A belated poem for Father's Day

The Gift

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BY LI-YOUNG LEE

To pull the metal splinter from my palm 

my father recited a story in a low voice. 

I watched his lovely face and not the blade. 

Before the story ended, he’d removed 

the iron sliver I thought I’d die from. 

I can’t remember the tale, 

but hear his voice still, a well 

of dark water, a prayer. 

And I recall his hands, 

two measures of tenderness 

he laid against my face, 

the flames of discipline 

he raised above my head. 

Had you entered that afternoon 

you would have thought you saw a man 

planting something in a boy’s palm, 

a silver tear, a tiny flame. 

Had you followed that boy 

you would have arrived here, 

where I bend over my wife’s right hand. 

Look how I shave her thumbnail down 

so carefully she feels no pain. 

Watch as I lift the splinter out. 

I was seven when my father 

took my hand like this, 

and I did not hold that shard 

between my fingers and think, 

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin, 

Ore Going Deep for My Heart. 

And I did not lift up my wound and cry, 

Death visited here!

I did what a child does 

when he’s given something to keep. 

I kissed my father.

Li-Young Lee, “The Gift” from Rose. Copyright ©1986 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

Source: Rose (BOA Editions Ltd., 1986)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43010

Education in love in larger families

Two good pieces of information from the Catholic Catalog blog. First a quote:

Knowledge is not enough for tranquility and goodness, because it doesn’t contain motivation to be good. Only love impels action. We don’t become better because we acquire new information. We become better because we acquire better loves. We don’t become what we know. Education is a process of love formation. When you go to a school, it should offer you new things to love. - David Brooks 

http://thecatholiccatalogue.com/

That quote may not be connected to the following bit of information, but I believe it is, even when families don't actually school at home. Research on how divorce rates are lower among children from larger families:

Growing up with siblings may provide some protection against divorce as an adult, a new nationwide study reveals.
And the more siblings, the better: Each additional sibling a person has (up to about seven) reduces the likelihood of divorce by 2 percent.
The practical difference between having no siblings and having one or two isn't that much in terms of divorce, said Doug Downey, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.
"But when you compare children from large families to those with only one child, there is a meaningful gap in the probability of divorce," he said.
One of the biggest surprises of the study was that it wasn't the difference between being an only child and having siblings that was significant.
"We expected that if you had any siblings at all, that would give you the experience with personal relationships that would help you in marriage," said Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, co-author of the study and assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State's Marion campus.
"But we found that the real story appears to be how family dynamics change incrementally with the addition of each sibling. More siblings means more experience dealing with others, and that seems to provide additional help in dealing with a marriage relationship as an adult."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/osu-msm080713.php

Something to read

To counteract the self-serving, anti-life message of the movie/book, Me Before You, here is something better to read:

Following his stroke, when doctors still weren’t sure he’d survive, Clay had a “mystical experience, for lack of a better word.” It wasn’t religious or near-death, but something more concrete. “I knew something had happened, but I didn’t know what. I thought for the longest time, did I imagine that? But ever since it happened, it’s guided my whole life.” In writing Will & I, Clay understood that this experience in the hospital was the framework upon which the memoir had to rest. “The experience felt both like I’d willed it and like it had come out of nowhere,” he writes. “I became my will—there was nothing holding me back anymore—but my will was more than me.” Paralyzed from the eyes down, Clay was free.

http://www.sewanee.edu/features/story/claybyars.html

20 Years!

Last week we celebrated 20 years of wedded bliss and all the reality that goes with it.  Our marriage is out of its teens, but it still feels young! We used to do marriage prep classes when we lived in the Chicago archdiocese 15 years ago, and on the evaluations, we received positive comments because we were young. I thought I knew a lot about marriage back then. Now we're middle aged, and I feel kind of the same way about marriage that I do about parenting. I don't have the answers anymore, but all the work is worth it!  

Some fun exchanges about marriage in the New York Times recently: Alain de Botton's essay urging a more realistic view of marriage over false romanticism, and the letters in response.  De Botton explains the irony of his title in the last paragraphs:

"The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.” We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners."

