Matthew to me, in the car the other day: Mommy, how did God make the world?
Me: No one knows, Matthew. It’s a mystery.
Matthew: No one knows?
Me: Nope.
Matthew, incredulously: Not even you?
Posted in Adventures in Parenting
I am not a huge fan of ants. Every rainy season they invade our home, finding their way to the dining room table, the boys’ food-splashed chairs, the dirty plates in the dishwasher, the powdered sugar in the pantry. Over the years, we’ve tried numerous ways of disinviting them — sprays, traps, strategically-placed sprinklings of cinnamon, the Clark Pest Control guy. They always come back. It’s gotten so that every time there is heavy rain in the weather forecast, I automatically move the syrup bottle from the pantry into the refrigerator, which we’ve learned from experience is the only truly safe zone in the kitchen.
So you’ll understand that I was rather apprehensive when my parents gave Matthew an ant farm for Christmas.
Mom pulled me aside. “I tried to tell Dad that this is probably the last thing you and Scott want in the house, given all your ant problems,” she said sotto voce, “but he insisted that Matthew would really like it.”
“It’ll be fine,” I said, aiming for optimism. “I guess the thing is pretty solidly built, right?” We looked at the box, which said ESCAPE-PROOF in capital letters. That was somewhat reassuring. Then again, that’s what they said about Alcatraz.
We had a few weeks’ grace time before the ants arrived. They don’t come with the box; you actually have to send away for them by mail. Dad eagerly took charge of that project, which confirmed my suspicion that the ant farm was as much a present for himself as for Matthew. Nearly every day, Matthew would ask me, excitedly, “So when are the ants going to be here?”
Last weekend, they arrived. They came in an envelope marked LIVE CREATURES, OPEN IMMEDIATELY , which I found slightly disconcerting.
Dad opened the envelope and pulled out a small test-tube-like container. I surveyed it apprehensively from a safe distance, and I got my first shock: the ants were huge. They were positively Brobdingnagian. It looked as if they had been messing with the kinds of substances that keep you forever out of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“The directions say to put the ants in the fridge for fifteen minutes. That will slow them down and make it easier to get them into the farm,” Dad informed me.
“Um, okay,” I said, thinking, In the fridge? My one safe zone, breached.
As the ants chilled with the milk and eggs, Dad filled the ant farm with white sand. Matthew and Luke watched with rapt attention. Then it was time to introduce the critters into their new habitat. We got them out of the fridge and Dad unscrewed the cap and gently knocked them into the slots at the top of the farm.
It quickly became clear that the ants had not been adequately chilled. They were fast little suckers. And it was nearly impossible to get them into the farm without spilling them onto the table. When we dropped one or two ants at a time, we could fairly easily get them to run onto a paper and coax them into the ant farm. But when about ten of them fell out in a clump, panic ensued. They spread in all directions like ball bearings. One of them headed for Lukey, who screamed with laughter; a few ran down the table leg; some of them ran over Dad’s hand and up his wrist. It was chaos trying to corral them all, and I’d have just smashed them with a Kleenex if they were normal ants and not, you know, pets. Thinking strategically, I trapped a few on the floor by inverting bowls over them and I managed to help Dad get the other errant creatures off of the table with the help of the paper and a straw. The boys thought it was one of the funniest things imaginable. Which it was, except that I was also worried that a few ants had escaped undetected. I had visions of them mating with our household ants to create a Super-Race of ants, terrifying creatures who would come into the bedroom during the night and carry my sleeping body away, like a picnic watermelon in a cartoon.
With the ants finally sealed in their new habitat, it was time to feed them. That was news to me. I had somehow been under the impression that they survived on air, or ate each other, or something, but in fact, it turns out that we have to water them every two days and feed them once a week. In other words, they are a wonderful lesson in responsibility for Matthew or, perhaps more realistically, for me.
