I haven't written in about four months. I wish I had something interesting to write about. It's the day before Mother's Day. I'm giving myself an early Mother's Day present in the form of self-pampering. I have about seven things I tcould be doing at this time, but I'm blogging on my netbook while sitting at the dining room table. The past three weeks were crazy hard. My final proposal for my grad school class was due on April 30th. Lily's First Communion was May 3rd. My parents-in-law and sister-in-law came up for the First Communion. We had a party afterwards. And poor Luke had to be out of town for four days from the 23rd-26th of April, come home for the party, and turn around and leave again. I'm wiped from all this. I halfway wanted to go out today, but as the day progressed, I wasn't feeling it so much. I have a really hard time dealing with just being at home normally, but it feels so good just to sit for a minute. No one needs to be dressed. No one has to be anywhere. I took care of mowing the grass and weeding the garden, so I haven't been a total slug today. The weather has been yuck all day long anyway. Maybe this was God's Mother's Day gift to me so I could rest and not feel bad about it.

Preview

Hi everyone:

I'm trying to work out what I will be saying at Becky and Dan's wedding. This is a daunting task. I thought the best way to handle it would be to leave it up for public comment. Becky, this way you can preview it, too. Here's what I hope to say:

I was very grateful and flattered that Becky and Dan asked me to speak at this day, the most important day of their lives. Of course I immediately developed writer's block. Luckily, I rediscovered a book I had purchased a few years back, Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader. Father Nouwen was a Roman Catholic priest, an educator who taught at several seminaries and theological institutes prior to embarking on life-changing work with people with mental disabilities. Although Father Nouwen never married, he had beautiful insight into the nature of love. I would like to share some of his words with you today:

"Love asks for total disarmament...in love men and women take off all forms of power, embracing each other in total disarmament. When through the careful growth of their relationship men and women have come to the freedom of total disarmament their giving also becomes forgiving...their ultimate vulnerability becomes the core of their mutual strength. Power kills. Weakness creates. It creates autonomy, self-awareness, and freedom. It creates openness to give and receive in mutuality."

These words resonated with me, because they seemed so true. When you get married, you need to take off your battle armor. Relationships with other people-all relationships, not just dating relationships-make us world-weary. Even in the best of friendships or family relationships, one can have the tendency to think, "What is his or her angle? What does he or she want?" Marriage requires the total suspension of this judgment. Marriage should preclude holding a grudge against one's spouse, because there will be inevitable disappointments along the way. There will be times when minor offenses-improper folding of towels, forgetting to buy toilet paper, not replacing DVD's in their proper cases-will get on a spouse's nerves. The marriage will be an environment of perfect give and take.

Father Nouwen also noted that at the core of marriage is the idea of weakness and vulnerability. A similar notion is at the center of twelve step programs. In any of the "Anonymous" programs is the idea each person is weak, and the group together is strong because of its weakness. Each person make be weak and strong in different ways. The beauty of marriage is how spouses complement each other.

The passage I quoted also explains that, ultimately, in this environment of total trust, total vulnerability, and total weakness, the spouses can grow and achieve self-awareness. In this marriage the spouses can totally be themselves, more freely than they can be in the outside world. This complete openness should be liberating.

I wish Dan and Becky all the happiness in the world. May you be fully open to one another. May your weaknesses and strengths work together for the good of your union and of the world. In this marriage, may you together become the people God is calling you to be.

In praise of Michael Brandt

We have a snow day! By "we" I mean "I." My super-cool boss gave us the day off by about 5:15. But I sat immobile on the couch for about an hour after that, waiting for Michael Brandt, superintendent of Schools, to call off Newport Independent Schools. He did not. My kids' school system is close to the only one that is on a normal schedule in the Cincinnati metro region. Cincinnati Public Schools, Covington Independent Schools, and St. Xavier High School, infamous for staying open in blizzards, all closed. I'm sure this heralds the coming apocalypse. Still my poor children had to bundle up and go to school.

But how nice is that for me? Thank you, Michael Brandt. Thank you for giving me permission to watch a movie, if I want. Thank you for allowing me to go to the new SuperMegaKrogerville down the street from me without bringing Captain Uncooperative with me. Thanks for giving me a few hours without hearing, "Mommy?! Vincent hit me/bit me/pushed me,etc." or "Mommy?! I'm hungry!" Michael Brandt, you are my new hero! Hip, hip, HOORAY!

