Light and Momentary

Triduum Quiz

You read the news about Pope Francis washing detainees' feet and you think:

a. First he declines the mozzetta, and now he washes female feet. Antipope!

b. I find this troubling, but I bet Jimmy Akin has a good explanation.

c. Unexpected but beautiful. In the interest of charity, I'd better stay away from the WDTPRS comboxes until this drops off the front page.

d. The pope does not need my instructions on how to celebrate Holy Thursday Mass.

e. This year, clean feet; next year, ordination, baby!

You are filling the kids' Easter baskets on Good Friday and you are so hungry. A square of Dove chocolate makes its way into your hands. You:

a. Resist temptation steadfastly, so busy fixing your eyes on Jesus that you can't even see to unwrap that sucker

b. Find this scenario totally implausible, because your kids' Easter baskets only include chocolates handcrafted by nuns.

c. Unwrap it and sniff it. Wonder if you can coax a priest into hearing your confession today because whoa, the concupiscence!

d. Eat it, figuring it can be one of your two small meals. That's why the wrapper's purple, right? For Lent? Or wait! Hold it in your mouth until it melts. Then it's a liquid and totally okay. So okay that perhaps you should have another. Wouldn't want to get dehydrated, you know.

e. Eat it.

Item #1: Your calendar tells you it's Good Friday. Item #2: Your chart tells you it's Peak + 4. You:

a. Wait until after after you've attended the Vigil with your whole family. You've been abstaining since Mardi Gras anyway.

b. Wait until Saturday morning, offering it up for the sanctification of the world, because Fridays in Lent call for many kinds of fasting.

c. Go for it on Friday night, but make sure to wear the violet nightgown for that penitential touch.

d. Have a William S. Burroughs-influenced* "lunch" date on Friday. (*This refers only to matters sartorial, not pharmaceutical.)

e. Peak + 4? Is that a brand of mountaineering equipment?

You wake up early on Holy Saturday. You:

a. Kneel beside your bed and use your hour of quiet to pray 20 decades of the rosary, remembering the Blessed Mother's pierced heart. If you have extra time, you'll review the vigil readings in preparation for the big event.

b. Bundle up the food you'll be cooking for Easter dinner and take it to the church to be blessed.

c. Go to the kitchen and set up a fun Holy Saturday baking project for the kids to enjoy when they wake up.

d. Go for a long run, intermittently contemplating the sufferings of Christ as you huff and puff.

e. Roll over and go back to sleep like a sensible person.

You love to use a fine paintbrush for decorating eggs. Your Holy Saturday efforts include:

a. Some of the best snippets from that awesome ancient homily* 

b. No egg-painting, because your pysanky have been ready for a week already

c. A black egg emblazoned, "Don't rejoice today -- it's still Lent. Also, back away from the Peeps."

d. Eggs with slightly catawampus exhortations to " Shout Alleluia" and "Praise the Lord, all you nations"

e. Bunny decals with captions that say "Hippity Hoppity."

 

*I am mostly being silly with the (a) options, but I am very fond of that homily.

Misplaced Mojo

I haven't been knitting at all lately. I have seven projects on the needles and I don't want to work on any of them.

The root cause, I think, is this hideous balaclava that I agreed to make for my 13yo. The pattern is a pain, my row gauge is off (and row gauge matters, which always vexes me), the seaming is going to be a drag, and I am really just mentally done with it. Also, I feel guilty that I didn't get it finished before spring, which perversely makes me less willing to work on it. Ugh.

I am tackling my first double-knitting project as well. It's pretty and fun but it's also s-l-o-w. I've never before held two colors with the same hand and they just won't stop tangling. 

There's a lace project that's going to be pretty, I think, but it requires concentration.

I have about ten minutes' worth of work to do to finish my felted French press cozy, but I've been stalled at that point since early January.

Plus I have three pairs of socks on the needles: one for my mom (the least intuitive pattern I have ever attempted, and although it might be heresy I am not loving the Madelinetosh sock yarn), one for my pal Amanda that was ticking along fine until I was ambushed by ugly gussets, and one that was intended to be my fun brainless project until I discovered that the green and purple and blue yarn hurts my eyes. Can't have a fun project if you hate the yarn, right?

I've been wanting to cast on a sweater with some yarn I bought on deep discount, but I feel I ought to finish that rassafrassin' balaclava first. And I don't want to pick up the balaclava, which means that finishing it will require me to develop telekinetic knitting skills. 

