Easter means to me

Just now my husband came down the stairs from giving the big boys a bath and said,

"Hannah."

With a big grin on his face he recounted how he had absentmindedly been singing the words,

"Ain't nothin' but a hoochie mama, hood rat, hood rat, hoochie mama."

I can picture him up there, just beating out the words in his head, bobbing his head in woodpecker-like fashion, his lower lip jutting out the way it always is when he's rapping. 

Josh continued to explain how Jonathan was paying attention, as he usually is, and only moments later was singing the tune as well.  At that point William apparently had had enough, and exclaimed,

"Stop saying that! That is MY mama, do not call her HOOCHIE mama!"

Oh my heart melted.  First of all, my three year old has no idea the significance of what he was defending in my character, and secondly, he just wants me to be me and nothing else.  The sweet loving innocence of that vivacious little boy sits on my heart like a backup battery of joy.

Right, so you're wondering what this family anecdote has to do with Easter.  Nothing!... and everything.

Jesus died on the cross, and then three days later he rose from the grave.  It was a miracle, it was the final and lasting proof that he, the man, was and is God in the flesh, and it was the sacrifice and resurrection we require for eternal life in Him. 

Sometimes I feel like I'm just waiting for heaven, and in a lot of ways (and on a lot of bad days) I am.  I look forward to that promise of eternal relief from sorrow and sickness and pain like dessert at the end of a five-year-old's dinner.  It's the reason I'm in this, it's the ice cream sundae at the end of the long hot summer day, it's the vodka in my tonic.

On those days, however, I am forgetting the promise of Easter.  Jesus came that we might have life, life to the full, but here and now, not just in the hereafter.  This life is bursting with the promise of heaven, and sometimes it takes the simplest things to remind me.

When my husband told me the little story about our boys, how they mimicked him and laughed, defended me and loved me, my gut reaction was not joy-- it was greed.  I wanted to go back in time and video record it.  I wanted to lock that moment in a drawer and keep it for days to come, so that I can one day unlock that moment and relive it.  My knee jerk desire was to bottle that joy, innocence, and love.

I love the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, which was my Easter inspired blog last year, because of Jesus's human-ness alongside his miracle work.  He wept, and why?  Why would he weep over a dead friend he was about to raise?  I believe he wept because he lived in the moment, and that moment was bigger for him BECAUSE of eternity.  The death of his friend was more poignant, more gut wrenching, more full of ache exactly because he loved Lazarus with an eternal love.  When his friend died he felt the sorrow of Lazarus' loss echo for long after his natural life would be over.  

He came to say that it matters- it all matters.  Our beautiful little lives don't have to go down in ashes and dust and become the particles that are lost in a history of small moments.  He created an eternity for our precious lives, so that every moment that pulls our heart out of our mouths in a huge smile or bitter tears will have infinite moments to follow it.  He took the smallness that is our story and he stretched it out infinitely.  Easter, for me, is the promise that joyful seconds last and that my hardest moments will not be lost.  He is holding my joy in wait for me, and he holds my pain and myself in his tender hand.

Sorry to the squeamish

It all started a few days ago.  For that reason I really feel I am not to blame, seeing as that was a whole weekend ago and I couldn't have seen the chain reaction coming. 

When I talk on the phone havoc ensues.  The loudest screaming, the most cacophonous banging, the worst uses of nail polish, balcony jumping, you name it, it happens when I am on the phone.  Therefore, being a woman of reason, I limit my phone time to when I am in the car.  Last week I made the mistake of checking my voicemail inside.  When I heard the pediatrician's secretary say in her sing-song voice, "I'm calling about your appointment on Tuesday," I clicked delete and hung up the phone.  I made a mental note to remember to go on Tuesday.

My track coach always said never to assume, that it makes an ass of "you" and "me", so when I showed up to the pediatrician this morning, (harried, because of course I had forgotten until thirty minutes before), I should not have been surprised by their anxious question, "Didn't you get our message?"

