Category Archives: Parenting
Raphael Now
At two weeks Raphael is finally off all tubes. He’s breathing on his own and taking a bottle. His bodily functions are all working. He’s focusing his eyes.
Raphael on Monday, November 27th, 2017
He is still on medicine for seizures, but it is controlling them. His heart showed a flutter over the weekend, but I haven’t heard any more about that. But please keep the prayers going. About five days after he was born the neurologist called and told Raphael’s parents that he would not have known the second brain scan was of the same baby as the first, it was so much improved. When we care and pray for one another, miracles can happen. Thank you all for your caring prayers.
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Giving Thanks for Baby Raphael and the Healing Already in Process
Hello, all my wonderfully supportive friends on line. Here is a Thanksgiving update on our new baby great-grandson, Raphael.
This is what his dad, our grandson, father of eight year old Eisley and six day old Raphael, wrote today:
“I always joke about the one little gray hair on my chin being named Eisley, but this guy may have already earned a whole head full this week. Raphael was born Wednesday November 15th. Despite a perfectly healthy pregnancy he became distressed during delivery and was in arrest and had to be resuscitated upon birth. He has been in NICU ever since, but has made amazing progress. He is currently still having intermittent seizures, but the neurologist called yesterday in almost disbelief that the second EEG (brain scan) could be the same child because it was so good. He is also breathing on his own now without a ventilator. This weekend was full of milestones that otherwise might have been taken for granted: he opened his eyes for the first time, his first dirty diaper, and a little sneeze. We are thankful for each moment. We have been hanging on every bit of good news the last 5 days and have received so much love and support from out family and friends. Paula and I are so thankful for all of you.”
Thank you for all your prayers. Please keep them going. I totally believe they matter not just to me, but to baby Raphael already. I will update as we learn more about our Raphael. Eileen
Love Makes Us Vulnerable
Love makes us vulnerable. But it’s a love that enables us to feel another’s pain, not a love that enables anyone’s destructive behavior. Suffering because we love is what Jesus did for us and he showed us there is a resurrection not only from suffering, but from death itself. If we aren’t willing to suffer because of loving, we end up alone without love. That’s the definition of hell.
It May Be Easier to Die for Someone, than Live for Them
What a week! My husband’s supposedly simple medical procedure with a one night stay ended up in a panic, two operations, and six days in the hospital so far.
I had an interesting, but guilty, thought today after spending 24 hours around the clock for five days in one room with my husband of almost 59 years.
……It may be easier to die for someone, than to live for them…………..
Nurse Norman, I am not. Quiet, I am not. Inclined to wait for introverts to answer Doctors and nurses’ questions, I am not. Able to wiggle and struggle up from a low couch and a deep sleep quickly and cheerfully, I am not. Used to impatient orders, no longer disguised as polite requests, I am not. Patient and acquiescent when very tired and told to do things I consider silly, I am not. Anyway, you get the picture. Thanking God that our children have come to the rescue of a reasonably happy marriage under serious stress!
I really do understand the why of my husband’s side of this, since I have been on the other side of this equation. But understanding and dealing graciously with someone you love’s responses to stress at the same time as trying to deal with your own, is a new challenge for us. Somehow in the past, it seemed to work out so that we got to take turns. Now simultaneous health issues of old age are becoming more frequent and that’s a whole new ball game. We’ve done so well in the past at keeping our sense of humor, that during one ER visit, the nurse said, “You do realize this is an emergency?” We laughed and said, “Yes, but we do this so often now, we’ve learned to use humor to get us through our crises.”
Five days of coming through a totally new life threatening experience and still not understanding why it happened, plus realizing the doctors didn’t know either, is not only frustrating, it’s scary. And one doctor wanting to send us home having to cope with unfamiliar and unappealing procedures that don’t seem important to him, because they are no longer life threatening, doesn’t really make the stress less.
