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It appears that the gunman who killed at least two Unitarian Universalists yesterday in Memphis was angry at liberals, homosexuals, age-discrimination, and the fact that he was being cut off from his food stamps. This is particularly crazy: how can someone not know that liberals are the ones who fight for support services like food stamps, and who also fight for an end to age discrimination? Obviously, the man was crazy in many ways — he was an isolated loner who decided to solve his personal problems by entering a sanctuary and killing innocent people — but what most strikes me about this news is that he chose to target this UU church because of recent publicity about its liberal programs.
I’m on the publicity committee of my own UU church. We are a liberal space in a conservative neighborhood. Should we reconsider what we publicize?
I think not, of course. I actually think that yesterday’s shootings were a triumph for liberalism. One 61-year-old professor stood directly in front of the gunman, in order to keep the bullets from hitting others. Other UUers quickly tackled the man, pinning his arms down so he could not access any weapons — while the rest took shelter and called the police. One mother lay her body in front of the nursery door (it was a glassed-in area, right next to the gunman) to keep the gunman from entering. Their quick, brave, wise, and incredibly noble actions make me proud to be UU. The man had entered the church with 37 bullets, but he managed to injure only 7 people, because of the self-sacrificing courage of the UUs who blocked him.
What this crime makes me think of is the coffee-shop stabbings in 1994 in New Haven Connecticut. That crime was remotely personal to me, too (I had just rented an apartment around the corner from the coffee shop, but I wasn’t home at the time, wasn’t even in the state). The journalist Bruce Shapiro was one of the seven victims in 1994, and he wrote this brilliant analysis of it in Harper’s Magazine. People said to him, “Now that you are a victim of violent crime, don’t you support harsher sentencing laws? Don’t you question your liberal views?” And what he insisted was that only liberalism could have prevented the crime. Only liberalism could have identified this lonely, mentally-ill man before he turned to mass violence. Only liberalism provided the dense community of people summoning help, the quick response of the police, the well-prepared hospital nearby to treat the wounded: all the services that kept the attack from being even more deadly than it was. Bruce Shapiro’s analysis of the stabbings in 1994 in New Haven CT apply just as well to the Unitarian Universalists yesterday in Memphis.
Liberalism kept this crime against liberals from being any worse than it was. An even deeper liberalism might have prevented the crime altogether, by getting this madman help earlier. That’s my declaration of the day.
(And here’s a technical aside: I’m a bit surprised that, in all the news reports, the Memphis UUs are called a “church” at all. Out here in Southern California, we buddhist-jewish-atheist-etcetera UUs call ourselves a “fellowship,” not a church. A few blogs are declaring that UUs aren’t Christian — but actually, some UUs are Christian. And all UUs are inspired by Christian and Jewish teachings; it’s our heritage, it’s one of six main sources of what UUs call the living tradition. Just so you know. We’re not exactly Christian, but we’re not non-Christian either. We’re UU. We’re complex.)
Rosa is my housecleaner, and she told me this story on the day after Thanksgiving — because Rosa doesn’t take ordinary holidays off. She comes twice a month, no matter what. She came even when we had evacuated because of the fires last fall — so when we returned, there was hardly any soot, astoundingly. Rosa cleans more thoroughly than I thought possible. She takes the silverware out of the silverware-holder-thing-in-the-drawer and wipes down that thing whose name I don’t even know. She takes all the food out of the fridge and cleans off every refrigerator shelf and cranny, every single time she comes. She cleaned mold that I didn’t know we had in our shower. I thought that tan was the color the in-between-the-tiles was supposed to be. I’m not a very good housecleaner, myself.
I feel a bit guilty about paying someone to clean, but I am working full-time and raising Sophie three-quarters time, and we do our own gardening and do almost all our cooking (we hardly ever go out to restaurants), but deep cleaning is one thing that we don’t like to do, and we argue over who has to do it. So we hired Rosa. There, that’s my defensiveness out of the way.
So, the day after Thanksgiving, Rosa was about to take a long Christmas vacation. She was taking six weeks to go home to Mexico. “Will you wait for me?” she had asked, very meekly, and of course we said yes, we’d save her job for her, we could clean by ourselves for 6 weeks. We were all eating Thanksgiving leftovers together, and Rosa said it was her first taste of pumpkin pie. Rosa usually says she finds my cooking interesting, because the twice a month that she’s here is the only two times in the month when she doesn’t eat Mexican food.
