Tag: babies

I have a job for you, baby.

Not the little guy who just kicked me for the first time, that I could feel, just yesterday (yay!). I mean the other one, the one I lost. I wrote about how hard it was not to have a body to bury. You want to be able to take care of your children with your own hands, but I couldn’t do that, and it hurt.

Now, as the months have gone by and the pain of loss has receded, I still find myself bewildered about what to do with the baby’s soul.

When I found out I was pregnant last time, I prayed for the baby’s protection constantly, and turned him over to God. So I have a strong hope that, whenever it was that he left us, he was already baptized through our desire and intention to do so, and he went straight into the arms of his loving Papa in heaven. This is a good thing! I am not worried.  I love him, but God loves him more.

But, what to do when I pray for my all children, one by one? I was never sure when I got to this child. It didn’t feel right to pray for him. Even though I know no prayer is wasted, it seemed like asking for something that was already given.

And I know that many parents pray to their lost unborn babies, and that seemed reasonable, but felt odd, too. Probably this shows that I have a poor understanding of the saints in heaven, but praying to him felt like turning him into a spiritual being, which made him foreign, elevated beyond the family, not really our kid; and at the same time, it felt like too much to ask of such a little guy. I’m not going to tell my five-year-old when Daddy is having a hard time at work or Mama is worried about school; so why would I spill the beans to a seven-week-old fetus, even if he is enjoying the Beatific Vision? I know, I’m over thinking it, but it just felt weird!

But yesterday, it came to me: Baby, you pray for the new baby. You two hold hands and be good to each other. Take care of each other while Mama is taking care of the rest of them. Aha! Everybody needs a job. We are at our best when we know what we are here for.

At the Register: Babies as Teachers

Skeptics may groan at yet another extraneous, feel-good program, where tax dollars are squandered on things that parents ought to be teaching at home. Teachers should spend their precious class time teaching math, reading, and science, right?

But others believe that an increase in empathy is not only desirable for life in general, but it also makes for a better learning experience. Kids who have participated in Roots of Emphathy bully each other less; kids are calmer and more respectful of the teacher and of others; kids feel more free to ask questions and to work on problems that they don’t immediately understand. They are learning, in short, how to live with other people, and how to live with themselves.

Read the rest at the Register.

What did you almost name your kid?

The other day, my groceries were scanned by a woman whose nametag said “Alma.” I almost told her that I wanted to name my daughter that; but then I realized that, if she’s anything like every other Alma I’ve ever met, she just wants me to take my receipt and go away.

Anyway, when I come across someone with a name we decided against nine times, sometimes I’m relieved (“Whew! Dodged that bullet”) and sometimes I’m wistful (“Just think, that could have been ours . . . “). Truly, I feel like all my kids have the perfect name for them. For a few of our kids, it’s almost uncanny: Clara, for instance, turned out to be remarkably clear-eyed and fair skinned, unlike all the other kids. But I supposed people just grow into names, so it’s hard to say if a name is really ideal, or just very familiar.

A few of the names I pushed for, and my husband didn’t like: Ada, Delia, Beryl. A few of the ones I’m pretty glad he didn’t go for: Oceania, Moselle. (Look, I was young, okay?) He also liked Edith, which I could never warm up to, although Edie is a sweet nickname.

Of course, nothing can beat my husband’s own dodged bullet. His mother had a boy’s name picked out when she first got pregnant, but she had a girl first, so she couldn’t use the name. Then she had another girl, and then another girl. By the time he was born, she realized that she really oughn’t name him . . . Huckleberry John.

 

 

PIC baby aghast

HA. How about you? What’s in your discard pile? Do you know what you almost got called?

Dr. Greg Popcak on marriage after baby

I’m putting together an article for Our Sunday Visitor about how marriages change after a baby is born — the good, the bad, and the things that need professional intervention (spiritual and otherwise). Dr. Greg Popcak gave me some wonderful information, and he has reprinted our entire interview on his blog. Here’s an excerpt:

Simcha: I assume you mostly work with Catholic couples. Is the strength of a couple’s faith a good predictor for how well they can work through their problems? This sounds like a softball question – like, “yes yes, of course when we are faithful, we will find life’s burdens light” – but I’m really curious, because I know that a strong religious faith doesn’t always translate easily or directly into good emotional health or strong relationships. 

Dr. Greg: You’re right.  In fact, many faithful couples who have more rigid role expectations may struggle more with birth than other couples.  If you tend to be of the mindset the God made men to do X and women to do Y and never the twain shall meet, you may tend to fail to be there for each other, take on too much for yourself, and make excuses for behavior that would be otherwise inexcusable.

