Mama’s On Live Radio! Quick, Time to Run Away!

Early in March, I participated in the local Children’s Miracle Network radiothon benefiting what we call in our house “Julianna’s hospital.” I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since, but I kept hoping I’d get my hands on all the photo files I wanted to share. But I finally decided to go with what I have. So here we go: My fifteen minutes of fame, mother-of-three style. :)

I pulled Alex out of school 15 minutes early so he could have the chance to be on the radio with me. The sky hunkered down black over our heads, but the rain held off until we were pulling out of the school parking lot. Then the heavens opened up and dumped. On the interstate, we managed to outrun it. Barely. It was a pretty wet walk from the car to the hospital, but we did manage to get under shelter before the downpour turned green and impenetrable with mere human vision.

I arrived at the radiothon with three kids under 6 and the promise of help from the organizers. In a word, it was hysterical.

Christian's reaction to this picture? "I'm telling you, we're gonna have trouble with this one!"

I did four interviews—eventually. But first, we sat around the couches and watched the first major severe weather of the year roll by, complete with a tornado warning, which moved the whole shebang into the hospital cafeteria for fifteen minutes. The kids passed the time eating crackers and fruit snacks provided by the staff. Fortunately, the twister went south.

It took me an interview or two to warm up. Alex ran the Batmobile on the floor, up the backs of the rollaround plush chairs, and around the back of the sound boxes lying on the tables—and then perched on my leg to talk into the microphone, so he could say he’d been on the radio, too. Julianna just wanted to spin the chairs around and around. Oh yes, and investigate the contents of various purses and laptop cases left on the floor by people who clearly were not aware of her presence in the vicinity. (What were they thinking? ;) ) Every deejay commented on how vivacious she was, by comparison to the story I was telling of a child on the verge of death (which sounds really melodramatic, but read the history and you’ll know she really was).

Christian tells me the mascots HATE having their tails pulled. T.J., my apologies.

Nicholas colored with Miss Missouri. T.J. (“Truman Junior”) showed up between interviews two and three, and my kids went crazy. They beeped his nose, hugged him, played with his tail. During the second interview, the kids started fighting, and I had barely started the fourth when Alex spotted plastic cups of candy on the table in front of me. “MOMMY!” he yelled, just as I began telling our story on live radio, “THEY HAVE ROLOS! CAN I HAVE A PIECE OF CANDY?” Hearing the word “candy,” the other two came running, and I was reduced to making jokes, trying to hold a microphone and unwrapping candy for three greedy pairs of hands. “I don’t think anyone’s eating dinner tonight,” I joked. And then Alex turned to me and whispered, with all the glee of a small child uncovering something scandalous, “Mommy,  guess what? Truman’s a PERSON!”

“How did you decide that?” I whispered back.

“He has a zipper!” Alex said.

So begins the unraveling of all the mystique of youth! ;)

We were supposed to be on the radio in the bottom half of the 3:00 hour. I figured we’d be home by 4:15, 4:30. Instead, we limped into the house five minutes ahead of Christian coming home from work. (And they sort of ate dinner, but not exactly.) But it was worth it when my next door neighbor asked for my autograph the next day. :)

(This Motherhood Moment shared with mama Kat’s Writers Workshop.)

Published in: on April 7, 2011 at 5:27 am  Comments (5)  
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Righteous

The other night, Christian and I watched “Righteous Kill.” For those who aren’t familiar with it, the movie stars Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino as New York police officers tied up in catching a serial killer who knocks off Bad Guys who got away with their crimes. The movie starts with DeNiro, a jaded, volatile fallen-away Catholic, confessing to the murders. So you know right away that he’s not the real culprit, and you spend the whole movie speculating who is.

 

It’s an engrossing, well-done movie, but… (Spoiler alert!) …in the end, who ends up being the real killer? Pacino, the “faithful Catholic.” Neither is this an unimportant side point in the story; faith, and the loss of it, is woven into the whole movie as a major subplot.

 

One of my biggest gripes with news and entertainment is that religion and religious people are always, always painted in a bad light. Halfway through this movie, I was trying to solve the mystery, and I thought, “Well, at least the devout Catholic guy isn’t the bad guy for a change…” Then suddenly I realized: oh, man, yes he is. Of course he is. Who else would they pick to vilify?

 

Not much suspense left in that one.

 

There is much that frustrates me about the pursuit of faith, or lack of it. People we refer to as “cultural Catholics” drive me nuts. Actually, anyone who calls him or herself Christian, or Jewish, or Muslim, but doesn’t integrate the faith into life, drives me nuts. How can you compartmentalize your faith like that? It’s like the world comes first, and then God—but only as long as He doesn’t inconvenience us. If you truly believe in God, in Heaven and Hell, in a just ending to an unjust world…how can you do anything other than put God first—or at least, struggle to do so? I don’t mean you should walk around spouting chapter and verse at every moment—that’s just annoying. But if you really believe what you say you believe, it ought to be visible in the way you live, in the choices you make. As Rich Mullins says, “Faith without works…it’s about as useless as a screen door on a submarine.”

