Light and Momentary

On the Feast of Stephen

I was going to write a post called "The Time Traveler's Strife," because the experience of synchronizing my own internal calendar, which told me ten days ago that Christmas was still five weeks in the future, with the punishing and implacable external calendar -- well, it wasn't pretty.  I felt like Harry Potter in the Floo Network as I came to a juddering halt on the morning of Dec. 23, coughing up ash and confused as to my whereabouts.  Or perhaps that should be my whenabouts.

Friday stunk.  But Saturday did not stink at all -- the weekend was, in fact, memorably unstinky.  Fragrant, even.

There was lots to do, of course:  wrapping and cooking and sticking pictures into scrapbooks and vigorous ignoring of the laundry Himalayas.  (We've moved beyond a laundry mountain; now it's a laundry range.)

But all day long on Saturday a sense of sacred expectancy nudged at me, a whisper of yearning and of fulfillment close at hand.  It was an invitation to let my preparations be an act of welcome and not a forced march.  It happened quietly, and I could choose to ignore it.  But it happened again and again, and I could also choose to listen, and to temper my haste with eagerness.

I was praying the rosary aloud on the couch and the weight of the Incarnation was brought home to me -- with my voice I can honor God; with my hands (cleaning up exploding diarrhea and consoling the boy whose favorite Christmas gift, his Batman pajamas, must go in the wash), I can give glory to the King.  Because God entered the world with a body and redeemed it by his body, the work of our own bodies can be redemptive.

Saturday I was washing dishes and reflecting on the resurrection.  I don't have to think very long about God's existence outside space and time before my head starts to spin, but in that moment the message was simple:  God has it all covered.  We celebrate a baby, the Alpha and Omega.  A baby, called Faithful and True.  A baby, with the keys of death and hell:  alleluia.

When I was 22 I was praying one night and trying to imagine what God enthroned might look like.  And as I prayed I saw in my mind's eye a great tearing -- the scene I had imagined seemed suddenly frozen, artificial, and as it was ripped away I caught a glimpse of something much vaster, something resplendent with glory.  I think the Christian life is a series of similar rendings:  moments when you realize how much more tremendous God is, how much more majestic, than you ever guessed.

Sometimes Christmas celebrations are sticky with treacly sentimentality -- perhaps it's because "awww" is more familiar than awe.  It's easy to sing piously "be born in us today" without remembering to be careful what you pray for because you might get it.  "Be born in me" -- let me work harder than I ever knew I could for you, stretch me beyond what I think I can bear for you, push me to my uttermost that I may gaze at you, afterward, with love and wonder.  The work of bearing my children is written on my bones; after I am dead a forensic anthropologist studying my skeleton will be able to say, "This woman was a mother."  Let my God write his Name into the core of me as well:  be born in me, Lord; be born in me.

I was surprised, as a convert, to see the eschatological elements of a Catholic Advent.  We say not, "How sweet that he came," but "How awe-some," in the true sense of the word.  How awesome, again, that he returns.  Grant me, O God, a holy impatience that tugs at me amid the quotidian.  Let me see beyond the packages and the potato-peeling.  In this season give me a heart that calls out:  Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

Day in the Life

Two of my more experienced homeschooling friends were talking recently about taking a more relaxed approach to school during Advent, and I decided to do the same.  Actually, I had already been doing the same; I just decided not to feel guilty about it.  I tried to think of one thing I ever learned in school in the two weeks before Christmas break and came up empty.  So, then:  here we slump relaxedly.

Yesterday morning we got a late start.  I aim to start at nine, and I also aim to get all the floors clean on Monday mornings before school, and only one of those things was going to happen yesterday.  I chose clean floors and we started at ten.

We sat down together, with the Christmas card boxes and my address book and the US map puzzle on the table, and while I finished addressing envelopes the boys made an alphabetical list of the US states.  We did a little imaginary road tripping when they needed a nudge -- where would you end up if you went west from Iowa and north from Kansas?  After the list-making and envelope-addressing were complete, Marty went through the stack and announced where each one was going while Alex kept a hash-mark tally of states and countries.

Here you can plug in your own data to create a graph, and that's what we did next.  They entered their results and had some fun with funky colors and fonts, and then they emailed the finished Christmas Card Destinations pie graph to Dad at work.

We are on track to finish the first half of The Story of the World (vol. 4) before we break for Christmas; yesterday's reading was about World War I.  On impulse I googled the Christmas Truce (I wasn't sure if I had the right WW).  In one version of the story, the German and British troops alternated Christmas carols until the Brits began singing "O Come, All Ye Faithful."  The Germans joined in, singing "Adeste Fideles."  Coincidentally, last week's Latin lesson was "Adeste Fideles," with its handy assortment of plural imperatives.  Be there! Come! See!  I didn't really expect it to stick, but my oldest left the table singing the Latin words yesterday.

