In this essay, a certain word deemed unsuitable for a family publication has been replaced with a phrase taken at random from an old undergraduate writing manual. Instances have been marked in small caps.
The bad news came in March. I was sitting at my desk, two days before Ash Wednesday, when I learned that our family is fundamentally disordered.
This was not a huge surprise, if I’m being honest. On the best of days, things chez Walther could be euphemistically described as “happening.” What do I mean by that? “Happen” is a surprisingly capacious verb. When we say that something happens (in the barest sense) we just mean that it “takes place” or “occurs.” Most events in our house could be described like this. “A candle is lit”; “a little white teacup with a hummingbird on it is cracked.” These are the things that happened. But in some cases we might wish to emphasize causality; things happen in the sense that they “ensue as an effect or result of an action or event.” E.g., “the other little white teacup with the hummingbird—the one that wasn’t cracked—is covered in purple wax as an effect or result of my son’s ultra vires decision to extinguish the lit candle on the dining room table and dump it in the kitchen sink as if it were a dirty dish.” Some things happen fortuitously; we happen to do something, such as run into an old friend after we said we were leaving the bar after one drink; or it just so happens that the babysitter is sick for the third consecutive attempt at date night. Happen is also a genteel formula of sorts: “Do you happen to know where my belt is?” is a question to which my wife has been subjected more or less daily for eleven years now. We sometimes happen upon things, finding them by chance: “No, I haven’t seen your belt, but if I happen to find it, I will let you know” (in fact, my wife never says this because she is omniscient, but you get the idea). Finally, happen can mean what it does in fairy tales, something like “befall”: It happened that someone rear-ended the car while stopped at a traffic light. This last sense—of an irruption of the half-world with its unseen forces of chaos—is one to which we are less used these days; but my experience suggests that it is surprisingly common.
It was not the voice of God from the burning bush which commanded me to hear the happening children’s cry, but a lifestyle “app” being marketed to Catholic families (in my case via an email sent automatically to everyone registered at our parish). The Well-Ordered Family is “a management system” meant to help happening families like mine achieve the status of the eponymous compound adjective by “adapting business tools for family life.” It is, in other words, an “app.” Before downloading it, users are asked to fill out a survey, which consists of thirty statements, each of which requires a numerical response ranging from 1 (“Not true at all”) to 5 (“Very true”). It helps, probably, not to think very hard about what precise shade of meaning to assign to the other numbers here. (For my purposes, I assumed that 3 meant “I don’t know.”) Some of the statements are reasonably straightforward: “My family has crystal-clear digital policies for the children.” For us that’s a 5, in the sense that they don’t know what YouTube is but are well on their way to becoming experienced V.C.R. repair techs. “Certain relationships in our family are strained” also seems obviously true, though I have never met a family in which that was not the case. I for one would like to believe that “Our household rules and consequent discipline are clear, leaving no room for misunderstanding,” but you would be surprised how many interpretations “Put your toothbrush back in the cup after you are finished with it” admits of.
Some of the questions seemed like put-ons. “My spouse and I frequently set aside time to touch base and align our schedules and priorities” is basically a sitcom plot. “Coordinating family logistics often leads to frustration and conflict.” Let me think. A few weeks ago, my wife was getting ready to visit my widowed mother-in-law on the other side of the state. The drill was for the kids to put on shoes and coats and get in the car while I helped her find her keys. One daughter (who has opinions about things like Keats and Latin pronunciation) didn’t know where her shoes were. Another was wearing sandals even though it was raining on the grounds that she didn’t want to put on shoes without socks and the latter were M.I.A. Another one still, the youngest, was wearing her ballet outfit and a cowgirl hat. Meanwhile, my son was upstairs in his underwear singing “Yellow Submarine.” “Come on, guys,” I said. “You need to get your APPROPRIATE CONTEXT together.” Five minutes later, as if on command, the situation had metamorphosed into a hilarious parody of order: The daughter who didn’t know where her shoes were was looking for her coat while thanking her sister who had replaced her sandals with winter boots for remembering to grab a piano book; the youngest, who had exchanged the ballerina-cum-Western getup for a bathing suit, was getting her socks on, and my boy had just put a tie on over his pajamas. The keys were still nowhere in sight. “You know,” I told my wife, “you could just walk into traffic instead.” “Sure thing,” she said. “First I just need to find my phone.”
Most of the survey’s statements are more ambiguous: “My spouse and I can easily articulate our long-term goals”; “My family has a clear understanding of our collective strengths and weaknesses”; “Discussing the future and our family’s trajectory brings us anxiety”; “We are very comfortable with the external influences on our family, such as friendships, educational systems, employment, religious communities, technology, and recreational activities.” The last one, especially, is an existential question about which, I suspect, most readers of this magazine could write a whole essay. What actually counts as an “external influence”?
