Saille
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Posts posted by Saille
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I thought it might be interesting, in light of the discussion about possessions on the women's work thread, to see what sort of things we buy. Maybe we could start with a couple of key places for which we're sold a lot of hyped up products, and go from there?
Shower: A bottle of shampoo and a bar of soap.
Cleaners cupboard: Dish soap. Several bottles of Seventh Generation spray cleaner. Method floor cleaner and furniture polish. Toilet cleaner. Baking soda. Murphy's oil soap. Sometimes castille soap, but not right now. White vinegar. Tea tree oil.
Laundry room: (full disclosure: we are not good at getting stains out of clothing) Arm and Hammer laundry detergent. Natural wasp and hornet killer. Bleach (one bottle chlorine, one natural). Dryer sheets. Oxy Clean. Spray and Wash, about empty. A bleach pen (I use it on the grout). Some random cleaners the last owner left, like dog shampoo and glass cleaner.
Where else is a hot spot for stuff we don't need? Bathroom cupboard? I've got a bunch of first aid stuff, q-tips, aveeno lotion, calamine lotion, bug spray, maybe some Burt's Bees lipstick? I'll have to go look.
Once upon a time I had a whole shelf of white barn candles and the like...before I had kids.
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I agree with your post, Charles Wallace. I think it's very well worded.
What gets my knickers in a twist is this:
We have a small mortgage (for this area) and lowish property taxes. We chose carefully.
We own both our (older) cars.
We don't have cable.
I don't have a cell phone plan.
We buy almost everything used, including clothing and furniture.
We grow a fair amount of our food, and we cook most things from scratch, including most of our bread.
Our kids share rooms.
I work two part time jobs.
We just about never use credit cards, and are paying what we do have down.
We mow our acreage with a push mower that was a gift. Before that we used a rotary blade mower and a scythe. It sounds silly, but it's true. Not only do we not live the normalized American lifestyle, we're pretty much skinflints. We had a serious conversation this morning about canceling trash pickup because hauling it to the dump ourselves is so much cheaper.
And we still just scrape by. Holiday gifts, any out of the ordinary purchase, major car repair, home repair, even dinner out...they're all huge nailbiters.
Now, I'll grant you that some of this is situational. Dh is doing something like three consolidated jobs on a good day; pay comparisons have made it clear that he's being paid less than he's worth, but his particular industry is in a state of extreme belt-tightening, and was before the Great Recession, but now? Forget it. He's lucky to have a job, and we express gratitude for that every day. OTOH, some of this is due to the rampant credit spending that has been such a trend in this country. The cost of goods and services does not reflect the percentage of our actual income that they represent, because so many people have not been paying for them with actual income. And I believe that this mentality goes back to:
a. mass production and its accompanying marketing perspective
b. two income mentality (buy it, you don't have time to do the job yourself or repair the tool that broke).
c. the gradual slide from "buy it instead of make it" to "buy it and pay for it later, you deserve it".
I'm sure some of it is TV, as well. If you come home too tired to make or do, you watch. Your entertainment is passive. And what lays in wait on that screen? An endless stream of implications that Americans are entitled to houses that look like the sets of their favorite shows. Then everyone goes to work or school, where most everyone else has also been watching those shows and commercials, and the whole mess is reinforced. It's insidious and pervasive.
That's what I meant about my life being commoditized. It's like we need some sort of mass intervention where everybody is locked in their homes and the malls are all closed until we figure out the difference between a want and a need. But I really feel like the problem has its origins with the two-income family. And I say that as someone who would own the word feminist. Business has stepped up to sell us things and convince us that these things *are* memories, experiences, and nostalgia. And Americans are tired and disconnected from home, and they believe it. Once you stop drinking the Kool-Aid, you can look back and say to yourself, "Oh, those were not experiences; those were just things." But when you're in the midst of it and so is everyone around you, it can be really hard to see.
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Oh, no kidding. I am mopping the kitchen floor and about to make the currant jelly I should have made yesterday. We went to see fireworks and they were canceled in one town, so we had to drive to another. I don't regret it, but I looked up last night and it was 12:44 and I was floored. I'd been wondering why dh had gone to bed already. I am dragging today. And the garden needs weeding, but of course it's getting up to 90 today, which in upstate NY is pretty phenomenal.
