I never wondered much about God’s existence.  This wasn’t a virtue, particularly; I didn’t know how.  I could do a thought experiment:  what would it be like if I didn’t believe in God?  But it was just an experiment — like imagining if 2+2 were 5.

Later, I got the rational foundations of the faith, largely thanks to C. S. Lewis’s popularizations. If I hadn’t already believed, I didn’t see how I could avoid it all:  man raised from the dead with numerous witnesses. Were they insane — all of them insane about the same thing, at the same time?  But if it was a scam, it’s hard to see what they hoped to gain other than what they got:  exile and execution by torture, with plenty of opportunities to say they made it all up, but no one ever did.

So something surprised me recently.  I was watching a movie I’d picked up when Hollywood Video went out of business:  The Man from Earth.  No, don’t bother; it turned out to be a bunch of characters who didn’t seem to belong together, sitting in a house and talking.  I didn’t finish it.  I can’t prove it but I am sure the big secret was going to be that the immortal caveman was Jesus Christ and he knew our religion, like all non-atheist perspectives, was (in his word) “hogwash.”

But along the way, when it came out that he was a religious figure, someone said (to build up to the climax I’m sure):  Were you Moses?

He dismissed that with contempt.  There never was a Moses, he said.  Moses was based on Mises, a god in Syrian mythology who was found on a riverbank, and maybe had some associated plagues.

What surprised me was that I actually looked it up.  Could the writer be right?

As it turns out, my Googling turned up anti-God blogs, and a quote from an angry atheist book published some time in the past century, I think.  Couldn’t find anything scholarly, anything actually about Syrian myth that would confirm that Mises was a god washed up on a riverbank, who predated Moses, and therefore Moses didn’t exist.

But what would I have done if I had found out that Moses didn’t exist?

What would we do if we found out Jesus did not rise from the dead?  St. Paul has his say:  this is what we’re all about.  ”If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain . . . we are of all men most miserable.”

And I don’t think this is a bad thing.  If we maintained our faith regardless of whether it was sound, we’d be fools.

So I’m glad I got this little jolt.

But I won’t do an extensive study of Syrian mythology to make sure. Seriously:  if someone could really prove Moses never existed, how would it be that I’d only just heard of it? As soon as it came out it would be world headlines.

Or would the media which brought us the hyped but silly lost tomb of Jesus documentary (claiming to have found Jesus’s bones) suppress this story to protect the church?  Or would nobody but a few angry dissenters think it was worth noticing that the #2 man in Judaism was an alien god?  At this rate . . . I could never be an atheist.  I’m too riddled with doubt.

More »

We just went on vacation to visit family several states away.

It was exhausting. OK, this is hardly news, that traveling with babies is tiring. But I started feeling blue, because…

I didn’t spend much time focusing on the people I was visiting. In particular, I started one conversation with Jonathan that wasn’t in passing, and that one was promptly interrupted by Charles crying. Didn’t spend that much time talking with others, either. Maybe an hour and a half with my aunt and uncle. Not much with Mandy. We spent our time taking care of babies. This, too, shall pass — but I don’t want our family relationships to also pass, based on my increasing focus on my own house, which seems to likely, given the distances. Waah.

I also recognized that these moments with Charles and Liam will not last forever. And I can’t treasure every moment: as Marisa pointed out, that’s something parents say after their babies are no longer crying every waking hour. That’s not much of an exaggeration for Charles last week. (Colic, and it’s better now.) I defy anyone to enjoy hearing a baby scream. Anyone who doesn’t need serious therapy, anyway.

But those other moments… I have to focus on other things, too, like, oh, working for a living. So I miss some. And I miss others from other obligations. And I will forget the ones I experience. I can’t remember a year later, sometimes, whether I went to a party or what someone important to me said; of course I’ll forget baby smiles, or when Charles or Liam first did this or that milestone.

And that’s very sad.

I intend to make more video. But I may not realize that intention. When the camera comes out, Liam stops what he’s doing to stare at the camera. And we don’t have a lot of beach pictures; I would rather play with Liam in the waves than stand back, refuse to pick him up, and get pictures of him feeling frustrated and scared because Poppa won’t take care of him. Of course.

