The holidays are always a time when people indulge in food that may not be the healthiest. This is true of omnivores and vegans alike. The difference between the two is that vegans often like to pretend their alternatives to meat-based rich holiday foods are actually healthy. Here's where I need to call out my fellow vegans who believe this. Here's where I need to make a plea to demand more, because only then will food manufacturers do better in providing truly healthy alternatives.
I've got news for you, vegans: Soy is NOT a health food. I've got more news for you: You probably ate too much soy even *before* going vegan. And even more news: Seitan is only the lesser of the evils, as we become more aware of the prevalence of gluten sensitivities.
We've been led astray, vegans. In our fervor to find a healthier diet style, we have embraced other foods that, in some ways, aren't much better than the foods they replaced. Soy is implicated in numerous health problems from breast cancer to thyroid function to hormone imbalance to nutritional deficiencies due to the negative impacts of phytic acids. You can find countless scientific journal articles of study results on some of these issues. Meanwhile we are told soy is healthy for us, a complete protein, but when you dig deeper, those painting the picture of soy as a health food tend to fall into two categories: those involved with marketing soy for financial gain or those who would love to think soy is healthy for them (mainly vegans, vegetarians, and menopausal women wanting a natural alternative to treat the symptoms of menopause). We need to ask ourselves who is likely to be more impartial. We need to face the hard truth that our beloved tofu may not be so beloved for our bodies, instead of believing the convenient lie.
Furthermore, we need to start reading labels. Soy derivatives are in practically every bread, cereal, cracker, margarine, soup, and chocolate bar on the market. Add up all the soybean oil, soy lecithin, textured vegetable protein, and soy sauce that even omnivores eat, it's likely to add up to more soy than in the touted healthful Asian diets. It then becomes clear why replacing cow's milk with soy milk, cheese with soy cheese, and meats with soy-based meat alternatives sends us to soy overboard very fast!
Those of us who have begun to realize the dangers of soy may turn to nut or rice milks and seitan-based meat substitutes. But it is becoming increasingly clear that gluten is not as easily digested by humans as we once thought. Elusive gluten sensitivites are often difficult to track down; often the only way to diagnose gluten sensitivity is to eliminate it in the diet and note if this causes the disappearance of symptoms. Sometimes it does; sometimes it's inconclusive. But one thing that is clear is that we don't fully understand all the ramifications of consuming the vast amounts of gluten in the typical Western diet. Not to mention that seitan products often contain soy in the form of tamari or soy sauce added to give a saltier flavor.
So if soy is unacceptable and seitan is not the greatest either, what's left? Simply put: nothing for anyone without time to make homemade veggie burgers, homemade veggie sausages, and other such meat substitutes. For this mother of a busy family of 5, I do not have that kind of time. We need to demand more. Time has shown us that food manufacturers have eagerly tapped into the faux meat market and more and more convenience foods have become available to vegans, vegetarians, and those seeking to reduce their meat consumption. It is "easier" now to be vegan than ever, except that you must be willing to accept high levels of soy, sodium, and wheat in your diet for the sake of convenience. That makes your Thanksgiving tofurky not much more healthy than the real deal. But if we stop buying these poor excuses for "healthy" alternatives, companies will be forced to re-think their tired go-to's of soy and seitan when devising meat alternatives.
There are a few such products on the market--Sunshine Burgers, So-Delicious coconut ice cream and yogurt, and Daiya nondairy nonsoy cheese come to mind, as a prime examples. But there is a decided paucity of soy-free, wheat-free wholesome vegan prepared foods to choose from. And yet there are plenty of viable alternatives that could be pursued. Take Hemp-Fu for example, an alternative to soy-based tofu made from hemp and sold in Italy: http://www.armoniaebonta.it/vediProdotto_EN.aspx?id=7 A quick google search will turn up tons of *recipes* for non-soy tofu and tempeh and veggie burgers and roasts, but very few commercially sold products premade, demonstrating both that soy-free, wheat-free meat alternatives *can* be made and that despite this, they are *not* being made commercially. There's no reason there couldn't be more to choose from except that vegans are just as happy to gobble up soy and stick their heads in the sand, so that there's no need for food manufacturers to be innovative or come up with alternatives. Now is the time to demand more.
Once there's demand, supply will follow. In the meantime, this Thanksgiving, I'll be cooking up a Celebration Field Roast, which is at least soy-free albeit high in sodium and gluten. In addition, I'll be making my gravy with Coconut Aminos instead of Braggs or soy sauce, my mashed potatoes will be made with almond or hemp milk, and my veggies will be smothered in soy-free Earth Balance margarine. I'll do my best to minimize the amount of soy and gluten in our feast, while optimizing for how much I do not need to make from scratch. This is my compromise for the time being, but of course at no point will I delude myself into believing it to be the healthiest meal possible--it will be healthier than most people's feast, and some day maybe with a little more progress in the faux meat and faux dairy market, it will be what I'd consider a healthy enough meal to be truly thankful for.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Friday, October 5, 2012
The Burden of Atheism
Many atheists I know claim they feel liberated by the fact that they do not believe in an afterlife. They claim it allows them to cherish the life they have and feel satisfied in the finality of death. While I agree that not believing in an afterlife does allow one to make every moment of one's life count and never take our time being alive for granted, I have a different outlook on mortality than what these atheists say. Furthermore, I think it's important to voice this outlook, because I often feel ostracized both from the religious and from the areligious because of my outlook. I suspect, though, that I am not alone in this persepctive....
Life to me is like this:
You find yourself on some type of a plane which seems built for long-term travel. You have no clue how you got there. But you have a full tank of fuel and find the plane on some apparent autopilot about to take off. You've never been on a plane before and you only have a vague clue what "taking off" might even mean, but soon you find yourself speeding ahead and it's a little disconcerting. But then you feel the lift under the wings of the plane and soon you are rising, rising to what you do not know. You swallow hard as you go through the changes in altitude and eventually you make your way through the clouds and level off. Your journey is born.
As you look around you see you are not alone. Vague voices you now recall having heard on your radio are speaking to you and you see the wings of other planes in your family, in formation beside you. Their voices sound reassuring. They seem to be showing you your way. You trust them instinctively and follow.
Soon all their jargon makes sense to you and you are quickly learning how to pilot on your own. Sometimes their instruction helps you; sometimes your observations help you; and sometimes you learn things by trial and error. But the feeling is exhilarating, as is the view around you. The sun reflects off the clouds whose shapes are constantly changing. Sometimes holes in the clouds reveals spectacular mountain peaks, oceans, rivers, or fields below. Sometimes the sun rises or sets and turns the clouds brilliant colors. Every sight you take in is new and gorgeous.
Eventually, you notice patterns develop in the weather and the sunrise and sunset, in the moon and stars above, and after some time you get the hang of it all and you hear less and less direct instruction from your more experienced family planes in the sky. Indeed, the other planes wander father and farther away, giving you more and more freedom of the sky. Soon you are on your own, independently piloting your own plane.
Somewhere in the back of your mind you know you only have a finite amount of fuel, but you're more focussed on the journey in the undertaking, and you know you have an ample supply left. You may chance to witness other planes. though, that, even with plenty of fuel end up caught in a storm or maybe try a tricky maneuver and crash to the ground. You might even experiment with some of these reckless moves yourself, but somehow you manage to keep your wits about you and not flirt with disaster too much. And somehow you are lucky enough that nothing as freakish as a lightning strike or bad storm has come your way and threatened your flight.
You sometimes find your independence exciting; sometimes lonesome; sometimes dull. But all in all, it is what it is and it's all you know. You sometimes contemplate what lies ahead. Maybe you even try to vaguely plan for it--at least in little bits anyway: perhaps the next hour or the next day. If you are lucky, you may find an attractive looking plane that comes your way. Your path flirts with the other plane's and perhaps you become a duo.
After some time with your cohort, you decide to beckon more planes of your own design from the earth to join you. You talk to them over the radio and figure out how to remotely launch them up into the sky. With your guidance you help them take off and soon they join you, protected near your wing, helped along with your radio and remote maneuvers... What a responsibility you now have! Other lives in your hands....
There's that fuel gauge again... Could it really be nearly half empty already? Where has all the time gone? But you distract yourself again watching your little family of planes in interacting formation, the newer ones testing out the ropes now and then, learning how to pilot for themselves.
Those planes you brought into the sky quickly start becoming more and more independent, and your fuel seems to be burning faster and faster. As you do from time to time, you reflect upon your situation. You've seen other planes crash and burn. You remember the planes that helped bring you into the sky. They are nearing the end of their fuel now. You know your time with them is limited.... And you know your own time is limited....
You visit your parent planes. They are happy to see you and the new ones you've brought into the sky. But the fuel keeps burning...
The flight is sometimes quite routine. You've seen that kind of cloud a thousand times now, flown over that landmark more times than you care to think of, and done countless repetitions of these maneuvers. Though it often feels a bit pointless, you also catch a glimmer of beauty that does not escape your attention. A flicker of light, the dazzle of the stars... And the planes you've brought to the sky, now independently flying, sometimes come to visit and make merry with you.
Some of your equipment may even have some pathological problems now, but nothing that seems to prevent the flight from proceeding. And the fuel gauge reads lower and lower. This last half of a tank has surely been burning faster than the first half. How could it be this depleted already? By now those planes that brought you up have long exhausted their supply and met their demise below. You've moved forward, for what else is there to do? Yet you know your fate is no different than theirs...
For thinking about these realities and accepting them at face value for their obvious inevitability, you've been met not with commiseration but with harsh words. You've heard some on their radios saying that people like you are the reason so many planes are led astray, because you won't accept on faith that after your fuel is exhausted and you apparently crash to the ground, you actually survive this aboard an invisible aircraft of grandiose design, beyond detection of our meager physical radar. And if you'd only just believe in this, you would be saved. It sounds beautiful--never to have to worry about an end to your journey. But try as you might you cannot make yourself believe this as much as you would like to. And despite the accusations that your lack of faith is leading you and other planes astray, you find that knowing your fuel will one day be exhausted makes you revel in each moment you have, and inspires you to help others see the beauty all around them and enjoy it while it lasts.
Yet despite this silver lining, you still see the cloud as being a cloud. The fuel as being the fuel. And the ground awaiting your demise as the ending to your journey. And the truth is... It is downright terrifying to know that all you know will come to an end. All you feel; all you see; all you experience. Over. You try to make the best of this realization in your every day actions. But it haunts you. It creeps in from time to time. In the quiet darkness of the night or the long shadows of the afternoon sun. You know as surely as the sun sets, so will your time on this, the flight of your life. There is no comfort in this thought, nor can you force yourself to believe something that to you seems nonsensical, just to give you some sort of relief to pondering your own mortality.
So you move forth again, sometimes going through the motions, sometimes realizing something profound, sometimes perfecting a better way to fly, and sometimes passing on a bit of your wisdom to those with more fuel in their tanks, hoping that in some small way a part of your influence, if not your plane, will go on long after you have fallen to the ground. And in these actions you reach a contemplative peace... That is, a peace that will last... at least until the next time you think too hard on that ever-shrinking supply of fuel...
Life to me is like this:
You find yourself on some type of a plane which seems built for long-term travel. You have no clue how you got there. But you have a full tank of fuel and find the plane on some apparent autopilot about to take off. You've never been on a plane before and you only have a vague clue what "taking off" might even mean, but soon you find yourself speeding ahead and it's a little disconcerting. But then you feel the lift under the wings of the plane and soon you are rising, rising to what you do not know. You swallow hard as you go through the changes in altitude and eventually you make your way through the clouds and level off. Your journey is born.
As you look around you see you are not alone. Vague voices you now recall having heard on your radio are speaking to you and you see the wings of other planes in your family, in formation beside you. Their voices sound reassuring. They seem to be showing you your way. You trust them instinctively and follow.
Soon all their jargon makes sense to you and you are quickly learning how to pilot on your own. Sometimes their instruction helps you; sometimes your observations help you; and sometimes you learn things by trial and error. But the feeling is exhilarating, as is the view around you. The sun reflects off the clouds whose shapes are constantly changing. Sometimes holes in the clouds reveals spectacular mountain peaks, oceans, rivers, or fields below. Sometimes the sun rises or sets and turns the clouds brilliant colors. Every sight you take in is new and gorgeous.
Eventually, you notice patterns develop in the weather and the sunrise and sunset, in the moon and stars above, and after some time you get the hang of it all and you hear less and less direct instruction from your more experienced family planes in the sky. Indeed, the other planes wander father and farther away, giving you more and more freedom of the sky. Soon you are on your own, independently piloting your own plane.
Somewhere in the back of your mind you know you only have a finite amount of fuel, but you're more focussed on the journey in the undertaking, and you know you have an ample supply left. You may chance to witness other planes. though, that, even with plenty of fuel end up caught in a storm or maybe try a tricky maneuver and crash to the ground. You might even experiment with some of these reckless moves yourself, but somehow you manage to keep your wits about you and not flirt with disaster too much. And somehow you are lucky enough that nothing as freakish as a lightning strike or bad storm has come your way and threatened your flight.
You sometimes find your independence exciting; sometimes lonesome; sometimes dull. But all in all, it is what it is and it's all you know. You sometimes contemplate what lies ahead. Maybe you even try to vaguely plan for it--at least in little bits anyway: perhaps the next hour or the next day. If you are lucky, you may find an attractive looking plane that comes your way. Your path flirts with the other plane's and perhaps you become a duo.
After some time with your cohort, you decide to beckon more planes of your own design from the earth to join you. You talk to them over the radio and figure out how to remotely launch them up into the sky. With your guidance you help them take off and soon they join you, protected near your wing, helped along with your radio and remote maneuvers... What a responsibility you now have! Other lives in your hands....
There's that fuel gauge again... Could it really be nearly half empty already? Where has all the time gone? But you distract yourself again watching your little family of planes in interacting formation, the newer ones testing out the ropes now and then, learning how to pilot for themselves.
Those planes you brought into the sky quickly start becoming more and more independent, and your fuel seems to be burning faster and faster. As you do from time to time, you reflect upon your situation. You've seen other planes crash and burn. You remember the planes that helped bring you into the sky. They are nearing the end of their fuel now. You know your time with them is limited.... And you know your own time is limited....
