Feeding My Hungry

Writing from My Mess

2012-01-17T09:16:00.000-08:00

There are several things I like about my new office. It's tucked away in a corner, for one, and it has a window, a high up one, which is glass block, so there's light but not distraction of the outside. My chair is beside the furnace, and I like that idea of being in the belly of the house where there is heat. It speaks of being at the source. I think of a womb, the creative center, a place of energy and creation.

But you know what my favorite part is? The laundry is here.

My office is right next to the washer and dryer and the masses of clothes and towels and bedding that six human beings can make dirty as they live and breathe and learn each day. There is evidence of life happening and I am able to make it clean. The work of motherhood and the work of writing can occur simultaneously.

Writing is like doing laundry: I start with a mess, let it churn in the waters of emotion, heat it with spirit, air it through in the mind, fold it and place it and baskets and return it to the people to whom it belongs: everyone, everywhere.

To be present to my family, to serve them, while also being present to all souls in all of eternity, now that is something to sit and stare at cinderblock walls and be amazed and grateful. A basement corner is the perfect place to sit and be filled with wonder.

Today I am in wonder at the words of other writers talking about the writing life. Here are some useful (OK, maybe they are not all useful, but certainly interesting) things I found laying around the basement.

As a nod to this being a room of my own, I checked out some of Virginia Wolff's literary classic, A Room of One's Own. I suppose if I didn't own time-saving devices like the washer and dryer humming along behind me, I may not have time to browse the internet and read inspiring words from women writers from the past.

Well, let's just say I'm starting at the bottom (the basement, if you will) with wide-eyed enthusiasm, small expectations, and a pile of gratitude that rivals our family's mound of laundry.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. -Virginia Woolf

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

And another beloved (to me) pariah, Annie Dillard....

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand - that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us. ― Annie Dillard

Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes. ― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. ― Annie Dillard

And another loved writer, also an Annie...

Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are. ― Anne Lamott

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. ― Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions On Writing And Life

“I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. Bird By Bird: Some Instructions On Writing And Life

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.” ― Anne Lamott

“Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here. - Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird: Some Instructions On Writing And Life

Dirt. Clutter. Mess. I'm surrounded by it here in my basement office, in my life blessed with so many loved ones. Something tells me I must be in the right place. Thank the Good Lord for that. Amen.

The King Has Spoken

2012-01-03T06:26:00.000-08:00

I wrote a post last night. What am I doing here again? Well, there were questions. I have questions about how to live the life of a writer and survive it, or no, how to thrive in it it is really what I want to know. How can I be present to these questions in me, and process through what is happening within by typing out these thoughts while at the same time participating in the tea party my four-year-old daughter is so graciously hosting for me at this moment?

How. How seems a much more relevant question than why. Who cares why? It has been placed in me, the need to write. Let's move on: how can I live with it? It sounds so dramatic to say that but I hope there are some writers out there who will read this and nod, nod, nod with affirmation when I say that to not do it is to be half-dead. An unhappy state of affairs to say the least.

So. I must get back to this lovely tea party with this lovely child bedecked in princess gown and crown, purses hung from both arms, sparkling plastic slippered feet clacking across the floor, delivering yet another delicacy prepared in her kitchen. She bows and declares, "Here you are, Your Majesty!" How can I not be present to this as well?

As I am, sitting here, the Queen in my sweet daughter's eyes, I turn graciously to the King for advice: Stephen King. His book On Writing, A memoir of the craft, is right here on my bookshelf. Let's just see what he has to say about all this.

The biggest aid to regular (Trollopian?) production is working in a serene atomosphere.

I had a feeling he was going to say that. Hmmm. Is a chattering four-year-old serene? I think not. Let's hear him out.

It's difficult for even the most naturally productive writer to work in an environment where alarms and excursions are the rule rather than the exception...

Oh. Well, let's see. Alarms and excursions...with four children? That could very well be the best descriptive phrase for life with children, yes. What else?

When I am asked for "the secret of my success" (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy (at least until a van knocked me down by the side of the road in 1999) and I stayed married. It's a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.

Amen to that. When I don't write, my health goes kaput and my marriage falters. When I am writing, I feel energized and happy and able to focus more energy on my children and husband and there is far less tension in my marriage when I can happily attend to the necessary domesticity. When I feel capable and fulfilled because I am doing what I am made to do, my husband doesn't have to deal with a simpering, emotional wreck of a woman who he wants only to make happy but who can only be made happy by writing.

Here is a frustrating dilemma, and why, on occasional bottom-hitting moments, I consider all manner of numbness-inducing solutions, of which I am sure you have heard all common vice for writers throughout the ages. Mental illness abounds, folks. I don't take it lightly.

I'm starting with finding a little time each week to do that serene type of writing King is talking about. A time without interruptions, a regular date with my writer self to put some words on the page that amount something other than the random rants I post here. I'm starting with that, a time off to the side, a small portion compared to the bigger part of my life that is my family, who I love immensely and love to serve daily. What would The King say to that?

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support system to art. It's the other way around.

Yep. I think The King would approve.

The Least Among You Shall Have A Blog

2012-01-02T19:20:00.000-08:00

In Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, she recommends "the morning pages". The Morning Pages are supposed to be written as soon as you wake up in the morning, before anything else. Three handwritten pages, Cameron recommends, of the first thoughts that come to your mind.

I do not do this, have never once done this, although I am creative and imaginative enough to envision a time when I could do this. In the scenario I imagine myself in very fashionable loungewear made of something like modal, holding a coffee mug. The mug is pottery, handmade, and the coffee is organic, fair trade, and made with freshly ground espresso beans. And of course it comes with some steamed milk made all frothy with one of those cool little frothing wands. A mahogany desk? An ergonomic chair? These all seem like necessities when I imagine myself writing the morning pages. I don't know why, Stephen King wrote Carrie on a typewriter while sitting on his toilet.

I would do this now, except for the fact that the first thing I do when I wake up tends to involve one of my offspring, possibly whining or wetting or needing. The words, "I'm hungry" sound familiar. And I'm fairly certain they have security cameras on me at all times, because if I wake up early, far before any of them would normally awake, they somehow know this and come looking for me, inquiring Why are you awake, Mama?

So that's my excuse. But, so what? Foo-ha. I write here. And I write whenever I want, morning, afternoon, evening, and sometimes in the middle of the night in an insomnia-driven panic to type the words out before I am discovered, before the security cameras catch me. And I write whatever is on my mind, which is, by the way, the reason I don't publish every post I write. That reason being because whatever is on my mind is sometimes scary, sometimes jumps or slithers or stares or bites. Yes, sometimes it bites.

Bites! Yes! Which is why I wanted to warn you first. My version of The Morning Pages is to write a post here. It's what I do here most of the time, at least except for those times when I have time, real time, time to write something real, something that makes some amount of sense at all. There are some of my posts which fit into this category (this being one), the category of blog posts for which I have a large block of time to myself and make use of it well (ahem). The time requirements are rather large for this sort of post, large meaning more than a 15 minute episode of Little Bear. A post like this one required an 8 hour car trip from Gatlinburg to Ohio, with stops only for potty and meals.

What I am telling you is that it is rare for me to write a post which I actually go back and read two or three times to do writerly things like edit and change and tweak and smooth the wild hairs flying around or trim the ends if necessary. Sometimes the hairs need a style, but more often it is just a little stroking to get them all going in the same direction. It's hairy and there is petting, that's all I'm sayin'. And Lord, help me to remember to put all those links in where I meant to. Please help me to do at least that.

You did say it was good to be among the least? You did, didn't you? That's comforting to think I may be pleasing in the eyes of the Divine to be doing this little thing here, writing my small thoughts here in this space for the world to look upon and say Silly Woman! How silly are you, woman! What mess are you making of writing, of the profession of writing? Do you not realize how much you belittle the task of writing? Your fingers are the disgrace of every keyboard.

I know. I sigh over these things. I spend days digging troughs and lying in them just feel the dirt of earth on my body and wonder at being alive. Sometimes just pretending to be dead can bring you back to life, force your legs into motion so you stand up, stand up and start living your life. This way you live, instead of just watching your life happen.

Praying The Magnificat Got Me Into Trouble

2011-12-15T06:12:00.000-08:00

I've been pregnant for awhile. Four years, actually, but not with a baby--with a book. I conceived of it while I was pregnant with Josie, one day during a love affair with God. I was in my basement, going through the pile of laundry looking for a clean uniform shirt for my oldest, in complete submission to the task at hand, when the idea struck me.

I remember feeling afraid, and I wrote about the experience in this poem. The idea came so quickly and took root in me, a seed falling on fertile ground, determined to grow without my willing it to. Conception happens like that, without your willing it, an occurence dependent on the ripening of conditions and serendipitous moments that many parents desiring a child and unable to obtain pregnancy will say feels like an act of magic. We scrutinize every aspect, determined to find the slight of hand behind it, that we might re-create the act when circumstances fit our liking.

We can't. And knowing that helps me to accept what I have been carrying, a life which grows larger and heavier as time passes. It was unwanted in my mind, at the time it happened, inconvenient. It has continued to grow in me, becoming a large protuding thing that impinges on my daily life since the tiny cluster of cells that formed the first three chapters I read to my writing group at Women Writing for (a) Change back in 2007. But in spite of my lack of cooperation, it forms. Like a baby in the womb of a mother who is either unaware or ignoring the situation, still cells divide, ears form, hands grasp.

I remember at the end of all of my pregnancies, when the baby had gotten large in my womb and my belly protuded so far in front of me it seemed I bumped into everything. My body had outgrown me and I struggled to accomodate the mass of it. Everyday tasks became overwhelming, days escaped with little accomplished. "I'm ready," I would say to anyone who asked when the baby would be coming. "You look ready," many would say back to me.

The time has come for the birth to happen. So much of this work has been done in me over the last four years without my awareness that I feel like those last trimesters of pregnancy, no longer able to accomodate it. Word by word, I have to do the labor of writing, to push the mass of it out into the world, to separate from it. Deciding to make it my will to give birth to a book is not an easy decision, but it has begun to feel like that is the only option.

When Shad and I were driving to the hospital when I was in labor with Eli, our third, I said to him, "Can you just keep driving past the hospital to the airport? I think I'd rather go to Florida than give birth right now. This is not what I want to be doing."

At that point, I knew birth would be painful. After I had Julia, our second, an 8 lb. 10 oz. baby, I said, "I never want to do that again." I didn't. Pain formed the memory of it, her head rocking, rocking, rocking across my pelvic bone as I gathered the strength for those last long hard pushes, to push past the stuckness of her body in the birth canal and finally see the life that was in the making, the beauty I had not been able to see with my eyes.

Of course I couldn't go on vacation instead of giving birth when it was Eli's time to be seen, to emerge into the world. And I can't escape what is happening to me now. I'm still afraid; there could be a stillbirth, the whole process coming to nothing but grief.

I'm telling you this to let you know where I am, when I am not here. I've written several times recently on how much I have been encouraged to write here at Feeding My Hungry because of the words and support of so many of you. Truly in my heart I am grateful for that. But I have come to realize that what I am doing here is, in a way, prostituting myself, selling myself for the lesser service. The creative energy that I give out here needs to be put to a greater purpose.

I'll be back to check in, I expect. There is always rest granted between the hard work of contractions. Pray for me, that fear stays far away and I have the strength I need.

God Likes Top 40 Music

2011-12-11T19:21:00.000-08:00

My 12 and 14-year-old daughters make me listen to Top 40 pop music. And me, not being the type of parent who can say, "No, you MUST listen to classical music ONLY while you are riding in my car, because I am your PARENT and I SAID SO and besides it will make you SMART so that you can get college scholarships and MOVE OUT so I don't have to deal with you anymore but instead you can spend your newly-found freedom drinking keg beer and strange concoctions of liquor found only in fraternity party bathtubs and THEN, and ONLY THEN will you be able to listen to the potentially damaging lyrics found in rock music."

What I meant to say is that as a parent, sometimes you find yourself between rock music and a hard place.

So my solution is this: I listen to music with them and we have talks. Sometimes I don't enjoy the subject matter of these talks, but I figure hey, that's my job. Why not take the opportunity now to help form in them an awareness of what kinds of messages they may be allowing into their minds?

I listen to a little more LMFAO than I would prefer, but on the flip side, sometimes I hear songs that I find enjoyable and inspiring, even. And every once in awhile an amazing thing happens: in the most unsuspecting place, I hear God speaking to me. You know that tiny voice deep in your soul that you only get to hear in moments of deep connection to the Divine? That voice? Well, what a gift it is to be driving along with my daughters listening to a combination of mass produced noise and sentimental yearnings for past dysfunctional relationships when suddenly haaaaaaaaah!

GOD. Except He's a woman (just like you suspected. I know, right?). And He sounds like Pink.

Would you call me crazy if I told you that I heard God speaking through Pink? Yes, Pink. She's prophetic, I'm telling you. I'll post the lyrics and maybe you will agree, maybe not. But what I heard? I heard the voice of God reminding me that He created me just the way I am and in His eyes, I am absolutely perfect. Not "perfect" as in "incapable of making a mistake" or perfect as only He is perfect, but perfect in the way that Mary Poppins means when she looks at herself in the mirror and declares herself, "Practically perfect in every way."

And as for my daughters? I hope this song lives in them forever. In spite of my irritation at being forced to listen to Top 40 music with them, they remain forever in my heart absolutely perfect.

(I hope the You Tube video for Pink's Perfect shows up here...I had some trouble with it.)

Made a wrong turn
once or twice
dug my way out
blood and fire
Bad decisions
That's alright
welcome to my silly life
Mistreated,Misplaced
misunderstood
Miss"No way its all good"
it didn't slow me down
Mistaken
Always second guessing
Underestimated
look im still around
Pretty,pretty please
don't you ever,ever feel
like you're less than
less than perfect
pretty,pretty please
don't you ever,ever feel
like your nothing
you are perfect to me
Your so mean(your so mean)
when you talk(when you talk)
about yourself
you were wrong
Change those voices(change those voices)
in your head(in your head)
Make them like you instead
So complicated
look how big you'll make it
filled with so much hatred
Such a tired game
It's enough i've
done all i can think of
chased down all my demons
see you do the same
pretty,pretty please
don't you ever,ever feel
like you're less than
less than perfect
Pretty,pretty please
If you ever,ever feel
like your nothing
you are perfect to me
The whole world stares
while I swallow the fear
the only thing i should
be drinking is an
ice cold beer
so cool in lying
and we try,try,try
But we try to hard and it's
a waste of my time
Done looking for the critics
cause there everywhere
They don't like my jeans
they don't get my hair
String ourselves and we do it all the time
Why do we do that
why do i do that
(why do i do that)
Yeeaahhh (ohhh ohhhhhh)
Oh pretty,pretty please
Pretty,pretty please
don' you ever,ever feel
like you're less than
Less than perfect
Pretty,pretty please
don't you ever,ever feel
Like your nothing
you are perfect, to meee
You're Perfect
You're Perfect to me
Pretty,pretty please
don't you ever,ever feel
like you're less than
Less than perfect
Pretty,pretty please
if you ever,ever feel
like your nothing
you are perfect to me

Why I Hate Blogging

2011-12-09T06:55:00.000-08:00

You should know that at least 10 times a day I decide never to write another blog again. Never EVER.

Every once in awhile I share this desire to quit blogging with a friend. A few days ago I told my friend Angie and she immediately withdrew a .45 handgun from her purse and held it to my head, demanding that I NEVER STOP. Because her life depended on it.

That's not exactly what happened, and I don't know if she owns a gun, but I do know that she carries rosary beads around with her and she could certainly beat me with those. And she did say that she looked forward to reading my blogs and it made her happy to see mine pop up on her google reader.

POWERFUL ENCOURAGEMENT. And it strikes me just now that I write those words that they are the exact ones that Anne Rice wrote back to me when I emailed her to tell her how much I enjoyed her book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, especially the epilogue where she reveals some of her conversion back to Catholicism. She said that my email was powerful encouragement to continue writing her next book.

(I think she has since diverted((unconverted? reverted?)) away from Catholicism. But whatever. This happens to me at least 5 times a week, so I pay it no mind. We all waver, just not in the public eye.)

(Oops, this is public. Well, there you have it. I waver in my faith. I try to maintain a mustard seed, because apparently that's all that's necessary.)

Encouragement matters, to big-time writers like Anne Rice, and to little blog writers like me. The darkness of discouragement is our biggest enemy, and we face the beast alone every time we sit down and start to type. We know our words might inspire or heal, but we also know how easily they can annoy and inflame, particularly when they are twisted in the heart of a mericiless reader.

There it is! The MELANCHOLY. I used the word merciless. Merciless readers. No, no, no, no, you are not the problem. Do you know how many of you I have recently run into who tell me how much you enjoy reading this...this...this stream of consciousness thing (good phrasing, Kelly)?

Enough. Enough people who say to keep writing to make me keep hitting the keys in spite of my not wanting to. In spite of the fact that when people mention my blog to my face I suddenly feel like I'm standing under fluorescent lights, naked, smiling with food between my teeth.

Vulnerable is an understatement.

It is what my friend Marianne over at Writer-Mommy once referred to as "my worlds colliding". The inner meets the outer, the virtual meets the real, and you are left without boundaries. People can see through you.

"He started to talk about my writing and I stopped listening. It made me feel sick for people to talk about my writing to my face...." A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

Have I mentioned that I've been coughing for exactly 27 days? The other night I demanded that Shad CHEER ME UP. He proceeded to describe the scene in Any Which Way But Loose where Clint Eastwood swings from the ceiling fan with an orangutan around his neck to make his woman laugh.

"Do you want me to do that?" He asked.

"No, it sounds exhausting," I said, "and you might break the ceiling fan. And besides, we don't own an orangutan."

But the thought of it make me laugh. A lot. It brought me up. It cheered me. It did.

Writing this cheers me up, too. Now I'm rockin' the melancholy. Did I mention how much I love blogging?

Here's How to Recession-Proof Your Soul

2011-12-06T05:41:00.000-08:00

Be weird.

Go to bed early on a Monday, let your mate give you a foot rub while you listen to Matt Costa's Desire's Only Fling and chill, glass of red wine in hand, careful not to spill on your Bean flannels.

No worries.

Skip the TV flashing holiday ads, the temptation of Facebook status updates, the lure of add to cart and add to cart and add to cart, the satisfaction of shopping doneness.

Be done.

Shut the bedroom door on it. Pick up the book of poetry on the nightstand, dust the cover. Read a poem or two, out loud, to your doting mate. He'll like it. I promise.

Women of my age, the nearing 40-ness, the moms of you, you may enjoy a little Sharon Olds. As the back cover of The Unswept Room indicates, her poems "embody the nurturing of a new generation of children and the transformative power of marital love." New York Times declares, "She has made the minutiae of woman's everyday life as valid a subject for poetry as the grand abstract themes that have precoccupied other poets."

Imagine that.

Or simply pick up the book, open to a random poem, and read it. I opened to "Fish Oil", and in the amazing seredipity of the moment, it spoke to exactly where I am, just at this point in my life. Thank you, Sharon Olds, for deciding to make the minutiae worth your time and words.

Thank you Poets, All.

Fish Oil
Sharon Olds

One midnight, I got home from work
and the apartment reeked of fish boiled
in oil. All the windows were shut,
and all the doors were open--up
from the pan and spatula rose a thick
helix of cod and olive. My husband
slept. I opened the windows and shut
the doors and put the plates in the sink
and oodled Palmolive all over. The next
day I fishwifed to a friend, and she said,
Someone might live with that and come to
savor the smell of a fry. And that evening,
I looked at my love, and who he is
touched me in the core of my heart. I sought
a bottle of extra-extra virgin,
and a recipe for sea fillet in
olive-branch juice, I filled the rooms with
swirls of finny perfume, the outlines
in the sand the early Christians drew,
the loop meaning safety, meaning me too,
I remembered my parents' frowns at any
whiff of savor outside the kitchen,
the Calvinist shudder, in that house, at the sweet
grease of life. I had come to my mate
a shocked being, agog, a salt
dab in his creel, girl in oil,
his dish. I had not known that one
could approve of someone entirely--one could
wake to the pungent day, one could awake
from the dream of judgment.

Happy Birthday

2011-11-26T07:47:00.000-08:00

Dad. I'm thinking about him today, because Monday's his birthday, but we're celebrating tonight with the big family shindig. I don't have a gift yet, which isn't surprising because when it comes to buying something for my Dad it doesn't matter how nice or thoughtful or expensive or unique the purchased gift is, I always feel like I'm giving him a kindergarten crayon drawing on a crumpled-up cut-out paper heart.

I feel the inadequacy of material offerings when it comes to buying something for my Dad. With him more than anyone else in my life, for reasons I don't know. It's like, Here's this thing I bought for you to show you how much you mean to me because, well, you gave me life. There's that. And not only that, but then you laid down your life to provide for me, to make sure that I had all the physical needs and comforts of this world and all the cute clothes I needed when I was a teenager.

Having cute clothes as a teenager is a very important thing, of course, but not really to Dad, who spent his high school every day wearing a suit and tie uniform at St. Xavier, an all-boys school. Once, when I was on my fifteenth outfit before going out the door to school in the morning, Dad said with just a hint of exasperation, "High school is NOT a fashion show, Lynn."

And what a beautiful memory that is to me, because for once FOR ONCE in my life, I was right and HE WAS WRONG. Because OF COURSE high school is a fashion show. Every teenager knows that.

Since he was my dad, I guess he could have used his position of authority to make me see he was right. He could have made me donate all of my clothes to charity and made me wear ill-fitting polyester pants and a scratchy shirt in an odd color that made my complexion look green. He could have taught me something about humility, I suppose.

But he didn't try to change me. Dad was wise enough to know that as a parent, sometimes you're just stuck. You just have to deal. He sighed and went out to the wood pile to gather up logs for the woodburning stove that heated our farmhouse, the house we lived in for all of my childhood until we moved into a house with a furnace when I was a senior in high school. Every day he woke me in that house with his "Up and at 'em!" call to action. Every day he opened the door to my bedroom to wake me for school, every morning the same phrase, "Up and at 'em!"

Up and at 'em, he was. You can't take the officer out of the Air force man, so he was up and at the wood stove and out the door to run his software company, a company he built from the ground up. On nights when he was home instead of acting as his own traveling salesman, I remember sitting on the stairs, face squeezed between the wood railings, watching him sitting on the living room floor, tools and wires in hand, building a television.

Building a television. For fun. And probably as a way to escape the reality that the fruits of his labor and his unbridled ambition were now contributing to the formation of his fashionista daugther with the You go, girl attitude. He's still stuck dealing with that, but as I said before, sometimes you're just stuck. Had he gone the polyester/scratchy shirt route he could possibly now be dealing with watching his emotionally warped daughter living alone with her cats and a stack of smutty novels to keep her company.

Dad's example as a parent is a reminder to me in my own parenting journey to accept my own humanity and the humanity of my children. I could give up my life, the path I am called to follow, and spend all of my time trying to find ways to make my kids perfect, to change all of the ways that my own flawed nature has turned them into something I find disapproval in. But I'm not doing that. I'm following Dad's example: having perfect kids is not the point, being a perfect person is not the point, not making mistakes is not the point.

I know what Dad would tell me the point is: being the person God is calling you to be. Following God's will for you in your life, that's what he would say. So what if your privileged upbringing has given you an attitude and fashionista flair and a feeling of untouchable fearlessness. Deal with it. Trying to change your humanity is a path leading into darkness, a focus in the wrong direction. Dad would tell me to stay focused on keeping Christ's love alive in my heart and hitting the floor every morning with the intention to bring that light to others.

Up and at 'em! That's what Dad would say.

Gratitude. Word.

2011-11-21T10:59:00.000-08:00

Give me a G! Give me an R! Give me a GRRRR.....

Grrrr?

Yes, grrrr. Grrrr is the the feeling that comes before the adjustment of the attitude. Grrr....attitude. Gratitude. I'm assuming you've been through this? The process of wanting something and getting frustrated and angry and pushing pushing pushing for it so much so that you become a total and complete a-hole to everyone around you, especially when you realize that nothing exists in the total perfect world that you imagine there should be?

Sound familiar? No? Probably not, unless you happen to be a person struggling to be both Mom and Writer, and not even trying to do either one all that perfectly, just trying to do it. At all.

So having been through both the Grrrr....(this was a process lasting several months) and the Capital A Attitude (several weeks) and then the painful shift of putting the two together (several days), I have thankfully and just in time arrived at a place of Gratitude.

My Grrr-attitude List (Ahem):

For my friend Marianne who blogs over at Writer-Mommy, I am thankful. For the past year or so that I have known Marianne, she has never minced words about the difficulties she faces in balancing writing life and motherhood. With Marianne, I have been able to speak candidly about the "ticker tape" of words that runs itself across my brain in near constancy. Marianne is one I know will raise her hand up in witness and give me an "Amen, sister" to the litany of crazy and then go and post something inspiring like a link to the Litany of Humility, a much-needed antidote.

Did I mention righteous Mama? You bet. Marianne's recent post about the book Expecting Adam (read it in my second pregnancy, awesome) pegs it right on the money when she challenges our cultural expectations of creating "perfect" children. Marianne and I are friends IRL and have shared our challenges with standing up for our NQP (Not Quite Perfect) children against the hard edge of standards and assessments. When the hair is standing up on my back, Marianne is one I know will be backing me up.

And speaking of NQP, my cornucopia is full full full of gratitude for my friend Jaime, who blogs over at Way Down the Valley, a friend who loves me in my not-even-close-to-perfectness (as in: can't even get the arrow in the vicinity of the target of perfection). Jaime has been at my side this past week, walking with me on my awkward path to be ser humano, one who has learned through travail to become a true human being.

Here's the funny thing about my relationship with Jaime: I used to be her tutor. This strikes me as near-hilarious now, to think of all the things she has taught me. Long ago, though, when she was a freshman and I was a senior in high school, I was her Latin tutor. And then when she moved back to our hometown several years ago, she called me up out-of-the-blue looking for a mommy mentor, because she'd heard that I was one of those baby-wearing, breastfeeding, cloth-diaperin' kind of mamas and she wanted to be one, too.

And I'm pretty sure that in her quest to find someone to guide her, she eventually recognized that I was just as much fumblin' around in the dark as she was (I'm pretty sure more so fumbling, but don't tell her that). And ever since then we've just been half-swimming/half-drowning alongside each other in the rapids of full-on motherhood, every once in awhile throwing each other an offering or two to help pull ourselves up out of the deep, sputtering.

You will only see small glimpses of Jaime's motherhood struggles on her blog, which is near-perfection in how beautiful it is. So beautiful, in fact, that it makes me want to either cry or try to find some way to reorganize the atoms of my being and dissolve my physical body into pieces small enough to penetrate the computer screen and go to live in her blog, forever. It is that. much. heaven.

Once I asked her, Why so perfect? It's not really like that, like what you show on your blog. That's not real, I accused. Well, no. She said. But someday when my kids are in therapy and think they had a terrible childhood, I WILL HAVE EVIDENCE. See? I will tell them. You had a GREAT childhood.

I am so grateful for my friend Jaime. She makes me laugh.

And there is one more person that I am astoundingly full of gratitude for right now: my husband Shad. Only a rock-solid kind of guy like him could take a crazed mama-writer like me and just.love. her.

For friends like these that make the mad journey bearable, I am thankful. For the gift of motherhood and the gift of writing, I am grateful. To being made less, instead of more, I give thanks. And as always, I have immense gratitude for the struggle. Here's to a week of Grrr...attitude.

Naming Julia, Woman-to-Be

2011-11-12T00:06:00.000-08:00

A bit belated on this one, but my sweet second child, Julia, turned 12 last week on November 5. Yes, that November 5th, the same one where her Papa turned 40. Last week was his turn for a lot of attention on his milestone year, and this week we're giving her what's due.

Julia, a beauteous beauty of a girl soon turning towards woman, pulled me deeper into the waters of motherhood with her birth, my first waterbirth. She arrived quietly in the darkness of night in a freestanding birth center in Cincinnati, Midwives Care, in 1999. Shad, my midwife Loma, and birth attendent Gayle, witnessed her arrival, pushed out into Gayle's waiting hands. 8 lbs. 10 oz. I pushed her out, and afterward felt so strong, like I could pull up trees.

I was inspired to name her Julia by two strong and interesting women: John Lennon's mother Julia and the song he wrote about her, "Julia", as well as Julia Butterfly Hill. Hill lived in a 180-foot-tall, roughly 1500-year-old California Redwood tree for 738 days between December 10, 1997 and December 18, 1999. Hill lived in the tree, affectionately known as "Luna" to prevent loggers of the Pacific Lumber Company from cutting it down.

At the beginning of my pregnancy with Julia, while living in Maine, I was friends with a woman (also pregnant at the time) who had gone to California and hiked,while newly pregnant, far out into the Redwood forest and up a long hill to the place where Julia Butterfly sat in that monstrous ancient tree. My friend, Gayle (different Gayle than the birth attendant), simply felt a strong desire to see the tree-sitting woman. Her story inspired me: women saving life, giving life, connecting with one another and the strong desires in our hearts to see greatness.

In my daughter Julia, I see greatness. Although right now she is most concerned with me teaching her how to shave her legs, maybe someday she will appreciate that I wrote her a poem, too. Approach the gates to strong womanhood, my sweet comfort.

