I read a very sweet and heartfelt ode to family and childhood this morning.  It is incredible to think about childhood and family as a mold. It made me realize, yet again, how very blessed I am to have the family I have.

I come from a huge, Irish, Catholic family. Both my parents come from large, tight, knit families. They are different. 

My Mom's side are very pragmatic. When my husband met them, he was startled by what he perceived initially as indifference. You cannot complain to these people! They have no sympathy! I don't even remember what the complaint was, but one Aunt rubbed her finger and thumb together and smiled. "It's the world's smallest violin playing the world's saddest song, just for you." 

Everyone laughed and it might have felt harsh. But what happened next was typical. Everyone, all at once, asked what could be done. What can you do? What can we do? How can we fix this? They are full of love and caring. They have empathy. They are strong and not afraid of emotion. They will not cave in front of a problem. And they won't let you cave either. They are not nosy, gossipy, pushy types. You won't hear them blabbing your problems to anyone who will listen. They will talk to you. And it will not be critical, but it will not be passive either. You are going to hash out solutions. 

Dad's family is loud. The Thanksgiving table is boisterous and perhaps hard to follow. It is not out of the ordinary to have several heated discussions going on simultaneously. Politics, religion, literature, history. Quite a number of them are or have been activists, so comparing jail stories is not as uncommon as you might guess on meeting the crowd.

Again, my dear husband learned by fire. It was election season. You might think that if you put a group of similarly raised people with similar values in a room that political discussion would be a merry game of back-patting. Not so, in this family. It was loud. Vehement disagreements based and similar foundations made the discussion exciting and fast paced. 

"Well, since we all agree that... it is obvious that..." 

"It is not obvious at all. That's a silly conclusion. Your mistake was..."

The Church this and the party that. Everything is evident. Of course.

"So, Josh, what do you think?"

...

Poor man. But he knew how to play the game. He chose a politician and made a relatively innocuous, but not obvious, observation. And the discussion moved on quickly with explosions. 

At the end of the party, everyone hugs. We all miss each other. What fun! What a good party! As long as there is argument and wine, everyone is happy.

Both sides sing. There is always music. Both sides drink. There is always wine. I could go on and on about how amazing my family is. They are tough, but empathetic. Brilliant and opinionated, but not judgmental. And Irish.

Awesome.

Awesome in that great and terrible sense when it suddenly dawns on me: I am a grown up now. I am a mom and I have kids.  If family and childhood are a mold, I am as much a shaper as a shape. And that is terrifying. That is some measuring stick I am holding. 

Winter network

Special needs networks are awesome. We depend on each other for help and advice. We lean and love and ask and emote. We get to know each other and each other's kids, even when we only actually meet a few of them. Just like in real life, you don't want to admit that you have favorites, but sometimes a kid just steals your heart and you cannot explain why. You meet silent heroes, who just quietly help whoever needs help. You meet loud advocates. You meet loving families working aggressively to find normal and you meet crazy, loving families rejecting any semblance of normal. We admire little heroes. I have hundreds of amazing acquaintances and a few close friends from these networks.

But it is not all happy optimism, advocacy, and empathy. A disproportionate number of these parents suffer from anxiety and depression.

And at this time of year, it is especially hard. The kids are sick. Not all of them at once, but for the past several weeks, not a day has gone by without one of our buddies sick in the hospital. And even those of us whose kids are not currently sick, we are worrying too. Is that cough a first sign? Dry air? My sweetie, who healthy has more snot than most kids, is especially boogery. It doesn't gross me out, but it worries me. Can she keep her airway open? Do I need to treat this? 

We heard the news about the flu shot before you. We knew that it was going to be a bad year. That kind of information makes rounds in these circles long before it is mainstream news. 

This is the time of year when all the sudden, special needs networks take their toll. We pay in tears. We are tired. We are worried. Our friends are tired and worried. We work hard to stay empathetic. We open our hearts. 

Sometimes I wonder, are my out-of-network friends sick of my sick posts on Facebook?  I don't share every story, only a small few.  Still, "Pray for my friend whose kiddo is dangerously ill," has become a regular feature on my Facebook page. 

Today I am praying for the parents.Thank you for all the support and prayer and love you have offered.  Thank you for bravely continuing to offer empathy, even when it hurts. We will get through these months. Spring and sunshine are on their way. 

Tinsel and incense

The kings are wandering. They have not made it to Bethlehem. In my house, they are still in the wrong room, roaming past the Purel and around the Christmas children's books. Mary and Joseph made it today.  They are looking ever so tired.  The kind animals have moved out of the barn, since our set really isn't big enough to house both the Holy Family and the animals.  They are huddled around the Noel candle. There are cookie crumbs everywhere, so any resident mice can have their fill before tonight's required hush.

