SIMCHA FISHER

So my husband says to me, he says, “Next year, I’ll be the one shooting at the roof. Then we’ll see who’s laughing.”

Let me back up. We were at Señor Tadpole’s, celebrating the benignity of my nodules. If you say that fast enough, it sounds like something fried they serve to gullible tourists in the French Quarter, but it is not. I had been waiting since last week to hear from the lab whether I had cancer or not. Thyroid cancer is kind of the Switzerland of cancers, from what I hear. You have to work really, really hard to get it to make a fuss.

Even the surgery isn’t too bad, if you have to have it. I’ve already had the other half of my thyroid taken out, and that was good for a lot of sympathetic door-holding, let me tell you. People see you coming down the hall with a bunch of little kids and your neck stitched shut, and they hold the door.

But this week, I had been holding my own doors, and my husband wanted to make sure I knew he had been worried and concerned and praying, even if he didn’t wear it on his sleeve. I knew this, because I know him. When I got the heebie jeebies, I would tell him so, and he would hold me, and there was no use thinking hard about what might happen should one of us turn out to be mortal.

Around the same time as I went in for my biopsy, he fell on his bottomus on the ice. His forearm bruised and swelled up impressively, and his jaundiced eye got a few shades yellower, but we thought that was the end of it. But no. It now looks like he may have fractured a rib or two — just enough to make most movements uncomfortable, not enough to, I don’t know, GO TO THE DOCTOR OR ANYTHING.

I can’t tell him anything. I did ask, “Do you want to, I don’t know, GO TO THE DOCTOR OR ANYTHING, YOU RIDICULOUS  MAN?” Which is my way of saying, “I love you”; but he didn’t.  He did tell the kids that it was partially my fault, because his rib is where I came from. This seems fair.

So there we were, sharing a plateful of what the menu called — I’m not making this up — “Nachos Cowabunga.” To the waitress, my husband said, “We’ll have these nachos. The ones with beef.” When she nodded and left, he looked at me and said, “I’m an adult.” Cowabunga-free since 2004, at least.

We got to talking about how decrepit we were, and I expressed astonishment that it was on this mild winter that he had fallen and broken his ridiculous ribs, and not last winter, which was the winter where I spent most of the time sleeping like a fat, fat, fat bear because I was pregnant, and he spent most of the time up on the roof, trying to chip through the aptly-named ice dams that were causing our house to slowly fill up with light brown water, one ceiling drip at a time. (That winter, we established that, as homeowners, our least favorite sound was trickling.)

Last winter would have been the time to fracture something. This winter has been mild. Next winter, he says, he has a plan, in case all that effing snow comes back. Next winter,  he says, he is going to fill his shotgun with salt and he is going to kill the ice. And then no one’s house will fill up with water, and no one’s roof will cave in, and we will all be safe.

Which is his way of saying, “I love you,” and I know it.

***

It won’t shock you to hear that sometimes, Catholic bloggers have nothing to say. It won’t surprise you to hear that inspiration doesn’t routinely and spontaneously descend from the heavens and whisper insight into our ears, leaving us only with the problem of rushing over to the keyboard fast enough to copy it all down before it flutters off in search of a writer who can type faster.

Sometimes, we have nothing to write about, but we still have to write something. So we look around, and we think, “Well, that thing that happened to me is kind of a lesson. About Jesus. Because I’m Catholic, and this is what I do.”

Let’s see. Well, my dog goes berserk and barks like crazy when the UPS man comes by, because my dog, being a dope, doesn’t realize that we wanted that package. And that’s like when the Holy Spirit tries to give us grace, and we, um, bark at Him.

Or, the baby spends all her time trying to throw herself off chairs and eat glue, and then she gets mad at me when I rescue her. That’s kind of how we are with God, thinking the commandments are God being mean and wrecking our fun, but really He’s trying to keep us safe.

Or, my four-year-old asked, in a worried voice, if people are made out of meat. It turned out that she was trying to figure out the motivation of the Werewolf of Gubbio. Took a while to untangle that one, and to figure out what her real worries were (namely, that St. Francis is real, but so are werewolves). It was only because I know her, and I know what books she reads, what games she plays, and how she thinks, that I was able to understand what was in her heart, even while she herself didn’t have the words to express what she was thinking. Just like me and Jesus, me all inarticulate, Him all knowing, etc. etc. etc.

In other words, it’s very easy — almost a game, or a chore — to browse the shelves of our daily lives and find little shrink-wrapped lessons about our relationship with God. I could do it all day. Sometimes I do it all week. It’s not a terrible thing to do, and often enough, people tell me, “That was exactly what I needed to hear today. ”

But after a certain point, it feels grotesquely cynical. Oh, look, Jesus is on sale this week! I’m going to buy a nice hunk, and I have the perfect recipe in mind. I’ll just chop Him up into nice, bite-sized pieces . . .