I love the comments of the last letter writer (a man who was married 47 years): "But binding your life together, creating a family and warmly remembering it all as one’s days become numbered is my definition of marrying the right person."

Cheers to 20 more years! Were we old enough to drink? 

To celebrate our anniversary, we went out for sushi. But we didn't stay out late because we had to go home to finish washing sheets and searching for nits in the kids' hair.  One of our dear children greeted me with a "Look what I found!" when I came in from doing something outside. One his finger was a nice, fat, louse. Thank the Lord, I did not find anything on the 8 other heads in our family (although I'm suspicious that my husband didn't check me thoroughly). But we still all washed with lice shampoo and used the comb-out gel. And I stripped all the beds, bagged on the stuffed animals, put all the pillows in the dryer on high heat, and had a great time combing each others' heads.  Lice is apparently almost at epidemic proportions out here in Southern California. People aren't the only things that love living here.

Here we are having fun on our anniversary! Just finished 9 lice treatments!
Thought we needed a photo to remember the day. 

Still loving life!

Lots to celebrate over the past few weeks: Memorial Day events, awards ceremonies, end of the school year parties. We have an eighth grade promotion and a high school graduation at the end of the week.  The calendar has been packed.

Awards ceremonies

Remembering the fallen 

Concert in the park 

More awards ceremonies -- an a haircut!

At another awards ceremony

Heading back to school after an end of the year picnic at the park.

Soccer is over, yay!

Exploring the botanic gardens with cousins.

The 18 yr old got a record player. Garage sale finds.

On Teaching

From James Matthew Wilson's "On the Overweening Pride of the Professorial Class" in Crisis Magazine:

     The proper life of the scholar and the teacher is one of drawing together the wisdom of the past, of keeping it alive, of developing it where it can be developed, and of passing it on, from the hands of the old to those of the young, as a tradition and inheritance. It is fundamentally an activity of conservation and cultivation, edging forward while looking backward, so that the wisdom in one’s care will not be lost. Again, as a great inheritance, its content is like a precious treasure that we already love for its accumulated glory and which we wish to pass down intact in a decided act of piety, reverence, and love. 

         The research of the professor should therefore be dedicated primarily to keeping something alive rather than to adding something new. The new supervenes on its own, left to itself, simply because the loving contemplation of what is good will always be by its nature fruitful. That is just the way with goodness. For my part, I have found I am at my best as a scholar when I seek specifically not to claim anything new at all, but only to explain what is old, what I have received in the common tradition, in terms inevitably distinct, because spoken in a new moment, but always in continuity and indeed intimate contact with what has gone before.
...
         The scholar of the Christian-Platonist tradition, whether in ancient Athens or medieval Paris understood himself not as in possession of knowledge but as standing before it in awe. Truth is one; reality constitutes a coherent whole; and all true education is a progress ever further into the depths of that whole. But, as we see in Plato and St. Augustine, for example, the philosopher is always the one who knows nothing. He knows he knows nothing, only because the truth is not his to possess, but rather is his to love. The true philosopher therefore looks on in perpetual wonder, staring into a truth that transcends us all, that is never to be comprehended, though our heart beats with intensity as we come within the corona of its beauty. The whole truth lies not in the mind, but rather the mind comes to rest in the truth.
          As the theologian John Cavadini argued in a lecture at my own university, some years ago, what is peculiar about modern inquiry is not that it is obsessed with a desire for new insight, but for the way it understands the nature of knowledge and the relation of the knower to the known. As my comments have already intimated, the ancient and medieval universities understood the cosmos, the whole of creation, as intrinsically wonderful. It was a cause of wonder, in itself, and also because of its origin as a gratuitous fruit of the generosity and love of God. To study nature was to sing the praises of the supernatural as one strolled down the road toward it. To study what was above nature—to contemplate God—was to enter in awe, wonder, and love, into perfectly intelligible mystery. Study was itself an act of devotion, a loving act where the mind comes to stand in intimate relation with that which is at one and the same time forever beyond it and always and already within it.

