monthly musings vol. 20

halloween fun, why being a parent isn't a lifestyle, is WFH even a good idea, don't romanticize the 1950s, the deep down things, and much more

Hi, I’m Katie, a writer and podcaster and I believe that literature, art, beauty, theology, and wonder are worth our time and attention. Every month I do some ‘musings’ on various topics on my mind… like whether or not it is good to exist or finding the melody of your life or conversion anniversaries. I also share some links to thought-provoking writing going on around the web. This edition is free for you to read, but took time and research to write - consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support the work I do.

Happy Halloween! Allhallowtide and candles and pumpkins and a ghost story round the fire. Truly does not get better in my mind.

I know not everyone likes Halloween. I could certainly do without the gory bloody displays at the hardware store. I kept telling my kids “hey look at the fan waaayyy up high on the ceiling, isn’t that so cool!” in an attempt to keep their little eyes drifting elsewhere as we rushed by a giant inflatable clown with a machete.

But luckily our neighbors seem more into the ‘friendly ghost’ variety of displays, if they have any at all. We do have one neighbor with a rather dementor-looking grim reaper swaying in the breeze at the end of their drive,¹ but all-in-all we’re duly steeped in the ‘coziness’ of Halloween and the accompanying fall leaves.

I loved Halloween as a kid. Who doesn’t enjoy getting dressed up, heading to class for a costume parade with a whimsical, slightly intimidating music teacher leading the entire elementary school in a rousing “stir it in my witch’s brew” song while throwing plastic spiders into a giant cauldron? It’s fun! (The candy didn’t hurt either.) I remember watching and rewatching this episode of Wishbone, a show I truly, unironically credit with much of my early interest in literature - “Halloween Hound: The Legend of the Creepy Collars.” So October was hot cider and blankets and my Mom’s sewing machine whirring upstairs working on costumes.

I feel an accompanying sense of digging in, settling down, sighing, as we turn toward my favorite time of year - the rush of Thanksgiving with its gravy and wine and the blessing of the hounds, and then the boxes up from the basement, the lights, O Come, O Come Emmanuel in the dark, Advent candles, Rorate Mass at Dawn, Christmas morning and the flurry of crashing energy, and finally, New Years, a chance to look back and start again.

I’ve been thinking about being a kid a lot. I think about the childhood I want for my own kids, and then I think how much I should detach from too many preconceived ideas of how things should go. Kids are people, not projects, and no amount of right schools (or homeschool/co-ops) or extracurriculars (or no extracurriculars) can give you much control over the basic, deep-down things.

I think of the many privileges of my own childhood and certainly there were incredible joys that have continued throughout my life - horses, travel, etc. These were gifts and I’m grateful for them. But when I think of the deep down things I think of my Mom reading us stories at night - Harry Potter, The Wind in the Willows, All Creatures Great and Small. And I think how much time was devoted to simply being outdoors, to climbing trees or getting lost in the woods, and how I spent so many weekends in my room with my Breyer horses listening to Jessica Andrew’s Who I Am (no doubt thinking who am I?).

The Surgeon General says parents are not okay. To me it seems a classic case of doing it all. Though people like to quibble with the specifics of this statistic it’s worth repeating that 50 years ago stay-at-home mothers (by and large) spent less time caring for their children than working mothers do today. The now-cliche image of the kids being let out to play only to come in for the dinner bell comes to mind. I’m not going to start waxing philosophic about the village or even start talking about some ideal scenario that I think never existed. I don’t want to go back to that time and I think there’s an inordinate amount of romantic nostalgia attached to a time period that actually becomes quite dangerous in the wrong hands.² And actually I love a whole lot about being a parent in the 21st century.³

But I also think parents now have social media and are doom scrolling and being told they’ll mess up their kid if they do xyz. I also think we live increasingly isolated existences - a lot less time with your in-person neighbors and schools and communities. So I appreciated the warning and sent this episode of The Daily to a few of my burnt out Mom friends who breathed a sigh of relief - my kid is okay! I am okay! I need to relax!⁴

Now that having kids is such a momentous choice, only to be embarked upon when you reach a certain dollar amount in your savings and the exact right moment in your career, it now also must become a lifestyle. And lifestyles are time consuming and involve lots of purchases and gear and bumper stickers.⁵

Here’s the weird thing though. Lifestyles aren’t really a life. They’re the stuff, the bylines, etc. - the outward markers that become shorthand to strangers on the internet and to your extended family and your frenemies from college who follow you on LinkedIn that you are doing great, thank you very much!

