Things I've Never Mastered Despite 27 years of Motherhood

 Since 1993, I've been a mom.  There have been good and bad moments but what every mother knows from the moment they see those two lines or that plus or they just know, there's a reason you don't get a period.  It's that motherhood never ends.  You are forever their mom.  That means, when they smile at you because you brougth them a cup of hot chooclate, you get that gift, that smile that only Mom or Dad gets.  When they cry out because they're hurt, you're the one they mean by that name.  These are the realities of parenthood. It's permanent or meant to be, because it's how God teaches us how to love as God loves --we are all His children, and He never tires of loving us despite however messy or naughty we might be. 

What I've come to know is, I stink at homework, paperwork, cleaning and potty training.  I'm not too good at bedtime or demanding that people practice either.  They all know how to read early on, and they almost to a person, have some artistic itch they have to scratch, be it musical, mechanical, or digital.  We go through dry erase markers, colored pencils and reams of paper for almost everyone.  They also all know how to cook something...no one in our house would starve, because everyone can make something.  Some of it isn't very tasty --see Paul's horseradish and motzerella on a corn tortilla attempt at a pizza, but as he indicated, you can survive eating it.   He wouldn't let me throw it out.  

That's the real reality of all my children. We've been cleaning out drawers and donating, and they're slowly learning, it isn't abandoning childhood to not keep everything --but it's hard for them.  Harder than I expected.  They hold onto things the way I want to hold onto time --this time.  I love having all of them home, even if it is because of a pandemic.  This time is secret stolen sacred time, when we get to be a whole family for however long we get these days together.  

It's not easy, and it's not what people want --because they want to be about the busyness of life.  However, I see them here, eager like horses to break from the gate and I'm reminded of the poem I saw every day I attended Saint Mary's that I walked into Madeleva, Sister Madeleva's poem on the seal in the main enterance.  "Why do they hurry and worry so? Can they, will they or do they know? They will earn some love, they will learn some truth, but never earn, nor learn, to gain back youth."  and it's a lovely understanding of that fragile four years when a child puts away childish things, when you get formed as something of the adult you will become.  

I've never learned to stop hurrying or worrying, so this forced stillness demands at least one if not the other, and the other, I'm learning to surrender bit by bit, but God's having to pry my hands from the worry, one fingertip at a time. I think each finger represents a child of mine.  I love them fiercely, but haven't quite yet learned how to love them well --I think that takes now and forever, and I'm an impatient person on all fronts, even love.   Sister Madeleva could write those words, I have to learn to live them before they leave, before this sacred still secret time ends.  I have to store all these moments in my heart. I also have to know, that I can never turn back the pages --just like Lucy can't turn back the book to reread what she's left behind in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  

But I take great reassurance in the continuation of their stories, and in the promise that Aslan makes to Lucy, and so also God to all of us, that He will be telling us these stories we've forgotten and cannot revisit all of our lives into eternity, when the still sacred secret time never ends.   

A Letter to Every Shepherd after the Report of Wolves

 The report's been published.  It’s been a while, and nothing new seems to be happening, and that my dear beautiful Catholic Church, is the problem.  The synods, the meetings, the letters, the talks, the policy changes, the reports, the hand wringing, the sorrow expressed, does not seem to have made any difference in how the Church as a body is acting, or in how the Shepherds are leading.  

Good priests struggle to do what they can, because no one can know which priests focus only on the outside of the cups.  It is to our sorrow, that the trust afforded their office, is justifiably shaken, and it is to their sorrow and all of Heaven’s sorrow, that the trust is not being rebuilt at this moment, by visible actions of reparations on the part of the whole Church by those who know, the laity need to see that the Bishops and Priests, that all who even tangentially contributed to the wall of silence, the years of silence, the enabling of abuse, the paying off of therapies and tuitions and whatever else was done to hush the scandals over the decades, get it.   As a member of your flock, who loves being a sheep, I wish to let you know what we, your sheep would wish more than anything. 

Dear all Shepherds who turned out to be wolves, you wear a ponderous chain, you’ve made it link by link and yard by yard year by year.  It is a ponderous chain.   It is not too late for God’s mercy, but it time to come forward and recognize the great damage done by sins of omission and commission, in the name of protecting the idea of the church from the reality of her leaders.   The Church is bigger than our sins, it is the Bride of Christ.  The Church is owed your loyalty, your faithfulness, and your permanence as her servants, so begin today.  If you’ve messed up, even beyond what has become known, begin again. 