Happily, Julian is on the mend. Our children living in the area were with us when this experience became traumatic and now the out of state ones have come in town for the weekend. So, I am home unpacking, running wash, thawing a roast, freezing some of the vegetable soup I made the day before we left for the surgery, organizing, and venting on face book, while our children take turns being there at the hospital with their exhausted and frustrated dad. Hopefully he will be coming home tomorrow and I will be able to welcome him with a peaceful spirit, a cheerful heart, and a rested body.
Years ago, there were times when I seriously questioned the wisdom of an impractical klutz like me having five children. But boy, am I celebrating it now.
Daffodils: A Sign of Hope:
My heart sank and I felt a wave of nausea as I read the thermometer. One hundred and four degrees.
“Oh, God. Not again please,” I whispered, as I coaxed medicine into my feverish son. While I was fixing him juice, the telephone rang insistently until I finally answered it.
“Eileen,” a neighbor said, “you need to get over there to my granny’s old home place and get yourself some of those daffodils. They’re just coming up. If you plant them now, they might go on and bloom for you next month.”
“I can’t take Tommy out today, Mae. He’s running fever again. Besides are you sure it’s not stealing??
“Naw. There are thousands of them now, all from the ones my granny planted years ago. They need thinning out, so they’ll keep blooming. I’ll come over and watch Tommy for you.”
“Well……Okay,” I answered hesitantly. “I’m just putting him down for a nap. Come in about twenty minutes.”
I sighed as I hung up. I didn’t really feel like going out in the cold January weather, but I couldn’t think of any more excuses. I picked up my three year old son and began to rock him to sleep. His face was flushed and his thin little body felt hot against mine. Poor Tommy. I hope this isn’t going to be another long siege, I thought silently.
“I love you, little one,” I said softly.
“Love you,” he whispered hoarsely, patting my face gently as his eyes began to close.
As I carefully put Tommy in his bed, I heard my neighbor come quietly in the front door.
“Hi, Mae. Thanks for coming. He’s restless, but I think he’ll sleep,” I greeted her. “But I don’t have anything to put dirt in. How will I carry the daffodils?”
“They don’t need dirt. Just put some newspapers down in the back of your station wagon. Get yourself a lot. They’ll look great along your driveway and out front of the house.”
A few minutes later I gasped and shivered when the cold wind hit me, as I got out of the car. I wished fervently that I hadn’t agreed to do this. I started digging as quickly as I could, eyes tearing from the wind. I dug for several minutes, then thought about giving up and going home. Each time I’d begin to straighten up, I’d see another thick clump just barely pushing through the frozen ground, seeming to beckon to me. I kept going until I had almost filled the back of my stationwagon with hundreds of bare bulbs.
When I finally got back and sent my neighbor home with thanks, I went to check on Tommy. He tossed restlessly in his sleep and when I touched his forehead, it almost scalded my hand. Tommy had taken a turn for the worse, so I forgot all about the daffodil bulbs, as I spent the next two weeks caring for him and making trips to the specialist fifty miles away.
With trembling voice, I finally admitted to the doctor how frightened I was, when Tommy’s fever ran off the thermometer and there was no way to know how high it was.
“Don’t try to bring it down below 104 degrees,” he advised me. “If you do, it will shoot back up fast and that can cause a seizure. He catches everything because the hole in his heart valve lets blood circulate without being purified by the lungs. We’ll try another antibiotic. If he has a virus, it won’t help, but we can’t risk this going into pneumonia. We’ll consider surgery when he’s four, but we need to get him stronger first. Bring him back in two days, if he’s not better.”
I drove us home through a flood of tears. Tommy whimpered listlessly, his eyes too bright and his skin too pale under the flush of fever. My spirits matched the bleak January landscape.
I spent the next two days and nights struggling to keep his fever down. Sometimes he lay in my arms limply. Other times when the fever shot beyond the measure of the thermometer, he would chatter brightly, using words far more complex than his normal vocabulary, reminding me of the possibility of brain damage.
