Marriage – Page 3 – Mama Needs Coffee

Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, Evangelization, guest post, infertility, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, reality check, Sex

Waving my white flag {guest post}

May 19, 2017

A dear friend wrote something so important, so beautiful, and so honest for me, and it is my privilege to share it with you here today. A wife of 10 years, a mother to 4 on earth and 1 little saint, and a Catholic convert, I’m so grateful for her transparency and her humility.

Because NFP? It ain’t no bed of roses. But the thorns can be wonderfully refining.

I’m 4 kids deep into this motherhood thing, 5 if you count our sweet guy in Heaven. We count him, and wish it was PC for the world to count him too.

I am open to life. Not because I always want to be. Not because I can handle it. Not because it’s the cool thing to do.

But because God calls me to be.

Now that doesn’t mean that I don’t come into it most days kicking and screaming. I mean yes, in theory I can list all the incredible, awesome, fantastic ways that being open to life is God’s plan and even the theology behind it, but putting it into practice is a totally different matter.

So here I am, ready to waive my white flag and say that sometimes I wish I didn’t have to be open to life.

Ouch.

It’s hard to say and even harder to admit the hardness of my heart that wishes sometimes that I could say that I am “done”.

But just like I know better then my six year old (even though he doesn’t think so), praise the Lord, God knows better for me, too.

But y’all, that does not mean that this is easy.

And it does not mean that just because God wants this for us that the world, our communities, our churches, our friends or even our own families will support us.

And that is tough. How are we to live this “call” out alone, with no one cheering us on?

Maybe I’m wishing for too much. But doesn’t it seem like this journey would be a heck of a lot easier if more of us shared the “hard”, the “it’s not easy”, the “I feel like I can’t do this” with each other? We need each other, y’all. We need others there to say “I understand”, “I’ve been there” instead of saying or thinking “well then why are you having more kids???”

Because to be honest, I could use some cheering on right now.

If I get asked one more time “are you done?” and I have to politely smile and say “probably not!” all the while secretly wishing sometimes that I could be, I’m not sure how I’ll handle it. It might come out more of a grimace.

Sometimes I don’t want to put on a fake smile and convince people that I’m not done and I am JUST TOTALLY HAPPY ABOUT IT. Because sometimes? I’m really not.

Because being open to life sometimes does. not. make. sense. I mean why in the world would I not be “done” if it is so hard? That’s what the rest of the world is doing, after all. And sometimes I want to have a temper tantrum and say “I want that too!”

And it feels like if I don’t put on a happy smile and say “probably not, we’ll see!” I’m some kind of a fraud. Or am at least setting myself up for more comment along the lines of “don’t you know what causes that?/why don’t you stop?/he should get “fixed.”

And deep down…I do know that God knows better. I really do trust Him. I really do know that his plans are perfect. I believe that. Well, I try.

And I also know that fertility is a gift. I know some of you reading this may have a pit in your stomachs and wishing you were on my end of the fertility spectrum, and would maybe give anything to be in my shoes. And for any pain reading these words causes you, I am truly sorry. It’s not far off from my memory when we lost our first little one and tried to get pregnant for what felt like a life time. It’s also not far from my memory having surgery for endometriosis and enduring HCG shots to regulate my hormones to help us get pregnant. Or having countless progesterone shots to help me keep my baby. So I understand, even as I sound I know I sound like an ungrateful you know what. This isn’t exactly my proudest moment.

But if I’m honest, I’m just here trying to live out the call to being open to life and it is hard.

Hard because I want to determine the number of kids I have. I want to have sex with my husband and not worry about getting pregnant. I want to not gain and then (have to try so hard!) to lose 50lbs (again!). And I know all of those are selfish reasons. (And listen, I know a thing or two about good reasons to avoid too…I have had my hands full of health problems, children with behavioral issues and really rocky times in our marriage).

But maybe we could all use a bigger dose of honesty with this open to life thing??

Maybe my words will make one of you not feel so crazy or alone. Sometimes I have the feeling like everyone else is doing this open to life/NFP thing with JOY and LOVE and a SMILE and I’m over here wondering if I missed something. Can we all take a deep breath and let it out? I mean, c’mon I’m not the only selfish, prideful sinner, right??

So here I am 33 years old and I’m staring down who knows how many *more* years (I know it’s a blessing!) of fertility and the possibility (again a blessing!) of a few more babies, but I’m lonely in a world where being “done” is the norm.

Don’t get me wrong… I ADORE my kids! And I look forward to a Thanksgiving table in 20 years that is bursting at the seams. But some days I need to let my guard down and admit that if I had it *my* way I would like to just throw myself on the floor like my 3 year old before God and scream “ I don’t want to”.

But here’s the thing. When I sift through all my sin and my pride in this area, I come upon a startling truth: I truly am grateful for the boundaries of the call of being open to life, because I have a God that knows me and desires what is best for me: To be with him for eternity.

And He knows in order to get there my soul needs (daily!) refining, and that my path that is most particularly refining is motherhood (and marriage, but that is another blog entirely 😉 ).

Thank God – He knows me better.

Thank God – He wants more for me.

Thank God – He gave me the boundaries of NFP and the call to openness to life that gives me the opportunity to practice examining my conscience and my heart daily – hourly – to root out selfishness and pride.

Because if I said I was “done,” I wouldn’t be giving Him room to stretch me.

And stretch me He will – and you too for that matter, if you let Him.

So here I am sitting here before you, waving my white flag. Wishing I was “done” but knowing that I’m not and grateful for a God who gives me the opportunity to wearily lay down my white flag and pick up my cross and follow Him.

breastfeeding, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Marriage, mental health, NFP, Parenting, pregnancy, Sex, Theology of the Body

NFP: The methods and the madness

January 12, 2017

Never one to resist a pun.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, but I wanted to have a few months (a year maybe, now?) under my belt before going and saying something crazy like “we found an NFP method that works great for us and it’s been a game changer.” Before we go any further, however, the necessary disclaimer that I am not a medical expert, that my opinions are not those of a trained healthcare practitioner, and that what works great for one couple may not be so hot for the next. Which is why we have a proliferation of methods at our disposal. Some friends who learned the Sympto-Thermal method alongside us while we were going through marriage prep are still happily using it. Other friends have gone through one method after another, landing in their doctor’s office doing bloodwork and figuring out all kinds of hormone imbalances and health issues.

