Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 70

A Redhead, The Avengers, and other QTs

Avengers Poster 2 (Photo credit: Boogeyman13)

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It’s almost Halloween, and our superhero-obsessed family has decided to go as The Avengers. There were months of on-again, off-again discussions of who would be whom. The only certainties were me as Black Widow and Nicholas as Iron Man, because the costume we have already is his size. At length, we settled on Julianna as Captain America and Michael as The Hulk. Saturday night I ordered a Captain America T shirt off Amazon for her, and we were officially committed.

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So on the way to church Sunday morning, who should pop up in the back seat? Miss Ju-Ju-bee, out of nowhere, says, “No! I wah Huck!”

Dead silence in the car. “What?”

“I…wah…HUCK!”

Ahem. Apparently we forgot to ask if she had an opinion.

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Step one for me in becoming Black Widow is to get the hair. I have the curls, but not the color. So: to spray-on color, get a wig, or dye it?

My first-ever hair coloring. So far my feelings can be summed up: meh.

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Somehow I thought I would feel different, yanno? Uh, news flash: hair color isn’t kinesthetic. Since I’m not walking around staring at myself all the time I keep forgetting. Day 1 I was going through the pickup line at school. One of the first grade teachers kept staring fixedly at me, and I couldn’t figure it out until I came around to the 3rd grade to pick up Alex and another teacher caught sight of me and smiled widely, drawing her fingers through her hair.

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I waited to do the hair color until after we took family pictures. Nicholas was in a bad mood, so naturally, the Law Of Portrait Taking was in effect: you can get everyone to look good, but not in the same picture. To illustrate:

Whoa, Nicholas. Really?

Okay, I guess a cheesy grin is better than nothing, but Michael, what the heck are YOU looking at?

Seriously, Alex? We got EVERYONE looking good, and you had to put your HEAD DOWN????

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We’ve been engaged in a Saga of TV lately: ditching cable because it was too expensive when all we need is networks; two antenna failures; a failed attempt to start PRISM, and then, at last, Direct TV (i.e. more channels than I can even process let alone know what’s on them, considering I never turn the stupid thing on except for Netflix or a kid movie anyway).

Anyway, the point is that this week the Direct TV guy came to hook us up. Nicholas was in a space raiders mood, and spent the entire time telling the guy that he (the TV tech, not my son) was an alien, and thus he (my son, not the TV tech) was going to shoot him.

Fortunately, the guy had four kids and, thus, a sense of humor. When he left, Nicholas said, “He’s got in his flying saucer.”

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Just call me Mayhem.

I was thinking about Michael last night. At almost 23 months, he’s finally trying to talk, although his efforts to make his mouth mimic the sounds we’re asking him to make clearly require a lot of thought. But he’s suddenly discovered the ability to recognize the need for the toilet and put himself on. And I am thinking–amid the shattering of pasta bowls, snapping of Sissy’s glasses-earpiece, and walking along the tops of couches until he falls off–that it is truly amazing to watch a baby morph into a “person”. That’s poorly worded, I know, but the metamorphosis from a cuddly baby who watches the world go by and a child who interacts with it is just really striking me lately.

(Go to http://www.clan-donaldson.com/2013/10/seven-quick-takes_25.html for more this week!)

(Mostly) Wordless Wednesday

St. Michael the Archangel is in the house! Good thing he has an obliging baby brother willing to play Lucifer.

Words Matter (a primer on disability language)

First, I am fully aware that many people are going to look at this as splitting hairs.

I did, until my daughter came along.

How do you refer to a person with a disability? If you are like most people, you slap a label in front of the name: Julianna is a “Downs child” or a “Down syndrome girl.”

The practice encouraged by disability groups now is what we call people-first language. Re the great Wiki:

The basic idea is to impose a sentence structure that names the person first and the condition second, for example “people with disabilities” rather than “disabled people”, in order to emphasize that “they are people first”. Because English syntax normally places adjectives before nouns, it becomes necessary to insert relative clauses, replacing, e.g., “asthmatic person” with “a person who has asthma.” Furthermore, the use of to be is deprecated in favor of using to have.

The speaker is thus expected to internalize the idea of a disability as a secondary attribute.