And I don’t always give him my full attention when I can. I think of it. I realize he is more important. Then he comes up, clingy, interrupting what I’m doing, and I turn away to finish it. It’s easier to say, “In a minute,” than to remember that I could instead say “In a minute” to whatever stupid thing I was doing.

And (I told you I was feeling blue) one day I will die. Then the hanging out will be over. (I find nothing in the Bible to suggest that in the afterlife we get to hang with our buds. We have “many mansions” and a new Jerusalem and be with our Savior, but regarding earthly spouses we shall be “like the angels” instead of married, and I can’t find any mention of meeting up with old friends or family, however close.)

Best I can think of now is to make those videos, somehow, and watch them again with Liam and Charles when they’re older, to relive a memory I still have with the person the memory is about; the time won’t be gone, then, and each boy can get that he was and is loved.

More »

This week, I had it planned.  I was going to insist Liam feed himself.

He has the idea that it’s inappropriate and evil for us to expect him to touch his food.  That’s our job!

People kept telling us, “Just put food in front of him in his tray.  When he’s hungry he’ll eat it.”  That baby would have starved to death before he did that.  It would have been like telling him, “You can have your food when you solve these differential equations.  I can wait.”

And now I know what the barrier was.  When it was clear he was going to have to pick up that spoon, he would try to take it, bang the food out by accident, say “Neh neh neh!” (means something like “NOOOOOOOOOOO!”) and push the spoon away.  That is, he was frustrated and angry.  He did the same thing when he dropped food as it was going into his mouth.  Liam, the Perfectionist Baby.  “If I can’t do it right,” he said, “then I won’t do it at all!”

I guide it to his mouth and don’t let him drop it.  He hasn’t got it yet that you have to hold the spoon even when it’s touching your mouth.  If I didn’t help, he’d drop it, or leave it sticking out of his mouth like a lollipop stick.

For finger food, I pick it up and wait for him to take it, and make sure he doesn’t drop it before it’s in.

He tried dodges.  Trying to get his mouth close enough to the tray that he could take it out of my hand.  He’d grab my or Marisa’s hand with the finger-food and pull it and leave us the responsibility of stuffing it in.  (I put it so my hand was out of reach but the food wasn’t.)  Marisa also reported him smiling and leaning his head to one side.  “I’m too cute to have to feed myself!”

“Nobody’s that cute,” I said.  He laughed.

In case you’re wondering, no, he doesn’t get distressed from the feel of icky food on his hands.  I learned that about a year ago:  I mashed up banana and shoved it onto his palms.  He looked at me — “What was that about?” — and went back to waiting for me to put food in his mouth.  So it’s not a sensitivity thing.

A former priest of our parish, visiting, told Liam — and us — the secret of the good life:  “pizza, and chocolate.”  So today I cut pizza into strips, moved it so he couldn’t use my hand as a remote, and waited for him to grab it.

By the end of lunch he was carrying it the whole way, and when it wouldn’t quite fit in, he’d follow my modeling of using his hand, not mine, to stuff it in.  He wasn’t good at it, but he did take at least one bite unaided except for the initial hand-off.

I wonder what it’s like when other babies learn this?

Might have been easier if we’d taught him this before he learned pouting, which was sometime last week.  (A PT told us, yes, that’s a developmental skill.)

Meanwhile, Charles has smiled (3 days ago), and has decided to bat at a dangly toy.  Lord, look at that face.

More »

Charles Joseph came to us on March 19 (feast of St. Joseph); he is named in honor of St. Joseph, and his great-grandmother Josephine, with whom he shares a birthday.

His brother Liam is 1 1/2 years old, but developmentally around half that, because of his Down syndrome.  Liam and Charles are not sophisticated enough to notice each other much yet. Mother, baby (and big brother) are doing fine.  Liam doesn’t seem to have been distressed at all to spend his time with Grandma and Grandpa instead of me and Marisa. Although he was happy to see us.

And we are happy to have both of them.  Welcome, Charles!

