what's so great about six

The End

When I was One,

I had just begun.

When I was Two,

I was nearly new.

When I was Three

I was hardly me.

When I was Four,

I was not much more.

When I was Five,

I was just alive.

But now I am Six,

I'm as clever as clever,

So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.

There are a lot of things in my life that make me smile. I live in Malaysia, down the streeet from a business with a large banner reading, "foot sense hot dip"- your guess is as good as mine. I deal with people like the lawncare man who arrives in his beat-up old car with golden idols on the dashboard, and smilingly asks my daughter, "Is Mother home?" I still get a charge out of being adressed as Auntie by children I have never even met. I absolutely LOVE ending up in a traffic jam behind a police car bearing the official bumper sticker. "Don't Bribe Me."

But what makes me smile most often these days is having a daughter who is six. I love six. I love six year old teeth, with their huge gaps and crazy angles - the quintessential "homeless person" mouth. I love the lisping and the constant wiggling of teeth with the tongue. I love helping write notes to the tooth fairy asking her to please leave the tooth AND the money.

I love answering six year old questions, and contemplating the really important issues of life that they so often raise. In the last two days I have been asked: "Aren't you ever sad, Mommy? Because I never see you cry." "Does God know I am afraid to die?" "Why is drawing so much fun?" "Why are geese afraid of foxes?" "Then are animals afraid to die?" "Where is the Garden of Eden?""When did people start talking in different languages?" "Do you think I am spoiled because I live in Malaysia?" "What does being spoiled mean?"

I love six year old books. I love getting to read Little House on the Prairie again, and Just So Stories and A Little Princess. I love Beatrix Potter and fairy tales and Bible stories that are still exciting and new. I love six-year old songs - the original ones which she croons while she plays and the old standards like The Fox Went Out on a Stormy Night which everyone in my house is singing these days.

I love watching a six year old discover the mysteries of reading. I love having to wait in the grocery store while she puzzles out a word on the back of a cereal box. I love finding phonetically spelled messages all over the house.

I love living with a person who gets excited about playing in the huge mud puddle left in our yard after a thunderstorm and tells me stories with homemade sock puppets. I love getting invited to secret places like the jungle behind the living room curtains with a waterfall made from a sparkly blue scarf, a stuffed monkey swinging from a scarf-vine, a crayoned dragon fly suspended with masking tape between a chair and the window. I love making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and going to the zoo and listening to earnest bedtime prayers.

I wish six could last for more than just twelve months!

I Do, I Will, I Have

How wise I am to have instructed the butler
to instruct the first footman to instruct the second
footman to instruct the doorman to order my carriage;
I am about to volunteer a definition of marriage.
Just as I know that there are two Hagens, Walter and Copen,
I know that marriage is a legal and religious alliance entered
into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut and a
woman who can't sleep with the window open.
Moreover, just as I am unsure of the difference between
flora and fauna and flotsam and jetsam,
I am quite sure that marriage is the alliance of two people
one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other
who never forgets them,
And he refuses to believe there is a leak in the water pipe or
the gas pipe and she is convinced she is about to asphyxiate
or drown,
And she says Quick get up and get my hairbrushes off the
windowsill, it's raining in, and he replies Oh they're all right,
it's only raining straight down.
That is why marriage is so much more interesting than divorce,
Because it's the only known example of the happy meeting of
the immovable object and the irresistible force.
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and
combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life,
particularly if he has income and she is pattable.
-Ogden Nash


What happens when an engineer marries a liberal arts major? Somewhere down the road somebody writes a memoir entitled, “Engineers are from the US; Liberal Arts Majors Might Feel More at Home in Malaysia.” It will never be a best seller; it has little movie potential, but I suspect there may be a niche market out there.

I’ve been considering possible plot outlines for just such a thriller since I caught a glimpse of our marriage in a microcosm. A while ago our entire family, at least what was left of it, was roaming around the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, trying to get our second daughter on a flight to Boston. For several reasons incidental to this account, we still did not have a ticket in hand when we arrived at the airport, though we had, we believed, a confirmed reservation. At the last moment - 40 minutes before her flight was scheduled to leave - we decided some things about her itinerary were too uncertain and we bagged the flight. Which left us in the position of needing to find another available flight with acceptable connections for a 16 year old flying alone, preferably within the next several hours.

We discovered the single available public computer terminal and both of us, engineer and spouse, sat down to hunt for the elusive ticket. It was a recipe for disaster: me at the keyboard and him looking over my shoulder. I don’t need to script this part; you can imagine how things went as Mr. Systematic and Ms Random attacked the problem from within their respective frames of reference. The drama inherent in this clash of worldviews was heightened by the shortness of time and multiplied exponentially by the number of children waiting for us to take them home.