Julia

Ocean child Bohemian

Woman he loved

her loved her

calm loved her Julia

Butterfly living

on branches in the big Redwood

forest standing

for the lives

of trees living

in them is of them. She walks

the big hill

upward she walks

then climbs

climbs

climbs the climb

is long for her but someday

she arrives

at the top of it.

Tree-sitter

Julia lives

in clouds

reaches

for sky.

What is Left to Say

2011-10-28T22:08:00.000-07:00

One in the a.m.

At the end of the day
poems
are all I can

remember.

Mornings I am a novel
needing resolution, a plot
moving forward
in

suspense.

Afternoons all but chop away
the excess, pare down the bones
to short story
squeezed
in the pages between
beginning phrases
of lunchtime and
conclusion of

nap.

Evenings are a tight sentence, well-edited.

Night balances light
and dark
elements in the story, shadows
casting across
pages. Lines
and curves
of letters
writing the conflict
of black
on white,
they

fall.

Words, they fall

away.

At the end of the day

a poem.

Seeds Handed Down

2011-10-14T05:35:00.000-07:00

In Memory of Richard "Chet" Augustein, November 25, 1941-May 25, 2011

The other day I was washing dishes and a gust of wind blew a jar of seeds off the windowsill: moonflower seeds, seeds Julia had collected from a moonflower plant that had been a school science project, seeds we had forgotten to plant. They scattered across the sink and counter, tiny brown specks of potential life.

Most of the seeds I was able to save, and I'm grateful for the second chance to see them grow. They are like the smallest of treasure chests, a buried opportunity for unsuspected beauty, a humble invitation to spill the magnificent contents across landscapes. But more than the hope for next summer's flowers, the seeds' fluttering across my vision reminded me of a past needing to be spoken, of words waiting to be released.

The moonflower seeds remind me of the things I have held in my heart since the death of a beloved figure in our lives last Spring, the much-mourned passing of Mr. A. He was the originator of the moonflower; it was Julia's project at the beginning of 5th grade, one of many projects that made up his hands-on science curriculum. Mr. A was that kind of teacher, the kind who makes learning become something alive and growing, the kind of teacher you want for your child every year of her education.

Last year, Mr. A's last year of teaching, I was blessed with the opportunity to teach a monthly art enrichment class to the 5th graders in his classroom. The months-long project was about photography-- not my forte-- and Elissa Whittenburg, the program coordinator, encouraged me to do it anyway, since the curriculum was all laid out and WE NEED PEOPLE.

As it turned out, I needed the program. I didn't know that until after it was over, of course, but that much became evident one day in May, at the very end of May, just before the school year itself passed away.

It was hot that day, and with the school lacking air conditioning, the substitute teacher had the lights turned off so the classroom felt peaceful to me, although I was a little nervous because this was the class where I had to help the children assemble the photography project. Assemble, meaning something requiring attention to detail, meaning something crafty in nature. Projects of this kind send me dangerously close to a panic attack.

But when I walked in after lunch and recess, the class was reciting a decade of the rosary together and I joined in, soothed by the repitition of words in prayer with the students. Faith, I was reminded at that moment, was another thing Mr. A deeply valued, the thing that inspired his love and curiousity for all of God's creation. And here I was, holding in my hands the envelope of photos the students had taken a month before on the one day when Mr. A, and not the substitute, had been present for the monthly art enrichment class. On the other days, his battle with cancer had made him unable to teach.

Standing there in the doorway to Mr. A's classroom, it gave me goose pimply skin as the beginnings of understanding started connecting in my mind: the photos the 5th graders had taken were of the their hands. How appropriate that felt in that moment, in light of my knowledge that cancer would most likely take the life of this beloved teacher soon, that we would be assembling a photographic reminder--pictures of the actual hands of his last class--which would forever memorialize a man who fully embraced hands-on teaching with his students.

Struck with the larger-than-lifeness of this craft project before me, a reverence for the work, for the Divine working through me and the students, I overcame my craft-anxiety and the framed photos came together easily. Here is a photo of the completed project:

In the middle frame is a picture drawn by two students who were absent the day we took the photos. They chose a theme for the project and wrote it on the picture: The Future is in Our Hands.

Indeed. And indeed, again. And more goose pimples. Heartwaves and joyful tears. Mr. A left this earth to rest in the loving hands of his Creator that afternoon, as the students and I created this work of art, a tribute to a man who passed a love of God and love of learning and love of life to thousands of students throughout his long teaching career. The future is in their hands, and the legacy of Mr. A gives me reason to hope.

Dance, dance, wherever you may be
I am the lord of the dance, said he
And I lead you all, wherever you may be
And I lead you all in the dance, said he.

~from Lord of the Dance, sung as the recessional song at Mr. A's funeral mass, St. Margaret of York Catholic Church.

Other People Say it Better

2011-09-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

In the face of writer's block, the best I can do right now is to steal something inspirational and share it. I'm takin' this one from my friend Alison at her blog, Aliblog, where she wrote this post about her favorite current song, All My Favorite People Are Broken by Over The Rhine. Thanks, Alison, it was just what I needed to hear today, in words my heart my wants to express.

Orphaned believers, skeptical dreamers, step forward. You can stay right here. You don't have to go.

Crying Over Gas Prices? Not really.

2011-09-14T08:45:00.000-07:00

I'm just going to assume, for purposes of affirming my own sanity, that the rest of the world struggles with inner child issues, too. DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT. (Yes, you DO. Because I'm saying you do, so let's move on.)

Let's imagine, shall we, that I was at the gas station today, you know GETTING GAS IN MY CAR because that's a normal thing to do, right? And while I was standing there holding the pump and watching the little numbers roll upwards in an ever escalating dollar amount past the point of EXORBITANT and feeling the urge to just slap my hand over it so I didn't have to actually SEE how much money that I don't have is going on my credit card...while that was happening I also became aware of the music coming out of the speaker above my head:

Even the best fall down sometimes
Even the wrong words seem to rhyme
Out of the doubt that clouds my mind
I somehow find
You and I collide

It's a song by Howie Day, in case you are wondering. Here it is on you tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca9ub9rpNK4&feature=related in case you are wondering what it sounds like. And no, I have no idea where I am going with this, in case you are wondering about that as well. But it's fun! Just think of it as a game of the dumb leading the blind, OK? Let's play!

Oh, what I wanted to share with you about this experience of getting gas and the angry impulse I was feeling toward the gas pump (well, probably misplaced anger because it was probably more about my spending situation) and THEN when I heard this song, I seriously felt the urge to just cry right then and there. RIGHT THERE STANDING AT THE GAS PUMP. And wouldn't that have been a photojournalistic opportunity? The hard economic times! The gas prices we can't afford! And here it is captured in a moment: a woman standing by her minivan holding the pump and CRYING.

And that's it, really. That is the moment I have to share for today, a moment which is really about what happens when you crack open the inner child, the one who wants to play at life, who longs to reach out and touch every moment as if it were the first, the last, and the only one she has to live. She's down on her knees today, tripping over the connections, bowled over by meaning. A hundred times she'll cry today, if she ever stops.

Is she really crying about gas prices? Not really. What she's really crying about is everything that's ever happened to her in her life that just. didn't. seem. fair. And in between the crying? She's dazed with absolute amazement at how beautiful and perfect all the unfairness is. It's a wild game of TAG YOU'RE IT! that's sure to last the whole dang day.

Soooooo....this sort of thing happens to you, too, of course. OF COURSE IT DOES. Watch me nodding my head. I'm nodding. Please nod. NOD YOUR HEAD. Thank you.

I DO love my red wine...

2011-09-10T17:33:00.000-07:00

Along with red wine, I love facebook, in case you didn't know that about me. Today I loved it even more because my fb friend (and Shad's co-worker IRL) Richard Jones posted this link to a USAtoday.com article about how moderate drinking in midlife is healthier for women than not drinking at all.

HOL-LA!

This is good news, very good news, and just the reason I needed to go and uncork a Parkers Estate 2009 Pinot Noir, a gift from my wine friend Jeff. Red wine is my favorite, with Cabernet topping the list, but Pinots are my fair weather friends. If they are good, I like them. And when they're not good, I don't.

Well, this one is good. And you can get it at Kroger. Just so you know.

The wine-related bad news for the day came from Redbook Magazine, which happens to show up in my mailbox once a month (along with Parenting, another subscription magazine I did NOT pay for), since about 9 months ago, when apparently the people at Redbook decided that I was old enough to be vulnerable to all of their advertising about how to look younger, thinner, and please my man in every possible way lest I lose him to a younger, thinner, more pleasing woman.

But that's not new news. The new bad news ('Mommy is an Alcoholic' Oct. 2011) is that some moms, especially ones who happen to stay home all day and I don't know BLOG, also happen to be vulnerable to becoming alcoholics. These are women who drink wine from their coffee cups and their water bottles, downing drinks throughout the day and getting too drunk to be able to drive to pick up their kids from school.

The good news is that they are coming out of hiding and writing about their struggles on their blogs. And mommy bloggers who write about their struggles with alcoholism are finding a HUGE audience of women who relate to their struggles. Women are reaching out to one another and holding each other's hands through the recovery process.

But I am not one of these moms. I am a mom who has spent all of today (Saturday) cleaning the house, doing the laundry, cooking, and caring for my children (who are now in bed) and who is sitting down for the evening to enjoy a nice glass (or two!) of this oh-so-yummy Pinot Noir (in a real wine glass, just sayin').

For me, wine is a pleasure and a source of relaxation, but not an addiction. For that, I am grateful today, along with the news that my love of wine might allow me a longer healthier life to enjoy with my husband and children and maybe some future little grandbabies (no hurries, of course!).

Cheers to good health and moderate drinking!

Ending the Bender of Summer

2011-09-01T18:06:00.000-07:00

Sobering could be the word for the week. I was drunk on summer, letting those long daylight hours have their way with me, riding the wild ride of outside and sunshine and barefoot and sleepy late mornings with nowhere to be except to the pool or the river or the Double Dip licking an ice cream cone.

Drunkenness of this kind (by which I mean more of an attitude and less of the actual imbibing in intoxicating substances) is probably a necessity when one is a housewife with four kids all crammed together in a small house such as the one we occupy. All together. The five of us (plus Shad for lunch and after work hours makes six).

We are one. big. happy. family. who sometimes annoy the ever-living heck out of each other.

It's true. Summer can be challenge, along with being the. best. time. ever. It's a Tale of Two Cities kind of time: the best of times, the worst of times. Here we are hating each other, fighting and squabbling over the smallest of issues such as Mom! Eli just had another cookie and you said we could only have one!

And then here we are loving life together: outside in nature, running and playing and laughing and Mom! Look! Lay on the ground and look up and see this tree and isn't the sky the bluest ever?

They take me there. And there. And over the edge.

I just have to abandon myself. Literally: Abandon. My. Self.

I can't do that all the time. That's a process that takes some coersion on the part of Spirit Me who has to do quite a lot of convincing to get Ego Me to just go take a nap and come back later. Ego Me doesn't like to take naps. In fact, Ego Me wants to be doing something every minute to further the cause of The Plan I have for Myself. Even when that plan is as simple as being able to walk freely from the kitchen to the living room without kicking/stepping on/tripping on some kind of material possession and when did we get so much stuff?

Oh, THE plan. As far as the last part of summer went, there wasn't one. And this was fun. For awhile. Until it reached the point of Not Fun. And that fairly recently and thankfully (Thank God!) coincided with the point of school starting again, which maybe makes me reconsider my word of the week. I'm thinking Cosmic could describe the forces at work when the point of Not Fun merges at a point of connection with the First Week of School.

Could this also be the phenomenon When God closes a door, He opens a window?

I closed a door this week. I left the Time of Eli and Josie, the last 3 1/2 years of my life spent on school days with two little ones in tow, their blonde heads bobbing at my sides, vying for complete ownership of The Mom.

Sometimes it's not easy to be the Most Popular Person In The World. Especially when this title is granted to you by two small children. They are your groupies, for real. They do not want to leave you alone, not even to use the bathroom. Not even #2. They don't care. They just want to be with you.

Time after time, they won me over and I threw up my white flag of surrender. I surrendered to the dirty house, the piling dishes, the laundry molding in the washer and the reality of an open door policy in the bathroom.

I gave it all up. For them. For time with them. The Time of Eli and Josie is over, and the word for this time is grateful. Grateful is how I feel when I realize that the parts of me that I lost to them are the things I didn't need anyway. Grateful is knowing that two amazing people think I'm worth spending every. single. moment. with.

And yes, grateful is how I feel that it's over. Just sayin'.

Jillian Michaels Led Me To Repentance

2011-08-27T18:43:00.000-07:00

One of the more impulsive things I've done recently is to buy a Jillian Michaels work-out DVD. Suddenly I was possessed with the urge to "Get Ripped!", although never in my life has this occured to me up until this point in time, which was the very moment that I was walking through Wal-Mart with my kids, cart full of school supplies.

The point in time of the purchase of the aformentioned workout DVD may or may not coincide with the rapid approach of my 20th high school reunion. The purchase was regrettably made without complete presence of mind, which left me open to the quick and dirty work of my subconscious. My guess is that it's modus operandi was some form of latent school performance anxiety.

My plan, upon discovering this deep-buried anxiety (which happened in those last two paragraphs there in case you missed it) to to transform, right here before your very eyes, the dark thoughts of subconscious into light of conscious thought and intention. Whatcha think? Shall we go on?

Yes! We shall! There was the purchase, of course, which as I mentioned was made with little forethought. This led to some remorse later due to the fact that I had spent money which may have been put to better use feeding our children and buying them shoes or something useful. But guilt was assuaged a bit by my intention to eat less, in addition to working out, which meant that I would be saving money with this plan. (I think of everything.)

The purchase, by the way, was Jillian Michaels doing yoga. I know, right? Never would have put those two together. Hardcore Yoga? I don't think so. (Yoga Meltdown is the title. Lose up to five pounds a week!) Even when Jillian is trying to feign some sort of yogic presence by saying things like "Melt your heart to the sky," she practically barks it at you.

If you think the idea of a Drill Sergeant Yogi sounds kinda peaceful yet motivational at the same time, buy this DVD. But I have to warn you that you may experience a desire to look around the room to see if anyone else was listening (you will be alone, of course) when Jillian barks, "Who's your daddy?" to one of her posing sidekick models in yoga pants. What to the heck?

So that's kinda how it went. The actually working out part, that is. In addition to tiring a little of certain motivational phrases (You. Are. Gonna. Get. Ripped!" she kept saying into the camera, pounding her fist into her hand. Yawn.), I spent a good part of the time laying with my face on the floor because my body refuses to do a plank ( I'm a little front heavy).

Finally, and in conclusion, I would like to say that in spite of this experience, I remain ignorant of the Catholic Church's position on the practice of yoga (it being a Buddhist spiritual practice and all) but I assure you that I did the sign of the cross both before and after and in between thinking I love God I love God I love God I also repeated Have mercy! Have mercy! just in case it really was a misguided thing to be doing and possibly a breaking of the first commandment (Hint: it is not freedom of speech).

Although it does give me a pause and an occasion for wondering when I have observed that some people (I'm not talking about you) use exercise as a way to worship their own bodies, and does this constitute some kind of false god, or could it be in fact a way to honor the divine presence infused into our bodies, the temple of the Holy Spirit? I don't know! You tell me!

The only form of Catholic excercise that I know of is the mass. Anyone who is not Catholic and attends a mass remarks on all the sitting, standing, kneeling. Then there is the sign of the cross and shaking everyone's hand during the Sign of Peace. Who even needs those annoying arm circle excerises or the tedium of bicep curls?

So since my high school reunion is coming up, I'm upping my attendance to twice a week. I'm. Gonna. Get. Holy! So. what. about the baby belly. I'll be sporting a shiny halo. They'll be so jealous.

Dreaming Trees Into Being

2011-08-23T13:37:00.000-07:00

For a long time I've been wanting a tree for a certain spot in my backyard, an open spot in front of our 6 foot privacy fence that divides our yard from the neighboring apartment building. We took out all the old overgrown honeysuckle bushes in order to put in the fence, so for a long time that side of the yard has looked incomplete: all wood fence and brick rising up to black shingled roof.

Something inside me longed for something green and growing in that space of everything manmade materials.

I thought about it a lot, actually. You might even call it an obsession. I would sit on the patio having morning coffee and dream of what I'd put there. In the afternoons I'd push Josie in her swing and lock my eyes onto that spot, imagining leaves and flowers blossoming against the backdrop of wood and brick and shingle. I daydreamed myself into a landscape artist.

I would go to nurseries and look at trees and bushes of assorted varieties, taking note of their branch span, their height, what season they flowered and whether they were evergreen or deciduous. Soil and sun needs I pondered, considering what would flourish. Sometimes I considered whether someday I might want something strong enough to hold a hammock, or whether there was room for two trees to support the weight, to one day cradle my resting body. How long would that be? How long until I could rest?

I thought about fruit trees: they seemed like work. Buying an apple pie and napping in a hammock was a more appealing option. River birch I liked, the texture of its flaking bark an invitation to peel it off and hold the delicate strips in my hand to investigate. Then there was the idea of a weeping willow and a water feature, a dreamy place to watch Koi swim to the sound of wind chimes.

I've always stopped short of actually buying a tree. Truthfully, the money was never really there to buy a tree. There is always money for the mortgage and food and gas and clothes and the kids' activities and fun things to do together as a family, but a tree? Especially a big one (maybe two if I went with the long-term hammock plan) that would require more money for delivery and planting? No, not really.

But I could dream. That I could do. And I did.

Today I got my tree: a beautiful 10 ft. Sunset Maple that is absolutely more perfect than any other tree. You know why? Because it stands as a reminder of how we really can dream things into being.

It came into my life like this: Partly because of my big mouth and the tendency to open it up and say whatever I'm thinking, I got Shad involved in helping with our church festival as part of the Auction Committee. For the past few months, his job has been to solicit donations from people in the community to be auctioned off at the festival with all proceeds going to the church.

One of the donations he secured was this Sunset Maple from Tepe Nursery.

Of course I coveted the tree (just a little) but I never considered buying it. We weren't planning on buying anything in the auction, with Shad working and me busy with the kids we wouldn't have been able to be bidding on things as well. And there was the fact that the tree ended up in a package of combined landscape-themed items with a total value of over $1000.

There was no way we could spend THAT much. The tree was not even remotely a possibility.

At least I thought. While I was busy single parenting our four children and Shad working for several days putting together all of the auction items and putting in time at the festival, some divine intervention was happening just out of reach of my awareness: my parents decided they were going to bid on the auction landscape package. Not because they wanted to get the tree for me or for themselves. In fact, the tree wasn't even a consideration. It was the 8 hours of landscaping labor that was part of the package which they needed. A day of landscape labor helps them to maintain all the flower beds in their large yard. "All that bending!" my mom lamented about how much the weeds were taking over.

Of course you've probably figured out that my parents were the top bidders for the landscape package. The one that included the tree, my tree. I said nothing, of course, assuming they would want the tree for their yard. But they looked around their yard for a place to put a tree and decided they didn't really need one, so they asked us if we wanted the tree.

Uh...yeeeaaaahhh.

And today, my friends, Mike Tepe and two other guys came to our house and planted our Sunset Maple, right in the spot I've been imagining a tree for so many days and months and years. It is absolutely more perfect than any tree I could have decided on and bought. Today Eli and Josie and I ran our hands along the smooth silky bark of its trunk and thought about the swings and birds and fall leaf crowns it will bring into our lives. Already a few of its leaves are turning orangey-red, a hint of autumn color to come.

And now, for days and months and years I will look at that tree and know that sometimes the things that we ask for in our hearts do come. They really do.

Overabundance and Other First World Problems

2011-08-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Elaine laughed at me yesterday, sitting at a picnic table, snacking with our children, when I pulled a whole green cucumber out of my bag and took a bite out of the end.

"I didn't have the energy to cut it up, " I said, explaining myself, thinking I must be a funny picture gnawing on so large a vegetable. We weren't exactly having a "ladies' lunch", but my friend Elaine's English-by-way-of-South-Africa accent conveyed propriety I felt suddenly lacking in, and my wide-eyed Midwestern country girl image morphed into a scary caricature of a redneck hick.

You might be a redneck if...

(Here is where I spend several minutes maybe hours trying to think of a funny yet not too vulgar way to finish that sentence working with the idea of cucumbers and what a less-than-civilized person might do with one and I could not COULD NOT do it. Does that mean I have standards? I hope it does. I SO want to be a person with standards.)

"That's what happens when you have so many vegetables from the CSA," Elaine commented, still laughing, watching the green and white vegetable disappear between my crunching teeth. She's known me long enough not to be offended or surprised, considering she was the only who accompanied me to the Village Cellars not so long ago and helped me drink a bottle of wine and then watched me spill half a glass onto my white shirt. (Gesturing wildly often occurs in consequence with wine drinking. For me. Just sayin'.)

And our town librarian saw me knock the glass into myself while I was talking and gesturing wildly and nervously (I get nervous around librarians because I always have overdue books) and oooooooooh did I wish so hard for the floor to open up and swallow me and my now scarlet-lettered shirt.

My wise librarian friend informed me that spilling wine is the reason she always wears black, and I'm really glad she told me this because I thought maybe she was either in mourning or just really avante garde, and now. I. know. it is because she's clumsy, too! I like her so much now!

But the whole incident left me with the feeling that I should check out more self-help books from the library. You know, just to let the librarian know that I'm cleaning up my act a little. Yesterday's wild and utter disregard for convention and appropriateness to the point of eating whole cucumbers untouched by any utensil but using only my hands and teeth was maybe a bit of a backslide, so please don't tell.

Along with my open displays mouth kissing vegetables, I also happen to be the type of woman that Elaine knows to be suddenly possessed with the urge to learn the guitar together so we can form some kind of girl hippie band. (That may have something to do with this idea occuring to us on the same night as the red wine meets white shirt incident and may also be connected to the name of that wine--which turns purple when it stains by the way-- a Chilean wine named Red Guitar.)

The guitar is now sitting in my living room reminding me of my inclination to laziness and time-wasting and why have I not learned how to play a song yet? It's on my bucket list, learning the guitar, which has long been a desire of my heart, but one not easily accomplished when you happen to be a southpaw like me and not so easily accomodated in this world where your brain is always having to translate the placement of everything into a mirror image.

In a grand romantic gesture (total plucking of my heartstrings! Zing!) Shad bought me a left-handed guitar just out-of-the blueness one day. And after I grew tired of just sitting and gazing at the pure loveliness of its form and the beauty of the sound that came out when I strummed across the strings, I began to realize that it was going to take a lot of time and effort to learn how to play this instrument.

Ooooh. You mean like, work.

I despair a little at the thought of the responsibility that comes with such a beautiful instrument which longs to rise to its potential as an accompaniment to poetry and sound. But despair is not where I want to leave this post, this long stretch of random connected thoughts and events. Does every. single. sentence. seem really really long in this post? Racing thoughts! Help! I am
begging, so begging, for an ending here. Please? BRING THIS TO AN END.

Witness

I am overwhelmed by the abundance
of cucumbers. I am weighted
with the promise of music.
What is welled up asks for
my gratitude by giving
a translation to words
of my seeing of it.

Well, that was just a huge dose of Woe-Be-Gone. Garrison Keillor would be darn proud, I hope.

Woe. Is. Me.

2011-08-18T19:39:00.000-07:00

My new Ode Magazine came in the mail yesterday with this amazing cover declaring The Spirit of Money and when I saw it, I was like, Yes! That looks SOOOO good, I can't wait to read it!

And that's as far as I got. I've just been staring at the cover. I don't even have the energy to read it.

Tonight I was in Aldi and I walked by the wine and I thought, Well, I could get a bottle for tonight...and then I just continued walking.

So you know things are bad if I'm passing up good reads and wine. It kind of goes without saying that I've also lost interest in cleaning, cooking, gardening, laundry, and filling out one more goshdang piece of school paperwork. And uniforms. Sorting through piles of navy pants and polos and sweatshirts and skorts and dangit can't I just wrap them up in duct tape or leftover fabric or recycled plastic bags sounds like a green option.

I called my chiropractor today because on top of everything Josie has been complaining that her back hurts and when she (yes, SHE, because she has this strange rapport with doctors) said to our pediatrician in the middle of Eli's check up yesterday, "My back hurts," he (the doctor) replied, "Well, you seem a little young to be complaining of back aches."

And I'm too young to forget where the heck I was going with this blog post, but I just got distracted by the loud volume of the TV in the other room where apparently Shad is watching a man with a cadence in his voice and frequent use of the word, "Gaaawd" and then occasional outburts from a crowd of people in unison shouting, "Amen!" But he must have lost interest and changed the channel.

The chiropractor! Yes! I called her. And she told me that Josie hurt her back falling out of her bed. And I said, why yes she did fall out of her bed just the other night and in fact she even told me she hurt her back falling out of it but I ignored her and thought instead that she had something horrible like a kidney infection or worse.

(Maybe because I googled "3 yo complaining of back ache kidneys?" So don't do that unless you like the genre, "medical horror nonfiction")

(Which tells me that maybe I should stop reading the internet and just call the chiropractor.)

Gosh, I'm just so tired.

And that's the problem, really. My chiropractor, the clairvoyant, in addition to knowing that Josie hurt her back falling from bed, also told me that I'm tired. And that I need a break from the kids. And when she told me I wasn't like, "Well, duh!" I was just thankful. She affirmed me, and that feels good.

So pray for me or send me good energy vibes or whatever it is you do to bring healing upon me in my state of tiredness and wretched lack of interest in life. Woe!

Tiny Whispering Sounds

2011-08-10T05:32:00.000-07:00

Eli is my hurricane baby. He's six today and it was six years ago this month that we saw Hurricane Katrina rip the Southern shores of Louisiana and Mississipi in massive waves of destruction. He was two weeks old when this happened, and I remember every morning fixing breakfast in the kitchen, him lying in the bassinet in the corner while above him on the shelf the radio filled us in on the latest of what was happening in the world.

NPR took over the kitchen. Voices of fear. Voices of anger. Voices of worry and want and confusion. I listened to those voices, cocked my head to the side, ears perked for information, standing a moment still, stopped to the motion of scrambling eggs and pancake flipping.

My body responded with a large letdown of milk in my breasts, the hurrying of hands to finish the cooking, to fetch the whimpering baby Eli and nurse him. I'd turn off the hurricane voices, sit in the quiet motion of rocking back and forth, righting the world.

Eli is named Elijah, after the prophet who hid in the cave, listening. "Is that you, God?" he'd ask to the sound of thunderclaps and fierce winds roaring outside his protected hiding place. There was never an answer, only more noise. Elijah was scared hiding there, uncertain of where to find God.

The first year after Eli was born all I heard was noise. He was colicky, for one, and if you've ever been around a colicky baby, you know how there is nothing so possessive of attention as the wail of an unhappy newborn. In me there were voices of anxiety and failure, as I attempted homeschooling my older two girls between nursings and diaper changes, in the daytime hours before the evening colic crying came.

And then the tragic death of someone endeared to us. How sorrow sounds its mourning in low tones of grief everywhere. I felt myself sink down to meet it. Here was Elijah, in my arms, out of the cave of my womb and where had I gone? Back inside. My own cave of hiding and searching for a God to draw me out.

An entire year of noise passed until I finally heard the whisper. I signed up for a class at Women Writing for (a) Change and began, slowly, and with trepidation, to write again. It had taken 10 years with only a scattering of journal entries to roll back the rock I'd laid in front of my dark cave of hiding.

Eli's birth had been the foretelling of my return to writing, a prophet whose coming had forced me to listen. I learned to wait and be quiet until I heard the voice, this voice, inside me, a quiet invitation to resurrect the lost things: those joyful, sorrowful, luminous and glorious mysteries to be found when light in silence pours itelf into the corners of darkness.

Happy Birthday today to the boy whose birth helped me to birth myself.

Texting Jesus

2011-08-03T06:27:00.001-07:00

Well, sort of. Except I don't need a cell phone, of course. I message him, in my head. I actually see the words typed in my brain and I see them floating outward and upward, like one of those message banners flying behind an airplane in the sky.

He doesn't have a whole lot of new things to say, Jesus. Which I guess means his message in the gospels is timeless. Duh.

Most of what I've been messaging him about lately is this writing thing, because it doesn't make sense to me, doesn't fit very well into my life, and if I'm supposed to think of it as a talent bestowed upon me to use to bring God's love to others, well I'd like to send this one back and trade for another please because I don't like this one. Not one bit.

But I never actually send the message about giving away my writing talent because I'm a little freaked out by the "Ask and it will be given to you" (Mt 7:7) thing and when you get down to it, I can't imagine NOT writing. I've been doing it since I wrote my first poem in Sr. Ann's first grade class at St. Francis (she kept it in her desk drawer for 15 years).

So not wanting to write would feel like not wanting to breathe. It would mean I would want to die. The need to write, as much as it causes me to suffer, makes me feel alive. I think above anything God wants us to be alive, that's why He made us, and when I write about my experience of being human, it's kind of like writing about God, even when I don't always directly talk about Him.

But I was telling you about messaging Jesus. Which I do. Several times I awoke during the night last night with these ideas spinning in my head and finally this morning when the light seeped between the blinds and I awoke, I sent Jesus a message.

Do u want me to write abt this? Let me know...

