Enoch Choi on Saturday night enjoyed dinner with some of his partners from the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
During the meal another physician at the table encouraged and strengthened my friend with his experience and advice. Enoch wrote:
He shared candidly the rules of maintaining a marriage thru toddlerhood (a time even more stressful to marriage than internship/residency):
– a spouse must share regular sexual intimacy with their spouse. even if you just lay there, that’s the most important need for the man
– the spouse that works more out of the home, must
– 1) come home and give the more-at-home spouse 2 hours off when they get home
– 2) limit time off to 2 hours to do their hobbies, and do parental duties in the rest of the time after work: wash all dishes, clothes, buy all groceries and do all needed shopping
– 3) continue this thru the time that the youngest is 4.5 years old because that’s when the more-at-home spouse will emerge out of the stupor of fatigue from caring for the kids, to have the energy to express their love again
– 4) examples of how to make this happen: bring kids to costco, keep them strapped in their car seat; bring to park, make sure you look up every 30 seconds; it was really clear that he’d done these things himself. pretty amazing.
– 5) the penalty for not following this advice is DIVORCE. pretty scary.
I was impressed that toddlerhood is considered more of a challenge to a marriage than internship and residency! I also appreciated the idea that it takes four years or more for the at-home-spouse to have more energy. Right now my children are 2.5, 4.5 and 6.75. I don’t think I’m being unfair to say that our youngest requires more work than her older two sisters, simply because she is a two year old. She needs help with her hygiene, clothes and food while her siblings are self-sufficient. At one point, I had 3 children under 5 years. That was a stressful time for us, with many changes in our lives, some of them unrelated to our children. Looking back I wish I knew then what I know now. On rough days I reassure myself that in a couple more years taking care of the kids will be easier, at least physically. Funny thing is, I’m not sure I realized how much effort it was, until the kids became independent; now taking care of one toddler seems like more work than it was to take care of three wee ones!
I like the idea of giving the at-home spouse 2 hours of hobby time a day! What a luxury! This wouldn’t work for our family schedule since we are a bit more nocturnal and Ted stops working at dinner time. If I took my two hours of hobby time then, we wouldn’t enjoy our time together as a family. As it is right now I have hobby time after the girls go to bed and on weekend afternoons.
The idea of doing parental duties and household chores in the time after work may be a good one for some families but probably wouldn’t work for ours either. Here on the island, many stores close by 5 to 7 at night so it would be difficult to run errands later in the day. I have to take the children with me to do some chores. Otherwise they wouldn’t get done. Plus it may be more efficient to run errands during the morning, when fewer people are shopping. I choose to do laundry, cleaning and dishes as much as possible during my time with the children while Ted works. The kids help me with the chores and I also free up time for later at night to spend with Ted.
Notice that the experienced physician did not suggest using money to solve problems. He didn’t say to hire a nanny or a babysitter or a house cleaner or concierge. I appreciate that he suggested how the parents could change the situation themselves. After all, money can make work easier but money can’t make a marriage work.
One further comment: without discussing explicit details, I’m not sure I agree with the advice on intimacy. Is it satisfying a husband’s emotional need if his wife doesn’t seem interested in him? I believe men want to be wanted, just as women do. My advice would be that intimacy of all kinds flows best when partners feel strong emotionally, physically and spiritually. Giving each other time away from the kids and duties, finding time alone and time together for refreshment, may help. Desire, like love, can be a choice, and may be made in the mind (at least for some women).
A paragraph later in Enoch’s post may provide more context for the advice given:
This is not what i expected tonight. It was like getting pleasantly walloped – but from a coworker I could trust, who actually did all of this, but suffered from not getting the physical intimacy from the more-at-home spouse that he needed.
I hope Enoch doesn’t feel too walloped but from his respective blog post it seems that he would both agree it was an excellent evening of blessing.
Tags: marriage
Ronni Bennett in her rich blog Time Goes By: what it’s really like to get older shared a story in Learning Forever / Forever Learning
On the afternoon of the third and final day of meetings, I was with the CEO in his office and in searching for some notes in my bag, I pulled out the book I’d taken with me for hotel and airplane reading: a life of King David by Jonathan Kirsch.