But being a parent isn’t about stuff, it’s about a relationship. And relationships involve flawed, broken, wonderful people learning to live with one another and love one another. It’s not a checklist of doing the right things or feeding the right foods or going to the right schools.⁶ Relationships are messy and difficult sometimes, but they’re also a heck of a lot more fun than any personal branding could ever be.

So I’m all for dropping ‘parenting’ as a verb and seeing kids as an often natural outcome of married life. They enrich and challenge and broaden our souls as we learn how to become better people in the context of a growing, widening net of family relationships.

me and my Mom on my 1st birthday.

All that being said being a parent will look very different based on who those parents are and their particular goals as a family. My Mom was an entrepreneur and CEO and I recently attended a big event with her former colleagues. It was the 10 year mark, you see - 10 years since she died. It had also been 10 years of being involved in the charitable foundation she left behind to help students in need. I was on the board running that foundation and I got to see my Mom’s legacy play out in real time: helping kids who had lost a parent, who had their homes burn down, who had no one else to turn to when they needed to pay their family’s rent. This was a beautiful, powerful thing to witness.

And as we wound down the foundation, we decided we needed to celebrate all that goodness,⁷ all that real-world important stuff my Mom made happen. And you know what, there were former employees and colleagues who flew in for this little reunion at a rural brewery, some from all the way across the country. These people became like an extended family to my Mom. Because of her business, people met their spouses - they met lifelong friends - and ten years after she died they were sitting around sipping beers laughing together.

So I get really frustrated when people start siloing ‘working’ parents and ‘non-working’ parents - and I get really annoyed when ‘pro family’ people start thinking women should only work and live in one kind of pre-prescribed box. Because the work - yes, paid work that kept my Mom in an office much of the time - had incredible, positive real world effects. Were there downsides to this? Yes. I’ve written about them. I don’t think my Mom always achieved the balance she strived for, but she taught me a lot about integrity and leadership and probably a lot more things that I’m still working out in my head.

a caption in my baby book that made me laugh - one month before I turned one - “Mom starts her companies”

We are going to do a lot of things wrong as parents because we’re human beings and we probably make a lot of mistakes in all areas of our lives. But if we do things in a spirit of creativity, love, hope, promise, and with a constant eye toward relationships I think we’re at least on the right track.

also, when in doubt - just get outside! solves so many problems.

Anyway! Let’s get to some links before your eyes start glazing over. As always, lots to peruse:

• My heart truly dropped when I heard the news of Maggie Smith’s death. She was such a class act and she aged with incredible grace and dignity, which this article does a good job of exploring.

• This was a really pensive, well-done exploration of one of John Keats’ last poems, ‘To Autumn.” From

  Joseph Bottum

• Loving this exploration of ‘early saints’ from

  Becca Parsons

• Ann Kennedy Smith
  does such an excellent job getting at the heart of a person’s work - I’ve especially loved her pieces on Sylvia Plath. Here she explores Plath’s singular ambition and determination.

• Work-from-home has been my saving grace. I have been able to take on contracts and basically just work a few mornings a week and during nap times. But I thought

  She Says She Thinks
  did a good job pointing out the down-sides of WFH, especially for early-career 20-somethings. There’s got to be a good balance here somewhere… (And I will say when I’m able to meet up with my ‘audio collective’ at the co-working space downtown and actually grab a fancy coffee and be in an office I am seriously energized - I love it!)⁸

• This was an absolutely bizarre, sad story about how two Przewalski horses got confused for mules and ended up at an auction house.

