Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 93
November 19, 2012
Twenty Minutes
sunrise on the wall (Photo credit: frenzy)
At 6:55 a.m., the household sleeps, but I know it can’t last much longer. The Nordic Track calls. After splurging on a glass of wine and bruschetta late last evening, I’m well motivated to spend the time this morning. Christian’s still asleep, but I’ve given him nearly an hour past the time he intended to get up; I can’t put it off any longer. He stirs as the machine starts whirring under my feet and arms. Buries his head under the pillow.
Whish-whish-whish-whish.
Ten minutes later, he’s up and about, starting the long morning task of getting four children up and ready for church. He leaves the door open, and I can see across the hall into the boys’ bedroom, where creeping dawn tinges the bunk beds rose. I can hear Christian in the other room, waking Julianna and the baby, but the first pair of eyes I see are Alex’s as he raises his head off the top bunk and perches his chin on the rail, watching me. I smile and wave.
Purple flannel pajamas walk into the room. Julianna has her hands cupped over her eyes. How she doesn’t smack into things is beyond me, but it’s darned cute. “Hi, sweetie,” I say. “Did you sleep well?” She pulls her hands away and gives me The Smile as she watches.
Alex darts into the room and peers intently at my arms and legs moving in sync. When this machine was first bequeathed to us, he tried and tried to figure out how to use it, but never could. Julianna retreats to the hallway right in front of the door, where Nicholas has taken up lounging on the floor. He’s learned well from his big brother, how to lie around and not get up in the morning. An impromptu wrestling match begins on the floor in front of my bedroom. Now I have greeted my whole family, save one. Nineteen minutes on the clock, and I can hear Christian opening and closing drawers, changing Michael’s diaper. One minute, I plead silently, and here, at last, toddles my baby into the room, clad in bulky prefold and Prowrap cover, and not another stitch. He sees me on the machine he loves to play with and breaks into a big grin, and my family is at last complete.
Twenty minutes. “Hey baby boo boo!” I say as I step off the machine. “You ready to nurse?”
And another day begins.
November 17, 2012
Sunday Snippets
Joining RAnn at This, That and the Other Thing for Sunday Snippets today, and sharing just three posts:
When You’re Raising A Child With Special Needs (i.e., “borrowing trouble”)
I posted my quick takes (@ the kids and dieting) on Wednesday.
November 16, 2012
Fiction Friday: Rain
This is an excerpt from the novel I’ve been querying…slightly condensed to fit the word count. Dean is falling in love with Beth and her young son Toby, and for their first “date,” they’ve gone to an apple orchard. As always, concrit is most welcome.
*
implying rain (Photo credit: vabellon)
She looked so cute in her baggy t-shirt, with crinkled leaves sticking out of her hair from dragging through the branches. She was just crying out to be kissed.
Her head jerked to the left. “Toby! Get back here!”
“I got him.” Smiling, Dean took off after the runaway. He scooped Toby up and hung him by his ankles. Toby giggled, and Dean risked a glance at Beth. She was laughing. “You ready to get down, kiddo?”
“Yeah!”
Dean swung him down, keeping hold of his elbows till he was sure Toby had his balance. Just as he let go, a cold drop of water hit his arm. He looked up and got another one in the eye. “Uh, Beth”
It started to rain steadily then, as if some celestial shower head had been turned on. Toby froze, then touched his neck wearing a puzzled expression.
“Come on!” Dean said, trying to shield his face. “We can send them out for the baskets.”
“Just a few more,” Beth pleaded, reaching up with a long handled basket picker. She stood under the shelter of the tree, but even so, it only took about thirty seconds for her shirt to be soaked through.
“Okay!” she said, setting down one last basket beside the others. “Let’s go!” She heaved Toby up on her hip, and they took off running down the wet pathway, laughing, feet slapping noisily as mud splattered their jeans.
But they were still well away from the barn when Beth stopped, gasping for breath, and said, “I can’t run anymore. He’s too heavy.” She set Toby down.
“I’ll take him.”
