We went in Tuesday to see our midwife and find out the sex of Baby #6; we were, well, shocked to find out that we're having yet another boy, especially after Bonnie and I took such delight in picking out all that pink quilt fabric and the pieces were already coming together. Bonnie began to cry during the ultrasound as soon as Jessica announced that he's a boy, and I've spent the remainder of the week in a state of mild befuddlement over what the cosmic plan is for my raising half the planet's testosterone in my own house. I told Bonnie that evening that, while I'm sad we don't get our little girl we've been waiting for, I can't help but be thankful for the gorgeous toes and fingers and ribs we see moving around on the ultrasound screen, obvious signs of a healthy, happy baby; so many people don't get healthy, whole babies. And yet, despite my preaching that perspective, I've felt a growing jealousy of every little girl I've seen all week, and I've felt a little resentful that we weren't getting our girl. We're 22 weeks along, by the way.
Enter the story of Shauna, my classmate from high school, who is 2 weeks behind me in her pregnancy. She was going in yesterday to find out the sex of her baby; I jokingly wrote on her Facebook page yesterday, "If you end up with a girl, wanna trade? I have 5 healthy boys to choose from!"
I'm glad Facebook has a delete button.
I confess that I stewed a little bit all afternoon yesterday, sure that Shauna would come home from her appointment and post to Facebook that she was having a girl, and being preemptively envious of her good fortune. But the afternoon waned on, and no word came. Then one of her sisters posted something alarming about praying for her sister, and then her other sister posted something similar. By this morning, the story was out that Shauna found out yesterday that she was having twin boys, and that she was in labor. There was twin-to-twin transfusion happening, and the excess fluid caused by this put her into labor; she was fully dilated by the time she felt a contraction. The boys, Luke and Josh, lived for 15 minutes last night, and then slipped away.
My sweet little healthy boy is kicking away in my belly as I type, and I have never been more grateful, or more shamed.
--Teri.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
i cry at books.
There's a long-standing tradition in my family of reading books aloud to each other; usually I'm the reader, and the rest of the family sits in wrapt attention while we live out in our collective mind the perils and adventures of real and imagined heroes and villains. Our latest literary escapade was Timothy Egan's newest work, The Big Burn. It's about the largest forest fire to ever sweep the United States which, on the surface, may not sound like the best topic for an entire book. But wrap that up with the personal stories of the men who fought it and survived or perished in the firestorm and the political underpinnings of the day, and you have an insanely nail-biting tale that had everyone from my five-year-old to a family friend begging for an excuse to have a chapter read to them. Whenever we had to pile into the van for an outing, the first question, before seatbelts, was, "Do you have the book?"
I possess no great skill in oral reading, but there's always something about having a story read aloud that people never outgrow. We've had weekend reading parties for years whenever the opportunity presented itself, usually looking something like what happens when a college frat house and a child's slumber party collide in our living room, big strapping guys draped over all the furniture next to kids-of-all-ages, lasting late into the night until everyone has lost the struggle to hold onto the last threads of consciousness and one more paragraph of whatever great story we're engaged in.
I'm never quite sure whether it's this unique synergy of generations of friends and family all tangled up in some exotic tale, or whether it's the story itself, but I often find myself struggling to continue on through the last few pages without a lump rising in my throat and warm tears obscuring the words on the last hallowed pages. By the final chapter of The Big Burn, I was a heap, almost sobbing while listening (my voice was out and Christopher had to finish off the last few pages for me) to the last breaths of lives that we'd become so enamored of during the past few weeks. My oldest son was surprised that tears were freely flowing down my cheeks, and he asked me why I was crying. What could I say? When it came down to trying to put that emotion into actual words, I came up short. What came to mind was, "How can I not?" I become so invested in the humble heroes of our epic tales, their struggles, victories, and losses, and the whole experience of reaching into a piece of literature and finding myself tugged by the hand from the other end, that it seems like a natural response in parting to shed a few tears and not want to say goodbye.
