Come Away With Me

For the first time in our five years as parents, we left the kids with my parents and took a weekend away.

We flew to Tampa on Friday for a wedding, and after a bit of a rough start, we felt our way back into coupledom. Bonnie was passing by on its eastbound, spill-cleanup-disrupting run, and we ate dinner at Rod & Reel on Anna Maria, at the edge of a tropical storm.

The waitress told us that a couple hours before we arrived, all the skimmer ships had been sitting in a line a bit north of the restaurant, as they abandoned the cleanup effort. The tiny pier held a fluctuating crowd of forty to eighty people, some fishing, some coming upstairs to eat, but apparently this was a molasses-slow day; usually a table at this place entails a two-hour wait. The owner told us he was considering closing early due to weather. (!) The wind pummeled the poor birds, the waves lashed at the pier, but the food was terrific.

It was well past sunset when we left and began meandering our way back down the island to Longboat Key and the condo. Along the way, we stopped so I could say hello to the Gulf of Mexico.

By dark, the rain had at last cleared out, and the winds along with it. I expected the surf to continue crashing all night, but it was as if, following the passage of the storm, the Gulf went to sleep. We took red velvet and cheese cake out to the beach and sat listening to the low grumble. And in the morning, we entertained guests: my uncle and aunt came to spend the morning at the beach.

Although off in the distance, the storm still pounded the Gulf, it was a perfect day at the beach. Uncle Matt and I spent an hour body-surfing the waves, which had sprung back up due to the distant storm. We had to convince Christian and Patti to come join us, but in the end we prevailed. (But I don’t have a waterproof camera, so I can’t share that.)

After lunch, we showered for the wedding and headed up to St. Petersburg, where we spent an hour in the Sunken Gardens…sweating profusely, reinforcing our certainty that we will never, never, NEVER be more than visitors in Florida. (Item: in Florida, the air conditioning is set at approximately 40 degrees. Thus, whenever you go inside you nearly shut down from hypothermia, and when you walk outside, your glasses immediately fog up. Every time. In case you didn’t know this, consider yourself warned.)

And then the camera broke. Oh, well. It ate batteries, anyway.

After a beautiful wedding on the beach, we returned to the condo to stare up at a full moon and stars that twinkled, improbably bright. Outside our window, the silhouette of two palm trees framed the darkness of the ocean. It is the first time in years that I have actually gotten to enjoy a night landscape without the interference of street lights, headlights, security lights. I had forgotten how something that would ordinarily seem pitch black is actually only murky gray.

But most of all, we spent thirty-six hours simply being two become one. Holding hands as we walked. Being quiet. Not talking about the kids…much. The partnership that we have developed these past few years served us well when we were by ourselves. We reveled in the freedom of solitude, of traveling without strollers and diapers and kids to entertain, of (gasp!) quiet in the back seat.

Frankly, as much as I felt the heart-tug when we talked to the munchkins on the phone, I wasn’t ready to return to the chaos that met us instantaneously upon returning home. But I sigh, I shrug, I wax philosophical and remind myself that endless as it seems, this stage of life will pass away soon enough.

In the meantime, I am so, so grateful for the gift.

holy experience

Mamarazzi Monday

 

youcapture 4-1

Published in: on July 26, 2010 at 5:45 am  Comments (8)  
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Beadwork (or: the origin of motherhood)

Motherhood Moments

It hangs in the the closet, tucked in the back with all the other clothes I don’t wear anymore, flowing concert black and high school prom red…

Like another of my blog friends, I, too, like to pull it out and put it on once in a while, as my mother did when we were little. And Alex, who after attending a wedding recently is newly intrigued by this weird grownup ritual of wearing impossible-to-keep-clean, really big dresses, insisted upon being photographer instead of one of the subjects.

So, for a few brief, glorious minutes, I got to be my bride-self again…the juxtaposition of who I once was with who I have become: flowing satin amid piles of laundry, and jammie-clad little ones on my lap.

And when it was done, we resumed our routine as if nothing had happened. Resumed the world of books, prayers, tucking in, and procrastinating by protesting that the radio is hissing, by screeching for water…

…to the ordinary tasks of cutting hair…hair that once was all black, but now begins to turn white at the temples.

Beadwork and tuxedos. That is where motherhood begins: in a union of two who become one, whose union becomes enfleshed again and again. Praise God.