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I've been thinking about this b/c of SWB's lecture on Teaching Students to Work Independently. She recommends having them keep a student planner starting in 5th grade. I'm sort of wondering if cognitively speaking a kid of that age would do better keeping it on paper...but I also think having a google calendar printout available this year might be an effective bridge. OTOH, he's supposed to have a checklist, and I don't want to spam him with paper...hmm.
Dh and I both use Google Calendar. We have networked calendars so we both know what's going on.
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No UU churches here in Australia, I don't think?
There's *one*. In Norwood, SA.
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I have to say, that by proper definition, I wouldn't consider a "UU" church a true church. If you don't want a "doctrine" that's believed, what's the point of church.
A church is a congregation, its members and clergy. And the informed choice to eschew dogma is not an abdication of doctrine. UUs trace their religious history back to Origen and Arian, and are proud of their heritage as religious freethinkers.
There are UUs here. Turn that statement around to be a commentary on any other religious group represented on this board and see what happens. Wanna maybe reword that?
Hotdrink, if you're looking for incense and holy water, the UU church will not have that. However, it would be a very interesting contrast to other churches, as would a Quaker meeting house.
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I don't think this thread is discussing the relative merits of woh mothering and sah mothering. That issue is much too complex to generalize about. We're talking about the factors that have contributed to the devaluation of unpaid hard work. Has WOH mothering contributed to that? Most of us seem to think so. Does that make WOH mothering bad? Absolutely, resolutely, loudly NOT. The question of SAHM v WOHM is neither here nor there. Well, actually, maybe it is here in this sense: "mommy wars" are often a red herring that distracts us from wondering where our culture is going and why. It would be possible to say, "the entrance of mothers into the workplace has had this negative effect," and not mean, "society would be better off if all mothers stayed home." I personally am saying the one and not the other.
This is the crux of it, yes. Visualize a GMA piece on "Mommy Wars" similar to the unschooling one from a few weeks ago. That's about as close as we ever get as a society to discussing what I'm talking about, although there has at least been some talk about empowered homeschooling in feminist magazines...the focus does tend to be unschooling, but still.
I can see how Heather would see more disdain for WOHMs, because she's in a different sort of religious community than I am. In mine, childcare and public education are seen as vitally important components of a socially just society, and homeschooling can actually be seen as failing to support the public schools. I had a very interesting conversation with an elder last summer, because I see homeschooling as a form of social activism. Public schools are not what I think they should be, and I believe that the rise in middle-class homeschoolers and homeschoolers who've chosen that path for primarily academic reasons creates fear of market instability in a big, top-heavy institution that has, until now, believed it had a captive customer base. I think that will improve things for everybody, not just my kids. She never had kids, but is an advocate for children at the local urban school board meetings, and has been for years. My POV had never occurred to her. At any rate, I also get less pushback than some, b/c I do have a bachelor's degree in education. So people are bemused, but not necessarily disapproving.
Peela, as far as being hard-nosed and not giving a darn what others think, like Rose said, I'm talking about the economic and overarching cultural issues, and not so much which individuals get my goat. If I were, I'd have a lot to say about two-income families who think we're cramping their style b/c we can't run off and do expensive out-of-pocket fun stuff with them/for them. Also, there's a sort of weird backlash that comes from working moms with internalized guilt who think they should be home, but don't want to be. I had to really struggle with a close friend about that for several years; it was bad to the point of enmeshment. All my choices were seen as a commentary on her choices. So I have a much thicker skin than I used to. ;) But I just got really crabby on asta's behalf.
Oh, and LOL Rosie...I've always advocated mandatory minimum wage employment in a restaurant.
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5. But I am still grateful that women have choices. I made the choice to have a career. I realize that makes me an evil working mom but I love what I do. My mom had NO education past high school and when my father cheated on her she had NO options...3 young children, no way to support herself. SHE WAS STUCK. That will NEVER happen to me.
I'm with you on this, I really am. I do like knowing I have my teacher cert. should I need it, and I've used it to bail us out before. Certainly it gets me a better hourly rate than I'd get at other p/t jobs...in specific instances, a LOT better. I simply wish the choices were more nuanced. Tomie DePaola's father was a barber, and they owned a house and supported three kids on one income. My dh is college educated, and we scrape by, even with my extra jobs and our general thrift.
