If you follow political news at all, by now you?ve probably heard of Julia, the character who made her debut recently on President Obama?s campaign website. The "Life of Julia" page documents this fictional woman?s life, from her entrance into the Head Start program at age 3, to her retirement and receiving of monthly Social Security benefits at age 67. Launched May 4, the chicly designed slideshow aims to demonstrate ?how President Obama?s policies help one woman over her lifetime?and how Mitt Romney would change her story.? Thus, it?s stoked the ongoing national argument over the size, scope, and purpose of government.
But there?s more to the story of Julia than that. A careful look at her life story reveals just how thoroughly alone Julia is. Ross Douthat of The New York Times put his finger on it when he wrote, ?. . . She seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House: no friends or siblings or extended family, no husband (?Julia decides to have a child,? is all the slideshow says), a son who disappears once school starts and parents who only matter because Obamacare grants her the privilege of staying on their health care plan until she?s 26.? Well, so what? Julia is just a cartoon character, after all, and not a very well-developed one at that. If the woman doesn?t even have facial features, why bother giving her relationships?
Continue reading ...
Like a lot of doting children, I loved Mother?s Day growing up. The holiday usually involved eating out at a fancy restaurant (not the norm for our family), where we gave my mom carefully composed cards and handpicked gifts. Even into adulthood, Mother?s Day never caused problems for me.
And then I miscarried. Last Mother?s Day was the first one where I felt deep down that I was supposed to be celebrating that day, yet my arms were empty. I should have had a one month old, not a spare bedroom filled with books and supplies we never used. Like many women, I dreaded the day, wishing I could sleep through it and wake up on Monday. And here I am, one year later, arms still empty due to infertility, still trying to make sense of this holiday. As Wendy Horger Alsup so helpfully said at Her.meneutics last year, Mother?s Day can be a painful holiday for many women. Maybe you are facing the first Mother?s Day without your own mom. Maybe you are longing for a child, but financially cannot afford an extra mouth to feed right now. Maybe you have a wayward child, and all you want is for him to call you this Mother?s Day and say ?Mom, I?m saved.? Or maybe you are like me, and are facing another Mother?s Day plagued by infertility. It?s easy to be overwhelmed by the commercials for cards and flowers and myriad of morning-show segments all dedicated to the one thing you want most. And then you throw in the Sunday morning church service, with its peppy messages to ?all the moms out there,? and you are now one conversation away from a meltdown.
Chocolate. Spa gift certificates. Flowers. Fruit baskets. These are some of the most popular Mother?s Day gifts. It?s easy to see why a conscious Dad and his loving children might want to spoil Mom. She does a lot.
In fact, according to the Tenth Annual Salary survey by Salary.com, moms work almost 97 hours a week. When her duties?broken down into ten categories such as CEO, driver, housekeeper, and my favorite, psychologist?were evaluated together, stay-at-home moms ?earn? a whopping $115,000 per year ($36,968 as a base salary and $78,464 in overtime). Moms that work outside the home earned $63,472 as a mom, on top of their day job. (Kind of puts perspective on a card and bouquet of flowers, but I digress.) Given those hours, it?s no wonder a study last year by ForbesWoman found 92 percent of working moms and 89 percent of stay-at-home moms feel ?overwhelmed by work, home and parenting responsibilities.? ?We see [Mom] as the compilation of 10 jobs in one person,? Evilee Ebb, the general manager of Salary.com, told Forbes when the survey came out. ?The breadth of Mom?s responsibilities is beyond what most workers could ever experience day-to-day. Imagine if you had to attract and retain a candidate to fill this role??
?As Christian women, have we set the bar too high for ourselves? Are we striving to achieve our own version of the American dream, some sort of Focus on the Family all-star clan where the kids all love each other, while also reading above grade level and excelling in at least two extracurricular activities??
