Children in Church

Taking your children to church can be so exciting... You never really know what to expect. Many Catholic churches have a special place called "the crying room." Ah, the crying room. It's usually up in the front somewhere, separate from the congregation but glassed in, so you can see, but the children cannot be heard from the sanctuary.

It's a lovely thought, right? Sound comes into the crying room through speakers, and the crying children are all gathered together like an out-of-control children's choir. At least you're there, and nobody is having impure thoughts of murder while your children disrupt and you struggle to contain their exuberance and energy. With our sons coming nearly four years apart, it seemed like I had ever just graduated to the main body of the congregation, when I again had to be exiled to the crying room. There were two incidents that I want to memorialize here. Both were only funny in retrospect.

The first happened when Jeremy was tiny. Tighe had watched for months as the ushers would quietly come into the crying room with the collection basket for our offertory gifts. People would place their cash, checks, or envelopes in the basket, and then the usher would open the door and quietly leave again. Tighe liked the idea of having money so freely given. One day he figured if it was good enough for the ushers, he'd give it a try himself. When the ushers left the room, he picked up the little trash basket and followed them into the main congregation, and started going up and down the aisles, holding out the trash can and looking expectantly, waiting for money to be placed in his offering basket.

I didn't notice that he was gone right away, as I was dealing with Jeremy, but I could hear sudden laughter coming through the speakers and started looking around. Out through the glass I saw what was going on, and put Jeremy down, ready to go retrieve my wayward eldest, when the head usher beat me to it. He marched him back in the room and actually slammed the door shut as he left! He kept the trash can, too. He never smiled at me again. I was a failed mother. (His standards were very high.)

The second incident only disrupted the crying room, not the general congregation, but one man never came back to that service; at least, he never sat in the crying room again. I'm not sure why he sat in there, anyway. He never had any children with him. He was a big guy, and there's no really polite way to say this. He had a problem commonly known as plumber's crack. He would kneel down with his hips resting on the seat, leaning forward onto the front of the seat in front of him, and this wide crack would be displayed, disappearing into the drooping edge of his pants. We usually came in after he did, and I was careful to sit well forward of him. One Sunday, however, he was late. He rushed in and sank into the empty spot right in front of Jeremy. Just then the service began.

Jeremy wasn't even two yet, and inhibitions aren't strong at that age. We had almost made it to the end of the service. We were all kneeling down after Communion when Jeremy, with a loud "Wheee!" stuck his finger down the guy's crack. I had never before seen a man levitate. He was out of his seat, and out of that church faster than I would have believed possible.

Church lasted another fifteen minutes at the most, but I don't think there was a person in there who wasn't still laughing off and on when we left — except me. I do have more church stories, but we'll save them for another day, assuming the kids don't travel to Colorado to kill me first.

In the Woods

I open my door, and I'm in the woods. The sheer wonder of it nearly bruises my heart with the memories of camping trips: my own childhood travels and trips with my growing family. I stand there and look over our trees, hear the birds sing, and inside I am singing along.

How does a person contain such joy? This is the reason I quit writing in my blog for so long. It seems that each day all I wanted to do was sit down and write, "Another day in paradise. How can I describe how lucky I feel?" And so I wrote nothing, but I felt much.

The Spring rains are light this year, coming in the evening and watering my growing iris plants. They should be blooming by the time Ellen arrives a week from Monday. There are over a hundred of them, gathered in merry bands beneath the pines, beside the lane, near the steps. Their colors will add a glory to the Spring, and an extra bounty for our table.

Riches we have here, once dreamed of, but never expected. And yet, so often did I quote Robert Browning's famous line, "A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Back in the Grocery Store

While we're doing grocery store memories, something else comes to mind. One day, when the boys were a little older, I took all three of them into the store. I was picking up kids from school. Tighe was a junior, Jeremy was a 7th grader, and Ben was a 3rd grader. I remember this only because of the circumstances below. They were going to three different schools at the time, and I had picked everyone up, which was an involved process, and still had to make a quick run for groceries before making dinner that night.

On our way into the store closest to the high school, we happened to see the president of the PTA coming out. She wasn't someone I approved of very much. Her attitude and mine conflicted in one very major way. She had chewed me out for missing a PTA meeting because Tighe had a baseball game that conflicted with the meeting. It was an away game, and I wasn't back in time for "her" meeting. As editor of the PTA newspaper, I felt that I could get the information I needed without being present for the meeting. If someone wanted something in the paper, they could call me or bring an article to me at the baseball field or drop it in my mailbox. I wasn't that hard to find. She told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had to be there. "You're doing this for your son!" I told her, "That's right. I do this for my son, not in spite of him. When he has a game, I'm there for him. I can't have someone phone in the score for me." She just never could understand that.

