go tell it on the mountain

one night hanging out at the ranch upstairs in grandma and grandpa's bedroom turned the east room turned mine, i heard my soon-to-be aunt head up to their room formerly the south room formerly my uncles' bedroom. where i imagined still to be the streak under the light switch from their nightly tossing of dirty clothes attempting to hook and pull it down to the off setting from their once was twin beds. i was nine or ten and in love with my dad's remaining younger brother. i had yet to really connect with my soon-to-be aunt.

i knew she didn't go to church. i decided guiding her to her Christianity would be an in-road. recently returning from church camp where carman's 'the champion' was a theme song, i played my audio cassette copy on the little boombox i'd brought with me. every few seconds turning it up a little louder. and then repeating the 6 minute long piece that was mostly spoken word about Jesus boxing the devil with an 80's opera-etic rock vibe again. i've no idea what i thought was going to happen, but i sat alert for some-something. and when some-something didn't, i would re-figure the thickness of our old wood doors and up would go the volume until i played an entire round at max. (which would have been heard downstairs had my grandfather not kept three tv's on at once, and all at their own unsafe-for-your-grandkids'-hearing level.) i imagined my soon-to-be aunt sitting on the bed with the Word of God floating around her. that she was either breathing it in to be transformed into a loving will-be-aunt who would bake cookies with me and take me shopping or was scowling at the air blowing it away.

after whatever time a nine or ten year old imagines to be a lot, with no-nothing from her room, i went downstairs leaving my soon-to-be aunt with her thoughts. certain whatever the outcome, i had done something good. i had just learned at church camp we were all called to spread the Good News. and Good News is what i, my little boombox and carman had spread through the air. loudly.

i clearly recall my grandfather greeting me "you want to dish up some ice cream for us? penny already went to bed with a bad headache, not feeling well."

and that's the only time i've ever gone up to the mountain top to proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord. sparked by want for personal gain. "and they'll know we are Christians by our love" is more my tune. not that defines me, but to which i aspire. and no doubt - for personal gain. i really suck whenever i try to take the wheel.

then. i saw this on the news and for the first time ever felt the missionary-bug, which for me, is saying an awful lot:

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=7613395&page=1

i cried. seeing children brutalized by a man wearing a picture of Jesus. the desire to scoop those children up and introduce them to Love was huge.

by chance that very night i ran across a blog about american idol with good news that "One of my college friends told me her mom and Kris' mom are friends and that he had told his mom before he got to the final that he needed one more week there because he had been witnessing to Adam and felt like he needed just a little more time with him." say what?

and over 100 comments under that i scanned through further praising kris for being a contestant we could all admire and what good work the Lord was doing through him and no wonder he won as he had God's Word on his side and... huh?

i don't watch american idol. i couldn't tell by the post or comments if adam is a declared atheist or what for everyone to be so united in their praise for his fellow contestant witnessing to him. i know he wears eye-liner thanks to my yahoo and the today show, but that's about it. also thanks to my yahoo and the first fifteen seconds of the view, i'm guessing the 'or what' is adam may be gay.

children in the congo accused of being witches and tortured in the name of Jesus. an american idol shoulda-been-winner gay. yeah. while there are some parallels i feel compelled to draw, i'll not. i am gonna stand on my mountain-high soap box that all mothers have over their own though and say: kids,

a) if you're like your uncle and feel a call to share your faith with someone you think is lost, keep that exchange sacred. sacred is not the blogosphere twittering away in prayer, praise and back-handed judgement because you opened your mouth and gossiped about your 'good works'. mothers will gossip regardless, esp if you win whatever form of american idol is around, but know in yourself to keep that type of thing between you, your friend and God. it's your friend's business to share and no one else's.

b) any faith, religion, can be perverted and abused and used as a weapon of discrimination, hatred, negligence or manipulation. when you think you know what a muslim, hindu or jew thinks, really consider your sources and dig a little deeper. keep in mind how some children have been introduced to Christianity. with hot wax and an image of Jesus on the offender's robe.

c) don't just go blaring your boombox around.

newsworthy

this morning it is not the fda going after cheerios. now caleb thinks they are bad for us and positions we may as well allow him to eat cinnamon toast crunch every morning. with a side of apple jacks.

i suppose it could be worse, and he could be discussing with me whether miss california should lose her title.

i've had my head in the sand all week. intentionally. with spite. such are the petty day-to-day goings-ons. otherwise known as marriage which God gifts us to further refine ourselves. my flaws boil to the surface and then - well. they get a proper sanding down after i've cooled as i pull my head out again.

the family of a dear friend was involved in a boat explosion in tampa. our neighbor's scary dog finally did break his chain. he mauled the neighbor a yard over while we five were playing in our backyard, separated from where the dog was kept by a few mere feet.

