Four Christmases plus One

A handful of Christmases ago, part of our McLaughlin family Christmas experience was going to see the movie "Four Christmases". This was pk (pre-kids) when going to a movie theater wasn't something to manage and would still enable you to remain off food stamps after buying the tickets and popcorn for everyone. The first thing that I remember about that trip was sitting next to our then-13-yr-old cousin. I fought urges the entire movie to cover her eyes. I digress... The movie dealt with the featured couple having to travel to 4 different places to be a part of each family Christmas. Well, we have little distance traveling to do, but we still traverse the rare blessing of making it to FIVE family Christmases yearly - and sometimes more depending on how much traveling we opt for.

This year, Santa came to our house on the evening of the 22nd. Because we were preparing for all of our family Christmases, there was no time to make cookies, so he was left 4 icy oatmeal chocolate rocks from our freezer. (Don't feel bad for our children on the cookie thing, we seriously normally make cookies here ALL the time.) Because we use Green Bean Delivery (which is awesome, by the way) for our grocery service and because carrots were not delivered last week, Rudolph received a parsnip. Here is a "before" shot when Santa had left everything. Following that is an "after". I didn't want to pretty it up with Instagram... after 5 Christmases, it ain't pretty. Just imagine our bedrooms and laundry room...

After Santa came to our house, he then visited Jeff's parents, then my grandmother's house, then Jeff's grandparents' house, then, finally, my folks' house. He had to work out special arrangements to then take everything from their house up to the cabin where we all stayed for 2 days and opened presents. All on behalf of S & J. He mustn't be union.

We had a beautiful time celebrating a myriad of different traditions, praying together, laughing together, singing together, and, of course, my favorite, gathering around the table together again. For many families heading to a cabin means bringing games, food, and walking shoes. We brought all of those things, but we also had percussion instruments, guitars, keyboards and amps. Ahh, Scharbrough family traditions...

We are a bit worn out, but very grateful for full cars and hearts.

xoxo

JW

This week, someone replied to my post about Joseph that I'd written right after he was born. My little baby boy turned 2 today! To celebrate him, I'm reposting this about his birth...

(Joseph Winslette McLaughlin born Dec 21, 2009 @ 5:26pm; 8 lbs 14 oz and 20 1/2 in long; pic @ 1 week old - 9 lbs 11 oz!!!)

I was privileged with Joseph to have a natural birth again. Believe me, during the day this time around, there were more times than not I would have chosen a word other than “privileged”. I had to look at the bracelet I was wearing during the day over and over – “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). I’ve come to believe even in a week’s time with Joseph that his attitude during his entrance into the world is much like his personality – even-keeled, laidback, and wanting to know what the big hurry is. He is content to snuggle (and nurse) all the time. Oh, how I love and adore this little man already.

I recently read a beautiful article from The National Catholic Weekly. It moved me so very deeply as one article focused on a meditation on birth and the spiritual life.* When referring to birth, the author writes “…it does not allow diversions; it is more glorious and messy, more trying and transformative than a person might suspect. Basically, it is a lot like prayer.” She goes on later to write that “one reason that few people take seriously the physical reality of giving birth as a teaching ground for receiving grace is that sanitized hospital births, with epidurals at the ready, change the experience of giving birth from a gift received to an event managed.” Yes, I realize that’s a very strong statement, but one I’ve come to believe myself. (And, as she points out, women must tell their own stories – especially when it comes to complicated or tragic ends.) While pain brings discomfort and fear, I think my greater fear was always missing the opportunity to feel this amazing rite of passage. To be fully immersed in the moment that my children entered the world. To understand what it is that women all over the world and through the ages have experienced. To think of it as something to “get through” instead of something in which to deeply plunge scared me. Natural birth required the greatest of me – trust, surrender, and awareness in full. “How different it would be if we saw childbirth as something to receive, rather than something to soldier through” she wrote.

Psalm 139:13-15 (NIV) says “For you created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place.”

I’m no bible scholar, but I do love to read up on the back-story on passages. It’s amazing to find out that the phrase “wonderfully made” is actually defined as “to be beyond one’s power” and “to be difficult to understand” meaning that we are made with so much complexity and extraordinary detail that only God could truly know us. Also, when the passage refers to our “frame”, it’s referring to our “power, bones, and might” – our entire being. And the “secret place” to which the passage refers is defined as somewhere mystical and deep within the earth. I’m moved by these thoughts of sweet little Joseph being knit together within me, so complex that even I cannot comprehend him, and so divinely put together that it’s more mysterious than the center of the earth.

