Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 45

The Only St. Patrick’s Day I Remember

St. Paddy’s Day is a complete non-event for me. Like April Fools, to me it is a time for people to do obnoxious things to you (i.e. pinch you) for no good reason. But it does have one claim on my heart. It’s the day Julianna was baptized.

We’d had it planned since before she was born, I think–a Saturday night Mass with family coming in from the East Coast and from places around the Midwest. Then she got sick…then she got very sick…then she went on the vent…and for about four or five very long days, her oxygen saturation kept plunging into the 40s. (FYI, 95% is the threshold for hospitalization for a child.) So we decided we weren’t about to put it off any longer. That was about the time the snow started on the East Coast and Julianna’s godparents got stuck at their connecting point and couldn’t get here at all.

We’d talked all week with the PICU staff about what to do about the baptism. There was a rule that said only two visitors at a time, you see, and priest plus parents is already beyond that.

The staff was amazing. When Julianna finally made an upturn later in the week, they said they’d move out all the furniture and make an exception so that the adults could come in, at least. They dressed her in the gown her daddy’s grandma had made. They covered the little hospital crib with the beautiful blanket a family friend had made. And they called Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, which usually only comes to capture moments for babies who are not going home. The black and white shots below come from that photographer. I can’t tell you how much I wish I had been in an emotional state to remember her name.

You would not think a baptism in a pediatric ICU could possibly be a beautiful experience. Not with all the hissing and beeping and alarms going off, and having to pipe the godparents in by horrible cell phone connection from a thousand miles away. Not with the fact that we couldn’t hold her, or even light the baptismal candle (because, hello, oxygen).

And yet it was. It was so beautiful, and so memorable.

And that’s what I think of on St. Patrick’s day now.

(Note: I like to joke that since Julianna was the only one of the kids not to be baptized at our home parish, she decided to do it herself when she was three years old. And yes, if you don’t know that story, you really need to click through.)

Click to view slideshow.

Why I Hate The “Blaming The Victim” Argument

In the midst of the online debate about Ferguson last November, someone I know posted this status update on Facebook:

A little provocative, to be sure, but I found value to this point of view, and it was one I hadn’t heard anyone else acknowledging amid the screeching chorus of pointing fingers and moral outrage on both sides of the so-called conversation. What I saw in that status update was a clear-eyed recognition that the only way forward could not be imposed from outside, but had to be undertaken by the people for whom the issue mattered most–those in Ferguson.

So I shared the status.

Photo by jetheriot, via Flicker

Almost immediately, someone invoked “blaming the victim.”

I cannot tell you how much I loathe those three words. There is no other phrase I can think of that so effectively shuts down discussion. What possible response can there be to that accusation? None. Any protest simply proves the point in the mind of the accuser.

So of course, I simply fumed in silence and swore off participating in conversations on the topic.

But I thought of it again this weekend, because this story appeared in my NBC news feed: Ferguson’s Future May Lie In The Hands Of Its Voters After Shootings, Unrest.

And I thought, Look at that. He was right. Now even the national news is saying it.

This is anything but blaming the victim.  It is a search for solutions. The final quote in the video interview with candidate Wesley Bell is: “I want to be a part of that solution. I think it takes people in the community to step up and do it.”

Solutions. That’s what it’s all about.

Bad things happen to everyone. When they do, it’s natural and even productive to think, “Did something I did cause or contribute to that?” You do this, not because you think you’re to blame, but to see if there’s something in the way you handled the circumstances that you need to rethink in the future, to try to avoid it happening again. You learn from the past, or the past repeats itself.

I can sit here and tick off a dozen examples of this in practice in the last couple of years in my own life. It’s never as simple as who was right and who was wrong, who’s the aggressor and who the victim. People always do what they do for a reason. They may not be good reasons, but the reasons are a result of people’s individual experiences. When bad things happen, we have to acknowledge that reality, if we want to move toward a better future.

And that’s the key here–when we go around throwing blame, we’re not getting any closer to a solution. In fact, we’re throwing obstacles in the way. And when we go around accusing people of blaming the victim, we’re throwing up the biggest obstacle of all.