Where to put them was also a conundrum. It had to be high enough that Luke could not get his hands on the farm and open the hatches; it had to be a place hidden enough that they would not repulse our guests and yet obvious enough that we would not forget to feed them. We settled on the top shelf of the bookcase in Matthew’s room, where they are watched over by this small statue of Mary, whom I now like to think of as Our Lady of the Ants.
With the ants settled onto their new perch, Dad and I peered in. “According to the directions, they’ll be pretty lethargic for the first few hours,” said Dad, and the directions were right. The ant farm looked about as lively as a college campus on a Sunday morning.
But since then — and it’s been a full week — those critters have perked up. They’ve been building tunnels, long, interconnected ones, and piling sand over the little plastic bridge on the ant farm. They are in fairly constant motion, and I have to admit, they are pretty cool to watch. Creepy, but cool.
And Matthew is enjoying them. One evening we put the ant farm on the table and just sat and watched it for a long time. Matthew was intrigued by the ants, questioning me often about their motives, following their movements. As apprehensive as I was about welcoming ants into the family, I will say that it is gratifying to see him stare at them with the same attention he normally reserves for the games that Daddy occasionally lets him play on the tablet. Is this the beginnings of a career in entomology? The dawning of an appreciation for the wonders of the created world? A vivid lesson in teamwork? Maybe so. He is certainly happy to have them in his life.
As for me, I’m still trying to figure out who will feed the ants when we go on vacation.
I think I’ll ask Dad.
Posted in Adventures in Parenting
What’s the best gift your mom gave you? Today I’m delighted to welcome Mary Curran Hackett to share her thoughts. Mary is the author of the bestselling novel Proof of Heaven, along with being a mom, a teacher, and many other things besides (see full bio below). I had the pleasure of interviewing her last fall on this very blog. Thank you for sharing your memories, Mary!
Your time will come.
There’s no way I could recall the first time I heard my mom say those words to me, because I am sure she was saying those words to my impertinent young self as soon as I started talking. Though I am sure it’s a stretch, it’s not too much of one to say that the first thing I ever said was: “When’s it my turn?” (Or some variation: “How come I can’t come/go?” “How come Val/Coleen/Sean/Maureen get to do that and I don’t?
I was born an interloper, a gadfly, a hanger-on. I joined the family long after it was well-established and “perfect” (or at least that’s how my older sister Maureen recalls it– “Two boys, two girls and I was the baby––I had my own room––it was PERFECT before you came along.”
And along, I came, trailing farrrrrr behind.
But it wasn’t always the worst place to be. While the older kids were running along ahead to ball games, parties, and movies, I had our mother to myself. I’ll never forget watching my dad pull our station wagon packed with all of my older siblings and an assortment of neighborhood kids out the driveway as they headed out to see The Empire Strikes Back, while hearing my mom assuage me, “You’re too young now, but, don’t worry––your time will come.” (It was the beginning of a lifelong exchange: Me feeling like I was always the odd man out and my mother assuring me I was not.) But, I also recall it wasn’t the worst place to be. After the car disappeared around the corner, I remember looking up to my tall, vibrant mother as she reached out her hand to my little one and walked me back into the kitchen and said, “Now how ‘bout you and I have a chocolate milkshake?”
Not a bad place to be at all.
As I grew, so did our family, three little girls followed behind me in quick succession and my sister Maureen’s perfect family of four dissolved into a chaotic and rambunctious estrogen-laden eight. And before I knew it my mother was right, I was the one headed to ball games and movies––and it was my little sisters hearing my mother say the same timeworn words “Your time will come” as the screen door slammed shut behind me.
But still, I wasn’t happy. While I was headed to the movies, the older kids were well on their way to colleges, careers, foreign countries, bars, and weddings. Suddenly my “times” weren’t good enough. A couple of years later, when I was a single mom living in my parents’ basement, caring for my daughter, and working two jobs, I’d often complain to my mom (over coffee now, instead of milkshakes): “How come it seems so easy for others? How come all of this is so hard? What if I never find someone who loves me? What if none of things I hoped for myself or wanted to become ever become real?”
