Relaxation

—1—

Tap, tap, tap.

Is anyone there?

I’ve enjoyed writing at the Catholic Review for the past almost-two-months, but I’m afraid I’ve killed my (this) blog! The thought makes me so sad.

How can I find the right balance to it all? Between writing and everything else I’m responsible for, between this blog and the other, between political writing and more personal writing? I have no idea.

No idea.

I guess I’m just going to keep plugging away at it and hope it works out somehow?

—2—

My six-year-old boy started 1^st grade this week. I’m currently a tad sappy about the passage of time and all that, but mostly just very proud of my boy.

He’s been really interested in being helpful lately, so we’ve found some small jobs around the house he can do. He’s taking out the recycling and putting away the flatware and even making some sandwiches.

Best of all, when it’s time for my crew to load into the van, he puts on the two-year-old’s shoes, ushers his little brothers outside, and then HE BUCKLES THEM INTO THEIR CAR SEATS. Truly, this is a life-changing level of helpfulness for me. I always thank him with something like, “Thank you so much! That is so helpful and it makes things so much easier for me!” He responds with a sweet little “No problem, Mommy! I like helping.”

I think I like six.

One more thing about my boy, which I already blogged about over on my Catholic Review version of 7 Quick Takes:

I had a sad but beautiful little exchange with my six-year-old son the other evening, courtesy of my almost-all-day-every-day NPR listening habit. While I was driving, my boy spotted a bug in the car and I told him that I’d seen a mosquito. “Is that mosquito virus here yet?” he asked.

“Mosquito virus? Do you mean Zika?”

He did.

“Well, it’s here in the United States,” I told him. “But it’s not here in our area. It’s in Florida.”

“Oh, that’s too bad for the babies there. There will be a lot of babies dying in their mommies’ tummies.”

Most people would probably be appalled to know that my six-year-old was thinking of such things. I’ll admit to feeling a little guilty about it. But mostly, I just felt proud. My boy is paying attention. He’s understanding. He’s asking questions. He’s caring. And he wrapped up our conversation by suggesting that we pray for the babies.

“God, please take care of the babies in their mommies’ tummies. Please keep them from getting the mosquito virus. That’s all.”

—3—

My four-year-old boy is a funny kid. He’s been telling me he loves me for a long time now – like, laying it on thick: “Mommy, I wuuuuv you, Mommy. You’re da best Mommy in da whole world. You’re boodiful. I JUST WUV YOU SO MUCH. I wuv you more den Jesus wuvs you.”

I’m not complaining.

But I am noticing that he tends to say these things when (1) he wants something from me, (2) I’m already helping him with something, or (3) he’s been naughty or annoying.

Clever kid, that one.

Lately he’s been adding the following into the mix: “Mommy, you’re da gweatest Mommy of aw time. You’re da gweatest PERSON of aw time! You’re MINE. You’re my mommy and no one else’s!”

This morning when I asked him why he was doing this fake crying thing, he answered: “Sometimes people just cwy because you’re so boodiful.”

Whoah. Slow down there, kiddo.

It’s gotten to the point where every time I become visibly annoyed with him he grins at me and raises his eyebrows and whispers, “You’re mine. You’re MINE.”

And I crack up. This kid! This manipulative, clever little bugger. I think we’re going to be in real trouble when he becomes a teenager.

—4—

Boy number three has been less charming lately. He is two. He is very, very much two. A couple of Sundays ago when our priest asked (playfully) why our boy had been screaming so loudly that we removed him from Mass, we explained that he has a major case of the TWO’s.

He is a screamer and though we are working on the screaming (i.e. lots of consequences for screaming), I will admit that the screaming is kind of driving me nutty. I do not like this phase.

I’m hopeful (though I may be deluding myself) that the screaming has something to do with the fact that our almost two-and-a-half-year-old is not yet talking. He says twenty or so fairly indistinguishable words, but he doesn’t yet put them together and he hardly ever uses them. He mostly just grunts. And screams.

We have a speech evaluation scheduled for the end of this month. If they deem him to be more than 25% behind, he’ll qualify for free in-home speech therapy. I’ve never before thought much of looking into such services, but now I’m all, “SIGN HIM UP.”

—5—

Our sweet baby girl, on the other hand, continues to be as sweet as she can possibly be. She’s still happy and laid-back and easy to handle. (Maybe she’s aware of our household’s overabundance of screaming?)