Hush.

I love the magic of Christmas. I love the blend of deep and rich theology against the starry, sparkly merriment. Christmas celebration echoes its theology elegantly.

This is the night when our Lord humbled himself. God as man. He didn't don a baby costume and pretend. He didn't set His divinity aside for a few years. Fully human. Fully God.

I cannot comprehend it, but I can smile at it.

Today my sister came to visit bringing her daughter. We made cookies.  While they were in the oven, we turned on Christmas music. The Children laughed and played and danced and twirled! The smell, the mess, the laughter, the light, the decorations- That is Christmas!

In sweet, joyful, human chaos, we celebrate and welcome our Lord. We sing with the angels, because He came. All our imperfect celebrations are for him. A holiday so wonderful that we share it with everyone. The green and red decorations and the blinking holiday lights, the reindeer and elves and snowmen, the trees decorated- in each house uniquely representative of the family- it all serves as a joyful but decidedly human backdrop to celebrate the birth this divine child.

Still through the cloven skies they come
With peaceful wings unfurled
And still their heavenly music floats
O'er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing.
And ever o'er its Babel sounds
The blessed angels sing.

But God... He did it first!

Every time the issue of torture comes up it is only a matter of time before someone brings up some awful thing terrorists are doing somewhere.  "Why aren't you upset about that?"

I am glad you asked.  I am upset. Terrorists terrorizing is, well, terrible.  Often so terrible it is disturbing. It is hard to imagine people being so utterly inhumane.  For awhile, I had to stay off Facebook because the gruesome images of violence were consuming my feed, a form of graphic violence. (I disapprove. But that is a post for another day.) There is extraordinary violence committed against innocents.

Sometimes in war there is not a clear cut bad guy and good guy. People fight for all kinds of reasons.  In this story, there is a bad guy. The terrorists are the bad guys. Right? We oppose them.  They hate. They embrace evil. They will use any method to achieve their end. Killing children? Rape? Nothing is beneath them. That is what a bad guy is.  A terrorist is a bad guy pretty much by definition.

That makes us the good guys, if only we were four year olds on a playground.

In real life, the presence of a bad guy and a guy opposing a bad guy might not indicate the presence of a good guy.  Opposing him does not make us good.  Good is harder.

So, lets talk about being the good guy. Here are a few of the things the "good guy" is saying.

How can you complain about splashing a little water? 

If you are still trivializing what happened I encourage you to read. I cannot argue with ignorance. I do not want to go into specifics about what we did, but there are a thousand places you can read descriptions in graphic detail. This is not one of them.

The report is partisan.

If you think the report shouldn't have been done and was only done as a partisan power play, set aside the question for long enough to decide whether or not the report is true. To my knowledge, no one is seriously arguing its veracity. If it is a partisan power grab, the way to diffuse that would be universal repudiation. Don't corner yourself. Don't dodge the question of fact. Truth does not belong to either party.

But, what constitutes torture?

If you are quibbling about the line between not very nice and torture, your questions are understandable, but wrong. When you are talk to teens about sex, they inevitably ask how far they can go. It is an obvious question that you cannot answer directly.  It is easy to find examples to frame the question, but then there is an enormous gray area. Wandering around blindly in that gray area, aiming for just this side of mortal sin is probably not wise. You cannot answer the question because what they are really saying is, "I really, really want to commit a mortal sin. How close to that can I get without being separating myself from God?" The question itself will lead you in exactly the wrong direction.

To be clear, I am comfortable asserting that what we did was well outside of the gray area.  It was torture.

Move ahead. We accept that what we did was torture.  Why did we do it? Was it justified? This is not loose moralizing from a borderline pacifist.  These are pragmatic questions because it will come up again.  Can we do it again?  Can it be justified? 

Don't you know what they are doing?

Why did we torture?  Because they are bad guys! How do we know? They hate. They embrace evil. They will use any method to achieve their end.  We had to stop them.  We had to find out what other violence was planned! We had to know! We would use any method to stop them!

 This is an old argument. When do the ends justify the means? Usefully, it has been answered explicitly for Catholics.

"It is therefore an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or emergency, etc.) which supply their context. There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery. One may not do evil so that good may result from it." CCC, 1756

Even if we are responding to gruesome violence we cannot resort to intrinsically evil acts.  When we face judgement and are called to account for what we have done, we cannot point and whine and say, "But Go-od... He did it firrrst."

Isn't it covered by just war theory?

