From Word To Word

I was on CFRU’s Family Matters show with Wendy McDonnell again this past Sunday to talk about the subject of nature deficit.  The other guests were John Jantunen and Anne Gajerski-Cauley.  If you are interested to have a listen, you can get the link through Wendy’s blog, Compassionate Solutions, or you can listen to the archived .mp3 file here.

My children have been leaning about their city and its environs as part of their homeschooling, so today we sat down with google maps to help them locate where they are in relation to the world. My hope was that that they would get a better sense of scale, of how big our city is in comparison with our county, our province, our country, our continent, and our world. We started at the broadest level and narrowed our scope, step by step, until we were at our street. Then I clicked on the street view to let them see their own house.

Up until that final click, they were interested and, I think, grasping the idea of scale that was the purpose of the exercize for me, but after that final click, they were beyond excited. The possibility of seeing an image of what had, until then, only been a map, of moving between map and image with a click, suddenly made everything real to them. From then on, nothing would do but that we had to follow along the streets on the map to find the houses of their friends, their church, their favourite stores, their parks, everything they could think of, to see it on the map. It was as if the idea of scale became concrete for them all at once, as if they could finally understand that the lines on the paper represented, not only the idea of things, but the actual places that they knew.

It was amazing, one of those moments that makes homeschooling my kids so wonderful.

I went to the market this morning and came home to a warm kitchen, which, considering the temperature outside and the lack of insulation in my house, was quite remarkable.   My wife was baking her favourite cold-rise sweet dinner rolls for the dinner we are attending tonight, and she was preparing our bread for the week also, a Swedish rye bread that she was trying for the first time.  My mother-in-law was in the kitchen too, simmering the stock for a chicken soup intended for our church’s soup luncheon tomorrow, so I put the groceries away amid the smells of rising dough and soup stock, and then I had the chance to add to them, beginning my own soup for tomorrow, potato and bacon and green onion and parmesan and cream cheese, and I put the pear pies in to bake, and I remembered, once again, that there is nothing like a warm kitchen in winter.

So, at last, I can share the excitement that postponed Dinner and a Doc this month and that has kept our two blogs even quieter than usual.

Our family is very happy to announce that we will be adopting a baby girl, just two months old.  Because she will come to us initially as a foster placement until she is legally a crown ward, I am not allowed to share any identifying details.  All I can say is that she is gorgeous and that we are thrilled to have her join our family.  There are literally no words adequate to the joy we are feeling.

Practically speaking, this means that I will just drop Dinner and a Doc this month.  I will post the information for our next date in due time.

Also, although we are mostly prepared for the baby, we are still looking for a running stroller, so if anyone has one to lend, we would appreciate it.

If you would like to come by and visit the new addition to the family, just give us a call.  We would love to share our joy with you.

When people hear that I have one birth son and one adopted son, they are often interested in the kind of family dynamics that this creates, and at some point in the conversation they will probably ask something like, “Are you able to love both kids the same?” or if they are a little more subtle and want to leave the question begging in my favour, “Was it difficult learning to love both kids equally?”  Their assumption, well grounded in a culture that values ideas of equality and egalitarianism very highly, at least in theory, is that a father’s love should be granted equally to both his children, so they are generally shocked when I tell them that I do not in fact love my kids equally, and that I find the very idea of loving equally objectionable.

You see, my kids are not equal.  They are not the same.  There will never be another Ethan, whom I carried along the hospital hallways while his mother slept, and whom I rushed across the road to emergency when he had the croup, and who would cook his own eggs at two years old, and who is in these and every other way uniquely Ethan.  And there will never be another Marlon, whom I first held in his foster mother’s house, and whom I rushed to emergency when he ate a yew cherry, and who loves shoes more than just about anything, and who is in these and every other way uniquely Marlon.  It would be absurd to think that I could love these two sons the same, that I could love them equally, because I love them both for what they are, and they are in so many ways different. The fact that one was born and one adopted into our family is only a very small part of what makes my two suns unique, and to love them the same would not be to love them in their uniqueness and in their individuality.  It would not really be to love them at all.