In the end, what matters most is never making sure the blame rests with the right person. What matters most is working toward a solution, toward a better future.

Things I Don’t Want To Forget

Things I Don’t Want To Forget:

Michael saying “I want to tuggle with you.” And then getting irritated because I repeat it that way. “No—no! I said, sssssstuggle!”

Michael “nursing” (where did he learn to do that?)

The way Julianna dissolves into giggles at the silliest pieces of nothing.

The way every one of the children has pointed to the pickle in The Very Hungry Caterpillar, knowing I will say it in crazy-silly voice and reduce them to uncontrollable laughter.

The way Nicholas’ eyes catch the sunlight from the window, illustrating something I thought impossible—that eyes that dark brown can be at the same time so luminescent and clear.

The tremble in Alex’s voice as he shares the meanest comment someone made about his sister: She’s always so happy. It gets on my nerves. And the way his smile broke through his tears when I said that if that was the worst insult anyone could come up with about his sister, then he should just take it as a compliment.

Things that only happen with small children around…like walking into a pitch-black room to comfort a crying child in the middle of the night and stepping on something sort of firm, sort of soft, that promptly grabs your foot and nearly makes you scream until you remember that Michael has been wearing (and dropping) a slap bracelet the last several days…

The feeling of a good night’s sleep after the last commitment of a stressful few weeks…of waking to an alarm instead of my own racing brain.

The moment my husband sends me an email inviting me to go to the opera with him.

These are the moments I want to treasure. To hold so close in my heart that they never lose the immediacy and familiarity of the present.

Favorite Places: The Pinnacles

All of a sudden, it decided to be spring. And on day one, I went out to commune with God in nature in one of my favorite places in the whole world.

I came here as a teenager with a youth group. I came here with my husband when we were first dating, and I swam in the creek. I came here and napped with nursing babies on a blanket in the shade. I have come here with a cousin and with children and with friends and most especially, again and again, by myself.

It’s not as quiet here as it was when I was a kid. Not since they built the four-lane. Then again, maybe my memories are skewed. I never realized, until I left the farm for college, how noisy the world beyond my haven is. But I know the spots where I can put the rocks between me and the highway and hear only running water.

The topography of this area is wild and unruly. It will never settle into the kind of organized beauty we usually prefer in our nature scapes. I love organized beauty, but something in this rambling, cluttered, ever-changing landscape speaks to me, reaches through the cluttered mess of my crazy life and strokes a heart-string deep inside, setting it to humming.

And so, in the middle of yet another crazier-than-it-should-be week, I pause to share it with you.

Click to view slideshow.

Note To Self: Saturday Evening Mass Attendance

Now you KNOW this bunch is gonna cause trouble. ;)

Note to self: stop trying to take your family to Saturday evening Mass.

Item 1: you’re trying to take children to church during the Witching Hour. And when you have spent 4 hours in the car and done two presentations, you are going to have trouble summoning the energy to deal with it.

Item 2: that bench gets very crowded on Saturday evenings. There’s not enough room for all those butt cheeks. There are going to be territorial disputes.

Item 3: No matter how tired you are, if you’ve been away from Mr. Michael Mayhem all day, he’s going to pull the world’s longest face if Daddy tries to keep him at that end of the pew.

Item 4: Julianna will follow up a whisper about how next year she’ll get to receive Communion with a chaser about riding a horse.

Item 5: Sometime during the Gospel, Michael, perched on top of the pew so he can see, will pretend to be Iron Man and start blasting your childhood church to smithereens.

All of which will cause laughter, but not leave a lot of room for a spiritual experience.

Remember this next time. Your children…are…morning people.

Sincerely,

Kate

Stillwater Rising, by Steena Holmes

Click on the image to go to Goodreads, where you’ll find an “open preview.”

The Women’s Fiction Cafe is open at Facebook again this week, this time with author Steena Holmes in the house to introduce readers to her book, STILLWATER RISING:

After losing her son in an elementary school shooting that devastates the tight-knit community of Stillwater Bay, Jennifer Crowne finds herself unable to settle back into her role of perfect stay-at-home mom and committee organizer. Meanwhile, her best friend, Mayor Charl…otte Stone, struggles to keep the town together, and Charlotte’s husband, the school principal, may not be the hero everyone thinks him to be.

