"Blue! I smell the blue!"

The boys went to their regular babysitter for three hours yesterday, but I didn't have my regular job to go to. I decided to tape, prime, and paint Oliver's room. I worked like a maniac for three hours, allowing myself one water break (but only what could be drank in one long swallow). And I did it! The boy has a blue room. He loves it and says the room smells like blue.

I motivated myself by chanting, "I'm Michael Phelps. I'm Michael Phelps." It's hard to describe how difficult it is to get anything done in the house, especially the boys' rooms. If they're asleep, they're in their rooms, and if they're awake, they're within five inches of me. So I had to go for the gold when I had the chance. I had to want it like Michael Phelps wants to win, and I did.

I was disappointed, then, to read Gregory Fruehwirth's article in The Christian Century. In "Letting Go", monk Fruehwirth says in the spiritual journey we come to realize "that much of our previous activity flowed from anxiety and grasping, self-centered desire." We move toward a "continual letting go" in which we realize that it is meditation and silent prayer that really matters. Eventually people move to active service again, but now motivated by "divine love for the world."

My painting was all about anxiety and grasping. I was anxious that my son would grow up in a room with dirty walls and ceiling, blanket-curtain nailed to a window, and no decorations. (It's been like that for 18 mos.) I was grasping for something better. Prayer and meditation were not in order. Hmmm, unless my "I'm Michael Phelps" mantra counts as meditation, in which case I'd need to rewrite this post.

Of course, I do realize that a room is just a room. But, wow, did it ever feel good to be just painting it. Just painting the hell out of it.

The glory of Margaret

It would be hard to exaggerate how important Margaret Mead is to me. As an undergraduate I wrote a paper about her that, when I look at it today, makes me blush and feel embarrassed for the person who wrote it. I don't have it on hand here, but the thesis was something like, "Margaret Mead, woman extraordinaire, faced trials in a patriarchial world but overcame them with astounding beauty and outrageous justice. When the world said sit down, she danced. And today she dances still, if only in our hearts. Dance on, Margaret! Dance on!" And on and on I went.

She made me believe that intellectual strength was a kind of female beauty. She awakened me to how other cultures become mirrors in which we see new possibilities for our own. She made the academic life seem possible, wonderful, and feminine. And she still does all of that for me.

I knew she was bisexual and had a long-term relationship with Ruth Benedict, but I was more scandalized by her three marriages. Three! As a public intellectual, Mead promoted a fairly conservative view of family, especially motherhood and childraising. She was profoundly pro-child, and was concerned about how 1960s feminism, working women, and household changes would impact children. I mistook her for a family-values conservative who had unsquelchable bisexual feelings.

I've struggled this week, reading To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead. Mead was a free love advocate (in her words, a 'polygamist'), meaning that she believed it possible to love numerous people at the same time, without damage to oneself or any of the partners. Her husbands knew and agreed to this arrangement when they married (the first was a free-love Episcopal priest). She wanted to be married and be a mother, but could only give 'less than half' of her heart to a man. So there was Ruth Benedict on the side, but then the others (including Benedict) had others on the side.

I read alot about sexual diversity and I'm not too often shocked, but this disturbs me (probably b/c it is within my own culture, so it's more plausible than an extremely different culture). As I read her letters, I just thought "Too much drama!" For me, being married means I'm just not available for romantic possibility, for flirting, for emotional exploration with other lovers. My drama is contained to one relationship, and it seems to diminish over time. We have too much work to do together -- and maybe the work of raising a family rightly replaces the work of relational drama and explorations of compatibility.

Judging from her daughter's accounts, Mead was a wonderful mother who raised her daughter thoughtfully, if unconventionally (group household, lots of time away from her child). And some of her lovers enjoyed her with the non-jealousy and pleasure of free love. But still, it doesn't sit right with me. I feel disappointed that she would pursue personal romantic drama for so many years of her adulthood. As I said to my husband after agonizing about the issue, "I guess I just don't believe in free love."

I suppose the Christian response to my opinion would be, "Duh." But this woman has inspired so much in my life -- including the value of cultural relativism -- so I will go to great pains to take each of her ideas seriously. But on this one, we'll have to part ways. I think love is costly, not free. And I believe a person can plumb the depths of human experience with just one lover, or maybe even leave some of the depths unplumbed for the sake of fidelity.

But Margaret Mead is not diminished as my mentor. She inspired me once again, this time to clarify life-long values that I choose to carry through my adulthood. Reminds me of the e.e.cummings poem that i can't quote -- that we travel the world only to return home and know it for the first time.