So the big fat disclaimer to this all is: NFP is women’s healthcare. And we women and the men who love us should take it seriously, and treat it as such. Which means seeking out doctors and nurses and instructors who are trained in the various methods, when we’re struggling with finding something that works and with figuring out our unique fertility. Facebook groups are super helpful, books are great, and online resources can be a godsend, but sometimes you need a trained professional to help figure out the language your body is speaking.

This is where I tell you that we found such a professional to teach us a wonderful new method of NFP well suited to my body, and we lived happily ever after. But no, I self-taught using the sage counsel of a combination of Facebook groups and my patient little sister. So do as I say, not as I do! End disclaimer.

Where were we? Oh yes, 3 methods in 3 years. Or just about. We learned Sympto Thermal through the Couple to Couple League when we were engaged, but perhaps because we were excited to start our family right away, I wasn’t paying the greatest of attention to that daily temperature taking protocol. Once baby #1 came along and I was supposed to start waking up at a reasonably early hour and testing again, along with making mucus and cervical observations, I was done. Between the night wakings, the nurse-a-thons and the unusual mucus patterns, we never found our rhythm (ba dum ching) with CCL again, and so we moved on to Creighton.

Creighton was great in terms of helping me to understand where I was chronologically in my cycle. Numbers are really difficult for me, and Creighton was more hands on (I’m sorry I literally cannot help myself) and helped make our fertility a more concrete concept. However. While I am nursing, it was basically an endless yellow sticker party for months and months and months. (For the uninitiated, yellow stickers are when your instructor gives you the green light to go ahead and consider some days infertile, based on observations over a period of months, and agrees that the hormones related to breastfeeding are also totally obscuring the cyclical mucus patterns your body is supposed to show once you cycle returns postpartum, and that you probably haven’t actually been in Phase 2 for the past 13 weeks. In my case, that return to regular fertility typically begins about 10 months after baby, as long as I’m breastfeeding.

The psychological toll of the yellow stickers was tough on me though, because it always felt very “fertility roulette” and very much all on my subjective shoulders to make the right observations and then to give the correct classification. Call it a lack of self confidence or just a body really intent on getting pregnant again, but I pretty much felt like every month we practiced Creighton we were going to conceive, so long as I was nursing. Enter the weekly Dollar Tree pregnancy test taking ritual.

After Luke was born in 2015, our 4th sweet bundle of joy in 5 years, I was very anxious for a break, both mentally and physically. Creighton did not seem to be a good fit for our particular situation, at least during the nursing months (and they were all nursing months, back then) so we sought out yet another method, one that several of my girlfriends had tried and found success with.

One thing I want to note is that because the postpartum season is so exhausting and so overwhelming, it is the one time I have really found myself tempted by contraception. I totally get it. I get that it seems like a godsend, like an obvious solution, and like the only non-insane thing to do when you’re bleeding and sleep deprived and financially bereft and just barely hanging on.

And I think a lot more of us have been there than are willing to let on in polite company.

But in my heart of hearts, and in the heart of our marriage, I know that God would not hold something good just out of arm’s reach from us. And that if contraption were a true answer to our hardships, the Church who is a good and faithful Mother would extend it as the healing balm to our fertility woes.

But she hasn’t. Because it isn’t. It isn’t the answer when you’re 7 weeks postpartum and haven’t slept in 44 nights, or when you’re struggling to make the mortgage payment, or when you’re teetering on the precipice of menopause and really, really afraid of having a baby in your mid forties.

Contraception is either good for human love, or it isn’t. It either builds up and supports marriages, or it tears them down. And it’s either something God has asked us to yield to His will over our own on, or else it’s something that everybody can freely partake of, no matter the circumstances.

Human circumstances are rarely black and white, but God is. And His guidelines for our happiness and holiness are unwavering, however wobbly and wrecked I might be in any particular month.

So, back to the new method. We ordered up a Clear Blue monitor (this one from amazon, use my pal Bonnie’s affiliate link to shop there), which comes in a really fun box with “helps you get pregnant faster!” scrawled on all four sides of it, as do the monitor sticks, which inspired a ton of confidence in me when I opened the package, and which I really love seeing under my bathroom sink every morning.

Basically, the Marquette Method did an end-run around this ovulation predicting and pinpointing urine-testing monitor and figured out a way use the monitor and to co-opt it’s data to reveal to a woman the specific parameters of her fertile window (Phase 2). The monitor uses urine test sticks which measure detectable levels of lutenizing hormone (LH) and estrogen levels and can give a pretty accurate picture of when ovulation is occurring, and then gives you a count down back to “low” fertility after peak day. I like the objectivity of the method tremendously, because I can put all my faith into a tiny machine instead of my exhausted midnight brain, and that seems eminently more reasonable to me. I’m only joking the very littlest bit about that. Which maybe I need to talk to someone about. But seriously, having an objective standard by which I am measuring my fertility signs has been a huge weight off my shoulders.

The postpartum period was a little tricky with Marquette (and a little more expensive with the test sticks) but it was hugely freeing for me to feel like I had a good understanding of what my body was doing, and that even with the continuous mucus patterns during breastfeeding, the hormone levels my body was producing were low enough to reassure me that my cycle was not yet returning. I think it probably bought us literally months of useable days during the postpartum period with Luke. And now that I am in regular cycles again, it has been extremely helpful in corroborating other psychological and physiological changes that each cycle brings.

Learning Marquette with a Creighton background helped me to not trust the monitor overly much, too, I would say. Because I know have what I think is the most possible data at my disposal, short of blood testing, I can make truly educated decisions about my fertility using what I learned with each method, checking the hard data against the more subjective. (Not saying Creighton is not scientifically rigorous, just that it’s easier to be objective with a little computer than with a square of toilet paper.)

Also, it should be noted that for couples who are struggling to conceive, Creighton is something of a gold standard for many people.

I hope this was helpful? Informative? Not mind-numbing or totally repulsive? And I may write a more detailed Marquette “how to” post one of these days, if I can work up the enthusiasm.

Catholic Spirituality, liturgical living, Marriage, motherhood

Silver linings of a small budget Christmas

December 7, 2016

All around us there is a rushing, frenetic, pulsing energy that seems to gather steam as the weekends roll by. In kid-time, 3.5 weeks out from Christmas is basically an eternity, still. In parent-time, however, it might as well be December 23rd.