So asks Amy Spiegel in her new book, Letting Go of Perfect: Women, Expectations, and Authenticity (B&H Books), in which the Tennessee native aims to expose the ?manmade construction of expectations and stereotypes that steal our joy and make us crazy.? Wife of 14 years to Jim, who teaches philosophy at Taylor University, and mother of four, Amy and I recently curled up in adjacent wicker chairs to discuss ways that we can resist bowing to the image of the ?perfect Christian woman,? instead caring for ourselves and showing grace to each other. What led you to write this book at this point in your life? I tell a story in the book about going to a prayer meeting with six other women and feeling really inadequate, and then at the end of the meeting realizing that all the women, who appeared to be spiritual superwomen, struggled with the same feelings of inadequacy. The pressures we put on ourselves to be perfect are not from God. I realized that if even these super-spiritual women felt those pressures, then the message of freedom needed to be shared.
In 1981, more than a century after America ended slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, the West African nation of Mauritania abolished slavery, the last country in the world to do so. According to a CNN report, since Mauritania?s later criminalization of slavery in 2007, only one?one?slave owner has been successfully prosecuted in a country where an estimated 10 to 20 percent of citizens are slaves.
It?s hard to imagine that in the same year the first woman joined the Supreme Court, the AIDS virus was discovered, the world raptly watched as Princess Di married Prince Charles, and MTV was launched, one nation still permitted slavery. For we moderns, whose days are ruled by objective markers of time?years, months, weeks, minutes, with Google calendars and Outlook reminders to track them all?it?s easy to forget that time is relative. With lives characterized by the overwhelming sense of time relentlessly marching on, it?s hard to remember that God transcends time. Yet, we often insist, adamantly, that change come instantaneously?or at least that change occur in others in perfect synchronization with our own. Yes, time is of the human realm, not God?s. And within the vast, dark sea of human time, moments of epiphany glimmer here and there like beacons of hope, transcending time and changing the warp of human experience forever.
Last summer, my best friends and I heaved a collective sigh of relief upon turning 30. How good it is, we admitted, to leave the restless, agitated wanderings of our 20s and begin to settle into adulthood.Thirty, we exhaled, for once comfortable committing to relationships, suddenly willing to send little root tendrils down into our own plots of earth. We were no longer holding in our tummies, content with our healthy, capable bodies, accepting the scars of surgeries and stretchmarks not as flaws but as badges of honor we had earned.
For women, negotiating adulthood has become increasingly difficult over the past half-century. Often a whole decade, your 20s, is taken up with figuring out how to find your place in society. As much as I appreciate the doors that have opened for women since the 1950s, I have to admit that the loss of a prescribed cultural path for women (education, immediately followed by marriage, immediately followed by motherhood), made navigating my post-college life confusing, to say the least. Everyone told me, "You're so gifted!" but no one could tell me how to steward those gifts into maturity. Perhaps that's why I am sympathetic to HBO's acclaimed new comedy show Girls, which premiered April 15. Wittily written and capably directed by 25-year-old Lena Dunham, it portrays with agonizingly accurate detail the confusion of being an overprivileged 20-something woman today. Set in New York City, the show follows the floundering of four well-educated young women trying to navigate the path to adulthood, and while the specifics of their struggles may be quite different from mine, the anxiety at the heart of it is much the same.
Is donating sperm and eggs an act of kindness to a stranger or a breach of our common humanity? Should wealthy women be able to hire surrogate mothers to bear their babies? What are the ethical questions surrounding adoption, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and prenatal genetic testing? These topics make the headlines, from Time magazine?which recently profiled a man who has sired at least 70 offspring via sperm donation?to The Atlantic, which recently commented on the problematic ethics of a society in which everything is up for sale, to Ann Patchett?s recent novel State of Wonder, which explores the possibility of lifelong fertility.
From time eternal, men and women have been making babies, usually by choice, and usually in the old-fashioned way. But in recent years, making babies has become fraught with promises and possibilities never before imagined, whether the opportunity to conceive children later in life, identify genetic abnormalities in embryos, or hire surrogate mothers from halfway around the globe to carry an embryo to term. Ethical questions often get shoved to the side in the face of both rapid technological advancement and the emotions involved. Who wants to raise concerns about the production of millions of babies who bring great joy to millions of parents? Thankfully, Ellen Painter Dollar has waded into the murky waters of reproductive technology in her new book No Easy Choice: A Story of Disability, Parenthood, and Faith in an Age of Advanced Reproduction (Westminster John Knox). Ellen begins with her own story as a woman with OI, osteogenesis imperfecta. She passed OI, a genetic disorder that causes frequent broken bones throughout childhood, to her first child, Leah, and wondered whether it was right for her to conceive other children who might inherit the same condition.
