Who's Your Daddy? A Diary

'I know what my heart is for,' she said

2011-02-26T07:39:00.001-08:00

Last winter, my wife was doing a workout video, and firstborn Brielle was joining in the fun.

Observing, Ashlyn asked, "Is there an exercise that makes you stay awake?"

Me: Actually, all kinds of exercise make you feel more awake because they make your heart beat faster and your blood flow all through your body.

Ashlyn: I know what my heart is for.

Me: You do? What, Ashie?

Ashlyn: To wake me up.

(pause)

Ashlyn: My heartbeat is like a lightning storm inside my body. Boom, boom, flash, boom!

I love my accidental Haiku poet, and I raise my Thanksgiving glass to her wisdom: To hearts that wake us up. To the inner electrical storms that beat life through arteries to hands and to world. To "boom, boom, flash, boom!"--and to whatever that lightning illuminates in you.

'I'm the president's boss,' she sang

2011-02-20T16:00:00.000-08:00

Last spring, Brielle came to me with sad news....

Brielle: I have sad news. Sidney is sick. And she is the one who always plans our games.

Me: I'm sorry she is sick. I guess you get to take a turn leading the games.

Brielle: Actually, Mia planned the games today.

Me: Brielle, you know what I like about you? You know how to lead AND follow. Like when you're with your sisters, you lead and plan the games. But when you're with your friends, you know how to follow and let them lead them. That is really good, because everyone has to lead sometimes and follow other times. At my work, I lead with my students, but I have to follow other people.

Brielle: Like the principal!

Me: Yep, and lots of other people too. (School counselors have LOTS of bosses.)

Brielle: Who does the principal follow? I know...God!

Me: Yeah, but she has to follow other people too. There is a man who is the boss of all the principals in the whole district. His name is Dr. Delgado.

Brielle: Oh, I thought you were going to say the president. Because he is the principal's boss too.

Me: Hey Brie, even the president has to follow sometimes.

Brielle and Ashlyn: Whoa!

Me: The president has other presidents and kings who are leaders in other countries, and he is not the boss of them. And actually, we are his boss, because we choose which president we want.

Brielle: (to the tune of the Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya-nya song used to flaunt one's invulnerability to another's threat of dominance) I'm the president's bo-oss! I'm the president's bo-oss!

Me: Verdad, niñita.

So here's to democracy, folks. Love our leaders or leave 'em, we are blessed to be bosses of presidents.

Happy Presidents Day!

"How did the war start?" she asked

2011-02-11T18:44:00.000-08:00

We were listening to their favorite Pandora station two nights ago. B ased on "A Whole New World" from Aladdin, it plays hours of Disney movie tunes, leading to spontaneous rounds of "Name That Movie." (You should try it sometime.)

Tonight it played "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" from The Sound of Music. (Yes, that was a Disney flick.) Over mac and cheese, edamame, weinies and greens, Ashlyn steered the conversation to the way the Von Trapp family had to run so they didn't have to fight in the army. We talked about how it wasn't just any army, but the Nazi army, the surface of whose evil I only scratched the surface with my description. Still, I think their main beef with Hitler's boys was that the Von Trapp kids would not get to see their Daddy while he was away fighting.

"That's like Ricky's dad," said Ashlyn. And next thing we know, we're talking about a friend whose Daddy is overseas in the U.S. Army.

Cognitive dissonance hung in the room: Nazis bad. Fighting bad. Children missing soldier daddies bad. At time same time, our soldiers good, our friend's daddy good. Fighting good?

And then, the question from Brielle: "Daddy, how did the war start?"

Deep inhalation, a proud thrill at such a big-girl question, and a sigh out. Resignation. This Daddy's answer would be so, so incomplete.

"Wow, that is a long story, girlies." My knowledge of Afghanistan's long history is limited to what I've picked up reading Khaled Hosseini's books, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. (Great, sad and beautiful both.) Cursory though that is, it was still too much information.

So, I told them the 9-11 story. World Trade Center. Pentagon. United 93. Al-Qaeda. Their friends, the Taliban.

The horror of it contorted Brielle's face as she listened, especially when she learned that the hijackers did their work as an act of obedience to their idea of God, with a belief that it would take them straight to heaven.

Somewhere in the narrative between September 11 and Afghanistan, Ashlyn realized I was telling too small a story.

"No, Daddy, how did ALL the wars start?" she interrupted.

I told her that the answer was more story than we had time to tell before bedtime.

Which sounded a little better than, "I don't know."

I could have related a story as primal as Lucifer's bid for godhood, or as recent as my last angry outburst at them. Or any story of creatures lusting for dominance that their Creator never gave them. But I didn't.

Whether from ignorance or prudence or cowardice or a desire to hallow a worthy question with a season of silence before daring to answer, I left my inquiring daughters' minds inquiring.

Maybe I missed a teachable moment.

But what would you have told them?

'My laughing is my prayer,' she said

2011-01-30T16:18:00.000-08:00

Getting ready for bed is anything but silent, except for Ashlyn, who usually knocks out to the lullaby of Brielle's expressed irritation that Melía is being so hyper (hyperactivity noise eclipsed only by that of Brielle's expressed irritation).

But this night, Ashlyn had the giggles. And we were trying to pray.

When it came her turn to say words to the Almighty, she laughed instead, and said, "Amen."

"My laughing is my prayer," she observed.

Indeed. And maybe a better one than most.

As Meister Eckhart, 14th-century German mystic and theologian, said, "God created out of the laughter of the Trinity."

Of the truth of this proposition, Ashlyn is awfully good evidence.

'Pretty much just talking,' she said

2010-08-24T21:39:00.000-07:00

Brielle wanted to read her Bible tonight. Cool.

Being who she is, she wanted to start right--from Genesis 1:1. So we read the story of Creation--at least the first story, the one about the six days. God says, "Let there be light...and it happened. And it was good." Day 2, God pronounces that there should be air to separate waters below from waters above (and thankfully she didn't ask what that means). It happens again, and it's good again. Day 3, God speaks and dry land, plants, trees and their respective yummy fruits all happen, all good. Day 4, and God talks a moon, a sun and the rest of the stars into existing. Day 5, God's mouth opens again, and now we've got seas and skies teeming with life, blessed with the command to reproduce. Day 6, a few more words from God, and the land is full of creatures wild, tame and creepy-crawly.

And then He makes human beings.

He can quit while He's ahead and save Himself eons of headaches. But never one to leave well enough alone, He goes ahead and makes us anyway. But not just any way--in His image, after His likeness. Brielle and I took a few stabs at what that might mean before getting to Day 7, when God creates...

Nothing.

It's my favorite anticlimax. After lighting a universe, molding a planet, populating its liquid, solid and gaseous spaces, and topping it off by fearfully and wonderfully making two mini-Me's, God's grand finale is stillness. Silence. Rest. Pretty much the kind of day He might have had before all the creating began, except with more company.

It's holy. It's good. Very good.

"Do you think God was tired after all that work, Bubby Brie?" I asked.

"Um, 'all that work' was pretty much just talking," my firstborn replied, patient with my denseness yet figuring I should have known better. "And I don't get tired from talking unless I talk and talk for like a whole day without stopping."

I don't think she would get tired of talking even in that case, truth be told.

And God probably didn't either. But the reminder that a work so humongous can happen with such relative ease when Creator God speaks is Sabbath-rest to this tired, laboring Daddy soul.

'God knows a lot of stuff, but...' she said

2010-03-12T22:21:00.000-08:00

Elbow-to-elbow in the Sentra today, questions floated forward, a merciful diversion to savor before the inevitable backseat brawl.

"Daddy, do animals go to heaven?" asked Ashyln.

"I don't know, Ashie. A lot of people think so. The Bible doesn't talk about that at all." My real hunch is that whatever is on the other side will bear little resemblance to what we know here. I suspect that we will live as we never imagined possible, more ourselves and less all about ourselves than ever. And in the midst of that mind-blowing aliveness, the presence or absence of pets will be the least of our worries, if we have any worries at all.

"Hannah's daddy says no," Melía offered. More chutzpah than I've got, that Hannah's daddy, I thought, wondering if my waffling over the pet cemetery question was more about tact or timidity.

"But he doesn't know," said Brielle. She attacked the unsubstantiated rumor as eagerly as I slap scary chain emails with Snopes-linked replies-to-all.

"God knows," Ashlyn said.

"That's right, Ashie-lu," said I.

"God knows a lot of stuff, but he doesn't want to put it all in the Bible."

No joke, Ashie.

Somewhere in late childhood I came to realize that God was bigger than my little brand of Christianity, that all that could be said of the Divine was far more than any single denomination could articulate. Sometime later it became clear that God was bigger than Christianity itself. How could anyone see a Gandhi or a Dalai Lama and say such a soul was godless? Even more recent has been my acceptance that not even a tome as remarkable as the Bible can be the final word on a Being who ignites and inhabits universes.

OK, so maybe I'm a little bit slow.

Certainly, much slower than Ashie.

"How many days...?" she asked

2009-12-26T15:06:00.000-08:00

After weeks of asking, "How many days till Christmas?" and cheering at decibel levels inversely proportional to my answer, my children finally got to enjoy the coveted day.

Halfway through her dissemination of stocking goodies throughout the living room, Ashlyn had already posed the logical next question: "Daddy, how many days till Easter?"

So much for kids being all about the now.

I didn't know the answer at the time, but now I do. Curiously, on Christmas Day this year, it was an even one hundred. And in case your kid asks you the same thing, here's your answer: http://daysuntil.com/Easter/index.html.

Happy holidays! And happy waiting till the next one.

'I'm wearing my birthday suit because...' she said

2009-12-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

One morning this Christmas break, I huddled under the covers in our snow-covered home as Ashlyn pranced and bounced around the bedroom in nothing but her princess panties.

"That's my Ashie Nunga-Punga," I said. "Aren't you freezing, Ashie-Loca?"

"I'm wearing my birthday suit because it's going to be Jesus' birthday!" she explained, cheesy grin smeared across her face.

How's that for a WWJD moment?

I spend a lot of December wondering how much of our Christmas chaos might make the Birthday Boy roll over in His manger or grave--if He were still in either.

But this nunga punga thing? I think He'd kind of like it.

For a morning, a day, a season, or more if we dare, maybe He'd rather have us dance in the buff, out from under all the crusty layers we thought could hide what we thought needed hiding. Maybe He'd dig that more than all the other stuff we've come up with to honor His incarnation. Maybe when it comes to hiding the real thing, less really is more.

Maybe my barely prancing Ashie-Loca is on to something.

So happy birthday, Jesus. Here's to naked celebration that lasts even longer than your birthday party.

'Six years,' she said

2009-11-27T00:03:00.000-08:00

Tonight on the ride home from Thanksgiving, all girlies were asleep except Melía. (This is as traditional as today's turkey.)

Winding up the mountain, we were talking about how different kids spend different amounts of time in Kindergarten, depending on how ready their parents and teachers think kids are for 1st grade. "Some kids do one year of Kindergarten and some do two, Melía. How many years do you want to be in Kindergarten?" I said.

Part of me wants to normalize redoing Kinder if necessary. The twins are on the young side, after all. Another part of me says this to lay down the gauntlet and see them go for their studies as ardently as they go for playing dress-up.

"But bwown-ups choose that."

"That's right," I told her. "Good remembering. " I had made a point of saying that this decision is not up to the 5-year-old. "But if it were your choice, how many years would you want to be in Kindergarten?"

"Do you know how many years I would want to be in Kindergarten?" she asked, making sure I still understood the question.

"How many, Melía?" I asked. I'd have put my money on "one." What kid isn't eager to be as grown up as possible as early as possible?

"Six years!" she said, exuberant. ("Tens of thousands of dollars' worth!" my Daddy-ears heard, despondent.)

But sticker shock aside, here's giving thanks for one great Kindergarten and for at least one girl who's not in a frantic hurry to grow up.

At least not today.

'I will remember it again later,' she said

2009-11-06T05:50:00.000-08:00

“While you’re sleeping, don’t forget how much I love you, Melía,” I told her.

(She hears this many nights, along with other valuable admonitions, such as, “Don’t eat yellow snow, Melía.” Some things just bear repeating.)

“I will not forget, Daddy.”

“Oh, good.”

“But if I do forget, that’s OK. Because I will remember it again later.”

This rings in my heart like an eschatological prophecy of a time of trouble. She won’t forget, she assures me. But growing daughters and flawed fathers being who we are, it won’t be long before she will.

What will get in the way of the love? I wonder. Curfew? Homework? Careless words? Wardrobe? Other men? All of the above?

But my little prophetess assures me that the time of trouble will outlast neither my love nor her knowledge of it.

Lord, when she does forget, please remind me that it’s OK. We do that. We lose sight of what we've been standing on. Things loom larger than people for a minute. Ego pounds impatiently at the front door, and Love slips out the back.

But it is OK. Later, she will remember again.

'Daddy, do you love the kitten?' she asked

2009-10-12T20:32:00.000-07:00

Since around last Christmas, we’ve been planning on getting kittens. We delayed in part because we need another needy little being in our home like Jaws needs another swimming lesson. But since the girls are getting slightly less likely to torture, and even more slightly likely to actually care for such a critter, we finally took the plunge this summer.

So Pepper "Loveball" Bennie, sneezy orphan Siamese kitten, moved from the San Bernardino City Animal Shelter to the San Bernardino Mountains, a move up in the world both in the mile of elevation she gained and in the tonnage of love she now bears. She joins my wife and me as one of the few who know the joy and the torment of living with our three daughters.

It’s hard to know whether it is ignorance or ignoring of the signs of feline displeasure that leads kids to love a cat in ways that push the limits of the animal’s endurance. Melía holds her for durations that would try even a dog’s patience. Eager to enrich the kitty’s life with adventure on the day she arrived, Ashlyn tried throwing her for distance. Brielle still pleads not-guilty for holding her captive in the treasure chest all day yesterday while we were at the fair.

We always hurt the ones we love, don’t they say?

Maybe a week after we got Pepper, Melía asked me this:

“Daddy, do you love the kitten?”

Let me defend myself before I tell you how I answered. I’m really clear that “love” is this holiest of words that has been profaned by overuse. Call me a snob or an idealist or whatever you must. But for me, true love is a sacred act of will that I define something like M. Scott Peck does in The Road Less Traveled: “the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”

Love is God.

And if I teach my kids anything about anything, I want it to be This.

So I'm all cautious about my answer, which, I was certain, had the heinous power to distort her idea of love for eternity.

"Not as much as I love you, my Melía," I hedged, circumspect as all get-out.

"What?" she asked, appalled at how the soul of any sentient being could be anything but filled with love for her kitten. "Why don't you love our kitten, Daddy?"

"Well, it's just...." I was tempted to bust out my arsenal of words that mean love but don't mean Love, words like cathexis and affinity and like a whole bunch. But I was smart enough not to. "I do love the kitty. But it's a different kind of love than how I love you. A much smaller, much less important kind of love than I love you with, Melía, because I love you so MUCH."

Was that a sign of relief I saw on her face? "You do love our kitten, Daddy. But a diffwent kind of love."

Relieved? Yes, I think she was.

But still a little worried about my soul.

'It hurts my heart when it's not fair,' she said

2009-09-13T10:04:00.001-07:00

Someone had gotten more of something than someone else, and Brielle did not like it. Not one bit. She wailed her way down the hall into the great room.

"It's OK, Brielle," I said, ever trying to turn down the volume on the girly drama in my home.

But the volume went up instead. (You'd think I'd have learned by now.) She deflected my poo-pooing response to her protests with fresh vocal vigor.

I winced and waited for the swell to roll past. When it did, she unveiled the why of her righteous indignation:

"It's not fair. And it hurts my heart when it's not fair!"

I loved her more than ever.

As a kid, the closest I came to going postal on my teachers was when they answered a complaint about unfairness with the truism, "LIFE isn't fair." Great. Just be in bed with the injustice, I would have told them if I'd had the words. Be part of the problem. Resign yourself.

Idiot.

I still feel that way. And though I have the words now, I also have the discretion or fear or prudence or whatever you want to call it to bite my tongue and simply resent the speaker. Too often, I choose cool contempt for the person over hot attack of the problem.

As an adult, I've learned more about the shades of justice. I've learned that equity is different from equality. For everyone to get the chance they deserve, some need more help. And when they don't get it, I still get angry.

Life is not fair; my teachers were right. But is the good-kid thing to do about it to shut up and take it?

Or to scream?

Brielle, may your heart never stop breaking when it senses injustice. Like you did just now, may you have the words--and the courage--to assault it wherever it lingers.

God knows you have the voice.

'It's OK, Daddy. It was an accident,' she said

2009-08-08T22:34:00.000-07:00

I cupped my hand under Brielle's face, pouring out apologies nearly as fast as her chin spilled blood. The drops were splashing now as they plopped into the swelling red pool in my hand, which sloshed as we cried our way across the sand toward the lifeguard tower.

We'd just been killing time on the beach, pausing our walk for some gymnastics while we waited for Melía to catch up. The somersaults went great, and led naturally into the headstands. I spotted Ashlyn's feet for her headstand, then spotted Brielle for hers. And when I did mine, helpful girl that she is, Brielle spotted me.

I didn't get the memo.

So that when my heel kicked up, Brielle's chin was waiting to greet it. I heard a sharp snap as the foot bone connected to the chin bone, separated by way too little soft tissue, and pounded her teeth together. It was a scary enough sound that the scream that followed it gave me a measure of relief.

At least she was OK enough to scream.

We walked across the sand, Brielle wailing, her Daddy wailing louder but without sound, sober sister Ashlyn in tow.

I wonder now, why was I making such a point of catching the blood? All those blood-borne pathogens trainings? Or a helpless father doing the only thing he could think of to feel slightly less helpless at that moment. Catch blood, and apologize ad nauseam.

"I'm so sorry, Brielle. I am so sorry. I didn't know you were back there. I'm so, so sorry. I was not careful enough. I should've looked back before I did my headstand. I'm sorry, sweet Brielle."

Through her sobs came this gift:

"It's OK, Daddy. It was an accident."

And it is OK. Now, at least. An hour in the ER, 3 stitches, a pop-sickle and a DQ ice cream cone later, she was sewed up and feeling little pain. Yes, the water slide plans for the next day were off, and I'd found another way to sabotage swimming lessons. But mostly, she was fine.

Me? I'm still a little traumatized. I hate it when, after quantities of energy, bribery, coercion and scare tactics spent on stopping my children from hurting themselves, I hurt them myself. And then all I can do is catch blood and say I'm sorry.

But in the trauma, I'm thanking God for lifeguards and doctors who can do more than that. For wives who watch shots and stitches go into their brave daughters' gaping lacerations--and still love me. I'm thanking Him for popsicles and DQ that bridge trauma to treats, and for healing--of chins and hearts.

And I'm thanking God for little girls who forgive faulty fathers even while the wound is still dripping.

'Everyone is a baby,' she said

2009-07-15T11:50:00.000-07:00

This morning over Cheerios, Brielle was estimating God's age.

"He's a hundred," she said.

"Even older than that, sweet Brie," said I.

"Yeah, He's a thousand."

"Even older than that. Infinity."

"Yeah, He's infinity, 'cause that's the number that you can't count to."

Also at issue this morning, on the other end of the spectrum, was how old we are. I must have started it when I said, "Ashlyn, you're my sweet, good Ashie-baby."

"But I'm not a baby for real life," Ashlyn countered.

"No, you are a big girl. But you are still my baby."

Ashlyn's eyes widened. "Actually, everyone is a baby."

