motherhood – Mama Needs Coffee

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Double or Nothing

November 5, 2022

The past 3 months have among the strangest of my adult life, so you’ll have to excuse my lengthy absence here. I’ve also been the recipient of a bizarre and profound circadian rhythm shift which now has me waking most mornings in the 5’oclock range and exercising for an hour before anyone else is up. I guess I have sobriety to thank for this? Or the desperate pursuit of solitude in the life of a mother of many children who are now around all the time. So far, everyone more or less respects my sacrosanct pre dawn territory and mostly stays in their rooms until closer to 7. It’s glorious, confusing, and very, very dark.

The falling back of this weekend should have the lovely double effect of solving the darkness while simultaneously ensuring that Benny awakens to take his morning bathroom constitutional at 5 am instead of 6, so something to look forward to for all.

What else? Well, I will say that homeschooling does not leave much in the way of margin for other intellectual pursuits, at least not along the curve I’m learning on, so in the spare moments where little is demanded of me, I offer to the universe very, very little in return. A little light scrolling of the tiktoks to watch other people organize their refrigerators. Reading on my Kindle. That’s about the extent of my brainpower capacity most days, and so writing has been cast utterly to the wayside.

There’s also the small matter of my being 18 weeks pregnant. I suspect that has something to do with my dwindling post prandial energy reserves and early, early bedtimes these days. Oh, and did I mention there are two?

Yes.

Yes indeed.

Cast your memory back to my last post if you will and cackle a bit with me as we reminisce about how I tossed aaaaaaall my baby gear and almost immediately felt a little off. Cackle with me or at me, but you can’t say I don’t deliver entertaining content even after all these years.

So, yeah, babies number 7(!) and 8(!) incoming late March/early April. I’ve moved from intense exhaustion and by far the worst nausea I’ve ever felt to ravenous hunger and alarming weight gain, so things are clipping along just as one might expect.

We’re so blessed, so overwhelmed, so tired, and so grateful. I’ve never been so intimately aware of the body of Christ as a real, physical, spiritual presence in my life as I have these past 4 months. We’ve had meals dropped off, prayers sent up, kids driven here and there, and just an absolute tsunami of support from our family and friends. Do the neighbors think we’re insane? Most assuredly. Do I care at this point? That’s a no from me, dog.

Let me back up about 9 weeks and tell you a little bit about how we found out. I was already having a rather intense first trimester and had made a few comments about feeling so bad that something had to be different. “You’re almost 40,” people helpfully pointed out, which, I can tell you, does not feel the same as 28. It just does not.

I was also feeling just a little bit overwhelmed by our still very new homeschooling experiment, now layered over with a solid 3 to 4 hours every afternoon of me lying facedown on the floor trying not to vomit up coconut water, the only palatable foodstuff of the moment.

And then I started bleeding.

It was not an insignificant amount of blood, and, having experienced nothing more than the very lightest of spotting with my last 5 pregnancies, it was scary. I called my sister, Dave, and finally a dear friend who has had several miscarriages of her own, and I asked her to coach me through what was coming. To her immense and everlasting credit, she dropped what she was doing and came straight to my house, hugged me and prayed with me, gave me some practical directives for what the next few days and weeks might hold, and bought all my kids dinner.

My doctors’ office told me to come in the next day around lunchtime for an ultrasound to confirm what was happening. I continued to bleed a little bit for the rest of the night, but by the next morning it had stopped. I’d talked to enough friends at this point to know that miscarriages can take days or even weeks, so I assumed I was just in the earliest stages of that and would find out more from the ultrasound.

We waited nervously for about a half hour in the waiting room before being taken back. I remember leaning over and saying to Dave at one point, “the baby is either fine, already dead, or twins.”

We both stared at each other and I immediately was like WHAT I DON’T KNOW WHY I SAID THAT and he was like yeah, I don’t know why you said that either. But foreshadowing, dear reader. Foreshadowing.

The ultrasound tech told us she would be starting with my anatomy first and getting “a nice look at my cervix” before moving on to the pregnancy. But I swear the minute she flipped that thing on, I saw something weird on her monitor. Two black open spaces where there should be one. She spent just a minute or two making measurements of me and then moved the wand.

“There’s baby,” she said, pointing to a small and seemingly unmoving little shape on the screen.

“Um, does baby have a heartbeat?” I asked pointedly, wondering if we were all on the same page as to why I was in the exam room.

“Oh yes, 155, looking good.”

Dave and I exhaled in huge relief which lasted approximately 4 seconds.

“And there’s your other little nugget right there,” she smiled, moving the wand and waving her hand as the second little image blurred into focus.

We stared at the screen and then at each other, jaws dropping.

“Oh…my God…” I stammered out, assuring Dave and the highly entertained ultrasound tech that I was not calling upon Him in this moment in vain. “OH MY GOD. WHAT. WHAT? TWO? TWINS?”

The next several minutes were a blur of suspected but entirely unintended blasphemy on my part and eventual scrolling of the phone on Dave’s part.

“Are you texting someone?” I demanded, causing Dave to sheepishly raise his screen for me to see.

“No, I’m on Redfin.”

I laughed because dear reader, my second and third thoughts after oh my dear sweet Jesus are you sure were definitely “how old will I be when they graduate high school?!” and “We have to call R (our old school’s principal) and see if there’s room to send the kids back.”

So to recap, the baby was fine, the baby was doubly fine, in fact, and mom and dad commenced immediately freaking out about extremely shallow and practical matters asap.

In the last 2 months as the news has sunk in and the belly has popped out, we’ve realized that a move is neither practical, feasible, or honestly all that necessary at this stage in the game. And as for the school question? Still TBD. We’ve mostly loved homeschooling, but I’m not naive enough to think being 40 and postpartum, likely surgically, with 2 newborns and 6 other kids to take care of is a recipe for domestic bliss or academic competence. We shall see.

Oh, and all that bleeding? “Oh, yeah, probably nothing. Maybe a subchorionic hematoma that cleared up on its own. Just one of those things that happens with twins sometimes.” <— the first of many such statements to have come into my life during this bizarre and wonderful turn of events.

And so my new mantra in life, gentle reader, has truly become “I control nothing.”

It’s been a trip, and we’re not even to the halfway point. Please pray for us, for our little nuggets, and for a boring and uneventful rest of the ride.

O Jesus, I surrender myself to you, take care of everything!

P.s. If you’ve ever considered becoming a patron, before, well, I can pretty much guarantee all proceeds will be transformed directly into diapers. Click away.

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If it makes me happy, is it God’s will?

