Birth story haikus

I am limited to one-hand typing while holding the new baby, so how about if you all do all the work for this post? How about this: Let’s do birth story haikus!

I love hearing birth stories, but they’re always so long — I don’t think I’ve ever been able to capture one of mine in less than 2,000 words. I thought it might be fun to put them in haiku form (if you need a refresher, it’s a 5-7-5 syllable scheme). Here are two of mine:

BABY #1:
Natural childbirth:
this is gonna be great, right?
Doctor Bradley lies.

—-

BABY #5:
O epidural,
You have failed me once again.
Uh-oh, time to push.

What’s your birth story haiku? Feel free to do it for one, some or all of your births. Thanks in advance for my amusement for the afternoon.

You don’t know how crazy you are until you get a personal shopper

This is not the post that was supposed to be here today. You see, I’d been using my free time to dabble at a reflection about recognizing Christ in others in the modern world. It was shaping up to be halfway holy and interesting. But then I had an idea!

My friend Hallie Lord recently started a thriving little personal shopping business, and I had a flash of inspiration to offer her a trade: She could take the time to do a super quick and easy session with me, and in exchange I could mention it in one of my community bulletin board posts or give her some temporary ad space or something to help her promote it. What a nice tradeoff for a short, easy, fun bit of work for her!

“The great thing for you is that I am totally low maintenance,” I said in my pitch to her. “I’m completely detached about clothes and stuff. I’ll be the easiest client you’ve ever worked with!” [Cue ominous, foreboding music here.]

She agreed to the deal. And the plan couldn’t have been more simple: I wanted her to help me pick a cute but cozy ensemble for me to wear during the three days that I’ll have to be in the hospital after the baby’s born. Since I’m always in a ton of pictures during that time, I wanted something equally comfortable yet cuter than my usual oversized t-shirt and sweats. Those days in the hospital can be stressful, and having a snazzy outfit to look forward to wearing might help boost my spirits.

So we got on the phone for the consultation. It was supposed to take 30 minutes, after which I could get back to writing my post, and Hallie could get back to…not dealing with people like me.

Let me just say: If you ever want to get a gauge of how neurotic, issue-riddled and/or bizarre you really are, schedule a consultation with a personal shopper.

Hallie’s first clue that her day was about to take a turn for the absurd was when I casually threw out the following caveat: “Keep in mind I have a 37-inch inseam, so normal pants won’t fit me. My arms are the length of some circus side show freaks, so sleeveless is out. I wear size 12 shoes. I have a pear-shaped figure and have the complexion of the Pillsbury Doughboy. I need a complete outfit that’s as stylish as it is comfortable and is conducive to nursing. Other than that, I don’t have any specific requirements.”

Hallie was undeterred. In fact, the consummate professional, she thought she might start our session by saying a few words to make her newest client feel good about herself. “Hey, Jen, look at this — Zappos carries women’s shoes up to size 15!” she reported with glee, clearly proud of her discovery. “You always make those comments about having Sasquatch feet, no women have bigger feet than you and all that, but here is proof that you’re wrong! Your feet are downright petite compared to some gals’!”

I wasn’t sure how to break it to her. “Hallie. Did you notice anything about those size 15 shoes in the Women’s department? All the leopard skin, the platform heels, the free Lady Gaga poster with purchase?”

“I’m not sure what you’re saying…”

“Very few ‘women’ with an F in the gender box on their birth certificates wear size 15.”

“You mean…”

“I mean it’s me and the drag queens, Hallie. I really do have the biggest, most gargantuan feet of anyone without a Y chromosome.”

Her attempt at cheering me up now officially an epic fail, Hallie changed the subject cheerfully to announce that she’d already gotten the pants out of the way. “Check your email. I managed to find these great yoga pants, in a tall length, exactly your color, and they’re on a 50%-off sale to boot!”

I clicked on the link. Indeed, to the untrained eye, they would appear to be exactly what I was looking for: Ultra-comfortable, polished, and even long enough. But then I saw the problem. “They don’t have pockets.”

“Oh…pockets are…really important to you?”

“I like to wear ear plugs when I sleep, because I don’t like to hear extraneous noise. And I keep my ear plugs in my pockets. The other day I accidentally put on pajama pants without pockets, and at one point I went to slide my ear plugs into my pocket, but it wasn’t there!”

There was a moment of silence in which you could almost hear the realization descending upon Hallie that this consultation was going to be neither short nor easy nor fun. Finally she suggested we approach it from a different angle, and started talking to me about getting a maxi dress. She pointed out that these often work well for tall women with my proportions, since they define the upper half of your body and let the material gracefully flow over the bottom half.

