Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 31

7QT on Julianna, school, First Communion, and what’s been keeping me busy

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Well, a day has come that I knew would arrive, but was trying not to think about. Julianna has fallen behind grade level in her reading. :( Yesterday we had our second home visit of her second grade year. (Her elementary school does these in place of parent-teacher conferences.) I’m not complaining about Julianna’s shift in academic status—I knew it was going to happen eventually—but there’s bound to be a pang, you know?

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It is “decoding” that is holding her back, as always. In other words, reading comprehension. There is a disconnect in her brain between the words and their meaning—it’s the same cognitive leap that prevents her from “getting” that a number stands for a concrete reality. We can do addition and subtraction, but we have to have counters—number frames, pieces of candy, sticks drawn on a page—in order to do it. The instant you take away the tactile, her ability to do the math is gone. She just looks blank.

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But how can you resist that smile?

This is the same cognitive reality that has me making phone calls to our pastor to talk about First Communion interviews. She has some basic concepts down, but she can’t expand upon them. She’s “got” the idea that the bread and wine is the Body and Blood, because for the last several years we’ve been whispering it to her every single week during the elevation. She can take pieces of paper with the parts of the Mass on them and put them in order, but if you ask her questions about the Mass? Blank. If you ask her what was the meal Jesus shared with his disciples the night before he died, or what Passover is? Blank. I’ve been trying to tell her the stories, but she can’t repeat them, and she certainly doesn’t connect them with reality. All that rich symbolic language? She can’t process that.

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It’s been interesting, because Nicholas wants to be involved in Julianna’s first Communion prep, and it’s driving him crazy; he can spout all the answers I’m looking for. Last night I had to yell at him because he just wasn’t getting the fact that he couldn’t answer the questions FOR her, she needed to be able to process them herself. (We went through this with Alex a few years ago too.)

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At Central Dairy ice cream parlor, 2010. I couldn’t find the picture where she was at adaptive gymnastics and the whole wall was mirrors, but this’ll do.

One more Julianna story that I’ve been sitting on. She is in love with her own image. Her favorite thing is a mirror. When she gets off the bus, she simply can’t get past the big rear view, and the big side mirror sticking out, without admiring and giggling at her reflection. It’s become something of a running gag between me and the bus driver. One day, the driver said, “You know, if you hooked up a mirror on a stand and put it in front of her, she’d probably move faster, ‘cuz she’d follow it around.”

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Changing subjects; perhaps after some Julianna stories you’ll be willing to humor me and read a little about writing? I’ve had an unbelievably productive few weeks. I finished revising/polishing my novel (although, inevitably, I have already begun to doubt my opening paragraphs) and entered it in a couple of contests. For the last week, though, I’ve been letting it sit and “mature” before I start gearing up for the querying phase. The truth is, no book is ever “finished” until it’s in print.

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In the interim I’ve been pounding away at writing music. Lately I am feeling incredibly affirmed about music writing. I have sent, I don’t know…four or five liturgical submissions, and I am working on a commission for a local flutist. I talked to my music editor about edits on a collection of flute-piano pieces for Easter (to complement Come to the Manger). I wrote a new song altogether, and today I get to meet with another friend about another one. Yesterday I cleaned up my primary music folder on the desktop, and I discovered songs I’d forgotten I’d written. A few of them worth revisiting, most pretty much, um, not. Here’s the Facebook status I wrote on that:

Lent is halfway done. How’s it going for you?

My Kids Keep Me Humble

You know how parents sometimes act like their feelings are hurt because their child prefers the other parent?

I don’t get that.

I figure they’re kids, and they’ll say whatever comes into their head, even if they don’t know they don’t mean it. It’s my job, as The Grown Up, to know the difference between what they think in a passing moment and their true feelings.

Then again, maybe it’s easier for me. After all, it’s my husband who catches the brunt of it. I’ve been the at-home parent, and, as such, the “default” parent. Plus, I have a bunch of mama’s boys, and only one daddy’s girl, and even she is starting to realize we XXs have to stick together.

