offering: real blessing

This past weekend, we all put on our Sunday best and landed in the front pew at church.  It was time to baptize our Littlest.  We worship as Episcopalians, and I am desperately in love with the liturgy of baptism in this community.  We welcome God’s smallest into this great big family of sinners, forgiven and and finding grace together.  We each are invited to revisit our own baptism, affirm for each other again how our lives have been claimed.  There is a lyrical narrative about this holy water.  The priest blesses these babes, and then with a bit of holy oil, crosses their foreheads – sealed by the Holy Spirit, marked as Christ’s own forever.  Forever.  Nothing this child can do can change that.

So here we are, spit shined and squeaky clean, doing our best to do our best, in the front pew.  The Littlest looks like a little man in his proper corduroy pants and button down shirt.  But he keeps ripping his socks off and chewing on them, and then he tires of sitting in the stroller, protesting loudly with his growing number of sounds.  The Middlest has climbed in and out and around every pew and kneeler, commando crawled her way through every pocket book and cup of coffee obstacle on the floor.  The Eldest, first enthralled with the music, has decided that he’s bored now and can’t understand why Daddy won’t play a game with him.  And that’s the thing about doing your best, right?  It’s all you’ve got, and somehow it needs to be enough.  Let me tell you, the front pew is not the right place for us, folks.

We’re called up front for the baptism part of the service, not a moment too soon. Though once in front of the crowd it becomes clear that maybe we’re not right to be up here, either.  Maybe, next time, we’ll just arrange a private thing in the bath tub, eh?  Because now the Littlest will not be still and is just about doing back flips trying to escape my grasp.  His protests are getting more extreme, and eventually I can think of nothing else but putting him down. On the ground. Where he is desperate to explore.

So I do.  I put him on the ground, kneel down with him, hold the brass pitcher of water to keep it from tipping over as he pulls himself up to it, checks out his reflection.  He taps it, smiles at the deep echo.  He crawls over to the font itself, begins to climb up the steps.  All the while, I’m following him around, kneeling on the floor of the church, murmuring the bits of call and response that I can remember, priest beside us, godparents surrounding us, family and a whole big congregation looking on.  I wear an apologetic smile.

Eventually, we get up off the floor, the Littlest and I, when it is time for the water.  I brush the dust off my legs, and hand my babe over to the priest.    The kids are mesmerized when the priest poured the water into the font.  The priest scoops handfuls of water onto the Littlest’s forehead.  Water runs down his eyebrows, follows the bridge of his nose.  The priest drags his fingers in that space between his eyes and his hair, writing the promise of grace into his life.  I am mesmerized by the magic of spirit and words, by ritual and poetry.  The symbolic becomes tangible. We pray these words: “Give him an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”  And all I can do is offer up my loudest Amen.

By the end, I think we were spread over three pews, and had left a trail of crayons and cheerios in our wake.  I doubt that any of the pictures will have us all looking at the camera. I hardly even remembered to take a picture.  It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t graceful, but it was full of grace.  Afterwards, we gathered with family and friends, to break bread, to laugh at the ordeal of it all, to rejoice in the mess of it all.

And that’s when a friend spoke into my heart: “Blessed is the mama who gets down on her knees to crawl around the floor with her little one,” she said.  She said this as I was, in my usual way, trying to make light of our embarrassing display.  I think what she meant was that in God’s eyes, this is the path to glory – this dusty position of prostration, of work and heart and honesty.  It is setting aside expectations to embrace this dynamic life, and being able to give what is needed within each moment.  That though I may have wrinkled my outfit, and that the happy squeals of the Littlest competed with the rhythm of the liturgy,  I was doing the work of mothering, which never stops, not even for a priestly blessing.  I was so caught up in the ways that we had made a spectacle of ourselves, crumpling up any church protocol and throwing it out the window that I had failed to see how my family, each of us doing our best to do our best, was there at the altar, at the place of grace.  That in letting the Littlest down and crawl around instead of scolding him to be still in my arms, I was offering him just as he is, not as he should be.  My family is real – not some prescription to fit a churchy image in my head.  My Jesus is real, too.

