James and Jenell Plus Three

The other day the umpteenth person said to me, "You're just like Kate from Jon and Kate Plus Eight!" If by "like Kate" you mean controlling, domineering, nervous, complaining, and dramatic, then I'll decline the comparison. But if "like Kate" means matter-of-fact, multi-tasking, practical, and survivalist, then I'll accept with appreciation. And whatever the umpteen mean by our marital dynamic being like theirs, well, I have no idea.

We do live twenty minutes from Jon and Kate (they're in Elizabethtown, PA), and we have the same Lowe's kitchen island. And we're Christians. And we used the same fertility treatments. Twice, like them. But the similarities end there -- we lost everything in a pregnancy only half the size of theirs. And our twins came second. And then our singleton. But I suppose no one's really comparing our families as such, just comparing my expressions of maternal overwhelmedness with hers.

So I said to my husband, "The umpeenth person just said I'm just like Kate from Jon and Kate Plus 8." He has a wonderful grasp on the literal, as well as a wonderful way of letting me be me, and responded, "We're nothing like them. We don't have eight kids, and I'm not Asian." Sounds (in spirit, not literally) like something Jon might say, don't you think?

I am woman, see me gather

But if I were to abandon heterosexuality, what are my options? Our cultural repertoire of sexual identities, alphabetic though it may be, is still very limited. Regardless of how one positions oneself, one is still emphasizing erotic attraction as a fulcrum point for making sense of and presenting the self.

Hallman's book focuses on how sexuality and its discontents emerge from problematic family dynamics, but what about culture? I may come from a dysfunctional family, to be sure, but my culture is equally dysfunctional. I also wonder about the simple notion of "fit." Even aside from dysfunction, like a quiet child in a loud family, or a bookish child in a sports family, some individuals just don't fit very well.

I don't fit well with gender hierarchy (not that anyone does, but some are able to accomodate it or even come to value it). I prefer flat, egalitarian structures, and situations in which gender matters minimally (if you call reproducing the species 'minimal'). I'd like to rely on gender when necessary, but for the most part just live as humans. And I'd rather live in a society without subdivisions of humans based upon sexual feelings. Though I write and speak about sexuality b/c of the world I live in, honestly, I'd rather have sexual feelings and behaviors be mostly private, and be more thoughtful about which parts of sexuality need to be public (marriage choices, for instance, or responding to sexual violence).

I think I'd be a better fit for !Kung culture (the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, best known for The Gods Must Be Crazy). Gender difference is respected and even honored when gender matters substantively, but much of the time a common humanity is more important. Women gather, except when they feel like hunting. Marriages are arranged, except women refuse to attend their own weddings, or leave marriages when they need to. Ideals of femininity and masculinity are mostly the same -- everyone should be cooperative, smart, fairly self-sufficient, emotionally expressive, and sexually appropriate. It's no utopia, but it's a culture that appeals to my gut sense of how I ought to live in the world.

Whether your problem is in your sexuality, relationships with same or opposite sex people, inability to accomodate patriarchy, or something else, our individualized culture identies you as the locus of the problem. You are the locus of experiencing and maybe even resolving the problem, but you are not the problem. We exist in inextricable relationships to our families and their histories, and our culture and its history. Not that shifting the blame to family or culture is a solution either. By imagining myself in other worlds, blame begins to dissipate and the world as it is comes into clearer view -- the world I need to learn to live in with love.

My on-going struggle with heterosexuality

Janelle Hallman's The Heart of Female Same-Sex Attraction is fantastic. So is Jonathan Ned Katz's The Invention of Heterosexuality. I'm beginning to find my affiliation with heterosexuality just as problematic as my affiliation with whiteness. Katz describes how sexuality was organized in western society before heterosexuality, from Greece to Victorian America. Yes, men and women were attracted to each other and yes, they had sex, but that didn't make them heterosexuals. Heterosexuality, as an idea, developed in the late 19th century, and only exists as a morally elevated norm by virtue of that which it denigrates, the homosexual. Who needs it? My top three identity categories are woman, human, and Christian -- those get me where I need to go in life. Sexuality gets worked out in my humanity, my gender, and my faith. I don't need or want a sexual identity that teaches me to internalize social norms, think of myself as better or more normal than others, and to shame whatever feelings or behaviors wander from a sacrilized cultural norm.

Katz surely wouldn't appreciate Hallman's book written for counselors helping women with unwanted same-sex attraction. Hallman is working in the ex-gay genre, but with more sophistication and intelligence and nuance than I've ever seen in books of this type. (I also appreciate Jeanette Howard's writings and Elizabeth Moberly's, but Hallman takes it to a new level.) She offers a theory of women's same-sex attractions -- essential that same-sex desire is a survival or reparative strategy on the part of women with difficulties in their relationships with their mothers, fathers, or both. She acknowledges an innate or genetic element to sexual attraction as well, that varies between individuals. And she doesn't claim to explain every single lesbian or bisexual woman out there.

