Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 99

The Mellowing of Mama Kate

Photo by Merelymel 13, via Flickr

Conventional wisdom takes one of two arguments. Some say the transition from one to two is the hardest; others say the real change comes at three, when the kids outnumber the parents for the first time. But everyone agrees after that, it doesn’t make any difference. Four or eight, it’s all the same.

I beg to differ.

I was the most serious of mothers out there. Total breastfeeding, cloth diapers, attachment parenting, homemade baby food–cereal, vegetables, meats, the whole works. Boxed cereal, begone! Low carbon footprint. No TV till age two. No stupid useless toys whose only purpose is to pad the pockets of toy makers and battery operators, no irritating characters who do everything twice. I’d waited three years for the privilege of motherhood, pondering, planning, visioning, and choking on opinions I wasn’t allowed to share because I didn’t have the experience. When the time came, I was ready.

Alex was parented that way. Julianna threw a huge wrench in the gears, starting in the OR when she was born with low blood sugar, and they gave her a bottle of formula. But even through illness after illness, and medical personnel freaking out because they wanted to know how much she was taking in, basically she was breastfed. They learned quickly that she couldn’t take from a bottle.

As Alex got older, we inherited some toys we would rather not have had, but by and large I have kept my parenting philosophies intact. By the time Nicholas came along, we gave up on the TV prohibition and just tried to keep it in control. (How do you keep the younger kids from watching age-inappropriate material when their older brother gets to watch it?)

But Michael? Adding the fourth child pitched our household from “chaotic” to “complete and utter madhouse.” I can’t even get the diapers washed sometimes; if I didn’t feel so passionately about the environment, I might chuck the whole works. It takes massive amounts of brainpower and focus to make sure I have the kids practice the piano, do homework, do their chores (the middle two are supposed to clear the table, Alex to sweep the floor). Alex keeps taking things away from Michael, like, I don’t know, puzzle pieces, and I wave a hand and say, “Let him chew on it! I don’t like that puzzle anyway!”

I absolutely dreaded the onset of solid food. The idea of preparing all those food cubes, cooking that rice cereal, having to think through a balanced diet separate from the rest of the family, just gave me the willies, especially now that we’re packing lunches for two older kids to take to school. (Who likes which cold lunch option? Is there something not sweet in this lunch bag?)

When we were packing for Mackinac, I caved and bought a box of rice cereal. I couldn’t see any way around it while we were on vacation.

The first time I prepared a meal using that box, I was flabbergasted. No microwave? No stove top? No crusted pan to scrub afterward? Where have you been, O Boxed Cereal, for the last seven years of my life? This is so easy!

That’s it, I decided. No more cooking meats, grinding them in the food processor, freezing them in cubes and fighting the baby on texture (because the texture never comes out right). No more battling rice cereal. I’m still doing vegetables, fruits and finger foods myself (mostly), but there now resides on the canned food shelf a small supply of Gerber and Beechwood bottles with beef and chicken meals inside. And let me tell you, pulling them out is like a breath of fresh air. I don’t have to wrap my brain around a meal with multiple components to be prepared? GREAT!

I may be copping out, but you know what? At this point, I don’t care. I’m mellowing. I’ve got more important places to expend emotional energy.

Making Peace With My Birthday

Photo by Packfill, via Flickr

For most of my life, my birthday and I have had a pretty dysfunctional relationship. It’s not about age–I’m seeing the first hints of the aging process taking its toll, and I don’t like that, but psychologically speaking, I think this whole obsession with youth is ridiculous. No, it’s about the day itself: the purpose of celebrating, the proper way to celebrate, the attitude I should be cultivating.

It’s a day all about you! Your day, your way! You should get to do whatever you want to do, and no one and nothing should stand in your way! In other words: me, me, me. For one day, I am the center of the universe.

The trouble is, for thirty-seven years I tried that route, and I’ve had way more bad birthdays than good ones. You know why? Because the world isn’t all about me, even on my birthday. It’s no one else’s responsibility to make me happy. In fact, they couldn’t possibly succeed in making me happy, because what I really wanted was for someone to read my mind and figure out what I needed in order to be happy and give it to me, because I didn’t know.

(Sick, I know.)

All I had was a vague sense that I shouldn’t have to work. Every year I trotted out the tradition from my parents’ household, that the birthday girl didn’t have to do dishes. And from that I drew up a wholly unsustainable vision of a birthday as a do-nothing, responsibility-free day. And then I was never happy, because it never turned out that way.

This year, my thirty-eighth birthday, I accepted a truth I’ve known for a long time: a birthday for a mother (or a father) is different from a birthday for a child. You don’t necessarily get the first piece of cake (I mean, you could, but your ice cream would be half melted by the time you finished getting the little ones’ cake and ice cream cut up for them, so what’s the point?). You don’t go wild with excitement over presents (what do adults go wild with excitement over?).

