Seven angels, four kids, one family

Topic for week ending 5/17/08 by grinningcomb
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE? Based on a book I read about a girl’s unfinished life list when she died in an auto accident.‘

Good gravy. All of a sudden the weblog tour has to get all serious on me.

I’ve tried to have as few regrets as possible as I move through life, and on the one hand you can say that’s smart, but on the other hand you could say I take far too few risks. Either that or I have my sights set pretty low.

Before I die, I have a few loose ends I’d like to tie off, and a few big things.

The biggest issue, of course, is raising my children. I would like to finish raising my youngest before shuffling off this mortal coil. I know we have no control over when we die, but it would be my wish to at least get my youngest into college before dying. It’s hard to lose a parent no matter what age you are, but I would feel that at least as a young adult, my child wouldn’t have lost out on having me there through his (or her — we may have more) formative years.

Plus, it would be really tough for my Patient Husband to raise all these Kiddos on his own. Pooh says “it’s friendlier with two,” but it’s also easier from a logistical perspective.

I’d also like to get more books published. 

On the “littler” end of things, I would like to:

1. Take a class so I can learn to draw
2. Learn Biblical Hebrew
3. Learn to drive a standard-shift vehicle

I’d like to build up such a readership that I have a thousand hits a day on my weblog, but that isn’t going to happen, and I’d like to limit my list to those things which are possible.

Here are the “would be nice but might not happen” things:

1. I would like to live within walking distance of my church
2. I would like to become one of those “cool” old ladies who organizes help for other old ladies and is always bright-eyed about the future rather than complaining about her liver, her finances, the drafty hallway and how the cat always misses the litter box. (I’ve met both kinds, and now I have my landmark.)
3. I would like to feel confident that I understand God’s will for my life and that I’ve fulfilled it. 
4. I would like to be organized, but to be honest, I don’t want it enough to work hard for it. Organized people tend to put their work into being organized; I tend to put my work into correcting for disorganization. It’s the “up-front” cost of being organized that tends to stall me
5. I’d like to play violin well enough that I’m not an embarrassment to those listening to me. Or a source of auditory pain. Being able to hold it without the shoulder rest would be a huge plus.

I think that’s it for now. Add your own list in the comments box!

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Other stops on the weblog tour are:

http://meganeileen2005.typepad.com/  twinkletoes
http://thatsloanegirl.blogspot.com/   CathyF
http://wryexchange.com/   Wry Exchange
http://www.absentmindedhousewife.com/  beckygoesape
http://verycontrary.wordpress.com/  Contrary
http://amandagorby.blogspot.com/  amanda_tg                 
http://whatsmylife.blogspot.com/ grinningcomb
http://nolechica.livejournal.com  nolechica
http://addierambles.blogspot.com  andra
http://la-eme.livejournal.com   MsMoonbunny
http://mischief0617.wordpress.com/  CrowGirl
http://www.housewife2000.blogspot.com   housewife2k
http://fatgirlartist.blogspot.com/  Amy Rose
http://lulupop.wordpress.com  Lulupop
http://chrisnada.livejournal.com/  Cnada
http://robandkrista.blogspot.com/  CelticGemini
http://anime-coroner.livejournal.com/. AllyKat
http://www.drunkenhousewife.com/ The Drunken Housewife
http://ladyj3000.blogspot.com/   LadyJ3000
http://heartstart.livejournal.com  Heartstar1
http://hijinksshenanigans.blogspot.com/  Hijinks’s Shenanigans
http://deltatangosgbs.blogspot.com/  afbluebelle
http://sarahesperanza.wordpress.com/ SquishyMooMoo
http://www.dutifuldanielle.blogspot.com/ dpbenson
http://sinkingtent.blogspot.com/ ladiedeathe

Kiddo#4 hates being put down. When I do, he’ll scrunch up his face with A Great Terrible Sadness and let forth this wail which means, clearly, “Why did you bring me into this world only to suffer?”

Over at Blair’s Blessings there’s a post about children and suffering. I can’t add to what she’s written, but I do want to extract the two quotes on her page and go in my own direction. Read hers too.