Just to tide you over

It came. The end-of-semester e-mail I've come to expect. (Text is paraphrased and anonymized, of course.)

"Dr. Paris, can we talk about my grade in your class? I studied so hard for the final and I'm so disappointed in my score. I don't know what I did wrong. I don't want you to think I wasn't paying attention or wasn't studying. I just didn't do as well as I had hoped."

My reply:
"The 98 you earned on the exam was a wonderful score. When set alongside your other semester grades of 95, 98, 100, and 100, it earned you a very high A in the class. You did an amazing job. I'm proud of you and didn't expect anything more. It's OK to get one wrong. In fact, it's OK to get lots wrong. Your best is good enough, and even when you don't do your best, you're still good enough. And truly, you don't need me to tell you this, because your own self already knows it. But I'm happy to say it, whenever you need to hear it, so e-mail again any time."

These e-mails pain me because they are like letters from my student self to my professor self. Just before I received this student's e-mail, in fact, I had been berating myself for the A- I earned in a sociology class during graduate school in 1997. If I hadn't been engaged, I would have focused more on the class. I shouldn't have taken a class outside my field. The professor didn't like me. Still doesn't.

My response to my student was, of course, only about partly about her. So I sent myself a copy of the e-mail, and wow, was it ever reassuring to read.

My favorite Buddhist mama priest shared some of her overflowing encouragement with her readers. She said it's OK to borrow from others, just to tide you over until you look deeper inside yourself.

Courage

It wasn't easy to eat an entire brownie sundae with chocolate sauce and whipped cream while watching the finale of The Biggest Loser, but I persevered. My husband says I must have a positive body image.

Michelle: - 110 lbs.
Jenell: + 1 lb.

Santa: yes or no?

My kids are right on the precipice of imagination: scratchy monsters, dinosaurs and talking wolves are all becoming characters in our everyday lives. That's great, but what should I tell them about Santa?

It's not just that if rearranged, the letters in his name spell Satan, though such a coincidence (or is it a God-incidence?) does give me pause. It's more the race and class dimensions of Santa's identity and his social role. Should we really encourage children to project their material aspirations onto an idealized white man? As a full-time working woman, I don't want my own hard work, income generation, present-purchasing and gift-wrapping to not only be entirely discredited, but all attributed to a benevolent white man. And I also don't want to encourage my children to associate material wealth, kindness and generosity, and feasting with whiteness and maleness.

I once knew a poor Latina woman who struggled to afford any Christmas presents for her six children. At a church gathering, someone mentioned Santa. Tina barked, "No way I'm telling my kids about Santa! I worked hard for these presents and they're going to thank me for them. No white man is getting credit for this!" It was funny, but also totally true.

Take the Easter bunny as a counter-example. A bunny that acts like a person? That's crazy -- totally implausible, but fun to imagine. A weak little animal suddenly gaining strength and animation -- that's funny! There's an upside-downness to the Easter bunny that models kingdom power dynamics. The weak become strong, the meek become players, the animal blesses the human. There's good theological potential there. If Santa were a refugee, or a woman of color, or a plant or animal, I could probably get on board.

But theologically speaking, Santa is in direct competition with Jesus, and it seems that Jesus pales in comparison. They're both bearded white men, but Santa gives more hugs and lets you sit on his lap. They're both invisible characters that appear from time to time, so how do you convince a child that though you once told them both were real, only Jesus is really real? They both listen to petitions, but Santa grants wishes in material, fun, lit-up ways. Jesus occasionally answers, but with much less reliability than Santa. Your odds are much better if you pray to Santa for a Wii than if you pray to Jesus for your fighting parents to not divorce.

This Christmas I've been seriously reflecting on Tina's words. We need to decide, probably this year, what to tell the boys about Santa. I'm inclined to tell them Santa is like the Easter bunny and the scratchy monster, a silly game we play when we give presents. I don't want to let them believe Santa is real, but of course I worry about being a freaky anthropologist parent, denying my children their own culture simply because I've deconstructed it to smithereens. I don't want to encourage American race and class sensibilities, and even more important, I want to protect the possibility that they may come to believe Jesus is really real.

What do you think? I'd really appreciate other perspectives.

Open letter to Rich Cizik

Rich Cizik is no longer with the National Association for Evangelicals (NAE), after stating in a Fresh Air interview that he is shifting in his views of civil unions. If I understand it correctly, Cizik continues to believe that biblical marriage is between a man and a woman, and that legal marriages should continue to be between a man and a woman, but that civil unions ought to be available to same-sex couples. I have long admired Cizik for learning in public -- he lets us watch him learn and grow as a thinker and as a Christian (especially on environmental issues). This makes some people think he is wishy-washy or slipping down a slope, but it makes me think he's smart.

