On Women Working Outside of the Home

I want to note here briefly, by way of acknowledgment, that for some of you the very question I pose in this title is ludicrous on its face, if not downright offensive. And, the title was intentionally provocative. But the fact that a great many of us consider this question definitively answered  by the various movements of the past 150 years does not mean it has been done so. To those people I can only say that we operate under a different paradigm with a different set of assumptions about many things, among them gender and the nature of work. But to defend my contrarian/traditionalist position, I find it odd that the feminist movement, so long a darling of the left and a friend to progressive notions in all matters, is so beholden to the greatest ignorance of the modern right: that of the triumph of capitalism and the notion that true meaning in society is to be derived by one's position within the capitalistic ladder of success and by one's contribution to the machine. So many modern feminist notions treat work outside of the home as somehow more dignifying than that within the home. I reject this notion for women and men alike.   

When we moved to Salina in November my wife took a couple of interviews at the hospital here in town. We were hoping for a part time position, but there were none available and given her nursing badassery she was offered a full-time position in the labor and delivery unit almost immediately. We are conservative and complementarian in our view of gender roles so the decision of whether or not to accept was not straightforward. It was a great job, her ideal hospital job, but it would mean a lot of time away from our son. And our son is more important to my wife than career fulfillment.

She was also slightly scared of taking the job; afraid, not of the time away from Owen or the strain it might put on our marriage, but afraid of other people’s opinion of her if she took the job. Afraid that our conservative, complementarian friends would somehow think she was denying the will of God for mothers by working outside of the home.

As we thought and prayed about what to do, it occurred to me that Clara was better at nursing than I am at anything and she could do a lot of good for a lot of women in a very vulnerable and frightening time of their life by taking the job. There are certain occupations that are better suited to women (essentialism watch), and my guess is that as the church we want good Christian women working in those positions. She took the job and has loved it, though we are hoping that after child #2 makes her July arrival that the hospital will switch her to part time.

I tell this story because a lot of my focus tends to be on the negative ways in which secular culture can pollute our ideas of marriage and family and I felt it right to acknowledge the ways in which Christian culture can do the same thing. Now, lest I be misunderstood, I am not saying that a stay-at-home mom is going against God’s will all of the time and working moms are always doing what God wills for them. What I will say is that we have to be careful how broad of a brush we paint with when it comes to considerations like this. A church whose doctrine includes stay-at-home mothering as an indispensable piece of virtuous Christian living can be just as totalitarian as a radical feminism that preaches liberation from the bonds of motherhood and marriage. Furthermore, to act as if today's version of stay-at-home motherhood is in line with some sort of historical norm for Christianity is a betrayal of a severe lack of historical understanding.

Let me provide a brief historical comparison between a “stay-at-home” mom of the early twentieth century and a stay-at-home mom of the early twenty-first. A stay-at-home mom 100 years ago would have had an enormous amount of time consuming responsibility around the house. Staying at home didn’t mean making sure little Asher had his A, B, Cs and 30 Bible verses memorized by the time he was two; it meant working your fingers to the bone washing laundry for eight hours at a time, working in the garden, cooking a meal that took longer than 30 minutes to prepare, making most of your own clothing, churning butter, etc. Today’s stay-at-home moms might spice up the dinner menu with something cool they saw on Pinterest and the really cool ones will have a small vegetable garden that would feed their family for one solid week if push came to shove, but we are hardly in the same position today when we think of time constraints.

Now, you could argue that part of God’s grace to our generation is that our technological advances have allowed us greater freedom to spend with our kids. And I would agree wholeheartedly with that statement, seeing especially that it applies to both parents. But, we cannot pretend as if this very narrow sliver of time we live in represents some historical norm for motherhood. Good Christian mothers who were not members of the aristocracy did not have the time to devote to full-time mothering that today’s mothers have (and the aristocrats farmed out much of parenting to governesses and tutors anyway).

Which cuts to the economic considerations at play here. Only a fraction of people on this planet can afford to manage their home with a single breadwinner. And, increasingly, only a fraction of households in our country are filled with enough adults to have one stay at home and one go and win the bread. So when we became absolutist about this, we deny the material realities of so many around us. Can you tell a single mother that she ought to be a stay-at-home mom? Is that part of the gospel?