Our discussion and the missed meeting had been months before, and our relationship was now professional if not cordial. She stopped us as we entered, gave me some dates and times, which I wrote down, and asked some questions, which I answered. She finally pushed her cart out into the parking lot, and we entered the store. One of the boys, I think it was Tighe, looked at me with an awed expression on his face. I noted that the other two seemed to be also looking at me rather strangely. "Wow, Mom. You really don't like her, do you?"

I was so embarrassed I could have fallen through the floor. I was so sure I had treated her with respect and courtesy! "Did it show?" I asked. "Yeah. You were so polite!"

I had to laugh. In my family, you tease people you like. There's joking and laughter, jests and humor. The total politeness that you give to a professional colleague you must deal with (but would rather not) was something my boys had never before seen, at least from me.

Ambrosia

This week I got an inexpensive perm and a priceless visit with my favorite hair stylist, Ambrosia. She's now the manager at the beauty shop inside my local WalMart. I've never found a better stylist, nor one I've enjoyed more. And I sure can't complain about the prices. We always end up laughing about this and that.

She's also one of the few who understands what I mean when I say that I don't worry about my hair until the morning that I step out of the shower, towel dry, and realize that my hair has morphed from wash and wear to wash and swear. At that point, I get professional help in the form of a cut or perm.

Two months after the first time she did my hair, I went back and filled out a card to say how happy I was with the cut and the perm, and with how well she had listened to what I didn't want. I didn't want to fuss with it. I didn't want to decide what I wanted. I just wanted it to look good without having to mess around. I wanted it to look like I have more hair than I do. She gave me what I wanted, and two months later I still liked what I saw. I figured it was time to say so. Now she's the manager. I hope I had some small part in letting them know that she was a keeper.

That's all beside the point of this ramble. She told me a story of her childhood that was too priceless not to share. I told her I was going to put it in my blog, and she surprised me by saying that she reads my blog. I vaguely remembered that I had told her about it over a year ago, but I never imagine anyone beyond the family actually being interested. Anyway, here's one of her memories that I'm still laughing about...

At seven years old, she was learning to assert her independence. Actually, she described herself as sometimes being "bad" when her mom would take her in stores. Her mom, she said, was nobody's fool. She could smile and look quite lady-like while voicing dire threats out of the side of her mouth. By age seven that didn't work quite as well anymore.

One day Ambrosia was acting up in a store and her mother decided she had had enough of being embarrassed and wanted to put a permanent stop to it. In the middle of the store, Ambrosia's mother threw herself to the floor and started kicking and screaming. She proceeded to throw a real temper tantrum right there in front of everyone while Ambrosia tried to pretend she didn't know her. Then her mom calmly got up, dusted herself off and asked her how it made her feel. Ambrosia said she never again made a scene in a store.

I loved that story, and I'm only sorry I never thought to do something like that. The closest I ever came was to wheel my basket to the manager and say, "Sorry, but my boys are acting like they'd rather go home than get all this food. Could you please put it away for me?" and remove them, crying, from the store. At that point, they were no longer crying to get what they wanted, but to not be taken home. It didn't do them any good, but at least it was a different song, and it did help for awhile. It wasn't as permanent a solution as Ambrosia's mother's tantrum, however. Where are the genius mothers when you need them?

Exponential Curves

For those of you who didn't take Calculus, let me briefly explain the exponential curve. Each equal point on the curve is twice the distance of the point before it. How does this relate to ordinary life? For a mother, this means that while two children are twice the work of one, three are four times the work of one, or twice two. When the children are four years apart, or nearly, as ours were, it seems the curve increases.

Let me go back in time, even though this particular memory is uncomfortable and embarrassing for me. It's worth recalling, so it won't be lost in the mists of time. Someone, though I don't know who, once said that everyone has value, even if just to serve as a warning to others. Here's your warning.

I had just produced our third son: Benjamin. He was tiny. He was sleeping. I was recovering from a C-Section, and newly home from the hospital. John was at work, and it had seemed like a long day. Jeremy, not four yet, wanted to go outside to play, but we lived on the corner, and he wasn't allowed to go out unattended. Tighe, at seven and a half, knew about busy streets, and was permitted in the front yard with his friends. It sounded like he was having a grand time out there with a couple of friends. Jeremy was not happy, and was letting me know it.

Tighe was never forced to take along his brother, since I remembered the animosity of my sister when forced to include her "little sister," a whole 17 months younger than she was. This day, however, I needed to get dinner ready for John's imminent arrival, and didn't have any patience left for a frustrated little boy who refused to understand why he was excluded from the fun in the yard. I called Tighe in and told him that it wouldn't kill him to include Jeremy in the fun for awhile. He wasn't pleased. He wasn't amused. He wasn't gracious. He was, however, obedient. 

I listened at the door for a few minutes. I heard the teasing from Tighe and his friends, but felt it was moderate and that Jeremy could handle himself. After all, it was important to let the children deal with their own problems to a certain extent.

As I started dinner, the front door banged open, and Jeremy tearfully ran into the house, lifting his little face to me. "Tighe called me the F Word." 