"Everyone?"

"Yeah! Everyone is a baby. Even you are a baby. Because we are all little--kind of little--and only God is big."

A big thought for a little Ashie-baby. One this Daddy-baby needs to remember.

'Daddy is lying again,' she must have said

2009-07-14T23:35:00.000-07:00

Last summer, the girls took their first professional swimming lessons. They LOVED swimming lessons.

This spring, my folks gave them all the birthday gift of another round of lessons, complete with leads printed from the Net on where they could take them. I've been planning on setting it up since school got out in early June.

But first I had to clean out the closet (which was at one time an office) where the printouts had buried themselves since being gifted. That occupied the first four days.

Once found, I set them out to call the next day. They sat out not quite long enough for me to call, but long enough for six small hands to disappear them into the rubble.

The next next day, I extracted my leads from among the piles of sorted stuff I'd removed from my blindingly sparkly clean closet (which has renewed its ancient claim to officedom), and from the piles of spent drawing paper to which my little swimmers had helped themselves.

That done, I found myself on Friday, July 3, when USA celebrated the foreshock of its 233rd birthday, and no one was in business.

No worries. Sunday night, I planned for them to start Monday after work. I built it up, had Mommy send the bathing suits with them to childcare, mentioned it at random times just to get a huge "Yay!!" out of them.

I called from work the next day and got the dirt on the lessons. I had the date wrong.

Darn. They'd have to start the next week. This would not go over well.

When I picked them up, the news was greeted with cries and screams, barely mitigated by my consolation offer to take them to the creek to swim on our own. I explained that I'd messed up on the date and that it was too late to start lessons this week. I was sorry, but we'd do it next week (i.e. "a million years from now").

Another week of planning and hoping--the girls anticipating the highlight of their summer education, me exploiting their anticipation to gain compliance and mood lifts when needed.

Yesterday was the big day. I had the times, I knew this was the session start date, and I'd get them there at 2 o'clock--opening time--so I could sign them up for the best time slot.

It's just that they were having so much fun that morning pretending to be pets inside those Tupperware storage bins. And I was having so much fun figuring out online if I could save money by cutting my home phone line. It was 2 now, past lunch time and they were asking for Rice Krispies in bowls just like pets eat their food.

That would be fast.

But somehow it was not fast, and when we got down the mountain to the pool at 4:29, the swim class coordinator tried to be nice as she explained that we had a snowflake's chance in a hot place of snagging a spot in the 4:30 class, the last of the day.

At 4:40, the girls were still in the bathroom helping each other put on their bathing suits. Normally I'd be itching for them to finish the job and get the hot-place out here to start the lesson. But yesterday, I considered letting them play at changing for half an hour (an easy amount of time to kill with such a task) and then telling them they were so slow they'd missed the lesson.

But I didn't.

Instead, I muffled the self-loathing tantrum that was going on in my head, told them the truth, and apologized. Again.

"We'll start tomorrow, girlies." They didn't even cry this time. And that was worse, because it gave me mental space to imagine what they must have been saying:

Daddy is lying again.

Another plan thwarted. Another promise broken. Another hope dashed. Another doubt planted.

They stood there, sweet and stoic, as I signed the paperwork and forked over the cash for lessons that really, truly would start tomorrow (i.e. "sometime slightly sooner than a million years from now, but at 5 p.m., still way too far away from today"). I knew it was for real this time. But the doubt in the air squeezed my throat tight.

I compensated with the increasingly lame creek idea, throwing in an ice cream cone this time. No protests. No complaints.

But no delight either.

Today, I had an afternoon meeting. My wife took them to swim lessons. She drove 40 minutes from work up the mountain where a friend was watching them, hussled them into the car and down the mountain, out of the car, across the parking lot and into the bathroom to change. They were in the pool for their 3:30 lesson at 3:31.

When I saw them afterward, they were bubbling with stories about what they'd done in class.

"Daddy, I floated on my back--withOUT any help!"

"Daddy, I jumped in by myself!"

"Daddy, I put my head under the water!"

After celebrating with them for a few minutes, Ashlyn added another boast. "And Daddy, we made it on TIME to swimming lessons today!"

"That's awesome, Ashlyn." Finally, someone had gotten these sweet little fish to the pond. Go Mommy.

"Um, Daddy, I have an idea." Ashlyn was bright-eyed. "After today, Mommy should drive us to swimming lessons."

'What does love mean?" she asked

2009-07-02T22:55:00.001-07:00

Melía tells us she loves us a lot. Scores of times each day.

And at least as often, we tell her that we love her.

We quite enjoy it, although it might get kind of nauseating after awhile if you were here listening.

"I-love-you-so-much-you-are-so-cute, pweety pie," she'll say to me, rapid-fire. Kisses--wet, wonderful and splattered all over my face--come with the deal.

"I love you so much, my mini-Melía. You are my wonderful, sweet, beautiful princess daughter."

"I love you so much, Bo-Bo." (Bo-Bo? Don't ask me.)

This kind of dance goes on throughout the day, from the first hello in the morning, to the final good-night in the evening. (And on to the five or six loving good-nights she manages after that, before we stop responding.)

But one day, in the midst of one of these syrupy sweet conversations, she asked,

"Daddy, what does 'love' mean?"

I know now that I answered way too quickly, considering that this may be the most important question in the universe. The fact that I don't even remember my answer shows how profanely hasty I was to field this holy inquiry.

But I must have said something like, "Love is sharing, and being nice and good to people, helping them, even when they are not nice to us." (Accurate, but so blasé. I should have spent days pondering it, like I'm still doing with the "When will God rest again?" question.)

What I do remember is her response: "Oh, that's fun!"

I buy that.

Is love easy? Rarely.

But when we manage to pull it off, is it fun? Absolutely, my mini-Melía.

'Is God resting today?' she said

2009-07-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

Driving down the mountain toward Vacation Bible School one afternoon, Ashlyn asked,

"Is God resting today?"

"Wow. That's a great question, Ashie-love. Um, Jesus says in the Bible that God is always working--listening to us, helping us, taking care of us. God doesn't really get to rest. He works every day."

"But He did rest one day!" Ashlyn cried. She must have thought I'd forgotten.

It should be said that infant Ashlyn was our angel baby, because she actually did the only two things babies really need to do: eat and sleep. She is still rather adept at this pair of simple pleasures.

She relishes her grub with commentary worthy of the top foodie magazines (at least the ones read by preschoolers). The first time she ate kiwifuit, at age two-and-change, she said, "Yum! Kiwi tastes like canteloupe and grapes." (And it does. I'd never thought of it, but I couldn't beat that description now.)

And even though she precedes them with tormented screaming and insanity, Ashlyn is our one child who still does naps. We've long known known that her crescendo of ferocity is just the storm beform the calm. Just this week, she confessed to her appalled sisters, "I do like naps."

Ashlyn plays hard, eats well, sings loud, fights strong. And she rests.

Was she looking for divine company now on this late afernoon, Someone as passionate, alive, brilliant and busy as she, Who also knows when it's time to stop?

"Yes, Ashie, you are right. The Bible also says He rested for a whole day when he was done making everything."

Exonerated, but no more satisfied than I with the paradox in the air, she paused. "Daddy, when is He going to rest again?"

Delighted, I laughed aloud.

"Daddy! When is He going to rest again?" She was urgent now, demanding to be taken seriously. And I was taking her seriously. It was just such a beautiful question that my joy at being related to her and the depth to which she had stumped me only knew how to come out as a giddy giggle.

"I don't know, Ashlyn. I'm just laughing because that is a very good question. It is such a good question that I think I will think about it for many days before I try to answer it. That is one of the best and hardest questions I have ever heard in my whole life. I'm very proud of you for asking it."

When will God rest again?

When we stop screwing up? When life stops giving us owies? When the human experiment is finally over and we're living out its happy ending in Paradise? Or will keeping Paradise Paradise take more God-work than ever with us on board, like a parent trying to keep the house tidy with a herd of small children on the loose?

Lord, you're the God of rest. You know--the One with the easy yoke and light burden. The One who made it a rule for us to chill every seventh day. (Great idea, BTW.)

You're the God of rest. But when will you get any Yourself?

Ashlyn and I want to know.

'Swats only teach me to hit other people,' she said

2009-05-17T23:53:00.001-07:00

It's been months since the conversation occurred, so I may not get it just right. But a quote I heard on the radio scooted it back onto my mental front burner after many moons of simmering.

Brielle was reprimanding me for my use of corporal punishment.

"You hit me!" she accused.

"No, I did not 'hit' you. I swatted you."

This is the term Rachelle and I settled on years ago for when we...uh...when we hit our children. The distinction is important, mind you, for several reasons.

1. Our swats are always open-handed. Hits, not necessarily.

2. Swats are dealt in cold blood, strategically. Hits tend to be crimes of passion.

3. While both are intended to manipulate behavior, the girls' hitting usually seeks selfish gain while ideally, we parents swat with disinterested, didactic motives. (I said "ideally.")

If that last one was the hardest for you to swallow, you've got five-year-old company. Brielle didn't buy it either.

I told her, "Hitting is when you want to hurt your sister because you're mad at her. Swatting is when I want to teach you because I love you."

"No, swats don't teach me ANYTHING! They only teach me to hit other people and be mean to them."

I don't recall how the rest of the dialog went. I only remember wondering if she'd been reading some anti-spanking parenting books--and wondering at what a point she had. When I swat, am I helping the child extinguish an antisocial behavior, or does she merely internalize my example of violence for dealing with others?

I don't know.

Pacifist though I am, I have not yet sworn off swats. I gave one to each of the twins just before kissing them goodnight in the wake of this lovely exchange between them:

"You're stupid."

"You're stupid."

"You aren't my friend."

"You aren't my friend."

"You aren't my stister."

"You aren't my stister." (sic)

I swatted and lectured both of them on what a special, precious gift they had in each other and how out of a hundred babies only one gets to have a twin and how they would be friends and sisters forever and how it was NOT okay to say such mean things. They cried pitiably for three minutes, their smarting skin either competing with my speech for their attention or underlining its urgency.

Then they buried me--and shortly thereafter each other--in hugs and kisses.

It was just the way a good spanking should go.

Little as I enjoy dishing it out, I think physical punishment is underrated. It has a primal zing that can shake us out of our false self to realize that moral failures actually cause pain, that ethical lapses lead to suffering. There is an immediacy, a relevance to a swat that talks and time-outs can't touch.

That said, the quote I heard came from an NPR source's commentary on the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on detainees in Guantánamo, and how they've been around for hundreds of years. One interviewee was convinced that the torture-like techniques have survived through time because they are so effective. A dissenter said this:

"These techniques have survived because it's easier to hit a person than outsmart them."

Touché.

Underrated and inevitable though corporal punishment may be, and even though I swat, not hit, I'm here confessing that in disciplining my angel combatants, I've been caving too often to what is easy to do. The rod is as old as time and as natural as sneezing, and to a degree it works.

But thanks to this interview, I'm going to work harder than ever on doing less swatting--and more outsmarting.

'I wonder how God puts the baby inside,' she said

2009-05-03T20:53:00.001-07:00

Thursday I talked Brielle into snagging a Del Taco strawberry shake to share. (This delicacy beats anything Starbucks sells and for well under three bucks.)

It didn't take excessive persuasion. But healthy girl that she is, she was helping me justify the purchase as we pulled out of the drive-through.

"Daddy, this strawberry shake is good for you--a little bit good for you."

"Well, yeah, it does have some good things in it, like protein, and calcium, and a little bit of vitamin C and fiber from the strawberries." (OK, so it is a VERY little bit of these latter--but part of the beauty of this shake truly is how many real frozen strawberries they blend in. You really must try one.)

"I know," she said.

She does, too. We often talk nutrients--and lack thereof.

"But it also has a lot of---"

"Sugar," Brielle finished my hackneyed critique for me. "Yeah." A wistful sigh.

"It has a lot of fat too," said I.

"A lot of people like to be skinny," mused Brielle.

A brief fear that our nutritional conversations had begun warping her body image poked its nose into my chest. "Yeah, they do, Brielle." I clung to matter-of-fact-ness.

She took the topic elsewhere, mercifully. "Pregnant ladies are fat and skinny."

"Verdad, niñita."

"They're skinny on top and they're fat in the middle. Because they have a baby inside their tummy."

I breathed a couple gentle laughs.

"I wonder how God puts the baby inside their tummy." (So much for merciful topic changes.)

"You wonder what?" I asked, feeling suddenly desperate.

"I know God puts the baby in their tummy, but I wonder how He does that."

I considered going there, but decided quickly that I lacked the time and preparation to do so competently. (OK, and I lacked the guts too. But honestly, if holding a cell phone to one's ear is illegal while driving, shouldn't having "the talk" with a 5-year-old be too?)

"That's pretty crazy, huh? We'll have to go to the library and get a book about that."

---

So...any great book ideas, dear friends? Seriously.

'I love you more than you do,' she said

2009-04-21T18:59:00.001-07:00

Melia is incredibly lovey dubby these days. She regresses into paroxysms of delight when I get home from anywhere. Before bed lately, she has been telling me, "I love you more than you do, Daddy."

I knew this was a good thing the first time I heard it, whatever she meant by it. At first I guessed she was saying that her love for me was greater than my love for myself.

True enough, I thought. Maybe her intuitive little heart had sensed my bent for self-loathing and wanted to tell me she saw a more lovable soul here than I saw in myself.

But only a few nights ago did I figure out what she was really trying to articulate.

"I love you more than you love me," Melia said.

I laughed and argued back, "You are very sweet, but I don't think so, because I love you soooo much!"

"I know, but I love you MORE than you love me." She was sticking to her guns.

And it cracked me up. "I don't know, my Melia...."

"Don't laugh, Daddy. I'm serious."

This only made me more giggly, but she was adamant now. "Don't laugh at me, Daddy! I'm serious!"

Finally, I shut up and let her love me.

'All the colors of the rainbow,' she said

2009-04-13T21:40:00.000-07:00

If recent posts about Ashlyn's demonic outbursts have led anyone to believe she is anything less than an angel from God, please, do not be deceived. For 23 hours and some 19 minutes a day she is a dancing, shimmering dewdrop of heaven.

Just a tad messier.

Exhibit A. A couple nights ago we were fixing to bed the twins down when Ashie struck up this chorus: "I love you, Daddy! I love you all the colors of the rainbow." (A giggle here. She was serious about the message, I think, but still my silly Ashie, delighted at the funky factor of her metaphor.)

She spread her arms, looked me in the eye, and crooned, "I love you, and I want to paint you all the colors of the rainbow." (More giggles, although here she may have been speaking literally.)

I feel the love. It is wonderful. She is my Ashlyn angel, as always.

And, just in case, I am moving the markers up a shelf.

'Because I'm playing with roly-polies,' she said

2009-04-08T18:00:00.000-07:00

Last post, I wrote about Ashlyn's recent retro groove, reliving her gory days of the terrible twos. They have been coming almost daily when her will is thwarted, complete with spit, screams, bites, kicks and seizures of wrath. But this time around, we enjoy bonus material: manipulatively cruel words that had been beyond her at age two.

Getting ready for a day at Disneyland, such craziness earned her a two-ride timeout. While serving this timeout, I insisted she go potty now so she'd be ready to party on ride #3. It’s our Disneyland tradition to clear the bladder before the day begins. She insisted she did not need to go.

So committed was she to being right about this that she sat on the john and held it, refusing to pee lest it give me any fatherly sense of having been right. (And how loathsome that would be!) I told her she had to either pee or remain seated (as in “Permanecer sentados, por favor”) for five minutes, whichever came first.

She opted for none of the above, hopping off the pot and announcing, "I’m NOT going to go potty." I plopped her back on the can. She slid off. A few cycles of this, including one which baptized half of her dress, and I was nearly done.

I returned the seething princess to her throne once more, and told her she had to start her five minutes over again. I shut the stall door more solidly than necessary and then tried to appear cool as dudes entered and left the men’s room.

Somewhere around then, Ashlyn screamed, “You’re a stupid boy, Daddy!” and descended from the commode.

That was it.

I snatched her up and carried her out of the restroom fireman-style, flailing and shrieking (Ashlyn, not me—yet). I felt the toilet water soaking into the right shoulder of my shirt as we walked through Ariel’s Grotto, where wide-eyed children awaited the arrival of Ashlyn’s favorite princess. Up the stairs toward the exit I stomped, enjoying a pause in the screams as Ashlyn eyed the magical scene from her upside-down vantage point, intrigued or embarrassed or both.

Once out of princess view, she resumed her tirade with fresh vigor, screaming the four-year-old equivalent of profanities at me as we worked our way toward the park gate. If she didn’t love her Gweppy so much, I swear she’d have insulted my mother.

“We are leaving Disneyland, Ashlyn. Little girls who act like this cannot be in Disneyland. We are going to the car.”

Halfway out, I tried letting her walk, since my carrying seemed to be irking her more. She thanked me by sprinting away from me, crying, “Help! Help! Help!” I seriously wondered if I someone would confiscate the child from me. (At least I could hope....)

“Ashlyn, STOP!” I barked in my most business-meaning bass tone. Mercifully, she did.

I carried her the rest of the way to the tram, trying to sound like a responsible parent as we got our hands stamped on exit, explaining to Ashlyn our reason for leaving with feigned calm. She wiped the hand stamp off and kept screaming.

I remember saying, “Ashlyn, you are a good girl. But good girls can turn into bad girls. And I love you too much to let that happen. I will not let you turn into a bad girl. I will help you be the real Ashlyn, the good Ashlyn.” Who knows if she heard it. But I still mean it. That love and that fear coexist every day I see her like this.

She screamed on the tram ride, sitting as far away from me as I would let her. She ran from me again as we got off the tram, and I laid into her again about never EVER running away from Daddy. I sat her down on a planter at the base of the mammoth Disney parking garage, and growled warnings about swats and extended time-outs if she ran away again.

The wait was on.

I pulled out my phone and began this post while Ashlyn’s screams turned to fussing, which turned into sulking, which turned into silence.

The sun shone through scattered clouds.

Minutes later, Ashlyn was digging in the planter for roly-polies. She found one and brought it to me.

"Daddy, I found a roly-poly!"

“That’s cool, Ashlyn.” Those things are nasty, actually.

She dropped it. “Oh no! Daddy, please help me find my roly-poly!”

I dug it out of the dirt and was her hero. “Thank you, Daddy!”

We chilled there for awhile, bonding over bugs, talking as if neither of us had been monsters just 15 minutes before.

It was better than Disneyland.

Finally, I got back to the unfinished business. “Ashlyn, why aren’t we going on rides right now?”

“Oh…’cause…I’ll tell you why. ‘Cause…I’m playing with roly-polies.” (Duh, Daddy!)

She was right, of course.

I did review some other reasons for her fate of sow bugs over Space Mountain, lest she be overly happy about the whole punishment. The conversation worked its way through my hurt feelings at the mean words she’d said. She quickly apologized in a tone that was sincere enough to count, but also connoted some amount of “That was so half an hour ago, Daddy.”

We moved on to the fact that even after all this drama I still required that she sit on the potty for five minutes, or go pee pee, whichever came first. She went in happily and as I expected, drained cups of urine from her little bladder. I finished with a fatherly reminder of how much more fun we’d have had if she’d done that the first time I asked.

We grabbed a sandwich and met the rest of the happy throng back inside the park. She was kisses and hugs and I love you’s for the rest of the day.

And we lived happily ever after. Or, till the end of the day. Whichever came first.

