The Saints -- They Move Mountains

I love the Catholic Church.

Tim and Saint John Paul II.

I love the smells and bells. I love the liturgical seasons, the cycle of major and minor feasts.

I love the sacraments. How could I not love the sacraments?

I love the wideness of the Church. I love the orders. I love that within a single Church there exists myriad devotions and spiritual bents -- the Dominicans, the Carmelites, the Franciscans, to name just a few.

I especially love the Missionaries of Charity with whom I worked for more summers than I can easily count.

The Missionaries of Charity love the saints, and they helped me to love them, too.

We recently recognized the Feast of Saint Joseph. A busy guy, Saint Joseph is patron saint of quite a lot -- husbands and fathers, workers and vocations, marriages and grace-filled deaths. My friend Rachel encouraged mothers of young men to ask for Saint Joseph's intercession as they find their way in the world. (Rachel just returned from a tour of Israel. I had asked her to remember all our boys during her visit to the Wailing Wall).

On New Years Day, I gathered the kids around my laptop and headed to Jen Fulweiler's Saints' Name Generator to find a saint of the year for each of us. John was first up. He said a brief prayer and pressed the button. "Saint Sigismund of Burgundy," the screen read, "Patron: Against fevers."

I did a double take, as would anyone who has known John for long. About ten years ago, at around 12-18 months, John began running sky-high, cyclical fevers. His highest was 104.6 (in the middle of the night, on an island in Lake Erie). A good time was had by all! His fever episodes peaked around 2nd grade when they came relentlessly every twenty-one days and lasted 48-72 hours. Fever, vomiting, sore throat, a mouthful of canker sores -- John suffered.

He hasn't run a fever since New Years Day.

Heaven is for real. The Saints -- the canonized ones with the big "S" along with the unheralded, unnoticed ones who simply persevered in faith, hope, and love -- are there with Almighty God ready, much like our friends here on earth, to intercede for all our needs -- for lost keys (thanks, Saint Anthony!, for lost souls (Saint Jude!), for a feverish little boy suffering on the couch (Saint Sigismund!).

The Night Before

Do you have Awful Mornings? You know, late start, lunch items in short supply, everyone crabby, uniforms elusive.

John can find just one pair of pants, and they look like he wore them in a Tug of War. His team lost. Ainsley is sporting an appalling case of bed head and thinks any variety of comb or brush came straight from the dungeons of a medieval castle. I spray detangler just as she turns her head. Doink! The bulk of it shoots straight into Ainsley's left eye.

We back out of the  driveway at 8:18 instead of 8:10. Kolbe then remembers it's Blazer Day. We pull back in. He forgets the house is locked. We pass him the keys.He locates the blazer. We pull back out and in the midst of refereeing a minor squabble that has erupted, I fail to angle the car, and the van bottoms out as we swerve into the street.

My friend and spiritual adviser suggested I begin a simple practice during morning prayers: ask the Holy Spirit to bring to mind three things I should do each day. As I sat for a few minutes of prayer after a particularly trying morning, I felt a nudge to focus less on the morning and more on the night before.

Note: This would be no revelation to most people.

Here's the glaringly obvious truth: What constitutes a crisis at 8:18 a.m. is really perfectly manageable at 8:18 the night before. We all know the devil is in the details. And three school-aged kids bring with them a pile of details -- the PE clothes, the permission slip, lunch money, shin guards, costumes for the play, et al.

I love, love, love uniforms, oh yes I do. I'd pen a sonnet, Ode to a Khaki Skort, if 3rd quarter didn't end tomorrow and if I weren't staring down a daunting pile of ungraded papers.

Ode to the Khaki Skort will have to wait, but know, O Beloved Uniforms, that my devotion remains unswerving.

I  admit that at or about 8:18 in the morning, when the belt goes missing or the tie is AWOL or one shoe is on hiatus, the value of uniforms becomes somewhat murky and as elusive as, well, the khaki skort that Ainsley swore she hung up in her closet exactly as instructed.

Last night I reminded the kids to stage their uniforms. "Stage" is a term left over from from my Procter and Gamble days when I'd call a plant to find out if a truckload of shampoo, toothpaste, and deodorant had been staged.

Lay it all out there, ready to go.

I recently reminded a nameless teenage age son to locate a red polo, a.k.a the travel uniform, as he was due to head to a game the following afternoon. Always quick to comply, he duly located a red polo. But come morning, once again at or about 8:18, the red polo turned out to be the one belonging to a brother six grades below him.

Yeah.

Clearly, we need to require something more than eye-balling. In fact, I think a full on dress rehearsal may be in our future.

It all begins the night before.

Pollen

Ainsley and I are dealing with goopy eyes and itchy noses and the fallout of a neighborhood that is bursting with color, but hard, so very hard, on those who struggle with seasonal allergies.

I'm not sure when I became one of those few -- those unhappy few -- that band of strugglers (Jamie will get the allusion. My ninth graders finished Act IV today). Were I to undergo allergy testing, I am certain I would come up positive for cats, chalk dust, and the pollen that is currently coating every vehicle, every bush, the outdoor furniture, my front teeth, you name it, it's covered with yellow powder.

