We’re having a baby!!  It’s still pretty early; I’m only 8 weeks along.  However, I went to the doctor a couple of days ago, where I saw that little fluttering heart beat, and I just can’t hold it in any longer.  The due date is New Year’s Day 2012, which pretty much guarantees we won’t be meeting this little one until sometime after that (my babies tend to want to stay warm and comfortable until about a week after I’m due).

The girls have been a lot of fun about this whole thing.  They were praying with us before, that God would send another baby to my tummy, so having all of our prayers answered has been exhilarating.  Pace asks me most every day if I know yet whether it’s a boy or girl, and then she reminds me of the baby’s size (which is, currently, about the size of a blueberry).  Mary Aplin puts her little hand on my tummy every day and asks, “Bigger now Mommy?”  I’m afraid it is.  I feel like I started showing approximately three days after I found out I was pregnant.  Not enough that I look right in maternity clothes, but enough to make you wonder if I’ve been eating cheeseburgers and downing beers lately….It’s awesome 🙂

I have been very nauseated and hormonal, and I’m not sure which is more manageable.  Jeremiah thinks the nausea is much easier to handle :), but I would tend to disagree.  I was horribly sick with Pace (until about 20 weeks), not nearly as sick with Mary Aplin (I thought maybe my body had mastered the whole pregnancy thing), and now I’m somewhere in between–but tending closer to Pace’s pregnancy than Mary Aplin’s.  Because I’m sure you all want these details, I’d say I’m nauseated off and on every day but only actually throw up four or five times a week.  Funny how pregnancy makes you want to get graphic and assume everybody else is interested in your graphic problems.  I will spare you some of the other issues…be thankful.

I had a heart-broken blog-friend email me a while back and ask if I ever felt like some of the joy of the last two babies had been stolen by the fact that my Mom was struggling with/dying of Ovarian cancer.  She could not have known the deep inward struggle that would follow her question, but I went on quite a journey.  You see, I have felt that way.  While I am unbelievably thankful and feel so blessed that my Mom was with me throughout both of my pregnancies, was able to teach me/take care of me after I had Pace, and met both of my girls–at the same time, her sickness overshadowed both experiences for me.  With Pace, she was taking chemotherapy during my pregnancy and recovering from the treatments as she tried to help me recover from having a baby.  With Mary Aplin, she was at the hard end of a long struggle and passed away when Dapples was only 8 weeks old.  I don’t know that my Dad knows this, but I called he and Mom three different times to tell them I was pregnant, and every time I called there was new bad news with Mom.  Twice, I hung up the phone, not wanting to mingle my happy news with their devastation.  The third time, I just told them despite the fact that we were all crying.  My time in the hospital after Mary Aplin was born was one of the darkest periods of my life.  I’m pretty sure the nurses had me on suicide watch, and I had an encounter with an angel/nurse who found me crumpled on the floor in the bathroom crying my eyes out in my hospital room.  It was too much to deal with at one time.  Sometimes I look back, and I don’t know how I lived through all of that…except my faith…and my husband…and my two sweet symbols that life does go on…

Anywho, you get the idea.  My blog friend’s question was spot on.  What I realized as I analyzed her question was that I was still dealing with those feelings but in an unhealthy way.  I felt like I’d taken every major step in my life at the wrong time: I got married before I graduated from college, I had Pace too soon after we’d gotten married, I’d had Mary Aplin when Mom was so sick.  Each life milestone seemed like mixtures of joy and hesitation with our families.  As a first born, people pleaser I had determined that I was NOT having another baby until everybody was on board.  I wanted Jeremiah to be done with his training–so nobody could say we didn’t have enough money to have a third child.  I wanted Pace and Mary Aplin to be old enough that nobody could say we didn’t space them out enough.  I wanted to be back in Alabama so that nobody could say we were crazy for having a newborn that far away from help.  And MOST OF ALL, I wanted everybody to be healthy…

I didn’t speak these things out loud, but it was all going on in my heart.  I was trying to control everything surrounding this third pregnancy.  I was trying to have a perfect pregnancy…and I couldn’t get pregnant.  I had gotten pregnant on birth control “accidentally” with both Pace and Mary Aplin and now I’d been off my medicine for five months and there was no baby coming in my “perfect” timing.  What I realized, when my blog friend asked that question, is that I had put myself in the place of God!  Did I really think I was the author and giver of life?  Did I really think I was just going to mix A and B, whenever I was good and ready, and make C?  It’s the miraculous gift of life, and who in the world did I think I was to try and control that?