January 7, 2022

If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad. If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?

Sheryl Crow

I have this little prayer card that came from I don’t know where, but I keep it propped up in the window above my kitchen sink so that sometimes my wandering, dish scrubbing eye might land on it, and I would remember to pray it. It’s a memento mori kind of prayer, one meant to invoke a consciousness of one’s mortality and the need to ask God for the graces for this moment, right now, and for that ultimate Moment when I’ll meet Him face to face.

As I was working my way through a sink full of dishes this afternoon, the card caught my eye and I began to silently recite the prayers. It starts out like this: “Lord Jesus, born in a stable, who lived a life of poverty and hardship…”

That’s as far as I got before my wheels started turning. I was fresh off a nap time face off with the resident four year old, and I’d promised her the sun, the moon, the stars, and Elsa if she would just Samuel L Jackson her little self for an hour or so mom can bust a move on the housework.

I was tired, and I needed a break from her even though I knew I was robbing bedtime Peter to buy off daytime Paul.

But as I meditated on the reality of Jesus’ life of poverty and suffering, and, by extension, the selfsame life Mary must have lived alongside Him, I got to thinking.

Lately I’ve been pondering the meaning of vocation and suffering and how they intertwine. I’m sure that has nothing to do with coming off a month of back to back illnesses including RSV, norovirus, and as a rotted out cherry on top, THE illness, which took our whole family down for the entirety of Christmas break. Ahem, where was I? Oh yes, suffering.

When I was a younger mom and a more bright eyed and enthusiastic mommy blogger in the business of faithfully and reliably harvesting nuggets of Inspiration and Relatability from my daily grind, I wrestled mightily and regularly with the tension between the work I felt called to do – my mission! My personal stamp on this world! – and, frankly, the work that shrieked loudly and insistently in my ears at all hours of the day.

There was a psychic tug of war that occurred daily, hourly, as I went about the very necessary business of crucifying my own wants and even needs for the greater good of the primary community I was called to lead, to love, and to suffer for: my family.

I struggled a LOT to understand why God had put this seemingly genuine mission to write and to teach on my heart while also blessing us (and I can say this now with an ironic, somewhat haggard 39 year old grin turning up the corners of my mouth) with robust and indeed, at times, seemingly irrepressible fertility.

Surely the thing God was calling me to was important enough that He could make my kids behave/sleep through the night/let me have 2 or 3 hours a day to work?

After all, I felt deeply fulfilled by writing and embraced the sensation of being seen and heard by an audience and a devoted readership. I got regular emails and messages on social media about how I had helped someone understand NFP a little better, how I’d led someone to reconsider Catholicism and return to the Sacraments. People told me I’d helped their marriages – this was big stuff!

And it is. And it was.

And yet, it wasn’t, and it isn’t, the primary thrust of my mission here on earth.

Yes, God has used me over the years in a mysterious and internet-connected kind of way to work in people’s hearts and to enlighten people’s minds, and that is a profoundly humbling gift.

But it’s not the most important work He has entrusted me with. By far. Like so, so much further than I could have imagined 5 or 6 years ago when becoming a famous Catholic author (L to the O L) was the burning dream in my heart, which I assumed God had put there).

There were seasons where I can now clearly see I was pushing ahead on my own steam and very likely stepping far outside the charted course of His will for me, although He brought great fruit out of those seasons nonetheless.

What a miracle! That we can step outside of God’s will, so to speak, and He can and does bless and sanctify our missteps and mistakes, if in our fumblings and detours, we are sincerely seeking Him and pursuing His truth. I don’t mean here that God blesses our sin, of course, but that when we settle for a lesser good (not an evil, mind you) and insist on having it our own way, He can and sometimes does bless our choice. He is, after all, in the business of conversion and resurrection.

But. The point I am painstakingly and meanderingly trying to arrive at here (a bit out of practice at ye olde keyboard) is that in our present cultural milieu, there are two persistent fallacies: First, if it doesn’t make you happy, it must not be worth doing. And second, (and this one is more important for Christians to understand, in my opinion) that your highest calling is, duh, obviously the work that makes you happiest. That if you’re feeling fulfilled and like you’re Making A Difference, you must surely be in God’s will, provided that you’re, you know, doing something that is objectively a good thing. (Not talking about hacking or robbing banks here.)

The problem with this set of beliefs is that they are almost entirely absent from the lives of the saints.

Mother Teresa may have occasionally achieved a state of flow whilst scraping human excrement off of fetid cement floors and hand washing blood stained saris in cold, brackish water, but, thank God, she doesn’t appear to have relied on feelings of job satisfaction and personal fulfillment as her litmus for whether or not she was doing the Lord’s work.

Her biographies tell a very different story from the typical millennial memoir. We know that her perseverance was rooted in a certainty of the knowledge of God’s goodness and presence that she literally did not feel for years. Decades. She discerned His will, she entered into it fully, and she refused to turn back in the face of suffering and even silence from heaven.

Was she happy serving the poorest of the poor? I’m sure she was. But I don’t think it was the kind of happiness that I spent the bulk of my early days of motherhood in search of. Her happiness was a resurrection born from death to self. My happiness, for years, was – and truthfully, often still is – contingent upon how much sleep I got, how good I felt about what I’d managed to accomplish in a day, and whether or not my house was clean. And most importantly of all, though it pains me to admit it? My happiness was utterly self centered.

Which meant (freaking drumroll please and a clap on the back to you if you’ve stuck with me this far) that motherhood, overall, did not make me happy.

Nor did marriage.

I loved Dave and I loved our kids but they were – and are – constantly getting in the way of me and my agendas. And so I found myself in constant escape mode, just trying to claw my way to a little relief, a brief respite from the demanding, all consuming price tag which comes attached to a vocation.

I wanted the fun parts and the sweet parts and the enjoyable parts but I did not want to “do the work” so to speak, to get there. So pregnancy and postpartum were hard, toddlers were (are) hard, Tuesdays were hard. Night feedings were hard. Pretty soon it felt like all of it was hard…and there was this constant tension because what I was clearly meant to do – my actual life, my work in our family- was burning me the freak out.

It only stopped burning, dear reader, when I stopped fighting it.

The moment I stopped looking for happiness, happiness found me.

It found me in the quieter and more hidden life spent offline, away from social media.

It found me in simple and unremarkable days spent ministering to my own family and the people in my immediate sphere of influence: my actual, literal neighbors, my family, my community.

It found me in a radical reorientation of my energy and efforts toward not what promised to make me happy, but to what I thought would probably make me holy.