I made the mistake of forwarding the link to my husband. Normally he does a “duck and cover” maneuver when I bring up fashion, but he surprised me by weighing in with a firm opinion on the subject. “That’s a muumuu,” he wrote.

“J. says this is a muumuu,” I reported to Hallie.

“No, it’s a maxi dress. Muumuus aren’t fitted at the top.”

I typed up her reply to my husband, then read his reply aloud to Hallie: “He says: ‘They always say that. I lived through the 70′s, where an entire generation of women was tricked into wearing tents by being told they were the latest style from Hawaii. Don’t be fooled!’”

The three of us then engaged in a lengthy and detailed debate, made a little awkward by me typing and reading emails to and from my husband, about what, exactly, the difference is between muumuus, maxi dresses, and tents. My husband refused to back down on his stance that all three are the same thing, despite reporting that he was laughing so hard he could hardly see to type. We eventually cut him out of the loop when he said that if it were true that these dresses were actually in style, he was going to start a clothing line using nothing more than burlap sacks and a Bedazzler.

“What do you think of the maxi dress I picked out?” Hallie asked.

“I actually think it’s perfect for my figure. It would look great on me.”

“Oh, wonderful! I can send you –”

“Except that it reminds me of hippies. I hate hippies.”

“What?”

“Well, I guess ‘hate’ is a strong word. It’s just that I’ve had these experiences…” and from there I proceeded to unload all my emotional baggage involving my various negative interactions with Austin’s hippie population, ending with a story about the time at Whole Foods that I got chastised for referring to a type of cookie as Gingerbread Men, when they were in fact Gingerbread People.

“So you don’t want the maxi dress…even though you agree that it looks great and meets all your needs…because it reminds you of bad experiences with hippies?”

“Exactly.” I said, quickly adding, “Normally I just think all of this stuff in my head when I shop.”

We took a break while I went to relieve my babysitter (and Hallie probably went to pour herself something strong to drink). When we resumed, she tried a different angle.

“I found some beautiful earrings. If we get a shirt that –”

“My earrings are stuck in my ears.”

Stunned silence. “What?”

“I got incredibly tight backs to keep my diamond studs from falling out, but now they won’t come off. Do I risk breaking the earrings to get them off with pliers? I haven’t decided what to do about it. I need to analyze it some more.”

“So, umm, wow. How long have the earrings been stuck?”

“Five years.”

If Hallie’s Will-to-Live-O-Meter had been waning over the past hour, it now plummeted to zero. If I were to turn my entire blog into a redirect to her business page, it would surely not even come close to being worth it.

Two hours of phone calls later, we’d meandered to the subject of swim suits, and Hallie, perhaps forgetting that it’s no longer Lent, signed herself up for the penitential act of helping me find a swimsuit to my specifications. After pointing out that the only option that technically meets all my requirements is a swim burka, she found an alternative that would bring me a little closer to the 21st century.

“I like it…” I began.

“Oh, great! And at that price –”

“Except that the pattern is too colorful. It might give off the vibe that I’m at the pool to have fun, whereas I only go when my kids get in heated arguments about what the world outside of our living room might look like. When I’m at the pool I try to find the darkest shaded corner and sit really still so nobody will see me. This suit might draw too much attention.”

Oddly enough, Hallie had something come up that demanded that she get off the phone immediately (she said something about the house being on fire and an impending phone-eating zombie attack that required her to hang up immediately and could perhaps mean that she’d never, ever be able to talk on the phone again).

But then, a few hours later, she did it. In my inbox I found the most awesome inspiration board for my “hospital chic” look, complete with links to where I could buy each piece, in my size, at prices I could afford! Check it out:

I’ll post pictures of me wearing the completed look from the hospital!

And so, here is the promised link to Hallie’s personal shopping page. If you would like help finding the perfect style for you, complete with real outfits for specific occasions, you’ve found your gal. She is, without question, the best in the business. As my husband commented (still laughing from the Great Muumuu Debate of 2011), “Hallie has a very special gift that she can work with people like you.”

(If you would like to read of another time I sent Hallie blog traffic as the only possible way to repay her for a horrible situation that I foisted upon her, you can read all about that here.)

Yaya meets St. Anthony

My mother-in-law, Yaya, is Baptist. Well, currently she attends Joel Osteen’s church, but the official denomination that she would claim to be a part of (and in which she raised my husband) is the Southern Baptist church.

Friends sometimes ask if there’s been any tension between us and Yaya since my husband and I converted to Catholicism in 2007, but there really hasn’t been. Occasionally my husband will try to start a good-natured debate with her about doctrinal differences, but she’s never interested: “I love Jesus and y’all love Jesus and Jesus loves us and that’s all I really need to know,” she once said.