I could tell she was about to say it: Your time will come. But she didn’t. Because she didn’t have to. I knew.
Have faith, Mary. Be patient. Your time will come.
And though I was far away from my mom when I walked into my first college class as a teacher, or stepped off a plane that landed in Italy, or beheld my newborn son with my husband and daughter standing nearby, or opened the box filled with copies of my first novel, I heard her ever faithful, confident, patient, encouraging, and wise words nonetheless. Only I didn’t hear “Your time will come,” but rather her other favorite thing to say to me:
See. What did I tell ya? God always has a plan for you.
Mary Curran Hackett is a sister, daughter, wife, mother, teacher, editor, and writer. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, Greg, and children, Brigid (12) and Colm (6). She could write a book about all the things her mother taught her, but only had space here for one story. She is eternally grateful to have learned how to be a mother from the best of them. Her bestselling novel Proof of Heaven (HarperCollins) is a tribute to motherhood and is available in all bookstores and major retail outlets and on digital devises. To find out more about her or “Like” her on Facebook visit her website at www.mchackett.com or to see her book directly go to Booksamillion or to Amazon.com.
Posted in The Best Gift My Mom Gave Me
Pruning rosebushes seems easy, in theory. You find an outward facing bud and cut just above it. You make sure the cuts angle slightly downward. You remove the old dead canes and any that cross others.
Over the weekend, I finally tackled the four rosebushes in the front yard. Gloves on, shears in hand, huge gardening compost bin at the ready, I mentally reviewed all the rules above and got ready to prune.
And, just like I do every year, I found myself confronted with no small amount of self-doubt. Because there is theory, and then there is reality. And the reality is that sometimes you just can’t find an outward-facing bud. Sometimes, you aren’t sure which canes are really dead. Sometimes, the branch is so close to the house that you can’t get the right angle and you just have to cross your fingers and snip anyway. Every year, I am faced with all these situations and I just have to muddle through as best I can.
This year, it hit me that the act of pruning is uncannily close to the act of parenting (except for the sharp implements, of course). I started pruning nine years ago, when we moved into this house, and up to that point I’d had zero prior experience with rosebushes. Parenting wasn’t so different. As the youngest child in my family, I had spent precious little time around babies, and knew next to nothing about the care and feeding of infants. In both cases, I’ve learned as I’ve gone along. In both cases, I’ve had more experienced partners to advise me (namely, my mom). And in both cases, I often feel as though I’m flying blind, faced with situations that look nothing like the diagrams or directions in the books. There is the cane with no branches or visible buds; what do you do with that? There is the toddler who won’t respond to rewards, reason, or timeouts; what do you do with him?
Like all parents, I want to raise my kids right. I want to help them become compassionate, honest, responsible, curious, intelligent, spiritual, happy human beings. (As the mother of boys, I also want them to grow up to treat women right.) In my more vulnerable moments, I feel as though I’m messing up, making mistakes that will stunt their growth. There are parenting guidelines and philosophies in my mind, but there are many times when applying them is far less neat and easy than I would have expected. Those are the tough moments. They are the moments when all I can do is take a deep breath, trust my gut, and make what seems like the best decision given the circumstances at hand.
And is it enough? I certainly hope so.
It’ll be a while before my boys are finished growing and blooming. They are very young shoots, these little guys, so it’s hard to imagine a time where I can sit back, look at them, and think, “Hey, I guess did a good job.” I hope that moment does come someday.
Until it does, though, I will trust my gut and look to my roses. Every winter I wonder whether I’m pruning them right, second-guessing myself at every snip. And every spring they explode into gorgeous bloom, exuberant and fragrant and beautifully forgiving of my mistakes. Every spring they astonish me with their color and splendor, as if to show me that maybe, just maybe, I’m doing a better job than I think I am.
