Interpersonal rules for preschoolers

(which we hope they will carry into adulthood)

• Consequences matter. If you were kicking your legs near your sister and you didn’t exactly mean to kick her but your foot did crash into her, you’re being reckless.
• You never need to give hugs or kisses if you don’t feel like it.
• No complaining or threatening when someone else refuses your hugs or kisses.
• If you can’t stop making loud noises at dinner, you have to go somewhere else.
• People can revoke consent (yes, even if she already said you could bite her. Now she’s telling you to stop.)

Nice things

Last night a friend of a friend invited us swimming at a private pond in a Boston exurb.

Part of me felt suspicious of the place. Something about the feeling of “this is something rich people do” and the knowledge that the adults chatting in deck chairs were doctors and professors made me almost allergic. I could feel my inner college-era socialist getting her hackles up.

But the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. I think it boiled down to: the things there were actually enjoyable at a basic level, not just good for signaling superiority over other people.

I would like every child on Earth to have the chance to spend hot July evenings swimming at a place like this. I understand that paying lifeguards and maintaining bathrooms costs money, and that there needs to be some public or private way to cover those costs. But it’s not so expensive that realistically more communities couldn’t provide this.

Looking into it more, that’s perhaps the problem. The pond is members-only, but the website doesn’t explain how to become a member, and a review notes that there’s a waiting list. Possibly you have to know somebody. That explains why it was so uncrowded on Sunday evening.

The approach I prefer is public beaches like Sandy Beach in Winchester, maintained as a state park. Because it’s open to the public, it fits my sensibilities more: on hot nights it’s crowded with families from all over the surrounding cities, playing Brazilian music and barbecuing. The main improvement would be if it were on public transit.

A lot of stuff I associate with fancy / rich people is wasteful because a lot of the resources are going to arms-race type spending to get ahead of the others. But some things, like a place to swim, would just be good to have more of. I would love to see more areas like this available, either through paid membership for people who want to pay for less crowding, or public beaches for people like me who don’t mind.

Unintended pregnancy in folk songs

I’ve been listening to a lot of the Watersons and Waterson:Carthy this week. It’s reminded me how absolutely full British folk music is of songs about unintended pregnancy.

Most commonly the result is unhappy motherhood:

“But if I had kent that I now ken
And taken my mother’s bidding o
I wouldn’t be sitting by our fireside
Crying hushabye my bairnie-o.

It’s hushaba for I’m your ma
but the Lord knows who’s your daddy-o
So it’s girls take care and you beware
of the ploughboys in the gloaming-o.”
– “When I was noo but sweet sixteen”

Sometimes extremely unhappy motherhood:

“The rain wets my yellow locks, the dew wets me still
The babe is cold in my arms, love — Lord Gregory, let me in.”
– Lass of Loch Royal

(His mother turns her away and suggests she drown herself, resulting in predictable tragedy.)

There’s occasionally a responsible father, as in “Bogie’s Bonnie Belle“, but this one is also thwarted by disapproving parents:

“When the full nine months were gone and past, she brought to me a son
And it’s then that I was sent for to see what could be done
And once more I said I’d marry her, but no that wouldn’t do
‘For you’re no match for my bonny belle, and she’s not a match for you.’
And I took my young son in my arms, and joy to him I’ll bring
And maybe he’ll mean as much to me as the girl that I adore.”

(I wonder if that last more tender couplet was maybe added in the 70s by Robin and Barry Dransfield, as I don’t see it in other versions.)

“Tam Lin” includes a memorable description of morning sickness:

There’s four and twenty ladies all in the court
Grown red as any rose
Excepting for young Margaret
And green as glass she goes, any grass,
Yes green as glass she goes.

Outten spoke the first serving girl,
She lifted her head and smiled
“I think me lady’s loved too long
And now she goes with child, me dears
Now she goes with child.”

And outten spoke the second serving girl
“Oh ever and alas,” Said she
“I think I know a herb in the merry green wood
That’ll twine the babe from thee, Lady
That’ll twine the babe from thee.”