I now take Allegra regularly, and during weeks like this, I reach for antihistamine eye drops as well. But to no avail. We need rain.

Back in the Saddle Again

John: How do you make an omelette?

Me: Step 1 -- Borrow eggs from the neighbors.

John recovering from croup but also John's reaction to cooking instructions.

As Summer Winds Down But Temperatures Continue to Soar . . .

True Devotion.

Ainsley and her three BFFs named themselves The Fantastic Four.

John and his buddy very thoughtfully renamed them The Fartastic Four.

Predictably, Ainsley cried.

Unpredictably, Ainsley's mother laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed some more.

In fact she laughed until she was crying right along with Ainsley.

Because we are just half-way through August.

And it's blistering hot.

And the pool hours have been cut back because the rest of humanity is back in school.

But we're not.

And I'm mostly glad.

But it's still blistering hot.

So we gotta laugh.

My Girl Turned Seven!

Best. Surprise. Ever.

As John Turns Nine

In light of John's ninth birthday, I pull this from the archives:


As John Turns Seven . . .

The day before his birthday, John rolled over in bed and posed an important question, "Is today tomorrow?"

"No," I sadly informed him, "Tomorrow is tomorrow."

Ainsley could sympathize. "There's so many tomorrows, so many tomorrows," she lamented.

Kids and time. Such interesting perspectives.

When Tim was still Timmy, Tomorrow was The Next Day To This Day and Yesterday was The Last Day To This Day. Kind of makes sense. Ainsley will ask when we're going to the zoo. I'll say, "next Thursday," and she'll then wake up everyday asking, "Is today next Thursday?"


Love that.

Well, eventually today became tomorrow and even John realized that the big day had at long last dawned. So instead of asking if today were tomorrow, he leaned over and said, "Presents?"

Love my John.

Love, love, love my seven-year-old, adventure-loving boy.

I love his laugh, his enjoyment of sea glass and stars, of bike riding and dead snakes.

Pelee Island is full of snakes. How these things can remain on the endangered species list defies evidence I viewed with my own two eyes and nearly stepped on at least twice. Every bike ride to the bakery garnered a few specimen dead in the road. I passed one freshly smushed snake and looked behind me to see if John would respond in predictable fashion. The boy does not disappoint. No, true to form, he screeched to halt, checked out the carcass . . . and ran it over a few more times with his bike.

{Insert head bang.}

I found one long dead reptile flattened and stiff. John carried it around for days until I found it hanging from my parents' door knob. He came out of the house sporting a blank, innocent expression and with a tone intentionally casual asked, "Has anyone seen anything near the door knob?"

You know, I should have screamed. Really, I should have produced the complete and proper scene John was looking for.

I was filling out a form for John's annual physical. "What are your interests," I asked him.


"Guns," he replied.

"Books," wrote his mother.

"What else," I asked.

"Computer games," he replied.

"Swimming," wrote his mother.

But really John reminds me of his grandfather in that he is a boy of many passions -- Legos and astronomy, spy gear and Batman, and, as he was quick to add, "money, presents, Auntie Kate, and all my cousins."

We walked down the shore of Lake Erie late one night, and John was astonished at the number and clarity of the stars. He slipped his hand in mine out of companionship, not fright, and pointed them all out to me.

I love all my kids. (Of course I do). But I look at each one through the unique lens surrounding their birth. Tim, our first, was born of youth and optimism. We wanted a baby; we had Tim. Kolbe came to us after four years of waiting and six rounds of fertility drugs. It's altogether fitting that he is persevering in nature. The month before John came to be, I endured my sixth miscarriage in as many years. For reasons emotional and physical, I had begun voicing thoughts about not pursuing that course of action any longer.

And then John.

I will always remember those first weeks of nausea and appetite swings that were followed closely by a week of feeling absolutely normal. Internally I mourned even as externally I continued to pray, continued to exercise the virtue of hope until there was no reason to hope.

And my boy held on.

I will always remember the night I spent in the hospital dealing with pre-term labor. Hooked up to monitor, breathene coursing through my veins, I took in the sights and sounds of the delivery room and was most struck by the pink and blue blankets stacked neatly by the bassinet.

I'm having a baby. I'm really having a baby this time.

He's the baby born of hope and healing.

Love my John, the boy who was just overheard saying, "Ainsley, do you want to see me put Pooh Bear on the fan?"

That's my boy.

Motherhood can bring its share of regrets, no doubt about it. I wish I had worried less and relaxed more, overlooked this issue and focused a little more on that one. But I realize that I'll look back on John age 5, John age 6 and know that I enjoyed nearly every minute of it, that I fully drank in and appreciated his liveliness, his humor, his energy. Even the challenges -- recurrent fevers, reading, math -- have led me to invest lots of one on one time with this boy of mine, so I can't regret those either.

One day John will no longer reach for my hand as we walk down the beach. One day his interest in bugs will give way to an interest in girls or cars or computers. One day Mama will morph into Mom.

But that day is not today.

And I'm glad.