Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 25

Zipline!

I’ve wanted to zipline for years, but this is not on Christian’s list of things he wants to do, so I never had the chance. Until this week, when Alex and I were hosted by Eco Zipline Tours over in New Florence (for the locals, at the Hermann exit). I’ll be reviewing the experience in full at Pit Stops For Kids in a couple of weeks, but I wanted to share the photos now, because this was without question the highlight of my summer. I always thought this might be terrifying, because, y’know, you have to jump off a high place, right? Wrong. It’s a whole lot easier to sit back and pick up your legs than it is to jump. It was so much fun. I could do this all day. Every day. Writing? Who wants to write when you can soar over the treetops?

Click to view slideshow.

Feeling Holy Vs. Being Holy

Image via Pixabay

I remember as a child going to Confession and telling the priest that I never felt anything about my faith. I thought I was doing the right things, generally, but I wasn’t feeling anything, and I thought there was something inherently bad in that.

He told me if I see a guy shivering with cold and I feel bad for him, that doesn’t help at all. What the guy needs is a coat, and it doesn’t make any difference if I feel anything when I give him a coat, the point is to give him a coat!

I think we all like to go around feeling holy, and sometimes we mistake that for actually being holy. I reread my mercy posts the other day and the one that highlighted itself in my head was about mercy heroes, and how easy it is for that warm glow you get when you do something good to turn into halo-polishing. Better to do so darned many good deeds that it’s a yawn-worthy occurrence, something you don’t even think about afterward.

Because when you get right down to it, nothing I do will ever be enough. I cannot lift a homeless person into a secure, productive life on my own steam. I can’t singlehandedly save a family, or even a single person, from the temporal forces that act against them. All I can do is an act of kindness, an act of generosity. It never feels like enough, but maybe that’s okay. Because if I ever felt like I did “enough,” the temptation to give myself the credit might well make me insufferably sanctimonious. The tension keeps me humble.

Today’s daily reading, from 2 Corinthians, was really uplifting that way: a reminder that I can’t see the big picture, anyway, and that someone else is putting the phantom power behind my microphone:

The one who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food

will supply and multiply your seed

and increase the harvest of your righteousness.

(2 Cor. 9:10, NAB)

Amen and Amen.

The Grace to Let Enough be Enough

“What come next?”

There was a period of several months recently when Julianna was constantly asking this question: when a song ended on a CD, at the end of a scene in a movie, whenever we got back in the van after running an errand or going to a lesson.

Lately, it feels like the two younger boys have taken up the standard she dropped. The whole time we were at the Lake last week, it seemed the moment we left one attraction they were demanding to know what the next one was. Frequently asking to do other things that weren’t on the agenda at all. Since we got home, I’ve been on full-speed ahead, trying to catch up with everything I didn’t have time to do before we left and while we were gone. And yet the kids are coming to me with deep sighs and saying things like “When do we get to go on the carousel?” and “I want to go to the arcade at the mall!”

I came down pretty hard on that last one. “We just went to an arcade–at the Lake!” I said. Quickly followed up by a (short) lecture on ingratitude and an attitude in which nothing is ever enough. (Because we all know how effective Lectures were when we were growing up.)

But short as that lecture was, I could see in their eyes that they Weren’t Getting It. And I took a look inside myself and had to wince at what I saw.

Because I have this problem, too. Christian ends every day by taking a survey, generally of what went right: what we accomplished, what he’s thankful for. Meanwhile I’m always fighting this rumbling dissatisfaction, this desire for more, more, more. If I managed to write a text for one verse, I’m dissatisfied because it wasn’t two. If I write half a chapter on a novel, I’m frustrated because it wasn’t a thousand words. Or because I’m afraid it’s episodic, and I’m terrified that it’s never going to live up to the potential of the concept. (Because this concept? It’s a good one. Really good.) When we finish a project, I feel a brief satisfaction, and then it’s right on to the next thing I haven’t gotten done yet. And of course, the list of things I want to get done literally never ends.

This is how I’m able to “do it all,” as people always put it, but it definitely has a dark side. I love everything I do, but, German-like, I have trouble drawing a line and letting go when it’s time to do so. I have trouble living in the moment.

But it drives me crazy when I see it in my kids. Perhaps it’s because they are trying to make their ingratitude my problem. I look at the kaleidoscope of experiences they’ve had and I’m just thunderstruck at how it’s never enough. I take a deep breath and I remind myself that kids are always clueless, self-absorbed, and developmentally incapable of the kind of awareness I’m able to exercise. I tell myself surely I was the same way, and this is just part of the process of raising holy terrors into holy men and women.

