your tags on parenting make me super emotional <3 that's exactly the kind of parent I want to be one day

Thanks! I feel the same way honestly. I have a lot of opinions about parenting and I can't say that I will be the perfect parent because that doesn't exist. I can't even say that my hypothetical future kid/kids will be perfect because children don't grow in a vacuum. I can only control what I do and say and try to be the best version of myself and hope for the best.

What I Tell Young Newlyweds

I am a writer, and as a writer I must, absolutely must write. I think during this Pandemic Season we have all come to realize that routinely doing certain things for our emotional and mental health is necessary and is good, but what I am talking about as a writer is something different. The simplest illustration -- one which I might use, say, with a child -- would be to try to imagine a bird which can’t fly, a fish which can’t swim. Close, but not quite. A better example (but one which incites a lot of non-artists) would be to try to imagine a man who can’t sire children, a woman who can’t bear children: these are (pro)creative activities (having children) which are hardwired and constituent parts of our identity on biological, foundational levels. There is a sense of death and grieving when one learns they can not have children, sometimes even social stigma and shame.Not being able to write is a little like that, not being able to have a child.

The basic gist of what I am saying is that I have to write… I have to write, and to write is nothing short of midwifing and serving (as a servant) the Story which I am writing. And in no less an affectionate, fully committed, delighting way than as I would sit upon the floor with my toddler child, and play whatever game she choses to have us play. I would equip that Story as I would that child (say, who delights in baking together) with the finest elements I can supply, that she/the Story would be enabled to fully be all she can be in the outwardly creative manifestation of herself/itself. And in this case, as I have done in my previous writings on what I would tell a young parent, I find myself listening and serving Story which I would not expect I would write about, nor for which I expect I personally warrant any reading by you. I don’t think I necessarily have any place but to serve the Story as I feel it leads, which very well may be to show something beyond how poor a servant of the material I might be, yet, at the end of the day, knowing I have done as I should while getting to do as I must.

The Story this morning leads me to this: an older man, right around the time of my wedding, gave me perhaps the most centering piece of advice I’d ever been given in all of life: the two of you will often find yourselves in different emotional spaces, and that is okay. It is both strange and hurtful to me that there are so few moments of sage wisdom (such as this between an older man and a younger me) in my memory, while there are yet countless episodes of impersonal and didactic … “intellectual firehosing” of me. So many times when I speak with younger friends who have just married I try to offer them that little nugget of sagacity I received from that older fellow because it was so good (yet try to do so in a way which isn’t coming across as obnoxiously unsolicited advice).

What I don’t tell my young, newly married friends (likely because I am just now getting a handle on it myself) is that it is actually some process intself to learn how to identify moments when you are (or/and are not) in the same emotional space, despite seeming to be in the same situation together. To throw in a little philosophical flavoring, it is a coming to the subjective awareness of the utterly objective alterity of the other (ie the otherness of your spouse), and the irreconcilable phenomenological subjectiveness of your experience, and that of your spouse, from each other. But, honestly, all philosophical fun I have aside, it might be true to observe that seldom if ever are the two of you in the same emotional spaces, and you certainly aren’t ever in just one emotional space, nor merely in one singular experience. For instance, with the moment of the closing of a new home purchase, one of you may be both excited over owning and stressed about a work situation, while the other is relieved but apprehensive because the mortgage lender was trying to play footsie during the signing, yet both of you have dreamed of the back yard for your children and are thankful to have it now in hand. For one of you owning a home means you finally feel like a real adult, while the other associates home ownership with a dreaded feeling of being situationally tied down. Somehow you have to find a way to be happy and to be sad and to be brave and to be scared around each other, not minimizing the other in their space while you occupy your particular space. A lot of times, for seasons at a time, this means nothing short of dying to your legitimate wants for the sake of the other’s needs, putting what the other needs ahead of getting your want’s met. Oftentimes it means that what you need God will meet, but not through your spouse; God may meet the needs through a friend. I tell the story that while my wife was having to deal with bad bosses at work (an utterly demoralizing set of circumstances causing her to feel entirely unprotected),  I was her listening ear while God supplied my need to be heard not through her but through others, some guy buddies  (even to this day who listen to me, who cause me to feel heard). I took it as God’s gentleness to my wife that He did not put the burden upon her already heavy laden shoulders, and His goodness to me to supply my needs as even I poured out to her. To my single friends all this should say, however, that if they have not learned how to let God help them not to be entirely lonely when single, being married sometimes won’t help answer that experience: sometimes you are the most lonely in marriage when you suffer but your spouse can not reciprocate, and God your only recourse.

