Beautiful

Sometimes I cannot forgive the new flat for not being the old flat. It doesn't have enough memories in it. It's cramped and untidy and if/when we win the lottery, we're fleeing to the West End.

At the moment, however, it looks lovely, and not just because of the guggle fish of purple tulips on the coffee table. 

It's because Polish Pretend Daughter and French Pretend Son-in-Law have just been here with their baby. 

PPD is of medium height, slim and beautiful. FPSL is very tall, slim and cheerful. The baby is only a few months old, and very cute and good-natured. Benedict Ambrose and I had not met her yet, and here she was at last. 

We had tea and coffee, cheese-bread and butter, cardamom bread and cheese, and a Victoria sponge (the simplest of British cakes). PDD fed the baby, and FPSL told us about the home renovations. They both told us about the adventure of the baby's birth, and how the nurses were so excited that the baby had black hair. (Apparently Scottish babies arrive bald.)  PDD opted for a natural birth (no drugs), and smugly admitted that she yelled a lot during the worst hour. 

PDD also praised her husband for all the hard work that he does. In the mornings he takes the baby for a walk, so the wife-mother can sleep, and then he goes to work. When he comes home from work, he takes charge of the baby again. PDD is not engaged in paid work right now, so she believes that FPSL works much harder than she does. (N.B. PDD is up several times a night feeding her baby.) 

What a blessing to have a happy young family in our flat and to serve them tea and cake. After their visit, we volunteered to walk them to the bus stop, and as we were all busying ourselves with bags, boots and baby buggy, I chanced to look in the abandoned sitting-room. The coffee table was bedecked with my best china and the whole room looked beautiful. 

Maybe the longer we live here and the more young folk who come and go, leaving happy memories,  the more and more I will like the flat. 

IRONY ALERT: I start an exercise class tomorrow, so I have bought two pairs of leggings. I promise not to wear them in the street, let alone the at the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. 

Methods for Healing Sorrow 5 and 6

Homeschooling! Yay! I'm a biweekly writing skills teacher now. It's great fun, and my pupils are smart.

They live in the countryside, and today the bus didn't stop at the right stop. This was a little disconcerting, especially as I wasn't entirely sure where we were when I noticed--and neither was the driver. However, as I was walking in the rain back to where I thought my stop was, I saw the following sign:


<--ANTONINE WALL


Okay, the Antonine Wall was very long, so that wasn't much of a landmark. However, I'm a big Rosemary Sutcliffe fan, so that sign boosted my spirits.

I soon ceased to be lost, had a delicious lunch and taught the kids.

Benedict Option, y'all!

From a Roman-British point of view, we're very north.

Burning Harry Potter

Dzień dobry! It's a beautiful sunny day, and although work and illness have conspired to keep me away from my beloved Polish studies for weeks, I discovered that I was still able to discuss complex topics with my Polish tutor po polsku in a reasonably fluent fashion.

This makes me very happy. Literally. The endorphins only chatting away in non-English can bring are coursing through my veins.

Polish Tutor brought up the news that some priests in Poland have burned a pile of Harry Potter books and expressed shame that this is being reported throughout the world. My question was why this story was of such interest to the newspapers of the world. It's not like the priests burned the Koran. Teen wizards are not going to rise up and burn down their local Polish embassy.

When a colleague brought my attention to the priests-burn-Potter story a couple of days ago, I didn't  read it because I already know that Polish priests don't like the J.K. Rowlings organon. They also don't like New Age, pentagrams, Odin worship, Halloween and the goodly number of other things they warn about on posters tacked up near Polish church doors.

Poland is a wonderfully different place from Canada and the U.K., and although I sometimes find the differences challenging, I was brought up to respect differences. That includes solemn warnings against and fiery rejections of symbols of the occult.

I shiver at the idea of burning books because my generation of Canadians had it banged into our heads that the Nazis burned books by Jews because they were written by Jews and next they gassed and burned the Jews. However, I also have a friend--an Oxford grad with a PhD from elsewhere--who burns occult books when he finds them on friends' shelves. I learned from this that there is a very big difference between burning paper because of the ideas printed thereon and burning them because of who wrote them. As long as the Polish priests burn  Harry Potter books because they extol magic and not because they were written by a woman or a Briton, I don't care.

Meanwhile, Canadian author Michael O'Brien famously thinks Harry Potter books corrupt the imagination, so although they are popular and fun, they are not universally loved by people who are not Polish priests.

So my question stands. Why is it that a Harry Potter book-burning party by priests in Poland is considered newsworthy outside of Poland?

Is it because it adds to a narrative that the Poles hate books and learning?

I sincerely hope not, given that this is the narrative the Nazi-led Germans tried to establish in 1939.

