a baby fix

helping dad clean his new Alden boots

where did that come from!?

muahahaha

self-portrait - he's really into using the camera.

chocolate

cape (he's captain hook - notice the "hook" on his right hand)

feminism, part I

I consider myself a feminist. This is sort of new at this time in my life. I think for a few years I've been quietly thinking of myself as a Catholic feminist, or something along those lines, but only recently have I become more interested in feminist theory and literature. Wow, it's a whole wild world out there, there are many schools of thought, many layers of development, concentric webs of inter-connectedness that require a good deal of effort to navigate with confidence. I don't feel exactly competent to lecture on the topic, but I feel excited about sharing where I am in the learning process with y'all. As a result, a lot of my writing in this series is going to be exploratory rather than linear, so bear with me!

I'm going to break the series up in three parts: background reading, my personal history with feminism, and my final essay on what feminism is, and isn't, and why it's important.

So first, let me begin this series with a brief, selected internet bibliography.

Mulieris Dignitatem, John Paul II's 1988 encyclical on the dignity and vocation of women. Considered a standard, socially progressive, woman-positive text in most of the Catholic world.
Tradition in Action's Ratzinger on Feminism, a very typical TIA analysis that shows you an extreme, narrow segment of the Catholic world (TIA is sort of the website that everybody likes to roll their eyes at; that is, Trads - defined for the moment as those who post on Fisheaters - generally roll their eyes and refuse to even discuss TIA as often as not, many outside of tradland haven't even heard of TIA... lucky them. I link to it anyway because it trickles up. There are a handful of people who will share TIA links on trad forums like Fisheaters, or Angel Queen, and there are a good number that will disagree with TIA but engage in the conversation nonetheless, with maybe another handful that refuse to deal with anything TIA at all, boycotting all TIA discussions... and these trads also use facebook, and the various Catholic discussion groups on facebook, and other Catholic forums, so sometimes ideas, if only reactionary, do trickle up, and so it's worth pointing right to the source.)
Our Babies Ourselves, the website, run by Meredith Small, author of a book by the same name, which arguably launched AP as a viable option. It was first published in 1999; Dr. Sears' The Baby Book was first published in 1992, which arguably was shaped by The Continuum Concept from 1986 - but the Continuum Concept was probably seen as a little too crunchy, and was based on the author's experience of one non-Western and the Sears book was, of course, written by a man, an MD on top of that, and I think a lot of women today begrudge MDs who give out parenting advice... Small's book, in contrast, had lots of new research, was well-marketed, and was written by a working academic mother. Really, it was terrifically approachable for women of a wider span of backgrounds, and continues to shape the AP world.
Catholic and Feminist: Can One Be Both? One woman's answer to the question. A salient position: "The core of feminism lies in the simple demand that women receive the same respect as men as independent, capable human beings" - I don't actually agree with this, and I'll get to why. (But maybe you can already guess - if it's just about equality, why be feminists at all, why not be "equalists"...?)
The Wikipedia article on the History of Feminism
Because I never took a Women's Studies 101, or read any feminism primer, I found this useful to string together the bits I'd picked up.
 The Wikipedia Article on Feminist Theory Ditto.
 Momtroversy: How Feminist Is Attachment Parenting? This is where we start getting into the good stuff, the thorny stuff, and which begins to affirm for me that I am more and more of a feminist because I am a mother.
Attachment Parenting: More Guilt for Mother More of the same but with fresh material, also worth reading.
How did the patriarchy influence parenting and what problems has it caused? This is a very important one because after having finished Mommyblogs, I am still confused as to what's meant by patriarchal motherhood. I googled it to try to figure out what was being said, and this looked promising, so I read what she links to, and by the end I was like, "Huh? What does this have to do with patriarchy - with the anthropological structure, or with Christian theology, or with the male genius, or the male-only priesthood, or... anything?" It was a bit of a relief in some ways. Really, it seems that the problem was a very un-Catholic technocratic worship of all that was industrial and man-made as opposed to that which was natural and God-made; hence formula was superior to human milk, hospital births with lots of medication and intervention were superior to the messy, wet, noisy work of natural birth, antiseptic industrial-style nurseries were superior to the primate norm mother-infant sleep, and so on. It was definitely a very destructive, heretical approach to nature, and its effects definitely linger on today. ... but I am no closer to getting the patriarchy bit. It looks like Of Woman Born was an important early secular feminist mother studies work, I guess I'll have to read that and see if it makes any more sense. Because of course, when people start blaming "patriarchy" I generally read that as "Christianity", so it's important to me to see if there are any grounds to that, and to learn, more broadly, about what the term may otherwise mean. From what I can see now, critics of "patriarchal motherhood" are referring to a cultural context where men physically control rates of reproduction and/or control mothering practices in some way... I'm still not really sure how to unpack all of that, and I'm not yet convinced that patriarchy is a helpful or essential notion to feminism.
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack A classic, helpful text for unpacking privilege. Must-read!

