Hefner at 80

I came across this hilarious roundup of bad reviews of Basic Instinct 2 this morning on Defamer ("taxidermy" -- ouch). I've been following that story in a train-wreck sort of way. It was so awkward and sad to read about Sharon Stone's insistence on being filmed completely nude despite the fact that nobody seemed to want to see it. She was really big on getting out there in everyone's face (literally) that women approaching 50 can be not just attractive, not just sexy, but worthy of decadent, pornographic coverage.

You hear this a lot among aging Hollywood starlets, and their obsession with this issue is indicative with society's views about women in general these days. Of course women of all ages can be attractive, but pop culture's obsession with pounding this point into everyone's heads comes from the fact that being SEXY is considered one of the most prized attributes a woman can have. I mean, come on, are you supposed to take pride in something meaningless like being a good mother or (if we can say it without laughing) being a good Christian?

I cringe a bit every time I see something in the media bending over backwards to make the world see this-or-that type of woman as sexy (the overweight, the handicapped, etc.), and blatantly overlooking the obvious question of "Who cares?" It's a subtle, insidious way of making sure our daughters know where their value lies.

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This fits in nicely with Matthew Scully's Opinion Journal article I came across today. A great bet would be to make the loser actually watch the entirety of one of these Hugh Hefner interviews as he hits the media circuit for his 80th birthday. How could you not barf watching the media fawn all over Hefner while he basks in his glory as revolutionary/ philosopher/ liberator-of-women/ fighter-of-intolerance. Scully makes some great points about the ridiculousness of the situation. Some highlights:

Lest we forget that there was actually a "Playboy Philosophy" to go with the pictures, Mr. Hefner has also reissued, online, all 250,000 words of his early-1960s disquisition on the good life and the evils of sexual inhibition. Still endlessly indulged by reporters, he has slipped into his best bathrobe for another round of clubby interviews in which to showcase his three salaried "girlfriends" and to reminisce about the original Playboy "dream."

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He is certainly right to believe that he has left his mark in the world. Richard Corliss in Time magazine is overstating it a bit when he writes that "porn doesn't affront contemporary community standards. It is a contemporary community standard." But he is close enough, and we have Hugh Marston Hefner, more than anyone else, to thank for the great plenitude of porn we take for granted today.

There was a dark and joyless time in America when one could actually go about daily life without ever encountering pornographic images. A child could grow up scarcely knowing that "adult entertainment" existed, much less acquainted with its many varieties. Hotel stays, in that prudish, stuffy era, had to be endured without pay-as-you-go porn, in-room and On Command. American males could not avail themselves of hundreds of millions of obscene films every year--as they do now, courtesy of even respectable corporations like Time Warner and Comcast--or take in the show at "gentlemen's clubs" when porn is not enough.

And here's what reminded me of the Sharon Stone situation, society's obsession with making sure that we all know that older women are still sexy!!!!! (i.e. still valuable).

Pornography, Hef still assures us, is an antidote to social and personal troubles rather than an obvious source of them, and his own softer brand of the stuff is in any case so innocuous as to have no harmful social consequences whatever. It is not license, he tells us in a typical bit of pretentious blather, but repression that "twists the nature of sexuality. What causes all the sickness, the perversion, the rape, is a repressive society--a society that can't be open in a loving and positive way." Likewise, Playboy and all it brought were "not just for the guys. The major beneficiaries were women."

Enough to say that police investigators, in the sex-crimes units that have expanded roughly in proportion to mass-market "adult material," rarely conclude that the rapist or child predator lacked for pornographic inspiration before committing the crime. As to those "major beneficiaries" of porn, you won't find too many women these days who think that the world is better because of Playboy or the smug, selfish ethic it has always purveyed. For good reason has the Playboy Foundation long been a benefactor to NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood: The Playboy Philosophy has always been for the ladies, too, all right--just so long as they remember what they're good for, don't get too sentimental and feel grateful when the playboy in their own life offers to pay for the abortion.

Ah, yes, Hefner has contributed so much to the world. And what a rich life he's built for himself: admittedly leaving his wife and children after the invention of Viagra, still trying to find the next hottest girlfriend at 80 YEARS OLD. Remember, everyone, he's not pathetic, he's living the "dream."

What is the pro-choice crowd's take on this?

I wasn't going to post this but it's been bugging me all day and I just wanted to throw it out there for my readers in case I'm totally missing something. Please pardon my indulgence in this most controversial of topics.

The BBC has a story about the recent historical arrest of an Indian abortion doctor who specialized in aborting female fetuses since families over there strongly prefer to have boys. According to the article, "Audio and video evidence showed the doctor telling one [decoy patient] that tests had revealed that she was carrying a 'female fetus and it would be taken care of'." (Whoever that decoy patient was has incredible guts. I couldn't do it.)

I've thought about this issue a lot over the years ever since my friend from India told me nonchalantly how common abortions on female babies are in India (hence it's illegal to reveal the gender of the baby in the ultrasound over there). When I recounted this fact to my friends (who were almost entirely pro-choice) they all reacted with horror. I didn't understand how you could reconcile the two views of being pro "a woman's right to choose" but feeling like what goes on in India is wrong. I've never figured it out, and coming across this story today reminded me of that.

For a pro-choice activist, Dr. Sabhani is a hero, right? How dare the Indian government infringe on women's rights to choose, right? Since it's all just tissue anyway this is no different than a dermatologist who removes basal cell but not squamous cell lesions...right?

