Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 74

Alex

You might remember that early this summer, Alex asked for a diary. Coming out of nowhere, as it did, we figured it was a passing whim. After all, I gave him a journal for his first Reconciliation, and he hadn’t written a single word in it.

But he was quite insistent. Patient, but insistent. Every week or two this summer, he asked if we’d ordered his diary yet. (It has to have a lock, you know.) So finally we ordered one.

He has written in this diary once or twice a day ever since it arrived. He’s made it quite clear that it is not for other eyes, but at times he can’t help himself; he has to share a bit, and tell everybody else (repeatedly) how much they’re missing. Like his rules for the spy club.

“And the first sentence I wrote in it is the most secret thing of all,” he told me yesterday.

“Will you stop it?” I said, laughing. “You want it to be secret and you’re making us all really curious!”

He froze for just a moment. Obviously that had never occurred to him. “Okay,” he said, and buried his nose in his diary again.

I took a minute just to look at him, this boy who is all arms and legs and increasing mystery. One of the truisms of parenting is that from the moment they’re born, life is about learning to let go of them. Alex’s desire for a locked diary underscores how great the distance already is between me and the child who barely left my side for the first two years of his life–even to sleep.

Those babymoon months, before Julianna came along, he was my whole world, and having waited so long for him, I embraced the all-encompassing world of attachment parenting. I remember going to see the third Star Wars prequel without him; by the time Luke and Leia were being given to their adoptive families, my entire body was crying out to be home.

None of my other babies have been parented quite so intimately. There’s the requisite splitting of attention, and with Nicholas’ arrival the onset of what Christian calls “zone defense,” although speaking personally, I’d been outnumbered for a couple of years before that. And I’ve changed in that time too, a gradual metamorphosis from stay-at-home mom to write-at-home mom. All of these things mean distance.

The younger ones demand so much more attention and time. A toilet-training toddler is self-explanatory, but it’s more than that. Nicholas, for instance, is the kind of child who says and does absolutely everything that passes through his brain. You might wonder why he thought of it, but what is not a question.

Alex has never been that way, but more now than ever I see him growing into a private, deeply thoughtful young man. And naturally, the more he holds inside, the more I long to get in his head and unravel the mystery. Some people institute parent-child dates in order to facilitate closeness. I’ve been thinking about that lately, but I’ve hesitated because I felt like it would be preferential. I know I could do it with any of them, but Alex is the one I feel a need to nurture a bit. I think it may be an idea whose time has come. After all, he is nearly a mirror image of me at that age: sensitive, intensely creative (with all the good and the bad that goes along with it), and not entirely comfortable in his own skin. I know what’s coming for him with the onset of adolescence, and it ain’t pretty. I want to be his safe haven. But I have to build that relationship now.

So here’s my question for all of you today: How do/did you manage to juggle all the responsibilities in order to make it possible to interact individually, distraction-free, with your older kids when you still have demanding littles?

 

Sunday Snippets

It’s Sunday Snippets time again over at RAnn’s This, That & The Other Thing.

The question of the week is: What is your favorite hymn that you hear/sing at Mass?

And to that I reply, Really? You’re going to make me pick ONE? I’m a musician! How can I do that?

The best I can do is break it down by category:

Among the traditional hymns, two leap to mind immediately: All Creatures of Our God And King and I Know That My Redeemer Lives.

Among the contemporary genre, I have a billion favorites, but two of my top are Rory Cooney’s We Will Serve the Lord and Bernadette Farrell’s sublime version of Ps. 139: “O God, You Search Me” (this video has our choir doing a bit of it in the background).

Among the P&W genre, I’d probably say “Sanctuary.”

As for posts, this week I’ll just share two:

The Things That Make Us Grow, which is actually a faith-topic post, and An Epic, Blog-Worthy Doctor Visit, which isn’t, except that it WAS one of the things that makes me grow!