Margaret’s lover interrupts her as she’s picking the abortifacient herb and reveals that he’s been absent because of being kept captive by the fairies (an unusual excuse). He tells her how to rescue him, and they go on to have one of the few happy endings in balladry.

Unhappy parenthood is the most common plot outcome, but there’s also infanticide, as in “The Cruel Mother“:

“She leaned her back against a thorn
And there she had two little babes born

She took her penknife keen and sharp
And pierced those two babes to the heart.”

(This one ends with haunting and damnation.)

And homicide, as in “The Cruel Ship’s Carpenter.” After a courtship goes on longer than convenient, the man invites his lover to the woods and murders her. Pregnancy isn’t mentioned until the last line when the vengeful ghost returns:

“She ripped him and stripped and tore him in three,
Saying, ‘That’s for the murder of my baby and me.'”

As a teenager when I first heard a lot of these ballads, they seemed like they were about unhappy, sometimes melodramatically unhappy love. I didn’t quite get just how many unhappy long-term situations must have resulted from lack of reliable birth control.

Valentine exchange 2019

It’s time for a valentine exchange! Here’s how it works:

• email me with your name and mailing address (julia.d.wise at gmail)
• I’ll let you know who you’re exchanging with
• make or buy about 4 valentines and mail them by the end of this weekend
• enjoy checking the mail!

As per usual, I’ve forgotten to announce this with enough leeway for international mail arriving on time. Most participants will likely be in the US, so you’re welcome to participate internationally but you’ll get your mail on the late side — sorry!

Contractor mindset vs. homeowner mindset

Jeff is redoing our bathroom, which involves taking down walls with old lead paint on them. He’s sealed off that portion of the house, and when he’s doing leaded work he doesn’t come back in the rest of the house until he’s taken off his coveralls, changed clothes, washed his hands in the basement, showered, and changed clothes again. That’s what you do if you’re an informed parent who doesn’t want your kids to get lead poisoning.

When my dad worked in construction, the comment made after a shoddy job was “Well, I can’t see it from my house.” That’s basically the attitude I’ve seen from contractors about things like lead dust, despite laws about precautions they’re supposed to take. When our electrician’s assistant cut through an old wall with no precautions, scattering lead dust all over the inside of a closet (containing, unfortunately, the cleaning supplies), I called to complain. “I have no way of knowing what’s in your walls,” the electrician told me, though we both know very well what’s likely to be in 1920s walls given that lead paint wasn’t banned until 1978.

I called the state lead safety agency, the ones theoretically in charge of enforcement. They told me to clean my house really well.

The next time the electrician needed to go through a wall, he promised he’d put down a dropcloth. He did — it covered the area just under the work, and the dust extended for yards beyond it, including down the stairway where he tracked it on his way out. When I went to clean it up, it was like one of those cakes where you can see the shape of where the doily was laid, because the icing sugar is sprinkled everywhere else.

That’s the kind of work you get when the incentive is to look like you’re doing the right thing, rather than to actually prevent lead from getting into your children’s bodies. You get a dropcloth that pretends to address the problem. You get a phone number where you can call and get no help.

……..

Last night I was talking with Jeff about some health problems I’ve been trying to figure out. I made a long list of things I had tried already, and a shorter list of things I haven’t tried. I spent a lot of the conversation arguing to him why the remaining things were unlikely to work.

I was essentially in contractor mindset. As if it weren’t my house, and all I needed to do was demonstrate that I’d taken some reasonable steps. But when you’re the homeowner, when it’s your roof that’s leaking, when you’re the parent of the children who live there, it’s not enough to try. You have to actually fix the problem. If you stop when you have taken the steps that could reasonably be expected of you, it’s you and your family who bear the cost.

I’m trying to balance this with the virtue of acceptance. I may try every single thing on both lists, and I may never find anything that works all that well. I may just need to learn to live with the status quo.

But it would suck to try 15 out of 20 things and never find out that the 18th thing on the list would have helped. This body is my home. If I can summon the energy, it’s time to keep trying.

 

 

How much do kids cost? The first 5 years

We did an estimate on how much our first year of having a baby cost. Four years and another baby later, we decided to do an update on how much the first five years have cost.