But I also think I have some work to do in my own soul. This Chade Meng-Tan book I’m reading is slow going because I feel I should be practicing, not just dinking around with it, and I have too many other irons in the fire to devote the time properly. But in the way it resonates with my experience reading Thomas Merton, whose words in turn resonated with what I have experienced sitting in nature, I know that the key to this whole puzzle resides in a quietness of spirit that has to be cultivated.

So there’s my next challenge. And perhaps—just perhaps—my efforts will enlighten my children’s lives, too.

Chicken Legs, Freckles and Pokin-A: The General Goofiness of Julianna

Since I shared my freak-out about Julianna getting older, I thought I should also share the stories about how much fun she can be. She’s getting much more interactive and mentally sharp, able to chime in on conversations and sometimes even crack (unsophisticated, but adorable) jokes. And she certainly recognizes humor now.

Christian is a tease. He comes by it honestly—he gets it from his father. In my uber-serious German family, such things would not have gone over well, and I have often hastened to reassure our kids that he’s “just being silly.” But the older they get, the more they recognize it for themselves.

Some exchanges happen over and over and cause no end of delight to both parties. For instance:

Christian: “Hey, Chicken Legs.”

Julianna: “Stah sayin’ tsicken legs!”

Christian: “Okay, Freckles.”

Julianna: “Stah sayin’ freckles!”

Christian laughs, and then Julianna giggles. She has this lovely, silvery giggle, and her shoulders shake. It’s like God took happiness and bottled it up, and she pours it out, sparkling, on the world around her.

Christian also likes to poke her, like a tickle, because she always gets this highly affronted tone of voice and says, “Hey, stop pokin’-a me!” (The “-a” makes the whole thing.)

We spent most of this week at the Lake of the Ozarks—posts soon to come on Pit Stops for Kids—and our last stop before heading back home was Wonderland Camp, which is a weeklong camp for kids and adults alike with special needs. I tend to be more trusting than my husband. I figure I’ve heard nothing but good things about this place, and you can’t possibly have that kind of reputation without earning it, so I was comfortable going in sight unseen. But I figured Julianna would be more comfortable leaving her family for a week next summer if she had seen the place. Christian, not so much. He wanted proof that it was not a dive hole.

So we drove the twisty, hilly roads to the camp. And when Julianna saw the big wooden sign, she screamed,

“WONDERLAND!”

We stopped in the office to meet the administrative staff, who sent us out with a middle school sped teacher spending her summer as a residence hall coordinator. In the first stop (the art room), Julianna tried to tell her entire life’s history to the art director. And then she said, “Where is the pool?” At the second (a sleeping “cabin”—air conditioned), she went around labeling everything: beds, sheets, bathroom. Then she said, “Where is the pool?” At the third stop, they were doing music. Julianna started dancing, to the delight of every single person in that room, typically-developing and otherwise. And we only got her to leave by promising that the next stop was the pool.

She all but jumped in the pool in her clothes.

By the time we got to the playground, Julianna was all, “You people may go now, I’m fine.” She was seriously hacked off to be forced back into the van to go home.

There are times when I feel frustrated, irritated, or overwhelmed by the issues that surround special needs parenting. But then there are times like these, when I am exquisitely aware of how blessed I am to have been sent down this path.

Speaking of blessings and goofiness and, well, all right, it’s not really connected at all. But watch this video anyway.

Julianna and the Ticking Clock of Approaching Adolescence

Photo by Frankieleon, via Flickr

I have this parenting theory: It’s not that a child is too young to learn a particular lesson (like, say, toileting). It’s really a matter of when the parent decides he or she is ready to take on the task of teaching it. When the parent makes it a priority, the child learns.*

 

I know this isn’t a terribly popular view, but I have four kids, so I kind of think I have the right to my opinion, at least as far as the young years go. And in fact, I think this theory covers a whole lot of life outside of parenting, too. Like weight loss, for instance. I spent years listing all the reasons I couldn’t lose weight, and then one day I decided it was important and I did it, and that was the end of that. I can think of two people who, facing their own mortality, did the same.

But it’s parenthood I’m thinking about right now. Because last week, Julianna had a zit on her nose.

A zit.

She’s going into the third grade.

I developed early, and it took me until I was nearly thirty to feel at home in my own skin. And in fact, I think I got ogled a few days ago at the grocery store. Which is not as flattering as you might think, a few weeks shy of 42. Truthfully, it was a little creepy.