And funnily enough, because that’s sometimes and so often how He works, I’m getting lots of the happy part thrown in for free. It only costs my whole life, which I have to grit my teeth and release anew from cramped, whitened knuckles day after day.

Imagine that. I know that I couldn’t have. But here we are.

And his yoke is easy. And the burden is sweet. (Most of the time.)

large family, Living Humanae Vitae, Marriage, motherhood, NFP, pregnancy, Pro Life

The wonder of the last baby

August 28, 2020

I hold my breath, waiting for another cry to pierce the midnight air. Ten, twenty seconds pass. Maybe I imagined it. Then a wail goes up like a fire engine and I push myself up and swing my legs over the side, toes groping the floor beside the bed for the shoes I must wear at all times, even for quick walks across the room. The lingering scars and injuries from his increasingly distant pregnancy and birth are daily reminders of the price his entrance extracted.

His cries halt the moment I crack the door and are replaced with urgent grunts and snuffles; I lift him from his crib, 24 pounds of warm, wriggling baby pinching at strained back muscles, and I know I would pay it again, a hundredfold.

He wakes relatively infrequently now at nearly 9 months old, and I don’t begrudge him these occasional nocturnal intrusions. The earplugs I’ve forgotten how to sleep without mean that Daddy hears him first, most nights. I mix a quick bottle using tap water from the bathroom sink and the can of formula we stash below it, shaking my head at the younger version of myself whose every mothering instinct would recoil from all of the above: formula, tap water, bottle.

We settle into the battered glider I bought off of Craigslist for his big sister’s nursery years ago, and we rock as he sucks greedily at his midnight snack. He looks up at me laughing, hitting my chest and swiping for pieces of hair loosened from my bedraggled ponytail. I shift my weight in the rocker, hips pinching from the too-snug grip of the chair arms. In the aftermath of his difficult pregnancy and birth and a stretch of time in the hospital for RSV last winter, I found myself heavier than I had ever been in my life. The weight is coming off slowly, incrementally. I calculate the rate and realize he might be potty training by the time my body returns to a more recognizable state, but then, I’ll be 40, so is it even reasonable to expect a return to familiar territory? Is he really our last baby, NFP being what it is? I’ve felt sure of it before, but the months and years have a way of smoothing things over – or fogging the short term memory up.

He laughs and swats his bottle away, ready to make flirty eye contact and pinch my face with his fat baby hands. It’s 2 in the morning and he wants to chat, and I can’t find it in me to resent it, to worry over the lost hours of sleep and the specter of the next day. The hardest baby I ever met is snoring lightly in the room down the hall, all 8 and a half increasingly gangly years of him stretched out on a top bunk littered with nerf darts and lego creations. I pull this latest edition closer, understanding now that I’ll blink and he’ll be starting kindergarten. The days are long, so long. Some of them longer than others. The first years of motherhood stretched out eternally, a string of endless days of filling and wiping and washing and zipping. These middle years have begun to speed up, almost imperceptibly at first, almost as if I’d selected 1.5x speed on a podcast or voice message without realizing it, looking up in surprise when the episode, the month, the year is over.

The last month of his pregnancy was riddled with doctor’s appointments and ultrasounds and hours ticked by on the monitor strip, watching his heart rate dance up and down, wondering and worrying. His birth was peaceful and easy, until it wasn’t. My c-section scar healed “beautifully,” the doctor said, but the scarred fascia and muscle beneath is still bunched up painfully. My brute of a 5-year-old slams his head into my waist at precisely the right level to leave me breathless with pain at least once a day. My feet ache from plantar fasciitis and my forearms tingle with residual carpal tunnel.

I throw away all my old jeans, even the pairs I scorned in the months after the previous baby’s birth, vowing I’d “never get that big” again. I laugh and remind myself that this season, too, with all its physical discomfort and disarray, will one day be a wistful memory triggered by pictures of my younger self, and I will come across them stop and marvel that I was once so young, so unwrinkled, so beautiful.

It is morning now and the baby is on the floor, slapping the ground and giggling, now falling with a resounding thump as his 110% percentile head bounces on the carpet. He starts to cry but stops as soon as I scoop him up, shifting him to my left hip and fixing a second coffee with my free hand. He rests his slightly sticky cheek against mine for a moment and I squeeze him closer. I don’t love him more than I loved the first five babies, but I like him more. I know now how fleeting babyhood is, how soon I’ll be wrinkling my nose and collecting his wet swimsuits and dirty socks from the bathroom floor. By the time he is eating as much as his brothers do, my hips will probably fit in jeans again.

Another sibling sidles up to us, reaches for the him, pleading that he is needed for an important game they’ve concocted in the back yard with the neighbor kids. I surrender him with a cautionary admonition to “hold him with an arm around the waist and under his booty, not by the neck.” His underaged minder staggers off under the weight of him, carrying him away into the orbit of sibling love that only tangentially involves me, and mostly at meal times.

And I smile, glad we had one more.

Hey, can I ask you something? If you’ve ever liked something I’ve written, or if what you read here today speaks to you, would you consider becoming a monthly patron?

For a $3 cup of coffee, you can help me bring more writing like this into the world. Click below.

cheers, Jenny

About Me, body image, motherhood, pregnancy

Some thoughts on body image during pregnancy and postpartum, and the ego-shattering expense of motherhood

December 29, 2019

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

Seriously, though, it was the worst of times for about the last 3 weeks of Benedict’s pregnancy, which seemed to stretch interminably out over major holidays and multiple trips to labor and delivery for additional monitoring. Dave can vouch for my extra special attitude during this season of anticipation and antacids.

At some point during the final week, the fortieth, much to my astonishment, I begged God specifically that I’d not have to face another Sunday Mass “still pregnant” because a. our church is being renovated and the basement is hot as hell and b. I wanted to crawl violently out of my own skin while doing the extreme walk of shame back and forth to the restrooms escorting yet another weak bladdered offspring and offering the entire parish an eyeful courtesy of the single remaining body con maternity dress that still “fit.”

Mostly I just wept, sat up at night timing contractions, and cycled through every heartburn medication on the market in a desperate bid to emancipate my esophagus from the fires of hell. And that’s pretty much how all of November went.

(N.B. He has lots of hair! Enough to braid, practically. Old wives tale confirmed.)

About 5 days before Ben was finally born, I finally hit the right combination of google terms and discovered a secret subculture of kindred spirits: other women, most of them multiparous, also plagued by unrelenting and utterly unproductive contractions night after night for days and weeks and even months of pregnancy.

