Au Contraire-the Mobius Strip of Feminism

Continuing my previous post...

When I express my worry, the response is often:  "You'll have time to pursue teaching and writing when they get older or leave for school."

Really?  Maybe not! Maybe no one wants to hire someone who's been out of the loop for a long time professionally.  Both fields are extremely competitive and reliant on personnel who are au courant.

Other advice comes in the form of reassurances: "But just think how much more happy and well-adjusted your kids will be if you are home."  Mmmm, no guarantees there, either.  The older two are getting to the point where my opinions are only opinions.  Their decisions are going to be theirs, not mine.  Life throws a lot at our kids, and  while I do my best, it's ultimately beyond my control.  That's between them and God. 

 And who's to say I am a good mom?  I can honestly say that there are days when the puberty-fueled drama at our house coupled with the high needs of a toddler do not bring out the best in me.  Becoming a mother for the third time at a later age has not calmed these struggles; it's exacerbated them.  I feel like I have less time to do the things I want to do. I'm more selfish than I ever felt as a younger mom. 

I think too much. About me.  There are a lot of I's in the paragraphs above.

But.

There are three people whom God has put in my life.  I impact them more than anyone else will.  He reminds me of that daily. He gives new grace daily. He helps me to remember that this is not my permanent legacy, the things here in this life. 

 I had the opportunity this year to switch roles, to pursue career full time and then some.  My husband simultaneously had a career offer in another state. He was perfectly willing to make it my choice, my time, my jump.  Ms. Badinter would have loved the things he said and offered to do to make it work!

I said no.  It was just not the right thing at the right time. 

And it was my choice. No one else made it for me. Perhaps Ms. Badinter is right to be appalled at the lack of women at the top of things, but my guess is that many women choose to prioritize family over career because (shhhh) it's exhausting to attempt to be all things to all people.  

Several  friends balance advanced careers and family life incredibly well.  They are extremely talented and exhibit a clear call on their lives.  (You know who you are and I am wowed by what you do, and I know how much guff you take on it, too.)  But I am not wired the same way. 

Feminism to me is the ability to choose what I want to do with my life.  That's exactly where I find the flaw in Ms. Badinter's ideals.  You can't argue for the right to choose only particular things. 

I know Ms. Badinter would not like me for this, but my three are my current career.  They are not my idols, nor are they constructs of a societal pressure to produce model citizens. Somedays I really like my job, other times I struggle with whether I chose poorly. But it's what I picked, and I  want to do my best at it for my own sake as well as theirs.  

A mentor of mine several years ago told me, "You'll never know if what you want to do is any good unless you make it the main thing."  And that's my hope, that my main thing(s) will turn out well. 

Ms. Badinter, I salute you, because in a Mobius strip of logic, I get to be what I am in direct contradiction of and yet because of you.   

Here's to choices, feminism, and the freedom to do in Christ whatever it is He's called us to do.  

Au Contraire, part one

Choosing to stay at home (mostly) and raise children (especially "green" children) is a betrayal of all our predecessors have worked for, according to a leading feminist. Okay, so maybe she's a French feminist, but this chick has serious chops and impact on women's issues around the world.  That's throwing down some pretty big gauntlets, but I think she's only saying what many of us face: the conflict between being what our educations and opportunities allow us to be and the desire for home and family.  It's the golden handcuffs of feminism. 

Intellectual, historian, and feminist  Elisabeth Badinter caused quite the ruckus last year in France with the release of her book, Conflict: The Woman and the Mother.  In this treatise, she takes the current generation of Frenchwomen to task for backsliding in the feminist movement through trying to put motherhood first.  Breast feeding in particular and the expectation to provide a nurturing environment for one's offspring are seen as serious hindrances to one's career and "sociobiological corruptions", a  societally inflicted guilt trip for women which holds them back from achieving on par with men. 

 Well, duh.  Or whatever the French equivalent may be.  It is really hard to juggle a newborn who needs to eat every two or three hours and business functions, teacher prep, or client meetings. I've done it. It wasn't pretty.  Things didn't really improve with toddlerhood. People were very kind and supportive, but the times I tried to juggle motherhood and full time work were less than my best moments. No one got what they needed from me.  When I went back to work this past spring temporarily, it took a husband and two grandparents to help out with our three kids and keep everyone afloat. My eleven year old put it succinctly: "Dad, you are a great dad, but you are not a very good mama."  He would be the first to agree. 

I will be very upfront: I haven't read Badinter's book ( I don't read French) but I really, really want to read it.  I've had to make do with reading synopses and articles about the book. Even though it is aimed very specifically at a small country which values intellectualism and discussion, the book itself made ripples around the world. I agree with her on this premise:  you really can't do it all.  It is incredibly hard to be fantastic at what you do professionally and keep it all together on the home front.  Something's gotta give: work, marriage, kids, life, health. 