'I don't love you anymore,' she said

2009-04-02T23:44:00.001-07:00

Ashlyn has been revisiting her terrible twos of late. Nostalgia, maybe.

Not that the terribles are even about being two. Brielle began hers around 18 months. Ashlyn's were at their nadir when she was three. Melía is mostly sweet, but at odd times over random issues, she draws her line in the sand and we all suffer needlessly.

The terribles are probably more about just being human. Pursuing the fantasy of independence. Trying to live out the myth that if we had it, we'd be happy. Sounding our angst over the torment of not being our own gods.

A couple of nights back Ashlyn was doing this expertly.

She talked a lot of trash, most of which transcended language (unless you can help me spell a prolonged shriek of rage). But the line that bounces around in my mind’s echo chamber was no more and no less than, “I don’t love you anymore.”

It was surreal hearing this from a four-year-old, let alone one throwing a two-year-old fit. Where does she get this stuff? How could such a little one take so skilled a stab at Achilles’ unsuspecting heart?

She missed, mind you. But not by much. If I had believed her, she would have had me.

“You don’t have to love me, Ashlyn. You just have to obey me,” I replied.

I believed my own words as little as I believed hers.

Indeed, she does not have to obey me. Endless options await her beyond the narrow path of Daddy’s will.

And don’t tell her this, but given the choice, I’d take love over obedience any day.

'Pretend you are God,' she said

2009-03-17T05:30:00.000-07:00

Melía had logged a lot of hours in church programs by Saturday evening, and for a girl who loves to interact so much that she won't even watch movies, she'd been extremely good about it.

But midway through the evening, she was cradled in my arms and ready to make conversation.

"Are you God?" she whispered.

"No, silly Melía. I am not God."

"You are like God. Did you make yourself?"

"No, God and my mommy and daddy made me." (So far when I 've said this, no one has asked, "How." Mercifully.)

She decided to have some more fun with this, saying, "You are God!"

"Silly sweet Melía, I am not God."

"Pretend you are God," she conceded.

I started to kiss her all over the cheeks and hair, saying, "I love you, Melía. I love you, Melía."

"No, pretend to be God," she said again.

"I am." I went back to my face-kissing.

"No, you're not," she giggled.

"Yes, I am. This is what God is doing right now. He's loving you."

It kind of blows my mind to consider that every child makes that request of her parent. Every baby looks to his father and mother to play that impossible role. "Pretend to be God," their hearts cry out.

I think I got it right in that moment, for once. It's harder of course, to play the part of God with fidelity when the girls are screaming and fighting and whining and hair-splitting.

Is it harder for God to play Himself at the times when we're doing the same? Or is mercy-triumphing-over-judgment the only role He knows?

God, give me grace to portray You with some semblance of accuracy. May Melía know by my example that whatever else You may be doing, above all else You're loving her.

'You're not the boss of me,' she said

2009-03-15T07:18:00.000-07:00

It is a well-established fact in our home that I, as father of three princesses, am a king.

So it shook me this week when Ashlyn, sprinting back in forth in front of the gym instead of walking to the car as requested by the king, sang, "You're not the boss of me! You're not the boss of me! You're not the boss of me!" And so on.

She was obviously just messing around with this choice phrase inherited from big sis, who had the great fortune to pick it up at school for handy and frequent use with both of her sisters. But never before had any of them had the audacity to say it to either of the ruling monarchs. (Never mind whether or not said monarchs have said it to each other.)

It was a playful caricature of defiance. (Which I kind of like as a name for the rock band my girls will doubtless found someday.) So I wasn't really mad.

But neither did I have the strength to leave it alone.

"Actually, Ashie-love, I am your boss. You're a princess, and I'm the king."

Without a beat of hesitation, she replied, "No. God is the King. And you are a prince."

OK, so she had me there.

I laughed, stumped for a moment, and scooped her up to plop her in her car seat. I'm actually still stumped, although I did eke out something lame about how God was King but He'd told me to be a good prince/king/boss to my three princesses. It was technically correct, but nowhere near as well-put as her line.

Sometimes the four-year-old argument is much more elegant than its 35-year-old rebuttal.

And sometimes, I need reminders that though my kids are under my command, in a larger sense, we're fellow subjects of the same King, brothers and sisters with the same Big Daddy.

'A kid today,' she said

2009-03-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

Eleven days ago, my brother became a daddy. Lovely baby Jenna burst in on the world a few weeks early with so little labor that her mommy forgot to get her epidural. (Isn't that what happened, Kim?)

We got to see her when she was only hours old, and the three girls who used to be the "babies" of the family were STOKED.

There's something about that perfect tinyness that captures their imagination. After we'd adored my niece as long as new Mommy could take it, we made the reluctant retreat down the elevator and past the gift shop toward the chilling car.

Melía asked, "But baby Jenna is not going to be a kid today? Is she?"

"No, Melía. Not today."

It's going to go too fast, my newly daddified little brother. But thank God, not THAT fast.

Quote of the day: I love

2009-02-22T23:19:00.000-08:00

The other night, sitting around the little Tinkerbell dinner table, seated on her tiny Tinkerbell chair, my mini-Melía was singing. The song was simple--almost too simple to write about.

"I love Brielle! I love Ashlyn! I love Mommy! I love Daddy!"

But if that's not worth writing about, what is?

Quote of the day - Everything Valentime's

2009-02-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

Ashlyn: We're going to celebrate Valentime's Day! Are people going to come over to our house? We need everything Valentime's day!

(I think she thinks this is a majorly celebrated holiday like Christmas. We do celebrate, but to her chagrin, there are no pipers piping or pear-tree-perching partridges here on any sort of twelve days of Valentine's.)

Daddy: You know what we need on Valentine's Day, Ashie?

Ashlyn: What?

Daddy: (attacking her cheeks) Kisses and hugs!

Ashlyn: (with wriggling protest) No, we need other things...like sharing. And caring. And not fighting.

Blessing be upon whomever brainwashed this into her--even if it was the Care Bears. The kisses and hugs are nice, but this Valentine's day, what we need even more are the love gifts that my Ashie asked for--in this Bennie family, and in the human family.

So here's to having "everything Valentime's" that we need. Sharing, caring and peace to all of you!

Love,
Mike

Quote of the day - But we can't see him

2009-02-07T22:20:00.000-08:00

It snowed a ton last night. It was beautiful enough that after church, the girls violated their tradition of wailing in protest when our answer to, "Where are we going now?" is "Home."

(It's a happy home, really. Mostly. It's just that, not unlike their Mommy, they really like to go and do. And go and do some more.)

But "home" was an acceptable answer today, because there was half a foot of snow to come home to, the first since Christmas Day. It took an hour to track down the snow suits, get the mittens on, find Ashlyn's left boot, take them both off and put socks on, and get out in the fluffy white stuff.

We made a snow man, sat and dined on snow from the porch table, buried a doll inside the snow man to hide it from a bloodthirsty King Herod, and then buried the twins themselves. They stayed buried up to the neck until Ashlyn assured us that Herod was no longer a threat. "Jesus killed him," she said.

"No, Jesus did not kill Herod," I told her.

"Why?" asked Melía.

"That's not how Jesus rolls. He doesn't do the killing thing. He does the loving thing."

"Oh," said Melía.

Maybe it was connected or maybe it wasn't, but some time later, Ashlyn observed this:

"Jesus can see us, but we can't see him. That's magic."

"That's right, Ashie," I said.

"That's not magic," Brielle said. She is quite the demythologizer these days.

But magic or no, Ashlyn was on to something significant, I think. I find fault with myself or with God for my failure to see what I think my eyes of faith should. Maybe it's enough just to be seen.

When you tell my dad, "It's good to see you," he's going to tell you, "It's good to be seen." And he's right.

What if I settled down comfortably into the knowledge that whatever I see or don't see, God sees me? What if that paradox moved from my pile of annoyances to my temple of cherished mysteries?

What if it is magic?

Quote of the day - No you're not

2009-02-04T18:21:00.000-08:00

She'd had pancakes sprinkled with chocolate chips for breakfast. And now she was laying into the continental breakfast the church had served up: hot chocolate and chocolate doughnuts. (Ever eager to contribute to a child's joy in the Lord--and to parents' prayer life--those church folk are.)

Both breakfasts had left her with chocolate on her delightfully round cheeks, which are tempting enough to chomp into even without such sweet frosting.

"You have chocolate cheeks, Ashie Lulu! I'm going to BITE those chocolate cheeks!" I growled with ferocity and opened my mouth like a lion.

"No, you're not." She regarded my gaping jaw placidly. "Because you love me."

Alas, she's right.

But love or no love, those Ashie-cheeks can be so dang tempting.....

Quote of the day - I already am

2009-02-03T17:56:00.000-08:00

Ashlyn sings and dances for an audience of none.

Anytime.

Anywhere.

This Saturday morning she was singing for no one in particular, there in the echo-friendly entryway of the house our friends were brave enough to share with us for a night.

The tune was epic in length, but spinning over the tile beside the staircase, she flung out this phrase that stuck to my heart:

"Jesus, help me to be a princess. Even though I already am...."

That's what I'm talking about.

Royalty by birth, with humility enough to ask for what she boldly knows is already hers. Guts enough to seek help being her truest, her princess self. Hunger for majesty, thirst for nobility.

And yet satisfied.

Quote of the day - It's a train station

2009-02-02T22:22:00.000-08:00

About three days a week, I run out of my office as the bell rings, hoping to beat my 3,000 students out of the parking lot so I can pick up Brielle before 3:00, when I have to start paying for after care. After I've hugged her, celebrated homeward-bound kindergarten artifacts, and talked her into sitting in her car seat, I pull out to the edge of the street and hope the sight of moving traffic scares her into buckling her car seat more than my nagging did.

On a good day, she reads me one of her little picture-guided books on the way and I get to hear about what she's learned, and maybe even a song.

At the twins' preschool, I take Brielle in and we wade through four-year-olds who've just woken from a nap. I find and squeeze Melía, who helps me find the hiding Ashlyn, who's dressed in some sort of costume. Melía joins Ashlyn in her hiding spot. I tickle them both till they come out. I goad Ashlyn to lose the dress-up gear.

It's snack time now. While waiting for them to eat, I collect artwork from one cubby, blankets and sweaters from another, peanut-butter-scented princess boxes from the lunch rack. And with any luck, two children.

With lots of luck, I emerge with all three.

We work our way down the hall, girls stopping to see what the babies are doing, reminisce about bygone days in younger classes, beg for ice from the ice machine. One gets out to the car, another decides she needs to go potty. They all get outside, and Daddy remembers he didn't sign them out. Back inside, another decides she's ready for a pitstop too. Daddy wonders what happened to his nap time.

It's usually a good 90 minutes between my quitting time and the delicious moment when all four of us are crammed into the battered green Accord.

To make things interesting today, between Brielle's kindergarten and the twins' preschool, I had to swing by Rachelle's work to snag a third carseat. Walking toward Mommy's building, Brielle eyed a set of temporary mobile home offices on a construction site.

"Are those choo-choo trains? Is this a train station?"

"No, but they do look kind of like trains. Those are mobile homes, Brielle. The call them 'mobile' because they are moveable. 'Mobile' comes from the same word as 'move.' Mobile, move, mobile, move. Auntie's house is a mobile home, but it is double-wide. See how skinny those mobile homes are? They are single wide. Do you know why they make them so skinny? That's so they can fit on the back of a truck and drive them on the roads to wherever they need them. Cool, huh?"

Brielle had listened politely to my lecture on manufactured housing nomenclature, etymology and transport. And she had one conclusion:

"I think this is a train station."

Quote of the day: The cement was stronger

2009-01-26T20:57:00.000-08:00

I picked up Brielle from school and she had this righteous shiner. It was on the same eye that attracted a log while sledding last January. This time she'd just been walking to music class when there was a sudden disagreement between her foot and the curb, and her right cheek ended up in the middle of it.

At the sight of the scraped bruise, I gave her the sympathy I genuinely felt, although she was pretty well over it. Once in the car, I decided she was big enough, humorous enough and over it enough to engage in her first round of the standard game I was raised with whenever we had a gnarly run-in with anything inanimate, in which said obstacle becomes the object of the parent's feigned concern. Let's call it, "Compassion for Cudgels."

Here's how my version of it went today:

"Brielle, that looks really ouchy. You must have hit that curb hard."

"Yeah."

"It's a good thing your face is so strong. Is your face stronger than the cement? Did you break the cement?"

"No, Daddy, I didn't. The cement was stronger than my face. The cement broke my face."

Asked and answered.

And then, "Dude!" (I've never heard her say this before. I have officially imitated Crush from Finding Nemo for her one too many times.) "How do they make cement? I know they must use trucks to make it."

Yep, my little grommet is definitely over it.

Righteous, dude.

Quote of the day: I hate fake princesses

2009-01-25T20:58:00.000-08:00

"I don't like any of the princesses anymore. We should sell all of our princess stuff." This morning, either my firstborn daughter said this, or I had a break with reality and temporarily streamed audio from an antithetically parallel universe.

More likely the latter.

Or so I thought until tonight, when Brielle again renounced the characters to whom she has devoted hundreds of her hours--and our dollars. "Anyway," she said, her sigh dripping with nonchalance, "I hate all the fake princesses."

No way.

You'd think this would be a moment of triumph for me. The princess mania, with its focus on foofy adornment, aesthetic perfection and all things sappy, has been one of the few items on my Daddy-of-daughters gripe list. Just last night I was coveting the manly toys that my friends' sons were playing with, imagining how much more fun they must have playing trucks and tools with their little dudes than I have changing Disney doll dresses with my dudettes.

No more castles or balls or pumpkin-carriages or cheesy princes charming? That's what I'm talking about!

Or so you'd think I'd think.

But in a bizarre twist of fate, this morning's princess repudiation did not bring on the elbow-pumping, "YES!" it should have. Instead, I caught myself swallowing a lump in my throat.

Is this what it feels like to see her grow up too fast?

Quote of the day: I want you to

2009-01-22T21:09:00.000-08:00

Tuesday nights, I come home late. Melía knows this, and waits up for me. Every Tuesday.

This Tuesday, the moment I closed the front door, I heard her suck in her breath all the way down the hall. It's the same noise her mommy makes when something destructively messy is about to happen. Or when she's really excited.

I stepped into the hallway, tentative, knowing what I'd see, but pretending not to know. She was out of her bed--grounds for a time-out after she's been put down--and squatting in the hallway outside her door, wide-eyed and beaming like I'd just come home from Iraq or something.

I stalked her, trying in vain to open my eyes as wide and blue as hers, singing, "I'm gonna catch you, you better run. I'm gonna catch you, here I come" (as made famous on Noggin by Laurie Berkner).

Normally Melía RUNS from this. She loves to run, especially from Daddy. Most fun for both of us is the instant when I catch her, scoop her tiny frame up in my arms, and kiss her tummy.

But tonight, she just said,

"That's OK."

I stalked closer in mock menace, wondering when the regular game would take hold. "I'm gonna catch you, you better run. I'm gonna catch you, here I come!" I sang, upping the intensity of my threat.

"That's OK," she said again, motionless. "Because I want you to."

Of course, my arms melted around her. I kissed her cheeks, her hair, and the bare forehead that now shines below her self-styled bangs. I put her back in her bed, and before I could say bedtime prayers, she told me once more. "It was OK that you catched me. Because I wanted you to."

Here's to daddyhood and daughters--to the chase, to the flight and to the times when more than anything else, she just wants to be caught.

Converstaion of the day - Pray in my heart

2009-01-21T21:52:00.000-08:00

"Daddy, how do you pray in your heart?" Ashlyn asked.

There had been a lull in the bickering and fighting in the back seat of the Accord, partly brought on by Ashlyn being on time-out. (Yes, time-out CAN work in the car.) It had been just delightfully long enough for her to forget the fight and pose this question, seated there between her momentarily silent sisters.

"You just think about the things you want to say to God," I answered.

"I'm going to do that right now," she said.

"Cool," said I.

And she did. "I'm done doing that," she announced, half a minute later.

"What did you say in your heart to God?" I asked, ever the voyeur.

"I said, thank you for dying on the cross, and thank you for loving us, and thank you for all the stuff you give us. Amen."

"That's awesome, Ashlyn. I bet God was so happy to hear you say those things to Him in your heart."

"Yeah," she giggled, as shyly as Ashlyn does anything. "I can pray in my heart."

Brielle weighed in now. "I can't pray in my heart. But I can pray in my brain."

"Those are both good," I said.

Quote of the day - You don't care

2009-01-19T23:21:00.000-08:00

I'd warned Brielle that the bath would be over if she fought with Ashlyn one more time.

They fought.

I hated to do it. But I hate breaking promises even more. So I did.

I grabbed the soap, and washed her hastily. She wriggled and cried. Eager to get her out, I slapped shampoo on her hair and scrubbed it over her scalp and wet locks. It dripped into her eyes. She shook her head and screamed. And screamed.

This is what she screamed:

"You don't care about me! You don't care about me! You don't care about me!"

Except that, knowing how slow I am to get things (she has heard Mommy try to communicate with me), she helpfully repeated this something like a dozen times--for a total of three dozen.

There are two possible responses to this.

The one I normally advocate is an acknowledgment of the speaker's feelings, respecting the fact that her words reflect reality as she perceives it. One might paraphrase the child's feelings in order to validate her viewpoint and confirm that one has heard and understood her. Diplomacy.

Then there's the response I chose: "That is a lie, Brielle. And it is a mean lie. I care about you too much to let you fight your sister. I told you what would happen if you fought with Ashlyn again, and I care about you too much to tell you I'm going to do something and then not do it."

I don't know if I responded well or not. The words she spoke seemed so opposed to all that I'm about that I didn't have what it took to just leave it alone. Maybe my defensiveness made it all about me, which demonstrated her point.

But what haunts me more is the source of such talk. Really, where does she come up with this? Is she repeating what she's heard others say? If so, where has she heard this stuff? Movies? School? It's certainly not a game we play here at home.

And how much does she mean it? Is she really feeling uncared-for in this moment? Or is she already advanced enough in the way of the Guilt Jedi to be laying this on with strategic intent?

Is this just the primal cry of every heart when we've fought in the tub, the soap's in our eyes, and judgment has been passed against us? On even the best days, is it the cry of our worst fear?

Quote of the day - The bare necessities

2009-01-18T22:41:00.000-08:00

The rest of us were boarding the minivan for the quick run home from grandma's Friday night.

But not Ashlyn.

She had a song to sing. And with a song, a dance.

She wiggled her way around the Odyssey at least enough times for its gray walls to come a tumblin' down, singing,

"The BARE necessities. Don't forget your worries and your strike!"

Around the rear bumper she sped, half-running, half-boogying, throwing the full weight of her little chest into the emphasis on "BARE." Almost colliding with the front fender, the modified lyric from The Jungle Book came back like a Zen mantra, over and over with each lap around the vehicle. "The BEAR necessities. Don't forget your worries and your strike!"

Her literal wording may have upset Walt Disney's original message. But her performance--free of cares beyond the moment, true to life's essentials of song, dance, passion and childlike power--clearly captured what Baloo was trying to tell Mowgli.

Quote of the day - I love Satan

2009-01-14T21:31:00.000-08:00

Melía was going through the motions of bedding down last night--a prelude to her hour of requests, potty breaks, talking to self and to knocked-out twin sister, playing and patiently enduring the silence before sleep sneaks in and takes her away.

With no visible provocation, she announced:

"I love God and Satan."

I was disarmed, not sure what to say. I'm not sure now what I did say. Maybe I said, "You do?"

