Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
When I was in elementary school, I would drift off to sleep listening to a top 40 music station, because that’s what cool kids did.
When I became an adult and realized I’d never be cool anyway, I hit the “seek” button on my car radio and came across a song about how the good stuff in life is all the memories you build with those you love. And as I drove along the highway, tears streaming down my cheeks, I knew I had found the music of my heart. I may have grown up attending the ballet, but I’m really a redneck woman who loves country.
Perhaps you’ve never been that enamoured with country, since you don’t need to listen to songs about losing your truck, or your dog, or your wife, but then you’re missing out on its power! Believe me, country music has power. A study done about a decade ago found that of all forms of music, country music is the most linked to suicide. So if you ever had a sneaking suspicion that there was something not quite right about Willie Nelson or Billy Ray Cyrus, you’ve now been vindicated.
But perhaps it’s the most linked to suicide because it sings about the stuff that really matters, and pairs it with music that’s haunting (though it may haunt you in a very different way than it haunts me).
Music does that. After watching a movie marathon for a weekend, I’ll start to imagine my own life with a soundtrack, since nothing ever happens in a movie without music to go along with it. Have you ever just been walking along the sidewalk and a shiver runs up your spine, because you feel like there should be creepy music playing? Or perhaps you’re not so morbid, and you hear an upbeat guitar during the happier parts of your life.
It’s hard to imagine life without music. I’ve heard it said that God created music so that we could worship without words, and I like that thought. Music itself creates a mood and speaks to us and through us. It’s painting pictures with sounds.
I live in a house with teen girls, so for the last few years I’ve been inundated with Taylor Swift. Swift has a rather clever tune entitled “Our Song”, where she describes what comprises the soundtrack of her romance. Their soundtrack isn’t a particular song, but it’s the slamming screen door when they run out for a date, or the way he laughs, or the whispered phone calls late at night. These things encapsulate their relationship.
Summer is filled with that kind of music to me. It’s the music of the breezes as I type outside on my deck; the screams of thrills as little children put their toes in the water at the beach; the sound of the overloaded camper backing up out of the driveway as we leave for vacation, and the children querying, “are we there yet?” It’s the campfire crackling as my daughters and I sing in a round, and my husband sits back to enjoy the melody, rather than joining in and wrecking it. It’s woodpeckers and splashes and even the buzzing of mosquitoes.
Soon the soundtrack will change to school bells and football practice and alarm clocks and times tables being recited. Each new season and stage of life has its own soundtrack, and its own songs. And so, as I head to the store to buy new fall clothes for my ever-sprouting teenager, I’ll flip on the radio, hoping to hear another song that will express that excitement I feel watching my girls grow up, tinged with just a little bit of melancholy. It’s country time. And if you like a good cry, and you’re not overly depressed already, why not join me?
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Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
I’ve heard it said that it is better to build a child than to repair an adult. Yet like many truths, this is easier said than done. What should society do when a parent is obviously tearing a child down?
My quick answer would be that children deserve loving parents who care for them, so I would put them in loving homes. But there are several problems with that. The first is that by allowing Children’s Aid to take children away easily, we could inadvertently remove kids from good homes. After all, deciding what is safe and what is not is not as straightforward as it may seem. Today we become incensed if parents smoke in the same room as a baby, but let’s face it: the majority of my generation grew up in smoky cars and smoky homes. Today it’s illegal to allow your children to ride their bikes without helmets, but all of us did as children. You can’t take a 7-year-old in a car without a car seat, but that’s a new rule. My 16-year-old left her booster seat behind at five.
It’s difficult to define bad parenting solely in terms of specific actions, then, because so much of it is culturally relative. Yet when it comes to protecting children, we all know that some parents are selfish, narcissistic, and abusive. I figure judging abuse and neglect is sort of like the standard for judging obscenity: I’ll know it when I see it. It’s not any one thing; it’s the total picture. And we leave it to judges to make that final call.
My problem is that I don’t believe judges necessarily make the right calls. For instance, did you know that judges can order the government, through Children’s Aid, to provide things like rides to doctor’s appointments, paid summer camp, paid extra curricular activities, and even paid maid service if the house is unsanitary, all so kids can stay with their biological families? Many kids in foster care are sent back home to parents who won’t actually be caring for their kids—you and I still will through our tax dollars.
If a parent can’t figure out how to get their child to a doctor’s appointment, that child shouldn’t be going home. And if a parent won’t scrub the kitchen floor, then the parent shouldn’t have their kids. Why should parents who have already had children removed benefit from free rides, free camp, and free maids, while parents struggling to make ends meet have to play by the rules? It’s ridiculous.
Were I a judge, my first instinct would be to put most kids who are apprehended up for adoption right away. But that’s not good for society, either, because there simply aren’t enough good adoptive homes to take all the children who would fall into care.
All of this would be so much easier if parents started doing their job. So speaking as a parent who truly loves her children, I wish other adults would stop neglecting theirs. If you think getting drunk on the weekend or doing drugs while your kids are around is fine, give your kids up. If you never play with them, never talk to them, and never take them to the doctor, then give your children to someone who loves them. The family is too important a social unit for you to undermine with your actions. And your children are too precious to endure your callousness.
I hope there’s someone superior to me who can sort all these competing interests out, because I sure can’t. And I wish them luck for this heart-wrenching job.
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Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
We live in the one of the best countries in the world. We have unspoiled nature, but we also have beautiful, clean cities. We have freedom. We have relative prosperity. We have health.
And so it’s jarring when we see homeless people. How can we have such poverty in such a wonderful country? Across Canada we have opened homeless shelters and food banks. We have public housing. We have breakfast and lunch programs for poor children. We provide welfare, job retraining, legal aid, and more.
Yet despite decades of these programs, poverty is still with us. And so we continue to throw money at the problem. In fact, we throw so much money at it that we could likely bring each and every poor person out of poverty just by giving them the cash we spend on programs—though I wouldn’t advocate that. Despite poverty programs, poverty isn’t disappearing.
I recently heard a talk by Tim Huff, an author and homeless advocate, who posited that the reason we’re not curing poverty is that we don’t understand it. We think we’re talking about poverty of resources—people don’t have enough money, or food, or stuff, and so we try to help them get more money or food or stuff.
But what if that’s not really the problem? He went on to explain that in his work with the homeless, he has discovered that they suffer far less from poverty of resources than they do from poverty of relationship. When people have real community, they will weather storms like job loss or family breakdown. On the other hand, if someone has no community, then what should be a relatively minor setback can cause them to lose their home.
