The original article addresses several different types of spaces, without fully differentiating them: workplaces, public social spaces, home social spaces, home workspaces, personal solitary spaces.

Work moved out of the home in the Industrial Revolution, but some work is moving back into the home via telecommuting and unbounded work demands.

Personal solitary spaces are relatively scarce for both sexes, as Little Miss Attila notes. My husband has his office, and I’ve carved my own space out of the living room. The Not-So-Big House helped a lot of people realize that they need a place of their own.

Home workspaces can also be scarce, and lack of space to do messy, noisy tasks affects both sexes. I’ve had to do all my woodworking in the kitchen and dining room the last few years. If I ever have a garage, I am not going to keep the floor clean enough to eat off.

The original article makes life for women and children sound just jolly, since the entire home is under their control. I get the impression that the author hasn’t had to spend much time defending his possessions and sanity from tiny barbarians lately. Pencil and marker on the wall, pee and paint in the carpet, books torn up beyond repair, clothing pulled off hangers and trampled, wallets ransacked, important items taken and hidden away, dishes broken, food dumped all over the floor–that was just in the last two days here, and I left out all of the normal cleanup. Half of the reason for having my own space is so that I can keep my most treasured possessions securely locked up right where I left them. And there are also the endless interruptions and disruptions to coherent thought and happy domestic industry.

Nor has the author tried to take small children out in public lately, I’m guessing. If I ever actually die of boredom, it will definitely be on a playground. Most don’t even have enough places for adults to sit, let alone socialize. Indoor play areas must be the germiest places on earth; we seem to always pay for going to one by getting sick afterward.

It used to be that upper-class children were confined to nurseries and schoolrooms upstairs out of the way, under the care of nurses and governesses. That was how the adults had the time to enjoy their spaces. Now, most people send their children out to day prison, and the women go out to workplaces to pay for it and get their social interaction with adults, while their homes sit empty all day.

Science is impotent to prove either the existence or non-existence of God–it is simply beyond the scope of scientific inquiry*–and Dawkins is thoroughly self-deluded and guilty of grave errors in logic to declare the question as scientifically settled. He also fails to realize that an atmosphere of religious tolerance benefits atheists as much as anyone else (especially since they are so thoroughly outnumbered).

The religious discrimination case that he cites also brings up some uncomfortable questions about the supposed intellectual superiority of atheists. Why were the atheist contenders for the position so much less qualified than the Christian? If atheists are, on the whole, better qualified, then why the effort to encourage active discrimination against Christians? In other words, why is it necessary to introduce an element of artificial selection against Christians, when, by Dawkin’s estimation of Christian mental competence, natural selection alone should be enough?

I have other points that I could make, but I’m starting to get that same shooting-fish-in-a-barrel feeling that I get after demolishing a few flimsy radical feminist arguments. Really, atheism is just another angle of attack against Christianity, and the best counterattack is to obey the commandment to pray for one’s enemies.

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*As Dawkins and his crowd consistently chorus anytime someone tries to discuss intelligent design topics in a scientific forum.

Last week we were insanely busy, shopping for a minivan. We decided on a Mazda MPV, which has decent reliability ratings (except for transmission problems for certain years). Toyota Siennas and Honda Odysseys are very popular around here, but the Siennas are overpriced, and the Odysseys are both overpriced and overrated.

Mazda discontinued the MPV in 2006; none of that year were for sale around here anyway, and there were only three 2005’s. We went around and test-drove them all. Then we took two of them to the mechanic for look-overs, and bought one on New Year’s Eve. All this while I was getting five or six or seven hours of sleep a night. The children got tired of being dragged all over town.

The dealerships weren’t busy at all during the week, and it seemed like their newest sales guys got stuck with mid-holidays duty. But Friday afternoon when we went in to buy, the dealership was quite busy, and they didn’t spend much time at all dickering. It helped that we didn’t have a trade-in, and came with cash in hand. MFH did all the negotiating, and got us a decent price.

So now we have a minivan, just have to unfreeze the side doors (we suspect some drainage holes there are blocked) and get the carseats installed.

