There’s no stopping M-Cat right now.

One of her favorite things to do is grab a newspaper and stuff if in her face. Often, I see her looking around and straining for a big piece of paper to maul. It is getting very tricky to read anything to her, or try to read anything ourselves when she is around.

She’s also started reaching for people, and has done so for two of our women friends whom she had never met before. Their hearts melted at such a gesture, of course, and both wanted to take her home. (Sorry, ladies! I don’t know what we’d do without her!)

She’s been rolling from front to back and back to front for a few weeks now; on Thanksgiving, she started doing slow barrel rolls across the floor. Now she is flipping over whenever she can — she’s getting ESPECIALLY wily on her changing table, so that I can hardly get her diaper on!

A few days ago, she pushed herself backward 10 feet across our hardwood floors. I just know she’ll be crawling any day now. Where did our little baby go?!

And yesterday afternoon, the inevitable happened. As I was doing lessons with Boo Boo in his room, and she was corralled on his bed, she rolled over a few times, grabbed hold of his plastic sword, gripped it in two hands and pushed herself up above it.

“She’s holding the sword as if she were a knight!” Boo Boo exclaimed with glee. (Score on the correct use of the subjunctive clause, Buddy!)

We’ve got to get this girl some dolls, stat!

If you’ve got some prayers to spare, please direct them to our friends’ little boy, Thomas. Read why here.

You know your five-year-old has listened to the Chronicles of Narnia audiobooks a little too much when he seems to say either “Oh, bother!” or “By Jove!” every other breath…

This time of year is so full of celebration, even though Advent is supposed to be a penitential season. I feel like every time I look at the calendar, it’s another feast day.

Nov. 29: The first day of Advent, and the beginning of our Jesse Tree.

Dec. 3: X-Man’s baptismal anniversary, marked by his dear Godmother sending him his first patronal icon.

Dec. 6: St. Nicholas’ feast day, complete with a few presents, candy in boots and clementines.

Dec. 8: The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, which fits right into Boo Boo’s recent lesson on Creation and Original Sin. He seems to easily understand the Blessed Virgin Mary’s exemption from Original Sin from her own conception so that she could be the mother of God — who remained sinless throughout his life, of course!

Dec. 12: Another Marian day! This time it’s the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, one of our family’s favorites. It also happens to be Boo Boo’s baptismal anniversary, too.

Dec. 13: The feast of St. Lucy — time to put the lights on the Jesse tree!

As Hilaire Belloc so aptly put it:

Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!

What Boo Boo’s been saying to me over the last few days…

Mama, I love you more than my best friend. (Which is saying a LOT.)

Mama, I love you more than M-Cat. (Which is saying even MORE.)

Mama, I love you more than all my friends combined. (Which just about the highest compliment ever, coming from him.)

Mama, I love you more than everything in the world. (Which made me cry.)

Remember my rant on freedom a few posts ago? Well, a friend read my post and directed me to an article that nailed exactly what I would have said — if I had the time to expand and the writing ability with which the writer was endowed! Read on, and you’ll see what I mean …

(Mantilla twitch to Mollie!)

Hands to Heaven
by Marion Fernández-Cueto
10/16/09

There is a line in Scripture that has always infuriated me. It’s Timothy 2:15, and for years I could not read it without wanting to hurl my Bible at the wall. “The woman,” writes St. Paul, “will be saved by childbearing, if only she continue with faith, love and holiness.” Its baptized misogyny was insulting enough (how typical to posit a woman’s salvation within her social confines of barefoot, pregnant servitude), yet beneath it lurked a more devastating injury: the idea that a woman’s sanctity was tied up in motherhood. That spelled damnation for me, I thought, for the drudgery of childbearing was the last thing I aspired to.

Then I fell in love with a man who wanted kids the way former boyfriends had dreamed of plasma TVs. As he wooed and pursued me, I realized it was not motherhood per se I had long feared and mocked; it was the utter dying to self that motherhood entails. My individualism and selfishness were alive and well, fostered by nearly a decade of independence, during which my time, decisions, money, plans, and body had remained solely my own. The idea of marriage thrilled me (it was no sacrifice to love Andrés), but children held no such natural enticement toward self-oblation. Like St. Augustine’s tepid plea for chastity, I didn’t want my selfishness scourged quite yet.

But St. John writes that perfect love casts out fear, and it is true, even of flawed loves like ours: A year after our wedding, we found ourselves praying I might get pregnant. Two days later, I did. To say I was ecstatic would be a lie — I hadn’t expected an answer to arrive overnight express. But we were awed at this new life God and our union had wrought.