Is it because it adds to a narrative that Poland is being "held back" by Catholicism?

Again, I sincerely hope not, since that was the narrative the Communists tried to push during their almost 50 year domination of the country.

Is it because it adds to a narrative that Catholics Poles were somehow complicit with the book-burning Nazis?

I sincerely hope not because that particular lying narrative spits on the bones and ashes of the three million non-Jewish Poles who died alongside the three million Jewish Poles who perished during the Nazi/Soviet occupation of Poland.

Anti-polonism annoys me very much, and although stories about priests burning children's books embarrass some young Polish ex-pats, what they mainly do is play into Polish fears that the world hates Poland and is out to get her. Although standing together against an outside enemy does stop Poles from quarrelling with each other for a few minutes, anti-polonism ultimately isn't good for anyone. It's both a form of lying and an example of virulent xenophobia.

Again, I don't like burning books. That's part of who I am as a Canadian born after the Second World War. It's a bit of a drag, really, as it makes disposing of unwanted books more difficult. Taking a lot of paperbacks to the charity shop is a pain, and just throwing them in the recycling makes me feel guilty. It's superstitious, really. I should burn an unwanted book or two in the garden occasionally on principle. One of my own books, written by me, has been pulped, incidentally: hundreds of copies (weep weep) robbed of their covers, shredded and boiled.

That, of course, was just a prudential decision by my publisher and signified nothing more than his loss of faith in his ability to sell the books. It had nothing to do with the content or me. If someone does want to burn her copy of Seraphic Singles (or Anielskie Single) because she dislikes it, though,  I think this well within her Freedom of Expression.

How to Dress Like a Lady

I have been amusing myself by Googling that phrase. So far this is my favourite find. I am not sure of Mr Wong's motives, but he certainly has a beautiful collection of photographs.

In my dreams, I wear such a chic and feminine outfit when I leave the house, bound for Italian class perhaps, having lost 20 pounds and having grown five inches taller. In these dreams, I have not been advised by my podiatrist to give up high heels, and I enjoy going to the hairdresser.

That said, today I am wearing a re-introduced Laura Ashley toile print blouse, and I went to Italian class this morning. On the way I stopped at a good French bakery for a cappuccino and a croissant, so you see that my life is not devoid of romance.

To be honest, though, I did wonder if it is ladylike to eat croissants in public, and if it is odd to conceal one's cappuccino from the bus driver by popping it in one's coat pocket.

Thinking more about the Notre Dame Leggings Controversy, I wonder what would make Domer girls cover their butts. The pleading of a Catholic mother of sons only caused the Notre Dame ab*rtion club to launch a rump-waggling protest. Sad to say, I think it would take a raft of fashion magazines putting leggings on their "Don't" lists while appealing to class-snobbery to end the sad fad. However, they may very well do it, as surely it is in their interests for women to wear three items of clothing--T-shirt + leggings + skirt--instead of merely two.

I never thought I would see the day when something worse than the black tights with blue denim shorts combo would hit the streets of Edinburgh, but here we are. And as I always say, it's such a waste, for British department stores carry beautiful, feminine clothing.

Update: Oh! Look at this charming girl. I'm going to ignore that one of her style icons is a burlesque dancer because she doesn't dress like one.

Update 2: Oops. Holly got into trouble with the Politburo, too, and was wrongly accused of suggesting girls who wear other sorts of clothes are "asking" to be sexually attacked. Dear heavens, why do people exaggerate so much? While reading about the Notre Dame Mom (and me), I came across a suggestion that she wants to put Catholic women in burkhas. Say what?

Hate Messages

I rarely get hate messages. Today I got one, though, for having defended the Notre Dame Cover-Your-Bum Mum. I was also decried for such unfeminism on Patheos, where the male writer didn't present my argument but did present my face in a photo that makes me look slightly mad. 

Ah, women's clothing. As long as there is an internet and spring, there will always be these passionate battles over women's clothing. I think, though, that the last time anyone bothered hunting me down over social media, they wanted to yell at me for questioning poor Aurelia Brouwers' right to die. 

Helping Girls Become Happy Women

When I first began to blog twelve years ago, my primary concern was finding meaning and happiness in  life as a Catholic Single woman. I was in my mid-thirties, and I thought my marriage chances were poor. The fault, I believed, lay with the Sexual Revolution and also with my younger self by having a lousy attitude towards boys and men.

(It is a myth, by the way, that men don't like "smart women." Most men like smart women. Most men just don't like women who tell them they're stupid.)

Feeling oppressed by crushes on boys that verged on OCD, I would tell my fellow high school students that the Amazons had the right idea. It took me a very long time to develop the insight that women who want to marry and have babies shouldn't sound like Lesbian Separatists. The reality, of course, is that I was frightened of boys.