After answering the questions, your family receives a preliminary assessment. This is not an all-or-nothing affair. Instead of an up-or-down answer to the question of whether your domestic unit looks more like the Holy or the Manson Family, you are graded on “Vision,” “Unity,” “Systems,” “Metrics,” “Relationships,” and “Discernment,” respectively. The scores, at least in our case, ranged from “High Achieving” to “Adequate” to “Needs Some Improvement.” In our case, “Vision” was the biggest area of failure, which surprised me, since we seem like such a dreamy, romantic bunch. Even stranger was the single category in which we were “High Achieving,” namely, “Systems.” According to the email I received, we have “a knack for navigating both external environments and internal routines.” By every other metric, including “Metrics,” we were “Adequate” at best.
What was to be done? The email invited me to “schedule a free 30-minute call” with “a Well-Orderd [sic] Family Head Coach,” after which I could begin using their online platform. I’m more of a print guy myself, so instead I tracked down a copy of the Well-Ordered Family’s companion book, entitled (guess) Well-Ordered Family.
When the book arrived, I was heartened to discover that it was not an anonymous production. The book had an actual author, who was described as “a father of sixteen children (yes, 16) and CEO of multiple businesses.” This wasn’t his first rodeo either. In the opening section of Well-Ordered Family, there was a mention of a previous title, If Aristotle’s Kid Had an iPod.
That one was worth the visit to Anna’s Archive. Scanning a P.D.F. eagerly, I was surprised to see that an early chapter dealt not with Aristotle but with Cesar. That isn’t a typo; we are not taking an immediate forward-ish leap from Athens into the slightly less remote classical past of the first century B.C. This “Cesar” is Cesar Millan, a.k.a. “the Dog Whisperer,” the host of a cable show. (Wikipedia informs me that it “ran for nine seasons, from September 13, 2004, to September 15, 2012.”) You can already see where he’s going with this. It is coming at you right now like the train in Anna Karenina. You try to talk yourself through it. “This guy is not really about to say that you can train your kids the way you train a dog, right? Right?” Wrong.
Forgive the long-ish block quote (the author prefers very short paragraphs):
Walk into any grocery store and chances are good you’ll find parents petrified and embarrassed by their children, just as Cesar’s clients are petrified by their dogs.
You can see the fear in mom’s eyes when her kid goes on a tirade in the store, making it impossible to shop. She becomes submissive, and her kid becomes the Alpha Male. With an embarrassed smile, she says, “Oh, he’s just independent,” or “He has so much energy,” or my favorite “He’s a very strong-willed child.” That might be true. But maybe Mom has the same problem that Cesar’s clients have: she has failed to understand her child’s nature.
Flummoxed dog owners call in Cesar Millan because he understands doggy nature. Likewise, parents at their wits end need to call in someone who understands human nature. They need a “Kid Whisperer.”
Luckily, just such a Kid Whisperer exists, an expert whose writings on human nature are unsurpassed after nearly 2,400 years. I’m referring, of course, to Aristotle, whom we are going to come to know very well in the course of this book.
See what he did there? Incidentally, we do in fact know a bit about Aristotle’s “kid.” The little nipper (named Nicomachus after his grandfather) was born “out of wedlock,” as our friends in the success sequence racket put it, to a slave woman. Later he became a pupil of his old man’s follower Theophrastus, as well as his lover. Both Diogenes Laertius and the Byzantine encyclopedists are mostly silent on the question of his relationship to Aristotle, but it was alleged that he wrote a commentary on the Physics. No iPod, in case you were still wondering.
The only other thing I took from Well-Ordered Family is that he and I have had different “lived experience” where the subject of car maintenance is concerned. At one point (oddly enough it is while trying to explain an analogy about “kid nature” and “dog nature”) he writes, “The ‘check engine’ light flashes on. Left unattended, the machine breaks.” This, I know for certain, is not true. In 2020, I bought a purple 2003 Chevy Express for one thousand nine hundred dollars. The “check engine” light was on the day I bought it. The “Shaggin’ Wagon,” as a decal—thankfully removable—styled it, ran for five years. Last year we gave it a party when it hit three hundred thousand miles; it retired only a few months ago, just shy of three hundred thirty thousand.
Obviously I digress. The premise of Well-Ordered Family (the book) and Well-Ordered Family™ (the “management system”) is simple. Per the advertising copy: “There is a reason business runs smoothly and family runs chaotically.” I would think there is more than one reason. Reams of them, probably, depending upon our working definitions of “smoothly” and “chaotically.” But let’s back up. What kind of business are we talking about here? A publicly traded corporation? That one is easy: If my family were on the Dow, our stock would just fall until some other company came along and decided to strip-mine our handful of valuable assets (our youngest makes excellent cat noises). If we were privately held, we would file for bankruptcy and start over; maybe some of us would go to grad school; others would become diner waitresses or circus performers or unicorns.
Family does not work like that. I cannot fire my intellectually disabled son for saying “The track is fixed” two hundred times in a row. (That is not an exaggeration.) My wife and I, having undergone a “merger” of sorts, cannot easily decouple. If the products we’re making—mostly a lot of noise and craft-related messes in addition to a massive though lately oral cycle of legends about Bunny Town and Wa-Wa the Annoying Banana Butler—aren’t popular with consumers, too bad. We just keep making them anyway. Shifting production overseas in the hope of lowering costs or securing a more favorable regulatory climate isn’t an option either. There is no way to do our thing in China. Nor can we bring in new talent except by “hiring on” an additional “trainee.” That is bound to happen sooner or later, but there is no strictly business logic according to which it would make sense for my or any other American family to have more than two children. Needless to say, whatever was tolerated in the Old Testament, the number of managers will always be the same.