for weeks i prayed every night God simply grant me an extension. just a little more time to do a little bit better. we got pregnant. i always thought that was kind of funny. not really the extension i meant.

i feel like i'm wasting this relatively easy span of time with sand in my eyes. but. i'm also very thankful we have this (relatively easy span of time) to work on the deeper crap no one has energy for once newsworthy happens.

what she said

the last 12 lines of this. i had a little light bulb moment. i needed one. bookmarked in this way because sometimes i forget to keep charging that socket's battery and allow what lightens to dim.

brag on your kid

i passed up a carnival last week for moms to brag with wild abandon on their offspring. this method versus the art of subtle implication most of us tend to use. the purpose of this carnival was to focus on the good if you've felt swept up by the less than pleasant bits of parenting. even so, i find plenty of parents are skilled at back-handed bragging on themselves and their children during tales of ornery, stubborn and boundary-testing.

on that day my daughter opened the child-proof cap of our flintstone vitamins and, knowing she was about to be stormed, grabbed as many freds and wilmas and barneys as she could in her little fist. and then realized her fisted score was trapped, fist and all, inside the bottle. it took some cajoling and quite a few tears to get maddy's hand out of the bottle. playing out another of aesop's fables which was what made the whole thing so amusing to me.

i laughed to myself what part of that a person would brag up for the carnival. in the hands of the right parent...

we have friends whose roughly 2.5 yr old once spent a few minutes eyeing the cookie jar on top of the counter before getting a piece of paper and sliding it under the jar until the paper became wedged firmly underneath. then. he pulled.

now that's something to brag on. same as the sweet little girl the today show featured once who was reading at 18 months.

there isn't really much our kids do that other kids their age are not. or simply haven't had the opportunity to try. or been caught doing. we just do not come up with the fun nicknames like "teeny houdini". the art is more in the parent than the child. turning whatever that child did into something so uber-spectacular. doesn't mean i'm not proud that caleb recently read 'go, dog, go' all by himself. he knows that, and that's all that matters. (versus the self-served blogging to strangers about it.) but. he also knows about that little 18 month old baby who could read circles around his 4 year old self.

it's the second shoe: 'God made you. He gave you special gifts and talents, and loves you SO much. and oh. by the way. He made everybody, and gave everybody special talents and gifts, and loves everybody SO much...'

i get a kick out of little kid stories. every child is gifted, you just have to pay attention. it's usually the brag, implied or hanging-all-out, by the parent who does that annoys me. unless the story has a large dollap of tongue-in-cheek or acknowledges that second shoe, i instantly bristle assuming the parent thinks their child is the only one who did/said/thought/strutted. i bristle so much so anymore that it alters the whole sweet story sour.

that's pretty lousy of me. and it assumes i'm always so deft at telling stories of my children without coming off like i hold a lime-light above their heads myself. i know i do not. sometimes i'm in a hurry and lucky just to get the story of how maddy scaled the oven door and climbed on top of the stove emailed before she goes at it again. let alone touch on how i know she's not the only one who can climb...

so. i set out to read all those blog posts with a smile on my face. practice makes perfect. i'd like to work on this flaw before it cripples me entirely, and - forget the random stranger's blog - my friends start to wonder what's wrong with my face whenever they start in on a tale about their smartest kid ever. or worse still, their smartest kid ever starts to wonder.

i'd like to eventually brag on myself for not being this person anymore who rolls her eyes at a blog carnival titled "brag on your kid". that would be something special.

can you say va-jay-jay?

i let loose caleb and maddy the bonds of nap time and turned on the tv to hear "and the erect penis goes into the vagina" even before the picture became fully lit. oprah. at 4 pm. i've never scrambled so fast to find that super-hero word girl on iptv.

it's 9 pm, little ears are in bed, and i'm taking advantage of this program's re-airing on the fancy-schmancy digital abc pt 2.

dr. berman is playing wing-man for a mother talking to her 10 yr old daughter about the mechanics of sex, the great period, and whatever else the child wants to ask. diagramarama. "but, where does the period come from?" followed with something like "i better stop wearing white pants, that could be dangerous." oh. priceless.

mine with my mother started in the car headed home from horseback riding lessons wednesday nights. mom would pull out some prop or diagram finishing up our conversations in pj's before bed. never a photo picture. but once a wooden-handled back massager and a condom. i was 8.

i asked mom just before leaving for college why she told me so much, so young, and she gasped, "you were asking!" ah, so. kids. they tend to forget the details. i thought all through my teens that mom was just a real women's libber at heart. like in college she may have burned her bras had she not actually needed them for comfort and support. no. apparently i ran out of things to say about my day at school, homework and horses 5 minutes into our 25 minute drive. i spent the following 20 minutes giving my mother hives.

and now what the doctor suggests to discuss with an older 15-16 yr old girl...

