This morning Molly (aged 18 months) opened the refrigerator, pulled out a Ziploc with a piece of leftover pizza in it, opened the bag and started eating. Possibly my other children did this (they learn young to fend for themselves), but I don’t remember quite such precocity. Either way, now that she has mastered cold-pizza-for-breakfast, she’s ready to sleep through History of Civilization.

Here she is helping herself to more of the lunch of champions last week:

I try to not take my kids’ development too personally, not to feel that accomplishments or milestones reached early are due to superior parenting OR to blame myself for set-backs like Lucy’s (hopefully overcome) kleptomania, but I admit I have always felt a little proud of how self-sufficient my kids are. But there’s a definite downside. An eighteen-month old’s self-sufficiency is not the same as a thirty-four-year old’s and the biggest difference is in the collateral damage. Sure, she can feed herself and get as much down her gullet as I can, but how is the floor going to look afterward?

Luckily for the kids, my laziness in the moment is greater than my cleaner’s regret in the long run. Though I did draw the line at Molly sitting in her high chair. She thought she was ready to graduate to sitting/kneeling/standing like her sisters and for a week or so I didn’t fight that battle. Then one day after mopping (we’re talking big chunks, I’m not a cleanliness martyr) the floor three times before naps, I apologized in advance at the dinner table and then we strapped her into her seat. She screamed for what seemed like an eternity and was probably only (only!) three-four minutes, eyes bulging, forehead splotching. Since then she hasn’t protested. The funny thing about that is I know moms who would look at me like I’m crazy: “You let her eat outside of the high chair?” and from others: “You forced her to sit in the high chair?”

I’ve been a mom for eleven years now, and . . . I don’t know what to tell you. Today she worked her way around the kid table after the cake and ice cream for her cousin’s birthday, scavenging off the plates half-ravaged by children impatient to get back to playing. She was so cute and stealthy (and had sat in her seat for the mashed potatoes) that I didn’t stop her until Callie realized it was her plate Molly was pilfering and protested, loudly. I guess that makes me an Anti-Helicopter-Free-Range Parent.

Today he is adjusting to life with a wife and four daughters rather admirably. He still listens to my untestimony and fantasizes with me about how wonderful it would be to move to Australia (if they reimbursed for relocation and arranged visas and paid enough to cover our ridiculous monthly debt payments, but we still got several minutes of fun from the idea).

On Monday I got my hair cut and the neighbor lady who cuts it wanted to know what Tom has been doing to lose so much weight. I told her we’d both been doing it {insert obligatory “you look great too!”} but that Tom is much better at it than I am. (“It” is counting calories via MyFitnessPal on our iPhones.) Part of that is my hormones insisting a famine may be on the horizon and then how will we nurse the baby without a cushion of fat? And part of it is that Tom, once he sets his mind to something, is pretty unshakeable.

(See what I did there?)

This is Tom making his signature spinach shake. Real men with daughters wear pink blankets on a chilly morning. They also wear rainbow nose rings graciously.

(I had no idea that blanket was so ubiquitous.)

Tom is fair, Tom is kind. Tom is not puffed up. He seeketh not his own. Tom is so great, that if all the men in all the world were like him, I would have no practical problem with patriarchy. He is that good!

What brought on all this ooey-gooey biblicality, you ask? Well, I cannot find Lucy’s birth certificate to register her for kindergarten, and I WILL register her for kindergarten. But it costs $42 for a copy from Florida over the internet, as I lamented to Tom at dinner last night. He offered to look around the house and also the internet for a better solution. You go right ahead, honey, I said. (I said you were awesome, honey, not that you could find the mustard in plain sight to save your life, sweetheart.)

In my continued searching today, I looked through our wedding album. I knew we’d taken a picture on the same Manti Temple steps at our wedding, but I was surprised when this is the print I found. It’s not stamped with the photographer’s imprint, so it was taken by my mom or dad. I’m hoping it was my dad, because he took that other impromptu shot, and that would just be sweet.

June 13, 1998

January 13, 2012

As Tara passed me the sacrament, her five-year-old son reached for two pieces of bread, fingered them a bit, and then dropped one back on the tray. I hesitated a second and then took the piece he’d dropped. Tara smiled over his head and whispered, “You’re such a good mom.”

I had just been thinking how I would phrase my objection to her expression of the Mormon Modesty Fetish (not appropriate sacrament pondering, but I had already confessed my utter lack of worthiness in my mind and then moved on).

Yesterday morning as Tara and her family and I got ready for the day, the boys and their father invited us to swim with them at the YMCA. But we had a hike in Superstition Springs planned, and I hadn’t brought my suit anyway.

Talk somehow turned to bikinis. I think Aaron joked that his wife could wear her (nonexistent) bikini while I borrowed a suit. Tara turned to her uninterested boys and prompted them to remember (in case we could ever forget) that Heavenly Father does not like bikinis and He is unhappy when girls wear stuff like that.

