Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 109

And Then, My Laundry Pile Moved…

It’s a crazy day as usual in the Basi household. My mother would shake her head if she saw me stepping through the laundry pile at the top of my stairs, on my way to drop the last diaper in the washing machine before I run it. Detergent, push, spin the dial, pull, wash hands, step through the laundry pile again as I head back to the baby, who needs to nurse before I teach NFP.

(Please excuse my mess.)

Wait a minute…What the…? The laundry pile just MOVED. What the heck kind of bugs are we growing in this house?…

Cackle, cackle, cackle.

And a head pops up:

“Alex?” I can’t help laughing. “How long have you been in there?”

“A while,” he says. “I was playing Spiderman and the lizard.”

“Man! I wish I had the camera!”

“I’ll do it again,” he says obligingly. And he does.

Gotta love that boy.

Bigger Than Me

After two blissful weeks of uninterrupted sleep, Michael started waking to nurse again. I took it philosophically, because I’d been expecting it–I’ve said often enough that sleeping through the night is a myth–and these days he mixes it up; a night or two on, a night or two off.

This was an “on” night, and his roommate (Julianna) pulled a drama number at 4:30 a.m. and woke him up, so it was, in fact, a double-nursing night…something I don’t take so philosophically. I sat in my nursing chair while he wiggled and pushed his legs against the spindles, mostly playing around while my temper shortened with the dwindling minutes till morning. He needs his nails clipped…badly. And he likes to grab things these days. Sometimes he gets my shirt, but more often he goes for skin, and pulls the breast right out of his mouth. Repeatedly. After he’s torn the skin to shreds, of course.

So as often as he’ll consent, I grab his hand and let him hold my thumb. And as I sat there in the murky quiet of early morning, I suddenly saw the scene from his point of view. I saw the absolute trust, the craving for closeness with something Bigger Than Me. So much bigger, in fact, that his entire hand will wrap around its thumb. So big that it can protect him from the terrorizing of older siblings, and the specter of loneliness. So big that it fills up most of his world.

It occurred to me then that this is the source of faith, the first way in which our longing for God manifests itself. What do we adults have that can compare to that experience of infancy? We long for the security being cared for, too, and we long for Someone so big that we can rest upon that person. But it isn’t the same, because the physical Being is missing. We can’t snuggle up to God and wrap ourselves around a divine hand, knowing because of what we can see and touch that we’re safe. As adults, we have to reach into our souls and our intellects, to see God present in the beauty and power of nature and in the presence of community and supernatural Presence at church. In our “show-me” world, those connections are held suspect, even by those of us who believe them sincerely. We’d like more, and the frustration of knowing we can’t have it leads everyone to question at some point, and many to turn their backs.

It’s good that we grow and become parents ourselves, that we can see these moments in a new way and recognize the truths in them, truths we might otherwise lose touch with.

In The World, But Not Of It

Remember this quote?

“It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else’s principles, but not on his own. … we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours.” (from St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, by G.K. Chesterton)

This is the subject of my latest post for Catholic Mothers Online. Hope you’ll click through!

Have Breast, Will Travel

For the past seven years, my days have been defined by the routine care of children. Lacking day care, I haul them with me on errands or I don’t go at all. (Christian does a lot more lunchtime errand running now than he did in days past.) I have a semi-regular babysitter now to give me time to write, but basically, the baby stays with me, because one thing we don’t have in this house is bottles. We don’t even own any.

Sometimes it’s frustrating to feel tied down, but in general I am at peace with our choice to exclusively breastfeed. People who haven’t breastfed their kids don’t get it; they look at me blankly and say, “Can’t you just leave him with a sitter? I mean, you could pump so they could give him a bottle, couldn’t you?” I have to explain that even if the sitter gives him a bottle, all the milk he was supposed to drink at that time still has to come out of my body. And I loathe pumping. I am in awe of the self-sacrifice routinely practiced by mothers who pump at work every day. Oh. My. Goodness. You deserve a medal. (You know who you are. You rock, ladies.)

So I choose to stay attached to my babies. I’ve become pretty adept at typing one-handed, and I save certain projects (blog reading, for instance) for nursing times. When Michael’s in a mood to concentrate on his job, I can read books to the other kids. He stays with me while I write, he stays with me while I teach lessons, he stays with me while we play for weddings. This is my life; it has been my life for the last seven years and four babies.

But there are days. Like this weekend, when Christian and I played a wedding.

On the wedding front, we’ve gone back and forth, trying out different solutions to the professional-musician, fully-nursing-mom dynamic. We choose different solutions depending on the age and the mood of the baby on a given day. This weekend we did the “bring baby along” thing, because he was cranky and we had a young sitter.

Michael amused himself in his car seat through the prelude and processional, but during the psalm, I heard Unhappy Baby Noises. By the time I got back to the music area, someone had come over to pick him up, offering to hold him. I hated to have a wedding guest drooled upon and distracted during the exchange of vows, so I said we’d be fine; at this point I was basically just singing a Mass, and I could do that holding a baby.

