How my Family Multiplies

              My parents met on the one day that they had anything in common. They've been drifting apart ever since. This drift has included almost 40 years of marriage, 7 children, and 12 grandchildren...and separate residences and illicit undertakings on the part of my father. While we all agree that this is not the best of situations, we kids have nonetheless responded to it by, well, laughing about it. That's just how we deal with things. So, for instance, when my father would take to the road for several days, without contacting us (including my mom), and this road included a small town some 30 miles away, where he would stay overnight (with whom, we never asked), we concocted an elaborate tale in which he was the mayor of the town. I think we may have even told him about it, although we may not have. Our jokes (and elaborate tales) have no real, practical purpose. They are for our amusement, and can actually get pretty ghoulish. But it's how we deal with things.
         Pretty much anything is fodder for us, and many of the tales have given rise to characters who've been with us for years...and years. One of my sisters and I have a running joke where we are heavy-set women who wear ironed tweety-bird sweatshirts or t-shirts and go to garage sales. We're really good at bargaining and have shrewd eyes and small town accents. And then there's William, an eternally pre-pubescent boy with the unfortunate combination of a hair lip and buckteeth. William takes over one of my other sisters on occasion, sometimes just for laughs, but in recent years, also when she's under duress. There's also an Asian named Rally (Larry) who my younger brother invokes; he answers the phone by saying, "herro" and then asks if yus yus chin is around. Rally was born when said brother entered grad school. And there's a man named Rick, also with a hairlip-- and a tapeworm-- who lives with his sister Tammy and is channelled by myself and another sibling. We actually wrote a pretty decent short story about him as the deranged leader of an uprising among employees at a local convenient store where, of course, my sister was, at one point, resentfully employed. Again, that need to deal with adversity by laughing at it, or something.
        I really don't have anything philosophical to tie into this post here. And I'm not sure why my family has so many characters. But I will say that they're almost like other family members: I'll catch a glimpse of William, evidenced by his hairlip and buckteeth, as my sister turns her head away from an awkward conversation with someone, or I'll answer my phone to Rally shouting, "herro", or Rick saying "hey" (his trademark salutation). Sometimes they all come out at once, like when my poor mother tries to have a serious family meeting. Suddenly, her 7 children are no longer sitting in front of her, having been replaced by  a motley crew of defense mechanisms.

Leviathan in a Car Chase

I've got this thing for cops. It's not that cliche "man in a uniform" attraction; I like any cop, male or female. Actually, it's more that I like what cops stand for: order, safety, a bizarre lack of boundaries (think of the questions they ask you when they pull you over), a lack of rules governing them....I don't know, maybe there's no sense to be made of it (although I'll try at the end of this post). But, when it comes down to it, I like cops.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found myself assisting the local police in chasing a car driven by a girl so high on heroin that, when arrested, she promptly fell asleep in the back seat of the cruiser. It all started when the family and I and were driving home this past Sunday from dinner at a friend's. I had some clothes to return at the mall (some of those bought on the pre-vacation splurge that didn't make the cut), and on the exit ramp off the highway, the car in front of us swerved. My husband pointed it out, but not being as cautious a driver as he, I (empathetically) thought that they had perhaps dropped something and lost control of the wheel while looking for it (when he reads this it will only fuel his belief that I am a bad driver. But that, in turn, relieves me of any driving duties on road trips). Seconds later, they overcorrected, hit the concrete barrier, and almost flipped the car. Now this is not something I would do, so (in response to the husband's clipped-bark order) I called 911. They put me through to the local dispatch and that's how I came to direct 5 cop cars through the city streets in hot pursuit of a heroin-high college student.
      
Let me just say that what's neat about cops is that they really listen. When they asked me for the license plate of the car, I only had to say it once. We followed this car for a few miles with me giving a "play-by-play" to the cops (this included the driver and passenger switching seats in an apparent attempt to gain some control of the car). I never once had to repeat myself. It's a girl's dream.
 