I love Tara. And I wanted to punch her in the face. (lovingly). My daughters and I have never sat around discussing how boys should dress or how we should feel about any article of clothing they might wear.

Yes, I realize that boys have an easier time of following prophetic pronouncements of modesty, and that we are obsessed as a culture over the female body, as public property most public. She’s too fat, she’s too thin, she wears leggings at BYU to tempt me, she’s a slut because she wants her health insurance to cover birth control hormones to treat her painful endometriosis.

I talked to Tara about it later that day. I do not want, I said, my vulnerable, sensitive, spiritually gorgeous daughters to ever run afoul of a self-righteous prig bent on blaming others for his own thoughts and actions. (I wasn’t quite that succinct or forceful, but I am now.)

And then we went to dinner where she empathized with my motherhood angst and the grocery store where we trash-talked each other about whose blood pressure is lower (I whipped her on diastolic, she creamed me on systolic), then back to her house where her wonderful husband had entertained the boys all day and put them to bed.

We watched the first episode of North and South and giggled with a couple of her ward friends, and went to bed.

Church is at eight and now we are here, among her three boys, her husband on the end of the row. I still hate the Mormon Modesty Fetish with its inherent sexism, but I love my friend Tara, and I love the sweetness of Mormon life.

*I’m visiting Tara for a few days, missing my baby (and the rest of them) exactly as much as I thought I would. Maybe now Callie will realize how much of a job I do at home, and possibly concede that I deserve sick days and the occasional, once-every-ten-years vacation.

As in, they’ve gotten their weekly Friday Night Movie Night movie and nothing else. No sanity-saving computer, no daily Little-Einsteins-so-Mommy-can-shower-alone. No ds or Xbox or wii or iPad time or whatever screen time the cool kids have now.

I could feel smug about that, but I’d rather have a couple hours of quiet. (And I’d rather have something to bribe/threaten them with other than “You can’t play pretend until your dishes are done!”)

*title source here.

And while father and daughter are talented in the literary, thrift-store and creating departments, I realized as I helped her prepare her presentation that neither of them had any idea of how the scientific method works.

Luckily, I do. And so she hit the sweet spot of the elementary school award system (recognition but no further effort required): Honorable Mention.

It was a family newsletter, the sort you get in the mail around the holidays, detailing the past year’s achievements and, if you’re lucky, a couple cute kid quirks.

This letter touted male career accomplishment/endeavor and barely mentioned female preoccupation with trivial things. It made me want to cut someone, and that someone was myself, because I sometimes feel so . . . I don’t know: guilty/resentful/ashamed/defensive that I am a mother and homemaker and housewife and . . . nothing else. I mean, professionally-speaking.

(On good days I am grateful/thrilled/humbled/content to be able to spend all of my time raising my daughters and making a home. On the good days I know it is a worthy and (even more importantly) interesting endeavor, with plenty of scope for the imagination. On every day, if brought to the point, I know I could not take my attention off my baby for any sustained period of time at this point, and I know that once she is grown (a milestone to be determined at a later date), I will be investing a good chunk of that attention elsewhere without prohibitive regret.)

So today (and here is where this post makes a screeching-on-two-wheels right turn at the last minute before we miss the turnoff), I got a package from Amazon that was like a missionary barrel and Christmas morning when you’re ten all at once.

It was my new Pullman/pain de mie bread pan that Marcy was telling me about last weekend, the day after our fateful discussion of Why Being a Homemaker Sounds so Loser-ish Even Among People Who Are Supposed to Value Such Things. (And Marcy, Callie rolls her eyes whenever I start a sentence, “Marcy told me …” or “At Marcy’s house …” She thinks I get all my ideas from you, and since most of the ideas I purposefully pawn off as yours have to do with discipline/organization/chores, etc, she is understandably cautious when things are prefaced with your name. I told her I gave you the idea about Tamale Balls. She was unimpressed, but they were good. Rather less like a tamale, but much more rational in preparation.)

This pan is the answer to my bread prayers, I think. I have made bread off and on and more off in the thirteen years of my wifehood. Mostly because it smells so good and tastes like gold-plated carbs. At one point I thought sourdough was the answer, but after a series of unfortunate accidents with the starter left in a pre-heating oven (in a melting-plastic container) my enthusiasm waned. 5-minute artisan bread was my next infatuation, and it is perfect for accompanying soup meals and making pizza and having on hand for last-minute fancy bread sides, but slowly it started to languish in vaguely-menacing too-wet form in the back of the refrigerator.

Then I finally finished up grinding my storage of red wheat and joined the modern age of hard white wheat. Oh glorious stuff of perfect-texture and crumb! I throw in extra-gluten (I know; how un-hip to be adding gluten to food!) and lecithin, and sometimes a handful of craisins. Yesterday I made a loaf to have some for after-school snack time and for lunches the next day. There was none left by dinner time, and I had to stop at the store for some Harper’s Homemade.