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Well, I think that's what we're saying. "Your basic suburban house" is a cinch to take care of because your basic suburban house is composed of and cared for with toxic materials and chemicals and throw-away objects. When you stop Swiffering and start mopping, give up paper towels and plastic tupperware, make bread and jam and cheese instead of buying it, use a clothesline instead of a dryer, and cram a family into the smaller space of an older non-suburban house, it's not as quick. This work is becoming devalued in part because it's being sold in the form of impersonal, economically unbalanced, unhealthy, ecologically monstrous aids of all sorts. What we're saying here is we're NOT suburban and no one seems to realize that non-suburbanity has value.
Oh, yes this. This is a very accurate description of my life, although you left out the quack grass, which is *extremely* time consuming. Not to mention that working folks aren't generally living in their houses all day. That's less toilet use, fewer dishes, less trash, less dirt in general. Now add in kids who are constantly exploring their interests...today we had playdough, shaving cream, and I don't know what all else. Yesterday it was paint and black raspberries. Last week it was everything in the recycling bin and all my masking tape.
One of the reasons I love winter is because the garden is asleep and I can have some time to knit. One of the reasons I hate winter is because all the activities start back up, and I tend to be the person running them, which means I can never just show up on time...I have to bring everything, have a plan, and wrangle children. Just once I would love to be one of the mamas in the lobby with a novel. And I think that people sort of expect that I will be that person with the plan, because after all, I don't *work*.
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(I ask sometimes, don't I?)
If we're not recommending gov't stipends for the homeworkers, and we're not recommending family wages so one adult can stay at home or both can work just part-time, then what? What is the solution?
I'm sorry, Rose. Yes, you do ask, but I should have been more specific. I think that I tend to group both of us in an extremely small fringe culture (see the GUS thread on top of everything else), and this causes me to think of you as an interested party in the sense that a colleague would be an interested party. But my family and my in-laws will literally sit and talk for hours about their jobs, dh's and SIL's jobs, etc., and those conversations do not include me, even though I know that they all value me as a person and consider me intelligent and capable.
Right this second, it occurs to me that a paradigm shift would help a lot. Perhaps we could focus on resource allocation rather than earnings. There are incentives for carpooling, and insurance incentives for being accident free, having a safer car or a shorter commute...why shouldn't there be some sort of grant/tax break/whatever for reduced use of infrastructure due to rugged individualism. I realize that this will connect back to the whole "money back for not using the public schools" argument, though.
The thing that bothers me most is that, in exchange for new and additional freedoms, we co-opted some of the freedoms we already had...I dislike the trend towards pricing people out of living more simply. It doesn't seem like that should be possible.
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Or money?
:iagree:
That, and we value titles. Compartments. If it's on a certificate, it counts. Actually, I think this arises from a type of bureaucracy that walks hand-in-hand with the industrialization I was talking about upthread. (Charles Wallace, your explanation was helpful. Thanks.) Automating things means that everything has to be broken down into steps and logged in easily definable ways. I actually think the dumbing down of public education is owed in large part to this mentality. (And it's how some of my worst bosses got to be bosses, by embracing that mentality. Lemme tell you how frustrated I am that some of those womens' work is valued more than mine.)
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nodding along violently.
One of the many reasons i did not finish getting my teaching certification is that it occurred to me that i was training to pay to put my kids in daycare and in school, while i left them to go teach other people's children, to take that pay to pay for their childcare ...
Made no sense. And yet the one option was honored and praised, the other was not. It is a rightful achievement to care for and teach other people's children for pay, but not to care for and teach my own.
Ack! Yes! Exactly!
(I have to add here that no one ever asks me about work anymore. Ever. And I'm working really hard.)
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I think saille is saying the problem now is that it has become very hard for a woman to have the choice to be a SAHM. For many women they sincerely and often factually feel they do not have that choice. They are in a situation where if they do it for minimum wage for someone else while paying lass than that for yet another someone to do it for their kids - that's readily accepted. But if the same woman decides to do the same work for free for her own home - she is a drain on society. It shouldn't be like that. It simply isn't logical, practical or healthy or even economically sound.
Yes this. And the essential problem would not be solved by my dh staying home instead of me. (We've done that, too.)
