'Why Is That Girl Wearing No Pants?'

By Joy Pullmann

Yesterday I was at the grocery store with my two toddlers. Before us walked a young lady in brightly bolored volleyball shorts, which is to say, underwear people call pants. My three-year-old son gaped at her and said, entirely innocently, "Mom! Why isn't that girl wearing any pants?"

I fumbled about trying to think of a thing to say that would be true but not close off future conversations on the subject. I came up with, "Because her mother did not teach her to wear pants." My son accepted this but was still quite confused as to why anyone would walk around in public with no pants. (And this little boy is no prude—for one, he whips down his pants in the front yard when he needs to urinate. We stopped that one, though.)

Usually when we see a young lady wearing really scandalous clothing, her mother is not too far behind, and the mother's dress makes it obvious that neither of them has any clothing propriety. In this case, the mother looked normal. But I know that mothers nowadays have lost the ethos and habit of training their children in what is right and wrong, in dress and in everything else. This is probably both because it's a lot of work to enforce morality on young barbarians, and because nowadays people falsely believe that there is no right and wrong—in appearance, or anything else. As a consequence, people really never become true adults.

Mothers Day: Sadly, Overcommercialized

By Joy Pullmann

I do not like to receive gifts for Mother's Day or Valentine's Day. And don't even think about Sweetheart's Day or whatever else they're calling further additions to the list of "buy crap no one wants because commercials made you feel guilty."

Mother's Day advertisements on my Kindle and email sidebars began a solid three weeks before Mother's Day. It may have been four weeks. Whatever it was, it was indecent. Mother's Day is not even on the A-list of holidays. That, for me, includes Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. And maybe the Fourth of July. Those would be the top two Christian holidays and the top two American holidays. (By the way, President's Day and Labor Day are also stupid.)

The Kids Come First

By Joy Pullmann

This week my husband and I made a big decision. It was to take a big pay cut and leave a job I enjoy so I can keep my kids from outside childcare. Right now, as readers know, my husband stays home with the kids most days while I work most days. I am comfortable with my children being cared for by their father if not always by me. But he will go to graduate school this fall. For a few months, I was not exactly sure what we would do with the kids, but my plan involved finding regular childcare, from either an extended family member or some nice local lady. I was not extremely pleased with the idea but was ok with our three little ones spending about 15 hours a week with someone who was not their mommy or daddy.

Long story short, another job offer came along, and I've been given the gift of cutting our income in half, which still pays our basic expenses, while continuing to do some of what I love. But, most of all, I don't have to outsource my children. And that means the most to me.

Letter to a Young Woman about Balancing a Writing Career and Kids

By Joy Pullmann

A few days ago, a college freshman emailed me to ask how I manage to work and have kids, and what a regular work day looks like for me, and if I have advice for her now. She also wants to be a writer and mother. Here's my email back to her, edited a little to add clarity and delete a few things that are unique to her situation.

Dear [young lady],
A regular day looks like crazy. :) Like right now I am standing in a New York train with my sleeping 2-month-old hanging off me in a pack. I'm here for work. I have three kids under four, and it would be utterly impossible to work if my husband did not stay at home with us (you can always ship your kids off to daycare, but I thought that would be selfish of me and knew it is also bad for their development). The littlest guy is two months old, and I mostly work around his nap schedule (luckily, the little ones sleep a lot) while my husband wrangles the other two. If I have to take or make a phone call and must not have random whining in the background, my lucky husband wrangles all the kids.

Luckily, writing and editing is very flexible and can be done reasonably at home, which is where I and many writer/editor friends work. Once your baby is about 6 months old, however, you basically either need to go part-time or get childcare, or plan to work evenings and probably weekends also to fill in those breaks during the day when he is now awake and needs attention. And that is only really possible if you are lucky enough to get a baby who sleeps well (hah!).

Ash Wednesday, from the Mouth of a Child

By Joy Pullmann

I was trying to be a good mom two days ago by telling my three-year-old son about Ash Wednesday to help him prepare for and understand why we would be going to church and getting ashes on our head. I told him that's what would happen, and he asked why.

"Because we need to remember that doing bad things means we must all die," I said. Then, I hastened to add the good news: "It's ok, though, because Jesus will make us be alive again after we die."

My son started to pout. "No, I hate dying," he said, grumpily. "I don't want to." Yes, son, neither does just about anyone.

