Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 100

Early Morning: Taking stock on the cusp of a new year

Sliver Moon Sunrise II (Photo credit: puliarf)

It’s quiet outside this morning, and the slim sliver of cream-colored moon, its remainder a charcoal disc, lounges in a straight line with two bright stars in the eastern sky. Last night was yet another bad night in a month-long string of bad nights (where, oh where did my lovely easygoing baby go? Is this payback for seven easy months?), but I have to choose between half an hour more of sleep and a little quiet soul food time, here on the deck in the cool air while . I need this time, as much as I need the sleep.

Today begins the Big Three first days of school. Nicholas goes to preschool this morning; Julianna has meet-the-teacher night after dinner. Tomorrow it’s Alex’s turn, starting second grade, the big sacramental year. And Thursday it’s Julianna’s turn at last. She’s been asking for the bus a dozen times a day since I got her off the summer school bus for the last time.

As quiet goes, it’s not really all that quiet. We’re too close to a major artery, and even at 5:45 a.m., even as far from the city center as we are, a smattering of cars runs up and down it. And if I focus on the quiet, I still can hear the interstate. But it’s quiet enough for now.

I feel scattered lately, my drive and focus splintered in dozens of directions. For several years, I’ve spent a good deal of energy trying to make sure I consistently increased my blog traffic. Watching what topics people responded to, tackling bigger and more important topics. But I wore myself out. I realized I was spending so much time on this outlet than the numbers justified. I feel bad, now that the numbers are down along with the posts, and I feel like I’m letting you all down. But I had to let go. I miss the numbers, the knowledge of how many people I was reaching, but my family is most important. Who knows? Maybe in the next couple of weeks I’ll discover new energy and focus. But maybe I’m simply shifting priorities on a larger scale. In any case, it feels right and proper, and for the first time in several years, I don’t feel addicted to the stats meter.

The sky is getting brighter, rendering the moon faded and the stars (planets?) dull. Reminding me that the clock is ticking forward. My skin tightens against the whisper of a breeze.

So many things in my mind: the phone call from a family starting down the road we’ve walked with Julianna for five years. Julianna triumphantly and enthusiastically shouting letters off a sign at her aunt yesterday–lower-case letters, no less!–the IEP meeting tomorrow, and how to work out babysitting–another lost day of writing and oh, my goodness, I have to focus today; I can’t keep putting off the writing forever, those deadlines are looming larger every moment, and writing’s going to have to wrestle back to #1 for a week or two. Don’t think about how much there is to do.

Maybe it’s time to leave this deck, light enough now that I can see the sycamore grove pale yellow-green and brown for lack of rain, leaves turning fully two months before they should. The eastern sky glows wispy salmon now, and the stars are gone, but the moon still hovers, a ghost of its former self. God get me through these next couple of weeks, and I promise I will somehow make time regularly to get out away from the noise, and simply be with you again.

What A Bad Week Looks Like

abject vociferations [iPad wallpaper] (Photo credit: undergroundbastard)

I completely lost it last week.

Twice.

The first time was on the heels of a horrible dream, one of those that should have served to make me unfathomably grateful for the gift of my life.

Instead, by naptime, I was screaming at the top of my lungs. Not shouting. Screaming.

That was bad enough. Worse still was the fact that it happened again three days later. At breakfast. Only this time, I wasn’t screaming. I was wailing, in tears, delivering a Shakespeare-worthy monologue about how I cannot do it all, they have got to help, I set out to clean one thing and by the time I turn around someone’s left one or two more messes. Nobody listens when I talk, I have to issue every single instruction five times per child (and though that sounds like an exaggeration, I’ve counted, and it isn’t), and only when I escalate to shouting does it actually get followed, and look at this horrible mess in the kitchen, that’s been sitting here three days, and look how it’s taken us FOUR DAYS to get the upstairs clean, and I AM NOT YOUR SERVANT! Families help each other! You’ve got to start helping me! And (barely-restrained expletive) why am I even bothering to talk, when the only one who understands me is the one who’s not the problem?

