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Parenting

I've been in the midst of a discussion regarding parenting and gender roles. I'm no expert but here's my two cents.

It seems to me that we have spent the last couple decades railing against something that never existed. The only place that the Leave It to Beaver world ever existed was on Television. There was never a time when only the women did the work in the home. It has always been a family job, maybe more so in the past when families were one wage earner places and kids pitched in to help.

The past few decades it seems like every time a woman does something domestic, feminists are ready to pounce and denounce the backward step for women. Women are not supposed to work in the home, they are supposed to have a career. By the way, men are supposed to have a career too. Raising children gets left out. Children get in the way of careers for men and women and we end up with kids growing up without parents because society does not value parenthood.

When are we going to wake up and realize that our kids are being shortchanged in this argument over something that never existed except in the TV world.

The other statement I hear that drives me nuts is the statement that women "shortchange" themselves by quitting work to raise a family and lose income later in life. The women that do this are portrayed as losers. Not one person talks about how families are richer when a parent stays home. Not one person talks about the loss of parenting when both parents are working outside the home. Single parent families have it even tougher.

Our society is not willing to honestly look in the mirror and see what we are doing to children. We leave them out and treat them as annoyances rather than the responsibility they are to us.

I Passed my test

I passed my state test for volunteer firefighting today (12/9/06). Now I can be more involved in accident and fireground activities, including SCBA use. I'm pumped and excited to get more involved.

Tough day

Got called to a vehicle accident today. The dispatcher said the driver was trapped in the car. By the time I got there with the crew in the heavy rescue, it was obvious the driver wasn't just trapped, he was also dead. My first clue was the fact that the vehicle was hooked to a tow truck and the tow truck driver was working to unwrap the car from the tree with the driver still in it. If the guy had been alive, we would have cut the car open just as it sat.

It's not fun to work on a situation like this. It's down right ugly and reminds me of the fragility of life. This guy was cruising down the road one second and the next he was dead, his car wrapped around a tree. It was not icy but we have had heavy rain here for the last couple days and the ground was already saturated. It appeared the driver tried to go through a puddle at 60 mph or so and hydroplaned, lost control and flipped over and over until stopped by the tree.

Slow down and be careful.

December Newsletter article

Here is my December church newsletter article.

Merry Christmas

So the title isn’t so original, but I can’t help it. Once in a while, I have to be predictable so the unpredictability doesn’t become predictable. I’ll pause for a moment to let you chew on that one.

It’s good to sit back and really let things sink in or they do become old hat. Times like Christmas can get that way. We always get together with family and we always open our presents at certain times and we always go to Christmas Eve worship and we always sit in the same place. Have you just sat and wondered about how we got to where we are?

There are times when the routines just don’t work anymore. Christmas can bring out the best and the worst for families. It is often the hardest time for widows and widowers as they adjust to life without their spouse. Estrangements hit especially hard when one sees the happiness on the faces of families brought together in celebrations. There is no Hallmark greeting for those situations.

I just received an email, one of those mass forwards, from my aunt in Texas. It was a listing of definitions of love according to kids. Way down at the bottom was a story about author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia who once talked about a contest he was asked to judge. The purpose of the contest was to find the most caring child. The winner was a four year old child whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman's yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When his Mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, "Nothing, I just helped him cry."

It’s easy at this time of year to avoid the people and places that seem to be the opposite of the “spirit” of the season. I think we avoid these situations because we don’t know what to say or do. This Christmas, the greatest gift I have received comes from a nameless four year old that showed me what to do. The greatest gift this Christmas can be “nothing, I just helped him cry.”

How I spent my Saturday

I spent Saturday, 11/18/06 with a few of my friends. That's me on the left sitting on the ground.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving in the USA. I just completed my annual self abuse ritual watching the Detroit Lions get beat on Thanksgiving Day. I remember as a kid at least looking forward to Thanksgiving because it was one day my favorite team, the Detroit Lions, actually played well. How a team can be so consistantly awful in a league that prides itself on parity is beyond me. Year after year the Lions seem to have the worst players. They can't make any improvements, especially over the last several years. I would blame the current management, like everybody else, but this goes a whole lot deeper. It must, because it doesn't seem to matter who coaches or who is the GM, they are always bad. There's a lesson in here somewhere, I'm just not sure where.