***

(Note: yes, I am very proud of the fact that eleven years and three children later, I can still wear my wedding dress.)

youcapture 4-1

Published in: on July 22, 2010 at 5:31 am  Comments (7)  

Of Husbands on Father’s Day

Originally uploaded by Enigma Photos
 
 
 

 

Okay, ladies, I’ll keep this short and sweet.

How did you celebrate Mother’s Day, and what do you have planned for Father’s Day?

There is a tremendous inequality in the way we approach these two holidays, and the guys get the short shrift. I mean, the kiddos are still in school on Mom’s day, and they bring home lots of adorable homemade gifts for us—you know, the ones that make us all go sniffle snuffle, even those of us (like me) who were hardened against kids’ crafts. But by Dad’s day, the kids are out of school and we’re trying to adjust to occupying the same space again without a) boredom, or b) World War III.

I think we women tend to get very self-absorbed in the sacrifices we make, the dreams we give up or the conflict between our work and our parenthood. The men have these same struggles, but because they don’t talk about it so much, we tend to forget.

Today, I set forth a challenge, for myself as well as for all of you. Let’s make this Father’s Day special for our husbands. For the men who are our partners, our best friends, our voice of reason and our sounding boards.

What will you do to make his day special?

***

Linking up with SteadyMom’s 30-Minute Blog Challenge and with

tuesdays unwrapped at cats

Published in: on June 15, 2010 at 5:24 am  Comments (8)  
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A Change of Acoustics

The day was not off to a promising start. My three little angels had had me up eight times in seven hours. And instead of sleeping in, they woke up before I managed to accomplish anything in my early-morning work time.

And they couldn’t pick a low-stress day to do it, either. No, this Memorial Day weekend was one of our busy weekends: two weddings, air show, golf, a room to paint. I sent Christian off to enjoy his outing and dragged the kids, kicking and screaming, to the farmer’s market and the grocery store.

(Let me interject that whoever invented the side-by-side double stroller should have his or her head examined. Little ones will find ways to torment each other in any case, but being side by side is just enabling!)

And don’t even get me started on grocery carts with cars on the front, and coexisting in those. Or, for that matter, on little girls enamored of their independence. How can you concentrate on grocery shopping when your three-year-old who can’t talk disappears every thirty seconds? I begin to understand the appeal of those stupid baby leashes 

By the time we got home, I just wanted them all to take naps. At 9:30 in the morning. (Riiiiiight.) So I did the next best thing. I put one down for nap and set the other two up with computer game and video. In separate rooms. Where no one could push, get in the other’s face, or take toys from each other. And I went to clean the house.

I often pause on the morning of a wedding gig to reflect on the difference between a wedding day and The Wedding Day. For the couple, the parents, and many of the guests, this day consumes every waking moment. We the musicians, on the other hand, are frequently still unshowered and frantically cleaning the house up till half an hour before we leave.

Well, anyway. By noon, I was in a foul mood: running on fumes, mad at my kids, and ready to vent the whole putrid mess on the first adult to express sympathy obligated to listen. In other words, my husband. Only I couldn’t. Because if I did, it would ruin the enjoyment of his morning, and he’d feel guilty for leaving me with the mess.

So I swallowed it. Mostly.

Two hours later, I stood at the ambo singing the psalm. And all of a sudden, something changed. I had sung this same psalm a week earlier at our own parish and barely registered the beauty of the melody, the prayer in the words: Lord, here I am, I have come to do your will. Here I stand; send me forth, I long to do your will.

Maybe it was the change of acoustics. Lourdes is a very neutral space in which to sing. Live enough, but muted by wall panels, so the noise of our parish’s many, many children doesn’t overwhelm all else. Singing in the Newman Center, on the other hand, feels a lot like singing in the basketball arena—wide open and zinging with reverberation.

Or maybe it was because I was standing in the church where we were married, singing the psalm that Lesley had sung at our wedding, ten years and some change earlier.

All I know is that after that psalm, the day was different.

The wedding finished early enough that we decided to complete the grocery shopping on the way home. We walked into Aldi in flowing, beaded gauze and tuxedo tails, and chuckled as eyes widened and followed us. We were like newlyweds. We laughed, we teased, we joked our way through the grocery store, free of the usual weight we carry.