7QT: Seven Ways to Save on Family Healthcare

By Joy Pullmann

Linked up with Conversion Diary.

Since my husband and I are both self-employed, we have to pay for our own health coverage. So, since saving money is very important (every bit saved goes towards paying off our mortgage early or giving to charity), and since we work hard we can't claim money the government has forcibly taken from other people who work hard, we have discovered a number of ways to save money on healthcare costs, even amid our country's expensive, cumbersome, and non-transparent healthcare system.

1. Try alternatives to health insurance.* We purchase catastrophic health expenses protection through a sharing program called Medishare. It works similar to insurance, but is not insurance: So we have in-network health providers, with whom Medishare has negotiated lower rates, and out-of-network health providers, just like typical insurance, but through Medishare members' monthly fees (ours for a family of five with a deductible of $5,000 is approximately $350) literally pay other members' health expenses. Insurance providers try to make money on top of that. I'm not against people taking risks in order to make money, but buying health insurance from a company would cost us at least twice what we pay. There are downsides: For one, Medishare doesn't offer preventative care incentives that might reduce overall costs like a no-copay annual physical; and for two we get put in this catch-22 where if we declare an expense and have health providers bill Medishare, we still have to pay the final bill out of pocket because of our high deductible and then we end up paying insurance rates, which are typically higher than cash rates. But if we pay in cash, we don't get the expense applied to our deductible, so we have to actually pay a lot more in health expenses than our deductible to go over our deductible and start to have our coverage kick in.

I do not want men in my bathroom or locker room, thanks

By Joy Pullmann

In college, I stayed at the University of Vermont for two weeks for debate training. The dorms were co-ed, but we figured that was fine until the first morning. I distinctly remember going to the bathroom for a shower, undressing, and hopping in the shower. A few minutes later, I noticed hairy man legs in the shower next to me. That was a wake-up far more alarming than ten cups of coffee. The bathrooms were co-ed, too.

Utterly embarrassed, I left as quickly and un-exposed as possible, furtively grabbing my towel from outside the shower and dressing in a toilet stall.

Now judges in Maine and California, and lawmakers in some seven other states, want to make thousands of little boys and girls feel like that, and worse. They are demanding that schoolkids be allowed to use whatever bathroom, locker room, and sports team they want. As Owen Strachan writes:

Our Home Is Not Wisconsin, Montana, or Indiana

By Joy Pullmann

So Mary's homesick. I can identify some, because I also want to live where we'd get free babysitting and the ability to actually participate in our extended family's life rather than catch glimpses by phone or Facebook. I have five semi-grown siblings, half of whose lives I've missed while away at college or, now, married and with kids eight hours away.

Before both sets of my grandparents died, their homes were our community centers. One lived five minutes from my house, and another 45 minutes away. Growing up, we spent countless weekends and holidays and Sundays and weeknights and piano recitals and random hellos together. Until about age 14, I grew up in the company of a boisterous family that, even if they lived in Minnesota and Illinois, frequently congregated at the halfpoint between the two: Grandma's house in Wisconsin. And then people divorced, and others died, and others moved away. Then we were all on our own. College cemented that separation. Then it was off to the East Coast, thankful to have found a good job, let alone any job given my graduation smack in the middle of the Great Recession.

But even when I got a job I can do from anywhere, we didn't move back. Our biggest reason was that we had searched every time I visited my parents, but there simply were no good churches within at least an hour radius.

Typing, One-Handed, and Hoping the Baby Doesn't Cry

By Joy Pullmann

I am self-conscious about working at home with my children clustered around, largely for the element of unpredictability: At any moment, a child may scream. If I'm on the phone, as I often am, the person on the other end instantly knows either I'm not in a traditional office or that something is weird. Baby noises now don't bother me as I work, because they're always there now, but they make me feel unprofessional. It would be like going to work with spitup on my shoulder.

I wish I could say to people, "This is how I put food on the table for my babies while refusing to outsource their care." I'm sure many would respect that, but many others wouldn't. Not knowing which attitude is the other person's, I'm nervous whenever I take or make a phone call.

Mission: Get Our Toddlers Married

by Joy Pullmann

Our three children are all under four years old, but I'm already worried about whether they can find a good spouse. Since I have, I've realized it may be the best thing in life to marry a good man (and I presume the converse is true for men). There are lots of reasons marriage means a good life, not least of which is more and better sex: A longer life, better health, greater long-term happiness, less loneliness, and more.

