Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 44

When Kids Decide “Who” They Want To Be

One of the great things about the magazine writing I do is that I get built-in opportunities to dig in and apply my faith in new ways.

Right now I’m working on an article for the Couple to Couple League on Theology of the Body parenting, and I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Gregory Popcak and his wife, Lisa. Most of what they shared with me will be saved for the July-August issue of Family Foundations, but something Lisa talked about, from their book Parenting With Grace, had such an immediate application, I wanted to try it with my kids.

She said once a year, they had their children write a list of who they want to be–not “what,” as in “doctor” or “fireman,” but who. Happy? Brave? Honest? How do they want their friends and family right now to think of them? Then they wrote that down on a knight’s shield, like a coat of arms, and throughout the year the parents referred back to that list to help guide the kids with their behavior.

Being the family who all dressed up as the Avengers a couple years ago, we branched out a bit for our designs. The kids liked this idea and took to it pretty well. I knew this first time out, I had to be pretty specific in order to explain what we were going for, so I had to come up with a list of possible virtues to get them thinking. But on the other hand, I didn’t want to be That Mom who tries to tell them what they should want to be. It was a fine line to walk, and not surprisingly, my thoughtful firstborn was the first to reach for the pencil.

Honest, humble, brave, optimistic, kind, and self-confident.

(That last one caught my heart, first because it was all his own, and secondly because it reveals so much about his character and his self-image.)

Nicholas, my strong-willed child, sat on the couch silently while I turned my attention to Julianna, and I decided to go with it rather than split my attention and push him. That turned out to be the right course of action, because suddenly he popped out with his own list–not nearly so ambitious as Alex’s, but they’re good ones for him. Very good ones.

Happy and honest.

Julianna? Not surprisingly, Julianna didn’t get it. She wants to be like Anna. Why? Because Elsa blasted her heart.

Not quite what I was looking for. ;) The developmentally delayed child clearly required more guidance than the brothers who sandwich her. I asked why she liked Anna, and I gave her options: because Anna believed in her sister, because she loved her sister, or because she was brave?

Julianna went with “brave.”

And Michael, as you can see, went with:

Well, my wingdings don’t transfer over to Word Press. Sorry.

But that’s okay, because he’s three. He’s not ready for this yet. He just really wanted to participate, and so he did.

We did this exercise on Easter night, and we have already had three occasions to refer to these “shields.” I have hung them in the kitchen, where people are constantly walking by and where they are in plain view from the table. I really love this idea of giving children the chance to think forward in their lives, to be intentional about who they want to be. I love it for their sake, and I love it for mine, because it helps keep me focused on the end game instead of the chaotic minutiae. And I love it especially because the long-term can seem so overwhelming and nebulous, and this cuts through all that and gives us a trajectory to follow.

Popcaks for the win.

Easter Weekend Photography Experiments

We’ve had a DSLR for years, and although I know the theory behind aperture, ISO and shutter speed, there’s a big difference between theory and knowing how to use it. I’ve been wanting to take a class that would force me to play around, but who has time? This weekend I finally started the process. Here are some of my experiments. (If you’re on Facebook you already saw these. Sorry.)

Click to view slideshow.

A Tale of Two Easters, Seventeen Years Apart

The most amazing Easter of my life was the year 1998. I was in Iowa, without a car, living in an eight-room suite with a group of people I barely knew and counting myself blessed to be out of the roommate situation I’d suffered the semester before. It came on the heels of a Lent of barren emptiness, of overwhelming homesickness and a feeling of great spiritual barrenness, of anxiety I was too afraid to admit. Of a loneliness and alienation that to this day gives me the willies to think about.

That was a semester of long, solitary walks to and from campus along the biking paths, while the creek slowly thawed and the snow eased back to reveal the cold green beneath.

I wanted so badly to be home for Triduum. But it couldn’t happen. I don’t even remember why now.