Sometimes the weight of the future frightens me. I know that every little snip and snap that I allow past my lips today multiplies into mean-spiritedness and hatefulness in the future, and that within the busy-ness of parenthood, we must be an active partner in renewing our marriage. Sex and an occasional date just don’t cut it. Lip service to God as a partner doesn’t cut it. We still have to make those daily choices, even when our spouse doesn’t reciprocate. When I hear about couples like the Gores, splitting after forty years, I have to admit to a niggling doubt. I’m not satisfied with a marriage that merely lasts. I want us to be more in love at eighty than we were at twenty-five.

But afternoons like that day at Aldi, following the wedding, remind me that it is possible. We just have to look for ways to tweak the acoustics of our life together, and hear the music in a new way. And in doing so, we rediscover ourselves.

9/4/99

Published in: on June 2, 2010 at 7:14 am  Comments (7)  
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50 (the magic number)

Part One: Fifty seconds.

Ears popping, rising ninety-five floors above overtired children, train schedules, bad bus directions and the guy on the street corner screaming about the end of the world. And at the end of it, the doors opened on this:

 

It was our tenth anniversary dinner, six months late, the first of two dates we set up in Chicago this weekend.

All morning at the planetarium, watching the top of the Hancock tower appear and disappear in swirling clouds, we wondered what we would be able to see when we went to dinner that night. But the sky retreated a bit, and we sat beside the soaring windows and chatted softly, minds and bodies slowly easing into the moment. It was almost seven before I remembered that I hadn’t left a menu list for Christian’s brother and sister-in-law, who were watching the kids back at the hotel.

The meal? Oh, of course, it was absolutely amazing. I didn’t expect anything else. But it was the respite, the chance to re-center and rediscover two made one, that made the experience what it was. And on toward sunset, the light around and below us shifted from smoldering gray to clear blue-white.

And although we went right back to the world of late buses and almost-missed trains, the quiet buzz remained, and carried me off into a deep sleep almost as soon as I hit the pillow.

Part B: Fifty minutes.

Date #2 was not so amenable to public transportation, so we drove downtown, leaving far too early for an 8p.m. concert because our hosts/babysitters didn’t know how bad construction traffic might be. Fifty minutes after we left the hotel, we pulled into a parking lot snugged up against the wall of the Symphony Center. With an hour and ten minutes left before the concert, we set off to visit Buckingham Fountain.
 

It was a relaxed, though windy and chilly, walk, and at the end of it we returned to Michigan Avenue…

 

…and made our way to our seats in the front row of the gallery, where we settled in for two hours of sheer musical bliss.

 

Any classical concert is a balm to my soul, but to watch one of the best orchestras in the world, on its home turf—that is a dream come true. Check it off the bucket list, and savor the moment for years to come.

What did you do for Mom’s Day?

Sweet Shot Day

tuesdays unwrapped at cats

Seven Clown Circus

Published in: on May 11, 2010 at 5:37 am  Comments (9)  
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High Fidelity, Part 2

Yesterday morning, I sat nursing Nicholas by the window as usual, when I heard the squawk down the hall. “Christian, Julianna’s awake,” I said.

“Okay,” he answered. He finished shaving and went into her room as he does most mornings. And, like most mornings, their voices floated back to me. “Good morning, Julianna! How are you today?”

“Euh!”

“Uh-oh, should I tickle Julianna? Tickle tickle tickle!”

Squeal, giggle, giggle, squeal! Hysterical giggle!

“Should I tickle Julianna some more?”

“Euh!”

“Tickle tickle tickle!” Squeal, giggle, giggle.

And, like most mornings, I sat stroking Nicholas’s back, kissing his hand, smiling as I listened to the exchange. How can I not? Her enchanting laugh makes me smile throughout the day no matter how foul my mood. And there is no moment in marriage so beautiful as seeing your beloved take such joy in the children you have created together, in partnership with God.

And that was when realization struck.

I’ve spent a lot of the last week pondering the subject of marriage. Thinking about the way a marriage changes, and the danger of dissociation. Thinking about how many people responded to that post, via comments and private emails, and realizing how important this issue is to so many people.

But I was wrong. I’ve been looking at the whole topic from the wrong perspective.

“One cannot step twice into the same river; for other waters are continually flowing in,” said Heraclitus. It’s not about trying to hold on to what we had as newlyweds, because we are no longer those people. Life has changed us. Infertility. Grief, and rebirth. New insights.

No, it’s about discovering new ways—and more importantly, new reasons­—to love each other.

