that there is no point of view in a vacuum: we all have baggage, and when someone disagrees with you, it may have a lot more to do with that baggage than it does with your idea or with you personally.
Pray before you comment. Not, “God almighty, enlighten these idiots through the workings of my keyboard,” but “Lord, bless Mr. Troll.” It couldn’t hurt, right? Or you could test out the idea, “I am pleasing God by writing the following,” and see if that changes your tone at all. If you’re unwilling to think about God being present while you write, that is a bad sign. The worst sign, in fact.
Fake it till you make it. It may be too hard to be civil for the sake of blindingly pure Christian caritas, so maybe just do it to make the next five seconds on earth more pleasant. If you can’t actually be a good person with your whole heart, the next best thing is to play one online. It’s okay to be angry, to acknowledge to yourself that you’re angry, and then speak as if you’re not angry. It’s pretty liberating, actually. Occasionally, the person who lashed out at you, expecting you to respond in kind, will collapse and apologize in the face of kindness. And even better, speaking like a decent person may actually engender decency within you. At very least, you’ll have refused to contribute to the overall horribleness of the world this one time.
Apologize when you’re wrong, and do it like a Catholic: in the active voice. If you’ve hurt someone, intentionally or not, then say you’re sorry for what you did—not “I’m sorry your poor widdle feelings got poked with the sharpness of my intellect.” If you got really carried away, a follow-up by personal email can make a big difference next time you meet online. If the other guy refuses to respond with his own apology, it’s his problem on his conscience, not yours.
Remember that the fate of the Church, the country, the future of the arts, the future of education, or the future of Western civilization in general does not rest on your shoulders. No matter how important the topic of conversation, it’s just a conversation, and your first obligation is to the people physically around you. Are you getting shaky? Have you heard yourself shriek, “Shut up, shut up, I’m defending Communion on the tongue!!!” Has your home shown up on Drudge with the headline “House of Filth?” If so, then whatever you lose by losing the argument is not as important as what you will gain by walking away.
Know when to go. If you’ve made your point as clearly as you can several times, and people still don’t agree with you, then there are three possible reasons: (a) you’re wrong; (b) you’re right, but not a good explainer; or (c) you’re right and eloquent, but this audience simply won’t hear you. In any case, it’s time to move along.
When in doubt, ask! Ask the recipient, or ask the person who facilitates donations. The one thing poor people feel very keenly is that no one asks them. The only real mistake we can make is to decide it’s too complicated, and to do nothing.
We finally got some snow on the East coast.We were hoping to get out the sleds for Christmas vacation, but what’s covering the ground is more of an icy, grainy, slush, not great for coasting. So I’m wracking my brains to recall more family games, besides the ones I suggested for Thanksgiving gatherings. Here’s what we’ve been doing:
Caption This
My sister Abby (who may have invented this game, I’m not sure) describes it like this:
“One person writes a sentence or phrase and hands the paper to the next person. He illustrates it, and then folds the paper so only his illustration is showing, and passes it to the next person. He writes a caption for the illustration, and then folds the paper so only his caption is showing, and passes it to the next person, who illustrates the caption, and so on. The round ends with a caption at the bottom of the page. Then you compare the original phrase with the final caption.”
It’s sort of like Telephone, but with words and pictures. This game works the best if you have lots of people playing, and it’s actually more fun if the people involved are not great artists. We also made it zippier by making a thirty-second limit before you have to pass the paper along.
I wish I had a sample to show you, but I may have been filling some time this week by shrieking, “We need to get this place cleaned up! I cannot live like this! Get up, get up, we need to throw all this stuff away!” So I think we threw them away.
One-Word Round Robin Stories
In a standard round robin story, each player contributes several sentences before passing the plot along to the next person. In this version, each person contributes only one word. So you might end up with an opening sentence like this:
“One day, four miserable Russians decided to excavate their uncle’s bedroom floor, and they found something TERRIFYING.”
This works best when you play with siblings or people who know each other’s thought patterns well, and some element of telepathy helps to keep the sentences afloat.
Werewolf
Werewolf is an actual store-bought game with cards that one kid got for Christmas (we have the deluxe edition), and it’s been a big hit. The play is simple, but it’s the psychological aspect that makes it entertaining.