Leith Anderson said in a CT interview that Cizik had to go because "his credibility as spokesperson for the NAE was irreparably compromised."

I disagree. Support of civil unions does not compromise one's evangelical status, in my opinion. Honestly, I can believe in the authenticity of someone's evangelical identity even if they are totally gay affirming. Evangelicalism needs some boundary markers, but theology on homosexuality should not be one. It's not that I don't have any standards at all -- Ted Haggard's choices, for instance, did make compromise his credibility, perhaps irreparably as head of NAE, but not necessarily irreparable for his evangelical identity. The truth on gay issues is that Christians of good will disagree. I'd rather air the disagreements than cast minority views as disagreeable and promote a public face of homogeneous conservativsm that isn't true.

Rich Cizik, you may not ever read this blog, but if you do, please know that I still consider you a wonderful spokesperson and representative of the evangelical movement. You represented evangelicals as intelligent, critical thinkers, learners, and conversant with diverse social others. Now you're making them appear self-protective and repressive, but that's their problem, not yours.

Ladders and tables

I recently visited the anthropology department of a big city secular research university. It had been several years since I had bumped up against the status ladder of secular academe -- it was my head that bumped, seeing as most of the ladder is far, far above my rung.

After defending myself and my university (probably unsuccessfully) as not fundamentalist, a professor introduced me to her colleagues as "Jenell-who-teaches-eight-classes-a-year-can-you-believe-that?" We compared jobs, and I don't think it was just our mutual anthropology that made us see we were really comparing cultures. I teach eight classes a year, spend lots of time with students, publish a little, produce a bit of primary research, and will likely never again do fieldwork as intensive as my doctoral work. She teaches four dreaded classes each year, avoids undergraduates, publishes university press books regularly, and spends semesters -- even years -- doing fieldwork away from the university. Her department is hiring, and 300 qualified applicants are after the lone position. People with only one university press book published within one year of defending their dissertation are shit out of luck when compared to people with two university press books published within three years of the dissertation.

In 1998, when I first went on the job market after defending my dissertation, I worried over whether teaching at a Christian college would be a casting of pearls (knowledge, time, and energy) before swine (the undergradutes whose tuition dollars, of course, make universities run). A mentor said, disappointed, "I hoped you'd go to a research university. You could get a good job if you tried." But I was trying, and I am still trying. If I were climbing a different ladder altogether, that would be clear, but teaching colleges, community colleges, vo techs, and faith-based universities are all linked to research universities despite having institutional missions and workplace cultures that seem second-best in light of research university standards. It would be to our detriment to separate ourselves -- the gold standard of peer-reviewed publication and the research that is thereby published is worth being called 'golden.' It's tempting to denigrate those high on the ladder as personal and institutional defense, but this would be unwise. I just wish higher ed could be a web of participants and linkages, not a ladder with a single measure of status and value.

But then what a day I had yesterday, a day for vocational clarity. I had a personal essay about mothering accepted to a regional parenting newspaper. I talked with students in class about whether becoming a critical thinker is worth the pain of losing naive faith. A student shared with me his strategy for honoring premarital chastity. A colleague and I made a little headway on a project that will likely be published with a Christian publisher. If I were at a research university, these things could hardly be celebrated -- maybe not even mentioned -- much less written on a vitae. But at a Christian college, they are all marks of a very, very good day.

I'm glad my research university colleagues are doing what they do -- I eat their work like food, learning about the sex lives of precolonial Melanesian Sambia, the lung capacity of Han migrants in Tibet, and how Puerto Rican witchcraft produces religious "heritage" (all interesting anthropology research I've come across recently). Teaching eight classes a year makes it impossible for all but the outrageously exceptional scholar to pursue such focused and sustained work. I'll eat their work and lick my lips in delight, but will set my own table with teaching, mentoring, doing field research (or not) as I'm able, and writing what I like to write.

Need gift book ideas?

Sometimes I read things that aren't about homosexuality! Living Gently in a Violent World is co-authored by Stanley Hauerwas (Duke Divinity School) and Jean Vanier (founder of L'Arche). It's about disability and how disabled people, as well as the notion of disability, can help us all learn about becoming more gentle.

I'd offer you a quote, but it was so good I gave it to a friend the day I finished reading it.