What matters, as with so much in the Christian life, is your heart behind your action. There are people who homeschool because they are talented at it, equipped to do it, and have a heart for home education. There are people who homeschool because everyone else in their church does and they don’t want to feel ostracized for sending their kids to public or private school. There are moms who work out of the home because they have a calling to a certain occupation and are no less loving, affectionate, or present for their kids. There are moms who work outside of the home because they feel home to be a cloistered nightmare and need to escape. Which makes it impossible to judge. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one handing down judgment on such things.

My anecdotal experience leaves me feeling blessed that Clara has a job that she loves and I get special time with Owen when she is gone. No other dad that I am friends with gets the kind of time with their kids that I do. And I think it is fantastic. When Clara is around I am more inclined to be lazy when it comes to raising him, more inclined to steal a few minutes to read or mess around on the internet. But when she is gone it is he and I and it is daddy and Owen time. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. 

Race and IQ

There was a bit of a fracas a couple of weeks ago when a scholar for the Heritage Foundation, a Harvard PhD named Jason Richwine, was fired resigned from his post when the subject of his doctoral dissertation—the effect of low-IQ immigration on the U.S. economy—became the target of a PC witch hunt. Richwine had just published a related report with the Heritage imprimatur about the high cost of lax immigration policy. Unable to refute the numbers he projected, Richwine’s opponents went into his past and found that he said some very non-diversity supporting things and therefore the sociological data he had amassed must be false. Because we all know that people who believe things counter to the progressive agenda are not just bad people but probably terrible at their jobs as well.

As can be easily gleaned from the opening paragraph, I am sympathetic to the plight of Richwine. I think he got a pretty unfair shake and it is lamentable that people do not really care whether or not what he wrote was true or false, only that it denied a modern shibboleth: the facemelting awesomeness of diversity. As someone who often gleefully denies modern shibboleths, I find myself inclined to agree with Richwine and his supporters.

But as I was running this morning and thinking about what Richwine had researched and the way studies of race and IQ are handled, I realized that my support for such studies ought not to exist. In fact, it probably emanates from a pretty nasty place in my heart. Here is what I mean:

Let’s grant for a moment that the people who publish reports about the intellectual inferiority of certain minority groups are correct in their data-gathering and analysis (and this is granting a lot, see here, here, and here). Say that IQ is innate and not culturally conditioned. Say that we can definitively prove that one race is intellectually superior to another. What then? What have we proven? What do we hope to do with this information? In other words, for whom other than a racist is this good news? How do we enact policy based on this? Do we want to enact policy based on this if it were true? What kind of policies would those be? As I confronted these questions, I realized that implicitly my support for and defense of these studies was colored by racism, by my desire to view my own self as dominant. How incredibly ugly.

As a Christian, this is the question I face: if each of us, individually, is made in the image of God, what does IQ matter? Since Darwin and the rise of capitalist economics (funny how intertwined those things are) we have been obsessed with determining the fittest so that we may be sure they, usually we, survive. Whether our methods are sociological, like eugenics and abortion, or economic, like cutthroat business practices and outsourcing, we seem hellbent on breeding out the weaker from amongst the thronging masses. (As I wrote this I was reminded of Chesterton’s great quip which I only paraphrase: “When we say survival of the fittest all that we really mean are those that survived.”) And nothing could be further from Christian truth and practice, which tells us that we all have the same Father and are therefore all brothers.

Another issue this raises for me is that of the limit of knowledge. I wonder if in our desire to know all things we tread on ground best left undisturbed. There is a recurring scene in the conversation between Adam and Raphael in Paradise Lost where Raphael warns Adam of overstepping the boundaries God has erected in his zeal for knowledge.

