Of Family Dinner

Writes Caitlin Flanagan (told you I loved her!):

"Their [writers of family dinner advice] notions about the meal and its importance in family life are rooted in middle-class American assumptions about how and when parents and children ought to interact.  What they are loath to admit is that the great missing element of that kind of existence is not dinner gongs or lists of conversations starters.  It's a kind of family life in which expectations have not been raised, but radically lowered.

"It requires a mother who considers putting dinner on the table neither an exalted nor a menial task, and also a collection of family members whose worldly ambitions are low enough that they all happen to be hanging around the house at six-thirty.  For family life to mimic the postwar ideal that is our current fixation, we would need to revive the cultural traditions that created it: the one-income family, the middle-class tendency toward frugality, and the understanding that one's children's prospects won't include elite private colleges and stratospheric professional success, both of which may hinge on tremendous achievements in the world of extracurricular activities.

"If children are to have unstructured time, they need a mother at home; no one would advocate a new generation of latchkey children.  But she must be a certain kind of mother--one willing to divest her sense of purpose from her children's achievement.  She must be a woman willing to forgo the prestige of professional life in order to sit at home while her kids dream up new games out in the tree house and wait for her to call them in for a nourishing dinner.  She must be willing to endure the humiliation of forgoing a career and of raising tots bound for state college."


Taken from To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife, "The Executive Child."

I have no need for friendship?

Caitlin Flanagan has become one of my favorite journalists in recent years, as she writes so well of the modern family and encourages her readers to question our current state of affairs.  One of the articles she wrote for The Atlantic, "Housewife Confidential," contrasts the modern day "at-home mother" with the "housewife" of years past.  (For the record, I identify more with the "housewife" than the "at-home mother," but that's another post.)

I've been bemoaning of the main differences the last couple of days (and nights) when I've been stuck alone with a fussy kid, in desperate need of a break and a friend.

She writes, "The kind of childhood that many of us remember so fondly—with hours of free time, and gangs of neighborhood kids meeting up after school—was possible partly because each block contained houses in which women were busy but close by, all too willing to push open a window and yell at the neighbor boy to get his fool bike out of the street."

There once was a time when women stayed home- with their babies, with their children- all hours of the day, rather than drop them at daycare or transport them to a different activity each night.  These women were there, in their houses, going about the work of the house.  While they may not have been making regular playdates with the children across town, I'm sure that they would have been available to lend a hand when a fellow housewife was at her wit's end with her own children.  If they were willing to discipline her child by yelling out their windows, they would have payed her a visit if she called in tears. Or at least sent their eldest daughter over as a mother's helper for the evening.

But now, when a mother has been left to tend to her house and child alone, and she feels the same anguish, she looks out the window, and realizes she's alone.  The town has emptied with everyone running to work, and she has no help.  How does she go about making friends, when she doesn't cart her children to different activities each day, and the only other adults she sees in a week beside her husband, are the members of her church who attend the same service on Sunday morning?  Or has loneliness just become part of the burden she must bear as a mother?




Flanagan's full article is here.

Laundry woes

Lest you go thinking I'm that woman, rest assured.  I don't do laundry. Really.  I have stacks upon stacks of laundry overflowing onto the floor.  I can say it's because I really don't want to go down into my creepy basement, but really, it's just because I'm lazy and hate laundry.  So there it sits, until my husband realizes he has no matching socks or clean pants, and he takes a load or two down himself, which then makes me feel guilty that I haven't done it.  You'd think guilt would be the motivator to head down once a day with a load or two myself, but I'm a master excuse-maker, and probably just too lazy.

A Strong Woman

I came across this beautiful description of a strong woman while reading Michael Perry's Truck: A Love Story.  Notice her strength comes not from her ability to strap a man's shoes and win the bread- rather, it comes from making the bread and feeding it to her children.  A bit lengthy, but bear with me.

"I was raised by strong women.  Of course they could only do so much.