So when the Littlest naps straight through his own party, so when the Eldest throws a fit because he’s not the center of attention, so that when the Middlest can’t.stop.moving.her.mouth because she hasn’t had a nap and is bit manic, and when we all have scrambled eggs for dinner – this all is real, too.  And I know that God is there.  And this, too, is full of grace.  And I’m on my knees crawling hard after these babes of mine, chasing them around the altar of the One who made it all, who knows this mess better than I, and makes it all beautiful.

Though I doubt we’ll take the front pew again any time soon.

object lesson: doc martens, smarties and grace

I did not blend in in high school.  That’s not to say that I was left out – I wasn’t.  I circled my way around in friends, and was involved in all sorts of things.  What I mean to say is that I stood out – I was different.  This was mostly my own doing.  Somewhere along the line it became easier to be different than to be the same. Don’t laud me with praise for clinging to some ideal, upholding some sense of integrity, because that wasn’t it.  Mostly, I was busy trying on all sorts of hats, and figuring out which one I liked best. I was following the beat to my own drum, with a rhythm that kept changing.

I may have been known for a few things, including my choice of footwear.  Sometimes it was just the mismatching socks worn with a pair of kicks, but often it was the hand painted canvas shoes that drew some attention.  Most memorable, and treasured, for me is the pair of colorfully flowered Doc Martens that reached half way up my calf and tied with one blue and one green lace. They were just tough enough, softened with floral femininity.  These shoes became a trademark.  No one else had these shoes, and I wore them loudly, with everything.

Another thing that remains faithful in my memory of high school is skiing.  Our school, thought not particularly close to any mountains, yet was always offering ski trips, big and small.  I saved up my babysitting dollars, and my friends and I  sat on those buses, as they navigated tight turns on small mountains roads, more often than not.  Not a lot makes any one of these trips stand alone, and looking back now they are hazy years of getting my ski legs and buttressing my courage to aim myself down black diamonds ever larger in size and challenge.

After a long afternoon of the round and round of chair lifts and ski runs, thighs tight and cheeks tingling with a hot-cold, I trudged back inside the ski lodge, thunking my way to the locker room, in the robotic movements dictated by ski boots.  The warm, wet air from inside that ski lodge softened my nose, and snot oozed its way from my nose to my upper lip. My friends and I, always looking to pinch a penny, cheap in the way teenagers are, refused to fork up the buck fifty or whatever it was for a bright orange key and a locker.  Instead, as was our habit, we hoisted our bags of day clothes on top of the locker bays.  Now, coming off the mountain, ready for a comfy sweatshirt and walkable shoes for my feet, I swung my ski bag back down off the ledge.  I noticed it almost immediately: my boots, my floral Doc Martens, are weighty shoes.  They lend heft to a bag that is otherwise filled with cotton clothes.  But this bag had no heft, not anymore.  My shoes were gone.

What followed next was a mess of tears, histrionics of teenage proportion.  I came home on that bus deflated, still walking like a ski robot.  I felt like someone had stolen a part of me.  These weren’t just an expensive pair of Nikes.  To me, these boots were one of a kind, and so much of how I understood myself was wrapped up in those shoes.  Some other person was going to wear those shoes, now.  Out there, in that great world, someone else was walking around in my size 6 floral Doc Martens.

At home, I expected an earful about being responsible.  I was certain that I this was going to be one of those life lessons, a teaching moment about making choices and respecting my belongings.  If I had just put my coins in the locker, shoved my bag in and locked it up tight, then I would still have my beloved boots.  I braced myself for the lecture, and though heart sick, understood I would get no sympathy.

I did learn a life lesson that day, but it wasn’t the one I expected.  The words are vague, the specifics unclear, but the lesson I learned that day was about grace.  Pure, undeserving, grace.  You see, I didn’t get the lecture; I didn’t get the “I told you so,” or the “you should know better.”  What I got was a new pair of boots: another brightly colored pair of floral Doc Martens, paid for entirely by my parents, and lovingly gifted to me, for no other reason than they loved me, and understood my hurt.

