Articulate Joe was due towards the end of April. We didn't want him to be born on our anniversary. He was.
Persephone came to get me from work for lunch, and when I got in the car she said she thought she was having contractions. She wasn't sure she wanted to go to the hospital yet, and I was starving, so we went through the McDonald's drive-thru while she figured out what her uterus was doing. It turned out it was squeezing out a baby, so we went to the hospital and, within two hours, had a son.
I promise the birth stories of Child #3 and Child #4 don't involve me eating lunch while my wife's in labor.
By the end of the year, I wanted to quit my job. I felt like a tool of the state, using the police power to raise the property values of existing home owners. An old man within the city's sphere of influence had a failed septic system and I got to tell him he had to spend $15,000 to annex to the sewer district. I didn't relish being the face of oppression. Many of our decisions were designed to enrich the already rich at the expense of the poor. Instead of wondering why a family was living in another's garage and trying to correct the situation, we evicted the garage dwellers and then exacerbated the problem with severe land use restrictions. How terrible is someone's life before they agree to live in a garage? Why weren't we doing anything to improve those terrible lives?
I did not like the prevailing model of the American family: kids go to school, parents go to work, and the home is a collection of boarders. I read Thomas Keneally's Abraham Lincoln and found I thoroughly agreed with Lincoln's take on labor, wages, and entrepreneurship. It was very important to me that, by the time Crazy Jane was school aged, I would work from home and we would homeschool our kids. In this sense, I wasn't a conservative who wanted to turn the clock back to the 1950s so much as I was a conservative who wanted to turn the clock back to the 1750s. To be in a position to work from home, I would need to finish school faster than I was as a full-time worker. I would quit my full-time job.
Of course, a lot of this was dependent on God helping me out for doing what He would have me do. But to have faith in that, I'd have to know that I was doing what He would have me do. Which is tricky sometimes. I spent a long time trying to understand what God would want me to do. Finally, I concluded that my good-faith efforts to understand God's will put the ball in His court; if I tried my best to understand and then pursued a course of action, it was His responsibility to dissuade me from traveling down a wrong path. I felt strongly that I would not be free as God intended as long as I worked for someone else in a wage-earning setting, that I would not be raising my children as God intended as long as I turned their care and education over to government, and that I would not be building family relationships as God intended as long as I was away from my family members for a majority of our waking hours.
In November I told my boss I wanted to quit and go to school full time. He said I should think about switching to part-time and going to school in the evenings, and that the city had an education assistance plan. But I didn't feel driven to study urban planning, and I didn't want to enter a drawn-out process. I wanted to be out of California within five years (the problems with living in California are an entirely different subject). He told me to think about it and we'd talk again after the first of the year, but the more I thought about it the more I was worried I'd end up second-guessing myself out of something I was supposed to do, so before the end of December I told him I was sure.
via oneofthebest
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