You visit your parent planes. They are happy to see you and the new ones you've brought into the sky. But the fuel keeps burning...
The flight is sometimes quite routine. You've seen that kind of cloud a thousand times now, flown over that landmark more times than you care to think of, and done countless repetitions of these maneuvers. Though it often feels a bit pointless, you also catch a glimmer of beauty that does not escape your attention. A flicker of light, the dazzle of the stars... And the planes you've brought to the sky, now independently flying, sometimes come to visit and make merry with you.
Some of your equipment may even have some pathological problems now, but nothing that seems to prevent the flight from proceeding. And the fuel gauge reads lower and lower. This last half of a tank has surely been burning faster than the first half. How could it be this depleted already? By now those planes that brought you up have long exhausted their supply and met their demise below. You've moved forward, for what else is there to do? Yet you know your fate is no different than theirs...
For thinking about these realities and accepting them at face value for their obvious inevitability, you've been met not with commiseration but with harsh words. You've heard some on their radios saying that people like you are the reason so many planes are led astray, because you won't accept on faith that after your fuel is exhausted and you apparently crash to the ground, you actually survive this aboard an invisible aircraft of grandiose design, beyond detection of our meager physical radar. And if you'd only just believe in this, you would be saved. It sounds beautiful--never to have to worry about an end to your journey. But try as you might you cannot make yourself believe this as much as you would like to. And despite the accusations that your lack of faith is leading you and other planes astray, you find that knowing your fuel will one day be exhausted makes you revel in each moment you have, and inspires you to help others see the beauty all around them and enjoy it while it lasts.
Yet despite this silver lining, you still see the cloud as being a cloud. The fuel as being the fuel. And the ground awaiting your demise as the ending to your journey. And the truth is... It is downright terrifying to know that all you know will come to an end. All you feel; all you see; all you experience. Over. You try to make the best of this realization in your every day actions. But it haunts you. It creeps in from time to time. In the quiet darkness of the night or the long shadows of the afternoon sun. You know as surely as the sun sets, so will your time on this, the flight of your life. There is no comfort in this thought, nor can you force yourself to believe something that to you seems nonsensical, just to give you some sort of relief to pondering your own mortality.
So you move forth again, sometimes going through the motions, sometimes realizing something profound, sometimes perfecting a better way to fly, and sometimes passing on a bit of your wisdom to those with more fuel in their tanks, hoping that in some small way a part of your influence, if not your plane, will go on long after you have fallen to the ground. And in these actions you reach a contemplative peace... That is, a peace that will last... at least until the next time you think too hard on that ever-shrinking supply of fuel...
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Reflections on Sense of Direction
"It's that way, mom!" I shouted, pointing at the right branch of the fork in the road.
"I don't know," she responded, "I think it's the other way."
We were a tad lost in New Jersey and I was a giddy 7 year old anxious to get to the beach. The right branch seemed to take us to a lower elevation and the trees seemed to thin out, so even though I had no proof, it just felt like that was the way to the ocean.
But my mom went the other way. Soon she realized she wasn't getting closer to our destination and stopped for directions. This was 1984, before everyone had cell phones and gps. No we were relying on a good old fashioned paper map--you know, the kind you can unfold but then never figure out quite how to refold properly.
Anyhow, it turned out that I had been right. Had my mother listened to me, my intuitive sense of direction would have led us straight to the beach. She marveled at this briefly but to me it had seemed obvious.
Ah the 80s, when kids like me roamed around for hours in the woods unsupervised til our moms called us for dinner. And not "called us" on our mobile phones but "called us" as in shouted our names repeatedly throughout the neighborhood. If you took too long getting home you would get an earful, so it helped to know all the shortcuts through the forest, especially when you had a penchant for wandering much farther than your mom probably realized.
My sister and I and some of the neighbor kids would sometimes play kickball, but what we really loved to do was explore. We would pretend we were trailblazers on a new frontier and go deeper and deeper into the wild. We soon learned that the easiest paths were to stay near the creek that wound through the trees. This creek was a tributary of Brush Creek (aka Bushy Run) which was a tributary of Turtle Creek which flowed into the Monongahela River which joined up with the Allegheny River in nearby Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. The Ohio River then ultimately dumps into the Mississippi River whose basin is the deltas in New Orleans which flow out to the Gulf of Mexico.
I had never been to New Orleans (still haven't) but as a child I was utterly fascinated with how things were connected. It was so cool for me to contemplate sending a message in a bottle down our little creek and thinking that maybe one day it would be found by a child in Louisiana. I was also naturally drawn to the water. Creeks, streams, rivers, lakes, and especially the sea called to my heart. I could spend hours listening to the water rush down a stream or the waves crashing to the shore. I felt at home wading, swimming and splashing. I never wanted to leave the water, even at a pool. When my mom would try to tell me it was time to get out of my grandparents' pool or the ymca pool, I would sneak under the water, acting like I didn't hear her-she literally had to drag me out! And when my recurrent ear infections would flare up I wouldn't tell my mom that my ears hurt because I didn't want to miss my swim lesson-I ended up needing tubes in my ears as a result. But every second I could spend in or near the water was worth it in my young mind.
So as we tread upon the deer paths near our neighborhood creek we would "discover" "new" features, mainly "waterfalls." We'd mark how far our explorations had taken us based on the number of waterfalls.we'd passed since the common entrance to the woods. If you passed waterfall #1 you'd embarked on a sizable journey, but if you made it to waterfall #2, you had done some serious exploring. Then there was the rare occasion when you could brag "I made it past waterfall #3!"
I believe these early explorations along with my natural attraction to water were what allowed me to sense which way it was to the ocean that summer day. Besides, I could just smell the sea with our car windows rolled down and notice which way the ocean breeze seemed to be blowing the leaves on the trees. It wasn't magic or divine intervention that told me, but rather, paying attention to nature's subtleties.
As I got older, I learned more about geography. I loved studying maps. Like those days in the woods, I turned my map into a journey. I imagined taking various roads or highways and pictured the towns and cities I would pass through. I would use the map's legend to give me an idea how big the town was, whether the road was two or four lanes, if there were parks or bodies of water nearby. I soon learned that many back roads seemed to meander along rivers or streams just as my paths through the woods meandered along the creek. I noticed that major highways more often took direct routes but sometimes had to wind around mountains or tunnel through them. I became proficient at estimating the distance from one place to another and even using the mileage markings to optimize a driving route from point a to point b. I could also come up with alternate routes in case of traffic or construction. And I could tell you which way was most likely to give you the most scenic route to your destination. All of this I could do long before I was old enough to drive.
Yet on vacations my mom & stepdad never listened to me. Every year they would have their maps and their AAA trip ticks and still get confused somewhere and end up arguing about which way to go. I gave up trying to talk sense into them and just tried to stay out of it.
Nor did they take my suggestion of booking a hotel room at a decent logical midpoint of our journey on two day drives. Instead, my stepdad insisted he did not want to be obligated to stop at some "arbitrary" point but wanted to see how far we could get the first day and then find lodging. It reminds me now a little of my 8 yr old holding her need to use the bathroom until she's desperate and then assuming there will always be a restroom available.
The flaw in this logic seems obvious, yet it took my stepdad seemingly by surprise one year when we were driving back from Florida. When he finally agreed we had driven far enough the first day, it was rather late and we were in Va. We stopped at hotel after hotel but they were all without vacancies. We kept driving north as we searched... and it got later and later... and eventually we were in WV...still no vacancies. Finally my stepdad gave up and decided to just push through til we got home... Thus he ended up driving the whole journey all at once and we arrived home at around 5:00AM. It was absurd and completely avoidable.
The summer after I graduated from high school I got my driver's license and shortly thereafter entered college in the mid 90s, attending a small school in the central Pennsylvania Amish country. It was the era of cheap gas and when my mom bought a new car she gave me her old 1989 Acura Integra and I used to take it on countless road trips. My college sweetheart and I would spontaneously decide to drive to Maryland or New Jersey or just some obscure little town in Pennsylvania. All we ever took with us were snacks and our PA Atlas and Gazetteer. And we always found our way around. People were amazed at our exhaustive knowledge of PA geography--we could pretty much tell you where just about any random town in PA was located.
When we married a few weeks after college graduation, we decided to drive to Sedona, Arizona for our honeymoon, a 2,000 mile trek. We explored all over AZ for a week, and on the way home, we purposely took a different route home so that we could see more of the country along the way. We never got lost.
When we separated and I took a job in Florida, I thought nothing of driving back to PA alone to visit family. I also took random road trips alone when I lived in FL. I loved going to St. Augustine (which was a really straightforward journey), but I also drove to Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando, and all over Brevard County where I lived.
Over the years, I continued collecting state atlases and using them to find state parks and campgrounds for cheap road trips. Eventually, I did start using google maps, too, but usually just to plan my tentative route, always leaving re-routing options open in my mind for spontaneous changes of plan or to avoid congestion. The latest technological innovation of smart phones has allowed me to avoid traffic before I even get stuck in it, since google has real-time traffic, and I can re-route before we get snarled in it. That said I hate GPS and never plan to own one. I don't like to be told where to go and just follow like a mindless robot, thank you. I have driven alone to Chicago, Myrtle Beach, New York, Baltimore, Allentown, and countless other places. I've also walked alone while pregnant all over Manhattan. I can handle it and I trust my sense of direction.
So when my new husband's parents worriedly kept calling us when we were on our way to DC for my brother-in-law's wedding, to be sure to give us detailed directions, I thought they were just being overprotective of their youngest (my husband). Thankfully he just went along with it, "yeah, yep," etc. but we were writing nothing down. The route there was ridiculously straightforward. I was not sure how anyone could possibly get lost on such a journey. As we got closer to the metro area, though, the red spots started popping up on google traffic, as I had anticipated they might. I'd already selected a plan b, and a plan c and d to re-route around traffic. We had to go with plan c, due to plan b becoming red the closer we got. But it was very simple to do, and even though it took us through a residential area with speed bumps and stop signs, we got there much faster than we would have if we'd have blindly stuck with plan a or whatever major highway directions my well-intentioned mother-in-law was giving us.
Then I came to learn that it's more than just overprotection motivating my in-laws. When my husband showed me the typed up directions to their condo in the Outer Banks, I was just like, "wow, really??" They had sent them to be sure we had every step laid out and everyone's phone number in case of emergency. He went on to explain that they had a whole vacation binder of info at their house.
I was awe-struck. Part of me admired their planning ahead (unlike the family vacations I experienced growing up). But mostly I felt it was very ocd of them. I thought about the almost ritualistic vacation traditions they followed, as described to me by my husband, and began feeling anxious about our upcoming trip with them. This will be my first vacation with the in-laws and they seemed to have every last detail planned out in cookie cutter fashion.
Cookies-that's how it was! Like following a recipe. When I cook, I rarely follow a recipe strictly. I like to be able to tweak things or go in a different direction than I first thought I would. I like that kind of freedom and spontaneity. So it is with travel plans-I like a little flexibility.
Don't get me wrong, I do like having a general plan (like booking a hotel room), but the details are better left to circumstance, in my opinion. Like when I took my girls to FL and let them choose which places to go to and when-we saw things I never knew existed when I lived there. Or the last minute re-routing we took on our way to my brother-in-law's wedding. Had we stuck with the "recipe" I can guarantee my husband would have been late for the rehearsal. Besides, hadn't my in-laws ever seen the National Lampoons Vacation movies? Hadn't they learned anything from Clark Griswold about the pitfalls of too much planning? The lesson I took away from these movies was that the more intricate your plan, the more bound it was to fail.
And what in life really follows our plans that precisely anyway? Isn't it better to stay open to the possibility of re-routing or taking the scenic way or detouring or doing something else a little different? There's almost always more than one way to get somewhere. The coolest highway I found in FL is a little two-lane road through the sparsely-populated wilderness between the Atlantic coast and the Kissimmee area. It has a speed limit of 55 mph and there are never any cars on it. Plus, it's FREE. You can totally avoid the tolls and enjoy the quiet serenity of this region and get there almost just as fast as you could have on the major highways. But if you go to google maps, and ask for directions, you won't see this pop up as an option. Like Robert Frost, I prefer this less-traveled-by road.
So thank you to my in-laws for their good intentions in providing us fool-proof directions, but I like playing the fool sometimes--throwing caution to the wind, leaving doors open, and trusting my instincts and sense of direction. We'll see you at the beach, but I can't say yet how we'll be getting there :)
"I don't know," she responded, "I think it's the other way."
We were a tad lost in New Jersey and I was a giddy 7 year old anxious to get to the beach. The right branch seemed to take us to a lower elevation and the trees seemed to thin out, so even though I had no proof, it just felt like that was the way to the ocean.
But my mom went the other way. Soon she realized she wasn't getting closer to our destination and stopped for directions. This was 1984, before everyone had cell phones and gps. No we were relying on a good old fashioned paper map--you know, the kind you can unfold but then never figure out quite how to refold properly.
Anyhow, it turned out that I had been right. Had my mother listened to me, my intuitive sense of direction would have led us straight to the beach. She marveled at this briefly but to me it had seemed obvious.
Ah the 80s, when kids like me roamed around for hours in the woods unsupervised til our moms called us for dinner. And not "called us" on our mobile phones but "called us" as in shouted our names repeatedly throughout the neighborhood. If you took too long getting home you would get an earful, so it helped to know all the shortcuts through the forest, especially when you had a penchant for wandering much farther than your mom probably realized.
My sister and I and some of the neighbor kids would sometimes play kickball, but what we really loved to do was explore. We would pretend we were trailblazers on a new frontier and go deeper and deeper into the wild. We soon learned that the easiest paths were to stay near the creek that wound through the trees. This creek was a tributary of Brush Creek (aka Bushy Run) which was a tributary of Turtle Creek which flowed into the Monongahela River which joined up with the Allegheny River in nearby Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. The Ohio River then ultimately dumps into the Mississippi River whose basin is the deltas in New Orleans which flow out to the Gulf of Mexico.