I want my kids to have what I know will make them absurdly happy. But I'm worried, because I already know quite a few twenty-somethings who would be a great catch but haven't been able to find anyone to marry, and are rather discouraged.

I know I can't control whether my kids find a husband or wife, but there are some practical things I can do to make it more likely. Matthew Cothran makes a brilliant comparison between how American  parents prepare their kids for college versus how we (don't) prepare them for marriage:

Abortion Kills 47% of Black Babies

by Joy Pullmann

Appropriate for a week that holds both Martin Luther King day and the anniversary of Roe v. Wade is a statistic I heard Saturday at our town's March for Life: thanks to abortion, 47% of African-American babies never take a breath.

The main speaker of our local event (which drew easily 500 people), Angela Minter, told her dramatic life story: Her mother had tried to have Angela aborted in the 1960s and failed. Later, Angela and her then-boyfriend chose two abortions and were about to commission a third, when Angela's father called.

"Don't kill that baby," he told her. She didn't. Later, the son that lived came to her. He and his girlfriend were pregnant, and planned to have an abortion. Eventually, his girlfriend refused the abortion, and now Angela has a beautiful two-year-old grandson.

Angela doesn't mince words when she talks.

Waiting for the Morning

By Joy Pullmann

I wanted to post this during Advent, when I was thinking it constantly, but I couldn't. During Advent, I was holding a newborn all day and night, and wishing desperately for some sleep. Any sleep. (I would still like more, but six hours a night broken by nursing is better than four broken by hours of fussing.)

Our second son was born December 5, and quickly revealed he would have the same tummy troubles as his two older siblings. This meant hours and hours a day of fussy sleep, where baby sleeps for five minutes in between squirms while mom and dad can't because he's squirming every five minutes. So I spent hours staring bleary-eyed out our bedroom window, holding a wiggly baby and waiting for dawn. I'd repeatedly check the time not to see how long baby had slept but to see how long it was until it was finally day and I didn't have to pretend I might get some sleep any more.

Advent, like Lent before Easter, is a time of sober reflection and preparation. New year resolutions and post-holiday housecleaning faintly resemble these two religious seasons. They are supposed to remind Christians that our eternal home is not this world, and that we await Christ's final return, when suffering will, at last, end.

Boy, did I feel that in my sleep-bereft state. A severe lack of sleep has always made me very melancholy. In college I used to cry every Friday night simply because I was so exhausted by the end of the week. This seems like a good setup for sober reflection, but it was hard to reflect on anything except how much I wanted to lie down.

This rotten experience did, however, reveal to me more about the reality of what it means to wait for a perfect eternity. I typically like this world. I have a good life. We're not poor, hungry, persecuted, or isolated. So why would I look forward to the end of it? Why bother with change when the present isn't that bad?

But when your newborn child is suffering, and so are you, this world gets a lot less attractive. It made me yearn, once again, for suffering to end. Some day, it will.

Image by Jan de Graaf, with no changes.

Invading the Man Cave

By Joy Pullmann

My dad is in the basement as I write, grinding something that reverberates throughout the house. He and my husband are taking a week to finish as much of our ugly basement as possible. The plans are glorious: a guest room and second bathroom. But the process has so far been pretty messy. 

Having my dad around for a week is unusual, as he and my mom live eight hours away, so the differences in our house are pronounced enough for me to observe them. One is the voracity with which he and my husband can and do talk football. I'm treated to stacks of football talk when my brother-in-law visits every few weeks, too, and again the difference in conversation in our household is jarring. I never knew there could be so many details and statistics to pore over in such a basic-looking game. I mean, it's a bunch of fat guys smashing into each other repeatedly. But not to my men. It's psychological, social, tactical, physical, and more. I suppose I get this detailed and loquacious when you get me talking about literary criticism or education theory, but not about many "girl things" like cooking or crafts, both of which I enjoy. Perhaps I just don't know comparatively many detailed things about sewing or baking.

It's not just football, though. My husband and some of his man friends also like to intricately discuss theology, which also is a signal for me to leave the room before I pass out from boredom. I don't think theology is necessarily a manly topic like football quite evidently is, but at least in our seminary town, more men get into it than women.