Dear Shepherds who didn’t do any of this, but must bear the burden of association, it is a hard cross Christ asks you to bear, but know you have been afforded the opportunity to really participate in Christ’s passion as a result of this grievous wound, to wear the scourges, to feel the agony in the garden, and to carry all the sins of those who sinned saying the same words, hiding under the collar, and the pains of your people, all of us, all of your flock wounded by the wolves.  You must be true shepherds now, and lay down your life for your flock, in full confidence, Christ will restore you if you do.  We need this, more than ever.  

As long as we continue as an institution as an earthly organization, waiting for the trouble to blow over, for people to be distracted, for the news cycle to turn to something else, we will continue to fail in our only mission on this Earth, to win souls for Christ.  As long as we maintain the Church as a means of advancement, prestige, power and lucre, where people remain silent so as to get key assignments, we are treating the Bride of Christ like a corporation, and more sheep shall be devoured, scattered and lost. 

We need to deal with the unspeakable, the scandal not merely of the abuse of power by predators in the clergy of both fellow clergy and children, but also of the cover up, which continues.  The level of transparency rings hollow, because we are still only just finding out about countless incidents in countless dioceses.  We have to wonder, what don’t we know, not because we wish the Church to be torn down, but because we want the velvet curtain hiding all that’s been hidden, torn down.   People of good faith, deserve to know when the institution they’ve entrusted with their faith formation, with their children, with their time, their treasures and their talents, have acted poorly, whether recently or decades past.   As a matter of justice, the protocols which have protected the ranks of priests and bishops from this sort of fiscal and legal scrutiny, the deference to a person of a cloth, is something the laity can no longer grant carte blanche.     

So dear Shepherds, please get the reality, not that we want to constantly scream or cry or blame or shout about what should have been done, but that we need to see (because matter matters), some outward indication of an invisible reality, of your grief for what has been done to your fellow priests and by your fellow priests, to your flock, past and present.   We need it now, and we need it ongoing, so that we as a people and all as priests, never forget this darkness, this grievous wound of this past century done to the heart of Jesus. 

At the preaching of Jonah, the King and all the people of Nineveh donned sack cloths, proclaimed a fast and prayed.  We know the Church holds the Eucharist, so there is something greater than the preaching of Jonah here, for which we ought to as a body, be donning sack cloths and fasting.   This is the struggle you were called to the Priesthood to weather, and if you don’t, there will be many sheep who do not know the great joy of Christmas, of Christ present today and every day because they only see what has not been done and think you do not take this faith to be a reality but a means of living, and thus they will shake their heads and say “Bah, humbug.” They will wander and be lost because they hoped it was real and true, and the witness of both those who were the cause and those who felt the effect, did not register this is the way, the truth and the light and vital to your forever happiness.  

First Lines Exercise

 Occasionally, my writing coach gives me an exercise to do that leads somewhere fun.  This was  the case.  He gave us a link to fifty of the best opening lines.  I've done this one before so I made sure not to pick lines I'd already examined.  It makes for fun blog fodder.  
Dissecting my five favorite lines starts with recognizing that sometimes a favorite line is not because of what It says, but what I remember from experiencing the story itself.

For example, one of my favorite memories from college involved reading Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend,” but aside from recalling it starts with a father and daughter rowing the Temps and dredging bodies and treasures from it, I do not remember another moment in the book itself. I do remember loving it, but that had nothing to do with the story (though it might have been good), as much as the story behind why I read it. It involves chicken pox, the infirmary at college, and an English teacher who officially declared I didn’t have to do another professor’s assignments while quarantined. (A professor at Notre Dame had assigned Albert Camus’ The Plague). So I looked at all the lines for the ones that whether I’d read the story or not, I could discuss something of what a reader upon seeing the first line, might guess about what was to come. There are books on the list I remember hating, but I get that the first line gets people and why. I hate everything about George Orwell’s 1984, most especially being assigned it because I was in the high school class of 1984. We endured a lot of references and frankly, by senior year, I didn’t care what time it was. However, “It was a bright cold day in April, and all the clocks were striking thirteen—” told us everything was wrong and yet uniform, that the world we entered in these pages, would be off but not incorrect, eerie and accurate and strange like a nightmare. I might be projecting from knowing the rest of the story, but I can’t not think that the opening sentence presents us with hints of how not alien the story to unfold is, and how dangerous at the same time.