As a parent, you know it’s bad when the madhouse is silent, and everyone’s in the room. When no one will meet your eye. When your seven-year-old starts weeping because he feels so bad for hurting you. I had to sit down and pull him on my lap and have an adult moment with him, explain that life is particularly difficult right now because I’m way overcommitted, and I’m frustrated because the other three are so little that they’re really needy, and there just isn’t enough of me to go around, and I’m really not mad at him, I’m just frustrated.

After that (in)auspicious start to the day, we loaded up and went to cardiology. It was our…let me stop to count…no, I can’t remember, let me go check my calendar…ninth appointment in four days, three of them medical in nature (the rest were lessons, wedding meetings, school evaluations, etc.)

The last time we visited cardiology, it warn’t pretty, and I couldn’t imagine doing it with a needy baby at naptime on top of everything else. So our sitter came to help corral the masses and then followed us home. And, because I knew there was a good chance she’d hear about Mommy’s meltdown from the kids, I thought I’d better give her the, ahem, cliff notes version, the one in which I flipped out because of the mess in the kitchen I haven’t been able to attack all week.

After I confessed, I went to work.

Half an hour later, she poked her head in the office. “I’m going to do the dishes,” she said. “Just because the kids are eating lunch, and I’m not doing anything anyway.”

I nearly cried. But after that act of kindness, things didn’t feel so hopeless anymore. The mountain only looked enormous, not insurmountable.

It’s been a soul-stretching kind of summer. I’ve learned my limits, in a big way. Or maybe I should say, I still don’t know how much I can do, but I know how much I can’t. I’ve tried to make sure the only image my kids have of me is not the one where I’m barricaded behind the computer telling them no, we can’t (fill in the blank), Mommy’s working. We’ve gone on field trips every week, we’ve done some chores…though clearly not enough to stop the slow slide of the house into a state even I can’t stand. It’s been a good summer, in many ways, but this pace can’t be sustained, and that truth informs much of the writing I’m doing now, for my new book on the Beatitudes. Not to mention making me skittish about next year’s editorial calendars.

This summer has been a reality check. Every so often I need a reminder of my own brokenness, my own sinfulness, lest I get complacent. The sick feeling in my stomach during those two meltdowns, the knowledge of the depth of my sin, well, it’s good for me, but not particularly comfortable to face.

Prune me, Lord, because I never want to face that look on my kids’ faces again.

Sunday Snippets

Time for another edition of Sunday Snippets, hosted by RAnn of This, That and the Other Thing.

This week’s contributions for me include the immediate aftermath of a bad dream; an unexpected reflection on Julianna inspired by our school supply shopping; some random (hopefully cute and funny) tidbits about the kids, and a fiction prompt titled Phoenix.

Head over to see what’s on everyone else’s mind this week!

Fiction Friday: Phoenix

Sometimes in the night, Micah allowed his mind to go exploring the world that used to be, the world that surely still existed beyond the overcrowded bunks reeking of rotting straw, beyond barbed wire and hunkering smokestacks. He longed for the peace and solitude of his study, the smell of Esther’s cooking curling beneath the door.

The lights in the barracks came on at 4:30, banishing delusion. This was reality: the sighing, the shuffling of countless worn shoes, the frigid blast snaking toward them as they prepared to stand at attention for an hour and a half.

Eli labored to his feet and leaned on the bunk, wheezing. Micah caught his son’s arm. “It’s bad this morning?”

Eli shrugged.

Worry gnawed Micah’s belly. “Come, my son,” he said urgently. “They’ll kill you.”

A rasp: “At least it would be over.” But Eli leaned on his father’s arm and struggled outside.