Maybe my son understands better than I do that it's never really a parting after all, but that the stories become a part of us as much as we become a part of them, and that they take up residence in our souls and color our view of the world, helping us become the heroes of our own stories.
--Teri.
I possess no great skill in oral reading, but there's always something about having a story read aloud that people never outgrow. We've had weekend reading parties for years whenever the opportunity presented itself, usually looking something like what happens when a college frat house and a child's slumber party collide in our living room, big strapping guys draped over all the furniture next to kids-of-all-ages, lasting late into the night until everyone has lost the struggle to hold onto the last threads of consciousness and one more paragraph of whatever great story we're engaged in.
I'm never quite sure whether it's this unique synergy of generations of friends and family all tangled up in some exotic tale, or whether it's the story itself, but I often find myself struggling to continue on through the last few pages without a lump rising in my throat and warm tears obscuring the words on the last hallowed pages. By the final chapter of The Big Burn, I was a heap, almost sobbing while listening (my voice was out and Christopher had to finish off the last few pages for me) to the last breaths of lives that we'd become so enamored of during the past few weeks. My oldest son was surprised that tears were freely flowing down my cheeks, and he asked me why I was crying. What could I say? When it came down to trying to put that emotion into actual words, I came up short. What came to mind was, "How can I not?" I become so invested in the humble heroes of our epic tales, their struggles, victories, and losses, and the whole experience of reaching into a piece of literature and finding myself tugged by the hand from the other end, that it seems like a natural response in parting to shed a few tears and not want to say goodbye.
Maybe my son understands better than I do that it's never really a parting after all, but that the stories become a part of us as much as we become a part of them, and that they take up residence in our souls and color our view of the world, helping us become the heroes of our own stories.
--Teri.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
duggaresque...part deux
I'm always a little nervous when I find those rosy places in the blogosphere where nothing is ever messy and the world is just dang skippy all the time, and lest anyone get the wrong impression from my last post that my artsy little sweet-spot of a home is all peaches and smiles, I submit to you Duggaresque...Part Deux.
Have you ever visited a real art museum? Well, yeah, me neither, but let's pretend for a minute. The halls are lined with inspiring works of imagination from some of the great minds in the craft over the centuries. Statues stand, loftily and perfectly, somehow above the sometimes-chaotic crowd bustling around below. There are no boogers here. And no wet paint.
Okay, now then, for a bit of perspective, have you ever visited a children's museum? You go over to the super-trendy 'art station' to have the kids create something, only to find that some hungry little "artist" has already made off with the tips of every single broad-tipped marker in the building, probably having eaten them and chased them down with glue or tempera paint, and obviously the green glitter, which also seems to be completely empty. And what's this? Oh, how nice--fingerpaint in puddles on the floor, and now on your shoe, and somehow up your pant leg, and suddenly all over your hands and the diaper bag and the baby and your hair. Nice.
Maybe the scupture station is a little more well-organized, so you make tracks (literally--remember the paint on your shoe?) over in that direction, only to find that the glue-glutting kid from the first station found out the hard way that those items don't sit so well in the stomach and somehow the cleanup crew has missed his not-so-little technicolor masterpiece now oozing into the carpet, you know, for posterity to enjoy, since it's full of glue (ooh, and that pretty green glitter!) and rapidly becoming one with the floor. Maybe they'll give it a name and make it one of the permanent exhibits, if the administration hasn't set aside funds for new carpet in this sort of event. But we were talking sculpture, weren't we? Ahhhh, modeling clay. Since the manufactureres of this staple of childhood creativity haven't yet discovered a way of keeping the colors from 1)bleeding 2)mixing or 3)smearing all over every surface they touch, at least without making the whole compound so toxic that you need a decontamination shower after opening the package, you try your best to interest the kids in the gummy-lump of poop-brown clayglomerate before you. Somehow, the best you or they can manage to come up with resembles strongly a zoo display of wild animal scat (those little pellets are from African pygmy deer; that big lump? Supposed to be a giraffe, but doesn't that look just like Siberian wolf scat after its latest meal of boneless mouse wings?)