But I don't think the Indian embassy needs to worry about being bombarded with pro-choice protesters any time soon. In fact, the little bit of looking I did on pro-choice sites showed no discussion of this story at all. If these people really believe what they say they believe, that women should be able to make their own choice about a pregnancy -- period -- then this guy is a hero and they need to get out there and support him and his practice. And if that's not their reaction, if they're uncomfortable with what he does, how do they explain it?

Good reading for the Schiavo anniversary

The one year anniversary of Terri Schiavo's death is coming up. Not surprisingly, Mark Steyn had one of the best takes on the issue at the time, focusing on the fact that that, moral issues aside, it was a flat-out miscarriage of justice from a legal perspective. His article from this time last year is a must-read. Here's an excerpt:

Michael Schiavo took a vow to be faithful in sickness and in health, forsaking all others till death do them part. He'’s forsaken his wife and been unfaithful to her: she is, de facto, his ex-wife, yet, de jure, he appears to have the right to order her execution. This is preposterous. Suppose his current common-law partner were to fall victim to a disabling accident. Would he also be able to have her terminated? Can he exercise his spousal rights polygamously? The legal deference to Mr Schiavo'’s position, to his rights overriding her parents', is at odds with reality.

Dear World: I'm not going back to work. Ever. Get over it.

I was so tired when I put together that post last night that I don't think I even remembered how much that whole subject touches a nerve with me. But Jennifer and Steve's comments refreshed my memory.

When I tell people that this next baby is a girl one of the more common comments I get is, "How great, you guys are all done then!" Ahem. No. But a more annoying offshoot of that comment is the thinking-aloud calculations of when I can go back to work. People know I'm "doing the stay-at-home-mommy thing" while my kids are little but, hey, in a couple of years this next little one will be ready for pre-school and -- hallelujah! -- I can finally get back to that cubicle and resume my life! Whew!

When I explain that I have no plans to get back to work I'm usually met with confused looks and furrowed brows. Oh...because I'm going to have more kids? Err, maybe I just don't have any offers right now. Or, uhh, is it because...? For some reason it is totally inconceivable to most people that I just don't want to go back to work. Even if for some reason I could not have more children, I'm still not going to polish up the old resume and jump back into the corporate world. I'm married and I want to be a housewife.

I've actually had to work quite a bit over the past year, something I just put a stop to a few weeks ago. My husband and I were still getting our business off the ground and I had to help pick up slack if it was going to work, so I worked from home as the webmaster, online marketing specialist, bookkeeper, HR manager and general jack-of-all-trades. As work goes, it was actually pretty fulfilling and fun. I hired a close friend of the family to act as a nanny for my son, then about a year old.

Most of my friends expressed envy that I had such an "ideal" situation -- I could WORK, mostly from my house, and have flexible hours to boot. What more could a woman want in life? I was living the dream, I had it all!

Wrong.

I remember one day in January I was particularly swamped with work and knew I had a long week ahead of me. I'd just gotten off of a contentious phone call with a vendor and hit "Send/Receive" to find four new emails from our employees, all containing requests for me to do something "urgent." I was tired. I walked into the kitchen to see our nanny, Maria, grilling up some lemon-herb chicken and veggies for her and my son to eat for lunch. They'd just gotten back from the park and looked refreshed and energized. After lunch they were going to read one of his new books about dinosaurs and then go explore the little greenbelt that runs through our neighborhood. I didn't have time to eat with them, I had to get back to work.

As I shuffled back to my office I thought, "I'm outsourcing living!" I was working while paying someone else to live my life for me. What's next?, I half-joked to myself, I'm going to pay Maria to go get a massage for me since I'm too busy? Maybe she could read that Groeschel book I've been meaning to get to and tell me if it's as life-changing as everyone says it is.

I'd always thought that I didn't want to work after I was a wife and a mother, and this experience proved that it sucked as much as I'd thought it would. When my husband came home that night we had a long talk and both agreed that it was time to change. No matter how financially painful, we had to hire someone to do the work that I had been doing.

And when I tell people of this new development they often assure me that this is just a temporary thing that we have to do while we have small children, that I will be able to safely return to the workforce and put that 'ol education to good use again in no time at all. You'd think that I was telling people I was going to prison or something.

Sometimes I feel like I need to get a t-shirt, or maybe a forehead tattoo, that says "Dear World: Short of unforeseen financial tragedy, I am not going back to work. Ever. Get over it." For the first time in my life I have the freedom to explore whatever interests me, read whatever books I want, try out little projects I've always been curious about, see the world in a whole new light through my children, and arrange my schedule however I'd like. For me, that's priceless. No title or paycheck could ever replace that.

[I have actually written about this before. Here is an article I published elsewhere in 2003 on this issue (it's aimed at a socially conservative audience). At the time I wasn't even married but, now that I am, my opinions haven't changed a bit.]

Having it all

[This is an old article of mine from April 2003. I post it mainly because it expounds on my next post.]

For those of you who read this site at work, I have a question for you: suppose you were to walk over to the coworker nearest to you and say, "Man, isn't being here great? I love this place!" What sort of reaction do you think you might get? Would it be one of gleeful agreement? Something tells me it wouldn't. In this culture where Dilbert is a bestseller and the movie Office Space has a cult following, I think we all agree that sitting behind your desk eight to ten hours at a time, soaking up the ambiance of the fluorescent lights, is not exactly the essence of human experience. Or do we?

