My sixth (and final) baby is learning to read.  By the time his other siblings were this age, they already knew how to read words like ‘happy’ and ‘birthday’ but that was only because they were motivated by whatever check amount was in their cards.

Cooper is 6 plus 3 months and we’re just now on c-a-t.  What they never tell you in mommy school is that whilst you start your first child reading at 18 months, by the time you are on kid #6 you’re not only wrinkled, but tireder than a week-old potato.

P-oh-tay-toe

The last few days he’s been ramping up his reading.  I’d like to think it’s because of his innate passion for the written word.  Really, it’s because his older brothers told him that I pay one dollar at the end of every reader.  An advocate for candy free trade, he’s now a mean, lean, reading machine.

Tonight we’re under his covers together.

Tired as I was, I couldn’t help being immediately lured in with such riveting titles as “Kim’s Tam” and “A Dab of Jam.”

Our session goes something like this:

Me:  Ok, it looks like today we are learning that ‘dge’ says ‘j’ as in ‘giraffe.’  So, go on now.

C:  Meg

Me:  Madge

C: …has a b-a-j

Me:  yes, a badge.

C:  The b-a-j is b-i-g

Me:  Good.

C:  D-a-d w-i-ll put the badge on the front of Madge’s shirt, no, dress.  Is that a shirt or a dress, do you think?

Me:  Neither.  Read, don’t guess

C: D-a-d w-i-ll p-u-t the b-a-j on M-e-g’s dress.

Me:  Read, don’t guess

C:  M-a-j’s dress, no shirt, no dress

Me:  Just on plain old Madge.  No shirt.  No dress.

C:  She’s not wearing a shirt or a dress?

Me:  Next story!

C:  The L-o-j

Me:  The Lodge, yes, that’s what we call the title, see how it’s in bold type?

C:  Yup.  W-eh

Me: Wee

C:  w-i-ll gah

Me:  go, that’s a sight word

C:  t-ah

Me:  to, that’s a sight word, too

C:  …the big wooden house in the woods

Me:  …the lodge

C:  Can we read seven stories tonight?

Me:  Oh boy.  That’d be fun.  But I don’t think so.  No tonight.  It’s already 8:04.  You know how growing boys need their sleep if they want to turn into Jedis.

C:  Oh yeah.  ‘Night mom.

Me:  Don’t let the sledge flogs bite.

C:  Kiss me again, foo

Me:  Never

C:  Don’t forget that when I finish this book I get a dollar

Me:  How could I?

C:  Send in Anna so I can read to her.  Then Lani.  I only have eight stories left and I get a whole dollar.  When I get a dollar, first I’m going to…

Me:  Anna!!

If they’d stayed married, tomorrow my parents would be celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary.

As I write this, tears.

Fifteen years ago, I was a child, hugely pregnant with my second child, Austen.  The other children were nothing but hopes.  Dad came to stay with us.  I made meatloaf.

Divorce–and I say this with all my being–sucks.

It is a ripping of the fiber of a family.  A renting of the one thing that should never be rent.  A betrayal to everyone involved.

You promised.  Remember?  In sickness and in health.  Remember?  Yes.  But the vows never speak to the other things.  The little things.  The not-so-little things.  The layers of misunderstanding.  Of tiny hurts laid upon tiny hurts.  Of things said that can never, ever be taken back.  Of a love that started so strong that was, one cell at a time, rendered impotent.

Mom.  Dad.  Why couldn’t you make it work???  Why didn’t you just call it what it was?  That you didn’t understand how to make love work, but that you would never, ever leave each other?  How could you walk away, taking the forks and writing explanations on 3X5 cards?  Wouldn’t a good fight, a good makeup session have made it all better?  Don’t all marriages go through dry spells?  Times we shout words we don’t mean, or, worse, words we do?

I’ve spent my life trying to make amends.  To make sense of it.  To fill the gaps.  To be a person worth loving.  Working my fingers to the bone with it at times.

And I have failed miserably.

Loving is this way, I’ve come to understand.  Not one high after the other.  Not mending hurts with scripted apologies, followed by hot sex and happily ever after.

