Jill Domschot

I will be publishing my book Order of the PenTriagon September 20, 2021. Why that date, you ask? It’s a minor point in the book that the protagonist, Talat, reads the marginalia in an old pawnshop Bible on the Psalm 127 page, in which the anonymous inscriber states that God has built her house and answered her prayers as of September 20. So I thought I would go with that date. There is no magic to it. I imagine I used it because that was the day I was writing that section of book; in fact, I added the year date as 2020…I no doubt wrote the section in 2019, looking forward to 2020. How strange that in September of 2020 I was sitting on my completed book, writing another one, and editing others’ books. I was also tutoring and homeschooling. I was doing everything but looking at a completed house of answered prayers (regarding my writing career — there was no doubt that God pulled me out of the Covid poverty when my bank account had finally hit empty).

On the other hand, life is never a completed house until we die. God doesn’t stop answering our prayers, either. Life is a process of building, and God is not a genie in the sky; he’s our heavenly Father whom we should have an active relationship with. If we don’t and call ourselves Christians, there is something broken in our relationship. We could be the prodigal son wandering in far-off lands, but if we are God’s children, we will always wander back to his house. In fact, he will leave his house and come fetch us back if we’re too lost to come on our own. That was the message Christ gave us — that he as the Good Shepherd would rescue us. I believe that. There are people who reject their rescuer, but that doesn’t mean that the shepherd won’t offer us a lifeline or a trip out of the canyon in his arms.

I was only going to write about my publishing date and post a blurb, but this post went it’s own way. Instead, I’ll post my blurb in the next few days and add Psalm 127 to this one. It’s long been one of my favorite Psalms, which is unsurprising, as it was written by Solomon, the biblical author who most resonates with me.

This is from the RSV:

A Song of Ascents. Of Solomon.

127 Unless the Lord builds the house,
those who build it labor in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city,
the watchman stays awake in vain.
2 It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest,
eating the bread of anxious toil;
for he gives to his beloved sleep.

3 Lo, sons are a heritage from the Lord,
the fruit of the womb a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the sons of one’s youth.
5 Happy is the man who has
his quiver full of them!
He shall not be put to shame
when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

If you are studying another language and want to learn vocabulary, I always recommend reading. Reading is the reason I have an extra-large box in my brain for English vocabulary — why wouldn’t it work for another language? Don’t stop too often to look up words but take them in the context they’re given; you could make a list and look them up later, if you want. Becoming a fluent reader is a great way to develop a feel for the structure of the language you’re studying. On the other hand, a more exciting way to learn a second language is to listen to the music (English music doesn’t do much for me in this way, but when my vocabulary is no doubt that of a fifth-grader, it works). For that reason, I’ve been listening to Mexican music for over twenty years now. Why Mexican? you ask. I’m sorry to be prejudiced, but Mexican music is better than all other types of Spanish music. My children have taken to calling me a Mexican Weeb due to my obsession with Mexico. I guess that depends on how one defines Weeb. Some aspects of Weeb culture are anything but wholesome, full of prurient voyeurs of…cartoons. I can guarantee I’m not that type of Weeb. I just love the accordion and brass instruments and dramatic vocals!

I have learned very useful vocabulary in Mexican songs, such as francotirador (sniper), naufrago (shipwrecked), tatuajes (tattoos), antojo (whim), limosnero (charitable)…. I was pondering the usefulness of this last night as I read in the Telemundo online news about some gente who had been naufraga due to a storm. I’m sure that I initially learned the word while reading 17th C Spanish literature like Cervantes (people in his day went to sea and were shipwrecked and attacked by pirates, at least in stories), but it didn’t quite stick in my head until I was singing a catchy chorus on repeat: Naufrago en mi cama de tanto llorar. That’s a song by Los Elegidos, in case you want to look it up. As far as I can tell, they are a one-album band; they had a few hits and then disappeared off Mexican radio. But these handful of hits are quite catchy and easy to listen to…by easy, I mean I can understand the Spanish.