"Yeah," she said, pleased with herself. "I love Satan!" She giggled, aware of the scandal of these words, but sticking to her guns.

Knowing Melía's heart, I sensed this declaration--dark as it may have sounded from other lips--was worth celebrating. "That's good, Melía. Do you think God loves Satan too?"

"Yes!" said Melía.

"No, He doesn't," Ashlyn protested.

"Really? I think He does love Satan. Because Satan is His child, and even though he does bad things, God loves him anyway, just like He loves us when we do bad things," I said.

"Yeah!" said Melía.

"Everyone is His child," said Ashlyn.

Amen and amen to living in a universe run by Love big enough to encircle the old friend-turned-enemy who crucified Him.

And amen to living in a house with little hearts big enough to get it.

(Click photo at top or PLAY arrow at left to see a short clip of Melía speaking for herself on the topic of God's unconditional love.)

Quote of the day - I cannot tell you

2009-01-13T21:53:00.000-08:00

I wish I could remember how this conversation began. What Melía said captured me so much that I forgot what led to it. Or maybe I didn't really start listening soon enough.

Despite these fresh efforts to tune in to my children and meditate on their words, my listening still kicks in too little and too late.

We'd just pulled into the gym, this time with all three girls and car seats crammed into the back of the Accord. As always, none of the girls was in a rush to jump out.

For a change, neither was I.

Melía had asked me some kind of "Know what?" question, and I was having fun answering this rhetorical by guessing what she was going to say. I threw out a couple bits of random silliness and a couple serious attempts at intuiting what she was getting at.

I was having fun at my own game.

But that was enough, she decided, and told me so:

"No, Daddy. If you are telling me I cannot tell you."

Her reprimand reminded me to do what I already know to do. "Seek first to understand, then to be understood," as I teach my students, in the language of Stephen Covey's Habit 5. Stop operating on what you think people are going to say, and let them say it.

Shut up and listen.

Thanks for the reminder, Melía Grace. I'll try to do that--and sooner next time.

---

"...O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love."
(From the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi)

Quote of the day - Favorite space picture

2009-01-12T20:55:00.000-08:00

Brielle's Kindergarten class is studying space. I picked her up after school. After a giant bear hug that lasted all the way from the pick-up bleachers to the car, the first thing she told me inside was this:

"I know what my favorite space picture is." She was giddy. I hadn't even begun to ask questions about the day. "It's called called 'Oh-Daven.' It's a group of stars."

"Orion?"

"Yeah, Oh-Ryan. And inside it there's a giant black hole. Astronauts can see it." She couldn't talk fast enough now. "And God and Jesus are going to come out of it!" Her grin was about the size of the great hunter's belt. "And that's why it's my favorite!"

Not a bad reason to choose a space picture.

---

Maranatha, come Lord--by whatever path You choose, whatever time You know is best. (But sooner is definitely better.) And however, whenever that is, come now and restore my childlike excitement about how perfect that day will be.

Conversation of the day - Trinity talk

2009-01-11T09:44:00.000-08:00

Driving home from church yesterday, I made a comment about something Jesus could do.

From the back of the minivan, Brielle corrected me (believe it or don't): "God."

"That's right, Jesus and God."

"No--God," she insisted.

"Jesus is God," I said.

Ashlyn weighed in. "No he's not!"

I hitched up my theological pants, drew in a deep breath, and set out to explain the Trinity to 4- and 5-year-olds. "Jesus is God's Son, but he is also part of God."

"No, he's not. Jesus is not part of God. Even though they do the same work."

"Brielle, is your pointer finger your hand?"

"Yeah."

"And is your thumb your hand too?"

"Yeah."

"It's kind of like that. Your fingers are all different, but they are all part of your hand. And Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit are all God. And like you said, they help each other do the same work."

"Oh."

"Or maybe it's more like ice and water and steam. Ice is water that is frozen. And water is water that is just water. And steam is water that is evaporating. But they're all water--just in different states."

Sometimes I wonder how in the same sentence I can remember to limit my vocabulary enough to utter something like "water is water that is water," yet drop an odd homonym like "states" at the end. This is why I never taught Kindergarten.

Brielle giggled. "Not in different states!" She said "states" in that high-to-low pitch sequence that means, "You're being silly, Daddy!" (I hear that sequence often because my daughters think I am silly often--even more often than I attempt to be.)

I laughed back. "I don't mean a state like California or Texas or Alaska, but like water in a different way of being, a different circumstance, a different condition."

"Conditioner?!" she laughed. Now her twin sisters were laughing too. "Daddy, you said 'water in a different conditioner'!"

Mercifully, my Trinity lesson had ended, and on a silly note, a note of comical ambiguity. Maybe a pun is one more Godhead metaphor.

And maybe silliness is an underused path to God.

Conversation of the day - Everybody loves God

2009-01-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

Home late after a meeting today, the twins were jumping, crawling, hugging and kung-fu fighting all over me on the couch.

It was unmitigated delight.

Meanwhile, Brielle sat front and center before the TV, watching yet another screening of The Story of Jesus for Children. It fascinates me how absorbing this story is for her.

Right in the middle of the wrestling match on the sofa, with Jesus feeding the five thousand via DVD, Melía looked at me and said:

"I love God a lot."

"I'm so glad to hear you say that, Melía," I gushed, caught off guard by the move from hand-to-hand combat to praise. "God loves to hear it too!"

"And you love God a lot too, Daddy."

"That's right, my Melía." I was glad--relieved, actually--that she noticed. Sometimes I wonder if this reality shines through the fog of my anger, haste and general preoccupation with things mundane.

"Everyone loves God," Ashlyn chimed in.

I could not leave that alone. "Actually, Ashie, not everyone loves God."

"Why?" she asked.

"Some people don't know God and some people don't like God," I told her.

"Only bad people don't love God," said Ashlyn.

"All people are mix of bad and good, Ashlyn. It's just that...."

The tickling, elbowing and head-banging resumed before the discussion went any further. Maybe it was for the best. I often err on the side of too much information.

But even that much had begun what I know is next for my girls. The difference between facts and beliefs, knowledge and faith. The coming to terms with how often black and white end up being gray. And more troubling, the reality of hypocrisy.

It's going to be an exciting ride.

Maybe, if we'd just stick to Melía's opening statement, "I love God a lot," none of the rest would get under our skin so much.

Maybe.

Quote of the day - Was it good?

2009-01-07T22:14:00.000-08:00

For Christmas, the girls got The Story of Jesus for Children DVD. It is excellent, narrating the Christ story from a few children's viewpoints. Tonight it was on in the van on the way home from the gym.

We were going through the passion.

The girls watched wide-eyed, tight-lipped. The twins had questions, which Brielle tried to hush so she could hear the movie. I gave her the Daddy version of "Suffer the little sisters and forbid them not--questions about this shocking story are a very good thing, Miss Brielle."

Melía asked this one:

"Daddy, was it good that Jesus died?"

How would you answer that one?

Nothing about the scene on the tiny LCD screen was appealing or good. The sounds surrounding us were horrifying.

Yet nightly we praise Brielle when she includes, "Thank you for dying on the cross" in her bedtime prayer. It's called "Good Friday," isn't it?

But could I honestly answer that the corrupt trial, torture and execution of a perfect man was "good"? It brought me back to the gore and grimness of holy communion this weekend. "What kind of a sick religion is Daddy teaching me?" my daughters must be asking.

How far should I go to help it make sense? How much mystery should I let ferment in their minds? How many of my answers should I lay on them, and how many should I help them work out on their own? How much of what I'd like to tell her is just more than she can handle right now?

How much do I myself actually know about this? Grappling with Melía's question, I'm thinking I often overestimate how much I know.

And realizing that is definitely good.

Quote of the day - What did you learn?

2009-01-06T21:33:00.000-08:00

Tuesday nights a buddy or two and I hang out at a coffee shop to catch up, read a few verses from Matthew and pray for each other. Sometimes I get home in time to hug and kiss daughters before they crash. Melía is always one of these non-sleeping beauties awake to greet me after Bible study.

"Daddy!" she squealed when through her cracked door she saw me walk down the hall.

I plopped on her bed, squeezed her tight, kissed her hair, and said, "I love you so much, Melía."

She asked:

"Daddy, what did you learn about Jesus tonight?"

"What?" I asked, incredulous.

"That's what Mommy told me, that you were learning on Jesus."

I only got a short ways into my response about the greatest commandments in Matthew 23, how the first was to love God with all my heart and soul and strength, and the second is to love my neighbor as myself.

But sitting there looking into those big blue eyes staring out from under those self-cut bangs, I think I felt--if but for a second--how good that twofold command can feel to live out.

Quote of the day - I lied

2009-01-05T22:02:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we celebrated Three Kings Day (Día de los Reyes Magos) Mexican style. The girls put their shoes under their beds and woke up to find them full of stocking stuffers, courtesy of the wise men.

But it had been no small task convincing Ashlyn to do this strange non-Anglo Christmas custom.

"No! I DON'T WANT my shoes under there! That won't WORK!" she had shrieked the night before when I kept sticking her red kicks just below her bedskirt.

But I snuck them back under after she fell asleep, and she woke up in the morning, delighted to find her goodies there.

"I lied. You were right, Daddy."

She smiled and laughed at herself.

It was beautiful. I have nothing to say to improve on the sound of those lovely words. I just wanted some virtual witnesses that one day in her life, she uttered them.

Will you back me up?

Quote of the day - Bread for real life

2009-01-04T22:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday at church we had communion. Our kids had eaten the bread and drunk the grape juice before, but it seemed like Ashlyn got it at a new level this time.

With Rachelle, Melía and Brielle in the mother's room, I had the rare privilege of one-to-one time with her during the whole service. It gave me time to explain things as we ate and drank. (Usually at that point I'm doing damage control on spillage and wishing the carpet were a darker, purpler shade.)

In the car that afternoon, out of the blue, Ashlyn reminded us:

"The grape juice is blood--for pretend. And for real life, the bread is bread. But for pretend, it's Jesus'...Jesus'...body."

What a strange religion she must think her parents are raising her in. One week we're celebrating a baby's birth, and the next we're eating His body and drinking His blood.

Hardly G-rated stuff--even for grown-ups.

Tons of Jesus' original listeners were so weirded out by this concept that they abandoned ship (John 6:53-68 ). Maybe I should be worried these gory symbols might scare off my little ones too. Being a cannibalistic apprentice of such a bizarre and demanding Teacher could be downright frightening.

Maybe that should disturb me.

But more than any of that, I hope such an early acquaintance with this ritual will not spoil the scandal of what God did for her. I hope the realism of His brokenness never ceases to jar her. I pray the depth of His descent, His passion to be closer to her than food is to her tummy--never seem normal.

I hope this sort of pretending disturbs her--for real life.

Quote of the day - In your eyes

2009-01-03T17:00:00.000-08:00

Brielle had just had a typically brilliant conversation with me. She was on the couch, hopping around. I was on the chair-and-a-half, moved and inspired.

Through my glasses, I looked hard at her. "Brielle, I like talking with you," I said. "You are a very good listener, and you say very interesting things and ask very good questions and are curious. When you get older, will you still sit down and talk with me? Maybe we can just sit down with a cup of tea and talk? Because you are one of my very favorite people to talk to."

"OK," she said. She'd turned around and begun to gaze into my eyes, beatific, amused and smiling. I thought for sure this little speech had hit home.

I was having a moment. (One too many screenings of Mamma Mia in my house this Christmas, probably.)

And then she said:

"I can see myself in your eyes. Whoever is looking at you can see yourself--can see themself--in your eyes."

Naturally, while I was high on my moment of heart connection with my firstborn, she was entertaining herself checking out her reflection in my glasses.

Any teacher knows the feeling. You're on a roll, breaking it down to receptive little souls in ways that nearly bring a quiver to your voice. You expect an "Amen" any second now. A hand goes up. It must be the profound question you'd hoped to inspire. The child asks, "Can I go to the bathroom?"

Her non sequitur got me thinking, nonetheless. Its implications left me asking myself a lot of questions at least as important as, "Can I use the john?" Like these:

When she looks at me, how well am I doing at communicating an image of her anything like what God sees when He looks at her?
How are the lenses I've crafted to see my world enhancing or distorting the world she sees, especially the world within herself?
When was the last time I looked into my Heavenly Father's eyes to see a truer reflection of who I really am?
How will I train her to value this heavenly reflection, this divine self-image, this God's-eye-view of her--above all others?

Quote of the day - Not cool

2009-01-02T13:21:00.001-08:00

I was just helping Melía dismount safely from her somersault over my knee. I wasn't sure exactly what she was up to, but our little gymnast is often wiggling around our laps and legs and shoulders, and I thought I'd help her land without breaking her neck this time. It seemed the prudent thing to do.

She squinched up her brow and let me know what she thought.

"Daddy, I was doing someping coo'. And then you did someping with me and it was not coo' anymore."

I'm sure this was the first of many such utterances from Melía, although she will probably learn to distill the sentiment into something more elegant. I could hear her saying, "I love you. And please butt out."

"Lame, Daddy," would work.

When words just don't do her feelings justice, the ever popular "Whatever!" finger symbol may serve.

My question for myself is this: How often do my prudent parental designs disrupt the genuine coolness of what my kid is up to? In the dance between childlike playfulness and fatherly purpose, how wont am I to step on the toes of the kids whom God sent to teach me as much as I them?

And turning it vertical, how often is God up to something really cool when I grab hold of things and help them land in a way that's more safe and sane--and lame? In a way that ensures my comfort--secure within the bell curve--but a way that calls for no faith, no risk, no grace?

Quote of the day - No map

2009-01-01T20:38:00.000-08:00

Today the girls' role play of choice was some sort of quest for the throne of God. I didn't overhear enough to know if they were playing angels, fallen angels or something more far-fetched for them--like mortals. But I did overhear this admonition from Brielle:

"There is no map to heaven."

One of the younger twins must have asked for one. How she received the news that no such document existed, I'm not sure.

I'm not sure how I receive it myself.

Some days when I don' t trust myself to follow well, I wish there were something more concrete to guide me to glory, maybe even a GPS set for things eternal. I'd like Google to spit out a tidy map with mileage down to the foot and timing down to the minute.

But most days, I kind of like it. The absence of a map to heaven intrigues me, piques my curiosity, brings me to my knees in wonder, primes me for mystery. Without a map, I know I've got to stay in touch with the Guide.

How does it strike you?

Quote of the Day - Jesus' gift

2008-12-31T23:59:00.000-08:00

Today I was telling Ashlyn, "You are such a gift from Jesus to me, Ashlyn."

Ashlyn looked back with her wide eyes and said, "And Jesus was a gift to us when he was born."

I guess that's what it's all about...being God's gift to the world in ways that point to His gift of Jesus.

Here's to a year of life with that possibility in mind. Happy 2009!

Padre nuestro, part 4

2008-11-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

Saying memorized prayers has its pros and cons. Engaging in any ritual can be an exercise in just going through the motions, in vain repetition.

Yet, as anyone who's endured viewing #14 of the same princess sing-along video can testify, kids love repetition, vain or otherwise.

The other night, after praying my English-language bedtime prayer--the heartfelt, personalized one recounting the blessings of the day and the beauties of our children--I paused.

The half-conscious Brielle nudged me. "In Spanish, Daddy?"

This from a girl who's more likely to tell me, "Ix-nay on the anish-Spay, Daddy" (or something like that) when I try to bless her with bilingualism. But a Spanish prayer she's heard 'most every night since birth? That's different.

I do not like conforming to fashion, doing what is expected or eating at chain restaurants. Given the choice, I'd rather have a bad time doing something funky and memorable than a good time doing something conventional. Something in me--and I'm probably to blame for this tendency in Ashlyn--despises doing what's been done.

I'm not a big Green Day fan, but I dig their chorus, "I wanna be in the minority." Rage Against the Machine is far from my favorite band either, but I absolutely love that name.

I do not like to identify with the majority machine.

How much less do I want my religion to be a memorized revisiting of things traditional?

This is all pretty sad. At twice the age of a high-schooler, I still get stuck in my teeny worship of the trinity of novelty, originality and independence.

But with my kids' help, I am just now unlearning this idolatry. I'm plugging in to prayers much bigger than me, prayed by pray-ers much older than me.

Vain repetition? Sure, sometimes.

But when Daddy's too tired, short-sighted or human to remember to pray for what is near to the heart of God, a prayer that came straight from that Heart sure is nice to have. And when a phrase from that prayer connects with my heart and becomes my own, there is a real sense that God is close.

If but for a moment, God's heart and mine are on the same page. And my sleepy (well, except for Melía) daughters are there too.

The part of the Lord's Prayer that most often brings me to this place is this:

Venga tu reino. Hágase tu voluntad, como en el cielo, así también en la tierra. (Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.)

This used to be a mere wish for Jesus to come back and clean up the mess we've made of things. And of course, it still is that. My kids and I agree that the most exciting part of God's kingdom coming will be when He shows up visibly and takes us back to His big, big house. We groan along with all of creation for the day when Jesus will come and wake the sleeping dead and carry us home to be with them, to kick it with wild animals, to fly with the angels.

It is going to be awesome.

Yet more and more, this line has become for me a cry for help making our house into God's. When they arrive at God's pad, I want my kids to feel at home--not only because God is able to make anyone feel at home, but also because the Bennie house was something like heaven.

Justice. Mercy. Peace. Delight. Glorious humility. Love.

Henri Nouwen wrote, "We can only really wait if what we are waiting for has already begun for us. So waiting is never a movement from nothing to something. It is always a movement from something to something more" (from Seeds of Hope: a Henri Nouwen Reader).

When the Kingdom comes fully (and the sooner the better), I want Brielle, Melía and Ashlyn to experience it as something more of what has already begun for them. I want them to recognize the love they find in God's big, big house as something they knew an inkling of in the little mountain cabin they once called home.

The Kingdom of God is coming--in all its splendor. One day the lifestyle of the Sermon on the Mount will be real instead of ideal. God's will will be done on earth to the same degree as it is now done in heaven.

We can't wait.

But while we do, I pray with Jesus that we will wait actively, not wishfully. I pray we wait for what has already begun--right here in our humble, hopeful little home.

Padre nuestro, part 3

2008-10-27T21:54:00.000-07:00

The Lord's Prayer (in Spanish) is the last thing my kids hear from me at night -- at least the last thing before they hear, "If your foot touches the floor you're on time out. I love you. Go to sleep. I'll miss you till the morning. Do you want to go to time out? Buenas noches, Melía. OK, I'm getting it. Cow's milk or soy milk? I DID warm it! OK, I'll dry it. There. Now go to sleep. Te quiero muchísimo, preciosa. Melía! You're on time out...."

OK, so the Lord's Prayer is ONE of the things they hear from me in the last half-hour of their day.

Anyway, I was sharing what this nocturnal last rite looks like on a typical evening, and then began reflecting on what the prayer means to me as I'm saying it.

Don't let any of this lead you to believe that I am actually thinking about the prayer each night. Some nights, it registers as gibberish even more to me than to my monolingual daughters, just a familiar game-over chant tantamount to the fat lady's song. Sometimes I literally forget the words and have to rehearse and start over to get to the Amén.

But often enough, a phrase strikes a chord, a word revives a dead branch of my soul. To use Jars of Clay's verbiage, the prayer can be "shelter from the rain or the rain to wash me away." Those nights, the words come alive on me. Or something in me comes alive on them.

Sometimes not. But often enough, I reconnect with the One who taught me to pray this way just enough to keep trying.