Love, as I reminded my little brother right after his wedding, is tender.  Ever so weak, it is a sapling,reaching toward the heavens in the hopes of what the future will bring.  Time, words, circumstances blow cold winds on that tender thing.  It’s a miracle any of us survives.

This year marks fifteen years since my parents split.  In that time, I’ve raised a daughter, and a son, almost to adulthood, four other children not yet so far. Late at night fears assail me:  What have I taught them, by my example, of love?  Of the relationship that is supposed to mirror Christ’s with the Church?  Tear-stained prayers usually end in sleep, a blissful release from the realities of that answer.

Marriage is hard.  Even for those of us who enter it with everything on our side.  It’s hard, at best, to take two fallen humans, put them together 24/7 and say, OK, do this thing.  And don’t mess up.  Don’t raise your voice, even when you’re up for the 15th time this night.  Don’t lose your cool even when all six of your babies are throwing up at the same time.  Don’t snap at each other when finances are tight.  Don’t bite each other’s head off just because you lost the house.

When I was nine I wrote a list of how a wife should act.  Reading it now, I laugh at its naivete.  What did I know of life at nine?  But I judged, nonetheless.

Fifteen years later, I’m done with that.  Yes, I’d give every tooth in my head for them to have stayed together.  I grieve the fact that I only ever saw them together with my first child.  By the second (and third and fourth and fifth and sixth), they were already apart.  I grieve the fact that my kids have no memory of them together.

But I also know that life–and love, if it’s real–is hard.  It doesn’t always turn out like a fairy tale.  I have a friend who once said to me, “Your family is the most messed up family I have ever heard of.”

Maybe so.

Most likely so.

But I love them.  Oh how I love them.  Those parents who just couldn’t make it work.  My two beautiful sisters who have so suffered from the ripple effect.  My two brothers, so tall and handsome, trying to be men, husbands…one, a father to four young ones of his own.  God, oh God, give us grace.

This messy, ugly, ‘dysfunctional’ family, however scarred, however wounded, is mine.  Everything I am, or hope to be, is because of these two parents who struggled along for thirty years, in large part on my behalf.

Yes, I’m sad they aren’t still together.  But more than that, I am grateful.  Grateful that they held on as long as they did.  Grateful for the heritage of faith (yes, faith) they gave me.  Grateful for the years of security I did have, for them pulling together, however stiffly at times, to pull off my teenage years, my wedding…

Thank you, Mom.  Thank you, Dad.  Thank you for doing the best you could.  Thank you for holding on, keeping the faith, being strong.

It may not be a storybook ending, but, as I told my friend, it us our story.  Ours.

Messy.  Messed up.  Broken. Bathed in tears.

And God will use it, as He does all things…for His purposes, however He wishes…making beauty of ashes.

Sola Deo Gloria.

It started July first.  The squealers.  The poppers.  The bottle rockets.

My big ole baby dogs, Kodiak and Sasha, were scared witless and got jittery just stepping foot outside.  A bomb going off every time you go to do your business has that effect.

July 3rd we left them in the garage with the garage door cracked while we went out, thinking they’d have more space to roam around than they do in the laundry room.

Big.  Mistake.

We came home to find that Kodi  had heard the firecrackers and, in his terror-induced attempt to escape the noise, had stuck his huge furry head inside the cat door that leads from the garage to the house, ripping up about a foot of linoleum inside the door in the process.  Slobber pooled on the floor and he was panting uncontrollably.  It was about 90 degrees in the garage and he has a fur coat like a black bear’s, so you can imagine his state.

Seeing him so panicked, we followed suit, trying first to get the cat door off.  No one could find a single one of our forty Phillip’s screwdrivers.  I had just started looking for a hacksaw (for the door) when Ian finally bent one of Kodi’s ears back and pushed him back through the door.  I don’t speak dog, but you don’t have to to know this dog was relieved.

Needless to say, since then,  neither dog will go outside without being physically forced.  A daunting task when the dog weighs more than you do.  I fully expect it to take days, if not weeks before they forget the trauma of their Fourth of July experience.  Meanwhile, except for Kodi’s one brief foray upstairs to relieve himself in front of my bedroom door, they are sequestered into The Blue Room.

