Resurrection week in review

Christ is Risen, Alleluia,

He is truly risen, Alleluia!

 … so much to say. Time for quick takes:

• Good Friday: A drawing by my son.    

And a mountain climb: On Good Friday, it is traditional in Guam to walk up part of Mt. Lamlam (the highest mountain in the world if you count the miles underwater to its source at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.) and pray the stations of the cross. A group led by our chaplain (really followed by our chaplain – the kids were a little quicker than he) met at 8 to pray our way up. By this time, most of the crowds were heading down.  The biggest group goes up before dawn. They carry up a new wooden cross to erect at the Mt. Jumalang crest.  Some penitents go up on their knees we’ve been told. We also were warned that we might see some people practicing physical mortifications, but we didn’t.  The kids were fascinated, though, by the blood left by some penitents on the small white crosses that mark the way.

 

• Holy Saturday: Spent the day making Too Much Food.  At the last minute we decided to go to the Vigil Mass. Yet again I was in a twit at my husband, because he spent the day running around shopping for a new camera, but didn’t buy one. Short-tempered from lack of food, I was peeved he wasn’t around to help with cleaning. Not the best attitude for the highest Mass of the year. But as the candles were lit, illuminating the expectant faces of the congregation, that dark cloud in my heart was banished away.

• Easter Sunday: Alleluia! Joy! Candy! Mimosas! And one spot of woe: In my rush of cleaning the day before, I mopped the back porch, where the rabbit and chick live and roam uncaged, with Lysol. But I didn’t take the time to move the animals to their outside cage.  When I went to feed them in the morning, the poor little chick, which was tame enough to come and sit on my lap on the porch swing, was quite stiff with rigor mortis.  And I felt quite guilty for causing its demise.  So we had to have a brief burial, a prayer of thanksgiving for the gift of pets, and some tears.  

• Then we were able to spend the morning celebrating the Resurrection with eggs and cinnamon rolls, before we welcomed a crowd to celebrate with us the rest of the afternoon.  I’m still not quite sure how many people showed up. What started as a get together with a couple of families grew and grew. And the food just kept coming. Everyone must have felt like showing their Easter Joy by cooking, because no one showed up empty handed. We ate well, then the teenagers hid some 500 plastic eggs for the thirty or so little kids. God smiled on us with beautiful weather.  Note for future parties: invite teenage girls who like to play with little kids. They got a kickball game started and kept the youngers entertained. Since the kids were happy, many of our guests stayed long enough to eat again.  And they all left with balutin.  But we’re still eating ham.

Palm frond Easter baskets

The dessert table

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• The rest of the week has been devoted to eating candy and learning to scuba dive.  It’s relatively cheap to learn to dive and to rent equipment here: $169 for the class –including a free boat dive!  We’ve been talking about doing it for months and when our trip to Japan fell through, we enrolled.

Scuba diving was not my idea. I love swimming. I love snorkeling. But I don’t love being underwater. I do not like being dunked, which probably dates back to the summer days of childhood spent at the YMCA, when my older brother thought dunking without getting caught by the lifeguard was a fun game.  That pool was always packed with screaming kids – I’m surprised there weren’t more drownings or asphyxiations by chlorine and suntan lotion.

My husband and older three sons really wanted to learn, and my husband, who turns 39 today, wanted me along for the fun.  I could handle the classroom work – aced my quizzes – but I was not much fun on the first dive.  First I couldn’t get my ears equalized, and then I couldn’t figure out how to clear my mask. You have to take your mask off, put it back on, and then breathe – or snort – out the bottom to clear the water. I snorted up the water, instead of clearing it. Then I started to panic. My sons stared on in amusement as their mother tried to ascend while the instructor pulled me back down.  I finally partially cleared the mask, and then the instructor swam with me back to shore to practice filling and clearing the mask about 100 times.

I went home exhausted and had terrible nightmares that night. They weren’t even about drowning – they were about having bowel accidents and trying to hide them. Odd.  I woke up about 4 in the morning and lay in fear for the next 2 hours before I finally got out of bed. I wasn’t really in fear of drowning, just in fear.  My stomach was in knots. I couldn’t get comfortable. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I kept trying to come up with good excuses to get out of the class. I hoped I would throw up.  I can’t remember being this scared, not since the night when I was about 13 and I heard noises in the middle of the night. I thought we were being robbed. Turns out it was my grandparents arriving to babysit while my parents took my sister to the ER for an appendectomy. I wasn’t even really scared after our recent robbery.

But I had to confront my unfounded fears. I tried to come up with a mantra for when I grew nervous – I was thinking of the Divine Mercy chaplet. “For the sake…”: breathe in; “Have mercy …”: breathe out.  My husband suggested the yoga class closure: “Shanti, shanti, namaste” (We’ve been going to yoga once a week on the base – a fun, elasticizing date night while the kids are at soccer practice). But what kept going through my mind was “I am a fish, I am a frog, I am a waterlogged dog.”

So Thursday, I had to get back into the water and do the same skills we had practiced the day before and some new ones, like breathing out of my buddy’s extra regulator after having my air cut off.  And doing an emergency ascent exhaling for 30 feet.

And I did it. Fears defeated! My legs were like jelly when it was all over, and I was shivering like mad.  Gotta get my $169 worth.  For our last class this morning, I was able to get a good night of sleep and wake up undeterred. We had one last skills review, before we were able to go on an exploratory dive, and I was able to clear my mask on the first try.