Some might accuse my parents of missing a crucial lesson, causing me to be still more careless.  Some might accuse me of being a bit too attached to the finer things of this world, and missing the point, ’cause after all stuff is just stuff.  I will tell you this: that other stuff is in there, too, but what I learned that day was a far greater lesson.

Recently, I dug through the bottom of my closet and pulled out my boots.  The flowers are worn away on the toes, the leather forever creased around the ankles, but they are comfortable in a way that only 15 year old shoes can be. Though they are not the most convenient shoe for this running-out-the-door-with-three-small-ones-in-tow-mama, I’ve been taking the time to lace them up, threaded to one hole less than the top, wrap that lace around the ankle before securing it with a double knot, just like I did in high school.  These boots have attitude, even now.

And these boots are a physical reminder to me, too, of the grace that I have received, the grace that I can so freely give.  Just like when my sister is hanging out with our kids, and is doling out Smarties, untwisting the crinkly plastic with the kids circled ’round, and she reaches out to place a few into each hand.  The Eldest, his eyes betraying his desire and disappointment, as he tells his aunt truthfully: “But I didn’t eat a good dinner.”  As she deposits a few Smarties in his palm, he is learning about that same abundant grace.

Folks, none of us is deserving.  I’m wearing my boots and passing out Smarties of grace.

resiliency, or guilt vs. grace

Why are we so heavy with guilt?  As moms, this seems to be a running theme — whether it is guilt about our children, our marriages, our houses, our work — it seems as though we all carry an invisible burden that we are constantly not doing enough.  We fall short, and we beat ourselves up for it. We crumble to the weight.  I want to change that: instead of guilt, heavy and burdensome, I’m choosing Grace, easy and light. I want to embrace my inadequacies, bear them with my loved ones, and offer them up as sacrifices.

The Working Mother’s Research Group just published a report of a survey it conducted with both working and stay-at-home-moms and it found that well over half of both groups experienced guilt about the cleanliness of their homes.  Working women felt guilty about the amount of time spent with children and women at home felt guilty about not contributing financially.

This week I also read a study about praising our children.  There was so much in it that I want to think about, but one finding of this study had to do the type of praise a child recieves.  It suggested that for more resilient children, and therefore more resilient adults, as parents we need to be less generous with person-based praise and more generous with process-based praise.  ”Kids praised for their efforts believe that trying hard, not being smart, matters. These kids are “resilient” and take more risks.”

To me, these two issues are interwoven.  The idea that we feel pressure for perfection, and then guilt from not reaching it, suggests that we lack precisely resiliency the second study applauds.  It seems to me that we are motivated by feedback, and feel as though we fall short when we don’t get the positive feedback that we were anticipating.  Having grown up as part of this over-praised generation, this makes sense to me.

I don’t get a high five every time I put dishes away.  My children won’t have any concept of the energy and effort I spend on them until they are well into the process of raising their own kids.  I’m not going to get a Thank You for enforcing boundaries, giving rules and expecting manners.  If I’m super lucky, and it’s a good day, someone might say Thank You for cooking dinner as we sit down for grace before the meal.  The lack of praise could lead me to believe that what I’m doing isn’t good enough — that I need to pile on the guilt because there is more that I should be accomplishing, different ways of meeting others’ needs.  But I know better.  Though there are plenty of areas where I fall short as a mother, as in life, I know that I love my family and I am committed to them.  My shortcomings allow for me to receive Grace — His, and theirs, too.  It allows me to be human to my Little Ones, to show them that they, too, are worthy of His Grace.

Of course I want my Little Ones to be proud of who they are.  But I want them to know that there are not loved because they are Smart, or Strong, or Athletic, or Beautiful.  They are simply loved.  And I want them to pursue excellence in all things, and work hard, not because of the praise they will receive, and how it in turn will become part of their identity, but because of the chance to seek a challenge and apply themselves to the best of their abilities.  To learn how to fail, and allow themselves to picked up again, without the guilt.  I want them to truly know Grace.  Isn’t that resiliency?