Feeble words

Miscarriage is a killing frost that drives a woman in on herself. It pushes her life into her roots, deep into private soils. It drives her into isolated darkness, wherein she meets and is measured by all that she has ever trusted, all that she has ever loved.

Miscarriage stands each woman apart on her own small patch of earth to grapple the brambles of death. It bids her to bleed alone; there is no other way. It bids her to cry alone, and to mourn alone. It traps her alone in a tomb of confusion and doubt, pain and anger, circumstance and superstition.

Miscarriage rends asunder, but Christ is risen from the dead. He is close to His daughters, much closer than death. He breathes upon them a Spirit of Life which cannot ever die and which cannot be driven down by the cold. He pours healing wine into their wounds and places into their mouths His Flesh, whereby He joins Himself to them in their very bones. And in His Church, He gives His daughters unto each other, that they might carry their burdens together. Alone in space, each is never alone in Him.

Sisters, it is dark where you stand, and so very terribly cold. But you are not alone. The morning comes which brings with it His blessed Eucharist, whereby we, His daughters, stand together and cry in our misery before Him who regards us so tenderly. And in the Morning (the signs abound!) we will each be called forth by name, never again to be alone in the tomb. And our children will be returned to our arms. And these tears, stored by God in His bottle, will be found credited to our accounts, already overfull with the merits of Christ Jesus our savior.

How long, oh, Lord? How long?

The stickiest PSA

We have a pretty extensive Schleich collection. That's right. I'm one of those cruel, thoughtless mothers who allows her children to play with toys made out of PVC. You can judge me later. Right now, listen up.

In addition to our Schleich collection, we have what we like to call, "The Toddler." This creature has worn many faces over the years, but it is always lurking about like a young lion seeking to destroy. For reasons that remain a mystery, it most dearly loves dismantling the best-liked of the PVC toys.

What a dilemma, right? The Toddler we will always have with us, and PVC doesn't just grow on trees. Neither does it respond well to any attempt to fix it with glue ...

UNTIL NOW. 

Here's what you do: Find a glue-friendly surface (like a Post-It note!). Dump a bit of baby powder (or some other talcum stuff) on your glue-friendly surface. Mix several drops of super glue (whatever brand you like; we have Gorilla) into your baby powder pile until you have a gloppy paste. Apply gloppy paste to broken PVC toy and hold broken pieces together for something like 30 seconds. Leave to dry completely. 

Voila. That beloved poisonous thing is fixed and you're a big hero for doing the fixing. Booyah, grandma.   

Book, recommended (particularly for those of us who are currently in a season of “little years” that may leave us short on sleep, reading time, coherent thoughts, temper…)

A dear person gave me this deceptively little book, and I am so glad that she did. Though some of its self-contained chapters don’t quite reach two pages, each one has exponential potential for unpacking through prayer, self-examination, and action (at least for those of us who are in need of a perspective check, which describes me approximately every other minute or so).

I skimmed it once, quickly, and it’s still all whooshing around in the churn. I plan to read it again, slowly now, to work at getting some of the cream to come together, solidify.

I needed to read a book about the “little years” again. I know that I’m still a total amateur in this parenting thing; I don’t even have a kid in the double digits yet. But after having been at it for such a seemingly long time (B.C. is but a lazy, hazy memory), a creeping frustration was beginning to darken my days—the feeling that I should surely have somehow moved beyond the “little years” by now, or at least should have become more breezily adept at coping with the daily fatigues of the preschool-toddler-infant set. I’ve got bigger fish in need of frying now; why am I still wiping bottoms and teaching people the alphabet and pretending to be patient while a two-year-old works to put on her own shoes? True: I don’t feel the weight of every decision anywhere near as heavily as I did when I had only two littles. But neither do I feel like an old pro at things like potty training and toddler discipline and babies who cry in the middle of the night. I just feel...old, and tired, and frankly sometimes just tired of it all. In short, I needed a good kick in the pants, which this book cheerfully provided. Thank you, Rachel Jankovic!

Perhaps I’ll have more to say about the book as I reread, but for the moment, I’ll leave you with an image that instantly and helpfully crystallized some of my recent musings. Jankovic uses it to describe what she calls “growth spurts” (those times when you feel like you’ve just gotten a handle on things, and then, seemingly overnight, the kids all show up with entirely new variations on crazy). The image is also quite apt for household adjustment whenever a new baby arrives:

“You know those pain scales at the hospital, where they rate your pain from one to ten? Well, pretend that you are screaming, “Thirteen, thirteen! Fifteen!” What that should tell you is that it is time to restart the whole thing, stop screaming, and just accept that this is now the new ‘one.’ Start over, and accept the new ‘normal.’ I promise that this little mental change will actually change how you feel, and by extension how your children feel. Growing is, after all, what God wants them [and us!] to do.”