The only trouble? What he really wanted was three minutes on the breast to fall asleep. And I couldn’t leave. So I held him carefully down-wind of the microphone and kept my finger in his mouth as he alternately sucked and chomped on it. I thought he might actually bite through it at one point. My pointer finger was positively numb by the time Communion was over, and he was at the end of his rope, proceeding from noisy slurping and occasional whimpers to out-and-out cries of “Feed me NOW, Woman!” I bolted for the sacristy even before Christian stopped playing.

Michael was so tired, he went down in ten seconds, but knowing him as I do, I didn’t dare move. Christian ended up playing the recessional solo. It works fine, and by that point in a wedding I question whether anyone even noticed my absence, but still, I wince. Because I need to be professional, too, and wrestling a baby while playing a wedding felt anything but.

Oh, well. Michael’s baby days are passing; this is a fleeting time in my life, after all. Soon enough my body will be my own again, and we’ll be on to a whole different, far more complicated set of problems to solve. Might as well enjoy this bunch while it lasts.

Related articles

Close To Me
The Hazards of Multitasking

Close To Me

Scene: Morning on Spring Break, time to go outside and play. I'm going through the complicated maneuver of putting on Julianna's shoes with a growth on my back.

Scene: 8:30 Mass on a Sunday morning. We're sitting in the front pew–taking up the whole front pew– and it's time to kneel down. Only I can't. There's only room for one knee at the very edge of the kneeler, because my three ambulatory children have decided they all need to inhabit the end where I'm sitting. I have to physically push children farther down the pew to make room for myself.

Scene: my nursing chair in the corner of my bedroom, with a baby who can't decide if he wants to eat or play. Nicholas climbs up on the Medela foot stool and leans over top of the baby, who grunts and lets go the breast in order to concentrate on, I don't know, BREATHING. Julianna takes flank position, leaning over the arm rest and putting her weight on my arm–the one trying to support Michael's head at the breast. "Guys!" I say, exasperated. "Back off!" Michael wiggles and laughs.

Scene: Good Friday services. Christian is out of town, so I've called on my cousin to sit with us and help me wrangle children. They like my cousin. They've stayed at her house several times while I've had professional commitments. But they want nothing to do with her. As the service goes on, there is a silent but ongoing wrestling match for who gets to sit by Mommy. The end result is that between my cousin at the end of the pew and us there is a dead space of almost three feet, followed by five bodies piled on top of each other. When at last I hand the baby down to her–the only one who can't move himself–Nicholas lights up and dives for my lap.

Perhaps I have a magnetic personality.

Perfect Moments

Photo by j neuberger, via Flickr

There are days that are full of moments. Moments of pristine clarity, the colors jewel-bright, the sight and the scent and the feel of them fusing into a single point so intense, it sears itself into the surface of my brain, and out of the pinprick point comes a single word: perfect.

I want these moments indelibly imprinted on my memory, not only to hold them for my own sake–because the camera is never on hand–but also so that I can draw on the details that can bring to life the words and scenes I write somewhere down the line. If I want to write stories that hinge on the drama in ordinary lives, I need these moments.

But how do I internalize them so deeply that they spring forth when they're needed? How do I draw a word picture of a three-year-old sitting in a toy Jeep wearing homemade monkey ears, his face perfectly completing the image of monkey mischief? How do I hold on to the timbre and mannerisms of small childhood, of Nicholas singing "Twinkle Twinkle/Baa Baa Black Sheep/ABC" from the moment he wakes in the morning until the moment he falls asleep at night, until I want to build a time machine just so I can shoot Mozart before he writes it?

How do I capture the feeling of amused tenderness as Alex, playing Spiderman, whisper-shouts to himself, as he pirouettes and rolls to the ground, posing against soft emerald grass in the evening twilight? The awe in trying to comprehend how the baby of my heart can get so big on nothing but food, air and sunshine?

How do I remember Michael leaning back in the Snugli, his eyes bright with wonder as he looks up at the trees on a woodland hike? How do I preserve the holiness of the moment when I realize he can't make up his mind what makes him happier: looking at the trees and the sky, or looking at my face?  How do I evoke the path, pebbles and sand and rock and clay, or the liquid light of near-sunset falling across Michael's face as his mouth splits open in a soundless shriek of joy?

How do I put you in the moment when I enter the room to see Julianna lying in bed with her bottom bouncing up and down under the covers in the darkness? How do I make you feel the warmth of her small hand as I whisper to her and lead her to the bathroom in the middle of the night?

How do I remember the exact sensation of nursing and playing handsies with a baby whose fingers wrap perfectly around my thumb. How is that even possible, a whole hand wrapped around my thumb?

I think Heaven must be made of those perfect moments. A whole mountain of those lost, perfect points of time. Moments when that which is sensed and that which is beyond sense reach across space and time and, oh so fleetingly, touch.