There's been some talk on the Internets lately about "the male friendship crisis," or that men's relationships have deteriorated over the past several decades. Some people say it's because men just need to become more like women: more apt to discuss people and feelings rather than objects and ideas. Others say it's because there's nowhere men can go be men together and let down their guard without the unnerving presence of women. I'm sure there are many combined reasons, but if we're picking between two I lean towards the latter.

Here's Bill McMorris in The Federalist:

The erosion of “male space,” as psychologist Helen Smith convincingly argued in her otherwise problematic book, “Men on Strike,” has played a key role in the social isolation of men. “Our culture has steadily made it almost obscene for men to congregate on their own together,” Smith writes. “Men are discouraged and actively made fun of or denied the ability to be in all-male groups by the law and by the disapproval of certain segments of the culture.” 

One thing that never occurs to Wade is that women have an easier time forming intimate relationships because men aren’t trying to elbow their way into their heart-to-heart sessions. Men do not enjoy this luxury in the days of public shaming against the likes of (formerly) all-male Augusta National. 

I have a friend—a close one in fact, but we’d never say that aloud—who no longer goes to bars because he can’t enjoy a drink with Rihanna playing in the background. 

I used to be one of those women who disdained "man time." In college, my then-fiance was really into the idea, partly because he was in a men's music fraternity (dry house and an actual reason for getting together, so quite different from the typical frat scene). I was an equal opportunity disdainer, because I've never been much for "girl time," either. "Why do people who happen to have the same body parts have to feel a unique connection?" I thought. Plus, it was offensive to be excluded based on my body parts. I felt like the guys were essentially holding a secret club I couldn't join. So I tried a few times, but was either so thoroughly bored or disgusted I gave up that idea. Man time, like football and theology to me, really isn't that fetching.

Besides, being a man is, in its essence, membership in a club women can't, by definition, join. It's the same for being a woman. No man can understand what it's like to birth a child or have a period. Women will never as a class have high upper-body strength or facial hair (thank goodness). So maybe it's time to just let the men be men together.

Image by Tal Atlas.

A Complainer Meets Sorrow, and Gives Thanks

By Joy Pullmann

I complain a lot about pregnancy (if you haven't noticed). I whine about how fat I am, and uncomfortable in myriad minor ways. But a few weeks ago, something made me sick of myself. It was a friends' funeral for their unborn child.

Their son died at about 19 weeks old. There is never very much to say about funerals. Thankfully, it was a Christian funeral and family, so grief in that case can be temporary. And I do not like to use other people's stories and sorrow as a morality tale—too much talk cheapens grief—but the little boy's death did make me realize how foolish I am. I complain frequently and crankily about a perfectly normal pregnancy (at least, as far as we know) while another woman and friend would give her right hand to have her little boy still kicking her ribs out. A commenter made a similar point a few weeks ago on one of my rants. And she was right.

My 14-year-old brother died in a car accident on my 19th birthday. Because of that, I sometimes look at my precious children and wonder if one of them will die before me. Or, worse, I wonder if one of them will not join me in heaven. There's no way for me to know, and it's not helpful to sit there morosely thinking of all the evil that may happen. Instead, I try to be thankful for what we do have, which is a great deal. One of them is this tiny little child inside, whose irritations to me mean he is not dead.

Image by The Bywaters.

Going on TV = Basically Not Worth It

By Joy Pullmann

This afternoon, I was scheduled to go on a TV program to talk about government preschool. I told the producer I couldn't make it to a TV station to record, because my husband is taking a test from 1 to 5 (therefore gone with our only car) and the show window was 2:30 to 3:45. Luckily, we could do the show over Skype, as long as I had a hardline connection.

Pertinent detail: The children nap from 2 to 4. Also pertinent: Our router is located in our unfinished basement, so I had to rig up some makeshift background. I duct-taped a navy sheet to our heater vents.

Apparently, Baby Bunching Is a Thing

By Joy Pullmann

I had no idea there was a name for our inability to schedule conception, which has resulted in three babies in four years. But, apparently, there is. It's even trademarked, and there's a book coming. It's called "baby bunching."