Santificado sea tu nombre (Hallowed be your name)

Kneeling beside my daughters' beds -- or scooting back and forth between them -- I realize once in a while that this is more than an acknowledgement that God is amazingly holy. That God is holy is plain enough to them, and to me.

They could tell you that God is taller than the roof, that He can fly, that He knows everything, is everywhere and can do anything. He is strong enough to carry all of us and our sleeping loved ones to heaven, and will when the time comes.

I could tell you how much God has grown up in my mind since I had all the answers, somewhere around adolescence. Bigger than my denomination, bigger than the Bible, bigger than Christianity, He is much taller than the ceiling under which I've often kept Him.

He is holy, and wholly other. Unbound by my expectations, unlimited by my anthropomorphizing bent, unaltered by the glass through which I see Him dimly.

I get this.

But the prayer is not saying, "Yo, God. Guess what? You are one holy Deity." This would be redundant, though not totally unhelpful. We do need reminding of the basics. Often.

But the prayer does not do this. It uses "sea" (read "SAY-uh"), the subjunctive mood of the verb be, which is nearly unheard of in English. It's suggesting, wishing, lobbying in favor of the Heavenly Father's name being holy. Maybe it's something more like, "God I want your name to be holy. I wish it were holy. Would that it were holy."

Is this blasphemous? I mean, of all things that need no intercessory prayer, you'd think God's holiness would be one of them.

But want to know why I do intercede for the holiness of God's name? Because to my princesses, I bear that name. I have the radical blessing of being "father," the metaphor God was crazy enough to use for Himself throughout the New Testament.

Like I said last time, I find peace saying, "Our Father in the heavens," because it reminds me that my kids have a Father more reliable than me. But the fact remains--their relationship to their Heavenly Father hangs heavily on my portrayal of the role of "father" in their world. If the earthly father is condemning, they might assume, how much more judgmental must the omniscient One be? If earthly Daddy is prone to rage, just how scary must the Daddy in Heaven, in all His power, be on a bad day?

Father God forbid.

God of Daddyhood, with all that I am, I dream that my fatherhood might do more good than harm to the hallowed name of "father." Whatever mistakes I may make, whether indecency, bankruptcy, idocy or whatever -- just let my girls grow up knowing that being in the arms of a Father is a good thing.

I don't know why you chose "Father" to sum up Who You are to us, Lord. I'm honored and terrified by it. But tonight, I beg You: Please let Your name, the name "Father" -- as I embody it -- be holy.

Padre nuestro, part 2

2008-10-08T05:13:00.000-07:00

Last post, I described what it looks like when I'm praying the Lord's Prayer (el Padre Nuestro) with my girls at night. This time, I want to begin sharing some of the things that have gone on in my head as I've said that prayer with them.

As a teen, I was devoutly anti-ritualistic. People repeating the Lord's Prayer in unison seemed ridiculous, and totally missed the point, I was convinced. Praying exactly the words Jesus gave his disciples seemed about as literalistic and lame as someone wearing a tunic and walking around with fisherman in an attempt to do what Jesus did. Obviously, I contended, Jesus was offering us a pattern to follow, not a liturgy to repeat.

These days, I've come to appreciate memorized prayers. After a day of work and parenting, sometimes it's nice not to have to drum up a prayer that is natural yet appropriate, heartfelt while setting a good theological example for the little listening souls.

Actually, we pray both, beginning with homemade prayers from the Mommy and the Daddy and whoever else is game. But often, the prayer that ushers in the most peace--and not just because it's the one closer to the end of the exhausting bedtime dance--is the one that comes straight from the 1960 Reina-Valera (think Spanish King James) Version of Matthew 6:9-13.

Padre nuestro, que estás en los cielos.... (Our Father, which art in heaven...)

Thank God I am not the only Daddy they have. Hard as it is to explain that I'm their father and so is God, what a relief to know my limited resources are but the hint of the aroma of the crust on the tip of the iceberg of their strength. After hours trying to love, discipline, feed, teach, referee, encourage, correct, clean up after and play with my beautiful brood of princesses, it is a grace to realize that at the end of the day, I do not have to be king.

"Our father." In these words, my wife and girls and I are on our knees together, equally childish, equally helpless to defend or make sense of ourselves. Not Brielle, Melía, Ashlyn, but it's me, oh Lord standing in the need of prayer. We all need Your Fatherhood.

With one Father, in a sense we are siblings. Sometimes the idea of being big brother to my girls seems more desirable to me even than Daddy. It allows me to love, protect and guide while acknowledging that the little ones and I have one Source. More than teacher to them, I am peer tutor, still a student, as needy as ever for wisdom from the Master.

I've always been intimidated by Bible heroes' abysmal records as fathers. (See Fathering fears, then and now.) Adam, born in perfection, raises a murderer. Noah, the one who found favor in the eyes of the Lord, ends up cursing a son and his descendants after waking up on the wrong side of the bed. David, man after God's own heart, raises one son who rapes a half-sister and another who starts a bloody rebellion against David.

I was talking through this uninspiring "cloud of witnesses" with a friend and mentor named Tracy. "I get a little freaked out realizing that most of the biggest heroes in the Bible really sucked at being fathers," I laughed nervously.

Tracy looked back at me, never missing a beat, and uttered the words that may have done more than anything else to put my heart at rest. "You're going to suck at it too, Mike." (Did he actually say that? I wondered.) "And by grace, they are going to be OK anyway."

"Padre nuestro." I am so deeply grateful that these little girls are not stuck with just this frail human father.

They have One who is in the heavens. And the old-school Spanish reminds me that it is not just "Heaven" singular, that far-away paradise where God sits on a chaise lounge with his iced tea while we suffer down in our ghetto of sin. It is "los cielos," "the heavens"--all three of them, including the sky above us and the air around us, even the breath I breathed to say this prayer. He is the Father whose kingdom is not of this world, but absolutely is in it--a kingdom within us, among us.

Our true Father is in heaven. And He is closer to us than our skin.

Thanks, Lord. I needed that.

Padre nuestro, part 1

2008-10-06T05:04:00.000-07:00

I had this bright idea that I'd teach my kids Spanish. I'd spent years making myself into a bilingual, and I wanted to save them the sweat. Kids' minds are sponges, right? I used to take infant Brielle for walks, describing all I saw in Spanish. For a long time, it was virtually all I spoke to her.

But as the only Spanglophone in my family and among the people we usually hang out with, speaking Spanish became to my kids yet another one of Daddy's strange and generally annoying quirks. I'd try to read a book in Spanish, translating on the fly, and Brielle would reprimand me, "It's not in 'panish, Daddy!" And the books that were in Spanish she did not want to hear. The more fluent she became in English, the more adamant she was that I not speak Spanish.

One day, I considered what was probably a false dichotomy: raise a daughter who was bilingual but distant because, over her protests, I always talked to her in her weak linguistic suit, or throw in the towel and let her learn Spanish the old-fashioned way--earn it. Figuring she'd have enough to tell the therapist about her weirdo father without this, I dropped the one-man immersion agenda and switched to a new tack.

I would try to make learning Spanish seem cool.

I'll let you know how it goes.

But one last vestige of my Daddy-as-Spanish-teacher days is that at night, after praying in English with the girls, I say the Lord's Prayer in Spanish, stroking their hair and kissing cheeks along the way. In the twins' room, I walk back and forth between the beds to deliver this affection as I pray. It looks something like this:

"Padre Nuestro, que estás en los cielos--" I lightly scratch Ashlyn's scalp and walk over to Melía, who is lying upside down in her bed.

"Santificado sea tu nombre." I turn Melía upright and smooth her curls back out of her eyes before walking gingerly back to Ashlyn, hoping not to tred upon one of the many homeless toys littering the floor.

"Venga tu reino, hágase tu voluntad--" After squeezing Ashlyn's cheek tight against mine, I return to Melía. I try to run my fingernails over her scalp without pulling it out of the ponytail, since this may be the hairdo she has to live with tomorrow, depending on how late we're running.

"--como en los cielos, así también en la tierra." Back at Ashlyn's bedside, I am either amazed at how fast she falls asleep, or at my foolish commitment to praying over the kicking, screaming fury that has been the storm before her calm since babyhood.

"El pan nuestro de cada día, dánoslo hoy." I walk back across the room, stretch Melía's beloved purple Tinkerbell blanket over her and just for kicks (literally), I try pulling the nice plush bedspread that grandma made up over her legs, just to see if she'll notice. "No! Not dat wow! I don't lite that bwankit!" Duly chastised, I return the comforter to its regular location bunched up at the foot of the bed.

"Y perdónanos nuestras deudas, como nosotros también perdonamos a nuestros deudores." I come back to the face side of the child and sneak as many kisses onto her cheek as I can respectably squeeze into the middle of a prayer. Melía is OK with this.

"No nos metas en tentación, mas líbranos del mal." I tiptoe back across the room. Ashlyn is nonresponsive now, either because of her ongoing pre-slumber fit or because she's already out. If it's the latter, I get to lay some kisses on her round cheeks. In the case of the former, I really get into this line of the prayer, for temptation is nigh.

"Porque tuyo es el reino--" I pause and make the perilous three-step journey back to Melía and plant a single kiss on her cheek.

"--y el poder--" Back to Ashlyn, who also gets a kiss on the cheek, whether she's dreaming or tantruming.

"--y la gloria--" Melía knows we're in the homestretch now, and is finalizing her plans for how to delay the end. Will it be another trip to the potty? Or a request for a beverage, followed by requests to warm/cool/dry it? Maybe both. I hug her, knowingly.

"--por todos los siglos." Ashlyn gets an indulgently tight squeeze. Unlike her skin-and-bones sisters, her solid frame feels like it can take it. And anyway, she'll sleep through it.

"Amén." One last kiss on Melía's forehead, and I tuck her in under the purple blanket, which she has mostly shed by now. I slide back over to Ashlyn.

"Amén."

A final kiss on Ashie's head, and I am the luckiest man in the world. I have three beautiful angel princess monkey daughters.

And they are now asleep.

Amén.

Of faith and flying reindeers

2008-09-18T22:39:00.000-07:00

Driving home in the minivan, still 6 weeks away from Halloween, Christmas was on my daughter's mind.

"Daddy, can Santa's reindeers really fly, for real life?"

I sensed this was the start of another high-stakes conversation, about far more than Rudolph and friends.

"That's a hard question, Brielle," I answered, wondering what skeptical kindergarteners had planted these seeds of doubt in my 5-year-old's mind. Maybe it was her 5th grade buddy? I went with an opinion poll--raw, objective data. "I know a lot of people say that Santa's reindeer fly. But other people don't believe that."

I know how to avoid taking a stand on an important issue as well as any good politician.

Quiet in the minivan.

"I've never seen Santa's reindeer fly, Brielle."

"But Daddy, you have never seen his reindeers at all."

"That's right. I haven't. So if I haven't seen them, I can't know if they can fly or not." I paused, trying to decide if this dialog should be connected at all to any larger questions. I was pretty sure it should not. But the old Bible teacher in me couldn't resist.

"Some people only believe what they can see. They don't believe anything is real except what they can see. Just like with God. Some people like you and me believe God is real even though we can't see Him. But other people don't believe in Him.

"I believe that lots of things that I can't see are real," I continued.

"Why, Daddy?"

"Well, Brie, my eyes are very small, and the world is so big--I think there must be a lot of things in such a big world that are real even if my little eyes can't see them."

"I only believe in God," Brielle said, all smiles.

"Yes, you do, my Brie. So do I."

A quarter mile of mountain road passed under our gray Odyssey as we neared home, my better sense scolding me for having a chat about faith in God at the same time we discussed the plausibility of airborne deer. But isn't it valid to compare two myths believed in and experienced joyfully by some and laughed at by others? Is faith not required for both? There would be time later to explain how the God stories we teach her are more intellectually defensible than those about St. Nick on the North Pole--not that I am ready to make that case just yet. I have years before she gets around to asking that.

On second thought, maybe I don't. Maybe I better get to the library and check out some C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, the best apologies I can find. Isn't there a kids edition of Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith?

While I questioned myself, Brielle was devising a plan of her own. "Daddy, this Christmas Eve, I'm going to go to bed in the front room on the couch. And I'm going to sleep a little bit and stay awake a little bit."

"Why, Brie?" I asked, feigning confusion. I knew where this was going.

"I'm going to find out if Santa's reindeers are real or if they are not. And then I'm going to tell all of you guys." She was very proud of this.

"That's good, my Brie," I said, appreciative of her scientific method, the show-me spirit inherited from her Missourian grandpa, but hoping she'd forget this plan by Christmas. Since she probably would not, I was also wondering what her odds of staying asleep in the front room the entire night before Christmas might be. For a second I think visions of Benadryl danced in my head.

"I'm going to find out if they really do fly or if they just walk a long ways," she announced. A beat. "My guess is that they ride from the North Pole on an airplane, and then go back to the North Pole on that airplane with Santa. And that's what I want to do."

"You want to go to the North Pole on an airplane?"

"Yes--but with my family," she said.

This was the most liberal exegesis of the Father Christmas narrative I had ever heard from her. For better or worse, the demythologizing of the sacred Santa scripture has already begun.

What will be next?

Glorious humiliation

2008-07-29T22:11:00.000-07:00

Parenthood is the most glorious sort of humiliation.

From its genesis, holiness and filth walk with fingers entwined, forbidden lovers born for each other. From the gooey mess of afterbirth emerges the angel face of a daughter. As I wipe muck from her year-old bottom, she giggles and launches my heart ceiling-high. Mopping up the collateral damage of her potty-training—again—I am caught between curses and praises. Waiting on tiny tables, buttoning princess dresses, washing heart-shaped dishes, breaking up kitten fights, I fight my proud resistance to this daily ordinance of humility.

Work is so much easier than this. And so much more rewarding.

Yes, more rewarding.

Work yields fast dividends: esteem, results, checks on checklists, unprompted thank-yous, a sense of accomplishment. At work I have an office space I control, where books stay neatly in line on the shelves and tools are my toys. People—nearly grown people—come and go in civilized fashion, wait their turn, say please. Stacks of work diminish in size as I solve problems using high-level mental processes. The diplomas I worked years to earn are on the wall, smiling down at me, stretching out an arm to pat me on the back.

It is really quite nice. A happy sort of limbo where neither glory nor humiliation come calling.

But home is the marriage of heaven and hell. The highs are high and the lows are low.

The question is (as it was for readers of Blake’s masterpiece), which is the real heaven and which the real hell? Is heaven when all is mellow, when the kids are napping or hugging me or playing nicely for a change? Is hell when I’m wiping up blood, urine and tears to the tune of children’s wailing?

Or is something else going on? Are the inconveniences of parenting that feel like hell purging the pent-up inferno of my self-centeredness? Are the quick rewards of work that seem so heavenly sustaining the life of my parasitic ego, the one that sucks dry the God-imaged me? Are the moments of peace paradise’s reward to me, or breaks in the boot camp in which God has lovingly enrolled me?

When did we decide that the best thing to do is the one we find most “rewarding” anyway? Did Jesus wash filthy feet for the rewards? Was Calvary his quest for paradise?

Caring for my children exposes the rawness of my nerves, the frailty of my facades, the poverty of my soul. It catches me red-handed. It brings me to my knees in ways that my rewarding job never could.

I do not like this part of the Daddy gig. It infuriates me daily. I fight against it, I whisper curses. I slam the wall with my open hand, hoping it will knock sense up through my arm into my heavy heart.

I pray desperately. I hug my girls, pressing my cheek in hard against theirs. I breathe in the bouquet of their hair and kiss the blonde curls atop their heads, hungry to be filled with the kind of love they were born to enjoy.

Through the anger of vulgar self-interest—my real hell—I emerge with a sort of peace. Humiliated. Gloriously.

Helping Daddy

2008-07-28T23:07:00.000-07:00

One thing I love about my children is how desperately they yearn to be helpful. I have three lovely assistants for all my screw driving, tooth brushing, seatbelt buckling, word processing, DVD cleaning, tea steeping, floor sweeping, needle raking, laundry folding, cake baking, grocery shopping, Band-Aid sticking, and doll hair trimming needs.

With all this help, it’s a wonder I manage to come up with things to do with my excess leisure time.

Or something like that.

Of course, the well-intentioned help of my dear ones proves to be a routine disaster. It costs me time, money and patience. With three little women at work, less things get done in more time generating more mess and waste than even I in all my advanced klutziness could manage on my own.

Working with their help is inefficiency on steroids.

And it is beautiful.

In one of his videos, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People author Stephen Covey relates his frustrating experience working toward delegating lawn care to his son. All he asked for were two things: green and clean. Simple as that seemed to Daddy Covey, his son consistently let things slide. Green faded to tan. Trash piled up. It was taking Covey more time and stress to supervise the job his son was doing badly than it would have taken to do it well himself.

Days into the experiment, Covey was ready to fire his new gardener. But he pulled himself aside and reviewed his real purpose in the whole process: “Raising boys, not grass.”

The young gardener kept his job.

Having my children help me makes an abomination of my proverbial lawn. I get scratched DVDs, a broken computer keyboard, eggshells in my birthday cake. I take a full 15 minutes to load the minivan while they buckle their own car seats. It takes longer still if I commit the atrocity of starting the buckling myself, because then they have to undo my work and redo it themselves. It makes me crazy.

But what am I here to raise—pretty turf or helpful souls?

I have often wondered why God lets us help Him. He could self-reveal directly to people and circumvent all our human distortions of Who He is. He could feed the world with a couple loaves of Roman Meal and a few cans of tuna instead of waiting on us to share our own loaves and fishes. He could finance mission work using some of His own cattle on His own thousand hills without relying on the fickleness of our generosity. He could realize social justice with His own omnipotent hand rather than suffering the sight of our clinging to the status quo.

It must make Him sick sometimes. You can hear His impatience in the voice of the Old Testament prophets. If I get anxious waiting for my girls to buckle their seatbelts, how much more desperate He must be for us to hurry up and do the right thing for people. He cries with all the victims of all the suffering we allow to go on. This is more than a pretty lawn we’re talking about.

If the Father wants it done right, why doesn’t He just do it Himself?

Maybe this was part of Jesus’ third temptation—bow and enjoy the convenience of having things right in the world without the hassle of having to work one by one, day by excruciating day, with people who are so slow, so stubborn, so immature. Maybe it is a temptation He has to keep fending off. Or maybe He faced it and conquered it on the day He settled on the insane decision to create people in His image.

Whatever the case, I’m sure of one thing. God is definitely much more interested in growing people—with all its steroid-size inefficiency—than in getting things done right or quickly or efficiently or any of those other things I lust for when I’m letting my children help their Daddy.

I need to learn from Him the patience that relishes baby steps in my children despite the mess they make while they are learning. I want to delight in their desire to help without regard for how unhelpful their efforts may seem. I long to celebrate what they are learning to do, even when it takes longer and turns out worse than I could have done on my own.

I am here to raise girls, not grass.

Know what I did last summer?

2008-07-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

I am on summer break--eight whopping weeks of unemployed freedom. I've been looking forward to it since Easter, planning my days. I would blog five times a week, revise last year's 3-day novel and outline this year's, accomplish a host of home projects and do all manner of cool daddy activities with the girls.

I do not know what I was thinking.

I should know from two years of experience what staying home with the kids for the summer means. It little resembles a writer's retreat or anything on the DIY channel.