A quotable

After long experience I am convinced that the best place to study nature is at one’s own home,—on the farm, in the mountains, on the plains, by the sea,—no matter where that may be. One has it all about him then. The seasons bring to his door the great revolving cycle of wild life, floral and faunal, and he need miss no part of the show. At home one should see and hear with more fondness and sympathy. Nature should touch him a little more closely there than anywhere else. He is better attuned to it than to strange scenes. The birds about his own door are his birds, the flowers in his own fields and wood are his, the rainbow springs its magic arch across his valley, even the everlasting stars to which one lifts his eye, night after night, and year after year, from his own doorstep, have something private and personal about them. The clouds and the sunsets one sees in strange lands move one the more they are like the clouds and sunsets one has become familiar with at home. The wild creatures about you become known to you as they cannot be known to a passer-by. The traveler sees little of  Nature that is revealed to the home-stayer. You will find she has made her home where you have made yours, and intimacy with her there becomes easy. Familiarity with things about one should not dull the edge of curiosity or interest. The walk you take to-day through the fields and woods, or along the river-bank, is the walk you should take tomorrow, and next day, and next. What you miss once, you will hit upon next time. The happenings are at intervals and are irregular. The play of Nature has no fixed programme. If she is not at home to-day, or is in a non-committal mood, call to-morrow, or next week. It is only when the wild creatures are at home, where their nests or dens are made, that their characteristics come out.

The Library of America • Story of the Week From American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (The Library of America, 2008), pages 168–71. Originally published in Field and Study (1919). From "Nature at Home" by JOHN BURROUGHS

https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Burroughs_Nature_Home.pdf

Field trip

We bounced on bubble horses.

It's my birthday! I'm celebrating by taking a minute to catch up with blogs. I've been indulging all day - my husband stayed home from work to go to Mass, and I let him chase the toddler. Then we got coffee and donut holes at the local diner and enjoyed them at the park. The big kids offered to babysit tonight, but it is the only night this week that we don't have something scheduled, so I told them all I want is someone to do the laundry, wash the dishes, and rub my feet. We'll see if it gets done!

In between end of the year awards ceremonies, field trips, field days, and band concerts, the toddler and I recently went to the local children's museum. It's a bit different than some we've visited. Instead of a play store, a fire engine, and a train room, this one had a creating space with paint and clay, and a sound and light room with relaxing mood music playing in the background and colored lights shining on sparkly sand. It had some gross motor skills play areas, a ladder house to climb, and a science station. My friend described it as an art therapy major's dissertation. With the poured cement walls and floors and open stairwells, the architecture is very modern. The spaces don't really connect in a logical way.  You wander around and then come upon something new. Oh what's this!

But LCJ LOVED it.  We tried to go back last week on a Tuesday, and it was closed. She had a meltdown in front of the door, and I had to manhandle her flopsy body back to the car. We later went to a different children's museum, quite a drive away, and the contrast was vivid. This one had the little dress up stations, a pirate ship play structure and slide, a bubble station, a water play area, a music making station, and a chicken pen.  The vibe was more of a Waldorf school play date than museum. Definitely for the under-7 set.  The toddler was absorbed, but it would have been more fun for both of us with a friend.

After visiting children's museums every place we've lived, I still have to rate the one in Indianapolis, where I grew up, as the best. First of all, it is enormous, but the layout is intuitive. Space leads on to space in a spiral design. The center of the museum is a carpeted ramp leading up the four or five floors. It has something for all ages, and the carousel at the top pleases everyone. It engages the senses and motor skills and has places to create with cultural and historical lessons tied in.  I don't remember it being as sensory overloading as the Houston museum which had lots of glowing flourescent lights, loud music, echoing chambers, and interactive computer stations, which I can do without, and which get boring quickly. We loved to visit the one in Portsmouth, Virginia, to play, especially on very hot or very cold days. It had the little town, a real plane cockpit and a real fire engine to climb on. The upstairs was mostly trains and a few physics displays. (bike and turn on a light! Balance the beach ball on the air stream! Touch the static ball!)  The price was right, and it was something to do, but I'm not sure it was actually educational.

We played with clay.

