The Good

In which I try to explain why I feel like often when I speak honestly it's sad and angry, because on the whole I don't feel like a sad and angry person, and if you ran into me at church or on the sidewalk you wouldn't think I was either.

The trying and tiring and disheartening and isolating are easy to write about, because everyone has known them, and we long to be known as we endure them. There is no mystery in weariness, because everyone has cried out "Why?" and "How long?" We share our sadness so that we will not be sad alone.

But while happy families may be all alike, the Good is much harder to share. It is too easily caricatured into the insipid, too quickly candied by a sentimental recipient mind. Finding a word truer than an innocuous "wonderful" to express the mystery of our private joys is dangerous. The Good is too intimate to describe or share; even, sometimes, to think about. To touch it is to risk cheapening it, and to share it is to risk turning it into someone else's boredom.

The weight of a warm, confused baby when you lift her from her nap; the way a little boy trotting along clumpily in overalls supersaturates the heart; watching how a bowl of grapes (!) can make a little one the single happiest person on earth; the extemporaneous sacred yodeling of an aspiring hymnwriter; the incisive question unexpectedly sprouted from the hidden mind of one's own child; that hour when everyone is together and laughing and a mother knows she's the center of all these people by God's grace--that is already being shared with the only people who can truly delight in it, in the moment in which it is real and now. It's Better that way, if you ask me.

Fancy a costume?

This had us ROFLOL. But then, we're us.

N.B. The under-10 set won't get the joke. Wait till they're passed out in a sugar coma before watching. :D

More fun with the phone

I hate those phone calls. A hapless coed from my Jesuit alma mater was trying to squeeze me for cash. But before these people get to their real point, we have to suffer together through the scripted chat-em-up, wherein they pretend to care about my graduate school experience and my life thereafter. She really had an uphill battle last night, since even I had no interest whatsoever in discussing my graduate school experience or my life thereafter. (Yawn.)

Hapless Coed (HC): So, I see that we have your current employer listed as . . . Homemaker. Is that still correct?

Me: [Chuckling over her rather clumsy handling of the script, especially since she’d told me she was a communications major.] Yes, that’s me.

HC: OK . . . So, what all does that entail?

Me: [More interested in my book than in this little game, but still feeling conventionally polite enough to censor my kneejerk response, which involved detailed explanations of the bodily functions of small and unruly persons.] Oh, you know, all the stuff that makes a house a home.

HC: Hmm . . . OK . . . So would that be more like interior design, or are you involved in the actual construction of homes?

Me: [Laughing out loud now, as I realize that the poor dear really doesn’t know.] I’m a stay-at-home-mom.

HC: Oh! Riiiiight . . . I’ve got you now.

I don’t think she’s the only starry-eyed undergrad in that call center who’d need “homemaking” explained. I only wish I had realized sooner that Homemaker, or Minister of the Interior, or Humble Servant, or whatever you want to call it, can be a legitimate and full-time occupation. I could have used my dormitory days to far better effect.

After I disappointed the caller’s earnest desire to get that pledge card out to you right now, I hung up, and I thought—I’d rather be giving out kisses for sweet dreams than dreaming big in a lonely dorm room. That hapless coed is burdened with the need to write the story of her own life. Exhilarating? Maybe…but also weighty, with the feeling of fate hanging on every decision. And even terrifying, fraught with agony over whether the mishandling of a subplot might not destroy the entire tone and trajectory of the grand opus.

I do expend much prayer and effort, even agony, in the earnest desire that my children’s names appear, along with my own, in the Who’s Whose. But oh, how sweet the comfort in knowing that the trajectory of this Grand Opus will not be mishandled! The story has been written, the main plot played out. The Hero has overcome. The mighty task has been completed. In the subplots, we groan desperately for a more final catharsis, but we know, even as we yearn, that consummation is surely coming. The more I lose myself in the larger plot, the more I’m rescued from the quixotic quest to “find myself.” No matter what I do or don’t with my life, that Day draws closer, every day.