Last night I cooked dinner in my beloved cast iron skillet, now the single pan I own. The other two were finally scrapped the week of Thanksgiving in a perhaps ill-considered fit of sadominimalism. (n. the practice of getting rid of something that is objectively awful, ill-fitting, or broken only to find that actually, you were kind of stuck with it until you replaced it.) I had to time things so that I could cook both the sweet potatoes and the salmon cakes (would you believe my pickiest eaters will gobble these happily, with ketchup? Cheap, too.) since both wanted a pan. I suppose I could have roasted the sweet potatoes in the oven, were the oven still performing its required domestic duties.

I told Dave later that evening that I felt very Ma Ingalls about the whole thing, cooking my dinner over an ~~open fire~~ electric range (thankfully still functional) in a single pan, taking 35 minutes to accomplish what could have been done in 10.

The thing is, we’re extraordinarily wealthy by almost any measure. We have a house with 4 toilets in it, which makes us literally royalty according to some cultural standards. I know this because last week I spent 20 minutes at a cell phone recycling kiosk recycling some of my growing collection of outdated smartphones for pennies on the dollar, and was forced to enjoy such mental stimulation flashing across the screen as “did you know more people in the world own a smartphone than have a toilet?” to which I had to confess, no. No I did not.

And the reason we’re having a tighter than usual end to the fiscal year in the first place is precisely because we purchased a toilet-encrusted castle of our very own, which is an extravagant privilege in and of itself. Broken ovens, leaking showers, rotted sheetrock, and all.

I’ve felt a little frustration watching the contents of my Amazon cart appreciate in value, waiting for a forthcoming payday to be liberated, but surprisingly, I think it’s helped keep the focus on Advent laser sharp. Removing the possibility of getting all the shopping done ahead of time or throwing in last minute impulse buys has been a freeing mental experience. And in lieu of expensive outings and dinners out, we’re having simpler, slower nights at home. Candles, books, board games, Netflix episodes. I don’t want to give the false impression it was all bottle service and velvet ropes in years past, but certainly, life is different now. Fuller in some ways, leaner in others.

The leanness has filled out Advent beautifully, though. Because I’m such a planner and anticipator by nature, it has been a hard stop for the cycle of buying, wrapping, hiding, preparing, impulsing, indulging, etc. etc. And I guess I’m grateful for that. Last night I slipped away at bedtime (St. David of Denver: coming soon to a liturgy near you in 2087) and ended up dropping by our parish’s perpetual adoration chapel for a half hour. The snow was just starting to flurry around the darkened windows but the chapel was warm and bathed in light, heated by the radiators and a half dozen or so of my fellow parishioners. As I was walking to my car I dug around for my keys and counted out the quarters in the bottom of my purse, collecting enough for a hot chocolate from the coffee shop on the way home. A luxury! And I don’t know that I would have seen it that way a year or two ago.

We’re incredibly blessed, even in tighter financial times. And praise God the times are tight because of blessings, not because of the burden of a job lost, a medical battle fought, or a relationship broken. But the tightness is showing me areas of real flab that were kind of perpetually being glossed over or taken for granted as “normal,” when in fact it isn’t normal to be so frantic, so caught up in planning and executing and getting it just right (and on time) that the holidays go off without a hitch.

We don’t do Christmas. Christmas comes to us, whether we’re ready or not. Whether we bought a single gift, or have to work an overnight shift, or can’t imagine facing the day alone without the person whose absence is a gaping hole in our heart. Whether our kids are getting 4 presents based on a rhyme we saw on Pinterest, or 42 because their grandparents all live out of state and have a Fisher Price addiction. Or no presents at all, but maybe an extra nice dinner with enough for everyone to have seconds, because that’s what’s realistic this year, and thank God there’s enough.

And maybe Christmas comes and there isn’t enough. Maybe it doesn’t wrap up poetically like a Dicken’s novel or a Hallmark movie, and there are still broken hearts and empty cupboards, or a pile of wrapping paper mounted to the ceiling but cold, cheerless revelers dissatisfied with their loot.

He comes to us at Christmas. Whether we are ready to receive Him or not. Whether we’re open or not. Whether we’re tired or busy or angry or broken or deaf to His newborn cries. He comes. And for the next 3 and a half weeks, I can choose to focus on that imminent deadline and continually redirect my distractible nature to the reality of the season. He is coming. Gifts are great and giving is beautiful, but gifts are periphery to the bigger event at hand: He is coming. I forgot to buy something for my son’s teacher and I need a Starbucks gift card. He is coming. We haven’t bought a tree yet. He is coming. I haven’t been to Confession in X months. He is coming. We can’t swing the plane tickets to visit X in X. He is coming.

There is still time to prepare. There is time to do what is essential. And when the essentials are covered, the peripheral seems to fall more gracefully into place. I have to constantly remind myself of this. That my sweet, round-faced children will neither know nor care (thankfully, still so true at tender ages) whether they get the hottest new toys or have an impeccably decorated house to relax in wearing coordinating Christmas outfits. They squealed with delight over their Dollar Tree ornaments and the candy canes they found in their shoes yesterday morning. They fight over who gets to light the advent candle every night at dinnertime. It is enough. It is enough. It is more than enough.

And if I can present to them a well-prepared and spiritually nourished mother come Christmas morning, how much more powerful will their experience of the deep, true meaning of Christmas be?

But, you know, no pressure.

(Also, let this be a lesson to us all to temper our KonMari-ing to a reasonable pace, lest you too end up with salmon-scented sweet potatoes.)

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Evangelization, Marriage, motherhood, Parenting

Drowning in grace: why Catholics practice infant baptism

June 17, 2016

I have a 2 year old who is incorrigible, in the most generous application of the term. If she were a little Austrian boy, her finger would be forever in her teacup. If I tell her to stop, she runs faster. If I yell about staying on the sidewalk, she jumps defiantly off the curb, cackling over her shoulder. I’ve shown her markers on paper and emphasized their fundamental relationship of belonging. I find scribbles on hardwood floors (washable is an accurate descriptor) and on clothing (not so much).

In sum? She needs a lot of encouragement to make good choices. Which is a diplomatic way of identifying her as a class 1 terrorist.