My pregnancy proceeded in a happy glow: I grew fat and contented as a tabby cat, unhampered by morning sickness. I shopped and cleaned, cooked and froze dinners, ordered parenting books, and interviewed doulas in a blissful whirl of organization. I found myself dreaming of long-scorned domestic scenes, a tangle of jolly siblings for our son, and a kitchen fragrant with hot meals and teasing affection. Finally, I thought, I was ready to be a mother.

Then Dominic was born. I still remember my feeling of incredulity when the hospital night nurse first woke me to feed him, seemingly minutes after a searing labor. I looked at the clock — 2:20 a.m. — then at my mewling, scrunchy little baby, and knew like Napoleon at Waterloo that the end had come — the end of life as I knew and liked it. This child, this responsibility, was mine for the rest of my life.

I felt a tidal wave of resentment that God had allowed me to welcome pregnancy while providing barely a shred of fuzzy maternal instinct beyond delivery. I knew my hormones were running amok, but I felt blindsided and betrayed. Where was the grace that had flooded the previous nine months? Right then, I wanted nothing more than to rewind time back to that September night when we’d first asked God for a baby, and postpone our prayer another two years. I wanted to push my son right back at the nurse and snap, “You feed him.” I’m a wretched mother already, I thought. Poor, innocent, ill-fated Dominic.

Somewhere I’d assumed that if only I prayed hard enough for grace when I accepted pregnancy, a good mother would be born with my son. I had forgotten that elemental wild card of Catholic theology: that grace builds on nature. Prayers are not magic spells, and none would instantly transform my long-fostered habit of selfishness into a spirit of enthusiastic self-sacrifice. Instead, over the next weeks and months, a loving Savior would ask me to take up my cross and learn to follow Him. In obeying, I would discover that God rarely calls the equipped. If we are asked to cooperate in our own salvation, it is only because He equips those He calls.

Meanwhile, Dominic didn’t know he was poor and ill-fated. He was a near-perfect baby by every account, with limpid blue eyes and pink, puckish smiles. I coddled and bathed him, tickled and sang to him, boasted shamelessly of his every new feat. When he napped on our bed, flushed with sweet sleep, I would lie beside him and murmur my undying love into his damp blond curls.

Yet through it all, I rebelled. A voice in my head echoed the old cry of Lucifer: non serviam — I will not serve. “You’re too good for this,” said the voice. “You were made for better things — not the endless, mind-numbing tedium of diapers and dishes and laundry. Where is the glamour, the intellectual stimulation, the chances and promotions you still deserve? Is this really what God intended for you?”

The voice would resume each morning as I watched the army of lawyers and interns swinging down 16th Street with their lattes and briefcases and careers. Each smartly dressed young woman, luxuriating in her phone conversation or iPod, represented a life I couldn’t have anymore, opportunities and experiences that would never be mine. “You see?” the voice would prod. “You see?”

Of course, every slide into self-pity would trigger an even greater avalanche of guilt. The world over, women were struggling with infertility, miscarriages, the death of a child, or newborns with cruel, debilitating diseases. Thousands of new mothers would never have the luxury of choosing whether to go back to work. Thousands more lacked a caring, sensitive husband, or any kind soul to see them through the first dazed months. I despised myself utterly for chafing under Dominic’s featherweight load; I knew to the core how fortunate I was, how ludicrously bourgeois my malaise — and so my self-loathing would compile.

I reached my breaking point one afternoon while walking with Dominic past St. Matthew’s Cathedral. A panhandler standing at the corner took a long look at my stroller and its sleeping cargo and inexplicably dragged a condom out of his pocket. “If you’d used one of these,” he leered, “you wouldn’t have had him.” Shaken, I knew the man had articulated the very thought that had risen like a demonic specter on more than one sleep-deprived night. That condom represented every temptation I’d experienced in my struggle to be open to life, every forbidden alternative I might have taken as I struggled to welcome first pregnancy and then Dominic.

Sick with shame, I sought out a priest in confession. With the gentle yet exacting probe of an experienced confessor, he asked me to name what I would rather be doing. “Go on, imagine,” he urged. “Let’s say you can leave your family, your responsibilities. What do you want?”

My answers were distressingly ready. “I want to see the rest of the world,” I told him. “I want to be the foreign correspondent I trained to be. I want to take my morning coffee in silence, to read the paper uninterrupted. I want to sleep until noon on Saturdays — or at least through the night. I want my time, my space, my schedule, my plans, my peace, my quiet . . . I want me again. I just want me.”