Faith tends to be helpful when it is expressed, not as “rules to live by” but rather as “a call to be generous and understanding regarding each other’s needs.”  Babies have a way of stretching your comfort zones.  If your faith helps you deal with that and respond accordingly, both your faith and relationships will become healthier as you grow as a person.  But if your faith is mainly about having hard and fast rules to live by, you might not adapt as well to the unpredictability that comes with post-baby life.

Good stuff, with lots of practical advice — things we learned the hard way, and are still working on learning. Read the rest here.

I will post a link to the finished OSV article when it comes out; and also keep an eye out for Popcak’s newest book, written with his wife: Then Comes Baby:  Surviving and Thriving in the First Three Years of Parenthood  (Ave Maria Press–Nov 2014).

A long Holy Saturday

Last night, I was cold and couldn’t sleep, so I snuggled up against my husband, who is always warm. When I’m pregnant, I like to press my belly against him so that we can all be warm all together, me and him and the baby.  “Here you go, little guy.  This is your daddy.  You will like him.”  Then, last night, I remembered that there is no baby.

There is no wild anguish here. I’m just tired, and bewildered.  I was so busy for those seven weeks, I sometimes forgot I was even pregnant, even though we wanted, tried for a baby. I hadn’t gotten around to even looking up what the little one was up to, week to week.  But I worked deliberately to make him real, when I remembered he was real:  I asked God to bless him.  I thanked God for him. I talked to him, and gave him a little happy pat when I remembered he was there.

Here is the thing that really hurts. I never saw the baby. I don’t know where he went.  I lost track of his body as I bled, and now he is gone.  Those are the worst nightmares:  the wave comes, the darkness falls, the crowd sweeps by, and your child is gone.  Where did he go?  Why didn’t I hold on tighter?  My husband would have gone and dug up the frozen ground to bury the body, but there is nothing to bury.  He has been washed away, and I don’t even know when.  Maybe he died weeks ago, when he was too little to be seen.  Maybe I was happily patting someone who was already gone.

It wouldn’t change anything if I could have buried him. But I wish I could have done it.

I’m trying to hear the voice of the angel — the one who stands waiting outside the tomb to explain the situation, so that when you go to take care of the body and find it gone, you will know that there haven’t been wild animals or grave robbers or some trickery or indignity.  You haven’t lost the body; the body has life.  He is not here, but he is not gone.  Don’t worry!  This is a good thing.  You cannot have his body, but you have not lost him.

I’m in a long Holy Saturday.  A bewildering time.  God promised joy, He promised resurrection, but in the mean time, what are we supposed to do?  It is hard when the ones we love hide from us.  They don’t need our care.

I want the baby to have eternal life.  And I want him back.

Jennifer Fulwiler interviews me from aboard her TARDIS

No paradoxes were created in the making of this interview, in which Jen Fulwiler of Conversion Diary speaks from the perspective of her past self.  She introduces the interview this way:

Seven years ago, I found myself in a place of great upheaval. I was in the middle of a profound religious conversion and found myself in a no-man’s land, adrift from my old belief system, yet not fully integrated into my new one.

Now this is the part that makes me blush:

Around that time that I came across a small blog by this woman named Simcha. She was a brilliant, hilarious writer on par with the famous names of the secular world…yet she was religious, describing herself as a Hebrew Catholic since she comes from a family of Jewish coverts to Catholicism. Reading her blog never failed to brighten my day (usually by making me laugh until I gasped for air), and her writing transformed my view of everything from motherhood to what it means to have faith.

About once a week I would think, “This woman’s blog needs to be much, much bigger!” and “When is she going to write a book?!” Seven years later, I got my wish.

Tons of frank, funny (and really difficult!) questions from the point of view of someone who can’t imagine why you would go to all the trouble of charting and abstaining, especially when you might end up having — ugh — babies anyway.  Check it out, if only to read the phrase “boinking machine” on a Catholic blog.

Why give birth? Why love?

Wow.  Many, many thanks to Garard Nadal for posting this incredibly pro-life short film from Unilever:

I do not know what Unilever’s Project Sunlight is about, but man, the clip is lovely, and will do much good. A great companion, as a matter of fact, to this comic illustrating a quote from C.S. Lewis, who died fifty years ago today.  (Thanks to Jason Bach for sharing the comic on Facebook!)