That was pretty much the peak of it, though,--my directing the cops via cellphone--because once they pulled the girls over, they told us to wait in a parking lot until they could question us. After about 45 minutes, I began to feel a little ridiculous and especially vulnerable because of my overeagerness. I mean, how long was I supposed to wait? It even occurred to me that it's really not cool to like cops. Of course, when they did finally come over after an hour or so, I was overly cooperative and eager to please, happily handing over my license for personal info and acting as if I knew the prescription drugs that the cop said were in the car. And later that evening, when they called and asked if I would be able to identify the girls in a line-up--which I couldn't--it was all I could do not to offer a theory that filled a hole in their story quite well, if do say so myself.
    
This was actually my second run-in with cops in the past 2 weeks, excluding the parking ticket I got while having dinner at said friend's house. While we were on vacation, my mom-- a modern Amelia Bedelia--watered our window boxes while leaning out of the front window, and accidentally left the window wide open. Our neighbor noticed and called the police, who called us and reported doing a "walk-through" our home (fyi: that's police jargon). Thank God I did all of that mad cleaning before I left:).
     
So, both of  these experiences have prompted me to think about why I love cops. This, in turn, made me think of what life would be like without them, which naturally made me think of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.In it, he imagines what life was like before civil society, i.e., the construction of laws and government. He conjectured that, in this pre-civil  "state of nature", man was brutally competitive and that, finally, in order to survive, a social contract was drawn up by which people forfeited their rights to everything in order to have some protection. In other words, we agree to abide by laws because we know that the alternative would be chaos. Or as Hobbes famously said, pre-civil society would have, "no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In fact, the work Leviathan is so named because of Hobbes' view of human nature: the leviathan is an Old Testament deep sea monster, and the analogy is that as the calm water is to the deep sea monster beneath, so is civil society to the monster that is our true human nature, lurking beneath.
       
So where do cops fit in? They are the most immediate enforcers of the social contract. But, really--even though they are not supposed to be, I think--they are above the social contract. In virtue of their position, they can run through red-lights, do a walk-through a complete stranger's home, and ask you anything they want (for any of you have been pulled over, don't they ask weird questions sometimes? And don't you answer?). They're sort of living above the law...which makes the think about what life would be like without the law. Which makes me think of Hobbes...
      
In any case, I love cops, and that was one exciting car chase!

The Socratic Plumber

        We're back home now and, for some reason, while we were gone, the plumbing in our bathroom, in various ways, failed. The bath won't drain (I suspect that the 2 year old has been sending toilet paper down it); the water pressure is completely off in the shower, so you have to manuever things to get something other than a trickle; and the sink clogs easily. You can imagine how the morning routine becomes frustrating very quickly.
     Now, in some houses, these would be minor problems: just a few adjustments, probably involving a snake and a wrench, and possibly (but hopefully not) some Drano. Not in this house. With all due respect, the husband is probably the least handy man in the entire world. The thing is, he isn't clumsy, he's just...overly thorough. He actually needs to have a complete understanding of what needs to be done before he does it. So, for instance, when we bought the (requisite) minivan, he sat down in an armchair one evening to read the manual. I actually found some parts highlighted. I'm not kidding.
        You can imagine how this approach works (or doesn't work) with ordinary household jobs. One time we bought an infant chair, in need of reassembly, at a yard sale. Because it didn't come with an instruction manual, it turned into a kind of working experiment, and after about 20 minutes, he was staring at a twisted peice of metal with a thin sheen of sweat on his upper lip. We also have a doll stroller that he "assembled" . When my sister sees it she always says, "that stroller is soooo funny", because he somehow  managed to connect all of the pieces into something that does not at all resemble a stroller. It actually looks like one of those deep shopping carts you can buy for your own personal use.
     So, in the case of the bathroom, the plumbing problems are going to result in one of two things: a day-long project that ends with his detailed description of the inner workings of the bathroom; or an expensive plumbing bill that most households wouldn't have to shoulder. I prefer the latter, because chances are it's inevitable anyway. (I actually have a pretty nice roster of handymen of various types, should those of you who know me need anyone).
     The thing is, in the grand scheme of things (read: philosophical), this all makes sense. At least from Plato's perspective. In Plato's Apology, after Socrates is told by the oracle at Delphi that he is the wisest man in Athens, one of the groups of people that he interrogates is the craftsmen. They, of course, quickly reveal  ignorance of their craft, in the sense that they don't really understand what they are doing.  This is part of Plato's theory of knowledge: the man who (merely) knows how to fix a sink does not really understand what a sink is or how all the parts work together, because when Plato talks about understanding he really means understanding. He would, in this case, require an understanding of the Platonic Form of the Sink, in which all sinks that exist "participate"; it's literally the ideal sink, and once you understand it, you would understand all individual sinks. And it's this Platonic Form that serves to distinguish between the type of knowledge the plumber/techinician has, and that which the philosopher has.
       So, what's really going on is that the husband, being a philosopher, is not satisfied with understanding at the technical level; rather, he strives for the philosophical level. Fat lot of good that does our household, though! And, it should be mentioned that as a philosopher, myself, I've become pretty handy with a drill and skimming through instruction manuals...