I think of the Duggar's little television-world home in kind of the same way as that art museum: we don't see the mess, only the masterpiece. Nevermind that Van Gogh got so frustrated that he whacked off his own ear (I'm sure Michelle Duggar never has those kinds of days); and you think that Jackson Pollack started out by slinging paint at his canvas? Anyone care to guess what happened if the great sculptors of antiquity suddenly found themselves with a one-armed Venus because of one wrong chisel blow? They'd stick it back on with wax mixed with some rock dust, pack it up quick and ship it away to the buyer, and pray that a sunny day didn't come along too soon! Isn't that a bit like the TLC show, where the snotty noses and puddles of vomit are somehow edited out, and we get to watch a polished, perfect family moving in unison and having-a-very-nice-day-every-day-of-the-week?
My house, on the other hand, is more like the children's museum on most days--we have a lot of fun and we make a lot of mess. Oh, sure, there are some great works of art here, but they're works in progress, and sometimes the chisel hits a little too hard, or sometimes not hard enough, and sometimes we have to pray that the wax will hold. I may not be tempted to cut my ears off, but you can bet that sometimes I want to pull my hair out! And sometimes I've been found guilty of slinging the paint like Pollack and leaving the world to wonder, "What was she thinking??" And on some days, the best I can manage to create feels and looks an aweful lot like a pile of crap.
But there are days, when I take a peek past the hallowed doors of the future imagined, into the day when my dripping, cracking, smearing works-of-art are finally completed, when I have lovingly applied the last brush strokes, smoothed the last surface on the alabaster man, carved my name into the heart of each one, and see a moment when I have offered up my best works to the world, ready to take their places in the hall of great masterpieces. No one will remember the children's museum days when we struggled to make sense of anything, when we all wondered how this art project would turn out, when we wanted to sling paint all over our hard work, and when tears and goobers were all part of the process.
On that day I'll stroll past in silence, admiring the beauty, and make one last track of fresh fingerpaint footprints down the hallway on my way past.
--Teri.
Have you ever visited a real art museum? Well, yeah, me neither, but let's pretend for a minute. The halls are lined with inspiring works of imagination from some of the great minds in the craft over the centuries. Statues stand, loftily and perfectly, somehow above the sometimes-chaotic crowd bustling around below. There are no boogers here. And no wet paint.
Okay, now then, for a bit of perspective, have you ever visited a children's museum? You go over to the super-trendy 'art station' to have the kids create something, only to find that some hungry little "artist" has already made off with the tips of every single broad-tipped marker in the building, probably having eaten them and chased them down with glue or tempera paint, and obviously the green glitter, which also seems to be completely empty. And what's this? Oh, how nice--fingerpaint in puddles on the floor, and now on your shoe, and somehow up your pant leg, and suddenly all over your hands and the diaper bag and the baby and your hair. Nice.
Maybe the scupture station is a little more well-organized, so you make tracks (literally--remember the paint on your shoe?) over in that direction, only to find that the glue-glutting kid from the first station found out the hard way that those items don't sit so well in the stomach and somehow the cleanup crew has missed his not-so-little technicolor masterpiece now oozing into the carpet, you know, for posterity to enjoy, since it's full of glue (ooh, and that pretty green glitter!) and rapidly becoming one with the floor. Maybe they'll give it a name and make it one of the permanent exhibits, if the administration hasn't set aside funds for new carpet in this sort of event. But we were talking sculpture, weren't we? Ahhhh, modeling clay. Since the manufactureres of this staple of childhood creativity haven't yet discovered a way of keeping the colors from 1)bleeding 2)mixing or 3)smearing all over every surface they touch, at least without making the whole compound so toxic that you need a decontamination shower after opening the package, you try your best to interest the kids in the gummy-lump of poop-brown clayglomerate before you. Somehow, the best you or they can manage to come up with resembles strongly a zoo display of wild animal scat (those little pellets are from African pygmy deer; that big lump? Supposed to be a giraffe, but doesn't that look just like Siberian wolf scat after its latest meal of boneless mouse wings?)