Of knowledge within bounds; beyond abstain [ 120 ]

To ask, nor let thine own inventions hope

Things not reveal'd, which th' invisible King,

Onely Omniscient hath supprest in Night,

To none communicable in Earth or Heaven.  (7.120-124)

be lowlie wise:

Think onely what concernes thee and thy being;

Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there [ 175 ]

Live, in what state, condition or degree,

Contented that thus farr hath been reveal'd

Not of Earth onely but of highest Heav'n. (8.173-178)

Raphael is warning Adam, because it is a very human tendency to want to know more than we really ought to know. Knowledge of some things is best left untouched. In our current zeal to explain everything by a combination of chemical imbalance, societal conditioning, and evolutionary prerogative I think we can overreach the proper bounds of human knowledge. And that knowledge can lead to dehumanization.

On questions like that of race and IQ, a question burdened with no upside, I defer not to truth or falsehood but to decorum, trusting that in some matters the truth will not set us free.

Sinclair Lewis and the Limits of Satire

The opening scenes of Dickens’ classic Oliver Twist are deliciously satirical. The poor urchin begins his life in a hellish orphanage, presided over by sadists espousing their heightened degree of Christian virtue in caring for such wicked youth. This is where his famous request for more gruel is made to the astonishment of his orphan compeers and the horror of his benevolent overlords. Unable to break such an indomitable demand for sustenance, the orphanage director apprentices Oliver out to a chimney sweeper who takes even less care for his wellbeing. It is funny, political, cutting, but then the novel turns towards more conventional storytelling: Oliver falls in with Fagin, a ringleader of child thieves, comes to live with an elderly benefactor, and finds out that he is really highborn. Also, a man falls off the edge of a roof and hangs himself after killing a whore. Not sure how they handle that one in the musical for kids. 

My point being, in case it wasn’t readily discernible, is that satire is great but you can’t push it too far. At some point conventional storytelling ought to be given its place in the proceedings. Otherwise, you wind up with a novel like Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, a book clocking in at slightly fewer than 500 pages of pure satire. This is not to say that Gantry isn’t a good novel, an entertaining novel, and at times a spot-on critique of religious hypocrisy; my complaint is merely to say that it is exhausting. It is the book equivalent of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, except it is 100 days and the people don’t get their shit together in the end (yet even for all of that I would still rather read Gantry than rewatch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days). It is like binge-watching Mad Men or only reading The Onion for your news.  

Gantry is the tale of the title character and his adventures from Philistine captain of a small Baptist college’s football team, to his emotional (and short-lived) conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, to his seminary days and expulsion therefrom, to his first pastorate and his deflowering of the deacon’s daughter, to his life on the road as a farm implement salesman, to his opening gig for a rockstar female evangelist, to his switch from Baptistical to Methodistical preaching at the behest of  a savvy Methodist bishop and his rise from small town church to big town megastardom, to his crusade against all vice as he maintains a series of affairs with women of his flock, to his honorary degrees from institutions looking for money, to his eventual position as leader of a society for morals and pastorship of a large Methodist church in urban New York. If that was a breathfull to read, it gives you some idea of the scope of the novel as well as the character of the protagonist. 

Elmer is a charlatan, pure and simple. He is not likeable or admirable or redeemable in any way. He is a terrible father, a cheating husband, and a minister who doesn’t believe in God. He is ambitious, which in some sort of Randian world I suppose would make him a hero. He uses his booming voice and physical presence to force weaker men into submission and cause weak-minded women to fall under his spell. He is everything you could ever want in a hypocritical preacher and Lewis spares no time thinking of ways to make Gantry anything other than simple and mean. On this score he succeeds brilliantly.  

Which could be fine—often an unchanging main character around whom other characters experience revelations and deep change can make for a good story, but none of the other characters have added dimensionality. Elmer’s fellow priests are either like Elmer—ambitious, morally suspect, and theologically obtuse—or humble and thoughtful closeted atheists afraid to leave the church for lack of other skills, continuing the charade halfheartedly for the benefit of their congregation’s weak-minded opiate-of-the-masses consumers. The women in the book are completely powerless and ridiculously gullible. And that is the entire book. 

  

There is no moral reckoning for Elmer, the story ending with him narrowly avoiding being exposed for his relationship with his secretary and he ends triumphant. Which, again, is fine. I like a sad ending to a sad tale, but the tale is paper thin. You can tell that Lewis spent time visiting Baptist churches and revivals in order to write the book, but you can also tell that he never really let himself experience these events. He was like one of the first anthropologists, smitten by how outlandish the conduct of people who believe different things than him appeared and reporting back to the likeminded about how they really are superior to those knuckle-draggers.  