Weeping with relief, I initiated myself honorarily into the sisterhood of the “irritable uterus,” devouring post after post of other women’s stories about contractions lasting 10, 12, 15 minutes at a time for hours on end, their uteri locked into rock solid basketballs of tension pretty much 24/7.

It’s not Braxton Hicks, it’s not prodromal labor, and it’s not actual, baby-bringing contractions. The answer is d., Alex, none of the above. And the reason for it is … elusive. Age? Fatigue? Number of prior pregnancies? Physical condition? Probably a little bit of everything. At any rate, it was a long November and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last. If for no other reason then we’re definitely on a procreative hiatus and even the most broken night of newborn sleep beats the hell that was my uterus versus somnolence.

November 2019 was not my best work.

I would be remiss, however, to fail to share the silver lining of Ben’s pregnancy. Other than the sheer physical hell of that final 4 weeks, I honestly felt good. Maybe not physically so good (raises eyebrow at total spent on physical therapy copays and massage) but emotionally and spiritually, pretty great.

This pregnancy was healing and transformative in a lot of ways. I was able to receive more of God’s grace for my vocation as a wife and mother, was able to see His version of myself more and more clearly, and most shockingly of all, for me, was able to let go of (or at least table, more on that in a future post) a lot of my deeply held and longstanding issues with food and weight and body image.

And guess what? I didn’t magically have a celebrity pregnancy because I stopped obsessing about food and how I looked. I still got huge, I still felt pretty awful by the end, and I am still struggling now, 4 weeks postpartum, with the fallout of crafting and carrying another human being under my heart for the better part of a year. My kids are simultaneously asking “so mom, when will you be skinny again?” and also “can we have another baby pretty soon?” so it’s pretty much every woman’s dream.

Here’s the thing though: for much of the past 10 months, I was at peace.

I was at peace with having a sixth baby (which felt – and still feels – shocking. Not the half dozen children so much as the being at peace part); I was (mostly) at peace with what was happening to and through my body, and I was at peace with how I looked.

None of that should have been possible. All of that is miraculous. I can only credit a well-timed introduction to the concept of intuitive eating, working with a wonderfully gifted RD, and God’s perfect timing.

Pregnancy has always been pretty terrible for me in the self image department. Blame the decades of disordered eating and the short stature, but I’m not a cute pregnant woman, and I don’t “wear it well.” The baby wears me. I am all baby and also the baby is all over, and we are both of us huge.

I was cradling Ben at his 2 week well child visit waiting for my turn to place him on the scale and the mom ahead of me looked back at us, eyes popping out of her head and cried out “another one? Again? So soon?!” I looked around and realized she was talking to me and politely asked “what?” knowing full well what was about to happen…

“How old is your baby?” She jabbed a finger towards Ben’s carseat, her eyes widening when I replied “12 days;”

“And you’re pregnant again???”

I stared at her with dead, sleep deprived eyes for a full count of 3 before calmly replying that no, I’d just had the baby 12 days ago. Her eyes goggled at my Kate Middleton-esque midsection and her cheeks had the decency to flush slightly as she stumbled over her words and I brushed past her to hoist my 10 pound baby onto the scale.

I wish I could say I was more incensed over the profound failure of our educational system to transmit the most basic fundamentals of human biology to a seemingly card carrying adult female, but alas, my pride was wounded deeper than my intellect. Though I do still wish I’d been able to slip her a little something to explain how ovulation works. Maybe just like 2 pages ripped from a high school biology textbook?

I’m not bitter.

I was talking with a friend earlier this week about how the newfound confidence I discovered during pregnancy is starting to wear thin as the hormones continue to come down and the baby weight…doesn’t. She pointed out I was less than a month postpartum, Christmas was only just happened, and perhaps I hadn’t been sleeping much? Not exactly a recipe for weight loss and wellness.

Here’s the thing, though. All that new peace and acceptance I found while Benny was on the inside? Now I get to fight to keep it. Now I get to experience the freedom and the terror of having the training wheels kicked off, of being at peace in my body just as it is, no baby on board to shield me from my own expectations or those of the world.

Because the acceptance and freedom I found during Ben’s pregnancy were a little bit conditional, it turns out, and dependent upon my “producing” something, having some sort of excuse for my body being less than perfect.

Now that I’m not growing a baby? Or nursing one? It is so, so tempting to get sucked back into the belief that my body is only as good as what it can do, as how it looks. As how well it performs.

I’m not actively “trying” to lose weight right now. I’m not doing a 30 day cleanse or a 4 week reset or trying a new diet of any kind. I’m not signing up for boot camp or pledging a certain number of trips to the gym per week for 2020. I’m not readily identifiable as an athlete of any kind, at the moment. And ironically, I’m not able to fit into any of my old clothes that don’t involve lots and lots of spandex, so living in running tights though I may be, no actual running is taking place.

For now, for the moment, in this uncomfortable in between season of sweet baby cuddles and scary parenting meltdowns and the whole-house post holiday hangover, I’m just me. I’m just a tired mom with a new baby and gross stains on most of her shirts and I don’t look or feel very cute, but I am happy.

And I’m starting to think I might be on track to find deeper, truer happiness than what I was hoping to find via the keto brick road or whatever other previous promises I’d clung to about finally being satisfied “when”.

As I sat down with my (dusty) laptop to write what this turned out to be, I happened to lock eyes with my bridal self in a wedding picture that hangs near my desk.

“I used to look like that. Look how beautiful I was.” I indulged the self pity for about 4 seconds and then shook myself with the rueful knowledge that however beautiful 26 year old Jenny had been, 37 year old Jenny would still look different. That there was no way I’d still be that girl in the picture, 6 kids or no.

And I recognize that I could easily, easily spend the rest of my 30s, my 40s, and beyond chasing that elusive image of who I used to be. Of trying to freeze time and keep her eternally present, if only from certain angles or through Instagram filters.

Or I could eat the pizza. Have the baby. Drink the beer.

This is less an “I give up” manifesto than an “I surrender” explanation. And in this season of lots and lots and lots of surrender (cough cough emergency c section + team no sleep) I’m figuring out that happiness lies less in what the mirror is reflecting back to me and more in what I’m able to reflect out to the world.

(And hey, lest we end this on an overly pious note, it must be said that I had the temerity to scream “what is wrong with you???” at a 7 year old child today for the heinous crime of crushing chocolate sprinkles into the dining room table with the back of a spoon, so please know that I am an all around ideal and uniformly excellent mother who is all done with spiritual growth and development, and I definitely did not get caught earlier in the day by the 9 year old muttering “good God I CANNOT WAIT for school to start” while bent over rehoming clean laundry found strewn across a closet floor.)