You don’t stop being an adult just because it’s your birthday, and trying to act otherwise is a recipe for unhappiness. Like it or not, there are still kids to feed and dress, clothes to fold, and dishes to wash.

And if you can make peace with that, you will find that the efforts your family puts forth on your behalf will be enough to evoke that little glow of satisfaction you were looking for all along.

For a rain chain, three pairs of pajamas, an umbrella, and a rain gauge….

and more importantly, 4/10 of an inch of rain to go with them

(even if that’s barely enough to scratch the surface of the worst drought in 50 years)…

For a twenty-mile bicycle ride with my husband

and a relaxing picnic beneath a tree beside a soybean field

For hundreds of online well-wishes (Facebook rocks, I don’t care what anyone says)

especially the thoughtful and personalized ones  from people I respect

For a student coming to help me clean house in exchange for lessons

and the end of the overwhelming set of deadlines coming into view

For Nicholas officially becoming the first of my children to be completely toilet trained, even at night (woohoo!)

Sunday Snippets

It’s my birthday weekend (38, to be exact ), and time for a gathering of Catholic bloggers at RAnn’s This, That and the Other Thing.

My week in a nutshell:

Living Gut Deep

Julianna’s New Schoolyear

In The Shadow of the Viaduct (a poem)

And a fiction excerpt titled Collision.

Fiction Friday: Collision

Image by Camryn Darkstone, via Flickr

The first time Ned laid eyes on Zin, the sight hit him like a tsunami–stole his breath, laid his soul flat on the floor of Summerset High. Her eyes nicked his face and moved on, and he wanted her like he’d never wanted anything in his life.

She swept past in a dizzying swirl of color and perfume. He watched her cut a swath of destruction through the beige hallway to her locker. She wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but she had self-possession that cast all the other girls into shadow. She scared him. There was something hard, a little too bright, about her. She’d chew him up and spit him out and not even notice the pieces of him crunching beneath her sparkly shoes.

So he kept his distance. Squashed the desire. He had enough on his mind, anyway.

But tonight, as Ned emerged from the shadows of the woods and saw Zin bathed in the golden pool cast by the porch light, he knew something had changed. There was a softness in the way her body molded around the bundle in her arms, a vulnerability to the curve of her cheek and downcast eyes.

“What’s Zin got?” asked Jon. “Is that–a baby?”

Dee’s fingers dug into his arm, all her weight sagging onto him. He nearly toppled into her. Before he could correct, she let go and took the steps at a run. Grammy’s knitting needles never stopped as her eyes flickered shrewdly to her great-granddaughter and dropped again.

By the time Ned arrived, the tension had drained from Dee’s face. He knew what she’d thought, but it was just her guilty conscience. Her baby was a thousand miles away by now, with her new parents.

“But whose is it?” The words hadn’t come from his mouth, though they echoed his thoughts.

“I don’t know.” Zin’s voice was hushed, lyrical. “She was down in the woods, under a tree. I heard her crying.”

“We should call the police,” someone said.

The corners of Zin’s eyes tightened; the bundle inched imperceptibly closer to her body. Ned clenched his fists to squash a tremor, then stepped forward. He crouched down and pulled back the blanket that shadowed the baby’s face.

He froze, then expelled a long breath and dared to look at Zin, only a foot away, close enough to see each individual lash framing her eyes. As if sensing his gaze, she met his eyes, read the look there. “What is it?” she whispered. The hardness was gone. Somehow, she had fallen in love with a baby she’d only known for an hour. What he was about to say was going to hit her like a tsunami.

“Zin,” he said softly, “I think this baby has Down syndrome.”

*

I’ve been trying to write free-standing pieces for fiction prompts, but I’m also really interested in the set of characters introduced in “A Cry In the Dark” and “Secrets.” This continues the story told in those two, adding another point of view to the mix. Still, I think you could probably read this independently and not miss much.

I’m very interested to know how I’m doing with an older-teenage male POV. I’m trying to portray a thoughtful, introspective guy–and I know those young men exist–but I’m also worried about making him just too feminine to be real. Would love your input.

Also, enjoy this video. I couldn’t get it to embed or I’d have used it instead.

In The Shadow Of The Viaduct

Photo by prestigiacomo.patricia, via Flickr

I gave to a homeless man.

Two pennies, a nickel, a couple of quarters

The jingling contents of my pocket

After twenty dollar tickets

And six dollar hot dogs

In the shadow of a viaduct

Cars roaring above

Stadium roaring behind

He saw me coming

Read my body language

Met me

As my family moved on ahead

Less than sixty cents

Practically nothing

And yet I touched his hand

Met his eyes

Bright and alive

Not dead

Not worn down

Surprisingly young

And I wonder what he thought

As he said thank you sweetheart

It’s still not enough.