It won’t shock you to hear that this is what I do. We all do it, in one way or another.

As I pushed past the hysterical dog, lugging my package (which was a colander I ordered in a fit of despond, and hadn’t been sent by Holy Spirit at all, at all), I fretted over how late it was and how I still hadn’t come up with anything to write about. And I thought with a little groan, “Okay, Jesus, get in the box.”

It was the best possible prayer I could have prayed.

Why?

Not because of what I said, but because I was praying. I was talking to Him, rather than about Him.

Yesterday on the radio, Mark Shea recalled how a priest once said, “Don’t ask yourself, ‘Do I really trust Jesus?’ Because that’s a question you could go on asking yourself forever, wondering, fretting, challenging yourself, never being sure that you really, truly trust God as much as you should.

“Instead,” said the priest, “Ask yourself, ‘Is Jesus trustworthy?'”

And the answer to that is always, “Yes.” Full stop. That’s all there is to it. It puts an end to the navel gazing and refocuses our gaze on the only gazeworthy thing in the world, which is Jesus. He really is the answer to all of our questions. Not because He gives us something to talk about! Because He is the answer, full stop. There’s no way to make that bite-sized.

Talking about Him is good. It’s great. We’re commanded to do it. But let’s remember what it’s all for. Through Him, with Him, in Him. It’s Him. It’s about being with Him. No story or lesson or parable or metaphor is a substitute for that. Whether you’re a Catholic writer, or a teacher, or a catechist, or a parent, or a combox warrior, or a politician, or a rosary-maker, or someone who, for reasons unknown, shares those gifs of sparkly flowers fluttering around the Sacred Heart . . . stop.

Stop and pray. Stop and be with Him.  He doesn’t want you to put Him in a box. He doesn’t want you to put Him in shrink wrap, or a recipe, or a lesson, or a meme. He doesn’t want you to set up a tent for him. He just wants you to stop, stop, stop, and be with Him.

***

image By Bill Branson (Photographer) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

On Sunday at Mass, I saw my four-year-old gazing at the stained glass window showing Mary, Mater Dolorosa. Mary’s face is twisted, her eyes large and sorrowful as she contemplates the crucifixion painted on the wall above the altar.

After a few minutes, my daughter took her crayons and started to draw. In her picture, the woman is agonized, her mouth open, her hands outstretched, a river of tears streaming down her face. My daughter crayoned in the last details, and then offered the picture to me. She grabbed my head and whispered hoarsely into my ear, “She is crying because her husband got eaten by a shark.”

We’re gonna need a bigger pew.

Here is a chart of this week:

[img attachment=”93744″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”emotional menu chart” /]

Also, I couldn’t find my camera charger all week, so the pictures are much more terrible than usual.

The specifics:

SATURDAY
One pan chicken thighs with veggies

[img attachment=”93771″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”fancy potatoes” /]

I’ve had tons of success with this one-pan roasted chicken and fall vegetable recipe, which I’ve made with crazy purple potatoes (see above. Yes, that is an old picture. I like to keep old pictures of fancy potatoes on my iPad just in case I need them), tender little Brussels sprouts, and all kinds of nice veggies. This week I got an attack of the cheaps when I was shopping, so we just had carrots, white potatoes, and butternut squash. It was still good, and the skin of the chicken thighs roasts up nice and crisp.

A bright and tasty dish you can prepare ahead of time, and only barely have to know how to cook.

SUNDAY
Pioneer Woman’s Perfect Pot Roast, mashed potatoes

This smelled heavenly, looked magnificent, and tasted . . . okay.

I was heartbroken. I’ve been waiting and waiting for beef to go on sale, so I scooped up a nearly five-pound roast and spent most of the day making Tasmanian devil noises while is slowly cooked in wine and beef broth.

[img attachment=”93767″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”pot roast in pan resize” /]
Looks pretty great, right? Well, it wasn’t terrible, it was just bland. The mashed potatoes were good, though.

MONDAY
Korean pork ribs, rice with seaweed, roasted sesame broccoli

I see now that I should redo that chart, because Monday was actually the high point. Couldn’t be more pleased with the way these ribs turned out. I made a triple recipe of my friend Elizabeth’s sauce again:

5 generous Tbs gochujang 
2 Tbs honey 
2 tsp sugar 
2 Tbs soy sauce 
5 cloves minced garlic

and set the ribs to marinate all day. Then I threw them under the broiler for half an hour and pulled them out when they were sizzling and gleaming. Then I stepped back and watched my family rediscover their lupine heritage. I’m surprised no one lost a finger. I think we would have considered it a good trade if we had, though.

