Please do not feel like you need to appreciate me

I've made some asides here before about how I don't get the whole clergy wife fetishism thing, but every once in a while it really hits home how much I don't get it. This parish owes me nothing. They called my husband, not me. I feel like I owe them for their willingness to call a married pastor. He is less available to them than a celibate pastor would be. They have also accepted the burden of providing a wage fair to a man with a family. They are the ones making the sacrifices. I cringe whenever one of these dear people apologizes to me for having called upon him in their need. That's why he's here.

Do not ever hesitate to call or to keep him as long as you need him. You gave me this great big house to keep me busy while he's gone. You are the ones who have given us this life which we love. You have adopted my children and me as friends and neighbors. Thank you. Thank you.

The silent epidemic

(Names have been changed to protect privacy.)

"At first I just thought it was because he was a baby," remembers Rebecca. "He did the stupidest stuff. He poked himself with forks and ate cakes of soap. These weren't one-time things. I mean, how many cakes of soap does somebody have to eat before they realize it's completely disgusting?"

But Rebecca's son didn't outgrow these lapses in intelligence. Although he gave up on eating soap and injuring himself with pointy utensils, he developed new idiotic habits. He chewed his toenails. He looked deep into Rebecca's eyes and then wiped his mouth on his shirt. He asked her to look for his "lost" pajamas in the same drawer where he'd hidden fossilized Easter candy. "Finally, I knew," Rebecca says. "My kid was stupid."

Childhood stupidity isn't a fun topic. No one wants to admit that her son or daughter is stupid. The evidence is embarrassing, and stupidity is a stigmatized condition in our society. It's also hard not to assign blame--can child stupidity really be an accident? But the problem is more widespread than anyone wants to admit. It's not rare or isolated, and parents need to know that they are not alone in dealing with stupid kids.

Becky, a mother of three, confesses to being horrified when she realized all of her kids were stupid. "They were SO DUMB," she says. "I was terrified all the time that other people would find out. They would leave their shoes right next to the shoe organizer instead of putting them inside. They put clean shirts in the laundry and dirty shirts back in their drawers. They used my hand lotion even though I'd explained to them 75 times that I could smell it on them when they did it and they'd get in trouble. I was afraid to go out in public. There was no way I could hide how stupid they were."

Becky was also afraid to tell her doctor about her suspicions. As it turned out, she didn't have to. Her kids acted stupid everywhere, and the doctor's office was no exception. But although it was obvious the doctor had noticed how dumb Becky's kids were, he didn't have a suggestion, a prescription, or even a visible reaction. "At that point, I really didn't know what to do," she says. "My six-year-old licks her shoes in front of a medical professional and everybody acts like nothing is happening? I felt so alone."

Finally, Becky confided in a friend. "The floodgates just burst," she remembers. "My friend told me that she busted her kids for trying to make strawberry milk with ketchup three times in one week, and they had a spitting contest off the balcony while she was cleaning the floor below, and her baby consumed something so vile that she wouldn't even tell me what it was. It almost sounded like her kids were as dumb as mine."

"The key to living with childhood stupidity is having realistic expectations," says Dr. Timbo Blogworthy, a father of seven and leading researcher in the field of childhood stupidity. "If you have a dumb kid, you have to know that your kid is going to do dumb things all the time and there's nothing you can do about it. Sure, tell him what's going to happen today and practice how he should act. But don't expect it to go right, because with a stupid kid it just won't. That's the nature of stupidity. Your life is going to stink until your kid gets less stupid or moves out. What the **** is oozing out of my Aldens?"

Rebecca, like Becky, has also found comfort in camaraderie. "After my sister had a baby, she called me with a lot of questions. One of the first questions she had was, 'If he has to nurse to live, why can't he nurse?' I knew exactly what to tell her. It's hard to hear, but childhood stupidity is a lot easier to live with when you know you're not the only one."

For infant and childhood stupidity support in your area, talk to the first parent you see.

At-home kids

Sometimes I get the feeling my kids think they'd be better kids to me if they left the house for 8-10 hours a day to do things they were good at and be with people other than parents. You know, they'd appreciate our time together more that way.

Humans

I know I've read Are Women Human? by Dorothy Sayers, but I don't own it and Google suffices to turn up the generally favored bits. Dorothy is obviously much more gifted than I in such matters, but now I can't remember if her essays contained what I think is simplest answer to her quasi-rhetorical question: it is certain that women are human because Jesus is a man. The saving of our fallen race did not require sex-specific incarnations, much less experiences. Male and female he created them, male and female he redeemed them. "That which he has not assumed he has not healed," and he himself has said, "Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague."