And then I just went about my usual morning business with the kids and they wanted pancakes and we mixed up the batter and laid them out on the griddle and sometime in the middle of that flour was everywhere in the kitchen (the kitchen I cleaned yesterday) and I had to work a little bit to not get frustrated especially before I had any coffee as I cleaned up the powder while I tried not to burn the pancakes and cleaned floury hands but not fast enough obviously because the black couch in the den now had big handprints across it but in the end the pancakes were fluffy and good and not burned at all and there was coffee, too.

But I still had no reply from Jesus.

So I cleaned the kitchen after we ate and ran the dishwasher and awoke Julia (late-sleeping pre-teen) and texted Gabrielle who is in Florida with a friend and texted Shad who was gone to work before I awoke.

And then there I was standing in front of my laptop and not thinking about anything and I opened it up and turned it on and clicked the link to my Blogger Dashboard and hit "New Post".

Maybe Jesus was trying to tell me something.

But I doubted it. I looked around a my house, surveyed the mess and the laundry wrinkling in baskets, saw plainly with my eyes how there were cutting boards and large cooking utensils still sitting by the sink that needed washing, knew for certain that I did not know what I was fixing for lunch or for dinner today. I saw hungry mouths waiting to be fed, bodies needing to be dressed.

My next message to Jesus was a little more demanding than before. I'm kind of embarrassed to say it here, but suffice it to say that it was a little on the irritated side. Perhaps. I may have thrown in a wtf? for good measure. Which is not really a good thing to say to Jesus, but I'm just hoping he brushes this sort of thing off, because maybe he is used to being cursed at.

But he answered me this time.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they?

The old "Dependence on God" speech from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. Yeah, I know it.

But am I important? Am I? I'm not so sure, Jesus.

And he was quick to answer this one.

You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.

He kinda had me on that one.

So now that I'm writing could you send me a nanny and a housekeeper?

Jesus hasn't sent a reply to this one yet. I'm guessing he's just checking with his people.

Nothin' Fancy. Just Good.

2011-07-31T13:59:00.000-07:00

I don't trust people when they sound like they know what they are talking about. I don't. I think it is because I know how to sound like I know what I'm talking about, but really I'm just full of it. Really, I am.

Also I don't trust people who look like they have it all together. Part of the reason for that is because I have tried very VERY hard on many occasions in my life for long periods of time with complete and utter perserverence to get all my ducks in a row and have always ALWAYS failed. So either something is wrong with me (OK, yes, I admit this could be the case) or it's just not possible at all to really have all of your stuff together all at the same time.

And yet I fall for fancy wine labels every time. Sigh.

So it's good thing I have a friend Jeff who knows a thing or two about wine since he works with some big wine company doing I don't know exactly what except that in the past two months he's gone to both Italy and Napa to do something with wine and live like a rock star (Gawd, I'm so jealous) and yet YET he never says anything high falutin' at all about wine.

Which is very respectable you have to admit because if it were me I would probably take the opportunity to say snotty and intelligent and glamorous-sounding things whenever I could. But he doesn't. Which come to think of it, is maybe why I like Jeff. Because he's Midwestern like me and more prone to saying goofy things like, "You guys are so cool! I love you guys!" (about me and Shad). And then handing me a bottle of really yummy wine to show his appreciation of our friendship.

And that's how I came to possess this bottle of 2009 Arrow Creek Meritage (available at Kroger). Because I never would have bought something with so humble a label, which is not to say that you shouldn't, only that I have an inherent character flaw. And that character flaw is that I don't trust things/people which appear to be more than they actually are, and yet I fall for them every time.

(But if you must fall for something, you could fall for the cute jumping horsey.)

But you should absolutely fall for this wine. You should. Not because I said so, but because Jeff said Meritage is the "hot thing right now." Or something like that. But what matters is that I opened the bottle this evening to try out my brand new hand-blown red wine glasses from IKEA and guess what? GUESS WHAT. This wine is fabulous with a grilled burger topped with homemade refrigerator pickles, fresh tomato, cheddar-mozzarella cheese, lettuce, and mayo.

(And later I googled a review of this wine that said it is best pared with simple fare. How much more simple can you get than a burger grilled in your backyard?)

So go to Kroger right now, buy this wine and some burgers to grill up, and enjoy the beautiful simplictity and humility of something that delivers more than fancy packaging: a deliciously simple, yet robust red with the flavor of the countryside. While it's plain on the outside, the wine inside is FULL of character.

Cheers!

The technical wine stuff:

Vineyards and Harvest: The vineyards for this Meritage are located primarily in the San Joaquin Valley, California’s breadbasket. It is from these verdant fields that Arrow Creek makes its award-winning wines. Grown on fertile soils, the vines thrive in the mild Mediterranean climate. Long known for pleasant and enjoyable wines, the Central Valley is emerging as one of the world’s leaders in quality wine production.

Wine Description:This wine is a blend of the classic grapes of the Bordelaise where each traditional variety plays its strength in a harmonious blend of flavors. This Meritage has deep aromas of sun-dried plums, ripe Bing cherries, sweet vanilla and a hint of fresh-ground coffee. Vibrant and juicy flavors ramp up the intensity of this classically styled wine.

Food Pairing:Serve with barbeque, roast meats or hearty vegetarian entrees.

Winemaking:The grapes were destemmed and classically fermented for eight days, after which the wine was sent to neutral stainless casks, naturally clarified and bottled in the year following fermentation.

Tasting Notes:Aromas of blackberry and cherry are coupled with silky tannins and a juicy, vibrant acidity. The mid-palate is intense and segues seamlessly into the long and supple finish.

Awards:2009 Vintage Silver Medal - San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, 2011 Certificate of American Merit (equivalent to a Silver Medal) - Jefferson Cup Invitational, 20102008 Vintage Best of Class/ Gold Medal - Jerry D. Mead's New World International Wine Competition, 2010 Silver Medal - San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, 2010

Why I Love Texting

2011-07-29T16:20:00.000-07:00

My husband sent me a text a couple of weeks ago that made me cry. I had texted him to tell him I was getting ready to go to the pool with the kids and mentioned that I was grouchy and feeling fat in my swimsuit. His reply text made me cry.

This is a regular thing, by the way: I text him to tell him what I'm doing with the kids and also give him an emotional update. For example: Working on cleaning the bathroom. Unmotivated today. Bah. Or maybe: Running errands with the kids. Thinking about stopping at a bar because MAMA NEEDS A DRINK. But not always so negative, like: Eli just told me I'm the best. mom. ever. Should buy him french fries more often. Love our kids :)

And he texts me back. Stuff about work. Funny things that happen in the day. Frustrations he has with his work or people. Once he sent several texts throughout the morning about how bad his day was and finally, in an attempt to help him out, I texted back a picture of his favorite "girls". (Yes, I sexted my husband, people.) He came home that evening all smiles. "You made my day, " he said. "Work sucked, things were frustrating, but I kept looking at that picture and it cheered me up....thanks, honey."

This is why I love texting: it keeps us connected to one another throughout the day, but in an unobtrusive way. We're communicating, but it doesn't have to interrupt the flow of our day. In the past, I can't tell you how many awkward phone conversations we had where I was venting about the kids and he sat in silence because someone was at his desk or he was in the middle of something that he couldn't quite get his head out of. After several minutes of me talking, I would suddenly think to ask, "Are you busy?" It did not always turn out well.

And the other reason I love texting is that every once in awhile you get one that really says the thing that you needed to hear and on top of that, someone loves you enough to take the time to type out the tiny letters to say it. Like the text I mentioned when I began this post, the one that made me cry. It was Shad's reply to the down-in-the-dumpish tone of my text to him, my lament about parading my survived-four-pregancies body around at the pool wearing practically nothing in front of like, A LOT of people.

His response? I'm proud of your mama body.

Those six words moved me to tears and changed my perspective. Forever. Those words finally clicked with me what makes my body beautiful: not because it's model perfect or toned and tanned or long and lean or aesthetically perfect in any way. But because it has "mama" written all over it. Because it says Beautiful Creator of Life over all of its (many) curves.

I have since purchased a new swimsuit, a little more revealing than my last one, and I walk with much more confidence at the pool, knowing that far from being perfect, my body speaks (voluptuous!) volumes of mama love.

Odor of Sweaty Feet Syndrome

2011-07-20T20:43:00.000-07:00

Just one of many things you find out actually exists (apparently, along with Odor of Raw Fish Syndrome) when you are googling to find out what might be wrong with your three -year-old who has suddenly (OK, for 2 weeks) had a case of really bad breath. There is quite a list of weird and scary sounding syndromes associated with children and odiferous face-holes.

While reading this list sometime, maybe around 3 am when worry and insomnia thrive, you might experience a sensation not unlike a panic attack or a heart attack or an aneurysm or something where your heart and brain both explode simultaneously from terror and confusion and shock.

But I can assure you that everything will be OK when you read the small print at the bottom of The Big List of Possible Horrendous Things that could be Wrong with your Foul-Smelling Child. There at the end, in parentheses:

(Oh, by the way, if your child has a persistent runny nose from one nostril in addition to the bad breath, she may have something stuck up in her nose. It's common for toddlers to put things in their nose holes and not really a big deal compared to the huge scary list above. Sorry to freak you out.)

At this point (thank GOD) you are able to stop imagining the conversations you will have with friends and family when you find out your adorable and sweet daughter has something called “Odor of Sweaty Feet Syndrome”.

“Her feet smell?”

“No, it’s her mouth.”

“But it’s called Odor of Sweaty Feet Symdrome?”

“Because her breath smells like sweaty feet.”

You will be very VERY relieved (did I say VERY?) when you take your runny nosed, stinky-mouthed child to the doctor the very next day and he looks up her nose with one of those little scopes with a light and says, well, yes, indeed there IS something up there. He will ask her to lay down on the exam table and you will hold the light and with a pair of long tweezers he will remove the thing from her nose in about 10 seconds.

And your child will think this whole experience is just about the most fun she’s had. Ever.*

You will not feel guilt after all of this, not even when you think about how long your precious sweet thing suffered with a blockage in her nostril and a bad taste in her mouth. No, you won’t really feel guilt because instead you will be overwhelmed with gratitude. Gratitude is what you will feel that everything is fine now. Freed from anxiety and worry, the knowledge of that big list of terrible things that could be wrong is just another reason to be grateful for all that things that can be made right. And that, you will suddenly realize, is grace.
　
*(At least MY child had an absolute blast having something extracted from her nose. What‘s wrong with yours? She thinks going to the doctor is magnificent for some reason, even when he sticks tweezers up her nose. Now, a few weeks ago I took her into an arcade and you would have thought I took her into Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell, she was so distraught. So I guess we’ll have her fourth birthday at the doctor’s office instead of Chuck E. Cheeses.)

Her Majesty, the Queen

2011-07-08T05:47:00.000-07:00

What they don't tell you about motherhood is that it elevates your status to royalty. Think about when your children were babies. Who was the most amazing person in the world to them? Mama. That's right. The stares of adoration, especially in those hungry moments while you struggled with those impossible clasps on the nursing bra, were almost unbearable. To be so important: Wow.

We have a special room in our house where my children come to worship me. In addition to a shower and sink, there is a white porcelain throne where they all rush and surround me, each paying homage to the Her Majesty, the Queen of Household Bissell.

And here's a wine that's just another reminder of how very special you really are: Her Majesty Chardonnay. Of course, the bottle is a selling point for me: I like to be reminded of my royal status and how fortunate my family is to be blessed with the honor of my presence among them. Somehow it builds me up after a long day of changing diapers and scrubbing the funk out of the bottom of the bathtub.

But the wine itself is nice, too. It's light and crisp in a green apple-pear-citrus way, light in color, not too dry. It's not the buttery, golden and heavier kind of chardonnay, but refreshing on a summer day. The lightness of it is a kind reminder not to take the mom-job too seriously. Have fun with it. Let yourself be worshipped a little.

My friend Jules (mom of 3) and I (mom of 4) shared a glass of this yesterday, a dog-day of a July afternoon where we hung out in her backyard with the kids and a large blow-up pool (the pool, by the way, was Jules' only requested birthday gift for her 35th today. A pool for the kids: what a queenly, servant-of-the-people gesture).

A glass of this Napa juice was the perfect relaxing accompaniment to the merry cavorting of our darling subjects, who lavished us with splashing and clung to our legs and necks in adoration as we paraded about the pool. The job of Queen can be tough: making sure the people are fed sufficient popsicles, protected with the right amount of sunscreen, and ruled with a gentle yet firm hand to avoid the possibility of an ER visit.

Her Majesty Chardonnay is a nice little reminder of how lucky we are to hold the position of honor of Queen Mom. Raise a glass, toast yourself. And make sure to have your children bow and curtsy when they approach you.

Cheers!

Anniversary Day

2011-07-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

43 years. Wow, Mom and Dad. July 6, 1968 you voiced the vows and here. you. are. Maybe 43 isn't a significant anniversary as these things go, like 25 or 50, but most of marriage isn't made of milestone days, just the ordinary day-to-day choosing to love more often than not. You taught me that: love is a decision you make every day. And then, I'm guessing, one day you find yourself on your 43rd anniversary with a whole lifetime of love behind you.

Watching you two love each other inspires me to love my husband more, to value my marriage above anything. And then I get mushy and start writing poems about it, as I'm inclined to do. So here's one I wrote last week about my marriage. I hope it will still have meaning for us on our 43rd. One day I hope to be where you are.

Marriage

We've hit the sweet spot, all the dirty laundry washed
and hung to dry,
washed and hung to dry,
washed and hung to dry. Now
sun bleached and folded, there's no more washing to do.

It's comfortable,
soft,
the kind of thing you want
to put on day after day and just walk around in. To feel
how it feels on your body. Worn does not have to mean useless
or unappealing. There is a character
to it, how the stitches are pulling apart
here,
a little threadbare
there,
the spot of something long forgotten.

And holes. There are holes,
which is about as close as we can get to
holy in this place. A holy marriage.

And that's what holds it
together. Not the weaving of threads of things of this world
or the intertwining of fingers wearing golden bands.
Not these things. Like clothespins
across the line, they hold us here. Wind blows
through us, doing the work
that needs to be done, flying across fiber and through
the taut strands of our hearts, softening. We are soft,
hearts sweetened with time drunk too fast.

And still I wonder what things there could be, what unmade memories
yet to harden our hearts? A shirt suddenly
stiff with unfamiliarity, uncomfortable to
put on. Uncertainty I hold up, look closely to see the belief
I won't claim, wash off the dirt of doubt. We are
nothing, if not clean.

The Middle of My Little Mess

2011-06-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

A long bedtime meltdown from Josie was maybe what I needed. "I miss you, Mommy!" she yelled, hitting me with her tiny fists, kicking the bed next to me. "I'm mad!"

Oh, honey. Me, too. I miss me, too.

There's still working out to do, with this mother-thing, writer-thing. I don't have plans or answers or anything, really, except the burning drive of inspiration that hits when it hits and kills me one way or the other. Suffer if you do, suffer if you don't.

In the middle of the mess, I know I'm blessed....thanks to this song, a regular in my ipod rotation. This is the Stuff by Francesca Battisitelli. Have a little listen. I'll see you back in a few days, after I clean up some messes.

Sweet!

2011-06-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Guess. What.

An angel came to visit me last night. Not, like, to give me any news about my possible role in salvation history or anything. No, nothing like that. He just left a box of wine on my doorstep. Like: Here you go. Stop whining. Drink up.

I have to admit, it kinda made my day.

(Not kinda. It really did. I mean, how often does a whole box of wine show up on your front porch?)

And because it was a day where Eli tells me that he hates me and tears to pieces a red paper heart that he made me last week all on account of the fact that I wouldn't let him have ice cream for the second time in the afternoon which was then followed by a massive post-vacation meltdown (later he apologized and tried to tape the heart back together)-- because it was that kind of day, I immediately cracked open a bottle as soon as the kids' took their first deep inhale of sleep.

This is what I opened first:

A dessert wine, a pineapple upside-down cake in a bottle, chilled and ready for me. Frost Bitten is the name of this Ice Reisling and it is sweet, sweet, sweetness. I found out two things when I googled this wine. One is that an iced Reisling is one where the grapes are frozen on the vine, hand-picked, and then hung from the rafters to let the water out of the grapes for full concentration. Two is that Frost Bitten is considered a wine of both good quality and affordability ($11.99/bottle).

As a lover of dry reds, I wasn't sure if I was going to like something so sweet. But it was a pleasant change of pace and satisfied my after-dinner sweet tooth. I could see drinking a red with dinner and then switching to this wine for the dessert course. You know, for a fahn-cy dinner that does not include cutting up anyone else's food. Maybe because this wine tastes of romance to me, of dark chocolate dipped strawberries and lingering glances.

And don't forget music. I paired it with not one, but two listens to the sweet voice of Alison Krauss singing "Dimming of the Day" from her new release, Paper Airplane. Perfect. A sweet note on the end of a not-so-sweet day.

Thank you, Wine Angel.

Click on the song link above to hear it. Beautiful.

Father's Day, a week late.

2011-06-27T07:58:00.000-07:00

For Shad.

A genuine expression is not always on time. But these are the things he tolerates--no, tolerates is not the right word--loves about me. He doesn’t mind inappropriate or irreverent and as much as I try for conventional, he never expects it. Unruly, he enjoys. And as many times as I murmur I’m yours I’m yours I’m yours into his ear, possession is unimportant to him. I tease him about his lack of a jealous bone and he smiles quiet smiles because he knows that I would squirm and slip away if his grasp were too tight. Open handed, he accepts me, lets me alight like a bird to sit on his palm, to fly away at will.

Acceptance. That is the quality in him that makes him the father he is. Our children, he lovingly accepts. From God, as our wedding vows dictate. God’s children, he holds them. Tiny newborns he brings close, smells deeply, smells heaven’s lingering scent in their baby ears. He loves all of them, each little detail of them. Details, he loves. That is the type of father he is: one enthralled with the tiny bits of humanity all moving together in color and sound and soul, a person.

He is interested, to a fault. Interested in his children to the point of desiring their presence more than a day at work or an afternoon of mowing. He does these things anyway, performs the motions of selflessness for his family but draws the line at providing the basics and then gives his attention. He does for them to a point, and then, he is with them. This is who he is with them: a man taking pleasure in his children. They thrive like this, with his acceptance, his attention. With his love.

Love. This he knows how to do. To go farther here would slide down a slope into sentimentality. And that I can’t abide; not as easily as I can abide with him, day in, day out. The ease of it, the comfort, the way he takes the desperate out of my housewife. The way love pours a river around us and we stand apart, islands of longing.

Kindness in the Face of Adversity

2011-06-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

Never mind that it's nearly July, Eli wants to make snowflakes. His fingers have just now found the dexterity to cut the small shapes out of the paper that once unfolded, yields something resembling a giant snowflake. Of course Josie wants to join in, climbing up on my lap and picking up the child-sized scissors, grabbing with small hands for a piece of clean paper.

But three is not yet the age for snowflakes, it is the age for tantrums, a certain destiny in the face of difficulty.

And that is where we find ourselves after a few minutes of struggle: me holding the paper, her guiding the scissors clumsily with both hands, determined to connect paper and scissor blade, but missing each time. Another try and then she screams. Scissors thrown. Head shaking. Legs kicking against mine.

I know she is frustrated from the effort and I hug her tighter, stroke her hair, remind her gently that she is little, that cutting is a big girl job and she will learn, it just takes time. Josie calms and relaxes against me. I pick up the scissors, handing them back to her. I hold the paper at an angle that will make it easier for her to cut and she guides the scissors, open, onto the paper. With one hand on each handle of the scissors, she closes the blades and the paper cuts.

"I did it!" she yells triumphantly, jumping down from my lap to go play something else, on to the next challenge. There are so many challenges to being three, to learning how to function in the world. It is the age of "I do it!" when even the smallest thing, like putting on her own shirt, is a HUGE accomplishment.

I sit and continue to cut paper, the making of snowflakes a relatively easy task for me. But my mind freely wanders to the tasks I've been working on that aren't so easy, the balancing of work and family and spiritual growth and writing that are pushing me forward, forcing me to grow up.

"Aim for the chopping block," says Annie Dillard, and I have. I aim with an intensity and still miss. I miss the mark on some things, but certainly not for lack of trying. Trying so hard is probably the condition that makes the failure so inevitable.

In the face of the frustration of failure, the tantrum goes on within, my own personal drama of scissor throwing, kicking, and head shaking. I know I've missed the mark, I know I've failed, and I am angry. The intensity of it pushed me over an emotional edge this past week and the things I failed to contain seeped out. Usually results in what I call "un-prettiness". People turn away from it: it's unattractive.

How interesting to learn recently that the word "sin" is an archery term meaning "to miss the mark." I like thinking of it that way, not so loaded with hell and damnation. Missing the mark implies that there is a trying, that intention to hit the target was there in the first place, but it would be silly to expect to hit the bullseye every time. Who can do that? Perfection is not our destiny here, is it? But we can try.

Like little Josie with her scissors, I tried. The mark was missed, the tantrum thrown. And now I must extend the same kindness and patience to myself that I gave to my child. I am growing. I will learn. It all takes time.

Someday I'll get to wear big girl pants.

Traveling the Road Home

2011-06-24T17:15:00.000-07:00

1-40 West out of Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge area. Our minivan packed, tailgate heavy. Four kids in the back munching Wendy’s fries, a chorus of giggles and the repeating of lines from Despicable Me. A deep breath and my chest muscles relax, beginning the slow unwind and release of stored up tourist destination energy. Ah. Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

Another yearly family vacation: famn damily, as in the whole of it. Like We are Family. Significant and others, umpteen of us. Away we go and it’s over and done. Last year we beached it, a vacation style that suits me just fine in the just-do-nothingness of it. Watch waves, move sand from place to place, skip the soap and shampoo, drink all manner of alcoholic beverages in slow succession for hours and never feel drunk, abide in a constant state of relaxed well-being and all rightness of the world.

But behind us now lies another reality of vacation-ness. One that includes massive complexes of concrete and steel and overstimulation. Like the go-kart place we visited on our way out, a must-do on the boys’ list of Stuff Not To Be Missed, a place that includes an arcade, carnival rides, a large booth dedicated to airbrush t-shirts (you can get one that says Just Married if you’d like).

We could, if we have the hankerin’, stop at this exit and visit a country music mecca called SuperTwang.

This could sound as if I am above senseless entertainment. Not the case at all. My problem is a week’s accumulation of daily exposure to neon energy and very loud, very bad music without the repose of the daily, the ordinary that keeps me tethered into place. And then there was little Josie. Josie with her bellyaches and her need to be held, to accessorize my neck like a whining child-necklace. I’m off-kilter and energetically imbalanced to phrase it all New Agey. Constipated chakras, or something like that.

Oh, that did slip out, didn’t it? That I have a problem. I do, thanks for asking. Crowds and lights and excessive intake of caffeine and sugar and the juggling of kids and needs and family dynamics and the constant uncertainty of what comes next and whether it will ever end in a time when I can actually hear myself breathe or pray or think or think or think without the noise of someone’s else’s thoughts so near to mine.

It’s slowly going away, the further we get away, the closer we near to home, which is not happening so quickly now that we are driving 5 mph in a traffic jam. Good thing we’re following a Lincoln Navigator with a bumper sticker of Jesus’ face surrounded by a wreath of thorns.

Phew. What a relief to know I’m not the only human being on this earth to suffer.

Earlier today, before we wound the exit ramp to begin this drive away from there, just after our visit to the go-kart place, we drove down the strip in Pigeon Forge, passing one after another of these complexes, these promised lands of family fun. On the front of one, above the doors, in true Southern style proportions, there was a sign proclaiming, JESUS SAVES.

There, in what feels like a Babylon of wild consumption and crazed debauchery, someone felt compelled to proclaim that message. I’m not sure of the intended meaning: a reminder? An inspiration to change? A warning to get the hell away from here? But when you look at the sign, juxtaposed as it is with the whirl of the carnival rides and lights and the buy this, buy that of every other sign, the JESUS SAVES sign comes across as silly and pointless and, well…meek.

Oh. Meek. That’s what they mean when they say meek. As in Blessed are the meek. Those meek? The ones who shall inherit the earth? Maybe I do see the point now. But I’m still getting the hell away.

Away we go, past Adult World, which makes it’s residence and overuse of the letter X in everything a bold statement next to a skyscraper-sized cross. I wonder which came first: a mockery on the part of the former, an attempt to chase away evil on the part of the other?

Or maybe there is just nothing to find much meaning in here, and that’s where I struggle. In the absence of meaning, I drown a little, tumble down dark holes in search of diversions.

Things are opening up now, traffic moves at 75 mph on a two lane stretch of highway carved out of the Tennessee mountains. Trees in summer greens close us in on both sides above a wall of orange-grey rock. Bluest of sky, a scattered brushing of white puffs of clouds and a range of mountains ahead in the distance. On the other side: Home.

Home. The dianthus have faded, the purple coneflower just starting to open. I parade past the garden, toting suitcases and souvenirs, watch the bumblebees hover about the lavender. Meaning sprouts, grows, blooms and bursts around and within. Home, thriving.

Giddy-yap, let's ride.

2011-06-23T00:13:00.000-07:00

To me, blog-post poet sounds just as romantic as Rhinestone Cowboy. Ok, maybe not so much. But here's one for the trail.

Dear Poetry,

I popped it open:
Memories.
Jeez.
My mind’s corner desk drawer
and me
there
kneeling like in some kind of prayer
reading words out of the palms of my hands.

It was an offering, maybe
imagined, but if so, a fiction
turned non by mere belief in it.

Sorry. For Everything. The words I heard
I believed, wrote them
on scraps of paper, folded small and tucked
carefully
into the pockets of my heart.

10 years of collected courage and finally I hear, adding my voice
to the eternal symphony of forgiveness. The words
repeat themselves because life needs apologies
as much as life needs gratitude.
And how
it washes
my heart
over
entirely.

That’s the thing that needed saying. How one sorry
carries over into forever. How time
commits to an infinite string of thank yous.

Love,
Me.

Finding a Guru, Feeding My Family

2011-06-13T06:44:00.000-07:00

Paradigm shifts don't come easily and change is a process that happens in a two steps forward, one step back kind of way. For years I've been making changes in the way I feed my family, exerting the effort to change and then feeling the slow slide backward.

Convenience food, fast food, processed food were the markers of progress of our generation. These technological advancements freed our moms from long hours in the kitchen and the garden and made the balance of working in the office and feeding the family a possibility. Now some moms like me have shifted to working from home on a laptop, but the convenience still helps: this morning I removed the foil tops from two yogurts for the kids and popped a bagel in the toaster for me.

Changes are happening, though, and I've definitely seen that in my fourteen years of motherhood. With my first baby, breastfeeding moms were the minority, organic baby food was not a presence on supermarket shelves, and when I decided to reduce sugar and eat more whole foods people expected that next I would give up electricity and running water.

But this weekend I had the opportunity to spend a whole day with a woman who's been leading the shift of the food paradigm for the last 17 years. Sonya Staffan, known as the Jam and Jelly Lady, quit her rat-race job as a technical writer and traded it in for her life-long love of cooking and canning.

Going from working in her small kitchen with young children underfoot and selling her products (like her to-die-for Apple Cider Butter and lick-the-jar-clean Christmas Jam) to a state-of-the-art cannery behind her house, Sonya has built a thriving farm market business that also supplies larger retailers and specialty shops.

Focusing on fresh local ingredients and low-sugar recipes, Sonya's products are a new generation of convenience food, bringing us back to the home-cooked goodness of the past coupled with some gourmet twists from the present market of international cuisine.

Sonya is about selling what's healthy and what tastes good, but she also has a passion for educating her consumers and empowering them to make their own home-made convenience foods. "I love teaching. I think it's my favorite thing that I do," Sonya shared with a group of us who attended her "Canning Bootcamp" this past weekend.

Sonya's passion was contagious as she shared the tricks of her trade with the six women who sat riveted (seriously) and listened to her impart knowledge about everything from tools of the trade to determining canning method by pH level in the food. Her years of experience add up to a wealth of information about modern, safe canning methods and her excitement about sharing it with others adds up to an experience that can make even the reluctant person ready to get busy in the kitchen.

That includes a reluctant person like me. Sonya's canning class was a gift to me, a gift certificate from my mom who bought a basket of goodies in our parish silent auction last summer that included Sonya's class. I probably would have hestitated to take a canning class, given that my last experience with it when my first was a baby yielded less-than-yummy results. Not only that, but my husband and I had decided to try canning to make Christmas gifts and given that we could not find a jar-lifter in winter (a must-have tool that is abundant in stores in the summer canning season), we ended up resorting to lifting jars from the water bath with a pair of fireplace tongs. Not an easy task.

And now that I have taken Sonya's class, I'm just thankful no one contracted botulism from our less-than-scientific foray into canning. With what I've learned, I'm feeling re-inspired in my food paradigm-shifting efforts and considering canning some jam when our blackberries come in this summer. The most encouraging thing is that I have a trusted guide I can call for guidance anytime, a pioneer in the back-to-real-food movement who is willing to share her hard-earned knowledge and make the way a little easier (and safer!) for the rest of us.

You can find out more about Sonya's products and her classes here.

Our Lady of the Insurmountable Laundry

2011-06-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

Once, long ago, I lived in Phoenix, Arizona. In the actual desert, in case you haven't been there. It's hard to know it, what with things like pools and AC and grocery stories abundant with watermelon and water chestnuts and seltzer water. I didn't necessarily feel the deprivation that living in a desert implies, although I did, indeed, inhabit a personal desert at the time: one that saw the drying up of friends and community where I knelt in sand sifting through my hands the lost fertility of hope.