I know she’s not actually bad. She’s just fresh to this planet, and she’s learning about right and wrong, dangerous and safe, and the best way to drive her mother straight up crazy.

Part of my job description as mommy is making sure she becomes a functional adult one day, and stays alive in the process. So as much as I’d like to let her learn everything via that helpful phenomena known as “cause and effect,” her reptile brain is frequently encouraging her tiny body to do things which are deadly dumb. See: stovetops, parking lots, adult-depth swimming pools, etc.

So I make some choices for her. I choose what foods are nourishing and safe, and I prepare them for her and make sure she has enough. One day, years from now, she might throw down her sausage link and embrace a vegan diet. But until then? I’m the one cooking her 3 squares, and they’re chock full of animal products.

Veganism is an imperfect analogy, but it illustrates the point I’m coming to, which is that children require their parent’s best efforts, on their behalf, in order to arrive safely in adulthood.

The most essential thing I’ve done for all 4 of my kids so far has taken place in the front of a church, tiny baby held aloft over a basin of water, candles burning and the tang of chrism oil in the air.

An inoculation of grace, administered to a helpless babe, with the aim of eternal life.

Catholics don’t baptize their children as babies simply because it’s our religious custom, or merely to satisfy the grandparents’ desire to see that hand-me-down gown on the next generation. We baptize them because it’s a transformative sacrament which initiates them into the very family of God.

My babies don’t need to wait until they’re 12 years old, or 18, to enter into the Uebbing family. They belong there, no matter what choices they make, and no matter what their future holds. It is pure, unmerited belonging.

And when we pledged our fidelity to one another and to God on our wedding day, those yet-unborn children were already present in the mind of God, woven into our wedding vows to accept, nurture, and bring them up according to His laws and the laws of His Church.

I’ve heard the case made for letting children choose their own way, waiting and seeing if the religion thing “sticks” once they’re fully grown. And I think that’s kind of crazy.

I mean, I’m not waiting until they’re old enough to choose whether they’ll wear underwear before stepping outside (always debatable) or if they’d like to practice oral hygiene each day (could really go either way).

Why, then, when I make dozens of choices for them day in and day out, always with their eventual happiness and health in mind, would I delay in extending them an invitation into eternal life?

That’s why we bring our children to the Sacraments, isn’t it? To strengthen them on their journey through this life and orient them toward life in the world after this one. I can’t think of a single reason I’d want to hedge my bets against my children choosing God.

(It’s helpful to pause and consider that the Church has always taught that, while we are bound by the Sacraments, God is not. So babies who die unbaptized, at any age, are entrusted to His unfathomable mercy.)

Infant baptism speaks beautifully of the reality of our helpless state before God, crying out, perhaps literally, in surprise and maybe a little fear as He pours out His grace. None of us fully “get” the reality of our neediness before God, or the staggering price He paid to redeem us. But redeem us He did, and He wants us for his own. And because He is God and we are not, He comes to us in little, ordinary moments of extraordinary encounter that even a child can understand.

Bread. Wine. A splash of water. A cross traced in oil. Bent knees and folded hands and a tiny red flame flickering beside a golden box. God speaks transcendent mysteries in baby talk, showing us His heart in a way we can comprehend it.

Kind of like how I’m trying to woo my wild toddler into civility. One teachable moment and shriek of resistance at a time. She’ll get there. And thanks to a cold morning in January of 2015, she has all the grace available to her little soul that she needs for the journey.

Bioethics, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, infertility, IVF, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, pregnancy, Pro Life, Sex, sin, Women's Health

Why not just use birth control? {some possible “right” answers}

June 8, 2016

I field a good number of questions along the lines of “how do I explain to my boss/neighbor/mother-in-law/college bff why we don’t use contraception?”

This tends to be an especially sticky conversation when the questioner in the scenario happens to also be Catholic. That being said, with fewer and fewer Catholics (and Christians of most denominational stripes) actively practicing their faith, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to toss out the simple “Because we’re Catholic” line out there, period, no matter who’s doing the asking.

You’re Catholic? So what? So’s my brother/hairdresser/uncle/pastor, and they all have no problem with the Pill.

And then there’s that persistently-pesky misappropriation of Pope Francis’ own take on the matter. (And no amount of pointing people to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or even Francis’ own latest encyclical, will do the trick. Because they read something on CNN he reportedly said on an airplane, so boom, 2,000+ years of Magisterial teaching, torched.)

In my own experience, my best conversations about how and why we have so many kids have been more personal than “because we’re Catholic.” But of course, that is one reason: We have more than a couple kids because we believe, with the Church, that marriage and babies are tied together in a sanctifying, delightful, and often overwhelming way. And for our marriage, that belief and the resultant openness to life has yielded a larger than average family size in a modest amount of time.

Remember though, this openness to life and docility to God’s will can look vastly different for different marriages. I have friends whose heroism far exceeds what I can hope to offer with my life, even if afforded several more decades of time on earth. Their “yeses” have yielded tiny caskets, months of painful longing, and years of frustrated hopes and dreams. We should never assume that a family with fewer than 5 children “must be using contraception,” or isn’t “open” to what God has for them. He gives and takes away.

We don’t actually get to call those shots, which is utterly confounding to the modern concept of omnipotence-by-science, where fertility is concerned.

Another possible good answer for inquiring minds can be a quick crash course in Theology of the Body, no advanced degree required: God’s plan for sex is better than ours.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what we hope for in our marriage, and about what marriage is. We want to be consistent with our actions and our words, and for our love to be holistic. It seems unhealthy to separate the potential for creating new life from the potential for deep communion through sex. So we don’t try to. And enough conversations with friends and acquaintances who do have convinced us that using contraception isn’t going to bring more pleasure or more unity into our marriage.

If anything, the anecdotal accounts we hear from couples who are using birth control seem to point to more strain, more sexual frustration, and more opportunities for miscommunication and conflict.

Another big reason for us, personally, is simply the casual observation that our culture sucks at sex.

Divorce, estrangement, frigidity, sexual assault, disease, abortion, adultery…all this stuff was supposed to be solvable via contraception. Or at least tamped way down. It’s gone the opposite direction, though. And what’s toxic for the culture at large isn’t something we want in our master bedroom.