So we were talking about Thanksgiving food, and I guess I told her that it’s all an invented tradition, an attempt by the North to assert its dominance after the Civil War by dominating America’s historic memory, even though the oldest European city in the current United States is St Augustine, Florida — and the next-oldest is Santa Fe, New Mexico. Therefore, I myself once ate burritos on Thanksgiving, but I also love the pies and all the other dishes that I grew up with, in New England. Probably I told her that (I am a history professor, after all, and sometimes I just can’t help sharing historic stories), and this prompted Rosa’s story.
Rosa was about to go home to southern Mexico for the first time in eleven years. Nephews and nieces had been born and died in the time when she was away, she said. Elderly folk had died too, but saddest of all was one ten-year-old who had died in a car accident before she had even gotten a chance to meet him. She missed her village, she said, she missed her parents, she missed her extended family, and most of all, she missed her mother.
Rosa left home at age 16 because of her mother, she said. Her mother didn’t have a refrigerator. Or a washing machine, or an indoor toilet, or even really a kitchen table: there was just a plank propped up on bricks. Rosa left in order to earn money so that her mother could get herself a refrigerator. “Everything I do, I do for her,” Rosa said. Just last year, she bought her mother the first indoor plumbing in their whole village. Rosa left at age 16, so that now her mother has a washing machine and a kitchen table — but she doesn’t have Rosa.
Rosa has an uncle in LA who has legal papers, so he can go home regularly, once every year or two. That’s as close as Rosa came to telling me that she herself is undocumented. It’s illegal for me to knowingly hire an illegal alien, of course, so I don’t know anything for certain: but what I do know is that Rosa stayed away for 11 years because, she says, the border-crossing is scary.
And that’s the heartbreaking thing: that Rosa, responsible Rosa, could be considered a dangerous lawbreaker. All December, we thought about her, listening to the news reports about how many people die trying to cross the border, dehydrated in the desert or shipwrecked in San Diego harbor. About 400 people die every year, crossing that U.S.-Mexico border: that’s more than one a day. We wondered if we could have loaned Rosa some of our camping supplies, as if that could have done anything to help. We wondered if we could at least go to some rally, somehow pressure our politicians to create some legal routes for people like Rosa, but we didn’t find anything useful to do.
All January, as we argued over whose turn it was to scrub the toilets, we said, “We miss Rosa” — and we wondered how late she would be getting back. We didn’t expect her back on time, but this is Rosa, and she showed up just when she said she would, exactly six weeks after she left.
She was wistful, sad at being back here. Most of her entire village is related to her, she said, and parts of the next village over too. For her entire trip, she said, she hadn’t been lonely.
And then she started cleaning our stove top, and I left her alone.
I’m already a bit tired of blogging about myself, but people keep telling me stories, so that’s what I’m going to write here for a while: other people’s stories.
About a month ago on our morning walk, Sophie and I met a beautiful white-haired neighbor also out for her morning walk. She was feeling reflective that day, she said, because it was her granddaughter’s 16th birthday and also the 6th anniversary of the day her mother had died, at age 100. So she was thinking about the past and the future.
This lady remembered when her son was little, they used to drive past a park with a merry-go-round, on the way home from the supermarket or other errands, and her son used to always beg to stop to play at the park. Sometimes they’d stop. Sometimes she’d decide they were too busy: they needed to get home to make dinner or do some other chores or something. One day, she declared, “We have time to stop today!” And her son whined, “Mo-o-o-o-om, I’m five now. I’m too old for that merry-go-round.” She told me that this is what she learned: always stop at the merry-go-round. It will be far too soon that your child outgrows the park. The other chores can wait. Stop at the park, stop at the merry-go-round, now while you can.
I love this story, partly because merry-go-rounds themselves don’t really stop. It’s such a challenge to live fully in the present moment, appreciating Sophie right now, instead of thinking, “I can’t wait till she can talk,” or “I already miss when she just lay still and cuddly in my arms all day.” It’s such a challenge to be entirely present with Sophie, slowing down enough to fully delight in the little rubber balls that she is currently obsessed with; it’s a challenge to simply take as much joy as she does in eternally fishing the balls out from under her crib. I spend too much time distracted, trying to also clean the house and fold the laundry and chat with other adults. It’s basic spirituality, I know, from Buddha to Saint Augustine to Thoreau to modern yoga. It’s simple slogans that are easy to repeat but hard to actually embody: “Be here now,” live in the present moment instead of the past or the future, breathe, stop at the merry-go-round.