Hap

From Pastor Weedon:

[God] wants us to be holy so that we may be truly blessed; and blessedness is even better than happiness.  I'd stand by that:  blessedness doesn't ride on the ups and downs of our emotions.  It rises above them.  And since God often uses adversity and trials to give us growth in holiness (yes, holiness is given you whole and entire in your Baptism, but I refer to growing up into the salvation that is yours), there are times of sadness that come our way on this path toward the fuller inner appropriation of that holiness which results in blessedness.  

I know this is one of those things someone out there thinks someone such as myself should never think or say, but the truth is that there are days when I pretty much don't feel happy until I'm in bed again. And then in that bed at the end of that day, I roll over and thank my husband for the wonderful life he's given me and tell him I am happy. Because even when I don't feel happy I am happy. I'm happy that there are certain things about which I will never have to wonder. I'm happy that there are certain regrets (or at least certain magnitudes of regret) I know I won't have. I'm happy that I have six baptized children even though life with them can sometimes land me back in bed having felt only inadequate and furious and unappreciated and imprisoned and sinful pretty much since I got out of it. If you could spy on my face during the day you might see clouds on it. So I'm sorry you can't see past the false strength of those clouds into the blazing sun that is my soul. I often feel sad, but I still consider myself happy because I know I am blessed.

And I don't want to burn you.

Uncool

People cite many reasons for not choosing the big family life. The reason few people are honest enough to cite is what I guess we must call "style" or "popularity" or "anti-loserishness".

Because, let's face it, big family people are dorks. They look like they just came from the last hour of a garage sale on Doublewide Drive, or the super weird ones even dress up like they're Amish or something. They can't shut up about homeschooling and &$*% breastfeeding and #$^&@%#$#$@ homebirth. The wives always end up looking like heaps of hairy blubber and the husbands are just creepy hagbait with giant guts (must be all those kids, ha ha ha ha ha). They have to drive those Baptist church vans to fit all their spawn in, how is that Lutheran, ha ha ha ha ha? It's fine that some people have a lot of kids, but . . . dorks!

It would sound pretty shallow to engineer one's family on the basis of coolness, though, and the myriad other reasons couched in terms of responsibility and stewardship sound downright mature. But the truth is that skinny jeans and makeup and generally not being a loser are a surprisingly big deal to a lot of people who ostensibly left high school a long time ago.

Little children, grow up. We know very well that all that cruel snobbery we can just say was a joke if we get cornered is a spiteful caricature we have based on a few people we didn't like. Coolness is the extremely silly wealth of a too-wealthy people, and our Lord has nothing but warnings for the rich man.

Of course we'd all totally die for Jesus no prob, but of most of us he does not make so straightforward a request. Most of us he asks merely to be despised and rejected even as he was. Which is to say, among other things, uncool; renouncing in large part the clothing, entertainment, demeanor, speech, and camaraderie of the World around us. Would I give up my edgy hipness for a meek and quiet spirit? Would I stop making a point of denouncing badly dressed weirdness to make sure everybody knows I'm not one of those losers even if we do all go to the same church? Would I risk appearing to be allied with (or at least refuse to speak ill of) that annoying hippie and her annoying hippie friends* who happen to be my sisters in Christ? Would I give up the ax I've been grinding so long on the backs of badly dressed weirdos to do right by the husband, the baby, the children, the church, the neighbors God has given or would give me?

I don't like being a weirdo. I have, idiotically, been jealous of the cool people since the time I was old enough to perceive their exclusivity. Although I'm getting pretty old and crusty, there are times when I hate knowing that I, with my six kids and my pragmatically determined appearance and my six-kid-centric lifestyle and my boring hangup on the same, am the loser the cool people are still sneering at. Little child, grow up.

*And this one is really dangerous, as I have been terribly embarrassed to find the hippies much kinder, humbler, and more accepting of others than I am. Organic jerks, making me feel all bad and stuff . . . .

"Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?"

It was befuddling to see Madonna working the crowd with her trademark methods during this year's big halftime show, and not because she has clearly purchased a sort of youth. It is befuddling to think why anyone Madonna's age would still WANT to shake her skirt like that.

I turn 35 this year. It is evident that in my body I have passed my solstice and will soon begin slouching through my dog days. My pride doesn't like it, but my more reasonable side finds some comfort in the idea that there is coming a day when my flesh will have proved itself, and the heat of summer will come to an end.

When the North Wind blows through my life and carries all my birds to the warmth of their own summers, there will still be sunshine enough, God willing, for all the days of autumn. To think of fighting that wind, of gathering up my falling leaves in taut, synthetic bags, and working to confuse eyes with my brittling branches . . . No. No running, or painting, or afflicting myself for growing old. What must be, will be.