Last summer, childless friends of mine were emailing from all around the globe--Paris, India, Thailand--sharing their romantic adventures. After a day that could only be called normal by a father of multiple preschoolers, I sat down and wrote about my own summer adventures. Here they are, with apologies to Jeff Foxworthy:

You may be a stay-home daddy of three toddlers if…

Your diet today consisted of half-eaten food including nibbled toast, soggy Cheerios, half a smashed banana, cold mac 'n' cheese, the crusts of PBJ sandwiches soaked in milk, and whatever they didn't gnaw off the broccoli stem.
You ate all of the above on plastic Dora the Explorer, Barbie Princess, or Care Bears plates.
You can disassemble, wash, refill, heat and deliver a sippy cup to a screaming child with a screaming child on your shoulders.
You hummed a kiddie song all morning, accented by curses.
You actually prayed to God for a word that would replace or clean up the four-letter mantra that kept coming up when the kids were too near…and He gave you three in one ("Fuggetaboutit").
You have ever reached down to pick up a crumb of stray trash and discovered it was a tiny sphere of excrement.
You recently cleaned Cheerios from any of the following places: mattress, floor, foot bottom, BOTTOM bottom, carpet, carport, carseat, car engine, under bed, vacuum cleaner (it can only suck so many).
Your IQ is inversely proportional to the number of offspring awake at the moment.
You have ever fished reading material from the latrine. (Baptized book titles include Prayers for Peace, and Silent Flowers: A New Collection of Japanese Haiku Poems. And yes, they dried nicely and still grace our john. Haiku submissions inspired by that scene are welcome).
You joined Netflix and instinctively put Elmo's Potty Time at the top of your queue.
You watched it the day it arrived—over breakfast.
You compulsively count to three when in public places.
You used the word "poopoo" and "peepee" more than twelve times today.
You cheer and dance when anyone in your home acts these words out.
You successfully answered the question, "Why?" six times this morning before punting with, "Because God made it that way."
Your working vocabulary consists 97% of "no, later, time out, be nice, please, eat, wait, I don't know, say you're sorry, time out, swat, not yet, get in the car, stop it, thank you" and "Daddy loves you A LOT."

So...where would I rather be? Nowhere. (Except it would be more fun with Mommy home from work.)

(August 8, 2007)

Hope (part 2)

2008-06-28T23:53:00.000-07:00

Weeks ago I ranted a critique of "hope" in Hope (part 1). My children, to my chagrin, are frequent flyers on hope's wings. Have I failed to teach them to embrace the present rather than pine for what's ahead? Instead of proactive designers of their destiny, are they learning to be victims, limply hoping for change down the pike?

I hope not. (Whoops.)

Maybe I'm the one failing to learn what my children are trying to show me about hope.

I did promise to share some kid stories that help me question my questions about the value of hope. Here is one.

---

We came home tonight to a jaybird dying on the porch. It lay there, just under the motion-sensitive light, moving too little for me to notice, but enough to give hope to the one daughter still awake.

Brielle wanted to save it.

“It will be just fine if we take care of it, Daddy. What do blue jays eat?”

“Brielle, blue jays eat other baby birds and the eggs of other birds. They’re not really a very nice kind of bird.” I was tired. A smear campaign against the species sounded easier than offering emergency veterinary services.

Brielle was shocked but quiet. The little birdie clawing the air on the porch looked too harmless to be an infanticidal egg thief.

I saw the harshness of my tack reflected in her eyes, felt its sting, and softened my approach. “Brielle, it’s probably the same one that smacked against our window yesterday. It probably is blind and won’t be able to live very long without its sight.”

“Daddy, why are blue jays not nice to other blue jays?”

“Brielle, you know, God didn’t make animals smart enough to know what is nice. They just know they need to eat and they try to find food even if they have to do not-nice things to get it. So they’re not being ‘not-nice,’ they’re just trying to eat."

She liked this. Not guilty by reason of low IQ. “So the birdie doesn’t know it’s not nice to eat other birds’ eggs. I think the birdie ate other birds' eggs and then it thought it would fly and then it hit our house and got blind and now it won't steal any other birdies' eggs."

This wasn't working.

"Brielle, you know, if this birdie dies, two good things could happen. One thing is that another hungry animal will eat it and be happy it found some food." There was that stinging, shocked look again. I hate causing that look in her eyes, even when I do it by telling the truth. "Or, if another animal doesn't eat it, its body will go into the ground and help other plants and trees grow because they will use the vitamins that were in the birdie's body."

”Daddy, maybe we can give it some water. And an egg. Maybe blue jays are not nice to other blue jays. But they are pretty sweet to us. It looked sweet and nice.”

Great.

She was right. It was a beautiful bird. Helpless. Beyond the need for judgment--guilty, not guilty...nice, not nice. At our mercy.

And truth is, resigned as I was to this creature’s place in the food chain, the inevitability of its downward slide on the circle of life, I didn’t like being out there watching it die. Euthanasia was probably the nicest thing I could have done, but even if I’d had the strength to do this, I lacked a way to do it so Brielle wouldn’t know, or a way to explain it to her if she did.

I grabbed an egg from its cardboard carton in the fridge. I filled a ketchup cap with water. Together, we went out to the still bird, set the egg and water a couple feet away on the porch. We found a stick and gently pushed them right next to the bird, urging our desperate offering toward its beak. It fluttered, and settled down again.

“Maybe the birdie will get some rest, wake up and drink the water and eat. Maybe it will fly away and be OK tomorrow,” I offered, wanting this to be true perhaps as much as Brielle wanted to believe I was telling the truth.

We both dared to hope. And our hope moved us to merciful action.

At 11:30 I heard the bird shriek. I ran across the room to see a hungry raccoon finishing the job that I lacked the courage to do. Masked and nonchalant, the raccoon dragged the jay--along with our egg--under the porch and finished off both.

Even if Brielle finds out what happened to the bird (and you BETTER not tell her), I think she will agree with me on this: I am glad she hoped. Because her hope moved me from tired resignation to actually doing something, however small, for a needy member of creation. And that moved both of us from guilt and complicity with the darkness into a place where we offered a sort of light.

Whatever the outcome, we both felt better having hoped, having tried.

My grand Father's Day

2008-06-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

This Father’s Day was kind of sad for the ladies in my life. Our family was missing two fathers. With Rachelle’s dad and grandpa both gone, and my brothers still trying to figure out how babies are made (or something like that) it left just my dad and me to get the royal Daddy treatment.

Neither Rachelle nor Evonne has a habit of tallying losses, but on a day like Father’s Day in a year as grief-ridden as this has been, it’s hard for the fatherless and the widow not to feel the irony.

These losses make me even more aware of how fortunate I am to have my dad. He lost his father when he was still in grade school. Naturally, he imagined he would follow suit.

As kids, we lived only half-resigned to the dread of Dad’s early death. We feared it but we knew it was coming. It was as real and as expected as other unavoidable certainties like swim workouts or going away to college.

But we dreaded this most of all.

And now, against all prophecies of doom, he has survived. By God’s grace, he is cashing social security checks, yelling at the Lakers, chasing the Four Freshmen around the country with Mom as they celebrate their 60^th anniversary (the Four Freshmen, that is), and working 80-hour weeks during tax season. (We still pray he’ll retire. Soon.)

Best of all, he is goofing off with my three little girlies. Listening with rapt attention as Melía tells about her prize snails and roly-polies. Making faces. Tickling his way down Ashlyn’s face saying, “Fore-bender, eye-winker, tom-tinker, nose-smeller, mouth-eater, chin-chopper, gully-gully-gully!” and cackling as raucously as she does. Playing hide-and-go-seek. Teaching Brielle how to cast with her new Barbie fishing pole (and dig that visual). Reading about Jesus calming the storm with real sound effects, the wind and waves rocking all four of them in the La-Z-Boy. (They eat this up as much as I did at their age.)

These are all things of beauty that I never imagined. Measures of soul music after movements of monotone. Breathtaking vistas out of miles of fog. They take me by surprise—as heaven will no doubt do when it comes in fullness—because I never dared to think of any of this. My vision was too short to see myself with children, much less with my dad around to enjoy them. It is unanticipated delight. Serendipity. An ambush of joy.

So thanks for sticking around, Big Dada. Life has often been tiring, and survival can be harder than its alternative. But we’re lucky you’re still with the program—despite your predictions.

“I’m wrong. I’m always wrong,” you have often lamented. You are far from always wrong. But I’m glad you were wrong on this one, Big Dada. Really glad.

We love you.

Father's Day every day

2008-06-16T07:37:00.000-07:00

It’s always kind of funny to watch us celebrate Father’s Day.

On Mother’s Day, we cook or buy mom brunch. We care for her needs, make cards and pictures for her, think of her first when choosing entertainment.

And that is all very special. Because we don’t do these things the rest of the year. Male behavior on Mother’s day stands out like a sore thumb from male behavior the rest of the days on the calendar. And women’s lives on Mother’s Day bear precious little resemblance to how they roll on non-feast days.

Father’s Day, meanwhile, is actually kind of redundant.

I mean, this Father’s Day, I was noticing just how good I have it the rest of the year, what special treatment I get throughout Ordinary Time.

Meals prepared? Yep.

Needs cared for? Absolutely.

Handmade artwork from the kids? At least a couple times a week.

Power to choose entertainment? Well…OK, so three out of four ain’t bad. It was a nice change to enjoy the Lakers game on Father’s Day rather than something involving princesses, puppets or purple dinosaurs.

But other than that, I was mostly aware of how good dads have it almost every day. It reminded me of when I was a kid, asking my parents, “When is Children’s Day?”

You know the answer we got. “Every day is Children’s Day.”

I’m thinking every day is Father’s Day too.

The day I became Daddy

2008-06-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Brielle turned five. That meant she ate a cupcake for breakfast, wore her fuzzy pink “Birthday Princess” crown (not that she hasn’t worn it night and day on many other days and nights), announced, “I’m five!” to various strangers and pretty much glowed all day long.

It also meant I’ve been a daddy for a half-decade.

This is one of those things that trips me out either way I look at it. On one hand, I cannot believe that a young, free, newlywed such as myself could have been doing the parenthood thing for this enormous span of time. Nearly half of the dozen years we’ve been married, we have been married with children. In a couple months, we’ll be taking Brielle to kindergarten.

No way.

In another instant, I wonder that I have not always been a father. I think about life before Brielle, and draw a blank. What did we do for entertainment before we had live dancing girls? Where did we spend Saturday mornings before we enrolled in Cradle Roll and Tiny Tots Sabbath school classes? What cluttered my back seat before yogurt had bonded Cheerios to the upholstery?

You mean it’s only been five years? A measly seventh of my life?

On a Tuesday not unlike yesterday—a warm morning with the promise of summer vacation on the wind, the dry heat of the mountain soil injecting adventure into the air—I loaded my wife and a strange collection of baby stuff, most of which I could not name, much less use, into our white Xterra. An empty infant carseat was strapped in back (utterly devoid of Cheerios).

Rachelle was ready to have the child out of her abdomen. We had a date with our OB, who had agreed she was ripe enough to induce before the expectant grandparents left for Jamaica.

I played with the camcorder as we got into the car, readying myself to be journalist, cheerleader, Lamaze coach…and something…something else. What was it?

Oh yes, that. Somewhere in the fuzzy corners of my imagination, like a mortal trying to picture eternity in heaven—or hell—I supposed that presently, I would be a father.

We checked in, joked around on the video, and finally got down to business. Pitosin works, but works slowly, I’m convinced, on a child with a will as strong as Brielle’s. She was in no rush to say hello to the cold, cruel world, and Rachelle progressed slowly through the day and into the night.

Knowing my penchant for fainting over finger pricks and blood draws, I left the room when it was time for the epidural. We didn’t need to occupy doctors with more than one baby that night, I thought. It turned out that this was one of the hardest moments for Rachelle, and she wished I had been there.

I remember with dread leaving Rachelle’s room while she slept to correct papers and calculate grades on my laptop from about 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. The school year was over, but my least favorite part of teaching was still in my face. I have always hated the process of turning students’ thoughts, ideas, creativity and hard work into cold numbers, and then adding those numbers up to come up with one of five letters.

Here, as my wife endured holy labor, doing grades seemed especially profane.

I was just exporting all this profanity to floppy disk when the word came that Rachelle was awake and making progress. (Please pardon the Male-ese. She might put it, “I was in agony like never before, turning myself inside out and WHERE WERE YOU?!”)

The contractions came quicker and quicker, and I just wanted it to be over. I put all my energy into rubbing Rachelle’s low back so hard that it would be sore for days after she came home. Finally, the doctor was telling her to push. I was delighted. The end was in sight.

Rachelle’s pain climaxed, and my delight clashed with her torture.

But finally, a terrific cocktail of fluids and tissues began to gush from my wife. Again, I was delighted—this was almost over. I would not have to watch helplessly while Rachelle suffered anymore.

From this nasty pool emerged the most beautiful infant face I had ever seen. The severity of contrast between birth and baby added wonder to the miracle. I have come to regard that moment as a metaphor of our existence in the universe—in the midst of chaos, entropy, decay, our planet is a beautiful exception.

My Brielle. She was beautiful from the moment I saw her. Beautiful and loud.

They cleaned her off, let me cut the end off the already clipped umbilical cord and wrapped her in a hospital blanket. They put the tiny bundle in my arms, and she began to quiet down. Her blue eyes stared up at me, clear and curious, it seemed.

It was all over.

It had really begun.

Remember in The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, how at the end when he sees the Whos singing even after they were ripped off, the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes? I am certain mine grew about five in that moment.

Five. I can’t believe it’s been five years already. I can’t believe it’s only been five years.

The stuff of eternity just doesn’t make sense in terms of time.

Happy birthday, sweet big Brie! Thank you for helping God grow my heart every day of your wonderful five years. I love you more than I ever imagined possible.

Hope (part 1)

2008-05-29T06:40:00.000-07:00

For a long time, I’ve had mixed feelings about hope. It’s a sparkly idea and all, and would have made a great monosyllabic middle name for our fourth daughter had we had triplets, going nicely with the twins’ “Grace” and “Faith.”

But I have a couple beefs about the whole idea of hope.

Beef #1: People hoping for change too often are people sitting on the sidelines complaining about the status quo and waiting for someone else to alter it. Rather than saying, “I hope such-and-such occurs,” I’d rather say, “Here’s what I want and here’s what I’m doing to create it.” Victims and slaves hope. As a free person, why not act instead?

And here’s Beef #2: When I’m hoping for something better down the line, I’m probably missing out on something great right here and now. C.S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, that in his miserable years of boarding school, perhaps the best thing he learned about the Christian walk was to live by hope—ever looking forward to the freedom and bliss of holiday. But wasn’t every moment he spent fantasizing about what was to come a moment lost on embracing what was? Isn’t every ounce of energy I spend pining for the future an ounce lost on appreciating the present? “Hope” seems like a happy, shiny word for “procrastinating happiness.” I say, why not have it now?

My kids make me think about this whole thing. Though their lives are far less miserable than schoolboy Lewis’s was, they too live by hope, always looking forward to what is next. “When is my birthday?” asks Melía daily. “What tind bir'day party I am doing have?” She savors conversation about an event that is months away, living in regular communion with the ghosts of birthday future. We think this is cute and go with it.

I’m sure I did plenty of this as a kid. But I remember my parents reminding me how precious the present was. They told me that my childhood years were the best of my life, that if anything, our growing up was happening too fast. This kind of talk did give me a certain trepidation about the onslaught of adulthood stress, but it also taught me to seize the day, because tomorrow is not likely to be any better than today. I wonder if I am doing too little of this with my kids.

I motivate my kids through difficult circumstances with hope. But I don’t like it. Last night I took the three girls to a former student’s graduation, a boring prospect even for people with attention spans longer than a Dora the Explorer episode. We swung through the evening like Tarzan from bribery to bribery: ice cream sandwiches if they got out to the car quickly, McDonald’s if they behaved during graduation, Blue’s Clues if they refrained from fighting my pajama-donning and tooth-brushing efforts. It’s embarrassing to write about. But it worked.

Is hope just something the powers that be, whether good or evil, use to manipulate us?

I have stories to tell about my kids’ hope that are making me question my questions about the value of hope. I’ll share a few next time….

Prayer-time prayer

2008-05-27T21:48:00.000-07:00

Lord, help.

I want our evening prayer time to be fun. But I also want my kids to stick around for the fun. They do have fun during prayer time; it's just fun completely unrelated to the prayer process. They laugh, play, box, squirm, bounce, wrestle, bite, kiss, tickle and wiggle, and that is fun.

But how do I crack down on these innocent activities so destructive of the focus I'm going for without wreaking another kind of destruction even less desirable than playing during prayer? I can explain to Brielle that God loves fun, and loves to hear us laugh, but sometimes He likes us to take a break from laughing so we can talk to Him about things that are not just laughing things. I think it made sense to her, but it sure felt like saying, "Talking with God is the vegetables, and the stuff you really want to do is dessert."

How do I draw their attention to the need for reverence, for silence, for respect, for awe, without raining on the parade of their God-given joy? Shoot, how do I even get through a modest-length bedtime prayer without sending someone to timeout or sounding like a self-interrupting idiot?

Melía, for example, has learned to pray the way we have modeled, even when there is no competing noise. "Dear Jesus--I'M PRAYING! Thank You for this wonderful--I'M PRAYING! Thank You for Mommy and Daddy and--I'M PRAYING! Thank You for Brielle and Ashlyn--MOMMY, I'M PRAYING!" These Tourette's-like utterances punctuate her prayers, just as they do ours. But, Lord, it is sad. What can we do?

OK, let's brainstorm options:

Ignore the bad behavior and hope it goes away.
Send all offenders to timeout on first offense, even if it means we're down to Mommy-Daddy prayer time with screaming children in various corners of the house.
Don't miss a beat; simply swat children as I pray for God to help us love people even when they are not nice to us.
Best of #1 and #3: Ignore misdeeds during prayer (as inaudible as they may render the prayer itself), swat child after we are all done praying for love.
Scold children via God by praying for divine intervention to control their misbehavior (my least favorite option because of how often my parents prayed things like, "And please help Michael not to scratch his brother's face while we are praying to You," after which I would insist that God ignore any such entreaties).
Give up on bedtime prayers till the children act appropriately (i.e. potentially not until our funeral).

I have tried all of the above except #6, and let me tell You, Lord, that one gets pretty tempting sometimes.

Maybe this all bothers me so much because I know how hard it is to settle my own soul down to pray. I have my own versions of squirming and giggling and fiddling and fussing that derail my soul from focus on its Creator: phone calls, self-congratulation, self-condemnation, NPR, blaming, worrying and Figuring It All Out, just for starters. I'm sure God has tried a list much longer than the above to get me to have the kind of fun that talking with Him can be, but so often I settle for lesser diversions.

Parents are wont to push their offspring to succeed in ways they've never been able to themselves. I guess this is a wholesome drive at times, but often it's no more than a lust for vicarious accomplishment. It's not about the kid; it's about me.

Maybe I'm so desperate for them to get this prayer thing now because I fear I've never really gotten it myself.

Be that as it may, Lord.... Help me help them. Help them. Help me. Help!

Amen.

Things I never dreamed I'd say

2008-05-26T15:31:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows kids say the darnedest things. But only parents know how often kids lead you to speak, pause, review what you just said, and wonder at the improbable language required for childrearing. We say insane stuff every day.