Ordinary Time

It's New Year's Eve. I'm not in the mood to go into a list of resolutions I might make for the upcoming year. I lack the follow-through to actually carry them out. Besides, my unoriginal resolution is always to lose my 40-50 lbs of nasty that accumulates around my middle. How tiresome. It's not as if every other chubby middle-aged woman in America makes that resolution. Why not make the resolution to try artisanal cheese or go sky-diving? What will happen is that for a week or two I go full-speed at the weight loss thing, then someone brings in brownies to school. So the logical thing would be to learn to love myself as a fatty. But I'm in the mood to make peace with my rotundness, either. And the other things I could improve, such as being more punctual or better organized just seem like a maternal part of my mind nagging the lazy teenage self that is blogging today. I want to tell my inner mom, "All RIGHT, all RIGHT. Fine, whatever," so I can go back to watching movies all day. So enough with the "new year, new life" pep talk.

This is my least favorite time of the year. What's so great about January or February? Not a blessed thing as I can see. In the Cincinnati metro region this is when we usually get our snow, not at Christmas. If we don't get snow, we usually have color-coordinated weather. The ground, the trees, and the sky are all a monochromatic gray-ish color. How utilitarian.

This is the time of the year that I start to look for little tiny things to anticipate. Good thing, too, since my big thing isn't going to happen after all. Here are some things to look forward to:

1. Luke and I are going to Pittsburgh for our friends' wedding on MLK weekend. I can't remember the last time we went away for a weekend without the children. I'm thinking it might have been in 2000, before we had kids.

2. My kids got a tent for Christmas, so I guess we can go camping.

3. I got two good cookbooks for Christmas, so I can try new recipes.

4. I have a sweet and thoughtful daughter who got me a pretty dishtowel from the Santa Shop at school.

5. Umm, well, there's always spring break.

6. And after spring break there's summer vacation.

As I said earlier, I'm not a fan of January or February. The holidays are never the shining wonder time that retailers want us to imagine them to be, but the time with family and friends is restful and fun. My day-to-day life is mostly pretty good, but to be certain the pace can take its toll. And I've got too short an attention span to be a fan of the repetitiveness of regular life.

If I had to make a resolution, then, I would resolve to find wonder in what is ordinary. I would resolve to bless the everyday moments of grace. To be certain each day is filled with grace. In my church we frequently sing the idea that "God woke me up this morning, and that's a miracle." It's easy for me to lose sight of the fact that breathing is a miracle, that trees are a miracle, that a good bowl of soup is a miracle, that my friends and family are a miracle. May I keep these thoughts throughout the year, and may I remember always to be grateful for small blessings.

Solstice

Today I needed to finish up some Christmas shopping. One of the items I needed to purchase could only be found at the Cincinnati Nature Center. I looked forward to going there. I figured that I would buy my items quickly and then let the kids play in the visitor's center while I read a book (Tweak, by Nic Sheff. It's a memoir of his addiction to crystal meth. I'm finding the bleaker the better right now). I thought I'd look at the panoramic view of the bird feeding area. What I didn't count on were the following:

I'm still sore from my operation, and I can only handle about an hour total of standing up. We went grocery shopping right before the Nature Center. So I hurt.

I didn't count on acoustic Christmas music on the speaker system. Of course I walked into "Silent Night." Later, it was "What Child is This?" There are way too many Christmas songs about babies, sleeping babies, lullabies for sweet, sleeping babies, etc. And the secular Christmas songs are annoying during normal years. This year, I really don't feel like rockin' around the Christmas tree OR having a holly, jolly Christmas. T'isn't the season to be jolly.

So the baby Jesus songs are on the stereo system, and I'm borderline weepy already. Then my kids call me over to the bird viewing area. "Hey, Mom-Look at all these birds! They're so pretty! They're different from what we see at home! This is so cool! I wish we lived by here!" This makes me smile. I have successfully indoctrinated them. My dad would be so proud of me, if he were here.

Wait-no fair. Dead family member double whammy. I was sad about the baby. Then, I thought about my dad. I'm bummed that he barely got to know my nephew Christopher, who was a baby when Dad died. I think it's totally unfair that he missed my graduation from grad school the first time, my wedding, my niece, Kate, my two children, and his soon to be three great grandchildren. And, looking at the birds, I think he would have loved going to the Nature Center with me and the kids. He would have taken Vincent and Lily fishing. They would have been so happy together.