In the never-ending debate about women and their roles in the household and the workplace, it seems that everyone from far left liberals to religious right conservatives agree on one thing: when women leave jobs to run a household it's a huge sacrifice.

In The New Republic Michelle Cottle talks about the "stark, painful lifestyle choices" women have to make when trying to balance career and family, and suggests that it's crazy to "let [men] off so easy" by allowing them to be the only ones who have jobs. She asks, "Why isn't Daddy expected to struggle with the same tough decisions about how to juggle work and family for the next four to eighteen years?"

Even family-values conservatives are behind Cottle on this one. Oliver North talks about how his wife "sacrificed" her career to raise their children; when presidential advisor Karen Hughes left her job as advisor to the president, Kathleen Parker assured readers that "this isn't a Mommy Track; this is a career track for any man or woman to envy"; Suzanne Fields mentions "tradeoffs" like "sacrificing" a career in medicine to stay home with children.

Liberals and conservatives alike fill up endless pages with words of advice to women about how they can try to "have it all," meaning have both a family and a career. Liberals suggest having fathers stay home more and government programs to help mothers keep working after their children are born; conservatives usually recommend that women postpone a career until their children are in school full time. Such advice usually comes with the doleful caveat that, alas, it is perhaps impossible for women to have it all and they will inevitably have to make career sacrifices.

Wait a minute. "Having it all" requires having a job? When did we forget that work sucks?

Women seem to think that if they don't work they're doomed to a life of fretting about burnt cookies and ring-around-the-collar. It's a sad state of affairs if people think that life degenerates into a lackluster, unimportant existence if they're not being told what to do by a boss. Besides, what if being a housewife did mean your worries revolved around cooking and keeping the house in order? Is that any less noble than your worries revolving around total quality initiatives and process optimization so that the company you work for can make a little bit more money?

Feminists are often quick to cite the countless examples of women who, after leaving their careers to stay at home, report feeling bored, unfulfilled, and lonely. The assumption is that this is the inherent condition of the woman who does not work. But the problem here is not that being a housewife is boring; the problem is that years of politically correct social pressure have pushed women into the workplace so successfully that they can't even imagine what it would be like to have a happy life outside of the cubicle. To compound the problem, workplace training has left women without personal goals or the ability to self-motivate. When you haven't developed any interests or passions of your own, aren't used to motivating yourself and setting personal deadlines for accomplishing goals, and don't have a boss telling you what to do, it's easy to let your days fill up with trivialities.

When I think of sacrifices and careers I think of the neighborhood fathers I knew growing up who stayed in jobs they hated in order to support their families. I think of single mothers I see who don't have the ability to spend their days with their children because they have to have a full time job (or two) to put food on the table. While wealthy women shout from the rooftops about not being able to work enough, men and women who actually have to work get no credit for the sacrifices they make.

This is not to say that being a housewife is easy or doesn't involve sacrifices. Like each member of a family that functions well, women who stay at home full time make plenty of sacrifices for the good of the team. But it's a skewed worldview that counts not having a job as one of them. After all, what constitutes "having it all" if not the freedom to spend your time developing your relationships with family and friends and pursuing your own interests?

As the debate rages on I expect that liberal pundits will continue to talk about discrimination, unfairness, and, of course, sacrifices. But I hope that conservatives, especially those who claim to promote family values, will stop tossing around suggestions for how women can "have it all" by getting up and going to an office every day in addition to focusing on their families. The last thing women need is more advice about how to work. What they need is some advice about how to live.

Throwing away your education

A Dutch politician is advocating for penalizing women who choose to stay home with children after going to college (which is paid for by the government). "You enjoy an expensive education, paid for by society, and you cannot throw away this knowledge without a penalty." I know that KathyJo is right there with her on this -- why learn anything at all if you're not going to use it in the workforce? (I just had to throw that in after reading some of her recent posts). :)

What worries me is that I see this crazy mentality slipping into our own culture, slowly but surely. A friend of mine who received an expensive education at a top private university got married and became a housewife the year after she graduated. Evidently it did not go over well at all with her friends, their reactions ranging from confusion to open hostility that she would "throw away" her expensive education.

It reminds me of back when I worked at a high tech company right after college. I had a cool title and made good money for my age so I seemed to have society's approval that I was putting my education to use. Everyone applauded the track that my life was on. But really, I did absolutely nothing to contribute to society. I worked all the time so I didn't have much of a life outside of work, unless you count Friday happy hours with coworkers. I sat in a cubicle all day. When I wasn't on conference calls or writing reports that nobody read or surfing the web I would occasionally write some code that would help the marketing department pull information about our company's clients from a database. But I was putting my education to use because I had my very own cubicle...and a paycheck!

Now that I'm a housewife and mom I spend every bit of free time I can squeeze out of my day reading about Catholic theology, history, world religions and politics. I'm often called upon by my working friends to share what I've learned over lunch or coffee since they don't have the time or the mental bandwidth to read those sorts of subjects themselves. If I don't homeschool my children I will at least be very involved in their education, taking them to museums, putting together fun physics experiments and reading classic literature together. I am working on getting involved in my parish, perhaps using the writing experience I gained in college to put together some literature for them. I also run the family finances, including printing monthly budget and investment reports from Quicken to go over with my husband.