Whew, is that enough for you to chew on for the moment? Have fun and see you next time!

FEMINISM SERIES. Part one: select bibliography, Part two: my feminist history, Part three: my feminist manifesto.

wild thing

We read this book over and over.

The Doctor's Wife, and the importance of the gray

I had meant to follow up on this book after having mentioned it being on my reading list in this post, but since I spend little time on the computer in nice weather, and I hate blogging on the ipad, it was forgotten till this morning. I logged onto goodreads on the ipad to rate Romancing Miss Bronte (which was just so delightful and absorbing that I wanted to make an effort in its favour, though I rarely log on to goodreads), and after that was done, I knew there was some other exceptional book I'd wanted to rate and possibly review. It took me a few moments to remember the title, as I returned it promptly to the library, but managed to find it and give it the five stars it deserves.

Out of curiosity, I scanned the reviews, and I found one negative one in particular quite appalling. Allow me to quote: "...I found this book nothing but trash. I found it to be very pro-choice and liberal, with Republicans potrayed as rude, ridiculous, religious bigots, and pro-life people portrayed as crazy and violent. The entire book is simply distateful; while the writing is well done, it is clear this author has an agenda (pro-choice), and the plot itself serves only to reiterate this purpose. ... Maybe it warrants a half star for decent writing, however even if you agree with the blatant politics (which are outrighly offensive to probably half the population, that is, anyone anywhere right of pro-choice and liberalism) displayed in this book, the story itself is deeply disturbing with nothing redeeming whatsoever. I cannot recommend this book to anyone [edited for spelling]."

Holy good God, I couldn't disagree more, and I said so! After skimming the review's other comments, I posted this:

I have to completely disagree. I think it's incredibly narrow to judge the book's quality by the type of pro-lifers written - and violent pro-lifers do exist, they are not an invention of the author, so why would you object to that being covered? You also neglected to mention the more moderate pro-lifer in the book - the doctor's son, who objects very strongly to his father's activities!
I personally do not support abortion in any way, and I helped start a pro-life group at my university. However, I found this whole novel extremely compelling. To my mind, the crux of what the author accomplishes here is laid out in the scene where Simon is subbing for Annie's English class - he tells the class that black and white are easy to deal with and feel self-satisfied about, but the real substance and beauty is always in the gray, which he encourages the students to explore. To my mind, this is the summary of the author's intentions with this book. We see that with the issue of abortion, obviously - even the doctor says he does not know whether it is right or wrong, only that it is necessary. And as a reader, I found myself very sympathetic to him and his patients - people truly live in appalling circumstances. The pro-life movement can be very superficial in the way we portray pregnancy and parenthood. It doesn't make abortion right, but these are valid criticisms.
The other way we see the whole gray area thing play out is with Simon. At the start of the novel, you are sympathetic with Lydia, and believe Simon must be horribly abusive. By the end you realize she's mentally ill, and Simon is not a black-and-white caricature of a Bad Person, but a complex, smart, charming, selfish, tender, ridiculous, gray human being, like all of us.
The author's approach is to lay first impressions susceptible to easy, rash judgement, and then slowly, before the reader quite knows what's happening, change the center of gravity in the characters and moral tensions, revealing to the reader the importance of, once again, bravely dwelling in the gray area, where we have to see people and their struggles as they are, rather than as we want them to be for the sake of fitting into our neat, tidy algorithms. To condemn the book and ignore this extremely gracefully-handled project is small and unfortunate - read it again. Dwell in the gray. 