So if you’re screaming “fifteen!”, or tired, or overwhelmed (Jankovic offers a helpfully convicting perspective on the “o-word” too), you just might want to spend a few minutes a day with this book, which helpfully smacked me back toward the Book whose perspective should frame my every moment.

Martha, Martha, even more than last time.

Hate writing about this; hate saying I can't stop myself.

We had a rotten fall here this past year. We lost two beloved sisters in Christ. Both losses were suffocatingly difficult, although in different ways. Both sisters had cancer.

As the day was surely drawing nigh for each, and with cruel proximity to each other, I found myself begging our Lord with even greater than usual fervor that He would come with clouds descending; that Bonnie and Jen would be raised from their sickbeds and gaze with us on His glorious scars.

Why? Why did I keep praying this? I was embarrassed to admit the answer. I didn't want either of them to die. O death, where is thy sting? And yet, 

at some point it is realized or admitted that a sick person just can't get well outside of extremely miraculous intervention. Anyone who has seen someone travel this awful road knows that although God can certainly bring about any miracle, He has made no such promise. In the absence of the miracle, the main thing we want for the suffering person is peace in Christ, comfort, and freedom from pain. Though we pray for the miracle, we must also pray as those who know that miracle is not promised.

I didn't want my sisters to have to die. I did not want them to pass into that black and stinking maw. I wanted the ultimate Deus ex machina for them and all of us.

"Lord, if you hadst been here, my brother had not died."

"Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world. "

Blue room

Somebody tell the passionate housewives desperate for God: I finally painted a room in my house. I can't claim it was for a love of beauty; on the other hand, maybe a disgusted surrender to indisputable unsightliness counts for something.

I had some blue paint, so I used it. I think I did an OK job for somebody who was too scared to look at How To Paint Dot Com before trying to paint something. Ignorance is the gift that keeps on giving.

At long last, the point: now I walk into that room and think, "Why is this room blue?" which (substituting in the relevant color) is what I always think any time I walk into a room that isn't white.

I just don't get it.

You might be CSPP if

two kids get a stomach bug and you feel like you won the lottery:
Only two!

O brothers, where are ye?

I wax synodical. Bo-ring.

The good news for all in disagreement is that the problems I cite will never change, because the top priority of the seminaries is to remain solvent, and the obvious way to do that is to enroll as many students as possible, and the way to do that is not to exclude any possible student. Penny wise, pound foolish is a discussion for another day.

Factor 1.  Recently I spoke with someone acquainted with a pastorless church. Soon one of its members will become an SMP student. "He's willing to be their pastor," I was told, "but he's not willing to drag his family to the seminary and wherever else for four years."

I sympathize. Well do I remember the hardships of men who dragged their families not only to the seminary and wherever else for four years, but even dragged them to a synodical college before that to complete pre-seminary training requirements. Without SMP, it wasn't enough simply to be willing to be a pastor. The seminary was a place and a community and a concrete committment, not merely a pragmatic entity. Many things about it were unpragmatic.

Factor 2.  My husband has few "seminary friends." The reason for this, I think, is that we were married a week after we graduated from college. He never lived in a dorm or even on campus. His hours outside of class were devoted to earning wages and maintaining me.

This makes for a different fraternity of pastors than was produced in the old days when seminary students were not permitted to be married. Surely there were many disagreements among those men, but they knew each other well, having spent a lot of time in close academic, spiritual, and living quarters. They were more like brothers because they had lived more like brothers.

Factor 3. Yes, I attended the seminary as a student myself. Once a student informed another student in my presence that you didn't want any chicks in a certain venerable professor's class because that professor would be considerably less forthcoming, especially on a certain topic. Frankly, I think the church would have benefited a lot more from that professor's unbridled forthcomingness than it did from me sitting in classes for pastors.

Now we factor the common factor. I think the camaraderie of our pastorate is in bad shape. In making the seminaries more "family friendly," in characterizing them as having been segregated rather than consecrated and legalistic rather than judicious, we have reaped pastors who are less fraternal with each other. I do not think there would be more agreement among them if they had formed stronger bonds during their training, but I do imagine there might be less animosity and more charity, less suspicion and more respect*. They would disagree, compete, labor, and love more as brothers than as acquaintances or coworkers or self-selected friends.  I do not mean to idealize brotherly love (I have some brothers myself :D), but it is a gift we are unwise to undermine among our pastors so carelessly. Dudes need dudes, and they need them close, and they need them without chicks around, and the more exclusively dudely their undertaking, the more do they need those things.