Last night I finally picked up the purple socks and smacked the gussets around so that they are 80% less ugly. I'll take it. Six rows up the leg of the first sock, she said with a sigh.

Probably the solution to my knitting doldrums is not to buy more yarn, huh?

Above average, baby

In the summer of 2010 I decided to get in shape before I turned 40. I wanted to be able to run 5K in less than 30 minutes. Looking back, I can appreciate the determination but I have to shake my head at the specifics. I thought I'd lengthen my stride, so I didn't have to take as many strides per minute, when really the key to running faster is to increase your turnover. It's like I was trying to make more tender piecrust by kneading it longer. I didn't give myself enough lead time to meet the goal, and so I was working way too hard on the treadmill, with heartrates in the 170s. Because I was exerting myself so intensely, I would do some cheaterpants arm support some of the time, taking my pulse for much longer than necessary. It was so miserable that after I recorded my 29:52 time I didn't run for months and months.

You know that post I just wrote about being surprised by my archives? Just last week I stumbled across my post on getting down below 30 minutes. I had misremembered the required pace: I thought I needed to run a 9:21 pace. Huh, I thought to myself, I only have to run a 9:40 pace? I'm not far from that!

And I wasn't! Tonight I ran a 5K in 29:55 -- no misery, no cheaterpants arm action, and no injuries. (My hips were sore for weeks after the 2010 shenanigans, thanks to that stupid stride-lengthening idea.) According to this calculator, that puts me in the 51st percentile. Onward and upward!

I might need to create a fitness category one of these days, which is not something I ever envisioned when I started blogging.

The Unrecorded Life

For as long as we've been attending the kids' school concerts, I've been wondering about the people recording school concerts. "Who," I would think to myself, "is going to watch that? Isn't it bad enough the first time through?" Clearly I'm in the minority. At the last junior high concert I attended, it seemed like every single family had at least one member charged with getting video of the proceedings. And I'm sure you saw the picture of St. Peter's Square in 2013 vs. 2005.

The first part of my question is this: why the emphasis on creating visual mementos? Do families really go back and watch the performances again? Is there something more special about having one's own photo or video of a famous event like the papal election? Are there lots of grandparents who enjoy cellphone videos of concerts that are kind of painful the first time around? Even when the events are non-painful, I still find it puzzling. Part of the magic of live performance is its evanescence -- the short-lived connection between an actor or musician and his audience. 

The second part of my question is this: does recording an experience alter the experience itself? If a person is shooting video, does the focus on framing the shot and panning smoothly leave a person with less capacity to pay attention to the present moment? I know it can change the experience for some audience members -- last weekend my son ran the lights for the high school musical, where a mom was recording each of her son's numbers on her iPhone. This is a recent phenomenon, seeing a performer on stage at the same time that you see the performer on the iPhone screen at the front of the house, a little oblong of light amid the darkened rows of seats.

Because I've been writing recently about being judgy, I should probably spell it out: there's no judginess lurking behind these questions. As long as people aren't blocking anyone's view, or making recordings after being asked not to make recordings, I don't have any objections. It's just foreign to me.

Somewhere there's a C.S. Lewis quote about two men watching the sun go down. One of the men is engrossed in the experience itself, while the other is inwardly watching himself watch the sunset. (Anybody know where that comes from? I can't find it.) I often watch myself watching -- planning a blog post about the sunset, thinking of a pithy Facebook status update about the sunset. "Stop that," I tell myself sometimes. "Be right here." Sometimes it works, for a little while.

For a long time, I think, the effects of self-watching were mostly confined to the self. With the spread of social media, it's a different story. There's a constant temptation to create a curated online life. I keep asking myself, "Am I being real, or am I buffing the image I'd like to project?" My pal Jenny talks about trying to teach her daughters that it's silly to envy a Facebook profile, which may be widely divorced from an actual messy life. It doesn't seem to be working, she reports.

One of the Mason-Dixon Knitting bloggers described a game she played with herself, trying to remember the unrecorded events of babyhood. It's a hard game for me too. I go back to my archives all the time and unearth fun stories I had completely forgotten. If I don't write it down, if I don't take a picture, will the memory fade? If we don't record the junior high band's rendition of Frosty the Snowman, will it be as if it never happened?

