Reb. Mary's news sends me into a dither

I hate knowing that someone is in labor. I am a mess until I get the baby report. I keep checking the clock, my stomach is all twisty, I'll even start sweating or breathing shallowly or crying if I think about it too much. I have to force myself not to call the grandma every fifteen minutes to find out if it's over. All I can think is, someone is suffering terribly right now. How can I go about my normal life knowing that something awful is happening? I could never be a doula. I'd spend the whole time hysterical and begging God for mercy. I can't think about my daughters giving birth some day because of the psychosomatic risks. They are five and two, so now is probably a good time to start panicking about it. Must keep typing.

Once I got word of a very bad labor experience which of course got me upset, and I mentioned it to a friend who had never given birth. This person suspected the traumatized mother to be someone on whom I wished some adversity and asked if I were really just sad or if there were some schadenfreude involved. I had to calm myself down by reminding myself that the experience of labor changes one's perception of it drastically. Labor is not a this stinks bad day or a gol-durnit clogged toilet. There is truly not a person in the world on whom I would wish a "bad" labor. They are all bad. It is far too terrible to wish it any worse, and I speak as someone who has never had a complicated delivery. I wish no one had to go through it, especially my favorite person, me.

The scary thing is that I want to say no one deserves to go through childbirth. The truth, ye who think of sin but lightly, is that childbirth is exactly what we deserve.

Anyway. The worse the labor, the worse the fear of going through it again. And that's a fear that just doesn't need to get any worse.

More Advent-appropriate reading

From Wendell Berry's "The Slip"

Nothing, having arrived, will stay.
The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon
passeth it away. And yet this nothing
is the seed of all—the clear eye
of Heaven, where all the worlds appear.
Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect
begins its struggle to return. The good gift
begins again its descent. The maker moves
in the unmade, stirring the water until
it clouds, dark beneath the surface,
stirring and darkening the soul until pain
perceives new possibility. There is nothing
to do but learn and wait, return to work
on what remains. Seed will sprout in the scar.
Though death is in the healing, it will heal.

Pax vobiscum

One of those silly, jumbly kid memories I have is thinking that the Communion hosts were called "peace." I arrived at this conclusion by conflating the two facts available to me, as kids will to make sense of things that haven't been explained to them: that they were "pieces" of bread, and that the pastor held one up and said, "The Peace of the Lord be with you always" right before everyone went up to get one. I couldn't have been more than four when I thought this, since we moved from the church in which I remember thinking it after that.

How precious a misperception. Even now, when I see a host, the word that reflexively comes to my mind is "peace." I hope many other English-speaking children are confused into the same clarity.

The risk(s) of birth

Until my eye, by divine coincidence, fell upon this poem today, I had forgotten that Madeline L’Engle also wrote poetry (I always associate her with the marvelous Wrinkle in Time trilogy). Yesterday and today, between long-distance updates on a very extended labor, I spent quite a bit of time contemplating the risks of birth for mother and child. (I’M AN AUNT!!! I’M AN AUNT!!! I’M AN AUNT!!! HOORAY!!! Er. Sorry ’bout the shouting. Just a wee bit excited--and relieved!--here. I would also like to add, for the record, that my SIL is Awesome :D)

So. Leafing through an Advent program this morning, I happened across L’Engle’s “The Risk of Birth”:

This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war and hate
And a nova lighting the sky to warn
That time runs out and the sun burns late.
That was no time for a child to be born,
In a land in the crushing grip of Rome;
Honour and truth were trampled by scorn—
Yet here did the Saviour make his home.
When is the time for love to be born?
The inn is full on the planet earth,
And by greed and pride the sky is torn
Love still takes the risk of birth.

Kinda makes the people who so virtuously decline to bring children into this world on the basis of its awfulness seem kinda…stingy, does it not?

Love still takes the risk of birth.

Time to sign off; all this long-distance laboring is quite exhausting, I find.

Oppression

Once my husband told me that men would always be superior to women because of non-bipedal micturation or distractability by shiny objects or something like that. He is right that men will always be superior to women, but the actual reason is that women have to wear pantyhose.

First of all, they're called pantyhose. This is offensive in the extreme.

Have you seen them? What would possess any person to try to put their legs in them? As if the lower extremities of half the human race are bulk sausage.

What short of childbirth surpasses the humiliation of manuevering oneself into a pair? The humiliation is then magnified by the numerous children looking on and offering criticisms of both process and physique.

Buy the cheap ones and they're full of runs after one wearing. Buy the expensive ones and you bought the expensive ones, which still get runs.

I spend my whole Sunday morning dodging the kids. My two year old follows me around manhandling my weird feeling unskin. The baby cries as I dance about the kitchen, knife in hand, so he can't reach me to shimmy up my pantyhoed legs while I slice potatoes. I spend the sermon watching everyone's feet lest a prickly Velcro shoe fastener grab on and leave me looking like That Mom for the rest of the day.

Control tops.