Everybody always wants Mom. And with Michael hanging onto youngest child status, he’s really, really Mommy attached.

On the other hand, most days Nicholas seems truly incapable of calling me anything but “Daddy.”

They routinely turn their nose up at food I’ve labored over, and don’t notice that I’m keeping straight who likes what treats from the grocery store, or the fact that I’m cleaning up their messes for them, etc. etc. ad nauseam.

And even Michael, this week, told me I should learn to be a doctor, because he wants a different mommy.

Yup. He did.

But see, it really doesn’t hurt my feelings. I mean, it was only about two minutes later that he wanted nothing except a Mommy snuggle.

So I can roll my eyes about the ego blows of young childhood. Most of the time I laugh about it. (That’s certainly how Christian handles it.) Admittedly, every so often I give the whole gang the what-for on the topic of ingratitude. But that has more to do with raising decent human beings who have a shred of empathy than it does with stroking my ego.

Don’t get me wrong. I have plenty of ego. But almost all of it is reserved for professional concerns.

Still, my kids’ attempts to keep me humble–and how oblivious they are that they’re even doing it–make me wonder what my parents remember about my childhood. I wonder how often I cut them with my own cluelessness. I wonder how they felt as they saw us growing and backing away from them. How it felt to see themselves becoming peripheral instead of the center of our world.

I wonder, because I’m starting to think about the coming of those days in my own world. Alex is a beautiful, thoughtful boy who, tween moodiness notwithstanding, still trusts us completely and wants our help in deciphering the puzzles of the world, from sex to immigration and abortion and the complete, horrifying mystery that is Donald Trump. (Some things, I have to tell him, are beyond my understanding.)

I have a feeling that when our kids decide we’re too stupid to help them figure out the mysteries of life, I’m going to find that those darts sting a whole lot more than they do right now.

Love Is A Tug of War

Photo by Nancy Phillips, via Flickr

There are days when I look at the words (or the notes) I’ve put put on the page and I’m in awe, where I literally think, “Where did this come from?” And yet it’s just as likely that by the end of the day I’ll thoroughly convinced no publisher will ever accept such drivel, and what was I ever thinking, anyway?

Some days, I know exactly what I’m going to blog about and how to start, and other days I wish I’d never started the darned thing, because it’s one more deadline I don’t need and one more demand upon me.

Some days, the demands of family and love lie lightly upon me—lift me up, even. Fill me with gratitude and a glow of fulfillment. Other days I am excruciatingly aware of every ounce that love requires me to give of myself.

It’s a beautiful thing to love your life and all the things it demands of you. Not one aspect of my life has been pushed on me by circumstances of necessity; my days are a tug of war among many beautiful, beloved factors: husband, children, words, music, faith, friendship, exercise. I am so blessed. And yet that doesn’t change the fact that each of these things is, in fact, a demand which must be weighed and measured, and that one part of life will always have to give way in favor of another.

I thank God for my life, but I also beg every day, with some desperation, for help navigating it in love.

A Math Problem For A Friday

Parent-teacher conferences

+

Big submission day

+

Languishing music projects

=

A Day Off Blogging.

See you on Monday.

The Imaginary Life of a Preschooler

It has been a source of constant delight for me in recent months to watch Michael developing into his own little man. Well, perhaps constant is an overstatement. He has his meltdown moments, in which he knows only four-year-old wails and forgets that he has to, y’know, tell Mommy what’s bothering him.

But most of the time, I’m watching him and smiling…and trying to do so without letting him know I’m doing it, lest he get self conscious and quit.

He has a rich imaginary life, beyond anything I remember seeing before with my kids. I’ve taken him to “Kidz Court” at the mall several times lately on days when he’s not at school, so that he can play and I can work and he won’t be bored and I won’t be frustrated by lack of productivity. The ability of children to start playing together without ever having met each other before boggles my mind every time. When do people become introverts? Because these kids certainly have no problem diving in together!

“Hurry!” he cries to his new friend. “There are two hundred mean sharks, heading our way!” They leap into the play canoe and paddle furiously down a river only they can see.

