Reflections on a Mother's Love: Milk, Cookies and a Carelessly Tossed Gym Bag

I snapped this photo this afternoon, shortly before leaving my parents' house after a brief overnight visit. The scene is a vivid reminder to me of what being a mother is all about.

I arrived at my parents' house close to midnight last night after driving from my graduate school class in Jersey City. My octogenarian parents were in their pajamas in the family room, waiting up for me, even though I told them they could leave the back door open and I could slip in. They turned off the television and my mom served us all milk and cookies.

We talked for nearly an hour, me sharing my tales from this fall's teaching, and they shared a story about one of their nine grandchildren, who recently found an excellent solution to a struggle.

Thoughts As Our Son Leaves Home

I developed a new habit for a week or so this summer: I would scan google news for reports of missing people. I even would type "missing" into its search bar and read the stories: missing tourists, missing Amish girls, missing man, missing teen and on and on.

The Value of Road Bumps

I'm not sure where I got the idea that if my husband and I did all the "right" things parenting, our boys would glide through childhood and adolescence and smoothly into adulthood. I'm not sure where that idea came from, or how it is I came to believe that watching them glide is preferable to the reality of watching them experiences the ups and downs of growing up and learning, often the hard way, how to make mistakes.

After all, life is a bumpy ride for us all, isn't it? Why was I thinking our teenagers would escape the inevitability of facing the consequences of their own limitations and excesses?

In the past week, we have come to discover, once again, that our children are on a bumpy ride. They are growing up unevenly, maturing beautifully in some places and not at all in others. Our boys make mistakes, sometimes don't learn from them, and try to please us in ways that end up backfiring. Sometimes, I feel like I am watching them take a ride on a road littered with potholes and sharp turns. Yes, I am keeping this vague because this is their ride, their journey, not ours.

On Mother's Day and Doubting Children: What Would You Do?

This morning, Mother's Day, I received a tearful phone call from a friend of mine who lives in another part of the country. I will keep the details vague so as not to identify or embarrass her. But really, her struggle is one most mothers of faith face: what to do when our children begin to question the truths with which we have raised them?

My girlfriend's son is 14 and he isn't "scheduled" for Confirmation for another two years. The age of confirmation, I have learned, varies diocese by diocese. Our eighth grader, still 13, will be confirmed next Sunday for example. My girlfriend is distraught. Her son told her he isn't an atheist, but is wondering whether the truth of the faith is really the truth. He told her he's agnostic. What's a mother to do?

Theme Thursday: Mom

My mom turned 82 in March.  Here she is last spring with my dad, her husband of 56 years, and two of my older brother's children on Grace's First Communion Day at St. Catherine Labore Parish in Wheaton, Maryland.

My mom is great for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is her sense of humor and unwavering devotion to my dad, her children and her grandchildren. (I guess you would need a sense of humor to put up with all of us.)

Also, she is one of the brainiest people I ever have met. She speaks many languages and worked for 10 years as a public school Latin and French teacher. Right now, she is in Florida with my dad. Instead of honing her golf game or working on her tan, she is writing a novel about her mother's native Argentina,  and teaching herself Creole so that she may volunteer at a health clinic for uninsured workers.

I love you Mom!

Linking up with Cari for Theme Thursday.

Tempus Fugit: In Which I am Reminded of the Passing of Childhood

 (the boys in seventh and fourth grades)

The passage of time rarely troubles me. I never have been a sentimental parent. When friends mourned children moving from one grade to the next, ("Can you believe kindergarten is over?") I never felt sad, only excited for them. 

Celebrating a Perfect Gift!

Today I got to help my friend K., who teaches at the same high school I do, celebrate her daughter's first birthday! It has been a long time since I have been to a child's birthday party, given that our own sons are 13 and 16 years old. So I didn't mind driving an hour each way to help her large extended family and circle of friends celebrate Joy's first year on the planet.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Try to Have an Easter Attitude

When you are in the midst of the most stressed-out week your family has had in a long time, 

On A Failure of Love: "Poor Baby: A Child of the Sixties Looks Back On Abortion:"

Last night - Good Friday -  felt like the right time to download on my brand new Kindle a book - really more like a 50-plus page essay, by L.A.-based writer Heather King called "Poor Baby," a raw meditation on her three abortions.

No matter one's personal history, or one's political views on whether abortion should be legal, or one's moral belief as to whether abortion ever can be an ethical choice, this book is worth reading. In fact, I would say anyone with strong views about abortion should read this book with clear eyes and an open heart. We need King's voice in the conversation.

So much of the profoundly polarizing abortion "debate" in this country lacks nuance; this book does not.

Happy Birthday to a Woman of "Ready Action:" My Mom!

Today, while decluttering the desk in our family room, I found a drawing I made of my mother and father for Mother's Day when I was in second grade.

On the Road of Life: Learner's Permit Already?

"It goes so fast." Everyone told me that when our firstborn was a baby.

Well, cliches are cliches for a reason. The baby in this photo tomorrow will have his first driving lesson. I am so thankful, no, so profoundly grateful for the days, months, years I spent at home with our sons. I do not regret a moment of stepping off the career ladder, even it it meant the tightest of budgets, few family vacations, ancient cars, peeling house paint and repairs gone undone. All of those sacrifices bought me precious time with our boys. Step by step, moment by moment, they grow up. This step is perceptible.

The packet from Somerset Driving School that came in the mail Monday with our eldest's learner's permit registration included a business card that said: "Driving Is The First Major Step For A Teen Ager In To Real Life." (sic) The card has a picture of a car in the left hand corner and an open road leading to the horizon.

He's ready.