And this is the problem with satire: all too often it loses the humanity of the people it would castigate in its clever barbs. Christianity may condemn vice but it calls people to repentance and to a life of love. Satire only slings arrows, only has room for the already convinced, only seeks to tear down. This can be effective and has its place, but if you’re going to write a 500 page novel it would seem to that it ought to be populated with more than caricatures. This quality of the novel allows it to be easily dismissed by those who ought to hear its message. In other words, the moral depravity of England’s orphan system was conveyed to me in a far greater degree by the later life of Oliver Twist (which is really about the eighth best book by Dickens), than the state of religious hypocrisy was by Lewis’s unhinged screed.  

When you abandon any sense of charity towards your characters, even the bad ones, you begin to treat them as subhuman. This makes one wonder what you think about real people in life who hold the same beliefs as those characters. 

The Problem of Irony

Irony is sort of the default position for a lot of people my age. The artsy television shows and movies are all cloaked in a steady layer of ironic distance. Mostly this is a symptom of the times. We are afraid or reticent to commit to wholehearted belief in anything for fear that it will crumble around us. And I don't think irony is a political response in the same way it was in the modernist era. I feel like today ironic detachment is just as prevalent in conservative-minded folks like myself. And in moderation I am quite sure that irony can be a fine response to a fallen world--better, at least, than depression or mania. 

But I feel hampered by my irony as well. Almost embarrassed to commit to something for fear of being found too zealous. This, of course, drives the hipster crowd to always seek new things and new experiences so that they stand out (together) from whatever crowd they don't like. But it drives me to be withdrawn.  

Last night I was walking with Clara and Owen and I was telling my wife about this running training book I have been reading. I have finally committed to getting back into shape and so I bought a book Amazon by a nutrionist and trainer that I think is solid and I committed to doing whatever he says in the book. And it has been exciting and fun to get back into shape. I was telling Clara about the life changes I have been making specifically in my diet and how great it is for a morning run to once again be my default position, when all of a sudden this little voice in the back of my head piped up that wasn't it a little silly to be so excited about three weeks of eating healthy and working out? "You sound like a couch potato who just completed their first 5k." 

And another thought responded, "what an ugly attitude that is." And I realized that the need to detach constantly, to subtly berate others through wordplay, is incredibly ugly. Not to mention unfulfilling. The happiest, most fruitful times of my life have not been the times when I have been smug and ironic and critical, but the times when I have been devoted to a cause. Now of course you can be smug and devoted to a cause or critical and devoted to a cause, but too often irony so frees us from anything binding that we (I) can become completely detached from anything concrete. My domestic life frees me from a lot of that, but it is still the battle I wage in my mind. 

Which is to say, I want to be different. I want to believe again, and live again in belief. Irony is a great response to a world governed by Chaos and destined for Misery, but that is not the world I as it is. The world as it is is a work of art, crafted by a sovereign Creator. And the end of this world is Love. And my response to this work of art is to live in it abundantly, not to sneer at it from the gallery. 

The Adventures of Toby Loco and the Mouserat Kid

Before I get into the tale at hand, I suppose it bears mentioning how this post received its title. In the days before Owen was born, Clara and I were watching the prior seasons of Parks and Rec on Netflix in the evenings. On the night before he was born we watched it for hours as Clara started laboring. Anyway, one of the characters on the show, Andy, has a band that has had numerous names over the course of the show’s run, one of which was Mouserat (my other favorite was Fourskin, which became Threeskin when they lost a member, so to speak). When Owen was a few weeks old I took to calling him Mouserat. Clara loathed the name at the time, but my mom, who was staying with us, found it very cute and that was all the encouragement that I needed. From that day on he has been the Mouserat Kid. Clara has since come around. 