I suddenly wanted to slap myself in the face for ever referring to my two sweet babies as “accidents.”  I became so thankful that He had given me Pace and Mary Aplin, exactly when He did–because His timing is perfect.  I was humbled and prayerful, instead of proud and planning.  I hurt deep for other Moms who struggle for years with infertility, when my meager five months seemed excruciatingly long.

And now, on the day when I finally come to tell you that He has answered our prayers for another baby, I also wanted you to know how gracious I really feel.  Not only am I thankful that He has begun new life in me but that His timing is always more perfect than mine.

First of all, I was highly impressed by how many of you actually read the last post and commented.  It was a feisty party in the comment section, and I liked it!  Thanks for the healthy banter.

Now, I needed a break from heavy books.  I needed to go back to my roots…{I didn’t mean to write a second book review in a row.  Sometimes, I just get away from myself.  If you’d like to skip down to where the book review ends and the title of this post begins, I’ll put some big bold letters that tell you where to start reading}

And you can’t go much farther back than Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.  It’s one I’ve been meaning to read for a while, even though friends warned me it was no outstanding piece of literature, I couldn’t help but hold a curiosity for “the land of cotton” as it was.

Much as I experienced with Augusta Evans-Wilson, I was delighted to read Mitchell’s well-penned descriptions of the red-clay fields, ancient towering pine trees, and rows of rich white cotton.  As a self-proclaimed Irishwoman, I empathized with Gerald and Scarlett O’Hara and found myself longing to go home and sink my hands into native soil:

Yet the serene half-light over Tara’s well-kept acres brought a measure of quiet to her disturbed mind.  She loved this land so much, without even knowing she loved it, loved it as she loved her mother’s face under the lamp at prayer time….

“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything,” [Gerald] shouted, his thick short arms making wide gestures of indignation, “for ’tis the only thing in this world that lasts, and don’t you be forgetting it! ‘Tis the only thing worth working for–worth dying for.”

I was also amazed by Mitchell’s gift of capturing dialects.  From the Charlestonians “drawling flat  voices,” to the “brisk voices of upland Georgia,” to Gerald’s Irish brogue, and–most especially–the hilarious diction of the plantation workers, Mitchell captured them all.

I was mesmerized by the characters of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler.  To have a hero and heroine who are at once villains and lovable creatures (to be pitied) was an exhilarating read.  I could identify with Scarlett one minute and want to wring her pretty little neck the next.  I could hope she’d stay good to her word and never speak to “that wretched Butler man” again on one page and be longing for Rhett’s sarcastic humor and proffered protection on the next page.

I’m not sure why I read two thousand-plus page books in a row, but I find it ironic that both of these tomes, while utterly different in writing style and subject matter, both contain a main character who is a female that would be considered a staunch Objectivist (to use Ayn Rand’s term).  While any of you Libertarians who are still following from the last blog may balk at the thought of Scarlett O’Hara being compared to Dagny Taggart, Scarlett certainly falls under the premise that: the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness or rational self-interest, that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in laissez faire capitalism… [Source]  Have you read the second half of Gone with the Wind?  After her famous decision, “…as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again,” she raises a cotton plantation up from nothing, marries her sister’s beau in order to get the tax money to save Tara from the Carpetbaggers, manages the affairs of her new husband’s store with an iron fist, and starts TWO lumber companies on her own–against her family’s utter disgust at the impropriety of her actions.  Sound familiar to Dagny?