The priest gazed at me, his eyes suffused with compassion. “All of us want that,” he said softly. But serving ourselves, living for ourselves . . . what does the Gospel say about that? ‘He who seeks to save his life, will lose it.’ ‘Unless the grain of wheat falls in the earth . . .’ We know we can’t find happiness that way.”

“Try me,” I thought darkly.

Not long after, God took me up on my silent challenge: When an old college friend flew in from France, I was given the chance to see, George Bailey-style, what my life might have been like without Dominic.

Veronique — a single, gorgeous, multilingual painter — was living out the very fantasy I had tried to articulate to my confessor. She jetted around the globe with no apparent responsibility standing between her next whim and reality. Her family was distant; her jobs, like her love interests, were sporadic and provisional; all were powerless against the lure of new ventures and continents. I couldn’t wait to hear her stories, to soak in the shimmering brilliance of her life. Inviting her over for tea one afternoon, I braced myself for the flash of pity I had often glimpsed in her eyes at my increasingly predictable, beige-hued existence (husband, child, mortgage, minivan).

It never came. Veronique was miserable, and desperately so. Approaching 30 like me, her hard independence, emotional skittishness, and sheer impulsivity were catching up with her. She hated her expensive art school. Her e-mails, dazzling travelogues forwarded to massive lists of friends, were going unacknowledged. The handful of men in her life arrived and then disappeared with a disturbingly familiar, slapdash autonomy. She was tired of being broke, of depending on the more conventionally stable for her car rides and phone calls and suppers. Yet the promising internships and positions were passing her by for younger college grads who had long since paid their dues in nine-to-five grunt jobs.

Veronique seemed haunted by a stirring realization that years of self-direction, self-discovery, and self-fulfillment (all so greedily panted after by me) had brought her not nirvana, but only herself — a self she was starting to find unbearable. As she watched me wipe applesauce off Dominic’s chin, help him down from the highchair, and start preparations for yet another meal, her eyes reflected not pity but raw, naked wishing. And her next words startled me further. “I wish I had someone to love and give myself to like that,” she said. “Sometimes I’m afraid my heart is going to shrivel up.”

I expected to feel relief at Veronique’s woe — after all, her admissions amounted to foundational cracks in a lifestyle I had lusted for with near idolatry. But instead I felt only wonder and the spreading epiphany that mothering — that vocation I wore like a penitent’s hair shirt — had spared me the tyranny, the terrible poverty, of my unconstrained will. As I glimpsed the bleakness in Veronique’s life, I realized I never could have borne the curse I had craved so long — that of gaining the whole world, only to lose my soul. In His all-seeing mercy, God had eliminated for me the option of exclusive self-service when I bore Dominic. As a wife and mother, my heart might bleed, but I knew it would never shrivel, pumped full as it was with the occupational hazards of delight and terror, grief and compassion. When Veronique left, I clutched my son to my breast and wept with gratitude.

Henry Ward Beecher once wrote that children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. I first inscribed that quote in Dominic’s baby book, but it is only now, nearly four years and an infant daughter later, that I see it is simply a more palatable version of Timothy 2:15. Through Veronique I realized that what I once called heaven — all that came from my own stubborn choosing — was the quintessence of hell itself. Only children could roll away the stone from the grave of self in which I lay and offer my soul rebirth.

Though I mostly struggle and stagger in my vocation as mother, I do so rejoicing, knowing that God will hold me through it, if only I continue with faith, love, and holiness. This woman, at least, will be saved by childbearing.

+++

Marion Fernández-Cueto is a mother, freelance journalist, and Catholic convert. She lives in Houston with her husband Andrés and their two children.

Pink bunny suit pajamas from Aunt Clara?

Nope. Just a pink bear suit/winter wear from Grandma Lisa. I bust up laughing almost every time I put M-Cat in it. Love it!

Sometimes it’s hard for others to understand why I do what I do. Why would I choose to stay home with my children, and not even send them to pre-school or school when I had the chance? Why would I want to keep having more children, who would continue to occupy my time and my life?

I was on the phone the other day with someone who questioned why I was homeschooling. Believe it or not, I don’t hear much criticism — or questions — from others about our educational choice. “Don’t you want some freedom from your kids?” was the question.