Now I am a certified diver. But I’m not planning to dive again soon. I’m happy to snorkel with turtles rather than dive with sharks.  My kids are sharks though. My oldest didn’t lift his head out of the water after the last dive until his knees were bumping into the rocks of the shore.

Day One in the water

Ok, Buddies

Day three - much happier in a wet suit

• Front page headlines today: Fire Code Violations at a government facility. Island life. 

Extreme sports

I’ve been known to be a worrier.  I have permanent squinting lines from fretting (and sun damage) around my eyes and mouth.   Some of it is genetic – or I learned it from my dad and grandma.  But as the kids get older I’m learning that I need to give them longer leashes.

Ironically, another home schooling mom commented not too long ago, as I was pulling my seven year old off the top of the swing set at the park, that she thought I was pretty free with how much I let the kids roam.  I had let that same 7 year old ride down to her house by himself to see if her son could play.  She said she talked to her husband and her neighbor about whether she was too protective and decided she wasn’t. I couldn’t tell if she was criticizing or just commenting, but I decided I would encourage my son to play with some other kids the next few times he was feeling lonely.

Still, I tend to err on the side of caution. But living in a place like this, where the weather is great, the neighborhood is safe, and the beaches and woods are open for exploring, is making me loosen up a bit. This Saturday the boys and I woke up before dawn to go and meet some friends on the south side of the island to swim across a channel to another little island, Cocos.  The boys had camped there last weekend with the scouts, and while they were describing it, we decided on the spur of the moment to try to swim to it.

One friend thought it was 1.5 miles, another 2. At any rate, we were looking at over an hour swim. The reality of it didn’t really sink it until the night before. I wouldn’t go run for an hour and a half without training for it, but I really haven’t done much endurance swmming here at all, just paddling around in coral reefs and laps a few times at the pool.

But sometimes it pays to shove realism to the back of your mind.

Our safety was taken care of: a friend rented some kayaks and gathered a few other friends to kayak or paddle board along with the swimmers. Four of those happened to be my husband and boys, whose life-saving skills are untested, but they had extra life jackets and a space in their boats if something happened.

Fortunately the sea was calm, and the tide was out.  We were swimming before I was fully awake enough to be a pessimist. 

It was a beautiful swim. Nothing bad happened.  I never felt exhausted, and in fact, paddling back in the kayak was harder work than swimming.  I did have a moment of anxiety when I was out in the blue, and I couldn’t see anyone close to me. Far off I could see some kayakers, and I worried about my boys flipping their boats, or letting someone else sink (although all the other swimmers were completely competent – one was a former swimmer for the Guam Olympic team- his claim to fame: he asked Michael Phelps to get out of his practice lane.) For a moment, I worried about my own sanity.  I’d been swimming for 40 minutes or so, and still had a long way to go. The ferry to the island was going to start running soon.  It might not see us.  Sharks could be out here.  I started thinking about Louis Zamperini in Unbroken, stranded in the middle of the ocean beating sharks off with a life boat paddle.  So I started saying the Divine Mercy chaplet, have mercy on us, have mercy, to turn off my brain.  And eventually, I sited one of the other swimmers and the kayak with my 11 yr old. My confidence returned.  A rainbow even stretched across the blue morning sky, although it wasn’t raining where we were.

Finally, we hit the lagoon, and the water was too shallow to freestyle, but I was determined to swim the whole distance, so I crawled on in to the beach, in a less than an hour and a half.

Scarier was letting my 14 year old test out his claim that he could have swum the crossing.  Another of the guys was already planning to swim back – he too had been a competitive swimmer and a swim coach, so he encouraged my son to swim with him. I was off finding a private spot in the woods at the moment they decided to go, so I didn’t have a chance to nix the plan with my worries. I wanted to be angry at my husband for okaying the arrangement – the 14 yr old hasn’t swum laps in years! But he has been playing football and baseball, so at least he has some conditioning. Since the other adults were being good sports about paddling with us, I tried to keep my worries to myself.

The current was stronger on the way back, and the waves were taller.  If I had taken in a few mouthfuls of seawater during my swim, I knew he’d be swallowing twice as much.  I was somewhat behind him, in a kayak with the 13 year old, trailing a 3^rd guy who also had decided to swim both directions.  But my protective mother instinct was kicking in.  Even though a friend on a paddle board was up alongside my son and the former swim coach, I was in a boat that had extra life jackets.  As I began to envision my son tiring but being too hard-headed to admit it, my heart began racing, and automatically, I was paddling faster. Forget this dude I was spotting. There was another kayak right behind me. He was a grown-up.  I was going to row right next to my kid.

We nearly ran over him. 

It took all my willpower not to pull him into the boat when he kept changing his stroke from freestyle to breaststroke and back again way too frequently.  But I figured if I ordered him out of the water, he’d be more stubborn and more likely to drown. So I bit my tongue, repeatedly.

Finally, finally, we grew nearer to shore.  With about half a mile to go I let the 13 year old jump out to swim.  I can’t tell you how relieved I felt when we reached the area where he could touch again. But he didn’t stop swimming. He was slow, but he swam all the way in.

Hurrah! Everyone clapped, even though they had to wait at least an extra half an hour for him to finish.  I think he was too tired to feel proud of his accomplishment at that moment, but he was happy to eat a whole Snickers bar on the ride home.

Some things really satisfy.

(Sorry, could resist…)