There are two primary differences between the two characters, however.  Scarlett called the pursuit of her own happiness, selfishness.  While Scarlett O’Hara embraced and lived by a code of selfishness, she did not give it the noble standing of a virtue (the supreme virtue) as did Dagny Taggart.  The second difference is that Scarlett was, in every manner possible, feminine and used her charms for her own selfish gain.  Dagny, while lusty, was certainly not feminine and Scarlett would’ve probably chided her for abstaining from the use of, what she considered, a great asset.

It was disconcerting to read a description of the Civil War from the viewpoint of a southerner and slave owner (and to hear the slang terms the slaves were called, tossed casually around!).  While none of us (including Mitchell, I believe) would argue that slave ownership was right, she does portray the reasons why the South thought it permissible and necessary at the time.  To “own” another person is abuse in and of itself, but Mitchell seems to believe that the physical abuse of slaves was the exception much more than the norm.  Tales of slaves being chased by blood hounds, or beaten, or murdered are scoffed at in the novel and depicted as Yankee propaganda. Instead, most of the slaves are portrayed as part of the family, cared for in their sickness by the women of the house and loved as extended family members.  I don’t know if Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Gone with the Wind is the more accurate depiction of how the times actually were.  Certainly, the South is the better from being forced from the practice of slavery.  However, it is intriguing to consider the mind-sets of both points of view.

While I don’t plan to buy a Confederate flag to fly in my yard, and I don’t plan to encourage Jeremiah to join in on the Civil War battle re-enactments that are still being staged in some small towns back home, I do have a better understanding of where these deep feelings come from.  Reconstruction was horrible.  Truly horrendous, and Southerners are a proud and unforgiving race.  If my Grandma had told me stories of Yankees burning her house to the ground, stealing her food and little money, and leaving her family to starve, I might set a rigid jaw at the thought of the “damn Yankees” too.

Start here to read the non-book-review part of the blog

But do you see the title of this blog?  I wasn’t planning to write about any of that.  I was planning to write a fun commentary on how Southern women are still being raised to attract men in much the same way as they were 150 years ago.  I don’t ever remember my Mom speaking words as clearly as Scarlett’s Mammy, but somehow she conveyed the message just the same:

“I wish to Heaven I was married,” [Scarlett] said resentfully as she attacked the yams with loathing.  “I’m tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do.  I’m tired of acting like I don’t eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired.  I’m tired of saying, ‘How wonderful you are!’ to fool men who haven’t got one-half the sense I’ve got, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they’re doing it….I can’t eat another bite.”

“Try a hot cake,” said Mammy inexorably.

“Why is it a girl has to be silly to catch a husband?”

“Ah specs it’s kase gempmums doan know whut dey wants.  Dey jes’ knows whut dey thinks dey wants.  An’ givin’ dem whut dey thinks dey wants saves a pile of mizry an’ bein a ole maid. ‘An dey thinks dey wants mousy lil gals wid bird’s tastes an’ no sense at all.  It doan make a gempmum feel like mahyin’ a lady ef he suspicions she got mo’ sense dan he has.”

“Don’t you suppose men get surprised after they’re married to find that their wives do have sense?”

“Well, it’s too late den.  Dey’s already mahied.  ‘Sides, gempmums specs dey wives ter have sense.”…

“I don’t think Yankee girls have to act like such fools.  When we were at Saratoga last year, I noticed plenty of them acting like they had right good sense and in front of men, too.”

Mammy snorted.  “Yankee gals! Yas’m, Ah guess dey speaks dey minds awright, but Ah ain’ noticed many of den gittin’ proposed ter at Saratoga.”

Fall of my Freshman year at Auburn.  Jeremiah and I were broken up (so that I could have my “Freshman year experience”), and I was out from under my mother’s helpful hand (insert watchful eye, asking me if I “had on any lipstick?  What about blush?”) and left to attempt dating on my own for the first time.  She hadn’t taught me so much by word (although there were some words) as by example.  I think my mother courted every boy that ever courted me, only with more skill.  I can still see her sitting at our kitchen table, batting her eyelashes at the boy I was supposed to be dating and asking him about every little thing under the sun.  Drawing him out to see what made him feel special, complimenting him with giggles that made me want to roll my eyes–because she knew I couldn’t do it quite like she could.  I know, in her mind, none of us (I have three little sisiters) would have ever had a second date if she hadn’t made the current boy fall in love with us.