Pope Benedict writes:

“Even suffering is part of the truth of our life. Thus, trying to shield the youngest from every difficulty and experience of suffering, we risk creating, despite our good intentions, fragile persons of little generosity: The capacity to love, in fact, corresponds to the capacity to suffer, and to suffer together.”

This is so true it needs to be emblazoned across the sky. I know people who were shielded intensely as children and young adults, and they’ve grown into shallow, self-centered people who are afraid to take risks and who have no extended network surrounding them.

I’m not advocating tossing your kid into traffic to teach him suffering. Life does not care; there will be plenty of opportunities to suffer hardship. It starts when you tell your child no, no cookie because you didn’t eat your dinner. It goes up and through the times a friend doesn’t want to play with him, and when a pet dies, and when a grandparent dies. There are the little losses — a broken toy — and the bigger losses — a broken heart. 

What we can do is stand beside our children and suffer with them. It’s what God does with us.

The only way to shield yourself from suffering is to close in around yourself. Community demands we suffer together, and without community, or commonality — or dare I say Communion — we cannot love. Love is the basis of the deepest human interactions, and to shield ourself from suffering the consequences of loving only renders us less than human.

Frequently on the anencephaly support group, where moms are enduring suffering beyond imagination, I hear moms saying, “How am I going to get through this? How will I ever be the same?”

And I tell them, “You’re going to get through this. But you will never be the same. You’ll be more compassionate, more loving, more appreciative of the small moments. You’ll be more patient. You will have learned to love unconditionally. You will be the person others entrust with their hurts because they’ll know you’ve been vulnerable and you’ve survived. No, you will never be the same. You’re being transformed, and transformation hurts.”

It happened to me too. I don’t have the same edge I did before I heard that Emily would die after birth. But I wouldn’t change that part of my life.

The second quote is in the comments:

“We can try to limit suffering, to fight against it, but we cannot eliminate it. It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater. It is not by sidestepping or fleeing from suffering that we are healed, but rather by our capacity for accepting it, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ, who suffered with infinite love.”

The primary emotional suffering is loss. The divorce book I mentioned recently states bluntly that logically, to insulate yourself against loss, you have to make sure you have nothing to lose. No friends, no lover or spouse, no children, no vocation, no hobbies. Nothing they can take away from you. Nothing you can’t live without. Once you’ve done that, you’re protected. But ultimately, that leaves you with no purpose.

Shielding children from every sort of suffering robs them of the chance to learn to grieve in a controlled, safe environment. They need that experience. They need to cry over a broken toy so that their first broken heart doesn’t devastate them. They need to cry over a lost stuffed animal because it teaches them how to cry over a lost baby, a lost relative.

They learn the world doesn’t end when they hurt. They learn that sometimes, this hard world which can knock them down also has soft hearts and soft arms on which they can land.

That doesn’t make it easy: it’s suffering. It’s hard as a parent to stand by and watch. But if I want my children to emerge from childhood as fully-manifested adults, with all the tools they need to conquer life and to be fulfilled, to be loving and lovable, then I need to support them in their suffering and suffer with them.

Although this is a religious-themed entry, I’d like to ask the non-religious readers not to leave just yet.

At four o’clock in the morning, I had one of my scary-thoughts, and I need to run it by you guys. While praying the Our Father, I got to “hallowed be thy name” and I felt this stab of guilt. We abuse God’s name in many ways in the world today, particularly in America. On the web, “oh my God” is used so often it has its own acronym. I’ve confessed it and been told by people more spiritual than myself that it’s not a sin. And yet it’s in the ten commandments.

In early 2006, I rubber-banded myself to force myself to stop saying “Oh God” when not praying. It took two weeks of snapping myself on the wrist, but eventually I extinguished the behavior. Yet now I’m thinking, it’s more than that. It’s more than words.

When someone openly proclaims herself to be of one religion, her life becomes something done “in the name of God,” whichever God she’s proclaimed her allegiance to. In effect, the believer in a religion becomes an ambassador for that faith, and for the deity, deities, or principles at its heart.

