Category Archives: Family

About Hockey

Posted on by
This one was probably in my secret collection.

[A annotated hockey throwback – I guess this would be a backhand shot?]

Now that Easter is over, our household has entered the next holiday season: Hockey. I can call it a holiday because just like after a big meal at Christmas or Easter, it’s difficult to get my husband off the couch – unless, of course, he’s actually going to a game. I consider it fortunate if Rick agrees to do something else with me if the Oilers are on TV. [We’re currently on vacation, in a city whose team thankfully did not make it into the playoffs, while Rick’s beloved Oilers did. But my husband, while he still loves his hockey, forgot to factor in that he’d be missing some first-round playoff hockey in the safety of his own province when we planned this getaway. Clearly, he now has too many other things on his mind.] It’s also not worth it if the activity is something where he can talk a lot, openly reminding me what he’s missing while he could be enriching his mind with the edifying commentary of Ron MacClean and Don Cherry. [We all know what happened to Don Cherry but Ron is still holding down the fort.]

I’m not sure exactly why I’m not a hockey fan. Along with Edmonton [football team] games, it was one of the times I really enjoyed, because most or all of the family would gather around the television like it was a fireplace on a frosty Canadian evening.  But, out of a family of seven kids, I am probably the only one who has never watched an entire game on TV. I’m more the type that comes in for the commercials and goes to fix snacks when the game resumes. My brothers were diehard Black Hawks fans: it was a banner Saturday night in our house when the Hawks were on and a cause for real celebration if they won. My two sisters had more focused interests, namely Bobby Orr and Bobby Clark, but they, too, actually watched the game.

When I became a teenager, however, I did begin to show an interest in hockey, but it manifested itself in a covert Wayne Gretzky newspaper clipping collection. You see, in my house the Edmonton Oilers had become the equivalent of watching Oprah Winfrey win another Emmy for Best Talk Show. [This is called Toronto Maple Leaf Fan Syndrome now.] But Wayne was only a few years older than me and his long flowing locks did the same thing to me as Guy Lafleur did for other women 10 years earlier. [R.I.P Guy Lafleur April 22, 2022.] Years later I married an avid Oilers fan (begrudgingly accepted by my big brothers). When I confessed to Rick years later, after the said clipping collection had gone the way of the burn barrel, that I had once harboured a secret Wayne Gretzky adoration, he said he would have felt the same way if he was a girl. [My mother saved those clippings for years after I had left home. She must have liked him, too.]

My three sons have yet to develop any sort of attention span when daddy settles down to watch a hockey game. All I have to do is dangle the Berenstain Bears or Dr. Suess in front of them and I have company. But they love wearing the Oilers hats that Dad got them and pretty soon they’ll probably sit with him for longer that it takes the theme song to play out. [This has definitely come to pass. Now, if we’re all together, WE gather around the TV like it’s a fireplace.] At that point, I’ll have probably have time to do my thing. Or maybe I’ll actually have to learn to enjoy watching hockey as Rick is always hoping. Chances are good that I’ll be hanging out in the living room, still doing my thing, but enjoying the four of them jumping and cheering when the right team scores. [I actually do enjoy watching hockey now, but even more, I love being part of Team Donily – of which Oil loyalty is a given. Go, Oilers, Go!]

About Inheritance & Climbing Trees

Posted on by

I’m an amateur genealogist. It’s important for me to keep up a family tree and I’ve even dug in a little into my roots (within the limits of the free trial period) on one or two of those sprawling online ancestry sites. It has struck me odd that a person would create a “tree” to show their “roots”. But it’s not really the same kind of tree. And perhaps a better way to look at it is that you are climbing up the tree to get a better look at things. Isolated facts mean nothing, usually, but from a bird’s eye view you can see a lot more.

I realize that when one starts poking around in the past, there’s always the potential of discovering something new – or even – secret. This very thing happened to writer Dani Shapiro after unceremoniously sending away for a DNA test when her husband suggested they take advantage of a BOGO offer. Shapiro thought she knew everything about her family – heck, she even wrote a memoir about her father and had done tons of family research. But then lo and behold, the results returned via email one day and left her completely discombobulated: her story was not what she thought it was and she had the DNA to prove it. She tells that story in her book Inheritance. Since then, she has created a podcast called Family Secrets, where many MANY other people divulge their secrets, also revealed by DNA tests, or by some other fate that led them to question their own status quo.