 

I know people who are fallen away Catholics, who never took the time to really dig in and understand the Church’s teachings. I know people who haven’t fallen away, but who fuss about rules and incidentals without taking time to try to understand. It’s far easier to pass black and white judgment than it is to learn and understand the rich complexity of Catholic teaching. Catholicism takes a deeply thoughtful approach to the Bible and tradition, incorporating all of Scripture (not just the most sound-byte-y parts), as well as the context in which it was written: the languages, the cultures, the times. Even “rules” aren’t arbitrary, but are based in Scripture and faith. And the teachings themselves approach even the hairiest topics with compassion…even if those who represent the Church sometimes don’t.

 

And therein lies the problem: people. Sure, there are problems in the Church, as in any institution made up of human beings. I’m not trying to suggest that discussion should be closed off, that we should ignore pedophile priests or power-hungry bishops. Jesus challenged the religious establishment all the time; that’s why the Jewish leadership wanted him dead. But it does bother me that the blanket portrayal of religion in general, and my Church in particular, is so negative. Unfortunately, the zealots—on both sides—are the ones who get the press. No news is good news; conversely, good news is no news.

 

So in the end, all we hear about religion is money and corruption and zealots. And terrorists. But that’s not the real story. If it was, the institutions would have fallen apart generations ago.

 

What I would love is to see more books written like Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, which is a post-holocaust story published in 1960. There are imperfect clergy members there, too…in fact, all of them are quite imperfect…some of them even corrupt…but he also portrays the simple faith, without turning them into caricatures. I’ve never figured out how he did it, but I want to learn to emulate it.

 

I have much more to say on this topic, but for today, I think I’ve written quite enough.

 

Two weeks from tomorrow.

Published in: on March 4, 2009 at 2:07 pm  Comments (1)  

My First Time on the Radio

When I launched www.columbiadownsyndromesupport.com a couple of weeks ago, I asked everyone I knew to link to it and visit it. My mother is a state rep, and she has a distribution list of mammoth proportions, so she bcc’d the entire universe. Or at least, the entire 22nd District. J

 

I received an email from Bill Peterson, who is one of the radio personalities in Moberly at KWIX radio. He invited me to come on “The Doctor’s Office” program on Sept. 2nd.

 

I have been performing in public for years, but this was a new experience, and I was quite nervous. Christian impressed upon me the importance of having “talking points” and “staying on message.” Even in a friendly interview, as this one was, you can screw up and say stupid things that will come back to haunt you. He knows this because talking to the media is what he does day in and day out.

 

So, by the time my “media training” was done, I was quaking in my shoes. Once I got going I was confident that I would be fine—after all, I can talk about Down syndrome till I’m blue in the face. But …

 

…..

 

Okay, had to take a break there to deal with kid issues. Now that Julianna’s finished eating whatever scraps she could find on the kitchen floor…

 

The experience of being on the radio was very interesting. Bill gave me a set of ordinary-looking headphones with a mic attached. I couldn’t hear anything going on in the room while they were on my ears. I could, however, hear the radio—mostly through the left, for some reason, which gave the whole experience a surreal, off-balance effect. The mic was so close to my mouth that if I pursed my lips, they touched the foam mic cover. I pulled the phones out from my ears to say, “Bill, is this too close—?” but before I could finish, I heard his voice in the phones say, “Good morning and welcome to ‘The Doctor’s Office’!” Hastily I dropped them back on my ears, but through the whole interview I felt sure that I was going to pop “p”’s and that my every breath would fly out across the airwaves sounding like Darth Vader.

 

Bill tried hard to get people to call in, but I wasn’t surprised by a small response. DS is kind of a niche interest. We got four calls—the first two wanted “trading post,” which comes on right after “Doctor’s Office.” The third wanted to ask me if I treat my normal child different from my Downs child. Ah, there’s a question for another post entirely. The last one was a quite elderly woman who wanted to share that she had seen on Donahue several years ago that children with DS are very musical, and to encourage me to expose her to as much music as possible. Extensive exposure to music, of course, is inevitable in our house, but it was nice that she took the time to call.

 

Overall, I felt it went well, and now that I’m initiated, I won’t feel quite so nervous about trying again, perhaps here in Columbia. We picked up one new member to the site, and hopefully people heard the interview and will pass the word to others directly affected.

 

Today’s DS news is that—gasp—we’re finally going to the audiologist & ENT! That stupid clinic has rearranged our appointments three times since we first called in mid-JUNE (yes, that was three months ago), I was on the verge of going to St. Louis. We asked our neighbor, who has influence in the hospital, to intervene, and he got them to work us in today. The customer service in that audiology clinic is abysmal. If we’d had 1/10 this much trouble at a restaurant, we’d get our meal for free, and probably several meals’ worth of gift cards to boot. But of course, because it’s the medical field, they’ll keep us waiting, reschedule us without regard for the reality of a child who needs a nap, and get paid their full fee for making our lives miserable for three months. It’s enough to make a person jump on the health care reform bandwagon.

Published in: on September 4, 2008 at 5:55 pm  Leave a Comment  
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