I’ve been pretty public about being a Christian. So then, whenever I make a wiseacre remark online, or when I snap at the kiddos, or when I cut someone off in traffic, my life isn’t embodying the principles I would ascribe to the Christian God, and therefore I’ve effectively taken His name in vain.

That’s scary. That, folks, is truly scary.

What I’m thinking is that if I take this far enough, then at its essence, keeping God’s name holy (however one perceives God) would be to embody the principles of purity, holiness, single-mindedness, mercy, loyalty, integrity, compassion, fortitude, and generosity. And that when those of us who have a belief system compromise that faith in our little actions, we’ve in some respect degraded the name of the God in which we perform those actions. In most faiths, it’s believed that all our actions are important.

I’m way overboard on this — no one I know has ever taught anything of this nature. The closest I’ve seen is Scott Hahn’s assertion that taking God’s name in vain means making a false promise using God as your witness, because then when you break that promise, you’ve sullied the reputation of your witness.

And yet, I’m not sure I’m too far out in left field. If I’m living as a Christian and someone sees no joy of Christ in my life, no integrity, mercy, compassion, purity or holiness–then haven’t I sullied God’s reputation? Wouldn’t that be far worse than exclaiming “Oh my God”?

While it begins with me cleaning up my language, it ends with cleaning up my life. With the whole world cleaning up its lives.

Quite a lot for four o’clock in the morning.

On Mother’s Day, as we left Angeltown to visit our favorite restaurant, a pickup truck passed us on the highway bearing a bumper sticker which proclaimed, “My other toy has t1ts.”

(I am a prude, but my real issue for the creat1ve spe11ling is that I don’t want search engines to pick up the correctly-spelled word. I already get an inordinate number of hits for “excited angels,” and that bothers me.)

My Patient Husband and I were both unsettled by the bumper sticker. But in reality I think we need to thank this gentleman for alerting the women of the world as to what they can expect if they date him. To whit:

1. That he considers his Ford 250 to be a toy, and therefore doesn’t take his driving seriously.
2. That he considers women to be frivolous, without feelings, and unworthy of respect.
3. That he has no respect for a woman’s body parts and refers to them in a derogatory fashion.
4. That he has no respect for a woman’s feelings because he feels free to degrade her by talking about her as “a toy” on the back of his vehicle.
5. That he sees the need to shock total strangers or else does not care if they are upset by what is commonly considered vulgar language.

That’s a lot of mileage to get out of one eight-by-three sticker, no?  

My Patient Husband wondered aloud why there’s a subculture in America which encourages men to act like pigs. (He wants me to tell you: on behalf of all men everywhere, he would like to apologize.)

I’m trying to imagine a guy bragging to his male friends about his bumper sticker, laughing it up over a beer during a commercial break while watching football. I wondered if the woman in question (if she exists at all: she might not) felt degraded. But then again, it’s entirely possible that the “toy” referred to in the bumper sticker just rolls her eyes at the guy’s juvenile behavior and takes a “what can you expect?” attitude about him. She may not respect him either. She doesn’t expect any better from him, so he doesn’t work hard to meet her expectations. Perhaps they deserve one another.

All this leads to my final conclusion about what that bumper sticker means: that the man who put it there has no respect for himself. That he has no expectations (and hence no realistic chance) of forging a lasting bond with a partner whom he considers his equal. He will never struggle to win the heart of a woman he feels lucky to be with, and in effect, when hard times come, he will have no one to lean on, no one who has his back (other than those equally-shallow beer-drinking buddies who laughed at the ‘t1ts’ line). 

When he wants to get someone’s opinion, will it be from his “toy”? When he’s unsure about a difficult choice (to find a new job, to relocate) will he consider asking his “toy” or will he find himself alone? When he needs to open his heart, will he open it to his “toy”? Eventually he’ll wonder about that hollow in his life.

He’ll probably try to fill it with another toy.

The opening of Chapter 19 of Seven Archangels: Annihilation is the scariest and most violent scene I ever wrote. MindFlights Magazine just posted that chapter in their continuing serialization of the novel.