I was stunned as I listened to him, because it made so much sense and yet I had never thought of it that way. And my mind wandered to two women I know only peripherally. Both became pregnant at age 20. There, though, the similarity ends. One has supportive parents, who have set up the nursery, and are caring for the baby so that she can go to school for the next few years to become a nurse. The other has alcoholic parents. She is now living in a subsidized apartment, caring for her baby alone.
I thought of my own mother, who was penniless when my father left. We lived with grandparents for a time and then with my aunt and uncle for a few years while my mother got on her feet. We had a church community that helped with baby-sitting and the occasional gift when she needed it. And my mother managed to thrive, without ever going on welfare. Today, she spends her retirement days trying to be that community to other women who need help.
The problem with attacking poverty as a money issue, Tim said, is that you’re dealing with the symptom, and not the root of the problem. The real issue is that we have a breakdown of family and of community. Those with a close family and a close community are not harmed by occasional financial setbacks. Those with chaotic families are, because everybody is too busy dealing with their own issues to help you with yours.
We can keep throwing money at the problem, but it’s not going to fix it, because it’s not a poverty of resources. It’s a poverty of relationship. And government can’t replace the family. Until we can rebuild families, and rebuild communities, there will always be people who fall through the cracks. We need strong families to raise strong people, and today those are in short supply. So if you want to help with poverty, build your marriage. Raise great kids. Encourage community at your school or your church. Let’s build relationships, which really are the best weapon to fight poverty.
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While I'm taking the summer a little more slowly, I've decided to rerun columns I wrote back a few years ago, before I was blogging. Here's one I was reminded of after all the kerfuffle about the prom. Hope you enjoy it!
When I was a teenager I had a curfew of 11:00. I don’t know why I complied, and I’m not quite sure what my mother would have done if I hadn’t (I don’t think she’s sure, either). Yet while I may have grumbled about it, I was always home by 11.
I think it all boiled down to this: I didn’t want to disappoint Mom. She had high expectations of me, though not the kind that drive you to despair. She knew what I was capable of becoming, and she wanted me to do my best. And, with a few exceptions, I tried.
All parents have expectations of their kids, but increasingly they are expectations of an entirely different sort. They go something like this: “Well, all kids will drink/use drugs/have sex. What are you going to do?” But there’s no reason to be so pessimistic. Here are the facts: most teens are still virgins. Most teens do not go to keg parties. Most teens do not use drugs. In fact, the rate of these behaviours is actually going down. Such behaviour is not inevitable, despite what the media make it seem.
And I find even many Christian parents giving in to this defeatism! One parent from our church recently questioned my 16-year-old daughter about her future plans. She told her about her plans to go to university in Ottawa, and eventually get an apartment with friends. "With your boyfriend?" the mom laughed. "Of course not!" Rebecca replied. Why would she even think Rebecca would live with someone? My daughter was flabbergasted, but that was how this woman assumed all teens would be.
I sometimes wonder if our defeatism encourages that behaviour. Perhaps the reason that many kids do engage in potentially dangerous behaviours is that we tell them that’s what we expect. We may yell at them when they do something stupid, but we don’t take steps to prevent it. All they’ve seen is our “what can you do?” attitude.
And many parents aren’t only sighing about their apparent hopelessness at controlling their kids; they’re actually encouraging their kids’ dangerous behaviours. They invite other teens over to their house and serve alcohol so that “at least I know where my kid is.” (Never mind what the other parents whose underage kids you are getting drunk think).
Then there are the parents who bring their young daughters to the doctor to get birth control. Their concern is not always that their daughter has begun to sleep around; often she hasn’t. But you never know what she’ll do, so let’s make sure she won’t get pregnant. Once you’ve taken that trip to the doctor, though, how can you turn around and tell your daughter “don’t have sex”, or at least “do so discriminantly”? You’ve already shown her that you expect her to sleep around. Once she’s in a relationship and confused about what she should do, she’ll remember that you expect her to say yes.
Having rules gives kids a safety net so that they have a way out. If they’re at a party that’s getting out of hand, they can always make the excuse “well, I have to leave or my mother’s going to ground me for life”. If, on the other hand, the kids are all at your house and you’ve opened up the liquor cabinet, it’s much harder for your teen to leave.
Maybe we need to try a different approach. I remember a comment my mother made in passing when I was 14. She had worked at a pregnancy home for young teens for a time, and she said the biggest heartbreak in her life would be if I ended up in that situation. She told me there was no reason why I should. That comment stayed with me. I was sure that if I did anything like that I would break her heart. And I didn’t want to do that.
It wasn’t only that my mother expected things of me. That was only one half of the equation. My mother also loved me. We can’t expect kids just to do what we want out of the goodness of their hearts, without ever deserving it. But if we’re steadfast in our love for them, and coherent in our expectations of them, they’ll understand.
We can’t eliminate the risk that they might choose poorly. Kids still have their own minds. Had I become pregnant, it would not have been my mother’s fault; it would have been mine. But just because we can’t completely prevent destructive behaviour doesn’t mean we should give up.
Most kids don’t want to disappoint their parents. But they can’t disappoint you if you’ve never expected anything in the first place. All of our kids have the potential for amazing futures ahead of them. Let’s make sure they believe that, too.
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Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Last week I was on vacation and forgot to post it! So here's my column from July 8!
Shortly after Osama bin Laden was sent to meet his maker, Rush Limbaugh lambasted the guy’s housekeeping. On his show, Limbaugh noted that with three wives, you'd think Osama's house would have been a little neater, rather than strewn with rotten food, soiled linen, and dirty dishes.
I think Rush got it wrong. Maybe one woman could have kept it clean, but add three to the mix, and a mess is the only logical outcome. It’s called the Tragedy of the Commons, and it’s human nature.
Let’s take a look at bin Laden’s pathetic brood to figure out why this is so. I hope it goes without saying that polygamy is absolutely, completely, and undeniably disgusting. I can't think of a worse type of relationship. It tells women that you're not really special. You're here to perform a role, which is basically a sexual one. You're not here to be a confidante or a friend, because I can't treat you any differently from any of the other wives. So I'm just going to use you.
In that environment, if you were one of Osama's three wives, would you clean anything? I sure wouldn’t, because nothing would be mine. Everything would be his, and if I made it better, then I'd be making life easier for two of my rivals and all of their children, too. A race to the bottom, then, is the only logical outcome: it’s a race to see who can get away with doing the least, so that nobody else benefits from our labour. So they all lived in squalor.