God knows I can’t be trusted to write my own story. Thankfully, all I’ve got to do is follow the script. And it helps if I play my part as though I mean it. So if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some serious rehearsing to do.

Dream big

Every one of us has heard the line, “You be sure to enjoy that baby. Children grow up so fast . . .”

Why do people say this? I do not think it is because they are ill-intentioned; they almost always say it with a kind smile or a friendly pat. But, seriously, why do people say this? Do they remember regretfully the screaming matches they had with their five-year-olds, and hope to help us avoid a similar regret? Are they swollen with nostalgia for footie pajamas and sleep wrinkles? Are they disappointed in how their own children turned out, and wishing they could reclaim all that lost potential?

The world may never know. I think, more often than not, people simply default to that line for lack of anything else to say. Regardless of the motivation, I always want to respond by smiling politely and whispering, “No.”

No, I’m not going to be able to enjoy the baby, because, you see, she is a baby, and an inordinate amount of work. She has several horrible habits, which I would be only too happy to detail for you, should you have the time. Let’s just say, between the reckless pooping and her penchant for yelling at me every waking moment, she’s really difficult to enjoy. Thanks, anyway, for the good hearted advice, but I can’t live up to it.

Ah, the serenity!

Here’s the truth: I’m not blind. If I’m a wretch, why wouldn’t my kids be wretches? They fight, spill, poop, backtalk, fling, dirty, and whoop their way right out of my good sentiments hourly. I love them—viciously, rebelliously, committedly—and I love them because they are mine. But I love them in spite of the fact that, tragically, I can’t enjoy them most of the time.

There are, however, moments—and each second is a gift—when I like my children. It is in these moments that I like them very much: the boy may be working diligently on inventing a machine for knocking down a tower of blocks, and in his furrowed brow I will see the workings of a man; the girl may be concentrating hard on her homework, and in her soft eyes I will see the glimmer of womanhood. Sometimes, even the toddler and the baby will, in breathless flashes, offer glimpses of the adults they might someday become: the women waiting behind the impish chins.

I feel genuinely blessed to be the recipient of sticky kisses and to hear the laughter of infants. But, at the end of the day, I like my children as people, not, implicitly, as children. And I dream of the day when I am surrounded by grown children, their legs stretched under my table, their voices deep and full. I fervently and readily pray God’s mercy upon me and my family, for my pain will be palpable should even one of my grown babies be missing from my table in my later days. I do not wish to imagine how awful it would be should one of them fail to appear at His. Come soon, Lord Jesus . . .

In the meantime, I struggle to put my trust in God's promises, and believe that the prayers of a righteous man availeth much. They will never outgrow their Baptisms nor will they outgrow my prayers. And believing this, I am free to spend my days looking for and praising the adults I see emerging in my kids--because, yes, they do grow up so fast. Isn’t it great?

The fluidity of sin

Sin takes the shape of its container.

We live easy lives of refrigerators, insulation, and plumbing. I didn't die of postpartum hemorrhaging, our son didn't die of pneumonia. This is a comfortable historical moment, and yet we're barely keeping it together. If kids don't have tuberculosis, sin invents something or other to render them inoperable (yes, yes, kids are overmedicated--but aren't we all afraid to say it in front of the parents whose kid can't function without his meds?). Medicine beat polio, and sin crippled us with panic attacks. Develop an economy that frees people from working like dogs, and soon they're slaves to sloth. Sin has programmed us to break down under afflictions great or small. Where it cannot brutally annihilate, it inexorably aggravates.

I'll take the petty complaints of my life any day over losing half my children before their first birthdays, and I know that my trials don't begin to compare to those of our brothers and sisters elsewhen and -where. But at the same time, rich Americans are sad people, like all of sin's victims. Every person staggers under her cross, whether that cross is a relentless series of negative pregnancy tests, or a relentless succession of kids, or a deliberate two with a house in the suburbs.

Force times distance

Polite people ask, "Does she work outside the home?" as opposed to, "Does she work?" We all know in these enlightened, non-judgmental times that women who stay home work just as much as everyone else (wink, wink).