So, a couple of months ago, I sent away my own DNA sample. It’s as simple as spitting in a tube – and paying a “nominal” fee. I really wasn’t expecting any book deals out of my results and, sure enough, I had paid to find out that I know – as Ken Jeong of The Masked Singer would put it – EXACTLY WHO I AM. No surprises, no secrets. In fact, the results pinpointed the two exact origins of both my father’s and my mother’s families in Poland and Ukraine respectively.

The particular genealogy sites I perused this past year had very little to offer me, first because only a couple other distant family members have surrendered their DNA – at least to those particular sites – so there’s no benefit to be gained from cross referencing. Secondly, since I don’t speak or read the languages very well, I can’t glean any info from the historical records from that part of the world. (That being said, I haven’t tried very hard yet, either.)

What I do have is geography – which actually determines a lot. I mean if my ancestors had not both moved to Canada – Alberta-Derwent (or thereabouts), my parents would never have met and – well, you can follow the bouncing ball. In the “old country” they would have lived about 4 hours apart – in today’s standards of car and highway – and probably would never have traversed either the geographical or cultural boundaries at the time. Plus – they didn’t have any dating apps, so…yeah.

It’s not only geography that determines what kind of trees can grow, but also what kind of family trees.

About Babies (of the Family)

Posted on by
Simon the Camper, age 2

[My “baby” turns 24 next week. How did that happen? I wrote a version of this when he was twenty less than that.]

Lately my husband has been bringing to my attention the fact – or opinion, depending which side of the fence you’re on – that I’ve been spoiling our youngest son. He says that my baby boy doesn’t get the same treatment as the other two sons. But it’s not that Simon doesn’t catch trouble from his mom. It’s just that mom’s tolerance level with her littlest man is a tad higher when he does get into mischief, meaning maybe, sometimes, okay, yeah, he might get cookies even if he doesn’t finish his supper.

Well, who can blame me? The baby of the family deserves some consolation: after all, he is always going to be the last, the most ignored, the one whose voice can reach screaming proportions and can still be unheard and the one whose ideas are never as good enough as the older people’s. And frankly, Simon has an ally in his mother because – ahem – I am a baby of the family, too.

I suppose that I see Simon’s frustration and automatically sympathize. Yesterday, he got beaned in the head with a snowball by one of The Older Bros., mostly because he was an easy target. The brother then dutifully led him to the house for first aid (hugs from mom and removal of the snow creeping down his neck). Simon was wailing and obviously very mad and, to his credit, (older brother’s name withheld for legal reasons) did apologize several times. But it was only when Simon all-out punched him that his own frustration finally dissipated and he was suddenly remorseful as well. Although I chastised him for letting his temper get the better of him, I related so well. Sometimes the only way to make the bigger people know you can’t be messed with is to get physical with them. Forgiveness doesn’t come as easy as when it’s mutual.

Simon does have an advantage over me. While I was a few years behind my next sibling, he’s not even two years behind and not compromised in size at all. Actually we predict that our youngest will probably outgrow the other two. (Update: Challenge accepted and met.) Consequently, we often warn them that if they keep trying the sit-on-Simon’s-head-game, it’s probably going to come back and bite them (in more ways than one). But Simon’s voice is smaller, if not in actual decibel output, in dismissible quotient. It seems all too easy for his older brothers to carry on a normal conversation while Simon tries in vain to get their attention. And when I casually mention to them that their brother is saying something, they appear surprised, as if it was only the wind blowing outside.

I remember those days of engaging in whole conversations only to find out I was the only one listening to myself. Granted, maybe my juvenile pursuits weren’t exactly interesting to my older, more sophisticated siblings. So I gradually became accustomed to doing things on my own. Anyways, when you’re ignored, it’s easier to get extra attention from mom, a trick that Simon has learned well. Some may call it kissing up (or other more derogatory terms). We babies just call it playing your hand.

If you sympathize with our plight, chances are you’re a baby, too. Oldest and middle children say that we live up to our name, but we can just give them back some of their own medicine: ignore them. After all, if you tried to say something, they probably won’t hear you anyways. 

About Travelling

Posted on by

Although it seems counter-intuitive to travel during a global pandemic, we decided to do just that this last week. Eschewing our plans made last December to visit Disneyland this fall with our adult children, we opted for safe(r) travels within the confines of our Canadian border. All of our pictures are clearly time-stamped by the masks we had to wear anywhere we ventured outside of our pod.