Two days passed and his fever was still shooting back up off the thermometer. Trying yet again to bring it down slowly, I put him in a tepid bath, that seemed to hurt his hot skin and make him shake with chills. He looked like pictures I had seen of war orphans with their ribs showing and their sunken eyes pleading. He looked at me like he was asking mutely, “Why are you doing this? Why are you hurting me? Don’t you love me?”
As I wrapped him in wet sheets and sat rocking him, both of us were sobbing. I even yelled out loud, “Where are you, God? I pray and pray and you do nothing. This is an innocent child. Why do you let him suffer? What kind of God are you? A cruel God? An impotent God? Where is the loving God of Jesus? Have you abandoned us?”
As, I exhausted my anger, memories of God’s many gifts of grace in my life flooded my mind and I began to pray again, “You are my God, the only God I have. I have seen Your awesome glory in the beauty of Your creation and I have felt the depth of Your love through Your son, Jesus. So, I, like Paul, will try to praise you at all times, in joy and in sorrow. Right now, I can’t feel it, but with my will I praise you. I thank you for the many times you have blessed me and for the grace you have poured into my heart even in my darkest moments. But, please God, help me know you are with us in this. I feel abandoned.”
Then I began to dress Tommy for another trip to Nashville. As I carried him to the car, I was stopped in my tracks by an incredible sight.
Hundreds of bright yellow daffodils in full bloom completely filled the back of my car. It looked like Easter morning! I felt like God had put His arms around us and whispered, “See, I am with you always. Don’t despair.”
I drove to the doctor’s singing hymns of praise.
The next post: God is in the Timing continues the story of the journey of Tommy’s heart defect.
Fairy Princess Delusions: Part Three of Law and Pleasure.
Luckily for me of the fairy princess delusions, my first child was incredibly resilient in spite of my complete lack of mothering instincts. I woke up in the middle of the night, late in my pregnancy, in a cold sweat from the sudden realization that a baby was not like a puppy that could be taken back if it didn’t work out well.
My husband was in the army and we were stationed far from family, but my mother-in-law paid for me to have a baby nurse for the first two weeks at home. (Perhaps the scorched white shirts were a clue that I might need some help.)
After sixteen hours of labor, Chris had been delivered by caesarean section, so fortunately both Chris and I were safely surrounded by experts at the hospital for the first week. Then, when we came home, the baby nurse was a large motherly woman with more than a dozen children of her own. Since I was recuperating from surgery, she pretty much did all the nitty-gritty and just brought me a clean sweet smelling baby to cuddle and nurse. I should have been watching and practicing for when we were going to be on our own. Fairy princess delusions die hard.
After the baby nurse left, the first time I bathed Chris, I propped the baby book with the instructions next to the little tub. Reading while holding a wiggling baby and trying to wash tiny body parts quickly had me in tears from a sense of total inadequacy. Never having changed a poopy diaper, I had no warning that I had a strong gag reflex to unpleasant odors or that when cleaning up vomit, I would add to it. I began to wonder if maybe I should have been a History teacher after all.
Eventually this will tie into the theme of Law and Pleasure.
New, Short, Self-Explanatory Version of the Traditional Ten
Since our society seems to have rejected rules of behavior, I’d like to pass on some guidelines:
1. If you don’t want the one or ones you love doing it, DON”T DO IT! 2. If you don’t want your grandparents knowing about it, DON’T DO IT! 3. If you don’t want your present or future children knowing about it, DON’T DO IT! 4. If you don’t want it on the front page of the local paper, DON”T DO IT!