Here's a link to the original NY Times article that caught my eye:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/fashion/06Culture.html. 

A year later, her pronouncements are still so controversial that the July 2011 issue of the New Yorker featured a piece on Ms. Badinter and her book.  She is, from all accounts, a tremendously talented historian and writer.  She also has three children and is married to a very prominent French lawyer who has played a significant role in French government.  Badinter isn't just writing from an intellectual perspective- she has to balance work, family, and societal expectations. Self-deprecating, she described herself as" a mediocre mother" in the  original Times piece.  I kind of doubt that anything this doyenne of French feminism does is mediocre, but maybe she's just being honest about what her priorities are. 

It was oddly good to hear what she was thinking, because I know I struggle with woman vs. mother questions sometimes.  I feel I lose my relevancy, I worry that the things I do have no significance.  (Excuse me for a moment while I go take the diapers out of the wash for roughly the 200th time.  It's getting old.)   I love my children with an intensity that makes me frightened sometimes, yet I wonder what my legacy outside of mothering will be.   

To be continued. 

tent plopdown 9.0

We've been in our new digs for about three and a half weeks. Chris has been at work for three weeks, and we are thrilled to be here at the camp.  I really can't explain how thankful we are, but it would be awkward if I began kissing the feet of those who asked us to come here every time I saw them.

So, I am just trying to be a very good camp wife, to be available as needed or wanted, to figure out the culture through observation rather than transgression.  My three T's- teen, tween, and toddler- are all giddy with joy.  The tween is in her second round of day camp.  The teen is going to get involved next week.  The toddler just loves all the people who tell her she's cute and play with her!

Here's the timeline:

• first of May- Chris has phone interview with camp in Washington.  After lots of disappointing leads and interviews, we pray and keep looking. But we nurture a secret hope...maybe this time... but I apply for what seems like the hundredth teaching job just in case.
• second week of May- I finish with my temp jobs and am asked to take a part-time library job. I thankfully take library job.  Receive phone call requesting interview for teaching position three hours later. Sigh.
• five days later- get offered teaching job by school I really want to work for and work with. Must jump through testing hoops to continue after first year-- six big flaming ones.  I should know, I bombed two of them before.  I have successfully jumped through two of the six already, but the time elapsed is too great, and I must perform again.  This is kind of scary. Hmmm.  Quietly give thanks that a contract takes a little time. 
• 3rd week plus a few days of May-  School district :"Would you mind two more hoops?" Me: "Yes.  I will jump through six, but no more. I would like to be able to teach and not just study for tests all year and attend classes that I have already taken before." Chris and kids aren't sure what they think, but a full time job is what we need.
•  3rd week plus a few days plus two- I get a contract approval and job offer.  Chris gets a phone call from camp inviting him to interview onsite for position.  Fess up to Library, ask for time off. Meet with HR and email principal from school to explain.  Most awkward thing, ever.
• Fourth week- attempt to fly to camp, flight cancelled.  (Amy cries in airport from all the accumulated drama.)  Next day, we get there. Beautiful place, wonderful camp, solid staff. Please?  
•  End of May-Offer from camp.  Decision time. Lots of prayer.  Can we do it?  Which way to go?  Kids weigh in- Camp!  Sad and yet right phone call to school district.  Everyone feels led to go to Washington. 
•  First of June-Two weeks notice at Library- frantic last minute family things with grandparents, including the tween embarking on a cross country trip to see Ohioan side. Find new home for best dog in the world (one of the hardest parts).
• Mid June-Finish up at work, pack Uhaul truck. Tearful goodbye to grandparents.  Drive across country, meeting Ohio GPs in Colorado for a great night together and tween retrieval.
• Third week in June- Arrive at camp.  Truck unpacked in 1 hour with entire summer leadership staff assist.  Get settled.
• Four days after arrival-  Long awaited nephew arrives...back in Texas. Sigh. 
• Five days after arrival- one year since we knew we would leave our last camp, Chris's third  day of work, and his birthday.

 Six weeks before, all we had were uncertainties and a meager part time job.  Now we have a new home, new ministry chances, and new but familiar location where we thought we'd never get to live again.  It's exhausting to read it, but it was exhilarating to live it. 