But this problem with human nature is not restricted to psychopathic Islamic extremist polygamists. Socialism has much in common with Osama’s lack of housekeeping. When everything is owned in common, then people don't care for it properly, because others can abuse it or can skate along with no effort on their own part. That's one reason, for instance, that agricultural output in the former Soviet Union kept decreasing every year, despite all the new agricultural policies. When people don't own the crops they produce, and when others can benefit from someone else’s work, then people will not work as hard.
Ownership matters. If we're going to have pride in something, we have to have a stake in it which cannot be taken away. We have to be able to benefit from the fruits of our labour, but, just as importantly, we have to be able to benefit only from the fruits of our labour. If we can get something for free, why work for it?
That’s why economic freedom is so closely related to happiness and well-being. The countries with the highest amount of economic freedom also have the happiest citizens, the safest citizens, and the wealthiest citizens. They are, on average, ten times wealthier than those from countries with the lowest economic freedom. Even the poor in Canada, for instance, are eight times wealthier than the poor in countries which are not economically free.
We just celebrated Canada Day, and every July 1 I feel humbled to live in this country. I don’t think we fully realize how wonderful it is to be as free as we are. But this will only remain a great country if we, its people, keep demanding that government do only what is necessary, and that we, its citizens, be permitted to pursue our own interests. That builds a country where we’re not trying to take from each other. We’re not trying to do the minimum. We’re working hard, because we get to enjoy what we work for. I’m proud to be a Canadian. Economic freedom, no polygamy, and thus much less tragedy. Sounds pretty good to me.
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Certain moments occur in every parent’s life that we vow that we will remember: the way she sounded when she said "mama", the way he looks when he sleeps, or the way she skips around the house. Yet too often our memories betray us, and years later we can't conjure up those images or those voices, no matter how hard we try.
Today we have tons of aids to remember our kids’ triumphs and foibles, but we don’t always have the time to use them. Many of my friends are into scrapbooking, and I’m always amazed at the wonderful collages they can make of something as simple as photos of kids playing in the leaves or going to the beach. But all that work is way too much pressure for me. My best friend started scrapbooking six months ago, and she already feels as if she’s five years behind! Yet nevertheless, when I see her creations, I feel like a horrible parent for not wanting to join the fun, but I don’t want to start a hobby that will just induce guilt.
So what can we do to stop that memory sieve? After all, one day I’m going to want all those memories to embarrass my children with. I’m already planning the video montage and slide show at my kids’ eventual weddings. My own mother started the tradition. At a speech on my big day, she read aloud the little booklet from my grade one composition class: “I live with my Mommy. Her name is Beth. She sleeps a lot. A real lot.” I used to wake up at 6, and having to wait until 7 to go into her bedroom just about killed me. It defined our relationship at the time.
When my girls were younger, I kept a notebook by my bed where I could write down anything particularly funny my own girls say. One of my entries from ten years ago was when Katie asked, “Mommy, if God has the whole world in His hands, does that mean Australia is getting squished?” I don’t want to forget that. And I won’t even go into what she said when I told her about the birds and the bees. I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise if any of you are ever invited to her wedding.
But that embarrassing slide show won’t be complete without pictures and videos. Too often, though, we only get the camera out for special occasions. I’m trying to start taking pictures of everyday things, like how they look curled up in bed reading, or playing the piano, or practising the guitar, or even blow drying their hair.
I always managed to remember to take photos when the kids were little of my oldest child. My younger one, though, was more like an afterthought. When Katie was five I realized I had no pictures of her that did not also include her older sister. My uncle, who grew up in a huge Irish family, once said that if the third child has more than 10 photos taken of him or her by the time he or she is 16, half of them are on file at the police station.
There are so many pictures I wish I had taken with they were younger, but it’s too late to get those years back. But I can still find plenty of embarrassing ones if I start snapping, even today. So this summer I’m being camera happy. And now that my kids are teens, and are well-acquainted with technology, I’m getting them to organize all the photos and videos so that I can find them if I ever need them. I may even let the girls prepare each others’ eventual embarrassing slide shows. But I’m still not taking up scrapbooking.
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I'm really busy this summer doing things like vacationing (where I'm busy lying around in a hammock doing absolutely nothing). So I thought I'd go through the archives and publish some of my older articles and columns periodically that never showed up on this blog, because I wrote them before the blog started. Here's one from way back in 2002, when my girls were still very small. It was the very first column I published!
It’s that time of year again: camping, cottages, water skiing, boating and beaches all beckon us. Unfortunately, they all involve a particularly gruesome form of self-torture: car trips with children.
For those of us travelling this summer to fun-filled destinations where we can relax, getting there can be an exercise in frustration. Tiny ones repeatedly bleat “are we there yet?”, while older ones yell, over and over, “she’s on my side of the seat!”. How can we survive this nightmare?
Every summer, our family takes an eight-hour trip down to Pennsylvania, and a four hour one up to Muskoka. They’re not always pleasant, but we’ve found some ways to pass the time, many gleaned from other parents who have trod this path before us.
First, you must have a zero tolerance for fighting. My award for Shrewdest Mother of the Year goes to a mom with two girls who told them they were going to visit Grandma, some six hours away. She packed their bags, loaded the van, kissed Daddy good-bye and took off, with a stern warning that when the first fight broke out she would turn the van around and head home.
They made it about half an hour before she kept her promise, landing them once again in their driveway. The two girls were too stunned even to cry. When they realized this was for real, they sobbed and begged, but their mother would not relent.
A week later, after many promises, they set out again. This time, they made it the whole way. What the girls didn’t know was that mother’s vacation time was actually booked for that second week. She knew they wouldn’t make it to Grandma’s on the first attempt. That was only a trial run to make the point.
Like that mother, I can’t stand fighting or whining in the car. It infuriates me, and if I have to listen to that for eight hours, I’m not going. The girls know that, because at the first sign of whining we stop the car.
We’ve also played every game in the book to keep them occupied: look for all the provincial and state license plates, count the cows, and find things beginning with all the letters of the alphabet. These really do entertain younger children, though unfortunately they’re not the most entertaining for us adults. Coming up with a word for X, though, took a lot of brainpower last year. I’m better prepared this year. I’ll be on the lookout for a xenolith--a type of rock fragment—as we traverse through the Canadian Shield to Muskoka.
Last year, in a spurt of energy between packing the camper and doing laundry, I laminated some “picture” bingo cards, with horses, cows, railway crossings, signs, and other landmarks. These were big hits, and best of all, the kids did them themselves, so Keith and I had time to talk to each other.