About a month ago we booked flights for six to Vancouver and held our breath, took our vitamins and said our prayers that we would actually be able to take said flights, barring any fevers, sore throats or other COVID-like symptoms. The plan, over which we had absolutely no control, went according to… well, plan.

Travel, as they say, is broadening. Our main destination was not Vancouver but the giant island to the west of it. Sure we could have flown directly there, into Victoria or Nanaimo, where we spent a couple of nights each. But part of the charm of visiting The Island is engaging in what I like to call Ferry Culture. For those of us born in the wide open prairies, we can get into a vehicle and drive ad nauseum for days. But when you live on the coast, water sort of gets in the way.

Ferry Culture involves a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. If you need too make sure you connect to a flight, you have to get to the ferry in time and before it fills up. So you get up super early, drive to the ferry landing nearest you, and then you wait in line. Then you get on the ferry and you sit back and wait again as the ferry takes you over. This can all take hours. Fortunately there was food and phones and, in this case, family to amuse us.

And it’s fun, especially when it’s novel and when you’re on vacation. And when the scenery around you is beautiful. All that water surrounding you seems to do its job of cleansing your brain – which is really what a vacation is for.

Maybe it’s the change of scenery or the brain-washing, but I found myself fascinated by the number of small things that added up to big things on this trip. While the boys skipped rocks on one little beach in Chemainus, Sharlie was able to look for seashells to her heart’s delight – there were so many on that little piece of paradise that she could literally take her pick of the best ones. On that beach there were hundreds and thousands of shells and rocks and logs that the tide had brought in.

Should I even mention the grains of sand? Or the gallons of water?

And then we visited the Butchart Gardens. Of course, there are very green plants and trees and flowers (still) everywhere in October on Vancouver Island but the Gardens do an especially nice job of arranging and clustering them in a way that gives you pause. And when you try to estimate the number of petals on an accordion-like chrysanthemum, you count past 100 quickly. When you consider the petals in a twenty foot square patch of mums, it’s boggling.

And most of the plants were not even in bloom at this time of year.

In the rather large Butchart Gardens there are also trees, shrubs, leaves and needles you could consider “counting”. But really, that would get old, fast.

And then, there is the travelling itself. The ferries we rode on could hold hundreds of vehicles, some of tremendous size. Where the heck was everybody going and what was so important that it had to get done on the other side? And plane travel: what would have taken us a good day or two in the car to traverse, we managed by crawling into a giant sardine can in just a little over an hour. 500 miles an hour at 30,000 feet. Really, you don’t want to think about it too hard or the whole relaxing part of the vacation just goes Poof!

All this makes me consider my own tiny mortality. It’s really not much in the scheme of THE WHOLE WORLD, is it? And sometimes, I wonder: what am I really doing here, anyway?

On a podcast recently I was reminded of something that Andy Stanley said – whether it’s his words originally or not, no matter – it’s still good. He said that when we get overwhelmed with the idea of doing something good for mankind, just try instead to do for one what you wish you could do for all.

For some reason, I was reminded of this as I considered the seashores and the sand and the seas this last week. The stones that were skipped and the walks that were taken and jokes that we shared didn’t do that much for the world, but they did a world of good for us.

Thanks for the nice holiday, world. I owe ya one.

About Flu Season

Posted on by

Hey, guess what? It’s flu season.

(Ducks to avoid rotten tomatoes, paper airplanes made from cancelled flight tickets, and cardboard boxes now empty of disposable masks.)

Yeah, I know. Remember the good ole days, those days of auld lang syne, when one would get the flu and puke your guts out and moan for a few days and have to learn how to walk all over again just to get on the scale and find out that you lost 7 pounds in addition to maybe three days of your life?

Yeah, coronavirus is not that kind of flu.

I have my share of vivid memories of having the flu. Me, nine months pregnant with Timmy, huddled over a basin on the floor trying to manage dry-heaving and Braxton-Hicks contractions at the same time. Me, again, last Christmas when I was deathly ill from a flu I caught from my husband that we then shared with EVERYONE else in our vicinity. (And that we secretly wonder if it was some sort of pandemic-prequel.)

