while we're on the subject of her

This is something I wrote back when she was three:

Looking With Our Eyes

          Today I went shopping with Kari and Tim.  Kari is three and she loves to shop.    Now that Tim sits in the cart, she has to walk along, and the freedom is a bit more than she can handle.    She crawls inside racks of clothes and hides.   She pushes the cart into my ankles when I’m distracted. 

She loves it most of all when she spots a long aisle—that expanse of glossy linoleum stretching out forever just makes her want to run as fast as she can.   At TJ Maxx today she was shoppin’ up a storm, touching everything she could, to the extent she reminded me of the dog on a walk, stopping to lift his leg on every bush.

“C’mon, c’mon,” I kept urging her.  “Don’t touch stuff.  Kari, look with your eyes, not your hands.  Use only your eyes.”    

Finally we got to the check out line and she jumped up and down, madly yanking on Tim’s arm until he decided it wasn’t funny anymore and started to cry. 

While I smoothed his ruffled feathers, she spotted a long shiny aisle extending all the way to the back of the store and away she went like the wind, her little pink tulle skirt puffing up and down, her long arms flying.   

When she came back, I scolded her using her whole name,  “Lydia Karina.  At the store, kids are supposed to stay by their parents.  There is no running.  You have to hold onto the cart now in case you get any more crazy ideas.”    

Out of the corner of my eye I could see the irritated, pressed together lips of the woman behind me in line, the sour, disapproving frown she had fixed on Kari.    Shopping moments like this used to devastate me when my oldest kids were little.  I’d come home feeling like a terrible, incompetent mother with an awfully bratty child.      

Now I have perspective.  Renegade Shoppers grow up.  We do manage to civilize them. They develop self-control, and I also know that along the way they cause virtually no harm, however distracting they may be.

            

            Kirsten is sixteen, but back in 1987 when she was a year old I had her strapped firmly in a stroller at the mall one afternoon, and I was relieved that there was a socially acceptable way to contain her, because she was a monkey and I was feeling pretty burned out dealing with it day after day.     

            I remember looking around the mall at all the people and thinking, “Every one of these people got from age one to age two due to the good care of someone else.”    It sounds silly now, but that day it didn’t feel a bit silly. 

            I felt a little awed to think of all the people of the world raising other people, teaching and protecting and feeding and washing and helping…the image of that much love bringing humanity forward, generation after generation… all that hard work, most of it done unpaid, contributed completely out of commitment and love, made me feel less alone on that very tired day.

 she told us her tutu made her head hurt

When we talk about being parents, so often it’s either the good or the bad.   The sublime or the feet-on-the-ground side, and we could benefit by acknowledging both.  It is wonderful, and it is hard work.  It’s rewarding but it’s also often isolating, and can be relentless, and numbingly tedious.  

 There is no money to be made at it, and this is how we usually measure value in this culture.  So then where on the Grand Plan do we place something that never makes it onto a spreadsheet, but is so essential to our existence here—our being raised and then turning around and raising the next generation? 

I don’t know.

            

             There has never been a time that I answered the phone or heard one of my grown up kids at the door that my heart didn’t swell with affection and pleasure.   I adore my babies, and little kids are easy to love, but I didn’t expect teenagers to be wonderful. 

         I’d heard a lot of serious warnings about teenagers, and honestly, we did have times we disagreed and were angry at each other… but it was not bad.  The arguments were a force creating growth, both theirs and mine, and their dad’s too.  

          And I didn’t know I would love adult kids in the same consuming and wholehearted way I do the babies.  As Dan left after being home one day last week, like always he yelled, “I love you,” as he got into his car.

         I called back, “I love you too…” and the unspoken second half of that sentence ran through my mind, “…more than you can imagine.” 

     

          By caring about birth and striving to create loving, respectful, safe births that are celebrations for our babies and families, we are laying the foundation for loving, respectful, safe families to live in.   

        We want families where all the people can grow together, where we can all seek our potential and be ourselves, where generations overlap, so that we know for certain because we see it with our own eyes, that love is continuous, and extends backward and forward in time.

       It was a foundation underneath our lives long before we were ever born and will continue flowing after we are gone. 

     my dad and his parents

 The photo I have included here is of Kari and my husband’s Aunt Esther, Grandma Lydia’s sister.  She’s 93 years old, and she was kind to me when I was a young mother, and she tended my husband and her own stepchildren (in the 1960s) and my husband’s mom too (in the 1930s), when they were children.   That’s a whole lot of loving.   

 Esther is irreverent and fun, and I think Kari has a bit of that in her too.   When we got home from shopping I was still impressing on Kari this whole not touching things at the store concept. 

I told her to tell her big sister Heidi how we look at things at the store.   I was waiting for her to say, “With our eyes,” but instead she tilted her chin and grinned at me, then turned to Heidi, “We look with our boooobs.”     

love you all so, MOM