Related articles

twinklings… don't miss them! (greatitudes.com)
but moment passes away…… (awakeningpsyche.wordpress.com)

In Awkwardness, Escape

The Perfect Rose (Photo credit: Scott Smith (SRisonS))

Twenty years later, I still cringe at the memory. Oh, let's call a spade a spade: it's memories. I was then as I am now, a hopeless romantic. Only as a sixteen-year-old who's lived a blessedly sheltered life, I was perhaps a little less prepared for a little thing called "reality." (If, by "little," you mean something the scope of the Grand Canyon.)

I was primed for falling in love, steeped in pop songs that crooned Two worlds colliding…and they could never tear us apart. And then it happened. We worked together, and when I heard his voice upon entering the building, my nerves electrified; when his arm brushed mine, I thought I would burst into flame.

Young as I was, I knew better than to call it love, but it was strong. I think he knew the effect he had on me; perhaps it flattered him, or perhaps something about me was more attractive than I ever gave myself credit for. In any case, somehow one evening I was joining a group of them for a movie. Afterward, as I rolled down the window of my little white Escort and prepared to head for home, he loped down the street and leaned on my window frame. "So," he said. "When we gonna go out, just you and me?"

I thought I might explode with happiness, and then…

Then I opened my mouth. "Whenever I can find the time," I said.

That little exchange encapsulates all the romantic troubles I ever experienced. What kind of dumb answer is that?

Perhaps you're not shocked to discover we never went out. And my romantic encounters in high school came to progressively more tragic ends. (Well. Tragic in a high school sense.) But now I recognize my escape. I was feeling wild and reckless, bewitched by freedom and hanging around a much more worldly crowd. Pushed just a breath, my life might have followed a very different trajectory, one that ended in real heartbreak instead of wounded pride that masqueraded as such.

As a mother, I now understand why a young and innocent girl might actually be attractive for the very awkwardness that causes her such agony. The world is even scarier now than it was then, the body and soul even less recognized for their beauty and goodness, and treated with even less respect. I would give a lot to shepherd my children safely through the mine field of young "love," but I know also that there's no teacher like an awkward, narrow escape.

Balance Is…

Photo by orangebrompton, via Flickr

I've been out of balance lately, and it showed: short fuse with the kids, a constant sensation of barely keeping my head above water, a house so disorganized and messy that it grated on my nerves. I don't like feeling this way, and every time I do, I question whether I'm actually doing what I'm supposed to be doing with my life.

I brought it up in Confession last week, and braced myself for his response. But the associate pastor went a totally different direction than I expected. We all think balance is static, he said. But that's not how it works. Balance is always in motion. It has to be. Like when you cross a tightrope wire. Because you're in motion, the balance is always shifting. That's just the way it is. It's not like you're ever going to reach a sweet spot where the balance stays still.

It was a very freeing thought, one that relieves the guilt, though not the urgency to act. And so last week, I spiraled downward in writing productivity and upward in the direction of family and home. I let myself be distracted from my work and lengthened the list of housekeeping tasks until Friday the only writing I did was finish a blog post. For Easter weekend, I was mother, wife and homemaker.

At the end of it, I am exhausted, but feeling less crazed. A new balance, and an appropriate one for the occasion. But last night as we prepared for bed, I began the mental preparation for the week and realized that I can't remain in this place. I have four deadlines by the beginning of May…and wedding season is beginning, with five on the books before Memorial Day. Clearly I have to make room for my other obligations.

I would like to make this blog post deeply meaningful and poignant, but the fact is I must shift my efforts elsewhere right now. And that, too, is okay.

Easter Snippets

I didn't expect to do Sunday Snippets this week, but Ruth has issued the invitation; who am I to naysay? Come join us to see what's on the mind of other Catholic bloggers this Holy Week!

Here's my week in a nutshell:

Persecution Complex

The Drama Next Door

A Palm Sunday hike

Good Friday Thoughts

Thoughts for Good Friday

Three quick thoughts for Good Friday:

1. I don't think I can legally use the image, so please click here. I hate fasting days. But if this picture doesn't sock you in the stomach and make you rethink your entire life, I don't know what will.

2. Our deacon gave a short homily with a powerful punch on our April-Fools-Day Palm Sunday that encapsulated everything today is about. It closed with these words:

Today, in this 21st century 'world of ironies', where:

Death is called 'Choice' and

Vengeance called 'Justice,' where

Love comes on a contract with an "escape clause," and

everyone's glued to their phones, yet, no-one is listening . . .

We just, might-again, ask ourselves,

"Who is the fool?" and

"Along with Jesus, where do I stand?"

Read the whole thing here.

3. I noticed things in the Passion this week that never quite registered before. Like this:

They gave him wine drugged with myrrh, but he did not take it.

Drugged…presumably in an attempt to be more humane about his death sentence. But Jesus didn't take it. He chose to feel every bit of his Passion.

I offer the discomfort of this fast day, small as it is, for a beautiful soul in my husband's family who went home to God yesterday. May He grant her speedy entry into His presence, and wrap her family in comfort.