In the case of my girly-girl: she is a child with Down syndrome, not a Down’s child, a Down syndrome daughter, etc.

This is a subtle difference, I’ll grant you, but it’s important. Aside from disabilities, there is no other medical, educational or cultural status in which we refer to the condition first. Doing so makes Down syndrome more important than the person. You don’t go around saying “that cancer guy” or “that four-eyes woman.” In the first case we would consider it insensitive; in the second, insulting. In both cases, it reduces the person to a fraction of his or her true self. So why is it okay for disability–unless we actually do subconsciously think a disability makes a person “less than”?

Julianna’s extra chromosome is an intrinsic part of who she is, one that impacts an awful lot of life–but not all. The basic things that underlie life are the same for her as they are for all the rest of us: eat, sleep, love, learn, live. Her disability is important, but it’s not the most important thing about her. She loves music, hates dogs, loves books and carousels and horses, is terrified of thunder, needs glasses, adores babies, had heart surgery, can read, cannot speak clearly, and is capable of making connections with the crustiest person she meets. To reduce all that to a label that comes first–”Down syndrome child,” “Downs child”–is to deny her the complexity of soul and personality that we grant everyone else.

The most important thing about her is the fact that she is…just like me, you, and everyone else we meet.

Marriage Has Made Me Free

The other day, Christian looked up from Discover magazine and chuckled. “Guess what?” he said. “73% of Discover readers think humans are meant to be polyamorous.”

I confess: I rolled my eyes.

Monogamy can be a challenge, I’ll grant you, but the alternative causes such pain and dysfunction, so much emotional scarring for the adults involved, to say nothing of the children, it seems irrational to me to suggest that marrying for life is contrary to our nature. It takes so many years for a human child to grow to adulthood; how can we be built for anything other than the long term?

This opinion reflects a skewed vision of what freedom is. We have this idea that “freedom” means doing whatever we want to do. Any restriction on what we’re allowed–and let’s face it, marriage is intrinsically a limit on outside amorous encounters–is viewed as an imposition upon freedom.

Well, that makes a certain amount of sense. But what it lacks is a larger perspective. One of my favorite Thomas Merton quotes is this one:

“It should be accepted as a most elementary human and moral truth that no man can live a fully sane and decent life unless he is able to say “no” on occasion to his natural bodily appetites. No man who simply eats and drinks whenever he feels like eating and drinking, who smokes whenever he feels the urge to light a cigarette, who gratifies his curiosity and sensuality whenever they are stimulated, can consider himself a free person. He has renounced his spiritual freedom and become the servant of bodily impulse. Therefore his mind and will are not fully his own. They are under the power of his appetites.” (From New Seeds of Contemplation)

Pay no attention to the grumpy-face boy.

I realized yesterday how very freeing marriage has been to me. It hasn’t happened overnight, and I’m sure it will face challenges down the line, but the fact is, before I was married, every male I encountered was a potential “mate,” even those who, well, weren’t. I was like Billy Crystal’s Harry, incapable of having friends of the opposite sex. I tried, but there was always this awkwardness involved, this “what-if?” dynamic.

Marriage has freed me. I no longer have to view every XY chromosome that crosses my path as a potential romantic interest. I can now set all that baggage aside and develop relationships with men that are no threat at all to my peace of mind. This is a liberating gift, one that has deeply enriched my life, and it would not been possible if I viewed marriage as anything other than 100% permanent.

In other words, the limit of monogamy has given me freedom.

Sunday Snippets

Today at Sunday Snippets, a Catholic Carnival, we’re answering this question: Do you have any suggestions regarding the Rosary? Books? Audios? Ways to pray it?  

My answer: Danielle Rose prayed the Rosary at an event at our cathedral last February, and I had never seen it done this way. Before each Hail Mary, she offered a one-sentence prayer-reflection on how Mary would have experienced the mystery in question. It was an exercise for the imagination and helped keep the focus on the topic.

Now, my posts for the week:

Here’s one guaranteed to stir the pot: Applause in Church Is Not Always A Bad Thing.

It Takes A Parish

Unanswerable Questions

Those are the substantive posts. If you want the cute (or otherwise) kid moment posts, try these:

An Orchestra, A Bad Boy, And Other Quick Takes

It’s A Girl!