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The working mother

August 20, 2019

She rises at dawn to lace up her running shoes, logging hard-won miles in the gray light of morning. She is up before the sun with a sick baby, a nursing baby, an anxious kindergartener, making toast and oatmeal and gestures of comfort. She is still asleep at dawn because the baby nursed four times last night.

She leaves the house by seven to get the kids to school, to get to her office, to get to the grocery store because the milk ran out. She is stuck in the house into well past noon with a sick child, a handicapped child, a crowd of many children whose number overwhelms her capacity to mind them all in the grocery store.

She brings home a paycheck that pays half the mortgage, more than half. She stays home and forgoes a paycheck and the comfort of saving for retirement or paying off her student loans. Either way, there is guilt. She is using her degree to change the world, but at the cost of her children’s wellbeing. She is spending her life in hidden service, burying her wasted talents in the opaque soil of motherhood.

She doesn’t dress appropriately. She dresses too modestly. She wears clothes that cost too much; if she only dressed more frugally, she could afford to stop working. She dresses frumpily because she has let herself go; she needs to get back out there, needs to get to the gym once in a while. She’ll never be able to recover financially, because she put her career on hold for her children. She’ll never get this time back with her children, because she squandered it on her career.

Her kids are suffering from being poorly socialized because she schools them at home. Her family can only afford private school because she works from home, sometimes in front of them, putting them in front of screens when she should be reading to them. Her kids are in public school because they have IEPs, and she can’t afford to pay out of pocket for the services they’d need at a Catholic school. Clearly her faith isn’t as important to her as their learning disabilities, she should trust God more.

She doesn’t feed them organic food because she’s spending so much on tuition. If she homeschooled them they’d be able to afford non-GMO produce, and their bodies and souls would flourish. She lets them eat fast food because she worked late, again, and she doesn’t try hard enough at crock pot meal planning. Trans fats are clogging their arteries while neglect chips away at their souls.

If her husband were a better provider, she wouldn’t have to earn a paycheck. If she would surrender her paycheck and stop emasculating him, maybe her husband would make more money. They should only drive one car, because a second vehicle is a luxury. She should stay at home without a vehicle in the suburbs while he commutes to the city 90 minutes away, because her children have everything they need as long as they have her.

While she works in the home, she should be careful to do everything: the dishes, the floors, the taxes (but only with her husband’s permission) the cooking, the laundry, and the religious formation of the children. She should grow her own garden if she can’t afford organic produce, because a good mother would.

It shouldn’t matter that her extended family lives 1,500 miles away. That she is the only adult at home on her block during daylight hours. She has everything she needs at home, and she can do it all, and do it by herself.

Mothers who use babysitters aren’t invested enough in the development of their children. Mothers who stay home with their children are wasting their lives. Mothers who stay home with their children must be rich, since they are living lives of luxury and indolence. Mothers who work away from their children are selfish, they should adjust their expenditures to live on one income.

Mothers with student loan debt shouldn’t have become mothers until that debt was repaid. Women shouldn’t go to college, it’s a waste of money. Women shouldn’t start their mothering careers until their professional careers are well established, it’s a waste of talent.

Women who have babies should be able to work the same hours as women who haven’t had babies. Children are a liability. Motherhood is a liability. Motherhood is your path to sanctity. If you fail at motherhood, you’ve failed at the one job God has given you. You must give all of yourself away to be a good mother.

What makes a good mother? Was Mary a good mother, staying at home with Jesus and cooking and cleaning and mending all the garments and running the family home and raising the Son of God?

Was St. Gianna a good mother, leaving her children in someone else’s care while she practiced medicine? Leaving her children behind on earth when she gave her life for her daughter?

Was St. Zelie a good mother, working from home and running a small business which was profitable enough to allow her to hire her own husband to work for her? Was that emasculating? But then…he became a saint, too.

Was St. Helen a good mother? She was a little too brash, a little too concerned with affairs beyond the domestic realm. Unseemly. But she rescued the relics of the True Cross … and her son legitimized the practice of Chrstianity in the Roman world.

Was St. Monica a good mother? Too clingy. If she hadn’t been so smothering, maybe her son wouldn’t have turned out to be such a derelict youth. But her tears watered the seed of conversion that bloomed in St. Augustine’s heart.

In the midst of the flame wars over what constitutes a “good mother,” I’m reminded of a favorite C. S. Lewis quote: “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.”

And how gloriously different are the working mothers. The mothers who work. The works of mothers.

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Thoughts from summer break + the 1 travel mistake you probably don’t want to make (or do you?)

July 2, 2019

Friends, it’s been a minute or two.

Directly after confidently announcing the blog would not die, I sort of … let it. Or let it lie fallow, anyhow.

But here I am now, popping in at the beginning of July with a 19 week belly and all the confidence in the world that now that summer is well underway and our “schedule” (of Instagram fame) is humming along pretty smoothly, I can dip a toe back in.

Some thoughts from my unintentional sabbatical:

Blog writing is really my favorite kind of writing. Or at least, it’s the easiest for me. Feature writing and teaching style posts will never beat the long form essay, for me; both for ease of craft and also rather unconsciously taking shape in my mind. No doubt from years of practice, the blog writing grooves run deep in my brain.

We just got home from a family vacation, the first of its kind for our clan. We flew with all 5 kids (and one now-obvious bump) to San Diego where we spent a week combing the beaches and eating lots of junk food. It was not all glamourous, but it was unbelievably and almost unrecognizably fun, even if loads of work were involved. Thanks to generous friends who had a house to spare and a backlog of Southwest points, we were able to do it all on a budget, and now back at home with our suntanned faces and piles of dirty laundry, it feels a bit like it was a dream.

Speaking of dreams, can I tell you a story that reads a bit more like a nightmare?

It begins in an airport terminal, as nightmares are often want to do.

Our boarding time for our return flight to Denver was 8:20 am – both Dave and I heard the gate agent as she reminded us while tagging our stroller at the counter.

Patting ourselves on the back for being so efficient and responsible and waking up at 5 am, we strolled to the other side of the small, crowded, hub-shaped terminal and found a swath of open seats. We rested there comfortably, breakfasting on $8 dollar yogurt parfaits topped with wilted fruit and a side of potato chips, and took multiple runs to the bathroom to ensure in flight bladder compliance.

