Kitchen Helpers

Lately the big kids have showing consistent interest in the goings-on of our little kitchen. Sis, especially, asks every night if she can help with dinner. She happily washes veggies, carefully peels carrots, hunts around in the fridge for the cheddar cheese and runs back and forth to the pantry in search of the Cream of Mushroom soup. Mister likes to turn the can opener while I squeeze the handle. Peanut opens and closes the refrigerator, making sure our perishables get lots of fresh air. With helpers underfoot meal prep takes at least twice as long. But I don’t mind. I love that they love to be with me- partners in the endless business of preparing our daily bread.

Just this week I overheard Sis telling a friend that she can make breakfast. “I can make two things,” she said. “Toast and cereal.” We have been eating a lot of toast lately. The morning meal takes around an hour as she moved from toaster over (with two oven mitts) to table. She painstakingly spreads the butter then struggles with the knife in the jelly jar, eventually tipping the jar so that huge, shiny globs of jelly jiggle out to pile on the toast. Mister always asks for half of one kind of jelly and half of another. He loves jelly and his scientific inclination for observation has tested, with reliable results, that half-and-half really means double when a novice toast maker is on duty. So they eat toast with obscene amounts of jelly, leaving a sticky trail from the table to the kitchen faucet.

At the church I recently visited the pastor suggested that God, with a few miraculous exceptions, provides for our physical needs through people. He has designed us to really need each other and charged us with the sacred trust of being his hands and feet in the places where we find ourselves. This pastor humbly addressed the ways that God’s system of provision appears unfair, complicated, and contradictory. But he also suggested that it brings God joy and makes good sense for him to come along side his children and teach them how to make and do things that he could have done more graciously and expediently by himself.

And I thought of Sis and the way she smiles when the toast is done, the way her dimple shows up as she hands her brother a cold slice of wheat with apricot and strawberry. It is beautiful. It is good. Even if someone else could do it better. Even if it takes a long time. And I pray that my days are used to provide something for others. I pray: that the pantry of my heart constantly has little feet running in and out for supplies; that it needs consistent re-stocking; that the food stuffs get used up before they expire. Lord, make it so.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” Matthew 6:11

MVM

I am in the beautiful Rocky Mountains this weekend. I am here for an important reason, but one that makes me deeply sad. I came with my family to honor the life of a man who blessed us for thirty years with his friendship, generosity and a focused zest for life and God’s creation. He went to meet Jesus in October in the state of his birth. I was not able to attend the funeral. But friends from Colorado gathered this weekend in a mountain chapel, where he had played the piano with surgical skill and gusto, to say good-bye. I cried. I smiled. I looked out the window at the slopes.

After the service, we went snowshoeing. The crisp air was rest, therapy, life. The view was beautiful but bittersweet. Were it not for this man and his family, I would not know Colorado. The beauty of this place would not be a cache of memories and foundational moments in my understanding of who God is, who I am, and what is possible in this life. So as I stomped around in the snow, I breathed little “Thank yous” for a life, too short but so full.

“The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field . . . But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children—“ Psalm 103: 15-17

something I wrote in his final days:

Back Country

Today I am praying, from the deepest part of me, for a family friend. They recently increased his morphine and stopped giving him food. He is in incredible amounts of pain and the people who would know say it is time. I cannot go to say good-bye so I ride my bike in the basement and pray. And think about how this man poured precious time and resources into my life. He flew us to Sea World in his plane. He played piano at my wedding and complimented my husband on his ‘exquisite taste’. He gave me his giant slalom skis when he upgraded.

I followed him down long sweeping stretches of the Colorado mountains in wide arcs, shoulders squared against the incline, knees bent, skis chattering with glorious speed. I loved those skis. The ones with his name engraved on them. I still have them.

But what I hold the closest, what squeezes my throat so I cannot breath, is the long rides up the chairlift. These where the times when he would ask about my school work and listen for the answer. He would tell me stories that said, “You are smart and able, so I will tell you some things you will need to know about this life.” A week away from the public high school, in the crisp Rocky Mountains, with toes pointed over the brink of a Black Diamond, is a beautiful gift to give a young girl.