But now, I was away at school and on my own.  Mom wasn’t here to faun all over the boys for me, I had to do it myself–if I didn’t want to be the only girl at Auburn without a date to a football game.  I remember riding down the elevators in Sasnett dorm, dreading the moment when those elevator doors would open and reveal the lobby.  My date would be standing there, the lights would be on me….

I’m proud to say, I did it.  All those days spent in the kitchen learning from my Mom paid off.  I knew how to make a guy feel like he was the center of my universe, with not so much as a peck on the cheek.  I drew them out, didn’t talk about myself, laughed at the jokes they made, and filled any and every awkward silence with quips of my own…and then came back to the dorm after those long days of tailgating, cheering, and doting feeling like I’d been doing a tap-dance act for hours straight.  I didn’t drink back then either…in retrospect I kind of wish I had 🙂

Not every Southern girl follows these rules for dating.  One of my dear friends and roommates at Auburn was one who did not.  Her nickname was “Barbie,” and there was good reason for it.  I quickly learned not to set “Barbie” up with anybody, because she didn’t play by the rules.  If she didn’t like her date–if he bored her, if he wasn’t as cute as she was expecting–she was silent and aloof, fine to leave him with his awkward silences and flailing manhood.  I was present at more than one of these massacres (that she was pretty enough to pull off) and always felt the need to do an extra tap dance for her date.  Barbie would laugh at me and my exhausted state later that night, when were safely back home, but the training was too entrenched, I couldn’t bear to watch a guy think he was less than special on my watch–even if he wasn’t my date.

And then there is that whole idea of feminine weakness.  I think that this point is not quite as cut-and-dry as it was in Scarlett’s day.  Today, I think men want to know there’s a hint of fearlessness in a lady…just not so much that she would ever dream of competing with him in any way.  Some examples of my interpretation of this are as follows: On nighttime walks through the woods, it is always better to ask for an arm to lead you–after all you might trip and fall without his help, right?  Four-wheelers are manly machinery, it is much better to cling to your man for dear life than to drive your own.  While you need a hint of fearlessness on horseback–a willingness to follow him on every adventure and a strong seat in your saddle–I don’t think there’s ever a need to saddle your own horse.  And when walking down the sidewalk on the way to a football game, go ahead and let him walk on the curbside and protect you from oncoming traffic.  It’s makes them feel good…and it’s kind of comforting to be helpless in some areas.

I was so thankful for the dating to end.  I still want to make my husband feel like the center of my universe, and I still try to practice selective helplessness, but I’m thankful that I’m now responsible for making only one man feel that way…at least until Pace and Mary Aplin start dating 🙂

I heard Jeremiah recently, talking to one of our single guy friends out here, trying to convince him that he needed to move to Alabama.  Once he had gone through all the normal glories of Southern life I heard him switch to Southern women.  You can believe my ears perked up as I casually added more cream to my pot of mashed potatoes.

“Girls are just different in the South,” Jeremiah said with conviction.  “When I was dating Abby, I felt like a king.  I’d walk into her house and her Mom was always cooking something she knew I’d like, and there were all these pretty girls just all around me.  I don’t know, man, it was awesome.  Out here, woman are just…harder.”

Lordey mercy! I dared not turn around for the boys to see the huge smile on my face.  I hope my Mom could hear, right up there in heaven, that her hard work and daughter training had paid off.

This is going to be a strange post, and one that most of you will not want to read.  I would not have read a post with this title a month ago.  However, I have a friend who read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and considered it life changing.  In an effort to understand my friend more, and in a quest to not be seen as a person who refuses to broaden her horizons beyond “turn-of-the-century, coming of age” novels, I took on this hefty challenge.

So that you’re not confused by the pictures that are about to follow, I took the girls to Mount Vernon, Washington for the annual Skagit Valley tulip festival.