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” –Samuel Beckett, Murphy I like a line that takes what we presume and either makes it new or reminds us when it is not. There’s a wit to this first sentence, and the added “the” keeps us from just running through the whole line. “The nothing new,” is emphasized by that article, and the sentence is at once an utterance of discouragement, and a promise of the search yet to come, for something better than, something other than the nothing. We are also, like the sun, gazing on the words, which in many cases when we open a book, are also, the nothing new.

“Mother died today.” –Albert Camus, The Stranger We immediately are in the immediate, and that sort of moment in real life is rare, and thus being placed in that moment equally so. Camus is not a favorite author but I’ve read much of his work and placing us in that moment at the start pf the story with when in real life, we would be most likely to wrestle with big questions, most likely to question our own answers, and most exposed to the extent any of us allow, by our thin understanding of the consequences of certain answers, is his specialty. Good stories, good literature strike at what matters, and Camus gets straight to the topic he wishes to address by placing us in this singular universal either experienced or dreaded moment that all of us have. , “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” –Ford Madox Ford in The Good Soldier Sometimes, bravado works. Here, because the reader already knows the title of the book, the opening line essentially offers a promise, of a tale of woe. The onus is on the author to deliver, but it also harkens back to another favorite story for me, “Rage –Goddess sing the rage of Peleus’ son, Achilles” for setting the tone. The narrator in both the Iliad and this story, is setting the tone for the reader of what is to come, and it’s gutsy to do. What will make the story sad becomes the important issue before anything Is known. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” –C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Now I happen to love this book. Of Old Jacks’ works, this one I’ve read perhaps the most often, and the mere mention of it makes me want to go and read it again. However, it is the revealing to the reader the whole of the story in a single sentence without giving away the ending that I love. The name seems like the most horrible name a writer could devise to give a character, and the author laughing at hi own mischief with the commentary. Beyond that, for those who do not know the story, it is the re-envisioning of the tale of Saint Paul becoming Saint Paul, and of the redemption necessary in that tale, for the ungenerous dangerous unpleasant human being (Eustace) to become more fully the human that we eventually love in the story.

P.S. I started reading Our Mutual Friend with my sixteen-year old son for fun. We’ll see if It turns out as fondly as I remember, beyond the story of why I read it.

I Miss Everyone

 Yesterday, I took my youngest four to a makeshift Drive-in Movie put on at our parish.  

They enjoyed it but what I discovered is, nine months of quarantine have made me jumpy.  Every time someone came by the car to see if we wnated to buy popcorn or just say, "Hi." because people do that, and it used to be ordinary, I'd feel anxious afterwards.   Not because I thought I'd get Covid-19, but because being isolated this long, warps the spirit, and I hadn't realized how warped my own had become. 

I do worry about Covid-19 though, because there is so much that needs doing in this family, for my husband and me.  We can wipe things down and limit our going out, but there's just the reality, it's a scary thing.  It sounds cowardly to be frightened of life, I've never been before and I don't want to be now.  Every cough makes everyone worry.  Every symptom other than fine, alarms.  We've become triggered to worry, to presume the worst, and to view everything as a potential threat.  I hate it.  It's wrong. 

I am tired of this damn quarantine.  I am tired of not seeing people's full faces. I am not advocating being dumb, but I am admitting, I am tired.   I need the more of Everyone.   I miss the more of everyone.  My mom, my brothers and sister, my inlaws, friends from across the country, all the ordinary contact that came within the course of a year, hasn't happened this year.   Busyness kept that from being too keen an ache most of the time, but when they'd come to visit, or we'd go there, I'd be reminded, this is more what should be happening.  

Now even those reminders are missing, and it is like food without salt, dull and missing what should be full of flavor.   Now even being busy doesn't prevent the missing --and I know that is a good thing.  I am grateful for all this stollen time with my husband and my adult children who otherwise would be off being busy themselves.   We wouldn't notice the time passing or the distance being created but it would be there.   So there are gifts with this time of trial, even here. 