When I began to blog, I was less frightened of being Single than I was of others marrying the wrong person, which I thought was hell on earth. At some point I had the insight that it is equally problematic to BE the wrong person. I was the wrong woman for anyone until I was in my thirties, which was good (when he came along I was free to marry Benedict Ambrose) and bad (no children).

My concern now is how women can become "the right woman" for anyone before their fertility dies and also how men can become "the right man" before all the fertile women are 15 years younger than they are. It's the rare 40 year old man who looks all that attractive to a 25 year old girl.

I think the biggest block to happiness for women is not understanding where happiness resides. As girls my generation of women didn't know where happiness resided because we were lied to. We were told that it was boring, wrong, laughable and dangerous to get married young and have babies.

Cool girls did not want to get married young and have babies. Cool girls wanted to beat boys at their own game, man, and become the first woman CEO of BigCo/Premier of Ontario. At the very least, cool girls got Careers--or became poets and moved downtown. When I found out a classmate was getting married the summer after high school to a dentist, I was horrified.

Housewives were unhappy, I believed. Even if a woman was lucky enough to find true love with a prince of a fellow with a good job, she would be stuck at home being stupefied with boredom, wasting her brain, wasting her life. Yada yada.

It did not occur to me to investigate these claims or ponder why it was that people despised housewives so much or find out why not all housewives threw off their shackles. Having known some  horrible boys (and read some very horrible things), I believed almost everything I read about the so-called Patriarchy, and thought it was responsible for just about everything bad. If it weren't for being a Catholic, I might have become a Lesbian Separatist after all. Being a Catholic, I was perturbed by the overt anti-Catholicism of the feminist movement and, of course, its obsession with abortion.

The embarrassing truth about women is that we want to be whatever society tells us "good women" are. And society jerks us around by changing its mind. Currently we're asked to be "badly-behaved", as in "Well-behaved women seldom make history." It's a con, though. It's saying that good behaviour is bad behaviour, and bad behaviour is good behaviour. What?

When I was going slowly mad at Boston College, I had a fit when someone whined about Catholicism being too obsessed with sin.

"We're all obsessed with sin," I snarled. "Only what we now think are sins aren't sins. People think smoking and belonging to the Republican Party are sins."

There was dead silence, either because the seminar group strongly believed that smoking and belonging to the GOP were very serious sins indeed or that it was obvious I was slowly going crazy.

I'll tell you something: most women, like most men, don't make history (whatever that is). We're lucky if, after sacrificing our marriage capital and fertility, we even have careers instead of a succession of dull jobs in unhealthy buildings with grey wall-to-wall carpets.

It's time to forget about "making history" and focusing on making happiness. In general, people make women happy: fond parents, thoughtful siblings, bright children, loyal women, decent men, supportive colleagues. Therefore, girls should be taught how to be fond, thoughtful, bright, loyal, and decent themselves, how to recognise these qualities in others, and how to help them develop.

Naturally, this is easier said than done, and there's a lot to sort out. But I think one thing that is absolutely crucial is to prevent boys and girls from growing up resenting each other.

Leggings and tiny Ts.

As every Catholic blogger knows, there's nothing like writing about women's clothing to get the hits.

Today I volunteered to write about the brave Catholic mom who asked the young ladies of Notre Dame University to stop wearing leggings without something to cover their butts. Her one mistake was not to say, okay, wear the leggings, but wear long shirts with them, for cryin' out loud because the tiny T-shirt detail is getting lost in the media circus. The controversy is not really about leggings but about women's rumps waggling about. (We're all too shy to discuss what's going on in front.)

Going out wearing a tiny T-shirt and skin-tight leggings and a tiny T-shirt is pretty much the same as going out wearing a tiny T-shirt and tights.  It actually is the same as going out wearing long underwear. My thought is this combo is okay at the gym, where everyone is focused on their own body, but nowhere else.

I cut out my reflections on my boxing days three times. In the end, I decided it would really detract from my point, which is that young women wield a lot of sexual power, and they should be gentle with it, as gentle as they expect young men to be be with their physical power.

This is not about blaming women. This is about asking young women to be careful. We ask young men to be careful all the time. We shout at them from birth to not hit girls. We ask them to be careful when roughhousing with their sisters.... Anyway, it's all in my article.

I realize that some of you may be disappointed that I have joined the ranks of the finger-waggers. But, hey, at least I have not joined the women-should-never-wear-trousers-dirndls-are-best brigade. And to cheer you up, here's my once-famous Modest Proposal.

Incidentally, if we're fighting about women's clothing again, it must be spring.