I was lonely, to say the least, and rather than attempting to transcend it, which I didn't trust, I decided with sheer force of will to get through it. I remember reading (that I did a lot of while lonely in the desert) Wallace Stevens' line from Reply to Papini where he says, "the way through the world is more difficult to find than the way beyond it."

At the time, less than a year after my graduation from a top journalism school (dusts shoulder and looks smug) my tendencies leaned more toward overachieving academic than my current occupation as lazy housewife, so I read the line as a direct challenge. As in, "difficult sounds like an honors class! Let's go for the higher GPA! Sign me up for the class Finding the Way Through the World." (And then I would do the stir the pot dance in a circle and sing "I'm comin' up so you better get this party started." )

In the next scene you see me land flat on my face in a pile of dirty laundry with screaming children around my ankles. By the time I was pregnant with the third child, I was thinking, Why are they making me take this class again?

And that's when it finally occured to me that I couldn't graduate. The only way to graduate from a class on getting through the world was to...well, die. This is it, I realized, it's my soul or the dirty laundry.

And that's a daily choice, by the way, an ongoing struggle between the needs of my soul vs. the needs of my household, which in turn gets really gray and muddy when my overthinking brain comes in and tries to figure it all out in a neat little system or schedule or pie chart or needs assessment analysis which looks really nice on a piece of paper with slick graphics and all, but doesn't do so much for me on the daily living aspect. I much prefer synergy to the expending of mental energy to figure out how to live my life.

Speaking of such, my energy for this is beginning to dwindle and shift into other areas, such as the awaiting splash into the outdoor pool and the physical heaven of summer sun and fun. And friends. Hope to see y'all out and about.

PS: Interesting side note that Wallace Stevens converted to Catholicism at the end of his life. I'm counting myself in good company for picking the transcendence route.

So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage....
This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair but not to consent. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness. If we cannot face it, we will never find Him. Thomas Merton

She Who Crushes the Serpent

2011-06-08T03:13:00.000-07:00

My friend Sue has been on my mind. About a year ago, I met Sue in the formation of a retreat team of women at our parish. One of a group of 13 women ranging in age from 23 to 75, Sue was on the grandmotherly end of the spectrum of ages and also one of our spiritual directors. Petite, with a head of gray curls and delicate features, Sue's spirit was much larger than the smallness of her frame and inspiration poured from her, words like tongues of fire reached out to pull listeners toward her warmth.

The retreat team where I was first introduced to Sue required a weekly meeting of about 3 hours for 6 months, so I got to know her rather well in this process. Diagnosed with a rare blood disorder, Sue often shares stories of her progressing illness with the rest of us on the team, the lightness of her tone replaced with an uncharacteristic somberness as she describes some of the suffering she must endure.

The other night I saw her when our team of women got together for a monthly reunion meeting, a gathering we continue in order to keep in touch now that our retreat process is over. The night we met, Sue updated us on her illness, jumping up from her seat with her usual intensity to describe the restless leg syndrome that plagues her at night. "I walk the house like this, pounding my heel into the floor," she says, demonstrating by walking around the table stomping in a funny, robotic way.

"The doctor has me on methadone," she shares, and I see Denise, a pharmacist in the group, raise her eyebrows.

"A drug for heroin withdrawal?" I ask. Everyone around the table giggles a little at the thought of Sue, our wise elder and grandmother guide, as a heroin addict.

"Yes!" Sue laughs and tells us how much better she is doing on a very small dose of this drug ("a fraction of what a recovering addict would take") as compared to another drug she was taking, a drug that comes with a virtual grab bag of ugly side-effects. Waving her hand up and down in the air in a roller-coaster motion, Sue describes the way she felt on the other drug. The relief is well worth the price of the stigma.

Social stigma is something Sue has always inspired me to ignore, particularly in regard to my faith. Never afraid to be a little "out there" in her beliefs, she encourages me to embrace my Catholicism and stop worrying about what the rest of the world thinks of us.

This is way easier said than done. For one thing, I am a revert to my faith, rejoining the church in my early 30's after I spent my late teens and twenties wanting absolutely nothing to do with anything remotely Catholic. As a journalism major in college, I witnessed the heydey of a tennis match the media has with all things Catholic. First a hit from this side, then a hit from that side, back and forth, back and forth, with the end score always being: nobody likes Catholics. I didn't want to be a loser that nobody likes, and I couldn't take the pain of the hits, so I opted to join the crowd on the sidelines.

The ironic thing in this media tennis match is that when your end score is nothing, you have love.
And love is the thing that finally gave me the courage to stop playing the game and return home to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation (new word for old school confession and now done face-to-face...the times they are a-changin') and reclaim the Catholic label. Seven years later, I am still getting used to it, but it is people like Sue who I meet and cannot help but be inspired to love more, to risk more, to say more, to write things like this.

I remember one meeting we had last summer when I was particularly discouraged and shared my struggles with my group of retreat women. I had been writing every day at that point, feeling a compulsion to explore every dark corner of my psyche, holding whatever I found there up to the light of my newfound faith. It was sometimes painful to go through this process, and I was reaching a point where I had run into the psychological equivalent of a "No tresspassing" sign. And I wasn't sure I wanted to go there.

During our break in the middle of the meeting, Sue approached me with an aura of urgency and took my arm. "Come with me," she said. I hesitated a second, the way I do when one of my children wants to drag me over to help with their play-doh creating or dollhouse rearranging. Not sure I feel like playing right now is the feeling.

Sue pulled my arm and led me out of the meeting room and down the hall to the church. I followed her up the steps and through the door, each of us dipping our hands into the holy water font and making the sign of the cross. Up the center aisle she marched forward into the dim and quiet church, stopping at the front to bow in front of the Blessed Sacrament enclosed in the gilded tabernacle on the altar.

I bowed, too, and looked up to catch a glimpse of the stained glass of Jesus in the garden praying just before his arrest and crucifixion. He doubted, too my inner voice reminded me. Sue was already at her destination: the statue of Mary on the left side of the church, flanked on both sides by flickering devotional candles in red and blue glass holders.

"This is your spiritual mother," Sue said, gesturing toward Mary, looking up at her and smiling, her face glowing, happy, peaceful. "She is a good mother and she takes care of things for you. Look!" She pointed at Mary's bare foot, peeking out from under her flowing gown. The foot was stepping squarely on the head of a large snake coiled around her feet.

I have to admit, I hadn't really noticed her foot on the snake before. At least I hadn't really thought about what that might mean. I had grown up in this church, attending mass with my family every Sunday, always sitting a few pews back on the Mary side and spending many a bored and sleepy moment staring at that statue. But never had I thought about what that image might mean.

Sue brought the meaning to me. "Anytime you get worried or discouraged or afraid, just come in here and see this. This is what she does for us! She keeps all of the bad stuff away. She's got it taken care of, so you just do what you need to do and don't worry. Your mother is taking care of things for you," she told me, eyes dancing, face smiling, arms wrapped around me for a hug.

That lesson Sue brought to me is one I continue to be grateful for and one that stays with me constantly. In the depths of my fear and discouragment, I return in my mind to the image of my Blessed Mother with her foot on the serpent, protecting me from spiritual harm. She is there, a real presence to me in my daily life, her words from John's gospel reminding me to stay focused on my calling: "Do whatever He tells you." (Jn 2:5)

Warrior (Dash) Wife

2011-06-05T10:40:00.000-07:00

I tried to make a deal with God last night. You know, one of those deals that requires the completion of an "if-then" statement. Something like, for example and not all from personal experience, an occasion where you might feel compelled to say, "God, if you just help me get out of the grocery store with this screaming child, then I promise never to watch another episode of Californication and lust after David Duchovny again." A deal like that.

The problem I was having is that I couldn't come up with the "then" part of the statement, which I think might be a dealbreaker.

The situation was this: our whole family in the minivan trucking along the lower half of Ohio, tracing a jagged line of highway from the southeastern part of the state over to our home in the southwesterly parts, guided by the occasional outbursts of direction from the robotic yet strangely soothing voice of the Garmin navigation system.

It was raining. No, not just raining, but storming, the kind of fierce storms we've been having here in the Midwest lately Also, dark. Sitting in the front seat of the van was like being at the Omnimax with a full windshield view of a lightning show across the sky. Each lightning flash provided a quick view of the surrounding trees, swirling and bent against the force of wind.

The kids slept in the back, spared the drama of worry and fear. For me, this meant no distraction from my worry, no need to exert the effort to find a means of comfort for them, and then how inevitably my effort to comfort them comforts me. How uncomfortably I sat there in the passenger seat, spared the task of driving through the mess and also spared the task of comforting the children.

Helpless, I felt, in that moment of being propelled through space in that small container of fiberglass and plastic and metal balanced on spinning rubber tires. Helpless, I sat in my seat worrying of wind and hail and tornadoes and the possibility of our small container hurled off course and into something. I worried of the possibility of disasters and the impact on our fragile bodies and the fragmenting of what for now exists in wholeness. Our whole family.

And here's where the dealmaking starts, in desperation. God, if you just get us all home safe, then.......then........then......?

Windshield wipers beat the time like a bomb ticking. Surely disaster will strike soon if I cannot fulfill my end of deal. Surely soon that lightning in the close distance will be upon us, strike us from above and send our vanload of fragile cargo reeling in fire and smoke.

In spite of the inevitability of this impending disaster of my imagination, the pressure did not inspire me to find an answer to this question of what I was willing to do to spare our lives. I had no answer.

You might think that the reason was because I am such a good and loving person that there just isn't anything else that I could possibly do to improve myself, to be more pleasing to God than I already am. Which is maybe a possibility, but is not the reason why I couldn't come up with my end of the deal.

Another possibility is that I'm actually just lazy and don't want to do anything else for God, to return the favor of sparing my life and my family from this disaster. Possibly I think I am entitled to this life and there is nothing I need to do in exchange for the pleasure of living it. Maybe deep down I don't think I owe God anything. Maybe deep down I don't even believe in God.

That, too, is a possibility.

The real reason, though, that I just couldn't come up with my end of the deal is that I know in my heart that bargaining is not a possibility in the spiritual reality. You believe or you don't. That's the deal, and the only deal.

Beside me in the van, Shad drove white-knuckled through the storm, eyes focused on the road, an aura of purpose surrounding him in his noble quest to see his family home safely. He was a warrior on his way home from the Warrior Dash, the race he'd run earlier that day and the reason for our trip to Southeast Ohio, a race that ended in a crawl through a mud-pit. He emerged from the race mud-covered and beaming pride that his nearing-40 body had not failed him.

Here, again, he was not failing. Always a good driver, Shad navigated the wet roads and difficult visibility with skill. And it left me feeling useless, a deal-breaking companion whose head periodically bobbed forward in a kind of sleep-apnea induced from the night before spent on the ground in a tent with a fitfully sleeping child.

And that's when I decided to believe. Seeing Shad's committment to his task and his belief that we could make it safely inspired me to believe in the possibility that making it home to the heaven of our comfortable bed would happen. And not only that, but I began to believe in myself as a prayer warrior by Shad's side, an ally to the cause of bringing our family to its destination.

In my mind, I erased the previous horrific images of disaster I had constructed and instead used my powers of imagination to envision God's angels surrounding our minivan, a kind of police escort of the Divine Army of the Protectors of Peace. They flanked the corners of our swift-rolling vehicle, their bodies a blurred vision of light and wings streaming behind faces taking on the perfected features portrayed in the angels of Renaissance Art. Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, perhaps? A team of archangels speeding to our aid in the dark storm of night, escorting us to safety.

The vision of it nearly levitated me from my seat, floating on hope. I meditated on this vision for awhile, mentally exhausting myself with the effort of canceling out the worrisome images that had sent me to the desperation of deal-making with God. I believed with such concentration that again my head dropped to my chest in hard-earned sleep and the scene in my mind went black momentarily.

Envisionnn....sleep. Envisionnn....sleep. Envisionnn....sleep. I made the rest of the trip home on the rhythm of this cycle, a head-bobbing helpmate and spiritual warrior who found her purpose: imagining the best possible outcome.

A Warrior-wife. I like that idea.

Thursday she graduates from eighth grade.

2011-05-23T12:53:00.000-07:00

And if you think I'm going to start this out saying Just yesterday she was a rubbery bundle of newborn limbs covered in amniotic fluid lying limp on my naked belly then, yes, you're right about the sentimentality of this post. Because although those first nights, days, weeks seem to take forever when one morning blurs into the next and the only way you know how many days it has been is by counting the number of days' dirty dishes in the sink, eventually you believe you are a parent to this child and you assume that this stage, whatever you are in right now, will go on forever. Just like last night went on forever with her teething. Just like her toddler tantrum in the grocery store today went on forever. Just like potty training and weaning and learning to read and remembering to keep her dress down in public seems to take forever. Reminding her to brush her teeth, comb her hair, get dressed in the morning, do her homework and finish her chores goes on forever and forever and for. ev. er. Then, suddenly, one night you are just sitting there watching TV, you and her father, and you hear the sound of her alarm going off in her room. You and her father look at one another quizzically, trying to figure out what is making that "beepbeepbeep" noise upstairs. In the middle of your confused looking into one another's eyes, you hear the sound of her feet on her bedroom floor and the creaking twist of her doorknob. Down the stairs she comes, in half sleep, murmuring I have to put my clothes in the dryer. And that is the moment when it hits you. Right then is the moment when forever doesn't seem so long. Then is the moment when forever comes to a spinning halt and you come crashing into the now. Now is the time when little baby girl is getting quite grown up. Now she is graduating eighth grade. Now she is starting high school. Now is only four years and then. Then, there is something else. And you don't want to think about that quite yet. Now there is now.

Before the internet, I had to whine to real people, and that wasn't nearly as effective.

2011-05-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

The last thing I will try to do here is to make any sense whatsoever. But making sense is not something that is possible after 4 days with 4 kids and no husband.

The kids ask me simple questions, a request for a drink of water perhaps, and I just stare blankly at them like they've just recited the Communist Manifesto in German and I'm trying to translate.

Withdrawal feels like the most viable option right now. Because for the past 4 days I have tried very, very hard and done well, thank you very much. I deserve a pat on the back. No, really, I deserve much more. A full body massage and a mani/pedi is more like it.

I think right now a singing telegram is in order, too. If there is such a thing as a person who goes around and knocks on peoples' doors and sings to them, I want him/her to sing some inspiring song about how wonderful I am but which I can't think of right now because my brain is so fried. But it would be the perfect song, I can tell you that much. It would be a song that would be so special that it would make me cry. And right now a good cry is probably what I need.

I'm not crying, though, although I've spent every morning for the past three days reading the newspaper and crying while I drink my coffee. It was like watching touching episodes of Oprah when I was pregnant. Sad story after sad story after depressing news about the economy and then! Then they hit me with the inspiring story about the local teenagers, both with down syndrome, who were voted prom king and queen. The terrible and the lovely all rolled up into one and tossed in my yard in a plastic bag every morning.

How I love newspapers and magazines and books and everything that says something in words. Right now I'm writing this only because it is news, it's what's happening in my little world. It will be over soon, the immediacy of the story of a mother coping in the last moments before her husband walks in the door from a trip. Shout out to all the moms I know who have been here and survived it. Woo-hoo! It's. almost. over.

For the last 3 years when Shad has taken this yearly man trip, how I have coped in these last hours has been a little different. Instead of giving myself a small break before his arrival, I worked non-stop until the moment he walked in the door. For the four days he was gone, I tried to be mother and father and housekeeper and cook and chauffeur and then, once he arrived home, I tried to be wife, too.

You can only imagine how that turned out. Because no person, no matter how saintly, can work that hard for that long at serving the needy. Even Blessed Mother Teresa took time to recharge and spent 3 hours in prayer every day when she wasn't caring for the sick and needy. And this weekend? Honestly? My prayer life was a just a little weak. It's hard to find time to give gratitude to God for his blessings and have faith in Him to help you through life's challenges when you're busy inwardly basking in self-pity.

Poor me left in a nice home with great kids and good food and a beautiful Ikea kitchen that my husband built with his bare hands and not one, but two bottles of 2006 Burnet Ridge Purple Trillium Red Wine (gifts from Shad for Christmas and my birthday) to open and drink at my leisure. Oh, wah.

And that's just what happens in situations where you are challenged to the max and feel like holding everything together is entirely on your shoulders, that you are alone. You forget to stop and see how blessed you really are and how much you are really NOT alone, not at all.

So this is good: this is the time to play one last time the song of my suffering. In spite of my many momentary laspes into stupidity, I CAN learn, and this year I'm drawing out these last whiny notes of my sad, sad song here in this blog post. That way, when my dear and loving husband (who absolutely deserves to spend four days with a big bunch of smelly guys canoeing down the river) arrives home, I will be singing a new song, a song of joy that he has returned to us.

But I'm not hugging him until he showers. Just sayin'.

For me, Judgment Day was today at the park.

2011-05-12T09:39:00.000-07:00

I read last night that some Christians are saying that Judgment Day will be May 21, 2011. If that's so, then I hope I fare better than I did today at the park. Today I was judged by another mom. The verdict? Not good: evil person. Turned away and left in shame.

"They're not sharing! This is not working out! We're going home!" she yelled, loud enough for me to hear several yards away, where I was helping Josie drink from the water bottle. She gathered up her two children in a whirlwind of anger and walked toward her car amidst their protests at having to leave (they had only been there about 15 minutes). "No! We're going home! You can't work it out and they're not sharing!"

I stood watching the scene unfold, dumbfounded. It had taken probably less than two minutes. In one minute, her older daughter and Eli were running and laughing and playing chase with a little toy dinosaur that Eli had found in the geocache site in the nearby woods. The other toy from the geocache (a little parachute guy) Eli had given to the younger brother (probably about 3 years old). But the little guy, being a toddler and not being able to keep up with the older ones (and wanting what he didn't have, as toddlers do), started whining and protesting.

The mom, who had been on her phone since they arrived, hung up and started questioning the little guy about what was wrong. "The dinosaur! I want the dinosaur!" he wailed. Mom cross-examined the older sister: "What are you doing? What do you have? Why won't you give it to him?"

The girl, who had been laughing and running, stopped in her tracks and a look of fear fell across her face. "It's his dinosaur," she said, pointing to Eli, who had stopped next to her.

"This dinosaur!" he said, holding it up for the mom to see. He sounded a little confused and anxious, aware that he might be doing something wrong, but uncertain of what exactly it was. "It's orange!" he announced, sounding as if he were trying to help, as if the color of the dinosaur would help to clarify the situation for her, would help her to see that they were just playing.

But she did not see it. There was no mercy and her judgment was swift. Right away she announced that because the kids were not working things out, they were leaving. Several feet away from her, I stood, my mind not working fast enough to figure out a way to "fix" the situation, to be the helpful mom, the "good" mom, that smoothes things over. My brow furrowed and my mind was a blank screen of TV fuzz. No words came. No signal from anywhere.

The mom did not stop talking and it seemed as if her words hung like pollution in the air. Anger and accusations blackened the clear blue morning sky. I was left behind to watch her back turned away from me and walking furiously away to her car, to hear the sound of her car pull away and fade into the distance. I was part of the "they" accused of not sharing (notice she didn't say he's not sharing, she said they're not sharing. I guess because I didn't step in to make Eli give the toy to the little boy).

The feeling of judgment I was left with at the park this morning was awful. It penetrated, if only for a few moments, the armour of my spirit. It pierced my heart and left me with a little less faith in the goodness of humanity. It also reminded me of how often I fail to be merciful in my judgment of others, how quick I can be to anger, how easily I claim myself the victim. I have been guilty, I'm certain on many occasions, of behaving very much like the mom at the park today, especially when things do not go the way I want them to.

Let me say that again, just for clarification: I'm guilty of judging others. I'm not better than that mom. For all I know, she got home and saw that her son had left with the toy parachute man from Eli and gained a new perspective on the situation. I can only hope that she felt like big giant jerkface for treating us like that. No, seriously, I hope that she can treat herself with kindness and compassion. I think we all deserve that.

There is one more thing I want to say after reading over this post. Before the woman had arrived at the park, I had been saying (well, attempting to say, with many interruptions) the rosary while my kids played. Usually I say morning rosary on Thursday with a group of moms, but I had gotten mixed up about the location and showed up at the wrong place, so I took the kids to the park to say it there.

Today the intention on my heart was for Officer Brian Dulle, who was killed in the line of duty by a runaway vehicle. Also for his wife and three children who have been left behind because of this tragedy. This event is weighing heavily on our community right now. It had felt very important to pray for them today, so I continued with my prayers in spite of the kids' interruptions.

I am very thankful that I had the perseverence to say that rosary. I believe I was blessed, through my efforts, with the grace to transcend the later situation when the mom passed judgment on me. Saying the rosary and meditation on the mysteries is one way that I am made aware of God's infinite love and mercy. This morning I reflected on the five luminous mysteries, pausing in particular on the fourth mystery, the transfiguration. This is when Jesus took the apostles up on a mountain to transfigure before them, becoming dazzling white. He wanted to raise their spirits. Later, when I was home, I reread this passage about what the transfiguration means for us:

Even now, God's glory shines in the darkest places of our lives, if we hold them up to the light of faith. Even now, we are given intimations, brief encounters, transfigurations of a lesser kind, as we confront the mystery of suffering. It is not God's will that the Cross burden us too much. Even now, Jesus reveals his glory to us as we go through life, that we not lose heart.

As we left the park and loaded into our minivan, Eli picked up a piece of trash off the ground and threw it into the trashcan. "It's good for the earth when you throw things away," he said sweetly. Then, as we drove home, he said, "I made a friend today. That girl I was playing with is my friend. She's five, too."

Intimations, no doubt. Although the mom at the park showed me the awful face of human judgment, Eli reminded me of our essential goodness, our fundamental innocence, how much in our hearts we want to love others. I'm sure that mom does, too, and I pray she finds her way back to that place in her heart.

Why I'm here

2011-05-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

On Fridays I volunteer for lunch duty at my daughters' school, St. Francis de Sales. I'm not sure I am a tremendous amount of help since I bring my two younger kids (3 and 5) with me, but every so often I make a huge difference in the life of a kindergartener by opening his fruit chews or ketchup packet or juice box.

I was there this past Friday, ready and willing to be strength to the undeveloped finger dexterity of the youth in my community. But as it turned out, I wasn't much needed that day, since the kids were having lunch in their classrooms on account of the Cosi event going on in the cafeteria and only one child with a package of apples needed me. (P.S. Why do we cut up apples and put them in packages? Isn't the apple skin a package that you can eat?)

As I was standing in the hallway pretending to be useful, I took the opportunity to check out some of the student work hanging along the wall. The kindergarteners had written a sentence in response to the question, "What have I become this Lent?" At the top of each of their papers it said, "He is Risen" and under that they had written their answer to the question. One response in particular caught my attention, written by a girl named Elisabeth. It said: "I love to love people."

I love to love people.

My five-year-old heart probably knew this, too, just like Elizabeth, but gradually I forgot. And as gradually as I have forgotten, I am gradually remembering. Throughout the last 14 years of motherhood, I have been discovering how it good it feels to love. But what does that have to do with Lent?

Lent, in our Catholic tradition, revolves around 3 things: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. It's all about sacrifice: giving of your time and energy, your money or resources, or giving up your bodily desires. Eventually at some point you ask yourself: why am I doing this?

Really, why is this necessary? Who cares whether I eat sweets or have fish on Friday or start saying the rosary?

Five-year-old Elisabeth knows the answer. It's because it teaches us how to love. And in learning what it means to love, we also see how good it feels when we love more, beyond what we think we are capable of.

It doesn't take long after you've had a child, or even just after conceiving one, to discover that you are going to have to sacrifice. A LOT. Like to the tune of several million dollars over the coarse of her lifetime not to mention never, ever having a shirt to wear without a spot. Did I mention stretch marks? And droopy boobs.

I've sacrificed many a vain notion along with a lot of time spent nursing babies and changing their diapers and organizing their birthday parties until it seemed there was little if anything left of ME anywhere, but what I'm certain of, absolutely certain of, is that I LOVE doing it. I don't have to. You see, nobody made me, I just LOVE loving the people in my life.

And that is the hunger I feed everyday: the desire to love and be loved. That's the core of who I am. Thank you so much to Elisabeth in the kindergarten who put it so beautifully into words.

(And as an aside, but not really an aside, that is why I reverted to Catholicism at 31: it helps me to learn, every day in many, many ways, how to love. For me it has been a direct spiritual path to loving and being loved in abundance. Try it. I dare you.)

Holy Week is coming and I am wholly weak.

2011-04-14T10:36:00.000-07:00

I'm like my Spring garden: bursting with new life, yet threatened by the overtaking of weeds. It's Lent, so I'm down in the dirt, searching patches of myself and yanking, yanking, yanking in hopes of complete eradication. Alas, they remain, those prickly-leaved and persistent suckers of life: the meanness and envy and gluttony and all the other deadly growing things of earthly imperfection.

I have to love the weeds; after all, they give me something to do. I'm kept busy with the trying, the questions of what will bear flower and fruit and what contains the seeds of evil, the constant intermingling of worry and hope. In the garden I use mostly my hands, the hoe, the occasional weed killer; but in me the best pruning is done in prayer.

Prayer is something I never find enough time for. First, because there are distractions. And in addition to that, there are more distractions. If it shines in the least bit, then it catches my eye, and I go looking for the light of truth in it. Never mind that the Creator made me the perfect vessel for it, and I need merely empty myself a bit of preoccupations to just open up and receive all that's coming to me.

Never mind the infinite availability of divine presence dwelling right here in my very soul....Oh! Look! A shiny penny! Now I only need to find 5999 more so I can buy myself an hour's peace at the massage therapist. Off I go along the path to seek and find a few more pennies here and there until it dead ends into the discouraging truth: I do not have enough pennies to buy peace.

I can't afford peace! The weeds that have woven themselves into my thoughts trick me into believing that the entire reason for that is because I am not good enough. Why else would the wicked have no rest? And then comes the voice of St. Augustine who reminds me, "Our hearts are restless until we find our rest in thee."

5th century or modern times; it does not matter. Truth. Is. Truth.

This afternoon I cut the dead branches out of the blackberry bush in the garden and threw them into a pile, considering a Spring bonfire. Traditionally, the Easter Vigil begins with a bonfire on Saturday night, a reminder of all that is dead and has been pruned away to make way for the coming of the light. This week, my challenge will be keeping my focus on Easter without allowing hopeless distractions to obscure my path.

I'm thinking spiritual blinders may be necessary. Any suggestions?

I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. Anyone who does not remain in me will be thrown out like a branch and wither; people will gather them and throw them into a fire and they will be burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you.
John 15:5-7

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

2011-02-10T16:59:00.000-08:00

Of my four kids, it is my youngest Josie that I worry about the most and have the most guilt about. She has always been small, for one. So from the get go I worried that I wasn't feeding her enough. I was breastfeeding her and also busy with Eli, who at the time was a very busy toddler. It seemed every time I sat down to nurse her, he would get into something. And not just any something. I mean like something dangerous. Or at least something messy.

Josie would be nursing away peacefully and it would get really quiet and I would sense something was wrong and then would interrupt her eating to go search. Then I would find Eli in the next room about ready to stick a paper clip into the outlet.

And I know what you're thinking: what kind of mother am I to have things like paper clips and outlets in my house? Don't I know the meaning of childproofing?

No, I don't. Nor was I able to prevent my toddler son from getting so bored that the only interesting thing he found to play with was his own poop. Because apparently I am such a bad mother that I did not provide enough interesting toys, things that light up and make noise, I suppose, the kind of toys that good parents provide for their children.

I had to interrupt my sweet nursing baby Josie on more than one occasion in order to clean up after Eli's poopscapades. And this led to my attempts to keep him busy and on the go so he did not get so bored that he felt the need to do dangerous and disgusting things. He was a boy, after all, and needed physical activity. So we did. And we went.

It wasn't all Eli, either. There was also the issue of the old galvanized pipes in our 1940 home that starting leaking one day when Josie was about 3 months old and then suddenly we had rain in the kitchen. And then later we had no ceiling in the kitchen (in order to fix all the plumbing) and that just seemed like the right time to start a kitchen remodel. Because at that time we weren't thinking: months of projects and money and time and mess. We were just thinking: four kids? A dishwasher might be handy.

Whether Josie's small stature has anything to do with keeping a busy schedule and stressing over renovations when she was a baby, I don't know. But I feel guility about it anyway. She crawled later, walked later, and talked later than any of my three other children. She will probably potty train later, too, because at 3, she is still not getting the concept of that, either.

There is one thing that wipes away all that guilt I waste so much of my time on: the way Josie hugs me tight around my neck, kisses me on the lips, and says "I wove you, Mommy!" For whatever ways she is lacking in physical development, she has more than made up for it with her huge heart.

Tonight I was lying next to her in her bed, singing her to sleep like I always do. For weeks I have been singing "Seek Ye First", a song we sing occasionally in church which is based on one of my favorite scripture passages in Matthew. After I sang a few rounds of the song, I suddenly hear her little voice next to me, singing along. In spite of her inability to enunciate every word of the verses, she sang loud and clear when it came to the "A-le-lu-A-le-lu-ia" at the end. Hearing her sing along with me, my heart nearly exploded in my chest.

After that, I don't worry so much.

Seek ye first the kingdom of God,
And His righteousness.
And all these things shall be added unto you,
Alelu-Aleluia.