But today brought my Pullman pan, heavy aluminized steel, 13 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches, with a lid to curb the precipitous rise that stops the bread fitting in bags and folding over symmetrically. So far I’ve only made the white flour with butter, milk and potato flakes recipe, but already I can tell: this is it. I even got a special airtight container for storing it.

I am indecently excited about my new bread accoutrements. It’s enough to make a girl forget how incensed she was to see herself as a guardian of the hearth, and nothing more.

*I went a-google-ing for the source of my title and found this article about Henry Eyring. He makes bread too!

The other day Callie said she wanted to have a friend over after school some day. At the time we were in the middle of a session of swimming lessons so I told her to get her friend’s mother’s phone number and we’d arrange something for the next week. It took delicate questioning, but eventually she said that the friend she wanted to invite was a boy (no idea of the distance to his house or what after-school activities he might have). I am the opposite of the play-date-arranging mother. I assume that the reason I had more than one child is so they can play with each other. When the weather is nice, our street is an old-fashioned mass of kids coming and going. But if she mentions it again, I should make an effort, and that boy better be excited to come over of an afternoon!

Callie is old enough now that she doesn’t need me physically. She can make herself a sandwich, she is the eagerest of helpers in the kitchen, passing Avery in scrambled-egg skills and pizza-forming prowess. She bathes herself, even remembering to shampoo her hair most of the time. She dresses herself, reads to herself, puts herself to bed, does her math homework on her own.

Now she needs me emotionally. She is prone to cyclonic outbursts, out of the blue. They are infrequent and short-lived, usually. When they follow a pattern, every morning before early school, for example, we can circumvent them by setting her alarm clock and letting her be responsible for her own waking. Now she will surprise us in the pre-dawn hours, standing patient beside the bed, dressed to the coat, backpack on, ready.

But when they’re disconnected, disjointed from what I think is going on in the day, throwing her body into a disjointed, disconnected spasm, I’m lucky if I can gather her awkward limbs in my arms in the nursing chair (no nursing for her though) and rock her to calmness.

She shows me her loosening front teeth, a little blood showing, and I shudder. Tom suggests tying it to a doorknob, and maybe she agrees. Hours or days later she shows me the latest tooth. I am not involved. She is total in her ownership of herself, physically.

But I can help with the confusing tangle of emotions, when it’s the feelings and middle-girl hormones making a mystery of the motions of her body and the tears on her face. Tom has wondered a time or two, last maybe when she was four, or six, if this is normal, if she needs to see a doctor, and I tell him this is nothing. You should have seen me in second grade, I say, when my penmanship wasn’t perfect and it was the end of the world as we know it, and my mother gathered me in and rocked me.

(Perhaps she too will get the baby mean reds, which either means I am not a reassuring example, or that I will be able to tell her then too, that it is okay. She is okay.)

I don’t remember when I couldn’t read. I think this is less because I was so young (I don’t know how old I was), and more because nothing really memorable happened until I could associate it with what happened to the characters in my book. I also don’t remember when I realized that other people lay claim to my books. I do know that at thirteen it seemed imperative to cross out “Dear Reader” in the last chapter of Jane Eyre and write in “Dear Shannon” and that now when I see hipsters invoking Anne Shirley I want to challenge them to a Lucy Maud devotion-duel.

So I might not notice when my daughters get, or lose, or get again, their teeth. I may be unaware of the leg-shaving milestone until I brush against a bristly shin. The first swipe of mascara may pass relatively unremarked, but I know when they cross that threshold from non-reader to reader. From faltering sounding-outs through the breakthrough book to unfettered abandon in the world of words. The breakthrough book is a milestone like no other, the book they first stay up with, unheeding of the clock, alone in bed, mouthing the words, sentences tumbling recklessly behind gleeful eyes in the brain that has unlocked the mystery of innumerable universes.

For Avery it was Harry Potter. When she was four years old I spent a few frustrating weeks trying to get her to sound out random words, sessions that ended in tears and shouts and frustration. I gladly threw out my half-baked phonics ideas and went back to reading for fun. A Florida public kindergarten taught her sight words, I stayed out of it, and then halfway through her seventh year she started on the Sorcerer’s Stone and a few months later finished the Deathly Hallows. Thank you, J.K.

With Callie I reluctantly followed her preschool teacher’s recommendation of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, a super-prescriptive phonics program-in-a-book that a lot of people really like. It was pretty painless, and the best thing was that it ensured I spent fifteen minutes each day sitting down with Callie and only Callie. Then Callie went to kindergarten and in first grade her fluency was lagging a couple grades behind her comprehension. Her eyes would glide effortlessly to the right edge of the page, finishing off the sentence, her teacher observed, while her mouth stuck back on an easy word, sounding it out as she had been taught. I despaired. Those phonics! A couple weeks ago she borrowed Avery’s copy of Rapunzel’s Revenge, a graphic novel by Shannon Hale, and a couple days after that I went in to kiss her goodnight, expecting a snoring, limp, heavy head, and there she was, sitting straight up in the middle of the bed, knees tucked up beneath her, tilting over Rapunzel’s Revenge, slipping and sliding through all of the lovely words, sentences, paragraphs, fast as anything. Thank you, Shannon Hale.