Finally, there’s something to be said about wanting what you can’t have. Abstinence is not, it turns out, the end of the world.

And I will admit, after almost 7 years of practicing NFP, there is an inherent element of healthy self denial (not to be confused with the mind numbing insanity of the postpartum period) that I’m throwing in the “W” column. It can be good to have to wait. It’s good to sometimes want what you can’t have, or at least, what you can’t have without rolling the dice on another butt in diapers 10 months down the road. It’s good for our marriage, and for our development as adult Christians who are capable of suffering out of love for God and for one another.

So, in summary, there are reasons beyond “the Church told me no,” “I don’t know where babies come from,” or “I don’t want to put more hormones/chemicals in my body.”

(Though those are all perfectly sufficient answers, too. Particularly in line at the grocery store.)

Catholic Spirituality, Family Life, liturgical living, Marriage, motherhood, reading, sin, Suffering

A liturgy of laundry

May 27, 2016

Last week in my rantings about impersonal social media and the vile temptation to permascroll, I may have insufficiency highlighted the upside. But the upside of the digital age – and there are substantial benefits – is that I do have honest to goodness friends I’ve only met once, or never, from all over the world.

Take my friend Christy, who hails from the wilds of Canada. Sure, we did meet once in real life summers long ago in Texas at Edel: ground zero. But besides that it’s been all Voxes and emails. And one, thoughtful Amazon-flung package of amazing lipstick and one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. And which I would perhaps never, ever have picked up but for Christy’s urging.

I’ve found myself in tears, agonizing over this or that character’s backstory, and flipping eager pages well past an appropriate hour in the night, just to see what the girls would do next.

And, wait for it…It’s about nuns. Cloistered Benedictines in 1960’s England, to be exact. Sounds riveting, right? But oh, it is. Such poignant studies of human nature, such incisive observations on sin, on personality, on life and politics. If you can sleuth a copy on Amazon or eBay, you’d be a lucky dog with the first good read of the summer in your paws.

Speaking of summer, today’s the last day of school here, and it’s 53 degrees and raining, which means indoor children and indoor problems and I’ve got 99 of each.

I was thinking abut the good sisters of Brede while I was folding the one millionth pile of laundry for the week this morning, and I was so done.

Even after a fresh purge, spurred by this week’s conversation about decluttering and spartan living. Grumpily I folded an especially ratty t-shirt, imagining that it would probably still be a house favorite when boy #3 is old enough to have opinions about wearing something with a guinea pig dressed up as Spider Man morning noon and night. Also, it should be noted, Peru lacks any apparent licensing or copyright law. But “Spider Cuy” is a beloved wardrobe staple (thanks, Uncle Handro!) and shall remain so, I supposed, until my back goes out for good and my hands are crippled from decades of careful folding.

It doesn’t help anything that my kids are still basically incompetent at household chores, groused I. And the downward spiral descendeth. Never mind that my friend’s little boy is in the hospital awaiting his first round of chemo, or that a fellow Catholic blogger buried his tiny son this morning. I was going to be disgruntled over laundry.

But there’s so much of it. And while I can weep in solidarity and offer small, pitiful sacrifices in the hard nighttime hours of wakings and rocking and fetching water, it’s harder to see the beauty in the beast(ly) grind of housework.

While Sister Colette thrilled to the task of mending and creating rich vestments to suit the liturgical seasons, marveling over how her work kept her tied to the rhythm of that “great wheel of prayer” that is the liturgical year of the Church, I was – am – less than enthusiastic about the dishwasher I just unloaded. The freshly-mopped floor splattered with applesauce. The decomposing (I wish this were hyperbole) lunchmeat I fished out of the coach section of the mini van this morning.

But couldn’t I be just as connected, in contentment, to my daily work and the constant offering-up and offering back as a kind of prayer?

If marriage is really a vocation, and I believe that it is, then there are day to day responsibilities that aren’t just annoyingly “there” as the result of it, but maybe they’re actually for it; the means of continual sanctification and for sure mortification, by which I perfect my selfish and supremely-irritated-by-poop-on-the-floor soul.

Maybe.

Or maybe it’s less meta than that. But it definitely got me thinking.

“Benedictae!” the “waker of the week” would intone, rapping on the cell door and swinging it open at like 4:30 am. I doubt the sister on the receiving end of the salutation would growl “GET OUT GET BACK IN THE BASEMENT” in a terrifying rat growl in response.

Instead, no matter how exhausted, how overwhelmed, how chilly, how overburdened…she’d probably swing her legs over the side of her cot and get up. Because 4:30m am wakeup calls are part of what she signed up for.

I did not. At least, I didn’t know I did. I didn’t think a lot about sleepless nights, discipline heartbreaks, behavioral issues, traumas, and tantrums. When I was a besotted fiance planning my wedding and eagerly anticipating a Hawaiian honeymoon, I figured children would turn up within the year or so. But even after growing up in a family with 6 younger siblings, I found myself arrestingly unprepared for the ravages of sleep deprivation. And incessant touching.

I think it’s probably my fault if it’s anyone’s “fault,” per se, because I was an exquisitely selfish teenager and must have been blind to my own parent’s sufferings in this realm. But, whatever the case may be, here I find myself elbows-deep in a vocation I’m ill suited for at best, spectacularly unqualified for at worst.

And yet, it’s mine. And these kids and their tears and tantrums and smiles and sticky sticky so so so sticky fingers and their tiny souls begging for love and formation and security…are mine. And this daily litany of laundry and diapers and filthy floors and another – yes, another! – load in the dishwasher or the sink, is mine.

I don’t hear bells tolling at Nones, at Sext, at Matins. I hear screaming from the basement at 1 am. I don’t practice “The Great Silence” (AS ATTRACTIVE AS THAT SOUNDS, HINT HINT FOR NXT MOTHER’S DAY), but I can still my frantic pace for a divine mercy chaplet at 3, or for the Angelus at noon.

And I don’t lovingly lay out vestments in a candlelit sanctuary before an early morning Mass, peacefully arranging flowers and flipping open the missal to the right pages. But I pack lunches. I scrub the same disappointingly-aroma’d bathroom … at times. Which will remain unspoken. I change an astonishing number of dirty diapers in a day. And none of that need be surprising to me.

I mean, it really shouldn’t be.