I think of the Duggar's little television-world home in kind of the same way as that art museum: we don't see the mess, only the masterpiece. Nevermind that Van Gogh got so frustrated that he whacked off his own ear (I'm sure Michelle Duggar never has those kinds of days); and you think that Jackson Pollack started out by slinging paint at his canvas? Anyone care to guess what happened if the great sculptors of antiquity suddenly found themselves with a one-armed Venus because of one wrong chisel blow? They'd stick it back on with wax mixed with some rock dust, pack it up quick and ship it away to the buyer, and pray that a sunny day didn't come along too soon! Isn't that a bit like the TLC show, where the snotty noses and puddles of vomit are somehow edited out, and we get to watch a polished, perfect family moving in unison and having-a-very-nice-day-every-day-of-the-week?
My house, on the other hand, is more like the children's museum on most days--we have a lot of fun and we make a lot of mess. Oh, sure, there are some great works of art here, but they're works in progress, and sometimes the chisel hits a little too hard, or sometimes not hard enough, and sometimes we have to pray that the wax will hold. I may not be tempted to cut my ears off, but you can bet that sometimes I want to pull my hair out! And sometimes I've been found guilty of slinging the paint like Pollack and leaving the world to wonder, "What was she thinking??" And on some days, the best I can manage to create feels and looks an aweful lot like a pile of crap.
But there are days, when I take a peek past the hallowed doors of the future imagined, into the day when my dripping, cracking, smearing works-of-art are finally completed, when I have lovingly applied the last brush strokes, smoothed the last surface on the alabaster man, carved my name into the heart of each one, and see a moment when I have offered up my best works to the world, ready to take their places in the hall of great masterpieces. No one will remember the children's museum days when we struggled to make sense of anything, when we all wondered how this art project would turn out, when we wanted to sling paint all over our hard work, and when tears and goobers were all part of the process.
On that day I'll stroll past in silence, admiring the beauty, and make one last track of fresh fingerpaint footprints down the hallway on my way past.
--Teri.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
duggaresque
As my belly begins to be a little more conspicuous lately as our sixth child gains a sizable standing (literally!) in our family , I'm getting more and more comments from mostly-well-intentioned people comparing our family to the (in)famous Duggar family of TLC renown. Somehow, now that we're standing on the lofty edge of 6 children, everyone we know (and most that we don't!) are tempted to throw a rope across that vast divide that separates our 6 children from the Duggar family's 19, and wait for us on the other side.
Like we're physically capable of raising 19 children without literally, figuratively, and in every other sense dropping dead (I'm flattered by the notion, really).
The critics of the Duggar family's jackpot of offspring complain that the family is too big, too white, too Christian, too organized, too delegated, too mid-western...the list goes on. There seems to be a never-ending stream of criticisms against a family who has chosen to go counter-culture and have a lot of children, receiving them as gifts, nondiscriminately and in their own time. And that pretty much scares the crap out of me.
We've decided to go counter-culture, too. Our kids don't mix with a ton of other children, we homeschool, we don't own a television, the kids have a lot of responsibility for their ages. We have about three times the culturally accepted number of children, and people are afraid we're not quitting. Some people wring their hands and worry that we're environmentally irresponsible, that we're rabidly over-populating the planet almost singlehandedly, that we're raising an army of homogenized, milky-white prosumers with a cultural appreciation for grilled-cheese-and-that's-about-it. They worry that maybe we don't recycle enough, that the kids will all grow up Republican, that they'll hate the arts and freak out when they hit sunlight.