At home one day, I turned around to find him wielding the light saber he got for Christmas. “Whatcha doin’, honey?”

“I am playing with my Kylo Ren wightsaber. I’m with Captain Phasma. We’re both bad guys.”

“Okay.”

He turned to his imaginary friend. “My wight saber is bigger than your wight saber!”

His pretend play is so detailed. I’ll look up sometimes and have to stop what I’m doing as I watch the intricate manipulation of thin air. It’s clear that *he can see whatever he’s playing with, even though I can’t. I can tell he’s picking something up; occasionally I can even see what he’s doing with it.

Even when I’m yelling, “MICHAEL! I TOLD YOU TO GET YOUR SHOES ON!” he refuses to leave any action incomplete. He has to carefully set down whatever invisible item he’s playing with before dashing off to comply.

He wants to be big. He’d barely passed his fourth birthday when he started asking when he’d be five. He wants to play a “real instrument.” Like the trumpet. Hey, his big brother is doing it, why can’t he?

And yet he still comes running over to me five or six times a day just to snuggle. At bedtime every day, we have the “I don’t WIKE to go to bed!” conversation, and yet that time is a ritual of fun and tickles and giggles and cuddles. I’ll frequently threaten to kiss him again if he says “I don’t like to go to bed.” So he says it again. And again. :)

The beauty of the youngest child is the fact that you get to immerse yourself in the stages in a way you didn’t get to with other kids. There’s no smaller child who needs my attention more. I’m really reveling in the richness of this stage.

I still miss babies. Yesterday at Target, I think 75% of the shoppers were mothers with babies. Little tiny ones. I had that heart-breath-catch moment more times than I could count in a short jaunt to return paper plates and grab a bottle of eye drops.

But at the same time, I am grateful for the opportunity to see this preschool age in a new way. It’s a real gift.

We Need a Thoughtful Discussion About Birth Control (A No Easy Answers Post)

There is a reason I generally don’t post about headlines: it takes me time to process things and make sure my first reactions all hold water. I hate the tendency to react without thinking, the way it leads us to view everything in black and white and fail to acknowledge the nuances in every situation, and the fact that if you stop and reflect for a while before posting, the topic has passed and no one cares anymore. But usually I choose to sacrifice timeliness in the service of thoughtfulness.

All this as a preface to the fact that my sister, the lawyer, pointed out that my post on Zika and contraception included a rather major flaw that, in my attempt to react in a timely fashion, I somehow overlooked. Namely, the whole flap about Zika really is about preventing pregnancy, not just about preventing disease spread, so the whole argument about barriers vs. hormonal birth control doesn’t hold up.

I feel particularly embarrassed because the topic of sexuality and its relation to family planning is so important to me, and I get so frustrated when people of faith end up turning off those they’re trying to convince by reacting without thinking things all the way through. It’s called shooting ourselves in the foot.

I think I shot myself in the foot, and I spent half the weekend cringing about it.

However, I do not delete the post, because I still believe most of what I had to say is important to have out there. Every single article that touches on the Church’s teaching on contraception emphasizes that “Catholics aren’t paying attention to this teaching, anyway,” as if that proves anything other than that people do what they want to do and always have—screwing around on their wives, cheating their customers, spreading rumors, and a host of other things the Church has always taught are wrong. Yet there’s not one of those other cases in which anyone would even consider suggesting that noncompliance = an institution “out of touch” and a teaching in need of change.

Birth control is one of those topics that people on both sides—myself included, apparently—just don’t seem to be capable of thinking rationally on. We can all project some semblance of reason, but there are conversations we ought to be having but which are considered to be non-starters.

Photo by Virtual EyeSee, via Flickr

For instance: if Church teaching on contraception is so universally ignored, why do its opponents get so bent out of shape about it? Why do they feel this compulsion to bring it up at every possible opportunity? What possible threat could it pose to them?

And another one: Is birth control actually good medicine? Isn’t it possible that it’s actually bad medicine, disrespectful to the dignity of woman, to go in and shut down a part of her body that is working just fine?

