Give us this day

I've long struggled with how to introduce Jesus to my children in ways that would not seem manipulative. As a teenager, I began to feel manipulated by how Jesus was presented to me. I've never been one to feel that going to church was absolutely necessary for salvation or favor in God's eyes. Staying away from church for as long as I have has actually helped me to think more clearly about God and what that concept means to me.

I've wondered, though, how exactly to convey the depth of my faith to a child who has not yet had the depth of experience that I've had.

A few weeks ago, the older kids came across a set of rosary beads. They both thought it was a really cool necklace. I told them they were rosary beads. Naturally, the next question was "What are rosary beads?"

I explained that they were special beads that people use to say prayers and think about Jesus -- very simplistic, I know. So from there, I introduced them to The Lord's Prayer. Big Brother repeated the lines after me. I stopped every few lines to talk about words such as trespass and temptation.

Give us this day our daily bread, I told them, means that we are asking God to give us what we need.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, I explained, means that Jesus forgives us our sins and, in return, expects us to forgive others.

A trespass is another word for sin, I told him.

What's sin? he asked.

It's when you do something that you know is wrong, I said.

And as if on cue, he reaches out and grabs a ball from his sister's hand.

That was the wrong thing to do, I told him. And he gave it back to her.

Next we discussed temptation. And as I'm explaining what it means to be tempted, he begins to sneak his hand toward the ball in Girlface's hands while eying me.

You're tempted to take that ball even though you know it's wrong, aren't you? I asked.

He admitted that he was.

So, without really trying and without feeling like I manipulated my children, I conveyed the three of the most important things that I pray to God for: give me what I need spiritually and physically, forgive me and help me behave.

We've also been reading a daily devotional book during what Big Brother has come to call "blanket time." Basically, it's our morning devotional time. We read our devotion, talk about it and do a prayer. Big Brother is pretty good about repeating the prayers after me, but one morning he said, "Wait, I want to do the prayer." And he started, "Dear God, I want to talk to you."

And I was stunned and humbled.

I've been telling him that prayer is just a conversation with God and that he can talk to Him whenever he feels scared or unsure of what to do next. I didn't think it actually would sink in. I mean, why would I think that it would sink in? This is the kid who still STILL leaves the door open when he goes inside or outside.

Next up? The rules. I found a children's book about the Ten Commandments at my favorite thrift shop. I began reading it to Big Brother and Girlface. I figured that I should start with love, forgiveness and conversation with God before moving on to the rules.

Breath of heaven

One morning this week, as our infant son wailed in his "room" (our walk-in closet) from his "bed" (a pack and play), I nudged my husband and asked "Are you awake?" He grunted. I took it as a maybe.

He later told me that he heard a small voice asking him if he was awake, and while he was indeed awake, he couldn't muster the strength to form any words.

That's how I've felt lately about, well, everything. I'm awake, but I can't really speak or think too clearly. It's been about 10 days since I've posted anything in this place. It's December. We've celebrated Big Brother's birthday. We've decorated for Christmas, mostly outside because our children would destroy whatever we put up. We've gotten a tree which will stay outdoors until a day or so before Christmas. It's even snowed, a lovely, soft snow.

But life goes on. We're in survival mode. I have seven-month-old who is doing this:

I have a little girl who is almost two and trying to potty train herself. (It's not as serendipitous as it sounds. So far this weekend she's peed on the floor and wiped poop on the fridge but at least gone potty a few times on her own.)

I have a four year old who is, well, now that I think of it, actually quite pleasant and fun right now despite the fits of willfulness.

The laundry is backed up. I literally cried when Girlface knocked over my pile of folded laundry. After that, I stopped folding and just stuffed all my clothes in my drawers. (This hurts, people. I used to fold and organize my shirts by color.)

I have three parties this week, one involves a cookie exchange (yeah!!) and the others involve bringing some type of food. And I've scheduled our first attempt at family portrait session, or, as I will likely refer to it for years to come, the holiday suicide mission.