Posted in Adventures in Parenting
Saturday night, my extended family gathered together for the yearly carnivorous carb-fest known as the Polish Dinner. This well-loved tradition was started years ago by my cousin’s wife Lisa, who (like us) is of Polish descent. The dinner is a chance for four generations to descend upon my cousin’s home, eating our way through pierogi and sausage and cabbage rolls and pagach and all kinds of delicious, artery-clogging fare. (This year, it also involved watching the epic Niners/Saints game. Those last few minutes were positively thrilling, and I don’t even LIKE football.)
I always look forward to this event, and not just because it is the one day during the year that I get to eat really good pierogi. I love the idea of celebrating the culture — well, one of the cultures — that has shaped me. My Polish heritage has played a huge part in making me who I am, giving me my looks (my resemblance to old photos of my grandma and her mother is pretty uncanny), and, even more significantly, my Catholicism. And though I can hardly claim a deep personal knowledge of the country and the language, I have dreams of traveling to Poland some day and seeing which sights, sounds, smells and textures strike a chord deep inside me. (I also really want to see Krakow, which looks intoxicatingly beautiful.)
At any rate, I love this yearly tradition. And I love that my boys are growing up seeing that it’s good to celebrate the cultures that have, in ways you can’t necessarily even identify, made you who you are.
What about you? How do you celebrate your family’s culture? Do you have any favorite traditions or celebrations?
Posted in Holidays and other fun times
Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m hooked on Downton Abbey.
Now that the wait is over and Season Two is finally here, I’m one excited gal. This show has everything I like in a costume drama. Gorgeous country estate? Check. Aristocratic English family with tangled love lives? Check. Beautiful dresses? Check. Maggie Smith? Check.
Even Scott, who normally goes all glassy-eyed any time I put on a series featuring women in corsets, is getting into it. For a guy whose tastes run more towards shows where madmen threaten to unleash computer viruses upon the world, this is no small thing. It is really fun to have a partner for my Sunday night viewing.
And I’ve realized something, too: there is a little part of me that wants to live in this show. I want to be Lady Grantham, or her daughters, and to have nothing more to do than swan around in lovely dresses and have people do my hair for me. I want to breakfast with a butler in the background and be able to go take long walks on green lawns with dogs at my heels. A life of leisure sounds pretty darn nice for a mom whose days are full of anything but.
I know, I know; it’s easy to romanticize the past. And when I really think about it, then no, I don’t want to switch places with Mary Crawley. I would not want to live in a world where women could not vote and could not inherit property and where one night in the company of the wrong man could ruin your life forever. That would stink. And I sure as heck wouldn’t want to be the scullery maid who labors below stairs nearly all day, like a mole, barely seeing the sunlight. I like how the show addresses all of these issues, pointing out the rigid constraints on women of the time.
But I still *do* love the thought of having people wait on me, which never happens in real life. And the idea of being able to sit at a vanity table and spend hours getting all dolled up sounds awfully good to a mom who never even has time to put on eye makeup before dashing out to work. Perhaps my reaction is a clue that I should find ways to pamper myself a little more in my real life. Maybe I need to bring a little bit of Downton’s grace and elegance to my own chaotic, messy existence.
Until I can figure out a way to do that, though, I’ll be living vicariously through the Granthams. Sunday night will find me with a mug of hot tea in hand, my husband beside me on the couch, and the household chaos a million miles away.
You too?
Posted in Musings
Last week, we went to my folks’ house for dinner and the Rose Bowl. The boys had gotten haircuts a few days before. Luke’s in particular is very short, almost a buzz cut; it makes his sweet roguish brown eyes stand out even more.
“Don’t you just love his new haircut?” I asked my dad as Lukey ran happily around the family room.
“I love everything about him,” said my dad simply.
That answer really touched me. It struck me as being exactly what God would say, about each of us.