According to other women I chat with, older women will often go deliberately for baby bunching because they have fewer good years of fertility left and they want to get kids in while they can. Some want to get the birthing years over with, which I am quite sympathetic to (I'm playing with the idea of "four by 30" but I hate pregnancy so much we'll see if we make it...or, which is more likely, if we continue to have children constantly despite my hoped-for 30-year cutoff). Other, less-organized people like me, keep having these kids during what are obviously highly fertile years, and we won't kill them, so we love them instead.

Does Marketing Mean No Free Market?

Since I'm apparently a budding right-wing pundit, you might expect my reaction to this press release from Lady Obama to be something along the lines of "get your nanny statism out of my grocery shopping." It's not. More on that later, but first here are some excerpts:

As part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative, Mrs. Obama today joined Sesame Street’s Elmo and Rosita to announce that Sesame Workshop and the Produce Marketing Association joined the Partnership for a Healthier America in a two-year agreement to help promote fresh fruit and vegetable consumption to kids... 

The announcement comes on the heels of the first ever White House convening on food marketing to children, during which Mrs. Obama called on stakeholders to leverage the power of marketing to promote healthy products and decrease the marketing of unhealthy products to kids. 

It goes on to mention a study where kids were given the choice of an apple or cookie to eat. Most, of course, chose the cookie. But when the researchers put an Elmo sticker on the apple, twice as many kids took the apple as before.

We're Not Confused, We're Married

My husband and I have sort of a strange relationship. I happen to earn our main income and produce all the babies, but he's not one of those lazy-a** husbands who make their wives do all the big jobs while they sit on the couch watching porn or Simpsons reruns. I'm also not the career woman who spends 80 hours a week in the office while her kids languish with a nanny. We're both sort of a weird mixture of the other, unlike both the traditional and sensible husband-wife relationship where the man is the hunter-gatherer and the woman the homemaker, and the modern relationship where everyone works while outsourcing the kids to strangers.

My husband is not androgynous or effeminate. He's spent the past two weeks jackhammering and digging out our hideous concrete patio to make way for what I hope will be a nice new brick one. He handles all the home repairs, car maintenance, and financial matters (thank goodness). I'm also not very manly. I'm not the Cinderalla-Barbie-princess sort of girl, but I crochet, and bake bread, and squee at mice. He's also more stern with the children, and I'm a mushball. 

But my husband also does almost all of our grocery shopping and meal creation. I used to, but I got busy and tired being pregnant all the time, so he took it over.

A Community Is Better than Experts

By Joy Pullmann

My three-year-old son learned a new word this week: Proud. I told him for the first time I was proud of him when he learned to ditch his diapers, all in three days. I'm not sure he understands what the word means--it's an abstract concept, after all, which is why he hasn't heard it before--but it was the best way I could think to express my approval.

My husband actually changes most of the diapers in this house, and makes most of the meals (we havesome role reversal going on because I'm currently the full-time breadwinner), so I wasn't as much relieved to get out of a big chore of mine as tickled pink my little boy managed to figure this out so fast. I mean, he went from peeing in his pants without thinking about it to marching himself to the bathroom at the right impulse, pulling pants down and up himself, doing his business, and cleaning up afterward. That was a lot to learn in six hours. But we haven't had an accident in two days (fingers crossed), and there were a few unintentional ones the two days before that.

I Like Babies, But Not Pregnancy

When I was pregnant with my first child, I felt horrifically guilty for being so upset I was pregnant. And there was room for repentance there, as Christians believe children are a great blessing, and that God has the right to give you one when He wants (since he's the only one who can put a soul in a being anyway). I did not want a child then, and I really wished I could end his life. That was wrong, and evil.

But there's another aspect to not liking pregnancy that I think is not so much evil as human. Pregnancy is difficult, and annoying. It just is. And no one gains by lying about that. Right now I'm near month seven for baby three, and I do not look attractive in just about anything I wear. I look rotund because I am rotund. It's frustrating to be a 26-year-old young woman who is used to being skinny but really can't possibly look decent no matter how much makeup I apply, especially when my job involves lots of public presentations and interviews in which it is quite helpful to look at least not-hideous. As I have grown older and shared pregnancies with friends and been able to talk to more women about it, I have learned something that has made me feel a lot better: Lots of women don't like being pregnant, and lots of women are annoyed when we get pregnant, and we typically just get over it (right about when the baby stops being a bloodsucker and becomes a milksucker, and you can kiss his squashy little face and ditch the fat pants).