It was during one of those bathroom runs while Dave had the male crew in the restroom that I could have sworn I heard an announcement calling out “last call for Denver flight 7393” and I was like, weird, two flights to Denver within 20 minutes of each other? Guess it’s a popular route.

Friends, it is not that popular of a route.

My higher level cognition clicked in belatedly and I began cramming garbage, potato chips, diapers, babies, etc. into the stroller and booking it across the terminal while frantically scrabbling in my filthy purse for my phone.

Sweating profusely, I stopped at the counter for our gate and dropped a load of kid crap that landed on the floor in a Peanuts-esque haze of sand and garbage and panted out my predicament to the bemused looking gate agent who deadpanned “we were surprised we lost your family”.

I finally located my phone in a tangle of broken seashells and earbud cords and dialed Dave, who had the wherewithal to answer from his captaincy of the men’s room trip.

“We’re about to miss our flight. GET TO THE GATE!”

Dropping my phone back into the sand coating the bottom of my purse without bothering to end the call, I set to dismantling our beast of a stroller and saddling myself with the backpacks and carryon items of the entire family while herding Zelie and Evie towards the already-closed door to our aircraft. Dave rolled in on my heels, trailing three wild eyed boys behind him.

We clustered around the not-amused ticket guy standing at the door and panted our sorry excuse for a story, causing him to roll his eyes and wearily point out that our boarding passes had “a departure time 8:20” clearly printed on them.

But we’d never looked at our boarding passes, guy without kids. We are like robot sheep in the airport, following the disembodied voices of computer announcements and, in a dire pinch, occasionally lifting our eyes to consult the glowing screens overhead. We never thought to look at the pieces of paper stuffed in our back pockets.

If his eyes could have rolled harder or further back into his head, he would have dislocated something, but after announcing that all flights to Denver that day were F-U-L-L, he opened the door and shooed us onto the airplane with a deadpanned “good luck.”

Now anyone who has ever flown Southwest (which, incidentally, we love and only fly domestically, as much as we can control it) knows that the best part is that it’s open seating!

You get to choose your seat! The 24 hour checkin window opening the day before your trip is the lottery of the unwashed masses, the great equalizer.

Want to sit in business class? Set your phone alarm and get in there like gangbusters at the 24 hour mark and check in.

Or have kids. Because family boarding takes place smack dab between the A and B groups and results in effortlessly arranging your offspring in a series of comfortable rows populated by you and yours.

I’m sure you see where this is going, yes?

Imagine the pleased faces and winsome smiles greeting us when we limped onto that plane, 2 adults, 4 kids and a mewling lap baby in need of seats, 3 minutes after the flight was supposed to have left the gate.

Oh, we were popular.

I scanned the impassive rows of travelers with the eyes of a hunted animal, wondering where in God’s good name was I going to park my recently un-potty-trained 3 year old for a solo flight across the western United States?

We ended up dropping Joey in row 2, squeezed between a pair of kindly businessmen, no doubt thrilled to have a small seatmate occupying the space between them rather than their laptop bags. John Paul landed in about row 12, next to a hulking, tattooed giant of a man who I prayed was more NFL player than serial killer. (spoiler alert: he was kind).

Now the hard part, Evie and Luke who, at 5 and 3, were the worst behavior offenders on our flight out to California.

I locked eyes with another mom flying solo with her own three kids, who resolutely lifted her lap baby from the lucky “open seat” and plopped him back into her lap, indicating that the aisle seat could go to Evie. I begged her forgiveness and dropped an extra child in her row, fleeing further into the bowels of the airplane.

Meanwhile, Dave was negotiating a tense standoff with Luke who was understandably not gung ho to be left by Daddy in a seat with strangers. A kindly business traveler surrendered his own aisle seat so that Luke could sit and look back at Dave, who’d landed in a row about 3 behind him, next to another traveler who’d given up his aisle seat so he could keep Luke in eyesight.

Placated with unlimited access to Daddy’s (airplane mode) iphone, Luke proceeded to spend the remainder of the 2 hour flight scrolling through years of family pictures and outtakes of the cat, stopping to show every single image to his longsuffering seatmate.

I, meanwhile, staggered to the back of the plane where a single seat awaited me: last row, backing up to the bathroom, next to a very large woman who smiled gamely up at me and Z.

“Want me to hold her while you get settled?” she kindly offered, unfazed by her current predicament.

Here is where I confess I was not excited to be sharing a seat with my lap baby, a pregnant belly, and a larger-than-average seatmate who was already occupying half my allocated space. Numbly, I handed the baby over and squeezed myself into the remaining spot.

Guys, I’m not a small gal myself these days, so I’m ashamed for my initial unkindness – even if only internally – towards this woman. But she ended up being the nicest, most interesting seatmate I can remember having on any flight I’ve ever taken.

And Zelie? The same kid who screamed her way to San Diego only 7 days earlier? She fell asleep in my arms like a newborn kitten, impervious to the frantic howling of another baby seated the row ahead of ours and the continual slam/flush/bump of the bathroom traffic streaming past our smooshed perch on the end of the aisle.

As for the rest of the kids, well, they finally came around and starting talking again.

Kidding! They did so great. When I inquired about their in-flight entertainment, Joey gamely said he “played with 10 legos I found at the bottom of my backpack” while JP “stared straight ahead and ate crackers,” both of which struck me as fine, solid options for 2 hours alone at 40,000 feet.

As for Evie, the newly adopted 4th child of the harried solo mom traveler? I ran into that mom at baggage claim where she waved cheerfully to us, “Bye Genevieve, thank you so much for keeping (naughty 3 year old) entertained for the whole flight. It was our best trip ever!”

The moral of this story is, I guess, be an absolute idiot and lose all track of time while travelling with small children, because you might inadvertently end up having your faith in humanity restored.

But also? You might get a crash course in Divine Providence. I marvelled at the kindness of strangers, the felicitous exhaustion that rendered my 18 month old unconscious on my chest for most of our flight time. The admiring comments by all the flight crew who could not believe “how well your kids handled being separated from you and one another,” or “how calm you stayed as parents” (lol if only they knew), and also, over and over again, the goodness of people who, at a basic level, do want to be kind and helpful or at the very least, simply decent.

It was a refreshing remedial lesson in basic human decency, and in the current cultural climate – cultivated largely on screens – of vitriol, hatred, and division, it was like balm to my soul.

Oh, and Dave and I joked afterwards that it might not be a bad idea to actually use the whole “leave you with strangers” plan as a strategy for future travel, because guess who has 4 thumbs and had the very best flight of their entire lives as parents?

Cheers, it was us!