But according to a lot of people in the world, I am "throwing away" my education, unlike back in the day when I had that glamorous (*cough* *snort*) high tech job. (I ran into an old acquaintance from my working days at a wedding last year and he half-jokingly asked what it was like not to ever have to use my brain now that I'm not working.)

I hope that one of these days the people in our society will wake up and remember that the original purpose of a university education was not to get a better job. I hope that the concept of higher learning for the sake of itself, learning about the world and its people and its history just because, has not been totally lost.

A must-read on the Christian execution issue

For the politically inclined, and/or those just following the story of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan man sentenced to death for converting to Christianity, Mark Steyn's article on the topic is a must-read.

Steyn is by far my favorite pundit. His writing is really brilliant. (Archives here and here for those who aren't familiar with him.)

Best of the Inbox

I'm still so deeply engrossed in my reading and thinking about the question of suffering (mainly reading the text of the fantastic link that Jeff provided) that I can't spare the brain power to post anything lofty or interesting right now. But I am going through email and came across a few amusing things I thought I'd share.

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I love this quote from a friend who is the mother of a five-month-old who has sleep habits just like my son's.

Sorry I haven’t been in touch, things have been insane - which is the norm. Which doesn't mean they are insane, just that I do not have a handle on everyday life.

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My husband was Googling around and came across the website for The Monastery of Christ in the Desert in the mountains of New Mexico. He was so excited to discover that they have a guesthouse where anyone can come stay. There's no fixed fee for staying there, just a suggested donation (which is extremely cheap). We're really enchanted with the idea of going there sometime.

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My husband found this great quote from Justice Scalia about judges injecting their political opinions into the Constitution.

"What is a moderate interpretation [of the Constitution]? Halfway between what it says and halfway between what you want it to say?"

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43things.com - interesting concept for a site. Social networking based on goals.

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This isn't from email, but it's so cute I had to share. We've been teaching my 18-month-old son that the answer to the question "Who lives at church?" is "Jesus." Normally he picks up on those things very quickly, but for some reason he just can't get this one right. Whenever we ask him "Who lives at church?" he thinks for a moment, then responds with delight, "Chuck E. Cheese!"

More on God and suffering

OK, I've decided to make the topic of suffering and God's will my thought project for the next couple of weeks. I actually have the book that Jennifer recommended, C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain, sitting on my bookshelf but just haven't gotten to it. I think I'll put down my current reading (On Being Catholic by Thomas Howard) and go back to Lewis for a while.

Part of my motivation is that the comments to my post and Jennifer's and Ersza's thoughts on the subject have been wonderful and have kept me thinking about the issue all week. But there's another reason that I really need to get some sort of resolution on this issue.

My family and I live with my mother (the story behind that is the subject of another post...or entire blog) and on the mantle of her fireplace sits a beautiful black-and-white portrait from the 1940s of her parents and her brother, their firstborn son and at the time their only child. The photo shows my young and beaming grandparents, my grandfather in his military uniform, probably just home for a while during his service in WWII. Their cute little son, Timmy, who looks quite like my own son, is wearing little khaki overalls and a striped shirt and he grins from ear to ear. He looks like he's probably about two and a half. And every time I walk past that picture I tear up a little bit and am reminded how much I need some resolution on God's role in human suffering.

A few weeks after that picture was taken, in April 1945, my grandmother, Timmy and her mother were out running errands near their home in Pennsylvania. A trucker ran a stop sign and hit their car. My great-grandmother was killed instantly. My grandmother, then five months pregnant with my mother, was thrown from the car. Timmy was injured but probaly not badly. But then the car caught on fire and Timmy was trapped inside. It took a while for them to get him out. I won't go into graphic details of his physical state, but he was in gruesomely bad shape by the time they got him out. My grandmother held him on her lap as he screamed in agony on the way to the hospital. Unfortunately for him, he lived another two days before he died from his burns. My grandfather was back at the war so my grandmother was left alone.

For a while I've been thinking about asking my mother to take this photo off the mantle so I don't need to think about that horrible incident every time I walk through the living room. But perhaps it's good that it's there. It's certainly a catalyst for my desire to have a deeper understanding of the problem of suffering.

I realized after writing my last post about this issue that what probably bothers me most about the photo is that it's a physical reminder that I cannot reconcile such an occurrence with my (currently very immature) spiritual beliefs. And little Timmy's physical resemblance to my own son makes it really hit home how woefully unprepared I would be to handle such a situation. I don't know what would happen with my spiritual quest if something like that were to happen to my family right now...but...it probably wouldn't be good. My grandmother, a Catholic convert when she married, remained a devout Catholic through the rest of her life, so she must have had some sort of insight into the issue. I wish she were still around so I could ask her.

I don't mean to burden you readers with such a sad story. I share it only because it's my litmus test for the problem of pain, the example I turn to to test every school of thought on the subject, so any further discussion of my views on the subject would be incomplete without sharing it. Whenever I hear possible explanations for what is and isn't God's will, how our suffering fits into his plan, etc. I always turn to this situation and ask if this-or-that theory makes it make sense.

So tonight I plan to print out and re-read Jennifer's posts, Ersza's posts and Steve's comments on the subject and then move on to hear what Lewis has to say. I know that this is probably one of those things that humans can never completely grasp, but I would like to feel like I have a little bit more spiritual depth on the subject, perhaps to one day even be able to walk through the living room and see those smiling faces in the little gold frame and feel like it all ended up OK.

