Parenting as the Crossroads of Lives

The early impression of parenthood is that it is comprised of always being on duty to keep small humans alive, fed, and moderately clean. As the kids get a bit older, transportation duties are added to this.

And to be fair, there is an awful lot of this.

But as the older kids move into adulthood, I think a deeper sense of what parenthood it comes into view.

A typical evening lately might range from taking one or two younger kids to activities, cooking and serving a dinner for 7-10, trying to get the youngest two kids engaged in something other than begging for screentime, hearing about the activities or workday of teens, getting those kids not yet old enough to put themselves to bed to head upstairs at a reasonable time, discussing some financial or personal issue with one of the adult kids, and Mom and Dad trying to somehow get a little time together as a couple.

When the kids were younger, everything moved more as one family machine: get everyone up, make sure everyone eats breakfast, have everyone do schoolwork, take everyone to activities.

The younger end of our distribution is more spread out: 7, 11, 14, 16 -- all different stages of life and development -- and among the adults, despite the closer spacing there is working-before-college, college, and post-college.  

The result is that it is more than ever apparent that our duties as parents do not consist of moving around an amorphous blob of children.  Rather, we sit at the intersection of many lives.

Some need guidance and help in their fledgling adult lives.

Some are working through those last years of semi-dependence before becoming adults.

And some still have many years of growth ahead before they will be stepping off to lead their own lives.

But all of them are separate human lives, bound inextricably to ours through our shared family, yet by tethers which become longer and more flexible with time.  Eventually -- indeed, not so very far away -- they will begin to form their own families, even as they also remain part of ours.  

I'm tempted to make some sort of astronomical analogy, but although multi-star systems can have planets, they tend not to be stable.  Perhaps that's some indication of how each new family needs the distance to be self containing, even while remaining part of the larger system. After all, gravitational pull reduces according to the square of the distance.

But this sense of living at the crossroads of many different lives has been the dominant one in parenthood for the last year or two.

Ordo Amoris is not the point

Vice President JD Vance has been out using terminology from Catholic theology to defend the specific policies and tactics which the Trump administration has been adopting around immigration, and so there was a brief burst of discussion a couple days ago about the idea of the Ordo Amoris, the order of loves.

You can hear him speak here, but if like me you'd always rather read a transcript, here's the relevant bit:

But there's this old-school, and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way, that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that. They seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society. I think the profound difference that Donald Trump brings the leadership of this country is the simple concept, America first. It doesn't mean you hate anybody else. It means that you have leadership. And President Trump has been very clear about this that puts the interests of American citizens first. In the same way that the British Prime Minister should care about Brits and the French should care about the French, we have an American President who cares primarily about Americans, and that's a very welcome change.

This quickly resulted in a firestorm, with all sorts of people calling Vance out as not understanding Christianity.  He tweeted back at them:

Pretty quickly lots of people were lining up to argue about whether Christianity taught that you were supposed to love strangers more or family more.

The problem is: none of this is actually apropos of the actual things that inspired this argument.

I think just about anyone would agree that if a father failed to feed his own children, because he was sending all his money off to feed the poor somewhere else, he would be failing in his duties as a father.  

However, the fact that one has the most urgent duty to provide for one's own family and friends and community does not mean that it doesn't matter what attitude you take towards those further away, or what political policies you endorse in regards to their treatment.

It's also worth considering what exactly a nearby need is.  If there is someone who is originally from another country who is in want in your particular parish or town, isn't that person's need arguably more proximate to you than people in some other state?  The idea of "America first", taken in certain ways, could suggest that we have a closer tie with some unknown person on the other side of the continent who is an American citizen over someone we work with or live next door to who is not.

One thing Vance has become very adept at is turning a policy question into what sounds like a moral balance of absolutely.  He famously said as a senator that he didn't care about Ukrainians, and when asked why said it was because his duty was to the people of Ohio.

But of course, it's not a question whether we should care about Ukraine OR the people of our home state. One can easily care to some extent about both. And even if one cares more about local needs than international needs, that doesn't mean that one cannot do anything to help those abroad.

Following that example, total US aid to Ukraine over the three years of war has been $113 billion.  That's a lot, until you consider the US government spends $6.8 trillion annually.  Ukraine aid has constituted roughly 0.5% of federal spending over the last three years. 

Maybe there should be no Ukraine aid at all, maybe it's not a good cause or one the US should be involved in, but if so that needs to be discussed on its own terms.  It's not sufficient to say, "Local concerns are higher priority, therefore we can't spend a cent on this particular non-local thing."

Likewise with any number of other issues.

Pointing out that we're called by Jesus to love everyone does not end arguments about enacting some particular policy, and neither does pointing out that we have the greatest duty to those nearest to us and thus most dependent on our personal help. Those are both important principals to recall when making any decisions about policy, but the policies have to be evaluated and chosen based upon themselves and the necessary trade-offs which implementing them would require.  

Trying to Lift Off

 

As I wrapped up my 2024 reading, I read a pair of books about SpaceX:  Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX and its sequel Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age

On the one hand, as someone who grew up in and around a planetarium, and who has always been fascinating by space flight, these are great for the sheer joy of seeing it all happen again. There was a PBS documentary from 1985 entitled Spaceflight, narrated by Martin Sheen, which I watched as a kid till the VHS tape wore out.  I have never grown out of that fascination.  

I've watched my share of SpaceX launches, but reading the detailed account of the scrappy, high speed fashion in which the company and their rockets were built is fascinating, inspiring, and reminds me of some of the things that I've been discovering as I work closer to fully launching my own business (not going to Mars, just helping people improve their prices and lower their costs.)