Regardless of their fame or fortune, no matter how many books or albums they?ve sold or level of influence they?ve achieved, never once had it occurred to me to be jealous of Reba McEntire or Rick Warren.
Yet there I sat, watching country singer McEntire on NBC?S Who Do You Think You Are? (Fridays, 8pm EST) and Pastor Warren on PBS?s Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates (Sundays, 8pm EST), feeling the envy rise as they lived my dream?the dream of digging deep into family history. If I had the spare change or moments, I?d sign up for Ancestry.com and whittle away the hours searching out my family tree. I?d travel to the American South like McEntire did, trying to piece together why my Danish great-grandfather moved his Swedish wife and young daughters out of Chicago, dragged them down to Alabama, and then disappeared. I?d head out West to Washington State to see if I could discern why my great-grandmother became a preacher?a Christian Scientist preacher. And then I?d explore the other side, heading back to Sweden, stopping only in Stockholm long enough to pick up my cousins so we could explore the island our grandmothers were raised on. The one that boasts royal summer residences and yet was the one on which my 10-year-old grandmother was sold to a neighboring farm. The one she fled from at age 16 to come to the United States. Alone. I used to think it was the writer in me that wanted to know what happened there, so I could tell these stories, try to cull meaning from the bits of generation hurts and mysteries. But now I know differently: The longing to understand from whom and from whence we come is more than an artist?s dream.
Apologists have a reputation for being obnoxious know-it alls. I should know. I am one.
An apologist is a person who defends something. I?ve sat next to apologists for veganism and rode horse-back with apologists for fashion. You might sleep next to someone who?s an apologist for a belief you?ve privately rejected. For example, my husband has been a faithful apologist for the beneficial pleasures of video gaming. Bless his heart. We all have ideas, beliefs, and rituals we want to defend, ideas we think are better for all people, at all times, and in all places. And we can argue our beliefs with the innocence of doves or the brashness of WWF wrestlers. Like women wrestlers, women apologists are curiosities. I didn?t grow up wanting to be an apologist. I grew up longing to be a librarian (the thought of all those books still makes my heart skip). But I got sucked in at age 17, when I left my private high school of 500 to become a missionary to the big bad public high school of 2,000. I was crazy for Jesus. But I was not crazy about the confrontations I faced: with the atheist guy in my AP English class or the girl who partied all weekend while making God look outdated. I remembered them mocking the Bible together. What did Jesus have to do with them?
?Bill Moyers would have loved your talk and Fox News would have debunked it. How do you expect to have credibility among conservative evangelicals??
The question was pitched contentiously from the front of the auditorium at Calvin College, while I sat further back, waving my arms, Hermione Granger-style, hoping to have the chance to ask Marilynne Robinson a teensy question about a character from her acclaimed novel Housekeeping. As is usual for me when I hear what might be taken for fighting words, I became chilled, and trembled a little. In short, I felt afraid. Robinson wasn?t. Without a hint of the fear that I felt simply as one who admires her greatly, even too well, Robinson said: ?The only obligation I recognize is to say what I believe to be true [...] and to say it with kindness. I believe that is how a Christian conversation should proceed.? The audience broke into applause. Later, by chance, I passed the questioner outside, where he was still fuming into his cell phone about Bill Moyers and Fox News. In the preface to her newest book, a collection of essays entitled When I Was a Child I Read Books, Robinson, a Pulitzer-prize winning novelist and essayist, suggests that Americans have ?ceased to aspire to Democracy,? the kind of spirit that gave rise to laws like the ones in seventeenth-century Maryland forbidding the use of the words ?papist? (Catholic) or ?round-head? (Puritan), ?fighting words in the Old World.? Today, Robinson argues, ?it is seen as un-American [. . .] to reject participation in the bitter excitements that can surround religious difference.? The subject of her talk at the recent Festival of Faith and Writing was the fear that accompanies these discussions and the ?increasing normalization? of fear more generally.
Username
Password
Remember Me