There will be spoilers if you go on reading. Just so you’re warned.

The chapter consists of two parts, and I deliberately set them in juxtaposition. The second half is the most life-affirming scene in the book, and the first part is all the more terrifying because it throws into high relief the way evil can take something inherently good and turn it toxic.

Chapter 19 opens with Beelzebub “taking care of the problem” with Mephistopheles (as Satan instructed him to do in chapter 17). If you haven’t been reading the entire book and you just want to see “scary” and “violent,” it doesn’t quite have the same impact if you don’t realize they’re a bonded Seraph/Cherub pair, and all along we’ve been seeing from the good guys the power of that kind of bond, how it can empower both and bring both closer to God. Here, Beelzebub uses it like a club.

Mephistopheles isn’t innocent at all; he’s been going along through the entire book thinking of himself and himself only. But he didn’t deserve what happens to him here. It’s not only the violence that’s upsetting; it’s also the lost potential. It’s the heartbreak. It’s the betrayal.

When I wrote this scene, I knew what was going to happen. I’d been reading the “toxic families” forum so I understood the dynamics of a toxic relationship, even though a lot of that never comes to the surface. Normally the Kiddos interrupt me about every ten seconds, so this time, I turned on the TV, went upstairs, plugged in my iPod headphones, put on a Styx playlist. I started writing. At some point, I looked up to find the kids had come up the stairs, seven or eight songs had played, and the scene was finished, but I hadn’t been aware of any time passing.

The second half of the scene shows another Seraph/Cherub bond, one that’s working as God intended. Raphael here is at his best, and his bravery, his calm, and his strength are what make that scene what it is, but also Gabriel’s cooperation in doing the impossible, their pairing, and the absolute trust between the two of them. At the end of it, when there’s that gasp as Gabriel “breaks the surface of reality” and he’s looking right into Raphael’s eyes, that’s my favorite moment in the chapter. Possibly my favorite moment in the novel.

If you’re grieving today because it’s Mother’s Day, I want to give you a hug.

A hug if you’re a bereaved mother.
A hug if you’ve lost your mother.
A hug if you’re separated from your mother or your child by distance or disownment.
A hug if you cannot have children and want them so badly it hurts.

Today at church, it was not only Mother’s Day (so they handed out carnations that the small children immediately snapped at the stems) but also First Holy Communion for the second graders. Emily would have been in second grade this year.

And now I’m cleaning out my desk drawer and found a copy of a poem that has me sad. Actually, I’m crying. So I’ve stopped cleaning for a minute to post it. The original poem is located here and is also in the book “Trying Again” by Ann Douglas, but I’ve rearranged it with photos of my own “different child.” Emily is the baby in the middle; every other baby is Kiddo#2. You should be able to click on the image to get it at a readable size.

Arwen asked for an Amen to her response to a troll. I didn’t see the trollish commentary, but apparently a faceless coward used the supposed anonymity of the internet to call her a bad mother.

Her response is a sound one, although in theory I’m not sure it does any good to respond to a troll, even if you’re well-reasoned, articulate, and willing to learn from the experience.

But something caught my attention. Arwen says the troll would have hurt her if it had actually hit on one of her weak points. Whereas in my experience, nastiness about actual weak points doesn’t hurt. It just gets acknowledged and moved on.

For me, “You’re a cruddy housekeeper” gets replied to with “Yes, I am” or else with “Yeah; I’m going to make some changes about that now!” and my life is actually improved by the attack. But not hurt, because I will acknowledge the truth of the statement.

By the same token, if someone tells me I’m a cruddy writer, I’ll laugh. That’s nice you have an opinion; we’re in America and brave men have died so you can hold that opinion. Nothing more to see here: move along.

The criticism that hurts worst — in fact, the only attack I think can hurt at all — is the issue where you’re only slightly unsure. You think you’re doing a good job, but there’s no metric by which to grade it.