At my Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, the high-schoolers sing Joni Mitchell’s song about merry-go-rounds at every coming-of-age milestone. They even do a cute little dance with it. I love how un-self-conscious these UU teenagers are, and every time they sing “The Circle Game,” it actually makes me tear up a little bit.
Our part of San Diego is one giant anthill, it seems. It doesn’t matter how clean we keep the house: once, a whole army-column of ants marched up to our kitchen-sink to suck the moisture from the drain. We have tried hot pepper flakes, oil, vinegar, pepper-oil, orange-peel, chalk, boiling water, and a whole array of poisons to try to keep them out. It was ineffective. Not even the commercial ant poisons worked very well, and anyway I don’t like to have poisons around the baby. The only long-term effective ant solution were the fires last October, which seem to have decimated the ant population, at least temporarily.
But the ants are back now, and we have finally found two safe ways to keep ants out. So here it is, my one housekeeping tip ever (I’m generally a pretty bad housekeeper): Coffee grounds work. So does turmeric. They don’t harm us, they don’t smell bad to us, but to ants, coffee or turmeric is a line they won’t cross. Even if they do cross it (our ants aren’t daunted by poison, so you wouldn’t think that simple turmeric would stop all thousand-and-one of them), then the coffee or turmeric seems to keep the ants from leaving their scent-trails for other ants to follow, so we are faced with only one ant a day, not a six-inch-wide black column of ant-army. Coffee and turmeric work.
Now every door has a yellow or black line in front of it, and I keep extending our defensive perimeter to every other hole the ants discover. Just today, there was another ant assault on the catfood dish, originating from under the bookcase. The war goes on, but I am armed with turmeric.
Ben is leaving for a six-day business trip to Japan. Before the baby, this would have been no big deal, just exciting for him. Now, we’re all concerned about how much we’re going to miss each other. Sophie erupts in laughter every time they play together, and she’ll miss that. I have difficulty taking a shower while watching Sophie on my own, so I’ll miss having a relief pitcher around in the parenthood department. We don’t have many photos of Ben’s parenting, since he is the family photographer, but here’s one that I took, trying to illustrate what an amazing dad he is.
This morning at baby-signing class, another mom said, “It doesn’t matter where I sit, my baby will end up following Sophie around.” And I realized that all the mobile children in that class spend a fair amount of time following Sophie around. She’s not the giggliest, or the oldest, or even the most active, but she comes in second in all those categories, and she may be the most confident. She’s also probably the best at sharing whatever she is taking joy in. At this age, being the best at sharing is like being the tallest midget. She shares only about two-thirds of the time; she’s still got lots of room to improve her manners. Still, I’m a little intimidated by my own baby’s popularity.
Today at the library, she took a bookend off the shelf and delivered it to a stranger with great ceremony. She perched on another baby’s stroller, examined that baby’s toy fish, then generously offered the fish back to its owner. She charms everyone with this deceptive generosity. We’re already worried about her teen years.
Yesterday I was at an academic conference, but I ended up spending a lot of the time talking to two pregnant colleagues, and I realized that it is time to blog about the stuff that I may do differently next time (if there is a next time); the stuff I wish I had known before Sophie was born.
- Don’t register for your baby-shower alone. Try to enlist a mom mentor who shares your style, so she can let you know things like, if you want a jogging stroller for uses other than jogging, you’ll want to get the kind with a pivoting front wheel – and a baby carseat attachment, which lets you avoid purchasing a whole separate stroller for infants. Better yet, talk to a lot of mom mentors. Offer to take a friend’s kid to the park, then ask the other moms there. Only another mom can tell you that a package of three easily-hand-washable bumkins bibs (with their brilliant pockets) will let you avoid buying dozens of other bibs that will stain & shrink. You’re going to need someone to help you navigate all the marketing forces of the baby industry. It’s an astounding industry, and astoundingly full of dreck, along with a few wonders that are great discoveries.
- Start on cloth diapers if you’re at all interested. It’s easy to go from cloth to plastic, but it’s very difficult to transition a baby from plastic to cloth, because once a baby gets used to the chemically-aided comfort of plastic she’ll be reluctant to give it up. I had read that given the environmental costs of growing cotton and doing excessive laundry, cloth and plastic pretty much even out — but I wish I had known that you can do your own diaper laundry quite easily, and that Happy Heinie diaper covers are far more convenient than all the annoying trips I have made to Target.