I had never been to New Orleans (still haven't) but as a child I was utterly fascinated with how things were connected. It was so cool for me to contemplate sending a message in a bottle down our little creek and thinking that maybe one day it would be found by a child in Louisiana. I was also naturally drawn to the water. Creeks, streams, rivers, lakes, and especially the sea called to my heart. I could spend hours listening to the water rush down a stream or the waves crashing to the shore. I felt at home wading, swimming and splashing. I never wanted to leave the water, even at a pool. When my mom would try to tell me it was time to get out of my grandparents' pool or the ymca pool, I would sneak under the water, acting like I didn't hear her-she literally had to drag me out! And when my recurrent ear infections would flare up I wouldn't tell my mom that my ears hurt because I didn't want to miss my swim lesson-I ended up needing tubes in my ears as a result. But every second I could spend in or near the water was worth it in my young mind.
So as we tread upon the deer paths near our neighborhood creek we would "discover" "new" features, mainly "waterfalls." We'd mark how far our explorations had taken us based on the number of waterfalls.we'd passed since the common entrance to the woods. If you passed waterfall #1 you'd embarked on a sizable journey, but if you made it to waterfall #2, you had done some serious exploring. Then there was the rare occasion when you could brag "I made it past waterfall #3!"
I believe these early explorations along with my natural attraction to water were what allowed me to sense which way it was to the ocean that summer day. Besides, I could just smell the sea with our car windows rolled down and notice which way the ocean breeze seemed to be blowing the leaves on the trees. It wasn't magic or divine intervention that told me, but rather, paying attention to nature's subtleties.
As I got older, I learned more about geography. I loved studying maps. Like those days in the woods, I turned my map into a journey. I imagined taking various roads or highways and pictured the towns and cities I would pass through. I would use the map's legend to give me an idea how big the town was, whether the road was two or four lanes, if there were parks or bodies of water nearby. I soon learned that many back roads seemed to meander along rivers or streams just as my paths through the woods meandered along the creek. I noticed that major highways more often took direct routes but sometimes had to wind around mountains or tunnel through them. I became proficient at estimating the distance from one place to another and even using the mileage markings to optimize a driving route from point a to point b. I could also come up with alternate routes in case of traffic or construction. And I could tell you which way was most likely to give you the most scenic route to your destination. All of this I could do long before I was old enough to drive.
Yet on vacations my mom & stepdad never listened to me. Every year they would have their maps and their AAA trip ticks and still get confused somewhere and end up arguing about which way to go. I gave up trying to talk sense into them and just tried to stay out of it.
Nor did they take my suggestion of booking a hotel room at a decent logical midpoint of our journey on two day drives. Instead, my stepdad insisted he did not want to be obligated to stop at some "arbitrary" point but wanted to see how far we could get the first day and then find lodging. It reminds me now a little of my 8 yr old holding her need to use the bathroom until she's desperate and then assuming there will always be a restroom available.
The flaw in this logic seems obvious, yet it took my stepdad seemingly by surprise one year when we were driving back from Florida. When he finally agreed we had driven far enough the first day, it was rather late and we were in Va. We stopped at hotel after hotel but they were all without vacancies. We kept driving north as we searched... and it got later and later... and eventually we were in WV...still no vacancies. Finally my stepdad gave up and decided to just push through til we got home... Thus he ended up driving the whole journey all at once and we arrived home at around 5:00AM. It was absurd and completely avoidable.
The summer after I graduated from high school I got my driver's license and shortly thereafter entered college in the mid 90s, attending a small school in the central Pennsylvania Amish country. It was the era of cheap gas and when my mom bought a new car she gave me her old 1989 Acura Integra and I used to take it on countless road trips. My college sweetheart and I would spontaneously decide to drive to Maryland or New Jersey or just some obscure little town in Pennsylvania. All we ever took with us were snacks and our PA Atlas and Gazetteer. And we always found our way around. People were amazed at our exhaustive knowledge of PA geography--we could pretty much tell you where just about any random town in PA was located.
When we married a few weeks after college graduation, we decided to drive to Sedona, Arizona for our honeymoon, a 2,000 mile trek. We explored all over AZ for a week, and on the way home, we purposely took a different route home so that we could see more of the country along the way. We never got lost.
When we separated and I took a job in Florida, I thought nothing of driving back to PA alone to visit family. I also took random road trips alone when I lived in FL. I loved going to St. Augustine (which was a really straightforward journey), but I also drove to Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando, and all over Brevard County where I lived.
Over the years, I continued collecting state atlases and using them to find state parks and campgrounds for cheap road trips. Eventually, I did start using google maps, too, but usually just to plan my tentative route, always leaving re-routing options open in my mind for spontaneous changes of plan or to avoid congestion. The latest technological innovation of smart phones has allowed me to avoid traffic before I even get stuck in it, since google has real-time traffic, and I can re-route before we get snarled in it. That said I hate GPS and never plan to own one. I don't like to be told where to go and just follow like a mindless robot, thank you. I have driven alone to Chicago, Myrtle Beach, New York, Baltimore, Allentown, and countless other places. I've also walked alone while pregnant all over Manhattan. I can handle it and I trust my sense of direction.
So when my new husband's parents worriedly kept calling us when we were on our way to DC for my brother-in-law's wedding, to be sure to give us detailed directions, I thought they were just being overprotective of their youngest (my husband). Thankfully he just went along with it, "yeah, yep," etc. but we were writing nothing down. The route there was ridiculously straightforward. I was not sure how anyone could possibly get lost on such a journey. As we got closer to the metro area, though, the red spots started popping up on google traffic, as I had anticipated they might. I'd already selected a plan b, and a plan c and d to re-route around traffic. We had to go with plan c, due to plan b becoming red the closer we got. But it was very simple to do, and even though it took us through a residential area with speed bumps and stop signs, we got there much faster than we would have if we'd have blindly stuck with plan a or whatever major highway directions my well-intentioned mother-in-law was giving us.
Then I came to learn that it's more than just overprotection motivating my in-laws. When my husband showed me the typed up directions to their condo in the Outer Banks, I was just like, "wow, really??" They had sent them to be sure we had every step laid out and everyone's phone number in case of emergency. He went on to explain that they had a whole vacation binder of info at their house.
I was awe-struck. Part of me admired their planning ahead (unlike the family vacations I experienced growing up). But mostly I felt it was very ocd of them. I thought about the almost ritualistic vacation traditions they followed, as described to me by my husband, and began feeling anxious about our upcoming trip with them. This will be my first vacation with the in-laws and they seemed to have every last detail planned out in cookie cutter fashion.
Cookies-that's how it was! Like following a recipe. When I cook, I rarely follow a recipe strictly. I like to be able to tweak things or go in a different direction than I first thought I would. I like that kind of freedom and spontaneity. So it is with travel plans-I like a little flexibility.
Don't get me wrong, I do like having a general plan (like booking a hotel room), but the details are better left to circumstance, in my opinion. Like when I took my girls to FL and let them choose which places to go to and when-we saw things I never knew existed when I lived there. Or the last minute re-routing we took on our way to my brother-in-law's wedding. Had we stuck with the "recipe" I can guarantee my husband would have been late for the rehearsal. Besides, hadn't my in-laws ever seen the National Lampoons Vacation movies? Hadn't they learned anything from Clark Griswold about the pitfalls of too much planning? The lesson I took away from these movies was that the more intricate your plan, the more bound it was to fail.
And what in life really follows our plans that precisely anyway? Isn't it better to stay open to the possibility of re-routing or taking the scenic way or detouring or doing something else a little different? There's almost always more than one way to get somewhere. The coolest highway I found in FL is a little two-lane road through the sparsely-populated wilderness between the Atlantic coast and the Kissimmee area. It has a speed limit of 55 mph and there are never any cars on it. Plus, it's FREE. You can totally avoid the tolls and enjoy the quiet serenity of this region and get there almost just as fast as you could have on the major highways. But if you go to google maps, and ask for directions, you won't see this pop up as an option. Like Robert Frost, I prefer this less-traveled-by road.
So thank you to my in-laws for their good intentions in providing us fool-proof directions, but I like playing the fool sometimes--throwing caution to the wind, leaving doors open, and trusting my instincts and sense of direction. We'll see you at the beach, but I can't say yet how we'll be getting there :)
Friday, July 13, 2012
Last Name Confusion
What follows is a clarification of the various last names of me and my children through the years. This has clearly been a source of some confusion for friends and loved ones, so I hope this sheds light on the matter, and also for anyone else interested, perhaps this post will serve to show some of the thought processes that go into decisions regarding last names.
I learned from a fairly young age to be defensive of my last name. This is because I was asked on more than one occasion before high school to change my last name. The first occasion was some time after my parents divorced, when my mom asked how I'd feel about changing my last name to her maiden name. The situation at the time was that my mother had primary custody of my sister and me, but we visited my father on weekends... Our visitations at that point were somewhat sporadic but I looked forward to them. We'd often stay the night and we were finding that these times were cherished and important in maintaining our relationship with our father. I felt very put in the middle by my mom's question. I did not feel I had enough time with my dad as it was, and I felt that if I abandoned his last name, it would distance us even farther. But on the other hand, I knew the divorce had been painful for my mother and that she'd really like to rid herself of this constant reminder of my father in her life. I also liked my mom's maiden name--it is a unique Irish name that stands apart from the rather common and bland last name of my father. If I'd have been given my mom's maiden name as part of my name at birth I would have embraced it. But I couldn't choose it over my father's last name years later. It just didn't feel right, because by now, my name had become a part of who I was.
Later when my mom remarried, my new stepfather asked about "adopting" me and having me take his last name. This was never an option in my mind. I already resented what I perceived as my stepfather trying to replace my father and my stepfather and I did not see eye to eye, nor did I celebrate my mother and stepfather's union. In fact, in my tween rebellion, I was at first refusing to even be a part of the wedding until my aunt sat down and explained how it would only hurt my mom. I eventually accepted that, while I did not understand her reasons, this was the man she'd chosen, so I would support her in this decision. However, it would be many years until my stepfather and I were civil to each other. Indeed, it wasn't really until adulthood that I would say we could predictably get along decently, and most of that had to do with his inability to control me any longer rather than a true reconciliation. Needless to say, taking his name was not something I would ever have considered seriously, but it did reinforce my name as my identity. This was the one piece of me that could not be taken by anyone, even though in my home life I otherwise felt like a prisoner to circumstances beyond my control.
So when my college sweetheart proposed to me, I automatically assumed I would keep my name. We had discussions about it and, though I think he was disappointed, he respected my decision. Of course we also discussed how we would handle naming of any children we were to have together. This was a little bit harder to decide upon. But I felt strongly that I wanted my name passed down in some way. My father had only one brother who had only one son, and that branch of the family was all but estranged from the rest of us. There was really no one to carry on my father's name. And besides that, I felt that if I was going to carry a baby for 9 months and go through the hard work of birthing that baby, I at least ought to be able to give it my name in some way. Still, I didn't want my name chosen over my husband's, as I felt we would be equal partners in parenting, and we were certainly equal partners biologically speaking, in the child's DNA. So it was difficult to come up with a fair way to handle the naming of our children. When we were expecting our first child, we finally decided on a hyphenated last name, for lack of better options. We chose my name to be the first in the hyphenated name, simply because it sounded better that way than with his name first.
We went round and round about what that child would do when that child had children, but that just made our heads spin. I came up with a theoretical system whereby last names could be passed down "fairly" even among those with hyphenated names: the oldest would pass down the part of the name that came from the older parent, then the second-born would pass down the younger parent's name, and it would continue to alternate that way, according to birth order. We resolved to explain to our child some day how this theoretical system could work, but make clear that how she ultimately handled naming her children would be completely up to her.
Thus my daughters have the last name: Myname-Hisname. That is their last name. The hyphen joins them together as one name. ie. you can't have one without the other--it would be just as incorrect to call them Firstname Myname as it would be to call them Firstname Hisname. Still, I quickly learned that this world is still ill-equipped for this concept. People get confused all the time. Computerized systems don't always allow a hyphen as a possible character. Schools, doctors, relatives, etc. sometimes call them only by Myname or by Hisname. Personally, I don't find this hyphenated concept to be that confusing. We use hyphenated words all the time in the English language, just as I have a few sentences ago. "ill-equipped" is neither "ill" nor "equipped." Those individual words have very different meanings from what "ill-equipped" means. But we generally have no problem recognizing that "ill-equipped" is one hyphenated unique word. My daughters' last names are no different.
Ok, well so far this isn't too confusing. As of the early part of this century, we had a family: the father went by Hisname, I went by Myname, and the kids went by Myname-Hisname. Frankly at that point, what was more confusing was probably that my then-husband also used his middle name as how he wanted people to address him, rather than his first name. Of course this was all going to get more muddled, as this family was destined not to stay intact.
My husband and I divorced and agreed on shared custody of the children. I selfishly would have preferred primary custody, but knowing how much I missed my father growing up, I didn't want to put my girls through that. I knew my girls had a good father, and if he wanted to be involved in their lives, I thought it was important for their sake, to continue our approach of being equal partners in parenting. The divorce was the easy part--no need to change any names. But a few years later we each remarried with the weddings taking place within a year of each other. First my ex's new spouse took his last name. This was a no-brainer for her as she was eager to ditch her ex-husband's last name. Then came my wedding. By this time, you'd think I would make the same decisions as I had in the past, but I didn't think it was fair to assume the same choices should apply to my current partner that applied to a previous partner. This was a new partner and a new marriage and I was not even the same person I'd been when I got married the first time. Thus I thought it made sense to at least re-examine the last name question.
Professionally, I had already been published under my maiden name as an author on a scientific journal article. That lent for a strong argument for keeping my maiden name. On the other hand, my soon-to-be father-in-law had only sisters (no brothers), and my fiance had one brother who was in a serious relationship but not yet married and so my in-laws did not have anyone yet to carry on their name (similar to my situation before my first marriage). We knew we were expecting a child when we got engaged, and I had already had the opportunity to pass my name down with my first two children, so this made a strong argument for taking my husband's name. Then again, would it be confusing to my girls' school, friends, etc. if their mother's last name did not appear at all in their hyphenated last name?