Lucy is my third child, my third daughter. Avery has a vocabulary that rivals Tom’s and outstrips her pronunciation at times because she has not heard in conversation words she knows from books. (I love that.) Callie is strong-willed and good at math; melts down quickly when things don’t come easily. Lucy is the color-er, the imagine-er, the helium-voiced observer of older sisters that I hadn’t really pictured knowing or needing to know how to read. But she’s five, she’s going to the same preschool Callie attended. Her teacher talked up the 100 Easy Lessons book at school and Lucy begged and begged. I hemmed and hawed, I didn’t think she was ready, didn’t want to deal with her disappointment and frustration when it was too hard. Didn’t she want to go play with her stufty Tigress?

She did ten lessons that first day. I should’ve started her six months ago. It is effortless, almost. She is Scout on Atticus’ knee, absorbing the newspaper. How did I read her so wrong? What if I read one of them more wrong on something not so easily remedied?

We are halfway through the 100 Easy Lessons, and I recommend it with reservations. This time I am de-emphasizing the sounding out and encouraging the sight-iness. We play sight word bingo with mini marshmallows and sight word parking lot with the Dolch sight words. I did make flash cards at first, but bingo and cars are much more fun. Callie and Avery quiz her on the way to swimming.

I can’t wait to see what her breakthrough book will be, and how they’ll surprise me next; may it always be a good surprise.

3854687827
Avery found it easy, as she has been rollerblading for a couple years. Callie started out clinging to the rail, ventured into the ring, fell and got a shiner, and is now the last person still on the ice. Lucy wanted to turn in her skates after her first circumnavigation, but got bored watching me watch Molly’s longing so she tried it again and got her money’s worth. Molly . . . well, Molly wants to live here.

*kudos (and an uncompensated shout out) to the Gallivan Center for being amused by Molly’s Flinstone shuffle in her tennis shoes and then providing complimentary (infant size 6!) skates.

I dig the cynical disdain for the holiday of lovers, I do. But it does seem to brighten my gray February a little, no matterhow not-Anthropologie-worthy my decor is and how not-Family-Fun-worthy my breakfast is. I had intended to get up and make those apple ring pancakes I found on pinterest, but then I slept in (till 8!) and maybe the kids had Cheerios?

When we lived in The Bronx, Tom brought home a bunch of little presents for Valentine’s Day. I remember especially a tiny sweet pot of African violets and a roll of duct tape. Both were appreciated at the time, I assure you. I couldn’t tell you what we did or got last year (if anything), but it is still a nice day, because fourteen years ago was our very first date — pizza and the nickelcade on State Street, which we both did not “get” and so ended up streetwalking and talking instead. (We were doubling with his roommate The Hairy Ape — he really was quite hairy, and happened to be in my Humanities class, where we were reading Eugene O’Neill, and he wore overalls (the roommate, not the playwright).)

This year we sent out Valentine’s Day cards instead of holiday cards, and it is a practice I highly recommend, if you are the card-sending type. Much less stressful, and again, something to brighten the after-holiday winter lull. The picture we sent out was taken by my dad at the Manti Temple (where we were married thirteen and a half years ago); the occasion was my youngest sister Karin’s wedding last month. It was the best picture we got that day (sad), completely unstaged (obviously), and the more I look at it, the more I like it.

I love you, Tom. I love you, Avery, Callie, Lucy and Molly. I may not get around to making fancy (or lame) valentines for you today, but that would be a lack of craftiness, time, and imagination, and not a reflection of the depth of my feeling.

(Also true story, I worked as the Assistant to the Chair in the Economics department, and often the Chair was not in; this is before he went to DC to do something for some guy named Bush. I nursed Avery to sleep many days, both of us lying on the floor, her on a blanket, in his spacious office, while my angel of an office manager posted a sign on the door that said “Do Not Disturb. Exam in Progress.” That was the sign she put up on empty grad student offices for me twice a day while I pumped, too.)

When I was at the BYU, there was a big kerfluffle (or according to motherhood aphasia, a ferdluffle) over a few Rodin sculptures being excluded from a traveling exhibition. Including The Kiss (which is the only one I remembered. Sunstone, however, reminds me that there were four, and that it was also this transition from Rex E. Lee to President Bateman at the time that made me sad).

Sunstone also reminds me that though the four pieces not displayed were of male nudes, the female nudes were exhibited. Also, that the museum director said it was the “lack of dignity” rather than the nudity that disqualified the sculptures.

Anyhoo, that’s not what I’ve brought you here today to talk about. Several months ago Grampa came from Florida and we took him to visit the Museum of Art on BYU campus. We also ate at JDawgs and played a round of bowling at the Wilk. I think we even finished off with ice cream at the Creamery!