7 Quick Takes

___1___

Julianna’s spotlight.  Here’s a little slice of my life. She uses the toilet before nap and takes her shorts & underwear off. Because I don’t want to fight it, I let her go to bed like that. Afterward, I’m taking a shower and I tell her, “Julianna, put your clothes back on. They’re right there.” (Pointing.) She begins to take her shirt off. “No, Julianna, listen to me. I said put your pants on. I did not say anything about taking your shirt off.”  Giving me a hurt look, she begins to comply, and I head for the shower. When I come back out, her pants are gone, but her shirt are there in their place. (Throws hands in the air.)

We’ve realized we’ve been slacking off on the green tea. Maybe it was making more of a difference than we thought.

___2___

This is what I found the other day in my kitchen.

I don’t know…I just thought it was funny.

___3___

I needed to go up in weights for my workout, but I wasn’t anywhere close to jumping from 3 pounds to 5. With my history of muscle and joint issues I’m very cautious. So we bought some 1-pound wrist weights. This is the instruction card that came with them:

Thanks a lot. Very illuminating.

___4___

A couple of weeks ago, when Christian had the three older kids at the baseball game, I took Michael to the neighborhood pool. It sits just beyond a four-way stop sign, and when I approached the intersection, there was a car sitting at the southbound sign, waiting for us to cross. I took one step into the intersection with the push-car ahead of me, and then yanked Michael back in terror, because another car was flying around the stopped car and screaming through the intersection at fifty miles an hour. Yes, I mean fifty. Engine roaring like the pedal was floored. A deliberate high-speed running of a stop sign, with a toddler in the intersection. In case you’re wondering, it was four teenage boys. The one in the front passenger seat made eye contact with me as they passed.

Christian’s always twitting me about having to massacre every dandelion I find. I told him if I hadn’t stopped to pick dandelions along that walk, we’d have been in the middle of the intersection. Seriously scary stuff.

___5___

While we’re on the topic of young poorly-behaved whippersnappers, last week when we were out with the kids on campus for the big marching band concert, this guy was saying “G-d–n-something” right behind us. Somebody nudged him for his language and he said, “That’s why I didn’t cuss.” Uh, yeah. You were really restraining the cussing there, man.

Then we went downtown for frozen yogurt. As we were strapping kids into the van afterward, these college kids walked by, you know, strutting, mouthing off. I turned around and said coolly, “Please watch your language around the kids.”

I’m not actually sure what he said in response, and neither is Christian, but it was mumbly and low-pitched. Christian was laughing at me. “That was awesome,” he said.

___6___

Did you catch the study last week that found that people who grow up with more siblings are less likely to divorce? Hmmmm. Wonder why that might be. Maybe because they learn to deal with more personality types and handle more opposition in the formative years? (Clue: heavy dose of irony in this tone of voice. Not a big mystery at all.)

___7___

The last time I really reported my practice time was August 5th. So. Since then I have practiced 9 days (out of 18…ouch) and a total of 5 hours and 25 minutes. I don’t know if that’s good or pathetic.

Bonus: Nicholas has been asking lately for “moustachios.” It’s so funny we can’t make ourselves correct him to pistachios.

On to query and pitch writing….

The Things That Make Us Grow

When I was a kid, we had one spoon in our silverware drawer that didn’t match the others. It had scrollwork on its handle, and even though it was thinner and clearly not as good quality as the rest, I wanted that spoon. And whether or not I expressed it aloud, I resented it when one of my sisters got it instead.

It was a sentiment completely contrary to the values my parents were trying to instill in us, but what can I say? I was a kid. Kids, I can now say from experience, are remarkably impervious to the application of values to their own lives.

When I was newly married, we had a set of four pasta bowls with spices painted inside them. I liked all the spices except cayenne, and even though it made absolutely no difference whatsoever, I made all manner of grumpy faces deep inside my head, where they didn’t show, every time I had to use the “cayenne” bowl.

Clearly, it’s not only kids who can be remarkably impervious to applying theoretical values to their own lives.

I was thinking about this last night as I was pulling out those bowls to set the table for dinner. We’ve expanded the collection to accommodate our family of six. On a “date,” Alex and I each painted bowls at a pottery place. It goes without saying that he gets to eat from the superhero bowl he painted, and frankly I’d like to eat from the one I painted. But Nicholas likes it, so Nicholas always gets it. And I don’t gnash my teeth about it, as I once would. I just shrug and set it at his place and go on. I have much more important things on which to expend my emotional energy.

