Family

So we don't live in extended kinship units any more. My mother probably won't be there to help me raise my children. I have, for all practical purposes, no aunts. And once upon a time, this would have been a tragedy. The dissolution of kinship ties for the suburban migration, the pursuit of the American dream, and the subsequent loss of matriarchal power in even the domestic sphere may not have been a nefarious plot of The Patriarchy per se, but the net effect was as gold as if it had been dreamt up by a cabel of old white men. Middle class women on their own island, surrounded by a manicured and chemically fertilized ocean of green grass. Castaways, cast away.

But those kinship ties? Feminist herald them. Write some nonsense in care ethics about them. Trumpet attachment parenting, even. Grasp and cling to a mythical past. What were they really? Just like there never was a 1950's, Leave It to Beaver, daddy run, American utopia there never were these fetishized kinship models.

This is how I know: your momma is a crazy bitch. Your aunt is an awful person. Grandma used to beat your father with a wooden spoon.

Do you really want to live in an extended kinship arrangement with these fuckers? Yeah, you get someone to change some diapers but you also are forced to suffer their endless emotional abuse and passive aggression and terrible cooking. And when you have an extended kinship arrangement you don't get to just not call them back until you are in a better mood for dealing with their shit. It's all day, every day. Ask any lower working-class person you know (if you know any) just how great it is that their momma is there all the fucking time. She probably wishes she had a suburban island, and a tank to keep Tia Tita out.

So, sure, the middle class lifestyle ripped women out of material support networks. But, in another way, it freed us from being mothers like our mothers and aunts. Or even being mothers, at all, since we can escape the nagging questions of when we will settle down with a nice man, etc. Simply, we didn't choose our families. We should stop pretending that it would be great if we all still lived in the same village and shared one cookpot. In fact, it would pretty much suck.

Instead of backward looking mythmaking, like the "family values" crowd and the Beav, we should look at what we have now, and what we can make of it. We have an unprecedented amount of freedom. To work. To pursue degrees in esoteric subject matter. To have families when it suits us, children when we want, with or without a man. To immerse in the realm of immanence on a whim and for diversion from the pressing terror of existential freedom.

This freedom to choose our pursuits, to move and follow our careers, means another thing. Mobility may take us from our village and a kinship network but it gives us something else. It exposes us to new people. New women. We make friends now out of shared values and common or complimentary personality traits. We don't have to take as our Best Friend Forever the shrew we grew up next door to. We can now bond with women who are genuinely wonderful, not just related by blood and convenience.

Women have escaped our gleaming suburban prisons even as they ripped us from a familial bosom. The reality is that we have neither to fly from freedom to. Good luck finding a partner to support your Angel in the Home aspirations, should you choose that as your choiciness. And the kinship ties are long scattered to the winds, especially with the freedom to leave their islands through divorce and self-actualization that feminism gave our mothers.

What we do have is the family we choose. The women and men that we fold into our lives. I believe that anything we choose is more precious than anything foisted upon us. So, if we long for the support of a women's community, we make one. And if we need help, we ask. And the composition will shift over time because we aren't bound to one another and locked into a lifestyle. We move, pursue our passions, and are always glad when one of our chosen family does the same. Especially when their hearts and minds take them to really neat places we want to visit!

Instead of kinship ties that bind, let us celebrate our networks of strong, wonderful women and men who take care for each other and give us strength and love when we need it, and never circumscribes our own freedom, only celebrates it as we celebrate theirs.

***

This summer my family is changing in a lot of ways. I love you all and I am very excited for the future, our awesome new adventures, and the magnificent reunions we'll have.

Rain

The rain here is a leaden weight on shoulders prone to sagging. A leaden sky, molten, falling, filling depressions and filling depressions. How many words for rain are there?

This is a new level of hell. A June with no sunshine. Just this interminable drizzle. Head perpetually ducked.

But it isn't all bad. Being inside, I am forced to look at my accumulation of stuff and consider purging, packing, storing. Moving.

Or maybe just play video games for a while longer.

The Problem With Teaching Logic

In my field, people are used to arguing about things. One's success is often a function of how well and vociferously one argues for a given position, regardless of one's particular stake in the position or its relevance to life as a whole. Of course, the best of us can make it relevant to life. We are the ones that get students to sign up as majors. Us, and the dudes that get really het up about obscure metaphysical apparatus and wave their hands around a lot. For some reason the undergraduates really dig that, as well.

So, the students become accustomed to arguing about things. They come under the misguided belief that there are no right answers.

Then they take Logic. And I fuck their shit up.

There are rules, you see, and a rich tradition of inquiry. The metaphysical presuppositions are often problematic and interesting but I'm not testing you on that. I'm asking you to understand the goddamned system, not judge it. The darling undergraduates are not, for the most part, in any position to judge the adequacy of any metaphysical system, much less that which underpins predicate logic.

They don't like failing. I don't really like failing them, although the general consensus in the department is that I am nails and delight in reversing the trend of grade inflation.

Welcome to Logic, kids. There is a right answer.