Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 63

Snow Days, Crazy Days (a 7QT post)

___1___

After the processional-cross-and=sound system Sunday, and the what-happens-when-we-push-the-sound system-slides-all-the-way-up? Sunday, I was gratified, last weekend, to see someone else’s child do something hysterically funny and extremely distracting. This child spent the Eucharistic Prayer painting her face with her mother’s brown lipstick. She looked like she’d buried her mouth in a chocolate fountain. It was hard to focus on Real Presence when everyone was waiting with baited breath to see what would happen when the mother turned around and discovered it.

___2___

Headband, beads, sticker. This kid’s ready for Mardi Gras.

Not to be outdone, during the final hymn Michael thought of a new way to be hysterically funny, extremely distracting, and wildly inappropriate. I was three phrases into “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” when I looked down and saw his pants–and underpants–around his ankles.

___3___

Incidentally, Mr. Mayhem? Seriously, kid. You can hum Twinkle Twinkle Little Star ON PITCH. How can you not have ONE SINGLE WORD?

___4___

Me, my cousin and my sister at the party

It was a busy weekend. A quarter inch of ice fell on Friday night, and we spent most of the morning Saturday agonizing over whether to risk the roads to get to my grandmother’s 90th birthday party. We did eventually go, but it required me and two neighbors to push the van up the hill by our house. Grandma’s a pretty special lady. I lived with her for a month before Alex was born, waiting in vain to go into labor.

Grandma with her children

___5___

We also did our NFP promotional weekend. Christian and I spoke before three Masses at our parish, and we had posters and candy handouts and bulletin inserts at our parish and others around the diocese. It went pretty well. Our first class is this weekend. Still praying for a good turnout.

___6___

Day 3. Thank God for the iPad. Oh wait. They’ve been fighting over that all week, too.

This week we had six inches of snow following a quarter inch of ice. Therefore the world ended. The university and the Catholic school closed for two days, and the public schools canceled THE ENTIRE WEEK. Random things happen when you have A WEEK OF SNOW DAYS (did you get that it’s been a WEEK?). For example:

We are stuck with two dozen store-bought cupcakes intended as a school birthday treat for Miss Julianna. What a waste of money.
The kids plumb new depths in their capacity for bickering.
Since snowed-in-Daddy’s work takes precedence over work-at-home mommy’s work, work-at-home-mommy gets up at 5 a.m. every day so she can have the computer before everyone else gets up.
As a consequence, Mommy is cranky.
Daddy does radio and TV interviews holed up in various bedrooms and has conference calls with university officials at 4p.m. while the kids tear the basement to shreds.
Daddy spends one evening playing Wii fit with the kids, which turns out to be the highlight of the week (see, it’s not all bad).
Daddy sets the iPad and charger on top of the computer, and when Mommy tries to print a recipe, the printer pulls the iPad charger through with the paper and jams it so thoroughly, the printer has to go to the shop. The repair man’s reaction? A chuckle. “Never seen that one before….”

___7___

My story, “The Third Day,” about a mother grappling with her newborn’s diagnosis of Down syndrome, published this week at Apeiron Review. It took a long time to find a home for this story, so I’m particularly thrilled to share it today.

Have a great weekend!

Fiction: Snow Day

Adapted (cropped) from an original photo by Giselle Vestergaard, via Flickr (license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/)

The bells of St. Brigit’s are calling tonight, winging over the snow and alighting on my windowsill. All day I have been imprisoned by twenty inches of snow. Something inside me quivers for escape. Something bright, warm, effervescent–and utterly impossible. But real. When I woke this morning I was half an inch above my bed. All day I’ve tried to recapture the feel of that moment without success. The quivering had almost vanished. But the bells are a clarion call; I can feel it surging again. I stand utterly still and close my eyes, focusing inward. The bells reverberate in my head. And I rise, into freedom.