It's just, I miss everyone. I'm wanting something of normal of being able to connect to return --and hoping with that return, we'll return to something better than what was normal; that we won't leave kind words unsaid, or put off lunches or visits or letters or phone calls; that we'll check in on each other willfully, because we love them, rather than just at holidays or when we're not busy.   I hope we'll learn, I'll learn, to not let things that shouldn't consume whole swaths of time, take over, that we as a whole, and I in particular, will cease being anxious about many things and choose the better portion with all time we've been alloted.  

I know this much, we'll be at the next Drive-in Movie offered, to remind myself not to forget. 

My Poor Dusty Blog

 I have about fifteen drafts from this week, because this week, like the many weeks before it, despite the absence of outside errands, has been packed.   I figure, it's only fair to give an update.   

1) What am I writing?  Well, I'm writing poems, I'm editing my book. I've thrashed at words but they're repetitive or just don't get where they need to go or they sound too stressed and I don't want to worry my mom.    

2) What am I reading?  Well I'm glad you asked, though you didn't.  We're reading Harry Potter's Order of the Phoenix with my youngest, The Book of Three with Paul --he's into it, and others keep hovering around not really listening you understand, but nearby.  I'm trying to get my next two to listen to A Horse and His Boy.  I'm going to keep trying.  I've also started Our Mutual Friend with my son John...and I'm hoping that one catches more of them too.   

3) Are you Exercising...three times this week I did...then it rained...and I've discovered an inverse theorem...if I dress to exercise, I don't.    

4) Are you praying?   Every day I drop off for school, I drop by the outside adoration chapel near my home for at least five minutes.  So yes.   

5) What else are you doing?  Teaching.  Managing the house...everyone's home now.   I'm also helping to organize a conference for January for writers ---so that counts.   

6) I haven't seen any links lately ...why is that?  Sometimes, you get dry spells.   This is one of them. I'm submitting, sometimes three pieces in a week...but they're getting what I'd call dead cat bounces.  Not to worry, I have a lot more to throw at them.   Visualizing me throwing cats at the editors...it's helpful.  

7) Will you ever be funny again...as a blog?   ---wait, I wasn't?   

The Long Commute

I've got three screens, two computers and a phone,
a mic, a headset and it's all at home.
I teach whole classes yet I'm all alone
As I start the long commute.

Starting Zoom all I see are avatars.
or names set on black blank spaces.
The silence speaks volumes as I stare at the screen
wondering am I speaking without leaving any traces?

Going over and over and over again,
in hopes at some point they get it,
the story, the wonder, the theory, the joy
is worth so much more than the grade or credit.

It's a long commute in every subject
no matter the school, grade or age
It's full of traffic and detours and unexpected stops
retracing steps, and getting lost on the page.

We miss the time, we miss the connection
when we would know before they ever turned it in
That something stuck, something permanent,
The teacher's best pay is that grin.

The Good and the Bad and the I'm Not Sure

Being a mom to a child with special needs means celebrating little victories, unexpected signs of growth. Throughout this time of Covid, my son (at the age of 12) has learned to give himself a shower, to make his bed, to make a pizza, to ride a bike without training wheels and how to pour himself a drink from a full gallon jug of orange juice.   He also mastered vacumning the floor, feeding the turtles and is now fully potty trained.  He can dress himself fully, he's planted bulbs in the back yard and knows how to help pick up the trimmed branches and compost it.  These are great skills and we wouldn't have dreamed all these things might have happened but for his being home with constant persistant coaching by his sibling and parents and desiring to fit in and show his own independence.  

However, with all these steps forward, there's the isssue that every parent of a kid with special needs has, the issue of whether this new level of independence requires a new level of vigilance on the part of the parents.   He can take a shower...do I need to always check to make sure the temperature is right.  I do, because he errs on the side of cold.  We've got to figure out a work around so he can make sure he doesn't resign himself to freezing showers.   He knows how to prep for a pizza.  We have to make sure he never thinks he can do the next step until we're sure he knows the safety issues involved.   (He gets out a cookie sheet, a pita bread, the sauce and the cheese and he can assemble it).   

