It's Official! I'm History.

In our family we have little rituals for growing up. Three year olds go to Build-a-Bear and build a friend. Nine year old girls receive the American Girl doll of their choice. We have an eight year old who is thinking over her American Girl options, so they were eager to receive this year's catalog. I handed it over like a good mom, and a few minutes later the four of them came giggling down the stairs to announce that I am officially ancient history. They've made an American Girl doll about growing up in the seventies.
Never mind that I was three in 1974, this is a minor technicality they are not willing to consider. Once your era is part of the American Girl collection it's over for you. :) My mother who has been waiting for a fifties era doll to come out is rather put out that the Boomers were just skipped over, but really, they'd need the blue state version and the red state version if they tried to get into that barrel of worms. Molly McIntire does lead a fairly fifties life with the added excitement of WWII as a historical backdrop. The seventies were a time of rediscovering common ground, and to be honest I thought they were a terrific time to grow up.
Our eight-year old is leaning toward Felicity who loves horses as much as she does, so I doubt that we'll be buying a Julie doll. For the record, we have a Josefina and a Samantha. I know the dolls are pricey, but we've been so impressed with the quality and the exceptional service that Fisher Price (American Girl's parent company) has provided with the dolls. We've also found our girls get very interested the period highlighted not only with their own doll, but with their sister's dolls as well. We've even had to have Josefina's head replaced because the hair was defective and they did so free of charge. For us, it's a good way to mark an important period of development and encourage the girls to learn about American history.

Car Watching

One of the perks of living in Michigan is the cars. With Motor City so close, folks hold on to classics and restore them. I love our village for a number of reasons, but I was tickled to discover a used car dealership that specializes in "classic" cars including some really old pieces from the 20's and 30's. Their slogan is "where quality is timeless."
Summer is the high season for being surprised on the road. There was a parade of Model T's and the Del Shannon Car Show in Coopersville, but my favorite is to just be driving along and suddenly there's an old beauty coming up on the right. Snow is in the forecast as this amazingly warm Fall finally becomes more seasonal. It also means the end of all the beautiful old cars and the flashy convertibles--though I did see a convertible still shivering down the road this weekend.
Life is more practical in the winter, and our vehicles reflect that. There will be lots of SUV's with 4 wheel drive and the ever popular mini-vans will bumble along as always. I hope there will still be a smattering of Bugs and PT Cruisers to perk things up. Of course with all that exhaust Spring will be back before you know it.

Confessions

When I was six or seven years old, the school I attended announced a poster contest. Students were to create posters about their adult ambitions and the most artistic effort would win. I knew what I was going to draw. Me at a podium speaking into a microphone with a gigantic flag as a backdrop. I wanted to be the President of the United States. Before the ink was even dry on the mental version of my poster, I was informed that such roles were reserved to men and that God didn't make or gift women for leadership roles such as President of the United States.
Here we are thirty years later and we have a woman seriously contending for the office I coveted in grammar school, and I have to confess I'm sorely tempted to vote for her as a way of finally voting for myself. I won't though. She's pro-abortion, and we can't have that. I would wonder why there isn't a woman of right conviction to oppose her contending for the Republican nomination but it is obvious that its because the same men who discouraged me fill the ranks of the Republican Party.
Women have so much more to contribute than the fundamentalist groups within Christianity are willing to admit. Sometimes I think one of the strongest pulls of Catholicism is their firm conviction that Mary's little yes was anything but little, and that the most powerful event in history took place because a woman said yes. I love how my new church is filled with women, women leading. No, there won't be a female pope, but there certainly are female saints and personally I think they count for more than popes anyway.
God does make and gift female leaders, and I'm one of them.

Happily Weary

I'm sorry it's been so long since I've posted. I'm pregnant and I've been working very hard on the annual Heifer International Living Gift Market. Those things combined with my regular gig as a homeschooling mom of five mean I haven't had energy to post my musings. However all the hardwork paid off, for the full story check out the Heifer Happening Blog. We raised 6,680 dollars and had a good time doing it.

Super Woman

Your Superpower Should Be Mind Reading

You are brilliant, insightful, and intuitive. You understand people better than they would like to be understood. Highly sensitive, you are good at putting together seemingly irrelevant details. You figure out what's going on before anyone knows that anything is going on! Why you would be a good superhero: You don't care what people think, and you'd do whatever needed to be done Your biggest problem as a superhero: Feeling even more isolated than you do now

What Should Your Superpower Be?

Knitting

I went out and thoroughly enjoyed The Jane Austen Book Club last night, and it reawakened a conviction I'd come to earlier that I need to learn how to knit. It's more of a spiritual metaphor really. I'm by nature an unraveller. I could spend hours, days, weeks, years, working on difficult knots both physical and metaphorical, but what do you do with all that material when you come to the end of teasing it out? I'm thinking you knit, but I don't know how.
I dropped into Meijer last night to pick up a few things after the movie. The handy craft section is nicely stocked and they had several different resources to help me learn the basics, but isn't knitting something you need to learn from another human being? Do it yourself knitting teaching just doesn't have the appeal of live instruction from a friend or mentor. Unfortunately, I know more knotty people than I know knitters. I guess that's part of the drill when you are an unraveller, but the material is piling up and I'd like to live more intimately with the metaphor. Maybe I'll sign up for classes.

No-brainer

I'm having a difficult time synthesizing spiritual freedom and intellectual freedom. In the early years of my life one had to choose and faced with such a choice jettisoning intellectual freedom was, well, a no-brainer. However, my mind seems particularly ill-suited to prison life so it staged a mid-life breakout. Now I've got to find a way to live with the consequences.
Turn about being fair play, the simple answer is to jettison my spiritual freedom in favor of agnosticism or a fuzzy faith without any particular allegiances, but I have a feeling my soul is even less suited to prison than my mind. So the question has become how to stand fast in the freedom Christ has given me and read Virginia Wolfe and Thomas Hardy. The old answer was to find out what respected Christian teachers had to say about such dastardly duos and carefully see nothing more or less than what you were instructed to see. My mind won't have that anymore.
My previous life assumed that Christianity was fragile, or perhaps that my hold on it or it's hold on me was fragile. I think that's false. Times of extreme doubt and struggle have always ended by uncovering unshakable bedrock, such as my complete adoration of/addiction to holiness. If I am going to accommodate the new freedoms my mind has appropriated for itself I will have to trust that that trend will continue and that I have nothing to fear but fear itself as I learn to think without walls and safeguards.