Hope doesn’t mean you know nothing will go wrong.  As Lewis says:

The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

 

At the Register: the Earth Is a Nursery

How lunch with friends turned a little bit Children of Men-ish.

And that’s all for me today, folks!  I got home from the ER at 3:30 this morning with a baby with bronchiolitis.  Never had to deal with that before.  Baby is doing much, much better today, but I think my husband and I are going to need some oxygen to get through the day.  My hat is off to all the parents who deal with medical emergencies — asthma, diabetes, CP — as a routine thing. I don’t know how you do it.  I’m feeling so grateful for my normally healthy kids.

Also, it would be nice if you could spare a prayer for the man in the hospital room next to ours last night.  He had lost an eye and was having some kind of crisis with his remaining eye.  I heard the nurse talking about morphine and hospice.  He was so gentle and patient, trying not to put anyone out of their way.  Other people’s fortitude just blows me away.

My Love Is Like a Big Red Dog

My kids are pretty, pretty smart.  But not quite as smart as I think they are.

One time, for instance, we were listening to a Danny Kaye song about “they’ll never outfox the fox!”  It goes on to marvel over the exploits of a dashing young scoundrel:

Whenever they try to find me

They find me where I am not

I’m hither and yon, I’m there and gone, I’m Johnny-not-on-the spot!

(He whistles as he jump to a low tree branch)

I’m out on a limb they think!

(He whistles again, jumping down)

I’m down on the ground in a wink

My enemies say “Gadzooks! It’s spooks!”

Shivering in their socks

They know that they’ll never, I’m far to clever

They’ll never outfox the Fox!

The toddler at the time said something like, “He singin’ ’bout Wobbin Hood.”  OH MY STARS! I thought.  What an intelligent child!  She extrapolated from the mention of all this clever, limb-jumping derring-do, and made the assumption that this song was about Robin Hood — when it’s actually about a very Robin Hood-like character, The Fox.

Then I suddenly recalled that we had just watched Disney’s Robin Hood, in which the main character is . . . a fox.  All that was going on was that when the kid heard Danny Kaye sing, “The Fox!  The Fox!” she figured he was talking about “the fox, the fox.”  Not a bad assumption, but not especially brilliant, either.

I never learn.  Today, my dear baby, who is the smartiest-whartiest baby in the whole wide world,  oh yes she is, came up to me and said, “Doggie have nursies!”

What an intelligent child!  I marvelled all over again.  We don’t even have a dog, but somehow she divined that they are mammals!  I wonder what slight clue was enough for her agile little mind, so that she understood that female dogs nourish their young with, as she so preciously calls them, “nursies.”

Then I saw the picture of the doggie she had in mind:

Yep.  To those with nursies on the brain, it sure do have nursies.

Bet you never look at Clifford the same way again.

Defund! Defund! Defund!

A Massachusetts antiabortion group has unveiled a bill that would let individual taxpayers opt out of paying for publicly funded abortions. Under the measure, a taxpayer could choose to have whatever portion of their state taxes pays for abortion coverage directed instead to the Baby Safe Haven Law. That law allows parents to leave unwanted newborns at fire stations and other designated locations.
I LOVE this idea.  Puts those Planned Parenthood ghouls in the position of saying,  “We don’t want desperate mothers to have a way to unburden themselves of a baby they don’t want or can’t care for.  Women should not have the choice to go to a safe location — they should be forced to do what their government and big corporations want them to do.”
Anne Fox, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, said the bill, one of several filed by the group for the new legislative session, would give residents who oppose abortion a way of exercising their conscience. The head of NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts, Andrea Miller, said she had not seen the bill but argued that tax dollars routinely go toward many things that a given taxpayer might not agree with. (AP)
Let me translate for you:  “But that’s ourrrrrrrrrr money!  It’s not fai-i-i-i-ir that someone was clever and enterprising enough to push for laws that a majority of citizens want!  We are, and always have been, opposed to choice for Americans!”
This is the way to do it.  Prayer, huge, peaceful protest, the brilliant Lila Rose with her exposés, and defund, defund, defund.  Some abortionists are just plain evil, and some, I’m sure, sincerely believe they are helping women.  But most of them are in it for the money, pure and simple — and they are making plenty of it.  Time to cut them off.
Oh, and I love how the Globe and other media think it’s some kind of stinging insult to say “antiabortion” instead of “prolife.”    Call me “antiabortion” all day long, folks.  Abortion is the kind of thing that the prefix “anti” was invented for.
(cross-posted on Inside Catholic)