It was hard to know what to do. But finally I came back to my original reasoning for having kept my name in the first place--my identity. I asked myself to reflect on my name and my identity, and what I concluded was that I didn't really have one singular identity anymore, but more of a multi-faceted identity. Over the years I had gradually taken on many different roles and identified with different aspects of what made me me. I wore different hats at different times. Sometimes I wore the "mom" hat. Sometimes I wore the "astrophysicist" hat. Sometimes I wore the "soon-to-be-wife" hat, or the "pregnant woman" hat, or the "daughter" hat, or the "aunt" hat, and I'd worn other hats over the years in the past, too: the "nursing mom" hat, the "teacher" hat, the "student" hat... I concluded that I wanted the kind of flexibility in my name to put on different hats as I assumed different roles. I wanted to be able to go by my maiden name, or my husband's name (ie. a married name), or a combination of the two. So what I ended up doing was tacking on my husband's name to my name, with a space in between. ie. I became Firstname Myname Hisname2 (note that the "2" is used in this example to distinguish this as my second husband's name).
The space in between is important and different from a hyphen. It means there are two names, not one name joined by hyphenation. This means that either name or both are equally valid, sort of like you might use a string of adjectives to describe something. If you called me "that smart, friendly lady," it would be equally right to say that I was "smart" or that I was "friendly." Maybe in some context the "smart" would be more important, say if you were discussing my student achievement, and in another context the "friendly" might be more important, like if you were talking about my qualities as your friend.
So using both names with a space in between gave me the freedom I was looking for. Professionally I could just go by Firstname Myname as I always had. Taking on the wifely role, I could be Mrs. Hisname2. To avoid confusion with my daughters' affairs I could go by Myname Hisname2, which would make it obvious that we share some name derivative, but also introduce the idea that Mr. Hisname2 was their stepfather.
When our son was born, I felt that I'd still like a piece of my last name passed on in some way. But I didn't feel as strongly that it needed to be a part of his last name, since I already had two children with my name as part of their last name, whereas my husband had none. So we chose instead to give our son two middle names, one of which was my maiden name. This way, if he choses to, he can still pass it on in some way (perhaps as part of his children's middle name), and yet it keeps things simple enough, too, because the three of us can still be "The Hisname2's" to my son's future school, friends, etc., and my in-laws know their name will be passed on. Of course, it turned out that my brother-in-law got married the very next year after my husband and I did, and I have a sneaking suspicion that my son will not be the only one to pass down the name :). But at least we got things started...
Ultimately, there's no easy solution to the last name dilemma. Some women never had a relationship with their fathers or had a poor relationship with their fathers and see no need to carry on the name they were given at birth. Sometimes you see couples that come up with a new last name for them both to assume, and sometimes there are husbands who take their wives' last names. I support all these choices and others. I think the important thing is to do what feels right to your family, even if that's simply doing the traditional thing of the wife taking the husband's last name and passing it onto their children. In fact I believe there's absolutely nothing wrong with a woman taking her husband's last name, but I do think there's something wrong if she feels she had to do so despite her wishes or if the husband just expects it as his right regardless of his wife's feelings on the matter. No one should bully anyone into last name decisions, and when decisions have been given thought and made carefully and freely, they should be respected. I don't expect everyone to choose the same way I have, nor do I expect everyone to never be confused, but I hope that, at the very least, everyone can understand the reasons that went behind my decisions with regard to my last name and my children's last names. Indeed that is my wish for all families' naming decisions--that others empathize with their reasoning, even if they would choose differently, since these choices are rarely simple. And my wish for all women is that they enter decisions on their last name and their children's last names freely and with an open mind.
I learned from a fairly young age to be defensive of my last name. This is because I was asked on more than one occasion before high school to change my last name. The first occasion was some time after my parents divorced, when my mom asked how I'd feel about changing my last name to her maiden name. The situation at the time was that my mother had primary custody of my sister and me, but we visited my father on weekends... Our visitations at that point were somewhat sporadic but I looked forward to them. We'd often stay the night and we were finding that these times were cherished and important in maintaining our relationship with our father. I felt very put in the middle by my mom's question. I did not feel I had enough time with my dad as it was, and I felt that if I abandoned his last name, it would distance us even farther. But on the other hand, I knew the divorce had been painful for my mother and that she'd really like to rid herself of this constant reminder of my father in her life. I also liked my mom's maiden name--it is a unique Irish name that stands apart from the rather common and bland last name of my father. If I'd have been given my mom's maiden name as part of my name at birth I would have embraced it. But I couldn't choose it over my father's last name years later. It just didn't feel right, because by now, my name had become a part of who I was.
Later when my mom remarried, my new stepfather asked about "adopting" me and having me take his last name. This was never an option in my mind. I already resented what I perceived as my stepfather trying to replace my father and my stepfather and I did not see eye to eye, nor did I celebrate my mother and stepfather's union. In fact, in my tween rebellion, I was at first refusing to even be a part of the wedding until my aunt sat down and explained how it would only hurt my mom. I eventually accepted that, while I did not understand her reasons, this was the man she'd chosen, so I would support her in this decision. However, it would be many years until my stepfather and I were civil to each other. Indeed, it wasn't really until adulthood that I would say we could predictably get along decently, and most of that had to do with his inability to control me any longer rather than a true reconciliation. Needless to say, taking his name was not something I would ever have considered seriously, but it did reinforce my name as my identity. This was the one piece of me that could not be taken by anyone, even though in my home life I otherwise felt like a prisoner to circumstances beyond my control.
So when my college sweetheart proposed to me, I automatically assumed I would keep my name. We had discussions about it and, though I think he was disappointed, he respected my decision. Of course we also discussed how we would handle naming of any children we were to have together. This was a little bit harder to decide upon. But I felt strongly that I wanted my name passed down in some way. My father had only one brother who had only one son, and that branch of the family was all but estranged from the rest of us. There was really no one to carry on my father's name. And besides that, I felt that if I was going to carry a baby for 9 months and go through the hard work of birthing that baby, I at least ought to be able to give it my name in some way. Still, I didn't want my name chosen over my husband's, as I felt we would be equal partners in parenting, and we were certainly equal partners biologically speaking, in the child's DNA. So it was difficult to come up with a fair way to handle the naming of our children. When we were expecting our first child, we finally decided on a hyphenated last name, for lack of better options. We chose my name to be the first in the hyphenated name, simply because it sounded better that way than with his name first.
We went round and round about what that child would do when that child had children, but that just made our heads spin. I came up with a theoretical system whereby last names could be passed down "fairly" even among those with hyphenated names: the oldest would pass down the part of the name that came from the older parent, then the second-born would pass down the younger parent's name, and it would continue to alternate that way, according to birth order. We resolved to explain to our child some day how this theoretical system could work, but make clear that how she ultimately handled naming her children would be completely up to her.
Thus my daughters have the last name: Myname-Hisname. That is their last name. The hyphen joins them together as one name. ie. you can't have one without the other--it would be just as incorrect to call them Firstname Myname as it would be to call them Firstname Hisname. Still, I quickly learned that this world is still ill-equipped for this concept. People get confused all the time. Computerized systems don't always allow a hyphen as a possible character. Schools, doctors, relatives, etc. sometimes call them only by Myname or by Hisname. Personally, I don't find this hyphenated concept to be that confusing. We use hyphenated words all the time in the English language, just as I have a few sentences ago. "ill-equipped" is neither "ill" nor "equipped." Those individual words have very different meanings from what "ill-equipped" means. But we generally have no problem recognizing that "ill-equipped" is one hyphenated unique word. My daughters' last names are no different.
Ok, well so far this isn't too confusing. As of the early part of this century, we had a family: the father went by Hisname, I went by Myname, and the kids went by Myname-Hisname. Frankly at that point, what was more confusing was probably that my then-husband also used his middle name as how he wanted people to address him, rather than his first name. Of course this was all going to get more muddled, as this family was destined not to stay intact.
My husband and I divorced and agreed on shared custody of the children. I selfishly would have preferred primary custody, but knowing how much I missed my father growing up, I didn't want to put my girls through that. I knew my girls had a good father, and if he wanted to be involved in their lives, I thought it was important for their sake, to continue our approach of being equal partners in parenting. The divorce was the easy part--no need to change any names. But a few years later we each remarried with the weddings taking place within a year of each other. First my ex's new spouse took his last name. This was a no-brainer for her as she was eager to ditch her ex-husband's last name. Then came my wedding. By this time, you'd think I would make the same decisions as I had in the past, but I didn't think it was fair to assume the same choices should apply to my current partner that applied to a previous partner. This was a new partner and a new marriage and I was not even the same person I'd been when I got married the first time. Thus I thought it made sense to at least re-examine the last name question.
Professionally, I had already been published under my maiden name as an author on a scientific journal article. That lent for a strong argument for keeping my maiden name. On the other hand, my soon-to-be father-in-law had only sisters (no brothers), and my fiance had one brother who was in a serious relationship but not yet married and so my in-laws did not have anyone yet to carry on their name (similar to my situation before my first marriage). We knew we were expecting a child when we got engaged, and I had already had the opportunity to pass my name down with my first two children, so this made a strong argument for taking my husband's name. Then again, would it be confusing to my girls' school, friends, etc. if their mother's last name did not appear at all in their hyphenated last name?
It was hard to know what to do. But finally I came back to my original reasoning for having kept my name in the first place--my identity. I asked myself to reflect on my name and my identity, and what I concluded was that I didn't really have one singular identity anymore, but more of a multi-faceted identity. Over the years I had gradually taken on many different roles and identified with different aspects of what made me me. I wore different hats at different times. Sometimes I wore the "mom" hat. Sometimes I wore the "astrophysicist" hat. Sometimes I wore the "soon-to-be-wife" hat, or the "pregnant woman" hat, or the "daughter" hat, or the "aunt" hat, and I'd worn other hats over the years in the past, too: the "nursing mom" hat, the "teacher" hat, the "student" hat... I concluded that I wanted the kind of flexibility in my name to put on different hats as I assumed different roles. I wanted to be able to go by my maiden name, or my husband's name (ie. a married name), or a combination of the two. So what I ended up doing was tacking on my husband's name to my name, with a space in between. ie. I became Firstname Myname Hisname2 (note that the "2" is used in this example to distinguish this as my second husband's name).
The space in between is important and different from a hyphen. It means there are two names, not one name joined by hyphenation. This means that either name or both are equally valid, sort of like you might use a string of adjectives to describe something. If you called me "that smart, friendly lady," it would be equally right to say that I was "smart" or that I was "friendly." Maybe in some context the "smart" would be more important, say if you were discussing my student achievement, and in another context the "friendly" might be more important, like if you were talking about my qualities as your friend.
So using both names with a space in between gave me the freedom I was looking for. Professionally I could just go by Firstname Myname as I always had. Taking on the wifely role, I could be Mrs. Hisname2. To avoid confusion with my daughters' affairs I could go by Myname Hisname2, which would make it obvious that we share some name derivative, but also introduce the idea that Mr. Hisname2 was their stepfather.
When our son was born, I felt that I'd still like a piece of my last name passed on in some way. But I didn't feel as strongly that it needed to be a part of his last name, since I already had two children with my name as part of their last name, whereas my husband had none. So we chose instead to give our son two middle names, one of which was my maiden name. This way, if he choses to, he can still pass it on in some way (perhaps as part of his children's middle name), and yet it keeps things simple enough, too, because the three of us can still be "The Hisname2's" to my son's future school, friends, etc., and my in-laws know their name will be passed on. Of course, it turned out that my brother-in-law got married the very next year after my husband and I did, and I have a sneaking suspicion that my son will not be the only one to pass down the name :). But at least we got things started...
Ultimately, there's no easy solution to the last name dilemma. Some women never had a relationship with their fathers or had a poor relationship with their fathers and see no need to carry on the name they were given at birth. Sometimes you see couples that come up with a new last name for them both to assume, and sometimes there are husbands who take their wives' last names. I support all these choices and others. I think the important thing is to do what feels right to your family, even if that's simply doing the traditional thing of the wife taking the husband's last name and passing it onto their children. In fact I believe there's absolutely nothing wrong with a woman taking her husband's last name, but I do think there's something wrong if she feels she had to do so despite her wishes or if the husband just expects it as his right regardless of his wife's feelings on the matter. No one should bully anyone into last name decisions, and when decisions have been given thought and made carefully and freely, they should be respected. I don't expect everyone to choose the same way I have, nor do I expect everyone to never be confused, but I hope that, at the very least, everyone can understand the reasons that went behind my decisions with regard to my last name and my children's last names. Indeed that is my wish for all families' naming decisions--that others empathize with their reasoning, even if they would choose differently, since these choices are rarely simple. And my wish for all women is that they enter decisions on their last name and their children's last names freely and with an open mind.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Sunday, May 6, 2012
5 Common Diapering And Potty Training Habits I Just Can't Relate To
Elimination Communication is not for everyone. I understand that, especially with today's busy lifestyles and carpeted floors. I consider myself fortunate in Western society to have the time and nonconformist attitude to be able to practice EC. But I never knew about it til my second child was over a month old. Til then I relied on diapers as most American parents of infants do. My oldest was in disposables for her first 4 months, then we switched to cloth. She spontaneously potty trained at 23 months. It was a rapid transition: she'd already been reliably dry through the night for many months, and "playing" with her little potty chair, until one day she peed and pooped on it first thing in the morning, I rewarded her with chocolates and in her precocious little voice she delightedly exclaimed, "I peepee and poopoo in potty rest of day!" And she did just that, and repeated the next day and the next. Sure we had a handful of accidents here and there but they were instantly the exception rather than the rule and soon we were picking out 2T undies at Target together. And all I did was set the potty out, tell her what it was for, let her play with it and reward her with chocolate. It was ridiculously simple and I had really made no conscious effort that I was aware of to encourage potty training because her sister had just been born just a few weeks before my eldest potty trained so I was decidedly preoccupied with my newborn baby. But as I have witnessed more talk amongst parents of little ones, I have come to realize that things I considered "nothing" apparently are something that many parents don't at all. I wonder if this could have anything to do with the steadily increasing age at which American little ones potty train. Here are the habits I hear people mention--habits I just don't get, as they seem to be just asking for problems down the road and/or exacerbating existing issues:
1. Getting the most absorbent diaper possible. What is your objective? To let your child pee over and over again in the same diaper? Seems to me this would make diaper rashes worse and teach your child that a wet bottom is normal, a lesson they will have to unlearn later. And the question remains: would you want to sit in a wet diaper so long that it was time to pee in it again and again til someone felt like changing you? I grant you nighttime as an exception. Even my son who we are practicing EC with wears a highly absorbent diaper at night because it's not worth disrupting his and my sleep to potty him or change him at night. (Though mind you, some EC babies do fine pottying at night with very minimal disruption--my second child was one of these, but with my son, we found the cost-benefit ratio didn't lend itself to nighttime EC). But during the day when we're awake, I just can't in good conscience let a baby stay in a wet diaper. Even with my fully-diapered eldest, I changed her as soon as she was wet or dirty. Especially if she was dirty, as it only became harder to clean her (and effectively rinse her cloth diapers) if she stayed in a poopy diaper. I am always surprised when I am in the presence of other parents and I notice their little one went and inform the parent (proud of my detective-work) only to have the parent do nothing or say, "well it's not bothering her (or him) yet" and let it go.