She makes the case that women's sexuality is very different than men's. I resonated more with this book's analysis of women's sexuality than with some Christian books on 'homosexuality' that don't distinguish genders, and make "the homosexual" seem like nearly a different species than human. Lesbianism, then, is more a manifestation of women's sexuality than an expression of an omnigendered "homosexuality." I like this very much, though at the same time I want to emphasize that we are all humans, and men and women are not so different, sexually, as to say we are from different planets. But common humanity and different genders are sufficient categories, I think, to understand sexuality and its diversities. Heterosexual women and lesbians become different, in type, because of sexuality, when in fact they might have more in common in their womanhood.

Of course, "homosexual" or "gay" or "LGBTQ" is a viable and powerful political identity. The categories emerged, in part, because people coalesced around those elements of their lives in which they were most oppressed and discriminated against. That's the hard sell in my theory here -- it is not in LGBTQ peoples' best interests, socially and politically, to abandon the identity categories that empower them to pursue their rights and interests.

Maybe if heterosexuals, especially religious ones, could use their socially constructed identities for something other than self-elevation and discrimination of others, then we could start getting somewhere.

Too Queer For Me

Queering the Non/Human (ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird) makes me remember that undergraduate theology professor shouting down the hall at me when I changed my major from Bible to anthropology, "Don't do it! You'll become a liberal!"

The book is about "the category of the human and the act of queering itself."

Incomprehensible chapter titles include:
- Queering the beast: the Antichrist's gay wedding
- Animating revolt/revolting animation: penguin love, doll sex and the spectacle of the queer non-human
- Necrosexuality

The book is featured as a new release in an anthropology catalog. I'm curious to understand what the authors are saying, but even more, I'm concerned about renegotiating the category of "human." Seems to me that last time western scholars took on that task, they excluded darker races from humanity or assigned them partial human status. If this book word-plays around with human boundaries without acknowledging the racial history of such a task, I won't be pleased.

So there's only one thing I could do: order it for my college's library. (It's a small college, and I think I'm beginning to make my mark on the library collection!)

After I read it, I'll let you know whether or not I still think I'm human.

If you find yourself at Messiah College this morning, you're welcome to come to my Presidential Scholar Lecture. Frey 110. "Studying Sexuality: Towards a Compassionate Pedagogy" Students from my class, Sexuality in Cross-Cultural Perspective, are doing a poster session and I'm giving a lecture.

If that doesn't entice you, the donuts and coffee afterwards surely will.

How many days in a row could you do it?

One of my readers -- perhaps a sex-crazed one -- sent me this link to CBS coverage of a Texas pastor encouraging his married parishoners to have sex every day for a week. I had read elsewhere of a pastor challenging his married parishoners to sex every day for a month, and then I just read a review of a book (review was in Christianity Today) about sex every day for a year.

It all makes me uncomfortable. As a wise friend said recently, "Christians just don't deal well with sex. They should just stop trying." Married Christian people discussing their daily sex makes me wince, like when I hear about parents having sex, or if I hear details about clitorectomy.

Princeton anthropologist Marie Griffith has a new book forthcoming that analyzes my dilemma, and I can hardly wait until it's published. Let's all promise to have sex every day until it is released.


Holy Sex: The Sexual Revolution in Christian America, from Alfred Kinsey to True Love Waits
(Under Contract with W.W. Norton & Company)
This book analyzes the historical changes that have transformed conservative Christianity from its onetime tight-lipped prudishness about sex (or at least what many imagine to be such) to current public fixations on sexual issues ranging from pornography, adultery, and abortion to homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and abstinence-only sexuality education. Enhancing this historical emphasis are extensive interviews with a sizeable sampling of contemporary Christian women and men, who comment revealingly on their own sexual histories, current beliefs, and reactions to the sexual revolution in their churches.

Not Mary Two-Name

One of my friends has a hyphenated last name, I'll call her Mary Smith-Woods. The computer system at work couldn't handle two last names, and people couldn't handle it either. A group of men began referring to her as "Mary Two-Name." I don't think that is the right way to go... but what would be, in the following instance?

In terms of gender inclusive writing, is there a rule for referring to the last name of a person with a non-hyphenated last name? Let's say I am writing about Barbara Brown Taylor, someone who always uses both last names. Would I write, "Taylor wrote a new book", or "Brown Taylor wrote a new book"?

Please don't point out the fact that I myself have had a double non-hyphenated last name for nearly 11 years. I don't write about myself in the third person, so I haven't had to resolve this specific issue.