The dogs reacted instinctively, which is never an excuse for a human, but I see a bit of myself in their response.  Hurt has that effect.  Once injured, the instinct is to pull back in retreat, to hide one’s head in a pile of dirty laundry rather than subject oneself to the possibility of further pain.

Taken to its logical conclusion, however, such action means, like the dogs are finding, incredible discomfort.  One can only stay mad so long before a decision must be made:  Either get over it, or suffer with a full bladder in The Blue Room indefinitely.  And the longer one stays in The Blue Room, the harder it becomes to go back outside.  As nice as it is to lounge in The Blue Room, nursing fears and hurts, the back yard, at some point, must be faced.  The bladder, remember?

Ever been in the Blue Room?

I have.

The squealers.  The poppers.  The bottle rockets. They all threaten.  And you’re scared.

You know that you can stay perennially safe, alone in The Blue Room, feeling that your anger and your pain are real, justified even.

Meanwhile, you are missing out on rolling around in the green grass or sitting under the tramp panting with your tongue hanging out.  The world goes on without you while you lick your wounds inside the safety of the sliding glass door.

Leaving the Blue Room is hard, no doubt.  It means taking responsibility for yourself, your actions, your reactions, no matter what someone else did to you.  It means choosing to be vulnerable again, even though last time you did that a bottle rocket went off in your ear.  Facing the outside,  you’re as jittery as a pre-Independence Day doggie with a good memory.

But, short of burying your head in the dirty wading pool until the bubbles stop, is there any other option?

Not really.  Not if you want to stay sane.  Not if you want to really live.  Not if you want your communion unhindered.  The Blue Room is a place to visit, but no place to live.

There are no juicy bones in there for one.

Plus, people with laundry baskets in their hands trip over you and the new kittens taunt you with their run of the house VIP status.

For dogs, the way out is to forget and slowly trust again.  For people, forgiveness has to be more deliberate, victim status abandoned altogether.  An honest look in the proverbial mirror is in order and may serve as a reminder of that grace which was so lavishly poured out, freely, without stipulation, the grace that is the very thing I now hoard to myself.  He doesn’t deserve it, you see.  And her apology didn’t have the right words in it.

Failure to forgive is the most overt slap in God’s face a person can give.  And I do it every day.

As I write this, six weeks after Independence Day, the dogs aren’t quite as difficult to push out the back door as they were on July 5th.  I hope that by Labor Day, they’ll actually want to go out and romp awhile and sit under the tramp while wild children bounce over their heads and grown-ups grill hot dogs, the sun setting like fire over a prairie falling into an azure summer night, abandoning The Blue Room for good.

For anyone stuck in The Blue Room…for you…for me…for all of us…I hope–and pray–the same thing.

Babies are wonderful.  But sometimes, when we’re in the midst of them, they wear us out and we can hardly wait for the little fatties to go down for a nap or for the night, what my husband and I call Happy Hour.

Our own baby just turned six years old so we haven’t had a real baby around for awhile.

Until now.

Emily is nannying for a family and has brought the little pumpkin over to the house the last two weeks.  She’s four months old and all eight of us spend the day fighting over who can hold her, who can make her laugh, who can rock her to sleep.  The teenage boys coo at her when no one is watching.  I revert into the baby language I’ve used with all my kids.  Elenia wants to dress her in doll clothes.

My baby days are over, but I’ll never be over baby love.  What mother would be?

I guess that’s a good thing cuz I’m hoping for at least 40 grandchildren.

It took two years, countless hours in her room sweating over just the right word, tinkering with Garage Band, playing with chords, being begged to just please be quiet by her brothers, mom being the bad guy when something wasn’t up to snuff…

But, as of tonight, Em’s EP is done.

About fifty songs later…

Eight of her best, ready to go.

At last.

Good job, sweet girl.

]]> http://www.wholemama.com/?feed=rss2&p=728 6 http://www.wholemama.com/?p=688 http://www.wholemama.com/?p=688#comments Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:34:54 +0000 wholemama http://www.wholemama.com/?p=688 Watching a movie together, his sweaty brown legs intertwined with mine, Cooper asks, “So, Mom, is magic real?”

Gulp.

The approved answer is, of course, no.