But do I have to apologize now for being white, Christian, or mid-western? Do I have to apologize that I consider myself an artist's tool in the hands of the Great Artist, and that I consider my children to be masterpieces that I helped create? Last time I checked, my lily-whiteness wasn't on the menu of life-choices I was given, so I can't really back-pedal on that one. The mid-western thing might can be remedied, but still not really a reason to be apologetic. And as for my Christianity, while sometimes an embarrassment because of the knuckle-heads in our ranks (I include myself in this epithet at various times), I can't really apologize for that, either. Or won't, anyway.
So that leaves the kids. All. These. Kids. And I wouldn't dream of apologizing for these little jewels, their amazing uniqueness, the obviousness of their potential impact on a hurting world. One scathing commentary on the Duggar's children called the latest addition to the family a "mewling sewer rat". Really. Really?? Has that nay-sayer never held a little 'mewling rat' in his arms and fell in love in the most irrational and profound way possible? Has he never looked into the face of a little one and seen the future, fresh and undefiled? How could I possibly apologize for helping to raise my very own passel of little tomorrows? Heck, they may all grow up Republican, and we may not recycle enough, and there's at least one of my brood who has good reason to freak out when he hits sunlight (oh, the woeful whiteness!), but not only will these kids love the arts, they are the arts--little kinetic masterpieces in a world in need of colorful motion. I could no more apologize for my children than Michaelangelo could have apologized for the statue of David.
But we will try to recycle more.
--Teri.
Like we're physically capable of raising 19 children without literally, figuratively, and in every other sense dropping dead (I'm flattered by the notion, really).
The critics of the Duggar family's jackpot of offspring complain that the family is too big, too white, too Christian, too organized, too delegated, too mid-western...the list goes on. There seems to be a never-ending stream of criticisms against a family who has chosen to go counter-culture and have a lot of children, receiving them as gifts, nondiscriminately and in their own time. And that pretty much scares the crap out of me.
We've decided to go counter-culture, too. Our kids don't mix with a ton of other children, we homeschool, we don't own a television, the kids have a lot of responsibility for their ages. We have about three times the culturally accepted number of children, and people are afraid we're not quitting. Some people wring their hands and worry that we're environmentally irresponsible, that we're rabidly over-populating the planet almost singlehandedly, that we're raising an army of homogenized, milky-white prosumers with a cultural appreciation for grilled-cheese-and-that's-about-it. They worry that maybe we don't recycle enough, that the kids will all grow up Republican, that they'll hate the arts and freak out when they hit sunlight.
But do I have to apologize now for being white, Christian, or mid-western? Do I have to apologize that I consider myself an artist's tool in the hands of the Great Artist, and that I consider my children to be masterpieces that I helped create? Last time I checked, my lily-whiteness wasn't on the menu of life-choices I was given, so I can't really back-pedal on that one. The mid-western thing might can be remedied, but still not really a reason to be apologetic. And as for my Christianity, while sometimes an embarrassment because of the knuckle-heads in our ranks (I include myself in this epithet at various times), I can't really apologize for that, either. Or won't, anyway.
So that leaves the kids. All. These. Kids. And I wouldn't dream of apologizing for these little jewels, their amazing uniqueness, the obviousness of their potential impact on a hurting world. One scathing commentary on the Duggar's children called the latest addition to the family a "mewling sewer rat". Really. Really?? Has that nay-sayer never held a little 'mewling rat' in his arms and fell in love in the most irrational and profound way possible? Has he never looked into the face of a little one and seen the future, fresh and undefiled? How could I possibly apologize for helping to raise my very own passel of little tomorrows? Heck, they may all grow up Republican, and we may not recycle enough, and there's at least one of my brood who has good reason to freak out when he hits sunlight (oh, the woeful whiteness!), but not only will these kids love the arts, they are the arts--little kinetic masterpieces in a world in need of colorful motion. I could no more apologize for my children than Michaelangelo could have apologized for the statue of David.
But we will try to recycle more.
--Teri.
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