oral sex
sexual response
vibrators
self-stimulation
self-control

omilord

gayle's throwing up her skyped hands and oprah's fidgeting a time or two.

i spent a summer month or so with my aunt and uncle in indiana watching their two toddler boys. it was just before i entered the ninth grade, and i still question whether i was really old enough to be watching a 3 and 2 yr old. but there i was. feeling pretty grown-up. away from home for the first time. defining myself.

one day i walked into their guest room-turned-mine to find my aunt and uncle had left two books on the bed. the one i no longer remember, but the cover and title were equal in 70's flair to the other i do: 'the joy of sex'.

i'm still all these years later at a loss to describe my reaction. sheer thrill embedded in...terror? nothing was ever said about this inter-room loan. i kept the two books stuffed deep under the guest bed-turned-mine. meaning at night i would sometimes have to crawl underneath to retrieve them again where i would be up late pouring over the pages.

no more diagrams. these were pencil-drawn folks with faces. and skin. and in the other book? real people. and skin. some of it i found exciting, some disgusting, most of it i'm sure went over my head. all of it, i realized, just wasn't all so forbidden. or racy. these people in pencil and real were old. and i have to say. not all that attractive. i had a new found appreciation after that for the imagination clothing allows to flourish.

when i left for home, i tucked the books under the guest pillows-turned-mine, and that was that. mom filled in pieces here and there when i would ask, and i felt confident throughout high school that i need not be doing it to know about it. i questioned whether i would ever find a husband, not whether i'd know what to do with one.

i cannot imagine had someone left a vibrator on a guest-turned-my bed.

mom never even had the sex talk as a teen. she actually once suffered banana confusion. sex to her was intercourse. straight up. oral was beyond intimate. in fact she often subtly reminded me that the fun of being married (aka 'having sex') was finding all the other erogenous zones. like the ear. not in addition to, but instead of. ya know. as in 'tickle the ear, you don't need to touch anything else. he won't believe you maybe at first, but trust me... it works just as well.' (i have to say. vern's ear is not ticklish or otherwise, and when i realized that i busted out laughing wishing so badly to call up mom.) and here these middle school kids think oral is just a step after kissing and under-the-shirt. and sexting each other. and ___. and i feel an emerging case of the hives.

dr. berman makes the point that girls need to be able to learn their own sexual response, and if your girl understands her own body and can do it for herself, she's less likely look for it elsewhere. and that climax is often hard to acheive without clitoral stimulation. and that she believes every woman should have one. berman's not waving around anything obscene. i mean, it's little, and does not look male.

but wow.

but.

yeah. you can be book smart and still get caught up in the moment. not be able to recognize that moment for what it really is. not be able to separate in that moment the feeling from the person you're feeling it with. it can all be a little overwhelming. we do have our kids run through fire drills for a reason. so they can think through the emotion. so they can stay safe and make the smart decisions you hope you've guided them to.

but. whoah.

and. is it so different for boys? and do we not teach them self-control?

i'm glad i have 14 more years to think on this with vern. i can handle the great period questions. i can point out girl and boy parts on a diagram. we have somewhere 'the joy of sex' for later years. but i do not have a vibrator. manly or otherwise.

the matter of sex ed is two-pronged. i do not want my children to be having sex until they're married, or way-old in a committed relationship. way-old and married. but really, it's not up to me, the when. i want them to always have respect for and ownership over their bodies. and when they do have sex, i want it to be good. simply waiting until marriage does not guarantee the good part. mom taught me that. still. a vibrator? for my teen daughter?

oh. for now to bask in the pre-school confusion over phonics, and ponder privately if i'm really missing as much as mom was always just touching dad's ear.

i-o-wa!

i have an old college friend who updated her facebook status as "proud of iowa today". the supreme court took down the ban on gay marriage. i expect hell fire and brimstone will soon be following with a chorus for something like california's prop 8 to be on the table.

should it happen in 2010 or 2012, i would vote to legalize gay marriage,

and the only people i really care to know this are my children.

vern and i do not debate family or friends firmly planted in the opposite corner. we both know nothing would sway their opinions in what we'd have to say anyway. and truly, we respect their opinions. the rest we leave to the Holy Spirit. i guess we're lucky that the issue has remained on the outskirts of our little hub. by lucky, i mean this has afforded us the luxury of remaining relatively quiet without offending anyone. we're not gay. no one in our immediate family is. none of our close friends have ever come out. our kids are still babies. discussions have always been hypothetical and non-personal and while we ask questions, we rarely submit rebuttals. we once listened to loved ones expressing their views on homosexuality as sin and afterwards, when vern carried me into their powder room, whispered, "do you agree?" "nah."

and so was life before children. easy. non-confrontational. we're all too soon realizing that our children's impressions of the world are being formed now, and everyone around here is a lot louder than their parents. unless we're going to make a family affair of taking mom to the bathroom, vern and i need to speak. just so our kids know where we stand, and why.