 I like my new tent.  

recent events

This was my profile until today.  I am deeply grateful for the many who have "prayed us through." You held up our arms!
I miss teaching but love mothering, have lost all semblance of organization in my home since the baby arrived. I love God's word and am really trying hard to follow Him, but He loves me in spite of my efforts. My husband has been unemployed for several months now, and we really aren't sure what happens next. We are currently dwelling in a figurative tent in the Texas Panhandle, occupying all the spare bedrooms in my gracious parents' home. 
My family begins with my husband, truly the only man I will ever love and who really gets me. A total gift from God. I also have a devastatingly handsome and intelligent 8th grade son, who thinks about the world in a different way than a lot of people, and that's a very good thing. I am thankful for my two daughters. My  creative, beautiful, smart 5th grade girl is navigating the minefields of early puberty with grace and savoir faire. And then there is our spoiled rotten, late-arriving toddler who sleeps wherever she wants and enjoys life to the fullest. Oh, and she likes tunafish salad, so you must hide it. She has been know to lick plates left behind on the floor by older siblings.
Update on Texas students-
My writing students all passed their state exam with THEIR story.  Yay!  My reading students all passed save one, and she was very close.   Yahoo!  And I know she will get it, she just needs a little more time to figure out how it works.  Next year, she will get commended, I know.  I will really miss working alongside them. 

Lenten Grace

"Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away." Revelation by Flannery O'Connor

I recently half-heard a talk in which the speaker extensively spoke on this short story, and I was so thankful to be reminded of it, even if his point was not what I brought away.

The "they" implied by the pronoun in the above quote refers to the moral, upright Christian folk spied in a religious vision by a woman cut of that same moral cloth. The good folk are at the tail end of a parade following all manner of undesirables into the kingdom of Heaven. Prim and proper, they are the only ones marching in an orderly fashion, singing on key, and generally following the rules--but as they march, they are changed, to their consternation. I don't want anyone to be deprived of the privilege of reading the story, so I won't tell you more. (But find it today if you can!)

I love Flannery O'Connor's short stories. Acerbic, cutting to the quick of the human condition with an elegant and honest knife, her characters are often not attractive- it's difficult to identify a protagonist, much less a hero in her tales of the South. Her stories are brutally honest and filled with a very uneasy look at grace.

Maybe that's why I love her work. Fairly few of us would qualify as a hero, and my view of myself as protagonist may well be in direct contrast to someone's view of me as antagonist. The grace I would like to experience is often not the grace I am given. And when the drought of my local geography reflects my spiritual state, honesty is all I have.

It is Lenten season again, and I don't know that I have ever inhabited the season so fully before. In January, we blew back into my home turf with our possessions like so many tumbleweeds- home gone, job gone, shaken, sad, confused, ill- driven before a circumstantial whirlwind and helpless before it.

Everything is ashen; gray and hard on the surface, soft and shifting underneath, like the fallout of some recent volcanic blast rather than a gentle smudge on my forehead. This ridiculous cavalcade of misfortune- it grits at the soul, leaves a terrible taste in my mouth, renders my prayers bitter.

After so many months and so many prayers, I am finding it hard to keep at it. God and I just sit and look at each other. He's nearly palpable in his proximity but He just doesn't say much. I would do whatever He wants. It is far more tenuous a thing to sit and let a torrent of trouble just wash over my life, knowing God is sitting there watching it happen. At least He holds my hand. This ashen grace is not, at present, one I would choose, but it is what I am being given.

Miss O'Connor, a Catholic single lady in a bastion of Protestantism, somehow found words to describe to what happens sometimes to tidy, comfortable lives. It is happening to me.

Grace, a brutal, ashen grace.

Honest, not easy, but true nonetheless. All my own "virtue" is being burned away, things I never really thought of as dross, things locusts are eating. As for what remains, I am not sure that the term hope describes what sits in my heart but something more certain.

Easter.

Unemployment curve ball one

Being unemployed is a weird state of life. I haven't worked full time since Babalu was a wee boy, but I have been employed in some state or another for most of the past 16 years. Not so anymore. I have no steady job, just a little sub work here and there, but to have had a husband who is unemployed along with me is a little... strange.

I was so consumed by the end date of his job that I hadn't actually considered what he would do once it was over. Well, Hubs was now HOME, all the TIME, and while I love him more than it is possibly normal to love another person, it was WEIRD. He began eating breakfast, he started helping with chores, he kept the baby while I subbed and often drove me to bible study. He was with me all the time. I have to say, there were a couple of days when I did not appreciate his presence.

I really didn't know what to make of this constant "other". I kind of liked my me time, my baby and mom time, my big kids coming home from school time. Now Hubs was around all the time, looking for jobs diligently, but still in the house. I felt like I had lost a little something.

Slowly, I got used to it. We learned to give each other space in the house and to communicate when we need a smidgen of time alone or to do some task quietly. I learned to take space for myself, and give him some also. We have talked about everything and anything and nothing. We have laughed a lot and watched foreign films on Netflix. We have watched the baby grow from infant to toddler together.

And it dawned on me that two things are likely: one or both of us will find full time work soon, and we will not always be together in this life unless by some freak accident, we go together. (Just know, it will probably be my driving if that's the case.)

And it made me happy that he's there, ALL the TIME, for right now. Love you, baby. I will miss you when employment comes our way.