But there was another dimension to my sadness in the moments I sat in the bird viewing area. Anything I say might sound like cliche, but here goes: The starkness of the trees, the cold weather, the grey sky-they're all beautiful in their way. This dark, bleak midwinter is sucktastic. But there must be some lesson I need to learn from it.

I sat and cried for a few minutes. Then my children asked to walk on the boardwalk path around the pond. I agreed. We hit the trail. The cold was bracing. There was a little bit of snow on the boardwalk. Vincent and Lily made snowballs and spent about ten minutes throwing them at the two frozen patches on the pond. We watched four adult ducks gliding through the pond, graceful as ballerinas in the Nutcracker. I thought about solstice. I'm not a pagan, but it seems like such a comforting holiday. If I understand correctly, the idea of solstice is that one celebrates the rebirth of light on the longest night of the year. To me, the celebration seems to say, "The world can be no darker than tonight. Let's rejoice in the fact that, although it seems far away, the light is coming back to us gradually."

Thank you for the days

I haven't posted in a while. Let me just say that my fall was a whirlwind. So many good things happened. For starters, I fell in love-with my husband. It felt as if we were in our twenties again. We did some crazy things. For instance, we went to see Wilco on a Monday night in Columbus. My mother watched the kids for us. After all was said and done we got to bed at about three AM. I usually wake up for school at five. It was crazy. But it felt so good to be young again.

The upshot of all of this was that I unexpectedly ended up pregnant again, as an almost thirty-nine year old. To be sure, I wasn't feeling it at the time. I thought,"Oh no-I've ruined my life." I was so worried about how we would manage. We have a small, cluttered house. We have small cars that work for a family of four. I was slated to start graduate school in January. I didn't know how we would begin to make this work. Early on, I just thought of this as a catastrophe. I had just found my groove as a mom with school-age kids. We were hiking, having adventures, going places without diapers or pull-ups. It felt good, but it was all coming to an end.

But by the beginning of the second month of this pregnancy, I began to feel hopeful. I could almost imagine cuddling a tiny newborn in my arms. I daydreamed about experiencing this baby's milestones. It has been so long since my children were babies that I have to strain to remember what it was like to have a baby. This was a new beginning. My husband and I were in love again, and this baby was a reminder of how happy we were. My belly began to get bigger, and I made the transition into maternity clothes. Being pregnant began to seem normal and wonderful.

The last day of normal was December 17th. I skipped choir practice that night to bake cookies so I'd have gifts to give my kids' teachers. My hips hurt, but I felt resourceful. I also felt happy because Friday was the last day of school before Christmas vacation. I had a pretty new (well, slightly used) outfit from Once Upon A Child: black velvet maternity pants, a red tee-shirt, and a red cardigan embellished with a row of red sequins. I felt pretty and happy. My husband was coming with me to an ultrasound appointment to screen for chromosomal abnormalities.

I had to scramble to get to the appointment. My doctor's office had called the month before to say that I had an appointment at 1 on the 18th. They neglected to mention that it would be at the hospital. So I drove to the doctor's office early only to find out that I needed to rush to the hospital. My husband met me there. We sat through genetic counseling, after which I thought, "Okay, so our odds are pretty good, really. We only have a one in 90 or 96 percent chance of some genetic problem. I'll stop worrying." We waited for an available ultrasound room. I wasn't worried about the baby; I was thinking about what I needed to get done for Christmas.

The ultrasound began as all my other ultrasounds did. My giant fibroid (which was there for both my other pregnancies) obscured the view of the baby. Then the tech saw the baby. Then, out of nowhere, she said, "I'm sorry; there's no heartbeat. Let me get the doctor." Before I could process the situation, a doctor came in, saying, "No, there's no heartbeat. Let's call your OB-GYN to see what he wants to do." So then, bam, the OB-GYN is on the phone, asking me, "Have you eaten today? If you haven't we can get you in for the D&C right now. You've eaten? Okay, well, you can't eat after midnight. You'll get a D&C tomorrow. We'll just clean it all out." Sure, it's just some gunk in my womb. No big. It's like cleaning out the fridge, right?