Project "Send Jenell to Washington"

See the thing is, my state is really close to Washington. Senators and members have a limited number of tickets to the Inauguration, but they're all taken for states close to D.C., because people can so easily travel there. My senator's office said that in early January the far-away states with left-over tickets will donate them to states with waiting lists, so maybe I can get one then.

But if you live in a far-away state, you could try to get me a ticket from your senator or member. Just call them and use my name and your address for the ticket. (I believe that's fine to do - I just put a friend from another state on the PA waiting list with me). I think you might need the right name on the ticket and ID to get in to the Mall.

I went to Clinton's second Inaguration and it was very cool, but I can't remember who gave me a ticket (I still have the ticket, b/c it is cool, too). I'm feeling very strongly about going to Obama's, even if I just walk to the mall to see the crowds and then walk back to a friend's house to watch it on TV. But if I could get a ticket, that would be even better!

I'd take photos for you, text you from the event, offer all my gratitude...

Buyoancy

Church is the last place I'd go for worship, if what you mean by worship is focused, emotionally intense, personally communicative time with God. I catch that in the woods a few times a year. In church, stuff gets in the way of worship, if what you mean by stuff is music, sermons, the presence of other people, and the nursery beeper that goes off when my baby has a personal crisis.

In Sunday School yesterday we talked about alms-giving, how hard it is to give in the right spirit, and how hard it is - at least for people of our religion and social class - to ask for help and then receive it. I thought about my bedridden pregnancies and how much I hated being in daily need, and gloated a little over my present ability to walk, lift, clean, and cook without assistance.

I was all by my self-sufficient self this weekend - James was away. It was no small feat to wake, feed and dress three bodies, stuff them in the van, and then distribute them to their Sunday School classrooms. When all three go racing down the church hallway like bats out of hell, people smile and say, "You sure have your hands full!, and we smile and say, "We sure do!" But today a couple saw me and said, "Looks like you're alone. Can we help get the boys to the car?" I smiled and said, "No, I'm fine," even though I had spent the last fifteen minutes of Sunday School strategizing how I would get three hungry and tired boys, two bags and a stroller across three lanes of parking lot traffic to the van in the back row. They said, "Are you sure?", and remembering the alms-giving conversation, I said, "You know, I really do need help." So instead of pushing a stroller with a screaming toddler strapped in against his will and barking "Walk together!" to the twins as they perform parking lot kamikaze stunts, I walked calmly to the car with two other adults, each managing a child.

I still felt a little embarrassed for needing help, but mostly I felt buoyed. Like someone saw me bobbing around out there in motherhood and threw me, well, a buoy (can you throw those, or are they by definition attached to something?). I said to the bats -- I mean boys -- "We're going to make it through this day," and then we did just that.

So if what you mean by worship is being the people of God together, then I guess church can be a good place for that.

Like I always say to my kids, "Raise your hand if you smell like poop!" (Someone always does -- raise a hand, that is).

It's been a shitty, shitty day. Thank goodness it was literally so, because it's all cleaned up now. Metaphorical shit is so much more difficult.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Elizabeth McCracken's memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, is a memoir about her first pregnancy, which ended with the baby born still. She has a second baby, a healthy living one, by book's end.

Surely I took it to heart too much, but I think I wish she hadn't written it. Memoirs of loss of spouses or parents or older children can enliven the dead with memories and personality, including flaws and misdeeds. A stillborn baby or fetus is unassailable and, to a reading public, unknowable. Mothers know their fetuses and babies, but it's hard to convey that knowledge to an audience, much as it is difficult to make a baby or toddler into a distinct literary character. And babies are just so tender. As I read, I imagined typewriter keys banging hard against paper, forcing into ink and words that which is too ethereal to be pinned down with language. Just leave the baby alone; don't interpret him, and for God's sake, don't let the stupid masses glom on to his precious existence and siphon off catharsis or meaning for themselves.

And besides, the book made me feel ordinary. The way she over-read simple sympathy cards and got pissed off at people trying to be nice to her. The way she cut people, even some well-intended ones, out of her life forever. The phrases and intimacies only she and her husband understand. Pathos that passes for wisdom. The tedium of daily grief. The baby clothes, the OB/GYN stories, the ultrasounds, the labor, the disgust at other pregnant women who insist on being out in public. My experience of loss and grief was singular, except for all the ways it was just like hers and everyone else's.

And another thing, she has a healthy baby at the end. I hate happy endings in child loss memoirs. I'd rather be left in the abyss. Don't make it easy for people to feel better -- for whatever reason they chose to engage your story, make them stick with the terror of it the way you have to.

Maybe the book shouldn't have been written, but since it was, I'd recommend it far and above any other for people caring for a loved one who has lost a pregnancy or a baby. A bereaved mother doesn't need it -- her chapters unfold in days instead of pages. But those caring for her need to get a clue, and there are plenty in this dear book.