(That last is a chance I'm willing to take.) 

Seven Quick Takes: The Edition With Yet More Snow In The Forecast. Harrumph.

1. Tonight I dropped the two oldest boys off for their Scout campout, feeling a little wistful as I pulled away. Alex (he's 16) was the oldest Scout on the trip, but it seems so recent that he was a newbie. This morning I took him to open a checking account so he could complete the paperwork for his summer job, which requires direct deposit. He pulled out his state ID, which asserts that he is 5'5". These days he's a little past 6 feet. I wrote one of my favorite posts the summer he got that ID, amazed that he was leaving the country without me. He seemed so old then; it's strange to remember that he was more than seven inches shorter.

2. On the way home Stella asked if we could go to a playground. Yes, Pete chimed in, let's go to our school. It might be a little odd to spend the evening at school on the first day of spring break, but that's what we did. I found myself wistful again, looking at the memorial bricks with their mix of strange and familiar names. My mother taught at a high school when I was young, and I remember feeling wistful even as a 10-year-old looking at the yearbooks she brought home. The girls seemed so elegant in their formal pictures, and it felt peculiar to imagine them out in the wider world. Sic transit gloria mundi, O Prom Queen.

3. Speaking of transit, Stella is changing so quickly. I should record her telling a story sometime. She's into future tense these days. and she's just figured out passive infinitives ("I don't want to be hugged"). But she's still sorting out the irregular 3rd-person singular forms (has/does), coming up with constructions like "Do she has a cat?" When she says something like that she'll take another run at it, knowing that it's not right, but she can't quite get it unmangled. 

4. I was going to read a book while the kids were on the playground, but all of those wistful feelings spurred me out onto the equipment instead -- I was keenly aware that I would not see this particular golden evening again. Did you read that Dear Mom With The iPhone post? I was a little surprised by the ire it provoked, because haven't we all been reading dear-mom-with-the-iPhone posts for a while now? I know I've been wrestling with the impact of the internet on my mothering for as long as I've had an internet connection. I have been writing this post very slowly, because one of my boys wants to tell me all about the Lego books he is reading beside me. "Would you scratch my back?" he just asked me. "Not right now," I said decisively but with an inner guilty twinge. "I'm writing a blog post." Did you find it more button-push-y than usual, this latest exhortation to be more engaged, and why? 

5. This evening when I was actually going down the slides instead of reading a book on my iPod as originally planned, I had a thought. Earlier today I was reading Stella a 1971 children's book about a 5yo boy named Steven who is only allowed to explore a bit of his block initially. When he gets a little bigger, he can go around the whole block on his own. On the other side of the block, he makes friends with all the other 5yo boys who are playing outside unsupervised. So here's my theory: it's easier to be fully engaged when your kids are better at occupying themselves. Do you know what I mean? When parents are expected to be full-time entertainers, driving kids to playdates and coaching soccer teams (and spending, heaven help us, full days at chess tournaments), it's no wonder they want to catch up on Twitter instead of climbing on the playground equipment. I would argue that more independence is valuable for kids for all kinds of reasons, but I also think it's beneficial for parents. Too bad Steven's neighbors would call CPS on his mom these days.

6. Today I've also been reading Stella the Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik. Mother and Father Bear have no qualms about sending Little Bear out to play alone, or telling him to be quiet so they can read. Were there 1950s editorials urging parents to put down their newspapers and be present for their children?

6.5 My nostalgia for older children's books is far from universal. I just stopped typing to read Danny and the Dinosaur. Tell you what: I will have no wistful feelings about the end of my Danny days. And Richard Scarry? I will do a little dance of joy when I give away our copy of Busy Busy Town in a few years.

7. I wonder, always, what my children will remember about their childhoods. A couple of sentences into take #5, Pete put his arms around me and squeezed me hard. "You're such a good mom," he said tenderly. Just a few sentences later he was impatient. "When are you going to tuck me in? You're spending too much time in front of a screen again." He might be right about that.

More quick takes at Jen's.

I am almost done being self-centered.

Three posts ago: I spend too much of Mass fretting about other people's choices. 
Two posts ago: I spend too much of life fretting about other people's choices. 
One post ago: my neighbors' catastrophe is about meeeeee. 
Today's post: my SIL's catastrophe is also about me. (I'm not really saying that, I promise.)