At this juncture in the discussion the other person, having intended no offence and feeling overwhelmed by my response, will generally try to sooth my feelings by saying something like, “Of course you love them in different ways.  I just meant that you love them both the same amount, right?”   Yet even this is a bazaar idea.  A love is not something that can be measured and compared and weighed against another love.  Do I love one child more than the other?  Do I love either of them more than my wife?  Do I love my wife more than my parents?  How about my brothers, my close friends?  How would such comparisons be made?  I love all of these people in the very different ways that they need to be loved, according to the very different relationships in which I love them, but it would not be possible, not under any circumstances, to measure and compare these loves.  Love does not consent to be hierarchized in this way.  Love is either infinite, or it is nothing at all.  Love is either measureless, total, beyond valuation, or it is not love.

I do not love my children equally.  I do not love them the same.  I love them according to who they are, and I love them with a love that is measureless, because nothing else would be love at all.

“The man of one woman is very rare,” Robertson Davies declares in World of Wonders, the final novel in The Deptford Trilogy, and he does not refer here merely to the monogomous man or to the family man or to any other such thing, but rather to the man whose life is essentially bound up with one woman, whose life is entirely dedicated to one woman. The reason that this kind of man is rare, he goes on to say, is that such a man “needs resources of spirit and psychological virtuosity beyond the common,” and this is perhaps true, but his next statement is truer: “He needs luck, too, because the man of one woman must find a woman of extraordinary quality.”

It is in this sense that I can truly call myself a man of one woman. I am not sure that I have resources of spirit or psychological virtuosity beyond the common, but I have indeed found a woman of extraordinary quality, a woman of such quality that my life seems always to have been bound up in hers, always seems to have been dedicated to hers, as long as I have been with her. It is not only that we are well suited to each other or that we relate well with each other or that we are commited to each other, though all of these things are true as well. It is that she is an extraorinary woman, in every sense that I can imagine, and she creates a desire in me to be an extraordinary man, a man who is truly of one woman.

Gerry Gordon, my maternal Grandfather, died last Sunday, and I spent this past weekend on Manitoulin Island for the funeral.  It is never possible to sum up a human life in a few words, especially not when that life has been well lived, but I offer these few words even so.

Grandpa Gordon did not condescend to be merely great.  In a world that measures greatness in money and possessions and titles and accomplishments, in a world where most of us are counted failures by these standards, he chose a different standard, chose to pursue goodness rather than greatness.  I remember him as the one who cooked countless summer breakfasts for my brothers and I, almost always bacon and eggs prepared in so much grease that they would shock nutritionists into heart attacks of their own.  I remember him as the one who supplied us with endless packs of Viva Puffs, the one who made campfires in the evenings, the one who drove me to vote for the first time, the one who made grilled cheese sandwiches for us on the worksite almost every day of my summer working in Saskatoon.  I remember him as someone who was always willing to listen to us, even from the earliest age, as if we were worth listening to, as someone who never had something better to do than spend time with us.

In these and in so many other ways, he was always a good man rather than a merely great one.  He was one of the few men about whom it would be sufficient to say, “He loved God.  He loved his family.  He loved others as he loved himself.”  I only hope that something of this kind might someday be said of me.

I had the opportunity this past Sunday to be on Family Matters, a radio show hosted by Wendy McDonnell on CFRU, the University of Guelph’s public radio station.  Some of you might remember that I was on the show once before, back in November of 2009, discussing the subject of homeschooling.  Wendy told me after that show that she might contact me again when she did a show on adoption, which is how I found myself on her show for a second time this past Sunday.

I am very passionate about the idea of adoption, and it is difficult to say anything very useful about a passion in something less than an hour, but I appreciated the opportunity to share, and I hope that the show will at least have raised the possibility of adopting for some people who may not otherwise have considered it.

For those of you who are interested, here is a link to the audio of the show.

There is a whole set of lies that our culture has been systematically telling its children for some time now.  We tell them that they are especially beautiful and especially smart and especially talented.  We tell them that they can be anything they want to be, that they can do anything they put their minds to do.  We tell them that they are extraordinary, that they will do extraordinary things.  And, generally speaking, far more often than not, this is nothing but lies.