5. If everyone doing this will make the world a worse place for your children and grandchildren, DON’T DO IT!
6. If you don’t want to spend your nights in old age overwhelmed with regret about it, DON’T DO IT!
7. If you don’t want others doing it to you or those you love, DON’T DO IT!
Let me put this another way:
A. What so ever you do now, will come back to bite you on your ass! B. What may be great fun after drinking four beers or smoking pot will make you feel like the fool you were – sooner than you think. C. The world has become very very tiny. What so ever you do in secret will eventually become public knowledge. D. Even senility will not protect you from the embarrassment and regret of flash backs in old age. E. God forgives us, but he doesn’t take away all the natural consequences of bad choices. F. The people who love you may want to forgive and forget, but may not succeed in time for it to matter.
I am almost eighty. While these things may not be self-evident, I KNOW them to be true.
The Blessings Beyond Measure of Loving a Handicapped Child
The gift of learning to love unconditionally.
The gift of realizing that life is about becoming the person we alone were created to be.
The gift of learning to want all others to succeed in their own journey.
The gift of sheer joy over small, but difficult accomplishments.
The gift of living in the present.
The gift of freedom from image and others’ opinions.
The gift of your best self being called forth.
The gift of patience.
The gift of tenderness toward all who are vulnerable.
The gift of humane values.
The gift of courage.
The gift of seeing beauty in those different from yourself.
Anyone who has not been blessed with the opportunity to love a handicapped person, needs to attend a Special Olympics to experience these gifts.
The moment of pure grace for me was when one of the children fell down in his race and the other runners all turned back to help him up. And every child was thrilled with finishing the race no matter in what order they came to the finish line. Each parent cheered equally hard for every child in the race, not just for their own.
The greatest blessing is realizing that life is not about winning, but about loving.
This Life: Appetizers Only
During a Jungian inner journey in my late fifties, I had a very vivid dream. My husband and I were in a dining room on a boat on a river cruise. They brought us a series of small appetizers one at a time, which my husband ate with great pleasure, but I ignored while waiting for the main course. At some point, I realized there would be no main course. I was furious and went searching the boat for another dining room. When I found one, they only brought me an apple, which I threw against the wall in frustration. I went out on the front deck of the boat to see where we were going just as it began to go through a dark tunnel which became so small that I had to hunch down as we went through it. I felt total despair at first, but became hopeful when I saw some light at the end of the tunnel. Since then I have learned to delight in and treasure the small joys of life, while accepting the pain of failures and disappointments that are part and parcel of being an imperfect human being in an imperfect world. I used to live focused on the future with its possibilities, missing both the joys and the grace available in the difficulties of the present. At seventy-nine, I am pretty much running out of future! But since that dream, I have had many experiences, both joyful and heartbreaking that have become grace for me. Life is about spiritual growth from living in awareness and finding meaning in the whole reality of the journey, not ego or worldly gains or idealized scenarios.
Heartbreaks that have brought grace:
The pain of loss filling me with hate, but persistence in prayer freeing me to let go and accept not only loss, but mine and others’ flawed humanity.
Letting go of past ways of experiencing tenderness and intimacy and becoming open to new ways of feeling deeply cherished even in my helplessness and physical pain.
Accepting that one of age’s delights, sharing laughter with the one I love the most, has an expiration date, because it brings on debilitating coughing spasms due to his progressive lung disease, then finding peace instead in quiet moments of just holding one another.
Letting go of the need for understanding, so I can begin to love instead of need.
Sadly recognizing my own vulnerabilities in the generations following me and knowing the pain these will bring them, but beginning to see that God can bring them through to joy as he has me time and time again.
Knowing that life will not get easier, but believing that grace will continue to bring the fruit of love from both heartbreak and joy.