2. Related to 1.: Putting off diaper changes. Sure changing diapers isn't super fun, but you only make the job harder if you wait. Poops are harder to clean, rashes become worse, and your child begins to learn it's within the range of normal to be wet, which is a habit we ask them to subsequently break during the oftentimes willful stage of toddlerhood. I read a review of a waterproof cloth training pant on amazon where the reviewer touted the ease with which the pants can be pulled up and down when her daughter poops on the potty, only to go on and praise the absorbency of the training pant because her daughter doesn't pee on the potty yet and she can leave these training pants on her for 3 hours without a leak. Yikes! How is that a good thing? How will leaving her in wet pants for 3 hours help her learn that pee goes in the potty and not her pants? Moreover, I have seen the following scenario countless times: mobile baby is playing but takes a break, squats and dirties diaper, parent groans but puts off the changing chore for a bit, baby goes back to playing and exploring while wearing their dirty diaper, parent finally decides they better change the baby and scoops him/her up, the baby understandably protests. Why do they protest? Easy: you just taught them, it's ok to poop in your pants then leave it there and go back to your playing, so isn't it plainly obvious that your sudden change of heart just as the baby was playing with his/her favorite toy is totally arbitrary? It was ok to play in a dirty diaper 2 minutes ago, why is now any different? You are effectively disconnecting cause and effect. If you change the baby promptly they learn that messes don't belong in their pants, that mess ---> get it out of pants. If you wait they may become desensitized to the typically annoying feeling of a wet or dirty diaper which then makes it difficult to even remember the cause that required this imposed end to playtime in order to be changed. Now sure you may not notice when your babe goes in their diaper. This still happens to me on a very regular basis. We all get distracted or busy or sometimes our little one isn't very obvious when they go. But as soon as I realize, I change. Again, I can't, in good conscience, knowingly let a baby stay in a wet or dirty diaper--it just feels wrong to me, and probably to them, too.
3. Desiring diapers that wick the moisture away. Ok I'll hand it to you that this might be a helpful quick fix against diaper rash. But if you change diapers promptly, you can have this same benefit. All the wicking away accomplishes is teaching that there's no adverse effect of peeing in your pants. Even if you don't think it's fair for a baby to have to have an "adverse effect" because you aren't going to be ECing, the fact is that babies are born with an desire not to have that wet feeling and we can either teach them that the answer is to go in their pants because the wetness will be wicked away or that as soon as they have that undesirable wet feeling they will be changed. The former sets them up to equate diaper with where you go to the bathroom. The latter keeps them more open-minded to going elsewhere when potty training starts, because then they don't have to have that wet feeling. Again, they can avoid that wet feeling by going in their diaper and having it wicked away or by prompt changing and eventually by going on the potty. Yes the prompt changing won't fully avoid that wet feeling, but that's exactly the point, because when the potty is eventually introduced it will seem more desirable than the diaper because the wet feeling can be entirely avoided rather than mitigated by prompt changing. If you have a diaper that wicks away moisture so well you can't really feel it, then what benefit is the potty to the toddler? It's much easier to keep peeing in your pants than to stop playing, go to the potty, take off your pants and go on the potty. Again, I'll add the caveat that nighttime may be an exception. Along with the absorbent diaper, we have a stay-dry liner for my son. This is so he can not be bothered with that wet feeling while he's sleeping, making for better slumber. Maybe this is just a justification, but I have learned recently that, while babies can be pottied successfully, they do not have a particular hormone that children and adults release during sleep which allows us to go longer stretches without the need to urinate. So for babies, since this hormone isn't present yet, they will pee during the night until they develop this hormonal release, so you can either potty them or use a backup diaper. Thus we decided that since the nighttime pottying wasn't working, the least we could do is make him comfortable in his diaper during the night until he's a little older and can go longer stretches at night without peeing. This happened naturally and spontaneously with my eldest around 18 months. Furthermore for both my eldest and my son, this "stay dry" layer isn't nearly as wicking as a disposable diaper, so there is still some biofeedback going on that there's some annoying wetness, which I think encourages the child to take advantage of the ability to go longer stretches at night as they develop the capacity.
4. Waiting forever to introduce the potty. There's been recent media coverage by "experts" claiming that it's harmful to introduce the potty before 2.5 or 3 yrs old. This flies in the face of the common sense of the rest of the world (where the average potty training age is 1 yr old). As long as you are not being rigid or coercive, what is the harm in discussing the potty? We know humans are capable of being toilet trained from a young age, so "developmental readiness" is just a misnomer, that is clearly colored by our cultural expectations. Traditional societies recognize that we are born "developmentally ready." And even before I knew about that fact, as I said, I did hardly anything to encourage my eldest to potty train. But I did put out a potty and tell her she had a choice: if she wanted, she could go pee and/or poop in the potty like mommy and daddy did instead of in her diaper. It was totally up to her. She decided to do so, on her own, before the age of 2. Was that harmful?? Should I have told her, "No, honey, some 'experts' think it is a bad idea to potty train this young, so you'll have to keep going in your diaper." Such a notion is clearly absurd. Again, I didn't do anything to insist she use the potty, but we began a dialogue about the concept and I set out a little potty for her from about 16 months of age. So I'm not advocating being forceful about this at all, but what could possibly be wrong about talking about the potty so that toddlers start to learn about the idea? What could be bad about helping them develop an awareness by mentioning, oh, are you pooping? Do you want to be changed? Would you like to try peeing on the potty? If they don't want to, fine. If they try it and no pee comes out, fine. If it seems they are just playing with the potty or having their baby dolls go on it instead of them, fine. It's still practice. It's still helping make the potty more familiar and not intimidating. And I believe that helps ease the toilet training process.
5. Shaming the training child over accidents. Yes, accidents are frustrating! I admit, I am human and become irritated sometimes when my child insists he/she doesn't need to go and then 2 minutes later there's a puddle on the floor. But in EC we don't call them "accidents;" we call them "misses." There's a reason for that. Learning about the potty is a process. There are bound to be setbacks, as with any other developmental process. In addition, we need to acknowledge the parental role. We are the potty facilitators. Even for a toddler capable of pulling pants down and up, we still need to remind that it's been a while since they went, or let them know where the bathroom is at a strange place, or warn them that we are going for a long car ride, or help them remember when they are distracted. So it's completely understandable that we'll let something slip through the cracks from time to time, and we should take ownership of that, and not put all the pressure on the child. Besides. What does shaming accomplish? When your boss wants you to get something done at work, would you respond better when you have a setback to your boss shaming you or to your boss discussing it with you respectfully as someone interested in helping you problem-solve, find solutions, and move forward? It's counterproductive to shame. And I think many of us realize this but get caught up in the frustration of the moment. Let it go. They're just little. They're just learning. And if they ever have to change our diapers someday when we're old and decrepit, we wouldn't appreciate them shaming us, would we? Remember, your kids are the ones who will choose your nursing home some day ;)
1. Getting the most absorbent diaper possible. What is your objective? To let your child pee over and over again in the same diaper? Seems to me this would make diaper rashes worse and teach your child that a wet bottom is normal, a lesson they will have to unlearn later. And the question remains: would you want to sit in a wet diaper so long that it was time to pee in it again and again til someone felt like changing you? I grant you nighttime as an exception. Even my son who we are practicing EC with wears a highly absorbent diaper at night because it's not worth disrupting his and my sleep to potty him or change him at night. (Though mind you, some EC babies do fine pottying at night with very minimal disruption--my second child was one of these, but with my son, we found the cost-benefit ratio didn't lend itself to nighttime EC). But during the day when we're awake, I just can't in good conscience let a baby stay in a wet diaper. Even with my fully-diapered eldest, I changed her as soon as she was wet or dirty. Especially if she was dirty, as it only became harder to clean her (and effectively rinse her cloth diapers) if she stayed in a poopy diaper. I am always surprised when I am in the presence of other parents and I notice their little one went and inform the parent (proud of my detective-work) only to have the parent do nothing or say, "well it's not bothering her (or him) yet" and let it go.
2. Related to 1.: Putting off diaper changes. Sure changing diapers isn't super fun, but you only make the job harder if you wait. Poops are harder to clean, rashes become worse, and your child begins to learn it's within the range of normal to be wet, which is a habit we ask them to subsequently break during the oftentimes willful stage of toddlerhood. I read a review of a waterproof cloth training pant on amazon where the reviewer touted the ease with which the pants can be pulled up and down when her daughter poops on the potty, only to go on and praise the absorbency of the training pant because her daughter doesn't pee on the potty yet and she can leave these training pants on her for 3 hours without a leak. Yikes! How is that a good thing? How will leaving her in wet pants for 3 hours help her learn that pee goes in the potty and not her pants? Moreover, I have seen the following scenario countless times: mobile baby is playing but takes a break, squats and dirties diaper, parent groans but puts off the changing chore for a bit, baby goes back to playing and exploring while wearing their dirty diaper, parent finally decides they better change the baby and scoops him/her up, the baby understandably protests. Why do they protest? Easy: you just taught them, it's ok to poop in your pants then leave it there and go back to your playing, so isn't it plainly obvious that your sudden change of heart just as the baby was playing with his/her favorite toy is totally arbitrary? It was ok to play in a dirty diaper 2 minutes ago, why is now any different? You are effectively disconnecting cause and effect. If you change the baby promptly they learn that messes don't belong in their pants, that mess ---> get it out of pants. If you wait they may become desensitized to the typically annoying feeling of a wet or dirty diaper which then makes it difficult to even remember the cause that required this imposed end to playtime in order to be changed. Now sure you may not notice when your babe goes in their diaper. This still happens to me on a very regular basis. We all get distracted or busy or sometimes our little one isn't very obvious when they go. But as soon as I realize, I change. Again, I can't, in good conscience, knowingly let a baby stay in a wet or dirty diaper--it just feels wrong to me, and probably to them, too.
3. Desiring diapers that wick the moisture away. Ok I'll hand it to you that this might be a helpful quick fix against diaper rash. But if you change diapers promptly, you can have this same benefit. All the wicking away accomplishes is teaching that there's no adverse effect of peeing in your pants. Even if you don't think it's fair for a baby to have to have an "adverse effect" because you aren't going to be ECing, the fact is that babies are born with an desire not to have that wet feeling and we can either teach them that the answer is to go in their pants because the wetness will be wicked away or that as soon as they have that undesirable wet feeling they will be changed. The former sets them up to equate diaper with where you go to the bathroom. The latter keeps them more open-minded to going elsewhere when potty training starts, because then they don't have to have that wet feeling. Again, they can avoid that wet feeling by going in their diaper and having it wicked away or by prompt changing and eventually by going on the potty. Yes the prompt changing won't fully avoid that wet feeling, but that's exactly the point, because when the potty is eventually introduced it will seem more desirable than the diaper because the wet feeling can be entirely avoided rather than mitigated by prompt changing. If you have a diaper that wicks away moisture so well you can't really feel it, then what benefit is the potty to the toddler? It's much easier to keep peeing in your pants than to stop playing, go to the potty, take off your pants and go on the potty. Again, I'll add the caveat that nighttime may be an exception. Along with the absorbent diaper, we have a stay-dry liner for my son. This is so he can not be bothered with that wet feeling while he's sleeping, making for better slumber. Maybe this is just a justification, but I have learned recently that, while babies can be pottied successfully, they do not have a particular hormone that children and adults release during sleep which allows us to go longer stretches without the need to urinate. So for babies, since this hormone isn't present yet, they will pee during the night until they develop this hormonal release, so you can either potty them or use a backup diaper. Thus we decided that since the nighttime pottying wasn't working, the least we could do is make him comfortable in his diaper during the night until he's a little older and can go longer stretches at night without peeing. This happened naturally and spontaneously with my eldest around 18 months. Furthermore for both my eldest and my son, this "stay dry" layer isn't nearly as wicking as a disposable diaper, so there is still some biofeedback going on that there's some annoying wetness, which I think encourages the child to take advantage of the ability to go longer stretches at night as they develop the capacity.
4. Waiting forever to introduce the potty. There's been recent media coverage by "experts" claiming that it's harmful to introduce the potty before 2.5 or 3 yrs old. This flies in the face of the common sense of the rest of the world (where the average potty training age is 1 yr old). As long as you are not being rigid or coercive, what is the harm in discussing the potty? We know humans are capable of being toilet trained from a young age, so "developmental readiness" is just a misnomer, that is clearly colored by our cultural expectations. Traditional societies recognize that we are born "developmentally ready." And even before I knew about that fact, as I said, I did hardly anything to encourage my eldest to potty train. But I did put out a potty and tell her she had a choice: if she wanted, she could go pee and/or poop in the potty like mommy and daddy did instead of in her diaper. It was totally up to her. She decided to do so, on her own, before the age of 2. Was that harmful?? Should I have told her, "No, honey, some 'experts' think it is a bad idea to potty train this young, so you'll have to keep going in your diaper." Such a notion is clearly absurd. Again, I didn't do anything to insist she use the potty, but we began a dialogue about the concept and I set out a little potty for her from about 16 months of age. So I'm not advocating being forceful about this at all, but what could possibly be wrong about talking about the potty so that toddlers start to learn about the idea? What could be bad about helping them develop an awareness by mentioning, oh, are you pooping? Do you want to be changed? Would you like to try peeing on the potty? If they don't want to, fine. If they try it and no pee comes out, fine. If it seems they are just playing with the potty or having their baby dolls go on it instead of them, fine. It's still practice. It's still helping make the potty more familiar and not intimidating. And I believe that helps ease the toilet training process.
