Private Parts

In case my children ever read this, I won't repeat our conversation verbatim. I don't want to embarrass them. But I have to say their innocence hurts it is so cute. I hope they didn't see me laughing. I don't want to dim the brightness of their unabashedness. They kept asking, "What's the girl's part again?”

This week we went from saying "boy parts" and "girl parts" to "penis" and "pagina." (We'll get there.) Also, I don't want them to take it as a laughing matter. It is said that instances of sexual abuse are reduced by up to 70% when children know the correct names of their body parts. When they say, "Don't touch my penis," the miscreant who is trying to will be put on notice that we talk about these things at home.

I'm surprised to find there's something holy about naming things. Hearing those words on my children's lips warns even me: This is real. This is sacred. Tread lightly.

(2011)

Maddie's Cubby

One night earlier this week after we'd put the kids to bed, I got up from the couch to get my third glass of wine. I said, "One more night of being a bad mommy. I'll be better tomorrow."

Kicking a pile of unfolded laundry to the other side of the sofa, Shep said, "You're not a bad mommy. You're a great mommy. You're just a bad housekeeper."

I didn't even mind him saying it. Before, it would have made my lips press together into a small grim line, even though there was no rancor in it. He was smiling when he said it. I think he knew this time I would laugh. "I may be a bad housekeeper, but I'm a great mom, a great actress, and a great person."

"And a great %#@!," he said.

My strength is in adventures, though. Madelyn and Sophie each took a turn going with me to the theatre. It was Madelyn, though, who ended up being completely enamored of it. I made her a cubby in the bottom of the dressing room closet with Robin's yoga mat, a spare pillow that was in the cabinet, and my bathrobe for a blanket. She had her backpack filled with stuff. She is a stuff girl, like her mommy. (I've been called "bag lady" in my day.) She watched me while I put on my makeup, helped me organize my bobby pins, ate her lunch at the greenroom table, sassed the other actors, and sat on my lap on the couch for me to read her a story. Whenever I had to go onstage, she cozied herself down in her cubby and waited for me to come back. At the end of the day, I asked, as I do, what her favorite thing that day was. "Being in my cubby," she said. She was fascinated with all things theatrical. I walked her all around the set backstage and onstage, took her through the crossover hallway, where we peered down the steps to the trap room. I showed her the prop cabinet and let her handle my parasol, handbag, lorgnette. Everything to her was a magical little world. When she saw my jewelry, she said, "I want to be an actress! I want to have jewelry and beautiful dresses and makeup."

That's the kind of mother I am.

(2011)

Mother of Divine Grace

I'm tied in knots.  I'm obsessing again, fixated on the kids' schooling.  It is not what I want it to be!  I want to do Mother of Divine Grace with them.  I want to sit with each one and do the necessary things and juggle the schedule and be with them all all day.  I want to go to daily mass together again.  I want to read to Carolina and have her narrate back what she's heard.  I want to read aloud to them all.  I want to teach David and Carolina concrete math.  I want to explain grammar to John William in a way he will understand.  I want to have him reading and narrating, reading and narrating.  I want Sophie to be doing the same, and Madelyn to be reading and writing, reading and writing.  I at least want someone to be doing these things with them.  It doesn't have to be me.  I have enjoyed being with my three little ones and having the time to change diapers in a timely fashion and feed them when they're hungry and read them picture books.

But I don't want the big kids to come home after a long day with a backpack heavy as a bag of bricks on their backs, to do homework all evening and have no time to play outside or pursue their interests.  They don't have time to take piano lessons or go to choir practice or play a sport, not if we are going to have dinner, pray the rosary, and get in bed at a decent hour.

I would be willing to sacrifice the time, perhaps, if I felt they were getting the education I long for them to have.  I have always been on a quest for this education since we started homeschooling, and I agonized about it to my husband every day for seven years, until he finally got involved and sent them to this school... this school that I found when I was searching for some kind of Catholic classical educational option up here in Greenville.

