Ah, the things we learn from the wee ones.

For those of you who have ever nursed a newborn (sorry guys!), you know about those precious little hands.  The ones you want to kiss and spend hours admiring.  And swaddle within an inch of their life so they will stop getting between the baby’s mouth and your breast when he’s hungry.  Because the hungrier he is, the more likely those sweet little hands are acting as appetizers…except they don’t take the edge of baby’s hunger, they just make him more frustrated.  And who has enough hands to hold up the baby, position the breast, AND gently hold two little hands out of the way?

Thus the swaddling.

The poor child just doesn’t realize that if he would put aside his desire for his hands (even though they are great for munching most of the time), something much more delicious and nourishing would suddenly come this way.

And now, for the slightly forced analogy to the spiritual life.

We never quite grow out of this tendency, do we?

Maybe it’s a not-so-great relationship, but we’re afraid that if we let it go, we’ll be alone.  Or a job we hate (or which simply isn’t good for us), but we’re afraid of not finding something that pays as much if we quit.

And then, of course, there’s sin.  What sins do we cling to, because they feel good, or maybe they just feel comfortable?  What do we fear if we let them go?

Are we too busy holding tight to our pride to seek God’s help and forgiveness?

What if we were to move our hands out of the way, and let God nourish us with his goodness?

It’s Lent, and lots of us have given something up (sleep in my case – thanks Jacob!).  Hopefully we’ve been able to clear away something that was actually in the way of our spiritual growth.  It’s a good time to reflect: How well have we used this opportunity, this little emptying, to allow God to nourish us?  What are we still clinging to, blocking God from filling us with his love and goodness?

Bonus:  Here is a great article about the little hands and breastfeeding – which makes me feel bad about all the swaddling, but sometimes I get desperate.  Still, it was illuminating, and helped me be less frustrated with hands-in-the-way phenomenon.

“The family is the hospital closest to us: when someone is sick, they are cared for there, where possible.  The family is the first school for children, it is the unwavering reference point for the young, it is the best home for the elderly.  It is the first school of mercy, because it is there that we have been loved and learned to love, have been forgiven and learned to forgive.”

-Pope Francis, The Name of God is Mercy

“And at the same time that I saw this bodily sight, our Lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar love.  I saw that for us he is everything that is good and comforting and helpful.  He is our clothing wrapping and enveloping us for love, embracing us and guiding us in all things, hanging about us in tender love, so that he can never leave us.  And so in this vision, as I understand it, I saw truly that he is everything that is good for us.”

-Julian of Norwich

This is why I like us all being home.

I’m making lunch and packing up to go visit Jacob this afternoon.

Lucy is practicing violin, working between piano, YouTube videos, and her metronome to get it “just right.”

I walked by the art room, and Samantha (who could not, would not read this time last year) is reading one of my childhood favorite books, Happy Birthday Moon, to Isaac (in Batman outfit) and Clare (caring for a baby bear).

These are the good times.  Lord, help me remember that!

Good news!  The nurses tried bottle-feeding Jacob last night, and it went really well.  That’s the next step to getting rid of his last tube.  Craig was able to be there (it was the 11:30pm feeding, so I stayed home with the kids and slept.)  Jacob is awake more now and feisty as ever.  3lb 11oz, as of yesterday.

Meanwhile, my milk supply keeps slowly increasing.  It’s still nowhere near enough, but at least we’re making progress.

So thank you for all the prayers (I think there have been thousands sent our way at this point – just from the people who have told me they were praying!) and please keep praying!  Your love and blessings have sustained us over this last month.

I wrote an essay on the theme of “waiting” for the Mudroom blog back in December.  You can find it here.

I thought, once this baby was born, the waiting would be over.  No such luck.  We started our waiting game over:

First waiting to meet my baby – I had be strong enough to get from the ICU bed into a wheel chair to make the trip to NICU.

Then waiting to get out of the hospital.

The waiting for Jacob to be big enough and free of enough cords so I could actually hold him.