But the smartest thing we ever did was to borrow books on CD from the library. You can borrow whole books on CD, like Charlotte’s Web, or C.S. Lewis’ Narnia chronicles. Many of them are entertaining for adults, too, and best of all, a lot of them last hours! Hours of not hearing “are we there yet?”, but only “it’s not over yet, is it?”. And to whoever lives in Trenton and is currently listening to Quinte West’s copy of Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus, I need it by the 19th!
I’ll leave you with my favourite summer car ride story. During a cross-country trip, one eight-year-old girl started to feel very carsick. She rolled the window down, but it didn’t seem to help. Her eleven-year-old brother watched her with growing concern as she turned different shades of green. Then, when it was obvious something REALLY BAD was about to happen, he showed tremendous forethought. Sticking out his hands, he caught his sister’s vomit and threw it out the window, so that they wouldn’t have to sit in a stinky car for the next few days.
So as you’re driving to the cottage, and the air conditioning isn’t working, and the kids are whining, just be thankful that at least you don’t have to catch the vomit.
Where are you heading this summer? What do you have planned to keep the kids busy?
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's, based on a news story I asked you all to comment on last week.
Thirteen graduating students from Quinte Secondary School [in Belleville, Ontario] have given us a whole new reason to despair for our country’s future. Their parents pooled resources to rent a bus to take them to their prom and then to take them to the after-prom party at a private residence where alcohol would be served. The school, however, warned all students that group transportation (which tends to be associated with alcohol) and any kind of intoxication would not be tolerated. Nevertheless, they showed up in a bus, with some of the students already drinking, and they were denied admittance. Several parents are now calling for monetary reimbursement and the firing of some school administrators.
The Belleville daily covered this story in rich detail, accompanied by a photo of the kids, girls holding up their prom dresses. The paper evidently chose to slant this story towards those poor students who missed out on the biggest moment of their high school life.
Why?
Those students were told that they were not to arrive in group transportation, and they did. They were told no alcohol would be tolerated, and several of them admitted to a reporter that they ignored that warning. Sounds like an open and shut case to me. After all, going to the prom is not a right; it’s a privilege. And by the way, why do you need to rent transportation to take you to and from the prom to make sure you’re not drinking and driving if you’re not going to drink until you get to the after-prom party? Besides, parents, providing alcohol to minors is still, last time I checked, illegal.
The consequences for breaking the rules were spelled out, and the students chose to disregard them. It is not the school’s fault if girls chose to spend $700 on a dress, and then broke the rules so they couldn’t get in. No one forced these girls to drop that kind of money on a prom dress (I spent less than half of that on my wedding dress, for pity’s sake). No one forced them to disobey the rules. No one forced them to drink.
And what about the other QSS students who were at the prom? Do they not matter? Why should kids who have not had any alcohol have to put up with potentially intoxicated peers at their prom? Besides, if any drunk kids had caused an accident or injury, the school would have been sued. The school had to stand its ground. That’s why I’d have written a much different headline than “Students Lost their Prom and are Angry”. I’d do: “Courageous Principal Stands Her Ground On No-Alcohol Prom”, or “Principal Sticks to Her Guns despite Parents’ Threats”.
Yet while I find the kids’ actions deplorable, we cannot entirely blame them, for they were raised by parents who evidently felt it was more important to be their children’s friends than it was to encourage them to respect authority. That “blame your parents” thing, though, can only last so long once you’re an adult. These kids have now graduated from high school, and so they have entered adulthood. It’s time they owned up.
They made a mistake. And by posing for a picture in the newspaper and complaining about their treatment, they compounded that mistake by broadcasting that error in judgment far and wide. What employer in this community is ever going to hire them? They have shown that they do not respect authority, don’t listen to instructions, think rules are for everyone else, and if anyone challenges them, they raise a huge stink.
So here’s my advice: go to the principal and apologize. Accept responsibility. Be an adult. At least you might get your self-respect back. And then, perhaps you’ll earn the respect of the rest of us in this community, too.
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There are some days when I’ve just about had it. Recently, when baby-sitting a friend’s two preschoolers for the day, I realized how much one can forget in the six short years since both of my girls have been out of diapers. On that day, the three-year-old got into the paints when I wasn’t looking. I discovered him sitting on top of the kitchen table, making interesting designs on his clothes, and took one look at him and decided he was too far gone to interfere with now. I just gave him some paper and figured at least this would keep him busy for a while. And it did. It kept him so busy he didn’t realize when he had to pee. My table got the worst of it. He peed all over a chair later that day, too. I spent the entire day walking behind the four kids and cleaning up after them.
Some of us have jobs that make us feel that way, too. If we work at a place where morale is lower than a double-jointed limbo dancer, everybody is grumpy. Nobody wants to be there. And nobody seems to notice anything good that we do. The problem, whether at our jobs or at home, is not necessarily that the work we do is miserable, or that the job is too hard. It’s that nobody appreciates our efforts. Attention only comes our way when there’s a problem.
Living that kind of life, with no positive feedback, can be like living a slow death. Even when we have chosen a life we desperately want—a career we feel proud of, a family we’re raising that we love, a business we’re starting—that inner sense of motivation, satisfaction or drive only takes you so far. We are social beings, and we need positive human interaction.
I think that’s what poisons so many marriages, and causes employers to lose the best people. These bad feelings, even if they don’t stem from huge issues, can start to add up as, brick by brick, we build up walls between us. Soon there doesn’t seem anything left to hold us together.
How can we stop this impending death? My grandfather, after every meal, would always smile and thank my grandmother. “Mother,” he would say, “that was wonderful,” whether it was or not. It seems quaint now, and maybe even a little sexist, but I think that meant something to her. He was acknowledging the effort and the love that she put into that meal. When we don’t acknowledge that love, too often it flickers out.
Much as we may know this kind of appreciation is vital, though, when we’re feeling unappreciated, it’s really hard to appreciate anybody else. We’re each waiting for the other person to thank us, before it even occurs to us to acknowledge them. It’s strange how we’re often the most critical with those we’re the closest to. We can be kind to strangers, but are we kind to those who really matter? When we’re not, we cause bitterness to escalate, even if it doesn’t stem from anything huge. Even so, bit by bit, we build up walls between us until there doesn’t seem anything left to hold us together.
I know many of us are tired. After that day with four kids, I certainly was. But think about those around you. Why not break through that wall today, before it becomes too high to climb over? Take my advice: whether you’re at home or at work, stop reading, smile at the person nearest you, and say thank you for something. You’ll be tearing down bricks, and that’s ever so much better than piling them up.
