unwittingly duped by feminism

The other day, when Trapeze Girl and I were complaining to eachother about pregnancy, we mentioned how nice it is not to have to be pregnant 20 or so times and raise 18 children. This morning, Cook came into the kitchen, with an appalled look on his face, to tell me about hearing a radio piece about the Quiverfull movement. Being pregnant at the moment makes me even more fervently grateful than usual that I have been coopted by the feminist movement and therefore am not going to be pregnant for most of my life. 

I was thinking about this, as I washed dishes* and I considered that it must be a tremendous relief to subscribe to this sort of approach to life. You don't have to think at all, or make choices - you just have kids and try to keep them alive (and I don't know, pray a lot or whatever). You don't have to strive to find and do meaningful work, you don't have to navel-gaze. You just have to be pregnant and tending to children ALL THE TIME (plus housework), if you're a woman, and work all day (and fill out public assistance forms all night, probably) if you're a man.  It's all laid out for you - have kids, and raise them in some sort of Godly way, and you're all set. Not that I think this is easy - I can't think of many jobs harder and more exhausting than raising 20 kids - but it requires no consideration, no decisionmaking. You don't have to consider whether or not you're making the right decision with your life, because it just kind of unfolds automatically once you give up the birth control option, and you've already been told It's The Right Thing to Do. If you didn't have a lot of choices to start with, you can find satisfaction and pride in Doing The Right Thing just by having sex occasionally, and then dealing with the consequences. You can look at your children as righteous achievements of yours. Arrows in your quiver. If you had too many choices, you can find comfort in brushing them all aside and just Doing The Right Thing. You don't have to make any proactive choices at all.

My striving to find meaningful and useful (or at least not damaging) work in the world, which hasn't actually gotten me anywhere or made any change in the world, involves an awful lot of angst that I could just toss aside if I decided to Do The Right Thing and become a permanent baby-vessel.

However, I like this life much better, angst and all, even leaving aside the issue of spending my life gestating and nurturing and making huge vats of pasta.** I believe that we'd all be better off if we took a little more time for thinking. Absolute confidence that you're Doing The Right Thing is pretty dangerous.  Also, it's just creepy to think of your kids as your arrows. Dutch is so obviously not our arrow, and deserves to be considered as a person, not as a notch in Cook's Godly bedpost. To painfully mix metaphors. Anyway, I'm stereotyping and dismissing something I don't understand. But hey, so are the Quiverfull people. 

This morning I made a relatively solid start to my three days with Dutch. She woke up at 6 (because she didn't have to - she has an unerring instinct about this, and always wakes up at least half an hour earlier on weekends and holidays) and wanted to watch the sun rise with me. I crawled out of bed, knowing that if I didn't, she'd just drive me nuts and get really frustrated, and then I'd have to get out of bed anyway. And hey, a teachable moment! So we watched the sun rise, which this morning pretty much just meant watching the cloudcover get paler, and we talked about the solar system, eclipses, perspective, and anatomy. Then I made breakfast while she colored my old Anatomy Coloring Book for a long time and interrogated me about muscles, which nicely integrated science and art in the homeschool curriculum for the day. This kid is so freaking enriched! Really, even though we ignore her as much as possible, and let her watch videos and buy horrible plastic dolls at the thrift store, she's one of the luckiest kids with one of the most "enriching" environments in the history of human beings. All because I've bought into feminism and family planning.

*I've mentioned how much I hate washing dishes, right? At least I've only got three people in my family for whom to wash dishes!

** And washing a billion dishes!!!