not to mention the awkward round-table discussion of "what your parents thought about homosexuality" should an angry glare and thrown box of kleenex prove mutually fatal any time soon. it haunts me to think our children might never really know, that our family and friends might never reach a true consensus.

which of course means letting our family and friends hear us - the ones who would strongly disagree and probably shake their heads a time or two. the ones who would be, who is now, a part of the community raising our children.

it'd be easy enough to simply list it out in a facebook note. i mean, that'd get it out there. that's just not me. i did, however, with these thoughts in tow, remark on another dear friend's status updated "disgusted with the iowa supreme court" with "i'm happy we can agree to disagree on this one..." a response from another one of his friends followed:

1 Corinthians 6:9-10 - "Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God."

Leviticus 18:22 - "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable."

Leviticus 20:13 - "If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."

Romans 1:26-27 - "Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion."

and then:

And for the non-christian gay-rights lovers, think about this; If all society bought into the gay love ideal, how long would society last? No offspring would be created (as intended) from the love of two men or two women. Society wouldn't decline, it would cease to exist. How could this scenario possibly work indefinitely? Haven't seen too many bulls screwing bulls or sow pigs mating with other sows in the countryside lately either so the other animals among us must have already figured out there is no fruit to gay love, when will we?

my face flushed and then i kind of giggled. and while i refuse to debate this, especially on my friend's wall, i think i will here. later. for now, i want to share what my dear husband was willing to reply:

I've seen some bull-on-bull action.

and so. we've got a lot of practice and red faces ahead of us. as long as we stay true to ourselves, our own discourse and brand of humor. i think we can find a way to quietly voice ourselves, just loud enough for our children to hear without disrespecting our loved ones. and then. i hope. having heard us, they will branch off and find their own voice.

i really do not have any expectations for what they believe, so long as they first commit themselves to listening.

looking up

i've grown so dissatisfied with myself.

1. i've lost my voice. i seem no longer anchored in my thoughts, and my speech and expressions rarely jive with what i really sound like.

2. i've lost sight of my vision. i take pictures in haste, in part because i know that date stamp will save me from complete and utter sorrow when i take a breath and realize they are no longer babies and i have no friggin' clue when maddy began crawling. hence all these terribly shoddy pictures i snap, knowing they aren't worth printing even before the image pauses on the screen.

3. i've stopped growing.

so.

1. write. here.
2. study. these new photoblog tutorials.
3. read. suggestions from lisa's book club.

see how i do with this before tackling the big monster: that sloth that has devoured my once obsessive desire to keep a place for everything and everything in its place and all of it clean. ya know. that whole 'homemaker' thing. and if i can slay the sloth, then maybe onto proper meal planning...

such lofty goals. getting back to where i was before i tripped and fell in this hole. with thanksgiving to God that all things can be course-corrected. even these dismal pictures of the kids given i find the time and proper photoshop suite... fix-it friday has been a real eye-opener.

super not

i try to start every morning imagining what a perfect day with my mother would have been growing up.

1 yogurt facial, 2 time-outs, 6 big brother teases, 4 ear-piercing screams, 1 on-going nursing attempt interrupted twice by a toddler set on going potty all by herself and caleb has given up looking for play-doh required for our play-doh date, owen is spitting up like nobody's business, maddy needs an early nap not yet rocovered from my putting the diaper back on her all by myself, and i've already become that evil mom even i do not want to spend time with. it's 10 am.

baby genius

i nurse my children for many reasons. one not included would be to boost their eventual i.q. score and aid in their early-acceptance to harvard. i pray my children will have common sense. i'd prefer they be the homeowner who laughs when the bank suggests they can afford a home loan far exceeding their actual means than the financial whiz who thought up the greed-based loan the bank offered. the only super-human intelligence i have want for them to possess comes from God.

faith. hope. humility. compassion. sacrifice. love.

that doesn't mean that if i was assured drinking 2 pints of guava juice during the 17th week of pregnancy a natural born spelling bee champion would sprout that i would not drink the guava. at the most, though, i would hope for a child who knew how to spell every day words like 'tomorrow' vs 'tomarrow' when updating their facebook status.

i want my children to move through this world eating their vegetables and exercising and always looking to learn something new. i want them to be profitable, agile and respected. i want all the best for my children. i do not want for them to be the best. i take my folic acid. i do not drink or smoke. even so. i do not fool myself with studies and reports into thinking my breast-feeding has any real sustaining impact on my children that makes them exceptional when compared to other children.

i often wonder to what end mothers intend with their insistence on plugging their babies in to all these brain-boosting practices. as if it's a shame to be average. as if being able to read before the age of 3 means...? as if God and humanity play a minor role to a mother's control.