Category Archives: Motherhood

The Leak – Part II

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3:00.  Do not ask for whom the bell tolls.  It tolled for me.

Will donned work boots and commanded me to leave the leak to him and to go about my day.  And I would gladly have done just that.  But I knew from grim experience the quickest route to the leak.  I knew he would need a gofer to run back and forth to the street to turn on and off the water and then into the kitchen to run the water through the fridge to take the pressure off the line every time we turned the water off.  He needed to take a towel, tape, scissors, his cell phone, kneepads, flashlight.  But mothers need to back off sometimes. So in he went. Cold turkey.

I waited.

Could I please turn the water off?

Indeed.  I was poised and ready, but I discovered a hitch.  The city had replaced the valve at the street and our convenient re-bar tool, a giant reverse screwdriver, no longer fit the valve head.  OK.  Vice grips.  From under the house, Will told me where they were and I trotted there.  Yes.  You are dead right. I am stove-up now from all this trotting and squatting.

Vice grips in hand, I approached the valve.  Had the valve been level and flat this story would lack a certain Facing-the-Giants element.  But the valve was a little tilted and at the bottom of a 6 inch deep hole.  So the vice grip handles couldn’t turn 1/16th of a revolution without hitting the sides of the hole, repeatedly knocking the pinchers off the valve, dinging my knuckles, and ruining the manicure I had gotten for Adrienne’s graduation.  It was a physics problem I couldn’t solve, and could have been the proverbial straw.  But here is where being a Category 2 came in handy and downright saved the day.

Remember, we 2ers weep over novels.  The novel I am weeping over right now is The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.  When you finish reading this, go get a copy.  It is a glorious recounting of the battle of Gettysburg from both sides’ perspective.  And though I am a proud southerner and my gut twisted to know we were going to lose this particular battle, my admiration for Union General Lawrence Chamberlain literally knew no bounds.  The God-given idea to fix bayonets and charge down Little Round Top against all odds was breathtaking.

And so, when I managed to get the valve turned and the water off and to trot back and resume my prone position holding the flashlight and Will said, “Now I can’t tell exactly where the leak is anymore.  Could you turn the water back on?”  I was able to summon my inner Chamberlain and say, “Fix bayonets!  Charge!”

I would do this 10 more times for various reasons until my trotting became walking, then listing, then limping, then staggering.  “Fix bayonets.  Charge,” I whispered on the tenth wrestle with the vice grips on the valve, knowing too that the grips were stripping the valve head down to the shiny metal and giving evidence of my bumblings.  I rubbed a little mud on it to cover mein kampf.

I found out later that my neighbor, watching my mud-covered, repetitious trips to the valve hole, thought I was planting a tree.

In the end Will patched the leak sufficiently that the duct tape is still in place and the hose hasn’t been replaced.

And Chamberlain and his Maine regiment have just been moved to the center of the Union line, right where the Rebel George Pickett is about to aim his noble charge uphill and exposed and utterly magnificent.

I am Chamberlain and Pickett.

And I am a Category 2!

Keeping The Candles Lit

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Before we had children, Andrew and I lived frugally but adventurously on our budget, listened to NPR in the evenings, strolled pillow-faced on Saturday mid-mornings to the St. Louis Bread Company in U. City for chocolate chip muffins and good coffee, exercised, flew to Chicago for Christmas, watched Masterpiece Mystery, camped our way to Rocky Mountain National Park, studied, and rang in the new year with champagne toasts and friends.

And then we had our firstborn, and those two people changed overnight.  The sweetness of this new phase, parenting, was so overwhelming, so charged with love and purpose, we didn’t miss the old life.  Of course, all new parents miss sleep.  And we missed the freedom to get up and go somewhere and browse.  We never browsed again.  That word drops from a parent’s life forever.

But still, we didn’t miss the no-kids days.  Because we loved the cherubs so much, and we still had some control even in the hairy days of the new human in the house dictating everything.  Then a second new human.  Then a third.  Even then, we had the ability to impose a grid on life that formed our days and ways.  The growing kids occasionally chafed at the grid, and now we are finding that though we meant well in forming our particular grid, we made mistakes along the way.  I guess we do our best at the time, making decisions with the factors and convictions in front of us, and then inevitably find that our earnest, horse-blinder determination could have been done better another way.  But that is only seen in retrospect, with the benefit of years and wisdom that I didn’t have back in the decision-making moment. In any event, right or wrong, the grid at its best was our attempt to listen to God’s voice rather than the culture’s.  At its worst, it was my lazy remote control for an easier life.

And then a moment comes when we realize that while it is good and God-honoring to create the family grid, the grid is no guarantee for a pain-free, perfect life for our children.  There will come a day when they don’t take their vitamins and go to bed at 7:30, when at midnight we are lying in bed waiting for the sound of the back door slamming. And until it comes, the heart hammers and the imagination does Oscar-worthy work.  There comes a day when their big-people tears show us our failures.  That is a good and humbling day because it drives us to our Savior in clear-eyed recognition of our need of Him.  We have no illusions of adequacy then; we just see that at our very best we are sinners.

The college-children years are a time of finding peace in the whirlwind of those children all on different trajectories, and very little time with everyone at the dining room table.  They are the years of having our hearts spread out on different continents, on airplanes, packing, planning, going, going, going.  And it is all good, and it is all completely out of our control. It is like our poor mama cat, Midge, the first time we bring the kittens down from their safe lair to hold them. They are all squawking in different locations and all Midge can do is dart from one to the other and lick them a little comfort.

The decisions kids make at the tender age of 17 are enormous; and we tremble and pray and look up at God and say, “In Your mercy, look at my child!  Protect her.  Protect him.”  And somewhere in there I realize I never had control to begin with!  These children, along with every molecule of creation, are His!  My job is and has always been not to control the grid, but to trust the heavenly Father of my children.  And even to pray the brave prayer my friend Nancy prays – Lord, I am not asking that You make it easy for them.  The grid is good; but it is not God.

So we breathe in a prayer for our peace and breathe out a prayer for their safety and growth.  And we cook and we keep the candles lit and we goon-smile when we hear their voices on the front walk.

There is a chapter in this phase of parenting that I don’t know yet, that many of my friends do know.  It is the chapter called, “Look what God did through your weakness!”  It is an amazing chapter.  I look forward to reading it.

(photo explanation:  the Scottish flag flies awaiting the Easter visit of our Covenant College students)