And I’m really hoping this entire essay isn’t reading as some sanctimonious my vocation is love story. Because while I adore St. Therese enough to name my daughter for her, and while my vocation is, indeed, love, I’m kind of a mess still. And I’m sure Jenny in the future will look back on present day Jenny’s whining over dirty laundry (literally), she’ll maybe smile in compassion or recognition and remember how hard it is to get unselfish. Especially when the desire to do so isn’t terribly strong most days.

Ding, dong. Maybe that’s what I’ll hear when the 4 year old is in my room at 11 tonight, weaving me a tale of bedtime woes. Time to get up and serve my vocation. That’s my call to prayer.

Or maybe I’ll roll over and let daddy deal with it. The flesh is particularly weak on Friday of the last week of school.

Catholic Spirituality, Evangelization, Marriage, motherhood, Parenting, politics

All things are passing away

May 4, 2016

America has a political hangover this morning. And I probably would have been partaking in the social media grousing myself, had I not woken to a text message alerting me to a tragedy closer to home and far more important. A family we know is being asked to walk a way of the cross that takes my motherly breath away, and as I sat this morning, unshowered and uncoffeed, tears blurring the screen as I struggled to understand what I was reading, the idiocy and the acrimony of the past 8 months of political chatter faded into the background.

I hope that’s where it stays.

No matter what flawed and potentially felonious human being mounts the Presidential throne next January, it won’t change the brokenness of this world. Nobody can save us from the pain, the suffering, the incompleteness of this life. No matter their party affiliation.

Help us, Jesus. You’re our only hope. (And It feels right acknowledging that on May 4th.)

I have been coming out of the tunnel of early motherhood these past few weeks. I can see it here and there, in moments of rare solitude or sibling contentment, when I’m for once sitting and observing my children at play, not wiping or directing or yelling or shoveling.

And it is so sweet.

And it’s fleeting. Every long, hot afternoon in the finally-defrosted backyard, spent packing mud pies and shredding grass and breaking plastic baseball bats against the fence. (Our yard is an aesthetic dream, let me tell you.) Each fathomless post-nap and pre-Daddy arrival hour spent refereeing and rescuing and reiterating basic rules of human decency…it’s all temporary.

The days are friggin long and the years are bitterly short.

That won’t look good on a coffee mug, but it’s truer, at least for me.

Even while I’m pulling out my metaphorical hair trying to coax charity and obedience out of my little band of brothers and their renegade flight risk of a sister, I’m grieving the transformation of fat baby cheeks into more sculpted toddler features.

A preschooler displays a sudden flash of empathy and I glimpse the man he might one day become.

My daughter hands me a slobbered apple carcass to dispose of and tosses a casual “I love you, Mommy.” my way, and I almost have to shut my mind to the intensity of the moment, it can be so overwhelming.

It’s bittersweet, because I want to walk the line of authenticity with my friends and my sisters and with you all, because motherhood is hard. But it is also so beautiful.

It is beautiful to have your heart torn open for another person, to give yourself entirely in service of a creature with an immortal soul, equal to you in dignity (which I am constantly and shamefully forgetting) and utterly inferior to you, for the most part, in personal hygiene.

When I met my husband, death entered into my world in a more tangible way, because I knew that one day we would be parted. It was written into our very marriage vows, woven into the fabric of the happiest day of our lives.

And really, marriage is sweeter for it’s fleeting permanence, the forced acknowledgement of our own mortality in our pledge of “what remains” to each other. You can have all of me. The rest of me, in fact, until last call.

Motherhood is a little different. Motherhood bespeaks a promise of immortality, in the supernatural and even in the natural sense. My children are my legacy, emissaries of hope sent into the unknown. We are building a civilization we ourselves will not dwell in, pouring out blood and tears and sippy cups full of milk in the service of a future we cannot know.

And no matter how grim the state of the world appears, God keeps sending new life. My mom told me once when I was younger, maybe a teen, “new babies are proof that God wants the world to go on.”

And while I have no very new baby on the way, my littlest son is now 8.5 months old, rolling across the family room floor, mouthing for toys and squealing with delight as his brothers tackle his 21 pound body to the floor in a kinetic explosion that would have stopped my first-time-mom heart. And one day, God willing, he will be a man.

The future will belong to him, and I will fade into the background of his own personal drama, his epic contribution to the Story. And then I’ll be gone.

Hopefully not in the near future, and hopefully, my God how I hope, before him.

But this isn’t forever.

These sleepless nights. This frustrating season. This heartbreak. This agony. This time of uncertainty or loss, of pain, of prosperity, of confusion, of clarity…it’s all passing away.

teresa-of-avila

All day I’ve turned over St. Teresa of Avila’s famous prayer in my tired brain, eyes filling up with unusual tenderness for a child in want of a drink, for a baby with an eager smile. And I’ve thought to myself, nothing outside these walls matters the way this does. And everything can – and will – disappear one day, in an instant.

Let’s not waste the time we have. Let’s not spend our hours wishing away the pain or hustling towards that next milestone.

And, looking away from the mirror for a moment, I invite you to consider doing the same.

Culture of Death, Evangelization, Family Life, Marriage, Pope Francis, Pornography, sin, Suffering

Lord, we need you

May 2, 2016

There are two women sitting to my right, and I’ve been trying – unsuccessfully – not to overhear them for the past half hour, sitting and working in a coffee shop.

They’ve been chatting therapy and personal growth and dating after divorce and escaping abusive marriages and widowhood and loss and…life. As we share the common space in this coffee shop, I’m failing to totally tune out the ebb and flow of their conversation, because we’re inches apart and I forgot my earbuds.

Somewhere between the story of one of their young sons’ walking upstairs and encountering daddy watching hardcore pornography on the 50-inch during his custody weekend and recognizing the “12 characteristics of an abuser,” it became suddenly and sickeningly clear to my interloping ear: they’re talking about the same man.

The divorcee and the new girlfriend are sitting at a table to my right, discussing the man they mutually loved, at different times, and the children she fled the marriage with, which the new girlfriend wonders why she never sees.

The new girlfriend is despondent because she lost her own husband to cancer at a young age and has only dated one man since – the abusive ex-husband, it turns out, of the battered former wife sharing a cappuccino with her.