I've been feeling nostalgic lately, as the baby grows bigger, counts, sings "We're all in this together" with the nine year old, and sort of knows the alphabet song. She prays in the Mary chapel, "Hail Mary, hail Mary, hail Mary," and sings the Gloria at church to charm the old ladies.  She welcomes everybody home by asking, "How's school, Claire?" or "How's work, Daddy?" The other day, she was sent to sit in the naughty chair, and she held out her hands and asked, "Why, Daddy, why?" with enough drama to suit a soap opera director.

Meanwhile, her oldest brother is still at college. School is out, but he is staying to play in a couple rugby tournaments and work on campus. He survived his first year. Although he failed his Calculus final, he still pulled off a B in the class, his only B. He'll be home for his brother's high school graduation and his sister's eighth grade promotion.

We painted a wagon.

We made faces in the funny mirror. 

I couldn't be prouder of those two, who had to come into new schools When everyone was finishing. The senior was especially bitter and unhappy about leaving behind his old school and friends, as I have mentioned.  But yesterday we went first to a Mass for incoming Notre Dame students and their mothers, where we met some nice kids and got excited about the future. Then we went to a scholarship ceremony where he picked up $5000.  Last week he received a really nice faculty commendation from the AP government instructor, with whom he debates politics from different sides of the political spectrum.  His boss at the pizza parlor goes to our church and told us how much he loves him.  We go to another awards ceremony in a couple days at the fancy hotel for academic honor students, for both the high schoolers.  And a couple days ago, he got a call about a $5000 renewable scholarship that he won. Finally, yesterday evening we went to the confirmation party for a friend who asked him to be his sponsor for confirmation. He was greeted with high fives and cheers and immediately was subsumed into the pack of teenagers, while we mingled with grown ups we didn't really know, except the priests. But we met a lot of nice new people and were impressed with the beautiful back yard and good eats. We have a hard time believing him anymore when he pulls out a complaint about how miserable we made him when we forced  him to move.

The eighth grader also has done well, earned academic honors and has gone from being one of my shyest kids to being a socialite. Fortunately, her friends are the ones winning the mental attitude awards at the sports banquet and starting "Best Buddy" clubs that pair students with other students in special ed classes for lunches and outings. We still butt heads about hemlines and high heels (she wants wedges for the promotion ceremony), but that's to be expected when it's incredibly hard to find junior sized clothes that are a decent length without looking Amish. She's tried new sports and is keeping up in Algebra and Spanish, two classes that used to give her trouble, and is willing to read the books I push her way by Peter Kreeft and saint biographies, if I give her freedom to read the books she picks up, which are usually stories about friendships or parents or pets dying.

The other three kids are also surviving and thriving. Sports are over for the spring for everyone, finally, so we have a brief lull in our schedule, other than my online classes. I've offered to sign everyone up for one summer camp, and promised to do some crafts and visit the water park. Summer stretches ahead like a blank slate, but it will fill quickly.

I've been reading a memoir of a priest's Camino de Santiago, To The Field of Stars, for my book club. The author is Kevin Codd, I think. I'm enjoying it much more than I thought I would. It could probably be edited, but now that I've grown familiar to his voice, I look forward to the detailed evening updates of his journey. He's my new friend. Yesterday I read the section where he talked about meeting a man from Argentina who couldn't believe Fr. Kevin was American. His Spanish was too good, and he didn't seem haunted by fear and anxiety like most Americans. This Argentinian criticized the American tendency to go, go, go, and to worry about the future and to fail to balance those highly intense personality traits with any family time, get togethers and celebrations - times to relax with friends and family. The Americans are no fun and don't want anyone else to have fun either.

To a certain extent we resemble those Americans. We have a lot going on. I can't keep up with my to do list. I worry a lot about the future. But we do celebrate. We do have moments when we sit down in the evening with all the kids and at least cram in one decade (and someone rubs my feet or braids my hair). Angel food cake and salted caramel gelato await me after dinner.  I am grateful that the toddler makes me slow down and explore museums again. Although friendly companions would make the trip more fun for everyone, happy memories keep me company when I tire of building castles in the sand.

We relaxed in the sand, light, and sound room.