Yes to what stripe said, too. And I think we've developed this very superficial sense of what's demeaning. Truly, I do not generally hear the word sacrifice outside of this board. And I hear it here mostly from Christian folks. Why on earth does that word have so little traction outside the context of religion or patriotism? The sense of the new, the clean, the manufactured or systematic as "good" is so pervasive...but there is great good to be found in making and doing things one's own self, for the benefit of one's own family. Homesteaders talk about this. But they're a fringe culture. The push in this country is to value shiny, glossy, new over homespun, patched, repaired, and just good old fashioned serviceable. To be honest, I even resent the dichotomy. Enslaved by our wedding bands and employing post-Depression thrift, or free and driving SUVs while sipping lattes and picking up replacement swiffer cloths at Target, where our fellow mama is busy getting hassled for feeding a baby...*gasp*...with her breasts! That affected sort of squeamishness just drives me crazy.
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.....but aren't a lot of the problems due to everyone wanting so much more than is really healthy and sustainable in the long run, for the majority? If everyone feels it is their right and privelege to have a decent family home in the burbs, to have 2.2 kids and all the mod cons of modern life....somewhere surely something has to give?
There are so many factors involved in all these issues.
Well yes, but where did that mentality come from? Bush isn't the first American President who told us to spend as a patriotic duty, and the reason people could (and in some ways, had to) do that is because we moved to a model of two people working outside the home, which meant that no one had the time to bother making things. They just bought them, instead. Over the years, folks in the U.S. have lost the skills to make, grow or raise what they need, to the point that there are people who are genuinely freaked out by the fact that I would eat eggs that come out of a chicken who lives in my yard. The practical effect of existing solely as a consumer and not producing anything is that, in the absence of reflection, it leads to magical thinking about where all that stuff comes from, and where it's going. Increasingly, the products we buy are made to be disposable. They are not intended to last, b/c if they were, we wouldn't buy more, would we? And all of this is the tip of the iceberg that led to shopping being the most common recreational activity in America. So yes, many, many Americans feel entitled to things they don't need, but they've been carefully groomed for generations to do so, and everything about American culture makes it easier to do that than to not.
Maude knows I march to the beat of my own drummer and will continue to do so. That's not the issue. The issue is that I had an adverse reaction to a song about social justice because I found it ironic in light of my modern reality.
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I suppose I *could* reword all my math problems to say things like, "Philemon and Baucis lived in a town with 20 houses. Each house had 6 people living there. When Zeus and Hermes destroyed the town for failure to provide proper hospitality to strangers, how many people died for not showing proper piety?" but it seems a bit cumbersome.;)
I tutored a kid whose math program required him to convert measurements to cubits.
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We live on three acres. We have chickens, ducks, a huge garden, two barn cats, an indoor cat, and the English Shepherd. I just put in eleven golden raspberry bushes this week, and we have three cherry trees and three apple trees if the doggone deer will just leave them alone.
So yeah, there's plenty here to keep me busy, and dh is pretty busy when he's home from work. I also work two part-time jobs, one as a tutor and one as an RE teacher at our church. My dh is the church's board president this year. We are the leaders of a local co-ed scouting group, which all three of our kids attend. Mostly the kids homeschool, read, paint, draw, pick black raspberries, invent complicated games and spend a load of time outdoors. I tried to send the two olders to a week of art camp, and they objected to being placed in different groups. We are also working on debt paydown, so we buy very little. We picked a flat of red raspberries and some currants at a pick your own place yesterday, and that was a major extravagance.
This weekend, I'm making loads of jam, freezing berries, and painting the glassed-in porch, which my mom will be glad to know, b/c she gave me the giftcard I'm using back in March, for my birthday. I'll post pics on the blog eventually, but all our cameras have issues right now. :glare: Dh is working. The kids are wandering. This is the first Sunday we've skipped church since September.
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I was struck particularly by the idea that we are now paying individuals to do the jobs that women used to do at home for free. Women are naturally more inclined to do these, so women take these jobs. The desire for this work to become paid work is a theme in Peggy Seeger's songs. Her most famous song, "Gonna Be An Engineer," goes like this --
I'd do the lovely things that a lady's s'posed to do
I wouldn't even mind if only they would pay me
Then I could be a person too.