- Allow yourself 6 months home with your baby, if at all possible. Breastfeeding usually lasts at least six months: they’re not on solid food until 4-6 months, and it is not going to be fun to pump enough milk to sustain your baby while you’re away. Sleep deprivation varies hugely baby by baby, but the ages 3-6 months are particularly tricky, sleep-wise. If you can possibly wait till 6 months, do.
- Let your baby put herself to sleep as often as possible, especially when she’s about 6 weeks old. Put her down sleepy but not asleep. We didn’t do this, so Sophie learned to fall asleep only with us, while nursing, or walking, or rocking. This meant that every night-waking, she also needed us. Every less-than-perfectly-smooth transfer into the crib, she also needed us to start all over again with the soothing. This was tough. Sophie and I had way too many 2am walks around the neighborhood, in our pajamas, singing lullabies. She didn’t learn to fall asleep on her own till she was 11 months old, and those were a too-sleepy 11 months.
- Get a book on Elimination Communication and try it with moderation. Sophie loves to spend time diaper-free, but we didn’t know about Elimination Communication till she was a year old. We especially didn’t know that you can go diaper-free for just an hour or two a day, then stick a diaper back on your baby when you need to leave the house and go somewhere where a diaper will be convenient. We fell into this without reading the experts, because it just makes sense: it’s good for curing diaper rash, it’s good for the environment, it’s good for Sophie’s own mobility and eventual toilet training too.
- Before having my own baby, I did not understand the parents who stick their children on what looked to me like too-rigid schedules. “Watch your baby, not the clock,” was the kind of advice-book I read. I still agree with this, but with moderation. A baby’s whole world is chaotic, so babies thrive on rhythm and ritual. Set up simple cue-ing events that work for you. For instance, when we pull the shades in Sophie’s room, then put on calm classical music or lullabies, and then nurse in the rocking chair, she knows that what is coming next is a nap, and she really appreciates knowing what is about to come. When those naptimes occur at roughly the same time every day, everyone is happier – just like I, as an adult, like to sleep on the same schedule most days. It’s astounding how much difference this makes. We can’t go out from 9-11 am or 1-3 pm, because of Sophie’s nap rhythm – but every time I decide that naps are not sacred, I regret it. Naps are sacred. Rhythms are useful. Find your own household rhythms and rituals.
- Your baby may be entirely different. Take this advice, and all advice, leavened with a lot of moderation and flexibility. In the end, Dr. Spock was right: you know more than you think you do. And your mother-in-law is right: babies will teach you how to care for them.
I don’t want to leave the impression that all I have are regrets. I love that I found Bradley nutrition to help me through pregnancy. I love that I found slings, which provide the swaddling, swaying, shushing, soothing that so many babies crave, all in one simple piece of cloth. I love that I knew to consciously seek a multigenerational community to help me through motherhood. I love that we figured out to give independent activities to Ben, activities that he is entirely responsible for, like bathtime, and daddy-daughter breakfast dates on any weekend day when I haven’t gotten enough sleep. There’s so much joy. As I type this, Ben is helping Sophie try on his sneakers, and I’m going to go out and join them.
Ben has a new bicycling blog here. It’s really good. Not only can he ride faster than most of the fanatics around here, and photograph like a pro, too: that boy can write. Check out his “about me” section.
We haven’t been climbing much since Sophie was born, but the latest Patagonia catalog had a bunch of interesting interviews and passages that reminded me why we used to climb.
From Henry Barber, who climbed barefoot, without chalk, in Eastern Europe in the 1970s, with knotted slings instead of high-tech pro — gear that he still uses:
Climbing these great routes in a minimalist style made me realize I could accomplish much more with less in all areas of my life…. Climbing is the only place in my life where I experience true simplicity…. the goal was to always have a day where I wasn’t sure of the outcome.
And from Lynn Hill, who concludes her book Climbing Free by declaring that rock climbing, for her,
has become a vehicle for evolving as a person, learning about the world, and sharing those experiences with others.
Stuff like that makes me miss our rock-climbing friends: Andre, Leah, Jeannie, Malcolm, Andrew, Corinna, Jonathan, Eric-Bubbles, all the people I have trusted my life to on cliff-faces. And all the beautiful places we have been. Andre’s photos are here.
UPDATED TO ADD: here’s my own philosophizing about rock-climbing with a two-year-old.