Francotirador was a funny one to me as I did what I always do — I tried to figure it out in the context of the song, which is unsurprisingly about a very painful love affair. My mind went weird directions, such as, a French shooter? Franco is surely related to Frank, which is related to French; and I already knew what tirador meant. Thus… ja ja ja. Actually, the title of the song gives it away, mostly: Directo al corazon. This woman’s treacherous love went straight to the heart, just as a sniper might aim for a quiet hit right where it counts. It’s a useful word in everyday conversation, I can assure you. And there might be some relation to “French” in there somewhere; I suppose the adjective “frank” could be related to the Franks. That’s a head-scratcher. I might have to look it up.

It turns out there are a lot of parents who don’t think distance learning is adequate for their children. It isn’t. It really isn’t. Neither is our up close and personal public education. Most parents have known this for a long time, but most didn’t also realize they could do something about it until the pandemic happened.

It’s funny to me that the bluest states in the nation were the ones who shut their schools down the longest. This goes against the progressive fantasy of having both parents in the workplace paying their taxes, while the children are ensconced in the indoctrination enclaves of the schools. Call me a positive thinker if you’d like, but this is ironically a blessed situation.

Please believe me when I say I didn’t seek out these stats on my own. I’m no longer the homeschool champion I used to be who goes out and looks for the answers I want to find. Okay, I was probably never exactly that person, but I used to be more of a homeschool champion. After raising two children who were completely homeschooled, and two more who have been given a greater variety of options, I’ve been tempered in my bleeding-heart idealism. Even though I didn’t go looking for this info, obviously the propagandist media is putting out their whine-fests about these stats, claiming that if the trend continues, it will bankrupt the schools.

La-dee-dah. At least as far as New Mexico goes, I couldn’t care less. We have the worst schools in the nation. It doesn’t matter how much money we pour into them, they do not get better. And oh, the school systems will beg for money. They’ll beg for it, and they will get it because when a high proportion of the population is on one kind of welfare or another, they don’t really care whether bonds pass that will raise taxes. Of course, higher taxes will affect all citizens at some level, but the schools here are such garbage institutions that the vast majority of the population will not be able to calculate or predict how it will affect them personally. That was why, years ago, the people voted to rape New Mexico’s rainy day fund (the kind of fund created for state emergencies like, gosh, a…pandemic) and give it to the schools. Guess what? It didn’t help the schools get any better.

Pouring money at schools doesn’t help. It never helps. Wealthy areas have better schools because upper middle-class parents are generally well-educated and consequently care about their children’s education — they understand why it’s important, and they have the skills to push their children to achieve. It’s not precisely that poorer communities don’t care. Sometimes individuals do; sometimes they don’t. It’s that they either believe they don’t have the skills to help their children, or both parents are too busy working to do much more than nag their children to do their homework.

There is a certain hopelessness regarding life outcomes in poorer communities that was broken or shifted during the pandemic. I’m sure most parents didn’t want their lives disrupted, but it gave them the opportunity to explore homeschooling, and many found that it was actually doable. Not only is it doable, but it gives parents the opportunity to discover what their children do or do not understand and to spend more time on those lessons. In a school setting, if a child doesn’t understand a concept, they will get a paper or test marked with wrong answers, and then the class will move on. In a homeschool setting, when the answers are marked wrong, the children have the time to learn why and correct their answers during school hours. That last bit is important because once children leave the classroom they have little incentive to go back and correct their work, even if the teacher is offering a better grade for doing so.

It always thrills me when people learn they have the wherewithal to fix problems like poor education. Believing you can’t do something is a mental block that will stand in your way your entire life. It doesn’t even seem to matter how poorly educated the parents are in a homeschool setting — if parents realize they can help their children, they will figure out how. If they don’t understand something themselves, they now have the resources at their fingertips to study it and understand it. When I started homeschooling, the internet was new technology. I still did most of my research in books. If I didn’t understand something, I had to find a library resource. And oh, by golly, did I ever. I still do, to be honest. But now parents can look up the concepts they never learned in school in a matter of minutes, so that they can teach their children. How incredible is that?!