This is why Amoris Laetitia is relevant, I suppose. These are the irregular situations in which people find themselves in this brave new world, unable to walk away from the mess of tangled relationships and responsibilities and brokenness.

It’s the saddest conversation I’ve ever been party to. And I’m so sorry to be hearing it. But I’m also oddly thankful to be allowed this opportunity.

The insanely composed ex-wife is walking the new girlfriend through the signs of neurotic narcissism, pointing out things to recognize when considering whether the guy in question is attempting to take control of her in an inappropriate way.

And I marvel at the courage it must require of her, of them both, really, to have this conversation, to have agreed to this meeting in the first place.

I can’t know their whole story, but the snapshot I’ve gathered in this coffee shop tells a redemption story of one woman trying to help another, and not out of malice for her abusive ex. (And I could be wrong. She could be operating out of pure vengeance, hoping to prevent him from a second – third, actually, turns out – shot at happiness. But it doesn’t strike me as the case.)

This is the strange and broken world we’ve inherited, east of Eden and post sexual revolution. Death. Divorce. Abuse. Pornography. Broken families. Broken bones. Broken hearts.

Is there any hope for any of us, truly? Can we honestly propose Christ as the tidy answer to problems which are this messy, to situations this heartbreaking?

Yes and no.

Yes, Christ is the answer. Today, yesterday, and forever.

But no, it doesn’t tidy up the tangled ends. It doesn’t wave a magic wand over the pain and the regret and unravel the snarled threads of lives converged in pain and brokenness and sin.

That’s the damnedest thing about sin, isn’t it? He forgives and makes new, but He does not undo what choices our free will have wrought.

Redeems them, yes. But He doesn’t grant amnesia to the victims of violence, doesn’t repair the shattered window with a divine wand wave, doesn’t refill the bank account depleted by deceit.

Those pieces He leaves to us, allowing us to participate as His hands and His feet. And not so much allowing as demanding, because if not us, who? If not now, when?

I’m overhearing a corporal work of mercy in action. And I’m weeping silently and stoically on the inside at the pain both women are wrapped up in.

God, this world is a mess. And You’ve left it to us – to me and to you – to tend it.

I have no trite answer, no tidy conclusion. Just an awareness of how deep our brokenness is, and how desperately we still need a Savior, even now, in the West, with our astonishing wealth and technology.

We still need Jesus.

We can’t save ourselves.

Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Marriage, motherhood, NFP

This vocation is shaped like a cross

April 5, 2016

Nap time is dying in our house. It’s been dead for months I guess, but I’ve only started to notice it really recently. Like on days when I’d give plasma for an hour of silence, or at least the freedom from verbal interaction with another humanoid for longer than 7 minute stretches.

This morning a couple girlfriends and I took 8 nearly indistinguishable blonde children to IKEA for kids eat free Tuesday, probably looking every inch the part of Sister Wives in so doing. Our friend with the smallest (so far!) visible number of children mentioned that she finally understood what it meant to get “the looks.” And, I mean, look away, 8 kids under 6 is legitimately gawk-worthy.

It’s nice to be past the point of caring even the smallest bit what or whether anyone thinks about you and your crew when you’re out rolling 4 or 5 or 8 deep, trying to keep it together.

I used to think I’d just become so mellow and peaceful that I’d stop worrying about keeping up appearances. It turns out it’s more like too busy counting heads and keeping butts in seats. When I look up to see if anyone is staring, they almost always are. But I never look up any more! And unless someone gets in my face for a compliment or light-hearted comment (frequent) or a rude remark (almost never), I have my blinders on. And they’re super effective.

(Except at Trader Joe’s. Everything at Trader Joe’s is sweetness and light. I make intentional eye contact with everyone in a Hawaiian shirt, and it’s a foretaste of the beatific vision, I’m sure of it.)

I’ve been re-reading Kimberly Hahn’s (prophetic? Challenging? Frustrating? Life-changing?) masterpiece, “Life Giving Love,” over the past couple weeks at bedtime, and almost every section leaves me with a new insight or some uncovered wound in need of spiritual Neosporin.

I picked the book up years ago, when I was a starry-eyed grad student and well before marriage became a reality. I remember sitting in Kimberly’s 4-part seminar on marriage and motherhood almost a decade ago now, scribbling furious notes and longing for the day I’d get to implement all this great stuff firsthand.

Well well well, that day is here. And I must have taken most of my notes with a rose-colored pencil. Because ouch. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Everywhere I turn I’m tripping over my own ego, lying dead in a puddle of double digit sized jeans from the clearance rack, or else I’m bumping up against my own selfishness in the middle of the night when I’m praying somebody else (hi, honey!) hears that crying baby and rolls to a reluctant vertical position before I do. Or when I’m hunched over a Dollar Tree pregnancy test feeling pretty sure there’s no way but still wondering if maybe it’s worth looking into. (FTR: Not an announcement. Just a relatable anecdote.)

There are lots of opportunities to practice life giving love in marriage. And there are plenty in the priesthood and religious life too, I’ve been told.

But what I hadn’t been adequately prepared for, thanks more to my own ignorance and media consumption and less to any failure on my own parents’ part, was the extent to which I was going to be asked to take up my cross.

Yes, I know. It’s stupid. It’s in the Bible over and over again, the parts about being a disciple and accepting the sweet burden of the yoke of Christ and promises of how He’d help us carry it and we’d be few laborers in a field ripe for the harvest.

But I don’t think I internalized it all, adequately, in light of the sacramental vocation of marriage. Because I also had plenty of worldly input that led me to expect something along the lines of romantic self actualization and total fulfillment of wildest dreams and security and blissful candlelit dinners and relaxing beach vacations. (Don’t ask where exactly I picked all those ideas up, just know that they exist.)

And then for me, harder still than the promise of fun and security, was the false notion of deserving to look and feel a certain way, in exchange for having been faithful.

I think I honestly believed that God owed me one for being open to life. That because I was “playing by the rules,” so to speak, I’d effortlessly drop that baby weight and have lots of silent time for sipping coffee and staring peacefully out the window into my sun dappled back yard, watching with pride as my well behaved offspring frolicked together in the grass.

Several of them did frolic in the grass this afternoon, matter of fact, but they were inexplicably naked and covered in dead grass and dried silly string when I retrieved them 6 minutes after idealistically handing over the long-coveted hose for the first bit of water play of the season. When will I learn?