More »

You’ve probably heard before a topic I heard at church last night: that the way you think of God the Father has a lot to do with the way you think of your earthly father. Was your father neglectful? Then, until you learn better, you may think of God as distant. Did he rage? Was he violent? Then you may fear God’s wrath and fail to grasp his mercy. Etc.

As I heard this, I watched my baby boy Liam, and wondered what he would say if he were in a conversation about this, years from now.

For one thing, I need to be careful about him hearing me yell.  Last night, driving with just him and me, I made a loud noise. He was in the back, but still, he went from being fussy about being in the back by himself into his hah-hah-hah I’m-so-upset-I-can’t-wait-to-take-a-breath wail.  He didn’t used to react much to things outside himself; now he does — progress, but it means I have to watch out for (for example) sneezing, shouting, or other things that are too loud.

For another, I’ve already decided, when I go by the living room and he smiles and wants me to come in, I must come in for a moment at least.  I don’t want him to feel unloved.  And I recognize that that’s how I felt; I must not pass it on.

And this morning, I did play with him just before leaving, and kissed Marisa and left, and he cried.  What’s up with that, me not waving and saying “bye-bye”?  I thought he’d cry less if he didn’t notice.  He thought he’d cry less if I said goodbye.  He’s getting more aware.  How could I be so dismissive?

When they were talking last night about this principle (thinking of God the way you thought about your father), I tried not to laugh out loud.  Because all I could think was, in 20 years, Liam will be having this conversation, and will say, “It’s the strangest thing — but sometimes I can almost hear God speaking to me.  And He’s saying, ‘Are you one of those poopy babies?’”

This post originally appeared on my blog, Letters to Liam.

More »

I’m not. At least, I started out compliant and credulous and utterly malleable, and developed stubborness (as much as I could manage) in an environment of abuse.

Marisa never learned to be stubborn, and may God grant she never has to.

Liam more than makes up for it. We want him to learn to feed himself. (He’s got a deadline of March, or whenever #2 gets here. I do not want to be dealing with a newborn and having to put each bite into Liam’s mouth.)  But his response has been, when we put a spoon in his hand, to push his arm out wide, lock his elbow, turn his face the other way, and scream!

For finger food, he has the same reaction.  Pull the hand back, reject the food, object to the whole process.

So Saturday, we took a tip from Miss Donna (the helper who at one meal wouldn’t put his cup into his mouth till he touched it — and now he always reaches for it), and decided to make him eat some of his meal with both finger food in his fingers, and him holding his spoon.  I prepared for a weekend battle.

I got one.

…except that(on the spoon issue) it only lasted one day.  Now, you put that spoon in his hand and he pulls it into his mouth, and says, do it faster! faster! faster!  As you might expect, it’s a horrific mess:  rice all over the table and floor at lunch; plate thrown on the floor at dinner… well, the speech therapist said he needs to learn to play with his food!  We knew it was coming.

But what I wasn’t prepared for was it working so quickly!  Now we have to get him to use the spoon to pick up the food.  He doesn’t get that yet — because we didn’t show him.

When we try — maybe tomorrow — he’ll say, That’s offensive!  No!  What are you doing?  Help!

And then, we hope, he’ll learn to do that too.  Wish us luck.

More »

I almost can’t talk about Liam — at church, anyway — without having someone try to soothe my feelings. (No matter how happy I am.)

About 3 weeks ago he developed stranger anxiety. Although not all babies ever start freaking when a stranger is near (or picks them up), it’s a sign that they are drawing distinctions, so it’s a developmental milestone. The next week I bragged on him at church to Mrs. X. She reassured me that it was a good thing!

Well, yes.

Or, there’s Mrs. Y. She told me that before long Liam would be doing some other developmental thing.

I said, “I don’t think he will.” (It was something that doesn’t fit his personality. I don’t remember what.)

She said, brightly, “Well then he won’t!”

I knew exactly what she meant: that I should take comfort about that he would do this thing; or if I wouldn’t take that, I should take comfort that it was OK that he wouldn’t.