A couple of you sweet blog readers suggested that I go, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to drag the chicken wings an hour north to see some tulips.  Then, I ran into some women who had travelled all the way from TEXAS just to go to the tulip festival, and I thought, “Well, wouldn’t it be a shame to not see it while we’re here?”  Consider me a stupid fool for ever considering NOT going.  It was one of the most breathtaking sights I’ve ever seen.  I went expecting to spend a couple of hours, and I drug myself away five hours later.  Y’all aren’t even going to believe how gorgeous these tulips are.  I figured if you’re going to plow through this book review, you deserved to look at something pretty along the way.  And if you’re not going to read it, at least this post has some pretty pictures for you to scroll through.

Ok, Atlas Shrugged.  I expected to hate it.  I expected to feel like a martyr the entire time I plowed through those thousand-something pages, just gritting my teeth and reading a bunch of Sci-Fi propaganda.  I mean, really, what could be worse?  I also expected it to be full of liberal spin.  Not sure where I got that idea, because it’s totally the opposite, but I expected to be wanting to vomit into a liberal garbage bag the whole time.

Well, instead I found myself totally enthralled in a well-written story that was even more “conservative” (at least in some respects) than I am.  It’s also a little racy, at least compared to the types of books I normally read.

On the whole, would I recommend it?  This is hard.  I think it’s a fascinating point of view and a good read, but if you’re not a Christian, or are a believer but are new to your faith, or are a believer but struggle with doubts–I would say, “Please don’t read it!”  It’s not that I wavered while reading it, and it’s not that I don’t believe that real truth will prevail, but Ayn Rand is extremely persuasive and this book is a long journey.  Telling a new believer to read this book would be like telling a recovering alcoholic to spend 30 minutes each night in a bar.  Chances are good, that’s not going to end well.

The primary theme of the book is that the best way for a society to thrive (or even survive) is for each person in that society to serve themselves above everything else.  If I am considering capitalism alone, I would agree with that statement.  I think that a country is most likely to prosper financially if each individual in that society is working hard to better themselves–even to the point of selfishness.  I don’t think that a business owner should hire someone based on that person’s need, but their ability, if he intends to run a profitable business.

I can even accept Rand’s view of me as a mother–That it is still a selfish act for me to care for my children well, because ultimately I am serving my own desire.  It is not a sacrifice, she argues, if I give my last crust of bread to my child and then die myself.  I want to see my child live more than myself, and therefore, that act is selfish, not a sacrifice.

I would even follow her so far as to say that I think that the “have-nots” should benefit from the “haves” self-service.  If a big business owner does not do what is best for his business to survive, then there won’t be jobs for the people who need them.  If there aren’t jobs, then there’s not enough money in the economy to stimulate economic prosperity and stimulate the abundance (however slight it may be per family) to support those who cannot support themselves.

And if we want to get really political up in here, I don’t think the government should have the right to decide who I give our hard-earned money to.  I believe it should be our right–those who earned it–to decide how to spend what we make.

Wow, those statements sound pretty taboo in our society.  Nobody feels like they should come out and say, “I want to make money, and I want to do that well!”  That sounds disgusting to us…Why?  For a book written in 1957, I feel like this statement relates frighteningly to where we are today:

This greatest of countries was built on my morality–on the inviolate supremacy of man’s right to exist–but you dreaded to admit it and live up to it.  You stared at an achievement unequaled in history, you looted its effects and blanked out on its cause.  In the presence of that monument to human morality, which is a factory, a highway or a bridge–you kept damning this country as immoral and its progress as “material greed,” you kept offering apologies for this country’s greatness to the idol of primordial starvation, to decaying Europe’s idol of a leprous, mystic bum.

Ok, so I could get fired up by some of this.  I could start to justify some of my selfishness as “right.”  It felt kind of good…but something in me quavered at the same time.  Something felt in direct contrast to what I believe in my heart of hearts.  Because, while I can believe in capitalism, I can’t believe in the hearts behind the people running our capitalistic society.  Can you?  I can’t even trust myself.