Ask and it shall be given unto you,
Seek and ye shall find.
Knock and the door shall be opened unto you,
Alelu-Aleluia.

Please do not send any more patience. Or opportunities for it. Thank you.

2011-02-01T19:54:00.000-08:00

Prayerful people will tell you, "Do not pray for patience." They say this because what you actually receive when you pray for patience is not patience itself in abundance, a peaceful seeping-from-your-pores tolerance of every trying situation imaginable. No. That is not what you get. You get opportunities for patience.

Do you get the subtle difference here? When you pray for patience you get things like two months of a neverending virus that keeps cycling through your family of six who all share a bathroom. You get snowstorms and cancelled school and ice storms. You get trapped in a house with children who entertain themselves by tormenting one another. You get a very long winter and never a long winter's nap.

You get an opportunity to be your most patient self ever. What you do not get is any guarantee that you will actually be able to pull it off. Sometimes you will surprise yourself at just how patient you can be, the very picture of patience, the poster child for World Patience. And other times the word "patience" will temporarily drop out of your personal dictionary and you will forget that this quality is even possible in a human being. You will occupy a world without patience, where no idea of patience exists. You will swear that the only place to find patience is in a waiting room at the doctor's office, except that it is spelled wrong, and the misspelling of anything makes you more im, im, im...what is the word?

So what I want to know is: who did this to me? Which one of you out there has been praying for me and asking specifically for me to be given patience?

Well, it's working. I'm finding more of it each day. So, thank you person out there praying for me to be given more patience. Thank you for the golden opportunity.

(And gratitude, on the other hand, is much easier to come by. Patience will always be a challenge, but in the midst of the crazy, I know I am blessed.)

What I said to my husband in bed last night

2011-01-03T17:49:00.000-08:00

So I announced last night suddenly to Shad (so suddenly that it made him jump right out of his almost Stage 1 sleep): My New Year's Resolution is to enjoy being with Eli and Josie during the day. Because this is the last few months when, you know, it's just the three of us all day. The last few months of bonding time for the two of them before Eli goes to school all day. And I want to enjoy it! This time! Because there will never be another time like it again!

And Shad replied, "Um-hm" before falling asleep.

Today I have decided that was probably one of the dumbest things I have ever said. Most likely Shad thought so too (if he even remembered that I said it), because to him that probably sounds like the easiest resolution ever. This is a guy who really enjoys his kids. I mean, for the past two nights he has built a fort out of cardboard construction blocks in the basement and played Nerf gun war with Eli. Every day he gets up and goes to work and when he comes home in the evening, he likes to hang out with the kids. On the weekends, he likes to do fun stuff with kids.

And I'm sure if Shad would have said to me, "Honey, you know what? My New Year's Resolution is to enjoy every minute of my time at work," I would have had a hard time holding my tongue, because I would be thinking well what kind of a resolution is that because who wouldn't want to get away for several hours a day from dishes and laundry and fighting kids and poopy diapers and contests of will with a five-year-old who always, always wins because the only way for me to win is for me to murder him.

The point of those last two paragraphs is just that Shad and I exist in parallel universes. His includes unlimited free coffee and headphones. Mine includes the possibility of being hit by random flying objects thrown by a five-year-old with an arm like Nolan Ryan. Also in mine are bad smells.

So what sounded like a great idea (Enjoy my life! Be content and grateful and positive! Take it one day at a time!) was pure idiocy. I don't know what I was thinking (mind over matter? maybe?). But I realized about half-way through this morning that I will never, ever, ever, ever, EVER enjoy spending hour after hour after hour with a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old.

It is sometimes pure hell. And that is the point. Because after hours on end with the two of them, I enjoy just about anything else. Anything. Tonight I enjoyed shopping for groceries at Kroger. With a headache. On a budget. With a list. Who enjoys that? And this past weekend, while Shad was enjoying hanging out with kids, I was enjoying steam mopping the floors. And opening all the windows because the weather turned warm and I wanted to rid the house of bad smells.

I tried, I honestly did. I tried to enjoy every moment with them today. But. I. just. didn't. I had some golden moments, like when I opened the refrigerator and accidently nailed Eli in the eyebrow and he collapsed into me crying and I held him like a little baby on the kitchen floor. It was nice to hold him. To think for a moment that he's growing up and will be gone all day at school next year and I won't have as many opportunities to hit him in the head with the refrigerator door.

You know what? I kind of hope I always have a little bit of pure hell in my life. It sure does make things more enjoyable.

I failed again but everything's OK in the end.

2010-12-27T17:25:00.000-08:00

Did I actually say that my resolution for this current and about to end year--2010--was to take this blog to the next level? Yep, you betcha. There it is in the archives: Tuesday, January 5, 2010.

I hate blogging.

And guess what? This year, I'm resolving NOT to blog.

Take that, Anonymous Blog Watchers Society. Otherwise known as the imaginary people who actually read this and pay attention. Write that one down in your book of broken promises and unfulfilled resolutions.

Yes, I had big dreams of actually taking the time to give my blog a hipper look with more pictures and additional info about me and my interests. I had hoped to make Feeding My Hungry a more definitive concept, not just more random thoughts from a sometimes overwhelmed mama with a brood of four hungry kids to feed, a mama whose coping devices (aside from writing this blog) include 1) prayer 2) food and 3) wine. But not necessarily in that order.

But this year, something else has happened in my life to help me cope with the normal ups and downs of mothering and life, an unexpected something which was in some ways a result of all those other coping mechanisms. Because it was this blog, my love for food and wine, and the many prayers I have said to God to ask for help that brought me exactly what I needed: friends.

Friends. And not the facebook kind. Real ones, honest to goodness and in the flesh people. People I see and talk to and share stories with on a regular basis. People who are willing to listen or give a hug if I'm having a bad day. People to laugh with and pray with and vent to. People to share a meal with or a glass of wine (or several).

No, 2010 was not the Year of the Blog. Far from it. But it has been a year of making friends. And while this blog hasn't changed significantly from what it was last year at this time, I have. Because of new friends, my world is brighter and my heart lighter.

For 2011, I resolve to remain grateful. Cheers to friends!

Prudence keeps one's pants on in public and Temperance avoids overused phrases

2010-11-12T05:30:00.000-08:00

So I've been doing this kind of every other day thing of starting a blog post, getting interrupted, then saving it as a draft. A couple of days later I do the same thing, but on another topic, because I can't seem to stay focused on one thing for too long and immediacy is what this blog thing is all about anyway. Old news is old news, right?

And the end result is not publishing anything. Poor neglected publish button. Which is not nearly as important as my writer's ego, which starts to panic in times of noticeable lack of publishing. And then I start to write posts in my head in defense of my noticeable lack of publishing.

All of this assumes an interested audience. People who care. I know who you are (Elaine! Marianne! Julie!) and I know you're out there along with the readers who share my DNA and are biologically driven to care about me.

Sometimes I stand in the shower washing my hair and thinking up blog posts to write to you. Was that TMI?

Anyway, it's an odd phenomena what happens when you start writing for an audience, the way you search for the details of your life that might be of interest to them, and then carefullly piece those together so as not to bore those wonderful loving supportive people to tears (cliche!) or cause them the unfortunate event of losing their pants.

And while we're exploring cliches anyway, what does it mean to bore the pants off of someone? Does that mean that they take their pants off to distract you from some long discourse about tiresome and irrelevent information?

"...so as I was saying, the real reason for the white film on the glasses was more of a lack of salt in softener than a problem with the dishwasher....whoa! What are you doing with your pants? What's gonig on?"

What's going on here is that my children are so bored with my lack of attention that they are chasing one another around and under the dining room table.

In short (ha!), what's happening in my life: I started aerobics three times a week, bought a juicer, and never once have taken my pants off in public this week. Temperence and prudence, thank the Lord for those. Amen.

Let's talk about sex, baby...

2010-11-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

I went to see a chastity speaker last night with my 13-year-old. Yeah. Bet you envy me. In fact, I bet you're sitting there right now dreaming about the day you get to talk to your kids about sexual issues. Or maybe you have already, and it was such a beautiful bonding experience that you are right now reliving the lovely moments in your memory...

Not quite. This is a truly uncomfortable thing, people. For reasons I can't yet figure out, because it doesn't make sense at all that your children are made from this stuff and come into the world right there in the central region of your body where such acts occur and yet, in spite of the fact that we readily tell our child every other small detail of her existence down to what color her first poop was, we draw the line at describing the details of how, actually, she was made.

But that's not even what this was about. It was a chastity talk, not a biology lesson. And it was fantastic. The speaker, Jason Evert, was a guy about my age, a husband and father with an absolute gift for talking to teens about sexual issues. You know, those awkward questions like How far is too far? and How does viewing pornography distort sexuality? and How can teens deal with the peer pressure to have sex?

He dealt with all of these questions and so many more issues (even facts on STD's) that I would have had no clue where to start talking about with my daughter. And he was funny. Really funny (I laughed to tears. I swear). I was amused by his observations of what our generation was told as teenagers, which was just to "not think about sex. Just wait until you're married."

"How is that a healthy approach to sexuality?" He asked. "That's like telling everyone here not to think about elephants. Nobody here think about elephants. How's that working for you? Elephant elephant elephant."

Jason Evert has responded to the call to talk about these things in a healthy way, to help teens navigate these dark confusing times with a wise and honest guide to show them the way. He speaks around the country to high schoolers and has written books and pamphlets (together with his wife) which give teens the information they need to survive the confusing passage through high school and college. They also spread this ministry through their website, chastity.com, where you can view Youtube videos of their talks. DVDs are also available for purchase, including ones which have talks directed to public school kids which contain nothing religious.

This is a message for every teen, not just those who are being raised in a Christian home. These are issues of health and well-being that every person can benefit from. Viewing the human person as being worthy of dignity and respect can lead everyone to more fulfilling relationships with others and greater success in life.

At the beginning of his talk, Evert cited statistics which point to a climbing number of high schoolers who are holding on to their virginity, a number which as been on a steady increase for ten years. As a mother of a new teenager and not-yet high schooler, a mother who wants nothing less than a deep, true, dignified love for her daughter, these facts are encouraging. I am deeply grateful for Jason Evert's message of hope, for his call to return to purity of heart for a culture which has lost its innocence.

Crockpot Obsession

2010-11-03T19:11:00.000-07:00

Because I named this Feeding My hungry and not Changing My Poopy or Ignoring My Eyeball-Rolling Teenager, I'll dedicate this post to some of my recent culinary ventures. Probably if I did not have five hungry people in my house drooling, I wouldn't bother much with cooking. I think I'd be fine living on French truffles and red wine, actually.

But, whatever. Have family, must cook. And my favorite appliance this week is my crockpot. I also like the sound of the word "crockpot" because using it makes me feel wild and half-baked and kind of crazy, like some domestic version of a crackhouse full of potheads. You can humor me here. You don't have to inform me that using a crockpot is a totally boring thing to be addicted to.

And I am so addicted. I've "used" (see!) the crockpot every day this week. I could not be the culinary goddess I am without Stephanie O'Dea's crockpot cookbook Make it Fast, Cook it Slow. This is healthy, easy, inexpensive, yummy, kid-friendly stuff (also all gluten-free), with a twist of the gourmet for a wannabe foodie like me.

The cost of the cookbook is easy to stomach as well, since O'Dea opted to forgo slick pages and photos in favor of a book the average mom can afford (I paid $12.95 for my copy). If you skip one dinner out on a busy evening because of this book, it will more than pay for itself). It is packed full of great recipes of every kind, even desserts and beverages you can make in the crockpot.

How's Maple Dijon Chicken with sweet potatoes sound for a chilly autumn evening? It took about 15 minutes to throw it all together earlier today, and that included peeling the sweet potatoes, which was really the only work involved except measuring. Paired with quinoa and a handful of organic greens out of the Costco economy-size salad tub topped with bleu cheese dressing, it was epicurean brilliance. And the rest of the family liked it, too.

Most of the recipes in the book serve 4, but since we've got a couple more mouths in need of nourishment under our roof, I just use a slightly larger 6-quart crockpot and increase the amount of ingredients by a little. I made the Spanish Rice on Monday, adding another cup of brown rice, additional liquid and a can of black beans to stretch the meal even further. That recipe gave us two meals for just over $5 (for both).

The crockpot makes a hot dinner doable on our busy, activity-filled evenings. The evening meal is the cornerstone of our family life, and the recipes in O'Dea's book are making it possible for the meal to be relaxed and pleasureable for us. Her crockpot brilliance is the daily fix that keeps me feeling capable, on top of things, and not to mention, well-nourished.

Happy, happy. Joy, joy.

2010-10-30T08:59:00.000-07:00

I have a blessed life. One could say I'm a happy person, although I tend to think of "happy" as a mood, and being of the moody sort of person, I'm not always happy. Joyful, yes. Happy, no. Just take a stroll down blog memory lane with me and you'll see many such not-so-happy days in my life: the poopy curtains incident, for example. Or last winter's five straight snow days in a row with sick kids while attempting to redecorate the bedroom. Those were not so happy blog posts.

When I look back at my life, I see that I have always had a blessed life, but I have not always been happy in the joyful, grateful way that I am now. I've been wondering about this, trying to pinpoint the exact shift in me that has brought about the fundamental change in how I look at things.

I remember last winter visiting my chiropractor with some mild health complaints and a vague restlessness that seemed to be preventing me from truly enjoying my life and family. I've been seeing chiropractors for years, and in general their treatments have focused on the physical aspects of health, like exercise, supplements, lifestyle, how my pillow is too soft or my shoes need more arch support. Those sorts of things. Occasionally my chiropractor had given me emotional work to do, like repeating positive affirmations or taking deep breaths to curtail anxiety.

In spite of the knowledge of chiropractic as a holistic practice, I was still surprised when my chiropractor used applied kinesiology to detect a need in me for spiritual therapy. Spiritual? Is there a supplement for that? I asked. I probed her for more information, but she was vague, and to my annoyance, respectful of my spiritual tradition.

"Your church. Your faith tradition. The answers are there. Look and you'll find some help," she said with a shrug and a look on her face like I can't help you there.

I'm sure she could have sold me at least $100 in supplements, a new pillow, and arch supports for my shoes and I would have gone home happy and hopeful that day.

That day. But a few days or a few weeks or a few months later I would notice the restlessness was still there and I would still be searching for the answers for how to fix it. I didn't go home happy that day. I went home confused. And maybe a little annoyed that I'd just paid for a visit to the chiropractor so that I could find out that what I really needed to do was to pray.

St. Augustine tells us, "Our hearts are restless until we find our rest in thee." That's an answer directly from my Catholic faith tradition. More specifically, Catholicism places emphasis on surrendering to God's will for us in our lives, a discipline acheived through knowledge of both scripture and tradition, as well as through prayer. But that's not it. Catholicism also emphasizes the necessity of serving God by serving others. We find our peace by bringing the peace of Christ to others.

It's brilliant and simple and healing, yet at the same time so contrary to the way my mind wants to break down my life into all the little parts and analyze and ruminate and control what happens, that it becomes a bitter pill to swallow.

Shortly after the vague and confusing advice from my chiropractor, I was asked to join a women's retreat team at my parish. Thirteen of us met once a week for six months to prepare for a retreat we gave to a group of women in October. Scripture and prayer were the cornerstones to our formation, as well as focusing on the growth of each of us as an individual through writing and sharing our spiritual journeys. We shared our stories with one another as a way to build community and experience personal faith renewal. We found the peace and love of Christ in the process, and then used our gifts and talents to bring Christ to another group of women who came to the retreat.

I didn't always want to take my medicine. Sometimes that pill stuck in my throat in the most uncomfortable way. But was it good for me? Most certainly yes. That is the shift that set me on the path to a joyful life, one where I answer the question of restlessness with faith.

Hard to swallow advice, but a million times better than any of those wheat-free, dairy-free, sugar-free cleansing diets I've done. Muchas gracias for the spiritual medicine. Muchas gracias.

Back in the Saddle

2010-10-29T06:22:00.000-07:00

Blogophobia: what I'm suffering from at this moment. I've fallen off a bit lately, like for the past five months (five? really? My, oh, my...), so I've decided the surest cure for falling off is to get back up and just start riding. I've never actually been thrown from a horse, but one thing I've learned from watching my daughter Gabrielle ride horses (and fall off of them) for 5 years is that getting back in the saddle in the face of fear and failure is the path that must be taken.

And as long as we're talking horseback, I had the pleasure (and anxiety) of watching my daughter take fifth, sixth, and first (!) place ribbons in the Camargo Hunt this weekend. Big thanks to Mom and Dad for sponsoring her in her endeavors to stay in the saddle while riding on the back of a thousand pound animal jumping over fences. Maybe you could sponsor me for some anti-anxiety meds while you're at it. Or at least a massage to ease my frayed nerves.

As long as we're trotting along here already into the third paragraph, the process is not nearly as painful as I anticipated, so let me just go ahead and make a mental note to do this more often. Like, every day. Practice, practice, practice. That's what it's all about, right? I've been putting a bit too much mental pressure on myself lately to do something BIG, which maybe someday I will, but seriously, now? With four kids and one still in diapers who likes to wake in the night?

No, this is not the big event. This is just me trying to stay in the saddle, a little daily practice to keep my butt off the ground.

On Being Brave in the Face of Discouragement

2010-09-21T08:30:00.000-07:00

Let's see: where did I leave off? Oh, yes. Putting God in the food processor, like my abundant zucchini in July, when I needed to slip it into recipes without notice by my children. How interesting to me now, a couple of months removed, that now I can see that at some level I desired to hide God from others, to speak of Him between the lines. And like the zucchini in the food processor, He would become unrecognizable.

Why, oh why, do I hide the light? Why not put it on a lampstand?

Oh, the courage I lack. Part of the reason for my lack of posting has not been lack of courage, but lack of time and energy to write here when I have been working on another writing project that has kept me consumed to the max, in a good way. Not without pain and discouragement, but ultimately for the good.

But I've noticed something, both in this blog and in other writing I've done about my own experiences in a deeply personal way: discouragement is the death of me.

It's not about worrying that I'm not a good writer. That particular thing I have confidence in. I have been affirmed in that my entire life: by parents, teachers, friends, professors, other writers, readers I don't know from Adam. I'm certain I haven't been humored about my writing talent.

But perhaps there is a great conspiracy I am unaware of whose cause is to make me feel like I'm worth something. If that is the case, I'm sorry to inform you that the conspiracy has failed. Because as much as I know that I'm a good writer, I fear that I have nothing to say.

That's the stumbling block, my friends. Fear is the tool of the devil, I know. And I'm not mincing words about that one. He knows I have no status, no wealth, I'm just a stay-home mom. I'm midwestern and mundane and suburban and have zits and a belly roll that is bigger than I'd like. I drive a used car and shop at Costco and have a messy house. He knows that I know that being a Christian stay-at-home mom is about as far from glamour as you can get. He knows stereotypes shame me into hiding my identity. He says I'm not really so special and my struggles with all of these things are lame and boring.

And right now he's got me quite convinced that no one is even reading this far because I lost everyone at the first lame sentence.

I've been skimming Mary Pipher's Writing to Change the World and she says too much humility is the enemy of writing for change. Because saying "Who am I to write anything? What do I have to say?" stops you from writing anything.

Not only do you have to start with the assumption that you have something to say, but to write also means that you assume there will be a reader and accept the possibility that he or she may be changed by your words. As James Baldwin writes,

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world....The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way...people look at reality, then you can change it.

Right now I am grateful to both Mary Pipher and James Baldwin for having the courage to write things that have changed my perspective, that speak to the struggles I am having right now as a writer. It's true: words change us. Elie Wiesel, survivor of the holocaust, also agrees. He says,

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

That was true, last week, when in the middle of writing despair, when I was heading down the way wrong path of self-hatred in my writing, talking about all of my flaws and why I've messed up so much in my life, a magazine showed up in my mail and I flipped it open to read a couple of paragraphs that pulled me right out of my pit.

Ann Gundlach, editor of the Catholic publication Family Foundations was critiquing different Christian approaches to parenting and childraising, particularly those that assume that children are inherently evil and manipulative and need their wills broken. She wrote that "a truly Catholic approach would be based on the belief that we are inherently good...such an approach is based on parents seeing the unique dignity of each child..."

Yet again, words changed me. Words spoke to my inner child and told her she is good and unique and worthy of dignity. No matter what the devil on my shoulder is trying to tell me about how little I have to say and how worthless I am, I have to believe that God gave me a story to tell. I have to accept that my story might change someone.

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.
Matthew 5:14

Do you think God planted zucchini in the Garden of Eden?

2010-07-08T18:10:00.001-07:00

There are two things going on in my life right now: zucchini and God questions. They are both the kind of thing that once you've had enough of them, you've had enough of them. You just have to move on to something else. Like corn. Or tomatoes. Or a new episode of Nurse Jackie. A new season of something.

Take the zucchini, for instance, which is annoying even in the fact that every time I go to write it, I can't seem to remember how to spell it (is it two h's? or two n's? No! It's two c's!). But mostly my annoyance with it has little to do with how it is spelled and everything to do with how prolific it is. Just today I swore I had pureed to a pulp every last zucchini I had, bagged them and threw them in the freezer to await a fate of bread or soup or cookies, and then I opened the refrigerator to find some lunch and THERE! hidden in the vegetable drawer, disguised as an innocent cucumber, another zucchini.

And to think I had just washed the food processor.

I don't even have a garden (of the vegetable sort), but I did join a CSA this year and for the past two weeks our bushel has runneth over with a heapin' helpin' of the swollen green squash. We've had zucchini in our stir fry, zucchini in our oatmeal raisin cookies, and today, zucchini chocolate chip cookies. No wonder there's that joke about why farmers lock their trucks in the summer...because they don't want anyone to put zucchini in there.

And questions about God resemble zucchini in exactly this way. You start out asking a question or two, hungering for truth. You chop it, grate it, mix it and bake it a few different ways, experimenting with all the possibilities your mind can come up with. The knowledge is tasty, you're quite pleased.

But wait.

Another question lies behind that one. And another. And another. Soon you're elbow deep in zucchini pulp hollerin' Hail Marys.

And that, my friends, is why people lock up their minds. Or at least why I do. And I have, in a way, because I can't really answer all the questions. But I know that I have to have some sort of lens with which to look at the world, a way to find meaning in my life, a star to fix my gaze upon.

I don't know: the part about the star is a little over the top. But what I'm trying to say is that I can't just drift in some purposeless fog, or live just for my own pleasure, or live to please my children or my husband (sorry, honey). I guess I need something higher. Which is where the star comes in.

And the star is....God. And God is....love? Right? Can I get a multiple choice test? Because I know I could pick the right answer from a selection of three or four. Will one of the answers be "all of the above?"

"All of the above" sounds like a really good answer to the question of God. If "above" means "good" in this case. God is all things good. I like that.

So...

If... God is all things good.

And... zucchini is good.

Then...God is zucchini?

Or something like that. But what I do know is that if you put it in the food processor and puree it to a pulp, you can sneak it in to just about everything and no one will be the wiser.

Sometimes crude reminders are necessary

2010-06-24T11:39:00.000-07:00

I think maybe things were getting a little too spiritual around here. At least after I wrote those last two posts, when I was spending an inordinate amount of time in serious rumination about the more ethereal things one has to ruminate about, I would catch myself suddenly forgetting about the task I was right in the middle of doing, like cooking, and then I would be all Aaah! The rice is burning! When did I put rice on? Is it dinnertime? What time is it? What day is it? Who am I? Is God real?

And then the whole process would start all over again.

And then one morning when I was driving (which I would sometimes forget I was doing so good thing I'm still alive to tell you about this), Eli was making his usual chit-chat from the backseat, which I was ignoring, but then he says this: Mom, when I poop my butthole gets bigger because the poop that's coming out is bigger than my butthole.

Oh. Really.

That's when I knew that maybe it was about time for me to just chill out a bit and take everything just a little less seriously. Enough with the obsessing. And the ruminating.

Out of the mouths of babes, my friends.

And then just shortly after that little incident we were all packed up and headed to the beach for our big family vacation. A long road trip brought us to the door of our vacation house just after my parents and three siblings, while my other brother and his family were still on their way. Tired from our travels, I headed into the house to use the bathroom. There on the back of the toilet, another hilarious reminder: a roll of toilet tissue wrapped in paper with the brand name Heavenly Touch.

I guess I'm not really above potty humor.

Sending out an SOS

2010-06-15T10:11:00.000-07:00

I'm having a Hurricane Katrina of a spiritual catastrophe. I see how it brewed in the sea of last week's events, in the rough seas of choppy waters we weathered during the burglary of our home and the arrest of the suspects. The wave built and loomed large. I should have seen the crash coming.

I didn't.

The tidal wave of tears last evening surprised me anyway. Waves continued to break this morning, these smaller, but still surprising.

Why does it surprise me?

Because I was riding the waves, I was. All last week, I'd surf and crash, surf and crash, always getting back up, always returning to faith, clinging to the knowing in my heart that God would make good of a bad situation.

To be honest, I felt strong after what we went through last week. I felt good about some of the things that we found the courage to do. I think, maybe, I even felt proud of myself.

I have another knowing in me, a phrase etched on my brain from a long ago English Lit. class in college on Medieval literature. The picture in my head is of a short, round, gray-beared little man of a professor who looked like he'd been teaching since the Middle Ages. I want to say it was Beowulf we were studying at the time, but I can't be sure so long ago it was and so mesmerizing was the cadence of his voice (more so than the content of the lecture), but I do remember the moral of the story: Pride goeth before the fall.

It occurs to me that maybe I didn't learn very much in college.

It occurs to me also that maybe this is a lesson to be learned over and over again in our lives. That we don't really know the Divine Plan. I've been reading Called Out of Darkness: a spiritual confession by Anne Rice, who was a devout atheist who had left the Catholic Church in her 20's and returned in her 70's. This passage brought me to tears the other day:

His was--after all--the Divine Mind which had made the miracle of the Big Bang, and created the DNA only lately discovered in every physical cell. His was the Divine Mind that had created the sound of the violin in the Beethoven concerto; His was the Dvine Mind that made snowflakes, candle flames, birds soaring upwards, the unfolding mystery of gender, and the gravity that seemingly held the Universe together--as our planet, our single little planet, hurtled through space.

And yet, I still question.

I questioned so deeply and so terribly last night--myself, others, God--that my entire world crumbled around me. This morning I woke to smaller storms, but mostly the devastation that is the aftermath: the dishes left from last night, the piles of papers, the question of what to eat for the next meal, the house awash with laundry detritus: in the basement, the living room, upstairs. It seemed to have been carried everywhere and everywhere lay about the reminders of inability to contain it all. The whole house screamed: FAILURE.

I yelled through the phone to my mom: the boat is rocking!

She said she was going shopping with my sister. I hung up, surveyed the landscape (spilled beads, black marker across the sofa, unmatched shoes, the half-empty cups) and called back.

The water is rising! I'm drowning! I really said that. I speak metaphorically in the middle of spiritual crises.

She said she'd send Dad. She left him a message at church to come to my house after his bible study was over. But sometimes he went to lunch afterward. So it may be later this afternoon until he could come over.

That. seemed. so. long. to. wait.

Fine, go and have your laugh at me right now. Laugh at the imagined drama of my tiny little life. HA. HA. Done? I was, in fact, at that moment, in deep spirtual pain. I did not think I could take it any longer. I seriously wanted someone to come and take it away. Right. Now.

I sat on my marker-stained sofa and surveyed the damage. I watched as Eli and Josie played away, unphased by their mother's spiritual death occuring right in front of them. Eli, who had been playing in the craft closet, pulled out a bag of broken things, a collection of odds and ends which perhaps I planned on someday fixing (now that's a funny thought!). He picked out two things from the bag and brought them to me.

One, a little wooden boat with a string attached to it, which used to hang from a mobile.

Two, a crucifix which used to be attached to end of a rosary.

I put these two things together, as Eli asks me to, tying the crucifix to the string on the little wooden boat. It is painstaking work, the threading of the string into the metal chain and tying a teeny tiny knot, a feat which takes me several tries. But I find peace in it somehow, this visible sign of my healing, of God's promise to save his people, to save me.

And then my poor drowning spirit found its last bit of strength, climbed aboard that little boat, knelt down at the foot of that cross, and handed over every bit of my suffering. The image of that saved me.

And you know why it did? Because I could see it. Because I'm human and so limited sometimes in what I can grasp that I fail to see it without seeing it. Because the truth is: my faith got me through the last week, it did. But that's nothing to be proud of. I found out in those terrible moments of spiritual pain that I'm no woman of great faith, not at all.

Consider me humbled.

Living in a Spiritual World

2010-06-11T20:38:00.000-07:00

Yes, I grew up in the 80's. And yes, I listened to Madonna whine the lyrics to "Material Girl" more than once bopping out of my little one speaker silver Sanyo boombox with the radio and cassette deck. I sang along. I did. I knew what it meant to live in a material world and be a material girl.

This song could have been an anthem for the 80's. And I could have been a poster girl for the movement: the permed hair, the plastic jewery, the stonewash jeans. Spending my formative years in the material excess of the 80's has branded me consumer, left me with an ugly birthmark I can't seem to cover. But underneath I know better: a growing body of evidence (this excess 20 lbs., I wonder?) points to something more, a spiritual reality beyond the things I can possess with the swipe of my debit card and drop into my eco-friendly tote bag.