I had terrific parents who instilled great values in me and a vibrant faith community to lift me up, and yet it took being a parent to make all those things come together.

When I found out I was expecting Alex, a friend sent me a card telling me, in essence, that I would learn to pray in a whole new way. That certainly has been true, although not in the way I envisioned when I first read it. Every moment is focused vertically now; in the back of my mind I’m constantly evaluating the example I’m setting, the circumstances, the painful need to put someone else’s wants ahead of mine, and so on in terms of the authentic practice and passing on of the faith.

I have never been so aware of my own failings as I have since I began to approach life this way, and it has changed the way I view faith. I have a friend who has expressed that faith ought to be a comfort. But I have come to believe quite passionately that a faith that only comforts you is useless, and a sure way to ensure it never has any validity in real life. If we’re not constantly being challenged, what’s the point? Only when we’re challenged do we learn. Grow. Become better people.

I get frustrated by my children’s apparent inability to connect the lessons about loving Jesus (an inherently non-threatening concept because it’s irrelevant to a concrete-thinking child) with loving their neighbor sibling. Yet I didn’t get it at their age, either. My whole third book is about teaching kids (and adults!) to see how those nebulous, theoretical concepts connect with the events of their everyday.

It still doesn’t work very well in my house, though. I just have to trust that life will bring them the experiences they need to make it happen. In the meantime, my job is to get the foundations laid.

Addendum: obligatory First Day Of School photos:

**And just because….

An Epic, Blog-Worthy Doctor Visit

Photo by jdsmith 1021, via Flickr

Over the summer, I have been to the doctor with my kids eight times, plus Michael’s tubes and four visits to have Julianna’s glasses fixed after Michael got hold of them.

It’s always tiresome and chaotic, but nothing compares to yesterday’s ENT visit.

Let’s back up a week, to Julianna’s well child check, the visit at which I promised both her and Alex that there would not be any shots. Well, guess what? There were. Not only that, but we haven’t had her thyroid checked in four years and we’ve never seen an ENT. Since thyroid imbalance and sleep apnea are extremely common in people with Down syndrome, we needed to address both those things.

Thus it was that on a day I promised Julianna no shots, she had not only a HepA shot but also a blood draw.

It took four people to get that vial of blood–three to hold her and one to wield the needle.

So yesterday, Julianna was not happy about going to the doctor, and she was not about to believe me when I said there wouldn’t be any owies. (Heck, I wouldn’t believe me, either!)

Enter present tense narrative.

We come down the hallway of the ENT office, Nicholas leading the expedition with the confidence of one who’s been here half a dozen times. The nurses look at us, look at each other, and one says to the other, “Move that other family to a different examining room. This one needs the big room.”

Things are fine until Doctor A (resident?) comes in. The kids grow steadily more restless as we talk. Michael climbs up, down, and over me without pause. When Dr. A asks, “So what symptoms of sleep apnea does she have?” and I answer, “None,” I can see it in his face: Then what on earth are you doing here?

About this time Nicholas thrusts his head in my face: “IT’S MY TURN FOR THE IPAD!”

“Alex, give him the iPad.” They switch and I resume being used as a human junglegym while talking with the doctor, but I can see that on the floor by my feet, Alex is butting into Nicholas’ game, as he frequently does, and Nicholas is getting mad. “Alex! Back off! It’s his turn! So, doctor, you’re saying…”

We’re discussing stridor breathing when the wrestling match begins, accompanied by screams from Nicholas and clenched-jaw growling from Alex. “Hey!” I grab the iPad before it gets clobbered. “That’s it! YOU go over THERE and YOU go over THERE! No more iPad for either of you! Sit down and I don’t want to hear one word out of either one of you!”

Alex flings himself into the corner. Nicholas sits down for a minute, but then notices there’s a more comfortable chair right next to Mommy. I spend five minutes challenging the doctor on the need for a laryngoscopy while wrestling Nicholas to force him to abide by his time out.

And then it’s time for the examination.