And we were patient, more or less, and got through all of these.  And waited for each set of tubes to come out of Jacob’s little body.

But then there are the two long waits: one for my milk to come in (apparently trauma and massive blood loss slows these things down…) and the other for Jacob to come home.  Not to mention for him to start eating on his own, wearing clothes, getting out of the isollete (the big clear baby warmer).

God clearly wanted me to learn some more patience.

It’s frustrating, four weeks after birth, to get milk drops at a time, if at all.  Not a problem I’ve had in the past.  But the thought of not nursing this baby – this last baby – is heartbreaking.

And so I’m waiting, again.  And praying.  And pumping.  And eating oatmeal (a galactagogue – add that to your vocabulary!) in every conceivable form.  And praying…while pumping.

I think of St. Zelie Martin (mother of St. Therese of Liseiux), who couldn’t nurse some of her children and had to send them to live with wet nurses until they were old enough to wean, and I am grateful that I don’t live 100 or 150 years ago.  Not only are there doctors and nurses and hospitals which have been able to keep Jacob and me alive, but there is formula.  I would not have to ship off my baby to feed him.

But somehow that’s small comfort.  And I want some big, fat comfort, the kind that comes from a tiny, warm baby falling asleep at my breast.

On the other hand, we’re both here.  Alive, when by rights we probably shouldn’t be.  So maybe I’m asking too much.  But I’m not giving up either.  Not until Jacob has tried for himself, and my body has simply refused.

In the meantime, I’m celebrating every 0.1 mL of milk, and waiting.

There are funny posts forthcoming, but it’s not all fun and games, this almost dying thing.  I’m glad I can laugh about some of it – really, I’m glad I’m here to have the option of laughing about it! – but there were lots of very poignant moments, too.  Which, honestly, are a little harder to write about, but here goes.

After 21 units of blood, while I was still in ICU trying to understand where the last two days of my life had gone, my hemoglobin was still not coming up like is should.  Which I think means my body was refusing to make red blood cells.  So our OB was pretty much shaking his head, and thinking that I would need another unit of blood if the count hadn’t come up the next time they checked.  (I got 21 units, but I’m pretty sure I gave back at least half of one for testing.)

Meanwhile, our dear Fr. Sam came to visit, and brought me the Eucharist.  Oh, did I cry.  Veronica, if you’re reading this, you would have been proud.  I felt bad for crying at him like that, but it was a very moving moment: I was in a hospital bed, tubes coming out of four (I think) separate parts of my body, unable to walk, so completely broken, and my God deigned to come to me.  Himself.  And Fr. Sam brought Him.  It felt like the right time for tears.

Anyway, at the next blood count, after receiving the Body of Our Lord, my hemoglobin was up, just about as much as if I had been given a unit of blood.

Our wonderful, devoutly Catholic OB told us this good news, and said maybe it would be best if he were to just prescribe daily communion.

And honestly, I would have preferred that to the iron pills he did prescribe.  🙂

Dear Recent College Graduate (and others seeking your way in life),

First, the disclaimer.  I am not a spiritual director.  I am not trained in the theology or methodology of discernment any more than any other semi-interested lay person.  I speak only from experience and reflection on that experience.  

Also, the hope is always that prayer is constant and earnest though it all.  We’re not perfect, but the more open we are with God (by means of giving him our time) the better chance we have of finding his will, whether we realize we have or not.

That said, I remember being in my last two years of college.  I remember the questioning: where is God calling me?  And more importantly(?), how can I know?

Shoot, I remember asking these questions in college, and after college, and when we had the opportunities to move our family or change jobs…we’re more or less there right now, as we consider finding a permanent place for our family to live.

So maybe that’s the bad news: discernment doesn’t go away when you decide on your career or who you will marry or which order to join.  If anything, the stakes just get higher.

So what is different about my discernment now and (gasp) 13 years ago?  How can I talk so glibly about such weighty matters?

Maybe it’s the good news: God is faithful.  With the benefit of hindsight, his faithfulness shows up all over our lives.  It’s just that often we had to be on the other side of the discernment to see it.