I pray and picture us riding the chairlift again. It is sunny. The chair swings slightly and the sound of accumulated snow, falling from the taller limbs, echoes around and up. We talk. The chair slows to let us off and I curve to the left like always. But he waves, pulls on a hood and goes right. Into the back country. Through perfect powder, towards the thin trail of smoke rising from the stone chimney of a great timber lodge where he will sit with Jesus, warming cold bones by the stone hearth, waiting for his wife, daughter and granddaughter and the table he chose by the window.

Lacking

I spent a weekend in October at a Monastery. A group of women, for whom I have deep spiritual respect, invited me. So I went. What would be needed to really describe the experience is beyond my communication abilities, but suffice to say on the last day I found myself in a tiny chapel, which I had previously mistaken for a garden shed, having a good snot-fest cry on one of the two pews. My tears blurred the details of the peeling baby blue wallpaper and the face of a plastic, painted Mary as she tenderly watched over my little soul.

I prayed for my kids until I actually thought I would be sick (so while I cried and committed my children to the care of their Heavenly Father, I pictured myself walking back up the winding mountain path to this sacred space with a mop and bucket). I told God it was too much. Not that my life has any real hardship, but the moments when I consider seriously the privilege and responsibility of Sheparding little souls, I find myself wholly and completely lacking. Completely lacking, as in naked without a pen on the first day at a new job. Or at the airport, boarding a cross-continental flight with a baby but no diaper. A house without a roof. A car without tires. Instructions to dismantle a bomb written in Mandarin. Lacking.

And so I said to Him, out loud, “This is too much.” And he answered me right away, “It is not yours.” It wasn’t much of a fight. What could I say? It is true that as a junior high kid I had dangled my toes in an alpine creek and told God that if he was real he could have my whole life. I was earnest, but it also seemed like a safe bet. If he wasn’t out there then no harm done. But twenty-something years later, in a little shed part way up the mountain, my promise came back to both haunt and soothe. It is too much. The blinding beauty as well as the darkness of this life: too much. And so with each morning sun, I have no choice but to place it all in capable hands and rest.

“Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.” Psalm 90:14

Listen All Gone

The baby looks a bit like a troll. Not the mean gobble-you-up kind that the Billy Goats Gruff encountered on the bridge; more like the happy troll dolls of my childhood, with perfectly round tummies, cherubic cheeks and fluffy hair that stands straight up. Her eyes are piercing grey almonds with sandy lashes that blink to buy time as she plots and schemes with her hands folded at the small of her back. She does what she pleases and if you ask she will tell you she is three although her second birthday wont come round until mid-February. She stomps around, crawling over us to sit on her brother’s head when she tires of making mischief out of sight at the end of the hall.

A good deal of our communication runs like the cliché ol’ Western shoot-out in front of the saloon. An example: she opens the fridge and takes out some yogurt. “No thank you, Baby,” I say. “We already had breakfast. We will eat snack as a family later. You need to put that yogurt back.”

“No,” she says, looking straight at me and rocking from heel to toe, a metronome ticking off the tense seconds while coyotes call and an unseen narrator whistles off stage left. “Peanut, you need to put that yogurt back in the fridge. Your mama is talking to you. You need to listen.” I put my hand on my holster. She blinks, twitches and puts the yogurt behind her back. A half step to the side, then a shifting of weight to the back leg in anticipation, like a triple jumper at the end of the approach.

“Little Baby, you need to listen.” I repeat. More blinking. Shoulders sway side to side, to reinforce the defiance.

“No,” she says. “Listen all gone.” Then she runs for her horse, yogurt cradled at her elbow like a running back. And so I chase. And chastise. Eventually the yogurt is in the back in the fridge. I call Grandma to update her on the toddler antics, turning my gaze away long enough to dial. A fluffy blur runs across the periphery and I pretend I don’t see. But then there is a still silence, the kind that signals a contraband haircut, permanent marker mural or the emptying of a Wal-Mart sized bottle of lotion. So I hang up and make my way down the hall to find a guilty baby sitting on her bed covered in gum wrappers.

“Gum baby,” she grins, shaking her head vigorously from side to side to blur her view of my stern face.

“Peanut, you know we don’t give gum to babies,” I say, frowning.
“Gum baby, all gone,” she grins again, wrinkling her nose, augmenting her response with American Sign Language, up-turned palms flicking the air- as if I did not understand the first time.