TL;DR: Over 5 years we’ve spent about $106,760 in cash, or about $150,000 including lost earnings. By far the biggest costs for us were housing, childcare, and lost wages of a stay-at-home parent.

Related posts:
Cost comparison of childcare
How much does it cost to have a baby? (at the one-year mark)
How much does it cost to raise kids? (speculation before we did it)

Total cost over 5 years:

Ok, this graph looks ridiculous because most categories are so much smaller than housing and childcare that you can’t see them, but that’s probably the point. People talk about baby gear and diapers costing money, but they just don’t hold a candle to the big two.

And that’s just counting what we paid in dollars. Here it is with my lost wages (post-tax) included:

So overall we’re about $151,690 short of what our child-free selves might have (assuming we neither donated nor invested the money). We’re also ahead by an unknown number of kisses and games of Lily-burrito.

Monthly averages:

With the exception of buying a house, most of your costs don’t come all at once. So how to the costs actually come each month?

Some costs scale with having a second child and some didn’t. The biggest differences were 1) moving towards more paid childcare 2) moving to a house where each kid had a bedroom, instead of sharing our bedroom as Lily did for the first two years. Of course some of this is more affected by the passing time than by adding additional children — if we’d had just one child, we still would have moved her out of our bedroom around that time.

Chart with numbers

What’s in the categories:

• Housing: this is kind of pretend, because we actually built two extra rooms onto our house, which had a high up-front cost but will be useful for years and will eventually make the house sell for more. I’m instead substituting the cost at which we currently rent our spare bedroom ($900/month times 2 bedrooms). Lily got her own room around age 2 and Anna got hers around age 1, but I’m prorating it equally between them. This is one where you’ll be able to work out pretty easily what an extra bedroom costs where you live. Remember that your housing size won’t scale with your family size unless you move to a larger place every time you have a baby, so you’ll likely have some crowded years or some spare space.
• Childcare: payments to daycare providers, payments to nannies, au pair costs (stipend, agency fees, room, food, utilities, phone, and transit). The cost of the au pair room is estimated in the same way as the kids’ rooms above. Duplicate childcare while traveling (when either parent takes one child with them on a work trip).
• Food: additional food while Julia was pregnant and nursing. Minimal food during child’s first year. When we split food costs with housemates, we started counting the kids at half an adult share when they turned 1. This is probably an overestimate of what they eat.
• Health insurance: increase over what we paid for 2 of us to be on health insurance from Jeff’s work.
• Gear/nursery: cribs, rocking chair, stroller, etc.
• Hygiene/medical: diapers, bottle-feeding supplies, medicine, dentistry, vitamins, copays on medical appointments.
• Other: travel, toys, books.
• Education: books and materials for doing home preschool with Lily, and a summer program.
• Clothes: mostly from thrift stores or Swap.com.
• Julia: maternity and nursing clothes. The fact that I even thought this would be a significant category when we started tracking shows how vague my idea of our future expenses was.

More on lost wages:

During 2014-2017 I worked 2434 fewer hours, or about 60 fewer full weeks, than I expect I would have. After Lily’s birth I used my 13 days of vacation and sick time I’d hoarded from my social work job, and then quit and returned 5 months later. Lily lasted 3 weeks in daycare before getting kicked out because she wouldn’t drink milk for anyone but us (who knew that was a thing? To be fair, it’s unusual and your kid will probably be fine in daycare). So Jeff moved his schedule earlier, I worked evenings and weekends, and between us we took care of Lily constantly while working the equivalent of 1.6 jobs. More on that period. When she was 18 months we switched her to 4 days a week in daycare, and I worked 4 days and 2 evenings a week.

With Anna, we had a more normal setup. I took 7 weeks unpaid maternity leave, Jeff took 10 weeks paid paternity leave, and then both children were cared for by a nanny or au pair. Cost comparison of childcare arrangements we considered.

