When Can I Move?

There's a universal nature to being a beach person.  It isn't whether you surf or fish or build sand castles, it's whether you get what it means to be at the beach, and how to beach.

The waitress at the seafood restaurant who couldn't tell me what the zip code was for the town where we were so we could get the five day forecast from a weather app, she is a beach people.

I also met a leather tanned woman at the pier, she could string tackle with ease and used her teeth to cut the lines.

The man who brought his dog Bailey with him to fish, who argued it wasn't true a bad day fishing beats a good day working if you don't work, and who took the fish off the hook for my daughter and used them for cut bait. (He asked), also a beach person.  He also got mad at his dog for trying to eat the head.

So how do you know if you're a beach people?

How many times today have you been swimming?  How many times today have you changed clothes.  If the first number is greater than the second number, you might be a beach people person.

When your husband suggests that while ice cream twice a day might be indulgent, perhaps it is reasonable today and you're already en route to the store before the discussion concludes...

Napping is considered part of the day, and taken seriously.

You start to know how to navigate based on the signs for the various tackle shops.

The TV, computer, phones and ipads are put aside for the pool towel, beach shovel, card deck and again, napping.

You start thinking, I could live here.
There's a storm.  You still think it.
There's a report of a shark attack and you've been watching shark week all week in the evening.
You still think, why not?

and you go back to the waitress at the restaurant, who turned to a fellow waitress to ask if she knew the zip code and she didn't know either.   "We don't get much mail here." she explained.  

When can I move?

The Perfection Found in My Chaos

First, to those visiting from Creative Minority Report, Welcome to my blog!

“You have how many?” I had seven in the store. “Nine.” The clerk began showing us off to her fellow workers as if they had not heard and could not see the stroller and two toddlers led by two olders and one boy who was trying desperately to figure out how not to be associated with us while his brother posed and preened in the three way mirror.

The woman helping us buy uniforms for the school year told my oldest daughter, “Your mother is a saint. You do know that right?” I caught her eyes. She was barely concealing her urge to roll them. This particular teen has a steel trap mind and as she said when she was five, “I never forget anything.” Then and now when I’m reminded of this fact, a deep chill runs up my spine and I know if I ever need to go to confession and am struggling with making a proper assessment of my failings, she can provide an annotated list for my convenience. Even though these words were meant as a compliment, they irk. First, if a case were ever to be opened on my behalf for canonization, the first ones to testify against it would be my children.

Second, I know that motherhood is hard whether you have one or nine. It’s 24-7, it’s without end and there are times when the tasks involved grind you to exhaustion and beyond. I know many mothers I wish I could emulate more; my own for example –she plans. I follow up understanding how much easier whatever it is I am doing would have been if I’d only planned. My mother-in-law is another shining star. She is thorough and thoughtful. I’m fitfully creative and live perpetually with the hope that the thought counts enough even if the birthday card is three days…alright…weeks…late getting into the mail.

I know moms who are so present to their children, I’m envious. I try doing it and both the kids and I get bored of each other or one group of kids wants me to be a judge and another, the designated monster or a third, the set home base. I’m an accessory to their play and a refuge, not a colleague or collaborator. I also know moms of one and two with ample dollops of charity for others to spare; charity I think of only after witnessing them. And I know mothers of six that I watch with awe who arrive on time and well dressed and combed and think, one day, I hope I can be that together and know that my current course and speed aren’t going in that direction no matter how much I flail.

But the polished present planning playing careful mother I’m not is not because of the how many I have. It never was the number that has prevented me from being a planner or thorough and thoughtful or charitable or present, for the number has continued changing, but the constant in the equation has been me. Instead, they’ve got this dreamy fitful enthusiastic and sometimes together mom who spends too much time on my computer, doesn’t write things down and when she does, she doesn’t check her calendar. I know because when we got back to the car and loaded everyone in, I asked my daughter, “Do comments like that bother you?” and she shook her head no and said, “Don’t worry Mom. I know you’re no saint.” And rattled off examples of my many failings, all 100% accurate.

She patted my shoulder but somehow that didn’t make me feel better. When you get a reminder of your sins, it’s a cue to at least make sure you aren’t stagnating spiritually so I talked to one of my go to priests about the trials of trying to raise 9 without discouraging any of them from practicing their faith throughout adulthood because of the obvious work load involved.

He told me to pray and remember “You know, some days, just staying sane is sufficient.” I told him I thought that was setting the bar a bit low.

But today, my four year old is dancing on a chair in her swim suit. No one told her we were going swimming, she just felt it might happen and because her mother is an impulsive person, it might. The three year old comes into the room. “Do you want to potty train today?” I ask. “No, I need to color.” And she marches to the table to demand paper for her latest magnum opus. My eight year old comes down to explain she stayed up reading and writing and illustrating a book and my eleven year old triumphantly explains how he beat his dad and older brother last night in an epic hour long magic game.
 
These whimsies won’t get them scholarships and aren’t brag worthy to strangers in the way that “we just got back from the semi-finals in 10U baseball” or she’s performing at the Kennedy Center in the junior orchestra or he’s spending the summer studying immersion Sanskrit, but I wouldn’t change or trade those for this blessed abundant and lavish creative chaos I’ve both promoted and created. They’re my triumphs of ordinary time. And while this work won’t generate a tv spot where one of mine flashes a victorious smile and says, “Thanks Mom.” I can look at them in the midst of their clutter, crayons and music dance and song and feel my heart burst as I whisper a prayer to hold onto this moment and say, “Thanks God for these kids.” And mean it with all my heart.