I’m not great at explaining games, but here’s the general idea: The premise is that, when night falls in the village, a werewolf comes out and kills someone; and everyone else has to figure out who the werewolf is and what to do about it. Everyone closes his eyes, and the leader instructs one person at a time to wake up, take a look at the card that reveals his role (werewolf, bodyguard, witch, villager, etc.), and then go back to sleep. There are several rounds of play, in which the players anonymously decide to kill, save, protect, or silence each other.
[img attachment=”86257″ align=”alignnone” size=”medium” alt=”Sometimes the werewolf is the last person you’d suspect” caption=”Sometimes the werewolf is the last person you’d suspect” /]
Then everyone has to vote on whom to lynch. Players are eliminated one at a time, and it becomes more and more evident who is killing everyone, who is being framed, and who is lying through their teeth (and, in my case, who forgot the rules and accidentally blabbed too much information).
[img attachment=”86258″ align=”alignnone” size=”medium” alt=”Sometimes they are a little too eager to lynch each other.” caption=”Sometimes they are a little too eager to lynch each other.” /]
Depending on your family dynamics, you may not want to play more than a few rounds of this game! It tends to bring everyone’s core personality front and center.
And oh yes, I do have “Where, oh werewolf” stuck in my head 24/7 now.
***
So, what are you doing over Christmas break, if you’ve got one? Any games you can suggest for us? Because night cometh, and I may have given birth to more than one werewolf . . .
Unpopular opinion time! “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” isn’t a rape song. It’s not even a rapey song. It’s a seduction song, and we used to know the difference between seduction and rape, before we elevated consent to the highest good.
For the record, I don’t even especially like the original song. It’s okay, as far as cutesy duets go. It does an adequate job of capturing a familiar relationship between a man and a woman. As with any song, you can make it come across as creepy and criminal; but you can also make it come across as it was originally intended: as playful. The couple is literally playing a game, a very old one, where the man wants what he wants, and the woman wants it too, but it’s more fun for both of them when he has to work for it a little bit. It’s a song about persuasion. That’s what seduction is, and that’s what makes the song interesting: the tension. If there is no tension, there is no song.
Here are the full lyrics. The woman’s lines are in parenthesis. If you’re convinced this song is a rape song, please do read through the lyrics before you read the rest of this post!
You’ll note that the only protests the woman makes are that her reputation might be soiled. She doesn’t say that she wants to go, only that she should. This is because . . . I’m dying a little inside because I actually have to say it . . . she actually wants to stay. As women often do, when they are already in a relationship with a man they are attracted to and with whom they have been spending a romantic evening, and whom they have been telling repeatedly that they are actually interested in staying.
Most critics get hung up on the line, “Say, what’s in this drink?” The assumption is that he’s slipped a drug into her cocktail (or, occasionally, that he’s spiked her virgin drink with alcohol). Okay. Or maybe, at the end of an evening of dancing and drinking, he’s added a little more liquor than she’s expecting. Or maybe he hasn’t done anything, other than give her the “half a drink more” she just asked for, and she’s playfully making an excuse for what she’s about to do: Whoo, what’s in this drink? I’m acting all silly, but it can’t be my fault, mercy me! This was a standard trope of that era. Anytime something weird goes on, you blame the bottle.
Again: there is no indication, unless you take that one line out of context, that there is anything sinister going on. There is overwhelming evidence, if you listen to the whole song, that it’s a song about a pleasurable interplay between the sexes.
Heck, if we’re going to give this song the darkest possible reading, and single out one line while ignoring the context, why not call it the False Rape Accusation song? After all, the woman says, “At least I’m gonna say that I tried!” You see? She’s calculating a malicious plan to claim that she didn’t give consent, so that when her family and neighbors look askance at her for spending the night, she can make it seem like it was against her will!
Humbug. This is what happens when we’re all trained to see consent as the highest good. This is what happens when we’re trained to ignore context. People who can’t tell the difference between persuasion and force are people who have forgotten why consent is so important.
Consent isn’t valuable in itself. If it were, then it would be a holy and solemn moment when we check the “I agree” box when signing onto free WiFi at Dunkin’ Donuts. Consent is only a good thing because it’s in service to other things — higher things with intrinsic value, such as fidelity, free will, self sacrifice, respect, happiness, integrity, and . . . love. These are all things that you can’t have unless you have consent.
But when all you look for is consent, and you ignore the context, you get two human beings who see each other in rigid roles — business partners with black and white contractual obligations. In short, you have what modern people say they despise about the bad old days: love as a business arrangement.