Of course, I shouldn't have to first define myself as pro-life, my views on abortion are irrelevant to my ability to critique the book and stretch the reviewer's understanding of the novel, but the point is that for people dwelling in the easy, comforting world of black-and-white, we do sometimes have to label ourselves in ways that are reassuring and comforting to them to get them to lower their defenses and just listen. I don't know how to not sound condescending in this point, truly I don't.

As a religious person, of course, I do have beliefs about ontology and ethics that I believe to be objectively, universally true. I am not one to say that we need to move away from the black-and-white of empiricism, ethics and doctrine into the great gray light of philosophical relativism - rather, this whole orientation pertains primarily to the way we relate to fellow human beings. Do we see them as made in the image and likeness of God, works in progress, open-ended, fascinating, complex individuals in need of love, mercy and dignity, or do we see them as aggregates of habits and beliefs that can be screened for unsavoury varieties ("I don't talk to Democrats / Republicans/ pro-choicers / pro-lifers / atheists / Christians / Muslims / New Church folks / Trads / francophones / anglophones / vegans / non-vegans / Standard American Diet eaters / formula feeders / lactivists / CIOers / bedsharers ... etc etc etc") and summarily dismissed? Can we not, rather, try on their views and experiences, whether through friendships or through literature, allowing those experiences to broaden our compassion and empathy?

I feel so strongly about this because in this reviewer's voice I hear myself at 16, 17, when I was a Baptist (a word I only started using after the fact, at the time I was, of course, a "Christian", refusing to recognize how my interpretations of ecclesiology, scripture and my own experiences were heavily shaped by my community's theological tradition), and I found comfort in retreating from my adolescent-paced broadening grasp of the at-times overwhelming complexity of the universe into the simple black-and-whiteness of my community's way of transferring belief into the way we dealt with people... there were unspoken (and probably spoken) formulae: you speak to unsaved people this way, to Catholics a special way, to pro-choice people a third way; they will try to argue with you in such and such a way, so while they talk, formulate your rebuttal rather than listen to them. You must be a witness to Christ by being an ambassador of the community, by conforming to the ways and means of the group, by insisting on how ecstatically happy you are, by admitting of no vulnerability, doubt or dissent.

Such a mentality can only thrive in small, small communities, with constant visibility and checks and "accountability". Becoming Catholic, being absorbed into the riotously huge, inconceivably global community of Catholicism freed two facets of my life that previously had had total overlap: personal religion, and community charism. I could go to a different church every weekend, if I wanted to. I could hang out at the cerebral Newman Center, I could keep up with my old church ladies at OLPH, or I could visit the Jerusalem Community, whose concept is living in the monastery of the city. All very different experiences, all strung together by the Creed and the basic structures. Nobody would blame me or harass me, in the urban reality of the church of Montreal this was all totally normal, healthy, socially accepted behaviour. By that point in my life I suppose I was more comfortable with the complexity of the universe, and more convinced of the need to hear peoples' stories and not be so locked onto a) the "good Christian listener being kind to the poor, needy unsaved person" dynamic, and b) listening to somebody in order to argue them to your perspective, to "win" them through intellectual force.

Being in the Daughters of Abraham book club, a few years into my Catholicism, opened new doors for me intellectually. I was skeptical at first of the intent of our chapter's foundress (now one of my closest friends!); I liked the book club concept but, as I explained to her, I'd been in inter-faith settings before that are advertised as dialogue-oriented in nature, but turned out to be either the host group's attempt to convert others (Baptists) or else a group of basically faithless, relativistic individuals trying to reinvent the Unitarian wheel, and neither option interested me. She assured me that she understood what I was referring to, and she really meant to have a proper inter-faith group, a true, respectful, person-to-person meeting of people of belief and conviction, and I was sold. The Montreal chapter has pretty much folded now (rest in peace!) but I learned great lessons about courage, vulnerability, friendship, and humility from that group of ladies.

So this is why that reviewer of The Doctor's Wife made me so irate. As I am perennially reminded, folks tend to get most angry at others' errors when they remind them of their own former errors. That's certainly the case for me, often. So go ahead and read this book, and let's talk about how to dwell in the gray together!

baby bear