Among the religious paintings highlighting Jesus Christ’s life there was this fantistic Nativity by Brian Kershisnik.

I love that the angels include people of all ages, and that they’re so focused on the nativity until they’re past it and then they’re rushing out into the world to bear witness. I like that Joseph looks a little overwhelmed, and Mary looks exhausted but exultant. I like that she is attended by two women. I like that newborn Jesus has that squished, red newborn look, and most of all, I love that they’re getting belly-to-belly contact and that he’s nursing, or she’s nursing him. The baby’s little fist kneads her breast and she rests one hand over Joseph’s while her gaze and her other arm are all encircling her little one.

I like the curious dog.

I really, really like the nursing.

I like the differing individual reactions to His birth, and again, poor Joseph. This painting is a little white, and I hope the open exhibition of it is not just a reflection of Western preference for female nudity over male. (Not that there’s much nudity here, but that is a sliver of her breast! and this is BYU!)

Molly has now been nursing longer than my other three kids. I still enjoy it most in my day, though not the occasional industrial suction through two rows of robust teeth, or even more the flailing foot and the busy busy hands and arms that wrap in and out and around my bra and shirt instead of drifting peacefully off to sleep. I have a trip planned in a few weeks, just a short three-day visit that my child-smothered mommy heart is calling the helpline to demand. I thought I would take Molly, because I’m her mother, and she still could fly free on my lap, of course I would take her.

And then I thought of the freedom of three nights away from all of the kids, three days and nights of no one needing nothing. It is bliss, no? Until I sat there this afternoon, rocking her and nursing for nappers, and worried, what if she forgets me in that short of time and weans without me? I would come home and my baby would be no longer be my baby. Ambivalent does not begin to describe it. (Well, actually ambivalent exactly describes it, but I mean, even more emphatically.)

I would turn around once in a circle to the right and find myself the mother of teenagers, or once in a circle to the left and find my own sweet line of ducklings, the youngest one still eager to be with me, be one with me, complete the circuit that is my left arm and my right arm. Which would I come home to? If I never leave her, would I ever be able to stop? Or will she stop one day, ready or not, and the next it’s off to college?

*More art by Brian Kershisnik: This is us on a Sunday afternoon, ahem.

*In Breastfeeding in Public: What’s the Big Deal? I posted a video and more pictures of nursing. In the comments there is a discussion of specifically LDS (Mormon) perceptions of public breastfeeding. I’m for it, in a big way.

Like:

Wow! Maggie Smith can really sing!

— Steve Martin (@SteveMartinToGo) February 6, 2012

(Maggie Smith is 77; She plays old ladies on BBC.)

Madonna (I wasn't going to include pictures, because that's so, so shallow, but I had already googled them anyway.)

 and

Madonna wants to go home and watch Murder, She Wrote so bad right now.

— Lindy West (@thelindywest) February 6, 2012 
 

(Which is actually pretty funny. But I bet Madonna would be watching something hip, like Jag. That’s what my mom, who was born the same year — 1958 — as Madonna, likes to watch of an evening.) (Okay, my mom doesn’t really like television, but she’ll watch that with my dad, who is 6.5 years older, despite my pleading with them to try NCIS.)

There were enough (and more vitriolic) jokes to inspire this tweet:

Nothing funnier than obese, beer-soaked, acne-ridden, cheese-stuffed, sweat-stained males making fun of Madonna’s looks.

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) February 6, 2012

So I wondered on Twitter, as you do when you have a burning need to point something out, if we would be making fun of Madonna’s age and looks if she were a man. Several people responded with examples of men who have either performed at half-time and been mocked or who would be if they did.

Only problem? The ages of those comparison males ranged from 9-16 years older than Madonna. For scientific purposes, they were:

(Madonna, and my mother, are 53)

Mick Jagger: 68     

Steven Tyler: 63

Bruce Springsteen: 62

Paul McCartney: 69

Pete Townshend: 66 and Roger Daltrey: 67 (The Who, which I am telling you because I had to look their names up)

So Madonna is compared (unfavorably) age and looks-wise to men who are, on average, thirteen years older than she is.

Possibly this is because she tries too hard to appear youthful, or because this is how people naturally age, men growing old gracefully (George Clooney, Sean Connery) and women hagging out early ([insert female movie star playing the mother/teacher/Mean Queen instead of the love interest]).

What bothers me is that there was also much indignation on the twitters about the GoDaddy commercial in particular and several others that objectify women. Why is it okay to judge a woman on her age/demeanor explicitly and implicitly/subconsciously by arguing it’s okay to mock her because her supposed male peers have faced the same (I say supposed because are people thirteen years older really her peers in the age stakes?).

A lot of the jokes were funny. Madonna is a public figure and well able to take anything we could dish out. I just worry that this is evidence that we’ve bought into the vast media conspiracy selling us on how women should look, how young/attractive/sexy they should be in order to merit our attention/approbation/respect.