No. Just war doctrine is limited, though theories abound.  Again, looking to the Catechism:

2309 The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
- the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
- all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
- there must be serious prospects of success;
- the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

That sound like we have to weigh our actions against theirs.  We do. But it goes on:

 2312 The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. "The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties."
2313 Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely.

It cannot be justified.  That is what intrinsically evil means. War is evil, but not intrinsically because it can be justified under certain very limited circumstances. Abortion is intrinsically evil. Torture is intrinsically evil.  



OK. So, maybe what we did was bad. But why are you more upset about our response than the crimes we were addressing?

What are we doing? We are becoming the bad guy! When we decide we hate our enemy and there is no action off limits to stop him, we are indistinguishable from him. We set his actions as a standard. See that line, that line they keep moving? We are running full speed toward it.

The good guy doesn't aim for the worst thing he can imagine and try to stop just short of it. He aims for the good. Even when he misses, he is justified.  If we become the bad guy, it doesn't matter anymore if we win or lose.

I am angry- livid- because these are evils done in my name. Why am I more upset about what we are doing than what they are doing? Why am I more concerned about being a sinner than stopping a sinner?  Because I am more afraid of Hell than death. 

Merry X-mas

Every night when my husband comes home, he has to gets to listen to me rant about discuss something or other. Last night it was x-mas. Or Christmas. Or outrageous outrage.

"See," he said, "That was a blog post.  You should write this stuff."  I promised him that I would try to take out today's frustrations on the internet.

Scrolling on Facebook, you might get the impression that we live under the kind of oppression our forefathers escaped. I was tempted to respond to each and every malcontent: x-mas is not an assault on Christmas.

The confusion is obvious. We use the English letter 'x' to cross things out, so a holiday celebrating 'x' sounds delightfully, modern nihilist.  X-mas is a celebration of tinsel and Santa and magic and everything but Jesus.  Cross him out.  Get your battle gear on!  Suit up!  America hates Christians!

Except that it isn't true.

X is a symbol. It is the Greek letter, Chi, which is the first letter in Khristos, or Christ.  As a symbol, it has been in art and text for at least a thousand years and maybe much, much longer.  It is not difficult to find examples, many that most people would recognize.

You don't have to know that. It's a special kind of nerd. It doesn't bother me that not everyone knows or cares about Greek letters. What does bother me is people who should know- people with a platform and an audience, spout off without bothering to check. I am not asking for hard research here. Roughly fifteen seconds on the internet answers the question. Some of the biggest names in Christian leadership are spreading inflammation. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention, or some such thing.

Here's the thing.  There are plenty of actual arguments worth having. You want complicated questions, bound to inflame tempers, that don't have obvious answers?  I can list a few. You want to fight? We can do that. We can talk about immigration or torture or contraception or Obama.  We can talk about feminism. We can talk about mommy wars. It has been months since I have had a good argument about healthcare.  Or if you want straight non-controversial outrage, there is plenty of violence worldwide.

I was the second of six kids. One day, two of my siblings had been at it all morning. They were sitting at the breakfast table and already Dad had had enough. He took a cheerio from one of the cereal bowls and placed it between them.

"Let's see you fight about that!"

Seconds of silence. Then, one of them ate it.

"You ate my Cheerio!!"

Outrage is exhausting. This is silly.  Lets not fight about the easy stuff.  Merry (almost) X-mas, my friends.

Hope confronting violence

There are a lot of painful questions on the internet today.  What happened, Ferguson? 

Last night I went to bed hoping along with everyone that the people in Ferguson would hear pleas for non-violence. What happened?

A kid.  An angry kid.  A community, distrustful of the people sworn to protect them. What happened?

This morning, so many people on on their contradicting soapboxes, the noise is deafening. What happened? 

There is an evil- and I mean satanic- glee in some corners.  To take such delight in suffering is not human. It just isn't. 

There is rage. Disquieted sympathy. Agitated, agitating. 

A pressure cooker with a tiny clog is a bomb in the house.  Can we see the problem without pointing fingers?  

Sheltered suburban America.  We like to pretend that violence doesn't exist.  We create distance. It is a coping mechanism, and it works. Them. They. There. 

We want to comprehend.  We want a complete, tucked in, ownership of the story; a neat little box can be closed and stacked in the appropriate closet. 

I hear fear.  I hear rage.  I hear sniggering.  I hear pleas. 

"We are a nation of laws." Guffawing.  How can you laugh?

I need to hear hope.  I need to hear love.  I need to know that this challenge to change will be met.