Hoo boy, isn't that an attractive list? I need to do some, like, recipe-blogging. Or cute kid pictures. Or something.

Tonight I have guardians on the brain. My SIL and her husband were our children's guardians. We need a new disaster plan now. 

It is a horrible question: who will watch over our children if we both die? Who might be willing to take them in and raise them in the faith and launch them into the world? This is a disadvantage of having a large family, because accepting responsibility for five kids is a whopping commitment. We discussed it for years before we settled on my SIL and her husband. Now what?

I'd love to hear some stories about how you chose a guardian for your kids. And by the way, the comments on those judgy posts are so helpful -- both the ones about being judgy and the ones about engaging in potentially judgeable behavior. Thanks again!

 

Collateral Damage

The house next door caught fire in January.

I wanted to be at work early that morning, so I scurried through the morning jobs and hustled my daughter out the door to preschool. I zipped back home and whizzed up a pumpkin smoothie for the road. I gathered up my things and walked to the office.

The smoke alarm must have been beeping as I walked between the houses, because twenty minutes later flames were pouring from the back of the house. Another neighbor called the fire department. Twenty-five minutes after that the fire was out, but the house was a ruin.

I wanted to post about it when it happened because this is the space where I think hard things through, and this was a hard thing. Another neighbor who works at the university sent me a midday email asking who lived in the little gray house near ours; she'd heard there had been a fire. Because she said "near" and not "next door," I thought she meant the little gray house that's kitty-corner from ours, the one that's occupied by an older single woman. When I walked home after my afternoon class I scrutinized that house from the first minute I could see it. No damage to the roof -- maybe the fire wasn't that bad. No damage visible from the front -- must have been confined to the kitchen. No damage anywhere at all that I can see -- must have been exaggerated along the neighborhood grapevine.

And then I turned my head to see my next-door neighbor waiting in her car with tears on her cheeks. The sidewalk was covered in ice, because the temperatures that day had been in the teens and the water had frozen rapidly as it rolled away from the house. I cannot convey to you the utter wrongness of the scene: the vinyl siding melted into sinuous ribbons, the roof with its gaping hole, the windows laid on the lawn like plucked eyes. "I'm so sorry," I gasped, with tears in my eyes. 

I wanted to show you the pictures so we could say together, "No, that is not right." I didn't, because it would have been tantamount to posting my home address on the internet. But it shook me up to realize that the lead picture in the newspaper story was taken from my porch: the best view of the action was from our house.

They were insured; they're rebuilding. They're staying in a hotel so we only see them every now and again, but they seem astonishingly upbeat about the whole thing. Please pray for them, if you are a pray-er.

In this neighborhood where lots are small it could have been much worse than it was. It was a windless day, the fire department arrived quickly and responded efficiently, and so the fire didn't spread beyond their house. Ever since, though, I have wondered about the invisible effects.

My little vegetable garden sits right inside the property line. That's my neighbor's house in the picture there. The firefighters left a fair amount of broken glass in the garden. (Which is 100% fine with me. If you can fight the fire faster by leaving broken glass in the garden, then bring on the broken glass.) I'm wondering more about potential toxins in the soil, though. Burning vinyl is really nasty stuff. Is there toxic residue in the soil now? If I plant vegetables there this year, will I be feeding carcinogens to my children? My compost pile is in the back, also right on the property line. The prevailing wind here is from the west, which means that all winter the wind blew across the fire debris in their yard and then across the compost. I'm thinking that compost is probably destined for flowers only. 

Do you guys have any thoughts for me? I called the county extension office but I haven't heard back. 

I'm having second thoughts about posting this, because it is SUCH a minor concern compared to my neighbors' troubles. But planting season isn't far off, and it's been on my mind. That's really the only spot where I can grow vegetables. I'd be bummed to lose my garden space. I'd be more bummed to feed poisonous food to my family.

Ten Minutes Till Bedtime

Oh, it might not be my brightest idea to try to write this post in ten minutes. But I wanted to follow up on some of what I was saying yesterday. I just re-published a long-ago (and looong -- remember 2005, when people read 2000-word blog posts?) post about rules and legalism and modern-day pharisees. The important part for this discussion is at the beginning: I like rules. This can be a good thing. It makes me a good therapist, for one, because spotting patterns is the key to changing them. It can also, of course, be a bad thing.