At the time I also thought it would be funny to write a series of tales about infant Owen as one of the most feared trainrobbers in the world. Since the Mouserat Kid sounded like a good name for a trainrobber, I needed an appellation for myself that would fit the nefariousness of our deeds. Hence, Toby Loco. Though, in one of the twists of the tales, it would turn out that Owen was going to be the crazy one in our gang who was quick to shoot. He was to be loved by women and feared by Pinkertons. I have yet to write the first story. But whenever we head out for adventure, I think of our duo as Toby Loco and the Mouserat Kid. 

Which brings us to the story at hand. There are precious few chances for adventure in this world when you are 21 months old and live in central Kansas. Though, I suppose, conceived from a different, more Chestertonian angle, everything is adventurous when you are 21 months old. But this past weekend, wanderlust got us and we were out the door. Clara works nights at the hospital here in town and the creaky floorboards of our World War I era house necessitate that Owen and I vacate in the mornings so Mama can sleep. This week’s destination was Kanopolis State Park, about 45 minutes southwest of where we live.  

It had rained a good chunk of the day on Friday and when we woke up Saturday morning it was misting still. Clara was a bit surprised that we were carrying on with my idea to go walk several miles through prairie grass in the rain, but the weather was warmish and not windy, the latter condition a virtual once-in-a-spring type day in this part of the country and I figured if we got too wet we could just hoof it back to the car in double time. Owen likes it when I run with him on my back and I had no other ideas for what to do to kill several hours on a Saturday morning in Salina, Kansas. So off we went. 

I had known the lake was there—a friend had done a triathlon there last summer—but I had not known that there were 29 miles of trails in the park surrounding the lake. We went to an event in town called Discover Salina Naturally, which is conservative state parlance for Earth Day celebration. (We talked to one of the event organizers who said that when it was called Earth Day no one wanted to come because they assumed it was some liberal hug-a-tree festival.) There was a ranger there from Kanopolis who gave us a brochure and I was hooked. Trails are a rarity in this part of the world, and hills perhaps even more conspicuous, but this place was reported to have both. 

We got there and the mist was clearing, but it was still cloudy. I was the first car in the parking lot for the trailhead, and for all I knew given the remoteness of the park, we would be the only people there that day. The start was somewhat ominous. The trail was wet and slick. It started by turning into the heart of a canyon. Lining the walls, like something out of an old Western, were swarms of vultures keeping watch on us, waiting for a fall. Some were flying. Owen, charitably, calls them hawks when they fly. I wondered briefly if a vulture had ever lifted child out of his father’s backpack. We climbed up out of the canyon, quite literally hand over foot. It was a tricky maneuver with 40 pounds on my back, especially since 30 pounds of the weight belonged to a young fellow I am increasingly fond of.  

We topped out on a ridge and from there began a 5 mile stretch of descending into and climbing out of canyons cut by the tributaries feeding the lake. At one point I slipped in the mud and fell backward, landing on my poor son. He took it pretty well, but I figured I better compensate him with his pacifier. He gladly accepted and then tucked his head into the back of my neck and fell asleep as I sang him old hymns.  

The hike was gorgeous. I had no idea central Kansas got this beautiful. There is a great line in the beginning of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s novel, where the narrator’s father watches a sunset in central Kansas, at the gravesite of his father, and reflects on how wonderful it is to know that every place can be beautiful. I felt a bit like that. But the spirit of the line in the book is a comparative beauty. As in, compared to how bad this place sucks, this sunset redeems the despair a bit. But this would be beautiful by any standards. A herd (pack, flock, gander?) of turkeys was running across the open plains. Everything was washed in green from all of the moisture we have been getting. Trees were starting to blossom, the grass smelled sweet. The creeks swelled in newfound vigor. Cardinals and robins and mockingbirds flitted around. It was majestic. 

I knew I was pushing it timewise with Owen, so when a trail split off and took a fairly direct path back to the trailhead I took it. He woke up right about then and asked for his mama. I told him she would be awake when we got home and asked him what we would do to her. "Kiss." Smart kid.  