So They Won't Suffer

I wrote this in response to a video article by Radio Free Europe about a journalits' piece proposing "Post Natal Abortions" and the position that children with disabilities ought to be "Finished off" as an act of mercy. If you want to see the piece, it is very inspiring what two women did when they committed to speak out against evil. They managed in Russia to fight the culture of Death and get the government to at least begin the process of treating these children for their very real needs. Miraculous indeed.

I've linked it in the title of this column so you can see the whole thing but suffice it to say, it fired me up. The journalist may have lost this round but we've heard this kind of thinking before. It lingers behind every discussion of abortion of the disabled in the womb. It festers in every legal wrangling over assisted suicide. Ultimately, it is an argument that only the undisabled life is worth living, and that everything less than fully rendered, is to be weighed, measured and ultimately, found wanting.

My grandmother had Alzheimers' disease, and in the end, she could not talk or do much, but if you prayed the rosary, she nodded her head. If you brought her communion, she put out her tongue. The Coco (our name for her) that swam in the ocean and picked out my wedding dress and knew all the words to My Fair Lady and liked an Old Fashioned and broiled lobster still beat within that shell of her body. Trapped by a decaying disease of the mind that robbed her of everything, still, she could rouse herself for the Eucharist. Her struggle was difficult to bear, but because we still watched, because we still waited with her, we were rewarded with these ever so quiet miracles when she would momentarily triumph over everything.

Years ago, I worked with children with severe developmental disabilities. These were non verbal kids with multiple competing issues, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, seizures, attention deficit disorder, autism, any and all combinations. Their lives were hard to be sure with medical needs, physical needs and poverty that often loomed large. Care varied from day to day and kid to kid in the state institutions that sometimes were understaffed. The sum total of their obstacles made life a bit duller than most of us would prefer our own on a daily basis.

But these kids who couldn't talk and couldn't walk and in some cases couldn't feed themselves; they loved being alive! Put them in the pool and even the most withdrawn and disabled lit up like Christmas trees. Slap some cologne on the boys and they'd grin and grin. Brush the girls' hair and they'd preen in the mirror like any teen. Crank up the tunes and you had a dance party like nobody's business. Each one of them opened like a sunflower no matter what the Individual Education Plan said about their hostile or anti social behaviors if given not simply basic needs, but human connections, relationships that mattered however short the time a volunteer, teaching aid or teacher had with the student.

In 1992, an editorial by a County Council woman ran about how some of these children would be better off dead than to suffer as they did. Our principal spoke out against this type of thinking publically. I remember her saying "These children are not dogs to be put to sleep." Her words barely contained her indignation. I admit to feeling fairly righteous myself and wanted permission to take a field trip to park my whole class on the lady's front lawn with signs, "I don't deserve death because you are uncomfortable with my life."

We didn't.

 We went to McDonald's instead at the Galleria.  Some guys from the NBA's Houston Rockets were there getting burgers and stopped to take pictures and hi-five with two of my students who spent the whole rest of the trip laughing and happy for being noticed.

They couldn't talk but they tried to tell everyone we passed in the mall to look at their new Rocket hats and to look at the new Polaroid pictures they had taped to their trays as we pushed them along. Their wheelchairs and exited faces made it almost impossible for people to walk by and not notice. But my students demanded eye contact because they wanted to share their joy. A lot of people tried to pretend they weren't there.  Most of them couldn't.

Not having a disability allows everyone else to ignore one's presence, to not make eye contact and walk on without any guilt or recriminations. No one expects a stranger to make eye contact. When we must hold together a society wherein no one ever experiences discomfort because of the existence of another, we will become very fragile indeed. We will become a nation of extremely touchy islands that pontificate to ourselves, consume ourselves, and eventually die checking our emails for someone, anyone to post a response affirming that they saw or read or liked or hated what we did, wanting ghost acknowledgments for ghost opinions and virtual accomplishments while the real instruments and books and relationships lie dusty and undiscovered.

Now the creeping return of killing them "so as to not let them suffer." is once again on the march as voiced by this initial journalist and paralleled by the public thinking about handicapping conditions being a legitimate rationale for abortion. Disabled children like my son Paul, like kids discovered to have Trisomy 13, or hydrocephallus or cerebral palsy or any number of conditions definable pre-birth, are eliminated via abortion.

"So they won't have to suffer." But the truth of that lie is that we don't want to see. We don't want to be tested. We don't want to bear more than our comfortable controlled lives manage now. We have scotch guarded and helmeted and padded our lives to cover every contingency such that we cannot bear anything outside of our carefully crafted plans well. One day, technology will advance to the point that all disabilities can be known pre-birth. At that point, will any child survive the Rubicon of the womb? How will we love if we will only tolerate perfection? Will we be able to bear the realness of being if we keep deciding that we can bear less and less of what it means to be real?


We don't want to have our spirits exercised or our hearts of stone broken."So they won't suffer." "So we won't have to love." is more accurate.  We would rather feel nothing than the pain of loss; or the fear of having our hearts taken over by another.  One thing is for sure, we will miss out on brighter smiles, better dance parties, warmer softer hearts, Polaroids and hi-fives and the quiet miracles that we cannot linger to see if all who fail to meet the standards of bodily perfection are summarily dismissed via speedy deaths.

And when we decide that we can no longer tolerate anything real, what will we be?