But I digress. The point is, the day I’ve been dreading since I found out my daughter has an extra chromosome is fast approaching. I know what happens to a girl’s body when puberty hits. And let me just say we’re behind the curve in learning self-care. Way, way behind the curve. In just about every area you can imagine.

The truth is, I’ve let a lot of things slide, where Julianna is concerned, because it’s easier that way. We’ve made halfhearted attempts at modesty (for boys and girls alike), but one of the Things You Hear Around The Basi House is: “There’s a whole lotta nakedness around here!!!” It’s really hard to get everyone ready for school or bed and police whether kids have put away their clothes, put stuff in the laundry that’s dirty, NOT put stuff in the laundry that isn’t, get teeth brushed, and so on. It’s simpler to do things FOR Julianna so we know it got done right. For instance, she has a strong oral defensiveness—it’s her only sensitivity, really. I’ve spent a year working very hard to get her to let me get at the upper front teeth, only to discover that we hadn’t worked hard enough on the lower ones.

But things keep smacking me in the face, reminding me that time is running out. There was the zit, of course. There’s the fact that in the last 6-8 months, she’s finally started putting on bulk. She doesn’t look much bigger, but she’s much more solid than she was a year ago. I can’t pick her up anymore (at least, not without risk of self-injury). Then there was the orthotist, who told me the other day, while prescribing calf-height inserts instead of ankle-height, that we have to deal with her feet before puberty, because once she starts cycling we have 18 months and the bones will solidify, because she’ll be done growing. I had to reboot and play mental catchup, because I heard the word “cycling” in relation to my daughter and my overload switch flipped.

And then, of course, there’s the sudden uptick in stubborn lack of cooperation—a taste of what adolescence might look like for this girl, I’m afraid.

It’s time to prioritize this. Now, while she’s still a giggly, sweet girl who forgives you as soon as the traumatic lesson in taking a shower instead of a bath is over and done. Because soon, she’ll be too big for me to work with physically, and I know, as stubborn as she is now, it’s only going to get worse.

Life with a girl with Down syndrome seems incredibly slow: slow to travel from point A to Point B (“But Mom, I don’t LIKE to walk fast!”); slow to learn; slow to grow. Slow all the way across the board.

But it’s movement all the same.

*Note: this is about typical kids, not kids who have severe disabilities or emotional/mental trauma. I’m talking about your ordinary, everyday, run-of-the-mill middle class kids with parents who read parenting magazines.

On The Wrong Side Of Mercy

Photo by orangesparrow, via Flickr

I suppose it was inevitable that sooner or later, I was going to run into someone who would threaten to call the police on me for child endangerment.

I mean, the odds were not in my favor to raise four kids to adulthood without encountering someone who would take issue with the laissez-faire style of parenting we have chosen to embrace.

But that didn’t make it any easier to experience.

The details aren’t important, because the point is really what happened AFTER this woman said her piece, threw her hand in the air and refused to allow me to respond, and stormed off.

Predictably, I couldn’t sleep.

My hands shook for hours.

For three days, I questioned every single decision.

I became paranoid—not that some calamity would befall my children, but that someone would judge me and try to take them away because they didn’t like how I was raising them.

I could not enjoy the honor of having my manuscript make the finals of the WFWA Rising Star contest, because I was too busy questioning whether I was a Bad Mother for writing the book in the first place.

For three days, I couldn’t even talk about it with anyone except Christian, who happened to witness the whole thing, because I was terrified of being told I was wrong and I had to become That Parent. I cannot be That Parent, the one who freaks out about ev.er.y.thing. I do not have the emotional stamina for it. I know how I handle anxiety. Me being that parent would be good for no one, least of all my kids.

And the thing that has stuck with me, this whole week, was that this woman knew nothing at all about me. She gave herself permission to be accuser, judge, jury, and executioner, with no defense allowed. It was—like sarcasm—the antithesis of mercy.

I will admit it: I’m no paragon of virtue when it comes to giving other parents the benefit of the doubt. But being on the other side of things made me realize how damaging it is to a human being to act in this way. We don’t know what’s going on in the lives of the people we are judging.

Christian tells this story about a kid at church, who was way too big to be lying across the pew, standing on the pew, making loud noises/talking, completely out of control, and his parents not stepping in at all. He says that even though his first reaction was to judge, or to step in and say something himself, his experience with Julianna stopped him. Because through Julianna we’ve been exposed to kids who look like every other kid, but who are anything but neurotypical. Some of those kids can’t NOT act that way. It’s not the parents’ fault, and if we impose these snap judgments, and yell at the parents, all we do is isolate them, make them feel even more alone in their struggles than they already are. Drive them away from the communities they most need for the emotional support they need in order to be—gasp—good parents.