The path we turned on to was more directly intended for equestrian use rather than human and the upkeep reflected that. The trail was wider, but it was also soft, red dirt. The days of rain had turned it into sticky clay. We crested a ridge and I could see my car. Not hardly a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies. But as hikers everywhere know, crow distance means little. I saw a stream crossing up ahead, imagining it would be like the half dozen others I had already crossed throughout the morning. I walked up to it and found out I was wrong. Very wrong. This was closer to the lake and definitely deeper. How deep I could only guess given the murky quality of the water. I assumed there must be a crossing somewhere and went to walk down the shore a bit to spy it out. Stepping out of the water, I slipped on the mud and fell right on to a reed sticking up out of the ground. My first concern was for Owen who, after all, was attached to my back. I took off my pack to check on him and he was fine, though somehow he had lost a shoe. I put it back on him and tucked his blanket around him and then noticed a searing pain in, how shall we phrase this, the left side of my primary gluteal muscle. I did a quick hand check and came back with blood all over my fingers. My shorts were ripped and there was blood dripping down my leg and (and!) there was no other way to cross the stream than to go straight through it. I put Owen back on my back and walked down the stream each way, but there was no getting around it. It was either go through or go back the way I had just come: 6 or so miles with blood dripping out of what I could only assume was a deep puncture wound on my ass.  

I broke a reed out of the ground to use to prod the ground in front of me as I crossed, hoping it would signal me to any sudden dropoffs. And I set out. Now, let me say that this crossing on almost any other occasion would not be a big deal. If I was by myself at the end of a trail run I would happily have jumped in and swam across. But I had 40 pounds of kid and snacks on my back, making it pretty hard to swim if the water ended up being deeper than walking height. I considered dropping Owen again and walking it alone to test the depth, but I figured he would freak out if I left him in his pack and took off. The water burned in my wound as it came up above my navel. I was trying to keep Owen dry with one hand while prodding with the stick in another. Comical, I imagine. It didn't take long to cross, maybe a minute, but my lips were trembling the entire time. And not just because the water was freezing, though it was. I came up the other side and shook off like a dog. I checked Owen and his shoes were wet. Once he figured this out he gave a characteristic one word response: "Home." Again, smart boy. 

We headed back toward the car and I looked at my trail map which showed one more water crossing before the end. I thought, or hoped, that it would be another small one, but alas that was not to be the case. We had one final stream crossing to make, this time with an audience. Another one of the trails, the one we had started the day on, skirts the other side of this stream before turning away from it and there was a Boy Scout troop and a woman hiking by herself. She saw us coming to this stream and came down to see if she could offer any help. It was a sweet gesture, but I am not sure what she thought she could do. Did she expect me to toss Owen across to her? At this point I wanted to heed my son's advice and go home and so without hardly pausing we just walked through it again. The Boy Scouts were impressed and asked their troop leader if they could do that later. The woman looked at me as if I were the worst father in the world.  

We made it back to the car quickly from there. My wound was really starting to hurt, which I can only imagine was aggravated by spending some time in bacteria-filled water. We split a snack of crackers and Cuties and headed back to civilization--daddy bleeding all over the seat and Owen pointing out to me every cow and windmill we passed--and the waiting arms of our Mama. Every time Owen sees the shoes I was wearing he tells the story again of how daddy walked through water and Owen's feet got wet. 

Tune in soon for the next Adventures of Toby Loco and the Mouserat Kid.

My Small Bear

I have had a busy week with work and life and reading and have done little writing, so I thought I would do some easy writing: tell stories about my son. Besides, I could spend 10 hours on a post about some deep issue and it would not garner as much interest as 20 minutes spent writing about my boy. Which should give you some idea of how awesome he is.

Owen loves being in his bed. This doesn't mean that he sleeps the whole time he is there, but that he just loves being ensconced in his crib. It is the only place he still gets his pacifier, he has stuffed animals and blankets and he can just relax--I get it, sounds nice to me at about 2 o'clock every day. Clara went in a week or so ago to get him from his nap and he asked if he could stay. A few weekends ago when Clara was at work I went upstairs toward the end of his nap to read so I could hear him when he woke up. He woke up, but he didn't fuss or bang on the walls like he does sometimes. I pressed my ear to the door to hear him. He was practicing his vocabulary. "Mama, mama, mama. Daddy, daddy, daddy. Ball, ball, ball. Yes, yes, yes. Mama. Daddy. Yes." 