People searching for abortion alternatives leads to "skewed" results

I just came across an article from the New York Times where some pro-choice people, including the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (ugh), are upset with Amazon because its technology reflects the fact that people searching for books about "abortion" also tend to search for "adoption". The headline reads Amazon Says Technology, Not Ideology, Skewed Results. Umm. Actually, the technology was fine and the results were not skewed.

Amazon.com last week modified its search engine after an abortion rights organization complained that search results appeared skewed toward anti-abortion books.

Until a few days ago, a search of Amazon's catalog of books using the word "abortion" turned up pages with the question, "Did you mean adoption?" at the top, followed by a list of books related to abortion.

Amazon removed that question from the search results page after it received a complaint from a member of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, a national organization based in Washington.

Patty Smith, an Amazon spokeswoman, said there was no intent by the company to offer biased search results. She said the question "Did you mean adoption?" was an automated response based on past customer behavior combined with the site's spelling correction technology...Amazon's software suggested adoption-related sources because "abortion" and "adoption" have similar spellings, and because many past customers who have searched for "abortion" have also searched for "adoption." [Emphasis mine]

So Amazon took down the "Did you mean adoption?" prompt. But that's still not good enough. It would seem that the pro-abortion crowd won't be happy until Amazon actually does skew its technology to prevent people who search on abortion from seeing adoption-related results, despite the fact that that's how their customers usually behave.

Customers, however, are still offered "adoption" as a possibility in the Related Searches line at the top of an "abortion" search results page. But the reverse is not true.

Ms. Smith said that was because many customers who searched for abortion also searched for adoption, but customers who searched for "adoption" did not typically search for topics related to abortion.

Still, the Rev. Jeff Briere, a minister with the Unitarian Universalist Church in Chattanooga, Tenn., and a member of the abortion rights coalition, said he was worried about an anti-abortion slant in the books Amazon recommended and in the "pro-life" and "adoption" related topic links.

"The search engine results I am presented with, their suggestions, seem to be pro-life in orientation," Mr. Briere said.

So Amazon's algorithm's accurate reflection of the fact that people who search on abortion also search on adoption, but not vice versa, has Rev. Briere "worried."

The mentality of pro-choice activists is really strange. On one hand, they give lip service to seeing abortion as an unfortunate choice but thinking it should just be an option for women. But in actuality their actions often make it seem as if they're opposed to women with unexpected pregnancies choosing anything other than abortion -- or, as in this case, even exploring the alternatives!

Discerning God's will

[I am in a huge hurry as I write this but it's such a pressing issue for me that I'd like to get it out there sometime this afternoon, so I apologize for any incoherency.]

I've been thinking about Jennifer's recent post a lot today and yesterday, using her incredibly selfless take on the issue as an example for me, looking at how I deal with the problems I face in my own life and how I might turn them over to God like she does rather than my usual route of whining and feeling sorry for myself.

But I keep running up against a theological stumbling block that has been tripping me up constantly since I started this spiritual endeavor last year: how do you know what is God's will and what is not? I tried looking it up in the Catechism and couldn't find a clear answer (I probably just missed it), so I turn to you readers.

For example: let's say something bad happens to me today. Let's say my house burns down. When I turn to God with this problem, am I to assume that this was his will? Or is it possible that it was either a) the devil or b) just random. It seems that many Catholics assume that everything that happens in their lives is the will of God. But is there no room for the work of evil forces, or the plain old randomness that comes with free will? And if these two other forces can be causes, how do you know which one caused your particular problem?

Surprisingly, in all my reading I have no idea where the Church stands on this. I am totally confused about this issue.

I know this is a big subject so if this is a larger question than can be answered in the comments field I'm happy to be pointed to a good book on the subject.

WSJ Opinion Journal on the Catholic Dems

Joseph Bottum weighs in on a topic that had sort of nagged at me in the back of my mind -- why did the Catholic Democrats make that statement out of the blue? It seems kind of random. But Bottum's take resonates with what I know of politicians:

But still the question remains: Why the statement now? For someone like Rosa L. DeLauro--or for such signers as Bart Stupak, Patrick J. Kennedy, Cynthia McKinney, and Nancy Pelosi--what's the political gain of claiming Catholicism at a time when the American Church is still reeling from the scandals that broke in 2002?

A general rule is that you should trust people to know their own best interests--or, at least, trust professionals to understand their own professions better than outsiders do. No one gets elected to Congress by being a complete idiot--about politics, at least. There is, I think, a glamour that attaches to Catholicism right now. A lot of mud, too, of course. But the intellectual force of Catholic analysis and vocabulary seems to have touched an awful lot of America's contemporary political debate, and the 55 signers of the "Statement of Principles" want in on it all.

In one sense, this is just another entry in the Democrats' general attempt to reclaim religion. But in its peculiar Catholic iteration, the problem of abortion wrecks the logic of the statement from its very first moment. Until the Democrats find a genuine way to be pro-life, they will not be able to deploy Catholic intellectual resources--or claim the prestige of doing so. [full text]

Prayers needed

Please pray for Jennifer and her husband. My heart breaks for her after reading this post, yet I am so inspired by her attitude and her spiritual maturity.

Good job, South Dakota

My favorite host on Relevant Radio, Sheila Liaugminas, has been raving about how well done the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion's report is. She has been strongly encouraging her readers to check it out for themselves so I finally got around to it this morning.

Now that I've read it, I couldn't agree more. This is great stuff. Even if you don't have time to read the whole thing at least click on the link and check out the table of contents.