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Accepting Holy Week

April 18, 2019

Lent can be a strange liturgical season for mothers. There is much wisdom and tradition to impart, and also it’s pretty much impossible to make it to stations of the cross, because 7 PM is a time of day which renders most preschoolers what the French call les incompetent.

I entered into Lent this year with some trepidation, mindful of years past spent crashing and burning, having bitten off a choking mouthful of penances only to end up with a month-long plague of rotavirus ripping through the house and an angry, under caffeinated mother overseeing triage.

Taking a page from Servant of God Dorothy Day, who was reported to have finally abandoned her repeated attempts at giving up smoking for Lent after members of her community begged her to stop trying, so unpleasant did nicotine withdrawal render her, I made no grand efforts this year. Don’t canonize me yet; though I did give up social media, which I mostly stuck to until Monday of this week, at which point the Notre Dame blaze tempted me into a Twitter binge that lasted almost 24 hours.

Applying a little mindfulness to how I felt after said binge, sitting on the couch last night having read perhaps my dozenth hot take on the previous day’s events in France, I felt almost as sick as if I’d taken down a half gallon of ice cream solo. Not that I have any idea what that feels like, mind you.

Maybe Twitter is too toxic for me to consume, I mused, closing my laptop with a disgusted thud.

This morning I was awakened by an excited 8 year old whose nose, inches from mine, fairly quivered in excitement at having an unexpected, citywide day off from school.

“A crazy lady wants to do bad things to schools, so we have a day off! Can I go check if (neighbor kid) is home today, too?”

I mumbled something incoherent about not bothering the neighbors before 7 am and rubbed sleep from my eyes as I contemplated what he’d said. And I wished my 8 year old wasn’t growing up in a post-Columbine world.

Just a few minutes ago my phone lit up with a stream of messages: ‘suspect is apprehended. Suspect is dead.’

Eternal rest unto that troubled soul, I mumbled, texting as much to my fellow school moms. Self-inflicted gunshot wounds. A chilling conclusion to a bizarre saga.

This Holy Week has been heavy with uncontrolled circumstances, the weariness and tragedy of the world seeping in and disrupting my optimistic plans for marking the most important week of the Christian year as something remarkable to my kids.

Having a house full of excited children home on what was meant to be my big spring cleaning day, the calm before the storm of Triduum, has largely derailed those plans.

Now I’m fumbling through my to do list distracted, anxious, looking at my phone every few minutes and wondering if we’ve done enough, if I’ve done anything, truly, to impress the solemness and meaning of this week, of this season, of the Christian life.

Nothing puts me into melancholic introspective mode more effectively – or reliably – than major holidays.

Are we showing the kids a different life? A more excellent way? Do they get that it’s more than what the culture tells them, more than candy and presents and imaginary customs? Do they know Jesus through me?

Days like this, I think not. Grateful that parenting is a season comprised of hundreds of ordinary days, thousands of unremarkable moments, I push aside my fears and holiday anxieties and ask for the grace of acceptance, of being willing to take the week I’ve been given and not pine for the one I imagined.

God is in reality. God suffered and died in battered human flesh. He is not confounded by my weakness and He is not repulsed by my failures to Get it Right.

Silly me, I tend to forget that this week – this universe – hinges on a Savior. I must need Him, still. We all must. We all do.

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The ache of the oldest child

April 9, 2019

This morning I took the 3 younger kids to Mass, and it was neither our best nor worst performance to date. Zelie squirmed and screamed and needed to be escorted out a couple times, and Luke too, but it was nothing out of the ordinary.

I remembered being a younger mom with same-aged kids, but struggled to recall some of the details. Did I have to take Joey out this often? Was Evie as loud and screamy as Zelie is at 15 months? Did I sometimes make it to daily Mass when the big kids were smaller?

I’m sure I did, but there is a filmy haze of sleep deprivation and a sort of rosy glow beginning to slip over the past as I cross into my second decade of parenting.

It’s hard to grasp that amount of time – 9 years – while I bounce a different baby on my lap, correcting homework written in cursive and answering questions about life and death and Nerf ammo and digital special effects.

Weren’t you just a baby, home with me all day? Didn’t you just learn how to read? How are you old enough to ride your bike to the park? To ask questions about death?

I don’t know if it’s because I am myself the oldest child, but I’ve always had a deeply melancholic love for Joey, our firstborn. I think about his babyhood and I could weep, because it was already so long ago, but also, wasn’t it just yesterday that we could not, for any amount of bribery, get him to give up his pacifier?

I look at him now, gangling legs that, while not long, are beginning to take on the knobby proportions of a kid, no trace of baby fat remaining anywhere. His mouth is full of more gaps than teeth, and his top bunk is overflowing with Nerf artillery and chapter books.

The kid I nearly came to blows with over “Teach your Child to read in 100 easy steps” has read 3 dozen chapter books since Christmas, tearing through the “Chronicles of Narnia,” the “Indian in the Cupboard” series, and more recently, grudgingly making his way through the ancient pile of “Bobbsey Twins” volumes I dumped on his desk. Not enough action, apparently.

Last night while lying inexplicably awake at nearly midnight, I started to do some mental math and came to a startling conclusion: I’ve already spent as many years with him under our roof as there are ahead of us. Put another way, I’m exactly at the halfway mark between “it’s a boy” and “Joseph Kolbe Uebbing, class of 2028.”

And like a weirdo, I already feel sad about that.

What is it about parenthood that insists on a continual tension between near fatal levels of exhaustion and also sneaking into your children’s rooms at 11 pm to stare at them while they’re sleeping?

Having kids has been a study in grief over original sin.

I’m never more convinced that human beings were created for eternal life then when my heart is breaking over some small piece of discarded baby clothing that fell behind the washing machine.

Why should the passage of time cause any grief? And yet, that the little boy who used to fit this tiny striped t-shirt is out in the front yard, unattended and hammering nails into scraps of wood for his latest invention, it breaks my heart for some reason.

We’re all speeding towards death, in a sense. The moment your first baby is placed in your arms, you’re already preparing for the long goodbye. A decades-long process of first steps and last public displays of (willing) affection; of diapers and braces and essays and baseball games and ten thousand bedtimes, in between, some harder than others.

I don’t know what it is about this kid, but he just makes me feel all the feels. He’s breaking trail for his younger siblings, all of whom I love just as fiercely but whose existences have, thus far, not sent me into midnight fits of existential arithmetic. Maybe when the baby is in high school I’ll be an even bigger wreck!

