thoughts in the deep of night

I've arrived here somehow, still oddly awake at an obscene hour and creeping up to the edges of thoughts that are too sleepy in the daytime to make themselves known. It's the time of night when the world finally gets surreal enough for my head to speak up and remind me that the goings-on up there involve more than the mechanics of my day-to-dayness, that there is a deep, quietly rippling moonlit pool there and a small me sitting at the edge, wanting to dive in and find out what's at the bottom.

Or maybe it's not really what lies at the bottom of that pool that draws me at all, but the sensation of swimming through it, the waters flowing through body and soul, undulating with the outward-moving memory of that first contact below the surface. Maybe it's the process, the impossible-to-describe feeling of getting back in touch with that part of my mind that needs the awareness of something beyond get-up-and-work-and-cook-and-breathe-and-teach-and-sleep, something warm with the aqueous promise of higher purpose and deeper meaning.

It's been weeks since my smaller self has sat at the brim of the moonlit pool in my mind, and it feels good tonight just to soak up the silence and dip my toes in again, swirling them around in introspection and wondering....
--Teri.

elisha's life on the run

So I lost my kid yesterday. Oh, and I'm due to give birth this week. He's not quite 2 and somehow escaped my notice for, ohh, about 4 minutes while we were at a friend's new apartment with another friend and all of our children, 11 in all, 3 of which are precisely Elisha's size. He trucked his little self down the stairs, out the door, and down the street; most of that time we were frantically looking for him around the apartment, and then spread out towards the great mortifying outdoors. After about 45 seconds, we saw a lady down the street crouching down and it ocurred to us that maybe she had Elisha, so I sent Ben down the street to check while I waddled with all my might after him. Sure enough, this kind lady had intercepted my mischievous toddler in the middle of the road, heading towards God-knows-where, and her first impulse (instead of looking around to see 8 children and a herniated woman running around like maniacs) was to call the police.

Nice.

So now I had to talk to the police, tell them my name, why my child got away from me and, dread of dreads, my location. They sent a car around to scope out the situation, and the lady-cop who came in began asking me the probably-usual gauntlet of questions, like how he got out, how it was I didn't manage to notice this, et cetera, et cetera. What she said and what I heard were, naturally, two different things entirely, so my rough translation would go something like:
"Are you an imbecile? Can you not keep up with a 2-year-old?"
"I should probably haul you in now for child neglect."
"What, your children are running wild through the streets and you're PREGNANT again?!?"

After this, she left, and I searched high and low for some duct tape. Unable to find any, I merely became incredibly irritable for the remainder of the afternoon, questioning my basic competency not only as a mother but as a human being and a citizen of Earth, and suddenly craving something very, very sweet to take away the bitter taste of my run-in with the law.

--Teri.

under and over: the cycle of motivation and commitment in my third trimester.

I really ought to be educating my children right now, but their bedroom floor is covered in biscuit crumbs and thousands of partially-sorted legos, and Elisha is trapped in his high chair in the middle of it all with a runny nose and sticky fingers...really, would you want to interfere with that kind of childhood utopia? Oh, and Gabe is bleeding from the knee.

I woke up with a sore throat this morning and so slept in for a bit and let the children do their own thing for awhile, and the resulting, uhm, harmony? is just a little more than I think I can tackle for the moment. So I'm escaping for a bit and writing down some random things for no particular reason. Isn't it good to know that these five precious lives are in such capable, responsible hands this morning?

Anyway, we have just about 8 weeks left of what is looking like our very last pregnancy. I imagine I'll always have conflicting feelings about ceasing to be a baby mill, but I've talked through it with my psychologically-astute husband and we've determined that 1)we're creatures of habit and have been in the baby-making business for so long that it's just going to take some adjusting to changing our pattern, 2) we're really good at this job (especially this morning, obviously!) and it's hard to mess with a good thing, like Oprah canceling her show after all this time, and 3) having kids has given us a false feeling of eternal youth, and making this our last kid is a stark admission that we're not spring chickens anymore. It's a lot to take in all at once, particularly with the wash of maternal hormones I've been high on for the last 11 years.

On the other hand, there are some strong motivations for not having any more kids, things like imagining having to spend our days in front of tv cameras on a reality show, the fear of being mistakenly called 'Mrs. Duggar' in the grocery store, and actually having been called a 'brood mare' in public at full volume. neigh. sigh. Oh, and the strongest motivator of all, of course, is the horrifying prospect of having to drive a white 10-passenger van (because white is the only color they come in, you know) for the next decade. That single thought is enough for me to line up 10 interviews with urologists for my husband this week! At least with six kids we can still cram ourselves into a Toyota Sienna, try not to breathe or fart on one another, and get ourselves from point A to point B legally.