Usually I try to get to the library in advance to get books to pad out the information in SOTW.  I hadn't done that this week, but I remembered that Rilla of Ingleside is all about the impact of WWI on the Blythe family and their neighbors.  I pulled it off the shelf for Alex, who said, "You want me to read this?  Maybe real school wouldn't be that bad."  It is #8 in the series, which offends his systematic soul, and it has a really girly cover.  He objects vehemently to reading it.  He would complain less if I assigned him some Hegel, I think.  I've agreed that he can bail if he gives it a fair trial and hates it.  One chapter in, he gave it a negative 10,000 on a 1-10 scale.  Two chapters later, it earned a positive 3.  We'll see.

After a little break we read the Tomie de Paola book on Our Lady of Guadalupe and prayed the beginning of the rosary together.  The boys sat down afterward to draw the Virgin of Guadalupe and got in a fight about art supplies.  "No!" said the oldest.  "You can't use my oil pastels.  You'll blunt them!"  I tried to mediate calmly, quelling the urge to turn away and beat my head against something hard.  Slowly and painfully it emerged that the 6yo only wanted to draw a border with the oil pastels.  Of his own volition, the 8yo said, "I'm sorry, Marty, I was kind of a jerk about that.  Do you need any others besides purple and red?"  I scooped up my jaw, which was somewhat the worse for its sudden smack against the floor, and we moved on.

We are finishing out the year with Revelation, a choice that worried me because there are many chunks of it that make me say, "Huh.  I don't know what that means.  Let's ask the Holy Spirit to help us with that one."  I had hopes of finishing David Currie's book on eschatology before we started but it is sitting under the end table, helpless against marauding dust bunnies.  In spite of my incomplete exegesis, the boys are eating it up.  More! they say when I finish a chapter.  Can't we read one more?

(You're not getting the wrong idea, are you?  You're not envisioning them sitting reverently and hanging on my every word, are you?  You have to imagine them squirming and poking each other and asking deliberately goofy questions -- and then asking for another chapter.  They love the war stuff, and the improbable beasts.)

We folded laundry all together while we listened to this CD, the first seasonal music I've played.  (Christmas is weeks away, see -- at least six weeks from now.  I wouldn't want to get tired of the CDs we have.)  I wanted to hear this hymn but I had forgotten how much I enjoy the whole disc.  We decided to play outside instead of going to the Y, and I started a pot roast for dinner.  While I was searing the meat and preheating the oven the smoke alarm went off (forgot to wrap the Springform pan in foil when I made the cake for Elwood's birthday). 

How does that thing work? my oldest son wanted to know.  I sent him here, and while he was on the computer I pulled Clown of God off the shelf to read to the middle boys.  I love that book -- love the idea that any gift can be given gladly to God.  Yesterday I even got through it without crying.  Alex came to ask if he could read further on that same site, to find out about how laptops work.

Then there was cabbage-slicing and potato-mashing, and table-setting for the boys.  After dinner there was dishwashing, and the big boys sat down to confer on their assignment:  how was the Narnia movie different from the book?  I was busy elsewhere and discovered later that they had only come up with one thing, **SPOILER ALERT** which was that the movie White Witch wore Aslan's mane in battle.  (In the moment I thought this was a cool touch.  Now it bugs me.  I can't remember -- where does Lewis write about the scent of Aslan's mane?  (Reminds me of the "aroma of Christ" passage from 2Cor.)  Wouldn't that drive the WW crazy?  Or maybe it was like the apple in the sixth book, which she ate even though she knew she'd pay for it forever.  One thing I know:  anyone who can change overnight from crazy cool dreadlocks to perfectly sleek has magical powers for sure.  I loved her hair.) 

Hm. I was going to write about today as well, because today was even more fun.  But this is long and possibly boring, and my kitchen is still trashed from our project this morning and there are many many library books arranged artfully on the living room floor.  And Pete fell asleep and would probably prefer horizontal in bed to slumped in the sling with his head leaning on my left wrist.  Maybe tomorrow I'll write about today.  LMK if you have strong opinions about boring vs. not-boring.  G'night.

The Evils of Glitter, the Value of Labor, and the Partial Return of the Nose

I am on a long-title kick here lately,  huh?

