August Transition

This one is for my sister as she leaves her beautiful daughter at Tulane Univeresity, far, far from home.

Krysti, I remember well how hard it was for me to leave you to go to college. And I still sting with the pain of learning how angry you were with me for abandoning you. And, oh, how I remember the raw grief of a child leaving the home and the heart into which I invested so much. I pray you south and I pray you home again, the seat beside you painfully empty. And I pray the autumn, though certainly tinged with browns, will be richly hued with the joys of a new season.

August. It hangs in the air, doesn’t it? A long month — hot, heavy, humid. Summer is well-established, but the threat of fall lurks in the shortening evening shadows. For right now, it’s still summertime. We hang on to these last golden days of closely knit family time. Still, with every day, the change of autumn grows ever closer.

Perhaps this is the fall when your baby first gets on a bus to go to kindergarten. Maybe you are shopping for the perfect outfit to wear for the first day of middle school. (Is there such a thing as a perfect anything in middle school?) Is it the adventure of high school that is this year’s first? Or, are you swallowing hard against the lump that keeps rising as you gather all the necessities for a college dorm?

Much more than January, it is September that is most likely to bring change to the composition and the rhythm of a family. August is replete with drawing every last little bit out of the family as it is this summer, before running headlong into the family as it will be this fall. August is for counting blessings, taking stock and looking forward. August is all about laboring toward transition.

There is a moment or two (though for some it seems more like an eternity) just before a baby is born that is intense and painful. For many women, it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done. Very often, in the moment, a laboring mother will tell you that she can’t possibly do this task before her. A good midwife will remind the mother at that point that she is very close, indeed, to holding her baby. And so she is. The stage is called “transition” and it is marked most often by intensity and pain. It is followed by the sweetest joy a woman can know. And the pain? Remarkably, it disappears.

What the new mother doesn’t know is that “transition” will repeat itself throughout her baby’s childhood. There will be intensity and pain and then she will most definitely push her dear child into another world. What she doesn’t know is that, unlike that first transition, the ones that follow don’t end with a baby safely snuggled at her breast. With every subsequent transition in their life together, that baby will move further from her. That’s what is meant to be.

His world will expand to include new people, new places, new relationships. She wants those things for him. She wants him to reach and to grow, to learn and to love. Still, it hurts. And in the quiet of an August night, she acknowledges in a whispered prayer that she wishes it didn’t have to be. She wishes they could just breathe together in the warm quiet after the hard work of birth. She wishes she could hold his hand as he walks on tentative, toddling feet, both of them secure in her ability to keep him from falling. She wishes to soak up the pure delight of his being just a little longer. She has loved all the springs and all the summers with a joyful gratitude.

It’s August though, and nearly September. With a sigh and a prayer destined to be oft-repeated, she turns resolutely toward the autumn sun.

--reviving this one from the archives at the Catholic Herald today (they've reformatted the site there:-) as we work at home. I hope this message finds you well as I endeavor to take a little computer break and focus intentaly on home. It's Boot Camp week before our autumn rhythm moves into full swing. I'm posting this as a genuine reminder to myself.  We're working hard to prepare the environment for our studies and to establish excellent habits so that each member of this family can serve the others well in the coming term. 

Choose Joy

As I was reading online the other day, a quote by Sally Clarkson, author of numerous excellent books for mothers, caught my eye. She wrote, “Loving one another, as adults find out in marriage quickly enough, is a choice, not a feeling.” There was really nothing earth-shattering there. I think we can all agree that over the life of a marriage, spouses are presented, time and time again, with opportunities to choose to act with love, even when they don’t especially feel a surge of romantic emotion. Sally goes on to write, “Honor given to another is an attitude of humility and respect that is trained into a young child and practiced over many years. So, those who cultivate love and respect find it blooming more than those who leave it unattended.” Her point is that children need to be taught intentionally to behave charitably and to respond to their fellow man with the virtue of love. When they are deliberately taught to love, they do love.

As I thought about her wisdom, I thought about the other virtues. Don’t they all require a choice? Can we not choose to act in virtue, despite our feelings, time and time again? And can we not intentionally teach our children to choose virtue. Lately, my family has been looking at the virtue of joy. Specifically, we’ve looked at the outward sign of Christian joy: cheerfulness.

This morning, I breezed by the Facebook page of an old friend to wish her a happy birthday. And I smiled to see her recent pictures. We’ve lost touch over the years, but she still looks very much like I remember her. Her smile beams exuberantly from shot after shot. I noticed someone wished, “Happy Birthday to one of the happiest people I know!” Someone else said, “I don’t need to tell you to enjoy the day; you enjoy every day.”