I don't only get judgy in Mass; it's just that I'm most aware of the perils of judginess there. I struggle all the time with how to respond to behavior that I dislike. I mentioned a few examples in the comments, but maybe this is the best one: at our gym, there are signs in the women's locker room saying you can't bring a boy in if he's older than four. People flout this rule ALL the time. It makes me uncomfortable. Once a woman brought in a boy who was at least 10. I called her on it, because I did not want to be naked in front of her 10-year-old. She told me it was okay because he was handicapped. I said, "You should take him to the family changing rooms anyway."

Because I love rules by temperament, I tend to take them seriously. I like learning about rules; I feel embarrassed if I've inadvertently broken a rule. It can be an act of charity to say to someone, "You know, that's not how we do things here."

It can also be an act of pompous pharisaism. Worst of all, it can be an act of charity on the speaker's part that's interpreted as pompous pharisaism by the listener.

I don't think I'm the only person who's uncomfortable with bigger boys in the women's locker room. I think, in fact, that other people there are likely to appreciate it if I say, "You know, the family locker rooms are just down the hall." I think it's better for me to bring it up myself, kindly, than to involve a manager from the get-go. And yet I hate doing it. (I hate not doing it too.)

Enjoying the comments on yesterday's post so much! Thanks for your understanding there. And now to bed...

Still judgy

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about feeling judgmental (originally called Judgy McJudgerson Rears Her Ugly Head), but it ended with my BIL's death. I got the call right as I was about to hit publish and it made all my concerns seem so trivial. This is actually something I'd love to talk about, though, because it's hard to get it right.

We often hear that judgmental Christians are an obstacle to belief. And I know that I need to keep myself in check when I get grumpy about non-essentials. But I struggle with knowing where the essential/non-essential line falls. This afternoon at Mass I sat in front of a pair of college students who were whispering and giggling the whole way through. I find it hard to be prayerful when that's going on. I did pray about it -- that the presence of God would be so unmistakable that we would all lay down our temporal distractions -- but on reflection I think that's kind of a dumb prayer. God doesn't overpower us in the Mass, usually; he lets us choose whether to rest in his presence or think about the nail polish we are going to buy on the way home or oscillate between the two.

Last week at the funeral there was a guest who was talking on her phone in the pew before the service started. For me that's a step beyond the texting that pushed my buttons last week, and I was a little indignant that she hadn't stepped outside. Today I asked for an opinion from my 16yo, who thinks I am ridiculously behind the times when it comes to cell phone norms. (If we are having dinner and someone raises a question that we can't answer, then we wait until after dinner to look it up. He thinks this is about two steps removed from banning paper in favor of requiring everyone to chisel letters into stone tablets.) Under what circumstances would it be all right to talk on the phone during Mass? An emergency only, he said. If someone needed an ambulance. What about before Mass? You should step out to the narthex, he said. You shouldn't talk on the phone in church.

I was relieved that he felt that way, but also a little uncertain. It's seldom a good idea to be too sure you're right. Among people with strong opinions about liturgy, it's not uncommon to hear comparisons to Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. Zeal for his house consumes us, you might hear them say. But in my view it is deeply problematic to compare expressions of anger by fallen parishioners to expressions of anger by the Son of God. Often it sounds to me like an excuse for being judgmental. Except-- even as I type that I'm aware that it sounds like I'm judging them for being judgmental.

This post is a MESS and I need to get to bed. But I would sincerely like to talk about this question, especially since a couple of you mentioned that you struggle with the same issue. When is it okay to say to oneself, "That behavior is not okay"? When it is okay to say to another person, "Your behavior is not okay"? And for those situations where you're thinking "not okay" but not planning to confront the other person on the not-okay-ness, what kinds of thoughts do you find yourself thinking? What's your inner script for situations where you dislike someone's behavior?

Back

Things couldn't have gone more smoothly with our trip and with the funeral. My SIL was amazing. She seems surprisingly at peace. Grace is a funny thing.

I always feel vaguely guilty about being happy to see people at a funeral, as if part of me thinks no joy is allowed. But that's always a funeral silver lining, isn't it?

The kids did well with my mother, even Stella-- although when she came down to our bed in the middle of the first night and found my mother instead of me, she was indignant to the point of trying to push her out of bed.