And it may not seem to flow here, but what I also like to tell my young newly wed friends is this: even being often in different places, seldom in the same spaces, there is yet still a magnifying of each, a magnifying of both through being “together” in marriage. Going through the different spaces differently you are yet still “home” for one another. You grow together, even if it is not the same growth, or kind of growth. As a male I am biologically predisposed to want to “share my seed everywhere,” and yet in my soul I am made more, I am finally allowed to actually be and to become, when all other options are given up for this one I call my wife. Some might find that a bawdy thing  to say, but when I say my wife makes me more than all the “possibilities” offered in being single, it is an expression at least as true as the bawdy truth. I dafre you to be more demonstrably true.

As I meander through this ponderously long wondering…. It strikes me that there are passages other than 1 Peter 3, for their call to submissive behavior, which generate more dispute, but not many. I necessarily read this passage as a cis-gender male who stays in the home specifically to raise the children, and to support a wife who has a very “toxicly masculine” work environment. (I do this, like Jacob, who did not do “manly” things like hunt as Esau did, but preferred to stay around camp and do “unmanly” things like cook, or so as the ancient, toxic masculinity looked at such things.) I thoroughly believe and insist that it would be a moral crime to deny my wife to function as she were made, as she is called vocationally; similarly it would feel a crime to deny me -- me the more “parenty” or maternal one -- the ability to foster my children’s sense of their worth as my being at home provides me the opportunity for. Moreover, by virtue of who she is and her vocational calling, my wife causes me to feel safe where I have never felt safe, to feel defended where virtually few have ever done, and more than those few others who did ever have done. (I am saying my wife defends me more than my other friends, far more.) We actually joke and say I am the more “maternal”, and she is more “paternal,” and we see the truth in both comments, and accept it. I am the one the kids come to when they seek comfort for a skinned knee, so to speak, and who she is as a mom has little to do with who she is in the home. My wife is the mom who models to her children what it means for a woman to be (vocationally) called into a passion, and what a strong working woman looks like. My grandmother stayed in the home, showing what a strong woman who stayed in the home looked like. Strength is strength, but it seldom looks the same, and my strong wife sings the praises of the strength which stays home to care for children and pray for strangers in the grocery store (praising it as something she isn’t capable of doing).

This is where things must already seem -- and may seem even more (ponderously) -- rambly and messy, but bear with my… well… my gist. For myself, what I read of 1 Peter 3 is “nuanced” to the point that it doesn’t mean what people argue about, and doesn’t at heart need defenses made to circumvent those arguments. What I read is kinda in the same vein as was my father-in-law’s advice: essentially there are going to be differences between each of you, and you are going to need to act relative to those differences if you want to demonstrate Christ to the other as the other needs. Being fully Christ to another is no less than subjecting yourself to them, thus demonstrating a greatness greater than the position or person to which you subject yourself. As is said of Christ, a bruised reed He will not bend… so neither should we.

