Attention and Parenting from Alice Munro

Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013. I've read one or two of her short story collections. I like her. I started another one of her books last week. I keep thinking about the first story. The title is To Reach Japan, you can read it online for free if you create an account here. 

One section especially spoke to me. And after a week, I'm realizing how good the story is. I wouldn't say the story is about parenting, but is it about a parent. And that parent captures one of my largest struggles as a parent. I would call it a tragedy of parenting, Munro's narrator calls it a sin.

I can relate so much to her quote below. I'm so often preoccupied and giving my attention "to something other than the child." Munro has 4 children, so I'm sure she's very familiar with the sin she describes. Even when you put your child in daycare for 7-9 hours a day, it is so easy to commit this sin.

Minimal spoiler warning! and brief context. The protagonist, Greta, left her child unattended on a train ride across Canada. The child was napping and when she woke up she wandered off crying looking for her mom. Here is the quote.

"All of her waking time for these hundreds of miles had been devoted to Katy. She knew that such devotion on her part had never shown itself before. It was true that she had cared for the child, dressed her, fed her, talked to her, during those hours when they were together and Peter was at work. But Greta had other things to do around the house then, and her attention had been spasmodic, her tenderness often tactical. 

And not just because of the housework. Other thoughts had crowded the child out. Even before the useless, exhausting, idiotic preoccupation with the man in Toronto, there was the other work, the work of poetry that it seemed she had been doing in her head for most of her life. That struck her now as another traitorous business—to Katy, to Peter, to life. And now, because of the picture in her head of Katy alone, Katy sitting there amid the metal clatter between the cars—that was something else she, Katy’s mother, was going to have to give up. 

A sin. She had given her attention elsewhere. Determined, foraging attention to something other than the child. A sin."

Defining Religion

Thinking exercise: without using any resources or searches, define religion in 1-3 sentences. Here is mine:

    Religion is a system of beliefs shared and traditions and rituals practiced by a group of people.

I've looked up definitions for religion before to argue with friends, so I might have a more dictionary definition. But I like my answer. 

I'm listening to a course called Cultural Literacy for Religion. The course presented this exercise after identifying how terrible Americans' knowledge of religion is. Unfortunately the course doesn't give a clear definition. It presents common definitions and identifies the limitations and problems with each definition.

Share your definition in the comments!