Two hours later over lunch, having eventually purchased a ticket and checked our daughter’s heavy suitcases, we attempted to debrief. However, as happens in so many diplomatic encounters, the tension refused to evaporate. We each, as it turns out, not only had different ideas about how the ticket search should have proceeded, we also had vastly different interpretations of “what happened back there.”

Me: “You know, I would really have preferred it if you had just taken over instead of coaching me from behind.”

Him: “But I didn’t want to take over! I just wanted to help you. I wanted to do this with you.”

Me: “Well I think we approach problem solving so differently that we should NOT try to work on something pressured and last-minute together. One or the other of us should do it alone.”

Him: “It’s true; we do approach problem solving differently. I approach it like an engineer and you.. . . “ something inaudible ending with the word “housewife.” (He was not trying to be patronizing; he was just, once again, at a loss for words to adequately describe me.)

Me: (outwardly calm, but with the last word reverberating in my head), “I do have a Master’s degree in Rhetoric. I know how to think.”

I think that was the end of the conversation; at least it should have been!

Before I take this any farther, there are a few things you should know. First, the real question here is not “Can this marriage be saved?” (The marriage is fine; the conversation, however, had to be scuttled.) ; The real question, it seems to me, is why don’t we do this a little more smoothly after 25 years of practice?! Sometimes, not often, I try to think past the immediate interaction and look for some underlying dynamic.


And, as I reflect on our marriage I have to say that the bane of both of our lives has been the lack of proper “systems” in our house. The engineer feels like whenever he comes in the door each evening he enters Chaos in its truest modern day incarnation, and he may be right, considering that mythical Chaos has three main characteristics: it is a bottomless gulf where anything falls endlessly; it is a place without any possible orientation, where anything falls in every direction; it is a space that separates, that divides: after the Earth and the Sky parted, Chaos remains between both of them That’s not a bad description of the home in which I have been homeschooling 7 children, 24 hours a day for nearly 15 years.

I, however, never feel the lack of systems except when I read it in his eyes. To his everlasting credit he has spent 23 years biting his tongue, but I do still know. . . . You see, I am the kind of person who has never had a place for everything, so that everything could stay in its place, though I can usually find a utensil when I need one, or improvise with the next best thing. You’d think an engineer could appreciate that kind of resourcefulness and creative thinking, but no. Lately he has even told me (and our children) about a Japanese management tool they are implementing at work to keep things in their places, a simple five step process with an accompanying mnemonic mantra to be repeated as you do the task. I can't remember what the system is called, or even what the five letters are, never mind what they stand for. I'd rather just grab that spatula and use it instead of the tool I was originally looking for. You see what I mean.

He, however, has not been promoted to be Director of Global Engineering for no reason. He is an extremely talented man, and a systematic one, at that. He knows in his heart of hearts that there is nothing wrong in our lives that could not be fixed with a better system, and the only thing standing in the way of a better system is. . . . you guessed it, me. I know that his expertise in making things run smoothly is exactly why we find ourselves here in Malaysia, where nothing is systematic, systematized, streamlined, methodical, orderly, efficient, logical or regular. The entire reason my husband was called in was to make the company’s Malaysian operations work smoothly and profitably. And he’s doing a wonderful job! The factory personnel here appear to be considerably more tractable than his wife, which is a good thing for us all. And while I find a lot of things about Malaysia frustrating, I have to admit that I understand how a country could have ended up like this. .. . all I have to do is look at my kitchen!

Is there a moral here? Not really, unless it's that the real key to a successful marriage must be the ability to laugh at oneself more often and more heartily than one laughs at one's spouse! Or that the real oil that keeps the machinery running is not the right system, so much as the right attitude - esteeming one another better than ourselves. Fortunately, my husband is an expert at that, as well. When we exchanged rings at our wedding we read the words from Ecclesiastes 4:9, "Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor." Which is, I guess, the inspired version of, "It takes two to tango." I think I'm going to go put on some dance music right now.

After Prayers, Lie Cold

After Prayers, Lie Cold

Arise my body, my small body, we have striven
Enough, and He is merciful; we are forgiven.
Arise small body, puppet-like and pale, and go,
White as the bed-clothes into bed, and cold as snow,
Undress with small, cold fingers and put out the light,
And be alone, hush'd mortal, in the sacred night,
-A meadow whipt flat with the rain, a cup
Emptied and clean, a garment washed and folded up,
Faded in colour, thinned almost to raggedness
By dirt and by the washing of that dirtiness.
Be not too quickly warm again.
Lie cold; consent
To weariness' and pardon's watery element.
Drink up the bitter water, breathe the chilly death;
Soon enough comes the riot of our blood and breath.
C S Lewis

Home Thoughts, From Abroad

Home Thoughts, From Abroad
Robert Browning


Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops—at the bent spray’s edge—
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
—Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

I'm Nobody Without Facebook

What would Emily Dickinson do with facebook? I wondered that yesterday when reading yet another staus update from a "friend." Once you join a social network you feel almost compelled to offer blow-by-blow descriptions of your everyday life - what music you are "currently listening to," your "status", your photos, your favorite this and that. If you never update you risk looking like the biggest bore in the blogosphere; if you once begin you can never stop.