If I were going to invent an internet hoax, like those people who feign pregnancies or catastrophic fires or whatever else, I would think that this story was too implausible. It's still hard for me to absorb, that someone could be fine in January, vaguely tired and confused at the beginning of February, desperately and mysteriously ill on Valentine's Day, and dead on the third of March. And that all of this would follow the arrival of two little girls, born seven months apart.

If I were ever to abandon my compulsive honesty and make up a story for internet consumption, it wouldnt be that far-fetched. Truth is stranger than fiction.

The Snowman's Hosanna

I am leaving my house at 6 in the morning, but I wanted to stop scurrying around and get down some things that have been rattling around in my head.

We've had more snow in the past week than in all of last winter, I think, and it was beautiful snow: lacy delicate flakes piling up on tree branches. When you look at the giant parking lot piles of snow it's hard to countenance the idea that God sees each snowflake's individual beauty, but I believe it is true. When I think about all the bodies piled up in all the graveyards around the world it is easy to lose sight of the fact that God looked at each individual and pronounced him (or her) beautiful and beloved, but I know it is true.

The snow is turning into slush now but I am remembering the flakes that fell on my coat sleeves and eyelashes, fragile and unrepeatable.

From the time we knew there would be a funeral we were thinking that Elwood would go and represent the family. We can't fly seven people to the West Coast, and leaving five kids requires a lot of logistical juggling. But my SIL asked me to come to the funeral and sing the Ave Maria that I sang at their wedding, and I said of course I would.

Well, first I said to myself, "There is no possible way I can get through the Ave Maria I sang at their wedding while I am standing in the room with his cancer-ridden remains. No possible way." And then I said to myself, "Jamie, if the woman who is marching forward into widowhood with two girls under two can do it this gracefully, then you had better believe you can get yourself together to honor her request." And then I said of course I would.

When my oldest son was weaning the hardest part was bedtime. He had always nursed before he fell asleep. Instead I rubbed his back and prayed the rosary, and the prayer morphed into a song -- a Latin version and an English version. My SIL asked me to sing it when they were married. I am remembering the comfort it brought my little boy as he learned to let go into sleep, hoping it can bring some consolation as we all let go of my BIL.

For Lent I wanted to pray compline every night and I've been pretty faithful to it. It's that "Lord, now you let your servant go in peace" bit that sticks in my throat a bit. It's so much more real right now that one day my soul and my body will be separated.

People have been so good and so generous. My mom cleared off her calendar to come stay with the kids. I have been thinking a thought I want to come back to, about how the awful bits of life bring out the best in the people around us -- how love becomes palpable in the middle of sadness.

The sight that sparked this post was a slowly melting snowman, his head sliding slowly back on his slushy shoulders. He was stable enough, with his tilting head and his upraised arms, that he looked to me like a person at prayer -- hands lifted and head thrown back, shouting hosanna to the pearl gray sky. And I thought, "I could look at that and think about how everything we make will fade and end. Or I could look at that and think, 'Frost and chill, bless the Lord.'"

I guess both those things are true.

Please keep praying.

In Memoriam

I folded this news into the post below because it struck me so forcefully after a morning of petty concerns, but my BIL deserves a post of his own.

He died earlier today, in his own bed with his family near.

Remember when my SIL asked for prayers to ease their younger daughter out of their bed? While we were talking about it she said something like, "I just want to lie next to him and feel his skin against mine." She climbed in next to him one last time today. He died while she lay next to him.

He was a patient husband and a joyful father. He waited a long time for those little girls, and he enjoyed them to the fullest.

It's hard to believe he's gone.

What really matters

I walked into Mass this morning and sat down in front of a teenager with her phone out, the texting screen visible. I thought, "Whoa." In our family that teenager would find herself phoneless in a hot second. I thought, "Maybe her mom doesn't know what she's up to." The mom turned back to her daughter a second later and said nothing about the phone. Again I thought, "Whoa." I thought, "Your daughter is texting in church and you're letting it slide?"

I know better than to be a judgmental toad; really I do. I have this inner judgy streak, though, and some days it gives me more trouble than others. I knelt down and prayed for the girl, that God would shower her with grace. "Maybe," I thought to myself, "she's called to religious life! Maybe this situation is supposed to prompt me to pray for her to be open to God's glorious call." So I did, but my inner Judgy McJ was still thinking indignant thoughts.