The Catholic student center in Cedar Falls needed a cantor for Holy Thursday. I don’t even understand why, because they had a choir that had been practicing for weeks. But they wanted a cantor. I volunteered.

I did not know my barrenness, my anxiety, my wasteland, had scoured my soul into a blank slate. Or perhaps, into fertile ground, cleared of weeds. That Holy Thursday evening, in that warmly-lit space, my soul responded in a way I had never, ever experienced. Kind of like salty and sweet, the pain of loneliness made that whole Triduum experience, three nights and a morning at the end, incredibly poignant and filled with the Spirit. For the first time I really got that connection between resurrection and new life, as the long Iowa winter crept to an end.

I’ve been hoping for an Easter like that to come again ever since, and it never has. Truly, I should be grateful; it’s the pain surrounding the mountain experience that makes the high ground stand out, after all.

I’ll refrain from telling the story behind this picture. Suffice it to say not all is as it seems.

Easter these days is a lot more prosaic, with moments of extreme irritation and extreme hilarity coexisting. For instance: discovering, when I go in to make sure the kids wear their Easter best, that Nicholas’ closet is once again a mess in which you can’t find anything, let alone the suit I know is in there somewhere, so then pulling out a pair of khakis for him, only to discover that they have a hole in the knee (AAACK!!!! ANOTHER ONE?????? WHAT IS THE ****DEAL**** WITH THESE KNEE HOLES?????????????).

Or choir warmup being interrupted by an extended (and deeply fake) wail from my youngest, who wants what he wants and thinks he deserves it even if someone else has it.

Or looking up during the Communion song to find my two youngest children wrestling over the chair next to the piano, only to realize they’re not wrestling, but hugging.

Or looking up again during “Up From The Earth” at the end of Mass to find them both giggling and playing air guitars and air drums in the space between the sound board and the boom mics.

Or coming out of church and sitting down in my seat in the van only to be poked in the butt by a broken Power Ranger mask, which I’d forgotten I’d thrown there when I forced Michael to take it off before going inside for Mass.

Or trying to take the obligatory pictures of the kids after Mass with my strong-willed child refusing either to cooperate or to decide he didn’t want to be in the pictures.

These are not exactly mountaintop moments. But I’m in a different season of life now, and when I’m not in the thick of being cranky-hormonal, I can admit that I wouldn’t ask for the other. Petty irritations come with little moments of beauty, and this is a different kind of spiritual exercise than the one that led to that mountaintop experience. Different, but no less valid.

Cranky Alert

Image by Fuschia Foot, via Flickr

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Can someone explain to me the compulsion to back into parking places? Having a) been caught in traffic behind people attempting to back into parking places on multiple occasions, and b) been in a position to back livestock trailers up to chutes for unloading, I can say with certainty that it takes far more time and effort, and causes far more traffic backlog, to back INTO a narrow parking place than it does to back OUT into open space.

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It’s a cranky kind of morning, if you can’t tell. Perhaps that’s a natural side effect of having, for a period of time, four people in my bed overnight. Even when two of them are miniatures, a queen sized bed does not hold four. And I pretty much can’t sleep if anyone is touching me. So I got some nice cuddles last night, but not a lot of rest.

It also didn’t help to come home from taking one child to school this morning to find the recycling bin had tipped over in the wind and strewn trash all over the street, the grass and the sidewalk, where it was all plastered to the concrete by a very, very cold rain. My hands are still not warm.

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The kids were completely insane at Holy Thursday Mass last night. I told them they’re all taking naps today, because tonight we’re not just attending services, we’re leading music, so we need a little less, er, insanity.

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An interesting article that was making the rounds this week: “Making Time For Kids: Study Says Quality Trumps Quality.”

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And another interesting scientific study: “Endocrine-disrupting chemicals can adversely affect reproduction of future generations of fish.”

Or, as the Washington Post, put it, “Fish Don’t Want Birth Control, but Scientsis Say They Get It From Your Pill.”