Repost: Faith, Love, and Fear

Yesterday afternoon I was talking to a friend about various topics in faith (because, yanno, we’re Catholic nerds that way), and the topic of fear and its power as a motivator of faith came up. I wanted to write on that topic today, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I have already pretty much said what I wanted to say. So today I want to repost what I wrote on the topic a couple of years ago:

Image via Wikipedia

Are you a Christian because you love God, or are you a Christian because you’re scared of Hell?

A pastor named Rob Bell wrote a book that raised people’s hackles because they felt it espouses “universalism,” the idea that nobody’s going to go to Hell. I ran across this topic here, and it got me thinking. Not about Rob Bell, his book, or the existence of Hell—frankly, because I think the whole discussion is a distraction from the primary issue.

I have no patience with the sentiment “I believe in God, but I’m not really religious.” Or “I’m more spiritual than religious.” Cop-out! If you believe in God, that God is creator of all and above all, then it makes no sense to act as if that belief doesn’t matter. When the stakes are so high—Heaven and Hell, eternal life and eternal death—how can you stick your fingers in your ears and ignore the call to act, saying “la la la I can’t hear you?”

On the other hand, being “religious” because you’re scared of going to Hell is a pretty poor version of Christianity. If that’s all your faith is based on then it’s bound to do one of two things: get twisted into some hideous distortion of true holiness (how often do we see that happen?), or fall to pieces entirely. Holy living should be a response born of gratitude to the One who gave us everything, love for the One who continues to pour out goodness on us, even amid the pain and difficulty of this fallen world. And by love, I mean a conscious decision to act, not some touchy-feely, ephemeral happy place.

When you love someone, you try to get to know them, to understand what they want, what makes them tick. When you love someone, you look for ways to make them happy, you look for ways to deepen your relationship with them. When faith becomes an act of love, the discussion of Hell, its existence or lack thereof, is….well, perhaps not completely irrelevant, but certainly beside the point.

Hell is the absence of God. Look around the world. Everything beautiful in this world, everything that makes it worth living, is from God: love, cuddles, creation, skies and outdoors and fresh air and friendship and music and all the things that make our hearts skip a beat. To be separated from all that? If that doesn’t give you the shudders, then I don’t know what will.

I don’t think much about Hell, end-times or the apocalypse, because it scares me, and when I’m scared I focus on fear instead of on my true job as a Christian. My true job is love. I’m trying to learn to live in such a way that I am acting out of love for the One who made me, acted out toward the people and the world He created. I have a long way to go; I’m well aware that I’m not guaranteed a place in Heaven just because I say I believe in God. Actions speak louder than words, and fear is not a good long-term motivator. Besides, it’s not like I have any control over the apocalypse (or lack thereof). God’s the editor of the final markup, not me. Thank…well, thank God.

Seven

She’s been a little girl for so long, I’m just now starting to realize it’s time to let her start growing up…and in some cases, to push her to do so.

She’s learning what mommies are good at (and good for), and she’s decided it’s worth choosing Mommy occasionally.

And she actually calls me “Mommy” now. I have waited so long for that.

She’s seven years old, and she began her birthday by escaping us yet again after church and heading for the doughnut hall, where she helped herself to a cherry cake doughnut without permission. When we found her, Christian looked helplessly at me. I, having had my butt kicked last week at the DSEI conference, dove in. “You do not run away from us. You do not get a doughnut without permission. That is not okay. You may not have this doughnut.” And I took it from her and threw it in the trash.

And she cried. And I felt like a heel for being mean to her on her birthday. And my husband gave me puppy dog eyes and said, “She’s crying.”

“That is how she manipulates us,” I said.

You know that thing about “This hurts me more than it hurts you”? There’s some validity to that, I think.

But we redeemed the day with pasta and cake and ice cream. And presents. We finally found a Lego set that’s good for her. A Duplo cupcake set. (She’s crazy about cupcakes. And purple ones, at that. Auntie C., you’ve trained your goddaughter well, and you didn’t even know it.)