She shook her head. “What’s the difference? It’s not like we’re gonna get any wetter.”
“Whee!” Toby stamped in a mud puddle and screamed with laughter.
Dean grinned. “I see your point. Come on, buddy,” he said. “Take my hand.” Toby obeyed, and they started off at a leisurely stroll through the gray downpour.
A big black Lab stood at the edge of the fenced yard, barking. Toby let go of his hand and took off running. His voice floated back to them, fractured at every footfall like a long, gleeful line of Morse Code. Dean looked at Beth, who met his gaze without any trace of the apprehension he’d seen earlier. It was as if the rain had washed away the barriers and created an intimacy that hadn’t been there before. He held out his hand. Smiling, she took it.
November 14, 2012
Quick Takes On A Wednesday
Mr. Moto Perpetuo
___1___
The best thing about Michael: how attached he is to me. No matter where he is or what he’s doing, when I call him he drops it and comes running, waddling from side to side with a huge grin on his face, and hurls himself full-body into my arms.
___2___
The worst thing about Michael: how attached he is to me. If I run upstairs to grab socks for a sibling, the wails are epic. Imagine what Christian has to put up when I go to novels group twice a month. He doesn’t seem to have had any “stranger” anxiety, but he doesn’t want to let me out of his sight.
___3___
The thing about Michael that makes me shake my head: If there is a stairway, he must climb it. It’s like some switch flips in his little brain: MUST-CLIMB-STAIRS-NO-WILLPOWER-CANNOT-RESIST. But the instant he gets to the top, he plops his cloth-diapered bottom on the floor and begins wailing because he doesn’t want to be up there.
___4___
Julianna lost her first tooth this week. No, I don’t have a picture. You know why? Because it would take two adults: one to hold her head still and pull her lip down, and the other to take the picture. It would not be a picture anyone wanted to see. Trust me.
___5___
This particular front tooth has been hanging by a thread for over a week. We were sure she was going to swallow it, so finally I decided enough is enough and at bedtime on Sunday I pulled it. I went and got a plastic baggie for the tooth fairy and handed it to her. She looked at me like, “What do I do with this thing?”
“You want to leave that for the tooth fairy?” Christian asked her.
“Uh-uh!” she said, shaking her head emphatically. The nerve. What was he thinking?
“You want to put it back in your mouth?” he said, his mouth twitching.
“Uh-uh!” Silly man. Stop teasing me.
“Well, what do you want to do, then?”
She paused, giving him the no duh look of the century. “Wee–book!” (Read.)
Priorities, man. Priorities.
___6___
This business of having three children in three different schools, with three different schedules, is brutal. I pray we can find a way to put Julianna in Catholic school with Alex next year. But. I love her school. I love her teachers. And I love what she’s learning from them. As witness:
(She wrote that name with no one helping at all, in any way. No direction, no hand support, no nothing. Julianna.
___7___
I’ve been using loseit.com for just over four weeks now, and have reached the point at which weight loss has slowed to a crawl. I am realizing that what I have begun, I must continue…pretty much forever. Desserts are going to be spotty, running to the computer to input calories before I decide what else to eat (or not to eat), doing some sort of exercise virtually every day. I think the main problem with dieting is that you always think “It’s just for a while, and then I’ll be able to…” when the truth is, the change has to be permanent, or the weight loss won’t be. On the flip side, however, is the truth that when you’re dieting you’re paying better attention to eating well and staying active, and that is a permanent lifestyle change that is good for body and soul.
November 13, 2012
Moon-set
Photo by Stephen Little, via Flickr
In the quiet of early morning, I bundled up against the newly-arrived winter temperatures and slipped out the front door for a 5:30 a.m. walk. Above, the stars gleamed as they only can when the humidity and temperature drop, and as I stepped off the porch my breath caught to see Venus, radiant and huge, a spotlight in the blackness, and barely north of it, the thinnest sliver of moon peeking from the shadow of the Earth, its yellow so slim that it seemed airbrushed on the edge of a smoky gray full moon. There’s something mysterious in seeing the whole moon when most of it is not “lit,” something that quiets the mind and highlights how small I am in the grand scheme of the universe.