It hurt to remember the boy Eli had been, compared to the broken man he was now, his faith shattered by brutality. Micah could hardly blame him. He wasn’t sure why he still clung to faith; surely Adonai had abandoned them. Every day, it seemed, another face was missing, another victim of the squat building they all tried to ignore. If the gritty particles floating in the air had once been a man they had worked beside, prayed with, it didn’t help to know. They would all end up there sooner or later. More likely sooner, if the rumors were true, and the Allies were coming.

“Fall in for medical inspection!”

This was new. “What’s happening?” Micah hissed as they shuffled forward.

“They need workers for the munitions plant,” the word filtered back through the line. “Better food. Less crowding!”

Hope flitted through the crowd. A chance to escape the waiting crematorium? All around him, lips moved in silent prayer.

Eli would not be chosen; his asthma made that certain. Micah passed through the inspection line without a hitch; as they shoved him toward the far door, he glanced wildly around the room. Eli was nowhere to be seen.

Outside, the guards shoved him toward a freight car waiting on the line. He saw Eli in another line, a line shuffling toward another building, a building many entered, and none exited.

Heedless of the guards, he hurried across the distance. “Eli!” He gripped his son’s arm.

Eli smiled sadly. “It’s all right, Abba,” he said. “At least it’ll be over.”

His fingers dug into the rough, worn fabric of the prison coat, and suddenly he knew what to do. Micah fumbled with the buttons of his coat, the coat stitched with the number the guards were expecting. “Take your coat off,” he hissed.

Eli stared at him with wonder as his father shoved him toward the transfer line. “Go, my son,” he said. “Don’t look back. Go. Live. And find the beauty in the world again.”

For a moment, as Eli ran toward the waiting car, Micah saw him as he once had been: carefree, secure, certain of the goodness of the Lord.

Micah closed his eyes against the fine rain of ashes falling upon his face.

*

When I started trying to think of ways to portray life rising from the ashes, I tried and tossed a lot of ideas before I suddenly thought of the concentration camps. What if someone gave his or her life to allow someone else to live?

I’m way over the word count, mea culpa, and clearly this story could use some fleshing out. In the meantime, critique me!

Random Tidbits For A Wednesday

1.

You know what the worst part about having four kids is? Corralling the clothes. The ones that SAY 5T, but MEAN 3T. The ones that SAY 3T, but mean 5T. The ones that still fit, so you leave them in the drawers till they don’t, and by the time they don’t, you can’t figure out where the box they’re supposed to be stored in is. I have eight or nine big Sterilite and Rubbermaid boxes stacked in various closets, marked with numbers that don’t necessarily correspond to the size inside. Then I think, “But whatever happened to that one outfit…?” And I pore through closets, tossing things hither and yon, and I can’t find it. Until the season is nearly over, and I discover the missing box or trash bag (there have been a few of those, too). I’ve tried so hard to keep the kids’ clothes organized, and it continually flummoxes me.

2.

My mom, now–my mom had old chicken boxes. I don’t mean boxes that held chicken pieces, I mean boxes that held chickens. The ones we used to get from MFA every spring, with holes in the sides and fuzzy yellow babies inside, cheeping madly. I don’t know how she managed to make them clean enough to use for cothes storage, but she did. And whenever we needed new clothes we went downstairs and pulled a box off the shelf.

I’d really like my mother to tell me it wasn’t as simple as I’m remembering. I’m quite sure my kids will never, ever remember the process of finding new clothes simple.

3.

Nicholas loves to play games. He wants to play all the games big people (i.e., Alex) play. Which means this summer Alex has been “teaching” him Connect 4 and…are you ready for this?…chess. They’re great partners, because Nicholas doesn’t care about rules, strategy or winning, and so he never gets mad that Alex wipes up with him. But considering Alex isn’t the best loser in the world, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing!

3.

Speaking of those two. Have a load of this.

I call this the angel on my shoulder-devil on my shoulder picture. But they have their costumes and poses mixed up.

4.