My friends, I firmly believe there is such a thing as rape culture. When we wink and smirk and say, “Boys will be boys,” we degrade both women and men, and we teach women that they have a duty to give men whatever they want so they’re not a tease or a downer. We teach men that they can’t control themselves. We teach women that they can’t really say no, and that if they do, they’ll be scoffed at or blamed or disbelieved. When we tell the world that “no means maybe,” we’re setting the stage for rape.
But is this song doing that? Or is it just a little vignette of that deliciously warm in-between place, where reasonable people can have fun together? Because when we step outside, and make everything black and white, then, baby, it’s cold. So cold.
We degrade both men and women when we tell them that sex is just another contractual obligation — and that there’s no difference between a violent encounter between strangers, and a playful exchange between a romantic couple, and a violent exchange between a romantic couple, and a loving relationship in marriage, and a violent relationship in marriage. We’re told that the relationship doesn’t matter, and that the actual behavior has no intrinsic meaning. The only thing that matters is consent. We think that focusing on consent will ensure that no one will be degraded or taken advantage of; but instead, it has won us abominations like “empowering porn” and 50 Shades of Gray and even the suggestion that children can give consent. It wins usa generation of kids that asks things like, “How can I tell if she consents or not, if she’s not conscious?” (A real question I read from a high school kid; I’ll add the link if I can find it again!) These miseries are not a side effect; they are the direct result of a culture that elevates consent to the highest good.
It’s not only promiscuous, secular types whose lives are impoverished by the cold rule of consent. I’m a member of a group of Catholics where one young woman wrote for advice about her husband, who, she tearfully reported, kissed her without first asking consent. This made her feel violated.
It was her husband.
Who kissed her.
And she thought he needed to ask consent every time.
This is where the pendulum has swung. We’ve pathologized the normal, healthy, give-and-take of love. We’ve taught people that there is no such thing as context: that’s it’s fair game to ignore the entire relationship and to reduce each other to business partners.
Now, if you’ve been victimized or abused, then this is probably not going to be your favorite song. You’re free to find it creepy, and you’re free to change the station. But we don’t heal from abuse by turning the whole world into an isolation ward. Healthy relationships, where the context does allow for some interplay and ambiguity, should be the norm, and they should dare to speak their healthy name.
And one more thing (and I could write volumes about this): not everything is a lesson. Not every pop song is a primer for how to behave. I tell my kids that it’s our duty to be aware of what the world is teaching us, for good or ill; but just because we’re learning something doesn’t mean there was a life lesson intended. Sometimes art, including pop art (like pop songs) is just giving you a slice of human experience, and when it feels familiar, then it’s done well, period.
No wonder people have no idea how to stay married anymore. They expect everything to be a lesson, and they expect those lessons to be black and white. They think that life is going to give them crystal clear boundaries. They think that it’s always going to be obvious what they can expect from other people and from themselves.
I’m not talking about sex, here; I’m talking about love, and about life in general — life without context, life without tension, life without ambiguity, life without play. Baby, it doesn’t get any colder than that.
Our Christmas art miniseries continues with the fresh and lovely work of Matthew Alderman, who graciously shared several of his drawings with us. Today’s piece is this remarkably lucid Madonna and Child, originally a Christmas card design.
When I saw his art, I immediately thought of the great Walter Crane, who illustrated so many children’s books around the turn of the century. This Madonna and Child recall that courtly, allegorical style, but in place of a characteristic smoldering, guarded expression, Mary and Jesus’ faces are open and enthusiastic, and the design looks nobly ancient rather than old-fashioned. Lovers of children’s books will also be reminded of Trina Schart Hyman, who drew heavily on heraldry and illuminated manuscripts, nodded at the pre-raphaelites, and then opened the window to let some air in.
Ohh, I have questions for Mr. Alderman! More about his extensive work later.
I chose this work of art for today because I can imagine Mary and Jesus having had a few days to rest and freshen up after the birth. They are clearly feeling fine and are ready to receive visitors. Mary wears rings and a circlet of pearls, as an honored queen, but just like any new mother, she is proud of her beautiful new baby boy, and wants to show him off.
[img attachment=”85785″ align=”alignnone” size=”full” alt=”christmas art Matthew Alderman madonna and child” /]
A nice reminder, on a day when many of us are heading back to work and taking up our daily chores and routine again. Take a moment, at some point during the day, to visit with this happy young mother and her wonderful Child. Praise him, and pass along this openness and joy to the next person you meet!