A tale from the Spite-Your-Face-Via-Autorhinectomy Files:  on Monday night I sat down to post as soon as I got everybody tucked in.  An hour later I was ready to publish when Elwood came down, frustrated about a wet bed.  I got irritated as we were talking and, in a fit of pique, closed the browser with my unsaved post inside.

I may look 35 but in some moments I am still stuck in junior high.

It was a post in part about glitter, because when my friend Kate advised me not to try the glitter stars craft from the Elizabeth Foss Advent unit we're both doing pieces of, I said, "Glitter?  Glitter is evil.  There will never be glitter in my home," and she said, "Oh, I just read a blog post about a woman who loves glitter."  I asked her to send me the link, because personally I would rather have a rat in my house than a tub of glitter.  A rat I could whack on the head with a mop and then he would be dead, but glitter is FOREVER.  (In my defunct draft of this post I said I'd rather have a rat infested with bubonic-plague-bearing fleas than a tub of glitter, but now, temperate soul that I am, I have reconsidered.  Fleas are hard to kill with a mop.)  When I checked out the glitter post, I found an invitation to write a day-in-the-homeschooling-life post.  And it had been a memorable homeschooling day, so I wrote.  And then deleted.  Ah, well.

I have been struggling lately, ladies -- I don't know how clearly it's been coming through, but I've been in a hard spot.  The baby is on a perpetual seek-and-devour mission, someone is always breaking into our house and peeing on the bathroom floor (I assume it's an intruder because the boys aver that they are innocent), I am still dealing with discipline issues (theirs and mine) during homeschooling, and the laundry -- my God [prayer, not oath, though you might be hard-pressed to tell the difference], the laundry never ends.  Perhaps this was part of my fit of pique.

Recently I have been thinking about going back to school to get a Ph.D., something I'd wondered about for years.  A couple of weeks ago, I was excited to start.  I was mapping out just when I'd put the kids in school and how I'd juggle the stages of the program to minimize time away while Pete is tiny.  Last week the irony finally struck me:  if the pursuit of a doctorate sounds like a pleasant and not overly stressful undertaking, perhaps the drudgery-to-fun ratio in my life is out of whack.

Lately the work of raising four children feels un.re.len.ting, my friends.  I have been trying not to whine, trying to pair those socks for the glory of God instead of throwing up my hands in disgust and flopping on the couch to reread Northanger Abbey.  And...some days are better than others.  But on Sunday I picked up Real Learning, by Elizabeth Foss, and found some really helpful stuff.

On Monday I resolved to put some of it into action, including a walk along the nearby bike trail.  We would appreciate nature.  We would bring home snow-covered locust pods and clusters of fallen leaves, and sketch them at the dining room table with cups of hot cocoa at our elbows.  We would have a total freakout meltdown involving three of the four children, two of them declaring they couldn't possibly move another picometer because they were dying, dying of exhaustion and cold.  Okay, that last step wasn't part of my plan, but that's what happened.  Coincidentally, or not, I was smack in the middle of the third joyful mystery when things fell apart.

At first I thought, "Excuse me, God? I was trying to pray. I thought you liked praying. How am I supposed to get three wailing children home from here?"  And then I thought, "I hope I don't get stopped by the police again."  (True story: last Saturday I was walking to meet some girlfriends for coffee with Pete in the stroller.  I turned onto the bike trail and an unmarked police car pulled over and honked.  A cop got out and said, "Ma'am, where are you going with that baby?"  He was appalled that I had Pete (dressed in warm layers, not complaining in the least) out in the (not terribly) cold weather.  "I'd strongly encourage you to reconsider your options," he said.  Option A, I thought but did not say, is for you to stop yammering so that I can get us inside.  I was filled with smug annoyance on Saturday, and it would have been humbling, to say the least, to run into the same guy two days later with my pink-cheeked anti-cherubs proclaiming their frostbitten misery to all and sundry.)

And then I thought, "This is so hard.  You work and work and you do the best you can and it's still just HARD."  But then-- a Lightbulb Moment.  I had been thinking about the Nativity, about the Blessed Mother laboring to bring Jesus into the world.  Whether or not the idea that Mary, as the New Eve, was spared pain in labor is correct (Arwen, am I right that there's room for multiple opinions on that one?), it seems certain to me that she worked hard to deliver her baby.  My two home births involved very little pain, but let me tell you, they were hard slogging.  I thought about Mary running a home in Nazareth, and I realized that she didn't have a laundry fairy either.

So this is my Advent resolution:  as I remember how Mary labored to bring Christ into her family and into the world, I am going to offer up my own labors, in hopes that they too can bring Christ into my little corner of the world.