I don’t mean to imply that I think overly much about death, either, just that the passage of time – as measured by melting deposits of baby fat giving way to lean, boyish muscle – causes a simultaneous swelling of pride and grief.

And I don’t know why I should feel grief except that death is unnatural, and separation a horror. As such, nothing motivates me to advance in the spiritual life quite like this future-focused grief over the passage of time, the peculiar agony of a mother’s heart. I am investing in a future I will not see, helping shape a character whose life only partially overlaps with my own. How magnificent.

And also, how difficult. It’s the stretching kind of love for sure, pulling at muscles that are tight and reluctant. I know this world is not my home, but my heart is still a little broken over it. And each of the short people who we share our home with have broken it open a little more. Hopefully for the purpose of being reconstructed, and rightly ordered. But man, is it tempting to hold it tightly closed.

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‘Back in February,’ an unexpected pregnancy led to unimaginable joy

April 2, 2019

“If you had asked me before this happened, ‘was I pro-life?’ I would have said yes. I was raised Catholic. We went to Mass. I even went to a March for Life in Chicago once. So, absolutely. And yet, once it happened to me, once it was me facing the unplanned pregnancy, abortion seemed like it was my only way out.”…

I had the honor of telling a little piece of Alexa Hyman’s story. Click here to read the full article on Catholic News Agency.

large family, motherhood, school

Kids at school, kids at home

March 28, 2019

I have had the distinct pleasure – spoken without too much irony – of having my big kids home for spring break this week. When I glanced at the school calendar late last week and realized that I’d misappropriated spring break to the first week of April, horror dawned in slow rolling waves over my psyche as I flipped through my Google calendar and beheld the 302334 doctor, dentist, professional, and personal appointments I’d unintentionally scheduled.

Now a few days into a rigorous schedule of dragging all five children on most of these errands, I’ve had time to appreciate how much they’ve matured in the past year or so. Or perhaps how much I’ve matured? It mostly boils down to, I think, having a couple kids who can buckle themselves in and out of the car. Game changer.

Still, I don’t mind that school starts up again on Monday. Not one little bit. And I have perhaps been busying myself clicking through listings of free and low cost summer activities, registering for swimming lessons, and generally spilling some ink onto the 12 weeks of summer stretching out ahead of us in the not too distant future. This week has been a brisk wake up call in a few categories:

How much they eat. It is truly shocking. I don’t fear college fees (because I think higher education is poised for a meltdown/restructuring that all of my kids will benefit from, and also hope to have a priest, a plumber, an electrician, a stylist, etc etc in the family) but I DO fear the line-item totalling I do each month as I scan through our checking account and note how much we spent at Trader Joe’s. IT IS SHOCKING. VV shocking. I’ll start out the week with $200 worth of groceries in the fridge feeling confident that meals are planned and lunches are ready to be packed with aplomb, but come Thursday the fridge looks like we’re all practicing intermittent fasting and we have plowed through 4 loaves of gluten free bread, and that cardboard IS NOT CHEAP. (GF bread, Kerrygold butter and Lavazza espresso beans are our big splurge items in this house.)

Horrified, I begin the cycle of checking fridge, freezer, pantry, repeat, wondering how we went through 5 containers of deli ham (Luke) 4 loaves of bread (also Luke) and 3 pints of cherry tomatoes (ONCE AGAIN LUKE). The pantry is roughly bare, save for 3 boxes of bean-based breakfast cereals which my snobbish offspring will not eat, even though breakfast puffs made of brown rice and lentils are both gluten free AND penitential.

How much energy they have, (and how many hours there are in a day without naps.)

Having little kids home with you 24/7 is exhausting. Full stop. I’ll never be as tired as I was when my oldest three were little. However, there is something precious about the sacred stretch of 1-3 pm when you have all little kids (or big kids in school) and the world is your freaking oyster. Got laundry to do? Not anymore, you don’t. A book chapter or six to read? Treat yo self. Want to each lunch in silent, introverted bliss? Nobody will stop you.

I miss those nap times, I truly do. Next year Luke will be in school with the big kids on Mondays and Tuesdays, leaving Zelie and I home by ourselves twice a week, and I’m already salivating over those 4-5 uninterrupted hours of bliss.

In the meantime, I’m making meals, sweeping floors, driving people to appointments and applying bandaids and stern lectures (okay, screaming) all around, giving helpful reminders about not putting your fingers in certain places and also public urination.

I look forward to 9 pm every night when all are asleep, feigning or otherwise, so that I can, um, also go to sleep. I was chronically exhausted when the kids were little, but also dying for some alone time so I tended to burn the midnight oil. Now I’m dog tired from physical and emotional labor and old enough (smart enough?) to know that most nights another hour of sleep will refresh me far more than an hour with my Kindle.

Screentime is best used as a carrot and not a stick. My kids are less likely to respond to my vague threats of “no more episodes” if they’ve already binged half a season of Rescue Bots in a morning. Since giving up shows for Lent, we’ve seen a 400% increase in good attitudes, destructive but endearing creativity, and time spent outside. No comment on sibling relations having either improved or deteriorated.

When screentime is a non-option, my kids tend to be more compliant and creative. When I shock them by offering an episode of something on Formed or throw a Hail Mary and put on an entire Disney movie while trying to do something on a professional level, they respond with eager joy instead of jaded eye rolls.

I also find it serves as a powerful motivator to finishing chores, behaving like a human being, etc, and therefore I’m wise to reserve it for end of day purposes.

They all have really strong feelings about each other, good and bad. Our neighbors probably think we are lunatics based on the screaming + pictures of Jesus all over the walls.

It’s a confusing playlist, I’ll admit. One moment everyone is bouncing idyllically on the trampoline, the next minute the hose is on and there is mayhem and not infrequently, blood.

Having everyone home and playing outside (read: not at school or staring at a screen) is a level of volume that I was not prepared for. Was Luke mute last summer? Was I still in a postpartum stupor? I do not know. But I cringe constantly throughout the day as someone screams in a truly blood curdling scream that someone did something to someone, wondering if today is the day the fire department is going to come.

Our neighborhood is mostly retired folks whose hearing is, I pray, sub optimal. The few kids on our block either live at my house during daylight hours or sit inside like vampires, shying away in fright when they are greeted by a fellow human. In other words, all the noise is coming from us, and it is a lot of noise. A lot.

As much as I enjoy this time together, in other words, I will not mind one bit when that school bell rings again on Monday morning. Until then I’ll be chugging all the LaCroix (another budget busting indulgence to get me through spring break) and thanking God for not giving me the grace to home school.

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