When I get the time, I'd like to create a random generator of things parents of young children have either said or will eventually say. All the computer would do is select a random choice from each of these categories:

Negative mandate (with implied threat) such as "stop trying to, you should never, please do not, never ever, you will go on time-out if you, I'm pulling over and it will be ouchy if I see you," etc.
Verb for frequent child behaviors, including but not limited to "hit, eat, break, throw, mess up, bite, kick, fuss at, scratch, smash, inhale, cut, splash, lick, pinch, wet, hurt, fight," etc.
Likely object of verb (usually something sentient, fragile, valuable or totally disgusting): "your sister, me, the carpet, my jewelry box, the kitten, poopoo, sand, peepee, the computer, the family portrait, the curtains, the toilet, your food, bathwater, my papers, the dirty gummy bear from under the car seat," and so forth.

A parent smart enough to program a robot to say these randomly generated bits of wisdom might save volumes of speech. Recording these phrases in one's own voice, randomly putting them together and then playing them at night while the child is sleeping would be a great subliminal preemptive strike on all manner of misdeeds, or at least would allow a parent to later say, with virtual truth, "I told you not to do that!"

Off the top of my head, here are just a few of the really-truly bizarrisms that we can remember saying, unaided by technology:

Do not eat the Band-Aid you took off your foot.
Never ever wipe your bottom with the hand towel.
No biting the chair while on time-out.
Please do not blow your nose onto the couch/Mommy's dress/the dishtowel.
Do not go poopoo in the bath tub.
Do not drink the bath water! It has poopoo in it!
Your sister/the kitten/Mommy's hair/the power screwdriver is not a toy!
Please do not ever stick a marble up your nose again.
Only eat flowers that Daddy tells you to eat.
No, you may not ride on top of the minivan.
Stop biting your Cinderella dress.
You can't wear your Jasmine dress to church.
Please take off your Snow White dress before taking a bath.
Do not throw diapers in the toilet.
Please clean the table with something besides the broom.
I don't think the kitty wants to eat your raisins.

The list gives you a feel for a day in the life, but is far from exhaustive. And if it were exhaustive today, it would be so no longer by tomorrow. New material is generated as often as our bathroom floor is desecrated by potty-trainers.

I would love to read other weird things parents have said in the line of duty. Maybe I can work them into my random Daddy-talk generator someday!

So, "for real life," as Brielle would say, let's hear them! Please comment away with your own peculiar parental prose!

Bedside prayer

2008-05-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

Last night I put Brielle to bed an hour late.

This is hardly an aberration. But usually it happens because they’ve fought more, kicked the pajamas off an extra time or two, gritted the teeth harder than normal through tooth-brushing time, and come up with more creative excuses to keep us waiting on them once they’re in bed.

But this time, child and parent both lost an hour of sleep just because I could not resist lingering with Brielle for the sublime conversation she had to offer.

The twins were down, and Mommy was down the mountain at her women’s Bible study, leaving just Daddy and the girl who first named me that. Kneeling by her bed, I had just told the parable of the talents, and had broken down how God shares so much good stuff with us, and wants us to use it, not bury it.

Brielle was pensive. “We use a lot of God’s stuff,” she observed.

“Verdad, Brielle. All the stuff we have is God’s, and He likes when we use it for good things,” I agreed.

“Yeah.” She laughed and stared ahead, lips pursed, her deep thinking evidenced by the tiny movements of her cheeks and jaw. “And God is even a girl too.”

I smiled. “Yeah, Brielle. God is way too big to be just a boy or just a girl. He is everything,” I chimed in, delighted that she had already surpassed most of the Christian church in her thinking on the gender of God, but wondering how.

Somehow the topic turned to the Second Coming of Christ, more popular than ever since losing two Papas and a kitty. I said something about the nonlinear growth we would experience when Jesus came and completed our ultimate transformation. Only I think I told her we would not do bad things anymore or have ouchies anymore because Jesus would do magic on us.

At this, her eyes glowed, cheeks swelling the way Ashlyn’s do when she is imagining herself to be a bride. “I can’t wait for God to do stuff to us. He might even give us wings, I think.”

“Maybe He will. Or maybe He will teach us to fly without wings, like Jesus can.” I have this irrational burden to prevent her from disillusionment if heaven’s transformations do not include wings.

Presently we were on to angels. She pointed at a spot on her pillow about six inches from where she sat. “Our angel is RIGHT-THERE,” she said, the last two words running together. She grinned—“RIGHT-THERE,” and giggled. “Our angel is right next to us and God is in our heart. And God is everywhere. God is even in my shirt.” She pulled her pajama top away from her and spoke through the neck toward her belly button. “Hi, God! Where are you? God! Where are you?” She giggled some more, and then turned back to a more sober question.

“Why is God everywhere but we can’t see Him?”

No response from Daddy beyond a mystified sigh.

“Daddy, why is God everywhere but we can’t see Him?”

I wasn’t going to get away with pleading the fifth. “I don’t know, Brielle.” I searched my heart for what I really believe about this, and realized that to this question I have no satisfying answer. Another sigh. “Maybe it’s because God is so big and strong and bright that it would scare us if we really saw Him. It would hurt our eyes. We can see God in people when they love like Jesus does. But sometimes I really do wish I could see God more right now with my eyes.”

“I think when we go to heaven God will give us eyes that are strong so we can see really bright stuff and it won’t be ouchy.”

“Sí, Brielle. I think He will. Jesus even told us that if our eyes are good, our whole body will be full of light. But if they are bad our whole body will be full of darkness.” As cool as that verse is to me, it was kind of a non sequitur here, I realized, so I didn’t bother preaching it further.

Brielle offered me another paradigm. “I think God is like electricity.”

I liked this. “You do? Why?”

“Because electricity has power and God has power.”

“Yeah, Brielle. That’s right. And even though you can’t see electricity, it works—just like God.”

“Uh-huh,” said Brielle, relieved, I’m sure, that I was catching on.

Somewhere around 10 p.m, the back door opened and Rachelle walked in. Sheepish about how late I had our daughter awake, I moved toward prayer.

Actually, we moved our prayer on to its next breath.

Riverside prayer

2008-05-20T18:25:00.000-07:00

When I think of all the things I could write about—things that have been so busy happening that they never bothered to materialize on the computer—I am overwhelmed. Every day my kids say and do things that are so cute, so disturbing, so hilarious, so instructive, that they demand being captured. Before beginning this blog, these things flowed like a waterfall, a steady stream that could be enjoyed but never caught. Beginning a project like this, I imagine myself cupping hands under that waterfall and hoping to catch it all. This, of course, would miss the point of enjoying the flow.

When I am in the mode of documenting important moments with my kids—ALL of them—I feel like Jesus’ friend Martha, so eager to get the carrots chopped up and into the soup that I neglect to be with my Guest. “Michael, Michael,” I can hear Him saying, “You are worried and upset many things [that you have missed writing about in the last several weeks]. But only one thing is needed.” (Apologies to Dr. Luke....)

I do want to spend more regular time here, where the rivers of childlike inspiration and parental desperation flow together, cupping hands, yes, but not to capture so much as to feel its shocking cold, to gawk at its transparency, to wonder and be refreshed. Much more will flow downstream than I could ever hold.

Today, despite all the unwritten stories begging to be documented, what I want more than anything is to pray for my kids.

God, please help them to be safe from all dangers—especially those more dangerous than loss of life. Deliver them from materialism, from the claustrophobia of self-absorption. Save them from the compulsion to please the audience of their peers. Rescue them from fear and its addictions: being right, looking good, coming out on top.

Make them citizens first of heaven, second of Earth, and third of their communities; may their contribution to our nation flow from these three loyalties. Teach them to value the differences in people, to crave new viewpoints and savor stories from less-heard voices. Help them to open their eyes and ears and hearts to the weirdos of the world and see, hear, love—Jesus.

Give them joy. Teach them to live for what they really want, beyond what they feel like, to set their course by the deep, silent yearning You have given them rather than the hollow cravings that shout for their attention. Help them acquire a taste for satisfying labor. When lesser options are more numerous and more obvious, instill in them the habit of choosing happiness.

Love them in ways they notice, or better yet, help them to notice all the ways You love them.

I love them so much, Lord. Help me be the kind of Daddy that makes palatable—even desirable—the idea of a Father-God.

Amen.

The bottom line

2008-05-14T21:53:00.000-07:00

A quick vignette, brought to you again by Ashlyn.

We were poking down our food in the Chinese restaurant. We ordered it to-go, just in case our children's behavior meant we suddenly needed to. Ashlyn was sitting next to me, rolling her legs up over her head and mooning the restaurant.

"Ashlyn, we don't want to show our bottom to the whole restaurant."

"But I want to show it to them because it's beautiful."

I coughed over my explosion of laughter.

"Yes, Ashie, all of you is beautiful. It's just that there are some parts that we don't want to show everyone here in public."

"Well, I want to show them my bottom."

Amen to the God's-eye view that sees beauty where others see shame, to the heart unafraid to bare what the timid keep hidden. Love makes us free.

And that is the bottom line.

Conformed or transformed, Ashlyn edition

2008-04-28T04:54:00.000-07:00

During our marriage retreat this weekend, we chewed on the Message version of Romans 12:1-2, which has always been more familiar to me in the NIV:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Am I conforming to a man-made pattern? Or being transformed by Someone greater?

Lying on a park bench facing shiny white yachts on Newport Back Bay, I had a good time thinking this through, massaging the challenge and promise of it into the dry, chafed skin of my soul. I even came up with a neato list of contrasts between conformity to the culture as compared to transformation by God, which you can read if you're so inclined. It was a great time.

And as seems typical of this phase of life, God used one of my children to ram home the point in even more living color than my brilliant, tranquil vantage point there on the park bench could offer. On the way home from the retreat, we took our children to their preschool spring concert. Class by class, waves of children took to the stage to dance, sing, shout or at least lip sync their way through songs their dutiful teachers and parents had toiled to teach them. Each class stood up on stage, sang their handful of songs, waved accompanying props, and filed back into auditorium seats to the relief of their cookie-wielding teachers. Illuminated by the camera flashes and proud gazes of their parents, hundreds of children engaged in this exercise.

But not my Ashlyn.

Spurred on by the promise of the cookie, she made it to the stage; I'll give her that. She even held the umbrella as her classmates sang the first song, "The rain is gently falling, falling, falling. The rain is gently falling, showing God's great love."

But from there on, she was all about Saint Paul's "be ye not conformed." She sat, she grimaced, she squirmed, she turned around. She screwed up her face in ways betraying her scorn for any activity in which many people do the same thing at once. Mommy took the stage and nearly mooned the audience trying to get Ashlyn back on her feet in a semblance of rank and file, but it lasted only seconds.

Ashie, my non-conformity sermon in shoe--one shoe, that is. The other had gone AWOL somewhere during her sit-in of the concert.

Of course, after this defiant performance, we didn't allow her to have the coveted cookie. Of course, she screamed in protest. And of course, I threw her over my shoulder fireman-style and carried her outside for a time-out that lasted as long as her tantrum and almost made us miss Brielle's part of the program.

And throughout the punishment ritual, I was glowing.

Part of me knows Ashlyn will avoid a lot of hassle if she learns to go with the flow, especially when it's a good flow, like this concert was. I suppose it is part of my job as Daddy Dearest to hammer the virtue of compliance into her ample skull.

But mostly, I hope she never does get around to picking up conformity.

Conformed or transformed, Message edition

2008-04-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

We spent hours today on our marriage retreat basking in God’s presence, which came at no extra charge with a perfect beach weather day—sunny, clear, with just enough breeze and shade to chase away the sweat. Rachelle and I spent a lot of time alone as individuals, and then as a couple, meditating on this passage (Eugene Peterson’s Message-version take on Paul’s words in Romans 12:1-2):

"So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you."

It led me to a contrast between conforming to the culture and being transformed by God. Here’s some of what I pray God will teach me to discern as I grow as a person, a husband and Daddy:

Conformed to the world/culture (“so well-adjusted to the culture that I just fit in without even thinking”)	Transformed by the renewing of my mind (“attention fixed on God, changed from the inside out”)
Lust	Whole-person love
Control	Trust
Worry	Peace
Self-righteous, taking self seriously	Humble, taking self playfully
Alcohol/caffeine for mood control	Prayer/thanksgiving to quiet or wake up the soul
Anger	Compassion, listening
Greed/hoarding	Generosity/sharing
Thinking of me	Thinking of God and His kids (including myself)
Criticism	Celebration/affirmation
Fear	Love, security
Entertainment	Entering God’s playground
Avoiding discomfort	Embracing growth
Doing it yourself	Being it by grace
Excess	Simplicity
Talking	Listening
Isolation	Fellowship
Looking good	Looking at God
Pride in what I do	Gratitude for Who God is and who he is making me to be

God grant me grace to live on the right side of these dichotomies, to refuse to conform to the mediocrity that surrounds us, and be transformed by you. Help us raise our kids in the Spirit of this transformation.

Clutter in sacred hearts

2008-04-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

Rachelle and I are on a weird marriage retreat. Sacred Hearts Ministry is hosting our third weekend in a year with a dozen other couples, here at a hotel in Orange County. This retreat is sort of a less-is-more exercise, built around two blocks of alone time—in the morning as individuals and in the afternoon as a couple. On the fringes of these times of “extended personal communion” are worship, a date, and conversations about the outer journey of our daily lives and the inner journey of our alone time with God.

It is simply delicious.

One of my chief complaints about my life is its clutter. When I walk around my home wading through a sea of jumbled toy parts, jettisoned matchless footwear, and random princess accessories, I get a sort of material claustrophobia. When I walk my way through the schedule of a typical evening with the princesses who claim all that stuff, I feel that same cramped chaos in the realm of time. Reviewing a month’s budget, I see the clutter of expenses and wonder, “How can I clean this up? Isn’t there something I can simplify?” More difficult yet, even a cursory scan of my brain reveals a monumental mess. (Another David Wilcox fave describes this: Inside of My Head)

This weekend is simple. The space and time here—unlike so much else in our cup-runneth-over lives—are clean. Like a song too good to be overproduced, this weekend promises to be true to its melody—acoustic, unplugged, organic.

That’s what I need. Because as much as I gripe about clutter, the clutter is in my life because I allow it there, even need it there. I create clutter in my mind, in my schedule, in my heart. I may lionize the Amish, but I am still a sucker for a chance to complicate my soul with words, news, thoughts, events, technology and stuff.

So what will I do this weekend without it? Here’s what I hope to do:

Restore my appetite for silence
Renew my thirst for God
Reconnect my heart to Rachelle’s

My schedule, my budget, my heart need de-cluttering. The space and time are here. God always has been. All I need now is the courage to let Him clean house.

Clothes of Dad's I want to keep

2008-04-20T16:15:00.001-07:00

Rachelle's mom, a widow of three weeks, has been doing the excruciating work of sorting through her husband's things--keeping this, giving away that. Some in her place wait months, years or a lifetime before putting themselves through this.

Not Evonne. Never one to procrastinate unsavory tasks, she sees a job, and whether or not she knows how to do it, she gets it done. As with the rest of the recurring nightmare that is grief, there is no way around this but through it. So true to form, Evonne has braved her way into the closets, sheds, cupboards and drawers of the life she shared with Don and wept good-byes to much of the stuff her soul mate owned.

The other day, before going to Goodwill, she brought over a pile of clothes she thought I might use. It was sad to see them spread there on the couch, like the disembodied plumage of a fallen bird, never again to be worn by their rightful owner. I felt guilty to be rifling through them, guilty to be profiting from Don's death when I accepted something, guilty to say "no" to the many things I didn't want. Rationally, I knew it was just a fact of life, of death. Some of our things will outlive our bodies. What else would I have done with them--have them mummified for use in the hereafter?

I kept a handful of garments: a fine medium-weight Helly Hanson jacket that his son had given him, a dark long-sleeve rugby shirt, and one other thing, I forget what. Mostly, I am trying to empty my closet, keeping only what I know I'll wear. Neither Evonne, Rachelle nor I are very sentimental about belongings anyway.

The treasures I covet are the things Don did to raise a daughter as extraordinary as Rachelle. If these things were garments, I would fight like a vulture to make them my own. As with the pile of his shirts, pants, sweaters and coats draped lifelessly on my sofa, I will respectfully decline a fair amount of his parental clothing. (If he'd been a perfect father, he might have raised a daughter too pristine to marry me.) But from his wardrobe of father finery, here is what I hope to don as I raise his granddaughters:

Playfulness - Don loved games, sports, adventures, travels, and all manner of play with the ones he loved most. If something practical needed done, Evonne was probably the one who did it. But when Rachelle wanted to play, she was Daddy's girl.
Faith - Don believed in the power of God, in the hugeness of God. Whatever his failings, he never modeled for his kids a small God.
Generous listening - Don loved to share, but shone best when he listened to the sharing of others. As pastor, innkeeper and father, he celebrated people and heard the best in them. I can't think of a better gift to give my own children.
Friendship - Rachelle learned from her dad the power of small groups, which he facilitated at most of the churches where he served. Her commitment to building small groups of friends sharing the journey together has paved the way for me to have the most meaningful friendships in my life, most of which I never would have bothered creating without her. I want to instill in my daughters a passion for nurturing deeply positive friendships that feed their life of faith.

Do I want every item in his wardrobe? Of course not.

But Goodwill, eat your heart out. By God's grace, you won't get your hands on those four.

---

Thanks, Don, for sharing these choice Daddy-duds. I hope you sensed during your life what beautiful things you bequeathed to your children. I'll try to wear them well for mine.

Ideal vs. Real

2008-04-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

Plato conceived of a world of Forms or ideas whose reality transcends that of the material world that we can see. In this tradition, Gnostics glorified the perfection of things spiritual while shunning the fallen world of flesh. Stephen Covey hints at the same notion when he writes of the mental creation that precedes any physical creation. William Glasser calls it one's "Quality World," which we constantly compare to the world we actually experience.

All of the above have made clear the difference between “Ideal” and “Real”—but not a clear as my kids make it each night at bedtime. Here’s what I mean....

IDEAL Monday evening schedule:

5:00 Daddy arrives home, kicks off shoes and puts away mail and work stuff.

5:05 Turn on music, dance, play while Mommy prepares dinner.

5:30 Sit down to dinner, bless food.

5:35 Eat food.

6:00 Clear table, load dishwasher, talk about the day with wife while children play.

6:30 Children put on own pajamas for bed.

6:45 Children brush own teeth.

7:00 Parents sing praises of cooperative children, with accompanying high-fives.

7:05 Children gather on parents’ laps to listen with rapt attention to stories .

7:20 Go over lesson from Tiny Tots class at church as spellbound children absorb it like dry sponges, making mental notes for application to their future behavior.

7:25 Practice memory verse so for once they don’t have to cheat to get their sticker for saying it at church.

7:30 Say prayer as a family at bedside, each girl taking a turn to talk with God while others listen, enthralled, with all five voices closing with a unified “Amen.”

7:35 Parents kiss girls good-night, sing chorus of “Jesus Loves Me” and “Miss You Till the Morning” (by Kevin Brusett).

7:45 Parents tidy house, set out clothes for next day, get ready for bed, talk and/or engage other in extracurricular activities.

9:00 Parents retire.

Is this too much to ask of three little girls and two adults in a span of four hours? Apparently so, because this is what actually happens:

REAL Monday evening schedule:

5:00 Daddy arrives home, kicks off shoes and drops mail and work stuff in middle of living room because all four girls are too cute to pass by on the way to the proper storage locations.

5:05 After hugs to the two girls willing to receive them (Rachelle plus a randomly selected one of the three daughters), Daddy breaks up fight between other two, assigns time-out to the one who committed most blatant act of violence. During time-out, Daddy lectures other participant on how she can avoid provoking similar acts of violence in future.

5:08 Daddy releases convicted daughter when time-out sentence is complete, insists on apology.