I’m sure you’re going to ask how poor parents who work all the time can homeschool. It’s one thing to discover you have the ability to impart information to your children. It’s quite another to believe you have the time to do so. Well, I don’t have an easy answer for that. I only know what I’ve seen throughout my years of homeschool. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. There were always those moms in the homeschool group, even a handful of single moms. I’ve personally known two moms who started daycares in their homes to make it possible. I know some who homeschooled their kids for a few hours in the morning before they had to go to work (generally a grandma or another babysitter would come over at that point). Currently, I follow a vlog of a Mexican woman who homeschools her son in the morning before she goes to her shift as a nurse. She and her husband swap shifts. See, it’s even possible in other countries!

Anyway, I hope my positive thoughts on this subject are merited. Some of these new homeschool families will drop out eventually, even though these articles are appearing now because they haven’t yet done so. All I know is small changes in our thinking paradigms can make big changes in the long run. Thus, hope is warranted. Wait…when is hope not warranted? The darkest hours humanity has suffered were much darker than these, and people still had reason for hope.

*When I wrote this post late last night, I titled it “homeschool doubles,” which, I realized, didn’t quite mean what I had meant. So I changed it to “homeschoolers double”….oh, dear, the pandemic weight gain has been a trial, hasn’t it?

The United States had moved forward by leaps and bounds by the time the twentieth century rolled around. They had a high standard of living and great productivity, which allowed them to engage in philanthropy like never before. But ease always makes a society apathetic and gives them reason to disavow God; I discussed this in my previous post. Apathy crept in to the hearts of the American people and before they knew what had hit them, Marxism, Darwinism, and Freudian psychology had taken over the education system with the help of men like John Dewey, who is now considered the Father of Progressive Education. All these men men were the grandparents and great grandparents of the boomers.

It’s important to understand this, especially considering the hate the boomer generation is getting of late. The boomers did not come out of a vacuum; they were a product of indoctrination and societal forces their parents chose to ignore. If there’s one characteristic that I would attach to the silent generation, it’s their distaste for discussing politics and religion. These were by and large forbidden topics to them. When the most important subjects aren’t allowed to be broached in the home, what do you think is going to happen? The younger generation is going to be disproportionately influenced by mandatory public education.

Progressivism plus wealth and opportunity made the boomers, essentially, spoiled children. Spoiled children are the devil’s playthings. They demanded evil, and their elders gave it to them. What, do you actually think the Supreme Court justices that brought in national legal abortion were boomers? The boomers were far too young at that point. The author of the majority opinion on Roe v Wade, Harry Blackmun, was born in 1908. That would make him a precursor to even the silent generation — whatever that’s called. We didn’t used to fix twenty-year generational cohorts with names like we do now. Blackmun, unsurprisingly, was appointed by a Republican president and became, again unsurprisingly, one of the most liberal justices in the Court. No-fault divorce was brought in a bit differently; it happened state by state and was the effort of multiple generations, unfortunately. But egads did the boomers ever love it — because they were spoiled children who thought life was about being happy and pursuing their dreams.

I’m not giving the boomers an out but providing context for why they became a massively bad influence on this country. You might give the previous generations excuses, though, because they lived through World Wars I and II as well as the Great Depression and were traumatized enough that they might have wanted to ignore the writing on the wall (or the writing on their children’s school chalkboards). And they wanted a way forward, which was why they bought into Roosevelt-era progressivism. There was also a great deal of propaganda from authors such as the great American novelist I despise so much, John Steinbeck.

Propaganda, propaganda everywhere. Our current propaganda is so bad that it rivals Stalinist Russia. We simply lack the gulags and mass starvation — but, wait, there’s still time! The level of progressive thought currently in our nation did not come about simply due to the boomer generation, as much as gen Xers want to hate them. It was a much longer process brought to us by Satan’s minions over the course of almost two centuries.

And let’s be honest; their music wasn’t that bad, either. At least they played real instruments and didn’t snap their rhythms to a dull grid of bleary white noise like most of the music made today. Of course, those grids didn’t exist for them. Maybe, if they’re as evil as my generation believes, they would have….?