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What else do I have to say that is not cranky and most un-Good-Friday-bad-attitude-ish? Not much, I’m sorry to say.

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Except that I have a matter on which I need to examine my conscience, and I decided to set aside the noon-to-three time today for that purpose. I am afraid it may be uncomfortable, so any spare prayers would be much appreciated.

I need to put up a graphic of a cute Easter egg or something tomorrow, so this bloggy-teeth-gnashing doesn’t hold the front page all through Easter morning.

Ahem.

Photo by Claudio Ungari, via Flickr

 

 

Nicholas Asks About Adam And Eve

When I was a freshman in college, I was required to take a writing intensive class. Being kind of stupid, I assumed all the classes were the same, so I just picked the one that fit my schedule best. And thus I spent my first semester of college sitting in a classroom with a guy who, in my memory, looks astonishingly like Peter Jackson (before he lost weight), reading Charles Darwin and having an existential crisis of faith.

Photo by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr

No one had ever actually talked to me about literary forms in Scripture. No one had ever really addressed the possibility that Adam and Eve were not historical figures but representations. When my teacher (I don’t remember now if he was a TA or a professor) started tossing the word “myth” around in regard to the creation story, I had my first practice at the Mama Bear-claws-out defensive stance, thirteen years before I ever became a mama. The only meaning of the world “myth” I had ever heard was the one that meant “not true.”

(Note: Certain words should not be used, however accurate, because they are front-loaded, back-loaded, and every-other-kind-of-loaded with inflammatory connotations that eclipse the dictionary definition. “Myth” is one of them.)

So I went on a reactionary rampage, listening to Rush Limbaugh and taking the most radical right stand I could find on virtually every issue. And although I moderated over time, it wasn’t until the words “chromosomal abnormality” entered my airspace that my stubborn brain opened to the rather obvious realization that issues are a whole lot more complicated than one party line—or even two party lines—can adequately address.

Last night at dinner–just me and the kids because Christian had to work late—Nicholas said something like this: “Mom, when the first mother, when the first mother, when, how did God, the first human mother, when God, how did the first, was the first mother, how did the first mother, what is God, when human…”

By this point I had a pretty good idea where this question was going, so while he sputtered around trying to figure out how to ask his question, I had some time to think about the age-appropriate response.

Some. Not enough.

See, I had this conversation with Alex, too, and it went pretty well. But I was pretty sure Alex had a couple years’ cognitive development on Nicholas (three, I discovered when I looked up that post). I’m really not crazy about trying to explain the difference between “historical” and “true” to a newly-minted six-year-old kindergartener. KINDERGARTEN.

Not *quite* a literal approach ;) Image by oddsock, via Flickr

And yet, the wholesale literal approach to Adam and Eve, even for little kids, has made me uncomfortable ever since I realized we start with that simple understanding, and we never take them beyond it. (Hello, fundamentalism.)

So I talked about Jesus telling parables, and how some stories are meant to tell us a truth in a way that’s easier to understand. And then it was time to load the gang to go to piano lessons, so on the way across town I went through the creation story and the theory of evolution side by side, like I did with Alex, showing how they tell the same story in the same order. It was rather gratifying to have to tamp down Alex’s eagerness to tell the story for me, because it meant he still remembered.

Just like last time, Adam and Eve themselves got a bit of the short shrift. But we’ll save that for the next time, when it’s maybe slightly more age-appropriate.

Six Uses for Palm Branches During Church that the Church Never Intended

In which

 plus 

equals

T-R-O-U-B-L-E

Our pastor began Palm Sunday Mass by saying: “Good morning! Welcome on Palm Sunday! The church cleaners always fuss at me about cleaning the church after we’ve had palm branches. So please don’t play with them!” Things my kids did with palms during church yesterday

6. Phantom pokes on my scalp and near-misses to the corner of my eye with sharp ends of palm branches.

5. Fights over whose palm cross belonged to whom.

4. Palm crosses coming unfolded to general wails.

3. Palm branches nearly smacking the choir member beside me in the face. (cough-Julianna!-cough)

2. A growl from Alex to Michael when Michael slammed down a heavy choir hymnal on top of a palm cross. (My reply: “Alex. Jesus is dying on the cross. I really don’t think he cares if a palm cross gets crushed.”)