The CEO riffled through the book, asked some questions and we talked about it for five minutes or so. Then he said, in a surprised tone of voice, “You’ve never stopped learning, have you?â€
I was surprised that he was surprised and he, a European by birth and upbringing, said that it was his experience, in the United States, that few people showed much intellectual curiosity past college or beyond what is necessary for their work. I refrained from suggesting he find a new set of friends, but he was not entirely wrong.
Go read more of her blogpost and her blog.
Ronni Bennett continued later in her post:
Too much of the public discourse on aging is dependent on two generally-held beliefs: that learning stops when formal education ends (which is applied to everyone) and older workers can’t and don’t learn new skills.
One of the reasons why Ted and I are homeschooling our children is to teach them that life is learning. Education doesn’t start at 9 am one morning in a child’s sixth September and end after the nineteenth (or twenty-third or twenty-seventh) June. Diplomas should mark the commencement, not the end of our education. We learn as we live. Ted and I hope to cultivate curiousity in our children. We don’t want them to think that they have to be in a classroom to have a teacher. They can teach themselves. We hope they have hunger. We hope they will discover and explore, wonder and share every day they are alive.
Education is at the essence of who we are as humans. We will always have more to know and discover, depths to dive and heights to soar if not in body then in soul. Eternity, I believe, will be eternal learning.
May we nuture intellectual vitality growing up inside our children as they grow. May our daughters be scientists and philosophers, readers and writers, mathematicians and artists all their days. May they never stop learning.
Related links of note this week:
This is your brain on stress
How to win the U.S. memory championship
Neuroeconomics
Tags: homeschool
March 20th, 2005 · 1 Comment
Tags: gardening
March 20th, 2005 · 1 Comment
If I could create a blogging tool, I would use it to insert posts from those who link to me into my blog and into my feeds. Through Technorati, PubSub, comments and trackbacks I’ve enjoyed meeting many new bloggers. Here are some of the conversations continued…
One of the best reasons to be a speaker at a conference, I’ve decided, is to meet new bloggers (update, to clarify, by new, I mean new to me, not necessarily someone who just started blogging.). I didn’t get to meet Mary although she was at my talk. However I’ve enjoyed her be lazy, go crazy blog with feminist musings, musical phenomena, lived culture. This post you deserve a gold star deserves a gold star.
A gold star is heaven; it is a new box of crayons; it is hot chocolate with marshmallows and whipped cream; it is a brand new Mustang bike with a banana seat and a sissy bar; it is the golden ticket inside the Wonka chocolate bar; it is a new picture of Bobby Sherman on your bedroom door; it is having a best friend.
A tender prayer for travellers is another favorite.
Tim Burlowski has been bouncing the ball back from his corner a few times. He has a sweet style and great photos. I appreciated his thorough critique of blogging as religion providing an alternate perspective to some of my points. Tim would like to be a surprise otherwise known as a Whitman sampler blog or gray goo. I think he’s well on his way.
London resident Jean at This Too: The texture of life, the yearning for change, the impulse to write about it linked to me, allowing me to discover her lovely observations. I am grateful.
Rae found me by Googling for Caitlin Flanagan. We do have a lot in common, as she wrote. I like her insights and bittersweet remembrances in the moment of mothering such as The Golden Days.
As I pass through the room, I stop to savor the inculpable nescience. I breathe deeply, taking mental snapshots of a smile, record a voice telling me “what this says,” and interpreting a masterpiece of crayon art. How I wish to have been able to have experienced such blamelessness.
Euan Semple linked to Amba. I linked to them both and then Euan and Amba graciously returned the favor, creating connections.
Amba linked to me again, commenting on my birthday post with her earned wisdom
This is the last year I’ll have the luxury of saying, with astonishment, “I’m almost 60!” I remember my grandmother saying, “I feel exactly the same as I did when I was 16, and then I look in the mirror and say, ‘Who is that old lady?'” At this age, I discover, you can feel very old and very young from one day to the next. One day it’s, “Sex is so over. I’m old now, a watcher from the sidelines. It’s not that I don’t have any desire. It’s that I don’t have any hope.” The next day, envy for the sex-ridden is replaced by pity, if not contempt, as I view their driven, drunken antics from the self-possessed paradise I last inhabited when I was 12.