I wonder if backward masking would reveal the real meaning behind the Madonna lyrics: We are living in a spiritual world and I am a spiritual girl. Maybe it wouldn't reveal anything but a gurbled string of syllables, but it doesn't matter. Years after I sang out the 80's affirmation of greed, I hear the notes of a new song that wants to be sung.

I struggle with the lyrics. I do. Because the message is new to me and my work at transforming language is slow and I must translate carefully. The weight of the message seems to be worthy of it. If that doesn't make sense, try this phrase: I see God working in my life.

A supreme being. A spiritual force beyond what I can see. THAT. When I call upon this entity, it responds by creating good in my life, even in bad situations. And I find myself believing in this more and more, and calling upon this divine energy to help me, and then seeing my life transformed before my eyes.

It's humbling, this blind handing over of power. But in my humility I have come to see that if I don't willingly sacrifice the driver's seat to polite invitation, then I will be forced out of it by the rudeness of another less-than-loving force to be reckoned with. I can put that more bluntly: If you don't invite God as your guest, the devil will feel more than welcome to show up uninvited. That's language everyone can recognize, but a truth we don't all see. I envision it something like osmosis: on not-so-good days I walk around with a low concentration of good inside me, allowing evil to flow in.

Perhaps my new motto will be this: Invite the good.

It's the word nerd in me that needs to explore the language of spirituality so desperately. And forgive me for needing to use words other than just "God" because somehow my idea of that word creates a pop-up picture in my brain of this robed old man with a beard on a throne, a phantasm of Charleton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments and William Blake's Ancient of Days. And perhaps it's pathetic that I've got to re-write everything in order to fully own it, but gotcha! (aha!) that's what God is calling me to do. See there? I can talk the talk.

But talking the talk is not really the hard part, is it? Not really. It's that other thing called walking the walk. Well, yes. But how can I do that if I don't understand the talk enough to know what it means to walk the walk? I know! It's all talky-talk and no walky-walk.

In spite of this terrible handicap of mine (have compassion, please!), this past week gave me the opportunity to walk the walk as things of a terrible nature descended upon my household and even in the moments of complete discouragement and anger and fear I continued to push forward on this path of prayer and faith and willingness to serve.

It was treacherous, people. And NOT FUN at all times. I even had moments of complete disgrace. Even more NOT FUN.

The short story is this: our home was burglarized. Several of our material possessions were stolen. Faith, though shaken, remained. Perhaps dangling by a thread at times, but still there. We were led to do things that under normal circumstances we would not have done. Mighty deeds came about: a relationship with a neighbor was healed, a mother sent her own son to jail, all of our things were recovered.

I sit here typing on my laptop that was for three days completely missing. It was returned without a scratch last night by a police officer. The police officer said never. Never are people's things returned to them. The insurance claims representative said never as well. Our friend who works for the Sheriff's department echoed the refrain: never.

Some will call it luck. But you will never hear me call it that. I know how much energy we put into inviting the good into this bad situation. And I know how many times the devil tried to show up at the party and we had to ask him to leave. This was not dumb luck, my friends. This was an opportunity to exhibit a better understanding of what it means to walk the walk.

Invite the good, people. See what happens. You'll never call it luck.

I was a messy, stubborn-headed child.

2010-05-24T20:44:00.000-07:00

My mom has tried to teach a lot of things. Organization, for one. Also, planning ahead. Other things she has tried to teach me include sticking to a budget and managing my time. Making lists, writing out schedules, and keeping a calendar, to name a few more. And organization. Did I say that already?

I have failed to learn any of these things very well.

My mom has said on more than one occasion that I was her most difficult child. I challenged her. For her, as a right-handed, left-brained, organization-prone, stick-to-the-plan kind of person to find herself faced with a left-handed, right-brained, willfully not-really-into-your-plan girl child...well, challenge is probably an understatement.

I'm the only one of my mom's five children who is left-handed, so I'm assuming maybe the organization/planning/scheduling gene doesn't come with the left-handed model. We come with other things, valuable options, things you wouldn't think would be important but it turns out they are...those are the things we come with.

(In the face of feeling like a complete failure, one will come up with the craziest reasons why one is, in fact, not a failure. And one will write sentences about oneself using "one" instead of "I" because it feels less personal that way.)

And I wonder sometimes if part of the challenge for my mom was that she was trying desperately to teach the things she was good at to a person who was genetically pre-disposed to fail at them. Did this make her feel like a failure as a mother? No matter how hard she has tried, I just haven't really got it.

There are significant differences in the way my mom and I approach certain tasks. My mom does laundry; I contemplate it. Her laundry gets done, the same day every week, load in, load out, folded and put away. Mine piles up; I wonder if the chute will hold the weight of it. I wonder if the wet towels will mold. I wonder if there is an end to it and if there is, I wonder if then I will finally reach enlightenment. I think about it all for so long I grow tired and then my husband takes pity on me and starts sorting. Together we work to get some clean clothes on the family. Then we feel joyful that we don't all have to go naked and maybe that's reaching enlightenment.

The joyful about having clean clothes part I get. But laundry schedules, laundry plans, laundry organization? Not so much.

Staying on top of the laundry is one of many skills which my mom has and I just don't. Organizing her stuff is another. Actually remembering where she stored a thing five years ago when she last used it. Knowing always without question what she can afford and what she can't. And other things, too, like understanding what's appropriate in any given situation. I've stood in awe of her for many years, wondering if a day will come when I will just have it, when it will finally be as easy as she makes it look.

The day is never going to come. I know that now. I know who I am and I am not an organizer or a planner or a scheduler. I find creative solutions for situations occuring in the now. Some might call it flying by the seat of my pants, but the better part of me wants to call it living by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

So now that I'm here and not feeling so much like a failure cowering in my mom's shadow, let me tell you one thing I know I have learned from my mom: helping others. I realized this today as I worked in my kitchen preparing a meal for a friend of mine who just gave birth to twins. Because as I chopped and cooked and packed into containers a meal made from my heart, my mom was in her kitchen doing the same thing, cooking food for the funeral of a friend.

In birth, in death, in times of need, my mom is a person who reaches out and helps people. And she has taught me to be that kind of person, too. That I have learned and I have learned it well. What mom taught me I have been passing on to my children, like today when they helped me with shopping and cooking and taking the meal to my friend. From one generation to the next and on to the next, we are creating a better world, one where people care for one another and help one another. That beats an organized closet anyday.

Thanks, Mom, for helping me to see what matters.

Waiting for "Bravo!"

2010-05-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I'm in the early stages of senility, I'm not sure, but recently I have developed the annoying habit of re-telling the same well-rehearsed story. To everyone. If you happened to be in the unfortunate position of needing to engage in any form of small talk with me: I'm sorry.

I'm sorry to all of the people who have had to hear what has come to be known in my mind as Waiting for Kindergarten: the Saga. It's a completely uninteresting story involving myself and Eli and the reasons why he's not going to kindergarten next year, although he is officially old enough to go. The very short summary of what I have turned into a very long explanation is that Eli will begin kindergarten after he turns 6, in August of 2011.

Of course I turn this decision into a saga that is not unlike the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot. It's a play in which two characters sit and pass the time doing nothing while waiting for someone named Godot, who never arrives. It's a fascinating play, a classic, but really not so interesting unless you're in the play or watching the play and absolutely boring otherwise.

And I realize, now a little late, that I've been re-telling an absolutely-boring-to-everyone-else story over and over again, sometimes including additional works under the title of My Sister, the First Grade Teacher, an intellectual drama detailing a teacher's writing of her master's thesis and her research on whether academic success and success in sports can be determined by birthdate.

Often if I have time, I like to discuss a minor work (only because of its unrecognized importance) titled: Kids Need to Play!

In the event that my listener has not yet changed the subject or run away screaming, I explore Criticisms of All-Day Kindergarten (also known under the title What is This World Coming to?).

The reason I feel the need to apologize for all of this is because I have finally realized what is going on with me. I have figured out why every person I meet has had to hear me out on this topic for the last 3 or 4 months. I get it. And it is completely selfish (sorry, again).

The reason I keep explaining this decision to everyone is because I need to know my reasons. I need to be darn sure of them. I probably need to type them up and print them and post them on my bathroom mirror or some other visible spot in my home. But for the time being I have been taking every opportunity where there are ears to hear in order to rehearse my lines over and over until I know them by heart.

You know why? Because I have to spend another year with my son at home.

And I don't care if you call me a bad mom but he is one high energy kid and he wears.me.out.

But you know what else? Someday I will get recognition for this, I will. Someday the world will see what a brave thing this is and I will be praised by critics and flowers will be thrown at my feet and I will bow a thousand bows when the world sees what an outstanding performance I am giving.

Because playing "mom" is not an easy role, people.

It's all so cyclical and fun I'm getting dizzy from it.

2010-05-12T10:24:00.000-07:00

I don't take my writing here very seriously. If I did, I don't think I'd be able to write poems about doing laundry and essays about trips to Ikea with my husband, or pretend to be a wine critic and write about cleaning my sheepskin rug.

This here is where I indulge my whims. Satisfy my cravings. Feed my hungry. It's about whatever I'm in the mood for. And I don't much care if my punctuation is off or I mistakenly use whom instead of who because whomever it is who notices must be a friend or relative and loves me anyway come whom or whomever.

And because of this I have been able to take life less seriously. And that's a good thing.

But what I still take seriously is making time to write. And the fact that I seldom seem to be able to find much time other than afternoons while Josie naps and Eli watches TV or late evenings when the whole crew is asleep (and I'm dead dog tired.)

And neither of these situations brings out my creative best.

So most of the time I keep in mind that it won't be long before the little ones at home will be off to school and I will be able to find more time alone to write. And most of the time that works. Most of the time I remain happy with what is and satisfied with the bits and pieces I create here.

But not everyday.

Not at all everyday.

Every so often on some random day (oh perhaps maybe about every 30 or so days I'm not sayin') trying to give myself the "there will be time someday" line is like trying to put my password in the computer with the caps lock button on. It just won't accept it.

I just won't accept it. I just won't accept the fact that there isn't time right now.

There are people I could ask to watch my kids so I could have the space to write. I could skim some of the fat from the budget and use it to pay a babysitter.

But I hate asking. And I can't seem to commit to a babysitter. Because this is just for fun. It's not a job.

But the real thing I won't accept? That I'm not worth it anyway.

Wine Wednesday: Bota Box Cabernet Sauvignon

2010-05-11T19:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday my whole day revolved around a sheepskin rug.

It happened shortly after the girls ran out the door for the bus and I was left standing in the living room with the two shortest people in the house, the ones who prance around me in their pj's and beg me to entertain them.

It was Monday and I needed something to do. And then I noticed that the sheepskin rug on the living room floor was looking a little grayish and spotted and kinda matted.

My purpose was revealed. God works like that, you know.

First, I had some googlin' to do. Because cleaning a sheepskin rug seemed like something I needed an expert opinion on. Without some guidance, I could be in danger of ending up with a dredlocked sheepskin hanky.

Next, supplies. Borax, baking soda, lemon juice, a wire dog brush, a pack of trident (that was for Eli and Josie so I didn't have to buy a cheap plastic toy in WalMart).

With the troops in the back chewing their tropical gummy bliss, I headed to the laundromat with my balled up hairball full of graham cracker crumbs and unidentifiable stains. Have I mentioned how big this rug is? I looked like I was carrying a dead sheep.

I tossed the dead sheep into the washer and returned 18 minutes later (and $4.50 in quarters poorer) to lug the wet lump of smelly wool back home.

All day the sheepskin rug hung on the fence drying in the shade. Late last night I brought the rug inside and placed it upside down in the living room to dry the skin backing under the ceiling fan.

Today the kids and I took turns brushing the rug with the wire dog brush. And guess what? It's now back to its original beautiful state: soft and clean and white and fluffy.

Now you're probably wondering why I'm telling you about this. The only real reason I have for telling this story is because today is Wine Wednesday. And the wine I've been drinking recently is another box wine, a Bota Box Cabernet Sauvignon. I'm not even sure it's that good. When I drink a glass, it doesn't necessarily make me want to drink another one, which is maybe good for keeping me from becoming a heavy drinker and falling asleep on the couch while my children chew on the electrical cords.

So its an OK daily wine to have with dinner, and hopefully I'll have those 20 glasses in the box consumed here in about 2 weeks.

That suddenly seems like a long time.

But you know what makes this wine better? What makes it taste better is drinking a glass while standing barefoot on your super-soft, newly cleaned sheepskin rug.

Cheers to making the best of a cheap wine...

Wine Wednesday: 7 Deadly Zins

2010-05-04T19:37:00.000-07:00

Dinner is an occasion in our house. Except for the odd night or two, we all six sit down every night at the table together, join hands and sing a blessing, and then commence with eating. And talking. And laughing. And dodging the food Josie likes to throw. It's really the only sure time during the day when we all gather.

Part of what makes our dinners so relaxing is that I usually have my glass of daily wine and Shad kicks back with a beer. The other special thing about dinner is that we usually cook something. Like food. Which apparently not that many people do anymore? I don't know, call us old-fashioned, but most of what we eat is just normal stuff like what you might find in the four food groups. Like the grilled chicken sausage, pasta, and steamed broccoli Shad made for dinner the other night (which was delicious by the way, honey).

A box wine like Boho is my wine of choice for occasions such as these. On a daily basis, a wine like this makes me feelfrugal, health-conscious, and enviromentally concerned. I feel very progressive when I drink this wine with my dinner, like I could run for political office on that platform alone: Let them eat real food for dinner and drink red wine from a box!

(Well, it sounds better than: Vote for me, I'm a wine-o!)

But I ran out of my Boho box wine last week. And so did Kroger. So I bought this other one, 7 Deadly Zins, a blend of seven zinfandels from seven different growers in Lodi, California. This wine, a 2007 vintage purchased at Kroger for $11.99, is not so much a feel-good, have dinner with the family kind of wine as it an occasion for examining one's conscience.

Maybe this sort of wine would make you afraid. But I'm Catholic, so this is just a normal part of our faith life. We sin. We confess. We're sorry. God forgives. We reconcile. It's all good like that. I opened the bottle, poured a hearty glass, and after a few good long sips confessed to my husband that I'd spent way too much of our budget on plants for the yard. Plant greed? Plant gluttony? Plant lust. Anger at the lack of bushes! Yard vanity. Yard envy. Such a sloth for not really making a budget to start with.

I was really sorry.

I drowned my sorrow in another glass of 7 Deadly Zins.

The really cool thing about this wine is that the clever, catchy name is not just a clever, catchy name. The wine actually lends itself to the label's intentions. First, because zinfandel has not traditionally been classified as a noble grape. At least, that is, until recently. Believers in zinfandel will tell you that it has the potential to make wonderfully complex wine, wine worthy of nobility, wine that has risen up and connected with its higher self. But poor zinfandel has a lot baggage. Kind of like the rest of us sinners who can't seem to shake the mistakes of the past.

So there's that. But there's also the fact that the seven zinfandels in this wine are all old vine zinfandels, which means the vines have been putting out grapes for over 100 years or so. A really long time, at least. And vines that have been putting out that long (I'm so tempted to make a joke about lust), have certainly attained some kind of wisdom. STAY WITH ME, PEOPLE. So what are these wise vines trying to tell us?

They are telling us that it is okay to be human. But they're also telling us to pay attention to the stuff we're doing that is deadening our souls. Sit back, relax, have a glass of wine and think about your life. Then just try to do better, that's all. It's that simple.

To me, zinfandel is an easy wine to drink, full of ripe berry flavors and a little spice, with fewer layers of flavor than other red wines like Cabernet. 7 Deadly Zins is simple, pleasant, and satisfying...kind of like a good confession.

Cheers to living the examined life!

Listen Up, Moms: Be Fearless

2010-05-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

I've said before that I like high heels. In fact, I've even claimed that God likes me in high heels. So when I spotted Laura Bennett's book Didn't I Feed You Yesterday? A Mother's Guide to Sanity in Stilettos laying on a table in my friend Marianne's house, I had to pick it up. And Marianne, having just finished the book and writing a review for her blog, kindly offered to let me borrow it.

I was prepared to laugh throughout the book. It's obvious from the title and the cover photo that the book is a humorous look at the ups and downs of motherhood, in this case the unique experiences of a mom of six and Project Runway participant and runner-up Laura Bennett.

Bennett delivers on these expectations for sure, entertaining readers with tales of life with five boys, her architect husband, a free-roaming turtle, an angry rabbit and equally mean hamster, not to mention the large cage of flying finches in a cramped Manhattan apartment. Add to this the fact that Bennett is a fashion designer who dislikes the outdoors, cooking and eating (she prefers chewing Nicotine gum) and whose favorite shoes are a pair of 3-inch alligator skin Manolos.

Comedy, yes. But what I didn't expect to find in the book was the deeper lesson Bennett has to offer about life, motherhood, and even fashion. If I could sum that lesson up in one phrase it would be this: Be fearless. This is the place where Bennett and I meet up. As a suburban dwelling, minivan-driving, church going, sneaker-wearing mom of four (mostly girls), I could surely offer up a big virtual fist pump in the air to Bennett for that lesson.

I haven't always shown the bravado that Bennett does in her life and at times have caved to the "overprotective mommy" culture that threatens to strangle the life out of mothers and their kids. Thankfully I've gone on to have kids three and four, a natural cure to the perfectionist sickness.

What's the difference between fearless mom and scared-of-everything mom? The first is not caring what others think. The second is having personal style. And the third is enjoying yourself and having fun with it. Coincidentally, these are the same markers of good fashion sense: you can't dress to please others, wear what expresses your personality, and have fun with it. In both of these areas, Bennett shines and gives the rest of us an inspiring example of beauty, both inside and out.

What I loved most about this book and other books in the momior genre is getting a peek inside the life of a mother whose life on the outside is so different from mine. It was a real treat for my imagination to see how my life would be different if I lived in a place like Manhattan, shuttling kids to activities on the subway, bus, or taxi, spending weekends in the Berkshires, having access to nannies and mannies and housekeepers for help, surrounded by a culture of glamour and sophistication.

Given my fondness for heels, I thought I might feel envy for a woman whose life can accomodate this kind of glamour on a day-to-day basis. Mine could, I guess, if I wanted it to, but chances are some morning you'd find me stuck between pavers on my way out to the garage, heels sunk in the mud. Most days recently you'll find me donning my Birkenstock gardening clogs, knees down in the dirt, digging and planting my way to another way of self-expression: my garden. But if you catch a glimpse of my eyes under my straw hat, you'll see the sparkle of fearlessness in my eyes, the gift of a stiletto-wearing mom in Manhattan.

How He Came to Be Here Now

2010-04-25T14:32:00.000-07:00

This weekend was the kind that made my cheeks hurt from smiling. Smiles of pride, smiles of joy, smiles of laughter, smiles of greeting and parting. One big smile when my son Eli called my dad "Deacon Grandpa."

Deacon Grandpa, that's his new name. Or Deacon Jay I guess is probably what he prefers. My dad was ordained as a deacon in the Catholic Church this weekend. I'm kind of tired of using the words "amazing" and "proud" to describe the event, but that's what it was. And I certainly won't bore you with the details from the two-hour ceremony in all its ritual and grandeur.

No, I won't bore you with all that. But since I've got this little blog here to record whatever I'm in the mood to write about, I would like to preserve one teeny tiny moment for posterity.

One moment for posterity. Because you never really know what kind of a thing is going to just hit you in the middle of church sitting there all choked up blinking back tears, all worried about whether you're going to end up with mascara running down your face. You just never know. So when I glanced at the program and saw "Calling of the Candidates" I had no idea that this was going to be it: the epiphany moment.

A Deacon on the altar was reading the candidate's names one by one and each of the men stood up and announced, "Present" when his name was called and then took his place on the altar. I guess you could call it an old-school role call.

When my dad's name was called, he stood up at the end of our pew and announced "Present." His voice was strong and clear. He declared it. I dare say he exclaimed it. I can't remember feeling so much love for my dad as I did in that moment.

Let me tell you something about my dad: he successfully started and ran his own software company for over 25 years. When his company celebrated their 25th anniversary, I gave a little speech at the banquet, giving creedence to the fact that not only had my dad started and kept his company running on a daily basis for all those years, but he was also a GOOD dad. The kind of dad who was home for dinner and coached soccer teams and even packed up the pop-up camper and took the whole family along when he went on business trips to sell his software to small towns around Ohio.

In that way, he was really THERE as a dad.

But let me tell you something else about my dad: he wasn't always HERE.

By here, I mean in the now. PRESENT. It was sometimes hard to feel heard or noticed or paid attention to by my dad. He was often up there in his head, thinking about quarterly profits or market shifts or new software developments. In order to make a company like his stay afloat through the rapids of the technological river of the 80's and 90's, he had to be all the time noting the strategies of the past that had worked and looking to the future to predict what might lie ahead.

Dad was definitely there for dinner, there for soccer practice, there for the birthdays and school functions, there for my wedding and there to see his grandkids in the first hours of their lives. But now? Now Dad is HERE. He's required to be, because it is part of his job as a deacon to be in service to others, to whatever it is that is needed at that moment.

When Dad answered the call to become a deacon, he began a five year journey to become spiritually present. He studied, read, listened, and worked to learn what it means to be open to what God wants him to do and say, a discipline that always begins in the NOW.

I feel so blessed to have seen Dad take this journey and to be part of the community where he will serve as deacon. Can I use another word I am tired of saying? Awesome. Some kind of awe is what I've been feeling ths weekend, because not only did I see a high honor bestowed upon my dad, an honor he worked very hard to earn, but I also saw him arrive at something else: I saw him earn the gift of spiritual presence. He's here, now, with God. "Present!" He said, and he meant it.

Congratulations, Dad! I love you!

I'm just going to go rest my cheeks for awhile, K?

Wine Wednesday: 2008 Quail Creek Chardonnay

2010-04-20T19:54:00.000-07:00

I almost couldn't write this week's wine review because I was in complete catharctic exhaustion after watching Crystal Bowersox perform "People Get Ready" on American Idol last night. At the end, when she sang "Thank the Lord" she choked up and started crying, so then I choked up and started crying...and then I had to rewind it and watch the whole performance over again because it was SO GOOD and then of course I choked up and started crying all over. And then I did that two more times until I was tired of my face involuntarily squinching up and my shoulders all shivering up and down with sobbing. Eek. Gotta love a good cry, though.

Anyway, prior to weeping Idol madness, I was drinking a glass of 2008 Quail Creek Chardonnay that I picked up at Whole Foods Market for $4.99. I guess in this case price won over the label, because the label is just a pencil drawing of a bird. BORING. But the wine is good, very crisp and not too oaky on the finish, and it pared well the brown rice/chicken dish I had for dinner.

If you want to know more about this wine, go here and find out what some other people who know more than I do have to say about it, how they found it to be a far better tasting wine than you would expect for the price. I'd probably buy it again, but I think they should change the label. Maybe like a pencil drawing of Crystal Bowersox singing "People Get Ready." With a free box of tissues.

Wine Wednesday: Boho Vineyards Merlot

2010-04-14T17:31:00.000-07:00

I have a new love. It's red and green and rectangle. It's a 2006 Central Coast Merlot from the eco-conscious folks at Boho Vineyards. And here's the kicker: it comes in a box. Wine in a box! I know!

Boxed wines have had a reputation for being of lower quality and barely worth tasting, but I had noticed recently that the selection was growing and my curiosity was growing as well. What really got me was the idea that boxed wines have a much smaller carbon footprint than the same amount of wine bought in bottles. And to top that, buying the box (equal to 4 bottles of wine) is significantly less expensive than purchasing a wine of similar quality in separate bottles. The final straw was when I went on my wine-buying trip to Kroger and the box of Boho Vineyards Merlot was on sale for $15.99(normally $23.99)!

And the best thing? Wine in a box keeps for 4-6 weeks. This little fact has changed my wine consumption habits on its own. See, in the past I would buy a bottle on Friday and spend the weekend trying to finish the bottle, which meant at least 2-3 glasses a day. The pressure alone could give me a headache, not to mention the hangover headache. But now? Now I live moderately and healthily on a glass of red wine a day.

And what a delicious glass it is. I look forward to my dinner glass of this cherry chocolate oak glass of relaxation and heart disease prevention. A very fine everyday wine, for sure. If you're in doubt, just come on over and I'll serve you up a glass from my tap. It's the house special.

Cheers to red wine and green packaging!

Spring is Here and the Grass is Speaking to Me

2010-04-12T19:36:00.000-07:00

I got down in the dirt today. Weeding, mostly. Weeding, hoeing, cleaning out leaves, clearing around the little buds of periennials just now poking their little heads up above ground, peeking just out of the dirt as if to say, "Is it safe to come out now?" I guess my gloved fingers sweeping around them is maybe a bit of a welcoming gesture: Come now, come into my garden!

There were moments today when I sat and watched the plants, the trees, the bushes around the yard, my eyes sweeping the scene of flowers and buds and leaves and I swore, I swore, I could see them growing. And I saw the showers of petals from the trees as they shed their white flowers and traded them for green leaves. I saw Spring happening.

And still my mind wanted to go backward. My mind wanted to see me, here in this yard, for the past 10 years on my knees weeding, planting, digging, coaxing. My mind wanted to see the future, wanted to envision this place with small trees grown large, bushes full, flowers in bloom. Why do we do this, in our minds, this traveling from past to future? Why not be here, now, where Spring (SPRING for goodness sake is there anything lovelier?) is happening?

I managed, today, to spend a little time in Spring, fully in the moment with her. It made me believe again in the possibility of change, of rebirth. It happens so easily and so effortlessly when it comes at the right time, when the whole universe is ready for it, when every action of the universe is supporting it. It was the joy of Easter I felt well up in me, a celebration of the joy of forgiveness. I lay down and rested after my weeding frenzy, my head on the ground, warm sun on my face, the lawn around me rising up, each blade of grass singing "Aleluia!"

Reading Mary Oliver

2010-04-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

There are troublesome days, like this
one: days where I mope about reading
Mary Oliver poems and crying because I feel
her finger pointing in those words about the journey
I must take to save my life, the only life I can save, she says.

I feel doubtful about that, like I'm
not enough here all on my own and
can't really save myself or anybody but
I'll try first for somebody else because there's
much less risk in that and I've just reached my hand
down into the faith bucket, the one supposed to be bottomless,
but my hand grasps at nothing, like whatever is left lies just out of reach.

And my inner critic just arrived
to inform me that this is just about
the darkest stupidest poem I've ever
written and why on earth would I waste
words on my moodiness and preserve all that
indulgent glum here for anyone to read and then
go and have a ruined day marked by ugliness because of it.

Perhaps that should have been a question
mark at the end of that last line because what
I'm really saying is: Can I? Or maybe the real question
is: Will I? Will I really stop listening to those voices that
only phrase things in the negative? Can I gag the inner critic
who points out my failures, my inadequacies, my lack of editing?
Can I stop moping long enough to begin the journey that must be begun?

(You can read Mary Oliver's The Journey here.)

Wine Wednesday: Menage a Trois

2010-03-31T17:23:00.000-07:00

Okay, I realize that I told you that one of the ways I select wines is based on the label. And this one, with the name that it has, and the suggestive quality attached to that name, and the Frenchness of it, and the threesomeness of it, WELL. Before you start thinking that my life is any more interesting than it really is, I am just going to clear this up right here and tell you: NO. No. I came to purchase Menage a Trois red wine in a completely innocent way. I swear.

When I first tasted Menage a Trois red wine at my sister's wine party, I had no idea that I was drinking something with a name of such scandal. In fact, the whole idea of the party was that guests taste the wines without seeing the bottle, which was covered in a brown paper bag. So upon my first taste, my first impression was Oaky. Not Okay, but Oak-y. I could strongly taste the oak flavors in the wine. And I liked it. I liked it so much that I kept drinking "R3", as it was named on the brown paper bag, for the duration of the party. In retrospect, I may have had a glass or two too many of "R3" because at some point I dropped my wine glass on my sister's tile floor and it smashed into a million teeny tiny bits. All conversations halted for a very long minute or so.

At some point, probably right before I dropped my glass on the kitchen floor, I found out the name of the wine I was drinking. Which made me giggle like a fifth grader who hears that there is a planet named Uranus. But I liked the wine so much that I didn't care about the implications of its sexy name. I was so certain of the wine's virtues that I had to go buy the wine for myself. At Kroger. Where I had some difficulty locating the bottle. So then I had to ask the older gentleman wine salesman. Who was apparently somewhat hard of hearing. So I had to say the name really loudly: MENAGE A TROIS! Which I think then made me blush, I'm not sure.

The point I'm getting at here is: don't judge a wine by its label (real wine people already know this, of course). And in spite of its racy name, Menage a Trois is, in fact, a very popular wine. A blend of Cabernet, Merlot, and Zinfandel (three varietals, hence the name), this red wine is a pleasure to drink with rich berry flavors, a hint of pepper, and the lingering oak finish I noted when I first tasted the wine.

One last thing: When I first bought Menage a Trois at Kroger, it was $11.99, just above my $10 cut-off. BUT I BOUGHT IT ANYWAY. In spite of the name, in spite of the price, I really liked this wine. It was worth $2 in guilt. But today? Today I found it at Costco for $9.99. And I bought it again. Sans the guilt. Hooray!

Cheers to suggestive French terms and Costco!