South Dakota Abortion Task Force Report

Sleep training: Day 9

Tonight I sat down with my son in the chair in his room for night-night cuddles and songs. A few bars into the first song he interruped me and pointed to his crib and said, "Crib! In!" and put himself to sleep after only 15 minutes of playing/light fussing.

We still have some big hurdles to get over, but I can't deny that this is major progress. There might be hope for us after all.

Finally, an alternative to A Baby Story

Discovery Health has a show about midwives that's supposed to be great called House of Babies. I can't find a good summary of it but here's the schedule.

I don't know why anyone even watches A Baby Story. It's the same thing every time: the woman wants to have a natural labor; she ends up getting induced for a really vague reason; she gets an epidural; about four medical personnel suited up in masks, plastic eye shields and rubber gloves hand her her baby over the divider tarp; they promptly take the baby away from her and sit it in a little tray, uncovered, while it cries (I have never understood why this is necessary). After staying in the hospital for a while she's wheeled out in a wheelchair like she's an invalid. Yawn.

Although it's a good thing that the House of Babies camera crew wasn't following me around when I had my son at our birthing center and he was compound presentation. Nobody would ever have natural childbirth again after watching my less-than-graceful handling of the situation. And it would probably get an X rating for language. I didn't even know I knew some of the words I was shouting.

Sleep training: Day 7 update

I have a lot of thoughts and am not quite sure how to organize them, but I'll do my best to make it as easy to read as possible.

My Favorite Sleep Training Book
First of all, why is Kim West's book Good Night, Sleep Tight not considered *the* book on sleep training? I have read each of the books by Pantley, Karp, Ferber, Sears, Ezzo, Brazelton, Weissbluth and Hogg cover-to-cover (in some cases multiple times) and didn't find any of them nearly as helpful as this one. Yet I'd never even heard of Kim West. I just randomly happened upon her book at the discount rack at the grocery store of all places.

I love this book is because:

• It's tough-love enough to be effective, yet it's much more gentle than Ferber and some of the others.
• The author is very respectful of parents' needs to make their own decisions and occasionally go against her recommendations. Most of the other sleep training books just tell you, "Don't do XYZ -- period" and offer no alteratives. West makes recommendations, but also includes suggestions for how to work it if you're just not comfortable implemeting her recommendation. (For example: for parents who are having trouble with co-sleeping she recommends getting your child to sleep in his own crib. But she also says she understands that that just doesn't work for some people and includes a section on sleep training while co-sleeping).
• It's written by a mother. She understands how difficult it is to make some of the changes she suggests and her tone is very encouraging, supportive and understanding.
  

My Plan
The plan I'm following is from West's book. Basically, you start out sitting right next to the crib. Then, slowly, over a period of a couple of weeks, you go from lots of physcial and verbal reassurance to just verbal reassurance as you gradually move your position out the bedroom door. (This is the plan for 17-month-olds, might be different for other ages, I didn't read those chapters). Although I'm stuck in the "right by the crib" phase since he's not adapting to it all that well.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times. (But mostly the latter).
I'm not really sure how to say sleep trainig is going. On one hand, an amazing, astounding thing has started occuring that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime: my son has started asking to go in his crib. Asking. To. Go. In. His. Crib. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

Oddly, as soon as I put him in there at night he starts screaming. He doesn't do this during naps or in the middle of the night but for some reason night time is the end of the world. I've tried moving his bedtime earlier in case he's overtired and putting in a brighter nightlight but nothing works. And the length of time he cries is actually increasing rather than decreasing, which is unspeakably depressing.

I've experienced this before. When I got desperate and resorted to Ferber's method (leaving the room but returning at regular intervals for reassurance) when my son was about nine months old, I did it under the premise that it "always" works in three days. That's what the book claims and that had been the experience of every single person I knew who'd done it. I knew probably eight or nine people personally and countless women on message boards who'd done Ferber with their babies and they all reported the same thing: first night is terrible, second night is bad, third night is pretty good, and then it's pretty much smooth sailing from there.

Not so with us. My child is strong-willed and intense and does not give in easily, to say the least. After 14 days of Ferber with little to no improvement I decided that I couldn't live my life this way anymore and threw in the towel, resinging myself to many more months of exhaustion. And I'm afraid that's what I'm facing now. I know that it's important to pick a plan and stick with it since drastically changing the routine is confusing and unsettling to children. But at the same time I can't listen to my son scream bloody murder for an hour every night indefinitely.

My New Pet Peeve
One clear thing that's come of this situation is that I have a new pet peeve: people assuming that all babies are just like their own. I've had to mention to quite a few people that I'm doing sleep training because I've had to cancel all my plans for the next few weeks, and that has resulted in all sorts of advice. A couple of people I know who have docile, easy-going little girls have told me that I'm wasting time sitting next to his crib and I just need to give him a lovey and leave the room, and he'll "fuss" for a little bit but get over it within a day or two. The sheer fact that they honestly think that my son would do anything with a "lovey" other than make it a projectile and that they think that I'm dealing with "fussing" rather than agonizing, top-of-the-lungs, shrieking is a clear indicator that they are completely unfamiliar with children of my son's temperament.