I have another flu-tinged memory: me, again, back before I got pregnant with Tim. My dear friend Lynn took care of Gil until his daddy got home from work, leaving me alone to my symptoms. Too weak (maybe?) to climb the stairs to my bed, I opted for the floor in front of the television. This was back when we had Super Channel – the premier movie subscription channel of the time. The movie playing was The English Patient. I wasn’t English and I wasn’t wrapped up in bandages, but at that moment in time, Ralph Fiennes and I had our supine positions in common.

And I will forever hate that movie.

Was it the flu that colored my dislike so much? Or did I somehow peer into the future and see Lord Voldemort? I’ll never know because I WILL NOT RE-WATCH THAT MOVIE OR READ THAT BOOK. Just the thought of it makes me nauseated.

It makes me wonder what about this whole world-wide virus epidemic will leave us with bad associations. Presidential races? (Well, the virus can’t be completely to blame for that.) The smell of tequila-tinged hand sanitizer? The feel of a giant Q-tip up your nose assessing your positive or negative status because you sneezed a couple times at your place of employ?

Yes, there will be bad memories when we think of 2020. Just the idea of another holiday coming up and wondering how to navigate it makes us wonder about the whole notion of Thanksgiving. (Let’s not even start thinking ahead to Christmas.)

I had a chance encounter this week with an old friend at the Coop where we were buying our Thanksgiving turkeys. I bemoaned the idea of another ambiguous get-together: I miss the freedom of hugging with abandon, of open door policies for the boys’ friends, of not having to THINK about dos and don’ts so much when it comes to just celebrating with family. And my friend reminded me that, on the flip side, many people are more thankful for their families than they were before coronavirus.

It’s good spiritual chiropractic, to have your thinking adjusted like that. There’s a lot that’s wrong with the world right now. But, as always, there’s a lot that is right.

Happy Thanksgiving.

About Jerkury, The Undiscovered Planet

Posted on by

(With kids back to school this week, here’s a throwback to our homeschooling days with our three little spacemen.)

            This week in our house, we’re discovering the final frontier. No, I’m not talking about the dust-bunny village under my bed or the dark recesses of the furnace room, although both are rather scary places. The kids have been learning all about outer space and not just because we are threatening to send them there.

            This expedition was kicked off by a simple bedroom renovation. Maybe we were being doting parents or maybe we didn’t know what we were really getting into (most assuredly the latter), but a couple of months ago we decided to create a spaceship themed room for the three boys. With a little manipulation, we were able to steer the brothers in this direction and even make them think it was their idea, since their suggestion of a castle bedroom with full-sized knight in shining armor daunted me just a little more than stenciling a few portholes and planets on the freshly painted walls.

            And so, after a few days of studying the sun, stars and so on, I find I’m learning a lot more than I bargained for. After all, can there be a larger subject than the cosmos? Most of the speculation of how stars are “born” and black holes could be used to travel through time is where science fiction found its origin. No wonder George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry made so much money plumbing the subject that has no limit.

            Children don’t have the same difficulty with entertaining such notions as do skeptical adults. Their minds as wide as the universe itself, they dispute nothing and marvel at everything: that Venus is hotter than Mercury which is closer to the Sun; that Jupiter is 1400 times larger than the Earth (more impressive if demonstrated with appropriately sized paper circles) and that dogs and people have rocketed into oblivion on their own volition. (Well, maybe the dogs had to be convinced.)

            While reading about the characteristics of the Milky Way’s family, the boys entertained themselves by yelling “stupider than Jupiter” and then collapsing into mad giggles. I was thinking that the phrase was very apt for anyone who would volunteer to leave the nice safe atmosphere of Earth to live in a spaceship where you had to sleep seat-belted to your bed. (If there’s a time I appreciate gravity, it’s when I sleep.) But all giggles aside, the gray matter in the boys’ heads soaks all this stuff up, if maybe not the correct names for everything. At one point, Tim tried to tell to me that the largest planet was named Jerkury. I suspected that although this planet was yet undiscovered by Earthlings, it probably had sent more than a few “ambassadors” here and presented a good explanation as to where grouchy people really come from.

            Much to my surprise, I found myself one evening when my husband was away curled up in bed with the oversized Dorling Kindersley Guide to Space and smaller but just as interesting Everything You Wanted to Know about Johannes Kepler But Were Afraid to Ask. I was riveted to the bed (without a seatbelt) and the subject matter. Earlier that day while the boys were testing the theory of gravity by dropping dangerously heavy objects from the tops of chairs and spinning pails of water over their head to imitate centrifugal force, I was my most captive audience as I read aloud the story of Galileo and wept as he succumbed to the Inquisition by refuting his theories about the Earth revolving around the Sun instead of the then popular vice versa.