Appetizers on the journey this Christmas season:
The tree full of cardinals outside our windows, children’s laughter, babies’ smiles, hugs from my husband Julian, people being kind and friendly in a crowded grocery store right before Christmas, Americans’ amazing kindness to the handicapped, Christmas decorations, Julian sitting quietly in the dark enjoying his Christmas village, both Leonard Cohen’s Halleluja and Handel’s Messiah, getting to do the sermon from the molehill at our worship service on Christmas day, our son Mike’s photos and delightful descriptions of his students at the Cambodian orphanage for children born HIV positive, our son Chris getting an interesting new job and so many people in Dickson telling me how wonderful he is, my suicidal friend now ministering to others, seeing friends find new hope in the person of Jesus without having to buy into the hang ups of any denomination, Tylenol taking away all my pain for a while, my loyal friend Margie being a constant in my life, my sister-in-law’s mouth-watering fudge cake, my first cup of coffee in the morning, Christmas memories on face book, our son Steve’s humor and willingness to take care of us Aged Parents in bizarre experiences in foreign airports, all of our grandchildren and great grandchildren, grandson Josh and wife Paula and seven year old Eisley’s adventurous spirits, grandsons Jordan and Jake’s caring hearts and courage, Nativity scenes, granddaughter Hadley so happy wearing her Unicorn Onesie at Norman Family Christmas, granddaughter Emma and her BFF talking and laughing non-stop in the back seat while I drove them to the mall, getting freed from my temporary insanity of hating someone by saying a prayer for love and peace each time while writing it on over a hundred Christmas cards, our teen-aged granddaughter Sophie hugging Julian whenever she sees him and laughing and discussing great books with nephew David, the HO HO HO’s – my friends who are not afraid to color outside the lines, my very own fun super drummer boy great-grandson Aaron, our daughter-in-law Molly’s incredible ability to continue to love even those that bring her heartbreak, our daughter Julie’s infectious laughing attacks that we call “Julie moments”, eight year old Bella’s unfettered enthusiasm for life, memories of waking up to a snow covered world, grown granddaughter Carmen’s resilience and lightning quick sense of humor, the delight of making vegetable soup to share with sick friends and the poor, becoming friends with our fascinating and loving cousin Mary Eleanor, my ninety-four year old friend, Barbara’s children coming to see her in shifts from all over America this Christmas season, grown up great grandson Ryan still having good memories of going downtown with me before the stores opened to earn nickels by sounding out words on signs, some people actually responding to my blogs, being able to keep up with my best friend from High School and College on line, getting to know interesting and friendly people in Canada, England, Nigeria, France, New Zealand and other countries across the globe through the internet, my Study Club women friends, who have miraculously bonded across huge differences in religion, politics, age, background, economics and interests.
These are just a few parts of the wonderful collage of my life that bring me seasons of joy in what sometimes momentarily seems like the “cesspool” of life.
Unrealistic Expectations>Disillusionment> Bitterness> Hate
We all have wounds. It is a feeling of loneliness that lurks behind our successes, a feeling of uselessness that hides under the praise we receive ……that makes us grab onto people and expect from them an affection and love they cannot give. If we want people to give us what only God can give, we become a heavy burden. Quote from Henri Nouwen’s “A Spirituality of Living.”
This has hit me where I live today. I have two daughter-in-laws and a daughter that have always seemed to be Super Women to me. When one daughter-in-law, who has spent most of the last 18 years being an awesome advocate and mother for her children with disabilities and a House Beautiful wife, recently reached the end of her endurance with her marriage, I found myself filled with raging anger at her. An anger that felt like hate. I didn’t understand where it was coming from. I have admired her and had complete faith that if anyone could find a way to make her children’s lives happy and productive, she could. Since divorce means she must work full time, it seemed like betrayal of her children and even of those that love them like we do. And when I found myself unable to help in any significant way because of health issues of aging, I hated myself also.
I know from study and many life experiences that unrealistic expectations of other people embitter those having them and destroy relationships.
None of us is God. We are not miracle workers. And we are not able to love unconditionally as long as we expect ourselves or others to walk on water. It’s an imperfect world filled with imperfect people.
To expect otherwise is to become both embittered and a burden to people already carrying as much as they can.
My most destructive trait is a blind idealism unfettered by reality that leads to disillusionment and hate. God knows our limits. Some are built in and others beaten into us. I must learn to live within human limits, my own and others’. And trust that God can and will accomplish His plans, not mine.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 