I turn and walk away, Sheriff Mom defeated, the evidence chewed and swallowed. Perhaps I should have turned a blind eye to the yogurt.

Princess

Tonight I was the waitress at a fancy restaurant. My two pint-sized patrons were celebrating.

“What is the occasion?” I asked.

“Well, this guy here is taking me on a fancy date because I just got married and am back from my honeymoon and he is taking me out for doing a good job and getting married. But he is not my husband. My husband is a real prince who rescued me from the high tower.”


“How did you get there?”

“A witch,” she answered, holding up her knurled hands, barring her teeth, and looking straight at me, as if to say, “I think you know her.”

Just glad to know she is having what all mother’s hope for: a fairytale childhood for their sweet little princess.

Yucky Soup

I sent the big kids downstairs to play today. There were two really good reasons. First, I needed to have a brief and professional conversation with the person at the door without endless interruptions such as, “Um, do you know what? Ya . . . I can . . . um, I have a . . . Um, do you know what?” or the less audible but ever-present hand sneaking across the periphery, as if I could have forgotten for one moment that five-ish years ago I became a mom. The second, and equally valid reason I sent them downstairs is because downstairs is awesome- a good balance of educational toys, junk from McDonald's hidden behind the educational toys where mom won’t find it and throw it away, and open space to run, jump, yell or pack incessantly for trips to far away lands, as the case may be. But banishment is banishment, even when it is to the Isle of Imagination. So, after useless protests from them and hand gestures from me that confirmed my seriousness, they headed down. On his way by me, Mister gave me the stink-eye and I heard him say to his big sister and he rounded the corner, “Let’s make Mom some Yucky Soup.”

Yucky Soup is something Mister likes to make downstairs in the retro-preschool kitchen, stocked with shiny wooden foods and empty bottles of curry, cumin and celery salt. He likes to make it for me. He likes to make it often.

And I think of all the bubbling caldrons of Yucky Soup I have stood over, sweating to make sure my culinary bitterness was just right for the occasion. Stirring and stirring, investing myself in poisons I inevitable spilled on myself along the way. The tricky thing about Yucky Soup, when served up by my son, is that it looks pretty much the same as all the other tasty wooden treats he brings me. I only know it is Yucky Soup if he tells me. Which he usually does, because isn’t that the point?

For as churning the milk produces butter, and as twisting the nose produces blood, so stirring up anger produces strife." Proverbs 30:33

Getting Stung

Summer vacation ended with Mister crying on the couch, an ice pack behind his head and another on his arm. We had stopped at the park on our way home and he had bounded from the van to run the perimeter. When he came screaming and holding his head, I assumed he had slipped. “It bit me! It bit me,” he wailed. I scooped him up and plucked the baby from the sand, where she had just situated herself. She added protest to his agony as I double-timed it back to the van. I buckled him in, ran around and was about to fasten my own seat belt when he became seriously hysterical. “It bit me again! It bit me again!” I ran around, scooped him out of his seat and stripped him down to his unders. A hornet had stung the back of his head and fallen down the back of his shirt, only to crawl out and bite his arm once he was strapped in. I hugged him quickly and got him back in when he started kicking. The hornet was still alive and tangled in his sock. I plucked it off, and it circled my head as I slammed the door and ran around to the other side.

Since then Mister prefers to stay indoors where he is oft heard repeating to himself the mantra of both mom and preschool teacher: “Bees only sting me when they are scared. If I am not scared, they will not be scared.” And I cannot help but think of a beautiful woman I met the autumn before Mister came home.

It was my birthday and my husband had taken me on a weekend getaway in the mountains a few hours from our home. In route to the Bed and Breakfast where we would stay, I read aloud from a gut-wrenching memoir on a list of adoption must-reads we had been given by our agency. It was the story of a Black baby adopted in the 60’s by loving and oblivious white folks living in a very White small town. The experience of this man was articulating questions and apprehensions that my husband and I felt ill equipped to deal with on our own.

By God’s grace, the woman who owned the B & B was an Asian-American immigrant from Canada with a doctorate in Sociology. So when she brought us a beautiful organic breakfast the first morning I asked a question. She sat down and opened up her heart, sitting with us for two mornings, retelling her experiences growing up with immigrant parents from China and moving through the immigration process to the U.S., where she was forced to ‘choose a box’ despite a well-articulated argument about race as a social construct to which she did not want to be tied.