She’s feeling very well and eating and growing like a champ, but she still has salmonella in her system. We’re waiting on the results of the latest stool test. The last one (in late July) was positive and they need two consecutive negatives before they’ll consider her clear. Fingers crossed that the latest (taken in mid-August) is negative; then we’ll just need to do one more.

Little girl is now sitting up fairly well (though she still falls over) and is just beginning to become really, actually mobile via that rolling and scooting thing that babies do. Yesterday I put her down on a quilt in the family room, walked into the kitchen, and returned to find her missing. It took a few moments of looking around and listening for her cries before I located her.

I think she enjoys her new skill.

—6—

Apropos of nothing, I have recently been reminded of a few blogs I used to read. As in used to. As in no longer read. It’s been interesting to remember those blogs and what my life was like back when I was reading them and to realize that me no longer reading them actually has nothing to do with them.

It’s not you, old favorites – it’s me.

I’ve changed. I’ve moved, in some ways, into a new season of my life. What I needed then in terms of encouragement, inspiration, and commiseration, I no longer need. At least not right now.

I read different things these days, things that meet my current needs. Who knows where I’ll be looking for inspiration tomorrow.

The realization has helped me to calm down a bit re: my woe in Take #1. My readership isn’t what it used to be and there are probably a number of reasons for that. But one reason might just be that people move on and change and need things one day that they didn’t need the day before.

It’s a big ol’ lesson to me to just chill out and not worry too much about things you can’t control.

—7—

Can I tell you how excited I am about this weekend? I honestly can’t remember when I’ve had so many fun plans jammed into such a short span of time. Here’s the run-down:

Friday afternoon: Get my hair done! I plan to sit in that salon with a glass of wine and a good book and let everything having to do with Take number four just roll… off…. my… back.

Friday evening: Join one of my girlfriends and several of her girlfriends for a little mommies-only birthday party. We’re going to sit on her front porch in the cool evening air and drink cocktails and eat hors d’oeuvres and just enjoy being in each other’s company. I can hardly wait.

Saturday: Head to Virginia for this year’s Mid-Atlantic conference of the Catholic Women Bloggers Network. It’s being hosted by Rosie Hill of A Blog For My Mom and will feature Kelly Mantoan of This Ain’t the Lyceum and Mary Lenaburg of Passionate Perseverance and lots of other amazing ladies too. I’ll try to write about it when I get back. (I wrote about last year’s conference, which I hosted, here.)

Sunday: Drive to Annapolis with my husband for Mass at beautiful St. Mary’s Church (where we were married – see gratuitous wedding photo below), followed by a dedication and reception at the Charles Carroll House. Which was the Annapolis home of Charles Carroll of Carrolton, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. And on whose board of trustees I used to serve. (And, for those of you who keep up with the Catholic mommy blog world, where I once arranged a tour for Catholic All Year’s Tierney family.)

Whew! That’s a busy Labor Day weekend before even getting to Labor Day itself. I am so excited! Now let’s just pray that the hurricane/tropical storm working its way up the East Coast doesn’t dash our plans.

(I’m linking up with Kelly of This Ain’t The Lyceum for this week’s 7 Quick Takes. Be sure to stop by her place to see what she and the other 7-Quick-Taking crowd have been up to!)

***

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Last fall (I think it was last fall) when Jen Fulwiler and Hallie Lord announced that they were planning an Austin, Texas gathering geared toward Catholic mothers, I told my husband, “I really, really, really, really, really want to go.”

And I’ll have you know that those were some determined-sounding “really’s.”

I knew almost nothing about it, yet I wanted to go to The Edel Gathering more than I’d wanted anything in a long time. I can’t fully tell you why. Yes, a break sounded lovely. Yes, it was exciting to think of traveling to a new city and beyond exciting to think of getting to meet so many women whose writing I had come to love.

But there was something more. When I thought of Edel, more than anything else, I thought of opportunity. I felt like there was some special opportunity tied up with this event that I would be foolish to miss.

So I darned well made sure not to miss it.

As Edel (which was held the last weekend of July) drew near and as I began to see excited Facebook posts from my fellow attendees-to-be, I mostly lost sight of that first, powerful feeling regarding the gathering. Rather, I began to daydream about those things that Edel purported to aim for: relaxation, friendship, encouragement in my vocation as a mother.