If I believed that, in my selfish state, I would still desire to help others in need; that if I was only looking out for my best interest, that my heart would continue to yearn to care for others who cannot care for themselves, then I think we could adopt this doctorine…but I don’t think I would.  And I believe in a God who charges us to do just that.

Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?  When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?”

The King will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 25:37-40

[And these words from the lips of Jesus himself.  If I take His words as truth, it’s hard for me to argue that it would be ok with Him for me to live a life devoted ultimately to myself as Rand sugests.]

What Rand worships, is production.  When she looks out over the city of New York and sees the skyscrapers that have risen from the ground by man’s effort, or a long stretch of railway that has been laid to facilitate production, or a business running smoothly under a capable hand, her reaction (or the reaction of the character that is thinly disguised to represent her in the book) is very similar to my reaction…when I see the work of God’s hands.  But what is the worship of production if not the worship of money, and I’m afraid the Bible speaks very clearly on the worship of money:

People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction.  For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.  Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. 1 Timothy 6:9-10

There were a lot of instances on my journey through this novel where I ached for Ayn Rand and the misguided plight of her soul.  She often roused feelings in my heart that were familiar, feelings–only stirred by my Heavenly Father,–but the problem was that she was seeking the same ecstasies from the wrong source.  Dagny Taggart (the heroine of the novel who represents Rand) cries these words in her heart at one of her lowest points of the book:

You–she thought–whoever you are, whom I have always loved and never found, you whom I expected to see at the end of the rails beyond the horizon, you whose presence I had always felt in the streets of the city and whose world I had wanted to build, it is my love for you that had kept me moving, my love and my hope to reach you and my wish to be worthy of you on the day when I would stand before you face to face.  Now I know that I shall never find you–that it is not to be reached or lived–but what is left of my life is still yours, and I will go on in your name, even though it is a name I’ll never learn, I will go on serving you, even though I’m never to win, I will go on, to be worthy of you on the day when I would have met you, even though I won’t…

And there is a description of finally meeting her god, John Galt, that made me want to cry–because something right was obviously stirring in her.  A longing for someone greater than herself to put her trust in, but instead of Jesus…she invented a guy named John Galt:

She was looking up at the face of a man who knelt by her side, and she knew that in all the years behind her, this is what she would have given her life to see: a face that bore no mark of pain or fear or guilt….He was looking down at her with the faint trace of a smile, it was not a look of discovery but of familiar contemplation–as if he, too, were seeing the long-expected and never-doubted.

This was her world, she thought, this was the way men were meant to be and to face their existence–and all the rest of it, all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone else’s senseless joke.  She smiled at him, as at a fellow conspirator, in relief, in deliverance, in radiant mockery of all the things she would never have to consider important again.  He smiled in answer, it was the same smile as her own, as if he felt what she felt and knew what she meant.

Does it make anyone else feel queasy–how close she is to the feeling of seeing our Savior face to face, while at the same time finding the wrong man?

The final dichotomy that holds me from joining the ranks of so many other Christians who support this book, is Dagny Taggart’s ultimate belief that to accept or give anything as a gift is reprehensible.  She demands to do everything in life by her own strength and would spit in the face of someone offering her a “hand-out.”  She believes that she has earned rewards and the right to a deep pride in herself through her own abilities and hard work.  I can get caught up in that pride feeling.  I can start wanting to scream “Amen!” to hard work and effort.

But what about the fact that our life and abilities are themselves a hand-out?  Who gave Ayn Rand her life to begin with?  Who gave her the mind she has to think and strategize?  Who gave her the strength for her tasks?  Did she conjure them up herself from the dust of the earth?

No, she did not.  I’m afraid that all the things she is most proud of are a hand-out from our Creator, and no matter how she balks at gifts, she has already accepted the ultimate gift.  While I think Ayn Rand has some wise ideas about capitalism, I choose to abandon her ultimate message–for the message of the One who gave her her mind and her ability.

{I know y’all didn’t read that.  I don’t blame you.  And it really is ok if you just want to leave a comment to tell me the tulips are pretty :)}