The choice to have a natural birth – and God’s gift that there were no complications requiring me to choose/have otherwise, I believe, allowed me to enter into the sacred process of attaching to my beautiful children. I do believe that childbirth is as the author writes “a transformative experience, the edge of life and death, the play of wind and breath, the shock of pain and joy. It is where a woman is given a new gift: a new relationship with God, her husband and their child – practice in receiving grace.”

* Excerpts from “A Fiery Gift” by Susan Windley-Daoust

Water

I have always loved the sound of water in its various forms. Well, water in motion against surfaces. Like when the timbre of cold water running and hitting a hard surface turns thinner, brighter, and higher pitched upon getting hot. What a reminder that you have received the luxurious gift of getting a hot bath. And the sound of a swishing dishwasher sings you to slumber reminding you that you had food to eat and people gathered around your table with whom to share it. I could go on and on and on.

So much of my life revolves around water, honestly. In fact, there are four pretty regular occurrences in my life-routine with my children: (1) cooking, (2) washing dishes, (3) doing laundry, and (4) bathing them.

And so, I’ve been looking in the scriptures lately on water and what I can know as I feel water on my hands and as I pour water on the heads of my babies in the evenings.

Jacob and Rachel began after a drink from the well, really. Seas were split, floods covered, people were baptized and healed in water, and, of course, there was Jesus’ first miracle of changing water into wine. People have argued this passage as a support for drinking. To me, it’s like all Kingdom things – there is much more than meets the eye. Would Jesus have really made this huge spectacle and performed his first of all signs and miracles to okay a beer here and there? Grab a Woodchuck and chill out! Again, there is much more, I believe. Water is not just water. Water is God’s instrument.

C.S. Lewis says “Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of nature.” He says that this is what Jesus is doing: He is overleaping the elements of time, of growth, gathering, crushing and fermenting. He takes water---an inorganic, non-living, commonplace substance---and without a word, without a gesture, without any laying on of hands, in utter simplicity, the water becomes wine, an organic liquid, a product of fermentation, belonging to the realm of life. Thus he demonstrated his marvelous ability to master the processes of nature.

As a mother, it is easy for me to see my role as functional, mundane. Where is the “all things new” that scripture talks about when every day starts just as it ends? And then, as if I’m Phil in Groundhog Day, it all repeats. It’s always hard to see things when you’re in them, you know? And yet, Mary herself, raised her children and would’ve been doing these day-to-day tasks too. Washing, cleaning, feeding, running hands in water. Day in, day out. And God chose to use a homemaker – the one who wipes noses and bottoms to bring His son into the world. Jesus Himself began enveloped in the water of a womb.

Brother Lawrence reminds us “we ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.” What I am seeing is that I, like Mary, have the capacity to see the Son of God birthed anew daily in my home. Little hands break bread daily. I have the opportunity to wash fruit, wash dishes, wash diapers, wash walls, and see that Jesus is overleaping the elements again. He is taking the inorganic and making something out of nothing. Will I see it? Will I see that Jesus is washing away our sins? Washing over us with His love? I will have many opportunities, just praying for the eyes to see, ears to hear… hands to feel.

Adding a leaf

This weekend we had to add a leaf in our table. Our paint-splotched, seat-stained, fork-pocked table. We had the good fortune of having some of our favorite visitors here. My college roommate and her beautiful family stayed with us as we celebrated our 10-year college reunion. Gulp. 10 years!!! I use the term “celebrate” quite loosely. If you call standing on the curb and chasing a 3-yr old and 1-yr old out of the crowd while on campus of one’s alma mater celebrating, then that’s what I did.

Roomie and I recalled days where we were each settled in our little twin beds in our little dorm rooms and having our nightly little conversations. Many of the conversations revolved around our dreams for the future. I’ve spent some of my best days around dorm room tables, less-than-gourmet-commons-area campus food tables, Roomie’s kitchen table, and, now, here at ours thinking about those dreams. Thinking about life.

As we separated the table pieces and wedged in another leaf, and as we wrote notes and placed them in our gratitude jar that centers that wood-top, we thanked God for the husbands and children that, now, a decade-plus later, fill the table.