I kept my eyes on it throughout my walk; the sliver was deceptive, I realized. There was a faint outline of light ringing the dark part, which made the fullness clearer. I watched it edge closer to the horizon and morph slowly in color, from charcoal to slate gray to something bluer and bluer as the sky around it lightened. By the time I arrived home, the sky was no longer black, but pale blue, and all that remained was the hairs-breath of a crescent. I knew by the next morning, it would be gone altogether, and the knowledge humbled me, filled me with an awareness of all that is beyond me, all that is holy and beautiful, and good.
November 12, 2012
When You Are Raising A Daughter With Special Needs (or: Borrowing Trouble)
It must have been the convergence of James Bond with a bedtime call from my sister, announcing the birth of her first baby, a girl. Maybe it was superimposing the image of her baby upon my own baby girl, no longer a baby, upon the image of the Bond girl, once victim of the sex trade and now caught in a supposedly even scarier net.
I don’t know what caused it. All I know is that I laid awake that night for an hour, two, three, tossing and turning, my insides churning.
When you’re raising a girl with special needs–especially one as beautiful as Julianna–certain subjects are bound to be especially worrisome. When Julianna was a baby, we attended the National Down Syndrome Congress convention, and for some reason I landed in a session on sexuality. It was taken for granted that you’d put your chromosomally-gifted child of a certain age on birth control, just for precaution. It was the first time it had occurred to me that what is already a high-stakes area in any family (particularly one with both philosophical and religious objections to manipulating the reproductive system), is even more fraught with terror in my own parenting journey.
The first time, but not the last.
I want Julianna to move out on her own, be independent, make her own decisions. But let’s be frank. The idea of raising my chromosomally gifted daughter’s chromosomally gifted child is enough to make me understand why so many parents keep their kids close under their wing into their twilight years. The fear of Julianna being taken advantage of, or simply having her feelings run away with her, strikes terror deep into my heart. Call me selfish, but I want my kids out of the house; I want the freedom and coupledom that is the heart of the empty nest experience. I have no interest in raising my grandchildren, and particularly not in starting this whole process over again–therapies, IEPs, and high maintenance everything–at the age of fifty or fifty-five.
Of course, there’s only a 50% chance that a child of Julianna’s would have the extra chromosome. That opens up another whole line of thinking. Imagine raising a child who’s bound to discover at some point, probably just about the time she hits adolescent rebellion, that she knows more and can do more than her mother.
This entire line of thinking is called Borrowing Trouble, and it’s beyond nonproductive. I’m well aware of that. It’s not like I live my life in terror over these issues. But it would be beyond foolhardy to take a Scarlett O’Hara approach to this and think, “I’ll think about that some other day.” If there is a safe path through these perilous waters, it comes by laying foundations so solid, so wide and deep, that nothing can shake what sits on top. Foundations are built now: today, tomorrow and the next day, amid lost teeth and learning to write her name. Waiting until Julianna is ten or eleven to be thinking about it isn’t an option.
November 11, 2012
Sunday Snippets
Sunday Snippets is a diverse bunch of Catholic bloggers who get together weekly at RAnn’s This, That and the Other Thing blog to share what we’ve been talking about this week.
I shared a guest post I wrote over at NFP and Me. The topic: how NFP actually does have a positive influence on marriage. Some good discussion in the comments there, too.
I’m sure everyone will be spending much time on the election, but my only contribution to that discussion consists of some very interesting definitions I learned in a “history of Catholic social teaching” class I attended this fall.
My 7 Quick Takes were almost entirely about Catholic things this week–Alex’s first reconciliation, and some odds and ends.
I also wrote a piece of creative nonfiction about the night Michael was born.