Julianna tolerates the first ear pretty well, but steadfastly refuses to turn her head for the second. By now I have Michael in arms, and he’s tired and cranky, which means the only way to keep him from fussing is to play physical games with him: upside down, tickle, dance. We attempt to sing “I’ve Been Working On the Railroad to get Julianna to look the right direction, but she’s having none of it. I put cranky child on the floor and grab her head and hold it still so Doc A can look.

And now comes the mouth. Julianna sees the tongue depressor and shrieks, then claps both hands over her mouth, elbows at right angles to her body. I spend three minute cajoling her, sticking my tongue out so the doctor can look at me, but she’s not buying. At length, I cup her head into my shoulder and hold her still so Doc A can force her mouth open. She gags mightily but turns her head, so after all that he still doesn’t have what he needs. “No wike eee!” she shrieks (No like it), and he evidently decides it’s not worth the trauma.

He exits to get Doctor B (attending).

While I’ve been thus occupied, Alex and Nicholas have made up and noticed that there are not one, but TWO rollaround chairs in this room. Now they are chasing each other in circles, coming ever closer to the Wall Of Expensive Equipment. “Stop that!” I snap.

“But WWWWHYYYYYY?” they wail.

“Because you already popped my exercise ball with a scissors today, and the last thing I need is you demolishing half a million dollars’ worth of medical equipment!”

Doctors A and B enter the room, and we rehash the laryngoscopy question again when I realize the boys are still chasing each other. “Alex! Nicholas! I told you to stop! Are you disobeying me?”

Doctors B can see that his office building is imminent danger. He says we can take an X ray instead and makes good his exit.

And now we go to X ray.

Perhaps you’ve identified my problem: I have two boys fighting, a patient who makes the word “uncooperative” look like a day off, and Michael Mayhem, who needs a nap. Thank God, this is a children’s hospital. They call in support staff to supervise the boys while the tech and I wrestle with Julianna.

I do not see how they could possibly be getting any kind of useful picture–she’s flailing and shaking and screaming “toilet! toilet!” (which is her way of getting out of everything unpleasant, like clearing the table) and employing muscle tone that never surfaces any other time while two of us in lead aprons try in vain to keep her still and centered in front of the + sign. Surely the X rays must be blurred. But the tech takes them to the doctor and they pass muster, so we make good our escape.

And about this same moment, on the other side of town, Christian’s boss is telling him how precious our children are.

Sigh.

On the Cusp of a New School Year

Photo courtesy of Tina Sbrigato Conley, http://www.fahrenheitnyc.com/

This is transition week in our house. Two kids start tomorrow and the third on Wednesday, but his is only half a day, so really I’m aiming for Thursday as the first day of our new normal. It seems appropriate today to pause and take stock of the summer.

Christian gave us an assignment last week: to make a list of everything we did this summer. He wanted the kids to be a little more cognizant of all the fun they’d had, because there’s been so much whining to the tune of “I want to go……….!” I’ve begun cutting them off sharply, with pointed reminders that we’ve done a ton and they need to be grateful for what they’ve done instead of always greedily grabbing toward more.

Carousels: Colorado, County Fair, Mall, Zoo, Royals
Circus
Car Museum
County Fair carnival and demolition derby
Monster Truck show (that was actually before school dismissed, but it looms large in their memory)
Royals game
Zoo
Aunt Andrea’s pool and Great Grandma’s player piano
Days on the farm
Pool, combine ride & fireworks, two of which were with grandparents
Weekend with Grandma & Grandpa as babysitters
Colorado:

Fun City
Cable Car
Mountain hiking
Cousins
Archery
Zip Line


Candy Cane City
Alex Boy Scout & Avengers theater camp
Swim Lessons
Stephens Lake playground, picnic & spray park
Cosmo playground
Band concert at the park
Baseball
Monsters University
Library
Little Mates Cove
Half a handful of picnics
Tiger Walk and Red Mango, last night, to farewell the summer

When it comes right down to it, my own attitude this summer has left something to be desired. I can acknowledge that without beating myself up over it. It would be idiotic, after all, to pretend that the level of screaming, hitting, kicking, shouting, procrastinating, overt and passive defiance and sheer bickering in this house is possible to ignore. I’m learning how to rise above it, but it’s slow going, and I submit that anyone who thinks they could keep their cool through it is delusional.