I recently heard my favorite pastor respond to this polite usage by saying, "You don't have to say that. Women who stay home don't work, they serve." Semantics, I know--and yes, Newton would describe what we do as work, and we've all got the sore feet or backs or round ligaments to prove it. But I appreciate it anyway. I'm not anybody's office slave, I don't answer to a board, and I don't agonize over whether I'm on the downsize list or if I should be asking for a raise to prove how valuable I know I am. The better I do at what I'm doing, the better my family is served. Some days that only means everybody eats food and wears weather-appropriate clothing, and some days I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I manage to pull off. And the other people who live here just keep loving me every day the same.

Weight up

We all know motherhood is everyone's excuse for not fitting into her wedding dress, which is often true and a fine rationale as far as I'm concerned. But there are some for whom parturition and its environs have the opposite effect. After a few months of nursing the chub down, I haven't had trouble getting into any dress I've worn in the past 10+ years. Lest your VBA alarm begin sounding, let me assure you that this does not mean I look at all good. If a blushing maiden is a slender birch and a fruitful matron is a shapely linden, I'm Charlie Brown's Christmas tree once the baby hits about 6 months. Which, at 30, is just the look I was going for.

I think this skirt really helps.

The strange workings of this cellular mass I've been issued (heretofore, anyway--every time I'm pregnant I think, well, this is the time I'll chunk up, so watch this space) have brought to my attention a fertility issue that doesn't get as much press, because most health care providers spend their time lecturing us about how terribly terrible it is to be overweight. As someone who puts on a lot of weight during pregnancy, I'm quite familiar with this too. But having very low body fat can be an impediment to conception. I'm an idiot and know nothing about medicine, chiro, magnetism, Brewer's yeast, or your health care belief system of choice, but I've read that having one's convenient health proxy known as BMI in the 19 or lower range can put a girl in problem territory in terms of fertility.

The preachy hobbyhorse I'm getting at for CSPP types is this: a woman of childbearing age should think very carefully before she decides to train for the Iron Man. 12% body fat may be what we see on the cover of Shape, but that is not a good shape for a mother in her fertile years.

Being physically fit is not, for us, about looking great on the beach or running a marathon or holding our own on the tennis court or fitting into our wedding dresses or getting back to a certain weight. It is about maintaining the healthy body necessary for the nurturing of a new life--which is probably rounder and definitely softer than what we've been hypnotized into considering attractive.

Most moms can benefit from taking a walk when they get a chance. For some people that walk wisely replaces a listless hour on the couch, and for others it wisely replaces a sweaty, panting hour in the gym. It's either ignorant or disingenuous for those who don't need to take off a few pounds to say, "If I get pregnant while I train for my marathon, I'll just quit." Training itself may well put the body out of commission for pregnancy.

I feel pretty!

Physical fitness is a vain god of our time, and as grotesque a caricature of the ideal it imitates as any vain god. Resisting the temptation to fitness excess (whether through exercise or starvation) has direct and quantifiable consequences for the ongoing work of mothers.

The problem with sewing machines

is that they're MACHINES.

No fate but what we make for ourselves.

Churchmomship

A properly executed headlock will appear, to the average pewsitter, like a loving maternal embrace.

From this headlock position, advanced practitioners may apply gentle pressure to an earlobe of the offending child, if an additional reminder is indicated.

Threats and ultimatums, when murmured with a pleasant expression, will likewise trouble no one but the youngster whose conscience is asking, nay, begging, to be troubled.

Homeschooling, hooligan-style

Homeschooling is a novelty around here. I get the impression that some of the venerable ladies of the congregation suspect, based on their observations of churchyard goings-on, that “homeschooling” consists mainly of hooligans running about outside. One retired schoolteacher, whenever she sees us outdoors during “normal school hours,” makes a special point of asking whether “we” are having class outside today, when she can see for herself that what “we” are in fact doing is chasing each other and the dog around the yard with balls and sticks. (Um—Animal exercise physiology class?)


I have two reactions to this perception of our family’s Great Homeschooling Adventure:

1) How sad, that they should be so mistaken.
2) They’re so, so right. :P