On our last morning she likened racism to bees. “I talk with my children and try to prepare them for what they will experience, but when my children are in a beautiful orchard I don’t want them to focus on the small bee, annoying as it may be. I try to show them the trees and the clouds and the beauty of what is around them.” I thought her answer was awesome until my son was stung twice in a span of five minutes and decided the out-of-doors, his former love, was no longer for him. When he goes outside he only sees bees. He is always looking for them. Because they hurt. Because he remembers last time he was stung. Because he questions whether or not it is worth it. There are some decent toys inside.

I have been thinking about bees a lot lately, especially when I drag my sweet, scared son from the basement into the sunlight. He usually cries at first but is distracted easily enough by the trampoline. But I still think about bees and look for them, too. My credibility cannot afford another run-in with the animal kingdom before the healing months of winter. And I think of what lies ahead- the little stinging things that ruin a perfectly good summer day and send my baby home crying.

Water

On Thursday evening we met a few families at dusk and walked a mile down the paved bike trail to fetch dirty water from the creek. Then we walked back, spilling as we went. The kids, running and chatting on the way there, scraped the rubber of their shoes against the pavement and began to hunch, passing the water between them and making intermittent attempts to balance it on their heads. There was a lot less talking on the way home. And when we were done, there was not even enough to fill a bathtub.

We have done this activity before, but never because we needed water or planned on drinking it. And I pray that my children are spared from the day when they do not have the things they need to survive. But even as a ‘homework assignment’ walking a mile for water hurts: my feet; the palms of my hands, where the handle rubs; and my heart because this ritual is reality for another mother who will feed her baby with water murky with disease and dirt.

Peanut did not carry any water. But she watched, leaning over the bridge as we filled the buckets. And I wonder what she already knows, and what she sees when she curiously stares, chin tipped slightly towards her sternum in impish grin. I pray: that she uses her life to help others; that she finds joy in sharing; that her arms are strong for the task; and she laughs at all the days to come.

“She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks.” Proverbs 31:17

True Story

True story. My husband was out of town. We still have three kids. The odds were not good for me, and qualifications mean nothing when the odds are bad. I was determined to have a great day, but locked myself in the car to call my parents a few times before ten o’clock in the morning because I just needed to know that the signal of my cell phone was tethering me to someone else, even if it had to bounce around from tower to tower, picking up static along the way.

After the skate park, Science Center, lunch, nap for the baby and the pet store (only to look) it was time to get groceries. We started at the upscale local co-op where all the well-mannered, fragrance-free organic people quietly wander the isles in Zen-like happiness wearing things made of hemp died with pomegranate. We went there for three items. I buckled the baby into the small, recycled plastic cart and made my way to the fresh bread. We were going to have grass-fed Sloppy Joes on fresh rolls. Even though dad was not home. Even though I knew that eight days of Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese wouldn’t kill them. But I just couldn’t bring myself to make a meal-plan (which we now post on the refrigerator) that said M: Pizza, T: Pizza, W: Pizza: TH: Pizza, F: Pizza. And, admittedly, there has to be something between Little Caesar’s and organic beef, but anyhow . . .

The bread was next to the wine. “Tuck in your elbows!” I called as I turned to select something from the case. Then there was a loud crash and howling. I turned to find the two big kids, pinned side by side under our cart, which they had upturned by both standing on the back and holding the rail, exactly as the picture prohibits. So, they lay pinned and screaming, with the front wheels of the cart spinning in the air and the face of the buckled baby smashed and screaming against their chests. In all my trips to Wal-Mart I had never seen anything like this. Ever.
Consider yourself warned.

Super Fun Everyday

Mister's Great Day

"Today I had fun at skate park and today I didn’t fall down. And today I had really fun at the Science Center and they had toys at the Science Center. I played with a rolling dog. Today at the Science Center I saw I mouse and today a kid was trying to catch it. He had some gloves. He got gloves on so he wouldn’t get bit. I had to tell the man that the mouse was out of their office. He was glad that I told him. Today I had really fun scootering and I didn’t fall down. And today I had a super fun everyday. And today we went outside. And today I had fun having sloppy joes. And today I had super fun."

Here's to more super fun everydays.

"This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it." Psalm 118:24