I read a NYT article about the new demographic woes our country is in due to childbearing plummetting even further than its non replacement rate ten years ago. Ten years ago, it was mostly women with higher education who put off having children; now it is all women, though unsurprisingly, rural and small-town women still have the highest birthrates in the country. More on that in a minute. Two of the biggest demographic plunges have occurred in unmarried women and in the daughters of Hispanic immigrants (that latter group used to have the highest birthrate in the nation.)

There is a lot to unpack in the article, though none of it is surprising or new information. I have talked with enough millenials to know all their excuses. They were handed a terrible economy. They can’t buy nice houses. There are few safety nets in the US, such as government care packages, free childcare, and paid maternity/paternity leave (they want both). They will usually bring up Finland, as Finland does have an extensive social welfare system for new parents and was meme-lauded on social media by young wannabe socialists for years. Meme-lauding and its counterpart, meme-shaming, is for people who want to grasp an ideal but who don’t want to be pestered by actual context; another popular one is Iceland and its books-for-Christmas meme. By the way, books are lovely if you have a literate population, which we mostly don’t, but the meme didn’t go into the fact that book-giving increased in popularity because other products were too hard to get during World War II. I won’t go into the egregious non-contextual meme-shaming, such as calling St. Augustine a misogynist, because that’s an entirely different subject that has more to do with our new illiteracy than it does our demographic problems.

The point about Iceland and its books is peripherally relevant, though, because it demonstrates that a culture’s values change when the people are deprived of material goods — generally for the better. This extends to one of the highest values we should be lauding: human life and families. There is probably a way to memify the actual reality, but I’m not the clever sort, so I’ll put it bluntly: the more material safety nets we have, the more we despise life. There is no way to get around the facts. The countries with the highest demographic declines are in the ones with the largest social welfare systems. That includes Finland, by the way. If they are resorting to new baby care packages from the state, instead of good old-fashioned parties where female friends and family members bring gifts to the mother-to-be, it means they are desperate. Their culture will die without a new generation. Even more relevant (to a government), there soon won’t be a workforce big enough to support the system that benefits those at the top. And this is really bad news for countries that might not be as appealing to new immigrants as, say, France.

That is not to mention that new immigrants only temporarily relieve the labor problem in countries where the natives refuse to have children. What happens when these immigrants are inculcated in the anti-life system? Like the daughters of Hispanic immigrants to the US, they also stop having children.

But why is our system so anti-life? Isn’t that the most relevant question? If you take a simple approach and note that the only people in the world who are having children at replacement level or above are poor, rural, or non-western nations, it’s also easy to make a case that western materialism is counterproductive to having children. All those excuses, such as, I can’t afford to buy a house; therefore, I can’t have children are meaningless. That house isn’t going to change where the heart is when the heart is deeply steeped in pursuing goals that can’t possibly bring fulfillment.

In the NYT article (I’m sure you can go find it if you want; I don’t feel like linking it), a female professor of something or other notes that it’s a powerful thing to be able to do what you want in this life. Is it, though? Is it really? Actually, you should read the article because the power that these young women are pretending is fulfillment is to the tune of….wait for it, being dental hygienists or cosmetologists or nurses. They aren’t trying to save the orphans like Mother Therese; they aren’t trying to invent a new life-saving medicine; they aren’t even trying to write a great American novel…which, by the way, I’m in pursuit of while raising my offspring. It’s actually a doable pursuit while raising a family, and it gives you something profound to write about, at the very least. But our young women, on the other hand, want to forgo the most important part of life to clean your teeth. That is what materialism does to the soul. It shrivels it to a prune-like stature.

Really, the most disturbing sign in our demographic problems is that unmarried girls and women are no longer having children. Hang on a minute, am I not a hyper-conservative Christian? Well, yes, but it used to be normal and natural for young men and women to want to have sex. In a moral society, the answer to this is to encourage marriage and to socially shame those who don’t wait. Socially shame…yes, I mean that, but only until they have shown constancy in settling down with a spouse. And then they are accepted into polite society again. But young people are over-sexualized to the point that it’s meaningless to them. It’s just grossness after a while, instead of being something beautiful. It’s not a happy pursuit anymore, where the young couple can’t wait to see each other naked. It’s old news; it’s boring and, besides, the nurse at school slapped a Norplant in the females’ arms starting at age fourteen. There is nothing for them to pursue but materialism. I mean, even the Girl Scout cookie boxes tell them pursuing a career is the most meaningful struggle in life.