5. Shaming the training child over accidents. Yes, accidents are frustrating! I admit, I am human and become irritated sometimes when my child insists he/she doesn't need to go and then 2 minutes later there's a puddle on the floor. But in EC we don't call them "accidents;" we call them "misses." There's a reason for that. Learning about the potty is a process. There are bound to be setbacks, as with any other developmental process. In addition, we need to acknowledge the parental role. We are the potty facilitators. Even for a toddler capable of pulling pants down and up, we still need to remind that it's been a while since they went, or let them know where the bathroom is at a strange place, or warn them that we are going for a long car ride, or help them remember when they are distracted. So it's completely understandable that we'll let something slip through the cracks from time to time, and we should take ownership of that, and not put all the pressure on the child. Besides. What does shaming accomplish? When your boss wants you to get something done at work, would you respond better when you have a setback to your boss shaming you or to your boss discussing it with you respectfully as someone interested in helping you problem-solve, find solutions, and move forward? It's counterproductive to shame. And I think many of us realize this but get caught up in the frustration of the moment. Let it go. They're just little. They're just learning. And if they ever have to change our diapers someday when we're old and decrepit, we wouldn't appreciate them shaming us, would we? Remember, your kids are the ones who will choose your nursing home some day ;)
Thursday, April 12, 2012
The Money We Give Up
I am often told I am lucky to be able to stay at home with my baby, and don't get me wrong, I am very grateful to have this opportunity. I can only imagine what it might be like for a single mom who has no choice but to send her baby to a day care and work full time just to keep a roof over their heads. However, most people seem to assume that staying at home is only a luxury for the privileged upper-middle class or better. They are shocked to learn that my husband only makes $23k/yr before taxes. It's incomprehensible to them that we would *choose* to have me stay at home and live in poverty.
Well, maybe "choose" is a little bit of a strong word, in all fairness, because as we're now scraping the bottom of the barrel and looking to the next school year as when I will need to go back to work, I have applied for dozens of jobs and haven't gotten a single call back yet. Not even for an initial round of interviews--nada. It's still only early spring and I do have a semi-solid temporary fall employment prospect to fall back on if all else fails (plus I could always join substitute teacher lists), but the fact is, permanent full-time positions aren't growing on trees, even for experienced teachers with advanced degrees looking at all arenas: public, private, and post-secondary schools.
That said, I could never imagine not staying at home in my baby's first year, even in the face of severe poverty, unless I had literally exhausted all other possible options. Yes that includes social welfare help. I don't give a damn if people say that that's leeching off the system. Why should the *lifelong* benefits of natural parenting be reserved only for those fortunate enough never to have to ask the government for help? I hear many AP folks argue that AP can still be followed with a working mom, and I wholeheartedly agree that this is true after about 12-24 months depending on the child. But babies less than a year old have a strong preference for close attachment and need frequent non-solid-food nourishment. Maybe to a certain degree you can closely replicate a natural parenting lifestyle if you are working in that first year, but let's cut the pc smokescreen and be honest for a minute. Is pumped breastmilk in a bottle really equal to nursing at the breast? Can a binky truly be a stand in for the comfort from "non-nutritive" suckling? Can the working poor usually afford to find a caregiver dedicated to upholding AP values? Is an attentive day care a genuine replacement for a parent? Are those daily walks in a stroller pushed by an early childhood educator as good as being worn in a sling or other baby carrier? Is responding as soon as possible to each (of numerous) baby's needs really as nurturing as immediate response by a parent who only has her own child(ren) to care for? Can a really sweet babysitter really be as intuitively connected to a baby's needs as a mother who follows her instincts? Can the snuggles in the evenings and weekends make up for the lack of bonding during the weekdays?
Let's be real. We can do things to get as close as possible to a natural state, but nothing in human biology is in line with mama and baby being separated for 40 hrs/week while baby is cared for alongside other infants. Just look at our closest animal relatives. A baby gorilla was recently born across the river from me at the local zoo. That mama gorilla won't even let caretakers come near her baby yet, much less relinquish him to any other would-be caregiver for any amount of time. We are not much different from other primates in our evolutionary expectations. We are born to be carried in arms during infancy, and to nurse frequently, and to only gradually begin to explore our world independently, unlike other mammals that are born being able to walk, trot, and/or gallop.
Are those other primate mothers lazy leeches? No. With babe in arm, the seek out food. They multitask, keeping a cautious eye out for predators or other dangers. They earn their keep and then some. If we human mothers were only granted the chance to similarly multitask and not be separated from our babies, it would be a win-win-win-win scenario. Mothers could pursue their careers outside the home, employers wouldn't have to worry about long maternity leaves, babies could get optimal nourishing, and society could stop whining about the lazy leechers. If it were plausible for me to bring my baby to work with me (and by that I mean in a sling or in the same room as me where I can respond to him immediately, not on-site childcare provided by someone else), I'd have already gone back to work (assuming I could have found gainful employment).
But instead I am on WIC and foodstamps. And I have sacrificed obscene amounts of money to be home with my babies over the years. I sat down and calculated a rough estimate of what my earnings would have added up to if I had continued teaching in the district I was employed by when I was pregnant with my first. I'd have earned, cumulatively about $400,000 since my first child's birth. Instead, I took a year off with her, only to find before I could start a new school year teaching, that I was pregnant with her sister, so I did some substitute teaching that school year, earning a few thousand dollars, followed by another year off with another babe. Did some more subbing the following year, and started going back to school to pursue astrophysics. But before I could finish, my husband and I divorced. I knew if I could just get through the undergraduate program I could start earning money as a graduate student researcher, so I went into debt to finish up. This far undid the earnings from subbing, putting me about $50k in the hole instead (since I was also living on loan money). Then there were a couple years of graduate school and child support which got me about $27k/yr. And now I'm at home again. So effectively, I've earned a total of about $2,000 since my first child was born. And that's not even bringing up the fact that, had I been employed in the position I gave up when she was born, I'd have been able to pay down my educational debt instead of "in-school" deferring it and adding to it. So the way I see it I gave up well over $400,000 to be at home with my babies. Was it really worth it?
Yes. I have looked back on my life and asked myself if I could trade what I have now for all those lost earnings and lost future potential earnings (since I'm a less-experienced and thus lower-on-the-totem-pole teacher that I would have been). The answer remains a definite no, no matter how I look at it.
Critics might still argue the label leech on the logic of poor family planning. But I doubt those critics saw a 99% effective IUD fail them and result in an unplanned pregnancy. Shit can happen and not everyone is ok with having an abortion. (This isn't a prolife argument, just a statement that some moms could never choose abortion, even if they respect the choice others may have made differently). Furthermore, many poor folks don't have a shining ray of light at the end of the tunnel. They see no end in sight to their poverty, no matter how hard they work. Should only the privileged in our society have the right to procreate? I believe that line of thinking is dangerous, elitist, and wrong. And I also believe it's inaccurate and equally-elitist to claim that hard work is the answer. Some are lucky to have their hard work rewarded by society. Others break their backs in fruitless hard work and scrape by living paycheck to paycheck.
Furthermore we are not all dealt the same cards. Some of us graduate from high schools with 90% of graduates going on to post-secondary schools, while others of us have to struggle to avoid drugs, gangs, and violence in our schools. How can students possibly be expected to concentrate on attaining the same level of academic achievement when they are dodging bullets from drivebys and may be forced to work as many hours as possible as a teen in order to help out their single mom, whose husband just went to jail? I personally don't belong to either of these extremes, but I appreciate that I had a better hand dealt to me than some and worse than others... And even with a decent hand, things can go wrong...
Well so what? Humans are adaptable creatures and many babies in day care turn out perfectly fine. It's giving them love that matters. Besides why should women feel they *have* to stay at home? I'm not arguing that they should! Indeed, mothers decidedly should NOT feel they have to stay at home to be a good mom. Everyone has to do what's right for their family. But the point is that, we shouldn't be asked to rear our young in a biologically unnatural way unless we want to. And we shouldn't be told that this unnatural way is equivalent. And it shouldn't be unfairly demanded that poor families be subject to this unnatural way if they disagree with it as being what's right for their family. We should *all* be given the right not to be separated from our babies for at least a year. AND the stay-at-home vs. work-outside-the-home choice should also not be a choice forced on any mom of an infant. There should be the very logical choice instead to multitask with baby, just as other primates do.
Well, maybe "choose" is a little bit of a strong word, in all fairness, because as we're now scraping the bottom of the barrel and looking to the next school year as when I will need to go back to work, I have applied for dozens of jobs and haven't gotten a single call back yet. Not even for an initial round of interviews--nada. It's still only early spring and I do have a semi-solid temporary fall employment prospect to fall back on if all else fails (plus I could always join substitute teacher lists), but the fact is, permanent full-time positions aren't growing on trees, even for experienced teachers with advanced degrees looking at all arenas: public, private, and post-secondary schools.
That said, I could never imagine not staying at home in my baby's first year, even in the face of severe poverty, unless I had literally exhausted all other possible options. Yes that includes social welfare help. I don't give a damn if people say that that's leeching off the system. Why should the *lifelong* benefits of natural parenting be reserved only for those fortunate enough never to have to ask the government for help? I hear many AP folks argue that AP can still be followed with a working mom, and I wholeheartedly agree that this is true after about 12-24 months depending on the child. But babies less than a year old have a strong preference for close attachment and need frequent non-solid-food nourishment. Maybe to a certain degree you can closely replicate a natural parenting lifestyle if you are working in that first year, but let's cut the pc smokescreen and be honest for a minute. Is pumped breastmilk in a bottle really equal to nursing at the breast? Can a binky truly be a stand in for the comfort from "non-nutritive" suckling? Can the working poor usually afford to find a caregiver dedicated to upholding AP values? Is an attentive day care a genuine replacement for a parent? Are those daily walks in a stroller pushed by an early childhood educator as good as being worn in a sling or other baby carrier? Is responding as soon as possible to each (of numerous) baby's needs really as nurturing as immediate response by a parent who only has her own child(ren) to care for? Can a really sweet babysitter really be as intuitively connected to a baby's needs as a mother who follows her instincts? Can the snuggles in the evenings and weekends make up for the lack of bonding during the weekdays?
Let's be real. We can do things to get as close as possible to a natural state, but nothing in human biology is in line with mama and baby being separated for 40 hrs/week while baby is cared for alongside other infants. Just look at our closest animal relatives. A baby gorilla was recently born across the river from me at the local zoo. That mama gorilla won't even let caretakers come near her baby yet, much less relinquish him to any other would-be caregiver for any amount of time. We are not much different from other primates in our evolutionary expectations. We are born to be carried in arms during infancy, and to nurse frequently, and to only gradually begin to explore our world independently, unlike other mammals that are born being able to walk, trot, and/or gallop.
Are those other primate mothers lazy leeches? No. With babe in arm, the seek out food. They multitask, keeping a cautious eye out for predators or other dangers. They earn their keep and then some. If we human mothers were only granted the chance to similarly multitask and not be separated from our babies, it would be a win-win-win-win scenario. Mothers could pursue their careers outside the home, employers wouldn't have to worry about long maternity leaves, babies could get optimal nourishing, and society could stop whining about the lazy leechers. If it were plausible for me to bring my baby to work with me (and by that I mean in a sling or in the same room as me where I can respond to him immediately, not on-site childcare provided by someone else), I'd have already gone back to work (assuming I could have found gainful employment).
But instead I am on WIC and foodstamps. And I have sacrificed obscene amounts of money to be home with my babies over the years. I sat down and calculated a rough estimate of what my earnings would have added up to if I had continued teaching in the district I was employed by when I was pregnant with my first. I'd have earned, cumulatively about $400,000 since my first child's birth. Instead, I took a year off with her, only to find before I could start a new school year teaching, that I was pregnant with her sister, so I did some substitute teaching that school year, earning a few thousand dollars, followed by another year off with another babe. Did some more subbing the following year, and started going back to school to pursue astrophysics. But before I could finish, my husband and I divorced. I knew if I could just get through the undergraduate program I could start earning money as a graduate student researcher, so I went into debt to finish up. This far undid the earnings from subbing, putting me about $50k in the hole instead (since I was also living on loan money). Then there were a couple years of graduate school and child support which got me about $27k/yr. And now I'm at home again. So effectively, I've earned a total of about $2,000 since my first child was born. And that's not even bringing up the fact that, had I been employed in the position I gave up when she was born, I'd have been able to pay down my educational debt instead of "in-school" deferring it and adding to it. So the way I see it I gave up well over $400,000 to be at home with my babies. Was it really worth it?
Yes. I have looked back on my life and asked myself if I could trade what I have now for all those lost earnings and lost future potential earnings (since I'm a less-experienced and thus lower-on-the-totem-pole teacher that I would have been). The answer remains a definite no, no matter how I look at it.
Critics might still argue the label leech on the logic of poor family planning. But I doubt those critics saw a 99% effective IUD fail them and result in an unplanned pregnancy. Shit can happen and not everyone is ok with having an abortion. (This isn't a prolife argument, just a statement that some moms could never choose abortion, even if they respect the choice others may have made differently). Furthermore, many poor folks don't have a shining ray of light at the end of the tunnel. They see no end in sight to their poverty, no matter how hard they work. Should only the privileged in our society have the right to procreate? I believe that line of thinking is dangerous, elitist, and wrong. And I also believe it's inaccurate and equally-elitist to claim that hard work is the answer. Some are lucky to have their hard work rewarded by society. Others break their backs in fruitless hard work and scrape by living paycheck to paycheck.
Furthermore we are not all dealt the same cards. Some of us graduate from high schools with 90% of graduates going on to post-secondary schools, while others of us have to struggle to avoid drugs, gangs, and violence in our schools. How can students possibly be expected to concentrate on attaining the same level of academic achievement when they are dodging bullets from drivebys and may be forced to work as many hours as possible as a teen in order to help out their single mom, whose husband just went to jail? I personally don't belong to either of these extremes, but I appreciate that I had a better hand dealt to me than some and worse than others... And even with a decent hand, things can go wrong...