Where to Go From Here
I am so confused right now. If things were uniformely bad it would be clear to me that this just isn't going to work and I'd feel comfortable giving up after another day or two. But I have seen some absolutely incredible improvements, such as him asking to go into his crib and putting himself to sleep all on his own without crying at nap times and night wakings. Yet the nightly scream-fest at bedtime just breaks my heart and ruins the evening every time, and the fact that it's getting worse instead of better makes me wonder how much more I can take. But I want this to work so badly since co-sleeping is a problem for us and I'm going to have a newborn in four months who needs my attention.

So that's how it's going. In some ways, wonderful. In other ways, terrible.

Advice is welcome. And my eternal gratitude to anyone who can figure out why my son now asks to go in his crib and eagerly climbs in yet screams once he's in there (mostly just at night time, although he sometimes fusses a bit at naps).

And thank you again for all your support and encouragement.

How did I not know about Bloglines?

I have no idea how I totally missed hearing about this way to organize your blog reading until earlier this week. I try to tell myself it saves me time because all my reading is consolidated in one place and I don't have to waste time checking sites that haven't been updated. On the other hand, my bloglines window is now permanently open and I can't help but glance at it every single time I walk by my computer. I should have just taken up smoking crack, it would be an easier habit to break.

Catholicism in old Mexico

Every Saturday night my husband and I have the pleasure of going over to my 92-year-old grandfather's house for dinner. He's a self-taught gourmet cook and always prepares a lavish meal fit for a four star restaurant, and my wine-fanatic husband always manages to pick out the perfect bottle of wine to go with the meal (I just have a sip these days). After dinner we all go into the living room and continue the conversation, sometimes well into the night (our record is 2:00am).

We talk about everything from politics to religion to current events, but one of my favorite topics of discussion is my grandfather's thoughts and observations from the 35+ years he spent living in Mexico and South America. He was born and raised in Texas but got a job offer to be an engineer at a refinery in a rural part of Mexico shortly after he married my grandmother. They took the offer and only reluctantly returned to the States decades later when my grandmother's declining health necessitated it.

Lately he's been regaling us with fascinating observations about Catholicism in rural Mexico back in the 40's and 50's. The stories are so enchanting, they make me yearn to be part of a culture where Church and God are so seamlessly integrated into everyone's lives, where everyone is on the same page about religion and it's a source of unity and comfort rather than debate and strife.

One of the stories he told me last weekend made me feel a little bit less bad about this whole not eating wheat products during Lent. He talked about watching the poverty-stricken villagers come for miles from the hills every Sunday to attend Mass at their church that had been standing for more than a century, traveling in all sorts of weather on foot or by donkey on gravel roads. And every evening the Church would ring its bells and set off firecrackers. Then, for the Easter Mass (or maybe Good Friday?), most of the villagers would stop about a mile outside of town, put a crown of thorns on their heads, fasten a piece of cactus around their necks and crawl on their hands and knees over the gravel the entire way into town. They would be exhausted and covered in blood by the time they arrived at the church.

Oddly, my first thought when I heard that story is what happy people they must have been. To believe that strongly, to have God be such an integral part of your life, must make you feel like you could face anything. And my grandfather said that, indeed, despite their poverty they were very happy, warm people. They had little by modern standards but their lives were filled with God and Church and family, and that's really all you need to be happy. Not happy in the self-centered, ephemeral sense our culture knows today, but a deep, still happiness that only someone who lives that kind of life can understand.

Proof!

I am happy to announce that I have proved God's existence once and for all. It's nice to finally have that whole question settled after all those thousands of years of humanity's uncertainly on the issue. I'm not sure if people who don't know me will accept this as proof, but my friends and family who are nonbelievers will surely fall to their knees and repent before God when they hear this story. Appropriately, it took place on Ash Wednesday...

So I don't know if I totally understand Lent. I don't even know if people who aren't yet officially Catholic are supposed to participate in the rituals of Lent. So I had decided to kind of skip it this year, to just use it as a time of reflection and hopefully to pray more and get closer to God.

But then, last Wednesday morning, I was driving around and listening to everyone on Relevant Radio talk about what they were giving up for Lent. I decided that I would give up something too. Even if you don't typically do that as a non-Catholic, I figured it couldn't hurt to give up something I love to show God that I'm serious about this whole "trying to believe" thing. So I picked something dear to me, that I would never normally go without for 40 hours, let alone 40 days: wheat. For a pregnant carb-o-holic could happily live on pasta and French bread, this is a big deal. No bread. No tortillas. No pasta. No pizza. No pastries. The list goes on.

Oddly, I didn't agonize over this decision much. The thought just popped into my mind and the decision was made.

That afternoon the weather was beautiful so I took my son out to a restaurant that has a great outdoor eating area. I had to run some errands before we arrived, so by the time we got there it had been six hours since I'd eaten. Keep in mind that I am pregnant. So to say that I was hungry and craving carbs in the understatement of the year. I ordered a cheeseburger and decided to treat myself to some of the restaurant's famous handmade onion rings. As I waited for my food I hoped I'd have the strength not to eat the bun on the burger.

The food arrived and my stomach growled loudly as I poured salt and ketchup over the onion rings. I was having a hard time with the whole not eating the hamburger bun thing so I decided to drown my sorrows in the crispy fried goodness that lay before me. And then it hit me: onion rings are breaded. In flour. Which is made of...oh no!!!

Let me take a moment to explain to you my utter lack of willpower around certain types of foods. I literally cannot think of one single occasion in my life when I did not eat something that I wanted if it was in front of me. I've often thought that the only reason I'm not really fat is because I don't keep tempting foods in the house. Because if it's in front of me, I eat it. Period.