Why not pants? Well . . . [she admits it grudgingly] men like dresses. Husbands want wives to wear dresses, and pastors think women should wear dresses to church. Some will come right out and say it, but most suspect they will be perceived as vaguely jerky so they drop hints and hope we'll notice. They think this is clever. In fact it is not clever because women communicate this way most of the time. Moreover, we do think it's vaguely jerky*. But Victor Hugo helpfully explains, "One of the magnanimities of woman is to yield." So in addition to all the other bad choices to which this magnanimity leads us (such as setting precedents for labor intensive Sunday meals), we who would otherwise never consider forfeiting our immeasurably more practical pants assume dresses, and therefore pantyhose, and therefore inferiority yet another day.

Because of the angels

(Pastors also want hats to come back, but seriously, dudes. Seriously.)

*Pam probably doesn't; however, she is a Nice Person and Good Wife.

UPDATE: Link corrected via elimination. It's in Les Miserables. Wasn't that a handy way to get to your inbox, though?

HEE haw

Why are very young children expected to know what noises animals make? If I have a kid who only knows four words, why would I want any of them to be moo or oink?

True friendship

You know you're really friends with someone when you can tell their kids to shape up. I'm sure all those little Gauntlets hate me. :D And if I ever get to spend any more time in the physical presence of Reb. Mary's crew, well, they'll hate me too.

Please consider yourselves not just authorized, but encouraged and implored to straighten out my children when they are acting rotten. It helps my credibility so much.

With bridal care yourselves prepare

We don't keep the Advent fast as scrupulously as the Lent fast. There are all those social obligations making it difficult. But I love the Advent fast because it brings back all those dear memories of crash dieting and binge exercising that went on in the months and weeks before our wedding (sorry, Billy Blanks, but there's a new man in my life). And then there was that morning I rose with the sun to spend hours of alternating stricken paralysis and frantic ablution alone in my parents' bathroom, the day I told myself I'd try the cake a year from now . . . :D

Good times, that juxtaposition of truest joy and pure terror. Eyes on the skies, guys!

Don’t kill the messenger

Household phenomenon #217: The Antigone Ploy a.k.a. She'll Never Bury My Sibling

The toddler stomps into kitchen where I stand (so call it?) at the sink, my hands immersed in lemony suds.

“MAMA! Wead. Book.”

“Not now, dear.”

The toddler walks back to the play room for a bit, then returns to grab my pants leg with authority and again make known her request.

“MAMA! Wead. Book. Now.”

“Go away, darling, I’m busy.”

The toddler again walks back to the play room and is gone a bit longer this time. When she returns, she pushes so that she now stands between my legs and the sink counter. I have little choice; it’s either fall on top of her (a bit front heavy, are we?) or stop working. Assured of my attention, she endures the suds dripping on her head long enough to furrow up her brow, put on her most ferocious pucker, and demand, “MAMA! WEAD. BOOK. NOW!”

“What’s gotten into you, you little ape?” I ask. Then I see them: the Big Sister and Brother peeking out the play room door. Sister holds a much beloved picture book in her hand. Brother’s eyes have a certain devious shine.

There’s only one thing to do. I waddle myself over to the play room door, wafting lemony freshness all the way.

“You want a book?” I ask.

“Yes, Mama.” They say.

“Why did you send your sister to ask for it?”

“Because she’s so cute!”

“Did you tell her to yank on my pants?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Did you tell her to shove me away from the sink?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“ . . . how nice.”

Whereupon I shut the door and walk (if I may be so bold to assume) away.

Blessed be the name of the Lord

I like to think that we who scrutinize our own procreative faithfulness carefully are sensitive to the fact that only God can give life. Simply counting children is not a valid assessment of a couple's procreative ethic. There are such tragic realities as infertility and other impediments to the blessing of children, and only the crassest of critics would make assumptions as to why a husband and wife have the family they do based solely on visible information.

This illustrates how insensitive, offensive, and hurtful it is when our brothers and sisters in Christ, especially in our own confession, are so quick to criticize a parish with a modest, steady, or declining membership. What does someone outside a parish family know of that family's internal life? It is just as foolish, uncharitable, and potentially cruel to judge a congregation by its communicant count as it would be foolish, uncharitable, and cruel to tell a random childless couple that they should repent of their refusal of God's gifts. Must every family be huge? Plainly God does not give a plenitude of children to every couple. It is presumptuous and abusive to demand of either a husband and his wife or a pastor and his parish a fruitfulness which a man's will is powerless to generate.

Like many childless couples who are misled by conventional wisdom to pursue children through questionable or immoral reproductive technologies, some parishes seek to grow through ill-informed or even theologically dangerous practices. Many couples come out of years of fertility treatments with crushed spirits, wasted bodies, and empty bank accounts, childless nonetheless. So do many parishes sell their catholic birthright for a mess of zeitgeist pottage with no change in numbers to show for it. Their time cannot be reclaimed, and the damage must be corrected through great effort for those willing to bear the cost of repentance. They languish alone, stories untold on convention screens or in official publications.

God grant us all to trust, be content, and offer him thanks whether he gives in staggering abundance or withholds his hand, and to think and speak of all other families in charity.