I certainly have felt, over the past year or so, a dawning awareness of how very little I understood what I was signing up for at the altar when I promised to accept children willingly, and to raise them to know and love God.

I foresaw back then that, with the help of the handy! easy! beautiful! effortless! tool of NFP, I’d be smugly spacing those children 2-3 years apart, maaaaaaaybe have 4 of them total, and they’d all be fluent in baby sign language and eating hand-cranked organic purees prepared by their thin and attentive mother.

Also, we’d go on lots of nice vacations.

(Well, we have gone on nice vacations.)

But I’ve never been called thin, at least to my face, and the babies have come closer than I could have anticipated; this morning my fourth born chugged a packet of Similac on-the-go mixed directly with frigid water from the IKEA soda fountain, chased with a torn off hunk of chicken strip and a pinch of somebody’s brownie. Also, nobody speaks anything other than English or has anything resembling nocturnal bladder control. #we’renumber1

But my life is rich. It’s rich in moments to give and receive mercy. It’s embarrassingly wealthy in service opportunities. (Like, for real, my 17 year old self would have been all over the college application padding potential.)

And it’s filled to the bursting-wineskins-point with moments to choose between Thy will and my will.

I suspect that, until the day I die or the moment I gain some semblance of sanctity, that will continue to be the case, and the opportunities to surrender will keep rolling in.

Sometimes wearing diapers.

Or sometimes wearing the bitter disappointment of another month of hearing “no.” Or of a painful diagnosis. A ridiculous spousal miscommunication. A gut wrenching betrayal. A loss. A hardship.

I guess this is what it means to live with one eye on Heaven and one on the daily grind. It’s not some kind of weird hybrid reality where things get easier because I’m trying to exercise virtue, but a real participation in the life of Christ. Which was and is all about self gift and loved poured out. And pain. Not pain for the sake of suffering, but for the sake of love.

I can suffer that. But it’s still going to hurt.

(Also, I’m going to forget I said or thought any of this within 4 days, guaranteed. Onward and upward.)

Catholic Spirituality, Family Life, feast days, liturgical living, Marriage, motherhood, Suffering

You’re dragging me to Calvary

March 21, 2016

I was sipping an herbal tea in the chilly and confused Colorado sunshine yesterday afternoon with a girlfriend, recounting an actual conversation I’d had with my 5 year old, and I laid the (slightly) hyperbolic one-liner on her as an example of how hard the last week has been: croup, stomach virus round 2 million, traveling daddy, poop exploring toddler.

“You’re dragging me to Calvary!!”

I did, actually, yell that across the house as the naughty child in question scampered down to his basement lair after hitting his brother in the head with a butterfly net-turned-lightsaber.

“Wow,” said she, laughing and setting down her chai, “you’re dragging me to Calgary! That’s intense.”

So close.

(And yet, no offense to Canadian winters, but I presume they’re not quite on par with the Crucifixion.)

Still, it made us both laugh, because her verbal misstep was funny and because I was being a little bit ridiculous. But I was also being a little bit honest.

This Lent has been different, because I didn’t prep for it, not in the way I’ve done in years past, starching my sackcloth and making DIY ashes out of ambitious New Year’s Resolutions thinly disguised as piety.

Nope, this year I just threw in the haircloth towel at the outset and let the sacrifices present themselves to me as they came, not in spite of my marital and motherly vocation, but right from the very heart of it.

And come they did.

I was amazed, not by how difficult things were, but by how many opportunities I have every single day to cast my heart heavenward and utter an internal “fiat.”

(Fiat can sound a little bit like a swear word sometimes.)

What has been most surprising has been that the opportunities to suffer appear to have increased over the past 5 weeks, with a multiplication of minor illnesses and naughtinesses and stresses and tensions.

But my anger and frustration have not increased. My sense of feeling assaulted by the fruit of my own womb or of being abandoned by God in difficult moments have not increased.

So to recap: things are harder, but they feel lighter. Lighter because I’m more aware I’m not in it alone, and because grace is real and effective.

It’s transformative not of the suffering, but of the sufferer.

That’s what I’ve never understood about heroic virtue and the saints and all my holy friends whose lives appear, at least to the outside observer, to be horrifyingly difficult.

How can anyone want to get close to you, Lord? St. Teresa of Avila had it right when she questioned Your relationship skills, I’d muse privately, observing some heroic soul undergoing yet another trial, enduring yet another setback.

But this little liturgical season of abandonment to Divine Providence, (ish. I’d say I’ve had moments of light abandonment. Work in progress.) I’ve had little glimpses of insight into the heart of God, into the economy of His grace.

And it’s really is sufficient, it turns out.

All the times I haven’t felt that to be true in the past, I think, had more to do with my unwillingness to let him shoulder the load with me.

I’ve got to allow myself to be dragged up that hill, right up to the Cross. And this vocation provides ample opportunities for growth in holiness.

My stubborn (and frankly, quite stupid) insistence that I got this, I can do this through gritted metaphorical teeth usually ended up with me licking my wounds and sulking in an adolescent pique of temper, knowing full well that I shouldn’t have moved that heavy dresser by myself, so to speak. And now my back ached and it was stuck in the middle of the room, even uglier and more obvious than before.

Am I losing you with the home decor metaphors? Mea culpa, moving furniture around is (one of) my love languages.

My prayer is that this Lenten discipline doesn’t burn out in the bright splendor of Eastertide, that I don’t both gleefully stuff my face with delicate Trader Joe’s chocolate and return to a shrewish, self reliant position of git er done-ness that leaves me exhausted and puddlish at the end of a weekday and wondering why I signed up for this marathon in the first place.

Because when I let Him run alongside me, when I don’t shove Him away and sprint for the finish line under my own power, the miles are easier. The shin splints might still come, and the ice might still be necessary, but the endorphins are flowing, too.

I think I’ll close here, since I’ve now referenced most of my personal leisure activities and tried to connect them to the spiritual life. Though if pressed, I think I could make a decent case for how sitting on the couch in sweatpants drinking wine with your beloved while rain falls outside the darkened windows and the children sleep peacefully in their beds at 8:55 pm on a Tuesday evening while you enjoy an uninterrupted episode of Madame Secretary is a fleeting foretaste of Heaven.

I could.

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