a. Monday. School at home all day. Scout Court of Honor at 6:30 p.m. Payday not till Friday; pantry contents eccentric. Bake weird no-rational-ingredient apple-gingerbread thing that you dust powdered sugar over to try and make it look like something another person, aged 12, would recognize as dessert.
Dash to van, herding kids ahead of you -- "Hurry! Hurry! Get in! Sit down! Buckle up! Hurry!" -- actually, it was the Scout telling everyone to hurry, not me so much -- get in van, plunge key into ignition, turn that baby, and --
b. Wednesday. At home all day. I guess we were at home all day Tuesday, too, though I didn't realize it until Wednesday evening, when we were rushing out for Mass and choir. "Hurry! Hurry! Get in! Sit down! Buckle up!" This time it was me saying all that, over and over again, just to wind myself up good and tight before falling on bended knee before the Lord God Almighty. I mean, you know. Hurry, hurry. Get in van, plunge key into ignition, and --
c. Today.
Yesterday we were out all day. Aelred jump-started the van in the morning, and I drove it to church, I drove it to Panacea Falls for the violin lesson, I drove it back to church where the other kids were playing with their friends, and ultimately I drove it back to Panacea Falls again to fetch the string player from youth orchestra. Surely, surely, I'd revved up the battery enough that -- so that it wouldn't -- I mean, so it would --
2. So it's the Feast of the Annunciation, and most of us stayed home, with the inanimate shell of a Ford E350. What was that "be it done unto me" part, again?
3. When life hands you a dead battery, you . . . uh . . . don't make lemonade, because all the lemons are at the store, and you are at home. But you can do breakfast like this, if you think of it in time:
4. Which, for once, I did. Lately, as in for probably the last eighteen months, the liturgical year has been blasting past me just as fast as the regular old world time has done, whipping my hair back and leaving me staggering in the slipstream. "What?" I cried in mid-December. "Christmas? But I didn't make an Advent wreath!" Long about that time, too, I looked at the calendar and remarked that Ash Wednesday wasn't till March 9, which seemed a yawning, painful eternity away. It's not that I love Lent so very, very much; I like it the way I like eight glasses of water a day, because it's good for me. But those acres of green across which we had to drag ourselves, like the girl on the ground in Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World -- how will I ever, I thought. And then suddenly.
5. So, here it is the Feast of the Annunciation, and not only did we not go to Mass, but oatmeal was what was for breakfast, albeit on pretty dishes. Just this past week I bought a 25-pound bag of quick oats, and today some people were happier about it than others. To those in the disappointed camp quoth I: "Be it done unto you . . . " But I let them have as much brown sugar as they wanted.
6. Ironic, actually, not to mention heartbreaking, that on the day when a woman said yes to motherhood, I should read of an adoptive mother who said yes, and a judge who told her no, on the grounds that her prospective son's Down Syndrome made him "socially unacceptable."
7. Incidentally, if you counted four places at my breakfast table, and you noticed in the sidebar that there are six of us, not counting the dog, who does not quite have his own chair yet, that's because Aelred and Epiphany left -- in the car that does start -- before five this morning. The girly was catching an early plane out to what may or may not turn out to be her college, for an "Accepted (not "Acceptable") Students" weekend. She called when she was on the ground at her destination, ostensibly to tell me she'd gotten that far in one piece, but also to solicit my advice regarding the obtaining of the SuperShuttle ride we'd reserved for her.
"Ask someone there," I said ultimately, though not unfeelingly, I hope. How could I help feeling? There she is, a thousand miles away, and here I am, trying to figure out where the time goes, never mind where the courtesy phone is, and once again -- because it's always the truth, isn't it -- the whole thing is out of my hands.
Seven Quick Takes is happening at Conversion Diary as it does every week, whether I keep up with it or not. Many thanks to Jen for her constancy and her having a clue.
7 comments:
Don't you live in Fiat? Making this the patronal feast of your pseudonymous blogiverse?
"Living in Fiat" is not a bad metaphor for life, is it? My father grew up in a town called Harmony. When he was at an out-of-town event during high school a stoned hippie asked him where he was from. My dad: "I live in Harmony." The hippie thought for a minute, nodded and said, "Cool, man, I totally get it."
Heh, yes. And I've thought about my fictional town name that way a lot.
"I totally get it." That's hilarious.
How awful especially since this feast is so great that we dispense with the Lenten fast and abstinence to celebrate.
Sally, our family practitioner almost didn't sign our medical forms for our adoption of Jude, because our son R. has special needs. I politely informed him that it's not his responsibility to determine the eligibility of our family to have another child, only to determine whether we're medically sound enough for the job. Exclusion is everywhere, and perhaps especially where you least expect it.
Anon: Well, we did dispense with the fast as best we could. Coffee at breakfast! I had some leftover chicken odds and ends and made a chicken-polenta casserole. And wine was brought home by the person with the running car.
But yes, I would have loved to go to Mass.
P: That's terrible. I think your experience speaks to a cultural mistrust of parents and parental judgment, and maybe especially of parents with special-needs children. It's as if you, by virtue of having a child with these difficulties, were somehow not quite an adult yourself, capable of making any kind of large decision.
And it's not just our culture; the judge in the adoption case I linked to was Russian. I understand that, after the highly-publicized incident in which the woman put her adopted 7-year-old on a plane back to Russia, officials there are more leery than they used to be about the potential for "failed" adoptions. Still, that child had a home waiting for him and was denied it, which is beyond sad. And that family completely expected to be taking him home -- I can't imagine their devastation right now.
Oh, Sally, that is horrible. I haven't read the link -- will do so now. I wrote a blog post about a family trying to adopt a special needs child from Eastern Europe recently -- I will be praying for them.
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