In this house, we're used to the tooth fairy being a little delayed. She does, after all, fly all over the world. It's reasonable to assume that if she's retrieving teeth in Myanmar, it will take her a night or two to make it the the Pacific Northwest, especially if she has to travel via Chad or someplace like that.
However, the tooth fairy's delinquence this month went well past the point of acceptable tardiness. Not only did she ignore Anna's two teeth, secretly stashed under her pillow after being hoarded in a drawer for months, but she also turned a blind eye to Josiah's molar, even after repeated reminders of its presence in his bed. After a week of nightly disappointments, the kids demanded to know why, WHY they were being thus ignored.
And that's when the real story came out. As Luke explained to the kids last night, the tooth fairy has been focusing all her energies on fixing the crisis in the Ukraine. Night and day, she's engaged in behind-the-scences diplomacy to bring a peaceful solution to a fraught situation. Resolving tensions in that region is even more important than teeth, Luke explained, and the children immediately understood. Realizing the gravity of the situation, they went to sleep without further protest.
In what I hope is not a bad sign for the Ukraine, the tooth fairy finally made it to our house last night. She should have continued her diplomatic work - the children, apparently convinced of her vital role in eastern Europe, didn't even bother to check their pillows this morning.
Delight with terror
Monday, March 31, 2014
Friday, March 28, 2014
Diving in again
Our family spent a lovely weekend on a church retreat, reveling in rare sunshine, good companionship, and minimal responsibilities. The kids ran and biked around the camp, gloriously unsupervised. Luke and a friend canoed to the end of a lake and ran two miles up a mountain. I stared at the reflection of sunlight on water, rippling up the branches of a cedar tree, ate meals I neither planned nor prepared, and talked too much. And my oldest child actually engaged with other children to some extent - with collateral damage limited to (as far as we know) a sandal kicked in a girl's face and a boy's eyebrow gashed with a canoe paddle.
Our son is frequently one of those children. The kind that stand alone and do strange things, oblivious to how they appear. The kind that get overly excited when something unexpected happens, then stay that way long after everybody else calms down. The kind that impulsively leap into the moment, missing all social cues, underestimating their own strength, realizing too late that they've hurt somebody, broken something, or humiliated themselves. These are the things people see when they interact with my son. Too often, it's all that I see, as well. I've spent a great deal of emotional energy agonizing over how Josiah is coming across to the world - reminding him over and over again to take his hands out of his pockets because he looks so weird moving them around in there; demanding a response to the unanswerable question of why, WHY he did what he did; engaging in emotional diatribes about how he's irresponsible and needs to think about other people, not just himself. I try so hard, not just to protect Josiah from a world that will judge and hurt him (as I often do), but to protect the world from Josiah.
What is much harder to see, and what I often forget to see, is the real Josiah. The generous heart of a boy who has bought only one thing for himself in the past two years, giving the rest of his money away or spending it on other people. The sensitive heart that makes him shudder and flinch when we read together about the horrors of slavery, war, or the Holocaust. The heart that breaks, then hardens, every time he fails and evil motives are ascribed to him that just weren't there.
A year ago at this time, Josiah had experienced so much failure that he completely withdrew in social situations that didn't include his family. During recess breaks on the days he went off to school, he would climb to the top of the play equipment or sit in the bamboo, quietly eating his snack. When gymnastics practice ended, he would leave the gym and wait outside alone to escape having to be with the other boys. When I asked him why, he said it was the only safe way to avoid doing something to embarass himself - a strategy that a psychologist later affirmed as well thought out and rational, albeit unhealthy.
The path we've taken over the course of the last year - the visits to our family practice physician and the psychologist she referred us to, the formal diagnosis of ADHD, and the difficult decision to begin medication - deserves its own blog post. But I feel Josiah has begun an upward journey again - finding the courage to engage again with the world, taking the risk of joining in games and activities with other kids. Yes, he did kick a sandal into a girl's face last weekend, the result of swinging his legs too vigorously in response to an under-the-table kicking game. But he was sitting at a table with other children and not by himself. And yes, he did hit a boy in the eyebrow (thankfully, not the eye) with a paddle, because he was switching it from one side of the canoe to the other with too much vigor. But at least he was out in a canoe with other kids.
"You know, this is really good for Josiah," Luke reassured me, as we paddled our own canoe on a later expedition. Josiah, his little sister, and another girl were arguing about how to extricate their canoe from the brush at the edge of the lake, and we were staying near enough to keep an eye on them, but far enough away to let them feel independent. "It's only by interacting with kids like this that he'll learn what works and what doesn't," Luke continued, restraining me from interfering as Josiah loudly tried to persuade the other girls to ram their canoe through dense rushes on a quixotic quest to find an outlet to the lake. Five minutes later, brave words forgotten, Luke yelled at Josiah to stop intentionally splashing water on his boatmates. But then, they seemed to get things together. They found a rhythm that worked for them, and they brought their canoe back to the dock quite competently, working together.
