Motherhood Mondays - My Sick Boy

On Thursday, Middle Man stopped talking. He wouldn't say anything at all. Now he is not that talkative most of the time, at least not talkative to other people, though he often does have very animated conversations with himself. But on Thursday he wasn't even answering the usual questions. The what did you learn at school question that he answers with "nothing" every day. He instead just looked at me with sad eyes.

Turns out he had a sore throat and it stayed with him all through Thursday evening and even Friday morning. He didn't complain. He didn't cry or ask to stay home from school. He just didn't anything. And so we kept him home from school because the one question he did answer was do you want to stay home today? His yes was enough to keep this school loving boy home.

It was a quiet Friday for me. Just a library volunteering stint that had to be cancelled but they would manage without me I knew. But it was also the first quiet day all week and now my space was being taken over by my sick little boy. Except he really didn't invade my space at all. He just curled up on the couch with his book and read. When he got tired, he closed his eyes for a bit, and then he read some more. He didn't need anything from me, except for me to stop asking him if was okay. Apparently that is annoying when you don't feel good.

The problem is I want to be the caring mom, the one with the magic medicine and cuddles that make the world better. The truth though is that I can't make his sore throat stop hurting, only time can, and maybe a little children's motrin. Oh and chocolate ice cream because everyone knows that the cold will numb the pain for a little bit and chocolate makes everything better.

All this to say that I am thankful for the margin I have in my days to be able to shut everything down and let my baby be sick. I am grateful that I am able to be home for my kids even while they are gone at school because sick days happen. Library volunteering happens. And sometimes writing happens.

Where do you build margin into your life? 

Linking up again with Joy in this Journey and the Parent'Hood.

Fiction Fridays - Prelude

Last week I was volunteering in the school library when a fourth grade class came in looking for historical fiction books for their October Book Logs. 

I loved historical fiction growing up. I would go through phases. First it was all things Laura Ingalls Wilder and Lucy Maud Lovelace. Then it was the Revolutionary War with Johnny Tremain and My Brother Sam Is Dead. I moved onto the Civil War and at some point later in my youth the World War II and the Holocaust. 

And now I get to introduce my boys and their friends to some of my favorite books as a kid. I told one of the girls in the class about my favorite historical fiction writer, Ann Rinaldi, and she checked out In My Father's House. This week I saw the same girl at lunch and she told me how she had already finished the book and loved it. She wants to read more of Ann Rinaldi's books now. In a world full of fantasy and supernatural books, I love knowing that I helped a girl discover great historical novels that will not only entertain but educate. 

That is what I love about fiction. I am always entertained by a good book, but I also learn something from almost every book I read. Whether it is discovering that Prada is a designer label or kite fighting is a competitive event in Afghanistan, my world opens a little wider as I see it through the lens of a character living out their story.  

And as I have said before, as a writer, fiction allows me to really tell the truth without worrying about hurting anyone's feelings, having my characters fact check my details or offending anyone with the real struggles of faith and doubt and living in a grey world. I get to explore feelings and experiences without getting caught up in explaining. I can merge and dissect the details while keeping the moment true to its core. I get to take life, remove the facts, and make it real again. 

Now that I am writing novels, yes plural, as the characters for a second book have started infiltrating my mind, I am finding myself observing the world around me more. I see the woman standing on the corner and I not only wonder what her story is, I start to write one in my head. I see my son curled up on the couch not feeling well and I begin to describe the scene in my thoughts. I have found myself spending a lot more time moving words around in my head and less time speaking out loud. This once very social introvert is starting to look like an actual introvert. 

With all this in mind, I have decided to use Fridays on my blog for fiction. Some Fridays it might be a scene I write and you can finish if you want. Some days it might be a book I want to recommend. I am not sure what Fiction Fridays will look like exactly, but that is the joy of fiction. You get to make it up as you go along. 

Oh and since I am volunteering in the library quite a bit this year with different elementary age groups, I would love to know what books did you love as a kid? 

What books you wish your kids would read? (Children never seem to want to read the books their parents recommend. Mine will only read something if it was discovered by someone else, a librarian, the person at the children's bookstore in town, the One Great Book Blog lady. Pretty much anyone but mom.)

(WednesDAY of Faith) Jesus: Loves Me - The Prodigal Son

I taught at our church Mom's group Bible study last Wednesday and am posting my talk. Here is part 2 with a little overlap from Part 1.

Part 2 - The Prodigal Son

“Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so...” 

I sang that song in Sunday school as a small child and I believed it - wholly. If you had asked me about Jesus as a small girl, I would have known that he loved me, that he saved me, that he lived in my heart. I would have told you about the love of the shepherd for the lost sheep, that God will pursue us into the wilderness. I knew my value as a child of God.

But small girls grow up and the world begins to replace the words of that song.

Remember those middle school years, the ones that destroyed all that self confidence we had as girls. The ones where we were starting to see the world, and the people in it for what they really were, flawed and scary. The years when we begin to sing a new song.

“No one loves me this I know, for the world tells me so...”