• A wonderful look at Sylvia Plath’s note-taking from

  Jillian Hess
  . I still remember the thrill when Chris and I went to Smith and actually touched her notebooks, her sketches. Unreal. (hey it’s Sylvia Plath’s birthday month, I can talk about her as much as I want!)

• A little nerding out over bridges in Scotland for us Jacobite enthusiasts, from

  Beth Reid
  .

• I purposefully have nothing to say about the election but for a refreshingly sane take, check out

  Sarah Carter
  ’s latest.

  

  10/10 recommend an afternoon - or a day - in Hodges Figgis if you go to Dublin.

  in case you missed it…

  • 10 days in Ireland and it feels like a dream. What a gift. I’ll be writing about my experiences there for a while no doubt, but here’s a little missive and photo album from the trip.

  • “The Weeping Mothers of Ireland”

  • “Mass for Sylvia Plath on her birthday”

  • “The Tale of the Three Lucys” (for paid subscribers)

a little self promotion…

I recently contracted with The Smithsonian and the Peale as the new host and producer of their podcast series, “Stories from Main Street.” My first episode for them released this week and it’s a fun one for Halloween:

Shapeshifters, Ghosts, and Red-Eyed Dogs: Spooky Tales and a Rich Heritage.

dose of random…

I’m rewatching Gilmore Girls as I do most autumns and this time around I just totally get Jess and I think it’s so crazy romantic when he demolishes that snowman for Rory and does all kinds of town vandalism for her sake. I loved Jess when I was a teenager but soured on him as a ‘responsible grown up’ so what’s happening to me!? am I becoming a sappy teen again?? Anyway, it’s fun.

Wishing you a cozy, magical, playful, happy Halloween.

The joy of this world, the hope of the next,

All good things x

Katie

Sunrise/sunset walks are my favorite this time of year.

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1. I should also emphasize we live on a rural lane and have like… two neighbors (and one of them is my Dad), so odds are good we won’t be overly bothered by displays.

2. I have absolutely zero nostalgia for women not being able to get a credit card, attend a co-ed Ivy League School (fyi Harvard and Columbia were male-only until 1979), get fired for becoming pregnant (1978 the pregnancy discrimination act was passed), practice law (women could still technically be barred from law practices until 1971), file a complaint for sexual harassment (sexual harassment in the workplace was not considered a legal offense until 1977), be unable to report marital rape (marital rape wasn’t considered a crime until 1993) - I could go on, but you get the idea. Random Catholic/otherwise influencers on the web STOP romanticizing this time period.

3. Hellooo thank you flexible remote work!

4. You could homeschool your kids and they could resent you forever for doing it (or love you for it); you could pay a fortune for the best private school and they could absolutely hate it there (or they could love it), they could do just fine at the public school (or not) - you could raise your kid as a freewheeling agnostic and have them end up a traditional Catholic :) (hi, I’m the problem, it’s me) - you just don’t know / have no guarantees - just do what’s right at the time with what you’ve got and what makes you happy, with the goal of preserving the relationship, not securing a certain outcome - that’s what I’m thinking - but hey what do I know! both my kids are under 4 and I’m just winging it :)

5. I do rock a “tiny hobbits on board” bumper sticker on my minivan.

6. This doesn’t mean I don’t care about how we live as a family - I actually have very particular hopes for schools, activities, how we eat, what we watch or don’t watch, and all those things, but there’s a certain amount of detachment we need to have to engage with this all in a healthy way that allows kids to be human beings - and maybe (per the surgeon general warning) allows parents to be human beings with interests outside of the ‘parenting’ dynamic.

7. Goodness that could be masked in tough love. Our ‘party favors’ were friendship bracelets adorned with one my Mom’s favorite things to say to people: “don’t be pathetic.”

8. Also WFH means no spontaneous drinks after work, coffee breaks, cake in the break room, etc. and these are all the things that build relationships down the road - many of the jobs I now I have in my flexible work I have because of networking connections I made from my years working in an office.