Posted in Adventures in Parenting
1. Thanks to all of you fabulous readers who weighed in with your house-cleaning tips last week. You have given me much food for thought. And since I’m promised to give you updates on how things are going, I’m happy to report that Operation Family Clean got off to a roaring start last Saturday morning.
After a suitable period of relaxing over breakfast, coffee, and episodes of “Curious George,” Scott and I announced to the boys that we were all going to pitch in and clean house! And it was going to be fun! Apparently we stink as motivational speakers, because Luke regarded us solemnly and then proceeded to keep doing exactly what he was doing. We let it slide. (You get away with so much when you’re three.)
Matthew, happily, had a little bit more intrinsic motivation, namely the fact that his best preschool buddy was coming over to our house for dinner for the very first time. He did a respectable job of cleaning his room, stowing things into bins under the train table. So what if the Matchbox cars got all mixed up with the Thomas engines and the puzzle pieces? There is a time to get hung up on the details, and a time to be grateful that you can, at long last, see the floor again.
Scott and I were the real stars, scrubbing and vaccuuming and dusting and finally getting around to moving old unused baby gates out to the garage. It was like the “Whistle While You Work” scene in Snow White, minus the dwarves and the woodland animals. And the house looked great afterwards. Overall, it was very, very nice to have a helper in my housecleaning endeavors. It removed my put-upon martyr-Mom feelings and gave me a chummy sense of camraderie with Scott.
The downside? I got zero grading done that day. I guess something always has to give.
But at least the floors are clean!
2. Yesterday, I was honored (and totally stoked) to find out that my article Between the Covers: On Loving Books in a Digital Age was chosen by the BustedHalo editors as one of the Best of 2011. (I guess I’m not the only one who prefers to read on good old-fashioned paper pages!) At any rate, it’s a piece that is very close to my heart, so this means a lot.
3. Bad news: someone stole the Baby Jesus out of the manger at our parish. Good news: it inspired a fabulous homily from our pastor yesterday, who took us on his own journey from anger to reflection. He finished with the great insight that God is something we don’t have to steal. God is freely given, always, to all of us.
That’s a very nice thought for a Monday morning, isn’t it?
Posted in Really random
Today being the Feast of the Epiphany, I thought it might be nice to reflect on the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus, and how it applies to my life.
And then I realized: Hey, I’ve already done that. I wrote about it last year, as a matter of fact. And that post still says everything I wanted to say on the subject.
So here it is: an Epiphany rerun. May your day be a blessed one.
Today is the feast of the Epiphany, when we remember the three Magi who journeyed to find Jesus. This marks the last of the twelve days of Christmas, though frankly, Christmas has felt like a distant memory to me ever since I started back to school earlier this week. Setting the alarm and getting up at dark o’clock is a real holiday buzzkill.
But enough complaining. Since it’s the Epiphany, I’m going to get all spiritual here and talk about one of my favorite poems, “Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot. I’ve read lots of his writings over the years, notably his very long poem “The Waste Land,” which we studied for a few weeks (it’s that kind of poem) in a college seminar class. Eliot is not someone I read often, though a lot of his imagery makes me swoon with delight. But “Journey of the Magi” — well, that’s one I read and re-read every holiday season.
It’s narrated by one of the Magi, reflecting on his trip to find the infant Jesus. It wasn’t an easy trip; there was lots of sacrifice, and discomfort, and “times we regretted/The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,/And the silken girls bringing sherbet.” And then, finally, he and his fellow travelers find the place where Jesus lives, and they see him, and he describes it as being “satisfactory.”
But then … in the last stanza, there’s a question, which goes right to the heart of the poem: “Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” And when you read the poem, you see so clearly how this journey has changed the narrator. Things that were once comfortable are not so comfortable anymore. His old life doesn’t feel quite right. After the sacrifice and hardship of the journey, a journey which has changed him without him even realizing it, he no longer feels at home in the life he used to lead.