"What?!?" I ran outside, not wanting to believe what I had heard. I marched over to Tighe. "Jeremy said you called him the F Word. Did you?" Tighe admitted that he did. I looked at his friends. Pointing at each, I ordered them home. "Go home — NOW!" I yelled. I grabbed Tighe by the shirt collar and dragged him into the house.

Some things are simply not acceptable. I had had a bad day. This was shocking and one thing too many. The fighting and sniping were bad enough, but this was simply unacceptable! I hauled Tighe over to the couch, stripped off his jeans and was on about the third smack on his bare bottom when John came rushing in the front door, hearing the screams. At this point, Tighe and Jeremy were both crying loudly. "What is going on here?" he demanded.

Before I could open my mouth, Jeremy yelled out, "Tighe called me a Freak, and Mama's killing him!"

I don't know if you've ever tried wiping red hand prints off an innocent child's bottom, but it can't be done. You also can't really explain to a not quite eight year old how you could make such a mistake. 

That night I learned an important lesson. When a child said he was called the B word or the S word or whatever, I always gave them permission to say the word completely "one time and only one time." 

That evening I skipped several points on my own personal exponential curve, with both feet dragging. I'm not sure I ever completely caught up. I never felt good enough, as a mother, as a house keeper, wife, or anything else. Well, almost anything else. The only area where I really knew I aced every test was the love quotient. I wouldn't have traded my kids for any others I had ever met. I still feel that way. I love my boys, and they are three blessings in my life that have been constant and heart felt. Through trials and triumphs, they live in my heart.

Some day they will understand (and perhaps having a daughter of his own now and another on the way, Benjamin might already have a glimmer of this truth) that I learned far more from them than they ever learned from me.

Thinking Back

I had decided to start posting memories, and was going to start with some of the funny things that happened as a young mother, but I thought I'd better get some of the really old stuff out first. 

When I was a kid, one of the things my dad did was to mangle nursery rhymes. I'm not sure how this got started, or when. I don't even know if they were original to him, but I suspect some were and some were not. I've often quoted my favorites and been asked to write them down, which I've very nicely neglected to do (lo, these many years). So, Sherrie, since you're the one who asked the most often, have fun with these. 

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

And all the King's horses

And all the King's men

Had scrambled eggs for breakfast again.

.-.

Old Mother Hubbard went to the closet

To get her poor daughter a dress.

And when she got there the closet was bare

And so is her daughter, I guess.

.-.

Mary had a little lamb.

Her father killed it dead.

Now Mary takes her lamb to school

Between two chunks of bread.

.-.

Now this one you'll have a hard time believing, but I swear... I was told to learn 'the poem' that teaches the number of days in each month. It was homework. My mom was busy with something, I don't remember what, and I asked my dad. Here's what he taught me:

30 days have Septober

April, June and No Under

31 have all the rest

Except for Grandmother

Who drives a Cadillac.

I got sent home from school with a note saying that I had failed to learn the poem teaching me the number of days in each month. My father wrote back that the poem I recited was the poem as he learned it, and that if she had another poem in mind, she should do the teaching herself. Luckily, I wasn't at that school very long.

Hopefully I'll be able to add to these as the days go by. Right now these are the ones that come to mind, but I know there were more. It's always interesting, though, to see how a person comes to be the way they are. People are always saying things like, "The apple doesn't fall very far from the tree," and things like that. Maybe so, maybe not. It's the nature vs. nurture thing in part, but as you get a clearer picture of how I grew up, I just have to ask: don't I seem more normal now? Don't I? Well, never mind. 

My first Mac

I got my first Mac back in the days when PC users had never heard of Windows. John was still using MS-DOS commands, and argued against me wasting my money, carefully saved from my job at that company in Calabassas. He told me in his best "I am a Missile Design Engineer" voice that the Macintosh was only a toy. I spent the better part of two weeks getting it set up the way I wanted, with Icons lined up and organized by work type, and files spring-loaded to open at a mouse click when needed. Of course, John had never used a mouse. He also never touched my Mac. After all, it was only a toy and he was a mighty engineer.

One night I went to bed first. As I lay there in bed I heard the chimes. Well, I thought, smiling, John's going to try out my Mac! Then I heard silence. Then I heard a mild expletive, followed by more silence. What? Then I heard a somewhat less mild word, having to do with the substance babies put into their pants regularly. I started to worry. More silence. This was repeated more loudly, followed by John stomping down the hall. 

"Somehow," he shouted at me, as if it were all my fault, "I've managed to erase your hard drive!" I jumped out of bed, racing down the hall. All I could think of was the many nights after work, when I'd race through dinner just to spend hours getting things set up the way I wanted. I reached out and grabbed the mouse, double-clicking on the drive icon. It opened up with everything in order. I looked at John and he stared blankly at me. 

"How did you do that?" he asked. It was just too easy. He had been trying to type in commands to make it open. He just could not comprehend that anything could be so simple. The PC mind has struggled with the concept ever since. I love it.