He has also become quite the household helper. He currently helps us with laundry, the dishes, cooking, sweeping, vacuuming, feeding the chickens, taking out the trash, putting the recycling into separate bins, and more things I am sure I am forgetting. And here is the thing: he loves to help. Loves it. He and I were building a tower with his blocks last night and Clara asked him if he wanted to help her cook. "Stir!" he said and ditched his old man. He redeemed himself by helping me grill the chicken and playing frisbee with me while we waited.

With the change in seasons, he has fallen in love with playing "upeball", which is his gentleman's effort at baseball. We use a big air-filled bouncy ball and the attachment for the vacuum as our bat. I alternately roll him the ball and he hits it (he says tennis when it is on the ground) and upeball when I throw it in the air. He likes to pitch as well and does his best imitation of my dramatized windup. This is essentially a 360 degree spin while standing on one foot. We were having problems getting him to hit off the rug in our living room. He kept wanting to hit it off the wood floor. We got the idea to tape a batter's box into the rug. Clara put the tape down while I showed him a video of baseball players launching home runs all while standing firmly in the batter's box. We went back to the living room and showed him his box and he flipped out with excitement. Every time he hit the ball he would run into the dining room where the computer is and point to it: "Dad, I am hitting it just like those guys!"

There are many more stories to tell. Words he is learning. Ideas. It is amazing to watch him grow, so fun to see some new concept click in his mind for the first time. To connect this, however tenuously, to my post a couple of weeks ago on the declining birthrate in our country, I want to say that raising kids is extraordinarily hard and challenging and a monumental time suck, but it is liberating at the same time. I am no longer the center of my universe. My son is. As will be my daughter here in a few months.

I read a writer once talking about how paralyzed she was in her twenties because of all the options open to her--career-wise, relationally, etc.--but now that she is in her thirties and married and locked into a career she feels more freedom despite the constriction. I feel that way with parenting. In the Donne poem I quote at the masthead of this blog, the old rogue tells God that unless he is bound he shall never be free. Life is like that in so many ways. Sometimes it takes steadfast commitment and the release of self to know who you really are and what really matters. My life is bound and restricted by my son, but it is also clarified and directed. I will provide for him. I will train him in the way that he should go. And that gives me direction, purpose, and focus. On top of that, it has increased my capacity to love and give. He, along with his mother and God's grace. is the greatest of gifts to my wandering soul.

The Case Against Young Marriage

I want to comment briefly here on a pair of articles that recently ran in Slate, the online magazine. The topic was marrying at an early age and the first article was written by a woman, Julia Shaw, who got married at a relatively young age (23). The other was a rebuttal article by another woman, Amanda Marcotte, for whom the advice to consider marrying young is anathema, what she calls a “conservative hobbyhorse.”

As far as marrying early goes, it would appear that I have a dog in the fight given my own relatively early marriage and while I do think marrying young can be delightful and ought to be considered before being dismissed out of hand, I am in no way dogmatic about this belief. But I was struck as I read Marcotte’s rebuttal at both the wrongheadedness of the data she compiles and the spleen with which she treats Shaw’s modest exhortation.

Shaw’s story is rather simple and fairly common. She went to college with big dreams and ambitions and no plans of being one of those girls who got married the week after graduation. She then met a guy and fell in love and married him way before she imagined she would. He was 25 and she was 23. (Clara once had a deal with a friend to not get married until she was 28, by which point in real life we had been married for four years and had a child. Life is like that.) What she found was that marriage wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but there was something really great about taking the steps toward maturation together. She and her husband were independent, where a lot of her unmarried friends were still fairly dependent financially on their parents, and they had decided to forego lavish vacations to build a life together. Her encouragement to her intended audience of similarly educated, middle class college graduates was that maybe our culture is not right when it tells us to wait until we are older to get married. Maybe there is something beautiful about doing life, all of life, with another person. She doesn’t say marriage is a silver bullet, only that our emphasis on marriage as the ultimate expression of love between soul mates forces a lot of people to wait unnecessarily. Sometimes the commitment of marriage makes that person all the more lovable to us. I remember well on our honeymoon watching Clara watch the monkeys playing around in the trees outside of our hotel room and thinking that I had no idea what love was four days before that when we exchanged vows.