The Confucian saint

We left Cape Cod yesterday and are heading to New Jersey to see the husband’s family. On route, we stopped in Mystic, Connecticut, (site of the movie “Mystic Pizza”) and took a really nice boat ride down Mystic River. Ok, if I was single and/or in my twenties, it would have been incredibly boring, but things change when you have kids. You find yourself on a lot of excursions with retirees for some reason, especially when you’re vacationing.

Now that we are on the road again, my husband is in what one of my sisters (my follower, Emcy) calls his “clipped bark mode”. In clipped bark mode, he –you guessed it—speaks in a clipped bark in order to get things moving in an orderly and timely fashion. He has no time for nonsense. And clipped bark mode is heightened when his plan involves his family. So, you can imagine the scene this morning, trying to get three kids out to the car and the room packed, so that we can leave to have lunch with his dad and then dinner with his uncle. A lot of barking is going on.

I actually really appreciate that he is so devoted to his parents. It’s an ordered devotion, too: he loves them, but is not at their beck and call. He has what Confucius called “filial piety”, which for the any follower of Confucius, is considered a virtue: respecting your parents is really important.

Well, that’s my philosophical spin on this leg of our trip: my husband, the Confucian saint.

The Elephant on the Beach

        People-watching on the beach is one of the most entertaining ways to pass a summer day. I just love the way people are so comfortable: fat, thin, tan, white; everyone’s walking around exposing a lot. Except for the new moms, who I’ve noticed are wearing black from neck to knee. We smile at each other.
        Speaking of what people are wearing, it’s ironic that the elephant on the beach (read: in the room) is the attractive, welll-toned woman in the string bikini, standing 5 feet from you and your husband!
      So, we’re pretty well settled here on the shore and I’m spending most of the time nursing or holding the baby while the kids play in the sand or surf. This leaves the husband in charge of a lot more than he usually is and he definitely doesn’t do things the way I do. Under his watch, every meal includes french fries and ends with dessert; the kids can go out of the hotel room in just diapers; and the fallback for entertainment is a movie or cartoons. I even disagree with him about where you should apply the sunscreen: I say the hotel room, to avoid the sand mixing in and to give it some time to be absorbed. He says the beach, to get more time down by the water.
         For some reason, all of this irritates me. I know he’s the other parent, and so, in theory, has equal say in their upbringing, but, frankly, I still feel like he should be doing things my way. Trust me, I don’t act on, or even voice these feelings all, or even most, of the time. But, I was beginning to wonder if I am unusually controlling. And then I remembered a little bit of Locke (read: John Locke, English philosopher and contributor, at least in terms of ideas, to the Declaration of Independence). Locke wrote on everything from colors to what human beings are. Somewhere in there, he also expounded on ownership—I think in response to the King of England owning the land that the peasants farmed. His theory is that ownership is based on labor: if you put work into something, you own it. I guess this matches my intuition: of course, I don’t think I own my kids (and I’m not dismissing lthe husband's hard labor which earns 99% of our income), but it seems that I should have more voting power, given the amount of labor put in to these 3. Maybe it’s a stretch, but that’s what came to mind when mulling this over.
        Of course, if I act on any of this, I might become Philosopher mom plus 3, if you know what I mean. And so we have another instance where philosophy makes no impact on the real world...