Through Amba, I discover Tamar and Ronni Bennett who wrote Feeling Old Redux in response.
As age has come upon me, I have lost most of the defensiveness I carried in younger years and I’m more willing to accept my flaws. That alone is a relief; a burden lifted. With the increased life skills I have accumulated – professional and personal – I am more confident. Another burden lifted. And now that death is no longer so far in the future as to be unimaginable, I have learned a lot more about amba’s “boundlessness of my inner dimension.â€
My outer dimension has marched along in step with the inner. I’m chubbier than I was in my youth when I was hungry every waking moment of every day for decades to maintain the weight the age and beauty police demand. I’ve got little jowls now. There are bags forming under my eyes. My neck is beginning to show some crepe-iness. My hair is gray. And so what.
If I succumbed to a surgeon’s knife, I could not achieve these bits of inner growth and understanding that continue to arrive – with no effort on my part – because, I believe, desperately pursuing what frequently turns out to be a grotesque approximation of youth, necessarily changes one’s inner direction.
And besides, I’m curious to see what physical changes time, left to its own devices, will bestow on me.
Ann Althouse also responded to Amba’s post on aging
Since I was quite young, I’ve thought about aging by imagining myself saying something to my older self, offering some advice or encouragement, and, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve remembered the things I thought of saying to myself all those years ago, so the communication actually did occur: my young self sent a message to my older self. I’ve also contemplated the reverse: what would my older self say to me now?
Hmmm…sounds like Bob Vis’ comment on my original post! Amba responded with her set of letters!…
This series of conversations and new voices to me combined with Lisa Williams’ timely Buy Experienced Parts post gave me a wonderful birthday present indeed, a sense of confidence and anticipation in this process of aging:
I’m not really sure the guy’s wooden skis, with the navy blue stripe down the center, had really gotten better with age. But the marks of experience that showed on the wood, and the aura of countless miles through the snow, through the woods, that has to mean something, doesn’t it? It did to me. I could feel it, like a magnetic field.
And when I say that there is a class of thing that does get better with use, I think we have to include ourselves in that class. What if we didn’t? What if we thought of ourselves like the auto parts, that to say that a worn person, like a worn part, is better, is nothing but a joke?
If everyone believed that it would be a very grim world. And we do believe it in part, in our sad discarding of people who are worn and broken through age or other mishaps, and the part of the world where worn means bad, and not experienced, is a grim dystopia.
The parts of the world where we think worn = experienced = good yields things like, oh, Paul Newman.
Which one do you want to live in?
‘Cause it’s all in your head.
Other conversations continued:
Amanda Witt’s limerick grande Finale round-up.
Scott Koon wonders how to get his kids (since he has one on the way!) interested in science:cooking is just tasty chemistry!
Bob Vis, longtime regular reader and commenter posted his responses (while my comments were broken) allowing me to discover his blog (since I’d somehow missed his link to it in his comment entries on my own blog!)
Tags: blog
Laura at 11D wrote:
After the morning with the neurologist, Steve and I googled disorders and disabilities until late at night. This maniacal googling is a new stage of grief. After denial and before resignation, comes the google stage.
Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross described five stages of grief:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
Googling is indeed a new stage of grief. I’ve done it myself. I’ve sat at the computer, typing terms, moving the mouse, clicking, reading, calculating, crying. Have you?
danah boyd wrote Google is the perfect tool for the intermittent hypochondriac. The weight of a diagnosis or a death can create a compulsion to try to understand, to seek in the sea of Google knowledge for answers and explanations. Try a term, try another term, yet a third all to see what comes up in the net. Ask Jeeves. From my own experience, what I read on the Internet can help or hurt my situation, throw me on an unnecessary roller-coaster ride or confirm my fears.
So Googling may be added to the grief stages. How about blogging? Emailing? Done that too.
How will our relationships on the Internet, with each other and with information alter the way we grieve?
Tags: journal