Wine Wednesday: Mad Housewife

2010-03-24T17:40:00.000-07:00

Let me just say this right off the bat: you are dealing with a person who buys wines based primarily on two characteristics. One is that I like the label, because I'm human and visual and buy things for exactly the reason that reseachers and marketing people know I do. And the second characteristic I like in a wine is that once I've bought it, I don't want to feel guilty because I've just spent a good portion of my family's food budget on an idulgence for me. Guilt begins to set in at about $10, just so you know.

The fact that I generally buy wine based on these two characteristics is exactly the reason that I ended up with a bottle of Mad Housewife Cabernet Sauvignon in my cart at the grocery store. At least the first time I bought the wine, which was way back in January, January 10 to be exact, my birthday, when I was shopping for a birthday dinner we were having with our friends Mary and Brian. The two weeks leading up to this day had been on the crazy side of challenging for me, with a round of bad colds going through the family over Christmas, then Shad spraining his ankle and being laid up for a few days, followed by a tremendous snowstorm that cancelled school and stranded me in the house with four kids.

Mad Housewife, indeed. I'd even kept the bottle, placed strategically on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, a place I frequent often throughout the day, as a reminder to myself of what can happen if life gets too busy and chaotic and I forget to take some time out for me.

But of course I forgot. So there I was again, at the grocery store, buying the Mad Housewife. This time the 2008 Merlot. It sat in the pantry for about a week, and then: the magic happened.

The magic was that each time I was literally filling my glass, the same was happening figuratively as well: I filled my glass, the one which gets a little too low sometimes and turns me into that crazy, mad housewife. It took me two evenings to finish the bottle, but the short story is that it paired well with a long, hot bath on Friday, a new marinara recipe over pasta for Saturday dinner, and with popcorn and The Time Traveler's Wife on dvd that evening. A whole weekend of taking a little time to fill my glass (glass after glass), made that much nicer with flavors of blackberries, plum, and hints of vanilla and spice. I drank it in, those moments, along with the wine, which was so so drinkable.

I'm happy to report that the wine behind the cute label was a delicious and complex surprise. And at $5.99 (0n sale at Kroger), this mad housewife was not the least bit guilty.

Officially the Mother of a Teenager

2010-03-22T15:56:00.000-07:00

Everyone warned me this day would come. Just wait unti she's a teenager others would tell me when I uttered complaints about my first child, Gabrielle: first a high-need baby, then a strong-willed toddler, and more recently, a dramatic adolescent. Usually I forgot about their words of warning, too busy in the moment to think much about what challenges the future would hold.

Well, the day has arrived. Tuesday is her birthday, her 13th birthday, and I will officially be the parent of a teenager. I'll just let that sink in for a moment.

The. Parent. Of. A. Teenager.

Has it been 13 years for real? Because it seems just moments ago that I held her tiny little body in my arms and thought how perfect. I fell in love with her, right then, and have ever since tried the absolute hardest I have ever tried at anything to be the best mother I can be to this perfect little being.

Which, at times, has been my downfall. I have tried too hard, many a time, to do what I thought was the thing that good mothers do. I read books and tried to follow them. I talked to other moms and tried to follow them. I thought up plans and tried to follow them. And sometimes, in the midst of all that following this way and that way, I forgot to follow my heart. It's true. I can sometimes be the smartest dumb person alive.

Lucky for me, my daughter is not so dumb as me. I have called her "my challenge" because she makes me see things another way. She is my bullshit barometer. She knows when I'm not being true to myself, when I'm thinking too hard about the right thing to say or do and forgetting about the moment that is presenting itself right now and the people who are right in front of me. She has always demanded that I open my heart and as hard as that has been for me to do, I have her to thank for the fact that I have been able to experience the greatest of love.

I know this is starting to sound a little too much like a Whitney Houston sentimental love song. I know. But for some reason I feel like this is that climactic movie moment where they play the big song and everyone cries. And maybe I'm falling headlong into something dreadful, but I still can't help but feel joyful and hopeful. Like I can't wait to see this girl become a woman. And I can't wait to see myself as her mother. And the two of us going through all of this together? That I am so excited to experience.

Bring on the teen years! She's prepared me well. May she continue to lead me through the rocky terrain ahead with her quiet confidence and patience. I trust her to keep me on the true path. Thank you, my sweet girl, for always making life full of interesting challenges.

I hope this isn't one of those drunk ideas I'll regret later.

2010-03-16T11:30:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday night I went out. To a party. A wine party. I know. I was in disbelief myself, that Shad actually gave me my shoes. I left him at home with all four kids and went out. And not just wearing any old pair of shoes, but in high heel boots. Yeah, I know.

Barefoot and pregnant jokes aside, my husband was the one who encouraged me to go. So I have him to thank for the fact that I drank a little too much and dropped my wine glass on my sister's kitchen floor, where it shattered into a thousand tiny pieces and brought the entire party to a screeching silent halt. Then everyone looked at me.

Let me just say right now: I think of the best things to say after the moment has passed. That's how I roll. Not very fast. Kind of slow, actually. Especially when it counts. Like when I'm standing in front of a room full of people in total silence and the only thing I can think to say is, "I have nothing interesting to say!" (Yes, that's what I said. Just brilliant.)

While I was saying nothing of any brilliance whatsoever, my sister Ann and my friend Elaine came up with an absolutely brilliant idea. "Write about wines!" They said, "On your blog!" Little did they know that I was trying to figure out how to bring my interest in wine to my blog, in spite of the fact that I am very new to the world of wines. Like new, new. So new that I'm still learning how to hold my glass without dropping it.

Since Ann and Elaine are two of my most faithful readers, I'm giving them what they want. And I hope I learn some more about wine in the process. Who knows? Maybe I'll be on my way to one of my dream jobs, which is to write the labels on the backs of wine bottles. (I'm not lying. Getting paid to taste wine and write prose? Are you kidding me? Heaven.)

So let me just stop blabbering and introduce my new(found) idea: Wine Wednesday! I did a little tasting of some wine blogs and found this idea on Jennifer's Reviews, a site I connected with because she, like me, prefers wines that are easy on the budget.

So meet me here next Wednesday, OK? In the meantime, I'm off to Ikea to buy some more glasses.

Oh, and, by the way....while I've got you here: What would you have said if you dropped your wine glass and had the full attention of an entire room full of people? I need to know because, well... just in case.

The Kid's Got Swagger

2010-03-10T11:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, at the park:

Eli: I'm way cooler than those boys over there. (He gestures to a couple of boys, who look to be about 2nd graders, goofing off over by the swings.)

Me: Really? Why are you so cool?

Eli: Because I'm a boy!

Me: But they are boys, too.

Eli: But they don't ROCK!

A few minutes after this conversation, Eli is over at the swings talking to the boys (the ones who don't rock). Eli, who is just FOUR let me remind you, asks these boys to play a game of tag with him. I stand astonished as they start up the game with him and a couple more gradeschoolers join in. Suddenly it is my four-year-old and a group of older kids playing tag. They all know his name. They seem to be enjoying themselves. I watch to make sure they are not teasing him or excluding him because he is younger. He appears to be able to keep up just fine.

I guess I'm still getting used to the idea that my son has a lot of confidence in himself. This is a good thing, right? Maybe someday I will be able to accept that my son is a ROCK STAR.

In Need of Strong Opinions

2010-03-05T10:47:00.001-08:00

Here's the thing: my kids want a dog. Like, BADLY. I would not be exaggerating if I said that the subject has come up at least twice a week for, like,the last 3-4 years since we had to get rid of our last dog, Maggie. Which is a decision I have never once regretted, since she was snapping quite frequently at then-one-year-old Eli. And that I was just not comfortable with. Add to that some other behavior problems she had, and the fact that we adopted her as a rescue dog when she was 5 months, so she never seemed to quite bond with us. It always seemed to be a case of "the lights are on, but nobody's home" kind of thing. A big change from our first dog, Emma, who passed away from a rare condition at the age of 6. Emma was an almost-human kind of dog. You could have a conversation with her, which I did, regularly, since we had her before kids. She was our first baby.

So, as you can see, we are dog people. 100% dog people. But recently, we just haven't had the room in our lives to actually have one. Between babies 3 and 4 and remodeling our entire home, we know a dog just hasn't been in the cards for us. And we respect dogs enough to know that if we have one, we want to be able to take care of it.

But it hasn't always been easy to say "No" to the kids' pleas for a dog. Especially since Shad has a habit of bringing home pictures of cute puppies in need of adoption. And I have probably been the strongest and loudest naysayer in the household, since I happen to be the one home all day, the one to deal with the messes and the barking, the shopper for dog food, and the cleaner of dog hair. I waver a bit sometimes, and then after a bit of thinking of all things I hated about having a dog (poop in the yard! Hello!), I put my foot down once again.

Well, folks, the time has come again. And I have to say that this time I am seriously wa-ver-ing. Like a drunk driver who's texting, wavering. All over the road (the puppies are free! And they're cute!) But before you tell me I am half out-of-mind for considering getting a dog along with having four (1,2,3,4!) kids, please let me explain. Because aside from the issues of dog hair and dog poop, I think we do at least have the lifestyle to support taking care of a dog.

The first thing I have considered is that the older girls are 10 and 13 (this month!) and are fully aware of the responsiblities of having a dog and old enough to carry them out. Believe me, I did not leave one thing out. Not the early morning potty runs, the poop picking-up duties, the muddy paws that have to be cleaned, or the fleas that may come. Not even the puke on the floor. They are OK (only the slightest bit deterred by the thought of puke) with all of these things and I do trust them. I mean, just last weekend, Gabrielle spent two hours at the horse barn voluntarily cleaning out the hooves of every horse in the barn. She smelled like a pile of manure when she got home.

Another thing I have considered is that we are home most of the time. Shad, the kids, and I are all home for lunch every day except a rare occasion. The girls have limited activities outside of school, so one of them is always home after school. We eat dinner, together, at home. On weekends, we are in and out but still spend a lot of time at home, mostly because, well, if you're gone for too long, then it involves eating. And feeding six people gets expensive, even just for fast food. We may be out for 2-3 hours, but the next meal is usually not far off, so we're back home again. And the little ones still need rest and nap at home, so there's that.

Speaking of the little ones, they are starting to spend more time playing in the backyard, sometimes by themselves. Eli, in particular, spends time outside without me, and the thought of having a dog out there with him would give me some peace of mind. At least it would help me avoid neurotically looking out the window every 3 minutes to check on him. Our house backs on the alley, and some pretty strange characters can be seen passing by, so it would be nice to have it known that we are a dog-inhabited yard/house.

Wait: it gets worse. I've even thought of what the puppy caretaking schedule might be. Maybe this will bore you, but people who really want to help me, can you tell me if I am being realistic here? We would take the pup out and give him/her lots of playtime from 6-9 in the morning, with caretaking duties split between the girls, Shad, and me. Then the puppy would be in a crate inside from 9-12 to rest/nap. For 1-2 hours at lunchtime, Shad and I would take the pup outside again and play. Then from about 1 or 2 until 4 (when the girls get home), the pup would be crated again. The girls would be responsible for playing with the puppy until 6, when we would crate the pup for dinnertime. Then out again before bedtime and in to rest in the crate for the night around 10. I am assuming in the beginning that the pup might need to go out during the night once or twice.

As the puppy grows and its sleep needs decline, we would start to replace some of the crate time with being by itself (or with us) in the yard. Early on, the pup would never be alone while we are not home in the house or yard. After awhile, we may trust it for a short time in the yard while we're out running errands or something. So the end goal would be a dog who, along with being played with and given walks, hangs out in the yard most of the day (unless really hot or really cold) and sleeps inside for the night. I am assuming this will cut down on dog smell/dog hair in the house. I have already explained to the girls that they would be expected to clean and brush the dog each night when they bring it in.

Have I forgotten anything? Money we've considered and the whole family is OK with cancelling our cable TV so we can afford the food/vet bills. In the long run, it seems a childhood with a dog beats a childhood with TV. We are aware we will probably have to pay to kennel the dog once a year when we take a vacation with my family. That is our only vacation, except for camping trips, and when camping we could bring a dog. Last year when we went camping with friends, the girls took care of their dog the whole weekend. Our friends thought it was great!

Maybe I am overthinking and obsessing about this (that I do well), but we've had our hearts broken twice by dogs, so I'm reluctant to take the risk of things not working out. AND, I've enjoyed our dog-free, smell-free, hair-free years to the fullest. I'm scared, y'all. But I love my kids, too. And believe me when I tell you that the dog obsession is not a passing fancy for them. They REALLY want it. And I know that after the older two are out of the house (oh, that hurts), we will still be taking care of this dog, but we will still have two elementary schoolers with a well-loved dog for a pet. Maybe then it will be time for another puppy?

Now you can let me have it. Give me your opinion. Don't hold back. For yay or nay, I'm listening.
Except Rachel, because I already know what she'll say. You should read her post too, because it will make you snort out your coffee. Or whatever you're drinking.

What I Sometimes Forget

2010-03-03T10:09:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that when I am watching Eli's soccer practice, I spend less time watching him than I do watching the behavior of the other parents around me. I can't seem to help it. You know those eyes you feel staring at you during your worst parenting moments? They're probably mine. I'm sorry. You could call me observant. Or, you could call me rude. Take your pick.

Well, today I cast several nonchalant glances (pretending to watch my toddler or find the trash can or inspect that really interesting spot on the wall) in the direction of another mom and her husband who were dealing with their 3-year-old son. The week before, I had observed the same mom with her little guy, who was not the least bit excited to be going to soccer. In fact, he was crying and unwilling to go back out on the field last week.

So this week she had brought her husband for reinforcement. The scene began the same as last week: the little guy did not want to go to soccer, so he cried and walked off the field. They made him go back. He cried again. He walked off the field again. Then I heard the Dad say to him, in a very stern voice, "You are NOT going to act this way!" A few minutes later, little guy was back out on the field.

I'm ashamed to say that I went from observant to judgemental very quickly. Several things went through my head: Why are they pressuring him so much? He's THREE. So he doesn't want to go to soccer. Big deal. Maybe he's just not ready for it. Why do we make such a big deal about sports and activities and force our children to be involved at such a young age? I was already beginning to write a post about just these sorts of issues: the current trend of high-pressure parenting. How we expect them, right out of the womb, to be performing, meeting our demands and expectations.

But you know what happened next? Well, I overheard (yes, I was listening to other people's conversations which were, again, NOT MY BUSINESS) the parents of little guy telling another mom how he came rightly by his stubbornness. They talked about their parents: how her dad was the most stubborn man on the planet; how his dad was stubborn, too; how much each of them challenged their own parents with their stubbornness. They were laughing and enjoying sharing anecdotes about having strong wills, those funny things parents say like, "Well, you got what you deserve: you were the most stubborn child! Now you get to deal with it!"

They also mentioned that it was their son's first activity of this sort. They also had a toddler girl with them. So I assume that this 1/2 hour soccer practice was a kind of break for mom, maybe one that she didn't get that often.

I have to say that in that moment, I felt the blood drain straight from my head down into my heart. Whatever thoughts I had before, they were gone. All judgmental thoughts were replaced with one thought, one of my core (but sometimes forgotten) beliefs: God gave each of us the parents that we need in order to be who He wants us to be. Period. End of Story.

Those two people are the BEST parents for that child. They know him. They know what he needs. They know what their family needs. I DON'T. How can I possibly make a judgement based on a few isolated moments?

The depth of my compassion for these parents (for all parents, really) was palpable as I sat there, hair on end, tears in my eyes, goosebumps on my skin, heart all pushing out of my chest. I MUST remember to keep this in my heart, at all times. And every time I'm staring, rudely, at parents in their challenging moments, I will look with compassion on them.

And I will remember, too, in my most challenging moments, that I am the best parent for MY child. And I will try to have the strength to do what I think is best, in spite of my worries about how others will judge me.

If This Tells You Anything

2010-02-27T20:31:00.000-08:00

"Are you happy?" Shad asked me the other day, just as he was headed out the door to go back to work after his lunch break.

I told him I'd have to think about that. Because it wasn't fair to ask me while I was standing next to a counter stacked with dirty dishes. And add to that my worrying about whether I'd get dinner in the crock pot soon enough. Oh, yes, and there was the laundry to think about. Oh, the laundry, the neverending laundry. And if I finished all of those things? Then there was the bathroom. Eek, the bathroom. Yuck.

I guess Shad was concerned about me. Maybe it was the droopy shoulders. Or the sighing. Or the obvious lack of spring in my step. And there may have been a little bit of snappiness. In the form of: "Are you going to just stand there and read the mail or help me clean up this mess?" Well, yeah, there was that.

"There's some bourbon in the pantry," he said as he went out the back door, "maybe that would make your afternoon better." I wanted to grab him from behind as he left, to wrap my arms around him and wail, "Take me! Take me with you! Don't make me stay here with this mess!" But I didn't. I just stood there, all droopy-shouldered and sighing, watching him go, wondering whether drinking bourbon really would make my day better.

I won't lie: domestic chores just plain annoy me. My top three: 1)dishes, 2) laundry, 3) cleaning. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it even more. They make me decidely un-happy.

Now you might be wondering why I had four kids. I mean, why would you have four kids and be an at-home mom if you HATE domestic chores? Duh. I hear you. I really do. It makes no sense. But still I totally love my kids. All four of them. I wouldn't send any of them back. Nor would I choose to work outside of the home (and perhaps hire a cleaning service and eat out more?) instead of spending my time with the little ones before they are ready to be in school all day. And here's another thing: why would I cook so much if it makes so many dishes? Why? Because I really like cooking. It makes me happy. And feeding my family good, healthy food? Well, that just gives me joy. Deep down in my heart, JOY.

So you know what I've figured out? The things that make me really unhappy come part and parcel with the ones that bring me great joy. There's just no having one without the other. This is one of those great and undeniable truths that just seems to well, escape me on some days.

Like this morning, for instance. I was very easily agitated for no apparent reason. Except for maybe because yesterday was Sunday and Sundays being NOT part of Lent (it's true, but even some Catholics are not aware of this: you get Sunday OFF)I went on a total sugar binge. Yeah. Blueberry pancakes and Girl Scout cookies and chocolate ice cream with Girl Scout cookies on top. That kind of sugar binge. And I think this morning I was having a kind of sugar hangover of sorts. So I was unhappy, in spite of my yesterday sugar-eating bliss. See? Can't have one without the other, right?

Once I was able to see through the ugly haze of irrational agitation and the nasty thoughts that accompany it: Please someone can you take these children and just leave me alone to bask in my misery or the downward spiral of What's wrong with me? What's wrong with my life? Who can I blame for this?, I was able to muster up enough self-awareness to make the sugar connection. And then it was just a matter of changing those energy-draining thoughts into something less likely to resemble the ending to those feminist novels we read in English Lit. class: the heroine kills herself.

My life has too much meaning to fall for that line of thinking. Seriously. And this is coming from a woman who spent a good part of her day playing "Who can make the funniest face?". At this point it could be really easy for me to think: did I really go to college for this?

No, I didn't. But I did go to college to learn how to think. Kind of. In a liberal artsy kind of way (which is not the least bit of help when deciding whether to vaccinate). But I guess it does help me to priortize, plan, and execute all the tasks that make my household run smoothly, as well as analyze my place in the history of Western Civilization. Or speak in a somewhat educated manner to the question of whether breastfeeding is a feminist thing to do. But you know what's even more important than thinking? Paying attention with my heart. Because when I do that, I see the REALLY IMPORTANT people right in front of me, the ones who giggle when my face contorts in ways I wouldn't let the general public see.

Lest you think that this is one of those motherhood rants which start out all "life with kids is challenging" and end all like "but at the end of the day, they're worth it," well, yeah, I guess it kinda is. But it's also like this: motherhood is hard. I mean, really hard. And then, it's even harder. But to make yourself feel better, you could just make funny faces. That generally works when nothing else does.

Vampires Probably Wouldn't Like My Chili

2010-02-24T17:36:00.000-08:00

Eli is very concerned about the health and safety of the general public when it comes to your preparedness for warding off vampires. "What about people who don't have garlic or crosses in their houses?" he asks me this afternoon as we make chili. I pause for a moment, staring thoughtfully into the colander of kidney beans, thinking of how one minute we are peeling garlic and the next we are peeling away layers of vampire lore. We cover garlic as a deterrent, fear of crosses, and the sleeping in dark boxes during the day habits of vampires. I opt not to mention the wooden stake through the heart facet. Too gory for a four-year-old, I decide.

What occurs to me in that moment of staring into the dark (blood?) red puddle of kidney beans in the sink is that maybe Eli's worry about households without garlic or crosses is a valid concern. Consider first, garlic: an essential ingredient. Heat some olive oil in a skillet, throw in some of this pungent root and you're on your way to a delicious home-cooked meal. No cook worth her salt and pepper would be without it. What I'm saying is that a house without garlic is a house without a whole lot of cooking going on. And that, my friends, is a BIG concern.

Long before Stouffer's turned the idea of the family dinner and its benefits to the self-esteem of children into a marketing campaign, we were coming together every evening for our daily eat and greet and dodge the food flying from the highchair. It's what we do. Do away with dinner and the family disintegrates from tightly woven yarn into a few loose ends.

A few years ago, when my older girls were 5 and 7, I took a teaching job that involved a long commute and at least one late night a week attending meetings. While I loved my job and having colleagues and going every morning to a place where things were happening and there were people to talk to and a whole community to inspire me, what I mourned was being away from home for so much of the day that dinner became a rushed thing to get through in order to get to the part where I could RELAX (I was pregnant with Eli for a good part of that year).

The loss of dinner is a grave loss, indeed. It's like this: take a few simple ingredients, chop them, stir them, heat them, season them and you have transformed those separate individual things into one whole nourishing dish. Bring your family together to eat what has been made to feed them and soon you have transformed all the separate members of your family into one WHOLE.

Eli is right to be concerned. And not just about the garlic. The absence of crosses is something to think about as well. Because how are the vampires to know that you believe in goodness if there is no physical representation of your spiritual beliefs visible for others to see? Is there something in your house that tells the vampire that you at least have a passing interest in the shining light of truth? Something that might cause him to take his evil self to the next house to find his victim?

Having dinner together and outwardly expressing our faith life together form the culture of our family. We are a house built on garlic and crosses. Take note, vampires.

What about you? What forms the culture of your family?

Fortifying for the Fast?

2010-02-22T18:24:00.000-08:00

Is that a contradiction in terms? Maybe when you consider the origin of the Lenten Fast, which was born more out of necessity than a trendy diet plan. You know, because people really didn't have a choice: they ate what was left. Well, not me. Because I spent Saturday at Costco, maneuvering my weighty cart around a whole crowd of other crazies, stocking up for Lent. But it wasn't fish sticks I was shopping for (although I did throw in a box of something called "Bronzed Tilapia"). Instead I bought enough whole grains to fulfill our family's dietary fiber requirments for the next ten Lenten seasons.

Here's what I ended up with:
And all of this is going to ensure that I stick to my Lenten sacrifice: No white stuff. No, I'm not referring to cocaine. I can do all the cocaine I want. What I'm not doing is eating white flour, or white sugar, or white rice, or white bread, or white people.

I don't really know why I'm telling you this, except maybe to say HEY! They finally have big bags of brown rice at Costco! And you don't know how long I've been waiting for that day to come. And the quinoa? Make it with chicken stock instead of water. Whole grain heaven.

blue true dream of sky

2010-02-19T19:25:00.000-08:00

Was the sky not SO BLUE today? If you were here in Ohio today, where the sun was shining and the ground still covered in so much white, it was just an amazingly beautiful day. I took the little ones to the park this morning to sled a bit and swing and play. I forgot the camera to capture the moment, but this poem (one of my all-time favorites) captures the feeling perfectly. I think of this as a Spring poem, but today felt like a resurrection of sorts since it has been all gray and cold and snowing so much. The warmer temps and sunshine really lifted my spirits.

i thank You God for most this amazing
e.e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

FAT TUESDAY!

2010-02-16T06:30:00.000-08:00

We started our Fat Tuesday with homemade Creole Donuts, or Beignets (Behn-yay). Fat Tuesday, a.k.a. Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday, or fetter Dienstag, is the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Because Lent is considered a time of "famine," some cultures traditionally ate as much as possible on Fat Tuesday, sometimes up to twelve times over the course of the day!

After the dump of snow we've gotten, we'll be holed up here for the day, gorging on Valentine's chocolate, Girl Scout cookies, and other tasty edibles in preparation for the traditional fasting and cleansing of the Lenten Season.

What about you? Is it Mardi Gras masks and King Cake for you? Pancakes for dinner? How are you celebrating Fat Tuesday?

What I Love About My Man

2010-02-14T11:13:00.000-08:00

Well, for one, we're just so different. Like yesterday, for instance, when we were standing in Aisle 5 in Ikea arguing about the under-the- bed baskets for our bedroom, which we are in the process of redecorating and reorganizing.

"What do we need those for?" He asked.

"For STUFF," I said, "like, you know, stuff we need to store that we don't have a place for somewhere else."

"Like what?" he challenged.

"I don't know yet. Clothes and stuff. Maybe shoes. Or linens. Whatever I can't find a place for somewhere else."

He looked unconvinced. Because this is not how he works. He's an organizer, so he looks at what he has and decides what kind of storage would work best for it. Only then does he buy exactly what he needs. He is not going to buy something with the idea that he'll find something to put in it. Unlike me, who has more of an artistic (read: disorganized) temperment and decides that the under-the bed baskets, being rattan, are the right balance of warm tones to ground the room and balance all of the white. And besides that, you can put things in them. Whatever it is you happen to be holding in your hand that you can't find a place for. Artistic me decides these things make it worth the price.

Organized him decides not. "I'm not spending $100 on something that I don't know what I'm going to do with it," He says.

And he won. Because, folks? He was right. I may have sulked for a bit in bitter disappointment about those under-the-bed baskets I had grown so attached to, about the idea of which I was so fond. You have no idea how often I imagined them, there under my bed, looking so rattan and pretty, just open and waiting for me to fill them.

But what I'm thinking about now is how much I love my husband for sometimes keeping me tethered to the earth. Which maybe sounds like a leash. But, no. It's just one of those cases of are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Because you guys? I can win, too.

Which is what happened later yesterday, after the Ikea incident in Aisle 5, long after I was over my sulking about the baskets thing: I redeemed my flaky self. Because we enountered a problem and I was the one to fix it. The problem was BIG and FRUSTRATING: the queen box spring we bought would not fit up our staircase.

Because this was a problem which involved actual material objects and physical space, I deferred to Shad. So he took the railing off the stairs. Which did not help our situation. The box spring still did not fit.

So he began discussing busting out plaster and then having a handyman fix the plaster after we got the box spring through. I imagined myself months from now telling the story about the "box spring that wouldn't fit" to visitors to our home when they noticed all the holes.

So he discussed the possibility of taking a window out upstairs. What? With snow and freezing temperatures outside? But he decided none of the windows was big enough. Then he looked at the box spring to determine how hard it would be to dissassemble and then reassemble the box spring after he got it upstairs. He started talking about buying a heavy-duty tack gun for the reassembly.

After a while, I decided that maybe I needed to think outside the box spring. So I went over to my laptop and googled "queen box spring 2 pieces." Bingo. You can buy them in a set. Apparently this box-spring-up-the-narrow-staircase problem is a common one. So I quickly found some mattress stores around us, made a couple of phone calls, and found one that had a set in stock and was open late enough for us to round up the kids and drive over. No missing windows in mid-winter, no busted out plaster, and a box spring still intact and able to be returned to Ikea. AND, we were able to sleep in our new comfy bed last night. I WIN.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY, hon! You are my perfect match.

UPDATE: Shad returned the queen box spring to Ikea yesterday (while I was writing the above post) and came home with one of my coveted under-the-bed baskets. I SO LOVE THAT MAN.

Why Mama Ain't Happy

2010-02-10T09:34:00.000-08:00

Buckle yourselves in, people. And HANG ON. This one's going to be fast and furious, but it HAS. TO. COME. OUT. I named this blog feeding my hungry for several reasons, one of them being that I hunger for self-expression. My chiropractor would call this a way to unblock my third chakra. Which is located, guess where? The stomach area. Solar plexus. Also involves the liver, the storehouse of emotions. Which is what you're getting today: a complete liver detox, OK? Once a therapist showed me how to clear the third chakra by chanting "Raaahhhm." Which maybe works, too, but generally I tend to require a lot more words than just that. So here goes.

I'm writing to you today from inside my own personal RED TENT. You know, that place that women long ago in like biblical times used to go when it was THAT TIME. The time of the new moon. The time when only womenfolk could stand to be around womenfolk. And the menfolk? Well, they just ate leftovers for a few days. And they didn't mind, not at all, because even leftovers beat having to sit face to face with the PMS beast. In fact, they didn't even know there was such a thing as PMS, because when the beast is allowed to go sulk alone (or in company with other sulking women), the beast becomes tame. Almost friendly. Perhaps even, insightful.

Which is what I will try to deliver to you today. Insightfulness. But I'm not promising anything, because what may come across could be just plain MADNESS. You know, like the kind of madness that happens when you take one mama with a case of wicked PMS, send a snowstorm to her house, and trap her in there with four children. THAT KIND OF MADNESS.

It's the BAD MOM COMPLEX. Really, that's what's getting me. Because instead of happily wiling away the hours enjoying the company of my children, playing games with them, building snowpeople, and drinking hot chocolate, I am praying every second for an alien abduction. Of me. Or maybe them. Which makes me feel like a REALLY BAD MOM, that I would actually want aliens to abduct my children. What is wrong with me?