No, in fact I did not get their message because I avoid phone time and only listened to .1% of the message.  How can I explain that?, and it wasn't their fault, so I rolled with it.  We waited for forty-five minutes to have Sam weighed and then be booted back out the door to await their call for when we could reschedule.  At this point I felt that it was still a kind of normal morning. 

Did I mention that I felt a UTI coming on?  Yep, and I had to get my husband to meet me in the parking lot of Target because I can't take my premature son into a germ filled grocery store, so he waited in the car while I walked into Target prepared to buy the whole dangum pharmacy if it would keep me from having to go to the doctor just to get an antibiotic I already know I need.

"No," says the male pharmacist while trying not to make eye contact with me, "there is nothing you can do to prevent it if it's already an infection. But you can buy the following.... to treat the symptoms."

So I did, I loaded my arms with $35 worth of symptom treating and slightly embarrassing products and headed to the checkout.  Two were open, one manned by an awkward gentleman and one, a sweet girl.  I steered myself for the girl and was cut off by a college dude with a backpack.  Seriously?? I wanted to yell at him, and as I was in line I thought of paying him off for his checkout spot with the girl. 

Cut your losses, Han, it's still a fairly normal day.

We get home and I am organizing and utilizing aforementioned purchases.  As I go to check on the sleeping baby in the car William darts by, "I'm going to poop on the potty, Mom."  Sigh, smile.  My big boy is learning to use the potty.  I am so stinkin' proud of him.

Two minutes later:

"Mooooom! There is poop on my leg!"

OK, this is no longer a normal day.  I give up, grab the baby wipes and head to the bathroom, but William is running around the house whining about his issue. 

"Mooooom, there is poop on the floor!"

I take baby wipes and grab him, wipe him down, and begin to wipe up the floor. 

"Mom, there is poop on the wall tooooo!!"

Yep, he speaks truth. 

I go grab my mop, grateful that I have my super expensive Norwex mop which is handy and easy to use.  After mopping the floor, I break my mop.  Yes, my super expensive mop which I am grateful for.

You, dear reader, may want to check on me later today.  No, don't check on me.  Come check on my children.  I will be on a plane headed to Aruba and my kids will be needing adult supervision.

The dinner table

This week we are home bound.  Due to germs coming in and germs going out, we aren't going to preschool, inviting people over, going over to anyone's house, or subjecting any babysitter to potentially muck-and-mire-ish type situations.

In other words, I'm doing a lot of laundry.  More laundry than I ever wanted to.  Oh, I'd say to myself, "It would be nice to just have a day stuck at home and knock out all that laundry."  Well, I did.  I did it all.  It is washed, folded, [almost] all put away, and the bins are empty.  There are no towels growing mold in the washer because I went somewhere and forgot to change them over... because I didn't go anywhere. ANYWHERE.  Alright, I'll stop screaming about it.

As I sat queen-like in my pajamas, surrounded by my subjects of tees, panties, and socks, I remembered Christmas music.  "It makes everything better!" I thought.  I grabbed my computer and set out to buy a Christmas CD, one of my faves, one that I had lost.  The great thing about iTunes is that you don't even have to get in the car, or wait for the mailman, it's just there.  Well, so I thought.

Being repelled like an intruder at Fort Knox for not remembering my password and failing miserably to come up with an acceptable replacement... was not even the worst of it.  Upon loading the iTunes store I was assailed by a sleek, dripping, shiny picture of this sexy singer as if she were the cover of SI Swim Issue.  Then the whole store's page loaded and it was all HER.  Boobs, thighs, gleaming thighs, and all in different kinds of shimmery negligee.  Between the soft porn I was viewing and the password barricade I had had it.  I slammed on the X, shutting down the program.  "Screw Apple."  Right, I know, not the choicest phrase.  In fact, rather hypocritical given my grievances.  I digress.

Being the resourceful woman that I am I emailed my husband and asked him to pick up the CD for me at Target.  I hinted at Apple's treachery in my email.