As they try to heal from this irrevocable trauma, Jenn and Charlotte find themselves at a crossroads—within the town and within their friendship. For Jenn, broken and grieving, there is no going back, and she demands that the school be closed so that she can bury the past. Yet Charlotte is equally desperate to hold the town together, fighting the school closure and helping the shooter’s mother regain her place in the community. Jenn and Charlotte’s relationship is put to the ultimate test as each weighs her own interests against the bonds of their friendship.

As always, all commenters will be entered for a giveaway of the book at the end of the week. Hope you’ll stop in!

Pinewood Derby Day

Today is about (insert epic announcer voice) The Thrill Of Victory and the Agony of Defeat….

…or something like that.

My oldest is a bright, thoughtful kid. Empathetic and sensitive and introverted, and in short, a continual source of pride to me. Not perfect, but a continual source of pride nonetheless.

“He wants to get his work done quickly so he can stick his head in a book,” his teacher told us last week at parent-teacher conferences, and I had to refrain from wiping a little tear away from my eye. That was totally me as a kid. Who am I kidding? It’s still me.

But he’s not all that good at boy things. He has to work really hard at baseball just to get in shooting distance of the other kids. He doesn’t have that “boy” sense of humor, which will make him one heck of a catch someday, but right now it makes him feel a little out of place.

Yesterday afternoon Alex’s face stretched about half a mile long when he got in the car after school. I thought he was sick, but it turned out he’d just had a bad day…because he couldn’t figure out his math homework.

So when we got home I sat down at the table with him and we worked through perimeter versus area. Division problems using the bracket and the carry-down technique. He felt so threatened and out of control from not understanding his math homework that he got emotional. When we got it figured out, his relief flowed out into the room.

And then it was time for Pinewood Derby.

Now, being a girl from a house full of girls, I had never heard of the Pinewood Derby until a couple of years ago. So if you are in the dark, let me enlighten you. The Pinewood Derby is where (cough-cough) the scouts (cough-or-their-parents-cough) take a rectangular piece of pine, design a car, cut it out, sand it down, add weights and wheels, and race it down a track to see whose is a) the coolest-looking and b) the fastest.

Christian wants Alex to do well, but he also wants him to do the work himself as much as possible.

Alex’s derby cars, the last three years, did not do so well.

This year, Christian walked Alex through it step by step. Alex did the lion’s share of the work himself: design, sanding, painting, assembling. He even took it to my parents’ farm so his grandpa could “help” him cut out some wings. My father, being a farm kid, took that to mean that Alex would use the jigsaw himself, too, under supervision.

So when Alex’s car took first place for design and third place for speed last night, he was over the moon.

And so am I.

Cross-Bleed

I’m not sleeping well lately. Bizarre, disturbing dreams. Waking at three a.m. and lying awake for hours. Sometimes giving up and pulling out the laptop to work for an hour and a half before I finally crash again, thirty minutes before the alarm goes off.

After Monday’s post I realized my problem is cross-bleed.

Here’s how my life is supposed to work: kids go to school, and I work. Kids come home, and I stop working to be mom and domestic goddess household coordinator.

But with six late-start days, four sick days, and three school holidays (none of which, I might add, overlapped), the upshot is that the last several weeks I’ve been working and parenting simultaneously, all day, every day.

It’s no wonder I’m feeling this way.

Sometimes I lie down with Michael and twilight-doze….or sometimes really doze….at naptime. It’s a bright spot I really need. Because when I wake up, this is what I see six inches from me.

The Guilt We Cling To

Photo by h.koppdelaney, via Flickr

No one has ever criticized me for being a work-from-home mom. Not even once.

And yet I go through a periodic…cyclical, perhaps?…festival of self-loathing. My house isn’t clean enough. My kids’ personal habits and academic/physical/fill-in-the-blank achievements aren’t enough. My flower beds aren’t pretty enough. My life is a long series of “should-have”‘s, and if only I had more…. (time, talent, time, money, time, are you sensing a theme?).