I'll tell you what is wrong with me. Unnatural circumstances. There is the fact that this past weekend my husband (God bless that handyman) painted our bedroom and I, helpmate that I am, took no breaks from the kids or cooking. It was all business as usual: breakfast snack lunch snack dinner snack all the day long. And then there was the SCIENCE PROJECT. We're growing bacteria! And there are petri dishes! And the agar must be melted in a hot water bath! And nothing must be touched by curious little fingers on curious little toddlers! So instead we'll make Valentines! With Glue! And scissors! And beads!

Here's me: OM MANI PADME HUM. Which may seem like a strange Buddhist thing for a Catholic to be doing, but in my book, prayer is prayer. It calmed me. It did. And now I've come to find out that the translation for these words is generosity patience ethics diligence renunciation wisdom. Yes, please, a big dollop of all of those would be helpful. YES. And don't you worry, there was plenty of Holy Mary, Mother of God, Pray for us sinners running through my head, too.

And that's how I ended up in this little self-imposed TIME OUT. Because I know you've all heard it before, come on, say it with me: If Mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Which is, if you will permit me to assume the tone of a rant once again: A GREAT INJUSTICE.The injustice being that Mama's not happy. Because I look around me and I see HAPPY. I'm sitting here right now in the room my husband painted and IT IS BEAUTIFUL. A VERITABLE EDEN. Why can't I just be happy?

Well, there is that little story about Adam and Eve and the beginning of creation and the whole mess-up with the forbidden fruit and the mean old Serpent who tempted Eve by telling her that if she ate it she would be LIKE GOD. THAT WHOLE THING. And then God pretty much said, "From now on you shall dread swimsuit season and be forced to drink unsatisfying protein shakes and not only that, but when you have a baby, it's going to HURT. Like, BAD. Like when the baby's head stretches your perineum, it's going to feel like someone is holding a blow torch between your legs and you'll yell, It's burning! It's burning! But your husband will be all happy and saying, I see the head! The baby's almost out! Wow, that's a lot of forehead. Because you have done this, that's what will happen. AND I'M NOT KIDDING ABOUT THAT." God said that. He did.

And so, that brings me to, what? A point? You expected there to be some sort of point to all of this? Well, there isn't. Get used to it. Because this here? This is me feeding my hungry. Now, if you'll excuse me, a bit of dark chocolate is in order.

I Own It

2010-02-09T14:26:00.000-08:00

Hey! I've got happy news to report! Happy news about my New Year's Resolution! I am now the proud owner of my domain name! So feeding my hungry will be dishing it out in my own space soon! Or something like that! I don't really know what will happen, but I'm sure it will be good!

OK, before the use of any more exclamation points, I have a CONFESSION to make. The fact is, well, I am a bit slow in the technological department. Like, really slow. Have you seen Meg Wolitzer's bit of mommy fiction, The Ten Year Nap? Well, that's about how it's been for me, because about 10 years ago I quit working from home publishing a newsletter and left the media world.

But not for good. Not at all for good. It's just slow, my return, when there's all this new stuff I have to learn. Like how to create links and post pictures and organize sidebars. I'm much more comfortable with things like, "beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks." That I can handle. And I've really got the al dente thing down. Leftover turkey carcass? I know what to do with it.

And Mother Goose rhymes! Did I mention that? I know hundreds of them. And fingerplays, too. I know many Grimm's fairy tales by heart, and Beatrix Potter, and Winnie-the-Pooh. But can I figure out Google Analytics? No. Not without help.

So, here I go. Into a new domain. This is the way I build my blog, build my blog, build my blog...

What I was going to write, only Sally Jenkins wrote it first...

2010-02-07T12:38:00.000-08:00

We happen to be a rather unsportly family. Unsportly being a word I made up to desribe people who have never been to a sporting event in face paint waving a big #1 finger and losing our voices to cheer on a team. Or maybe the kind of people who aren't really certain who's playing in today's Super Bowl whatever-Roman numeral-we're on by now. A word which describes those of us who find the half-time show the most entertaining part of the game. And even that isn't really that great.

Once when we were playing a marriage quiz game with some friends I had to guess what Shad's favorite televised sport was. The other wives were trying to decide WHICH ONE of their spouse's many favorite sports they should pick. I had to stretch my imagination a bit and guess motorcross racing, only because I had seen him pause in his channel surfing to watch it for a few minutes on occasion. And the funniest thing is that I GUESSED IT RIGHT.

So, being the unsportly people that we are, we have not been having conversations around the dinner table about the teams or players in today's big event, but we have been discussing the controversy surrounding some of the ads that will be aired. By far my favorite take on the whole Tim Tebow "Celebrate Life" ad fiasco was given by Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post.

Read it! Tell me what you think! I won't be able to discuss the score of tonight's game, but I LOVE LOVE LOVE to have conversations about other unsportly things. Go, Sally! Woo-hoo!

The waiting is the hardest part....

2010-02-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

Eli is waiting for Josie to wake up from her nap so we can have a tea party.

Ah, but little boys cannot resist playing with fire.

The tea is ready and the bread awaits...

Happy boy!

New Doctor, New Day

2010-02-01T09:58:00.000-08:00

How nice it feels to just close the book on some things, y'know? I'm having that experience today, a happy ending to a not-so-pleasant story. Maybe you remember from last fall when I posted about the whole "failure to thrive" saga? No? You mean you haven't been hanging on my every word? Checking in on me to see how it goes in the thrilling life of a mother-of-four? Well. Let me just tell you it was heart-wrenching, the whole experience of having a doctor tell you there is something wrong with the child you created and carried in your womb and birthed and nursed and held and cared for.

So after the lab tests (two awful blood draws where I had to hold down my child while she screamed) and the follow-up visits ("We're still not where I think we should be. We need to get her into a gastroenterologist..."), I finally drew the line and decided to get a second opinion. Which was today. And guess what? There is nothing wrong with my child.

Our NEW DOCTOR, the one with kind eyes who looks at me and actually seems to be LISTENING to what I say, told me that her growth curve is normal and he sees it all the time. Based on her health history it doesn't appear that she is having any issues and she is developing well. She's just small. Imagine that.

So, perhaps you are one of the very few who has been really paying attention and you're wondering about all that stuff about my chiropractor and the bpa's and getting rid of plastics. Was all of that necessary? You might wonder. All I can say is: Yes, that was all good stuff. Great for Josie's health, great for our family. We are now enjoying a better quality of life because of it. But do we need a medical doctor for any reason at the moment? No, we don't. Thank goodness. And the next time we do, it will be the NEW DOCTOR we see.

For now, this will have to do

2010-01-29T05:34:00.001-08:00

Probably I shouldn't be too upset about the carrot peels in the sink.

The older girls have been making their lunches every morning and for that I am very, very happy. Probably I should also consider the fact that my almost 13-year-old daughter actually chooses something so healthy as carrot sticks for her lunch, as labor intensive as they are. There's all that peeling. And then the cutting. If it were me, I probably would have just washed it off and put it in her lunch box with a quick disclaimer it's organic you can eat it with the peel on. I may not have noticed her roll her eyes at me. Quite possibly the carrot would have returned home in her lunch box, uneaten. Then it would be all rubbery and inedible, so it would have to be tossed in the compost.

No, I should NOT be upset about the carrot peels in the sink. I'm going right now to wash them down the disposal. Happily. With joy.

You know, sometimes it really is just a matter of perspective. And these days, with so many changes going on in our household, I sometimes need that reminder. Because the biggest and most permanent changes come in increments. A little shift here, a nudge over there, several more tiny pushes over that way and the next thing you know a whole new paradigm is born.

Wow, I really needed that reminder. Seriously. I have this terrible tendency to beat myself up about things. Because I start believing that everything is in my control and that the things that I'm not happy with are changed by simply forcing my will upon the situation. And then when I fail, I believe it is all my fault.

Let me tell you a little story. Several years ago, when the girls were toddlers, I went to a workshop given by a parenting guru who had written a book about nurturing spirituality in children. During the break in sessions, I asked this guru how she came to make all these changes in her life. It all comes so slow to me, I said. It seems like I try to change and the next thing I know things are back to the way they were and I have to start all over again.

And do you know what this guru said to me? She told me that change is easy for her. What she actually said was, "I can manifest things pretty quickly in my life. I just decide I'm going to change and then I do it."

This pretty much shocked me speechless. I think then I crawled under my chair and hid for the rest of the workshop.

And apparently I have not recovered. Because this was almost 10 years ago and I'm still bringing it up, this exchange of two or three sentences. Because to a woman who beats herself up for every small failure, this was deadly advice. I felt like the biggest loser on the whole planet, me who sometimes needed an hour of sitting the girls in front of PBS in order to get through the day without punching a hole in a wall. Or more likely breaking my hand since we have plaster walls. Which would really set me back, because who was going to cook all those homemade meals and change the cloth diapers while my hand was in a cast?

You see the problem here? Do you? I have this vision for my life, of the mother I want to be, of how I want our family to be, and something keeps interfering and preventing me from attaining that perfect vision. Something like, well, real life.

OK, guru lady, maybe I haven't written a book and traveled around giving workshops to people, but I can tell you something for certain: everyone fails. EVERYONE. Even you, guru lady. I know there must have been some time when you tried to accomplish something and it didn't work for you. Or you got frustrated and gave up momentarily. Maybe it has been 10 years since we spoke and you have accomplished everything you have set out to do with confidence and ease. But just in case life hasn't always handed you that sweet bowl of cherries, here's my advice:

Don't get discouraged by a few carrot peels in the sink. Sometimes you have to stop and take a minute to check in with God and make sure you've got your purposes aligned. And when you do that, most likely he'll give you the little head nod, that kind of slow nod with his eyes half-closed and a small smile and the look that says: Yes, my child, this is the way it's supposed to be. And then he'll hand you another generous dose of love or patience or courage or whatever it is you need at that moment. Then when you look around you, you may not see your perfect vision of things, but you will have the peace of knowing that everything is as it is meant to be at that moment.

And that's how change happens, guru lady. Just so you know.

Peace and Muffins

2010-01-19T11:35:00.001-08:00

THESE are what we had for breakfast this morning...

Because that's what happens when you tell your daughters NO MORE with the laugh tracks, the Disney attitude. For ONE NIGHT a week we get to have peace around this place. So Monday nights, they have to forgo nightly "Disney Channel" hour and do something else after homework is done.

And so last night the two girls made blueberry muffins together. Which made the whole thing a DOUBLE BONUS, because not only was I spared from an hour of torture listening to the "huhuhuhuhuhuh" at regular intervals from the TV, but I got to feast on scrumptious muffins for breakfast, too.

And guess what else? There was just no end to the loveliness this morning, because the WHOLE family gathered for breakfast before work and school and Shad made eggs and sausage to accompany these delightful sweet and bready blueberry wonders. It was our vision made manifest--what Shad and I have been wanting for our family but which we have been too lazy/ignorant/physically incapable of doing before. There are 3 points to accomplish in order to call it a successful morning:

1) I shower and dress before everyone leaves for school and work.

2) We eat breakfast together as a family.

3) The girls make their own lunches for school.

Sounds simple, I know. But we are apparently just slackers of the worst sort. We have big problems accomplishing this. But we ARE doing it. It has become possible. And it is LOVELY. Let me tell you. You know that whole, "breakfast is the most important meal" thing? Well, it's true. As goes breakfast, so goes the day. And today? Oh, the loveliest. A giant blueberry muffin of a day.

PS...sorry about the lack of spaces in between paragraphs. I can't seem to fix it. It makes it all seem rather dense and hurried. Not at all like our breakfast. The muffins were airy, the pace relaxed. Ah.

The Things I Do for Art

2010-01-15T11:11:00.000-08:00

I left my chiropractor's office shouting, "Woo-hoo! I'm healed!" today. That was right after I dumped a capsule full of brown powder into my mouth, swished it around and washed it down with some water. I'm pretty sure it tasted like a cow terd would, if I had ever tasted a cow terd. Which I haven't.

The capsule was mostly calcium and magnesium, apparently extracted from bovine hoofs or something, which would make sense because it tasted like something that had spent its life walking around in a barn, caked with manure. What my chiropractor said was, "You need to open up this capsule and take it as soon as possible" which even she seemed to be surprised to be saying. I took this to mean A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, which it wasn't, but which I had to think in order to get myself to swallow manure flavored sawdust, so I just pretended that it was AN EMERGENCY.

Anytime I go to my chiropractor, it is, in effect, a kind of emergency. I really don't like going there. She makes me think about all the stuff that I've worked quite hard to repress so as to NEVER think about it again, and she discovers all of my favorite foods and suggests that I NOT eat them, and sometimes she makes me swallow rude tasting pills. One thing she has never told me is that I should not drink coffee, because she knows that if she did, I would not come back. Ever.

Have I told you about my chiropractor? Because "chiropractor" is a bit of a misnomer. She's more like a sadistic fortune teller without a crystal ball. And only bad news.

So you can see how it takes the worst kind of hitting the bottom in order for me to pick up the phone and make an appointment and then to fail to come up with a good enough excuse to cancel the appointment. Every time I have an appointment with her I always, always consider cancelling. And in order for me to actually keep the appointment, I have to give myself several pep talks. And prayers: God, please help me to be open to changing.

And when I see that written down, it seems dumb to me. That I wouldn't want to change. And sometimes, it's not even that I need to change. Sometimes I just have to be aware. How simple is that?

Well, it's not. The whole process is much harder than swallowing a cow terd, I can tell you that. Which is why I left her office today shouting and pumping my fist in the air and wondering what was in that disgusting powder I just swallowed, because I feel GOOD. And even my chiropractor, who is pretty comfortable with out-of-the-norm so much so that she makes a profession out of it, was like, "You're shifting fast. It's weird." And she seemed kind of in awe. Or scared. I'm not sure.

And all the way home I kept thinking, "I have to write a post about this!" Which is really about nothing except that maybe if you swallow dirt it can act as a placebo and cure whatever ails you. But here's the thing: I have five FIVE saved drafts from posts that I've attempted to write over the past week. Writer's block=GONE.

The 11 lb. Rabbit and Other Things to Do on a Snowy Day

2010-01-08T11:56:00.000-08:00

1) Make biscuits. And Eat them.

2 ) Weigh the Rabbits.

Gabrielle is holding 11 lb. Orrville, her Flemish Giant. Julia is holding 6 1/2 lb. Wilbur, a Mini Lop. We put them in the wagon and walked down to Shad's office to weigh them on the postage scale. Which, in retrospect, was completely unnecessary because we could have just as easily weighed them on the bathroom scale...but it was something to do on a snowy day, anyway, and got us out of the house.

P.S. That's a really big rabbit's foot, isn't it? Try putting that one on your key chain.

3) Go sledding at Harmon Park.

4) Gaze out the window at the snow or "no" as Josie calls it.

5) Play with new Christmas toys.

This is Josie enjoying her new Ikea kitchen from Grandma and Grandpa.

6) Have a drink.

It's Friday, isn't it?

My 2010 Resolution and Other Random Words in All Capitals

2010-01-05T12:23:00.000-08:00

At first I was thinking that this year I would just resolve to keep my houseplants alive. Sounds silly, I know, but I'm actually quite nervous about it. I've already moved the corn plant three times.

Yes, I said corn plant. Plant people will know what I'm talking about. It's like a tropical palm and a midwestern corn stalk mated and had a baby. That's what it looks like. A mutant thing that apparently is very hard to kill. Hard to kill AND one of the top 10 plants for cleaning toxins out of the air in your home. Which is what attracted me to it. WELL. Well, let me tell you that this plant was hardly in my house three days before the bottom leaves started to yellow. And then brown. And, uh, D-I-E.

So I panicked. And then I did what any rational person does when faced with a dying plant. I fell down on my knees in front of it and pleaded, "Oh, please, PLEASE, don't die. I'm begging you. Just hang in there. I need you. I need you to clean the air for us. PLEASE."

And when that didn't work, I consulted the internet. I Googled corn plant yellow leaves. And I found out that guess what? I'm a plant murderer, basically. Because corn plants are pretty happy in just about any environment EXCEPT that they hate drafts and overwatering. OOPS. In other words, DO NOT LET YOUR 4-YEAR-OLD SON DO THE WATERING.

So, since I've made a long story really really long, my point is that this plant-keeping-alive-thing is a real challenge, much harder than last year's resolution to drink more wine. Which was a really good one, I thought. But if I did that one again this year, I might be resolving to become a drunk. So I'll just stick with the occasional glass and have another year go by without Children's Services visiting me. And besides, there must be some unwritten rule that if you successfully keep a resolution one year than you can't repeat it the next.

Which is really the thing about resolutions, and why I don't think keeping plants alive is really in the spirit of resolution-making. We're supposed to be changing something in our lives for the better, right? And while plants arguably do contribute positively to our home environment and I certainly will make an effort to keep them around, I don't know if changing my watering habits and opening the blinds is going to change me. Like my character and stuff, y'know?

So after all of this talk about my corn plant, what I've really been getting around to saying is that my RESOLUTION for 2010 has to do with this here BLOG I'm writing. And the fact that I haven't been able to just SAY IT after all this beating around the bush makes me certain that I've hit on the right one. Because a resolution should be something you're kind of scared about. Imagine me a little turtle, and here I am just poking my head out just a bit. In two seconds I could pull myself back in that little shell and never see the light of day again.

BUT. NO. I'm going to take this blog to the next level this year. I am. Whatever that means: more posting, more pictures, ads, I don't know...

Just remember the turtle. She's so goshdarned slow, you know. She'll get there. You watch.

The Worst Ever, Except for the Butter Cookies

2010-01-04T06:11:00.000-08:00

I had the most gawdawful holiday ever. So if you see me, don't bother asking how it went. Here's the gawdawful summary: Josie had a fever for three days so I missed every Christmas celebration. Then Shad sprained his ankle the day after Christmas, so I even missed seeing my brother Mike before he went back to Chicago. I spent 2 days carrying trays of food to him in bed while he rested, elevated, iced, and compressed his ankle. The rest of the time I wiped Josie's runny nose, which came after the fever left. By the third day Shad could hobble around. Then he went back to work. By New Year's Eve I had a cold and so did Eli. Then Shad. Then Julia. Today Gabrielle is down. A cold lasts forever when there are six people to get through. Six sick Bissells. Gawdawful.

Of course, with any gawdawful experience, there were some shimmering gems, some moments I wouldn't trade for all the nosewiping in the world. Like that box of Danish butter cookies I discovered in the pantry. Those were sure good.

Spirit of Christmas On Sale at WalMart

2009-12-18T22:07:00.000-08:00

To all Believers in Joy:

I danced to Mariah Carey today. In my living room. Because All I want for Christmas was playing and the house was a complete train wreck of wrapping paper and glitter and ribbon shreds. Because the kids and I were totally high on chocolate cake so we just had to dance. Because just for a few moments I abandoned my nearly 37-year-old self: the one keenly aware of the economic recession and job scarcity and toxic pollution and cancer and the healthcare crisis and the fact that I don't dance all that well. Because I let myself be completely overtaken by joy.

And what a lovely thing it was. Not my dancing, but the beholding of joy. And it wasn't just the Mariah Carey that caused me to swoon. There was the trip earlier today to the dollar store with Eli to do his Christmas shopping. And after that there was WalMart. Because who couldn't get into the Christmas spirit going to the dollar store and WalMart with two children under 5? Right?

I know what you're thinking: Wrong. So totally wrong. You're thinking: Nightmare from Hell Wrong. And normally I'd agree with you. I'd choose having a mammogram over Christmas shopping with little ones. But not today. Today I had joy. I danced in my living room today.

Part of what inspired me to the point of dancing was watching my 4-year-old spend an hour thinking about other people. You do not realize how hard this is. Every 5 minutes he'd say, "Now can I pick out something for me?" And I'd have to say, "No, we're buying things for other people today. You'll get lots of gifts on Christmas. Trust me." And then he'd go back to picking out a package of straws for my sister ("so she can drink her hot chocolate through a straw and go vvsss"), toothbrushes for my brother (because who can't use a few spares?), and a box of frill toothpicks for my mom. He thought she could stick them in cheese cubes for fun or entertaining, I guess.

It was truly inspiring for me as a mother to see the spark of generosity beginning to shine in my child. It was so pure to see, because at his age it was not about the money. It was about setting himself aside and thinking about someone else, what they might need or want or enjoy. Like whether Uncle Mike would want a stick of deodorant for Christmas. Eli decided not, after I told him that you put it under your arms so you don't stink. Nah, he said, throwing it back into the bin, apparently deciding that not stinking wasn't that important or desirable for Uncle Mike. So after going through this process of deliberation for everyone on his list, I let Eli pick out something for himself. Because he deserved it. For his faith and selflessness and in spite of his doubts, he deserved it.

After shopping at the dollar store with Eli, I had to finish up some Christmas shopping of my own at WalMart. I noticed that I am not so different from my son. What a hard thing it is to have faith! To think of other people with no regard for oneself, a challenge for sure. With every item I added to the cart, I questioned: Is this too much? Am I blowing our budget? Will we have enough to pay our bills, too? Is this crazy to be buying all of these gifts during such an unstable economy? Should I be saving this money instead? WHEN CAN I BUY SOMETHING FOR MYSELF?

You'd think I was buying a flat screen TV for everyone on my list, when the main purpose of my shopping excursion was to buy socks and underwear stocking stuffers for the kids. But still the dialogue of fear. I ignored it and continued to buy gifts. For my faith and selflessness, I bought myself a set of glass Pyrex storage containers. I know, Crazy. But a woman who does WalMart with young children (joyfully, I might add) deserves something nice to store her leftovers.

The stangest twist to this whole story is that I found the faith and hope and joy of Christmas at WalMart. Not really where you would expect it, huh? But I guess no one really expected the Savior of the World to be born in a stable to a carpenter and his wife, either. Hard to believe, I know.

So dance with me, will you? Put on joy, have a little faith, and give selflessly. Open your heart wide to receive the beautiful gifts. You deserve all of it.

Have a lovely holiday season.
Joyfully yours,
Lynn

Who Wears the Pants

2009-12-02T11:40:00.000-08:00

I'm having a day of I have arrivedness. Because I've been a mother now for oh, let's see, about 13 years if you count from the beginning of my first pregnancy. Which I had no clue about for at least 9 weeks. So I spent the first weeks of motherhood traveling from Phoenix to Massachusetts thinking, Why am I so hungry and tired? Must be the road food. Hey! There's a McDonald's, let's pull over. You know, because there wouldn't be another one until at least, well, the next exit. So, several days of transfatty acids and corn syrup sodas later I arrived in Massachusetts, then several days after that I arrived one morning to motherhood in a hotel bathroom staring at the plus sign on a pregnancy test. And then I arrived at the point where I would no longer eat crappy food for days on end.

Motherhood is a series of arrivals. And today I have arrived at the place where I will no longer dress my 4-year-old. Maybe it is not so monumental of a milestone as discovering you are pregnant or giving birth, but there is still a sense of being right at the point in your journey where you can see the place where you have been and the place where you are going and know with complete clarity that they are not the same place. So today is the day when I know that tomorrow I will not be the mother I was yesterday: I will no longer be the mother who dresses her son because she is too busy to deal with finding a way to get him to do it himself.

For a long time, I was kind of oblivious to the fact that I was being duped by my son. My first two children both had a strong desire to do things themselves and getting dressed was no different. Both girls were fully able to negotiate sleeves and neckholes and pantlegs around age 3. Gabrielle, our oldest, was the one who we wanted to pin a button on her shirt at age 3 that said, "I dressed myself" because the outfits she picked out were so horrendous they might cause you to have a seizure when you looked at her. So I guess when it came to Eli I just sort of expected that one day he would want to put his clothes on himself.

Wrong. And so there I was, everday, wrestling with a preschool boy who could barely stop hopping around long enough to get his leg through the hole and getting rather frustrated with the situation until DUH! one day I saw Eli's 3-year-old friend put on his underwear and pants completely on his own with no help. And I kind of furrowed my brow and thought to myself, huh.

Huh. How interesting. My son is playing me. He just doesn't want to get dressed by himself. He can totally do it. He's an able-bodied 4-year-old. Why hadn't I noticed this before? It was kind of like those first weeks of my first pregnancy: I was otherwise occupied. And then the day came when I had to open my eyes. And that day is today: I have arrived.

So. This morning I spent an hour listening to him protest dressing himself while I went about my other morning chores, getting myself dressed, Josie dressed, and gathering all of my things together to go run a couple of errands. I'll give you a couple of the highlights:

Eli: I'll give you a choice: help me get dressed or go downstairs!
Me: Okay, I'll go downstairs.
Eli: No, what I mean is, help me get dressed or destroy me!
Me: Okay, I'll destroy you.
Eli: No, I'll destroy you!

I walk downstairs without commenting. Never once did I lose patience. I don't know how. I guess because I have arrived. I am now the mother of a 4 -year-old who dresses himself. He did quite well this morning, after he gave up trying to bully me into doing it for him. He only had to put on his pants 3 times: the first time backwards, then forgetting his underwear, and the third time was a charm. That's OK, he needs the practice...

Happy Goes Together with Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T10:58:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week my friend and I were complaining to each other about how generous our parents are. Yes, generous. All of the time they are just giving us things. Which, for those of us who are spoiled by this generosity, can be quite an emotional burden to carry. Both of us could describe in detail the intensity of our inner struggles with pride and guilt. Whether pride or guilt wins out, you lose in either case. Neither is a healthy or loving way to live.

Is it crazy to complain about parents who want to help us to provide a better life for our children, for their grandchildren? Who help with school tuition, buy us safer cars, or put new windows on our houses? Who take us on vacations we couldn't afford so our children can see more of the world? Is it crazy? Yes. Yes, it is.

But crazy as it is, we still get stuck in it. Knee deep and wading through emotional gunk. But there is an end. There is. And my friend and I found it, together, doing that thing that women do when we talk with no point in mind, just weaving our words in a kind of labyrinth way, uncertain of the destination but eventually finding ourselves in the center. As we made our way through the labyrinth of pride and guilt, we were all the time reminding each other of the importance of gratitude. And somehow we made it there, to the center, to gratitude. And there is where I have been able to remain for several days since.

And how appropriate that is, that without any prior planning I should end up in this place right here in the middle of Thanksgiving week. Here's another discovery I will share with you: when you are thankful, it is impossible to be unhappy. There is grace in receiving what comes to you with love.

So, go be happy. Eat turkey and be happy. Give thanks for all those crazy and wonderful people in your life, the ones who love you and challenge you and drive you to therapy. Hold them all in your heart with gratitude. Happy Thanksgiving!

Ode to The Guy Who Changes My Oil

2009-11-19T19:37:00.000-08:00

I just feel like writing about my husband. Because I know he hasn't read my blog in awhile, so I figure if I write about him, maybe his ESP will kick in or something. Right now he's busy changing the oil in my car, so I'm figuring maybe tomorrow morning when he's at work it will kick in and he'll kind of scratch his chin and go, "Hmm, you know what? I haven't read my wife's blog in a really long time...maybe I'll check it out." And then, when the page pops up, SURPRISE! It's all about YOU, love.

And I'm not just going to skim over the fact that he's changing my oil right now. This very minute. Out in the garage. Which is one of the reasons that I love him. Because he's a geeky computer guy by day and a mechanic by night. And I like a man who can get his hands dirty. OH STOP. Really I just admire anyone who can actually work a jack. Because I'm not the kind of feminist who would actually change a tire. That's what cell phones are for.

So, even though there are places all over where you can drive in and get a 10 minute quickie lube, he prefers to do it himself. And that, I guess, is something I get. Because even though McDonald's is just a block away from my house, I still would rather cook a good dinner myself. I guess that is where Shad and I connect: a drive for self-sufficiency: the feeling of satisfaction over a job well done. For me, it might be a perfectly balanced soup or a well-written blog. For him it is a well-maintained car, a level counter, or tiles set in just the right pattern. We are two people who enjoy seeing the fruits of our labor. Which is why, most nights, we stand and watch the swirl of commotion as our four children laugh and talk and hug and fall down and jump about us and we look at each other and say, "Look at these kids!" And the look we give each other in these moments is one that says good job, you're doing a good job. Because really, you should see them, they are so much more perfect than anything else we could create.

But I'm not done. I have one more clumsy offering for my husband. That is, assuming that he really is out in the garage changing my oil and he didn't just take my van to the quickie lube and then go over to his other wife's house. You know, the one who thinks he's a trucker and he's just passing through to pick up another load. Ok, assuming that's not the case, I have written him a poem. In honor of his birthday (Nov.5) and our upcoming 15th (!) anniversary on Dec. 10....this one I wrote about 3 years ago, but it is still very true.

Contemplating a Coconut

If you want to be a poet, marry
the wrong person, my college poetry professor
lectured the class. I remember
how I contemplated
what he said, how I looked down
at my left hand
which held my pen and wanted to hide
it, to conceal in my lap the shiny new engagement ring
encircling my finger. Now years later
I sit, left hand still holding my pen, ring
still encircling my finger, contemplating
a coconut,
so hairy and imperfect, like my husband
of almost a dozen years now who I have
just begun to have the courage
and interest to crack open. Like I want to do
with this other strange fruit in front of me,
to find the nourishing milk inside, to taste
its silkiness, and once done, to scrape the white fruit
from the sides and dissolve
it on my tongue, tasting it
for the first time, each bite. This must be
like tasting happiness, being present
to something, to someone, a thing
to write a poem about. It is years later
and I contemplate
a new truth,
my truth: If you want to be a poet, love someone.