That’s the person I remember so well, the person who saw more sorrow before she was 25 than most of us have seen by 50, yet who was known then and is still known now for her predictable, perpetual cheerfulness. I remember loving being a guest in her home during our high school days. Her parents were kind and gracious and some of the happiest people I’d ever met. Joy lived in that marriage and when those dear people named their only daughter, her middle name, literally, was Joy. Did she inherit their joy or was it taught?

A little of both, perhaps.

We all have days when cheerfulness seems elusive, just like we all have days when we don’t feel particularly loving towards the people God has given us to love. Spiritual maturity demands us to be cheerful anyway, to smile warmly, genuinely, and with joy. In order to love when we don’t feel loving, we call upon the grace of the sacrament of marriage and, truly, the other graces of the Church. That grace is available to us as we strive to live all the virtues.

St. Josemaria Escriva writes, “A piece of advice I have insisted on repeatedly: be cheerful, always cheerful. Sadness is for those who do not consider themselves to be children of God.” I think my friend’s joy bubbled up from the inheritance given by her parents and then was fostered by their example. She was born into joy. If we are children of God, we are all born into joy, aren’t we? Sometimes, we need to reminded of that; we need to be reminded to be always cheerful. Truly, we need to live it for our children so often that it is instilled into their very beings. We need to smile.

We need to choose joy.

--reviving this one from the archives at the Catholic Herald today (they've reformatted the site there:-) as we work at home. It's Boot Camp week before our autumn rhythm moves into full swing. I'm posting this as a genuine reminder to myself.  We're working hard to prepare the environment for our studies and to establish excellent habits so that each member of this family can serve the others well in the coming term. 

Maybe if I write it, it will leave me alone

There was an earthquake here yesterday. The day was bright and beautiful and clear as a bell. I'd just come inside from dropping Paddy off at the pool to lifeguard and I hustled Sarah into the bathroom before taking her to the doctor. There, the house shook and a low rumble filled the air for what seemed like a very long time. I yelled to my kids to stop roughhousing in the house (though I couldn't imagine what they were doing to make the whole house shake). When they said they weren't doing anything, I told them to turn off the washer. Most crazy off-balance spin cycle ever. They told me the trees outside were shaking. We all figured out that it was an earthquake just as it ended. 

Three trophies fell from an upstairs shelf. They broke. No big deal. They were Division 2 trophies.

I talked to my sister--the queeen of hyperbole--and learned there was a tidal wave in her backyard pool. I checked in with my mom and my dad. I left a message on Mike's voice mail. He called back a few minutes later and we briefly connected before his phone went dead. That happens all the time.

I scooped up Sarah and we went to the previously scheduled doctor's appointment. Business as usual. I thought about how it was kind of cool to have felt an earthquake, particularly since there were no reported serous injuries or deaths. 

Most of my children left to go a long-anticipated sleepover at their cousins' house. Mike's sister commented that it was taking her husband forever to get out of the city. Mike decided to stay and wait out the crowd. So, the handful of people left at home ordered Chinese carryout. They watched a movie and I sewed.

Mike returned home around 9:00. I asked him if he'd been in his office when the earthquake happened. He said that he was two stories underground in the studio. He described the same thing we felt here. Only he was underground. A stone's throw from the White House. He didn't think roughhousing kids. He didn't think off-balance washing machine. He thought "if that was a bomb I should..."  "If that was a plane I should..."

When  you work in Washington, D.C., you don't think first of earthquakes, you think of a clear September day ten years ago and you think of bad guys who would be tickled to watch the federal government scramble in fear and chaos. When he told me about his earthquake moments, it stopped me in my tracks. It still brings tears to my eyes.

That studio is in the basement of ABC Washington. It didn't take long to find out it was an earthquake. Mike went outside and saw the panic in the streets. It's easy to poke fun of the silly people in Washington, DC who are overreacting to a minor earthquake. And it's the fun thing to do to get on Facebook and giggle over incompetent folks who work in our nation's capitol. But it's another thing entirely to think about my dear man, working to support his family yesterday and wondering if the world had been rocked the way it was ten years ago. No matter what I think about our government and the people who do or don't get things done in DC, I have to applaud the courage of the men and women who got back in their cars this morning and drove over those bridges. Because really, it's hard to shake that "what if" feeling.

Yarn Along

The knitting pace is picking up.It's so nice to have hit a knitting rhythm again! I have taken six children to the dentist in the last 24 hours and Sarah visited the pediatrician--lots of waiting room knitting. Tomorrow, we have 5 orthodontist appointments and then Friday will bring some labwork. I think this sweater might get as finished as possible without a trip to see Ginny this week.

