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Day 10

Day ten. Still no murderous rampage. Sufficient sleep is being obtained by plonking children in front of the TV and going back to bed when required. Outdoor activity is facilitated by lovely weather. Sanity being maintained just barely.

Yes, I’m single mumming it right now. Aidan is away for a month. I’m not sure if I’m meant to say why or where, but be assured it’s not because of any personal issues or anything!

In his absence, a great many friends of mine and colleagues of his are offering assistance if I need it; people have offered to bring me groceries (because I don’t drive), or look after the kids (so I can study), and some have already brought me food. I’m realising how fortunate I am to have people willing to do these things for me, even though I will probably never need to accept most of those offers.

I sort of want to write nice personal letters to all the real single mums out there congratulating them and asking for tips.

Anyway, I haven’t gone totally mental yet. It’s all good.

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Lies, lies, lies

It is human nature to look at the past through rose coloured glasses. Things were always better when you were younger, and morals are always deteriorating. Once upon a time, when somebody said something you knew it was a fact; people simply didn’t lie. People are so much more violent these days, too.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Take it from a history student. The more I study, the more I see that human nature really has not changed significantly in at least the last 3,000 years. Ancient Romans even used to make the same complaints about how much better things used to be!

In the year 41, Seneca the Younger was exiled. When the emperor Claudius’ wife wanted her sister-in-law out of the way, she accused her of adultery, implicating Seneca. The charge was completely false, and yet he was banished to Corsica for it. There’s some nice morality for you, from 1,972 years ago!

Going even further back, to 133 BCE, we can find the death of Tiberius Gracchus. He was a Roman politician who had proposed a new law concerning the use and distribution of agricultural lands for the benefit of the poor. The law threatened the land holdings of the very rich, including many other prominent politicians. It ended when members of the Roman Senate brutally murdered Tiberius and 300 of his followers and threw the bodies into the river.

As for sexual assaults and the subjugation of women, I find it hard to track down specific ancient cases. However I do know that in countless societies around the world, female inferiority arose alongside the advent of agriculture. That means that women have been looked down on for at least 10,000 years, and I see no reason to suppose that brutal rapes have not occurred with some regularity from that point onwards.

So no, things didn’t use to be better. People were not magically nicer. The world was not more peaceful or loving. The sun didn’t always shine, and the grass wasn’t always green. People have always been people, just like us, moved to act by essentially selfish motives – to gain something, or to get away with something.

If you want something different from the world, don’t look to the past. Work on it for the future.

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Morals vs. Religion

I’ve been told a couple of times recently that I shouldn’t be so anti-religion because religion serves a purpose. An example often given is the Christian prohibition of sex before marriage: isn’t it for the best, they ask rhetorically, that we don’t end up with a bunch of single mums with kids they can’t handle or didn’t want, kids that may end up being neglected or abused?

Obviously my first response to that is that if the church promoted contraception that wouldn’t be a problem!

However the more in-depth response is that I do believe morals serve a purpose. I think society – the world – needs morality, a code of behaviour, a set of rules. However, morality is just the set of rules that suits us best and allows us to best get along. As our societies change, so should our morals. The world and humanity are in a constant state of flux, nothing is ‘normal’, and ‘tradition’ depends on the time and place you value the most.

Turning your morals into a religion causes them to stagnate. It denies the change necessary to keep up with a changing society. It eventually makes them counter-productive and divisive.

To a follower of such a religion, life must seem like a tortuous exercise in Orwell’s double-think: sex before marriage is totally unacceptable, yet it is done all the time by decent people, even people who adhere to this religion, so it can’t be that bad, so maybe I’ll do it, so I did it and now I feel horribly guilty for being immoral… 

Once upon a time, it was probably a good idea not to have sex before marriage. There were limited contraceptive options, and having a child was difficult and dangerous. The risks and hardships were very real and very severe. But now we have a myriad of cheap and simple contraceptive options, and in the event of their failure we have ways of safely aborting a foetus. If you don’t want an abortion, there are systems in place to care for a child or help you do so: adoptions, orphanages, and so on. Now, with these changes and choices, the prohibition on sex before marriage makes much less sense. We don’t need that rule anymore, but religion clings to it.