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
A train wreck of a political scandal has erupted in the United States over these last few weeks, and despite its sordidness, it has given me reason to hope for our future once again.
In case you have not heard, a Democratic Congressman from New York named Anthony Weiner (I am not making that up) apparently sent lewd pictures of himself to strange young women on Twitter. He was discovered when instead of sending one as a private message, he sent it for all the world to see, and now everyone knows where he stands on the boxers vs. briefs question.
Originally he claimed his account had been hacked, and he self-righteously demanded that news organizations focus on something more important. As more and more pictures surfaced, though, he was
eventually forced to resign in disgrace.
That’s right: he was forced to resign. Woo hoo!
For I still remember when another politician was caught in a rather uncompromising position involving a cigar, a blue dress, and the line “it depends on what the meaning of “is” is,” and everybody pretty much excused him.
That was back in my major feminist days during my postgraduate degrees, and I initially liked Clinton. But unlike the rest of the media, I wasn’t comfortable with saying, “It’s not about the sex; it’s about the lying.” That didn’t wash with me. I thought it mattered that he had sex with a 21-year-old intern. All the feminist literature I had read taught me that this was an abuse of power—and yet here were these same feminists saying we should excuse him, because he was a Democrat.
Now there’s one big difference between Weiner and Clinton, which was that Monica Lewinsky was a willing participant, and Weiner seems to have emailed or “tweeted” pictures of himself to women who didn’t ask for them. But nevertheless, in the early commentary of the Weiner scandal, I kept hearing variations on that now standard line: “the issue is not the sex; the issue is the lying.”
When people say that, it’s as if they’re also saying that we’re not allowed to judge anyone’s sexual behaviour as being somehow unseemly. So let me clearly state that sending nude—or even merely lewd—pictures of yourself to young women who are strangers, while you are married and a Congressman, is disgusting, immoral, and shows an amazing lack of judgment. Besides opening yourself up to blackmail, it’s just plain a mean thing to do to your wife, and an ultra-creepy thing to do to these women.
In the nineties, liberals in both Canada and the United States had to excuse Bill Clinton’s behaviour because they didn’t want to give leeway to Republicans. Republicans, in turn, to avoid being labelled as “prudes”, had to frame the issue as just the lying, and not the fact that the man was engaged in sexual activities while talking about national security on the phone.
But Clinton was a president. Weiner was just a creepy Congressman from New York. And so people didn’t circle the wagons. One by one, reluctantly at first, key members of both parties said, “he’s got to go.”
People were just plain grossed out, a reaction I cheered wholeheartedly, since I have teenage daughters—who are not on Twitter. And there is nothing funny or cute or quirky about sending nude pictures to young women. So perhaps we’ve finally given rest to that line, “it’s not about the sex; it’s about the lying.” Sometimes it is about the sex, and about how creepy and icky someone is being. I hope we as a society are free to start calling out people to behave responsibly again. If Weiner called us back to some basic standards, maybe he did serve a purpose, after all.
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Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
Father’s Day is upon us, so it’s time to thank Dad by emptying stores of ugly ties and the occasional fishing lure.
Now I have to admit that sometimes the females of our species are guilty of approaching this day with a little bit of derision. Just look at how easy he’s got it! Women are the ones who really do everything; men may work at their jobs, but they spend the rest of their lives trying to get out of labour. They’re the lucky sex.
Not so fast. If we women were honest, I think we’d admit that we’re the more fortunate gender. After all, in countless things in life women are allowed to have it both ways. We can decide we want a high powered career. If we put our kids in day care, men can’t complain, because that would be sexist. But we can also choose to stay home with the kids, telling the guys, “it’s your job to support me.” If a man were to say, “I think I’ll quit my job and stay at home and you can support me,” he wouldn’t get patted on the back. He’d get suspicous looks from strangers and potentially divorce papers from his wife.
We tell men they’re not allowed to treat us as sex objects, because that’s sexist, but we’re also allowed to wear whatever we want, and they’re not supposed to look—unless we want them to.
At school, we girls can bicker and insult each other, but if we shy away from actually throwing a punch, people don’t question our bravery. If a guy were to refuse to stand up to a bully, though, he’d be labelled “a girl”.
Women can cry at movies, at good byes, at births, at deaths, and even at slivers being removed, and everyone just passes the Kleenex. If a man cries, people giggle and back away slowly.
If we want to make friends with kids on the block, people think that we’re saintly. If men want to, people assume they’re perverts.
If a guy has difficulty putting a roast beef dinner together or dressing the kids in clothes that match, women are allowed to laugh at him. But no guy is allowed to laugh at a woman who doesn’t know how to change the oil in her car.
When a crisis hits, like a basement flood or a dispute with contractors, she can always pass the buck to him to deal with it. But he can’t pass the buck to anyone.
If a man is grumpy, we lambaste him for it. If a woman is grumpy, she has a “get out of moodiness” free card she can play, no matter what the time of the month. And if a guy challenges her on it, then she can whip out the “I went through labour because of you” trump card. Then he’s toast.
Do women have it bad? Of course we do. We’ve got PMS and pain and superwoman syndrome and pressure to be a size 4 and soccer practice and hot flashes. But let’s not pretend that we’re alone in our suffering. We can be moody, we can be demanding, and far too often we can even be condescending. So on this day, let’s acknowledge that men do indeed have it rough. And as much as we may complain about men, our lives would be awfully empty without them. This Father’s Day, let’s celebrate him for being a guy, whether he’s a brother, a son, a father, or a husband. After all, guys really do deserve our gratitude.
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Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
Recently I was chatting with a woman who’s walking through a bleak time in her marriage. She’s not sure if it can survive, though she desperately wants it to. But one of the things that breaks her heart the most is that her children, who are in their twenties, have told her, “why would we get married when we see how awful marriage has been for you and Dad?”
Excuse me while I get a little worked up here, but I find that conclusion, while understandable, completely illogical. I hear variations of it all the time: “Mom and Dad were such bad parents, how I could bring a child into the world? I might do what they did!” Or, “Mom and Dad just hated each other; why would I get married? I’ll end up hating my spouse, too!”
So let’s deconstruct this for a minute. If you believe these things, you obviously have plenty of negative feelings towards your parents. You did not have the kind of childhood that you deserved. And so you’re angry. And your anger is directed first and foremost at your parents. Yet who are you taking it out on? Yourself. You’re saying: they did me wrong, and so I am going to punish myself by making sure I never have a family of my own. Despite the fact that marriage is one of the best routes to happiness, I’m not going to participate. Sounds kind of backwards to me.