And here I was, pregnant and starving, with a plate of handmade, fresh onion rings in front of me. And I did not eat a single one. Not even a taste. I didn't even have them taken away. I just picked around them as I ate my bunless cheeseburger.

Anyone who knows me well knows that only possible explanation for the untouched onion rings on my plate that day is divine intervention. And the fact that I have still not had any wheat since then -- even when my mother-in-law brought over a double-fudge chocolate cake, homemade sourdough bread, and raspberry and cream cheese pastries -- closes the debate once and for all.

[My tone here is a bit tongue-and-cheek but, on a serious note, this newfound and very uncharacteristic willpower is absolutely stunning to me and is the closest thing I've felt to feeling God directly at work in my life. It's a very interesting experience.]

Sleep training update on Friday

I've promised myself that I won't write about how sleep training is going again until Friday. One of the problems I've faced in the many times in the past when I've dealt with this is losing sight of the big picture and making changes to the plan after every single nap/bedtime. So I'm simply going to try to be as robot-like as possible and just follow my plan without thinking about it all that much, and reevaluate at the end of the week.

Thank you all so much for your support and encouragement, it really means a lot to me.

(I will make other updates this week, just not about sleep.)

Time to get some sleep: a prayer request

I've never asked for prayers before in my life, but I'm currently in a stressful situation that I clearly cannot solve on my own, so I figured this would be a good time to ask for prayers...

I may have mentioned that my 18-month-old son is not much of a sleeper. And after 18 months of constant sleep deprivation, I have to do something about it. The main problem is that he never learned how to fall asleep on his own. I never taught him. I was so devoted to attachment parenting when he was born that I scoffed at the notion that that was something I should try to teach him. I figured that it wouldn't matter since we were going to do the natural thing and just have a family bed if he didn't like sleeping in his crib. We would be just like a picture I saw in one of the Sears' books: Mommy and Daddy peacefully asleep with their zonked out little baby between them. If he had trouble going back to sleep I would just lean over and gently soothe him until he drifted off again.

I actually laughed out loud as I typed that last sentence. Man, that is NOT how the family bed has worked out for us. Most nights (like last night, for example) he thrashes around constantly while he is asleep. Around 4:00am his sleep cycles into that light phase and he wakes up and cannot go back to sleep until he's at the point of exhaustion. Last night in between kicks to the stomach I got an hour and a half soliloquy about "doggy" and "helicopter" and "school bus" as he alternately crawled and rolled around. He didn't go back to sleep until 5:30 in the morning. He usually insists that I face him, which inevitably leads to accidental kicks to my stomach, chest or face (he almost broke my nose once). If I roll over and face the other way he has a screaming meltdown and starts climbing all over me. My husband does what he can to help but if he prevents my son from being right next to me a total meltdown ensues. Also, he has a job that requires him to be "on," so more than a couple nights per week of him being exhausted just doesn't work for us.

I mostly feel bad for my son. He doesn't want to be awake all those hours every night, and I know it hurts his feelings when I'm short with him. I try to be patient but when I'm totally exhausted and it's 5:00am and he's been thrashing around and making noise for an hour and I get a strong kick to a sensitive part of my body, I tend to get extremely frustrated. Night before last I actually snapped, "Go to sleep, dammit!" And I knew that that's when something had to change.

So tonight we're starting sleep training. I feel so depressed about it because we've tried all sorts of things before and they've never worked. Also, I haven't found any book that I think is both effective and humane (I think I have read every single book on the subject of baby/toddler sleep issues). The "no cry" books are so obsessive about the baby not shedding one tear that the advice isn't very helpful (for us, anyway); but the other books just say "leave the child in his room to cry alone, he'll get used to it," which is ridiculous.

I know that whatever I do will involve some serious crying on his part, considering that anything short of me lying on my left side so that I can face him and bear the brunt of his flailing hands and feet leads to major tears. I HATE to hear my son cry, it really, REALLY bothers me, so this is not going to be easy. Yet something has to give. My son and I are both constantly exhausted and I have to have at least some improvement to the situation before the new baby gets here.

Currently I have only two sleep training goals: a) that he learn to fall asleep with minimal intervention on my part, and b) that he sleep in his crib. I plan to sleep right next to the crib and will continue doing that indefinitely if that's what he needs, but I just cannot share a bed with him any longer.

Anyway, that's the long, rambling version of why I need your prayers. Please pray for me that I'm doing the right thing and am able to follow through, and pray for my son the this is not too traumatic for him and that he'll finally be able to get the sleep he needs.

(Quick disclaimer: I don't mean for this to be an anti-family-bed post. It doesn't work for us, but I know a lot of people who happily use this sleep method with no problems.)

It's a...

GIRL!

I can't believe it. I had really wanted a girl but since boys seem to predominate on my husband's side of the family (all his paternal cousins are also boys) I was just sure it'd be a boy (which would have been wonderful too, of course).

I had a startling reality check as we all (me, my husband, son, mother, mother-in-law and mother-in-law's friend) poured out of the ultrasound clinic, gushing about how thrilled we were to be having a little girl and chattering about names. I looked up to see that the clinic shared an entrance with a cancer center, and a frail woman who had a light scarf covering her bald head was limping to her car. It was such a startling reminder of how incredibly, amazingly lucky we are.

It's impossible to articulate how grateful I feel to have one healthy son and a daughter on the way.