Things that may change your costs:

• Paid parental leave: Both times Jeff got 12 weeks paid leave and I got none. This is better than what most Americans get, but not so good by world standards.
• Opportunity cost: If a parent earning a lot takes unpaid leave or reduced hours, it’s a bigger difference from your previous income. If the parent wasn’t earning that much, it’s a smaller difference. If you’re in a field where taking extended leave will hurt your chance of promotion, etc, that’s an additional loss.
• Cost of childcare in your area: Boston has one of the highest childcare costs in the country, which is why an au pair (with nationally standardized costs) was the cheapest option once we had two kids. I don’t really understand why it varies so much by region. Also, different types of childcare vary in cost, quality, and convenience.
• Cost of living in your area: There are many places (including cheaper areas of our city) where a spare room costs less than $900/month, and some where it costs more.
• Sharing rooms: We could have moved to a three-bedroom place before having kids, which would have increased our costs. Or we could have stayed in a smaller space for longer — children having their own bedrooms has been unusual historically. But extended room-sharing means extended night feedings and (at least in our experience) more disrupted sleep for everyone. That’s one thing if you don’t need to do a lot of mental work during the day, but chronic sleep deprivation is no joke if your job requires you to think clearly. There are also other ways around this (baby in the bedroom and parents sleeping in the living room seems to happen a lot in San Francisco). Having children share with each other is another common option.
• Buying more or less stuff: We’ve kept costs pretty minimal here by buying used toys and clothes. Swap.com and similar sites are excellent for this.
• Preschool: we opted for minimal paid preschool because we were already paying for full-time childcare. We could either have put the kids in a daycare (the more expensive of which include preschool programming) or paid for Lily to go to morning preschool on top of the childcare we already had. The difference is whether someone is basically watching the kids play, vs. leading more organized group activities and having them learn letters, basic math, prewriting skills, etc.
• Vehicle: We have never owned a car, so kids really haven’t changed our transportation expenses. This is a cost to consider.
• Travel: The trips we take are now more expensive, but we take fewer of them, so I think this about evens out.
• Health insurance: Costs would be lower in a country with free health care, or higher if you don’t have an employer that covers as much of insurance costs as Jeff’s does.
• Health needs: children with special needs (medical, emotional, behavioral) need more of your time and more money for medical copays, services that aren’t covered by insurance, childcare that can handle their needs, etc.

How I want you to use this information:
To think about how much it may cost you or others to raise children. I particularly advise saving money before you have kids.

How I do not want you to use this information:
To criticize my family for our lifestyle or financial choices.

Hardly anyone publishes their budget. Please don’t disincentivize that.

Thoughts on “you owe me”

I chose the title quote of this blog in a more socialist stage of my life. I was excited about applying generosity to personal relationships, to my finances, and to policy in general.

There’s an ideal of marriage in my mind, based on novels like I Take Thee, Serenity, of old people enjoying a lifetime of selfless love. At a friend’s wedding, an older married woman gave her the advice, “Don’t count. It will always seem like you’re doing more. Give and give and give thanks.” I loved that. I hung the last line in our first apartment.

Then I had kids, and now I definitely count. 

Jeff and I have done several rounds of time tracking, including at least one where I was quite sure I was the put-upon wife. Embarrassingly for me, it turned out he was doing quite a bit more work. But now we know that.

The idea of people truly not minding their generosity to their spouse is appealing. At the same time, treating women’s time as valuable is a major victory of the 20th century, and the gains are not complete. Excerpts from the mothers’ group I’m part of:

 

Note that this isn’t purely a gender thing — there are similar stories from moms with a female partner, or from moms who acknowledge being the weak link in the household.

Now that I’m familiar with the kind of “partnership” that many of my peers experience, it amazes me now that so many people read The Giving Tree as a heartwarming story of selflessness. I read it now as being about annihilation. No matter how much she gives, it never makes him happy, let alone grateful. He does not even enjoy wrecking her. Maybe it’s meant to be about parenthood more than partnership, but I wouldn’t let my children treat me like that either.