Now back to small rural towns having the highest birthrates in the US. It fits with everything I’ve just said. There are few good jobs in small towns. There are few stores to shop at. The real estate market is limited. The schools may not yet be slapping Norplants in teen girls’ arms because they don’t have the resources, or because the Baptist matriarch raises a fuss at the PTA meeting. She might even be on the school board. When you are mired in material limitations, what else are you going to do? You’re going to procreate. I hate to be a downer, but I don’t believe in Mayberry. The rate of childbearing is higher in these communities, but it is still not high enough because of influences like the internet, where videogames, social media, and porn bring materialism right into bedrooms at the touch of the finger all over the country. And many young people can’t resist its call.

So, what is the answer? There is no easy one. When our nation was at the crossroads, we chose the wrong path. Perhaps it was foisted on us while we didn’t complain because materialism feels good. It’s comfortable. It’s not hard. It’s not the grand struggle in life that makes everything worthwhile. The human soul, I suppose, is the answer. Humans can’t live like this, not forever. Their souls will cry out for more. Unfortunately, it will be too late for many.

This is going to be a short tidbit while my really annoying adorable dogs are sleeping at my feet. I came across a word I’d never heard of before in a Father Brown mystery: asseverate. It caught me up short because it looked like a word I should know. It is obviously of Latin derivation; sever or severe appeared to be the root, but in the context a man “asseverated” that he didn’t know something. I couldn’t make sense of those potential Latin roots with the context being used in the story.

When I looked it up, I realized the meaning should have been obvious: to assert with force (hence, “severe” as the root). The word, however, is so rarely used that Merriam-Webster gave as an example the very Chesterton passage I had just read. The word dates to the 17th C, so it isn’t new, just not often chosen.

The Merriam-Webster entry has a story in its entry, about Elmore Leonard reading the word in a Mary McCarthy book. He, too, had to look it up. The interpretation of the Leonard story was to demonstrate that only those who want to show off their vocabulary would use such a word. At least I’m in good company with my ignorance. It seems Ms. McCarthy was perhaps not in bad company when she used the word asseverated instead of the more ordinary said (Chesterton is clearly good company, too); she is simply in a group so small it hardly exists. Whether she was trying to show off is not for me to say. I’ve never actually read McCarthy’s books.

I don’t think it’s bragging to claim I have a vocabulary better than 97% of the population. I could go with 99% because it’s probably true, but that might actually be bragging. In any case, I just added to it, though I doubt I will use it any time soon. I use vocabulary in a fluid sense when I write and speak — whatever comes to mind. That word would be a definite challenge to use in any way that wasn’t artificial and/or didn’t seem to others that I was trying to show off. I care little about the latter, having often said offhand things I found ordinary, to be met with that cult of stupidity smugness of “[eyeroll] I don’t listen to people who use words with more than two syllables.” One time, I casually remarked that syllables has three…do they no longer listen to themselves? I was met with more smug eyerolling.

It’s always good to learn something new, though. What’s life without a few good extra words to pack around?

No, this isn’t about humans. It’s about my new puppy friends and my obsession with relearning Spanish. Against my better judgement, we added two puppies to our pet family. Over the years, we have had many cats and one sweet dog. My husband has been bringing the kittens home for years; firefighters have a reputation for rescuing animals, and sometimes people will leave a box of unwanted baby cats or dogs outside the fire academy or department. That is how we started getting pets, despite my housecleaning meticulousness.

I’m really more of a dog lover than a cat lover, so we eventually rescued a puppy from an Albuquerque shelter and brought her home. She’s now an elderly dog, about eleven or twelve, I think. I can’t remember what year we brought her home, but she is the best dog in the world. She looked into my soul with her puppy eyes, and that was how I knew she belonged with us.