✥ ✥ ✥
Let’s be serious for a moment. The first problem with obviously well-meaning projects like the Well-Ordered Family is that they are probably being directed at the wrong sorts of people. If you are signed up for bulletin updates at your Latin Mass parish, you probably already have complicated and even, by the standards of your neighbors, baffling views about questions such as “screen time.” You are also likely aware—acutely so—that many of your “lifestyle decisions” make organizing family life a far more complicated affair than it is in most other households. The underlying problem that the Well-Ordered Family and other Catholic lifestyle services like it seek (perhaps only half-consciously) to address is the collapse of a shared social and community life for American Catholics. These problems will not be solved by marginally improving anyone’s “time management” skills, much less by attempting to reconceive family in terms of a series of grotesque metaphors. Every family is functional—and dysfunctional—in its own way. There’s no way around that. To paraphrase If Aristotle’s Kid Had an iPod, that’s just “family nature.” A certain amount of chaos is, as the author might put it, simply the price of doing business.
What follows is a more or less verbatim transcript of our first and so far only “family meeting.” Per the book, we were supposed to sketch out our family’s strengths and weaknesses and settle on, inter alia, a family vision statement, motto, and tagline, in addition to asking each other questions like “Where would we like to see ourselves in three years?”
Dramatis Personae
Me (M.)
Wife (W.)
Oldest Daughter (O.D.)
Second-Oldest Daughter (S.O.D.)
Son (B.)
Youngest Daughter (Y.D.)
W.: Okay, guys, now remember, no one did anything bad.
M.: [officiously] What are some good things about our family?
Y.D.: They help us. Grandma makes cookies for us.
W.: Papa means our family in this house.
Y.D.: [S.O.D.] plays video games for me.
M.: You guys get to do that once a week, maybe. On the old T.V. This is going in a magazine.
S.O.D.: One time I was mean to [Y.D.] and Mama was giving us all candy and I didn’t get any, but [Y.D.] gave me some anyway.
W.: Growing food. Just fantastic, really.
O.D.: We say the Prayer Book together.
M.: Yes, that’s good. Let’s skip the weaknesses for now and move on to our vision statement. Does anyone know what a vision statement is?
O.D.: Something that tells you whether you can see?
M.: No. Let me give you an example. The book says that the “vision statement” for LinkedIn is—
W.: What kid would know what LinkedIn is? I don’t even know what LinkedIn is.
M.: Neither do I. Nevertheless, its vision statement is “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.” Can anyone think of something like that for our family?
Y.D.: To be kind.
M.: That’s pretty good. Anybody else?
S.O.D.: To try to be nice, especially to [B.].
B.: [finally making his way to the table] I’ve got blocks.
O.D.: To be pious, charitable, and educated.
Y.D.: And to be calm.
W.: These are certainly aspirational.
M.: [beaming] Now how about a motto? Does anyone know what a motto is?
O.D.: States have them.
M.: And our state’s is “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.”
S.O.D.: I don’t see a peninsula.
O.D.: Michigan is a peninsula.
M.: It’s two peninsulas. Anyway, what is our family motto going to be?
O.D.: “Don’t fear failure.”
W.: “In this family, we solve problems.”
S.O.D.: “Do your schoolwork.”
O.D.: [leaning dangerously sideways in her chair] That’s not much of a motto.
[O.D. falls to the floor.]
M.: Okay, moving right along—we now need a tagline.
W.: Not to be confused with our vision statement.
O.D.: [leaning again] Or our motto.
M.: If you fall again, I’m going to lose my APPROPRIATE CONTEXT.
W.: Nike’s tagline is “Just Do It.”
S.O.D.: What is Nike?
M.: They make shoes.
S.O.D.: “Be Funny.”
O.D.: “Enjoy the Things You Have.”
B.: “Is.”
M.: That doesn’t quite work.
B.: “Wall-E.”
M.: Another example of a tagline is McDonald’s. Does anyone know the commercial?
W.: [singing] Ba da ba ba ba / Pickupafter yourself.
M.: This is great stuff. Okay, time for the big ones. Going forward, having identified our strengths, animated by the spirit of our . . .
[He checks his notes.]
. . . vision statement, motto, and tagline, how can we make our family better?
B.: Root beers.
Y.D.: Be kind.
S.O.D.: We can—
O.D.: [while B. is shoving a wooden mushroom craft into M.’s ear, interrupting S.O.D.] Not interrupt.
M.: Where would you like to be in, say, three years?
Y.D.: China.
S.O.D.: Japan.
O.D.: Oxford.
B.: Can we play wolf after lunch?
Y.D.: I have one question.
Y.D.: Is APPROPRIATE CONTEXT a bad word?
M.: Yes.