So maybe it's denial, and maybe it's just my nature, but I've managed to completely over-commit myself for the next 8 weeks. None of this sitting-around-and-nesting-with-my-unborn-child business for me! Nope, before this is all said and done, I've managed to schedule:
*teaching a weekly childbirth education class for my kids plus 3 others
*hosting a weekly marriage class in our home every Wednesday night until Asa is at least a month old
*making a wedding cake for 200 people--in Pueblo
*helping my husband get ready to officiate that same wedding
*making Bonnie her annual dress for the father/daughter dance
*finishing the baby's quilt
*helping my local doula association with marketing materials and other such interestingness
*making a white chocolate castle for this year's chocolate contest (because I'm not going to let a little thing like 8 months of pregnant belly keep me from getting my dang ribbon this year!)
*Attending a post-secondary trauma workshop for birth professionals (hey, this could come in handy with all the post-secondary trauma I'm putting myself through with all the other stuff I have to do!)
*Oh, and somewhere in there, I expect to go into labor at just the wrong moment and have 10 or 11 pounds of baby to aid me in my adventures.

What is wrong with me?! And the worst part of it might be the fact that I just want to sit on the couch and bore my friends and relatives with incessant yammering on about all this! Well, the upshot, I guess, is that I've managed to inhale a few times now and might can trudge upstairs now and deal with what lies in the kids' bedroom.

Blood and crumbs, here I come!

--Teri.

on fear.

"...yeah, but what is it, really, that's keeping me
From living a life that's true?
When the worries speak louder than wisdom,
It drowns out all the answers I knew.
So I'm tossed on the waves of that surface;
Still, the mystery's dark and deep,
With a much more frightening stillness...
Underneath."
--David Wilcox, Underneath

I've been ruminating again on the purposes of pain and fear in our souls, what roles they play and how to master them. I came to the conclusion years ago as I prepared to give birth to my fourth child that pain has a powerful effect on us when we let it; it makes us immeasurably stronger when faced with all of our courage, or it breaks us down and shows us how weak we can be when it's not. It has been a powerful lesson for me and remains incredibly important for me, especially as I prepare to birth my sixth child.

But what of fear?

It seems that fear is a different animal entirely, more elusive, more difficult to control, and more threatening, whether real or imagined. It takes bravery to stare down pain, but it takes something different, I think, to master fear.

I've always been intrigued by the apostle John's take on the subject: "Perfect love banishes fear".

Perfect love.

Banishes!

Fear.

It's a lot to take in, if we're honest. But if we look deep into the underneath, what it is that ultimately motivates us to get past the crippling fear we experience? When all we have is an incomplete equation and we're forced to find the answer or to fail, is it not a deeper love that rises to cast out that fear?

So then the question becomes personal: how do I develop that kind of love? I suppose it's a discipline of the heart and of the mind, one that chooses to say,
"I'm afraid for the people of Haiti...but I love them more and so will not do nothing."

"I'm scared to take this huge, life-altering step and I don't know what lies on the other side, but I love more than I fear, and so I will not be paralyzed."

"Life can be dangerous and painful and even cut short, but to live is to love, and so I will live fully."

And what a strange, beautiful paradox that love leads us to such vulnerability that we can be so affected by fear, and yet is so much stronger than the fear when we cultivate it and take the risk to find out if our love is really strong enough to banish the fear, underneath.

--Teri.

my funny micro-date

About a mile from our house is a Pei Wei restaurant, and Christopher and I often take little dates there, leaving the kids at home for a bit so we can spend a little time together. The food is always good and hot, the floor is red, and you can eat as many fortune cookies as you want--and how sweet is that?

On Saturday, we escaped once again for our little micro-date at Pei Wei, and found it to be a super-busy afternoon, so we were scrunched in between 2 other couples at narrow tables along the back wall. No big deal. We had some things we needed to talk about, but nothing so heavy that it needed to be secretive, so we didn't mind it.

The two ladies to my left were talking about how much they loved Pei Wei, when suddenly one of them turned to me and said, "Do you two just LOVE this place?" We answered that yeah, we loved it, because it was so yummy but also close to home, etc etc. It came out that we had 5 kids at home, and then her eyes got wide as they came to rest on my rounded belly; she blurted out jocularly, "You're PREGANANT AGAIN?!?" At that point, half the restaurant turned completely around and stared at me. I waved, Miss America-style, and acknowledged that yes, we're pregnant again.