However beautiful and intelligent and talented they may be, there will almost always be those who have more beauty and more intelligence and more talent, and none of these things will guarantee them success in any case.  However much they may put their minds to it, there are some things that they will just not be able to be or do.  However much they may believe themselves to be extraordinary, they will almost certainly come up against the fact that they are as ordinary as the next person, better at some things, worse at others, individual and valuable perhaps, but not exceptional.  They will come up against the fact that their entire conception of themselves has been based on lies told by their parents and family and teachers and counselors and so on.

Now, we tell them these lies out of the best intentions.  We want our children to have good self-esteem, to believe in themselves, to have the confidence to pursue their dreams, but we end up doing exactly the opposite.  Our lies give children a grossly unrealistic conception of themselves, and this self-conception begins to disintegrate when they are exposed to a wider world where others are in fact as beautiful and intelligent and talented as they are.  They are confronted by the fact that they are not naturally superior to their peers and that they have not developed the disciplines they need to succeed in the world because  even their poorest efforts  had always been called exceptional, had not required work or effort or discipline or commitment from them.  Confronted with this new reality, their self-image is shattered, and they alternate between depression and bravado, between accepting that they are not in fact exceptional and insisting that their true superiority has gone unrecognized.  They are trapped in this alternation, immobilized, unable to commit to any direction enough to do the work it would require of them, waiting for the greatness that has been promised them.  They cannot be the best, so they will be nothing at all.

There is now the greater part of a generation who occupy this position, a generation who have never been able to face the truth about themselves.  There is nothing less acceptable to them than an ordinary life, and they are unwilling to live this ordinary life, though it is the life that they will have to live, one way or another.  They came of age in a barrage of superlatives, and any life that is not superlative must be a failure to them, and so they live mostly with failure, still striving to deny this failure at every turn.  They keep insisting on the lies that they have been told, keep ignoring the base facts of their lives, keep hoping that their destiny will somehow, miraculously, reassert itself.

They have never been told the truth, that there is no shame in living an ordinary life, in doing ordinary good, in overcoming ordinary evil, in accomplishing ordinary things, just as countless lives have been lived before them.  They have never been told the truth, that it is no great failure to fall short of wealth and fame, that it is a far greater failure to fall short of being a moral human being.  They have never been told the truth, that the best lived life is one spent, not in exceptional things, but in ordinary things, in being a loving child, spouse, parent, friend, and neighbour.  They have never been told the truth, that the life spent serving others brings more joy than the life spent in pursuit of one’s own pleasures and successes.

We must speak truthfully to our children.  We must tell them that their value does not depend on their beauty or their intelligence or their talent or their success or their superiority to others, but in the love that they might offer to one another, which is their very humanity.  We must praise them when they have done well, certainly, but we must also correct them when they have done wrong and encourage them when they have failed.  We must teach them that there is nothing so very ordinary about living the ordinary life, that this is indeed a life worth living, as complex and as full and as rewarding as any other they might choose to live.

Though I am a proponent of home schooling in many of its guises, I am actually a little wary of the term.  Its connotations are too much about schooling and too little about learning for me to be completely comfortable with it, and it seems to imply that either children are educated at school or they are educated at home, where the fact is that all children, wherever they are more formally educated, need to be learning in the home, because there is much that formal education does not and can not teach us.

So, though my kids are not yet old enough that I am forced to put them in formal education of some sort, and though my wife and I have not yet decided whether we will actually home school our kids when they come to that age, we are already learning at home, not necessarily in very formalized ways, but intentionally and constantly.

As part of this process, I was looking for a way that my kids could express what they are learning in ways that are not just assignments, in ways that are relevant to them, and so I have decided to make a blog that I am calling Ethan and Marlon’s Field Journal.  Though I am doing most of the typing, my kids are directing all of the content.  It is a place where they can tell their stories, show their pictures, and link to the things that interest them in what we are learning. They are very excited about the idea, and I am just as excited to see them learning at home.