Then there’s Miss Z, who apologized for saying Liam might be normal in some developmental way, because that implied he might not be completely normal, and who are we to say what is normal, and maybe him having Down syndrome was no worse than our usual little foibles or petty neuroses, and –

I’ll be kind and assume this is all well meant — and point out that it’s just not helpful. If you feel the need to comfort someone, you might first check whether that someone looks distraught. And even if he does…

Let him have his sadness. Even if he didn’t need to feel it — and I sure did, those first few weeks of knowing about Liam’s Down syndrome — you couldn’t stop him. If you don’t need to be around it, you can greet him later. If you don’t need to be protected from his sadness, then just be there with it.

If it’s there. So far, every time someone tries to reassure me that Liam will be just fine, it’s at a time when I’m not sad at all about him. For the very good reason that I’m almost never sad about him — unless I was just looking at a baby of similar age doing much more than he is. Or hearing my friend X-prime talk about how his girl of the same age is almost up to doing vector calculus. I exaggerate slightly.

Thing is, sadness doesn’t go away when you cover it up. If you succeeded in getting your friend to bottle it up, you’d be turning legitimate grief into long-term melancholy. Better to hope you’d fail!

Probably the best reaction I’ve gotten from anyone in this regard was in those first few weeks, when my colleague Glenn Buck mentioned to me an “early learning” center he’s involved with. I told him I wasn’t sure what Liam would need, because he was going to be riding the short bus. (Internationals among us: American school districts commonly have a miniature bus for taking mentally handicapped students to special classes. And, no, I don’t know that he can’t be put in regular classes. It was October 2008, and I was still a little dazed.)

Dr. Buck said, “That’s OK. We take students of different ability levels.”

That is, he didn’t try to fix me. He just showed me what he had to offer — that there might be ways to help Liam. I’d way rather have that than fluffy words.

Or Dr. DeClair. He spoke with gentleness, and offered to put me in touch with a colleague of his with a DS child. (If we hadn’t already known pretty well the parents of a one-year-old DS girl, I’d have been on the phone that night to his colleague.)

Or Mr. Minter. “God’s special children,” he called DS people, when I first told the Knights council. Not something I wanted to hear, exactly, because it tells me Liam’s different. But it also tells me that God cares. The bad and the good. I can live with that.

Is it a man thing? No man has tried to comfort me; only women. (No, that’s not true. One man did.) But I don’t think it’s a man thing anyway. I’ve seen women before react with annoyance when people tried to stop them from feeling what they felt.

In any case . . . maybe my best approach now is not to continue to squirm away from this advice, but to say, “It’s OK, really. I don’t need reassurance. Your good wishes are all we want — and it’s clear we have them. Thank you!”

And . . . the best reaction was the one we got from family (OK, not the this-isn’t-happening reaction, but the other), and from one of my high-school teachers, and from so many others:

“Oh, he’s so cute! Can I hold him?”

To which the reply now will probably be: We’ll have to consult him. Stranger anxiety’s kicking in. It’s a developmental thing. Liam, you want to go over and say hi? You lean forward when you want to go and turn away when you don’t. You’re developing communication, too.

Cool.

This post first appeared on my blog, Letters to Liam.

More »

My brother-in-law says you can tell which fathers are involved in their infants’ lives by referring to a “5-wipe diaper,” and seeing who says, “What’s that?”

I recently read a blog post on Catholic Dads that showed advice (IMHO) to the uninvolved set. In particular, let your wife make all the decisions about child care, as it’s her show; babies need nurturing, not discipline, so your expertise won’t be needed until he’s old enough to throw a tantrum and have you “play the heavy.”

With all respect to the author, who is trying to comfort a female friend whose husband is perhaps essentially absent from both baby and mother: what a sad, sad view, I thought — that my primary relationship to my son should be as a disciplinarian! that I’m a fifth wheel until it’s time to make him toe the line! What a starved, barren view of how fathers can relate to children.  Supporting Mom is great — better than not supporting her! — but I think we should challenge the absent husband and father further.