Well so what? Humans are adaptable creatures and many babies in day care turn out perfectly fine. It's giving them love that matters. Besides why should women feel they *have* to stay at home? I'm not arguing that they should! Indeed, mothers decidedly should NOT feel they have to stay at home to be a good mom. Everyone has to do what's right for their family. But the point is that, we shouldn't be asked to rear our young in a biologically unnatural way unless we want to. And we shouldn't be told that this unnatural way is equivalent. And it shouldn't be unfairly demanded that poor families be subject to this unnatural way if they disagree with it as being what's right for their family. We should *all* be given the right not to be separated from our babies for at least a year. AND the stay-at-home vs. work-outside-the-home choice should also not be a choice forced on any mom of an infant. There should be the very logical choice instead to multitask with baby, just as other primates do.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Religious Discrimination as a Case Study for Tolerance and Scientific Literacy (Part Two)
To be fair, maybe science should stay out of religion, as religion should stay out of science. All I meant to justify in the end of the preceding post is this: one can always use facts to justify opinions but you can't use opinions to justify facts, so if science is akin to facts and religion is akin to opinions, you can see why I object more strongly to bringing religion into science than vice versa. Still this might be an oversimplification. After all I think the term "truth" is the key here, and may be more apt than "fact" or "opinion." Science isn't all facts and religion isn't all opinions (though for someone like me, it is difficult to find anything I consider to be factual in most religions--still I'll assume for sake of argument that factual information does exist in religion). Both seek truths of some kind. So perhaps we should just keep these sort of truths separate entirely since they use very different methods for uncovering their respective truths and require very different modes of mental processing (faith and belief vs. skepticism and proof).
This then just gets back to my assertion that it is often difficult to keep such realms compartmentalized. I admit that I personally could not do it. At first when learning basic science it was enough to simply address the areas in which my religious teachings seemed to conflict with science. In doing so, I took the Garden of Eden to be a figurative creation story. After all, surely the Bible has passages that no one takes literally (certain diet restrictions or harsh punishments), and there are even parts of the Bible that contradict other parts (I've read the whole thing). So it made sense to me that the creation story was symbolic and that the Big Bang and evolution were the actual tools god used to create the earth and man from seemingly nothing.
But the more I embraced the scientific way of seeking truth, the more untenable the religious way seemed to me, and I'm betting my story is not at all uncommon. Fortunately, the devout need not become a scientist and can remain in the stage I was in when religion and basic science coexisted in my modes of thinking, maintaining religiosity and scientific literacy. And if the devout is very deliberate, careful, and willing, he/she can maintain that compartmentalization while going on to pursue science more seriously. But this is not an easy task. And if folks like me are incapable of leaving the sacred immune to skepticism, it is quite conceivable that this often works in the reverse.
Indeed as an example, there is a certain professor in a certain department that I happened to be in as a graduate student who thinks other scientists loathe him because he is religious. Sadly, he doesn't see that those of us who do not respect him as a scientist could care less what his religious beliefs are, EXCEPT that he brings his religion into science. This is especially enraging because as a scientific "expert" he speaks with "authority" and tries to make the case for belief in the supernatural as being necessary to explain scientific phenomenon. Not only is this a departure from the scientific method, but because of his credentials, the average person is likely to think this man's unscientific conclusions represent science in general. I won't go into the sexist interactions I personally had with this professor, but suffice it to say that his perception that people do not like him due to his religious beliefs is far from true. There are valid reasons people avoid him.
Similarly it is also highly suspect when a religious school decides they only want religious scientists working for them. It wreaks of an agenda. An agenda that is also not scientific. For if you are truly teaching science, you cannot bring religious belief into it, as I have already argued. Otherwise, you might be teaching your sincere beliefs but you are not teaching science. And the logic can't work both ways. For example many Christians claim that their religion is separate from their science. And for some this is totally true--they rise to the challenge and keep religion out of science and vice versa. I have many scientific friends who are very religious and admirably keep those two spheres apart from one another in their thinking. But if this can be done, then could you not just make sure that anyone who teaches science in your faculty is doing the same with their beliefs, be they Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Agnostic, Atheist, Wiccan, Pagan or whatever? If science has no place for religious beliefs in its teachings then what should it matter what the teacher's beliefs are, so long as they aren't being brought into the classroom and as a consequence, destroying the science. And if you argue that religion needs to be brought into science then: a. you are not really teaching science but rather an unscientific pseudoscience, and b. you should not be surprised, then, if the scientists you train fall under heavy criticism for their departure from the scientific method via the introduction of religious belief into their science. You can't have it both ways: Again I repeat, if you are teaching true science then a person's religious beliefs shouldn't matter as long as they can keep them out of their science and if you bring your religious beliefs into your science, you are necessarily betraying the scientific method.
With this in mind, we get to the crux of the issue. It would be completely reasonable for a religious school to ensure that its science faculty are not stepping outside science and teaching a belief system counter to their sacred beliefs. It would be appropriate to question candidates, therefore, as to their beliefs and how they might handle potential questions from students regarding matters of the divine. For example, if I was given this chance, I would tell the school officials that I respect their beliefs totally and that I would sign an oath if they wished, promising that I would never speak against those beliefs. I might even be willing to say something like this (as a stopgap in response to a student's repeated questioning), "the _____ denomination of the Christian religion teaches this: _____" and commit to learning some canned responses to common questions. That way I completely circumvent speaking on my own beliefs and align my response with the beliefs of the school. Most of the time; however, I would find it most appropriate to say something like "questions of religious belief fall outside my curriculum as a scientist. I recommend you speak with [insert religious mentor's name] for questions regarding religion." Since I do not have particular beliefs in the supernatural, it would be quite easy indeed for me to keep religion out of science even though I couldn't do the reverse with my own beliefs. But to refuse to even consider candidates like myself is something I find highly offensive (again, imagine the reverse situation), and makes me also question what they consider to be science if they believe it necessary for science faculty to have a particular religious belief in order to adequately teach science. And then this question ripples down the line of consequences: if it's suspect whether or not they are teaching true science then is it suspect that their science majors have a true understanding of science? And if growing numbers of science majors have an inadequate understanding of science, then how can we hope to spread scientific literacy in our culture?
Finally, you may wonder, if I am such a staunch atheist, why would I want to even teach in a religious school. The fact is that, in addition to financial pressure to find employment, there are certain things I like about religious schools. First, they tend to be smaller and more personable than huge universities. My first bachelor's degree (in music) was earned at one such college and I really loved that faculty made personal connections with your students. Education in such an environment is more efficient and effective. Second, I think it's important that religious folks have some basic understanding of *true* science (ie. NOT the pseudo-science taught when religion is brought into science). As an atheist I think I am in a unique position not to allow supernatural beliefs to be inserted into my scientific teachings, thus I would be able to give my students a true scientific experience. There is a growing problem of scientific illiteracy in our nation and we are falling behind in the STEM areas compared to other nations. I do not aim to try to destroy religious belief, only to outreach to those most in need in order to get them basic scientific proficiency. What they do with their religious beliefs is up to them, as it should be. They can reconcile any differences on a basic level as I once did, they can keep religious questions completely separate, or they can find themselves unable to resist questioning their religious assumptions. Religious school officials can teach what they feel to be important in regards to religion, but certainly they cannot hope to have their teachings stick if they are externally applied without internal faith. Whatever spiritual route students choose ought to be up to them, but I certainly do not mean to steer them in any particular direction, nor should this be the agenda of any scientist of any faith. I would like the chance to teach students about objective scientific truths, but I have no desire or will to teach them anything about religious truths. That is the job of the religious leaders, faculty whose expertise lie in religion, and ultimately their own hearts. And isn't that the essence of the ideal science faculty candidate?
This then just gets back to my assertion that it is often difficult to keep such realms compartmentalized. I admit that I personally could not do it. At first when learning basic science it was enough to simply address the areas in which my religious teachings seemed to conflict with science. In doing so, I took the Garden of Eden to be a figurative creation story. After all, surely the Bible has passages that no one takes literally (certain diet restrictions or harsh punishments), and there are even parts of the Bible that contradict other parts (I've read the whole thing). So it made sense to me that the creation story was symbolic and that the Big Bang and evolution were the actual tools god used to create the earth and man from seemingly nothing.
But the more I embraced the scientific way of seeking truth, the more untenable the religious way seemed to me, and I'm betting my story is not at all uncommon. Fortunately, the devout need not become a scientist and can remain in the stage I was in when religion and basic science coexisted in my modes of thinking, maintaining religiosity and scientific literacy. And if the devout is very deliberate, careful, and willing, he/she can maintain that compartmentalization while going on to pursue science more seriously. But this is not an easy task. And if folks like me are incapable of leaving the sacred immune to skepticism, it is quite conceivable that this often works in the reverse.
Indeed as an example, there is a certain professor in a certain department that I happened to be in as a graduate student who thinks other scientists loathe him because he is religious. Sadly, he doesn't see that those of us who do not respect him as a scientist could care less what his religious beliefs are, EXCEPT that he brings his religion into science. This is especially enraging because as a scientific "expert" he speaks with "authority" and tries to make the case for belief in the supernatural as being necessary to explain scientific phenomenon. Not only is this a departure from the scientific method, but because of his credentials, the average person is likely to think this man's unscientific conclusions represent science in general. I won't go into the sexist interactions I personally had with this professor, but suffice it to say that his perception that people do not like him due to his religious beliefs is far from true. There are valid reasons people avoid him.
Similarly it is also highly suspect when a religious school decides they only want religious scientists working for them. It wreaks of an agenda. An agenda that is also not scientific. For if you are truly teaching science, you cannot bring religious belief into it, as I have already argued. Otherwise, you might be teaching your sincere beliefs but you are not teaching science. And the logic can't work both ways. For example many Christians claim that their religion is separate from their science. And for some this is totally true--they rise to the challenge and keep religion out of science and vice versa. I have many scientific friends who are very religious and admirably keep those two spheres apart from one another in their thinking. But if this can be done, then could you not just make sure that anyone who teaches science in your faculty is doing the same with their beliefs, be they Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Agnostic, Atheist, Wiccan, Pagan or whatever? If science has no place for religious beliefs in its teachings then what should it matter what the teacher's beliefs are, so long as they aren't being brought into the classroom and as a consequence, destroying the science. And if you argue that religion needs to be brought into science then: a. you are not really teaching science but rather an unscientific pseudoscience, and b. you should not be surprised, then, if the scientists you train fall under heavy criticism for their departure from the scientific method via the introduction of religious belief into their science. You can't have it both ways: Again I repeat, if you are teaching true science then a person's religious beliefs shouldn't matter as long as they can keep them out of their science and if you bring your religious beliefs into your science, you are necessarily betraying the scientific method.
With this in mind, we get to the crux of the issue. It would be completely reasonable for a religious school to ensure that its science faculty are not stepping outside science and teaching a belief system counter to their sacred beliefs. It would be appropriate to question candidates, therefore, as to their beliefs and how they might handle potential questions from students regarding matters of the divine. For example, if I was given this chance, I would tell the school officials that I respect their beliefs totally and that I would sign an oath if they wished, promising that I would never speak against those beliefs. I might even be willing to say something like this (as a stopgap in response to a student's repeated questioning), "the _____ denomination of the Christian religion teaches this: _____" and commit to learning some canned responses to common questions. That way I completely circumvent speaking on my own beliefs and align my response with the beliefs of the school. Most of the time; however, I would find it most appropriate to say something like "questions of religious belief fall outside my curriculum as a scientist. I recommend you speak with [insert religious mentor's name] for questions regarding religion." Since I do not have particular beliefs in the supernatural, it would be quite easy indeed for me to keep religion out of science even though I couldn't do the reverse with my own beliefs. But to refuse to even consider candidates like myself is something I find highly offensive (again, imagine the reverse situation), and makes me also question what they consider to be science if they believe it necessary for science faculty to have a particular religious belief in order to adequately teach science. And then this question ripples down the line of consequences: if it's suspect whether or not they are teaching true science then is it suspect that their science majors have a true understanding of science? And if growing numbers of science majors have an inadequate understanding of science, then how can we hope to spread scientific literacy in our culture?
Finally, you may wonder, if I am such a staunch atheist, why would I want to even teach in a religious school. The fact is that, in addition to financial pressure to find employment, there are certain things I like about religious schools. First, they tend to be smaller and more personable than huge universities. My first bachelor's degree (in music) was earned at one such college and I really loved that faculty made personal connections with your students. Education in such an environment is more efficient and effective. Second, I think it's important that religious folks have some basic understanding of *true* science (ie. NOT the pseudo-science taught when religion is brought into science). As an atheist I think I am in a unique position not to allow supernatural beliefs to be inserted into my scientific teachings, thus I would be able to give my students a true scientific experience. There is a growing problem of scientific illiteracy in our nation and we are falling behind in the STEM areas compared to other nations. I do not aim to try to destroy religious belief, only to outreach to those most in need in order to get them basic scientific proficiency. What they do with their religious beliefs is up to them, as it should be. They can reconcile any differences on a basic level as I once did, they can keep religious questions completely separate, or they can find themselves unable to resist questioning their religious assumptions. Religious school officials can teach what they feel to be important in regards to religion, but certainly they cannot hope to have their teachings stick if they are externally applied without internal faith. Whatever spiritual route students choose ought to be up to them, but I certainly do not mean to steer them in any particular direction, nor should this be the agenda of any scientist of any faith. I would like the chance to teach students about objective scientific truths, but I have no desire or will to teach them anything about religious truths. That is the job of the religious leaders, faculty whose expertise lie in religion, and ultimately their own hearts. And isn't that the essence of the ideal science faculty candidate?