I read that passage as an artist, a writer, who sees the intent like that of performance installation art: it is meaning, and worth, and value not seperable from being experienced.  The winning and respectful, pure conduct, the beauty of the gentle and quiet spirit, the doing of good and not fearing frightful things, these are things which are aspects of God’s character in whose image Male and Female were created. There is no excuse for either male or female to fail to show such things as these qualities of God to one another. I am a cis-gender male and I want to be beautiful, want to be considered as a beautiful thing, so surely my adorning out to be that of an imperishable beauty of character (and not an athletic prowess the likes of which equal an olympian competitor but for which Christ was never described nor applauded), right? Male and Female are equal in the sight of God, or so I assume, so when my equal shows me a respectful, pure conduct and gentle spirit, not fearing either my frightful temper nor the stigma of submission to me, am I not then won over by the representation of God as Christ himself exhibited himself to me, and thusly am challenged by someone equal to me (not lesser) to be better than I am behaving in that moment with my frightful temper? I see no suggestion here that women should be and are to be subjected to memn, but that their choice to do so is for a purpose whose worth is nothing less than the full value of humanity as such resides in either and both of us, male and female, husband and wife. Put simply, wives here are asked to be Christ, which is not “less than” but fully all, to their spouse. If Christ’s death on the cross was meek, and meekness is power unexerted, then is submission not itself a wilful non-exertion of power triumphaning over my “ish” no less laudable (after a fashion) than Christ’s meekness and death on a cross which triumphed over death and Hell?

Julian of Norwhich made the case about the necessary esteem and value inherent to God’s love of Man this way:

“It is the most worship that a solemn King or a great Lord may do a poor servant if he will be homely with him, and specially if he sheweth it himself, of a full true meaning, and with a glad cheer, both privately and in company. Then thinketh this poor creature thus: And what might this noble Lord do of more worship and joy to me than to shew me that am so simple this marvellous homeliness? Soothly it is more joy and pleasance to me than [if] he gave me great gifts and were himself strange in manner.”

Is that not the very submission or subjectifying which Peter is suggesting, but one which is predicated on there being no inequality between male and female? The submission of my wife is not to a role in the home, nor to my (laughably) telling her what to do, but in a way (and from out of her strength) which shelters me in my weaknesses and lifts me up in my lowliness -- just as I hope I do for her. Again, strength (and weakness) look different, and that is okay.

As I understand it, the point of this life (as understood by one receiving the promises of God) is not this earthly life, not the roles we play nor the societal meanings ascribed to those roles, nor the values this world ascribes to such things. And neither are our actions defined according to what those actions “mean” in this world, or within our society. God’s kingdom is about goodness, humility, truth, nobility, righteousness, justice, purity, excellence, praiseworthiness, gentleness, kindness, joyfulness, love, peacefulness, patience, self-control; it’s about living out the classic virtues (and especially those mentioned above) because those things are writ in the fabric of reality as meaningful, and beautiful, and good. A mother is not made a valuable and strong mother simply and only by being in the home and being subject to her husband, but it is her strength to be Christ to her husband as Christ was to the Father in Heaven. “Christ who being in every way equal to God did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but humbled himself, taking the very nature of a servant,” and thus, in such a way, a woman and a mother model to her husband and the father of her children the strength he should exhibit in how he should live towards her… yet it looks different in each situation. My wife’s submission is a form of holy performance art, enacting Christ to me in no other way than one through which I can participate in and experience it. A holy performance art much like a ritual, but a ritual performed over / through the course of lives spent together.

So, yeah, here’s where I try to pull some (if you’ve been paying attention) three disparate streams into one, multi-dimensional thought. Yes, you’re going to be in different places, and that is okay. Yes, you’ll find in each other a home, as even you represent Christ to one another. Yes there is submission involved, but it is a strength itself submitting in order to cover and model to another. Most times (and here’s the pulling together of it all) you submit to the other in their places of need, for their support and healing, being each other just as Christ was in the world to us -- and that for the short time we occupy this life before we are all any longer in different places. There is indeed purpose and beauty to be had, in the suffering, of being in different places so often times. For what this is worth…

there was no Danny Nucci name in the opening, right ? They fanally decided to get rid of him... ? It's funny I thought "no Mike means no Ana"... but you know, Gabe is there so they can hang out in Stef and Lena's house while they are not there.

Correct. I have been suspecting this might be the case for a while. His time has been cut each and every season. Last couple, he’s been on as much as other side characters. I do think that Freeform’s budget has really cut his time down as they extend into season 5. He also was not in the cast pictures. I believe that they cut the money and insisted on one less regular. I think letting Danny direct is a concession to the fact that he is no longer a regular. There is an outside possibility that Mike leaves at some point. Or maybe he’ll be listed as a regular on the episodes he is in.