"I use the term raised  in the perpetual sense, because the work continues.  There is my mother, of course, sentenced to nature's most blessed curse, in which the female is expected to give of her body and blood in the rearing of a creature bound to bring trouble on the house.  Not to mention the heart.  A child is prayer and worry wrapped in a blanket.  Tax deductible, yes, but oh, the hidden costs.  You might describe my mom as the valedictorian homecoming queen who wound up a God-fearing homemade granola-slingling Florence Nightingale in a maxiskirt and construction boots stuck on a cow farm. 

"Over the years she has taken responsibility for for the care and feeding of legions of children--some conceived, some adopted, some fostered, some delivered by the county for the weekend, others for a lifetime.  She is slight of build, and (to use her phrase) just mortified by public attention (thus I write of her in the broadest terms), but I have watched three firefighters rush to her with an unconscious baby and then enclose her in a semicircle of hulking apprehension while she calmly gets the kid breathing again.  I have also seen her up to her elbow in the rear end of a sheep and giving rescue breaths to a newborn Holstein calf. (Mind you, not simultaneously.) 

"For forty years she has raised a constantly fluctuating passel of tots, drawing on her wits, fifty-pound bags of oatmeal, and a fistful of coupons the size of a bad UNO hand.  There were undoubtedly sleepless nights, but she never betrayed them."

Fear not, the next paragraph goes on to describe her inefficiencies and weirdness, including a strange hand tic and her inability to fold a basket of clothes without getting distracted.

I have reread that passage several times now, and the only thought I have is this: Would that I could be like her.

Of Home and Housework

I'm rather amazed at everything I can accomplish in one day, and still have some energy left by the time my son goes to bed.  Besides general cleaning and dinner preparation, I can go to the grocery store, walk to the post office, make bread or cookies, and do a load of laundry.  (I realize some of you may be thinking, "Well sure, she's only got one!"  Rest assured, for every ounce of cuteness in my son, there is a pound of "Hold Me!"  Most of my day is spent one-armed singing Yankee Doodle and various nursery rhymes.)

Granted, I am squeezing a lot of work into the glorious 40 minute nap, and I do a lot of kitchen clean-up after dinner, when my husband can baby-wrangle for me; but still, the possibilities are endless.  I can do my dishes!  I can scrub and vacuum the floors weekly!  I can read a book! I can clean the windows! I can shine my silver! I can make dessert!

Look out home, I'm apron-clad, wielding a spatula and broom!

After I retrieve them from my son.

I don't feel so bad for wearing sweats.

There's a reason I don't watch the Emmy Awards.  Or the Acadamy Awards. Or any other awards.  I find the hubbub slightly ridiculous.  I like good acting as much as the next guy; I have a Netflix account.  But when it comes down the glitz and glamor, it has no place in my life.  Those women were professionally dressed and styled- and gorgeous.  They are, after all, the Ideal American Woman. So I found it rather appalling when I overheard (I do mean overheard.  My son can turn the TV on by biting the remote) the criticism concerning their dresses, makeup, and hair.  The following comments from the Today Show seemed more appropriate directed at me on any given day, not them.  So I laughed.  I don't feel so bad for wearing sweats and t-shirts anymore.  Have a laugh with me.

"Her hair was just kind of down and blah."

"Her hair looked not as polished as it could- or the makeup either."

"She needs a product for frizzies.  There was some serious static- electrostatic something or other going on in that head.  Not a fan of it."

"She was so busy getting her dress on, she didn't have time for her hair!"

"This is a really great testament to why some dresses work in magazines, but not in person."

My Sunday morning glitz and glamor

My new addiction

Embroidery! What a wonderful thing I have found.  It started a desire to make Hubby's stoles while we're out on vicarage. The problem was, I hadn't ever tried to embroider anything.  So I figured someone out there would have put out some videos to show me the basics, or I could find someone in the congregation to teach me. Last week, I found a great website with over 50 videos of stitches, and I tried the simpler ones, then moved on to the more complicated and complex.  Now, I can't stop.  I'm dreaming up the elaborate designs I could make, deciding which stitches I can use to best fill in designs, and trying to master perhaps one of the most complex stitches out there, the plaited braid stitch. I'm close. Very close. I'll give it one more try tonight before bed. 

Won't that make a lovely border on a stole?

Check our Mary Corbet's embroidery blog here.