"Maybe," I thought to myself, "she was texting her frail old grandma who was supposed to meet them here. Maybe she is texting because she is a kind and concerned granddaughter." JMcJ snorted, "She still should have stepped outside."

I glanced across the church and spotted a young mom nursing her baby under a cover. You already know JMcJ had something to say about that, too. Before the first reading the kids were dismissed for children's liturgy of the word, and the choir director played Edelweiss to accompany their walk down the aisle. You guys, I am ashamed to say I made actual scowly faces: why does she play secular music during the liturgy? Why is she playing the whole thing -- bless my homeland forever! -- when the kids have already left the building and the lector is waiting to start the reading?

Once the readings started, the irony that I was wrangling with JMcJ on this particular day was not lost on me. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. You have had five husbands, and the man you have now is not your husband. Did Jesus make scowly faces? Did Jesus wag his finger as he told people UR DOIN IT WRONG? Uh, no. 

Our pastor gave a lovely homily, encouraging us to learn more about our faith in a specific and manageable way. Part of my brain thought, "Yes, I should totally do that!" Part of my brain was busy sitting on JMcJ. I asked St. Therese to pray for me, remembering her struggles with the nun who clacked her rosary beads. Sadly, I did not notice any immediate results. There was just no let-up, all through Mass. Even at the end-- we sang a hymn where the choir director always makes a particular mistake in the accompaniment. While my mouth sang about God being beyond all praising, my brain thought, "I can't really explain the mistake in a conventional blog post, so maybe I'll make it a video post instead." Because that's exactly how humble people do it -- they plan video posts about other people's errors during Mass.

Sometimes I am reluctant to post about my weak moments and my strong opinions for fear of being judged in the comments. But you know, if you judge me for a post about being how I struggle with being judgy, I will have no choice but to smile at the irony. And maybe if I put it out there -- I just spent an hour of my life in a fetid fug of fault-finding when I could have been learning to be the aroma of Christ -- maybe you can pray for me to do better next time. 

***

I had just finished writing this post when the phone rang: my BIL is gone. He died a beautiful death, my MIL told me, with my SIL right next to him. I cranked up Mozart's Requiem until the kids complained, and I thought about the times we spent together. Here's the thing that struck me: the only words I remember from him are kind words, encouraging words. I cannot remember a time when he was irritable or snarky or mean -- not even once.

I hope I can leave a legacy like that, free of pettiness and ugliness. Et lux perpetua luceat ei. 

Seven Quick Takes for a Saturday

1. Most important: my brother-in-law is declining rapidly. Initially they told him he might have a year, but it is looking more like a matter of days until the end. Please keep praying.

2. It is shocking to me that someone I was joking around with in January will not see the end of March. It is a bracing reality: when I find myself wringing my hands about -- I don't know, the kids' failure to put their laundry away or my students' failure to prepare for an exam, I have to pull myself up short. Is my husband expected to die in the next few days? Time to shut my mouth and offer up my little (teeny, minuscule, absurdly small) sufferings for their family.

3. Will I ever stop being a hand-wringer? One wonders. I wonder, at any rate. I have been reading Walter Ciszek's beautiful book He Leadeth Me. He talks about learning to surrender totally to the will of God, to be buoyed along by it and thus to be fearless. This happens at the spot in the book where he is finishing up four years of solitary confinement punctuated by frequent interrogations, and preparing for 15 years of hard labor in Siberia. During my Adoration hour on Monday I resolved to adopt this attitude to the best of my ability.

4. That night I lost my legal pad. It was where I'd put my 2013 resolutions, some short-term goals, my big list of all the stuff currently on my plate, and my tasks for the week. I was SO vexed that it disappeared. I was walking in circles around my house, searching for it with rapidly decreasing efficiency, when I remembered my resolve to try on Fr. Ciszek's attitude. "Yes," answered my inner drama queen, "but did he ever lose his LEGAL PAD?"

5. [heavy sigh]

6. This weekend my husband is leading a Cub Scout expedition to the St. Louis City Museum. Have you ever been there? It is the craziest place ever, a bracing antidote to bubble-wrap-ism. You can be standing peaceably by the gift shop, just checking things out, when all of a sudden your kids dive into a tunnel. You can't really fit in the tunnel, and you have no idea where it leads. Also, it's dark in there. My kids adore it. As much as I try to avoid unnecessary bubble wrap, the City Museum stresses me out. 