The weekend was busy, too. MFH and OLC went up to Grandma’s house for a New Year’s Eve party, and stayed the night. Sunday we had nursery patrol–somehow we get assigned most of the holiday weekends. We actually were up for both Christmas and New Year’s, two Sundays in a row, but we pleaded off Christmas Sunday because my parents were visiting.

In the nursery, we had a three or four month old, and I realized that I had no idea what to do with a baby that young. The times when OLC and TLG were that age are lost in the fog. It’s like when MFH asked one of his friends with older children what it was like going from one child to two, and his friend thought a minute, then replied, “Sorry, I just don’t remember.” Some other friends told us that going from two kids to three was the hardest transition; from three to four (and four to five) wasn’t as bad. So it’s probably a good thing that this baby is coming right after my sabbatical.

I was thinking the other day that the U.S. was in World War II for four years, while I’m been pregnant, nursing, or both for five years straight now. Vox Day called mothers the “front-line shock troops in the ongoing, centuries-long struggle for the survival of Western civilization.” That’s pretty much what it’s been like around here lately. No wonder I’m tired. One of our midwives said a previous client was worried that she had lupus, because she felt so worn out, but she discovered that it was just normal fatigue for being pregnant while caring for two small children.

With the holidays and all the running around last week, I’m behind where I wanted to be with my book. Right now I’m proofreading. I’m already having spells of anxiety about self-publishing it again. Lulu.com has more options for listing books on Amazon than it used to, and I’m anticipating that the new edition will receive much wider exposure.

Then I’ve been reading some about The Fourth Turning, which theorizes that American history has been running in four-generation cycles, and we’re coming into the next great Crisis. I don’t entirely buy their theory, though I do think crisis is already here and that there’s much more to come. I would like to believe that my generation will take much more of a role in resolving it than the authors of this book project.

Another thing that ties into this is the Gray Ceiling. I had heard about it before, but didn’t think it applied much to me, since I’ve never worked in a larger corporation myself. (Though the company I did end up working for was a very small company founded and populated by refugees from a large corporation, who were perhaps escaping the gray ceiling there.)

Then it occurred to me to ask: why was it so hard for me to find a college teaching job in physics? The biggest reason is that the federal government subsidizes science graduate students heavily, leading to excess Ph.D production (only about 50% of physics Ph.Ds end up working in recognizably physics-related jobs). But the next biggest reason is that Boomers are occupying all the tenured positions, and not leaving them yet. Most of the entry-level teaching is done by cheap teaching assistants, or by almost equally cheap adjunct professors stuck in “adjunct hell” with discouragingly slim opportunities for advancement to more stable employment.

Advocates for greater “equality” in physics say that the path from undergraduate physics student to tenured professor is a “leaky pipeline” for women. The percentage of women in physics diminishes significantly between undergraduate and graduate school, between Ph.D. and postdoc, and from there on into the levels of professordom. I myself don’t care how many women are in physics; probably there should be more than there are now, but if it ever comes close to 50%, I’d think there was something wrong. Physics requires strong mathematical and spatial reasoning skills, and those are not evenly distributed between the sexes. Anyway, now I am thinking that the pipeline is not only leaky, but also quite clogged at the far end.

So I have no guilt at all about “wasting” my Ph.D by staying at home and reproducing. (In fact, I think that the greatest contribution that I can make to science right now is to have children and pass on my mutant genes!) (Also, if it is such a waste, where are the recruiters that should be beating down my door and offering me shiny new cars to come work for them??) Nor do I regret spending the time to get the Ph.D. I got a husband out of it, finally, and six years of practice at living comfortably on a low income, enough that I can easily pooh-pooh Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dime as a very amateur attempt at starting from scratch. (As in: Woman, why art thou eating fast food instead of getting thyself to a thrift store to obtain for thyself a $5 toaster oven in which to bake thyself some potatoes!?!)

All right, that’s enough overgeneralizing for now. Back to real life.