It was another small step in the right direction.
Our son is frequently one of those children. The kind that stand alone and do strange things, oblivious to how they appear. The kind that get overly excited when something unexpected happens, then stay that way long after everybody else calms down. The kind that impulsively leap into the moment, missing all social cues, underestimating their own strength, realizing too late that they've hurt somebody, broken something, or humiliated themselves. These are the things people see when they interact with my son. Too often, it's all that I see, as well. I've spent a great deal of emotional energy agonizing over how Josiah is coming across to the world - reminding him over and over again to take his hands out of his pockets because he looks so weird moving them around in there; demanding a response to the unanswerable question of why, WHY he did what he did; engaging in emotional diatribes about how he's irresponsible and needs to think about other people, not just himself. I try so hard, not just to protect Josiah from a world that will judge and hurt him (as I often do), but to protect the world from Josiah.
 |
| Josiah, being Josiah |
What is much harder to see, and what I often forget to see, is the real Josiah. The generous heart of a boy who has bought only one thing for himself in the past two years, giving the rest of his money away or spending it on other people. The sensitive heart that makes him shudder and flinch when we read together about the horrors of slavery, war, or the Holocaust. The heart that breaks, then hardens, every time he fails and evil motives are ascribed to him that just weren't there.
 |
| The before picture. During the reception, Josiah climbed on top of the getaway car to write on it with lipstick, then smeared it all down the front of this expensive, rented wool suit as he slid off. We didn't get an after picture. |
A year ago at this time, Josiah had experienced so much failure that he completely withdrew in social situations that didn't include his family. During recess breaks on the days he went off to school, he would climb to the top of the play equipment or sit in the bamboo, quietly eating his snack. When gymnastics practice ended, he would leave the gym and wait outside alone to escape having to be with the other boys. When I asked him why, he said it was the only safe way to avoid doing something to embarass himself - a strategy that a psychologist later affirmed as well thought out and rational, albeit unhealthy.
The path we've taken over the course of the last year - the visits to our family practice physician and the psychologist she referred us to, the formal diagnosis of ADHD, and the difficult decision to begin medication - deserves its own blog post. But I feel Josiah has begun an upward journey again - finding the courage to engage again with the world, taking the risk of joining in games and activities with other kids. Yes, he did kick a sandal into a girl's face last weekend, the result of swinging his legs too vigorously in response to an under-the-table kicking game. But he was sitting at a table with other children and not by himself. And yes, he did hit a boy in the eyebrow (thankfully, not the eye) with a paddle, because he was switching it from one side of the canoe to the other with too much vigor. But at least he was out in a canoe with other kids.
"You know, this is really good for Josiah," Luke reassured me, as we paddled our own canoe on a later expedition. Josiah, his little sister, and another girl were arguing about how to extricate their canoe from the brush at the edge of the lake, and we were staying near enough to keep an eye on them, but far enough away to let them feel independent. "It's only by interacting with kids like this that he'll learn what works and what doesn't," Luke continued, restraining me from interfering as Josiah loudly tried to persuade the other girls to ram their canoe through dense rushes on a quixotic quest to find an outlet to the lake. Five minutes later, brave words forgotten, Luke yelled at Josiah to stop intentionally splashing water on his boatmates. But then, they seemed to get things together. They found a rhythm that worked for them, and they brought their canoe back to the dock quite competently, working together.
It was another small step in the right direction.
 |
| Diving in |
Friday, March 21, 2014
"It is a delight with terror in it!"
"I thought", she said, "that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. It is a delight with terror in it! The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we were going along paths - but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path." -C.S. Lewis, PerelandraI first read the space fantasy Perelandra when I was in college, and (like a lot of C.S. Lewis' writings) it was a book that both articulated and shaped how I saw myself and my journey. It was a time when life was beginning to open up before me, when the careful path I thought I must follow - indeed, the very person I had learned to describe as myself - was crumbling away. I was beginning to glimpse an ocean of freedom before me. The words of Lewis' female protagonist, an Eve-like figure that is beginning to realize her own will and possibilities, made me want to shout and sprint and leap (I don't dance very well, but I can run and jump). Yes! That was how I felt about the opening of possibilities around me: delight mixed with terror.
It's been more than 15 years since that time, and I've spent some of them throwing myself headfirst into the delight and terror of life, some of them gasping for breath in the undertow, and some of them with my back to the waves - trying to make a safe, quiet place for myself and my family to rest, away from both the danger and the exhilaration.
I find myself wanting to face the water again, to know the delight of plunging into life with my own legs and arms, to trust God through the fear that comes with it. Beginning a new blog is part of that. I find both a freedom and joy in writing and an terrifying sense of vulnerability in opening myself to others. So here I go - hitting "Publish" and making a new start. To the delight and the terror!
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