Superparents

Watching Supernanny recently, several times I've found myself siding with the parents and their excuses. The kids really are bad. The parents really are trying their best. And most of all, the parents really are tired.

Tonight's episode featured a single mother of three regularly becoming monstrous in response to her kids' monstrous monstrosities. I started tearing up when Supernanny told the mom to put the boy to bed in a way that required the mom to go into the boy's bedroom 98 times within an hour and 45 minute period. If cameras hadn't been there, that approach likely would have led to spanking and yelling and possibly hitting within 10 to 15 minutes. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Do you have any idea how tired a parent is by bedtime?

Some of the parents on Supernanny need a kick in the pants, especially women who are afraid to displease their kids and husbands who are afraid to displease their wives. But this mother's real problem was fatigue. Supernanny could have achieved the same end -- improved child behavior -- by changing the material conditions of the woman's life: a higher income to afford hired help, a good life partner, and most of all, sufficient sleep at least six nights a week.

When I'm yelling, blaming, and not attending to my children who are crying, kicking, spilling, and dumping, I suppose sometimes it's because I need to buck up and try harder. But when those moments come at the end of a 15-hour day, preceded by 300 nights of broken sleep ... come on, I just need a break. "Whatever it takes" is my parenting mantra, and I allow myself to turn to sugar and television (for them) and even tantrums (for me) when necessary. And I don't apologize for it, don't reflect on it, and don't feel bad about it (well, maybe a little - that sentence sounds a bit defensive!). It may not be pretty, but it gets us through the rough spots.

Supernanny has good advice, but sometimes -- when parents look so tired they're about to collapse -- I worry that she's kicking people who are already down. Maybe she should just be "nanny", and we could be called "superparents."

P(ete) R-ollin-s was in P(hil)a-del(F)ia

The less sense it makes, the more postmodern it is, right?

Sorry for not posting - my parents visited from Minnesota and I didn't take time away to blog.

Last weekend I attended part of the Emergent Mid-Atlantic Conference with Pete Rollins. I wanted to see what an emergent gathering would be like, and I had some pent up gratitude to express to Dr. Rollins. He's a lovely man, very euro. He speaks rapidly with lots of quotation marks and parentheses, just like he writes.

I thanked him for this: when I was interviewing for the job I now have in Pennsylvania, six months into an uncomfortable pregnancy and nervous about possibly up-ending my life for less than absolutely necessary reasons, I read this sentence in How (Not) to Speak of God. "a love that requires absolute assurance in order to act is not love...when we can say we will follow God regardless of the uncertainty, then real faith is born - for love acts not whenever a certain set of criteria has been met, but rather because it is in the nature of love to act."

I realized that I needed to _do_ what would be good for my family, not just think loving thoughts about them and wait for absolute assurance before doing anything. Pete's book reassured me that doubt is part of faith, and concealment is part of revelation, and that despite all we don't see or know, we are given enough light to take the next step.

Luke 16:1-9 -- check it out

The unscrupulous manager gets fired, but before he leaves the job, he calls his master's clients and reduces their debts without the master's knowledge. This secures good will that the manager can leverage in the future for his own survival. Not only does the master praise the former employee, he honors the reduced debts.

Eugene Peterson says this parable does not teach morality, rather it shows the improbability of grace (excerpt from The Jesus Way in The Christian Century, Oct. 7, 2008, not online). The manager was in a desperate situation and relied on his master's reputation of generosity when the manager solicited support from clients -- unethically and in a way that would be costly to his master and beneficial to himself -- on his way out the door. And his bet paid off. The master not only carried the cost of those unpaid debts, he praised the manager. In Peterson's words, the manager practiced "creative survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you'll live, really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior."

The unscrupulous manager, in his sinning, relied more on grace than many who avoid sin and do good in self-preserving ways. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus seems to dethrone morality -- right and wrong as defined by law -- suggesting that obedience (rote, surely, but maybe even genuine) is not the ultimate way to relate to law. Surely morality is important, and surely Scripture guides us in understanding personal holiness, but it seems to me that in both the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the manager, the power to judge is being taken away from humans. Right and wrong may be absolute and true, but in this instance, an immoral person deserves praise. Only the master was able to make that call.

Maybe when we make desperate, even immoral, decisions about what to do with our lives, our religion, our bodies, and our relationships, God alone understands how to judge rightly. Maybe we could have done better, and we'll be held accountable. But maybe we were practicing creative survival -- lying, cheating, or manipulating because it was the only way to dodge death or indignity in an impossible situation. Sometimes what looks like sin to one who holds the rule book is really -- in the heart of the person doing it and in the eyes of God -- risking everything to survive, hoping that grace is real.