I was going away for the weekend. I would be staying in a fancy hotel. I would be responsible for only one child. I would be surrounded by grown-ups. I would be eating delicious food and drinking wine (and maybe margaritas) and not doing the dishes. Any stay-at-home mother would be blinded by the prospect of such brilliance.

So imagine my surprise, as the weekend progressed, to realize that for me, Edel didn’t end up being about those things after all.

(This is where I pause to tell you why. This is where I tell you about how very tired I was and how it was cumbersome to have a baby with me – even a very good one. About how the baby had a major blowout in the middle of a popular restaurant. About how I kept running over people’s feet with my stroller. About how I didn’t spend as much time with my fellow Edel attendees as I would have liked, because of my exhaustion and my baby and my not fitting through crowds with my stroller. They’re all very exceptional challenges, you know.)

Yes, he’s naked in public for just the reason you think: an insufficient diaper and an unprepared mama. Thankfully, Grandma’s arms are nice and cozy.

In short, the weekend was not, on its face, quite as enjoyable as I had hoped it would be. And yet, it turned out that The Edel Gathering meant more to me than I could have ever anticipated.

In her opening remarks on Saturday, Hallie spoke about how she and Jen saw, again and again, the influence of the Holy Spirit in bringing The Edel Gathering to be.

Maybe you’re not the type who looks for traces of the Holy Spirit in everyday life. Maybe such talk seems a little superstitious to you. But I figure that if I believe in God, I’ve got to believe in more than an abstract concept. I’ve got to believe that God can have a tangible influence on my life, and that sometimes His influence can be sensed powerfully.

So it was for me last weekend. And so it seems to have been for many other women who attended The Edel Gathering. In countless Facebook and blog posts this past week, Edel attendees recounted the words that touched them, the support they found, and the messages they felt they were meant to receive.

Many seem to have taken to heart the words, “You are not alone.” And, “Your work is hard.” And, “There is no one way to be a good Catholic.” They are excellent messages to be sure, but they’re not the one that resonated most with me. If my own message could be put into a few words, it would be, “You are to work toward something more.”

I felt like I received a cascade of that message last weekend (and in the days that followed) – again and again, layer upon layer. The message seemed to be just about falling over itself to be known to me.

I felt like I was – I feel like I am – being instructed to consider my future beyond my role as a mother. Which seems sort of ironic, doesn’t it, to have come from an event that was meant to lift up the vocation of motherhood?

When I left my job as a lobbyist (which I loved) to stay home with my firstborn son, I was asked, again and again, “So when are you coming back?” It was difficult for me to convince people that I wasn’t just leaving for one year or for the few years it would take for my son to be old enough to go to school. “Well, I don’t know how many children we’ll have!” I would say. But it was more than that. I was ready to begin the child-rearing phase of my life and I wanted to do it whole-hog. I was in it for the long haul.

So other than a few cursory thoughts about some things I maybe, who knows, we’ll see might like to do when my boys go off to college, I hadn’t given much consideration to my own future. But at Edel it finally became clear to me: I still have most of my life ahead of me. (God willing.) I won’t forever be a mother to small children.

I assure you that I’m crazy about my boys and I love staying home with them, but can I tell you what a liberating thought that was for me? That I have my own personal future – not just that which is wrapped up in my family’s? And do you know what was almost as exciting to think of? That I may be called to do something in particular with my future – something that makes use of my natural talents and interests.

I work better when I have a plan, and I now realize that for years, I’ve been functioning without one. I’ve been so busy trying to get through the day in front of me that I haven’t been giving thought to the years. So this past week while I worked in my home – doing the same cooking and feeding and diapering I always do – I was pondering my life’s direction. And I did so with a sense of purpose and peace.

I am so thankful for that weekend. I’m thankful to Jen and Hallie for all their hard work in putting together The Edel Gathering. I’m thankful to all the wonderful women there who showed each other kindness and solidarity and Christ’s love. I’m thankful to the Holy Spirit for using the event to touch so many people and for pounding me over and over with a message that (I think) was meant just for me.

I’m thankful for the peace and the hope and the sense of opportunity I now feel.

These Walls

Sharing stories from within the walls of my home; encouraging discourse on the wider world outside them.

Catching Up (7 Quick Takes Friday, Vol. 41)

It Meant More Than It Was