Oh, and what is this? A purse? Or…something. A Jazzercise sparkle bag that Mommy pushed through the whole holiday season to earn for Miss Jujubee.

And what’s in inside? Sticky stars for her hair. She’s in Heaven. We finally found a hair accessory she’ll wear.

Happy birthday, sweetheart.

7 Quick Takes

___1___

Just you wait until you see what manner of chaos I come up with next. Nothing is sacred.

Michael Mayhem moments of the week:

Friday night, he pulled Strawberry Shortcake’s legs off.

Thursday afternoon, he took a pencil to our bedroom wall. Deep, dark pencil. I trashed half a big pink eraser cleaning it off.

___2___

On the list of new experiences: being paid for a story in Euros.

___3__

In the category “what the…?”: The AARP is soliciting our membership. Um. Okay. I guess I really am an old fogey.

___4___

I read a blog post this week about how to distinguish professional writers from the amateurs. Routine was one of the biggies: pros have times set aside for writing. I have to admit, I sighed. How in the world do you establish a routine when you’re in charge of a pack of kids whose schedules are different every single day? In theory I buy into this, but there’s quite a gap between theory and reality. Life is life, and some of us have to squeeze in the profession around the margins of life. I’d say, instead, that that what distinguishes the professionals is the consistent effort to make it happen even when routines can’t be established.

Then again, maybe I’m just an amateur, despite the paychecks.

___5___

Have you ever had one of those Alexander days? You know, the terrible horrible no-good very bad kind? That was my Wednesday this week. I don’t normally dwell on things like that, but there are not very many days as bad as this day was. Some of it was big stuff, like babysitting falling through for the second time this week. A great deal of it was petty stuff, like my poached egg falling on the floor and splattering everywhere. Mostly it was just that things multiplied on each other, intensifying all the way into choir practice, the first half hour of which was lacking both husband and child care for the nine choir babies.

Some days you just have to write off.

___6___

On the other hand, I’ve been making good progress on rewriting my novel opening this week. Combining and compacting scenes, spinning out the conflict and mercilessly slashing things I spent days and weeks putting in. If it makes the book catch an agent’s eye it will be worth it.

___7___

Our CCL chapter is doing a big NFP push in our diocese this weekend–or more accurately, in the targeted parishes we can realistically get to. Prayers for open hearts would be much appreciated.

(Mostly) Wordless Wednesday: The Box

What is in this box, I wonder?….Not meat, I’m pretty sure. Hmmm, let’s see….

Oh, silly me. It’s Steve Rogers, newly made into Captain America.

(Note: Although Nicholas is modeling it, this was Alex’s baby.)

Because I don’t want my daughter to be ‘Peter Pan’

Julianna likes to run away.

Actually, she doesn’t really run, and to say she “likes” it implies that she does it on purpose, to get away from us–neither of which is true. She simply thinks the world is there for her to explore, and it doesn’t occur to her that staying near her parents is necessary. Julianna is so secure in her place in the world, she just assumes it’s safe as long as, you know, there’s not a dog around.

Julianna also likes to hug people.

In this case, the word “likes” isn’t quite strong enough. This girl is the poster child for the stereotype about people with Down syndrome wanting to hug people. And it’s becoming a problem, because increasingly she wants to hug children her own age and younger. The children her age are growing into an awareness of personal space and appropriate boundaries. The little ones just feel threatened.

This weekend I went to a one-day education conference presented by the Kansas City Down Syndrome Guild and Down Syndrome Education International. I went seeking strategies to help Julianna learn math. I got those, too, but the biggest thing I took away from the day was a crystallization of awareness that these behaviors, while they are quirks of her personality that are cute and sometimes even lovable, have to be addressed.

Imagine a tiny British woman with steel-gray hair who raised a child with DS in the days when children with DS were institutionalized, and managed to raise her well enough that her child is living independently in a committed relationship. Imagine what sorts of things that tiny British woman would have to say on the topic of appropriate boundaries and behavior. “If your child has a behavior,” she said, “it’s because you let them. You wouldn’t accept that behavior from your other children. Why do you accept it from your child with Down syndrome?”