In another case, I was lurking on a attachment parenting forum with a thread about accepting public assistance (while staying at home) and not feeling guilty about it. I learned a couple of weeks ago that we probably qualify for WIC and some state medical assistance. The income and asset limits are pretty high when you’ve got one child and another on the way, and we easily meet them on one income even though MFH has a good job, decent health insurance, and just got a nice raise. I went back and forth with myself for a while about whether to apply for at least WIC, as a way of getting some of our tax dollars back, but in the end I decided not to, because we just don’t really need it and I WOULD feel guilty if I accepted it. The thread on the forum had a lot of people saying, “Yeah, I get assistance and I get mad when people think that I shouldn’t have any ‘luxuries’ like cable TV.” I suppose they’re partly right in that I don’t know anyone’s situation well enough to judge whether they “deserve” assistance or not, but I also noticed an undercurrent of E-N-T-I-T-L-E-M-E-N-T running through the thread. I would rather live without cable (which we do) and have the government that much less involved in my life.

Anyway, I received plenty of “welfare for smart people” (support via scholarships, government research grants, and contracts) up through my most recent job, and it’s been nice to step away from the trough for a while.

We found a book on being a working Christian mother at the thrift store Saturday. One sentence summary: working mothers are busy, busy, busy, but it’s good to be using one’s gifts and talents, and the kids will probably still turn out ok. About half way through it, a suspicion crept up on me, and it turned out to be right: this book had absolutely no mention of a Sabbath rest for anyone, let alone working mothers. Just repeated images of being on a never-ending treadmill of activity, and that the solution for keeping sanity is better childcare. Sad. We’ve been reading Keeping the Sabbath Wholly by Marva Dawn in our small group, but she was single when she wrote it, and didn’t really address how to observe Sabbath while tending to young children.

One little idea in the working mothers book that could have been expanded though, was this: the workplace was opened to women because the church failed to allow sufficient room for the use of their God-given gifts. (Not that I necessarily agree with it; I think it would apply more to single women, anyway.) Part of the reason I’m still working is to use my analytical gifts. But there are also plenty of ways that I use my talents in my home.

We’ve been getting the last of our birth supplies ready. I’ve been working through my list of projects-to-get-done-before-the-baby-comes, and have accomplished 39 of them so far. One thing I haven’t gotten to yet is washing windows, at least the ones I look through most. MFH washed one of them for me, and did such a wonderful job that I should have him do the others.

Despite my best efforts to keep October completely unscheduled, I have a baby shower and a dentist appointment. Sigh. Also, I’m continuing to dig in my heels against pressure to use a diaper service, despite recent setbacks in the search for a usable diaper pail. The baby aisles have little beyond Diaper Genies. All I need, though, is a sturdy bucket with a lid, like a big paint bucket. How hard can that be? Home Depot bucket: lid far too loose, the baby could knock it right off. Menard’s bucket: lid far too tight, very difficult for me with my strong hands to get on, and impossible for MFH with his wrist problems. We finally bought a 20-lb bucket of birdseed, and put the birdseed into another container. It will do to start with, but I am still looking. Probably will have to go to one of the hip-baby boutiques where the cloth diapers are $20 each.

I am about as big as a house now–rolling over in bed takes great effort. Our new mattress arrived, though.

Our cat has learned how to drink out of a glass–she dips her paw in a little, then pulls it out and licks it off.

Homemakers are often described by career women as Stepford wives, as someone put it “popping out children and being subservient to their husbands”. Feminist career women get all upset when someone even hints that may be, women belong at home, yet they consider it normal to insult their fellow women who are often intelligent, hard working wives and mothers.

I really don’t understand the logic which says that women are freed by earning paycheck which often means being stuck in the office for an x amount of hours, operating the cash register the whole day in a busy local supermarket or being a day care worker earning a minimum wage.

It seems that if a woman cleans her own house and takes care of her own children, it somehow makes her brainless, and a slave, but if she works for a cleaning agency, or takes care of someone else’s children, and has to please her employers the whole day, it makes her empowered, liberated and happy.

People must have had really bad experiences in their own homes when they were children if they equal staying home to being in some sort of prison. Home should be the happiest place, a small Paradise on Earth, full of joy and laughter; where the woman is not a servant or slave, but The Queen, admired and respected by her children and husband.