But puppies are a lot of work. I’ve been loath to bring home any new puppy friends. Our poor older dog has had to be satisfied with cats for her animal companions. She was always a lot nicer to them than they were to her. Our most elderly cat died a couple of years ago, and our other cat is living with one of my daughters because she was peculiarly unhealthy living in Roswell. The alley cats had given her fleas, and she was allergic to them. For some reason, fleas don’t proliferate in the desert, and so we had to send her back to our desert-dwelling daughter before the poor patchy creature withered away.

To make a long story short, just having one dog and a large yard with plenty of trees for shade allowed me to give in to my kids’ pleas for puppies. A friend had rescued a pregnant dog, whom the owner didn’t want, and she needed to give up some of the puppies. We brought two home. Since then, my life has been consumed with them, as they are very young. Thankfully, unlike human babies, they can be put out in the yard when they become too trying. They move like a whirlwind through the house, you see. Anyway, it’s been fun, but if you notice, I haven’t posted on here for about as long as we’ve had these pups in our lives. I suppose I should give an explanation for the title of my post: the dogs are true friends, as dogs will always be. They will fill your heart because they will love you like only dogs can. They are true blessings from God!

As I said, I’ve also become somewhat obsessive about relearning all the Spanish I’ve lost over the years. When I graduated from college, I could read and write fluently in Spanish and speak it if forced (I’m not good at speaking in my native tongue; trust me, it’s worse in Spanish). I had to be able to read and write fluently because my degree entailed reading very long novels and writing fifteen-page papers. I still remember when I became a fluent reader; it really was to the point of one day translating slowly as I went, and the next, just reading and understanding.

I’m doing Duolingo because it was recommended to me. Duolingo does deal with grammar, but it’s also good for conversational Spanish, which is what I need. So far, it’s helpful. I also found a copy of El amor en los tiempos del cólera at a thrift store and will test my reading fluency, to see if it’s still there…somewhere. I also started a Finnish course on Duolingo, but it’s not very expansive, and I have no earthly idea why I chose to take it in the first place, except that the Minä in Minäverse is Finnish for “I” — it was meant to denote a narcissistic world. Not the Finnish part — I chose Finnish because it has a pleasant sound and the umlaut looks nice.

My days, then, are full of puppies whom I run after while shouting Spanish phrases at my phone. I don’t yet shout in Finnish, though a friend on Discord posted a video of strong Finnish swear words. Very serious shouting words, those. But that’s a digression. Re Spanish, I decided I needed more than Duolingo, which brought me to the website Real Fast Spanish, where I read a post that piqued my interest, on false English-Spanish cognates. He calls these “false friends,” which is apropos. True cognates make your life easier and they are, consequently, your friends. False ones can lead to embarrassment or confusion.

Obviously, there are many false cognates, and his article doesn’t deal with them all. I found his article fascinating because the words he groups together all have to do with emotions. He gives some theories as to why there are so many false cognates in the world of emotions. I believe it has to do with the intangibility of emotions, as well as the way different cultures approach them. If you are interested in learning Spanish, you should read his handy table. There is one word where the false cognate goes one direction, Spanish to English, and that is gracioso. Gracioso does not mean gracious, as one would expect. It means funny. But the word for gracious is cortés, which has a true English cognate, courteous. Gracious is simply an extension of related to manners of the court.

In between work and caring for puppies, I’ve managed to find a subject that makes me emocionada about life again. Words. Words in Spanish, Finnish, and English. Yes, emocionada is on the list of false cognates. Go see for yourself.

To bring this back around and force two subjects to fit together that don’t at all, the reason I prefer dogs over cats is that they are true friends, while cats are false friends. Is that a cruel thing to say? Cruel, perhaps, but true. Cats will eat your face off after you die; dogs will curl up by your side and get depressed because they want you to run with them again. Dogs really love their humans, and cats are capable of the same love, I suppose, but they will only show it when it suits them. Cats are the false cognates of the animal world. Okay, I admit that was a real stretch. My apologies. I haven’t been sleeping much. Puppies, you know.