There is a segment of modern American society that clings to the idea that women should be little June Cleavers who do nothing except play with, nourish and nurture their children, even though that has always been an idealized, unrealistic picture. But it’s not a big segment. We’re constantly being reminded to put on our own “oxygen mask” first.

Why, then, do so many of us cling to this guilt that regards our efforts as not good enough? This sense of guilt that clouds any personal or professional fulfillment, enjoyment, or success? Is this another way we pervert our children’s inherent selfishness–that because they see themselves as the center of the universe, we feel we must do the same?

I’ve always regarded this side of myself as a necessary evil, a built-in check on my own selfish tendencies. Because I love what I do. Difficult it may be, filled with setbacks, littered with rejection, with what often seems like fruitless pursuit of an unattainable goal. And yet I could and would happily spend every waking moment in that pursuit, if real-life commitments, to husband, to children, didn’t force me to redirect. And all the publishing success in the world would be empty without the richness of the life I’ve been given.

So I’ve made peace with the guilt, allowed it space to roost and nest and put down roots.

But I’m beginning to wonder. Guilt might make me redirect my actions, but it doesn’t free up mental space for living in the moment and enjoying the things that are most important. Guilt just takes up all the vacated regions and stuffs them full of a different sort of pathological hangup.

I don’t have all this worked out. Conclusions are frequently the hardest part of blog posts to write. I tend to see life as process, and processes don’t lend themselves to neat packages tied up in a pithy, memorable parting shot. So for today I just send these thoughts out into the world, to see if they resonate with others.

Random, Unpolished Tidbits, thrown together on a Friday morning

Random, unconnected cute picture. Sensing a theme?

(because this is one of those weeks when polished, focused blog posts just ain’t happenin’, folks.)

1. The universe is unfair. When my kids get the stomach virus, they wake up in the middle of the night and then they go back to sleep, and come morning they’re raring to go: lightsaber duels and the whole works, and a whole day off school!

Me? I throw up and I feel horrible for half the next day, and yet I have to take kids to school and the car to the shop.

The universe is unfair. That’s all I’m saying.

2. So we got this game for Christmas called “Tall Tale.” They’re circular cards with pictures on them, and in the simplest form you pass out the cards and take turns building a story off the person before you. It leads to great hilarity.

Our story last night went something like this:

Nicholas: “There was a hot girl surfing, with her daughter.”

Michael:

Alex: “And the mom had a boyfriend who had a motorcycle.”

Me: “So he took them to his secret mad scientist lab, where he was trying to create superhero ants.”

Nicholas: “And he had a dream about the ants and a big scary monster.”

Michael:

The trouble is, now Michael knows it makes us laugh. So every time his turn comes up, he stares at his card very hard, as if he’s thinking. Then, without lifting his chin, his little twinkly eyes look sideways at someone in the circle, and he gets a Mischief Grin…and out comes:

He thinks he’s soooooo funny. (He gets that from his daddy.)

3. Speaking of so funny, I just have to enshrine this Facebook thread from yesterday afternoon:

4. Talk about a seasonal muddle at the end of the first full week of Lent! I took this picture last night:

At this point I’m on a mission to have both an Easter lily and a pointsettia gracing my kitchen on April 5th. Think we can do it? :)

5. Speaking of Lent…Alex decided he would limit his screen time to half an hour a day as a Lenten discipline. Which lasted about four days. Yesterday he asked if he could change to something else. Like not yelling at his siblings. I said, uh, YES!

Want to hazard a wild guess what made me think of that just now?

6. Speaking of Alex…he’s still two months shy of ten, and his feet are virtually the same size as mine.

7. Julianna just came downstairs wearing a Captain America T shirt and black tights…and nothing else.

Wait, I am wrong. She’s wearing socks under her tights.

Wait, I was still wrong. She was wearing ONE suck under her tights.

Well, look at that. I just wrote a 7 Quick Takes post. Only I don’t have time to visit everyone else, so I’m just not going to link up. But if you like 7 quick takes, you can find them here. Anyway. Time to be done, because it’s yet another day off school. Library, groceries, laundry and baths are on the agenda for today. Time to get moving.

Have a great weekend!