After seeing a bit more of real life, my guess at what works best is now something like:

• Be aware of the work your partner does, and express gratitude.** I do recommend a few days or weeks of time tracking as a way to realize what this looks like — I had forgotten whole categories of work that Jeff does, and tracking made me more aware of the full picture. It might also help make clear how much time is spent on invisible planning-type work (arranging with the babysitter, making the shopping list, reading about how to fix the drain).
• Don’t expect perfect equality on a daily or weekly basis, but try to even things out over time. (I’m particularly happy that Jeff now deals with the kids’ night wakings after my years of night feedings.)
• Recognize that things may not even out. People vary in their need for sleep, in the tasks they hate, and in physical and mental health. Maybe the reality of your partnership is that one of you will consistently put in more than 50%.
• If one of you has your heart set on a career that will leave little time for helping with household and children, get on the same page about whether that’s something you can both live with.
• Freeing each other up to do special things occasionally — to go out with friends, to sleep in — can go a long way even when you’re both handling a lot.
• If you’re dividing work in a traditional fashion, double check that this is really what you both want.
• Recognize that society may not allocate responsibility evenly between you. If the baby is in dirty clothes, if the table is set wrong at Thanksgiving, if your kid does not bring a good present to their friend’s birthday party, society will not be even-handed in assigning blame between a mother and father. If you’re both cool with saying, “to hell with society’s expectations,” great, but recognize that society already assigned all these expectations to the mother and she is the one who had better be cool with disregarding them.

*A second note of irony is that years after falling in love with Daniel Ladinsky’s translation of Hafiz, I realized they are not translations at all, but 20th-century riffs on Hafiz’s 14th-century poems. No wonder they sound so modern.

** Thanks to Jeff who is putting the kids down for their nap as I write this!

Lives we didn’t plan to have

A throwback post. This week I was packing a suitcase, which always makes me think of a woman I knew and her backpack.

. . . . .

Here are some categories of people I once thought of as having always existed in some alternate world from mine:

Parents.
Cancer patients.
Old people.
Homeless people.

I was kind of shocked when I was pregnant that I didn’t just magically have time in my schedule for things like prenatal yoga and lots of medical appointments. I knew these were the kinds of things pregnant people did, but I did not enjoy the transition from non-pregnant person’s schedule to a pregnant person’s schedule. Somehow it hadn’t really clicked with me that I would have to actually drop things from my schedule in order to have a pregnant person’s schedule.

Having seen people develop serious illness likewise made me realize that it’s a part- to full-time job. The time it takes to wait on hold with the insurance company, go to 9 million appointments, to not be able to work today — that was not time that was just available before. That time used to be filled with hobbies, dates, work, projects. Those things had to be swept aside.

I still catch myself thinking this way about old people. They are like a separate life form, one with back pain and segmented pillboxes. The rational part of me understands I may one day become this life form, but I still catch myself thinking they must have been doing it wrong and surely it won’t be like this for me.

. . . . .

“Homeless people” are perhaps the most extreme of this category. Until I became a social worker, this category contained only people I did not know and never planned to know.

At the jail, one young woman described her backpack routine. When she was not in jail she was homeless, and all her belongings were carried in her backpack. She packed it anew every morning, folding every item before it went back in. Her life might have fallen apart in every other way, but her socks would never be unfolded. A crack erupted in my sense of what made “regular people” and “homeless people” different.

Another client, a self-described germophobe, told me about his process for settling down for the night when he was on the outside: he’d find a porch with an electrical outlet. He’d get out his bottle of bleach or ammonia, sanitize the porch, then plug in his electric blanket and make the best of a cold night. He refused to stay in shelters because of the stench of other residents. “I may be homeless,” he hissed, “but my feet don’t stink.”

. . . . .

Those categories? It’s a person like you in there. They weren’t always like this. This wasn’t their plan.

Thoughts on Samuel Pepys

I’ve been listening to the diary of Samuel Pepys on audio. He wrote it between 1660 and 1669 while living in London and working in the British government. He’s unusual among diarists in that he was interested in everything from politics to fashion to music, spared no detail even about his own faults, and witnessed some major historical events.

At first I was enjoying the details about daily life and their similarities and differences with daily life now — What he thinks of his new wig! The argument he and his wife had about whether the dog should sleep in their room! Boy, there are a lot of public executions!