Gradeable offenses are different: if I snap at someone, “You waste all your money!” then that person can presumably look at his or her bank statements and measure my perception of reality against reality itself. Either there’s money there, or there isn’t. Whereas if I say, “You’ll never save enough money for retirement at this rate!” the person is going to be less certain, since it’s not truly possible to know how much money is “enough.”

Now look at parenting. Specifically mothering. We won’t know until our grandkids come along and we witness our own children as parents if we’ve done a good job. That was the hardest adjustment to parenthood when I had Kiddo#1: I felt like I was doing a crappy job, but I couldn’t figure out where. The child was fed, clothed, clean, and growing. He was a high-need child, but I was able to meet most of those needs. And yet, I never knew for certain that I was doing okay.

People assured me I was a good mother, but I knew my momentary lapses and my times of not wanting to keep doing this. There were things I hated, things I missed about my pre-child days, and other parts where I was just lukewarm. I felt at times trapped, and at other times traumatized.

In those days, I was highly vulnerable to attacks about my parenting because although I knew I was doing everything okay, I always thought there might be a better way. A way to do it perfectly.

And I did get attacked. I got attacked by other mothers whom I realize now were probably lashing out due to their own little uncertanties.

It took losing one baby and having two more for me to realize, one day, I really am a competent mother. I’m doing well. I’m not perfect, but I’m good-enough. And my children are tough little humans: they’ll thrive with “good enough.”

Right now, an attack like Arwen experienced wouldn’t harm me either. But it’s taken nine years to banish that little uncertainty.

Ladiedeathe gives a hilarious reaction to the weblog tour question about which fictional character she would be. In her post, she takes on He Who Must Not Be Named, but with a flair all her own.

You see, she cheats…

Amy, a mom whose baby had anencephaly, sent me this story and gave me permission to post it here:

I have a VERY wonderful story about my Anna’s cap in the hospital…

I love to crochet and a couple years ago, I made a baby beanie and one to match, larger, for the mom. I was going to give them as a gift at a baby shower.

Well, time went by and low and behold WE were pregnant, so I saved the caps for us. We thanked God.

When we got Anna’s anen diagnosis, the caps became even MORE precious and needed in a special way. We thanked God.

When we were in the hosptial (March 16th) and I was in labor, I showed the crocheted caps to the nurse and our doula - Anna was 4 weeks early and we all just knew the cap was way too big for her. So I let go of the idea. God knew what was best, and we had so much peace at that moment that nothing disappointed us.

When they bathed my stillborn baby girl and handed her back to me, she had a crocheted cap on… It was EXACTLY the same yarn and stitch as the ones I had made years earlier!!!! Someone had donated a cap to the hospital for premies and deceased babies, and my doula spotted it and knew it
HAD to be the one for Anna!! Praise God for His attention to the smallest details.

Needless to say, I’m crocheting caps of all ALL sizes and donating them to the labor/delivery unit of our local hospitals.

Isn’t that amazing? So many of us say from time to time that we feel “called” to knit a certain thing, although we don’t know the reason why. Clearly in this case, someone was called to knit not only a cap for a baby, but to do it in THAT size, THAT color, and THAT style. By answering that call, the anonymous knitter showed Amy the love and care of God at a time when she needed it most.

Charity knitters, crochet-ers and sew-ers, keep on. The work does matter. Sometimes very much.

Product: one hat for anencephalic baby
Materials: two size 8 needles, 2 size 8 dpns, about an ounce of pink yarn. Maybe.

• Cast on 46 stitches, k2 p2 with one k at either end.
• After about an inch, do two rows of reverse stockinette
• Begin again with one k on either side and then reverse the ribbing for p2 k2 so the ribbing will lie flat against itself.
• Go up about two and a half inches. Mess up the decreases. End up with three stitches remaining. Do about an inch and a half to two inches of i-cord. Tie one knot. Sew up the back. Turn up the brim.
• Have a hat that would fit a plum. Offer it up on the anencephaly support group for anyone who wants it.
• Be really, really sad because that’s probably the right size, although you hate to admit it.

• Final step: procrastinate on offering it on the support group for months. Feel bad about that too.