Uh, ouch?

Because she’s right.

We assume Julianna doesn’t understand a lot of things because we give her the option not to. She tends to shut down and not respond and not respond. But this particular presenter laid it out straight: “You’re trying to get them to answer a question, and you re-prompt, and you re-prompt, and they’re still thinking!”

That was in the context of math, but oh, dear, it’s true across the board. We equate no response with not understanding, when the truth is we didn’t give her long enough to respond. We’re willing to wait three or four seconds, but not ten or twenty, if that’s what it takes.

“There’s the chronological age, and there’s the mental age,” the presenter said. “We tend to treat people with Down syndrome according to what we think their mental age is. But their emotional needs are not delayed. A teenager with Down syndrome has the same hormones, the same desires, the same needs as her peers. The stereotype is the ‘Peter Pan’ thing–that people with Down syndrome will be perpetual children. That’s only because we don’t let them grow up.“

You know she’s right? Because letting them grow up opens a whole Pandora’s Box of scariness and complication that we aren’t sure how to handle.

In the two days since coming home from this conference I started trying things with Julianna. Nicholas uses the computer, for instance, but I’ve never had the energy to try to get Julianna to use the mouse. You talk about a fine motor skill. Yowza. I tried to have her click around to fill in an online reading project for school, and it was everything I expected.

Then I put her on a math program they’ve been using at school. I had no idea how it worked, and there were no instructions, so instead of trying to control the process, I stuck her in front of the computer on her own to see what she’d do.

That girl went to town. She knows how to click. When she cares, when she’s motivated, she’s perfectly capable of manipulating a mouse.

The long-term implications of all this are a post of their own, and one that will be much harder to write. For now, I’m working on my own behaviors and expectations where Julianna is concerned. It’s easy to make her do less than the boys, because it’s hard enough just to supervise them, let alone her. But if I want her behavior to change, mine has to change first.

Fading Into Memory

Photo by Leonard John Matthews, via Flickr

Bedtime on a Tuesday evening is a zoo. Christian is in the basement teaching piano. Julianna is listening to a Christmas sing-along CD (yes, still). Nicholas is endeavoring to stay in the tub until he develops hypothermia. In the other bathroom, Alex sounds like he’s making a movie in the shower, complete with sound effects, music and all dialogue.

And in the front bedroom, Michael sees me sitting on the floor, waiting with a footed sleeper for him. Smiling so big his nose crinkles, he spreads his arms wide: game on. I mirror his position, and with a belly laugh that could power Monstropolis for a year, he runs six steps and launches thirty pounds of heavenly soft skin and baby fat into my arms.

There are moments in life when a mother’s whole world freeze-frames upon a point in time. The clarity makes them seem longer than they are. The feel of the air takes on a character. Colors sharpen on the intersection of sensation and emotion. There’s that heady, half-dizzy buzz in the brain that I associate with joy and with the Holy Spirit, and the achy, fluid feeling in my chest. These are the moments that inspired the cliché about hearts melting.

They’re fleeting moments, quickly buried beneath an avalanche of distraction. When they burst upon me I hold my breath and try to shut down my brain to maximize the imprint. Because it’s not enough for me to be able to tell you about it afterward. I want to be able to close my eyes and feel it all again.

Only it doesn’t work that way, does it? You have to shut down the brain and experience the moments because when they’re gone, they’re just gone. They leave an impression, but it’s not the same. You can’t recapture the visceral, full-body-and-soul experience. Only the memory. Sometimes I question taking pictures because I end up remembering the photo instead of the moment.

