Marsha says she’s grown a bit concerned about my absence.  Very sorry, I didn’t mean to worry anyone (and thanks for the concern, Marsha!).  Yes, my bad, I should have posted this past week like I said I would; that might have helped matters.

I’ve just been so doggone freaking busy!  I’m even writing this bit after midnight, too busy to do it during daylight hours or while the kids are still awake, with the intent of posting it as soon as I have a moment to myself.

We’ve also had a few other quasi-scheduled disruptions here in the household.  Visits to and by the in-laws.  A surgical procedure.  Oddments of contract work on my part and increased work on the spouse’s part.  Continued work on the house accompanied by visits by contractors and deliveries of materials.  Deadline for writing a policy statement for a progressive organization.  And so on.

That’s not to say I haven’t been thinking about blogging; I give it a lot of thought while I’m doing some of the most mundane tasks.  But I’ve not perfected a way to capture fleeting thoughts that should be converted to a written piece.  I can’t see myself dictating into a recorder, nor does a note pad seem to work.  The kids would giggle at the sight of their mother talking to herself (well, that’s what it would be, wouldn’t it, even with a recorder involved?).  They also have a way of walking off with my note pads and using them to scratch on.  I already have several steno pads in flight, many of them interleaved with juvenile works of art (and one left in a coffee shop just last night).

But I have been thinking about blogging…and reading, too.  I’m  s l o w l y working my way through Collapse by Jared Diamond.  Highly recommended if you want to know; it’s a must-read.  I’ve said before that Diamond is very accessible, not at all what one would think of as a dry academic.  He writes in a clear, authentic voice about real people and real issues.  I’ll have plenty to say when I’ve finished the book.

While I continue to flail and slog away at the mundane tasks that currently swamp my life, I’ll leave you with something that I haven’t thought all the way through and lack resources and time to sift more finely.  It’ll be a separate post below since it merits cross-posting to another category.

1:16:51 PM    comment []

It occurred to me that we are caught on the horns of a dilemma, that we are thrust into a Catch-22.  I overheard some bit on television by Ayelet Waldman wherein she reiterated that she loved her husband more than her children.

No surprise that many people have taken her to task for this sentiment.  Our culture demands the most absurd levels of performance on behalf of our children; we’re made to feel incomplete as parents if we do not provide cable television, the most stylish clothing, the best schools and colleges, the best opportunities for our children.  We’re not supposed to question the sanity of sacrificing our own desires and our own relationships in order to make our children happy, keep them freakishly safe from harm, pave a golden highway to the future for them.

Never mind that many of us have difficulty parenting ourselves, let alone these small and precious gods we’ve been given.

It’s no wonder at all that so many of us are divorced, either.  How can a marriage compete with the demands our culture places on us about children?

We’re failures as parents if we can’t make marriage work, for the sake of the children.  We struggle to keep the flame alive, driven by other primal programming pushing us to procreate and stray to procreate further, while sacrificing nearly everything else we have in terms of time or resources for the benefit of our progeny.  We are torn by societal norms that say marriage is another must if we are to be successful at raising healthy children.

Men, once the “lord of the manor”, entitled to all the glories and attentions of the family, are now secondary to the children.  They are frustrated with a demotion they cannot point to without appearing anti-child; they continue in their long roles as “bread winner”, not having escaped the pressure that society places on them to perform, yet not receiving any external strokes from society for taking on this newer, subordinate-to-progeny role.  This shift has taken place in such a short period of time, too, making it easy to understand why some men resort to violence; they may not yet have been able to acquire other adaptive responses to this change in role.

Women in western culture have always been second-class citizens, quite used to the yoke of servitude to children and spouse.  It is this familiarity with an aged role that makes it more difficult to rise above the same role; women who choose not to have children or opt to place career achievement ahead of a traditional role are denigrated not only by society as a whole but by other women.  How dare we ever place ourselves and our desires above that of others – especially children?  Women are blamed, too, easy scapegoats for the frustrations of men; they are surely the reason why men are demoted in society, aren’t they the real reason why “lord of the manor” is no longer a politically correct aspiration?  Yet look at the response to Ayelet’s placement of her spouse and marriage ahead of her children; women are faulted no matter what choice they make.  It is easy enough to do so; those used to subordination rarely mount an effective retaliatory strike.

But there is little genuine dialogue about this quandary on balancing the demands of autonomy and marriage with the demands of children.  At least there is little that isn’t pop psychology, packaged with a bow to sell an ideology or simply sell a book.  Much pop psychology today is negative reinforcement of the existing, problematic dynamic, merely marketing for a meme that may be endangering.

There’s also little discussion about the pressure that children must surely feel about being raised in such a fashion, coddled and pampered, not allowed to feel the pangs of suffering that many before us were told would shape character.  Could children even articulate what the absence of failure in their lives does to them?  They have no words for failure, after all, unable to recognize it when it eventually does break through the bubble of societal cushioning and parental doting.  They have no words for the demands placed on them as the new leader of the family; they are unaware of their position, only knowing there are few boundaries that guide their growth and development.  The lack of boundaries manifests itself in increasingly outrageous behavior.  Who doesn’t think that children are far more rude and disrespectful now than in generations past?  Who can blame children, though; they cannot be responsible for themselves yet, let alone responsible for the direction of our culture and society…

This is where I left off on my train of thought.  What think you?

1:09:11 PM    comment []