Something I heard a company founder say recently in an interview was, "The rules are made up, and no one knows what they are doing."

The higher up I get in business, the more this strikes me as true. But also, the thing that strikes me is: Just doing the basics right is very, very hard. Most of the time, most companies, are not hitting all the basics. On the one hand, it seems like companies should be able to do that and more.  And yet, I look around the office and how often people come into meetings and say, "Oh, yeah, sorry, I didn't send that email."  "I didn't have time to do that."  "We didn't check to see if that worked."

Just doing all the basics right will put you ahead of a lot of people.  So many teams get bogged down in endless cycles and approach their goals like the sprinter in Zeno's Paradox.

And on the other side, if you're truly driven, you can do a lot of things wrong and still move faster and be more successful than most.

That latter situation is what seemed often to be at play in the books about SpaceX. As we've all had reason to see, Elon Musk can be chaotic and drive so fast as to skip steps.  And yet, reading these books (and having read Walter Isaacson's lengthy biography of Musk a year ago) it's clear that he both has an ability to instill a tremendous inspiration and urgency towards a goal, and to do an almost superhuman job of hiring the right people for critical roles.

SpaceX routinely burns those right people out.  And yet it continues to make progress towards its goals in ways that few organizations do. It seems fully believable that if he doesn't get distracted with Twitter fights and dabbling in government, Musk will get humans to Mars 20 to 50 years sooner than might otherwise have been the case.

Meanwhile at my last two day jobs I can see the contrast between a company in which the CEO was able to inspire people with a vision and drive, despite himself being an utter chaos monkey who often sabotaged his own efforts, and a company with a CEO who is genuinely good at leading projects and yet who is not good at the inspire-the-room thing it takes to keep people moving at speed through significant change.

Leading people is hard -- and hard to define. The more I think about starting an organization in which I hope myself to lead people, the less sure I feel about whether I have the indefinable skills or instincts it takes to provide that leadership. A lot of company founders can get things done but will never be able to inspire people to excel, and so they will either never grow big or if big will move ponderously along tapped within the habits of consensus.

And then other people, with some combination of imagination and drive and willingness to put the objective above the individuals, are very, very good at moving an organization forward at speed.

Don't worry, the SpaceX books are honestly all about rockets, with few meditations on these vague questions of leadership. If you like rockets, you'll like those books.

But this -- combined with the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs which I also read recently -- have very much set me thinking about how flawed some very effective leaders are, and how many nice people are not effective leaders.

Ringing in the New Year with Darwiniana!

 This weekend, our daughter Julia, the second of the Darwin offspring, got engaged to a delightful young man whom we love as a son. This is a moment of pure joy, untainted by internal reservations or fears. Lots of photos were taken -- not by me; I'm the world's worst documenter of events! -- and as we started to share the news, I wondered: what was the earliest photo of Julia here on the blog?

As it happens, it was the birth of her younger sister Isabel in 2006, and it features all three of the big girls:

Eleanor and Julia welcome an oblivious Isabel

Well, it's not 2006 anymore, and everyone has gotten much older. Let me present the Misses Darwin now:

Eleanor

Eleanor, 22, is now graduated from college. After a year of health woes, including surgery and a colonoscopy, she's finally been diagnosed with PCOS and Crohn's Disease -- which news she's given me permission to share, as she'll tell anyone that she's dying of Victorian Women's Disease. We're still in the throes of learning about how to manage everything, including the double whammy of chronic fatigue being a result of both conditions, but she keeps up her good cheer and her artwork. She played Trinculo the clown in my recent production of The Tempest, and was celebrated for, as an experienced Shakespearean colleague put it, "her extraordinary conception of Trinculo as a being who walks about as if he has no bones in his body."

Julia and William

Julia, 21, finds herself in the amusing situation of being engaged to a man with the same name as one of her brothers. Can there be too many Williams, though? She is at The Ohio State University, and recently changed her major to prepare to study midwifery. She loves hands-on work, and is often busy either with her own projects, or with keeping the rest of us on task. She's become a notable costumer, doing work with the University, and also costume design for my productions. After a recent trip to Italy for Christmas, she's come back more fashionable than ever, but reports that there's no place like home.

William, who came into our lives by playing Orsino to Julia's Olivia in my production of Twelfth Night, recently played Caliban opposite Eleanor's Trinculo. I knew that I could count on those two to be supremely ridiculous while rolling around under a gabardine, and they did not disappoint me. William has the bass voice of a radio host and a gentle good nature that is the ideal foil to Julia's energy. He and my son Jack recently adopted kitten sisters from a litter of strays, and now William's Antigone comes over for playdates with Jack's Mithril. I just live here.

Isabel, no longer oblivious

Isabel, 18, is taking a gap year while she decides if she needs a business degree to rule the world, or if she should just keep making money without going into debt. She is the spreadsheet queen, and will manage your business as well as her own. To the chagrin of her sisters, she scored a used 2025 car -- in 2024. If business does not avail her, she has the chops to be a successful TikTok dancer, and was dance captain for my production of The Music Man last summer. She does not put up with your nonsense, but appreciates a good meme.

The rest of the Darwin youths are minors, though at the rate everyone is getting older, that will change soon enough. The comings and goings in the house rarely cease, and we often have several people (and kittens) dropping by for dinner or to hang out. Like Mary, I find myself increasingly inclined to ponder all these things in my heart, and feel less and less inclination to write about them. And yet they are good things (except chronic disease, maybe), and writing them down helps me to give them all back to God, from whom all blessings flow.

We wish you all the joy of the Christmas season, and the peace that passes understanding.

Darwins, minus Julia (in Rome) plus William