7. I can't stop thinking about my little nieces and their mama, trying to say goodbye. And their dad, jaundiced and weary, though thankfully not in pain. Thanks for praying.

More quick takes at Jen's.

Bubble wrap culture strikes again

"Mom," said Joe, "Mrs. Whatsit says it was totally not okay for you to drop me off at the chess tournament."

I said, "What?" (Because I'm articulate like that.)

Apparently parents were expected to stay on site for the entire NINE HOURS of the Saturday chess tournament -- an expectation that was news to me. I am wondering if this is a memo I missed at some earlier point in the eight years we've done chess club (we started going to our elementary school's chess club while we were still homeschooling), or if this is a recent and poorly publicized change. In either case, I am not a fan.

Point the first: I am raising kids who know how to occupy themselves quietly. Point the second: I check in regularly with them during chess tournaments, stopping by at intervals to make sure they are fed and happy and behaving; we complete our volunteer shifts as requested. Point the third: I have FIVE children and my Saturdays are packed. If I spend Saturday sitting at a chess tournament making sure that my children don't -- I don't even know -- pick up a rook too quickly and sprain their wrists? run shrieking from the competition room if they're unexpectedly checkmated? -- anyway, a Saturday spent hanging around at a chess tournament is a Saturday in which some important things can't get done.

(I just typed out a list of all the things I had to do last Saturday besides sitting on my butt at a chess tournament, but it was too long for anyone to bother reading so I deleted it. You're welcome.)

I grilled the boys about what precipitated this comment from Mrs. Whatsit. Had they caused any trouble? Ever, at any of this season's tournaments? Even a whisper of trouble? Had they ever declined to listen to an adult redirecting them? It wasn't anything like that, apparently; it's just this same old business about children "needing" more supervision than I am inclined to provide.

If you are new to this blog you might not know that this is a hot-button topic for me: I was investigated by CPS in 2008 over allegations that I failed to provide adequate supervision for Joe; a year or two later a neighbor reduced Pete to tears when she insisted that his mother shouldn't have allowed him to walk around the block. It's not that I expect other people to set the same kinds of boundaries that I do for their own kids. What gets me is the assumption that I must be wrong-- that it's "totally not okay" for a pair of reasonably well-behaved children to spend the day checking in intermittently with their parents. (Who, by the way, aren't even allowed in the competition room during the games. Joe tells me that the parents all pile up around the doors, squinting in through the narrow windows to catch glimpses of their kids.)

We had this conversation on the way to the ice rink, where Joe is doing Hockey 1. "Hockey 1" is actually "learn to skate": go forward slowly, go backward slowly, do some slow swizzles, do some gentle slalom action around some orange cones. I was astonished, and a little embarrassed, to discover that he was the only kid in his class without a helmet on. Now you guys, I am well aware of the hazards of pediatric brain injury, but I'm telling you: a kid in this class would have to fling himself bodily in front of the Zamboni before a helmet would be necessary.* What's next-- life vests in the bathtub?

I still feel awkward that he wasn't wearing a helmet.

It's like there's this race to see whose kids can be the most protected, which parents can be most cautious. The outcome of this race is not remotely interesting to me. I do not want to compete in the Most Overprotective challenge. And yet it's not easy to opt out.

The challenge I'm most interested in is the one where we're realistic about the risks that really affect the kids in our neighborhoods (e.g., many more serious brain injuries are caused by car travel than by slow and gentle ice skating) and where we work together to encourage resourcefulness and independence in our kids. I'm also a fan of that event where we acknowledge that there are all kinds of workable ways to raise kids, and that descriptors like "totally not okay" are more appropriate for behaviors like, say, putting out a cigarette on a kid's arm because he spilled his milk than for behaviors like dropping kids off at an event where you'd dropped them off for the past several years.

Even to myself I sound pretty defensive. I guess I do feel defensive. And frustrated -- if participating in chess tournaments means that a parent is out of action for an entire Saturday, then my kids won't be able to participate in chess tournaments. These weird and inflexible new norms mean that they will be missing out. And, given Joe's winning record on Saturday, so will his team.

*I know, I know: a kid could lose his balance while standing still and fall unexpectedly, striking his head on the ice, which is unyielding and also -- think of the children! -- cold. But the version of parenthood in which we see who has the most well-developed capacity for envisioning worst-case scenarios is not the version of parenthood I signed up for.