Even when the kids are out of line, or the parents are allowing something we think is inappropriate on some level or another, it’s so…cruel–immoral, even–to leap to the conclusion that they are unfit to be a parent. Some days, there was a thunderstorm at 4:30 a.m. and the night was cut short by comforting a terrified child. Some days, the kids have been fighting all day and a parent is too worn out and worn down to pick the particular battle you witness. Some days, there are deep stresses that have a mind preoccupied–stresses you have no idea of.

And even if you feel you can’t walk away from what you’re seeing, the response of mercy is not to swoop in brandishing a cell phone like a weapon, threatening to call the police. The response of mercy is to figure out what’s going on and see if there’s a reason this is happening. What if that parent is desperate for help, and you just pushed her over the edge? What if that parent has just lost her home and her job, and is standing there trying to figure out how she’s going to provide for her children?

I’m not saying anything new here. This entire calendar year, I’ve been coming back to the same idea again and again: that mercy is about an open heart and mind—about “entering into the chaos of others”. That to judge others is, in fact, to turn our backs on mercy altogether.

But there’s just something so crystal clear about it all, here on the wrong side of an encounter that was handled 100% without mercy.

For more Mercy on a Monday posts, click here.

How I Do Political Season

Image by Donkey Hotey, via Flickr

For the last four or five months, Trump has been calling me 2-3 times a day from a 646 area code. First I answered it, thinking it was my sister because it was a New York call. Then I ignored it. Then I answered and yelled into the phone, just to see if it might provoke some unexpected reaction in the automated message…like sending me to a real person, who I could tell to take me the bleepety bleep off the call list. (It didn’t.)

Then came the surveys. I lost patience last election cycle because the pollsters wouldn’t allow for a single bit of nuance. They insisted upon black and white answers. Which I get, except that the polls = the news = the only reality most people recognize, so I’m not about to feed into a “the world is black and white” mentality. (News flash: IT’S NOT.)

And then there were the push polls, in which “haven’t yet done my research” was regarded as justification for throwing out questions like, “If you heard that Deplorable Candidate B did (gross distortion of reality), would that make you choose Deplorable Candidate A?” After about five or six of these, I said, “I am not going to get my political news from someone who clearly has an agenda.”

No, actually what I said was, “Look, it’s clear to me that you’re trying to push me toward Deplorable Candidate A and I will not be pushed, so I’m hanging up now.”

Fortunately they seem to have defaulted to automated surveys, and those I will take, because I figure if the polls actually push the news, then I have a responsibility to push the polls in as accurate a direction as possible.

But the ones that keep calling over and over? I don’t want to mess with it. Nor do I want the “missed call” showing up on the caller ID. So now I hit “talk,” wait one second, and hit “end.”

This week, however, I was waiting for some calls, so I answered everything. And I got this call: “Hello, can I speak to Christina Baaaaaa-si?”

I was just in a sassy enough mood to say, “There’s no Christina Baaaa-si at this house. There is a Christian Basi, but since you obviously don’t know us well enough to know that, I’m assuming this is a political call we don’t want to take, anyway.” And I hung up.

About two hours later it occurred to me that those poor people are just doing a job, and that wasn’t a terribly mercy-filled response.

Clearly, politics brings out the worst in everyone, not just candidates.

Nothin’ But a Teeny Bit of News…

(Not that I’m excited or anything!…..)

All The Posts I Haven’t Yet Written

What does a blogger do when she’s feeling frustrated, stretched, and simultaneously directionless?

She pulls out all the posts she’s started and dumps them into a single post.

Image by docoverachiever, via Flickr

1. At the end of the school year, I took my four plus the two from carpool to the library. Their mother said they could bring home as many books as they could carry. I had to giggle (inwardly, of course) when I saw the way they struggled with the stack of books. They took that directive very literally and went right to the edge.

2. The interstate bridge work that’s caused traffic nightmares for our part of town is finally winding down. It’s been very interesting to watch, but I’m so glad all the entry points to the north are available as options again. We were getting epic lines at the 4-way stop.

3. Does it bother anyone else that cards are being taken without PIN number or signature? I mean, how much time does it really take, and as overly freaked out about privacy as we are these days, why on earth are they doing away with layers of security?