I really think that religion has no place in the world. Be moral, be ethical, but allow for flexibility.

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Mug shots

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Quite some time ago, I had a favourite mug. It wasn’t the design so much as it was the size and shape; it was bigger than standard, and kept my tea hot for longer than my other mugs. I came across this mug quite by chance; I think it was a gift from my mother-in-law.

But one day, my favourite mug broke. I forget how, I think it was just a clumsy accident on my part. Not unusual.

The breaking of the favoured mug kicked off a quest to find a new favourite mug. I embarked on a mug search spanning months. I bought a cool black one, but it turned out to have a manufacturing fault: a bit of ceramic stuck out at the bottom and scratched any surface I put it on. So I tried again, and again.

The end result of my search for a favourite mug is that I now have five favourite mugs, and each time I have a cup of tea I feel a slight pang of guilt for not using one of the other four.

 

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Job or not??

Again and again I see people assert that being a stay at home mum is a lifestyle choice, not a job. It only leaves me wondering why it can’t be both. As I see it, most jobs, careers, and workplaces are chosen with a degree of lifestyle in mind. You wouldn’t take a job that was incompatible with your lifestyle, and you would be more likely to want to work in a place which holds similar values to yourself and, hopefully, a place where you can be yourself and enjoy being there. Is that not a lifestyle choice? I fail to see why we need to draw stark distinctions between things which in truth are similar, related, or intertwined. I chose to be a stay at home mum, and I like it. I feel no regret. But I also acknowledge that it is work, a job. Like any job, it has ups and downs, good and bad bits. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like work, and sometimes it does. Believe me, I didn’t want to be awake at 2am this morning, but that’s  part of the job and part of the lifestyle.
I also feel that claiming motherhood, or being a stay at home mum, is not a job somehow devalues what we do. “It’s only a lifestyle” belittles it and overlooks the effort we put in. It might be a lifestyle, but there’s no mansion or pool or eternal sunshine; instead there are midnight feeds, dirty nappies, and tantrums.

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Philosophy

For 2,500 years, humans have been trying to formulate ideas about how we should live, what constitutes a good liife, and how happiness may be reached. We have  considered material goods, the pursuit of duty, the application of pure rational thought, resignation, and a variety of other methods to reach a good life, as well as endless combinations of these ideas. We hope always to improve our lives and to become better people. But after 2,500 years, can we be said to have improved, to be happier? When one reads ancient letters, journals, and essays, one finds very much the same concerns and activities as those which occupy us now. What, then, is the purpose or point of philosophy? Is there one? Sometimes I feel that the point is to make the philosopher feel smarter or better than the general populace. It seems very much a pursuit for the benefit of an individual rather than society. In the 300s BCE, Epicurus told us that happiness could be attained with friendship, freedom, and thought, and that we habitually and needlessly purchased expensive goods to satisfy the needs of our souls; modern corporations still use this habit against us. In the first century CE, many Roman orators and writers described politics as being more about personal glory than the greater good; this appears to continue as it was. In the 1500s, Montaigne made similar observations about education as might be made today: that it teaches fact without teaching understanding, what to think but not how to think. Socrates himself told us to question every presumption, to apply logic and rational thought in all matters, and that a view held by a figure of authority or by a majority or for a very long time is not necessarily correct simply because of that fact. When you look around and see what we have done with such wisdom, one might be forgiven for taking Schopenhaur’s grim view of the world!

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Things Evelyn says

evie tummyEvelyn is getting more of a grasp on language now, and says many understandable things. She’s really good at ‘bubble’ and ‘bread’, and ‘wa-wer’ consistently means ‘shower’. We get ‘more, more,’ whenever she wants, well, more of something. She makes a sort of ‘jooossss’ noise which clearly means ‘juice’. She makes, upon request, the correct noises for a variety of animals, including dog, cat, elephant, snake, monkey, sheep, and cow. She says ‘eye’ while poking me in it. There are plenty more, but those are her best and clearest sounds. She’s becoming quite the chatterbox!