My first attempt at a Christmas calendar was so badly botched by the drug store that I abandoned the entire project and started over with a different store. So much for quick, easy and convenient. On my way home from the store, feeling defeated and stressed, I heard a Christmas song with this charming line, "There's something about Christmas time, makes you wish it was Christmas every day."

Um, really?

I wanted to punch the radio. Better yet, I'd like to hunt down that Bryan Adams and punch his silly Canadian face. (No offense to my French Canadian relatives, of course.)

Christmas is hard enough for me without all this going on. Every year I am dismayed by the excess and the lack of authenticity surrounding celebrations and depictions of Christmas. Every year I struggle with how to connect the dots for myself and my children from the gift giving we do for each other to the gift of the baby Jesus, because, really, a new cell phone or a remote control car or even a real car pales in comparison to that gift. Let's face it, I'm not going to out-give Jesus.

Every year I struggle to explain to a child and myself why we put plastic wreaths and garland and lights up in our house and decorate a live Christmas tree. I mean, it can't just be that we like all the extra vacuuming that comes with these things. I awkwardly explained to Big Brother the other night that we'd celebrate Jesus' birth soon by bringing our tree in the house. Jim then summed up my confusion nicely, surmising what Jesus may actually think of our charade down here.

"You cut down a live tree and wrapped it with electric lights and put what under it to celebrate my birthday?"

Yeah, what he said. But I would add, "And you spent how much time and energy and money on this?"

Every year I spend at least the first two weeks of December stressed about what to buy for whom and how what I buy will compare to what I receive and whether any of it will be good enough or thoughtful enough. I even feel slightly stressed that while I'm thinking of all these things, the true story of Christmas is not weighing sufficiently enough on my heart. See, guilt is so second nature to me; I was just born to be Catholic.

And, speaking of Catholic, someone showed me to this the other day:

Mary. Doing to Jesus what every mother on earth does to her baby. Hold them close and kiss them. A lot. And I imagine, too, that she's feeling the breath of her son, that breath of heaven, soft and ticklish on her cheek. (I suspect that she's also whispering in his ear that he really should sleep more and let her get some rest.)

My grandmother was Catholic. Much of my father's family is Catholic. I was not raised Catholic, though I chose Catholicism as an adult. Growing up, I never understood my grandmother's love for Mary. It seemed like an obsession, beyond understanding. The year that I played Mary in our church's live nativity scene was a proud year for her. Photos of me dressed as Mary adorned her apartment for years. She once, to my mother's great distress and horror, put a string of rosary beads around my neck when I was a toddler. I'm not sure if it was the Catholic-ness of the beads or the strangulation risk that upset her.

Friday morning, I worked at my Parents Morning Out program at our church. Around 9:30 or so, I sat in the darkened back portion of the church to nurse The Baby before his nap. A group was up front saying the rosary. I sat silently and listened.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art though amongst women and blessed is the fruit of they womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.


And I finally felt a little peace about the season. I felt that breath of heaven as I sat with my son, who was breathing steadily in my arms.

Now that I'm a mother, I understand Mary, perhaps better than I understand Jesus, and I understand his love for me. I understand selfless, imperfect love, the kind that would lay down its life for the same child that you want to strangle when they smear poop on the refrigerator door. I understand being afraid of the task I've been charged with. I understand feeling blessed yet unprepared to raise these children. I understand doubt, I understand fear because never before has so much been at stake.

I believe there's a little bit of Mary in all mothers. Esteemed, shown a divine mercy, uncertain but hopeful. The image of Mary and her son is the picture of Christmas to me, not the lights or the decorations or the gifts or the songs or even the food that I love to cook. It's the familiar feeling I get at the sight of her nuzzling that baby in her arms. Because I know what that kind of love feels like. I get to feel it whenever I choose to, not just in December or during the entire Advent season.

And I get to remember that I, too, am loved that way.

Cosmic dot to dot

I made a decision Wednesday afternoon not to attend a childbirth educator workshop as scheduled. It was made an hour before we were set to leave. With the car packed. And my mom there to take care of the older kids. And it was the third time I had changed my mind that day.