The Platonic soul hits the beach

We have finally left for the much awaited vacation to the beach. We've been preparing for this for a week, now: the husband, by typing up a 47-item "to-do" list, which he left on the dining room table in a file folder marked "Cape Cod"; and me, by washing every item in the house and buying for myself a new "beach/vacation" segment of my wardrobe. The shopping trip for that segment amounted to me snagging every black item near my size at Macy's, perhaps the only store left in the mall that does not have that depressing (recession-induced) final sale policy. Final sales don't work if you have a Moby'd baby attached to you: I can only eyeball things, since I am not going to unwrap 100 yards of material and a sleeping baby to see if something fits.

      But why all of the black, you ask? Am I one of those existentialists (think Sartre) who can turn any environment into a Parisian cafe? Nope. It's that extra 14 lbs left over from the devil-may-care attitude I adopted during my second trimester; black is a handy way of slimming down when you have neither the time nor energy to really exercise. So, here I am, heading to the beach with a black wardrobe.
      The thing is, the problem with the extra lbs is not so much that they exist (although, for health reasons, they must go), but that they matter to me: 'tis vanity that has me investing my husband's hard earned money in this wardrobe. So, really, what I can do, at the least, is put this whole appearance thing lower on my list of priorities. In fact, one of the "greats" offers a nice argument for doing so. Plato, in his dialogue Phaedo, describes us as immaterial souls trapped in material bodies. The more attached to our bodies we are, the more difficult it is for us at death (you can imagine how heaven, hell and purgatory eventually fit nicely into this system). So, adopting an eternal perspective, or at least a Platonic one, this vanity is ultimately bad for me. God forbid I become like that vain soul in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce who couldn't cope with the loss of her material body.
      Alas, even Plato admits that this perspective can take a lifetime to gain, so in the meantime, it's off to the beach in my new, black, skirted bathing suit.
   

Stoicism and Babyhood

So, I've been pretty much stuck at home these last 3 months, since the birth of my youngest son. It's really not him that keeps me at home; in fact, if I do go out, I take him with me, all Moby'd up, as we run errands. No, it's the thought of taking all three out to Target, or wherever, that prompts me to reconsider and then stay home. As they say, this too, shall pass, but it could have been a lot worse if not for people visiting. I can think of a few (oustide of my fam) who really made my days easier by bringing their kids over to swim; who knows what I would have done with my days otherwise.
Despite the diversions, though, my reaction to being stuck at home was to ponder the stoic, Epictetus, and how life is what you make of it. (This, of course, is what any normal person would do). In fact, this is the quote that came to mind:

          I must die, but must I die groaning? I must be imprisoned, but must I whine as well? I must suffer   

          exile, but can any prevent me from going with a good grace and at peace? This is in my power.

           "But I will chain you." What say you fellow? Chain me? My leg you can chain, yes, but my will,

           no, not even Zeus can conquer that. "I will imprison you." My bit of a body, you mean.

Okay, so it's a bit melodramatic. But, the fact is, I am somewhat immobilized, due to circumstances, and yet, in the tradition of the Stoics, my perspective (or "will", as Epictetus says) is what I can work with. I can make this a bad situation, or a good one, and so I chose to make it a good one by seeing it as an opportunity to throw a series of what I thought were great pool parties! And, on the other hand, it also lets me spend quality time with my kids, while they're still home all day. Because, sadly, this too shall pass.

"One swallow does not a summer make....

....neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy." Okay, this is probably one of my favorite quotes from Aristotle. It's a perfect rejoinder to someone who thinks that one instance proves their point; at least the edited version--one swallow does not a summer make--is. But the latter part also says a lot about happiness: there can be a huge gulf between experiencing things that make you (momentarily) happy and actually being happy. Happiness, for Aristotle, is a state. And, it's what we are all looking for: once we find it we need nothing
more. So says the Philosopher, as he's been called.
      But there is still something to be said for those things that bring that warm fuzzy feeling of happiness, if even for just a moment. It even makes me happy to think of them. So, here's a list of some, but I'm sure not all; I see no pattern, but if anyone else does, let me know! And, the order of things listed means nothing.
Here goes: penguins; bikers on Harleys; road trips; an email or phone call from my husband; family coming over to visit; my kids, first thing in the morning; Christian, and especially Catholic, philosophers; Peter van Inwagen's Quam Dilecta; mass; healing masses; Barnes and Noble bookstores; libraries; a book by my bed, waiting to be read; Asian Indians (no idea where this come from, but when the feeling's there, it's there!); the Christmas season; landing in a foreign country; C.S. Lewis books; a well-delivered lecture; the life of Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta; my kids having a full, happy day; St. John of the Cross; fully habited nuns on a city street; college campuses; making power point slides for other people; chocolate during a crisis (I'm not sure that such a biological reaction counts as happiness!); the day after a big grocery shopping; memories of grad school (no idea how that experience morphed into something positive, but it did); and family vacations.
     Of course, my mind also turned to those things that can give me a feeling of despair capable of sinking me for a moment or even longer. Among these are: any thought in the middle of the night; memories of summers in my hometown, during my teenage years (boooring and hot!!); settling disputes with customer service representatives; thinking of my kids going to school; and thinking of my kids growing up. Nothing else comes to mind right now, which I guess is a good thing.

Housekeeping and the Myth of Sisyphus

We're leaving for the beach on Tues. and I am determined to have the entire house cleaned for our departure. This makes no sense: I want it cleaner for when we are gone than for when we are there. But, in my defense, I'd be fighting my genetic code to do otherwise (or at least a strong case of nurture). My mom would literally be dragging the wet mop to the door as we locked up the house for our annual trip to the Jersey shore.
So, as is the case with housework, weak management skills, and three small children, I am cleaning one room while they mess up another. Right now they are all sleeping and I have a load of laundry and the dishwasher going, so I feel like something is being accomplished while I write. But, when they wake up, it will start all over: they'll need a snack (more dishes and more crumbs); my three old princess will need her 4th outfit of the day (more laundry); my 2-year old son will want to play (more toys dumped); they'll want to swim (more laundry and dirty, wet feet on the floors); and the baby will want to nurse (more hand-tying and watching the mayhem).
Sisyphus pushed a rock up a hill only to watch it come back down so that he could begin his (boring!) task all over again. He had nothing over the housewife! And, it has been said that (like the housewife), he found this tedious, absurd task somehow rewarding. Such is life (says Camus).

Why I'm blogging

I just saw a friend's blog and thought that this would be easier to do than write a novel, which is one of my lofty (and likely unattainable) goals. Any novel that I write would be too close to an autobiography, anyway, since I have very little imagination (I think). So, a blog is a happy medium between doing nothing and writing a novel.
It's also manageable, since I can only write in brief spurts. This is because: (1) I am a stay-at-home mom with a 3 year old, a 2 year old, and a 3 month old; and (2) I have a short attention span. Some might call it multi-tasking, but I'm not fooled.
Why the title? Being a philosopher is my part-time, online profession. I have a PhD in philosophy and teach online courses in philosophy. Despite appearances, I probably won't give much of a philosophical perspective on motherhood, but who knows? I might do so more than I think. (Here's a tip to anyone who might think they know who I am: the husband is also a professional philosopher; he's gainfully employed as such...)
So, hopefully I can keep up on this. I started a blog months ago, and, honestly, I don't even know where it is. Better luck this time.