What price for a woman?
You can buy her for a ring of gold,
To love and obey, without any pay,
You get a cook and a nurse for better or worse
You don't need a purse when a lady is sold.
My gut reaction to this had nothing at all to do with valuing women's work or the right to be paid for that work. It had more to do with the economic effects of the two-income family phenomenon.
I have a problem with the industrialization of the jobs women used to do at home for free. I'm glad that paid childcare is available, but it's become the status quo, and I don't consider that healthy. Now, probably on a homeschooling board, that's not a terribly controversial opinion. But I suspect it is controversial in my community.
The main problem, at least for me, is that women can get paid to do this important work, as long as they don't mind doing it for someone else, while paying someone else to do it for them. It looks really silly when I type it out. This concept has become so normalized that us homeschooling mamas get all those "I could never stay home with my kids" comments, even from teachers and child care workers.
Additionally, the freedom to earn income has made doing important work at home a privilege instead of a right. Many people are just priced right out of doing it. Homesteading becomes almost a necessity, and who bears the brunt of that? Not the man, who in the current economic environment is doing the paid work of two or three people. So, if your gold band is not in fact a form of white slavery, but a compact between equals, you are both worn to a nub and exhausted from trying to do something that few of your acquaintances do, using skills few of them have. Either they treat you like a carnival sideshow, or they completely romanticize what you are doing. Either way, it's hard to chat.
Add to this that modern American pop culture is so far removed from your reality that LOST looks more normal than American Idol. I don't know. I'm tired just thinking about it. But I sort of want to slap Peggy Seeger right now, even though I understand what she was saying. It's not her fault the big corporations have commoditized my life. But I wish our elders had at least considered and prepared for that possibility.
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but the book by David McCollough is not to be missed. Really, almost anything written by him is fantastic. I've read 1776, and my husband has read Mornings on Horseback, about Teddy Roosevelt.
I also heard David McCollough speak the other day on C-SPAN's Book TV to a convention of history teachers. He's a tremendous speaker as well!
I wonder if he'd come to a homeschool conference...
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UU Pantheist here.
I've been thinking about this question all day.
I started to say that we don't homeschool to raise little UUs, but I'm not sure, upon reflection, that that's true. Certainly the things I dislike about public school tend to violate the principles of my church, which are:
- The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
- Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
- Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;
- A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;
- The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;
- The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
- Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.
And anyone who has seen the copybooks I make my kids, or read my posts on the worldview thread, knows that I choose to integrate UU history and beliefs into our curriculum. Does that make me a religious homeschooler? I don't know. But if that's what I am, that's a pretty small camp. Can I hang out here anyway?
- The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
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Coffee
Ditto on the sweet potato fries
Price Chopper's Veggie Chips
I love dark chocolate, but can't eat it forever. The taste is so strong, I get "full". Also very fond of smokehouse almonds just now.
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Oh, cool!
I have been rocking Pandora on my roku constantly. We've been using the radio stations on there, too. KEXP has always been a favorite of mine.
ETA: I'm on about episode 7 of Donald Kagan's Ancient Greek History course, but I've been using the audio version on iTunes U. Now I can see him! I have to check and see if they show the phalanx he forms using students.
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Saille, I think I love you. :D
Seriously? I knew I loved you like, a couple of weeks ago! :tongue_smilie: I always enjoy your posts.
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"Gods don't kill people, It's people with gods that kill people" (not sure where that quote is from, but I read it somewhere)... I always think of this when we are studying religion and history. Most wars and atrocities have been committed because someone thought their thought was right and must be forced on others.
I think there's a difference between dogmatism and worldview, at least the way Rose is describing it. Worldview appears to be shorthand for being reflective about what you can and should do about what you believe. In some cases, people might come to the conclusion that furthering religious absolutism is the answer to that question, but worldview is specific to the individual even if large groups share overarching worldview principles. And non-religious, or non-evangelical, or any other sort of people can have worldviews. In my case, my worldview is focused through the lens of a religion that believes in universal salvation, so my worldview has to do with transcending religious differences, not emphasizing them. Hopefully I'm explaining that correctly.
s/o -- If you try to buy locally, will you please stop in here?
in General Education Discussion Board
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Hey LL, what kind of chicken is that? Something spangled?