Julianna’s New Schoolyear

I owe you an update. You might remember that when we first had Julianna’s kindergarten IEP meeting, back in January, the representative from her elementary school, who knew very little about her, recommended that she be in a self-contained classroom for 65% of the day. I was very upset about this on a number of levels–the most basic being: if the assumption is that kids with disabilities are going to be walled off, and they have to fight their way into the general population by proving they don’t really have a disability, then society is setting them up for remaining behind that wall their whole lives.

Christian and I set up an appointment with the school last spring. He took a day off so we wouldn’t be rushed, and we spent over an hour meeting with people at the school expressing our concerns. Julianna’s peers need to be around her at least as much as she needs to be around them, we stressed. And after all, we’re realistic about her academic future. There are a limited number of skills she needs to learn in order to function in the world: reading, writing, some basic math. And she has thirteen years to learn those skills. What she really needs is to learn how to interact with typically-developing peers–because those are the people she’s going to have to interact with as an adult. We want her schooling to prepare her to live in the community, not behind a wall.

The team was cautious in their response to us–cautious, though supportive in theory. I spent most of the summer thinking I was going to spend this school year skirting the fine line between advocate and pain in the school’s @$$. But about three weeks ago, the head of special ed at the school emailed us and said, “Hey, let’s do this IEP meeting now instead of in September.”

Really?

Wow!

So the day before school started, we had an IEP meeting in Julianna’s classroom at her new school, a meeting that included the principal and a representative from the district (I’m not sure if that second one is standard, but I’m pretty sure the principal’s presence is not). It was a good thing on many levels. Our ideas for goals have solidified in the past few months, for one, and this allowed us to formalize those goals. It also served to introduce us to the team, and best of all, the school was on board with a much greater level of inclusion. They reversed the proportions. Now, Julianna is spending the day in her regular classroom, and being pulled out for PT, OT, and speech therapy, plus adaptive PE and a little bit of extra instructional time. It boils down to this: Julianna’s in a regular ed classroom around 70% of the time.

I’m very pleased with the school so far. There are the quirks I don’t care for–like the chocolate Teddy grahams at breakfast that first day, and the fact that the bus didn’t even show up yesterday morning (but that’s a problem with the bus company, not the school)–but the feel of the school, and the vibes from the staff, have been 100% positive. Very supportive, very sweet, very professional and empathetic–in a nutshell, everything you could ask for in the people who are going to be working with your child. And I put this out in the e-universe as a word of hope to those who are viewing the transitions with trepidation.

Living Gut-Deep

Livin’ the good life…even if it is crazy sometimes

A few weeks ago, I was driving to a neighboring town to teach at a church music camp with four kids in the back of the van. The camp was every afternoon for a week. None of my kids were getting naps; everyone was crabby–Michael was a holy terror–and every day I spent the drive berating myself for trying to do something I knew was too much before I ever started, and problem-solving how to minimize the effects, now that I was committed.

Suddenly I had a fleeting vision of myself a decade or two from now. If I suddenly found myself dropped back into these days–the triple and quadruple diapering days, the teaching-everyone-self-care days, the making-your-breakfast-for-you days, the must-supervise-you-through-every-task days…if, after so long, I really remembered what it is like now, I think I would shake my head and wonder, How did I do that?

It’s definitely been crazy this summer, and a lot of that is because I definitely overreached. But a big part is also that I refused to take myself away from the kids. If I had abandoned family time, banished the kids to Netflix, holed up on weekends and hired babysitters 3 times a week, I’d be done with my work by now. But I’m becoming keenly aware of how easy it is to go through life skimming the surface, skipping like a rock and only occasionally dipping in for a luxurious swim. I don’t want to have regrets. I want to be present in my own life. I want to have gut-deep, whole-body memories of these days. I think the regret people so often warn us about comes from letting life sweep you by.

What’s that thing look like, anyway? What’s on the end of all those spires? I really wanted to know, too!

This came home to me really hard yesterday afternoon. We went to a Cards game, and had the opportunity to have our picture taken with the World Series trophy. It was kind of an assembly line, of course, and we were corralling four kids wearing red amid thousands of other people wearing red. Somewhere around the fourth inning, I suddenly realized: I didn’t even look at the trophy. Not for one second. I turned to Christian. “Hey, did you actually really look at that trophy?”

He frowned, then shook his head and chuckled ruefully. “Not really.”

That’s not how I want to live my life–seeking photo ops that are completely meaningless because you didn’t interact with the backdrop at all.

This summer,  we played board games, worked puzzles, read books, attended story time at the library. We went on field trips: to see snakes and turtles at the biology department, to watch Venus cross the sun, to ride the tractor with Grandpa, to play in forts and fairy houses, to ooh and ahh over Chinese lanterns, to picnic at parks and visit a science center with a cousin.