I was that girl. The one that believed that I was not loved, not worthy of love. The one that walked through life, who spoke of God and Jesus, and the stories in the Bible but did not feel it. And then one day it all changed for me.

I was in eighth grade the first time I really heard the story of the Prodigal son. It was a sunny Sunday morning in Oregon. I can picture the Sunday school classroom with the thin metal chairs. The song that played to illustrate the lesson - the story of the Prodigal son from Luke 15.

While we can all understand Jesus loving the lost sheep and searching high and low for the lost coin, the next story, the story of the two sons... Oh my this was a paradigm changer.

Luke 15: 11-24

Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.

Tim Keller writes in his book The Prodigal God that this request. “...was a sign of deep disrespect. To ask this while the father still lived was the same as to wish him dead. The younger son was saying, essentially, that he wants his father’s things, but not his father. His relationship to the father has been a means to the end of enjoying his wealth, and now he is weary of that relationship. He wants out. Now. 'Give me what is mine' he says."

“Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.“When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ So he got up and went to his father.“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.“The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’“But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.

I think we often look at this story and see the son’s arrogance, his independence, and then his eventual repentance. We see the story from our point of view. It was on this particular Sunday in 8th grade that I saw the father for the first time. It was verse 20 that sunk deep into my soul. “So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, and was filled with compassion for him; he rant to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”

The father ran to him. While he was still a long way off. He ran. He picked up his robes and ran for his son who he saw in the distance. When he reached his son, he threw his arms around him and kissed him. He did not wait for his son to apologize, to grovel, to earn his way back into the family. His father loved him, even after all the harm he had caused. His father loved him because he was his son. It was that simple. 

I don’t know why I was lucky enough to really hear those words that day, to know deeply that my father in heaven loves me, but I was. I knew once again that Jesus loved me. This Bible story told me so.

Henri Nouwen writes in his book The Return of The Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming, “It was the loss of everything that brought him to the bottom line of his identity.”

On that day in 8th grade I found my identity. I am a child of God, loved and redeemed. It is the very essence of who I am.

Where do you find your identity? How do you describe yourself as a person? 

Motherhood Mondays - Do You Remember?

"Do you remember the time we lost you at the beach?" my mom asks. "You were two." She says it as if we are remembering something funny that happened when I was a kid. I reached to figure out the connection to the conversation, the only thread being that we were going to drive near the beach to get to the harvest festival we were taking the kids to.

"No," I answered but I left off the part about not having a lot of childhood memories. I have fragmented memories that hit the high points. I also have the memories of the stories told to me about my childhood but I do not remember getting lost at the beach when I was 2.

Nor do I remember the time I was around 18 months and almost drowned but I remember the story told by my parents. The story of the family swimming in a pool and someone looking down from a balcony and yelling down that there was a baby in the pool. I was face down. Not sure how I got there, either that part of the story is left out or my brain decided to cut that part of the story out of my memories.

I know that 1975 was a different time, a time when kids could play in their front yards without adults hovering nearby. When we walked to school with our friends starting in kindergarten, again sans adults. It was a time before CNN and 24 hour news shows reporting each isolated kidnapping as if they are happening every minute and parents have to be ever vigilant of these evil doers. I say that not because kids are not taken, I know they are, someone just attempted to kidnap a girl from her school a few miles from my house, but because the rates have not really increased over time but the reporting of them makes it seem like it happens every day.

Today parents are seen as negligent if we let our kids ride home from school too young or leave them in the car when we run into the bank. I remember agonizing over whether it was okay for me to leave my preschooler in their carseat in the car parked right in front of the dry cleaners where the door was open the whole time and I was not ten feet from my child. I finally decided that was okay because getting the kid out and then the kid and the dry cleaning back in the van seemed like a more precarious option. But I still ride my bike with the kids too and from school and not just because the youngest is in first grade.

But I go back to that story, the one where I as a two year old wandered off at the beach, only months after falling in a pool and almost drowning. And I wonder. Why did that little two year old girl decide to go to the bathroom alone? That was where I was. In the bathroom. I guess I needed to go and so I went. By myself.

I was a pretty independent two year old it seems. I don't know if that is in my DNA or a result of me having to take care of myself. I just know that I was though I remember wishing my mom or dad looked after me more. But don't all kids. I know my boys would prefer I make their school lunch for them like the other parents.

It is hard to know what messages we pick up when we are young. I wonder what my boys will take away from their early years, or have taken away now that they are all elementary school aged.

After hearing the story of my getting lost at the beach this weekend, I felt sad. Sad for the little girl who felt she needed to go to the bathroom alone. Sad for the grown woman who had more insight into why she did not feel safe with her own mother.

Sad that the stories of my early, early years are all told of me being invisible.

Oh, except for the stories about my mom playing with me in the middle of the night so my big brother would not get jealous. She would tease him that, "babies can be annoying can't they," when I would interrupt their fun needing to be fed or changed. At least that is the story she tells me.

And I have learned over the last few years that those stories change.

Have your childhood stories changed or taken on new meaning now that you are a grown up? *****

Turns out I am not the only one writing about parenting on Mondays so I thought I would join in on the Parent 'Hood fun.