Maybe the most striking thing to me is how much he writes about sex. I can think of a few contributing reasons:

• he was just unusually interested in sex.
• lots of people are very interested in sex, and I usually don’t read their diaries.
• this is an abridgment of the original million+ words, and they kept the juicy bits in and cut some of the details about his day at work.

By the time we get to 1665, I was pretty done with the constant description of his interactions with bosoms and was relieved that he started talking about the Great Plague of London instead.

The fastest way to find the sex passages is to search for the phrase “God forgive me,” which basically always means the rest of the sentence is him trying to figure out how to get it on with his servants, his friends’ servants, his friends’ wives, or random strangers.

“God forgive me, I was sorry to hear that Sir W. Pen’s maid Betty was gone away yesterday, for I was in hopes to have had a bout with her before she had gone, she being very pretty. I had also a mind to my own wench, but I dare not for fear she should prove honest and refuse and then tell my wife.”

One of the rare bosom-themed passages in which he does not ask God’s forgiveness, apparently because it was the fault of the Mrs. Penington involved:

“she willingly suffered me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there long. Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought she could have suffered it, by her former discourse with me; so modest she seemed and I know not what.” Poor Sam, so deceived.

Maybe the nerviest episode is where he tries to grope a woman in church, she threatens to stab him, and he just moves on and tries another woman in the next pew instead:

“I walked towards White Hall, but, being wearied, turned into St. Dunstan’s Church, where I heard an able sermon of the minister of the place; and stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand and the body; but she would not, but got further and further from me; and, at last, I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again — which seeing I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little and then withdrew. So the sermon ended, and the church broke up, and my amours ended also.”

(Through the 1910s, hatpins were used for a similar purpose.)

…..

Another (literally) striking aspect of the diary is the casual attitude toward physical violence. He routinely complains about injuring himself while beating his employees.

“I sent my boy home for some papers, where, he staying longer than I would have him, and being vexed at the business and to be kept from my fellows in the office longer than was fit, I become angry, and boxed my boy when he came, that I do hurt my thumb so much, that I was not able to stir all the day after, and in great pain.”

“I bade  Will get me a rod, and he and I called the boy up to one of the upper rooms of the Comptroller’s house towards the garden, and there I reckoned all his faults, and whipped him soundly, but the rods were so small that I fear they did not much hurt to him, but only to my arm, which I am already, within a quarter of an hour, not able to stir almost.”

He has a similar approach to his wife. After giving her a black eye, he does admit to being “vexed at my heart to think what I had done, for she was forced to lay a poultice or something to her eye all day, and is black, and the people of the house observed it.” It’s unclear how much of the vexation is due to the black eye and how much is due to the servants noticing.

He married her when he was 22 and she was 14. In the early years, he discusses the pleasant times they have talking, singing, walking, and “sporting.” As time goes on he more often complains about her requests for money.

At one point she gives him a letter asking for him to hire her a female companion so she won’t be so lonely during the day while he’s gone (working/drinking/wenching). He burns the first copy without reading it. When she reads him a second copy, he’s afraid it will become an embarrassment to him. What’s a husband to do? Destroy her documents:

“She now read it, and it was so piquant, and wrote in English, and most of it true, of the retiredness of her life, and how unpleasant it was; that being wrote in English, and so in danger of being met with and read by others, I was vexed at it, and desired her and then commanded her to tear it. When she desired to be excused it, I forced it from her, and tore it, and withal took her other bundle of papers from her, and leapt out of the bed and in my shirt clapped them into the pocket of my breeches, that she might not get them from me, and having got on my stockings and breeches and gown, I pulled them out one by one and tore them all before her face, though it went against my heart to do it, she crying and desiring me not to do it, but such was my passion and trouble to see the letters of my love to her . . . to be joyned with a paper of so much disgrace to me and dishonour, if it should have been found by any body.”

“Though it went against my heart to do it.” Why do it, then? Just the kind of stupid prideful argument most of us have had, taken too far? Or to be sure she knows her place? Much more on the scene here.

The scene reminded me of literature-class debates about The Taming of the Shrew. Surely Shakespeare didn’t really mean the happy ending (Katherina abandons her pride and submits to her husband’s every whim) unironically? He wasn’t really celebrating the breaking of a woman’s will, was he? After reading this passage, written about 70 years after The Taming of the Shrew, I find it a lot more likely that the answer is no. A 17th-century audience may have just found this good comedy.