But I’m conflicted.  Telling a child that magic isn’t real feels like telling him that despite their angel-like powdered heavenliness, donuts, although delightful, aren’t very good for you.

It’s true, but feels wrong.

To tell him magic doesn’t exist is to negate half the books I read him that suggest otherwise.   The Chronicles of Narnia.  Five Children and It.  The Velveteen Rabbit.

He’s smart.  He knows that Santa is really mommy, working up a sweat filling stockings with Cracker Barrel candy sticks, oranges, and the year’s newest pennies.

Not having lost any teeth yet (our kids are on the protracted tooth-loss schedule), he hasn’t any first-hand experience with the Tooth Fairy, but his older siblings fill his ears with her magical offerings, if only you sit still while mom pulls out your wiggly teeth with pliers or (preferably), a piece of toilet paper.

At present, Cooper lives in a Star Wars world, dressing up like Obi Wan Kanobi or (sigh) Darth Maul, acting out the perennial battle between Good and Evil.  He jumps on the tramp, pretending to be some athletic star he isn’t.  Every night I tell  him the mythical tales of Dexter, The Restless Polar Bear, who has become as real to him as his dogs, Kodiak and Sasha, and his five flesh and blood siblings.

What’s a mother (who herself tried to get to Narnia several times between the years of 1979 and 1984) to do, then, when asked point blank, Is magic real?

I’ll tell you what she does:

She begs the phone to ring.

He rescues her from lying:

“Do you not know?”

No, Cooper, not really.

Common sense and book knowledge and the second law of thermodynamics tell me that, no, magic doesn’t exist.

But the truth is, she thinks it does.  Maybe not what people normally call magic.   But how do you explain the following?

Santa’s sled marks that both she and her sister witnessed one Christmas.

The time she and the same sister simultaneously drew one solitary line on a piece of paper to describe the word ‘atmosphere’ in a game of Pictionary.

The dream she had about a person she hadn’t thought about in ten years, whose birthday, as it turned out, was the very next day.

The knowledge, delivered just in time, of what a certain boy’s note would say, word for word, before it reached her eyes.

Not magic, exactly.  But magical.

So, Cooper, to answer your question:  Officially, no, magic isn’t real.  Neither is Santa.  Or the Tooth Fairy.  Or mommy and daddy’s hedge fund.

But, off the record…

just between you and I…

yes…

I believe…

magic is..

on some level…

most definitely…

without question…

real.

Here’s what I thought about:

1.  I love my babies.  They are louder than a bugle in the ear at times, but a day without seeing their sunny faces at least a million times is a day without sunshine .

2.  I love my man.  The only one brave enough to enter my room.  Who went to the store for saltines and Sprite.  Who was sad to see me half dead.  Who offered to kiss me even if it meant risking getting sick.  Gem with a capital G.

3.  I love boring old regular everyday monotonous dull repetitive drudgerous life.  A lot.

4.  The verse, “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy cometh in the morning” is, in fact, quite true.

5.  I will never outgrow my need for my mother.  Who else will sympathize and listen to every gory detail of my misery?

6.  It’s good to occasionally ‘check out.’  Refreshing.  Especially when it’s a voluntary and sickness-free hiatus.  Which mine wasn’t.

7.  I love the movie ‘Out of Africa.’

8.  There may be some worth in fasting.  I feel clearer in the head than I have in a long time.  Colors seem more colorful.  The sun, sunnier.

9.  Love is hard.  As in:  I-really-want-to-bury-my nose-in-Cooper’s-sweet-hair-but-don’t-want-to-make-him-sick-so-will-resist.

10.  I’m a big baby.  The people who say, “Oh, it’s only a 24 hour thing” may be right, but when you are so miserable that you can actually hear each tick before the subsequent tock, that 24 hours takes at least three lifetimes to get through.

Plus, the dogs have been inside and needier than usual.  Then I visited my mother.  And WORLD magazine, it appears, doesn’t give its every other Thursday bloggers a month long all-expenses-paid vacay.  Projects pile along with the laundry.

All that to say, blogging has been low on the totem pole. I know you wait with bated breath for every word that tumbles forth from my fingers, but still yourselves in the knowledge that one day soon, when you least expect it, a post might actually get written.

Til then, patience, ma cheres.