I was quite unprepared for it. It made me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

It made me want to laugh because I don’t think parents are ever or should ever be “free” of their kids. We are given them to raise them, and prepare them for greater independence someday, but even when they go to an institutional school at five years or leave the nest when they are 18, they will never leave our hearts and minds. The worrying and work and love don’t stop, I think, ever.

It made want to cry because the questioner unintentionally was making my children sound like burdens, like inhibitors to my “freedom.” How sad to wish their years of wanting and needing and liking you away quicker than they go already.

Of course, the choices I’ve made are hard. They don’t call them sacrifices for nothing! Sometimes I, too, question them, for a minute or two — but rarely longer than that.

That’s because I have an entirely different perspective of what my life on earth it is about. It is not to be “free.” I lived for myself and my “freedom” before I was a wife and mother, and I was miserable. I am not enough to make myself happy. It is in loving, serving and caring for others that makes me truly happy … even when it’s not entirely pleasurable at times.

As a Christian, I am called to imitate Christ, the epitome of self-sacrificing love, the suffering servant. He gave up his freedom, himself, his will, his life entirely as a gift for each one of us. He asks us, in turn, to take up our cross and follow him.

That means for me dying to self — what I sometimes want, what I think I need, what others think I should be doing. Giving up little and big pleasures for a greater good — to please God, to work on my vices, and to serve my family better.

It’s a completely different kind of freedom. And it’s what I believe is God’s choice for me.

Now that M-Cat is five months old, I’m understanding a few things more. First, how a girl gets spoiled, even more than boys. Second, how different and protective we can feel about a girl. And third, why people can go gaga over babies.

Things I never thought about or bothered to do with the boys, I’m doing with her.

I insisted that she have a mobile over her crib to look at while she fell asleep. I’m asking for a grocery cart cover for her for Christmas. I scrubbed down our grimy stroller seats (for the first time since we got it three years ago!) so they don’t soil her or her clothing. I gave her a bath every night for months on end. She owns four pairs of shoes — including red patent leather Mary Janes! — and her feet will hardly touch the ground for another six months. When she cries, we all come running, and are distressed until we find the cause.

If we keep this up, she is going to be a first-class prima donna!

We also are intent on guarding her from harm, in a way more intense than I’ve ever felt before. With the boys, I’ve always thought, “He’ll be fine; no blood, no foul; what doesn’t kill him will only make him stronger.” I’ve encouraged them to get dirty, tough it out and shake it off. But no chance would I ever do that with our precious daughter. She may have the stature for rugby, but I think I’ll probably cry the first time she hurts herself.

Boo Boo has said often that he never wants to lose M-Cat. I capitalize on his protective nature and respond, “Good. You’re never going to leave her side until she is married or a religious sister.” We like to kid that she can choose between betrothal or the convent … and we’re half-way serious.

I’ve always liked babies well enough, but I’ve never liked one this much. Ever. I never expected to be this baby crazy, and never completely understood people who were until now.

I’ll never forget hearing a mother of 11 children — yes, you read that right! — share how sad she was when menopause kicked in and she realized she’d never have another baby again. At the time I was a bit dumbfounded. Now I know how that mother could feel that way: if all babies were like M-Cat, I would have bucketsfull of them.

Dear Husband caught me the other day squealing with joy over her. He said to me, “I haven’t heard you make those sounds since we started dating 10 years ago and you were crazy about me.” Well, I’m crazy about her!

I know all babies aren’t this easy. When people ask me if M-Cat is a good baby, I say, “Yes — and I know the difference.” For the record, I love our firstborn to pieces, but he was a very challenging, discontented baby — probably due to all of his food allergies from birth. He was a “bad” baby, if you will. X-Man was a consolation and relief after that. And M-Cat has continued the upward trend.

The older my other children get, the more I appreciate babies. I love their simplicity, their ease, their contentment. They’re just happy to be fed and held and cuddled, and look up at you with huge, gummy smiles and adoration pouring out of their eyes if you just nurse them or change their diaper. I have never felt so loved by a child as I do by this baby.

How easy it is to please babies, how simple they seem compared to more-demanding, perplexing and intensive older children. There’s no discipline, frustration, tantrums, yelling, disobedience, spats. Babies are just sanctuaries of pure, unconditional, beautiful, true, God-given love.

As Boo Boo and I were looking at a book of explorers featuring James Cook, the first European to find Easter Island…

Boo Boo, pointing to a picture: Mama, what are those?

Me: They are giant stone heads on Easter Island, off the coast of Chile.

Boo Boo: It must feel like Easter (the feast day) there every day; I bet they get to wear nice dress-up shirts.