With the other diners still looking on, this flamboyant lady turned to Christopher now and said, still in an incredulously loud voice, "You IMPLANTED your SPERM in her SIX TIMES?!?" "You TURNED her into a BROOD MARE?!?" Christopher laughed and said something like, "Yup!" in a tone that landed somewhere between embarrassment and pride (mostly pride, as I later found out; when I asked him if he was horrified by that, he said, "Nope, with 6 kids, it's a little hard to deny!")

We went on to have a really fun and enlightening conversation with these two ladies and I even shared my shrimp with her. We talked about how she hated her one childbirth experience, how she hated mothering, how she wondered if we had fun with that many kids and whether I ever cry.

In the end, we didn't mind our date being interrupted or having the whole restaurant know that my husband is a stud (uhh, literally?!); it was a fun encounter and an unexpected twist to our day.

--Teri.

hearts aflame

I accidently set fire to my children yesterday.

It was really a school day like most others, only I was more grumpy than usual (woe to the children!) and just going through the motions of teaching. On days such as these, I generally sit loftily and moodily in my teacher's chair, coldly barking commands from afar and expecting an atmosphere of silence and contemplation.

What I usually get instead is a reflection of my own inner thoughts: broody, sulky, disinterested kids. Oh, the lessons we teach.

So when the fire broke out yesterday, my first impulse was to extinguish it. It started quietly enough, with an obligatory science lesson about the ocean. Then it turned imperceptibly toward benthos, and a faint flicker was seen. Before I knew what was happening, four children with tongues of fire leaping in their little heads were crowded around a computer screen, hungrily researching the most nefarious-looking bottom sea dwellers, yard stick in hand, ready to measure every specimen for maximum impact.

Somewhere in the back of my persnickety mind, thoughts of moving on to a math lesson loosened their grip and began to fade away, finally and reluctantly surrendering themselves to the flames, and I was able to let the rest of my school day be consumed entirely, a warm glow replacing the coldness of my bad attitude.

Thank God for small miracles.

--Teri.

holy days

We’ve spent much of the past year “chasing after the fleeting winds of youth, through forests of indecision”, as I wrote long ago in high school, way before I actually knew what that meant. It turns out there’s great fun to be had in trying to catch certain moments as they fly past, all giggling and breathless and fresh from the well-springs of young hearts alive with discovery; but then the task gets more difficult: trying to capture them for keeps, to preserve them as vibrant and bright and meaningful—that’s the real trick, isn’t it? And yet that’s where we manage to find some of our highest purpose, while wading through the messiness of life, of new jobs and new babies and new challenges that tempt us to become overwhelmed in the sheer inconstancy of it all.

And 2009 has certainly proven to be that kind of year: we’ve made major life decisions and changes, career shifts, and discovered that our passel of 5 children evidently was not complete, and now we expect our sixth sometime in late March of 2010. The children have grown, and changed, and are all finding ways to make their marks on the world already, even as we—as their parents—work to find ways to make our marks on their hearts, through the sacred days that are masked in the mundane.
We had the delight this year of trekking up to Yellowstone, one of the most fascinating and beautiful geological wonders on the entire planet. We were struck by the changing, moving nature of the earth in that place, how some places within the park can grow by several feet a year, while others recede, a terrestrial dance of balance. This is no sterile, stagnant monument for the ages; instead, it is the very picture of creative forces at work, forging their paths up through what, at first glance, seems to be impenetrable rock. The result is often chaotic and sometimes a little scary, but always beautiful and irresistibly thrilling.

We’ve found a great many parallels between our experiences in Yellowstone and those within our network of family and friends this year; the nature of our relationships is always changing—growing or receding or just changing form—and what we wind up with is always beautiful in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Late nights at the coffee house with a few good friends, an impromptu dinner with someone we just met, game night with cousins up in the mountains of Montana, even a frightening evening in an urgent care waiting room with the children huddled about; all of these experiences, though often unplanned, have been little expressions of a great Love bubbling below the surface of our lives, rising to break that surface and creating something surprising and Beautiful. These are the moments that we treasure and chase after, trying to capture them, like snapshots, for the scrapbooks of our hearts. And we thank God—and you, our precious friends and family—for the chance to experience the greatness of the small moments we’ve shared with you throughout the year. It is our prayer that we learn to let more of those moments happen with each of you, to look past the façade of our mundane everydayness and reach out for the Creative and the Beautiful, wanting and waiting to happen.

We pray you a coming year of fullness and grace and vision to take hold of what is truly important in the world, beyond dirty dishes and money and commitments and schedules, and all that threatens to cloud the sight, and into the real joy of capturing the great moments for all that they’re worth.

a hard lesson in gratitude

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.

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.

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.