That’s pretty much the Gospel message right there, isn’t it? If we let ourselves be changed by the Incarnation and by the presence of Jesus, it’s bound to feel a little uncomfortable. The Gospel message challenges us to color outside the boundaries of our lives, to journey further into love and sacrifice than we’d go on our own. Maybe this means letting go of grudges that we would love to nurse forever. Maybe it means giving time or talent to serve people who can’t help themselves. Maybe it means giving those of a different political or theological stripe the benefit of the doubt instead of shunting them into the category of Other. Overall, it means having a generosity of spirit, which is something that I often fail at doing.
But I try; I really do. And though I haven’t encountered Christ in his infant form, as the Magi did, I encounter him every week at Mass. I meet him over and over in the people who cross my paths — at work, at home, in the mall, everywhere. And in every encounter, I’m challenged to let the old, petty me die so that a new, more generous me can be born. This is a lifelong process, honestly. It is a lesson that I learn and re-learn and re-re-learn. And this poem is one of the ways — an especially beautiful one, at this time of year — that I am reminded to keep on trying.
(Note to poetry geeks: on this website you can listen to a recording of Eliot reading his own poem. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard his voice.)
Painting: Adoration of the Magi by Gentile Da Fabriano
Posted in Holidays and other fun times
Okay, I want to pick your brains. I want to pick your brains about housecleaning.
See, my normal system just isn’t working for me anymore. It’s actually no system at all, truth be told; it’s totally random, haphazard, and infrequent. Basically, I avoid serious housecleaning until either 1) we have company coming or 2) I get so utterly fed up with the dust buffalos that I am ready to explode, whereupon I haul out the cleaning supplies in a huff of frustration at the squalor in which I live, laced with heavy feelings of martyrdom and self-pity.
This is not exactly conducive to a healthy spiritual life.
Nor is clutter, really. For a long time, I felt that I could more or less let the housecleaning slide; after all, I’d rather read or write or play with the boys than Swiffer the floor. But lately, I’ve been starting to realize that — for me, at least — a messy home sort of equals a messy mind. It’s hard for me to find inner peace when the living room is chaos. I can’t help but feel that if my immediate surroundings were a little more ordered, there would be a little more harmony in my soul. Or something.
Part of the problem is that, between my husband and me, I have the lower tolerance for mess (I’m not saying it’s low, mind you; just lower). This is good in the sense that he is not an obsessive neat-freak, which would be hard to live with. On the other hand, this means that he never spontaneously decides to do anything to clean up the mess (save vaccuuming, which he seems to enjoy, perhaps because it involves cool gadgetry). I cave first.
I don’t mean to diss my wonderful hubby. Lord knows I wouldn’t want to do the tasks that habitually fall to him, such as preparing income taxes and disposing of anything that turns up dead in the backyard. But I wouldn’t mind a little bit of company in my sporadic efforts to keep the house in order.
Scott has offered, at times over the years, to look into hiring a cleaning service. I always balk at the idea, though, because of the money, and the logistics of scheduling. And it’s not like I live in a mansion; we’re talking eleven hundred square feet, with one bathroom. I should be able to do this myself …right? But then, I know friends who have hired help, and they’ve been thrilled to outsource their cleaning tasks. One friend jokes that it has saved her marriage by removing a constant source of stress and argument. And Scott is fond of saying that sometimes, you need to buy sanity. So maybe I should seriously consider this as an option.
Or we could try what he and I brainstormed last weekend: taking an hour, every Saturday morning, to get the whole family (even the kids) involved in house tasks. If it’s a regular thing, and if we’re all pitching in, maybe I’ll start to feel that I’m mastering the housecleaning, not that it is mastering me. I’m certainly willing to try. Maybe I can even convince the boys, in the manner of Tom Sawyer and the fence, that it is really super-fun to dust the baseboards!
But here’s where I want to get your take on this messy subject. What’s your housecleaning routine? Is it regular, or random? Do you outsource? If so, how has that worked for you? Share away! I’m all ears.
Posted in Musings