Perhaps it’s because so much of the moment depends upon context. We edit our memories depending on what we want to evoke, be that good or bad. Women routinely block out just how wretched the last few weeks of pregnancy are–you think you remember, you talk about it, but when you’re there again the enormity of it overwhelms you anew. Then, as kids grow up and move on, people choose to dwell on the sweet moments, and yet what gives those sweet moments life and body is the chaos, and sometimes the frustration, that surround them. No matter how wide you fling the corners of your mind, you are never going to be able to catch all the nuances and piece them back together: your mood, the myriad details, one stacked upon another, that create one particular day, unique from all others.

I do the best I can, but I mourn the moments even as I clutch at them, because I can already feel them fading into memory. Babyhood, for instance. I know I’m at my limit, and there’s joy and freedom in the dawn of a new era. And yet oh, how I long to hold and nurse a baby again. When I saw a baby being baptized at Mass this weekend, I actually gasped, the shot of longing was so painful, the longing to live it again. Memory lacks that visceral experience.

As the moments come, I try to slow down and hold them as long as possible. And I hold onto the hope that Heaven will allow me to exist in them once again.

Mostly Julianna (a 7QT post)

___1___

I mentioned last week that we’d had Julianna’s IEP meeting. I never really talked about it, though, and I thought some of you might be interested.

Every single meeting concerning Julianna begins with the adult in question pulling their notes together in a stack, prepared to dive in, and then pausing to look up with helpless disarmament to say, “First of all, you do know just how sweet your daughter is, right?”

Yes, we know it. We wonder what her brothers think of such an assessment, though.

___2___

Reading Pinkalicious to Grandma and Grandpa

Reading is her strength. She’s basically at grade level, even with comprehension factored in. Her ability to read words on a page is way beyond her comprehension. She’s been reading Dinosaurs Before Dark (the first of the Magic Treehouse series–a chapter book!). “I do it by mysef!” she says insistently, with that deliberate, one-word-at-a-time inflection that characterizes her speech.

___3___

Math, however, is Julianna’s bugaboo. Yesterday afternoon, I was doing math homework with her. What number comes before?_____16     _____8     ______6        ____14

She stared at it like she’d never seen numbers before. We made a chart across the top of the page, counting backwards. That alone was excruciatingly difficult. I thought, though, that it would then be relatively simple to refer to the chart to snag the number that comes “before.” Not so. I may have mentioned that the concepts of “more” and “less” have been a huge stumbling block. How can you add or subtract without understanding those concepts? (Short answer: you can’t. She’s way behind in math already.) But they’ve been working on that a lot and I’m seeing progress in comprehension of those concepts.

Now we’re on to “before” and “after.” I looked for good Sesame Street-type videos for her to watch and couldn’t find any. The only “before” and “after” they address is the cause-and-effect kind. You can have dessert AFTER dinner. You must eat dinner BEFORE you have dessert. She’s got that down. The math meaning, though, is another story. I’m attending an all-day “Downs Ed” conference tomorrow, so I’m crossing my fingers I’ll come away with some good strategies for teaching abstract concepts to a child whose brain is wired firmly to the concrete.

___4___

After committing to public schooling for Julianna, Christian and I have been devoting time this year to Down syndrome awareness. We spent two mornings at the local Catholic school talking to all the students from 3rd grade up to 8th grade about Down syndrome and Julianna specifically, and I am bringing Julianna back to go around and visit with the classes when she has a day off school in a few weeks. It looks like we’ll be talking to the third graders yearly from here on out. We also went to Julianna’s public school classroom, and we are working on scheduling more visits around her school. I also spoke to the parish religious ed director this week about coming in to her Wednesday night class for the same purpose.

___5___

So we’re doing what we can to address the “fear factor” a lot of the Catholic kids seem to have  around our daughter. She has boundary issues. As in, she doesn’t recognize that there are any. I talked recently about how we teach sexuality in our family. But Julianna’s so concrete, I haven’t felt that she’s ready for all those concepts. I think the “boundaries” issue is our entry point. I’ve long thought that little children are very intuitive about boundaries. The most open, demonstrative child can turn into a turtle instantly when a needy adult comes around broadcasting their neediness. Kids, I firmly believe, like people who don’t need them, but just enjoy them. Julianna just wants to hug kids, and they find it off-putting. My heart bleeds for my daughter. I want the kids to be more sensitive and willing to accept that this is part of her disability, but I also want her to learn boundaries.