The organization I was about to involve my family in is embroiled in a dispute among its members. One camp started its own certifying body in response to years of dissatisfaction with the current management. Lawyers are involved. And very strong, passionate personalities. And a whole lot of contention and uncertainty.


I didn't make this decision with my head, though. It's a little foggy up there from four years of intense sleep deprivation. My gut and my ailing, exhausted body had to convince my brain.

This organizational uprising came to a head Friday, October 29. I was supposed to leave Wednesday, November 3. And now I and countless others are in limbo. Some people I know have switched to the new organization. Others are on the fence. Still others are firmly entrenched with the original group. Clearly, I can't make this decision based on what others are doing.

I'd like to say that 11 years of learning to live a certain way of life helped me let go of the issue and focus on recuperating and spending time with my family this weekend. I spent way too much time monitoring the situation online, which is where much of it played out over the past week. And along with my head exploding
from a vicious cold, it was also bursting with the question of what this all means. Because I want to know right now what the next step is and why this happened when it happened. (Seriously, the timing of this could not have been worse for me. And it's all about me, right?) I really believe things happen for a reason and I'm always intrigued by the timing of such things. I like to connect events and timing in a sort of cosmic dot to dot. It really helps me see the big picture. Unfortunately, completing the dot to dot can takes months, if not years.

One of my earliest school memories was of doing a dot-to-dot picture at my desk while the school principal stood behind me telling a visitor that I was one of the school's star students. Then he leaned in to instruct me not go from number 5 to number 27, but to instead go in numeric order. Even at a young age, I would get ahead of myself in a rush to see the big picture. (Come to think of it, this incident may also have shaped my pathological fear of messing up when others are watching. A shrink would have a very expensive field day with this one.)

Over the weekend, the short-term big picture began to emerge. I could have spent four days at a training workshop with a mind poisoned and distracted by the dirty laundry that had been aired about this group. I would have been sick (by Friday, I had a fever). The Baby would have been miserable. Jim would have been frustrated trying to keep him happy. My other kids would have missed us. My parents would have been exhausted. And I would have felt guilty for putting everyone through this and too distracted to concentrate on the training. Our money, time and energy invested in this group would have factored into a looming decision about whether to stay or jump to the new group.



In a way, I'm fortunate. I don't have to make a decision right now. I'm at the beginning of a new career. Actually, I'm at the pre-beginning. I didn't even start. I didn't take the first step, which is what this workshop would have been. Sure, I'd invested some time in the academic requirements. It actually didn't feel like work. I love reading about pregnancy and childbirth. I love being around pregnant and nursing moms who help each other feel empowered through birthing and mothering their babies.

As for the long-term big picture, that one is not so clear. I'd like to go from 5 to 27 in this cosmic dot-to-dot, but the resulting picture just wouldn't make sense. I'd like to just take my "lesson" from this, apply it and move on, but the lesson isn't even clear. I do know, however, that the choice is really about when not who I certify with. Because, ultimately, my loyalty is to my family—the four people who allowed me to personally experience the joy of natural childbirth.

Spiritually disheveled and that's okay

Shortly after Girlface's and The Baby's baptism, we began going back to mass. Partly out of guilt. After their baptism, the priest asked if we were new in the parish as he hadn't seen us around. I told him that we've come on and off for years (mostly off) and that it was hard to get here with the children.

Since September we've managed to make it about every other week. This past weekend was the first time we'd made it for the second weekend in a row. And I'm using the term "made it" pretty loosely. This past Sunday, there was not much difference between night and morning thanks to The Baby. Jim had taken The Baby out to the 24-hour Wal-Mart so I could sleep in and brought back donut holes. I managed to get the two older kids dressed and fed and myself showered. But The Baby wound up losing the getting dressed lottery and went in his pajamas. Turns out he wasn't the only disheveled one in our bunch. As I unbuckled Girlface in the church parking lot, I discovered that she had only one shoe on.