If you have not yet read A Mother's Rule of Life, do do do. (Da da da da.  That's all I want to say to you.)  (Hey, did you know Holly Pierlot has a blog, where she will answer your questions?)  MROL talks about the problem of concupiscence, a problem I had not paid much attention to because I thought concupiscence was mostly about sex.  I'm a happily married woman -- that's not much of an issue for me.  But lying on the couch reading Northanger Abbey when the kids need dinner is also concupiscence.  As is staying in bed for an extra half-hour because it's cold and the robe on the back of the bedroom door feels too far away.  Concupiscence is a desire of the lower appetite contrary to reason. 

My plan:  to labor gladly for my family, to subdue my lower appetite to my reason by the grace of God.  And I have a rallying cry.  Sing with me the opening to Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water":  dum dum dum / dum dum da-dum / [and here substitute the new lyrics:] "Fight against conCUpiscence."

If you'll excuse me, my air guitar needs tuning.

Already? or 38 Things Plus Thoughts on Ripeness

1. Today is my husband's thirty-eighth birthday.


2. I met him when he was nineteen.  Nineteen and three-quarters, so he hasn't known me half his life quite yet.


3. I was seventeen, a freshman, and he seemed like savoir-faire personified.


4. Plus, he was cute.  Oh, my, did I pine for him.  We started dating in January of 1988.  I was studying for a Latin quiz, translating some forgotten Plautus passage, when he came down to my room.  He kissed me.  He's been kissing me ever since.


5. He likes shellfish, and Scotch whiskey, and chamber music, and long elaborate wargames with so many rules that they cause Talmudic scholars to blanch and flee.  "Want to play a game?" he asked me that first fall, and I agreed, envisioning an afternoon of Monopoly.  Instead he pulled out Axis and Allies.  Two hours later I said numbly, "I have to go [stick a fork in my eye]."


6. We don't play wargames.  We rarely have time for games at all now, but we do play a fierce game of Scrabble every now and again.  I get a little too keyed up about Scrabble, though, and see it as a moral failing if I score less than 325 points.  He secretly thinks this is ridiculous.  Anyone knows the moral failing threshold is 350.  (Ha! I'm kidding! Um, mostly.)


7. We broke up messily during my sophomore year.  On Valentine's Day, actually.  I spent a wretched week not eating and not sleeping, with Patsy Cline, Aretha Franklin, and Melissa Etheridge sharing the turntable. 


8. We had turntables then.  He had something like twelve linear feet of vinyl.  I thought it was extravagant of him to plan on buying a CD player eventually when he had such a good setup already.  Isn't that quaint?


9. We spent the rest of the school year sort of broken up and sort of seeing each other.  I thought I'd never see him again.  He was supposed to be graduating and going into the Navy.


10. That summer I spent a lot of time thinking about where I was going.  The preceding year, a hard-drinking, soul-sucking year, had been brutal.  Tentatively, I sought God.  I don't have to be bitter about all that anymore, I said to myself.  I'm going to let it go now.


11. A few days later a 47-page letter from Elwood arrived.  "I can't stop thinking about you," it said.  "I can't eat and I can't sleep."  That's sweet of him, I thought to myself.  I have no interest in a long-distance relationship with the man who broke my heart, but it's still nice to hear he misses me.


12. My family was going to be in Florida the next week.  He was going to be in Florida the next week.  He drove up to the Gulf Coast to see me.  I still remember the way my heart leapt when I saw him at the door.


13. Let's try it again, he said.  I'm sorry about last year.  Bad idea, said my head.  But my heart wrested the microphone away and said, Yes! Let's! Oh, I've missed you. 


14. He grew up Catholic but was agnostic when I met him.  In the Navy he encountered God and has been faithfully, unostentatiously serving him ever since.


15. We agreed that a commitment to Christ required us to be chaste.


16. Which was hard.  Awfully hard.  But we stuck with it anyway.


17. We were married five days after my 23rd birthday -- it was a day brimming over with happiness.  He wanted to get married on my 23rd birthday so he'd only have one date to remember, but it fell on a Monday that year.  His great-uncle married his great-aunt on her birthday -- February 14.  He asked me if I'd consider changing my birthday to February 14, but I declined. 


18. He used to be the least time-aware person I knew.  He has changed since the boys came along,  but sometimes the weeks still sneak up on him.  "Your mother's birthday is next week," I'll tell him.  Inevitably he says, "Already?"  I'm going to put that on his tombstone.


19. His mother invited an Elvis impersonator to our wedding reception.  In costume.  We were surprised.


20. Elwood reads essayists for pleasure.  Nineteenth-century fiction, not so much.  His desert island shelf would have Montaigne and Brodsky.  Maybe Thucydides.  Dickens? Thackeray? Voted off the island without a moment of remorse.