…..

I worked in a jail, right? I’ve heard people talk about bad stuff they’ve done.

What feels disturbing about this one is that he feels like part of my tribe. He’s super into books and playing the flute. He gets all excited about practicing his multiplication tables when he realizes it will help him find errors in the books at work. This is the kind of person I might well have been friends with.

…..

I come away with both a sense of disappointment about human nature (this is how powerful people treat less powerful people if they can get away with it) and also a sense of progress.

If it’s no longer acceptable in developed countries to beat your employees until your arm is sore, if destroying someone else’s documents is now considered abuse rather than a husband’s right— maybe there’s hope.

One of the main reasons animal advocacy doesn’t appeal to me at an intuitive level is a sense that the power imbalance here is eternal and intractable. The economic change involved would be staggering. To teach my children that animals are not there for us to use would require a lot more critical reading of most of our books. (“Why is there a pig on Old MacDonald’s farm?”) In short, it wouldn’t be easy.

But the idea that Pepys’ wife could earn her own money or choose her own friends was likewise unthinkable to him in 1663. A lot has changed, and it wasn’t easy.

Maybe someday my meals will seem as archaic and barbaric as the dinners Pepys describes:
“a dish of marrow bones; a leg of mutton; a loin of veal; a dish of fowl, three pullets, and two dozen of larks all in a dish; a great tart, a neat’s tongue, a dish of anchovies; a dish of prawns and cheese.” I’m not sure what would need to change, but it seems less impossible than it used to.

Last glimpse of the Shakers

On Sunday I visited the last active Shaker colony in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. After 271 years, the sect has two remaining members. I figured this was close to my last chance.

…..

I first heard about the Shakers when I was about 13, on a radio program about their music. You’ve heard “Simple Gifts” in one form or another, but they have a rich body of thousands of songs. They range from slow meditations on humility:

I will not be like the stubborn oak
But I will be like the willow tree
I’ll bow and bend unto God’s will
And I will seek his mercy still.

to upbeat depictions to their namesake “shaking” worship through ecstatic dance and song:

Who will drink the wine of power
Dropping down like a shower?
Oh, oh, I will have it!
I will bow and bend to get it
I’ll be reeling, turning, twisting
Shake out all the starch and stiff’ning!

I wrote to the last colony of Shakers, and one Sister Frances wrote back to me. She sent me postcards of their sheep, and a copy of her memoir Growing Up Shaker. After I lost my religion, she was one of the few moral authorities I trusted. In high school I asked her how to handle the fact that a lot of the nice things I did for my friends and classmates were more intended to signal that I was a good person than out of deep desire to serve them. She said to keep doing good things, and the true desire would grow.

It was her death last year that made me realize it was time to go see the last colony.

….

The Shakers were a branch of the Quakers who split off and moved to America in 1774. They were known for their vigorous worship style and celibacy. The leader, Ann Lee, had been married against her will and had seen all four of her children die as infants. Lee reasoned that if “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30), why not start living like angels here on earth?

A lot of the early stuff, especially their treatment of “Mother Ann” as the second coming of Christ, was culty and weird. They were just one of the radical political and religious movements that sprang up in England around the same time (the Levelers, the Diggers, the Quakers, the Ranters — catchy, right?) plus the various American utopian movements. For a while, every radical in New England seemed to be writing a manifesto and founding a communal farm. Between financial mismanagement, fires, scandals, impractical farming arrangements, and inability to pass leadership on to a second generation, the track record of communes is not really encouraging.

But history bore this one out. Ann Lee’s successors developed an organizational structure that would last the next two centuries (“villages” divided into “families” of 30-100 people, each led by a team of two male and two female Shakers). The ecstatic shaking and whirling became a marching dance, more suited to a society that had lasted long enough to include a geriatric population. In the 1780s they were meeting in the woods and living wherever they wouldn’t be beaten or jailed. By 1821 they had financial agreements for sharing property, a written covenant that members signed, organized division of labor, rules about how soon to leave your room after waking up, and standards for architecture down to what color the meeting house should be painted.