Unlike previous Sundays, the kids were restless and not able to be quiet. Girlface ran around the halls while Jim policed her (maybe giving her a donut hole was not such a good idea); I tried to console cranky The Baby while trying to listen to the homily from the hallway. Big Brother did go into the children's Mass eventually and later told us they talked about goslings (that would be the Holy Gospel). We left before hitting the host. All in all, it was the worst attempt at Mass we've had since we started going back.

When we returned home, Jim finished repairing the kids' wagon (that mommy broke about a year ago when she hurled it over the fence after breaking up one too many fights between the kids). We took a walk down the cul-de-sac, then a hike in the woods across the street. I'm pretty sure God is in the woods on beautiful fall days.

I have a pretty good grasp on how to teach our kids many, many things—reading and match concepts, most manners, getting dressed, hygiene and so on. For some reason, though, teaching and talking about Jesus have been more difficult for us. We're not deeply religious people. We don't pray much around the kids, although Jim used to do bedtime prayers with Big Brother. We don't talk about Jesus too often, although Big Brother did excitedly proclaim recently that God made gum. We hadn't gone to church regularly because our specific denomination offers little in the way of child care or even age-appropriate programs. Yet we are deeply spiritual people. We rely on God's wisdom and God's grace every minute of every day, sometimes even without consciously knowing it. And that is difficult to explain to young children.

At Big Brother's preschool, they emphasize prayer as a habit, part of their daily routine. They pray when they begin their morning, when the eat snack and when they close for the day. That's good. At home, Big Brother now sets up the snack, getting out cups and napkins and exhorting us to pray. "Let's pray for food," he says. And he folds his little hands and says, "God is great. Thank you for food. Amen." He doesn't close his eyes, though. His first introduction to prayer was at school was a bit traumatic. The teacher told the kids to close their eyes. He did. And then he freaked out, crying "It's dark. It's dark. I can't see."

Many churches introduce children to Jesus through Bible stories. I've read Big Brother a few Bible stories, but his eyes glaze over. He can probably sense that I'm not too interested myself. As a child, I knew all the stories. My understanding of them was a little odd, though. For instance, I really believed that Jesus was born every Christmas and somehow four months later he was a man who hung on the cross, was buried and then rose again.  I had a very vivid picture of these things in my head. I remember being sad and anxious around Easter time because, in Jerusalem, people were getting ready to crucify Jesus. And when you think about the imagery surrounding such stories, it's hard to explain without giving kids nightmares. Daniel was put in a lion's den and prayed that he wouldn't get eaten. Three men whose names I won't dare try to spell were put in a furnace for not bowing down to an idol. God told Abraham to sacrifice his own son on the altar and he almost did. And the man who saved all these men was hung on a cross to die for our sins. There must be better ways to teach faith, loyalty and sacrifice than through Old Testament horror stories and the crucifixion.


I certainly didn't learn those things from the stories of Jesus' life and those who followed him in the early years. Relating my life to Biblical principles came only after, well, living my life. My life experience, some of it rather rough and dark, was what brought me into the fold. The church of my youth actually caused me to flee from the fold.

Would I have known Jesus was even there without the Biblical foundation offered in church? Maybe not. But my point here is that my road back to a relationship with God was a hard one, seemingly made more difficult by church and the ideas that were put in my head at a very young age.

My son may be on to something with his aversion to closed-eye prayer. I tend to pray with my eyes open. It's then that I see what's before me. And when I see what's before me, I am grateful and when I'm grateful, I pray. Even when what's before me does not appear to be ideal. Even when life is stormy. Even when the next right thing to do is not clear.

I wrote the preceding paragraph about two months ago and really needed to be reminded of that this morning as I struggle with what to do next in a certain situation. If The Baby hadn't gotten up this morning at 4:30 a.m. (and gone back to sleep), I wouldn't be sitting at my kitchen table rereading these words, taking them to heart and praying a prayer of gratitude for the wisdom God surely gave me, for the grace He bestows and the spiritual discipline that He has imposed and I have accepted over the years. 

Spiritual discipline is a hard thing to teach to a child. But it's the only thing that makes sense in my world. We'll stumble along with the Lord as our guide, though, and hopefully, our children will see faith in all its messy action.