Besides, autumn is an enchanting season: she has gained so much from the sun that she more fully reflects its colors; she blesses her people with unexpected bursts of warmth; she shelters the time of harvest and prepares the soil for generations of life to come. Sing to the Lord, for autumn is at hand! There is still much, very much, to do! And not a second to waste groping after a spent spring. An honest Spring is coming, and soon, and it will appear in the sky without our doing a thing. In the meantime, dignity as we await the snow.

I think I'll go for a walk!

Stir occasionally and keep track of the water

Here's something that seems weird to me about babysitting/day care: the kids get attention paid directly, exclusively to them all the time. That's not how it works at home (mine, anyway). At home I spend as much time as possible picking up, cleaning up, cooking, doing laundry, and whatever else I can to keep this place operational as long as the kids are operational without my direct involvement. They usually kind of follow me around while I do these things and find things of their own to do in the same vicinity (I wear the baby or park her where I'm working). Eventually I get tired enough and/or they whine enough that I will sit down and read books to them for a while (I almost never "play"--I am a grownup, and they can knock down blocks without my help). Then I feed them something and we go back to our semi-interactive businesses for a while. This cycle repeats throughout the day.

A child care arrangement is designed solely around keeping children occupied/entertained. No adult there has to make supper or straighten the bedrooms or keep up with laundry. While I am very aware that it is my job to care for my children and teach them what they need to know, this does not mean that I spend every minute of our shared day crawling around on the floor and providing them with structured activities. My caring for them includes providing an acceptably livable house and decent meals, and that means they don't have my undivided attention all the time. I am always with them, but I am not always singularly engaged with them. I have more jobs here than just child care--thank goodness, because I (like many women and nearly all men) would go completely insane if talking to babies was all the day held for me.

The babies are not a Crock Pot, but they are definitely not a wok. They're more like a double boiler.

Bummer.

There are lots of reasons why it’s sad to live far from grandparents.** (And aunts, and uncles… And cousins!)

There’s the obvious: it’d be really great to have an extra hand on deck every now and again, and also nice if Dad didn’t have to rearrange his schedule every time someone needed a doctor’s appointment. It’d also be pretty great to have grandparents at things like baptisms, Christmas programs, and birthdays. More importantly, how precious it would be to see the heads of those generations regularly bent together over a project, with skills and quiet wisdom imparted simply through the togetherness. While those moments can and do happen in the midst of whirlwind out-of-town visits, they’re simply not the norm when routines are disrupted and everyone’s clamoring for the scarce novelty of Grandpa’s attention or Grandma’s lap.

Here’s another tough thing about living far from grandparents: it’s so easy for a mom to lose perspective, in the midst of the daily fray, on the hilarious, wondrous small persons in her constant charge. While our parents love our kids just about as unconditionally and fiercely as do we, they are, in some ways, more ideally positioned to appreciate the singular qualities of a child that we’ve lost sight of in the midst of daily disciplinary and educational necessities. I’m ashamed to admit how easy it is for me to fall into thinking of a kid as being a particular issue, rather than as being a marvelously complex person who happens, like the rest of us humans, to have some issues.

It would just be really great if grandparents were here more often to remind me, simply by being with the kids and loving them as only a grandparent can, that Kid B’s maddening quirks are balanced by that special sparkle in his eye and by the hugs that he passes out at day’s end, no matter what’s gone down. And that the vexing habits of Kid A are nothing compared to the comic relief he provides. And that Kid C is still only three, for heaven’s sake, and isn’t his innocent-mischief face just adorable? And that by the time the toddling Girlbaby acquires the competencies that make her easier to live with, much of her squishable-baby-loveness will be outgrown as well.

Ah, the double-edged sword of good grandparents: more to treasure—more to miss.

**I’m not really complaining, especially since I know how much farther many other people are—physically or emotionally—from relatives. Our parents are great about making efforts to stay connected and regularly travel the distance to help out whenever possible. No, I’m not complaining…just thinking greedily ;P

What to expect, Month four

The day arrives (especially if this is not your first pregnancy) when you go to bed with a paunchy little pooch and wake up with a full-blown baby belly.

As you contemplate this development with astonishment, it occurs to you that there might be twins in there. Twins! Or triplets! Triplets!!! What if there are triplets in there?! Forgetting all the statistics that you know, forsaking all rationality, you suddenly envision yourself trying to nurse triplets (!!!) whilst cooking supper for the rest of your clamoring young brood. Panicking, you can’t decide which is more daunting at this point in your career: the thought that there might be more than one baby in there, or the thought that your belly might just be that big already. You Google multiples, smile at the pictures of parents who’ve mastered the art of double-slinging babies, and choke on the price of the triple jogging stroller.

At your next doctor’s appointment, you tentatively raise the twin theory. Your doctor laughs at you, then recommends cutting back on both the flights of fancy and the carbs.

It’s awfully nice to know what to expect, at least.

It appears as though there are several of these in the oven.