Anonymous said:                                                                      It’s completely horrifying to see how much wasted screen time Ana and Gabe took on last nights episode! Babies! They say there and cried and complained like two immature toddlers! And where was Mike? Shouldn’t Ana be with him? Then Gabe trying to act like the hero for helping Jesús! Bull-hockey! They don’t belong in the show at all. In fact, it’s so hard to watch their scenes and it’s almost as if I should wait until the next day to fast forward thru them. I agree with you 100%!            

It’s like they’re 20 years old instead of the middle aged people they should be. I guess maybe immature people are into that, but I am not. Babies. And Gabe acting as if it’s some big huge burden that he gets to live in a nice home for fucking free. I wonder if they’re buying his beer. Probably Jesus steals from Lena so Gabe can have his beer. Ana is so thirsty for Gabe. I mean really. There was no need for her to be all up his ass at their house. Why was she there? If I was Mike I wouldn’t like that at all. If you want to arise jealousy, don’t act a fool. I should have waited, but I really wanted to see the promo and well ugh. Thanks for your thoughts!

Anonymous said:                                                                      I know Jesus is sick or whatever but I’m also sick of him. I’m tired of him yelling at Lena. And Gabe is all cool with him he doesn’t say anything and now what, Lena is going to be the bad guy because she’s actually parenting HER son ? what happened to her being the mom the kids went to ?            

Here’s the thing, like I’ve always said. I would take care of my aging mom (dad’s dead) till the end with pretty much any disease, except if they had dementia and were trying to hurt me. No one deserves abuse. If a condition is causing irrational behavior it has to be treated. I saw a real life show where a man had a stroke and changed his personality so much he ended up murdering his wife, his adult daughter and his grandchild. It’s no joke and Jesus, intentionally or not, is going to hurt Lena. I see Lena running towards Jesus and Brandon fighting, it’s not going to end well.

And sure Gabe was effective this time because he’ just about the only person physically able to stop him. That isn’t a solution. Emma can’t possibly deal with him like that. So what Gabe did is not a solution. Lena is right as always, he needs to be able to manage or he can’t live with them. It’s just that simple.

                                                                                                    Anonymous said:                                                                      As for the writers being ridiculed? LMAO! I write and am ridiculed! It comes with the territory, and honestly, they are practically turning a deaf ear to the audience! This show should have ended in season 1 because that season was where it was truly at!            

Honestly, what’s the point of asking how people are feeling and to discuss the show if all you actually want an echo chamber of how amazing the show is? Don’t ask for opinions if you don’t like them. They aren’t turning a deaf ear to their audience, just a certain segment. I can’t say that I would have liked the show to have ended in s1. I just wish that in what could possibly be their final year, they would focus on their main characters. This was essentially a Gabe and Ana episode and that’s wrong. No matter how you slice it. Even when they have done that for Girl’s united, I could at least say, well they really haven’t had a voice. Gabe’s woes are like the stuff of every tv show novel. Daddy regret. Heck we’ve had enough of that with Mike.

Anonymous said:                                                                      This is fast becoming about how two moms can’t raise their 5 kids and need help! I’m pretty sure, “It takes a village,” isn’t referring to bio humans helping the parents! UGHHHHHH

I always make this point, you never see biological families needing the local homosexual for some nice homosexual bonding with their children. No, it doesn’t take a village, most of the time out there in the real world, it often just takes one mom.    

Anonymous said:                                                                      I’m really, really tired of the show acting like Gabe, Ana or Robert do or should have any say in decisions made about the kids. Mariana, Jesus and Callie are quite literally Stef & Lena’s kids. They don’t need anyone’s permission to parent their kids. Honestly, I worried we’d end up here when the show had Robert constantly making a point of calling Callie “his” daughter as if she wasn’t Stef & Lena’s and the show never acknowledged that was wrong of him. I didn’t think it would be this bad tho.             