It's been nice to knit in waiting rooms and talk with recptionists about knitting. One of the ladies behind the desk at the dentist told me all about how her mother taught her to knit when she was little. She said she hadn't knit in years. Then, she went on to remember how it's a wonderful stress-buster. Pretty sure there's a visit to a yarn store in her near future:-).

I'm reading Young and in Love: Challenging the Unnecessary Delay of Marriage. I did receive a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for a review and I'm breaking radio silence this week because that review is overdue (and because I missed talking with y'all  about knitting.). The topic of early marriage is one that fascinates me. By today's standards, I married young. Since one of my children is already older than I was when I married (he's actually older than I was when he was born), it's a topic whose time has come around again. I haven't finished the book, but there is one critical point that absolutely rings true with me: young people today have a tendency to extend the immaturity of their teen years well into their twenties and delaying marriage is part and parcel of that selfish behavior. Often, delaying marriage is not about delaying gratification and waiting until one is mature and capable of establishing a household; it is instead, about choosing to behave as if they were the center of a universe that exists solely for their pleasure. 

Ted Cunningham, the author, validates young love. He doesn't dismiss the idea that there are young people who know that they have found the spouse God intends and he encourages them to get married and begin the life of love God wants for them. He gives a young couple tools for evaluating the relationship and for forging a solid bond. It's a worthwhile read and it is certainly food for thought and for discussion. If God is trying to knit a couple together, society shouldn't tangle it all up. Every relationship is unique. When I consider my own relatively young marriage, I'm always astonished. How did we know? How did we do that? Where did we get that sure confidence and exuberant joy? It was the grace of God. Only the grace of God. And 25 years after making that decision, it's still the grace of God that fuels the union. No matter how many books are written or how many scholars and pastors weigh in, no matter how many demographic studies are done, the most important thing I want my children to consider God's will for this most important decision. 

Go visit Ginny for more reading and knitting inspiration.

The Warmth of Your Smile

It’s a quiet early September morning. Very early. In just a few moments it will not be quiet at all. A flurry of activity will begin to encircle me and I will be needed in all sorts of ways. Right now, I focus on the wisdom of the saints and try to gather my thoughts and offer my prayers; this is a habit that has blessed me abundantly, a habit I know is the very sustenance of my soul.

St. Jane de Chantal, who writes so directly to the heart of mothers, of women, reminds me without reservation or exception: “First, upon awakening in the morning, turn your thoughts to God present everywhere; place your heart and your entire being in His hands. Then think briefly of the good you will be able to accomplish that day and the evil you can avoid, especially by controlling your predominant fault. Resolve, by the grace of God, to do good and avoid evil. Then, kneel down, adore God from the bottom of your heart and thank Him for all the benefits and graces he has given you.”

What is the good that I can accomplish today? Surely there is the omnipresent to-do list. And the crazy, ridiculous, drive-children-everywhere schedule. Those are good things I can do. They benefit my family and contribute to the well-being of the people I love. I am an efficient listmaker. I’m quite sure I’ve earned an honorary degree in iCal. I’ve got driving to soccer down to such a science that I can be certain dinner is cooking while I’m driving. Check. Check. Check. All good.

But blessed Mother Teresa warns those of us who are queens of efficiency: There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in — that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

Work for the sake of work? I do have days where I barrel through. I go from one item to another, forgetting that the list serves the people and not the other way around. I fall victim to “just a minute” and small faces crumple as I achieve. They don’t want “just a minute”; they don’t want a tower of efficiency. They want a warm lap. They want me to look them in the eyes when they recount the latest teenage drama. They want my undivided attention. They want me. And, truthfully, it is my job to bring warmth and beauty into their lives just as much — or more — as it is my job to be chauffeur and cook.

Therein lies the challenge of my September morning. Dear God, please show me all the good I can do and show me how to do it as beautifully as possible. The answer rings forth readily — a very simple thing really. All He wants from me today is the gift of my smile. Nothing is more beautiful to a child than his mother’s smile. With every task, at every chore, He wants me to smile. And every time I address a child’s needs or answer the call of my husband, I am called do it with a warm and genuine smile. Upon smiling, I will feel my shoulders relax and my countenance soften. I will generate unique beauty. Good things will follow.

The warmth of a September smile: It sets the tone for a busy, productive, beautiful new season.

--reviving this one from the archives at the Catholic Herald today (they've reformatted the site there:-) as we work at home. It's Boot Camp week before our autumn rhythm moves into full swing. I'm posting this as a genuine reminder to myself.  We're working hard to prepare the environment for our studies and to establish excellent habits so that each member of this family can serve the others well in the coming term.