My Grandmother's Table

I love the sound of ice clinking in their glasses. Any glass will do, but my favorites are my grandmother’s thick red ones in which she would serve iced tea. She would let the sun bake the tea out back on her picnic table and then, as we drank it over a meal, she would periodically get up just to refill our ice. I can still remember the way that her hands looked as she scooped handfuls of ice out – long skinny fingers (I have the same ones) with her three rings that would move side to side and that were never lined up sitting inside of one another. I always liked the way that looked and sometimes move my three bands slightly askew just because of it.

We would all sit down together during a meal – there were never people sitting on the floor or on a couch, but my Grandmother would make sure that she’d prepared places for each diner and she always knew exactly how to cook dishes for the right amount of time and in the right order so that they’d all end up warm together.

The part of the meal that still stands out to me the most though is when we would pray God’s blessing on it and on our time together. Now, some people make light of the prayer before the meal, but I love that pause when we’re all there and praying together before a meal. We’re gathered hand in hand and making ourselves wait while the fragrance of fresh baked bread and creamy mashed potatoes hits us in waves.

Always, and I mean always, after a prayer when we would all un-bow our heads, my grandmother’s eyes would be watery and a bit red. Each time I would look for her eyes at the end of the prayer to see if it she would prove that true, and each time she did. When I was little I wondered what she was thinking about. I wondered if she missed her husband who had passed away when my dad and his siblings were just teenagers. I wondered if it had something to do with even just closing her eyes. Only as I’ve become and adult, a wife, and a mother can I understand. I do the same thing. It’s the same reason that I can hardly make it through a church service (any church service) without shedding tears for God’s goodness and for community, for my family and my friends, for my husband and my children. I’m simply overwhelmed in my heart and it leaks out my eyes. Pausing to pray and take in the fact that we’ve all, from our various walks of life, made it back into Grandmother’s kitchen to sit around the table laughing, praying, and eating was too good to put into words. Tears were the only way to “describe” it. Feel it. Thank God for it.

I love the way that my grandmother appreciated the simple things – homemade quilts on which we would have slumber parties, keeping the doors unlocked (sometimes I would try to lock them when she wasn’t looking… I mean, I was a city girl), listening to us practice our hymn-playing on the piano, not turning the window air-conditioner on in the summer (much to our chagrin and to our sneaking in to sleep under that window unit), and reading the clues and participating in our scavenger hunts and plays. I remember one times when we passed a “Big Lots” and I pointed it out, she called it “big lots of junk” and I know that she would hate the fact that I can spend an hour in the dollar store and a day at IKEA. She didn’t clutter her house with knick knacks which would overwhelm the house, but let the really important things be the first thing you’d see when you’d walk in – pictures of her family, beautiful furniture, organized shelves and closets, dry cleaning bags and tags over her hanging dress clothes that told me how much she respected and appreciated the things she owned, and just enough dishes that it was easy for all of us to help in the kitchen because we knew right where to get things out and right where to put them away. We always did the dishes together after the meal before we sat down with more ice tea. One washer, one drier, and one putter-awayer.

My favorite memories though have to do with the afternoons at her house when we would start baking bread and while it mixed in the bread machine we would listen to the churning while we played canasta, waiting the whole time for the next part of the process. And then, when it was time, we would get it out, roll it open, spread the raisins and cinnamon on it, form it to fit as a loaf in a bread pan and then let it rest and rise some more. While it rose we would play dominoes with pennies. And then, when it was time, we would put the risen bread into the oven and while the bread baked and sent the smell of pure goodness into the whole house, we would sit at the kitchen table playing Kings in the Corner with one eye on the cards and one eye peering through into the lit-up oven window while we tried to keep our bottoms on the chairs in anticipation of the delicious bread. And then, when it was time, we would get it out of the oven to cool for a bit and Grandmother would send my brother down into the basement to get the homemade strawberry jelly in the little white tupperwares out of her extra freezer and she would get her electric knife out to carve perfectly straight pieces of bread. And then, when it was time, we would put the butter and cold jam onto our warm bread and taste a bite of heaven.

I can’t explain how much I miss my grandmother and how much I miss those times together, but I know that someday, when it is time, we will gather around the table again and, for now, I will keep tearing up at prayer times and try to keep my bottom on the chair in anticipation of all that is to come.