21. Last month he told me for the nineteenth year running that next year is the Cubs' year for sure.


22. He excels at gifts that are practical with a fillip of luxury.  When we were in college I rarely wore socks, even in the dead of winter, and so one year for Christmas he gave me (among other gifts) a box with a dozen pairs of cozy socks in cheerful colors.  I still wear the hot pink ones.  When Marty was a baby Elwood bought me a gorgeous black leather bag.  I was afraid to carry it for a long time, afraid it was too pretty and I'd damage it.  But I have decided that slightly scuffed in the course of appreciative use is better than perfect in the closet.


23. He makes me laugh and laugh and laugh, sometimes with just a gesture or an eye roll.


24. He cranks the heat so high in the van that I think he is secretly raising orchids in there. (Very hardy orchids, that can withstand the freezing temperatures they are subjected to during the other 167 hours in the week.)  He has always liked it to be 158 degrees in the car.  I asked him about this early in our marriage:  How come I'm always hot in the car, when you're cold, and I'm always cold in the house, when you're hot?  He explained:  That's because I'm normal, and you're a space alien.


25. The memory still makes me laugh so hard I have to stop typing for a minute.  I wish I could duplicate the delivery for you, because it doesn't look that funny, I know, but it was hilarious.


26. He is right there for me when I am having a hard time emotionally.  He is in my corner like nobody else.  This took a long time -- I used to feel alone when I got emotional -- but he is my staunchest ally now.  (Lest I make him out to be too saintly, let me acknowledge that this gets more complicated if I'm upset about something in our marriage.) 


27. He always sings every song at Mass.


28. His grade school music teacher told me, "Elwood P. Gladly just can't carry a tune."


29. Of course he can.  It just took him longer than she expected to figure it out.  I like a man who is persistent.


30. He is forever surprising me with the things he knows.  Like when Moxie left a comment about U Thant ages ago, and I said, "???" -- Elwood P. said, "U Thant.  The former UN Secretary-General.  From Myanmar, although of course it was Burma at the time."


31. He is indestructible at Trivial Pursuit and related games.  He is the Six-bladed Power Mower of Death at Trivial Pursuit.  But if someone puts one of those wedge pieces in sideways, he might get distracted enough prying it out to miss a softball question.  Keep this strategy in mind if you are not on his team.


32. He hates when people are careless with game pieces, because he loves games of all kinds.


33. He says the nicest things about me to other people.  Once we were in a married couples group through our church.  We were supposed to go around in a circle and share something we loved about our spouses.  (All the men reading this go "AAaaaaggghhh!" in unison.)  Elwood said:  Jamie has a beautiful soul.


34. He tells me my exterior is beautiful as well, no matter what shape, no matter how unvarnished.  He prefers it when I don't wear makeup.


35. He has beautiful hands -- square and strong.  I wrote a sonnet about them my sophomore year.  (Now that is an embarrassing admission.)


36. The thing he misses most about life without kids, I think, is backpacking.  Or perhaps silence, but then the silence is one of the things he loves about backpacking.  We have hiked in the backcountry of the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, Arapaho National Forest, and Mt. Rainier (for our honeymoon -- best week ever).


37. I love to watch him with our boys.  He is such a good dad:  generous, attentive, patient.


38. He loves blueberries.  He doesn't love waking up early.  Instead of Blueberry Morning he'd prefer Blueberry Elevenses, with a Times, enough quiet to read it in, and a cup of black coffee at his elbow.

For years now I have been chewing on a song about our marriage.  The trouble with writing a song about your husband is that you get a verse written and then he goes and gives you a trash compactor for Valentine's Day and it makes you want to revise the verse so it says "She saw the trash compactor / And angrily she whacked her- / self upside the head / She should have married Ted."  And then the Bad Lyric Police haul you away and it's years of legal nonsense before you can think about songwriting again.  (NB:  only a fictional example; I am a low-maintenance gift recipient and I don't fuss about Valentine's Day.) 

More to the point, I started writing it after a friend had Kahlil Gibran's marriage poem read at her wedding.  I can't quite finish it (because what would be next? a song about avocado appliances?) but I can't quite let it go either.  It goes like this:  Like two trees planted together... [many bad draft lines deleted but some non-clunky thing about reaching upward and bearing fruit will eventually go in this space, followed by:] ...Love is sweeter when it's ripe than when it's green. 

Here's to ripe, Elwood P. Gladly.  Happy birthday.