Like the way Christian gets Julianna out of bed in the morning.

Or the way he makes his fingers into tickle puppets at the dinner table, instantaneously reducing all three children to hysterics.

Or the way he does voices when reading books to them.

Trying to separate my children’s father from my husband is counterproductive at best; unfair at worst. Here, at this season of our life together, we are the parents of young children. To pretend otherwise, even for a few minutes, belittles all that we hold dear. In a few years, we’ll be different people yet—homework helpers and bleacher cheerers. And ten years after that, we’ll have the house to ourselves (hopefully), and our task will be to find new ways and reasons to love each other in the quiet.

Marriage isn’t about staying connected to what brought us together. It’s about staying connected where we are now.

Published in: on March 29, 2010 at 5:40 am  Comments (7)  
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High Fidelity

She wrote her story anonymously for O Magazine—the story of a couple trying to put their marriage back together after the worst kind of betrayal.

Sandwiched among a series of pieces on alternative relationships, I nearly skipped over it, especially when it began by talking about the days when she was “the other woman” to a married man. But for some reason, I kept skimming. And then slowed down. And then began drinking it in, word by word by word. The raw honesty. The fact that despite the hit to the core of her being, she was sticking with it for the long haul.

But the real eye-opener came three-fourths of the way through the article. “I had to admit I was partly to blame,” she said, “not for Sam’s affair…but for the cloud of disappointment and annoyance that had become a permanent feature of our marriage. I had grown to resent him when our kids were babies—a time when his needs, even his love, felt to me like just one more tiresome burden.”

It was a shot in the gut, but it got worse. “How could I (look at him adoringly) when he neglected to call and tell me he’d be home late from work again? Or left his underwear in a wad behind the bathroom door again?…A habitual mild bitterness, a casual scorn, became my default attitude…”

That was me talking. Not the actual incidents—Christian’s very good about calling when he’s going to be late, and he’s a far tidier person than I am—but the resentment, the “habitual mild bitterness.”

And I realized how easy it is to filter out all the good and zero in on petty annoyances—stuff that isn’t even important. The only thing I worry about in marriage is how easy it is to grow apart, not because either of us is doing anything wrong, but because we don’t have time to focus on each other. It’s so easy to view my husband as a parenting partner, to resent it when I feel (rightly or wrongly) that I’m taking a disproportionate amount of the work. It’s so easy to stop paying attention to that which drew me to him in the first place.

“It is very hard to fall back in love with someone you know as well as you know a spouse after 12 years,” the anonymous writer says. Which serves as a reminder I need: Don’t wait till the spark is gone to decide that the marriage is the primary relationship in the family. Fidelity is bigger than not cheating on each other. It involves standing together, supporting each other’s endeavors. Fidelity means growing together—not parallel, but together. It means looking for and drawing out the best in each other. And just like everything else in life—like attitude, like habitual anger, like love—fidelity is a choice.

I choose love. Love of this man, and all the beautiful things he is:

 Forever.

Published in: on March 24, 2010 at 9:31 am  Comments (16)  
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For better or for worse (or not)

There’s a new series starting on NBC this week. It’s called “The Marriage Ref,” and it one-ups the rest of so-called “reality” TV by giving celebrities a chance to critique couples in real-life marital distress. One of the series promo spots boasts, “We’re gonna give couples the one thing they’ve always wanted: a winner!”
              …to read the full post, click here.

 Today I’m guest posting over at We Believe Blogs. And I’m kind of on a tirade. Head on over if you want to see what happens when I get up on my soapbox! ;)

Published in: on March 10, 2010 at 7:04 am  Comments (1)  

I Root for “Brangelina”

I’m rooting for Brangelina.

It goes without saying that relationships in Hollywood generally don’t last. Famous people, for some reason, seem to be pathologically incapable of long-term commitment—with the odd exception, of course.

I’m a super traditional kind of girl—the kind who got married for keeps, and who, by the grace of God, managed to find a guy who also got married for keeps. I don’t belittle the blessing, and I certainly don’t understate the importance of the values with which we were both raised. Like everyone else of my background, I get disgusted with the obnoxiousness of Hollywood hookups, breakups, and “marriages”—especially when actors and actresses start deliberately having kids together without getting married. Talk about setting children up for emotional damage.

And yet, there’s something about Brad and Angelina.