Speaking of Nicholas, the other day we were talking at the dinner table about an acquaintance who used to be in the seminary. “Wasn’t he going to become a priest?” Christian asked, and I shrugged. Julianna began grunting frantically and beating on her chest as if to say “My turn! My turn!”

“You want to be a priest?” I asked her, mouth twitching.

She looked at me like I was crazy, then shook her head. And across the table, quietly, Nicholas said, “I want to be a priest.”

As I’ve said before, I can’t decide whether he’s destined to be the priest or the GQ model of the family. It’ll be interesting to find that out as he gets older.

5.

One of the services we receive through our county is “home-based support,” i.e. babysitting for kids with special needs. It’s been a godsend these last 5 years, and one of our providers recently had her last babysitting gig with us. After Christian and I came home, we were all standing around talking–about her future, about how much the kids love her, how much she loves the kids. “They all have such different personalities,” she said. “Julianna’s like, stealth hug girl! She’s so quiet, and then she just attacks!”

Christian and I laughed hard, because we’ve both been on the receiving end of those. “She’s just devious,” Christian said.

6.

We’ve had a crazy summer full of weekly field trips, which has really mitigated the boredom of being stuck inside for weeks on end, imprisoned by 105-degree temperatures. The picture of the boys above was taken Friday night at a Chinese Lantern Festival. I’d love to share more pictures (I love our new camera!), but the file sizes are enormous, so I’ll just have to make do with the welcome dragon from the entrance:

7.

Have I mentioned that Michael has a random blond streak?

(Why yes, I am doing my 7QT post on Wednesday, thanks for noticing. And now I’m committed to writing that fiction piece for Friday…)

Confounded by a Primary Composition Notebook

School Supplies Pencils Erasers August 07, 20103 (Photo credit: stevendepolo)

Early Friday morning, we loaded up the van and headed for Target, armed with three school supply lists and Christian’s iPhone to calculate whether it’s better to buy 18 small glue sticks or 9 large ones.

I had compiled the three lists into one so we’d know total numbers without having to cross-check lists, but questions kept arising, and I’d have to refer back to one list or another. Filling the boys’ was pretty straightforward, but as we picked items off the shelf for Julianna, I found myself for the first time really contemplating the disparity between her and her soon-to-be classmates.

There are things on Nicholas’ preschool list that he can use, and she, a kindergartener, can’t.

There are things on Julianna’s list that made me stop, kerflummoxed. A primary composition notebook? Really? She’s still in the scribble-all-over-full-sheets-of-paper stage. A composition notebook is a very poor use of money for her.

I thought back. Yes, of course, Alex wrote in one of those notebooks. It’s a perfectly reasonable item to place on a kindergarten list.

It was just that I hadn’t really processed how far delayed Julianna is. I’ve consistently said she’s really close to on-target in her understanding–she knows letters and colors, for instance, and she can count to five and sometimes higher. It’s just her speech, I said, that makes people think she’s so much farther behind than she really is.

But a primary composition notebook?

“You’re the one who said you wanted her to be included more,” Christian reminded me; in other words: Don’t overthink the list, let her be like her peers. And he’s right, of course.

It just drew the distinction in a way I wasn’t quite prepared for.

Last night as I helped her brush her teeth, Alex came into the bathroom. He’s far too tall now for the stool Christian made for him, the stool both Julianna and Nicholas have to use to reach the sink. But tonight, for some reason, he climbed up beside his sister, reached across her for a cup. Julianna turned her head, gave him a big goofy grin, and put her arm around him. She stuck it at a right angle to her body, and wrapped Alex’s waist.

His waist.

They are less than two years apart.

Afterward, I came downstairs and faithfully copied her school calendar into my planner, just like I do for Alex, just like I do for Nicholas. There were things I found exciting. Movie nights. Parent teas, a fancy dinner on Valentine’s Day for the kindergarteners.