Crazy Days

Crazy Days (a 7QT post)

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You know how some writers insist they have to have a soundtrack of fill-in-the-blank style in order to get anything done? I always thought I couldn’t handle music while writing because I have two degrees in music and I spend the time analyzing music instead of writing. But now I realize there’s another reason. Did you know that every blog post I write these days is accompanied by a soundtrack of “BUZZ LIGHTYEAR, REPORTING FOR SECTOR DUTY!” and “MICHAEL WANTS A MO-VIE, MICHAEL WANTS A MO-VIE” and “I NEED RIDERS IN MY COMBINE!” and best of all, “BLE-BEUH-BLE-BEUH, BLE-BEUH.” It’s a wonder I write anything worth reading.

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You know how sometimes someone says something that hits you square between the eyes, and you think, “Yes! Exactly! Why didn’t I ever see that before?” That’s how I felt when I read this post. Especially the part where she said, “There’s that old saying that when you have young children, ‘the days are long, but the years are short.’ This trip reminded me of a similar truth: the days are hard, but these years are so, so blessed.”

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I was trying to think earlier this week about why this school year feels so much worse than last year. Alex hasn’t picked up any more activities and I’m teaching a lot less. Why does it feel so excruciatingly busy?

The fascination of a sewer

Finally I realized I’m doing more of the school pickup–a lot more. Every time I try to expound on this fact it ends up sounding whiny. After all, everybody else has to pick up their kids every day, and plenty of them have younger kids’ naps disrupted by it, just like me. But the afternoons feel so frantic these days, trying to cram in nap between picking Nicholas up at 1p.m. and Julianna at 3p.m. before dashing over to pick up Alex, trying to get Michael toilet trained in between, and I just have this feeling that life isn’t supposed to feel this crazed.

So perhaps you can understand why Jennifer’s words resonated so deeply with me.

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Because you see, there’s the high comedy of Michael grabbing the bottoms to Julianna’s swimsuit and sticking his arms through the leg holes, trying to wear them on his head.

And the wonderful moment yesterday when I was given a moment of insight that allowed me to handle Michael’s first-ever tantrum in a way that ended in snuggles and smiles.

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Expletives? MOI????

And I can’t fail to mention this moment, even though my Facebook friends already saw it. This week Julianna’s spelling words are “s” and “sh”-based. Christian was going through them with her, and she got mixed up between “she” and “sit”. You do the math.

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Wednesday I attended Liguorian Magazine’s 100th anniversary celebration. The logistics of getting all the kids to and from school and my mother here to watch the little ones in the middle of harvest is quite the production. We had to have plans A, B and C in place in case she had to take the boys back to the farm so she could help move equipment or grain.

It was a nice celebration, though. For lunch I sat at a table with an acquisitions editor, a marketing specialist, the one and only Fr. Joe Kempf (of “Don’t Drink the Holy Water” fame), who cracked jokes all through the meal, and three other priests, one of whom was Fr. David Caron, head of the Aquinas Institute of Theology. “It’s one of my dreams to come study there,” I told him.

His face lit up. “What can I do to help get you there?”

“We-ell,” I said, “you could make my kids grow faster.”

(Refer to Takes 2 and 3.)

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Last but not least, I finally finished the little details that were hanging me up on being able to say: MY NOVEL IS READY TO QUERY!

(Now I just have to finish the submission package!)

Warts And All

As if Tuesdays weren’t enough of a zoo–Christian went downstairs to teach with the words, “Good grief! This is nuts!”–I went upstairs to get Julianna ready for swim lessons at 7:10 and discovered her wearing her sparkly new shoes….without the brand new, $1500 Sure Steps that are supposed to be inside them.

“Where are your inserts, Julianna?” I demanded.

She looked at me, lovely and doe-eyed and clueless.

“Where are your inserts, Julianna?” I repeated.

“Because I…” she began.

“I didn’t say ‘why,’ I said ‘where.’ Where did you take your shoes off?”

Fifteen minutes of searching every room, every drawer, every box in the house while Julianna stood at the top of the stairs with her face dropped into her hands, her brain having locked up completely. Fifteen minutes rocketing up a parabolic curve of Mommy frustration. Racking my brain. Thinking:

Did she take them off in the van on the way home from Alex’s piano lesson? But why would she have put the shoes back on? I tied her shoe AT the piano teacher’s house…didn’t she have the inserts on then? Could I possibly have missed that? Did she leave them at the piano teacher’s house?