I mean, there wasn’t even one twitter reply-er outlier who said, It’s fine to make fun of Madonna; I riff on Bono all the time. Those tinted glasses? Puh-lease. (Bono is 51)

(If you’re on Twitter, I’m @seagullfountain. If you follow me long enough, I’ll retweet the smart people I conversed with tonight and then you can follow them too!)

So she likes to drop clues for me. Some are blatant though occasionally resistant to abductive reasoning: a certain stink in the air usually portends a diaper change but can signal merely a passing of wind. Rubbing her eyes might mean she is tired, but sometimes is just a ploy to score some more nursing. At the table, handing me her sippy cup is often a red herring, asking for more juice rather than evidence of thirst quenched.

But some clues are unambiguous and escalating. First the undesirable food elements are dropped plop plop on the floor, then the plate is rubbed (food surface down) on the top of her head (especially if spaghette was on the menu), and finally the bib ripped off and handed imperiously over. Today I caught her after the plate and before the bib. 

*I only watched the first four episodes of Downton Abbey last year, and now that everyone loves it, I feel even more reluctance to finish, though that is probably cutting off my nose. I finished the Inspector Lewis on Netflix too quickly and resorted to buying the fourth season on iTunes (and I’m wondering about Inspector Morse on half.com). I’m trying Midsomer Murders, but though Barnaby’s voice is mellifluous x 10, I’m not hooked yet. Can you help a hopeless Anglophile out? What’s your favorite British TV?

** Oh, and thanks to Tara for the Inspector Lewis heads-up!

Last Sunday we sprinted home after church, as you do when church is three long food-less hours. I looked up from foraging in the fridge and wondered where Avery was. Molly in the booster seat eating cheese, check; Lucy not putting her boots away, check; Callie not hanging up her coat, check. No Avery.

She was upstairs on her bed, reading.

Two days before Avery’s birthday we had a party for her friends. In the past my plan has been that the kids can invite half as many people as they are old, and that they must plan, write and deliver the invitations and help with decorations, etc. This cuts down on friend parties quite a bit. In fact, seven-going-on-eight seems to be the age when my kids are aware and determined enough to do their part (that’s seven friend-party-free years!). This year there are only eleven girls in Avery’s fifth grade class and anything exclusionary gives me junior high hives, so I told her she might invite everyone. She stamped her invites with celery-head roses.

(What’s the hooker quotient on those hand-me-down boots from Karin? They’re not black, leather or stiletto. Still . . .)

Eight little girls/almost-grown-ups showed up and dressed pizza rounds. (Question: how does a Mormon girl grow up in exurban Utah and not know how to make pizza?) They drifted upstairs to the dress-up box and then regaled us, in full costume and at full volume, with their Hope of America songs. I probably would have been weepy-eyed if it had been five decibels below eardrum-piercing.

They ate, watched The Princess Bride, opened presents and scarfed down fruit pizza on a sugar cookie base. Tom herded the other cats to bed, then asked Avery how the party was. She had glanced at the balloon bouquet and then never protested her sisters’ gleeful assault on it. “It was the best party ever,” she said.

The next day she and I got up early for a  swim meet in Salt Lake City. She swam respectably in the first session and then we had six hours to kill before the second. We ate a decadent breakfast at a “fancy” (her words)/”tacky” (mine) diner, ran to a store for sunglasses to replace mine that got stepped on and for Avery to spend birthday money on the graphic novel of Twilight (despite all my pleadings). I let her pick a cheap pair of earrings (hope they really are “hypoallergenic”) for her birthday.

(This girl has not experienced nitrous oxide (or anything stronger than Motrin) yet. Oh, the humanity.)

We walked around the Gateway even though it was cold. I realized later that the Anne Mother would probably have encouraged more playful shenanigans in Anthropologie. Since it was my first visit ever, I spent the whole time scared we’d break a whimsical fifty-dollar salt cellar. We were too late to see the second Sherlock Holmes movie, so Avery chose the planetarium and a viewing of Flying Monsters. I didn’t realize that the Amanda Quick heroines who dig for fossils in the caves on the coast in England were so historically-based.

Avery smoked them in the 100 meter freestyle that evening for her final event despite a couple disheartening disqualifications earlier. I mean, beat them by a length almost. Of course, she had a slight advantage being surely the oldest ten-year old there.

We stopped for Chick-fil-A nuggets and then small chocolate shakes on the way home. Avery told me she likes books so much because they never change. You can re-read your favorite parts later and they’re still the same. It was a lovely sentiment, but I had to disagree. When you grow up, I said, books change when you re-read them, and if it’s a good book, that’s not a bad thing. She said she wished today was in a book so she could experience it again. Another lovely thought; I told her she could write about the day any time, in a book or a letter or her journal. She said it wasn’t the same. Sometimes, I think it’s better. In writing or reading, you don’t get the same spine-crunching feeling of suffocating sauna and sound that I did up in the concrete bleachers through endless heats of the thirteen & fourteen-year-old’s men’s backstroke.