They all think they have a say because they put their penis in a vagina. That’s all Gabe did. He can be there in whatever capacity Jesus and his moms allow, but he doesn’t get to dictate. For people who don’t understand how Callie could choose her moms over her rich bio daddy. Lena took one look in her eyes, saw her soul and took her home, straight from Juvy. Stef saw her value after just like a day. Bio daddy needed a DNA test to even see if he wanted to get invested. Tell me which connection would feel more real to you? No worries though, in case you missed it, Robert is right there disciplining Callie, though I am sure he takes a crack at Stef and Lena’s parenting.      

Anonymous said:                                                                      I love The Fosters, but I can’t get over how much I hated tonight’s episode. The unnecessary focus on Ana and Gabe totally contradicts what’s supposed to be the message of this show (that love makes a family, not DNA). It struck me as disrespectful. The idea that Lena and Stef aren’t enough for their own kids? Who they raised? Nah. I’m equal parts mad (the idea that Jesus needs a man is offensive, full stop) and confused (who asked for this?). Have TPTB forgotten the premise of their own show?            

Yeah, it wasn’t just like their point of view, it was entirely their episode. It is disrespectful to lesbian moms in particular. Here’s the thing, I don’t know where they are going with this. Even if they have a point to make, the visuals have already been made. You’ll have tons of people swooning over Jesus’ dad. The only thing I liked in an interview with Noah, was him saying biological father, instead of the “dad” the insensitive interviewer kept using. These visuals, these words will be the ones that stick with the people, and there are many, who think lesbians can’t raise kids without male role models.

Anonymous said:                                                                      The worst thing is that the episodes are already done. Even if we tell Bradley or Peter that Gabe being around in Stef and Lena’s house is wrong , it’s too late. And I think that the worst is yet to come. I knew I wasn’t going to like the first episode but I didn’t know it was going to be like this the whole 5A part. I can’t stand Jesus anymore.                               

Well, they supposedly change the tone next episode, but we will see. I still see this show as too depressing and too unhappy. The dykes can’t just raise their kids and be happy in a family, it has to be constant misery. I think the worse is yet to come too. I am going to try to ignore Gabe, but that’s going to be hard.  And yes, I can’t stand Jesus anymore either. It’s not even the TBI, he was already aggressive and drooling over his daddy before that.

Anonymous said:                                                                      How do people know Stef is going to cuddle with another woman? I get they need drama to keep the show interesting but Stef would never do that.  

Ahh, yes, no, we don’t know that. I think there was a misunderstanding. We are saying, Tess is the woman Stef cuddled with on the couch when she was a teen. CUDDLED in the past, not going to cuddle with. I agree that Stef would never do that. We just know it’s going to bring up interesting issues, especially if Lena is frustrated with being a stranger in her own house as the bio takeover continues.

Anonymous said:                                                                      Callie said she can’t forget about the past and she’s right but she told Jude to use the pain in a positive way. Callie needs to do the same.  Which is why I’m happy she’s wanting to do art. Just that pain to make a project.       

That’s a good point. I am living for people yelling at Callie. She needs it. That’s why AJ was good for her, too bad.

Anonymous said:                                                                      I hated that Stef and Callie scene. But that’s something they really needed. Callie needed to her that. I’m glad they had that talk.            

I am glad that least Stef was the one parenting Callie. Yay! It was needed, but it did feel cold but behind it was a lot of love. Stef will get emotional next episode. I am sure we’ll get some scene with them later on in the season that is warmer.

Anonymous said:                                                                      Freaking Kamar ordered a bunch of sushi while Sherri is out of town and he’s eating it on their bed. He posted a pic on Instagram. Sherri replies he better not get it on her favorite sheets or he’ll be punished and now all I have in my head is a visual of a dominatrix Sherri dressed in all leather and a riding crop and to be honest it’s kinda weirding me out. LolAhh, my instagram monitor! Lol, Sherri’s funny and I am not sure my mind would have gone there, but it would not surprise. Sherri’s bossy.   I instead will focus on all the lovely things Sherri said about Teri and Stef and Lena last night! Maybe I’ll make a post later since there’s NOTHING to gif.