I called the piano teacher on my way out to the van to check my last brain wave: her backpack.

And there they were: two innocuous hard plastic booties with double velcro straps, cuddled in the bottom of a Tinker Bell backpack for no earthly reason I can discern.

When did she take them off? Did she take them off, or did I just spend fifteen minutes completely flipping out and scolding my daughter for something her PT or her teacher or her para did at school? But why would they have done that? I told them she was cleared to wear them all day on Monday, and this was Tuesday.

We often say of our chromosomally-gifted daughter, “Julianna has a lot going on up there.” But when it comes to really important (and very basic) conceptual questions like “Where are your shoe inserts?”, it is clear that she’s not as advanced as we’d like to believe.

Here ends your “reality check” Down Syndrome awareness month post, shared because I need to be clear that life with DS is not all “unicorns and rainbows.”

It’s A Girl!

(She’s wearing the necklace in this photo)

I always wanted a girl. A little girl to dress in adorable clothes–because girl clothes are just so adorable! A little girl who would love pretty things and horses and unicorns and…

You know, I’m kind of drawing a blank on how to continue that sentence, because the girl I got? Well, she’s, er, not a girly girl. She’s more a “don’t-you-dare-touch-my-hair-you-foul-woman-what-do-you-think-you-are-doing-with-that-hair-bow?-I-HAAAAAATE-floofy-skirts-and-I-will-SCREAAAAAM-if-you-make-me-wear-them” kind of girl.

At least, she was.

In July, our last day in Colorado, we were shopping downtown Estes Park, looking for appropriate souvenirs for the kids. We’re really picky about souvenirs because the junk factor in the house is so annoying. Alex had chosen a pocketknife with his name and the mountains burned on it. Nicholas is collecting snow globes. But Julianna? She kept going after stuffed animals (NO, NO, and N!O!). And then I spotted a rack of necklaces and grabbed the first one that caught my eye: a kokopelli. “Julianna, do you like this?”

Her entire body language lit up. “YEAH!” she cried. We could barely pry it out of her hands to give it to the cashier. She wore it every day for two weeks.

It’s not a total transformation, but she’s latched on to another necklace and a bracelet I had kept around for her to wear. She wants to wear Christian’s ring all the time. She’s all into sparkly shoes and she wants to show off all her new pretties to her teacher.

[image error]

Cover of Goldilicious (Pinkalicious)

She’s gone crazy about horses–she always liked horses well enough, but oh, my goodness, now? This is a girl who resists anything new–anything–won’t consent to read an unfamiliar book, for instance…except when she saw that I brought home “Goldilicious” and “Claire and the Unicorn” from the library. Heaven.

It took six and a half years, but I finally, finally have my girl!

(And you thought this was a baby announcement, didn’t you? )

Applause In Church Is Not Always A Bad Thing

_Emotions 02 (Photo credit: SeRGioSVoX)

If there is one thing you can get both sides to agree on in the liturgy wars, it is that applause in church is a bad thing. I heard the argument made once that any time there is applause in church, it is a sign that the liturgy has been derailed. Applause is for performances; the liturgy is not a performance; ergo, applause = bad.

In general I think that’s reasonable, but it’s not 100%.

There are many reasons why people applaud, and most of them have nothing to do with praise for a performance. Applause is a sign of support, of solidarity, of affirmation, of appreciation. We applaud when kids receive their first Communion, when families celebrate a baptism, when a priest announces he is being reassigned (and not because we’re glad to see him go!). One on one, there are many other ways to express these sentiments, but as a community, applause speaks love and fellowship most simply and effectively.

But even if we focus on applause that is a response to the music, I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as it seems. Applause speaks of emotion, and music evokes an emotional response. A few weeks ago, we finished Mass with “Amazing Grace.” The congregation sang its heart out, and afterward, they applauded. If you asked why, most people probably would say something that invokes a good performance, but I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. What they’re responding to is the fact that something touched their hearts and evoked an emotional response.