Marcotte can barely stifle her disdain for this type of marriage proselytizing. She takes Shaw’s claim that exchanging the wedding vows in front of God and all of your friends and family can actually strengthen the bond you feel with your spouse as nonsense. Her main traction point for her argument is that people who get married at a young age tend to get divorced at a higher rate than those who marry older. Which is true, although not in the way Marcotte claims, as I will show briefly.

Marcotte has a weird paragraph in the middle where she uses Shaw’s financial independence from her parents as evidence that she is “talking up how much more cool stuff she can supposedly afford. . . now that she’s married.” But this is a complete (and willful) misreading. Shaw isn’t bragging about being able to afford a bunch of cool stuff. Quite the opposite. Shaw’s whole point is that she cannot afford a lot of the stuff her unmarried friends afford because most of her unmarried friends are still supported by their parents. She isn’t bragging, only asserting that marriage has made her more independent.

The lynchpin of Marcotte’s argument is that young marriages lead to more divorces. Something she is remiss to point out, and a fact hiding in plain sight at the bottom of the Chicago Tribune article she cites as damning the case for young marriage (people would be far more successful if they actually read the entire article they cite to bolster their claim; it is almost like she Googled “young divorce” and pasted the link to the first site that came up), is that young marriage is not such a big deal if you have a college education. Marriage at any age is generally more successful when both partners have received higher education. Shaw isn’t speaking to high school dropouts encouraging them to get hitched; she is telling her fellow college graduates that there is not necessarily a reason to kick the marriage can down the road until your 30s.

Marcotte ends by saying that she is “glad young marriage is working out for Shaw” but the entire tone of her article betrays this sentiment. She wants Shaw’s young marriage to fail, as she wants all young marriages to fail, in order to prove her point that young marriages fail. And her claim at the end that for the majority of women dating and cohabiting is working out just fine is another example of statistical disingenuousness. It is true, of course, for the elites in the system, but cohabiting and bearing children outside of marriage is wreaking havoc on the lower classes in this country.

So Marcotte’s argument collapses on itself. She is correct when she says that young marriages have a higher divorce rate, but she neglects to point out that if you break this out for educational attainment and income, i.e. the people Shaw is addressing in her article, then the divorce rate plummets. Her argument on this score has little to do with the reality of Shaw’s target demographic. On the other hand, she argues that delayed marriage and cohabiting is working out fine for women, but neglects to mention that what she means by “women” is educated, white women. In reality, then, both Shaw’s argument and Marcotte’s second claim, when applied to Shaw’s intended audience, are true. Educated people with middle to upper-middle class incomes can marry at whatever age they want and be generally successful. One demographer has joked that the key to a successful life is as simple as not getting married before 20 and waiting to have kids until after you are married.

Marcotte's last paragraph is symptomatic of the derangement even the suggestion of marrying young can throw some openminded people into. She begins her concluding paragraph: “Watching conservatives desperately try to bully women into younger marriage with a couple of promises and a whole lot of threats is highly entertaining but clearly not persuasive.” Maybe there are conservatives out there threatening women with dire consequences if they wait to get married until they are 30, holding shotguns to women’s backs and all, but she in no way proves it in her little rant. Shaw, her ostensible sparring partner in this debate, nowhere threatens or bullies or even promises a grand ole time once you tie the knot. Shaw’s claim is limited: young marriage can be fantastic. Marcotte’s is absolute: young marriage will ruin your life and Shaw just hasn’t wised up to that fact yet.

Her inability to engage with Shaw, specifically her inability to do Shaw the favor of actually treating her article as if it were written to a very specific audience, is unfortunate and sloppy. But her splenetic rant against young marriage as a conservative means of controlling women and her glee at predicting divorce for participants in young marriages is something more: an ideological rigidity and refusal towards charity worthy of Marcotte's most egregious targets on the right. It is funny how closeminded these openminded people can be.