My friend came to visit yesterday. She homeschools with Mother of Divine Grace.  Her kids are a rare breed.  They glow.  They have a generosity of spirit that I have not often seen.  Her boys, 15 and 13 years old, play with my 9-year-old son without a hint of reluctance.  They played twelve hours of football yesterday in the front yard.  Somehow she has taught them to give themselves as a gift to those around them.  Somehow she has trained them to look for opportunities to offer something to others instead of focus on themselves.  It's quite impressive.

I look at the formation and education her children are getting, and I like what I see so much.  It doesn't make me feel bad about what we are doing, but I do feel sad.  She said something about sending her oldest away to college.  She said she felt like a limb had been cut off, like someone had died.  And she said now every moment is precious, every bickering fight, every inconvenience, every moment.  It's not long enough.

It makes me think I only have five more years with Madelyn at home.  I want them to be good years.  This is for real.  I want to do it right.  We've only got one chance to live these five years together as a family.  What are we going to do?

I want to see my kids being schooled with Mother of Divine Grace.  We could go off and do it on our own.  We have been doing that for seven years before this.  Of course we were always in some kind of group.  But we were homeschooling. It took me so long to be open to someone else setting the curriculum.  Finally I decided Mother of Divine Grace does education the way I feel is the best way, and I could trust them and outsource some of the work.  But now we find ourselves in this school, this Battle of Lepanto school.  Tommy, the headmaster (yes, Tommy!), has the outlook we want.  But the education is not there yet.

Tommy and his family are coming for lunch November 17.  That is the feast of St. Anthony.  I'm going to pray to St. Anthony of Padua, worker of miracles, for a crazy miracle.  I'm going to ask for a hybrid school that does Mother of Divine Grace, all the way up to November 17.  How do you like them apples?

A Thought Before Bed

I have so many things to say.  I went to Kansas with Teresa and saw my cousins at TJ's wedding.  They all have a story.  There are too many to write about in the fifteen minutes I have right now before I crawl into bed.  I just finished the chocolate covered strawberries for tomorrow, and it's one a.m.  I'd like to tell you about Noel.  He's struggling with depression.  I'd mention Martha. She's a prophetess.  She's wants to do whatever God puts in her to do, and sometimes she's way out there and driving her family crazy, but her heart!  She is willing to die for God.  

I'd mention this house.  It fits us like a glove.  I never thought I'd feel this way about a house.  I never knew what it meant to have "a few nice things."  You can't have nice things if you don't know how to take good care of them.  It helped to get rid of everything I didn't really care about.

I want to tell you about the move to South Carolina and sending the kids to school for the first time after homeschooling all these years, and how I cried for the first month and felt like I had no purpose in life anymore but that now we feel called to really support this school and do something no one else is doing:  commit.

But what is sticking out to me the most right now is Mary and how she followed me around while we prayed the rosary. She had those little pink sunglasses on the top of her head and her purse over her arm, and she was "nursing" her baby just like I was and pacing and jiggling just like I was, just like she always is following Mommy and "helping" Mommy, doing whatever it is I do, like I'm the model for everything she wants to be.  I can tell her to take the wet clothes from the washer, put them in the dryer, and start the dryer, and at two years old, she can do it.  

Read, Write, Think

I think five days might do it, a retreat at the beach or just some hole in the wall by the freeway. Of course, unfortunately, by the second day missing my kids would be a physical ache. But I could really use a big chunk of solitude and silence, just to think, read, write, read, write, think, oh, and sleep.

Mary

A great mystery - about who we are, who God is, who He wants to be to us and us to Him - is revealed in her.  She is the path by which he came to us, the site of the convergence of the human and divine.  If you want to know Jesus, contemplate his mother - the deep truth about God and his relationship to us is made known there.  The great saints go so far as to say if you really want to bless Jesus, bless his mother. She is the very simplest, easiest path to him.  There is no better way to become as a little child than under her calm, cool, protective guidance.

Marginal Sleep Deprivation

Finding that balance of enough sleep. Staying up on that hump of feeling full of sleep (never stuffed - someday, maybe I'll have a chance to indulge in that again.) I used to sleep so long I would get that nightmare of not being able to move. So easy now to fall into the black hole of sleep deprivation, where my brain functions slowly, fuzzily. I find myself wasting a lot of time walking back to where I started from so that I can remember what I came for.