4. Once, I thought I’d write a whole post about how different classical music evokes different food associations for me. But then I realized, if modern culture can only handle classical music as a blazing billboard advertising: “BAD GUY! BAD GUY!”, then who would read such a post? Still, I’ll say this much: Rachmaninov Vespers is like butter cake, so rich you feel your arteries clogging up. Glorious, so glorious that I can only listen to it in small doses because it feels as if I’m going to turn into a Marvel movie CG and shatter into shining pieces of light. This April I played in the orchestra that accompanied the university choirs. We did Symphony of Psalms and Alexander Nevsky, but the concert began with an a cappella selection from the Vespers, and when they sang it at dress rehearsal I fell to pieces, right there in the front row of the orchestra. Being in the middle of that sound was an overload to the emotional circuitry. It was amazing.

Why don’t I just stop there and leave you with a glorious shadow of that experience? It’s less than three minutes. Come on. You can let this play for three minutes in the background while you check Facebook and Twitter.

Anatomy of a Pseudo-Foodie Family

Our go-to cookbooks are personal compilations. Bottom: main dishes, Italian family recipes, and desserts. Top: Appetizers, vegetables, starches, breakfast, sandwiches. We also keep the laundry detergent recipe in here. (You can see it peeking out from behind the tenderloin recipe.)

Item: one of Alex’s first words was “creme brulee.”

Item: when our kids go over to other people’s houses and get asked what they want for dinner, they have been known to ask for “crab quiche.”

Item: we’ve started doing cheese tastings with the kids.

We love food in our house. And over the years, Christian & I have gotten a number of chuckles out of the un-kid-like way our kids look at it. We’re not hard-core foodies, mostly because we have four kids and we’re too cheap to be. (Because, yanno, we have to be.) But as I’ve noted before, it’s all about the food.

I like to cook. For a time, as a preteen/teen, my mom paid me $5 a week to make dinner for the family. We had a set repertoire of meals, perhaps because she’d learned we would all eat them. I remember her teaching me: bacon grease in the skillet to fry the pork steaks/pork chops/round steaks/T-bones (though we might also broil or grill those), then pour some water in and cover them up to cook. There was also fried chicken, chili, spaghetti, “Aunt Jo’s hamburger dish,” burgers, barbecued chicken, and hash (which is soup bones cooked & separated and served as a stew with potatoes over bread). And of course a handful of fishy recipes for Fridays. Tuna casserole, tuna gravy over rice, microwaved perch.

I have to credit that period of time, however long or short it was, with setting me and my family on a trajectory toward cooking. Even at that time I wanted to experiment with recipes, although my experiments were pretty innocuous (chopped mushrooms in the spaghetti, anyone?).

These days, Christian jokes that I’ll say I’m making baked chicken but I’ll end up with fish tacos instead. If I don’t have an ingredient, or I know I don’t like it (hello, tarragon), I’ll substitute something else. (Anything sweet is better with cinnamon in it.) And, being on a healthy eating kick the last few years, I’m constantly trying to work super vegetables into things. Spinach is my go-to. It gets chopped up and put in every stew we eat, including chili.

But one thing I don’t do is lie to my kids about it. I made a decision early on to be straight with them. If they ask if it has onions in it, I tell them, “Yes.” Spinach? “Yes.” Mushrooms? “Yes.” Always followed by the words, “Eat it anyway.”

All my kids are really good eaters, who are not scared of spinach, because we insisted on a healthy, balanced diet when they were little and they got used to it. I don’t make anyone eat starches if they don’t want them (Alex used to gag on mashed potatoes), and there are times when we’ll compromise. The cubanos were a little exotic for them, for example. But by and large, they are very good eaters.

There are many things about myself as a parent about which I feel insecure, but this is not one of them. We endured the battles when they were little. We had budding picky eaters; we just refused to coddle them. I was not going to make separate meals for kids, and I want to eat widely and with great variety. Ergo, so will they. Every one of them went through a phase (around age 3) where dinner was a battle. I had almost given up hope on getting through it with Nicholas when he finally came around. Julianna scavenges broccoli scraps from people’s plates. (Broccoli!) Michael is the last holdout, and has been known to sit at the table for forty minutes to finish his meat (oddly, it’s not usually the vegetables.)

We’re not perfect. I’ve never been able to develop a taste for the beans and legumes that would allow us more variety in our meatless meals. But I love that our kids have a taste for a variety of food and that they’re not scared of trying new things. Last week at the zoo in Omaha we had them try sambusa, for instance. They were lukewarm about it, but nobody objected to trying it. And all our food conversations involve discussion of protein, vegetable, fruit, and starch. I feel like I’m growing kids who are going to take their food seriously—in the best possible way.