And yet I’m scared. Intimidated. Our first public school. Julianna’s first foray into the real world, where she’s going to interact with the un-walled-off population of the world without us around to guide and protect her.

(That’s not really true; we sent her to children’s liturgy by herself yesterday, and she did great–came back all by herself, just like any other kid. But still.)

The week before Alex started kindergarten, I was awash with excitement for him. Today, my feelings are much more ambiguous. It’s poignant. Bittersweet. Kind of nerve-wracking.

I’m sure she’ll continue to leave a string of touch points behind her, as she always has. I’m sure she’ll charm everyone. But it’s a different experience this time. Alex was ready to fly the coop. I knew it, placidly, comfortably. Julianna’s ready, too–at least, she thinks she is. But I’m nervous about pushing her out of the nest.

On, In, Around

I’m sitting in the back of the van with the kids, watching Christian talk to his new wife up front. Out of nowhere, Nicholas glibly recites an entire line of some REM song with a lot of words, and I think, Uh-oh. I head forward and lean between the front seats to tell Christian we really have to watch our language now, and he turns to me briefly. “Stop interrupting!” he snaps. “We’re trying to have a conversation up here!”

Soul-slapped, I stumble back to the back seat. I know better than to interrupt. How rude am I? No wonder my kids interrupt my conversations all the time. And then whipped-puppy rises up in a howl of outrage and pain. Wait a minute. That’s supposed to be me up there.

There’s a touch on my elbow, a warm hand shaking me gently. “Kate,” I hear my husband’s voice muffled through the earplugs. “It’s quarter of six. Are you going to get up?”

I stir and remove my earplugs as the world shifts around me. I want to roll over and fling myself into the warm embrace, to prove that I’m still beloved, still valued, still the only one. But Christian goes on. “He’s kind of crying,” he says. “You want me to go get him?”

At certain points in a married couple’s life, there’s no need for proper names. I don’t hear anything, but there’s no doubt about which of our three boys is under discussion.”Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

I settle into the nursing chair, closing my eyes to feel the first cool breeze in over two months coming in the open window, bearing the roar of the interstate and a low-grade hum, birds twittering, a scattered few crickets that have managed to hang on through the drought. I feel the textured knit cushion against the backs of my legs. And then a big eight-month-old with chubby legs and a voracious appetite is handed into my arms, making noises that make it clear he thinks my breasts are the only things standing between him and certain, instantaneous annihilation.

Michael nurses. Christian crawls back in bed and falls almost instantly asleep. And the world is again as it should be.

Sunday Snippets

Sunday Snippets time again over at RAnn’s place! Come on over and see what else is going on!

I missed last weekend; here’s a sample of what happened with me while I was gone:

A Letter To Age Twelve

Henri Nouwen pops up again in The Beauty of Life and Dark

My NFP week post

And a fiction offering.

7 Quick Takes: An Update on Kids and Weather

___1___

As of Thursday morning, the scales read 141-point-(something, I was too stunned to remember). I have now grazed a weight I haven’t seen since pre-pregnancy with Julianna, six years ago. (Fist pump.)

___2___

Alex spent an hour and a half yesterday morning in the lab of a soil scientist at the university, doing “experiments” and learning about electrical charges of clay. For a long time, he’s shown an interest in science and how things work–encouraged by his daddy, who often wishes he’d pursued science himself. Late last school year, Alex and a friend started “studying” the dirt on the playground. Christian cooked up this very special field trip as a result.

___3___

Nicholas and I have been having fun lately. Mostly–we still have moments where we butt heads, but I think I’ve finally found the perspective I needed to turn things around. Last weekend he was wowing grandparents and cousins with his vocabulary: he went tearing down the lawn to the low fence at the edge of the lake where his grandparents live, and stood staring out at the scene, then came running back to say, “Gamma, the lake is beautiful.” She kept marveling over it all weekend, and it made me look at him in a different light.

