Real

Last week I was talking to a friend who said, "I read all these blogs where these women are writing about their happy lives and I wonder what's wrong with me." And I said, "Whatever else is bothering you, don't let the bloggers get you down." The thing about blogging, see, is that I choose what to present. And I could tell you that my children brought me breakfast in bed, scrambled eggs and bacon and a sectioned grapefruit and coffee, and that they had made me little secret gifts. I could tell you that my oldest wrote me a poem in which he said I was "as cool as a Star-Bellied Sneetch." ("What else was I going to rhyme with 'speech'?" he said when I asked him why.) I could stop there, and leave you a saccharine picture of life in the Gladly house.

Always remember: saccharin = fake.

The real picture of our day also includes an uncharacteristic meltdown from the child who is usually peaceable, and a stupid conflict between the two hotheads, one of whom was utterly unrepentant about his part in it, and a morning full of outright defiance from the 4yo. We had planned to go for a picnic after Mass. I envisioned myself sitting under the big trees while the boys played, and finally knitting the button band for baby Stella's cardigan. Maybe some of us would walk home along the bike trail, watching for wildlife. Instead two of the boys started complaining. They just wanted to go home -- no picnics for them. I started to cry, because why is it so hard for us just to enjoy each other?, and my husband started to yell, and I wound up eating my peanut noodles in the dining room, in silence.

Happy Mother's Day.

Our church has covered the crucifix with flowers for Easter and it is an evocative emblem for me. In the bleak months after I miscarried my first baby, I was praying once about how hard it was for me to bear the emptiness -- the literal emptiness that follows a miscarriage. An image flashed in my mind of a cross covered with flowers. It was as if God said to me, "You must carry this burden, but I will soften it and make it fragrant for you." A few days later, when I was close to despair, a co-worker who knew nothing of this gave me a little pin: a cross with flowers upon it. It is an image I associate strongly with that grief over my first little daughter and so it was strange, and beautiful, when we picked up the cake for Stella's baptism and it was decorated with...a cross, with flowers upon it. As I write this I am thinking that perhaps it is part of how we become "the aroma of Christ" -- through the painful business of bearing the crosses that he softens and makes fragrant for us.

I knelt in Mass and prayed for grace to be grateful. "Do not," I said sternly to myself, "yield to this self-pity. Push it away now." I did so, still thinking a little wistfully about my naivete as a young mother. Before I knew how many times I would teach the same lessons. When I thought all I needed was patience and resolve. Before I had been humbled by the enormousness of the task. It's not that I'm not trying hard enough: the difficulties are real.

Today there came a reminder: the grace is real, too. Receiving communion is not usually a mystical experience for me, but today the Eucharist brought me sudden consolation, and the certainty that I am not alone in this undertaking. My flesh is real food, says the Lord, and I am thinking today of how much it cost him for me to receive it. I am striving to be generous as he was generous, and to become, as Renee writes every year on this day, real.