1 Mother 2 Another

Wait, what day is today?


Seriously?


How is it that it felt like Thanksgiving was waaaaaaay too early,
so we had aaaaaaaaall this time between Thanksgiving and Christmas,
and now it's Christma ALREADY? The kids just got out of school
-aren't there three or four days of running around and getting
errands done before Christmas?


I gotta go. Too much to do.

Maddie and Cora are in quite the feisty
stage right now, and I’m dangerously close to opening up a
can of whoop-ass on both of them sometimes.


I do not, do NOT understand why they are so mean to each other, yet
so different with their friends. What is this natural antagonism,
this inbred animosity?


I fret that I have instilled some sort of insecurity in each girl:
that each is mean to her sister out of some fear of being
less-well-loved by Mommy. I worry that I have made each girl feel
not as good as her sister. Or even that I walk around trashing my
own family members, setting a bad example.


Then I just watch them and realize nope, this is just contempt bred
by familiarity at its absolute finest.

Just href="http://www.aholyexperience.com/2012/12/the-truth-about-sandy-hook-where-is-god-when-bad-things-happen/"
target="_blank">read this.


Thank you, Ann Voskamp, for this beautiful essay that gives us hope
in these days.

We’re all still reeling from the
Connecticut tragedy, I know. And I have nothing new to say –
and nothing that hasn’t been said better, by smarter people
– on the subject. We live in a fallen world, and as one local
official remarked on Friday, evil did indeed visit that town.


If you’re like me, you’re walking around on a knife
edge, one sappy Christmas commercial away from sobbing
uncontrollably. I know my children are tired of being squeezed
relentlessly, snuggled unashamedly, clutched ridiculously tightly.
I am unwilling to let them out of my sight, reluctant to stand even
a few feet away in a room of strangers. School today will be a
strange thing indeed.


Brian and I wrestled Friday evening with whether or not we should
tell the girls what had happened: on the one hand, they have little
to no exposure to the news or social media, and with Maddie’s
tendency to worry about EVERYTHING we could see her getting
incredibly wound up about this if we told her. On the other hand,
if we kept this from them and they heard about it at school –
we didn’t even want to think about the state they’d be
in by pick-up time.


So we decided to tell them.

Cora is, for whatever reason, in love with
the act of measuring things. She keeps a small tape measure –
an automatic roll-up one like people use sewing – in her
bedroom, and when we’ve finished with books and prayers for
the night she gets out her measuring tape and happily measures,
well, all the stuff in her room. She’s said it makes her feel
like part of the Cyberchase gang, a math-based cartoon on PBS.


So whenever I get out my industrial metal tap measure – you
know, the 25-footer – Cora’s eyes light up and she begs
to use it. I pretty much always acquiesce, always reminding her to
watch the automatic retraction – it’ll snap your eye
out – and leave her to whatever story she’s got going
on in her head.


I’ve been working on getting ready for Christmas, and Monday
I had my tape measure out preparing boxes for shipping. I left it
on a counter and didn’t think anything more about it. But
when I went to use it Tuesday to measure out pine garland for our
stairs, the tape measure seemed, well, sick.

Yesterday morning I went in to wake up
Maddie for school. She’s usually the harder one to wake up,
and she’ll often begin to stir in a very, um, crabby fashion,
so I usually approach her bed gently, like nearing a wild animal.


But when I gently touched her and lovingly said, “Maddie,
it’s time to wake up now!” she opened her eyes wide,
gave a huge grin, and stretched happily.

A good friend of ours came into town this
week to run the marathon; he’d originally been scheduled to
run the New York marathon, which was canceled at the last minute
due to Hurricane Sandy. He’d been one of our really good
friends in New York, so we were thrilled to have any excuse to see
him.


Now, I am not a runner. At ALL. I have several friends who run, and
I truly don’t get it. But I hear that it’s lovely if
you can withstand the pain and there’s nothing quite like a
marathon. I’ve also heard that having a cheering squad is
invaluable along the way; having friends to scream and jump and
encourage you along the route makes you feel a bit less alone, a
bit less like giving up.


So I hear.

Maddie is usually the most difficult
member of the household to wake up. On school days Cora and I end
up in Maddie’s room, snuggled in her bed for a few moments
before we get up and get moving. Once Cora’s up she’s
up and moving and she’ll be dressed and downstairs in two
minutes; Maddie takes exponentially longer and will often come
sliding into her seat with sixty seconds to gulp down oatmeal
before we leave.


Sometimes, though, she wakes up for whatever reason, and
occasionally she’s startled me when I’m downstairs
thinking I’m the only one in the house awake; I’ll be
doing my devotional or packing lunches and Maddie will pad silently
up to me, fully clothed and smiling with pride. These are the
mornings I live for.


Yesterday was such a morning.

Yes, Daddy is home.


And all is right with the world.


Although Cora said something disrespectful and snappy at bedtime
last night after we'd brought Daddy home from the airport, and I
corrected her, and she said with a sniff, "Well, I AM still sad
that Daddy left, you know . . ."


Yeah, that won't fly any more, kid.

My family has been incredibly fortunate in
that Brian’s job requires almost zero travel for work; in
addition, he works less than two miles from our house and so is
often home for lunch, can have lunch with the girls at school, and
can slip out of work to see a school play or something.


In short, the girls see their daddy a LOT. And are quite used to
it.


So when Brian told the girls he had to make a three-day trip this
week, they seemed unfazed at the announcement. But in retrospect, I
think they simply didn’t understand. He traveled once (ONCE!)
last year and we survived pretty well, so I figured we’d have
a few “I miss Daddy!” at bedtime but would otherwise
soldier on. Brian gave each girl a hug and kiss Monday morning and
sent them off to school, not to be seen again until LATE tonight.


When I picked Cora up after school Monday, she seemed distracted
and out of sorts. I began questioning her gently, trying to see
what went wrong with her day, but everything sounded like it went
“great” or was “a lot of fun”. Finally,
Cora turned to me impatiently.


“If you’re wondering why I’m having a hard
time,” she said astutely, “it’s because I really
thought I’d see Daddy one more time! I really need to give
him one last snuggle!”


And she burst into tears.

We started our Matthew 25/Good Deeds jars
over the weekend: every day in December the girls draw a slip of
paper from their own jar, and they do whatever that piece of paper
instructs for the day. It’ll be something like “write a
thank-you note to your teacher” or “tell a friend what
you like about her” – simple stuff, but all things that
encourage you to love on someone else. At the end of the day each
girl will put her piece of paper in a box wrapped like a Christmas
present with an opening at the top, and at the end of December we
put the box under our tree as our gift to Jesus – all the
ways we’ve loved him by loving others this month. The girls
look forward to it every year and I confess I enjoy it too.


So on Sunday Cora drew “pray for a stranger” and her
brow wrinkled up. “Mommy, how can I pray for someone if I
don’t even know them? How do I know what to say?”