On Sunday she turned eleven. She acted embarrassed to be sung to in Primary, but would’ve been devastated if they’d forgotten. Grandma and Grandpa, newlyweds Karin and Justin and Marcy and Hans and their seventeen children all came over for dinner and cake. That night I discovered, hidden in my room, waiting for wrapping, the bag of small presents, a few clothes and a Jessica Day George book, that I’d been gathering for Avery. I kissed her good night and told her she could have them the next day after school. Since she hadn’t asked where they were, or noticed their lack, I wished they were bigger and shinier. But not really.

I am the comfortable marriage and bearable mortgage, not the idealistic dreamer of genteel, educated poverty. More hearth guardian Mrs. March, less fire in the belly Jo.

And yet Anne was a mother, a mother of, let’s see: Jem, Walter, Di and Nan, Shirley, Rilla, yes, six. Why can’t I be a mother like Anne? She never yelled, she probably composed odes to eyebrows and greeted each day as a grand adventure. She made her kids feel loved, and special, and unique, and different in a good way. Recited poetry at the dinner table instead of reminding of the “no singing at the table” rule.

Yesterday Callie was awful at Hobby Lobby and Costco and waiting during Parent-Teacher Conferences for Avery. She ran down the aisles, included Lucy in her crazy shenanigans. She said she wanted to do something fun. I just wanted some quiet. In the car she read books to Lucy and passed crackers to the baby. Lucy couldn’t see the pictures from the back seat and Callie told her kindly to use her imagination.

I thought: this is the Anne Mother Moment. My kids are not a dead loss. They are worth what I am doing here, they are worth watching, worth listening to, worth my attention, worth describing and remembering and liking. (Loving, always, that goes with the heart milk; liking is harder, except when it’s a free gift).

But I am not the Anne Mother. The minivan stops at our next stop and it’s back to fighting or whining or snotty nose crying and I am not the Anne Mother.

I am the Marilla Mother. And I guess the best thing about her is that she really didn’t want Anne, she wanted a hardy farmboy, but what she got was a fragile yet strong, slender and red-haired, day-dreamer, flavor the cake with liniment girl.

And she kept her.

Esther’s Courage (to Nephi’s Courage)

The Lord commanded Esther to go and wed the king

Haman told Ahaseurus the Jews were rebelling

Esther and Mordecai worked to save their lives

Esther was courageous and she would reply:

(chorus)

I will go, I will do, the things the Lord commands

I know the Lord provides a way, He wants me to obey. x2

Deborah the Prophetess (to Follow the Prophet)

Deborah the Prophetess judged her people well

As she served the Lord and lived in Israel.

She led them to battle with her friend Barak

They defeated Sisera who never more would mock.*

(chorus)

Follow the prophetess, follow the prophetess, follow the prophetess, don’t go astray.

Follow the prophetess, follow the prophetess, follow the prophetess, she knows the way.

*Previous versions of this line included “Deborah knew Sisera would fall by Jael’s hand” and “They defeated Sisera as she did foretell.

Avery was wearing the clip-on earrings Nana brought from Florida this week, as she has every day since Nana’s visit. I mentioned she might want to think about the ear piercings, because the short pinch of pain in the beginning is worth saying goodbye to slow death by clip-on squeeze. It’s like the difference between tights and leggings, I said, except even better because regular earrings become even more unnoticable  once they’re healed.

She thought about it for awhile and I struggled between ensuring it was her choice and thinking we should seize the day before she got scared again. She chose the blue-green zirconium in the white gold post and gripped the arms of the chair tightly.

Tonight I asked her if she brought it up or I did. She remembers it being her idea, which is good, because as I stood there patting her hand, I was impressed that her eyes almost filled but she didn’t cry, she got quiet as she waited for the sting, and once it was over, I felt sick to my throat. While she was relieved and excited, I was filled with mother’s remorse.

I felt like a conspirator to the murder of my daughter’s childhood. It would’ve been easier if she hadn’t looked so grown up in that chair. I can’t even remember getting my ears pierced at eight. Compared to my period starting at thirteen and holding hands with Chris Hansen during a U2 laser light show at sixteen, getting my ears pierced was nothing on the child-to-woman continuum.

Except now I realize it probably was, that or the day I became aware of my underwear showing while doing a cartwheel. (I don’t remember that day, either, but having girl children of my own, maybe that’s first).

I’ll keep telling myself: it was time. She’s almost eleven. It was her choice, and now I don’t have to find a punching bag for Christmas.

At fifteen months, Molly is more understandably verbal than the other kids. Meaning she can say Mahm! and Cat! and sometimes Dah! She can also follow simple directions and keeps better track of her hat, coat and shoes than any other person in this house. Her socks still get eaten by the dryer.

Several times a day she climbs into my lap, tugs at the bottom of my shirt and bobs her head cajolingly, eyes big and locked on mine, mouth in a wide expectant grin.