"The fact is that no one can be by nature superior to his fellows, since all men are equally noble in natural dignity. And consequently there are no differences at all between political communities from the point of view of natural dignity." Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris

Where is the dignity?  What happened?

"Our families are torn by violence. Our communities are destroyed by violence. Our faith is tested by violence. We have an obligation to respond. Violence -- in our homes, our schools and streets, our nation and world -- is destroying the lives, dignity and hopes of millions of our sisters and brothers.
...
The best antidote to violence is hope. People with a stake in society do not destroy communities." 

Confronting A Culture Of Violence: A Catholic Framework For Action, A Pastoral Message of the U.S. Catholic Bishops

If we want to raise our children in a better world, we have to hope.  The anger, the pride, the cynicism, the resignation-- claim hope. Believe that we can be better- that we are better. Baby steps.  In my house, we will start by praying.

"God of peace, bring your peace to our violent world: peace in the hearts of all men and women and peace among the nations of the Earth."  Pope Benedict XVI

We will love.  We will learn. We will pray. We will hope.

"Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God."  Matthew 5:9

Habits. Part 2. Wherein we break bad habits. And I mean smash them to bits.

Summer is usually our down time.  Much of my support system is built on teachers, and they have summers off.  So, my support system is stronger, or at least more flexible.  Sarah breathes better in the summer. She is not sick as often.

This summer, we spent time at my Godmother's house on Cape Cod.  It is such a beautiful place. While we were there, Sarah breathed better than she ever has. It was a magical vacation. Since she breathed so well, and since ICU stays are expensive, we have decided to submit to insurance a claim for a house of our own up there. (We didn't.  This is a joke.)

After I got through my fight with anxiety, we had a few peaceful weeks.

Then, Autumn.  It used to be my favorite season.

Sarah started school, which is both the best and the worst news! (Yay class interaction and therapy!  Boo germs!)  I decided to homeschool Lily this year.  (I promise to write about that soon.)  Sarah had a surgery. (That too.)  We are facing cold and flu season.

But really, things seemed to be going well.

We joined a CSA over the summer.  We had decided to make general health a priority. Every week we collected a beautiful box of fresh produce from a local farm. Josh decided he wanted to run a marathon. I am so proud of him for setting such an ambitious goal!

He had been diagnosed with asthma about a decade ago.  He has not had trouble recently, but I really thought that if he was going to run a marathon, he should get it checked out and get cleared.  He went in for a full physical.

Good news! No asthma! He is clear to run!
Bad new: Diabetes.

The old truism, "Its not fair," comes to mind.

Diabetes.

New specialists.  New appointments.  New doctors.  You don't get to talk back when life hands you a rotten diagnosis, but you don't have to lose control either.  We have been learning a whole lot of stuff we never wanted to know.  Again.

We chose right away to spin it. This diagnosis hurts.  It is scary.  It is going to mean good things.  Not just for Josh, but for the whole family.

The day after the diagnosis, I cleaned out the fridge, throwing away anything Josh couldn't eat.  If he couldn't eat it, it didn't need to be in the house.  We're doing this as a family.  (Well.  Except the Halloween candy.  I am not that cruel.  I won't eat it now, but the kids still can.  Is that a reward?  We won't be doing mac and cheese anymore, at least not a main course.  Not even for lunch. But at least they don't have to share their Halloween candy!)

As soon as we told people, we got advice.  Vegan! Paleo!  (Wait. What?)  We basically lived on kale for a few days.  I like kale.  My husband (still) likes me. Kale is inexpensive and filling.  I tried four different preparations in that first week.  (Josh liked one of them!)  Thankfully, he had an appointment with a dietitian to make a personalized meal plan.  I went with him.  I am doing this too.  What the heck is a diabetic diet?  I'm an excellent cook, but I need to know the rules.  What are the rules?

Diabetes is, among other things, a battle against bad habits.  Good food is good.  Bad food is very bad. Exercise is important.  Count. Pay attention. Measure. No cheating. OK. This is going to be good.  This is not going to be easy, but it is going to be good.

We've been promised that at some point you stop wanting terrible foods. I don't know if that's true.  Breaking habits is hard. What will my new go to its-5:30p.m.-and-I-haven't-cooked-anything dinner for the family be?  (Fish, if you are wondering.)  What will I reach for if I'm hungry at 3:30?

We are only a few weeks in.  We are learning.  I still like Kale, but I've diversified.  Josh is training for his marathon.  I'm not, but I get up and exercise when he goes out to run in the morning before the kids are up.  The kids have stopped asking for dessert.  Becca joins me in eating Kale, even when no one else will.  This is going to be awesome.