___6___

This post is approaching epic length, so let me switch gears to share a couple of funnies. First, Nicholas to Julianna the other day as he stalks around the living room with Alex’s nerf crossbow: “HOLD STILL! I’M GONNA AMBUSH YOU!“

___7___

And finally, Alex on the piano, giving a “rock concert” for his younger siblings, drags his thumb from the top of the keyboard to the bottom. (This is called a gliss and it’s his daddy’s trademark.) He stops. Yells, “Ow! How does Daddy DO that?????”

(Hm. Both of those were funnier in person.)

Have a great weekend!

Fiction: A Legend Is Born

Tenements, via Unsplash

The facts? The facts are these: I am wholly ordinary. Black hair, caramel skin, no extraordinary features, no super powers, although I’ve gotten pretty good at karate lately. Self-defense, you know. I am a city girl, after all, born and raised in the shadow of the tenements.

I make my living dyeing and designing special order fabrics for customers far more interesting than I am. I drink Folgers coffee and I don’t eat meat. My favorite channel is TCM, and I would consider my life complete if I could shake Gregory Peck’s hand. Considering he’s been dead over a decade, I’ve had to make peace with incompletion.

These are the facts. But sometimes reality is bigger than facts. Sometimes reality births a legend. And if the legend makes the world a better place, I’m all for that, too.

It began in the alley, where I found myself one muggy afternoon being used as a human shield by a punk who’d gotten himself cornered by the police. His foul-mouthed screams deposited spatters of saliva on one cheek while his revolver–sometimes the barrel and sometimes the muzzle–crushed my opposite temple.

Put the gun down, the officers kept yelling, but I was Punky’s only chance, and he wasn’t about to blow it. Unless, of course,  he managed to blow my head off with his twitchy trigger finger.

Best I could tell, the conflict seemed to be over some piece of property Punky swore was his, but the officers believed belonged to a jeweler on Second Avenue. Not even a diamond. A pocketwatch, or something. It seemed a damn fool thing to die for. Even worse if it was me doing the dying. The only thing I could do was stand as still as possible, so I didn’t accidentally set him off. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life.

I tried to distract myself by looking for variations in the rigid columns of windows and tenement faces that boxed us in. I’d never seen–or perhaps I’d just never noticed–how some fire escapes spiraled at the end of each flight. A sound pierced the clamor of the city and the shouting near at hand: Someone had hung wind chimes from the balcony.

Outside my little bubble, things were escalating. I could see the police officers had twitchy trigger fingers now, too. Nobody was going to save me except me. I might get my head blown off, but there was no point in standing there waiting for it to happen.

I closed my eyes, got my bearings in space, and when the muzzle of the gun waved away for a split second, I seized my chance.

I ducked and ground my heel into Punky’s toe. He flailed wildly, and I shoved and twisted and ran. Gunshots ricocheted off the brick. I hit the ground. The screaming stopped.

Footsteps approached. “Miss?” A police officer took my hand and helped me up. “Are you all right?”

I pulled out a handkerchief and wiped my cheek clean. Are you freaking kidding me? What kind of question is that? That’s what I wanted to say. What I said instead was: “I’m fine, thank you.”

And inside, I added:

I will never be a victim again.

A few weeks ago Alex asked me what story I was writing. I told him I was plotting a new story based partly on a true story that had always made me cry. I told him that story and then told him what I was thinking of doing with it to make it fiction. Like a typical third-grade, superhero-obsessed boy, he said, “Why don’t you ever write adventure stories?”

Alex, this one’s for you. A superhero is born.

Concrits always welcome!