If only I thought her frequent flailing limbs connecting with my head were accidental.

As I described Molly’s birth to her, I felt this warm wave of good feeling and my heart stood up and twirled around as I re-lived those moments last September. When I got up off the hospital bed, after pushing an 8 pound 15 ounce baby into the world, snuggling her at my breast, downing two celebratory and hard-earned percocets, and walked, all by myself, to my recovery room one floor down.

I haven’t felt that victorious, relieved, goddess-like, I-can-do-anything, show me a mountain . . . ever. Before or since.

Which tells me two things: 1) I need a new goal, some big, hard, rewarding thing, and 2) I need to do something in support of natural birth in the world. (even if that starts with something as small as this blog post).

My cousin is getting really close, and I was trying to think how to express my best encouragement. When I was fretting over my inconsistent mental preparations, it helped when Andrea told me her epiphany that there wasn’t any one thing she had to do and do right, but rather, she just needed to experience, to allow, to surrender. It helped to know that when I thought I couldn’t do it anymore, I didn’t have to because it was almost over, and I was already doing it anyway. It helped to know that by the time the pain was something I’d sell my soul to avoid, it’s too late to find a black market buyer. (and it was almost over.)

It helps me now, to remember that night and think: If I can do that, I can do anything. If I can do that, anyone can do that. And the thing about not doing it, but allowing it? That also helps for if things go wrong. If something goes wrong and intervention is needed and you have to allow something else to happen, something that wasn’t in your birth plan, that’s okay, because it turns out that was the thing you had to allow, to experience, to submit to. It wasn’t something you failed to do right, it was the thing that was supposed to happen. You can do this. Or that, or whatever you have to.

Giving birth to my baby, naked, lying on my side and indignant that I had to hold my own knee up and out of the way, feeling every stretch and burn and push and fire and thrust and swell and release, that was ecstatic. That was living deliberately, that was building my cabin in the forest by a pond, that was a luxury of wild nights! wild nights!, and squeezing the marrow out.

That was (every expletive you can think of) amazing.

—

Molly’s birth story

What to read when you’re expecting

Thinking about natural birth after thinking I had miscarried

An old one that shows how far I’ve come

(Who am I kidding? by “sometimes” I mean “always,” except then I am irritated when my routines of kids clearing up the kitchen and making lunches and packing backpacks for the next day and generally behaving like responsible members of society don’t get honored so well.)

But as I was updating my Jesse Tree, I grew more and more dissatisfied with the representation of women in it. Who wrote that thing? Is that the best she can do? (I hope not.) Already I do prod the kids to consider the unnamed or obscured women in each story we tell, but I need to edit my devotional outline to reflect this. For the Moses night, for example, I think I will read my meditation on Jochebed (Moses’ mother). Beyond that, I’m going to add six distinctly female stories: Deborah, Anna, Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, Abish and Mary Whitmer, to my Jesse Tree, bringing the devotional total to 31.

(This exercise has been a little frustrating. Why don’t we have better art and songs about women? Why isn’t there a Follow the Prophet verse for Deborah? Why does the picture of Mary presenting Jesus at the temple include Simeon and not Anna? Why does God hate women? Just kidding, I’m sure he doesn’t!?!)

You can find all 31 of the stories in (rough) chronological order on the Jesse Tree post, but here are the six additions:

Deborah (scales of justice), picture (Judges 4:4-9) Deborah was a prophetess, judge and warleader. Perhaps as judge and temporal savior of her people she is more a type of the Second Coming of Christ. Battle Hymn of the Republic, Hymn #60

Abish (feather) Picture (Alma 19:16-17, 29-31) Abish was the Lamanite woman who hoped that seeing King Lamoni and his household prostrate after the teachings of Ammon would convert her people. She also raised the queen and king from their stupor. Army of Helaman #172

Anna (Bible) Illustrated Video (Luke 2:36-38). Anna lived 84 years as a widow, fasting and praying in the temple. She is called a prophetess. I Know that My Redeemer Lives Hymn #136

Mary and Martha (cooking pot) GAK 219,  GAB 45 (Luke 10:41-42, John 11:21-27) I love Martha. She was admonished by the Savior to care more about spiritual things, and yet, she is the one who told the Savior He could have saved Lazarus, had He only been there. Families Can Be Together Forever #188

Mary Magdalene (spices) GAK 233, GAB 59 (John 20:10-18) Mary was the first person to see the resurrected Lord. He asked her to tell the disciples that He was ascending to His Father. She did. I Know that My Savior Loves Me

Mary Whitmer (milking cow) Fourth Witness movie* (February 1989 Ensign) Mary Whitmer was rewarded for facilitating Joseph and Oliver’s  translation of the Book of Mormon by an angel who showed her the plates. My Life is a Gift #164)

*I can’t find this twenty minute movie online anywhere, but it’s worth buying. I (briefly) dated the producer at BYU, and remember an uncut version that was impressive.