However, it is easy to focus in on all that static and miss the fact that we really did do lots of life-enriching things this summer. It feels like mostly we stayed in the house and yelled at each other while accomplishing very little chore-doing. But the list tells another story.

I know the coming of the school year is not the nirvana I sometimes make it out to be. The schedule feels like a pot of TNT: Christian teaching lessons two nights a week (i.e. single parenting at bedtime); choir on the third night; meetings and adaptive swim taking up the fourth. And I’ll be starting to teach lessons again, after a summer’s (almost complete) hiatus, which crams more into the witching hour. Plus, Alex adores Michael, and the feeling’s mutual, which means Michael has been very well entertained this summer, and is about to be stuck in a house with Mommy and sometimes one brother who finds him a nuisance rather than a plaything.

Still, the chaos level in the house will drop. Two mornings a week I’ll only have one child. There will be fewer dishes and fewer messes because of the census drop. And it looks like I won’t have to take Julianna to school on preschool days now, because the school start times (and thus the bus schedules) have shifted twenty minutes earlier.

So I have great hopes for the coming months. Today we’re milking summer break for its last dregs: library, homemade funnel cake, and one big honkin’ chore in which the kids clean up the tornado zone they’ve made in the basement before Christian’s piano students arrive this evening.

Ready. Set. Go.

Sunday Snippets

Sunday Snippets is a gathering of Catholic bloggers at RAnn’s This, That and the Other Thing. (Come check it out!) This week, she instituted a question of the week, beginning with: Introduce Yourself!

Well, I did that via blog post. (Sorry. It just kind of happened.)

Other posts this week:

On the Need For A Recovery Day

We aren’t losing people because of worship. We’re losing them because of hypocrites. This post took off like I never thought one of mine would. Wow.

And 7 Quick Takes in Cute Pictures, in which I lead off with a day in the life of Michael Mayhem.

Hope to see you in the roundup! Although if you’re on BlogSpot, chances are I can’t comment at the moment. Grr. The instructions Google sent me to explain why my computer isn’t allowed to talk to BlogSpot read like Greek to me. So I’ll do my best, but if I don’t comment that’s why.

7 Quick Takes In Cute Pictures

___1___

Michael Mayhem, Illustrated:

___2___

The Lone Ranger Reads:

___3___

Close Encounters of the Sea Lion Kind:

___4___

The Obligatory Carousel Picture:

___5___

The envy of every exhausted zoo-walking parent:

___6___

Biggest and Littlest, Same Age, Same Shirt:

___7___

And if you really want heavy content, after all that adorable-ness, my post on why people are leaving the church hit pretty big this week. Probably because it’s provocative.

10 Things You Might Not Know About Me

Generally speaking I think it’s a good idea to follow up a really heavy post with something light. (Translated: I can’t sustain that emotional level two days in a row.) Since yesterday’s post broke another personal stats record, I need an easy blogging day. And since RAnn has instituted a Sunday Snippets question of the week, I’m going to answer it by sharing 10 things you might not know about me. Have fun. I know my life is the center of your universe. (Cough-NOT-cough.)

My favorite picture ever taken of me.

I learned to match pitch before I was in kindergarten, and yet in my home parish and even in my family, no one knew I could sing until I’d been gone for a decade, because all they ever let me do was play my flute. Ironically, now that I’ve earned a Bachelor and a Master of flute performance, no one lets me play; all I get to do is sing.
Speaking of singing, I’ve sung in front of Sheryl Crow. With a sore throat.
When my grandparents lived in Michigan, they knew Madonna’s family. Somewhere I have several snapshots Grandpa took of her at age seven. I’d like to share that but the file isn’t on the computer, and the photo CD has been sent offsite with the other photo backups for safe keeping. Boo.
I have a lot of opinions. And I probably air them more often than I should. Which is why I will never be in politics, or a good political wife.
I analyze, therefore I blog.
I’m an introvert. I know that sounds ridiculous, considering I lay my whole life out there, but there’s a big safety zone between me and other people. It’s called a screen. In person I shrivel up unless I know exactly what my role is in a situation. And I hate the phone.
I had only three dates in all of high school. And all of them were reaaaaaaally awkward.
Almost every night around 7:45 my husband yells, “There’s too much nakedness in this house!” But man, it’s cute nakedness. I’m a sucker for little kid skin.
I’m crazy about Russia and all things Russian. Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov are probably my favorite composers. I dream of getting to see a ballet and opera at the Bolshoi.
We once were at the top of the list to adopt from Russia. As in, the Russian government passed over us in favor of the #s 2 and 3 on the list, in an attempt to clear the backlog. (We were asking for two kids, and #s 2 and 3 only wanted 1 each.) Thank God, when we got that call we’d just found out we were finally expecting.