I think we (by which I mean Craig and I) always knew not to expect a booming voice from Heaven when we asked God to reveal his plans for our lives.  I expect most people are with us there.  That would have been nice, of course, but we weren’t quite that hopeful.

Still, I think we expected our options to be narrowed down.  Or some friend to come up with the perfect, unassailably flawless solution.  Or a scripture quote to appear in a retreat note which was exactly the same passage we were praying over when the email about this grad school came in.  

Basically, we wanted a sign.

And even now, a sign would be lovely.  I would love to be able to say, “Thanks, God!  Now that I know exactly what Your Holy Will is, I’ll do my best to follow your blueprint.”

Life just doesn’t seem to work like that. Not for us, at least.  We have found that the best way to find God’s will is to jump in and see what happens.  Peace?  Then we made a good guess based on the understanding we had.  Not peace?  Maybe we need pray (a lot) more and try again.  

I have found, for myself, that it is usually my gut that listens to God the best.  (This is rather Hebrew of me – the seat of the person being not in the heart but the innards.)  Anyway, it’s almost always a gut check that points me in the right direction.  

Watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from 2,000 miles away was my first indication that I wasn’t meant to spend my life in the hallowed halls of academia – I needed the real world too badly.

I knew for a while that I would rather be home with my kids than teaching Latin, but it took a drive across the Huey P. Long Bridge, my first day back to work after having Samantha, with her two-year-old sister in the back seat, with SNOW fluttering around the car – what on earth was I doing?  I was going to drop my kids at day care when it was snowing in New Orleans so I could teach Latin.  To mostly uninterested high school girls.  Gut check.

You get the idea.  Sometimes the scholarship comes through (or doesn’t) and the decision is made.  Sometimes the path is clear…but sometimes you just throw caution to the wind, close your eyes, and jump.

God will catch you.  

And where ever he puts you down, he will cause you to grow.  There may be a transplanting in your future, but by then you’ll have grown strong enough to survive it, and to blossom.

I fear this blog is digressing into writing conference memoranda and book reviews.  

I guess it could be worse.

On that note, my summer plans include a visit to South Bend for a Catholic Writer’s Conference:

Trying to Say God

So it turns out that I’m not just lacking in talent for finding Catholic publishers…there are very few of them out there.  And few reviewers.  And few “Catholic” writers who claim the title and write with a “Catholic” worldview.

Why the “quotes”?  I’ve been doing the suggested reading to prep for the conference (see below), and this is one of the big questions: what does a “Catholic” writer look like and write about in 2017?  It’s easy to look back (Flannery O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Tolkein, and friends are mentioned constantly) but that’s not particularly helpful when faced with the challenge of how to address our current challenges and a church, as writers, and as readers.  So what’s a budding children’s author to do?

Thus the conference…maybe I’ll have some answers afterwards.  But if you need some reading (including lists of the American Catholics authors you may or may not have missed in your public high school American lit class), check out the links below, courtesy of Kenneth Garcia, who is hosting the conference.

And seats were still available last I heard…come join me!

Dana Gioia,  “The Catholic Writer Today,” Dec. 2013, First Things (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/12/the-catholic-writer-today)

Paul Elie, “Has Fiction Lost its Faith?”  New York Times, Dec. 19, 2012  (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/books/review/has-fiction-lost-its-faith.html)

Kaya Oakes, “Writers Blocked: The State of Catholic Writing Today,” America, April 28, 2014 (http://www.americamagazine.org/issue/writers-blocked)

Randy Boyagoda, “Faith in Fiction,” First Things, August 2013 (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/08/faith-in-fiction)

Francis Spufford, “Spiritual Literature for Atheists,” First Things, November 2015 (https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/11/spiritual-literature-for-atheists)

The scene: Lucy andSamantha sittiginthenew prayer space with fans of saint cards in hand.
Lucy: “Do you have a Saint Rose?”
Samantha: “Go fish!”