And related, but distinct, because sometimes the body isn’t working just fine: Is it truly good medical practice to use pharmaceuticals to mask symptoms of problems like PMS, endometriosis, PCO, thyroid deficiency, etc.? Shouldn’t we default to “Let’s figure out what’s wrong and fix it,” and only go to “mask the symptoms” when all other efforts have failed?

These are questions that truly puzzle me, and on which I truly would like to see thoughtful, non-polemic discussion take place. Perhaps there are things I don’t see that would make a difference to my view on them.

Can we have that discussion? Are there any people out there willing to read through a post on birth control and get to the end of it willing to engage?

For other posts in the No Easy Answers series, click here.

Mountains, Molehills, Contraception, and The Zika Virus

Image by KOREA.NET – Official page of the Republic of Korea, via Flickr

When I heard the radio headline yesterday afternoon, I groaned. Because I knew I was going to have to blog about the pope’s comments, and as a proponent of natural family planning, it would be hard to convince anyone that I’m approaching the topic objectively.

But there under the awning of the Gerbes fuel station, I took a deep breath, and I said to myself, “Okay. If Pope Francis does move us away from the teachings on contraception, I will be open to the Spirit, and I will be a better person for it.”

Of course, the headline was sensationalized; when I listened to the report, it became clear that a Mount Everest is being made out of, well, a hillock at most. So here are my thoughts, as someone who’s been studying and reflecting upon this extremely complex and far-reaching topic for sixteen years.

1. There’s always been a medical exception to the birth control teaching. So why don’t we hear about it? Well, this is just my opinion, but I think it’s because it can’t be sufficiently addressed in 140 characters, and since that’s about all most of us are willing to listen to these days, it’s better to stick to the “in general” rule of thumb and deal with the exceptions case by case. There are other reasons, of course. The medical exception is really easy to abuse, for one thing. For another, hormonal birth control is used far too often as a bandaid to cover up problems that need to be addressed at the level of cause, not symptom (i.e. irregularity, PMS, abdominal pain, etc). I wrote a lot about that for this post and then realized it was irrelevant, so I may post those thoughts on Monday.

2. If you think logically, you have to realize that the only form of contraception the pope is even addressing in the case of Zika is barrier methods; hormones are going to do absolutely nothing to prevent disease transmission. And if you think logically, it should also be clear that barriers aren’t a slam dunk fix. They’ll surely make a difference, but there are plenty of people still getting STDs in America, and we have plenty of condoms.

3. A caution about oversimplification. The story I read on CNN yesterday ended with a quote from a Catholic theologian that I am guessing was taken out of context, because as it stands it makes no sense at all (here’s the original article; oddly enough, the link I copied yesterday goes to a very different article this morning, in which Bretzke isn’t quoted at all. Hmm.):

“In Catholic Church teaching, some would say it would be acceptable to try to prevent conception in cases like this,” Bretzke said.

Why does this make no sense? Because the Catholic Church has never said you can’t try to avoid pregnancy. Never. Ever. The assumption in the secular culture, even when lip service is paid to natural family planning (as it is in the CNN article), is that there are only two paths: contraception or perpetual pregnancy. The Church never said you can’t plan your family. It just says it matters to our human dignity how you do it.

4. Finally: NFP proponents also need to take a deep breath and recognize that NFP can’t prevent Zika, either. Just as it couldn’t help the nuns in the case Pope Francis invoked–the exception given to nuns who were being repeatedly raped. So it makes perfect sense to see the Pope offering this very specific exception to the Church’s teaching on birth control. He would be less Christlike if he did not.

This Stage of Motherhood, In Four Pictures

1. Alex’s search for the meaning of life is carried out using the simplest of tools…like the wax tablet he made in his gifted program, where he has spent the last several weeks learning to utter such profundities as “May the Force Be With You” and “Stay out of my room”…in Latin.

2. Alex was assigned to write a simile as a Valentine for his parents.

Best. Valentine. Ever.

3. We are the Loser-est of Loser Tooth Fairies. Seriously. This is like the fourth time for poor Nicholas. And losing teeth is a matter of great drama and panic for him, which makes our Loser-li-ness even worse.