So there you go. Ten things you might not have known about me. Care to play along? Share one thing “about you” in the comments.

We aren’t losing people because of worship. We’re losing them because we’re hypocrites.

And you gave me to Drink (Photo credit: Lawrence OP)

There’s a blog post making the rounds right now about the dismal record of churches, both mega- and traditional, to retain their youth into adulthood. The author and all the commenters have their pet theories about why this is–the age-old argument between “worship isn’t relevant” (i.e. it’s too traditional) and “the worship is too contemporary” (i.e. it’s too contemporary) seem to be the focus of discussion.

Although I’m a liturgist, and I have impassioned opinions on the question of musical style in worship, I actually don’t believe the style of worship has all that much to do with this question at all.

We are losing the youth–and everyone else who’s leaving organized religion–because they think it’s a bunch of B.S. A conspiracy made to pacify the ignorant and keep the masses in line. And why do they think this?

Because we call ourselves Christians, and we don’t act like Christ. We say we believe, but then refuse to act like believing changes everything. We talk big and then we talk trash about others. We act as if the aesthetics and the personal preferences are what it’s all about.

In simple language, we’re losing people because we’re hypocrites. Even, and sometimes especially, those of us who are the most involved in our churches.

In every Catholic discussion, Vatican II seems to be the lightning rod. Someone always says that whatever problem we were facing was caused by V2 because it didn’t exist before that, and if only we went back to the way things were fifty years ago, all our problems would go away. As if somehow people were intrinsically holier then, instead of simply doing what was culturally expected. Fifty years ago, people went to church whether or not they really wanted to, not because they were better Catholics, but because that’s what everyone did.

These days, church is not what everyone does, so people don’t do it. And that’s not a change caused by Vatican II. That happened in the context of a larger world. All matters of faith are lived in and influenced by the context of the larger world, and that is as it should be. We aren’t “of” the world, but we do live “in” it. We can’t possibly hope to leaven the world if we stand apart and wag our finger at it. You have to dive in.

I know that’s scary. Each of us has a vision for the way the world should be, and it’s pretty cut and dried. But the world isn’t black and white. It’s a complex, interwoven mess. You tug on one string and every other one is affected. There are no simple solutions to any of the issues we face.

The world is messy, and the more you get down in the muck, the more you realize your pat answers don’t–can’t–stand unassailable in the face of the real world. You find yourself forced to reconsider, to shift your dearly-held philosophies to make room for circumstances that don’t fit neatly into the box you’ve made.

Nobody likes having to do that. But if you just keep confirming yourself in your own rightness, it pretty soon becomes self-righteousness, and self-delusion. And then your faith, strong as you think it is, ends up ringing very false to others. They might not know why, but they’ll sense the underlying conflict.

And then they figure, if this is what faith is, I don’t want any part of it.

We can’t ever stop seeking deeper truth. And that search is exercise for the soul. Like physical exercise, it hurts, because it begins with breaking down the boundaries of the muscle in order to make room for expansion.

photo by Catholic Church (England and Wales), via Flickr

But at its basic level, that spiritual exercise begins because we go out and we do something with our faith. It’s in the doing that we experience the things that challenge our presumptions and assumptions. Don’t tell me all the reasons it can’t be done. Do something about it. You may not succeed, you may fall flat on your face, but do something.

This is what Pope Francis keeps saying over and over. Sure, worship is important, but worship is not the most important thing; worship is the spiritual food for doing the real work of Christianity. Do something.

If all of us who call ourselves Christians heeded his call, it would be a game changer.