Like in every other area of life, the details of Christian doctrine are of little importance to her — in fact, I’m not sure if she notices them at all. She is so intensely focused on the big picture that she doesn’t have time to mess around with the small things. (For example, when she unloads the dishwasher when she’s visiting our house, she takes the silverware basket and just dumps the whole thing into the drawer. “I’m not gonna sit there and sort knives and forks when I’ve got grandchildren I could be hugging and kissing!” she says.)

Nevertheless, as a gesture of respect, I rarely bring up the areas of Christian doctrine where Baptists and Catholics differ. In general, I figure there’s no need to wade into controversial territory and risk causing tension between us.

But then Yaya lost some important paperwork. And I decided to tell her about St. Anthony.

My phone rang one afternoon, and as soon as I said “hello?” I heard Yaya’s voice shouting, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO DO I’VE LOOKED EVERYWHERE FOR THIS STUPID THING AND IT’S JUST LOST AND IT’S DRIVING ME CRAZY!” She eventually calmed down enough to explain that she’d been helping an elderly friend who’d been caught up in a scam, and she’d borrowed some critical documents to contact state officials on his behalf. Now they were lost, and her friend desperately needed them.

I wasn’t sure how she’d react to this, but I decided to risk it: “Have you ever heard of the St. Anthony prayer?” I asked.

She said she hadn’t. I proceeded to tell her about the Catholic tradition (with a lower-case “t”) that Anthony of Padua prays for people who have lost items. I recounted some c-r-a-z-y moments I’ve had after saying the St. Anthony prayer, including the time my husband’s cell phone had been lost for a week. We’d turned the house upside down and had finally given up, though a new phone wasn’t in the budget. I was thinking about it in RCIA class one night, and asked St. Anthony to pray that it turned up. Not five minutes later my phone rang. I didn’t answer it since I was in class, but later I heard the voicemail from my mom telling me that the kids just found the cell phone. I have countless St. Anthony stories like that.

“That’s what I need! How do I do that prayer?” Yaya asked.

Surprised at what an easy sell it was, I told her the words to the simple prayer:

St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around,
something is lost and can’t be found!

I started to include some caveats about how we’re just asking another human to pray for us, that it’s not a magic spell or anything like that, but she cut me off and said she had to go say that prayer. She called back that night, ecstatic: she’d found the papers. Yaya was officially sold on the St. Anthony prayer.

Since this was obviously going to become a key devotion for her, I thought I’d take the opportunity for a little catechesis on the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. “Now, Yaya, I want to clarify that Catholics do not believe that saints have any power of their own,” I began. “We believe that they’re just regular people who are ‘alive in Christ’ in heaven and can pray to the Lord for us.”

“I am so excited that St. Anthony found that paperwork for me!” she shouted, and I heard the shuffling of papers in the background. I wasn’t sure if she heard what I’d said.

“You know, in the second century a bunch of prominent Christian writers talked about this belief. Origen of Alexandria wrote about how saints who have ‘fallen asleep in Christ’ pray for those of us still on earth…”

“I was so angry I was fixin’ to slap someone if I didn’t find those papers! But that St. Anthony sure did come through. I’m going to pray to him more often!”

“Ah, yes, well, I hope you understand that when we talk about ‘praying to’ saints, we’re using the word ‘pray’ there as shorthand for ‘communicating,’ different than when we pray to Jesus, which is an act of worship. We only ask the saints for their prayers, no different than when you asked your friend Ethel to pray that you found the documents.”

The response was more ebullient commentary over the sounds of scattering papers, so I said I’d just email her some additional info about this doctrine.

I figured she must have read what I sent her, or perhaps absorbed my erudite theological explanations, because we heard a lot about St. Anthony in the ensuing months. When she lost her safe deposit box key, she called my husband in a panic.

“I need you to pray to St. Anthony! I can’t find this thing anywhere!” she said.

“Sure, I’ll ask him to pray for us,” he said, thinking that that would be the end of it.

She paused, waiting for him to start. “Do it now,” she said.

“Oh, umm. Okay.” He cleared his throat and said, “St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and can’t be found.”

She paused again. “Tell him it’s a safe deposit box key.”

And my husband repeated the prayer, this time replacing “something” with “a safe deposit box key.” Yaya found the key the next day, once again giving thanks to her buddy St. Anthony.

I was delighted with this opportunity for interdenominational dialogue, perhaps feeling a bit satisfied with myself that I’d offered such a rock-solid defense of the Communion of Saints that even my Baptist mother-in-law was convinced.

Then, the other day, I got another frantic call. This time she was so frustrated she could hardly speak because she’d lost her driver’s license and needed it to register for something. It’d been gone for a few days. She couldn’t find it anywhere. “Did you say a prayer to St. Anthony?” I asked. I’d obviously explained this teaching so well that I could relax my terminology, so I’d begun using the shorthand phrasing of “praying to” saints rather than the full articulation that we are simply asking the saints for their prayers.