First, the disclaimer: It’s not about Brad. Mizzou claims him (even though he didn’t graduate); he’s a pretty boy extraordinaire, but I’m more a Hugh Jackman and Denzel Washington type, myself.

I think I started rooting for Angelina when I heard that she adopted a child from Cambodia. And then Ethiopia. And then of course, all the love triangle stuff started, and impossibly, improbably, and totally out of the cultural norm, Brad and Angelina created a family. A BIG family.

They’re not married, and I wish they were—but even so, look what they’ve created. Look at what they’ve done—refusing to be defined, puppet-stringed, or manipulated by the smut “journalism” industry, they deprived the paparazzi of the pictures (and associated money) that were inevitably going to follow the birth of their kids. And then they took the money and gave it away to someone who actually needed it.

Every week at the grocery store, some magazine claims it’s over—crowing about fights, rumored breakups, and so on. Triumphant, as if the tabloid-gobbling culture resents their success, and is determined to pull them down into the muck. And yet the more reputable sources indicate that everything remains just fine. How can you not root for that, in this day and age?

But most of all, I think I root for them because imperfect as they are as role models, they show themselves to be more down-to-earth than many Hollywood idols. They show themselves to have a real connection with what matters. They appear to have an innate understanding that it’s not enough to engage in political posturing and tossing out largess (however monstrous the amount) to the needy of the world—that they make a bigger difference by touching the face of Christ one on one, in the person of a child in need of a home.

Maybe I’m totally off base. But until someone convinces me otherwise, I’m in their corner.

Published in: on February 8, 2010 at 9:58 am  Comments (3)  
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The Sacred Cow

“Is it not possible for us to do with gender, sexuality, and reproduction what was long ago done with the stars? To realize that these are also secular areas…?”

So says Anne Rice in the conclusion to her book, Called Out of Darkness, her memoir about her flight from and return to Catholicism. She’s talking about the discovery that the earth revolved around the sun, and lamenting the Church’s consistent position on sexual issues.

It’s a common criticism, that Christians in general and the Catholic Church in particular are obsessed with matters of sex. Not that long ago, a man I know commented on “Life-Giving Love in an Age of Technology,” a pastoral letter recently approved by the U.S. bishops. His comment went something like: “Oh, so they’ve run out of poor and hungry to care for, so now they have to spend their time on THIS?”

Such arguments miss the point. It’s not either/or. It’s both/and—and anyone with a fair mind must admit, the Church does speak often and pointedly on many issues, striking across the political spectrum: war, health care, poverty, and yes, sexuality.

Painting sex as a secular issue rings false because our sexuality is the very core of our being. Who we are, how we look at the world—these are intimately connected with male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, etc. Abortion is high on the Church’s priority list not because the evil patriarchal bozos want to put “laws on my body,” as the bumper sticker says, but because there’s another body to be considered. Abortion is not about one woman’s body; it’s about two bodies, one nourishing the other. How can we see the heart beating beneath the woman’s ribs—that unique life, with its own DNA, its own blood type—and claim that it is a part of the mother, and can thus be disposed of?

And this is also why contraception gets such air play from the bishops—because hormonal birth control, at least, acts by multiple mechanisms, one of which is the hardening and thinning of the uterine lining, which makes it nearly impossible for the child to implant. (See here and here.)

No one wants to talk about this, because nobody wants to know how often that third function of hormonal birth control comes into play. If pro-life people had to confront this reality, it would force them to change. It’s easier to say, “Oh, it doesn’t happen often enough to worry about.”

In a broader sense, nobody wants to confront the fact that sex has a biological purpose, and mucking with that purpose is fraught with perils, both emotional and physical. I think everybody realizes that casual hookups are damaging to a person’s sense of trust in permanence. But the only way you can know you’re in a permanent relationship is to wait till marriage…and to view marriage as indissoluble.

The Gospel has always been at odds with the culture—in Biblical times no less than today. It’s easy to corrupt religion, I’ll grant, but when you take a thoughtful, balanced look at the Gospels—the languages, the cultures, the context—the implications spin out far beyond the actual words written in Scriptures. I can only skim the surface in a blog post; I’ve started and discarded four or five other related topics. Which just goes to illustrate that sexuality is intimately connected with matters of faith. Sorry, Anne. It’s not going anywhere.

Published in: on December 15, 2009 at 6:46 am  Comments (14)  
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