[img attachment=”93778″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”korean pork ribs” /]

To get this image, I took an elderly cell phone, soaked it in mineral oil for a while, and then hit the shutter button with my elbows while balancing on a can of condensed milk.

The broccoli, I cut it into pieces and put them in a shallow pan, drizzled it with my new found best friend, sesame oil, and sprinkled it with salt, pepper, and toasted sesame seeds.  Put it under the broiler for a few minutes until the broccoli was a little bit charred, and it was not bad.

TUESDAY
TACO TUESDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!

Is Taco Tuesday so exciting because it’s called Taco Tuesday, or because you get to eat tacos? Or is it mainly about the sour cream?

WEDNESDAY
Pizza

Two pepperoni, two olive.  I’ve never made four pizzas so fast in my life. Not really a story, but I was impressed and feel like telling someone.

Oh, wait, I have a second pizza triumph to report. Here is a pizza that I made several weeks ago. I like to slide it off the pan in the last few minutes, to let it brown up a little underneath. Well, look at the terrible thing that almost happened when I stretched things a little too thin:

[img attachment=”93770″ align=”aligncenter” size=”full” alt=”pizza in peril” /]

But guess what? I saved it! You have to approach these things with confidence.

THURSDAY 
Chicken nuggets, chips, veggies, dip, and hummus

The children prepared this meal for me in my hour of need, and all I had to do was set it all up ahead of time, give them detailed instructions, yell at them for not doing it, and then give them a massive guilt trip for how hard it was to get them to do it. Tasty!

FRIDAY
Spaghetti

I may go lie down first, though.

Have you heard of Unified Sports? I caught a quick story on the local news yesterday, and it’s a brilliant idea. In Unified Sports, which sprung out of the Special Olympics organization, students with and without intellectual disabilities practice and play together on all sorts of athletic teams, from basketball to volleyball to figure skating.

I can’t seem to find online the story I heard, but one girl told the NHPR reporter that she got involved simply because she wasn’t ready for the regular basketball season to be over — so she signed up to be a “partner,” helping kids with disabilities to pass, dribble, and score. The rules of this league stipulate that partners may not score more than 25% of the points in a game; but in the most recent season, the partners didn’t score at all, choosing instead to pass the ball to their developmentally disabled teammates. As the team practiced and played together, friendships developed naturally between kids who, in other circumstances, would never have spent time together at all.

The games are less fierce and more cooperative, but they are real games, and part of real tournaments. The program has recently taken off in a big way in high schools across New England. The games are lively and exciting, but “[t]he best thing we found out that happened last year were all the things that happened off the court,” [Project Unify director at Special Olympics Maine Ian] Frank, Frank said.

“The traveling to games, putting on the uniform with the school colors, playing in a home gym, socializing with students that typically you wouldn’t have, the barriers that got broken down and the doors that got opened, obviously the things that are happening are very positive to all of us and the students involved.

“It’s a place where people can shine, it’s a great avenue for sports at its truest form. There are so many life lessons that really come out of this program it’s hard not to be able to sell this,” he said.

…

“The impact it had not just on a basketball team but the culture of a school internally was special to see.”

When I was in school, kids with developmental disabilities were segregated into separate classrooms. Students in the general population rarely saw them, much less played or worked with them. They were just those weird, scary kids who got shuffled around when the rest of us were doing regular school. A few of the more effusive kids with special needs were treated as adorable mascots, but there was certainly no concerted effort to integrate them, or to get to actually know them. Things have changed.

Another happy innovation: in my kids’ high school, the Interact club (the high school version of Rotary) has an initiative that encourages students to become friends with kids with special needs, checking in on them throughout the day, cheering them on, helping them get along with other students. I talked to a student from one high school in a different state, and he said that, as the year began, the kids with developmental disabilities were outcasts, and their classmates nervously averted their eyes, or even jeered at them. But once the school made an organized, explicit effort to bring them into the community, the special needs kids gradually became “rock stars,” collecting high fives and swapping nicknames with the other kids as they made their way down the hall. More than that, true friendships formed, which endured outside of the school.

These programs are very much in line with the aims of Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, a foundation which builds special communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together for their mutual benefit. How beautiful to see secular schools making a similar effort.

Sometimes it feels like the world is getting worse and worse, but this effort to integrate the developmentally disabled is a true, meaningful, and increasingly popular movement in American society. Even as there is a push to eliminate “imperfect” children before they are born, there is a simultaneous push to make contact and to build genuine relationships with people with developmental disabilities, for their benefit and for the benefit of the non-disabled population.

Little green shoots! They’re there if you look for them.

I don’t have to tell you why.

Read the rest at the Register. 