That night over dinner Josh explained that he had tried to find the CD in two stores, but neither had it.  I thanked him, sincerely.  Then he sort of smirked as he asked why I was so enraged about Apple.  It was all I needed.  In a machine gun blast of words, most of which were "apple," "porn," "Fort Knox," and "mad mad mad," I answered him, nearly out of breath and trying to peel my eyebrows off my hairline by the time I was finished.  He laughed.

"Huh," he said, "I may have to check that out."

"Whhaaaaatt?" I sent my eyebrows from my hairline to his pupils.  "Aren't you mad?! It's wildly inappropriate!"

"Yes, of course it is. I know."

"Be MAD with me!" I exclaimed.

He laughed again, a slow chuckle, and again I entreated him.

"Hannah, I don't know.  I just don't have the energy to be mad right now."

I think the sheer force of his logic sat me back in my chair (at that point I think I was hovering genie-like over the kitchen table.  Luckily the kids were already up and playing somewhere else).  He was right, of course.  Besides the fact that this is the craziest month at work he has ever had (and that right there at least is no exaggeration), and the fact that we have two energy charged and play date starved children, and the fact that our feisty survivor Sam is still very very feisty; besides all of this we had the stomach bug in our house this weekend.  It felled Jonathan and me like thirty foot trees and left Josh standing amid the wreckage holding a baby.  

I wanted to stuff all that anger back inside of me, pick it out of the air like blueberries and eat the energy up.  He is right, I don't have the energy to get angry, so why do I?  I suppose that sometimes it is the fuel I need to rocket me out of the exhaustion and into the go-go-go.  Nevertheless, that energy gets burned.  It burns up like fuel and it's gone.  I should have laughed along with him, since that always seems to pay back some of the debt.

I want to remember

My sister is a writer.  I think one of the reasons she breathes the written word is that she hates for life to pass by.  I did not say pass her by, for if you know my sister you know that's not possible.  She holds on to things, and she cherishes them.

I, on the other hand, love the pace of life.  In a regrettable way I often bear the present by looking forward to what's coming next.  Recently it hit me that soon I will stop dead in my tracks and look backward.  Like a runner in a sprint kicking up dust I will stop in a cloud my tracks have created and not be able to see through the dust.

That said, here's to remembering.  Here's to holding on, and here's to what I'm grateful for.

I'm grateful that I found a golf ball in my purse today for the second time this month.  I'm grateful it was hidden there by my two-year-old fireball, and I'm grateful he's latching on to one of his daddy's passions.

There are tiny bathing suits draped over my bathtub, and they are haphazard and in dire need of grass-stain treatment.  Often I roll my eyes and wish for tidiness, but today, this week, for now, I am glad they are there.

Laundry is piling up in my husband's man room.  I pride myself in leaving his room clean and alone, it is a small gift I give him that he might not even realize (except that now it's out there in the blog-o-sphere).  I don't have time to do a lick with that laundry, now that our third son has come home, and today I am grateful for that.  I am so glad that there is laundry piling up and that dishes sat in the sink because I chose to build blocks with William instead of clean.

Tonight I'm grateful that my husband cleaned the kitchen, that I didn't have to, and that while he cleaned the kitchen I truly appreciated a cheap glass of wine with my sister at a small deli.  I'm grateful that I have a sister to share cheap wine with, a husband who gets it, and a kitchen that had to be cleaned at all.  (As an aside, please note the irony that I dumped clothes all over his man room and he cleaned the kitchen to spotless.)

Today I'm grateful that my yard looks like Cousin Eddy from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation just left--because all of those basketballs, soccer balls, baseballs, footballs, tricycles, scooters, clothing, goggles, shovels, and superheroes that took a swim in our inflatable pool are the leftovers from days and nights of brothers having fun.

I am grateful for the children's books running rampant in my van, grateful for the little socks I find balled up under my comforter at the foot of my bed, grateful for the pieces of grass at the bottom of the bathtub, grateful for the adventure my kids are living.

Furthermore, while I will never be grateful for losing sleep, I am grateful that my newest son is home, and that he needs me in the middle of the night.