All of this is going on right in the middle of Christmas preparations, the "most wonderful time of the year." While my daughter is at a Christmas party for her after school program, I'm home pondering my dead child. I can't stop thinking about what I did wrong. Why wasn't I happier about being pregnant when I first discovered that I was pregnant? Why did I think about all the hardship this would cause me? When my mother was not initially supportive in finding out about the pregnancy, I said, "Well, maybe at my next ultrasound there won't be a heartbeat." I was angry at her for not being kind. I wasn't really saying that I didn't want a baby. I was trying to make her feel bad. If only I could take back those words. I shouldn't try to hurt my mom that way. I shouldn't have deliberately tried to make her feel bad. And for certain I didn't want my baby to ever think that I didn't want her. I know in the logical part of my brain that the miscarriage is just nature's way of making sure that a child who would be too unhealthy to survive ex utero would not be brought into the world. It's a tidy solution to a problem. It's as common as oxygen, really. But I can't help feeling that she didn't understand how much I loved her, so she left to be where she would be appreciated.

Until I miscarried, I didn't know how many people lose children. Think about all the children who die of preventable diseases and hunger in the world. We here in the easy and comfortable parts of the planet don't give the poor a second thought as they die from malaria and starvation. Here, too, in the easy and comfortable parts of the world, children die. What I am finding so interesting and comforting is that as my family suffers through this, other people come out of the woodwork to tell us their stories. A friend of mine at church said, "If you meet women with two or three kids, chances are they've had a miscarriage along the way." She had one. My mother had one. One of my sisters had one or two. My niece had one. When I told my principal at school, she told me that she had two miscarriages. Beyond the many women who have miscarried, I have spoken to people in the past two days who have experienced stillbirth, who have lost babies ex utero, and a woman who lost an 18-year-old son. When I told the woman that her situation seemed much harder than mine, she said, "Oh, but I got to have him for 18 years. I try now to live the life he would want me to live." There is comfort in knowing that others understand my sorrow.

I am grateful to the staff at the hospital who tended to my D&C. When I found out on Friday that the baby was dead, the hospital staff seemed brusquely efficient. I went in for the operation the next day to find out that I needed to go through labor and delivery, past women trying to deliver their live babies. I cried, sobbing wordlessly I as handed my forms to the nurses at the front desk. The nurses there were emissaries of Heaven, I am certain. A lovely young receptionist took my hand and said, "I am so sorry. We will take care of you." A nurse named Pam found me a quiet, solitary room away from the laboring moms. She and Heather, the nurse who assisted in the operation, made sure that I understood that the baby was dead, because I had made the mistake of reading other people's ultrasound urban legends on the internet. Pam wanted to be sure that I could accept what needed to happen before I signed my consent. I am grateful to Debbie the anesthetist, who made sure I was comfortable. I am grateful to Dr. Bhatia, who showed respect for the situation, not treating it as a simple housecleaning procedure.

I am grateful to my friends and family who have all offered to help. Thank you, Jim and Carolyn, for watching our children on Saturday. Thank you, Mom, for being so sympathetic. I am sorry about the cruel thing I said to you. Thank you Judy, Karen, Becky, Drew, and Kathleen for offering your help. Thank you Jonni and Justin, for listening.

When I look back on this situation, if I am honest with myself, I can be grateful for the time we had with Peach (which is what we took to calling our baby, based on the size she grew to be. The pregnancy books would say, "At this time your baby is the size of a bean/prune/etc. Our baby grew to be the size of a peach. Hence the name.) Peach made me feel hope again. Peach reminded my husband of how much he loved me. Vincent was certain that Peach would be the playmate who would always want to play with him. Lily was very solicitous of my health and Peach's development. Peach reminded me that I still was young, not middle-aged, because I could be the mother of a baby. Peach taught me to be open to possibilities.

Maybe Ray Davies of the Kinks said it best in his song, "Days":

Thank you for the days
Those endless days those sacred days you gave me
I'm thinking of the days
I won't forget a single day believe me
I bless the light
I bless the light that shines on you believe me
And though you're gone
You're with me every single day believe me.

Thank you, Peach. I will always love and remember you.

This is the first full week of Autumn that we are entering, here in the northern hemisphere. I'm writing at 7:12 on a Sunday night and the sunset (already) is yellowy-orange. I love autumn: leaves falling, pumpkins, Halloween, crisp air, all that stuff. Still, however much I love autumn, I always feel a tinge of melancholy at its onset. I've already made my list of things I love to shore up my sagging mood. I have been told that cultivating gratitude helps in this situation. And I have to admit that at my core I'm self-centered (aren't we all?). I'm wont to complain about the problems I have. Yet I if I can be honest with myself, I must admit that any trials in my life pale in comparison to what 90% of the world goes through. I'm more blessed than cursed. Here's a list of why I know that I am lucky:

1. I have people who support and love me.

Any time I have problems, I can talk to my husband, my mom, my sisters, my brother, my in-laws, my brothers and sisters-in-law, and of course, my friends.