1. And finally, my favorite: the Palm Cross as Baseball Bat. Yes, Nicholas, I’m looking at you.

File this one under the category of my mother’s voice saying, “Yes, there were many Masses when you girls were young that we didn’t get much out of.”

More Adventures In Speech Production

In which I share recent mannerisms from my two speech-challenged children:

Julianna, upon being given anything at the table (tea, milk, more pasta):

“Oh, sank you sweetheart!”

(This is her parroting me, btw, and as soon as she discovered that it reduces people to giggles, she adopted it as a permanent fixture. I’m now trying to discourage it by lack of reaction. It’s really cute, but she’s eight years old. She’s not really a little girl anymore, appearances and behavior to the contrary.)

Michael, when told “no”:

“Oh, but the (denied item) make me saaaad!”

Julianna, upon having her will thwarted or redirected in the tiniest detail:

“Heeeeeeyyyyyyyyyy!” (Word Press is woefully inadequate to the task of showing the inflection of this, a two-pitch falling whine.)

Michael, when his big brothers, thinking he’s adorable, repeat his stilted, imperfect sentences:

“Yeah! Dass, what, I, said!”

Julianna, at any old time of the day (it happens upwards of a half dozen times a day):

“Hey–Mommy–guess–what? Michael, said, if der iss, a toh-nado dweel, we haf–to–go–to, the base-ment!”

(We think this is an attempt to “coach” herself about things that scare her. Although similar self-coachings on the topic of getting up and coming to Mommy and Daddy’s room if there’s a thunderstorm failed spectacularly three nights ago. When push came to shove, she reverted to her usual bloodcurdling wake-up-the-whole-household scream.)

Michael, after seeing something scary:

(little giggle): “Mum-my, da monsta is fun-ny!”

Happy Palm Sunday weekend! The biggest week of the year is around the corner!

Ordinary Love

I am hopeless romantic at heart–a sucker for a great kiss in a movie or a book, hopelessly sentimental about stories where new love is found alongside other adventures.

But I’m also becoming ever more aware of how easy it is to take an oversimplified, overdramatized, and romanticized view of love and trying to measure your reality against it. The end result? A deep dissatisfaction with what you have, and a longing for something that seems more “like the movies,” and thus better.

Random, unconnected cute picture. Sensing a theme?

There’s a power in ordinary love, and I am determined to find a way to depict, to celebrate, and to develop that theme in my fiction. Yesterday, after a six-month process, I finished the first, extremely rough draft of my new novel: new heroine, new conflicts to resolve, and a new love story to go with it–a story more mature than others I’ve written before, because it was conceived by a heart and mind that has experienced more. And yet I still have been walking a tight-rope between getting emotionally involved enough to make it work, and recognizing that it is fiction.

Because my life doesn’t match the drama I write. The reality is, I have a wonderful life–rich, happy, infused with petty irritations that are no different and no less ephemeral than that of every other person in the world. And because I am already so blessed, my life doesn’t have that urgent tug toward resolution.

Everybody loves a happy ending, because it’s neat and tidy. But Happily Ever After is not a moment, it’s a lifetime, and the truths you discover in the process of getting to HEA have to be unpacked over the course of years–decades, if you’re lucky.

I learned some things about my marriage in the process of writing this rough draft. In the longing of a character for the trust and touch that I take for granted, I realized we sometimes forget to act like lovers at all. We take each other for granted. And it’s beautiful that we can, that our relationship is so fundamentally solid that way–but I realized I wanted more “lover.” I wanted that sense of longing and desire to come forward, to enrich the “best friend” and “partner” aspects of our marriage that tend to take front and center because, yanno, they kind of have to with four kids.