A bunch of men living together under compulsory celibacy has its own set of problems, and I don't know that second career pastorization should be categorically excluded, and I am not advocating the construction of a girl- or layman-proof fence around the seminary campuses (not that such a thing would help if and when the seminaries cease to possess locality). But we are foolish not to give serious thought to the implications of the drastic changes pastoral formation has undergone in the last couple of generations. What have our pastors gained from the changes at their rightful alma maters? Might they get along with each other better, even and especially in disagreement, if they had ever necessarily taken up the habit, so to speak? Would a more personally united pastorate make for a more personable and united Synod? And a bunch of other stuff.

*I particularly have trouble imagining (and I am 100% imagining here, so I may be 100% delusional and wrong) any sort of "alternate route" pastor achieving a parity of respect with pastors who got at it the old timey way. Ordained is ordained, but they are simply not equals in terms of effort. This is math, not meanness. It seems to me a formula for resentment all around.

Guys.

I bet if you blended coconut oil and raw human milk with an immersion blender in an organic glass and drank it, you would never die.

Chewing gum: a cautionary tale

I am not a germophobe, but I do have some borderline phobic issues with public restrooms. I know, I know: statistically speaking, a kitchen is waaaay germier than a bathroom, and an average toilet seat has fewer germs than the average light switch, door knob, phone, etc. That’s the thing about a phobia, isn’t it? We’re not talking rationality here.

Now, no mother who ever leaves the house with her young children can survive their childhood if she has a public restroom phobia. Any kind of bathroom phobia, in fact, is just another of the luxuries that mothers discover they must do without. So I’ve developed coping mechanisms, and I’ve been getting along fine, thanks in part to the fact that if ever Dad’s along on an outing, bathroom duty is all his. Quality male bonding: he lines up the troops, reviews the lecture (no touching anything, no looking under stalls, no asking any questions about anything you see or hear or read until you are all out of the restroom again…), and marches them all in and out.

Until recently, that is, when I entered a new stage of motherhood, enough to make a person phobic all over again: taking a toddler girl to use public restrooms. No such thing as a non-sitting visit. Oy. So. Again, I needed to find ways to cope, and hopefully to appear nonchalant enough not to phobicize my dear daughter, who will doubtless have enough other issues of her own as a consequence of being raised by me ;P. On our post-Christmas road trip, I shored up my mental health by taking along some of those disposable toilet seat covers, the ones that are specifically designed to cover all surfaces of the seat that little hands can’t seem to keep from grabbing. And all things considered, those gas station bathroom stops (*shudder*) went pretty well. (Uh, except for that little incident with the automatic flusher, but we got through it.)

All this is mere preamble to what is possibly the most horrific public restroom story I have ever heard, which came to me secondhand, but with horror all undiminished: A mother was supervising her young daughter’s bathroom visit. The girl was chewing gum, which dropped out of her mouth and down onto that middle place of the toilet seat. Before the mother could react, the girl picked up the gum and popped it back into her mouth.  (Can you hear the screaming in my head? Can you?!)

From the time of hearing that story and forevermore: never, never, ever shall a tender-yeared child of mine be found chewing gum in a public restroom.

Trying times

I remember running into a Hallmark card once which congratulated the recipient on a pregnancy. The inside read, "Thank you for not telling us you were 'trying'."

I despise "trying" as a concept and a casual conversation piece. It is freakin disgusting. He who has ears, let him hear: anyone with potential reproductive function who is not celibate is "trying;" those who use contraception are actually trying to pretend they aren't trying (as any parent of an "unplanned" child or any Christian fornicator can testify, although you'll probably have better luck with the former). Neither is wanting or not wanting a qualifier for "trying" or "not trying." This was all covered long ago in a galaxy far, far away.

What the existence of "trying" means is that anyone who's not pregnant must be not trying, and anyone who wants to be pregnant and isn't needs to try harder, and what could be evident through the modest disclosure of nature is instead an incessant topic of indiscreet and tasteless dialogue. Like all sin, it cannot but be confessed, and where there is no private confession, it must be shamefully public.

try

 [trahy]  Show IPA verb, tried, try·ing, noun, plural tries.

verb (used with object)

1.

to engage in sexual intercourse without use of contraception with the intent to achieve pregnancy: We're trying!