“Jennifer, I’ve tried everything!” she said over the sound of slamming drawers and crashing boxes. “I prayed to Jesus, I prayed to St. Anthony — hell, I asked Jesus to say a prayer to St. Anthony!”

Looks like we may have a ways to go on this one.

Image from this t-shirt at Cafepress.

If I have to have a scorpion in my toilet, I should at least get a blog post out of it

I don’t have much to say about this:

Oh, wait. No, I do. Until I saw the picture to refresh my memory, I had forgotten that my charism is freaking out about scorpions.

[Before I get started, let me apologize to any new readers who may have mistakenly thought this was a classy blog and were not prepared to see a close-up picture of a toilet and a scorpion when they checked for new posts at Conversion Diary today.]

So anyway, I was walking by the hallway bathroom yesterday morning and noticed some object in the bottom of the toilet. In this house it could have been any number of things, none of them good, so I was relatively prepared that my findings were not going to improve my day. I was not, however, prepared for it to be a scorpion.

My first thought was to reflect that Yaya, for whom potty training is a second religion, so effectively whipped everyone into shape around here that even our scorpions use the potty now.

The joking ended abruptly, though, when I realized: it got in there by itself. My husband was out with the kids, and it hadn’t been in there when they left. The most likely route would be that it crawled under the space between the bottom toilet seat and the bowl, i.e. WHERE NO ONE COULD SEE IT. Which means…well, lest I cause Feedburner’s servers to melt down from mass use of the “unsubscribe” button, let me just leave it at this: I was prepared that our family might have to deal with stings on our feet from scorpions hiding in shoes, or on our torsos, backs, arms, legs or faces from scorpions in the bed at night. But there was one thing I had not considered. And the possibility of it is now seared into my brain forever.

That night we went to dinner with my dad and grandfather, and I knew that this wasn’t going to be an impromptu support group. I’ve mentioned before my Texan relatives and I just cannot seem to get on the same page about scorpions. As I said in this post, when I would shriek about the very real possibility of being stung in bed while sleeping, my relatives would think that the problem was simply that I couldn’t figure out what to do in case of a nocturnal scorpion attack (“you just brush them off”) or that I was concerned only about the toxicity level of the sting (“it’s not like they’re rattlesnakes…though I did see one the other day…”) But they did try.

When I recounted the story to my dad, he nodded like I was telling him that I went to the store to get some milk. Then he remembered that I had that hang-up abut scorpions, and dutifully put a very kind and sympathetic look on his face. You could just see his mind in overdrive to think through all the angles to try to figure out what bothered me about this. You could tell he wanted to comfort me with some fatherly advice. So finally he offered: “They’re no worse than tarantula bites.”

I just kind of stared at him, wondering if there’s an official repository of Most Epic Encouragement Fails to which I could submit that statement.

He tried again: “Remember that time I woke up to that scorpion stinging me on the knee? “

“Yeah…” I said, eagerly waiting to hear the part about how it didn’t hurt or the sting ended up giving him superpowers or something.

“I didn’t die,” he said. Sensing that that might not have caused my quirky phobia to instantly dissipate once and for all, he tried another angle: “Plus, it’s not like that time Uncle Benton had one fall off the ceiling and sting him on the face while he was sleeping,” he added, pointing to the bedroom about five yards away from where I was sitting, where my uncle had been staying when he was stung. “His eye sure did swell up!”

And to think, if I had been in my dad’s situation of waking to a scorpion attacking my knee, I might have thought my glass was half empty! It was nice to have that little helping of Chicken Soup for the Texan Soul to inspire me for the rest of the evening, especially as I was falling asleep.

I mentioned it on Twitter, of course. This is one of those times that people who follow me on Twitter get a payoff for all the inane and boring tweets they put up with. It’ll be weeks of “I’m tired,” and “I stayed up too late,” and “Why do I stay up so late?”, and then, boom! “SCORPION IN MY TOILET!!!!!!”

Luckily the Twitterati had my back, and I got some advice for how to handle this all with prayer and grace. The guys at Creative Minority Report were able to offer me encouragement from a Catholic perspective:

And Scoutsigns weighed in with some practical suggestions:

Scoutsigns pointed out in another tweet that it was probably still alive — scorpions have been known to live for more than a day under water. OF COURSE IT WAS STILL ALIVE. I have no idea why I thought a mere few hours submerged under water would mean it was dead. Since I keep having to learn this lesson over and over again, I guess I need to make a flowchart to put on the living room wall to review in case of a scorpion sighting:

Anyway, I hope you’re all enjoying your Memorial Day. If you’re not, you can always remember that at least you didn’t just find a scorpion in your toilet.

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