Most of these moments will be forgotten.  I will forget how Jonathan sang a song to me while he tunneled through a cardboard box in our living room.  I will forget how tenderly William approaches his baby brother when he approaches everything else in life with such gusto and ferocity.  I will even forget how it feels to get butterfly kisses from my four-year-old son and how he was so excited when his baby brother gave him butterfly kisses.

But, God, don't let me forget that it was sweet.

Irises in my Window

My husband brought me a bouquet of green the other day.  Rich green leaves rose to bulbs about to burst, and he told me he was thinking I might like to watch them bloom.  From the color peeking through their tips I could tell there would be white-pink lilies and some other flower the color of my toenail polish, a deep midnight blue.  At the time I was just grateful for his tender thoughtfulness, I had been having a rough day in the hospital and knowing he understood that was comforting.

In these last few days the sun has had its way with the sky, clearing out the rain clouds and bursting through with a soft yet brilliant spring light.  My large hospital window has been a canvass colored in Carolina blue and puffy white clouds, "Pixar" clouds as I think of them.  In the corner of my window the bouquet of flowers has been opening up and today the irises are wide open.  They are looking towards the sun and basking happily like teenage sunbathers who have just hit the beach.  The only reason I know they are irises is because they opened with a surprise-- not only midnight blue; there is a daub of bright yellow on each petal.

When my Jonathan was born with dimples in his perfect baby cheeks I felt just as an older friend had described:  sometimes the finale is better than we could have imagined or asked for.

Samuel and I, Josh, Jonathan, and William are being written into a story and I have this feeling that the next chapter will be much richer than I can imagine.  Have you ever bitten into a chocolate cake with an assumptive air, and then you closed your eyes because it tasted so much more delicious than you were expecting?  That's how it's going to be, just like the irises with that brush of yellow.

The Cicadas are Coming!

I apologize to the faint of heart.  Here they are, the shells of the massive beasts now chirping in the trees of old neighborhoods, emerging from the ground to shed their crunchy shells before they take Greensboro by storm, or plague.  I was describing them to my son Jonathan today, I said with large eyes, "They are huge."

"No, mom, they're not.  Bugs are not bigger than people."

My four year old is so frank in his observations; it helps me see the world the way it is, not the way my cockamamie brain often interprets it.  This is not to say cicadas aren't huge, I'll have to differ with him on that point, but he does help me put things into perspective. 

Today, as another round of visitors were leaving, I had my first itch to jump out of the hospital bed.  Of course, I have wanted to leave before, but today it was a charged impulse.  It took will power to stay put and not fly out the door on their heels, "Wait, I need a ride out of here!!"  This first itch of insanity tickled me from my back to my front, and for a moment I panicked as I thought about how many more moments like this I will endure.  Luckily I am allowed to use the utilities, so I did, and then I grabbed my computer and channeled my electric energy to fix a glitch.  Computers are my Achilles heel, so fixing the too-small font on my Gmail homepage took about fifteen minutes of research and focus, and relieved my physical tension.  For now. 

I realized that this discipline of staying put is going to be none too different from the discipline it took for me to run cross country races, complete fifteen page papers in college (in Spanish), teach high school, or get through forty one weeks of pregnancy with Jonathan.  The practice of staying still is going to be another lesson in grit, and while I didn't see it coming this is the race I am running.  I remember my coach telling me to look up, just look ahead during those painful sprints, at the end of the track.  

Jonathan asked me today when I am coming home.  I told him honestly, "I don't know bud."  Then, after a moment's pause, he said,

"Oh, I know.  You're coming home when Samuel gets here." 

There is the frank truth.  I am coming home when Samuel gets here.  No matter how many more currents of fire that run through my veins and scream at my physical body to leave this space, I am not coming home until Samuel gets here -- and really, it's not huge.  This problem is not bigger than Samuel and me.  Reminding himself of the endgame seemed to comfort Jonathan, and it comforts me too.  We're running this race, albeit with iron in our boots, with a purpose.  I just must look up, and ahead.     

Happy Mother's Day :)