I recall a time when I asked my own father, “Why weren’t you more involved with me, when I was young?” His reply was, “Well, you seemed wise enough, I didn’t think you needed me to tell you what to do.”

I take it from this that this was the old way of fathering: the primary, and almost only, thing a father can do, is to give orders.

It would make me kind of useless to someone too young to understand orders. (I’m also possibly too laissez-faire. We have a helper who was telling him, no, you can’t have milk unless you’re willing to touch the sippy-cup. This is as a prelude to getting him to hold his own cup. We’re going to follow her lead — but I wouldn’t have thought of it.)

No way would I limit myself so. I will change, feed, hold, rock, comfort, play with, giggle with, be played on, support, challenge (to do his PT), show off, and protect from overeager admirers who forgot to wash their hands after wiping their noses. (That last one’s mostly at church.) I don’t think this is remarkable or even unusual, although it may once have been.

I do understand two barriers to this.

One is worry of doing something wrong. I felt like this holding our fragile bundle-of-joy on Day #1. I was over it on Day #2.

Another is having women dismiss you as genetically incapable. But my wife isn’t dismissive, and no one else matters.

I recently encountered another, probably unusual, issue: someone who backed me into a corner and put her hands on me uninvited, while I was holding him.* In that case, it would have been better if Marisa’d been holding Liam, so I could defend the family; I can hardly expect Marisa to do that kind of defending!

But usually people go after him, not me (something about the cuteness, I’d suppose), and in those cases I prefer to be holding him, because I can play the heavy with them more than she would: pulling him back, twisting so they can’t put touch his hands, which of course go straight into his mouth. (This is no longer so much of an issue, since he’s older now and has a stronger immune system.)

So in that case, I’m not sure which is best: traditional, or otherwise.

But my hope for uninvolved fathers is: don’t support your wife in being the sole adult in your babies’ lives. Instead, support her — and them — by making her no longer alone in that role. They need your attention. Give it to them.

(This post also appears at my blog, Letters to Liam.)

More »

Earlier this year I wrote this for Art of Manliness, a web site for all things manly.  Since the new Catholic Dads site has “Masculinity” as a category, I decided it might be relevant to our task, especially if we have sons.  (Which I do — hooray!)

I commented on this remarkable similarity of ideas (from such different people as Spaniards and New Guinea highlanders), and a friend said, “Fortunately, we’re in the modern world, so we can get rid of the whole silly idea.”

Was she right? Is manliness old-fashioned and silly, best replaced with a new post-masculine ideal, in which we don’t admire courage, procreation, or the old manly ways?

It’s an easy question to answer, isn’t it? Reverse the list of manly qualities above, and ask yourself: would the human race be better off if each man were an irresponsible, impotent, stingy coward who couldn’t hold down a job or keep a friend? We can tinker with the ideal of manhood, but throwing it out entirely would be a disaster.

But let’s look further anyway. To keep it short, let’s consider one example each from three classes of manly virtues: those that only men can do; those that either sex can do equally; and those that either can do, but are more characteristically male.

Men Only: Fatherhood

Consider where the new post-masculine man has really caught on, at least in regard to procreation: Europe, and blue-state centers like Greenwich Village — that is, in certain rich locations that people imagine are the future of the world.

But they aren’t the future, and here’s why: those post-manly men aren’t fathering many children. A society without fatherhood has no future, because its members die without being replaced.

I don’t have birth rates for Greenwich Village, but you can get them for Europe. They’re crashing. Greece, for example, has a replacement rate of about 1.29; on average, if this continues, population will nearly halve each generation. Spain’s and Italy’s are about the same. The future belongs to nobody — except possibly immigrants, who will bring a different perspective on fatherhood with them, or they’ll disappear as well. Either way, this particular aspect of post-manliness has no future.

Of course not every man needs to be a father, and moderation has its place here. But if this particular manly virtue disappears entirely, so does civilization.

For Both Sexes: Responsibility

Consider a world in which males don’t take responsibility. They don’t commit to women; they father children but don’t take care of them; they have high-flown dreams but lack the discipline to carry them out. What kind of world would it be?