Which leads to…

4.

 

Seeking the Best (instead of expecting the worst)

I was on the hunt for little boy dress shoes when I discovered the tight bundle of clothes wadded up and shoved behind a storage bin in the boys’ closet. In that bundle I found a pair of khakis and a school uniform fleece that I had given to Nicholas less than twenty-four hours before with instructions to put them away.

This is not the first time we’ve faced dishonesty coupled with lack of compliance from this particular child. It’s not even the second. Or the third. Or the fourth.

But it had been months since the last episode, and I had really hoped the lesson about honesty and obedience had finally sunk in.

Parenting Nicholas has stretched my creativity so far that it’s taken on a whole new shape. Trying to discipline using “natural consequences,” when there aren’t any natural consequences that matter to him one whit, frequently leaves me feeling completely helpless.

I do not react well to feeling helpless. I firmly believe that the greatest tantrums and rages we fly into are caused by feeling powerless.

But yesterday—call it grace, call it personal growth—I did not lose my temper. True, for a change I did have a consequence I could apply: he’d been promised a play date, and losing that mattered to him very much.

But it’s also because I’ve spent a lot of time in the last several months making a concerted effort to seek out the best in this child. To open my heart to him, to love him better. But especially to look for the best in him instead of the worst.

To put it simply, yesterday was different because I was able to approach discipline with mercy.

Now, if you’d put those two words together a few months ago, I would have turned my nose up. I would have equated mercy with clemency–like a child is getting away with bad behavior. Like, I’m not disciplining them at all.

But that, like most of our thought processes about mercy, is far too small. The thing is, when a kid pushes your buttons time and time again (you’ve all got one of these, right?), your heart starts hardening toward them. If you’re not careful, you start expecting the worst from them—and worse, looking for it. And then, when it’s time to discipline, you’ve got all that baggage, and it’s impossible to discipline in love.

In the past months, because I’ve made a focused and ongoing effort to seek out positive interactions with Nicholas, I have laughed much more with him. Been able to take advantage of his eagerness to be useful. Had thoughtful conversations with him. Learned to recognize the sensitive soul beneath the demon named “strong-willed.” And (most importantly!) I’ve learned that he’s far and away the best kisser of all my children. ;)

The upshot is that our relationship has become far less contentious, and when we did have an episode yesterday, I was better equipped to handle it.

And all because I have begun to seek out the best in him instead of expecting the worst.

To me, that is the essence of an attitude of mercy, and it is the attitude of mercy that underlies what Jesus lays out in today’s Gospel, the actions that became the corporal works of mercy.

There’s a clear parallel here to all our attitudes toward others, but for today I’ll leave it at the level of home and family. There are plenty of Mercy Mondays left to spin out the implications for the rest of life.

For other Mercy on a Monday posts, click here.

Good Person #Fail

Image by Oskar H. Solich, via Wiki Commons

I try very hard not to be That Parent. The one who thinks the rules don’t apply to their little angels and blisters the ears of the people who dare to challenge either child or parent. I figure the best way to have successful relationships in my kids’ schools is to problem solve together, not be combative.

 

I failed yesterday.

Mind you, I still don’t think I was wrong. But ordinarily when I hit one of those brick-wall-meets-unmovable-object moments, I take a deep breath and find a way to respond in a measured, rational, relationship-building way.

Yesterday, I handled an encounter with a staff member at one of the kids’ schools very, very badly. I let the frustration of a week filled with nuisances get to me. I thought, “I’ve lost more than half my work time this week to necessary interruptions. I am not about to give up the rest for something that isn’t even real.” What was real was this: I was a real jerk. I have to own that. And it bothers me all the more because it’s Lent, and today’s readings say this:

“Why do we fast, and you do not see it?

afflict ourselves, and you take no note of it?”

Lo, on your fast day you carry out your own pursuits,

and drive all your laborers.

Yes, your fast ends in quarreling and fighting,

striking with wicked claw.

I can only respond the same way the psalmist did:

“For I acknowledge my offense,

and my sin is before me always.”

It is a new day, and I start again.