We lived hard this summer. Is it any wonder we wore ourselves out?

I’m a realist. I know those moments when the memories are so clear that it’s like I’m living them again will be fleeting and far between. And I know I could have taken an easier road. Perhaps I could even have saved myself the meltdown of a couple of weeks ago.

But I don’t regret it. I would rather not have lost it, but it was a good reality check. And we’ve had a really good week and a half since then. Sometimes you need the darkness to highlight the rest.

Sunday Snippets

The weeks are flying by, and it’s time for another roundup of Catholic bloggers at RAnn’s This, That and The Other Thing.

My contributions for the week are:

We took our last summer field trip this week, after which I paused to take stock of life on the cusp of a new schoolyear, especially considering the multiple meltdowns last week. This week, I’ve felt like a good parent. Last week, not so much. And then, of course, I took time to detail the back to school craziness (plus a couple of other random items).

Back-To-School Takes

___1___

We went to the pool on Wednesday. I put one toe in the water and realized pool season is over. Amazing, what ten days of cool weather can do. We washed all the suits and are officially retiring the pool until 2013.

 ___2___

I’ve been feverishly juggling end-of-summer, beginning-of-schoolyear commitments with DEADLINES. Which is how the word looks in my mind these days–all caps, rife with foreboding. Still, the process of writing for the religious market always inspires insights. As I was writing about the sacraments yesterday, I found this in the Catechism: “The Anointing of the Sick completes our conformity to the death and Resurrection of Christ, just as Baptism began it. It completes the holy anointings that mark the whole Christian life: that of Baptism which sealed the new life in us, and that of Confirmation which strengthened us for the combat of this life. This last anointing fortifies the end of our earthly life like a solid rampart for the final struggles before entering the Father’s house.” (CCC1523) Isn’t that just a beautiful way to look at it?

 ___3___

We had three First Days in a row this week. Three days, three kids, three schools. Nicholas began the new school year by starting preschool two mornings a week:

Gotta love that belly

Oddly enough, two out of seven kids in his class have the same name, so he’s been dubbed Nick by his teacher. Ah well. It couldn’t remain in my control forever.

 ___4___

On Wednesday, Alex started second grade:

I volunteered to play piano for the holy day Mass, so I snapped a shot or two while Alex was wrapped up in the priest’s homily. (He’s a Dominican, and he always uses tacticle props to engage the kids.)

___5___

And Julianna rounded out the week by starting kindergarten on Thursday.

Using Daddy’s backpack, because hers mysteriously vanished at the moment it was time to leave for school. It reapeared late in the afternoon on top of a shelf.

I walked her to the cafeteria, and when I saw the mayhem of almost a hundred kindergarteners, I decided I’d better walk her through the “breakfast” line before leaving.

Whatever, Mom. You and that camera. Just leave already, will you?
(Why yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. What the public school calls “breakfast” is, indeed, Teddy Grahams and icing-covered snack bars. Miss Julianna will not be skipping breakfast at home, let me assure you.)

It was a bit nerve-racking, because I left her without direct supervision, but I reminded myself that if we want her to be able to operate in a generally inclusive environment, we have to, y’know, back off. She came home from school happy, so she seems to have done fine on her first day.

 ___6___

This is my life these days. Note the precarious angle of the sugar canister and the two canisters on the floor. Michael’s four front teeth are coming farther out of his gum every day, and when he smiles it is with a rakish, “My name is trouble” attitude. He’s huge. Christian calls him “Butterball,” and routinely tells people we’re going to have him for Thanksgiving dinner.

___7___

As I tucked Nicholas into bed, I asked, “Are you ready for another day of school?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Twenton is the wine wheeler.”

“The what?”

“The wine wheeler.”

“The wine wheeler?” I said blankly. I started doing consonant substitions in my head. “Oh, line. Oh! Line leader!”

“Twenton’s job is to tell ev-wy-one, ‘Wine up!’”

Sounds like good advice to me. Everybody, ’tis the weekend. Wine up!

The Last Field Trip

It’s been a summer of field trips: to the observatory, to the lantern festival, to the real field with Grandpa, to the reptile exhibits, and so on. I have several ideas for blog posts, but unfortunately, this morning is Alex’s first day of school, which involves me playing piano for Assumption Mass, which means getting five people (four of them littles) in the car by 7:15 a.m. Which means scheduling a post the night before. Which means…pictures! We went to “Science City” with my sister and her son.

Michael and Aunt Tamara

Which one is harder to lift?

Waiting for lunch at Fritz’s, where the food is brought by train. Seriously.

Alex and his cousin hard at work at a water table

Nicholas giving Aunt Tamara instructions on running a helicopter. Thank goodness he’s there to tell us these things.

Julianna loves her aunt. People kept mistaking them for mother and daughter all day.

So there you have it: summer’s end. Time for school to start! Ready–set–go!