I thought of Dickinson' while reading updates on what all my "friends" are currently doing, and feeling like I had better change my "status" soon lest people think I have spent the last seven days "waiting for someone to make me a cup of coffee", (which I sort of have, but that's the story of my life).

From my persepctive, grounded as I am in the last century, social utility networks are wonderful for seeing pictures of what distant friends and family members are doing, for dropping a quick note to a loved one far away, for instant encouragement and fun repartee, but they can easily turn people into frogs who tell their names, and the details of their everyday lives, and their most mundane thoughts the live-long June to the entire bog (which sounds curiously like "blog.") That's just what I think. I'll let Emily speak for herself.

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
by Emily Dickinson

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

Good intentions

I have been following, albeit from a distance, a long distance, the progress of a South Carolina bill which passed the House last month by a huge margin. The bill requires women requesting an abortion in South Carolina to view an ultrasound image of their child before they agree to the abortion. I am about as pro-life as you can get - a real litmus-test voter on this issue, but I have to confess I just don't get this bill.

I have watched over the years the restictions which pro-lifers have tried to enact into laws in order to by any means save some babies - requiring "informed consent", waiting periods, parental consent for minors, etc. And I have hoped, along with all others who deplore the taking of innocent life in the womb, that the provisions will, indeed, keep some women from making that fatal mistake of terminating a pregnancy and a life. I have sometimes been embarrassed by the rhetoric which surrounds these issues; don't we all, pro-life and pro-abortion, know that making abortion more rare is what they are really all about, not just helping women be better informed or simply giving them time to think about an important decision. The availablility of over the counter abortifacients has, I am sure, seriously limited the impact of such restrictive laws, but they may still save the occasional baby who has made it past the first six weeks, and so I applaud them.

This South Carolina bill, however, seems wrong-headed in the extreme, even to me. First of all, the very presumption that anyone can make someone else look at something they don't wish to see is ridiculous. It reminds me of those gory Driver's Ed films they used to show in high school in the 70's. I remember sitting through an entire class period with my eyes closed while everyone around me groaned and gagged at the images on the screen. No one was allowed to skip the class period when they were shown, but even in my South Carolina high school no one pretended they could make us watch. And I never did. Who is to keep a woman who has already agonized over the decision to seek an abortion from simply looking away or closing her eyes? And don't we all know it is possible to look without really seeing?

The supporters of the bill also, I believe, attribute more power to the grainy ultrasound image than it really possesses. Representatives talk about letting a woman see the face of her baby. Now granted, the last ultrasound I had was about 14 years ago, and I know from images on friends' refrigerators the technology has advanced somewhat, but I would never have been able to make out the face, or the heart, or the tell-tale gender markings of any of my children without a very patient ultrasound technician pointing everything out to me, often more than once. And I really wanted to see what was there! Assuming that most abortions take place in the first trimester, there is not much easily seen on the ultrasound screen, though a beating heart is usually hard to miss. I would sooner vote for a bill that required the mother to hear the heartbeat magnified by a Doppler than to look at a blurry picture. It's harder to close your ears than your eyes, too.

But the biggest problem I have with this bill is the question of how it can be enforced. Short of having an armed officer in each clinic examining room, I can not possibly imagine how this regulation could be enforced. Neither, apparently, can its sponsors, who have said they will figure out at a later date how to enforce it if/when it becomes law. Just imagine the scenario. A clinic worker who has no incentive to dissuade the patient from having the abortion, a patient who has most likely nerved herself for what is to come and just wants to get it over with - and the two of them are expected to cooperate in this joint venture of taking the time and effort to obtain a clear picture of the baby and then examine and appreciate it together. It boggles the mind. It seems to me the state can require a signed piece of paper saying the client has seen the ultrasound, but there is no way they can guarantee the truthfulness of the claim.

I deplore abortion. I weep for every baby who is sacrificed on the altar of convenience, poverty, fear or desperation. I have sheltered unwanted little ones in my home, and I would take a dozen more if I were allowed to (I have too many children to be considered for adoption or foster care in my state.) But I can't see how this bill could possible have any effect on the number of abortions performed in South Carolina, though it can certainly add fuel to the fires of abortion proponents across the country who already believe pro-lifers are not living in the real world. Let's not confirm their suspicions.