Hope (part 2)

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.

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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

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

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

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)

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

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:

1. Ignore the bad behavior and hope it goes away.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
   
5. 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).
6. 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

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!