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Religious Discrimination as a Case Study for Tolerance and Scientific Literacy (Part One)
The following started out as one simple blog post, but I have decided to turn it more into a treatise on religion and science and make it multi-part. Kudos to you if you can stick with me through it all! But in the meantime, I request you refrain from drawing hard and fast conclusions until I've completed all parts ;)
Let's face it, there are far fewer opportunities in academia for those with only a Masters degree and not a PhD. Even less rare are positions available for those with only a Masters AND who are constrained to an approximately 100 mile radius of a medium-sized metropolitan area. These realities make it sting even more when you are living on loan money and food stamps, searching for a job, and finally find an opportunity that you know you are qualified for in every aspect except your religious beliefs. And because of your beliefs, you are discriminated against, thanks to a loophole in Equal Opportunity Employment law. Even though you are not seeking a position as a clergy person, or any position in which your religious beliefs are at all relevant to your job, you are asked not to even bother applying, because this institution is "committed" to hiring only those subscribing to a very narrow subset of Christian beliefs, a euphemistic way of saying their hiring practices are unashamedly discriminatory.
There are so many questions inspired by this situation:
1. Should a religious school be allowed to discriminate based on religion in its hiring practices of faculty in departments unrelated to religion?
2. Why would they want only those of a particular religious belief in their science department in particular? Are they afraid of the scientifically-accepted truths of the big bang or evolution that some faiths deem to be at odds with their beliefs?
3. Can religion and science be successfully separated by an individual? If not, how does that affect the individual's understanding of science?
4. Playing devil's advocate, if you deem that religious belief and science cannot be separated and that it is thus acceptable to discriminate because of beliefs because you are a religious institution, then why would it be any less acceptable to discriminate against those of religious faith by a nonsectarian institution who wants its faculty's science to be unaffected by religion?
5. What place, if any, does religion have in science?
6. If religion is brought into the scientific curriculum at an accredited institution, what does that mean for the validity of science degrees awarded by that institution? Moreover what are the more far-reaching implications of the way alumni from that institution contribute to scientific understanding in our society?
7. If a religious school feels that religion should not be brought into the curriculum, and feels that a person is capable of separating the two (as I imagine they would claim if one of their alumni were met with skepticism by a potential employer that their religious beliefs might interfere with their understanding of science), then what relevance should one's religion have in hiring science faculty at their institution?
8. If religion and science cannot be separated by the individual, then what brand of "science" is being taught by that person?
9. Would their Jesus have approved of excluding the "heathen" from their ranks? The same Jesus who, according to scripture, sat down with lepers, beggars, and prostitutes and taught unconditional love?
I could go on and on with similar questions, but instead, I will simply posit my assessment of this state of affairs. But first let me re-state and turn on its head what I have said above: you "finally find an opportunity that you know you are qualified for in every aspect except your religious beliefs. And because of your beliefs, you are discriminated against, thanks to a loophole in Equal Opportunity Employment law." Could you IMAGINE the uproar if a Christian were writing those two preceding sentences?! Let's just say for a moment, that a science department, such as biology, decides it will only hire people who are agnostics or atheists because it believes that only such people will embrace the theory of evolution without reservation. How long do you think those hiring practices would last without lawsuit? Yet it is PERFECTLY acceptable to do the exact reverse?! How is it ok to discriminate in one direction but not the other? Why is religious tolerance not mutual?
Now let me step back from what is quickly becoming a rant and say that I did try very hard to see things from the religious schools' perspective. They cherish their beliefs and they want faculty who will honor their beliefs. They want consistent examples, as parents might, for their youngsters so they are not led astray from the path of the righteous. They do not want a dissenter rocking their boat with a worldview incompatible with their theology. I get all that, I truly do. I was raised as a Christian, attended a very "born again" Baptist church every Sunday, sang in the choir, went on a mission trip, spent weeks in the summer at vacation bible school and religious camp, etc. One thing I learned in those days was the importance of acting as a "witness" to the Christian faith. As Christians who were saved we were obliged to spread the "good news" and try to lead others to salvation. This meant reaching a loving and kind hand out to others, including those who were not Christians, not turning our backs on them. Preaching to the choir did nothing to spread the word of the lord; only inviting others to our teachings could help achieve that. Certainly Jesus himself taught us to love even our enemies and would not have snubbed the non-believer.
Ok, but it's one thing to invite an atheist friend to church, but it's another thing entirely to hire an atheist to be employed by the church, right? Shouldn't a religious institution be allowed to ensure its disciples are those of the same set of beliefs? I maintain that it depends on what they are employed to do. How relevant is their faith to the job description? Certainly you need your clergy and religious educators (pastors, reverends, sunday school or ccd teachers, youth directors, etc) to be of the same beliefs the church espouses. I could see how faith might also be relevant to directing a church choir (having an understanding of scripture would be important in choosing relevant hymns and other repertoire, for example), or even for secretarial duties (where you might have to field phone call inquiries regarding the beliefs of the church). But is it necessary for the church custodian or groundskeeper to be of the same faith as the church? Not that most churches have a shortage of faithful from which to choose for such positions, but in principle, I doubt too many church members would object to employing a secular landscaper to weed the church gardens, plant seasonal bulbs and spread fresh mulch or a faithless roofer to repair some shingles on the church steeple or a godless electrician to install the new sound system in the megachurch ampitheater. Especially if they were the best at their trade.
To explore this point further, if the above is true for the church itself, it only stands to reason that there ought to be similar examples for church-affiliated schools. I think most of us can think of examples of teachers at religious schools that are not of that religion. I have heard through the grapevine that a former student of mine is now teaching at a Catholic school though she is not Catholic, and one of my high school classmates' fathers taught at a Jewish school but they are not a Jewish family. These two examples are teachers of subjects unrelated to religion. So it seems reasonable and not unprecedented to hire outside the faith for positions that do not require belief of a certain kind. Moreover, I imagine there would be an even stronger case for such hiring if the candidate was highly qualified, as I am sure the school would like to be able to say they employ faculty of the highest excellence.
Not to toot my own horn but I do believe I am an excellent teacher. I pride myself in being fair, in teaching in a hands-on way, and in accommodating individual learning styles and needs. Moreover, I am genuine in my passion to help others understand. I have had many students compliment me on my teaching abilities, received unsolicited praise, and thank you's for going above and beyond expectations. I believe my qualities set me apart from most teachers, and that the proof is in the pudding. So if you were in the business of hiring a physics teacher, would not the experienced talented teacher be more appealing than an average teacher who happened to share your religious views? Presumably those in charge of setting hiring policies care about the quality of education they have to offer their students, so why would they exclude potentially exceptional teaching candidates sheerly on the basis of religion. If two candidates were equally excellent teachers and one had a belief system more in line with the religious mission of the institution, that might be a different story, but you'll never know if you have the best teacher for the job if you automatically reject a whole segment of the pool of candidates.
Most members of the population may not realize what a huge segment that actually amounts to in this case. The average person is used to thinking of atheists and agnostics as comprising the small minority (roughly 2-5% of the US population according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#cite_note-14), but in the areas of science these numbers are vastly different. For natural scientists (biologist, chemists, and physicists), less than 40% believe in god (http://www.livescience.com/379-scientists-belief-god-varies-starkly-discipline.html ). So to only consider candidates for a position if they believe in god, you are already axing over 60% of candidates, and to further only consider those of one particular denomination of one particular religion clearly excludes the vast majority of candidates. It is only logical, then, that you are not even considering some highly talented individuals. What are the odds that the best scientists happens to be in such an overwhelming minority? But this subject leads to a deeper question. WHY are so many scientists agnostic or atheist? Obviously there must be some connection back to the questions of what relevance religion has to science and whether the two can be separated by the individual.
I believe two simple assertions: 1. religion has no place in science. 2. religion and science can be successfully kept separate by an individual willing to keep them separate. Take, for example, the man who first theorized the Big Bang as the way our universe came into being: a Catholic priest named Georges Lemaitre. He is quoted as saying, about his Big Bang theory (though it wasn't called that yet) "As far as I can see, such a theory remains entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question." He clearly felt that religion should and can be kept apart from science. Indeed an article in the New York Times describes Lemaitre this way: "'There is no conflict between religion and science,' Lemaitre has been telling audiences over and over again in this country .... His view is interesting and important not because he is a Catholic priest, not because he is one of the leading mathematical physicists of our time, but because he is both." I have known many scientists who are also religious. Most tend to agree with my first assertion and exhibit a capacity to keep religion out of their science. But that is not to say it's an easy thing to do. That's why I believe people like Lemaitre are rare, and why so many scientists are not religious. It's simply difficult to keep your life compartmentalized in that way.
Science speaks a language of facts and evidence; religion speaks a language of belief and faith. At some point, most who study science with any level of seriousness realize that they have never taken the tools of scientific skepticism to other areas of their life, and upon scrutiny, realize there is no evidence or facts speaking to the supernatural. The scientist is then faced with a choice: speculate and allow for faith in the absence of proof; or accept the lack of evidence as reason not to place faith in the existence of the supernatural. While the laymen love to turn this choice on its head and say, "but there's no evidence there *isn't* a god," the way science works is by suspending conviction until confirming data can support an idea, not the reverse, of assuming an idea is true sans evidence until proven untrue. An application of this distinction: there is currently no proof that I have invisible fairies living in my patio. I could posit that they cannot be detected visually or by sound or any other physical sense--that I simply can "feel" their presence. And no scientist could prove they *don't* exist, but I hope this silly example serves to show that it's not logical to assume they *do* exist just because we can't prove they *don't.* The scientific method doesn't work that way. First a hypothesis must be testable to be considered scientifically legitimate. Hypothesizing the existence of god would require, in the scientific realm, a means by which to prove god's existence. Furthermore, when we suggest a hypothesis, we never say that science allows for fully believing it on faith until we can gather evidence to support it. If we try gathering evidence and fail, we usually discard our hypothesis unless we have reason to suspect that the tools of science in our era lack the sophistication to sufficiently find support for our hypothesis. For example, many astronomers felt there probably were other planet systems out there, aside from our own solar system, but for many years the level of precision needed to detect the signature of a planet simply didn't exist. There were other pieces of evidence to suggest that planets probably were out there, but we couldn't fully support this until technological advances were made. Therefore, the only position astronomy could tell us about planets was an agnostic one. Scientists could assert that they believed extrasolar planets were out there, but they would concede until very recently that there had been no direct scientific proof for this. Nor could they have used the logic that surely extrasolar planets existed because no one had proven they *didn't* exist. But whether a scientists believed in extrasolar planets or not 40 years ago, they would probably have said the matter required more time for technology to be able to advance in order to draw a scientific conclusion. Another example to consider would be the existence of the ether that some hypothesized light waves to propagate through. Many scientists (who turned out to be correct) rejected this idea because there was no direct proof for it. Others, even without proof, felt that we just needed more sophisticated testing. In fact Michelson and Morley were trying to prove the existence of ether with a new and advanced interferometer when they managed to disprove its existence.
So it is with the existence of god. There is no evidence, but scientists can handle that by believing anyway, possibly deciding that some day science might advance sufficiently to be able to gather the proof that is currently lacking or possibly deciding that the question is inherently incompatible with the tools of science. Either way they keep the question separate from science, at least for the time being. Other scientists take the lack of evidence as an indication that we cannot say one way or another. But most of us scientists disbelieve in the existence of god because of the sheer volume of null results: never in the history of mankind has a single shred of scientific evidence been uncovered to support the existence of god. With extrasolar planets, we knew from our own solar system that planets can form and we knew there were billions of stars like our own sun, so that gave us at least a basis on which to suggest the existence of planets orbiting other stars. Likewise, even though we now know that light can propagate even through the vacuum of space, it made sense to conjecture the existence of an invisible ether, since we knew all other waves (such as sound waves) needed a medium through which to propagate. Contrasting this with the existence of god, not only is there no evidence, but there are no "logical" similar examples to extrapolate from in order to posit the existence of a supernatural being. Indeed, all other similar "examples" come from mythology, which most people regard as fictional, and for which there is certainly evidence for their fictional nature (we know, for example, that the sun appears to set because the earth spins on its axis, not because there is a sun god pulling a fiery chariot to the underworld). In this light, many of us conclude that there is no reason any modern notion of a god is any different from other fictional mythological gods of past eras.
Ah, but you object, I claim religion should stay out of science, but I imply that if science had sophisticated enough tools, it could be used to probe for evidence of the existence of god. Why shouldn't science stay out of religion as religion should stay out of science? This is a good question. Some people feel science should indeed stay out of religion, because religion and science are seeking two very different forms of truths: one is objective, the other is subjective. However, science has been used to probe religious questions: to carbon date religious artifacts, for example. Still as I have painstakingly argued, using scientific tools to investigate questions of the divine often destroys religious belief for the scientist, so how is that any less of a crime than religion being brought into science and possibly destroying science as you might be anticipating I will argue? The difference is simple and goes back to the nature of the truths being sought. Because science seeks an objective truth, objective truths begin to appeal more to the scientist in most cases and they tend to abandon subjective truths such as religion, but they do not need to claim that others need to do the same. Because religious truths are subjective, they may continue to hold validity to anyone wishing to seek such subjective truths, and as I might have poked fun at earlier, it remains true that science can never disprove those subjective truths. On the other hand, trying to apply subjective search for truth to science quickly gets you into trouble. It is tantamount to using opinions to argue with facts. Science doesn't hold different truths for different denominations or belief systems, it isn't a personal quest, it isn't emotional. Instead, science cares about *one* underlying objective truth that applies to everyone and everything. Once you start bringing religious belief into the equation you have necessarily gone astray because the truths you are searching for are inherently not subjective ones. Nor can you simply say, well I abandoned this scientific way of thinking just as the scientist has abandoned the religious way of thinking, unless you are willing to abandon objective realities and/or refrain from calling your conclusions "science." No one needs you to apply science to questions of god's existence if you do not want to, since that is the subjective realm of thinking, but once you start saying that the earth was formed in such a way because of some words men have deemed holy rather than in the way that objective tools and factual evidence suggest, then you have lost objectivity for scientific reality. If you are ok with knowing you have lost touch with scientific reality and call it a belief instead, then you may proceed with this line of thinking. But sadly, it seems it rarely stops there, and instead, those who have abandoned facts in favor of opinions when it comes to science end up trying to speak to others with perceived authority on the subject of science, perverting both the scientific truths already uncovered and the scientific process in general. Now if I as a scientist, with no religious credentials, make it my mission to claim religious authority and spread the word to all I can that religion is just a big delusion, then I would expect the devout to be angry with me, and with good reason. Yet when the reverse is done, somehow this is seen as an opinion to be respected.
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