November 9, 2012
(Non)Fiction Friday: New
Sometimes people think I’m crazy for having a fourth child. Sometimes I think they’re right. As I sit on the sterile operating table, this cold November night, I know full well that not one person in the OR approves of the decision to proceed with a 37-week C section. They think I should go home and put myself on bed rest to keep the contractions at bay until week 39, past the danger of respiratory problems. To them, the three children who make that impossible, the two-hour drive to the hospital, are irrelevant. In the moment I feel the big adhesive patch tamp down on my back, I know with improbable certainty that they are right. Three babies, and not one delivery without drama. I flash back to the post-term induction and 10-pound child that led to my first C section. To the little gymnast whose 37-week flip into breech was a harbinger of her chromosomal abnormality, if only we’d realized it. To my husband’s one a.m. trip to the hospital by ambulance the morning we delivered #3.
No way this baby is coming out of my womb without problems.
But it’s too late. They’re sliding me into position, raising a blue drape, and soon the doctors are in place, poking me to test the spinal before starting the cut. I’m committed.
I wait it out, praying without words, until the cries begin. They’re not enough. “Boy,” someone–my husband?–says. I focus on the crowd around the warmer, heedless of the work taking place beyond the blue drape. I can’t see my baby’s face.
“Special care,” they decide at last, and scoop him up, wrapping him tightly in blankets. They bring him to me for a fleeting moment, lay him on my collarbone beneath the bright lights, so close that as I whisper his name, the flutter of his eyelids brushes my cheek. I turn my head, my lips grazing silky skin, fresh from Heaven. And I know I will never again wonder if I’m crazy to have four children.
*
Today’s Write On Edge prompt is about new beginnings…the excitement, the heart-catching novelty.
I post this in honor of Michael’s first birthday, coming up in a couple of weeks.
Mr. Moto Perpetuo
7 Quick Takes
Alex showing off his OLL statue, the card I wrote, and his new journal
___1___
Last night was First Reconciliation night. Alex came home from Cub Scouts wiped out, car sick and with a cold, and I began to wonder if he was going to collapse and miss the sacrament altogether. But dinner perked him up enough. When the formal service ended, all the kids in church made a mad dash for the two priests they know best. I had to chuckle because it all looked rather un-holy. Alex, like all the other kids, steadfastly refused to go to Confession to a priest they didn’t know.
___2___
I went to Confession too…a not-altogether satisfactory experience. In the past, I’ve always felt less nervous going to someone who didn’t know me from Adam. But the priest was offering direction like take a few minutes to pray and we don’t always have to have noise and distraction going. I was hard-pressed not to smile, considering that was exactly the subject of the column I just turned in to Liguorian magazine not eight hours earlier. I tried to look at it as an excercise in humility, and remind myself that the grace of the sacrament doesn’t depend on my emotional satisfaction. But it made me appreciate a confessor who knows you.
___3___
Alex came out of Confession wiping his runny nose, and we went back to where Christian was waiting with the other three kids. I took over kid duty so he could receive the sacrament himself. In the meantime, the pastor finished with the kids who’d been in line behind Alex and strolled up the center aisle. As he passed us he tossed me a wry grin, which I interpreted as a wordless reference to the history of the many penance services we had done together while I was working as liturgy director. “So, Alex,” I said, returning my attention to my kids, “were you nervous?’
“Yes,” he said, “I started crying.”
And I thought: Oh, so THAT’S what that smile was all about!
___4___
At the beginning of the year, the pastor encouraged us all to do something to celebrate First Reconciliation so it doesn’t seem like it’s so much less important than First Communion. My solution? Ice cream! We went over to the mall and got Blizzards. I saved calories all day to allow me to go. A Chocolate Extreme Blizzard, size small, has 630 calories, according to DQ’s website. So I ordered a small, and split it three ways. Meaning I had a very miniscule amount of Blizzard. And yet, after a six- or eight-week “fast” from them altogether…let me tell you, that was one satisfying 1/3 of a Blizzard. Moderation, people. It’s all about moderation.
___5___
Here’s my latest column at Liguorian: “Let Yourself Get Caught.”
___6___
___7___
And finally, re the big event just past last Tuesday: my thoughts mirror those of Rae at Vita Catholic.