(Practicing natural family planning, incidentally, gives us a built in chance to do that–if we choose to take advantage of it. Which we are better at some times than others.)

But I also had to be careful. There were times when I had to take some space from the manuscript, because the more I got to know my characters, the more writing all that longing and drama into their lives made real life seem flat and dissatisfying. When I write fiction I have to guard against the tendency to get lost in a world that doesn’t really exist, and forget to notice the one that does. Living in the moment is not one of my strong suits, anyway, and it’s something I want to work on.

At the end of the drafting process (and the beginning of what I know will be a far longer editing process), I am so very grateful for my happily-ever-after-in-action–for the ordinary-ness of it, for the luxury of taking it for granted, and especially for the reminder not to do so.

Early Spring in the Woods

Photo by Milos Golubovic, via Flickr

I could swear I can hear the earth breathing in and out around me. The tiny sounds that I would attribute to rustling leaves, except there aren’t any leaves in the trees. Or to the drip of water from rock to rock, except it isn’t water dripping. It’s as if the thick carpet of dry leaves shifts, one click at a time, as somewhere, buried beneath it, the earth begins to push the new year out from within.

Two birds are singing to each other in turn, a falling call. C-B, calls one. A-G, responds the other. C-B. A-G. C-B. A delay, then A-G, almost on top of the next C-B. And then they sound together in faulty thirds.

The breeze picks up, and now it really is the rustle of dead leaves, still clinging stubbornly to branches, that whispers. A leaf taps against an adjacent branch. The birds have shifted. Part 2 in the duet has notched up a degree, as if trying to match pitch. C-B. B-A. C-B. B-A. And another shift, until they are a quarter tone apart. Part one drops a pitch, and they sing in unison.

The air spreads out all at once, like a muscle relaxing with a whoosh that can’t be heard or seen, only felt, spreading warmth across mossy rocks—dull brown-green and vivid lime-green. Across empty seed pods quivering in the breeze. Across fallen trees reduced to mahogany piles of sawdust. Across cedar trees growing from sedimentary rock, clinging to life by a thread. And across me, the lone intruder, sitting high on a hillside soaking in the sunlight.

The Danger In Raising Kids In A Musical Household

The danger in raising children in a musical household is that car rides home from piano lessons can turn into this:

Julianna: Mommy, can I, sing, Let It Go?

Me: Of course you can.

Nicholas: SNOW GLOWS WHITE ON THE MOUNTAIN TONIGHT, NOT A

Julianna: No! No no no no no!

Me: Julianna, if you can sing it, he can sing it too.

Nicholas: Kingdom of isolation, and it looks like I’m the queen!

Alex: EVERYTHING IS AWESOME, EVERYTHING IS COOL WHEN YOU’RE

Me: You do NOT have permission to sing THAT.

Alex (to the tune of “Everything Is Awesome”): PERCY JACKSON RO-OCKS!

Me: Or any of its permutations!

Nicholas: THE WIND IS…

Alex: DON’T MIIIIIINE AT NIGHT! DON’T MINE AT NIGHT!

Michael: WUT, IT, GO, WUT, IT, GO, TAT HODE, BACK, ENNYMOH!

Alex: YOU’RE FEELIN’ KINDA BRAVE AS YOU LOOK IN THE CAVE!

Michael: EVEE-FING IS AWESOME!

Alex: WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY? RING DING DING DEE-DING DEE-DING DING!

Nicholas: I am one with the wind and sky-y-y!

Alex: JINGLE BELLS, JINGLE BELLS, JINGLE ALL THE WAY!

Nicholas and Julianna: YOU KNOW DASHER AND DANCER AND PRANCER AND VIXEN….

Michael (to the tune of the Imperial March): DUM DUM DUM, DUM DUM-DUM, DUM-DUM DUM

Me: (facepalm). (In parentheses, because, after all, I am driving.)