A poor one, for one thing, and there are parts of the First World that work that way. They’re the underclass neighborhoods where most children don’t have fathers at home or have a series of “fathers” who come and go. Theodore Dalrymple (Our Culture: What’s Left of It, Life at the Bottom: the World View that Makes the Underclass) writes about a nightmare society in Britain that works like this. Unfortunately, it’s nonfiction.

There’s also a modern glorification of never growing up (see, among others, The Sibling Society by Robert Bly). Underclass or rich, we can put off indefinitely trying to make the world a better place, turning to entertainments and drugs to occupy ourselves. But why should a man occupy himself in a less than perfect world? When there are children to mentor and causes to champion, why spend all your time playing Halo 3? Is being comfortable all there is to life?

Obviously responsibility is a virtue women can embody as well as men. But ask the women in your life if they want the men around to take less responsibility. If they’re in a good mood, they’ll laugh at you. If not, they’ll regale you with stories of the One That, Thank God, Got Away. Life isn’t so easy that half the human race can remain forever children. Men have to shoulder adult responsibilities, too.

Especially for Men: Physical Bravery

Bravery can mean daring to open up to a friend or sweetheart. (We need more of this kind of bravery.) But there is also the bravery of facing physical danger. Maybe that’s the part that’s obsolete, no longer needed in the modern world?

Maybe. If you are in a rich, civilized country, nobody is likely attacking you; you aren’t in a high-crime area; there is no natural disaster; someone else is a soldier so you don’t have to be; someone else is a policeman so you don’t have to be; someone else is a fireman so you don’t have to be; that is, if you’re very lucky, you will never have to confront physical danger. In that case, you won’t need to be physically brave in order for you and yours to survive.

So if we’re really lucky (and many of us are now, most of the time, thanks to the bravery of others), we’ll only need this manly characteristic

…for ourselves; we have a need to face danger.

…for our sons and male mentees; they need it too.

…and for our romantic attachments. Women want to date men, not aging boys.

It’s a paradox: women don’t want the men they love to kill themselves on motorcycles, but they still don’t find cowardice in men attractive. (Neither do men, for that matter.) And it’s not symmetric. I don’t know many men who would say, “I think a woman should be strong and brave, to protect the man she loves.” Or women who hope for the relationship to go that way, either.

But it doesn’t matter. Eventually, our luck will run out, and we’ll need physical bravery for physical danger again.

Conclusion

To sum up: why do we need manly virtues?

• It goes with who we are physically. Men are bigger and stronger; it makes more sense to have them bursting through the doors and carrying unconscious smoke-inhalation victims out of the fire, because they can actually pick those victims up. (I say “they” because I’d have a tough time picking up a 180-lb. man — but there are plenty who wouldn’t!)
• It goes with who we are mentally. Think about the difference in flavors of honesty. Women can be blunt and artless with the truth — but they’re often more nuanced, using more diplomacy and more we’re-a-team thinking. Men can be diplomatic, but we’re usually more apt to just say it. Both ways are useful — but although working on our weaknesses makes sense, it also makes sense to use our strengths.
• It delights us. Birds gotta fly; fish gotta swim; men gotta do manly stuff. Look what happens on the forum part of this site: men come so they can revel in manly stuff, from barbecuing to power tools to cars, because it’s fun. That ought to be enough reason.
• It delights women, too. To be blunt: if you say manliness is obsolete and we’re all just a mix of feminine and masculine, it probably won’t hurt you much socially with the ladies. But if you act on it — if you become that irresponsible, impotent, stingy coward who can’t hold down a job; or if you drop the symbols of manliness for a more feminine style, plucking your eyebrows and wearing a tastefully lacy dress (!) — it won’t just be other men who shudder and look away; it’ll be the women too.

But the ultimate reason to embrace manly virtues is that they are virtues. Being the best man you can be is a calling. The world may not thank us if we follow it, but thanks isn’t what we’re after. Excellence is, and charity.

More »

We get to see baby #2 in all his or her glory. Pray for us, for everything to be OK.

Update:  “no abnormalities detected.”  It’s a brother!

WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!

More »