Maybe.

I mean, I pluralized his last name as “Hoopses.” If that’s not unfair, it’s at very least weird and inexplicable. Mea maxima culpa.

But seriously, a few readers protested that I was unfair in my response to Tom Hoopes’ essay Why We (Still) Home School. The main objection from readers is that Tom was just telling about his family’s experience, and there was no reason to get irritable about that. Why try to refute an anecdote? He’s just saying, “This is what we do, and this is why.”

Just the other day on Facebook, I said that Daddy Wars will never catch on, because:

Woman 1: I think such-and-such.
Woman 2: I disagree, HOW DARE YOU?

Man 1: I think such-and-such.
Man 2: What an idiot. Hey, football!

So, I guess Tom Hoopes said, “I think such-and-such about school,” and I responded, “HOW DARE YOU?” Or at least it came across that way.

As I re-read Tom’s post, I see that he was at pains to talk about his experience, his wife’s experience, what he and his wife want for their family. He doesn’t say, at any point, that everyone must or even should make the same decisions they did.

To be fair to me, I also spoke mainly of my own experiences, and about what I had learned from realizing I had been making false assumptions. I never said, at any point, that Tom Hoopes or anyone else must or should make the same decisions my family did. I was a little snottier than absolutely necessary, but that’s how I sound when I’m trying. Mea maxima etc.

He does speak about the nefarious origins of public schooling in a way that implies that present-day public schools have the same goals (and that they are achieving those goals), and this was the part that annoyed me, and which prompted me to respond. He said:

[By the 1970’s] 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.

The fathers and mothers of the modern education system wanted schools to remold young people into good citizens — as they conceived good citizens to be. Families deeply inculcate values in children. That includes good values to reinforce, like altruism, but also bad values to mitigate, like racism. But the reformers threw the baby (family-rooted culture) out with the bathwater (occasionally backward values). Actually, it was even less benign than that: One of the “bad family values” to be discouraged was religion — the basis of meaningful social order.

By the 1970s the school system had grown into a kind of Plato’s Republic world of children being educated in a set of virtues that didn’t come from their families or their churches but from secular experts hired by the state.

The end result is that, when we began having children and we started talking about school, I instinctively recoiled and April stepped forward and we decided to home school.

If you read closely, he never says that all public schools in 2016 follow John Dewey’s goals to turn children into homelife-contravening, secular state-trained cogs. He does say that public schools were founded for this purpose, and he says that he wants to avoid letting this happen to his kids. I think it’s splitting hairs to claim he’s still talking exclusively about his own experience at this point. He’s inviting us to draw the logical conclusions about the public school system today.

I mean, if someone asks why I feed my sons graham crackers, and I say it’s because they were created to tamp down excessive lust, it follows that I think that eating graham crackers is likely to have that effect. If I write a post called, “Why I Feed My Sons Graham Crackers,” it would be reasonable for someone to write a response called, “Are You Willing To Learn About Graham Crackers?”

You know, I think we’re getting off point here. Maybe a better illustration: the YMCA was originally conceived as a religious organization, designed to promote healthy Christian principles of developing body, mind, and spirit. Some Ys are still overtly Christian (at least according to Wikipedia — I’ve never come across an even faintly religious Y myself!), whereas others are 100% just a place to go to swim, lift weights, and maybe take a fencing class or something.

If I were an atheist who thought Christianity was bad for kids, it would be weird to refuse to sign my kids up for classes at the local Y — or at least, it would behoove me to find out whether my local Y retained its Christian founding origins, or had morphed, over the years, into a facility with completely different aims. It would behoove me to find out if there was a difference between a Y deep in the Bible Belt and a Y in the liberal North. If I wrote a post called “Why We (Still) Lift Weights at Home” . . . well, you get the idea.

My main goal in writing my post was exactly what I stated: to encourage parents who are unhappy with home schooling to look into their actual, local schools, and not make assumptions based on what they’ve heard or on what they remember about their own childhoods. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve talked to parents who say, “I finally bit the bullet and registered my kids in a brick-and-mortal school — and I was shocked at how decent everyone is.” I keep hearing, “Don’t ask me what horrible thing I was expecting, but it was nothing like what I was expecting. It was actually . . . a good school, with good teachers.”

Where would they learn to expect otherwise? Well, from their own experiences, for one thing. From actual bad schools, certainly. And also from essays like Tom’s, which — with only the best intentions — encourage nervous parents to go ahead and listen to their fears.

Well, sometimes fear is telling the truth, folks, but sometimes it’s not. I remember how horrible it felt to be so afraid of school, and I remember how foolish I felt when I realized my fears were ungrounded. I’m hoping to spare other people the same difficulties. And that’s it!

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.

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!