With all these steps forward, we've learned more about how Paul thinks and acts.  He imitates and he thinks by association.  He watched the Disney shorts and he assembled a set of John Henry using blocks and cars to indicate the tracks and the mountain and the train.   He uses short hand with his communication device to let us know which song he wants to hear on the radio --crab means Shiny from Moana, frog alligator bug means Going Down the Bayou from Princess and the Frog.  We usually can guess from context what he wants and what he thinks, but part of it is just knowing what he loves and likes and thinks about.   

Sometimes however, he has a bad day.  We use a chart to help him keep on track.  We draw a check list and that works for bedtime routine and class work.  Because he struggles with screaming in class sometimes, we devised a plan --three X's in class mean no TV.   He knows this.  Last week, he got a bad report. Three X's.   He didn't like the report so he found his own paper and drew three checks and a smily face and what was unmistakably, a forged signature of his oldest sister who often oversees him while he works and keeps track of his behavior.   

It was hard not to laugh.   

The next day, he settled in to watch a favorite movie,  Spiderman Into the Multiverse.  On the deck that day, a huge spider had spun an impressive web. He could see the spider and the web as he watched television and I knew he'd connected the dots.   It's very hard to explain to Paul, "No, you can't get bit by the spider. It's not radioactive."   

Like I said, the things you have to anticipate, that no one can prepare for, they're what makes being a parent of a special needs kid interesting.  What's a gentle reminder to me, he's taking notes on me too.  He's learned to anticpate how I think. 

The other day I said I was stressed and he showed up with a candy bar from his Halloween stash and a diet coke.   

Friday Musings

 Me: One of the things I do with writing, is figure out what I really think.   

Brain of Me: What do I think?  

Me: I think I'm tired of Covid, of people justfying hating based on politics, of the inability to throw a party, to celebrate, to smile at people and have them see the smile.   I think I'm tired of being tired.   

Brain of me: What am I going to do about what I think? 

Me: Make a plan. 

Brain of Me: What's the plan?  

Me: You're the brains of the outfit. What do you think?

Brain of Me:  Maybe write and something will come to you. 

Me: ...you're punting aren't you?

Brain of Me: Yes.   Yes I am.   

What Matters More

 The election remains both an uncertainty and a necessity.  It is exhausting not knowing and yet feeling profoundly unhappy that the results, whatever they are, won't fix the fundamental problem.   Half the nation thinks the other half hates it...and the other half is sure that the half that isn't them is hateable. Everything about this is wearying because it does seem (if social media is to be believed) as if we are being reduced as a country to an Us and Them --which is not what allows our country to thrive. 

I know no one reads blogs anymore, but since it's my corner of the internet universe I'm going to say something.   People don't vote for all the reasons we ascribe. They are not all of their vote, nor are they only their vote.  There are the 365 days of the year of living, of doing, of treating others as human beings that should be considered when deciding if someone ought to be cut out of one's life.  Perhaps it is simpler to use a one strike and you're gone, but reality is that each of us, all of us, are more complex than the binary system of voting reveals.  

There are pro-life democrats and people who vote democrat despite the party platform because they believe government's role in providing a safety net to the poor and the sick is part of being pro-life and a part that should be strengthened.   There are republicans who advocate for the immigrant, who want us to not be poor stewards of the government or slavishly devoted to corporations and CEO's over middle class people.  They just aren't on the top of anyone's ticket.  They're our neighbors and friends and family.  They believe in things like civic responsiblity, justice for all, providing support to infrastructure and promoting growth that doesn't edge people out of neighborhoods where they've set down roots. They believe in cultivating the arts and education, in science and libraries and technology and beauty.  People who want a good government, want the government to bring about good for and to people.   

The people who vote, want the world to be a safe and thriving place of freedom and opportunity, they don't agree about the how of it.  For our democracy to last, we will have to reach across the aisle in all things, and find where we can do the most good.  We will have to work with and for each other.  We also don't get to decide the government is always the solution or always the problem.     Either one is a simplifcation of the complex reality of an insitution that has served however faultily over the years.  The system works as well as the people who serve in it, so if we want it better, we'd better be better ourselves.   

How?  The voting is the beginning, not the end of our civic responsibility.  Join some part of what makes your community run, be a voice that speaks, be the hands that do the work, be the eyes that see the problems or the ears that hear the needs of the community.   Maybe explore if God is calling you to run for public office or help discuss within the parties the purpose of the parties themselves. It's not that it doesn't matter who wins, it's that what matters more is what we do going forward, irrespective of who gets to 270.