After a Novena: What Are Some Good Ways to Show Gratitude?

My girlfriend K., like me, was raised Catholic and like me, did not receive a full grounding in the faith.  She asked me yesterday how best to show her gratitude to God for answered prayers. "Prayer works!" she told me yesterday. "It really really works!" I'd like to ask you, dear readers, what your suggestions might be.

How Grace Grounds Friendships

Another day, another hike. This time, I hiked with a mom. Our sons are each other's longest and dearest friensds, having met in nursery school.

In some respects, we moms could not be more different.

Joe (Kaz) Kazimierczyk 

Canal at Griggstown

Wow! A Mother's Love Bracelet/Chaplet

I promise, I am not on any kind of commission from my friend Sarah Harkins, owner of Clay Rosaries. But I gotta tell you, the Mother's Love Bracelet she created for my new-mom friends is unbelievably wonderful. Above is a picture of mine on my kinda hairy arm. Below is a picture Sarah took of the bracelet, with the accompanying prayer card.

Mom and The Art of Chauffering

My girlfriend J. had a dilemma the other day. Her college-aged son, home for the Triduum, had a music gig in his college town about 40 miles away at two Easter services at a  Presbyterian church and then had to come home for Easter dinner. He isn't an experienced driver, so her initial plan was to drive him to the first gig, drive home, then go get him when the second gig ended, drive him back home for dinner, then drive him back to college. We're talking 240 miles of driving in one day.

No! I told her, perhaps a bit too forcefully. Drive him to the first gig, wait the three or so hours until they both are over, then drive him home. Have his dad drive him back to his dorm after Easter dinner. OK, she said, but what would she do with all that time in the van, waiting?

Bigger Picture Moment: Holy Thursday, Middle School Baseball, and Contemplating My Vocation

"You can sleep in another lifetime," my girlfriend told me this afternoon, when I complained to her during my seventh period cafeteria duty that I was bone tired  and asked her if I should show up for my 12 year old's middle school baseball game. After all, I had been to a game yesterday and he had told me he didn't care if I showed up for this away one. "Really?" she said. "You know what that means. Go to the game."

Dare to Share: Spring Has Sprung (and I am Still a Klutz)

If you just saw a woman driving by in a minivan with a black cherry milk shake streaming from the hood to the windshield and the driver's window, that would be me. 

And that would be our son in the driveway, hosing off the remains of what was supposed to be his after-school treat.

 

Do Not Avert Your Gaze: On Teen Motherhood

Do you believe, as I do, that we are summoned into being by a Presence and that our lives begin at conception?

Then you are what our culture calls "prolife." But supporting "life" in the abstract and supporting, really supporting, life as lived and experienced by real human beings is very different. Our lives can be messy, vulgar, joyful, unfair and pocketed by violence. To support those lives - from conception to their natural deaths - is radical, counter-cultural, and, some might say, nonsensical.

Our culture is full of ugly messages about  girls and the consequences of teenaged sex. How can you knit a baby blanket for a teenager? Isn't that just supporting her poor decision making? How can you accommodate pregnant teens at a high school? Won't that make more young ladies pregnant? Why didn't she use a condom? What was she thinking? Why did she let this happen? Isn't her mother angry?  If she had had an abortion, none of us would have to deal with this scandal. ACCIDENTS HAPPEN: call your local Planned Parenthood and we will give you a morning-after pill, no questions asked.

In these days, I am praying for a young lady I know. She is mentally ill and the victim of violence by boyfriend. She is 17. She is pregnant. She is making a brave and difficult choice to carry and raise their child.

I am remembering a story from years ago, when I was living in Raleigh, NC and a high school student became pregnant. Her private Episcopal school kicked her out : not because she was pregnant but because she chose to carry the child. You see, her pregnant belly was causing a scandal. And I wondered then how a church-affiliated school averted its gaze when their students got abortions. Noone had to know about that, you see. No reputations lost, was the thinking.

I stumbled across a poem from a website I love called "Fried Chicken and Coffee." The writer is 29 (pictured here ) and writes with heartbreaking clarity about another mom in another difficult circumstance.

We must not avert our gaze from what is real, what is true, what is life. Only Beauty can save us.

Read Misty Skaggs' poem here.

In Praise of Soccer Moms

This afternoon, I found myself riding in the front seat of a minivan, heading north on the Garden State Parkway to a travel soccer game. My driver was a friend named K., just 30, with three children, ages 10, 8 and 5. Traveling with us were my 12-year-old son and her oldest, her daughter K, a fifth grader who plays up on a boys' travel team.

As she drove, K. fielded phone calls on her cell phone from her husband, from other soccer coaches and from the managers of three other soccer teams with which she is involved. It occurred to me, that were it not for women like K. my son never would have played what is now his ninth soccer season with our local club. K. never finished college, but she has the management skills of someone running a thriving business.

Without women who stay home for at least part of their children's childhoods, so much of what other children in my suburban community enjoy - the travel soccer teams, the privately subsidized public schools' music programs, and so on, would not exist.

Happy Birthday, Blessed Mom

My mom was born 81 years ago today, in her parents' home outside Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was an investment banker and her mother was an immigrant from Argentina. My mother met my father, a surgeon and the son of Italian immigrants, on the beach in St. Croix, where she was vacationing with her parents. She was 25 when she converted to the Catholic faith and married my dad.

When she opens her mouth, she does so wisely; on her tongue is kindly instruction.

She keeps good watch on the conduct of her household, no bread of idleness for her.

Her children stand up and proclaim her blessed, her husband, too, sings her praises:

Many women have done admirable things, but you surpass them all!' Proverbs 31