Or let’s look at it from another angle: you obviously think they were not good parents, or even good people. But do you have the same opinion of yourself? Are you simultaneously saying, “I think Dad was cruel and distant, and so I’m not going to get married because I’m cruel and distant, too?” If the things that bother you most about them are simultaneously in you, then what right do you have to feel cheated of your childhood?
Now, of course, you may not necessarily believe that your parents’ marriage failed because they were wrong; it may have failed because marriage itself is a bad institution. That’s a pretty commonly held belief, but it’s not supported by evidence. Instead, studies show that those who are most likely to be happy, least likely to be depressed, more likely to live longer, healthier, and wealthier lives, and more likely to raise well-adjusted children are the married. We may think marriage is dead because that’s loudly proclaimed on the covers of magazines, but outside of freaky Hollywood it isn’t. Marriage is good for you, and it’s good for society. And here’s another tidbit: the majority of first marriages still succeed.
Does that mean every marriage will be good? Of course not. But marriage is not the problem; people who get married are the problem. Divorce is not like the flu that you suddenly catch for no reason; if you work at a marriage, in most cases it will thrive. And if you grew up in a dysfunctional family, you can choose not to continue that pattern. Read books about how to have a great marriage. Go to a parenting class. Talk to people who have a great marriage. Figure out what makes it work. I grew up without a dad, but I married a man who is an awesome dad. I figured my childhood was lonely; why should my adulthood be lonely, too?
If you are blessed enough to find someone you love spending time with, whom you can truly be yourself with, and who shares your values, then cling to that person for life. You are not your parents, and if they messed up with you, you don’t deserve to punish yourself for it. Break the cycle by committing to love someone over a lifetime. Then you won’t be that hurting child all your days.
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Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
Last week, a Toronto couple hit international news with their experiment in child-rearing. They have decided to raise their latest baby to be genderless.
That’s right: they are not announcing whether their child is a boy or a girl, so that this information doesn’t affect how people treat the baby, and the baby’s natural inclinations will be encouraged.
Pardon me while I jump off the bandwagon. Sure, it’s wonderful to accept your child no matter how they turn out, but there’s a world of difference between acceptance and denial of identity. If you don’t let your child think of himself as “a little boy” or herself as “a little girl”, then are you not saying there’s something fundamentally wrong with who they really are?
When my daughter Katie was a year and a half old, someone presented us with a summer white frilly dress. All winter it hung in her closet, out of reach. Yet several times a day she would wander into her room and try to reach for that dress, the only frilly thing she owned. She thought it was beautiful, even before her second birthday.
But let’s say she hadn’t liked frilly dresses. Let’s say instead that she had preferred to play with trucks. Would that mean that she was, by gender, a boy? Absolutely not. I have a dear friend who loves to hunt and likes household repairs, but she also looks amazing in an evening gown—and she knows it. As a child, she grew up with all brothers and she loved doing boy things. But she was also very glad that she was a girl. The urge to tackle a brother did not override her femininity.
That’s because not all gender is socially constructed. Study after study has shown that there are legitimate differences between the sexes. Women, for instance, have much more discreet hearing. A mother can identify her child’s cry when that child is with a whole bunch of other children, whereas a father often finds all the sounds overwhelming. That’s one of the reasons, for instance, that ADD boys have more trouble in school than ADD girls. Boys find all the noises distracting, whereas girls have an easier time filtering them out.
Or take risk-taking. Boys are naturally inclined to be more risk-takers than girls are. Obviously there are exceptions, but insurance adjusters will tell you that it is boys who are naturally more dangerous. We are not interchangeable. If you tell a boy who likes to play dress-up that he is naturally a girl, you’re letting one preference override the plethora of other indicators that makes him a boy. And that’s wrong.
Yet that doesn’t stop some from wanting to create a “genderless society”, which I think is often an unspoken effort to attack masculinity. In Sociology, we were taught that every parent should give little boys dolls so that they would learn to be nurturing and thus not grow up to be soldiers. And in stories where parents try such experiments, it’s typically the masculine that is discouraged. Little boys are encouraged to paint their nails, while no one minds if a little girl plays with a truck. Girls are allowed to be masculine, but boys aren’t. Even in this family, the genderless baby has an older brother, now two, whose long, braided hair gives the distinct impression that he is a she.
I have no problem with boys wrestling, or playing rough, or wanting to catapult things into their backyards. I also have no problem with a boy who would rather sit in his room and read. But I do have a problem with telling any of these boys that they’re not allowed to think of themselves as boys. We are who we are, and much of that is innate. Let’s not use children as our political experiments. Let’s let them be who they were born to be, and that includes letting them be a little girl or a little boy.
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Recently we received a ticket in the mail from the Toronto Parking Authority. It seems we parked one evening at midnight in a no-parking zone, and we owed them $40. There was just one minor detail they overlooked. It wasn’t us. Sure, that was our license plate on the ticket, but we were nowhere near Toronto that night. My husband was working in the Emergency Room, and I was home with the kids two hundred kilometres away. No problem, I thought. I’ll just clear this all up.
That was easier said than done. There was no email address on the ticket, just a regular phone number (not even toll free) to phone during business hours. The only other way to deal with it was to go in person. So I phoned. It was busy. I tried for three days. And then, miraculously, I got an answer. “You are number 24 in line. Your wait will likely be 38 minutes.” So I waited. And waited. Number 17. Number 8. Number 3. And finally, number 1. And as I was being transferred, I heard—a busy signal. I had been disconnected.
In desperation, I called some traffic ticket specialists, figuring they could help me. They told me that if I didn’t pay the ticket on time, the authorities would double the fine, and it would cost me more than $40 to fight it. I could take them to small claims court, they explained, but again, it would cost me more than the price of the ticket. I may as well just pay it. “But it wasn’t me!” I told her. “It’s the principle of the thing!” She told me she understood, but there was nothing I could do.
How could the government just do this to me? I was really steamed. I told everyone my story, and actually found other people who had received similar tickets. “What did you do?” I asked. “We paid.” they said. “We could never get through on that phone number.”
So after a week of worrying about this, doing little else, I finally realized there was no point. Sometimes you just have to let it go.
A lot of life is like that. We choose to hold on to our grudges, because it’s the principle of the thing. Bitterness, though, doesn’t pay very good dividends. Someone once said that anger is like a poison that you take yourself. It doesn’t do anything to the person you’re angry at, but it hurts you. You go through life always testing, always suspicious, and never at peace.