2. I have NPR

When I feel lonely, sad, irritated at having to enter grades into the computer at work, I can go online to NPR's site and find something interesting or enlightning to listen to while I toil (no, this is not a pledge-week testimonial).

3. I have the job I was born to do:

I love Spanish; I love doing creative things; I love kids; I love to sing. How lucky am I that I get to teach Spanish with all academic freedom I need while also doing music at school masses?

4. I am no longer doing a job that I hate:

I am thoroughly convinced that there is no good reason to hate what you do for a living. Well, maybe that's easier said than done in a recession. But I so don't miss being a planner in zoning services. Three years away from my time as a planner, I have to laugh at the crazy idea that I could have ever been successful in a job that entailed measuring the area and height of proposed signs and counting trees and parking spaces on a site plan (and, look, I don't want to cast aspersions on anyone, but what kind of person a) enjoys and b) is good at this?)

4. There is more than enough water to drink in Northern KY:

Ask people from Colorado, Florida, Montana, California about how great it is to live in a state that doesn't have a lot of water. It may not be a normal thing to bring up, but I used to be a planner. I think about these kinds of things. Most of the rest of you don't think about signs on buildings or billboards, I'd bet.

5. I lived in Paris for awhile when I was in my twenties.

6. I lived in Florida for three months and went to the beach whenever I could.

7. I am grateful for the collosal errors in judgement I have made:

These may be too numerous to count. But I believe in a song I used to listen to, from a nineties-alternative band called Poi Dog Pondering. One of the lines in the song went, "Would our paths cross if every great loss had turned out a gain?" If teaching had worked out for me the first time I tried it, in the nineties, I wouldn't have gone to UC for planning and met all of my friends from planning school. If I hadn't spent five years in a job that made me miserable, I wouldn't have had to courage to go back into teaching. If the principal at my urban junior high school had decided to let me come back for a second year, I wouldn't have found my dream job. The chorus of the song goes, "Thanksgiving for every wrong move." Amen, I say to you!

8. I am grateful that neither of my children is at an on-site child care facility with me this year, for the first time in three years.

I like having some time to de-compress after I'm done with work. My paid employment and my unpaid employment leave me frazzled and hassled. I'm so glad to not have to move jarringly from one into the other. The other benefit to this is that I have the drive into school in the morning. Covington is its prettiest in the morning.

9. I am grateful for the fact that I'm finally being to feel comfortable with who I am:

You know, for the most part, anyway. I mean, there are still moments of doubt and panic, moments when I'm embarassed with who I am. Yesterday, for instance, I felt one. I went to Barnes and Noble at Newport on the Levee to kill some time. I was reading aloud to Vincent. The book was making me laugh, so I was laughing. I don't laugh quietly; I'm a loud person anyway. So this European-accented woman stage whispered to her daughter, "Let's go outside. She's too loud." This threw me into some junior-high-ish crisis of self-esteem where I felt vaguely Roseanne Barr-ish. In social situations where I feel that I'm floundering, I see myself as fat, loud, and embarassingly working-class. Of course, none of these is bad, actually. Now that I think about it, what's wrong with being fat? As for loud, yeah, well, I can probably outsing that snotty Eurowitch any day of the week. I have a phenomenal speaking voice, and I'd lay odds I'd read any book with more dramatic flair than she and her bland, non-specific European accent could do. And as far as working-class goes, too bad for you if you disdain people for working honestly. Maybe your lazy European tuchis doesn't have to work, but I WORK FOR A LIVING. AM I LOUD ENOUGH FOR YOU NOW, YOU PRETENTIOUS SNOB? IF YOU WANT QUIET, DON'T GO INTO A BOOK STORE ON NEWPORT ON THE LEVY, STUPID!!! AND STAY OUT OF THE CHILDREN'S SECTION.

10. I am grateful that I am not saying this things in real time to Eurowitch:
I am still a chicken. All I said to her in real life was, "Sorry."

11. I am grateful that you all like me despite my neroses.

12. I'm grateful that Luke, my amazing husband, took me and the kids to Natural Bridge in Kentucky for Labor Day weekend:

It rained the whole time we were there. Here's a picture of all of us together. We look like drowned rats. There were only camouflage rain ponchos in the adult sizes at the gift shop, so I look hunter-ish.

13. I am grateful that the folks at Blogger let me do this:

It makes me feel better to be able to write.

Happy first week of autumn, everyone!