Amen

The only thing harder than parenting is not parenting. That was irredeemable and unbearable; this is just unmanageable and exhuasting. I don't mean, "boy, do I have my hands full" in the chit chat sense, when people spend their spare time talking about how they don't have any spare time. I mean, "boy, do I have my hands full" in the way a person might talk to their therapist, as people do when they have the spare time and money to see a therapist.

The phrase has come to me in waves this week --
- when my feelings were hurt on Thanksgiving
- when the fifth person in my household started vomiting (the fourth person was me)
- when I was woken early this morning from desperately-needed sleep by a boy yelling "Mommy, get my ..."
- when four different people really needed me today, all legitimately, but all at the same time and for different purposes

When my triplets died, I swore off petitionary prayer. When God doesn't answer your life's greatest prayer, why ever ask for anything again? If new prayers go unanswered, it's just further disappointment. And even worse, to have new, much smaller wishes, granted - that's insult added to injury. But in weeks like this, I'm pleased to find myself praying to every God I've ever imagined. To Santa God I say, "I've been good. Please, please, please help me." To Judge God I say, "Have mercy." To Daddy God I say, "You know I can't do this. Help me." To Anne Lamott's God, I say, "Help me, help me, help me" (isn't that one of her two prayers?) It's not even that I take my prayers all that seriously, in terms of my understanding the God to which I pray, or my calculated expectations for justice in answers. I just have to say them, out loud, over and over. And in a sense, it seems that to ask for help is to receive help, right then and there.

We've started saying prayers together, me and the little monsters. I say, "What did you like today?," and we say thank you for that. Last night, while three were jumping on the bed and one (myself) was not, we offered thanks for teletubbies, the boy down the street, sausage meat, and pajamas.

And I -- morning, noon and night -- offer thanks for this wild life with these wild boys, with the same passionate desperation with which I beg for strength to raise them.

Phonecall to YMCA

Jenell: Hi. Did I leave my walkman on a machine this morning?

She: What does it look like?

Jenell: It's white, and has an arm band.

She: Um, we have a white one here, but it looks more like something on Star Wars that would transport a person from one dimension to another. Does that sound like yours?

Jenell: I haven't tried that yet, but maybe I will.

She: We'll hold it at the front desk for you. Bye!

Word of the day: countertransference

I've been reading a book for counselors that warns against countertransference, the tendency for counselors to begin getting their needs met, pursuing affectionate mutuality, in the counselor-client relationship. Warning signs: the counselor has unmanageable anxiety and sense of intimdation, sense of supreme power, anticipation of excitement in seeing a particular client or relishing in a sense of feeling special or being needed, compulsion to share personal problems with a client, desire to hold or reassure client through physical touch.

At Christian colleges, we professors are encouraged to have close, meaningful mentoring relationships with our students. We eat meals with them, have them in our homes, and enjoy relationships that are mutually beneficial. But -- along with never having been trained as classroom teachers -- we aren't taught skills for boundary maintenance in relationships with students. (What the hell are we taught in graduate school, if not to do the job we are pursuing? Mastery of an incredibly small body of literature and skills to produce knowledge to advance that literature, I suppose.)

In my second year of teaching, a senior professor asked me, in a jovial but competitive tone, "So, have you cultivated a following yet?" He had quite a following, one that included nearly every element in the warning list for countertransference. Professors can come to feel powerful, relishing in the sense of being special, and cross boundaries with students to get their own ego-needs met. In Christian settings, we strangely reverse our usual theology and emphasize the importance of not crossing sexual and physical boundaries in the workplace. But most of the time, evangelicals argue that the spirit is more real, more important, than the body. We ought to give equal attention to how best protect the spirituality and intellectual boundaries of students, and especially how to engage in close mentoring relationships during seasons of life when our own personal needs are going unmet.

I responded to that senior faculty member, "What would I do with a following? Sounds like a hassle." The last thing I need is a bunch of sycophants draining me of energy and time. What I do need is a spiritually engaged, friendly intellectual community that includes everyone from first-year students to senior faculty. Each has a place in the community, and we need to know and respect those various places, but no one is worthy to lead others to truth, and no one should belittle him/herself in becoming follower to a great charisma or even a great mind.

John Alexis Edgren, founder of Bethel University (where I worked before coming to Messiah), believed the teacher-student relationship should be "one of real friendship
and helpfulness" rather than one of "master and subordinate." Of course, he was probably assuming that the friendships would be between men of Swedish descent and Baptist religion. Our diverse workplaces certainly raise particular challenges, but his vision is sound.