Letting go isn’t easy, but it’s a lot better than driving yourself nuts. I could have fought that ticket on principle, but it would have cost me more. Bitterness often costs us more than forgiving would, even if forgiving doesn’t seem fair. Forgiveness, of course, doesn’t mean that we ignore problems or subject ourselves or our kids to harm. It just means that we choose not to let those problems consume so much of our emotional energy. We let the anger go so we can enjoy the rest of life. Dwelling on such problems and seeking revenge, even if only in your head, only hurts you. You spend your life with such negativity that you don’t even notice to see the good around you.
I know someone whose wife left him for someone else. It wasn’t a pretty situation. It certainly wasn’t fair. This man, though, now uses his kids to get back at her. He won’t buy them clothes, school supplies, or toys. He tries to minimize his child support payments as much as possible so she has very little money to live on so that she can’t spend on herself. He’s punishing her, he thinks, but really he’s hurting his kids and himself in the process. He’s losing out on his relationship with his children because he’s still so hurt over her.
She did betray him. She did hurt him. But sometimes you have to let it go. It isn’t always easy, and it isn’t always pretty. Chances are, though, that life will be much easier on the other side. The principle of the thing isn’t always worth it. People are. Sometimes that’s hard to swallow, but it’s the best medicine there is.
After finishing this column, I gave that phone number one last try. To my amazement I got through, and they cancelled the ticket immediately. It felt great, but not nearly as wonderful as giving up that anger in the first place.
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Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
The school year will be winding up soon, so high school seniors are planning their futures. And the default for many students is university.
Now university is worth it if you’re aiming for a specific job. And learning is certainly a worthy endeavour on its own. Nevertheless, I worry that we’re pushing so many kids into the university stream without giving them other options.
It seems that every parent yearns for that university degree for their child, but I know many credentialed twenty-somethings currently working in Chapters or fast food joints. Not too many jobs exist for History majors or Sociology majors or English literature majors. And meanwhile the kids have spent close to $100,000, and foregone the income they could have earned some other way.
It’s that other way that Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy from the TV series, wants people to start thinking seriously about. Dirty jobs can be incredibly rewarding, physically fun, and get us back in touch with the world around us. We live our lives with iPhones and Blackberries, trying to keep connected to each other. But in the meantime we’ve lost touch with the physical side of life; we don’t use our brawn, thinking the brain is all that matters.
And we forget that the brain is actually involved in many dirty jobs. In one video I recently watched of Mike Rowe, he was working on a sheep farm when it came time to castrate the male lambs. The farmer showed him how to do it: you stick the testicles between your teeth and let ‘er rip.
Rowe was appalled. He knew the correct and humane way to do it (based on research he did on his Blackberry) was to put an elastic band around said body part until it swelled up and fell off on its own.
The farmer invited him to do it, and so he banded the lamb. The lamb soon became immobilized with pain and fell down, panting. On the other hand, the lamb who had undergone the bite and rip procedure was already trotting off with his companions, as if nothing had happened.
And Rowe realized that much of what he knew about the world was wrong. He called that moment a turning point. What we have done, he says, is to assume that the people that work in front of computers are smart, while the people who do the real work out in the world are dumb. And in reality, it’s the people who do the real work who actually often understand the world better.
What we need, Rowe says, is a PR campaign for manual labour. We need a PR campaign that says hard work is actually beneficial, and fun, and rewarding. To climb into bed at the end of a day feeling as if you have done a good day’s work isn’t something to be ashamed of; it’s something to be proud of.
Our society seems to believe that hard work is something that one must avoid at all costs. We must have cushy jobs that are inside, in front of a computer screen, accompanied by tons of meetings. For most university students, that is what their futures will be. For many that will be a good life. But not for all.
Our high school students need to know that a life of manual, skilled labour is something that can be very rewarding psychologically, physically, and financially. It isn’t something to steer clear of. And maybe if we began to praise those dirty jobs more, we’d get back to our roots of what’s really important, and we’d stop being such pretentious snobs. It’s worth a try.
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Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's! Sorry for the Canadian slant for my American friends, but I think you'll understand anyway:
Before children understand the birds and the bees; before they can make their beds or tie their shoes or choose clothes that match; even before they venture forth to school, they have already grasped one simple concept: fairness. If Jimmy gets cake, everyone should get cake. M&M's should be shared equally, as should jelly beans and gummy bears. In fact, it's this attempt at fairness that's usually the impetus for many children learning how to count beyond ten.
Yet as they grow, their definition of fairness often changes. If one child saves his allowance for months so that he can buy a new video game, and one child squanders money on chocolate, it’s not fair that the first child should have to let the second child play said video game. If one child practices piano, and one never does, it's not fair that both get to watch equal amounts of television. If you don't follow the rules, you shouldn't get the rewards.
Thus, fairness can be defined in different ways. It certainly can mean that everybody gets the same number of gummy bears, but it can also mean that people receive rewards commiserate with their effort. When people work and study harder, they get more. When they work less, they get less. And interestingly, the two definitions of fairness are ultimately diametrically opposite. Tell a child who has just purchased a packet of M&M's with her chore money that she must share them with her sister who goofed off and didn't get any allowance and she'll cry, "That's not fair!" But tell a union leader that seniority should be based on merit rather than just years of service, and he or she will cry, "That's not fair!", too. We may use the word "fair", but we mean entirely different things by it.
So which definition of fairness do you agree with?
That's essentially the debate that our country had last week. The difference between left and right usually boils down to concepts of fairness. The left thinks everybody should have equality of outcome; we should all have basically the same amount, and it's not fair for some to have much more. The right, on the other hand, thinks that people should get what they put into something. We should be responsible for our own actions.
Looking at the new map of Canada, surprisingly divided into blue and orange with only dots of red, it's interesting to see where the colour lines are. The one province of the country that is always clamoring for the government to do more--Quebec--is almost completely orange. The one province of the country that just wants the government to leave them alone so they can work hard and grow, all on their own--Alberta--went pretty blue.
Perhaps I'm being too simplistic in drawing the political lines like this, but I think the difference between left and right isn't just about spending; it's about philosophy. What is the role of the government? And what is the role of citizens? Personally, I think the more government does, the less citizens do. We start relying on the government too much, and it distorts family relationships, economic decisions, and even, in my view, the moral health of the community.