5:10 Daddy sends daughter back to time-out after two minutes of badgering daughter to apologize correctly (i.e. looking at victim of violence, saying her name, using the word “sorry,” and naming offense for which she is apologizing, all the while avoiding silly or baby talk).

5:11 Daddy attempts to trash as much junk mail and pay as many bills as possible while child is on second time out, gets distracted by incoming email, forgets that time-out is over despite resounding beep from microwave timer, until prisoner shouts, “The timer is going off, Daddy!”

5:15 Daughter released from time-out offers apology that is adequate (or at least close enough to avoid re-sentencing).

5:16 To victim of violence, Daddy expounds the value of forgiving offender, finally abandoning effort after realizing the apologizer has moved on, already having forgotten what she apologized for in first place.

5:20 Daddy returns to email and other online business.

5:30 Mommy starts feeding 1.6 children, begins begging Daddy to eat food while hot.

5:35 Mommy reminds Daddy food is getting cold and she’s already reheated it twice.

5:40 Mommy gets a few bites of food in other 1.4 children, allows tones of desperation to enter voice as she insists Daddy eat what she has prepared.

5:42 Ashlyn sows handfuls of granola throughout kitchen.

5:45 Daddy eats cold dinner while assigning Ashlyn to clean up her mess, under threat of time-out.

5:48 Daddy puts Ashlyn on time-out for having scattered granola with broom rather than sweeping up.

5:50 Mommy checks her email, relieved to have someone else in the house so she can at least read words from other adults.

5:51 Daddy releases Ashlyn, sets microwave timer for 5 minutes, after which Ashlyn will be back on time-out if granola is still on floor, explains this deal to Ashlyn.

5:59 Ashlyn returns to time-out as Daddy laments the diffusion of granola through dining area and living room as well.

6:02 Ashlyn comes back to kitchen and works with Daddy to sweep granola as Brielle holds dustpan. Daddy realizes Ashlyn does not know how to use a broom, wonders how we’ve allowed her to get by this long without cleaning up her legion messes.

6:04 Melía hits Brielle for refusing to share dustpan, is sent to time-out.

6:05 Melía attempts escape from time-out, gets swat on hand from Daddy, is returned to time-out, screaming bloody murder.

6:08 Melía released from time-out, followed by forced apology to Brielle.

6:10 Daddy and Ashlyn continue to work on sweeping kitchen, a project that would take 3 minutes if done by adult, but which takes 30 in order to teach Ashlyn that she must clean up messes she makes.

6:40 Ashlyn dumps dustpan out onto floor, scatters it again, setting back cleaning job by a quarter hour.

6:45 Mommy has phone conversation and Melía instinctively whines at her for her attention until she cuts conversation short.

7:00 Daddy and Ashlyn finish sweeping floor, dump dustpan into trash, give high-fives.

7:05 Mommy and Daddy notice that children have barely eaten, but that it is time to get ready for bed anyway—they have to learn to eat when it’s eating time or miss out.

7:10 Daddy hunts through house for matching Disney princess pajamas that have hope of being acceptable to twins.

7:20 Daddy finds two matching sets of pajamas, pants on floor in twins’ room, one shirt in drawer, one on couch arm in living room.

7:21 Daddy walks toward Melía, she swings toy in protest of imminent bedtime, with only mild degree of malice, but hits him in privates, lightly, but not lightly enough to avoid time-out.

7:22 Daddy channels pain and rage into task of creating a walkway into twins room by kicking toys into corner behind princess castle.

7:23 Daddy grabs Ashlyn as she runs by in hall, wrestles her into pajamas.

7:25 Ashlyn kicks pajama pants off, gets a swat on the leg. Daddy puts pajamas back on as Ashlyn screams.

7:32 Melía reminds Daddy, “Set da timer, Daddy! Set da timer!” Daddy sets microwave timer for two minutes.

7:33 Daddy puts toothpaste on toothbrushes during time-out

7:34 Melía released from time-out.

7:40 Daddy calls for Melía to come, counts to five. She comes two seconds too late, is sent to time-out again, screaming bloody murder.

7:43 Melía released from time-out, now agrees to get ready for bed but throws tantrum because Daddy detached Velcro tab on Pull-ups (overpriced, underabsorbant diapers used to make toddlers imagine they are making progress potty training) while she wanted to don them with tabs attached.

7:44 Daddy attempts to help Melía with Pull-ups, but is chastised till she has finished tantruming enough to accept assistance.

7:46 Ashlyn goes into bathroom, actually opens mouth before Daddy’s threatening counting (“1…2…3……4………5”) runs out, allowing him to brush teeth with vibrating mermaid toothbrush without knocking any of her pearly whites out.

7:47 Mommy somehow convinces or forces Melía to brush teeth somewhere else in house.

7:48 Exhausted by this effort, parents call a late-4^th-quarter time-out for themselves and work in kitchen and bedroom, preparing for tomorrow while children engage in hyperactive play with energy inversely proportional to that of parents.

8:25 Realizing the kids have got to get to sleep, parents try to rally children in one bedroom for prayer (too late for stories or lesson). Children argue over whose room will host bedtime prayer.

8:30 Mommy and Daddy put twins in bed. Daddy goes to kitchen to clean rancid sippy cups in anticipation of upcoming milk request.

8:34 On return to twins’ room, Daddy catches Ashlyn nibbling on a piece of thread she yanked from blanket (a favorite snack of hers). He confiscates blanket and replaces it with a blanket that is less appetizing to Ashlyn. She screams bloody murder and begs pitifully for the original blanket.

8:36 Mommy and Daddy pray with twins over their screams for blanket, milk and in general protest of our abusive habit of putting them to bed at night.

8:40 Mommy brushes Brielle’s teeth. For once, she cooperates like an angel.

8:45 Twins get out of bed to come and ask for something to drink, violating the law prohibiting rising from bed after being put down. One is put in time-out on traditional chair in corner, other placed behind door in hallway.

8:48 Microwave timer sounds, twins returned to bed. Daddy breaks them the news: we are out of cow’s milk—only water or soy milk. Melía agrees to soy milk after a couple minutes, Ashlyn screams bloody murder at the announcement that cow’s milk is not an option.

8:45 Daddy pours and warms soy milk in sippy cup for Melía, brings it to her room. Ashlyn cries for her soy milk until calming down enough to ask nicely.

8:48 Daddy returns with warm soy milk for Ashlyn, who accepts it resignedly.

8:49 Daddy snuggles and kisses both girls. Mommy, who was supposed to be in bed an hour ago because she is terribly sick (I have no idea what kept her from falling asleep in our placid home…) finally crashes. Daddy prays with twins now that they are quiet enough to hear it, first in English, then the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish.

8:55 Daddy remembers the girl who’d drawn the Easy Kid lot for the night (mercifully there is usually one), and goes to Brielle’s room to pray with her too, thanking God and girlie both for her relative cooperativeness this evening.

9:01 Daddy tells sick Mommy good-night, puts off cleaning messy kitchen and great room till morning, sits down and writes blog.

John Lennon wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.”

Thank you, Lord, for life with our little ones. Help us work and pray our way toward our plans for the ideal; and meanwhile, deliver us from begrudging the real.

Trying to stay positive, continued

2008-04-11T23:07:00.000-07:00

My kids can sometimes be the greatest buoys for my spirit. After days of fixation on life’s end, my heavy soul, embraced by these lives just begun, knows the miracle of flotation. When I am sinking in my own bad humor, their goofy, girly love pulls me to the surface for air.

I used to think it was the height of unselfishness to have kids. But as Liz Gilbert asserted in Eat, Pray, Love, there are many very self-interested reasons to have them. Right now, one of those reasons is the hope and energy that surround me in my children. When time seems frozen at Good Friday, my little ones wake me up to Easter morning.

I want to maximize this natural spirit of hopeful energy, never spoiling it or breaking it. I worry I rain on their parades too often for the sake of prudence, as I try to help them grow up.

The other morning, I was playing the tough guy, insisting that Brielle do something for herself rather than bossing me around to get it done. She wanted a blanket, and was helplessly trembling and crying about how cold she was while the blanket she wanted was three steps away.

This went on for about a minute and I finally said the obvious. “Sweet Brie, if you’re cold, just put that blanket on you,” I told her, working on breakfast at the sink.

“No! I can’t! YOU do it!” she demanded. “Brrrrrr!”

I didn’t respond. We try not to respond to any requests unless she “asks nicely,” meaning use of the magic word and a ladylike tone.

“BRRRR! I need a blanket!” she cried.

“It’s right there, sweetheart. Grab it.”

“I can’t reach it! My arm isn’t long enough!” More screams from the neglected child.

Sarcasm time. “Hmmm. What is another way you could get that blanket? Let’s think….”

Brielle recognizes sarcasm well enough to hate it. “Stop it!” she shrieked. “You’re being MEAN to me!”

“Brielle, I’m not being mean to you. I just know you are a big girl and you know how to fix this problem by yourself so you can be warm.”

“You’re NOT being nice to me! It makes me very sad and mad when you are not nice to me!” Forlorn cries.

“Brielle, sometimes Daddy’s job is not to be nice. Sometimes my job is to teach you how to be a big girl,” I said.

In the past, we’ve used “being nice” as the ever-desired goal, although the older I get, the more convinced I am that love is not always nice. I just hadn’t tried before now to get that across to my four-year-old. Just now I was realizing why I had waited so long.

“But the way you teach me doesn’t teach me anything!” she cried, cheeks soaked. “It only makes me sad and mad when you fight me like this!”

Most of me wanted to put her on time-out for her insolence in this whole conversation. I was not cool with being bossed around by my preschooler for something she could handle on her own. I resented being chastised for taking a stand that she take care of herself rather than ask me to drop what I was doing to wait on her.

That was what most of me was saying. Yet there was this annoyingly vocal minority in my head saying, She is right. You are fighting her, not teaching her. You could easily do the nice thing here. She’s only asking for a blanket. Is this the hill you want to die on in the battle to teach her self-determination?

And then, Actually, you ARE teaching her. You’re teaching her not to help people who ask for a simple favor. You’re teaching her to be contrary and difficult, to ignore the plea of a shivering human being in the name of teaching her a lesson she is clearly not in the mood to study. Teaching her to be…mean?

I walked around the room in external quiet, defending myself against this minority voice. But it’s important to say “no” to build self-reliance instead of chronic dependency, not to enable laziness or bossiness, I insisted.

But there have got to be more positive ways to do this, whispered the minority.

I busied myself, recounting the ballots to see which voice was really me, and which the pretender. My verbal ceasefire gave her time to calm down.

The votes were tallied.

When I thought it was clear that I was not rewarding her bossiness, I brought over the soft crimson blanket Brielle had been crying for and wrapped it around her skinny pajama-clad frame. From over her shoulder, I kissed the salty cool of her right cheek.

“Thank you, Daddy,” she whimpered.

“I love you, sweet Brie. Next time, just ask nicely and I will be happy to help you.”

My kids do so much to be the light of my darkened life, the updraft that carries me above the thunderheads, the spring that thaws away my hard winter. When I think of them, I see grins, hear giggles, feel cuddling.

What more can I do to be this kind of a positive presence for them? What creative responses to difficult times might increase their experience of me as the brightness, the favorable wind, the warmth in the midst of their dark, storm and winter?

I know there must be negative moments in parenting. But I’m thinking maybe I have been resigning myself to too many of them.

Trying to stay positive

2008-04-06T22:20:00.000-07:00

I’m struggling not to violate the cardinal rule of blogging: “Don’t let it become too negative.” (I’m trying to do the same with my parenting in general; more on that tomorrow....) It’s not like I get a kick out of life’s dark stretches. I don’t. Nor do I derive any sadistic pleasure watching my kids walk through them.

It’s just that so far in 2008, my girls have lost their More Papa, their Papa and their cat. (Please don’t mention the cat to them—they still haven’t spoken of his absence and we haven’t brought it up.) Shuffled into this was a holiday featuring the violent death of God. Watching my kids process the first death of their life at the end of January was touching and even a tearful sort of beautiful. I didn’t like that they had to go through it. At the same time, it was important, deep, inspiring.

But watching them lose their grandpa has been simply bleak.

It’s as if two deaths in as many months has left them feeling like this is routine. They felt the stress and sensed something was wrong; it showed in their hyperactive and hyperfussy behavior all last week as they spent evenings with other loved ones while we were at the hospital. But there was a grim resignation this time, something even more painful to see than the more visible grief that showed up when they lost More Papa.

The twins both took the news of Rachelle’s dad’s death in silence. Brielle didn’t even manage to cry until half a day after she’d heard, when she listened to Mommy sing “Goodbye for Now,” the same song she’d sung at More Papa’s funeral. And then, at last, Brielle fell to pieces. I was relieved.

We barely got to that point though. The evening had all the ingredients of human brokenness. We had designed it as a quiet time for the family to gather in our home and remember Don.

By 8 p.m., we had not yet begun to do this.

I had been waging a man-against-machine battle up to the last minute, trying to get the 161 photos I’d scanned of Don to play on the TV, oblivious to any human beings in the room. Don’s sisters were getting along like sisters, which at this point meant a disagreement sharp enough that one was out on the porch calming herself down before she said something regrettable. Rachelle’s recently widowed grandma had come up the mountain to share in the time, but had run out of steam by then and was begging for rides back home, convinced that she too had lost her husband that very day. In the midst of this was Rachelle’s mom, shell-shocked after the loss of the two most important men in her life, just trying to hold it together.

And in the wailing department were my three daughters, whose enthusiastic screams would have put Bible-era professional mourners to shame. So vociferous were our lovely progeny that we carried the twins off to bed in the middle of dinner. This meant leaving them out of a process I fear they really needed. It was this process that finally wrung the tears from Brielle’s eyes, the moment that her resignation gave way to real feelings.

We all need those moments. Maybe even fussy three-year-olds? Why couldn't they stay sane enough to have theirs?

Melía prayed the night before last, “Thank you for this nice day. Thank you for this wonderful day. Thank you that Jesus die and rose adain. Thank you that Papa die and rose adain. Amown.” It was sweet. It was funeral homily quotation material. But is it OK that either one of those tragic deaths should roll so routinely off the lips of a child? Is this a welcome sign that Melía is trusting in the hope of the resurrection, accurately applying Jesus’ story to that of her grandfather? Or this all too glib for a loss that is much closer to home than the one two thousand years ago? Should I be encouraged or concerned?

I am sad that my daughters have to deal with so much death right now, resentful even that Easter had to fall when it did. More than than, I'm angry that this most recent death came much sooner than necessary. I am indignant that hospital visiting rules and the twins’ own fussiness has made it so they haven’t gotten to say good-bye the way I think they needed to. I am worried that theses losses will lead to I don’t know what in their psycho-spiritual future. I am scared of how we adults may fail them as we handle our own grief.

And despite all that has been breaking in our babies’ hearts of late, I’m trying to keep my eye on what remains whole. I’m making an effort to keep things real yet positive with regard to the family we’ve lost and all of us who are left. After last Tuesday, we got out of town and spent a couple days in Carlsbad at the beach and pool. Yesterday found us at church and a birthday party. Today we all went to a play and dinner with the kids' choir. Good stuff. Hollow-feeling at times, but good.

So yeah, we’re working not to let this all get too negative. But it is work. Sometimes, it is hard work.

Who's her Daddy? - A legacy

2008-04-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

As I watch his earthly life slip away, I’ve been thinking about everything Rachelle’s dad has given his daughter. Here are just some of the ways that Don will live on through Rachelle:

Food: This family expresses love through food and over food. Love is their food. Food is their love. The bestselling book, “Eat, Pray, Love” describes the heartbeat of the Long family—they love and they eat, the synergy of which rises up as a sort of prayer, a holy fellowship around these two essentials. Conversation over breakfast inevitably reaches back to recipes of the past and forward at least as far as dinner. Don has been speaking love via gastronomy most of his life, putting more than anyone could imagine into his recipes—growing and grinding ingredients than others would barely think to even purchase. “Taste o’ this,” he’d say, handing over a forkful of his latest creation. Rachelle, too, loves the world through her food, which, like her love, is always more abundant than necessary, more delightful than expected. Tonight when we gather to remember Don’s life together, Rachelle will be making pizza, her dad’s favorite. You can bet it will be better than anyone would guess pizza could be. You can also bet there will be leftovers.

Music: Don exults in good music—jazz, Celine Dion, the Four Tenors, and most recently, the Celtic Woman. He would record his favorites from PBS and play them for anyone who would listen when they came over. “You’ve got to hear this,” he would say, sinking into his recliner. Often he’ll be in tears minutes later, fully at the mercy of the music. He likes to get our girls dancing around the room as they listen, fancying themselves to be the singers. Of course, he loves to hear Rachelle sing. His daughter is music herself, with an essence that puts life to a melody, makes it a thing of beauty. Like her dad, Rachelle finds hope, energy, peace—God—in music.

Affection: Don is a hugger, a snuggler, a lover of cuddly animals. He gives backrubs, which must have been the family sport as a child judging by the spontaneous massages that break out at Long family get-togethers. His wife, daughter and granddaughters have always been, “Darlin’” or “Sweets.” Yet his affection is more than a family thing. He has space in his heart for all kinds of people, knowing not a stranger—only friends not yet met. Likewise, Rachelle is the kind of soul who, coming upon a row of five chairs with a single person sitting in a chair on one end, will select the chair next to that person over the other three vacant ones. Space between souls is not a good thing for her. Rachelle’s random back and foot rubbing qualifies her as a true Long, and even the roughest character may qualify as “Sweetie” in her generous language. The world will not sink into loneliness and despair while people like Don and daughter are on the loose, because they will snuggle up, give a hug, work on that knot in the shoulder and let people know that they are not as solitary as they had supposed.

Acknowledgement: Don—whether wearing the hat of pastor, innkeeper, friend, brother or dad—is an encourager. He has a prophetic eye for the best in people and a prophetic voice that puts that vision into words. He speaks to the best part of a soul, with conviction that makes believers of the people he builds up. Best of all, he listens to that best part, relishing opportunities to hear and celebrate people’s stories. Rachelle never needed that rule about saying seven nice things for every criticism; her verbal recipe pours in gallons of sincere compliments for every ounce of censure. She is the best fan I could dream of to bring to speaking engagements, showering heartfelt praise on me after every sermon or presentation I’ve given. Even in times of famine, when my character is a scorched, fruitless wasteland, she finds the one thriving plant in my soul and holds it up as the hallmark of who I am. I think I know where she learned this.

Spiritual Hunger: Don has a voracious appetite for God. He devours reading not only on biblical scholarship and archaeology, but on spirituality as described by yogis, emergent church leaders, scientists and others outside the traditional church in which his faith was forged. He is open to anything that might grow his understanding and experience of the divine. Some ten years ago he ended his employment as a minister, but he never stopped seeing and participating in the work of God. One of the first things that drew me to Rachelle was her genuine interest in things spiritual. Her heart beats to the rhythm of simple, solid faith—the lifeblood of a mind open to ideas that stretch the traditional boxes into which God has been stuffed. She works to create opportunities to learn more about relating with God and to talk about this learning with others. For Rachelle, authentic encounters with God and His people are pretty much the point of being alive.

The irony is this: I find it so easy to love her, while for him I have often found in myself as much criticism as love. How can this be when so much of who she is she learned from him? Dad, forgive me for failing so regularly to connect these dots, to see your goodness spilling over in the woman I love.

Thank you, Dad, for teaching your daughter so much of what matters. I pray for the grace to pass on as much to my little girls. We miss you already. But thank God, the best of you lives on in the people lucky enough to have known your love.