….

When I was 15, my family visited the Pleasant Hill Shaker colony (now a museum) in Kentucky. It’s a particularly beautiful set of buildings, and as we walked around the grounds my father was clearly worried that my enthusiasm for the Shakers would cause me to convert. He didn’t mention this worry overtly, but told me that when he’d interned at a methadone clinic, one of the clients told him that the best things in life were sex and heroin. “I haven’t tried heroin and don’t recommend that you try it, but I do think you should try sex when you’re older,” Dad advised me. (….thanks, Dad?)

This conversation didn’t exactly strike at the crux of my decision — it wasn’t the idea of celibacy that bothered me, but childlessness, the snows of Maine, and isolationism. In any case, I never seriously considered it.

I’ve always found the public’s emphasis on the Shakers’ celibacy rather than their communitarianism a bit odd. If anything, at least during the 19th century it seems like they may have been less sex-obsessed than typical Americans. Obviously there was some selection effect in who chose to join, and I’m sure there was some rule-breaking. A few years ago, the numbers fell from four to three when one convert left after 26 years to marry a reporter who’d come to interview members of the colony.

Pleasant Hill colony. There is another identical staircase on the other side of the hall so men and women each have their own.

….

The event at the Sabbathday Lake village this week, part of a Maine statewide “open farm day,” was essentially similar to any other day aimed at historical farm enthusiasts. There were people doing woodcarving, blacksmithing, and rug-hooking. There were tours of the barn, its huge dimness full of politely listening people. It felt strange to see the last vestiges of Ann Lee’s radical vision come down to antiquarianism.

It being Sunday, as far as I could tell, the two Shakers (Brother Arnold Hadd, age 58 and Sister June Carpenter, 77) were nowhere to be seen. I assume they were observing their day of rest inside their dwelling house.

I wonder what life is like for these two people, living in a colony that once housed 150. Shaker buildings were designed with symmetric doors and staircases so men and women wouldn’t touch each other, but also wouldn’t take precedence over the other — they could enter a room simultaneously instead of one group waiting for the other. I wonder if Arnold and June still walk each through their own doorway, if they still sit at separate women’s and men’s tables in the dining hall. They’re not married, but must share a kind of intimacy like that of any two people who expect to spend the rest of their lives together.

I hope they like each other.

…..

Especially touching was the Boys’ Shop, where children’s dormitories and schoolbooks are preserved. Thousands of children were raised by the Shakers, either because their parents had joined the sect or, more commonly, because their parents couldn’t afford to raise them. In the time before welfare and the foster system, if times got too hard you knew your child would be fed and educated with the Shakers. They’d live there until age 21, when they would either depart (with skills in woodworking, herbalism, orchardry, and the other Shaker industries) or sign the covenant and become a full member of the community.

In one room, a recording played narrating the childhood of Sister Mildred Barker, who was the spiritual and executive leader of the colony from 1950 to her death in 1990. When her newly widowed mother left her with the Shakers at age 5, Mildred contemplated running away home but was won over by the community and particularly an elderly sister she was assigned to help. By the time her mother returned eight years later, Mildred refused to go with her.

After Mildred reached adulthood and signed the Shaker covenant, she became a collector of the Shaker traditional songs. In the boys’ dormitory, one was going through my mind:

Little children, says Holy Mother
Soothe and comfort one another.

I left the colony with a few of the chamomile flowers from their herb garden in my pocket, and drove back home to Jeff, and to this one and her sister.

We made chamomile tea, admiring the yellow-green color the flowers left in the water. Jeff and I put the kids to bed. My heart ached for Ann Lee and her four dead children, and for all the children who had slept in Shaker dormitories missing their families, and for Mildred Barker’s mother losing her daughter not once but twice. I was grateful for antibiotics, and for welfare, that now prevent families from being broken apart quite so often.

And also warmed that these thousands of people over 271 years found a way to fight scarcity and injustice. They looked at a deeply unfair and imperfect world and shaped their reality to be more like the heaven they envisioned.