The problem the Liberals had was that nobody was quite sure what they stood for. In the next few years, the Liberals are going to have to pick a side: which vision of fairness do they stand for? Do they want everyone to have the same, so they stand for higher taxes, more regulation, and more government, or do they want people to be responsible for their own outcomes? And the rest of us should ask the same question, too. It's only fair.
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(my 3 kids all grown up! Well, 2 are mine. The boy's my nephew. But I still love him!)
Happy Mother's Day! May all of you who are brought soggy cereal in bed, carried by little hands and accompanied by joyful smiles, manage to get that soggy cereal down!
I thought in honour of Mother's Day I would reprint one of my old columns, especially for the occasion.
And so, here we go, from 2004:
I have often marvelled at the fact that my youngest daughter is so healthy. At first I chalked it up to homeschooling, since we shelter her from germ factories. But thanks to Austrian lung specialist Dr. Friedrich Bischinger, I now have the real answer. It turns out that picking your nose and eating it boosts the immunity.
This is one of those things that, as a parent, you would rather not know. And as I was pondering this piece of research, a few questions occurred to me. Does Bischinger have nothing better to do with his time than worry about nose picking? Perhaps he should come do a shift or two at Canadian hospitals and fill in for some of the overworked internists here.
Even more importantly, how does one measure this particular experiment? You have to compare the pick-and-swallow kids with something. Do you arrange for a group of pick-and-stick-it-on-the-side-of-Grandma’s-couch? Or a group of non-pickers? In our family the question may be moot anyway because we have actually cured my youngest of this habit, at least in public. According to Bischinger, of course, we should just let her rip. Somehow I just don’t think I can find the stomach for it.
Stomach fortitude, though, is something I have discovered in a whole new way since becoming a mom. Grown women venture out with other grown women, only to find the conversation turning to the consistency of toddlers’ fecal matter. Two or three years earlier many of us wouldn’t even admit we had fecal matter. Kids, of course, don’t share our squeamishness. They know body functions are taboo, but these still cause gales of laughter. They are the source of the most outrageous insults and humour they can imagine. (Typical joke told by a four-year-old: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Fart!”, followed by everyone collapsing on the floor laughing). Recently, when our family was considering renting a particular movie, I refused since it had swearing in it. Rebecca, our oldest, leaned over to her younger sister and whispered, “that means it has bum words.”
The odd thing is that children have no concept of what actually is distasteful. They think nothing of barging in to the bathroom at that particular moment when you really want privacy, but should they see you and your spouse kissing, well, the screams you hear are enough to think we had been the ones nose-picking.
Meal times are perhaps the worst for these expressions of disgust. I actually enjoy cooking, but my meals usually have vegetables and meat—I know this will be hard to believe—mixed together. This is a major faux pas in my children’s eyes, and worthy of several choruses of “eeeewwwws!”. If everything is not confined to its own hemispheres on the plate, it’s not worthy. And don’t even get me started on sauces.
Yet I am not the only source of squeamish stomachs in our family. My daughters cause plenty of nausea, too. One of them, who has never met a sauce she likes, thinks nothing of picking up the gum she stuck on her dresser before dinner to finish it afterwards (we’re working on curing her of that, too). And why is it so hard to get kids to remember to flush the toilet?
It seems that motherhood is an inauguration into new challenges for the stomach-challenged, which is probably why it begins as it does. When I was pregnant with Rebecca the only thing I thought of, for the first five months, was food. I dreamed about food. I daydreamed about food. The only thing I didn’t do was eat food. I was so nauseous that every waking minute was dedicated to trying to picture some food that would stay down—an apple? A hard boiled egg? Definitely nothing with sauce.
One day I will have the bathroom to myself, I will be able to kiss my husband whenever I want, eat whatever I want, and ignore the consistency of everybody’s toilet habits. I think I’ll miss these days. And that’s why I still cherish the mushy kisses and mushy cereal I’m presented with every Mother’s Day morning. I hope you all had a wonderful day Sunday, too.
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's!
The hats were plentiful, colourful, and unforgettable. The guests were delighted to be included. The participants were nervous--except for the best man, who looked like he was having the time of his life. And the spectators, at least on this side of the pond, were bleary-eyed and coffeed up.
It was a wedding to be remembered, of which I only watched highlights, because my dedication to cultural moments only goes so far. Nevertheless, I did find the wedding lovely, especially Harry's whispered, "wait til you see her" to his brother, who was staunchly facing straight ahead, just as he was supposed to, while the eyes of two billion people were on his bride.
Her image will now adorn not just books but plates and mugs and spoons and teacups forevermore. And yet as over the top as much of the coverage was, I can't say I was altogether sorry to see a million people lining up to catch a glimpse of the couple, or billions more tune in to see the vows.
We have lived through turbulent days. As I'm writing, our country does not yet know who will win the election. We have witnessed tornadoes and floods and earthquakes and tsunamis and wars and disasters. So it seems fitting that we should, for a time, focus on something as seemingly mundane as a wedding.
After all, the best remedy for much turbulence, I think, is weddings. It is family that keeps our society functioning and strong, even when all around us is falling apart. Government can't do that; it is only family that gives you the sense of belonging, love, and constancy. So William and Kate have the right idea. It is a good thing to find someone to spend your life with, not just because you love them, but because you vow and promise that you yourself will stay true. That commitment changes us, and has ripple effects through the whole culture.
Unfortunately, these effects are growing slimmer as more people eschew vows altogether. Though in the United States 83% of the upper middle class are currently married (and tend to stay married in huge numbers), less than half of working class adults are currently married, and those marriages are less stable. Much of our society no longer believes in the dream of marriage because they have not seen it work. This does not mean that people have given up on love; they have just given up on the thought that love could last forever.
I think that's a tragedy, because marriage brings huge rewards. Married people have the best sex. They're healthier. They live longer (especially the men). The women are less likely to be victims of crime or even domestic violence. They earn more money. They're far wealthier.
Their children are happier, healthier, better adjusted, and more likely to go on to higher education and marriage themselves.
And a society where kids are healthy and make good decisions, and where adults are in stable relationships, is a society where people can use their limited resources, time, and emotional energy to focus on their neighbours, on their communities, on their jobs, and on their hobbies, because there is not as much dysfunction in their lives.
I know not every marriage is perfect, and not every marriage is worth saving. But marriage is still a worthy goal, and for a brief moment last week the world was captivated by it. If that causes a few more little girls to dream of their wedding day again, or a few more little boys to start thinking about the girl that they're going to see walk down the aisle, then maybe the monarchy has proved its relevance once again.
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About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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