___4___

Am I a bad mom because I repeat Nicholas’s speech foibles? He can say “r”‘s, but not consistently. He says “kie” for “car” and “aye” for “are.” And he can’t say “th” at all. So we get “I tie-ing to faw down!” and “Aye you going to wide in the kie?” So cute.

___5___

I can’t believe it’s time to buy school supplies. Julianna has an eval this week–something new they’re trying at the public schools. The whole process of starting kindergarten is so different this time, it’s like doing it for the first time. And even more because we still don’t know what’s going on in that little brain most of the time. Maybe we need to take her at her word: according to her signs and rudimentary words, she wants a) Signing Times videos, b) carousel rides, c) the pool (but she won’t get in when we go; she just wants to sit on the steps). She’s driving us nuts with the carousel: “kee-yoh,” she calls it.

___6___

Speaking of Julianna, here’s the newest development in her speech: she says everything three times: “Ba-ee ba-ee ba-ee!” (Mommy.) “Ba-koh ba-koh ba-koh!” (Michael.) “A-ah a-ah a-ah!” (Alex.) “Da-ee da-ee da-ee!” (Daddy.) But her own name? “Ooo-eee-aaaaaaaaa! Yaaaaaayyyyyy!” She never fails to congratulate herself. Notice also the exclamation points at the end of every word. She’s so thrilled to be talking at least, even if we can’t understand her half the time.

___7___

Meanwhile, Michael has started popping teeth like nobody’s business–four in two weeks. He’s continued his freakishly fast gross motor development and is now pulling into standing and trying very hard to figure out how to cruise. (He’s 8 months old.) At choir practice on Wednesday, he actually let go of my leg for one second.

___”Bonus” take, though I hate to use that word for this subject….___

Finally, please pray for a break in the weather. My parents are farmers and they think they might have enough of a corn crop to fulfill their obligations to the ethanol plant they are invested in, but as of last week there were zero pods on the soybean plants. The beans are close to the end of their blooming phase, and they simply can’t set fruit when it’s breaking a hundred degrees every day with no rain. This is scary stuff, and it’s not us who are going to feel the worst effects of it, but the poor.

I Am Not Indispensible

pulling hair out (Photo credit: wstera2)

I made a somewhat horrifying discovery last week. As I excavated the computer desk, descending through layers of papers waiting to be filed, responded to or otherwise dealt with, I unearthed my work list, compiled last December in order to keep myself from overdoing it during the Year of the Baby. I had forgotten a writing assignment. It was due in five days.

Five days to prepare a polished freelance writing assignment.

I’ve been feeling increasingly crazed these last few weeks, and I no longer attach my hopes to some arbitrary date for deliverance. It really should get better after one set of deadlines passes, for instance. But it doesn’t. Instead, I shift focus to an altogether different set of stresses. Like all the housework and home projects I’ve allowed to pile up while I devoted my energy to deadlines.

I used to hesitate to share things like this, for fear of inviting criticism from others scolding me, telling me what I can and can’t handle. But I’m beginning to realize all of us are fighting the same battle, the same misguided idea that we are somehow, in some way, indispensible.

The thing I never expected about writing was the way it would stretch me inward. It seems that almost every assignment I undertake connects intimately to some life lesson I desperately need; it’s as if Heaven hammers home different facets through conversations, interviews, and the reading/writing process, assembling the picture for me piece by piece until I can’t miss the point.

I am not indispensible.

I don’t want to be indispensible.

It is not my job to save the world.

And this is what I will remember as the kids go back to school, as Nicholas goes off for the first time, as I suddenly have stretches of time in which kids are not interrupting me. I will remember that throwing balls and playing Spot-It cast at least as many long-term ripples as columns, award-winning articles or even a novel.

Words are my vehicle to touch people I will never meet, but they only have meaning if they stand upon the bedrock of the people I love.

I am not indispensible…except to my family.

I will keep that truth before me…today, tomorrow, and always.