The prevalence of emotional manipulation in a lot of modern religious rhetoric tends to make Catholics suspicious of emotional response to religion. We often see Catholicism as strong because it isn’t emotionally manipulative; it doesn’t rely on gimmicks and flashy trends to reach people. Instead, it rests on a fathomless tradition of study, prayer, and big-T Tradition. This is true, but none of that negates emotion. Emotion is part of who we are as human beings, and if we try to pretend that it has no place in our worship, we’re not being true to how were created.

In New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton talks a lot about transparency and its close relationship to humility. A truly humble person, like Mary, is like a pristinely clear window offering a view of God. The view you see through that window is what receives the praise, not the window itself, which is nothing more than a conduit for the view.

Most of us, including me, are not pristine windows. Our pride and vanity smudge the glass, and all that praise catches on the surface instead of passing through to its proper destination. So we’re always going to have to wrestle with this issue. But I think our preoccupation with the topic reveals more about our own sins than it does about reality.

An Orchestra, A Bad Boy, And Other Quick Takes

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It was a late night last night. I took the older three kids to the University Philharmonic concert. This is the orchestra I was a member of when I was in school, and being back in that gorgeous old theater, watching the same conductor who directed me, was very bittersweet. I got to thinking about a high school classmate at our reunion last summer, who was talking about how much he missed high school, because it was the last chance he had to play football. And it occurred to me that that is how I feel about orchestra in college and grad school. There is nothing, not one part of my life, that I would willingly turn back time for–except playing in an orchestra. And this orchestra in particular. I adored our conductor. (Still do. He’s amazing.)

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Even in college I was aware of how I felt about orchestra. I don’t remember ever wishing away the minutes during rehearsal. Other ensembles–definitely! But never orchestra. I always, always loved it. I remember when I was in grad school, we only played in one ensemble per semester–wind ensemble or orchestra–a marked difference from undergrad, where I did both every single semester for five years. I wanted to mix it up: one semester of each per year, but instead they assigned me to orchestra the first year and wind ensemble the second. I remember the spring of my first year of grad school, trying to soak every moment of the experience into my bones, knowing I would never have it again.

[image error]

This is me playing Charles Griffes’ Poem with the orchestra in 1997. I had to “miss” playing in this concert b/c I was the soloist.

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Well, in any case, I took the kids last night. That grand old theater was beat-up when I played there. Now it’s been totally restored. I love attending events there. It is just gorgeous. The kids did really well, although I had to pull Nicholas onto my lap because it was the only way to contain him. You know how when you can’t get comfortable, you wiggle around trying out positions until you find one that works, and then you settle down? Yeah, not so much. I pretty much had Nicholas trying to find a comfortable spot for the entire length of the Tchaikovsky 4th Symphony.

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However. I am not complaining, because it was a chance to spend some time cuddling Nicholas. His bad behavior has escalated monumentally since I last mentioned it, and the tension in the house was near the breaking point. I caught myself thinking (several times) this week, “I don’t LIKE that child!” Fortunately a few days ago I had a Spirit moment and decided to try giving him some concentrated time early in the day, before everything had a chance to go south. It worked wonders. We’ve played Connect 4, we took a bike ride to the park and had a picnic, and now we went to the concert and he sat on my lap for forty minutes.

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To give you an idea of the Nicholas week: he was pulling his sister’s shirt off in the car. When we got home, he shoved his way forward in the van and sat down in Alex’s seat, making it hard for Alex to get out. Then he kicked Alex repeatedly. I know he likes to feel useful (and compliment himself on it: “That was so helpful, wasn’t it Mommy?”), so I tried to give him a little job while I was making dinner: put some plastic & tin in the recycle bag. He told me no. I knew he was acting out to get attention, and I didn’t want to reward him, so I held my temper and gave the job to Julianna instead. He wailed and screamed, so I gave him a plastic lid to put in and told him to wait until Julianna finished (because she’s very, very slow). He said he was going to go push her out of the way, and proceeded to do so.

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I was considering that behavior modification program they advertise on the radio, until I realized I needed to give him attention of a better kind. Parenthood is the ultimate self-emptying, because you have to give what they need even and especially when you don’t feel like you want to.

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Wow, this is getting epic in length. How about a cute traffic “cop” that showed up this week in the middle of the humongous construction zone SURROUNDING Alex’s school?