            While I wonder to myself how I could forget (or never have learned) such interesting stuff, my sudden fascination with the subject at hand is very comforting. After all, the idea of trying to teach your children everything is overwhelming. At any rate, what they don’t learn when they’re young, they can still look up when they’re 35.

About a Change in the Weather

Posted on by

(True to summer in Alberta, there certainly has been A LOT of weather lately. Here’s another throwback to the what the weather was like in my yard twenty years ago…)

Some days it seems like my children go through more emotional ups and downs than a Richard Simmons infomercial. Often the grouchy quotient is elevated by a bad cold and/or not enough sleep. But sometimes, in young families, I find we’re still all just trying to get used to each other.

Throw another kid into the mix and things can really get messy. My children love to have friends over. The best thing is when a family with about the same number of kids comes over and mine pair off with theirs. But the other day, just one friend came over and this particular day, it emphasized the battle lines. 

It all started out innocently enough. Gil, my oldest son, had the great idea of playing baseball. Of course, Mom had to dampen that idea by nixing the use of the real baseball bats since I wasn’t able to supervise at the time. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about three and five-year-olds swinging a Louisville Slugger with reckless abandon that I have a problem with.

So, they settled on just playing catch. Gil doled out the ball gloves and, true to form of the oldest child, began to give everyone orders of where to stand, how to hold their glove, who throws to who, and so on. As I looked up from vacuuming out the van, I first noticed Simon, the three-year-old standing about one hundred feet away from Tim, to whom he was supposed to throw the ball. So, I did what no mother is supposed to do. I interfered. All I did was make the suggestion to Gil that maybe there was no possible way that Simon ever in a million years could throw that far. Simon apparently had more faith in his big brother’s direction and proceeded to run the first ninety feet towards Tim before he hurled the ball at him with all his might. He still came short three feet.

Everything went downhill from there as the three younger players suddenly lost all interest in “organized” sports. Gil declared mutiny and informed the younger tribe that he was running away from home. At first, they weren’t too concerned since kids are used to each other’s dramatics.

But then Gil crossed the fence and Tim got mighty upset with this turn of events. Perhaps it was genuine concern for his big brother’s welfare or maybe he was worried about losing a good Nintendo partner, but he felt the acute need to report Gil’s departure to me at the top of his lungs. I yelled out to Gil to remember that he couldn’t cross the fence that bordered the back of our property and he replied that he merely intended to stay out in the bush forever. Much to Timmy’s dismay, I returned to removing an entire sandbox from my van.

After ten minutes of Tim keeping a not-so-silent vigil at the barbwire fence, Gil suddenly decided that forever was a long time if he had to listen to his brother whine for him to please, please, please come back. He stepped out of no-man’s land and to Timmy’s relief, agreed not to play baseball but to ride bikes instead.

With the incentive of the younger friend’s ability to ride his brand-new two-wheeler, Gil that day learned how to ride a training-wheel-free bike, after a few good pushes from his mom. The boy who convinced himself he could never learn to ride a bike was all sunshine and laughter, a sharp contrast to the gloomy boy he left behind in the bush. And I just marveled at how quickly the weather could change in my yard.

About What I Learned While Homeschooling

Posted on by

Along with all the other inherent stresses imbued in a global pandemic, parents right now are finding themselves thrust into a scenario they never wished upon themselves or their children – schooling their kids at home. It’s not for the feint of heart, taking responsibility for the education of your kids, but then neither is parenting. Having kids is probably not what you ever thought it was gonna be: it’s way harder and way better.

About twenty years ago, Rick and I made the decision that we would willingly take on schooling our kids at home. There was no virus threatening our safety, just three little boys testing our sanity. It’s actually a little amusing to me right now that the government is telling parents they need to do this, because it wasn’t always a sanctioned choice. I never was a vigilante-homeschooling mom, insisting that everyone should do it. But I did always maintain that it was an option, like public school or private school were other schooling choices out there. And for us, at the time, it was the right one.

That’s the way you have to look at parenting in retrospect, whether giving grace to yourself or your parents: you do your best with what you know at the time.

I admit that I’m relieved that my kids are graduated and responsible for whatever the heck they want to learn now. And COVID-19, with all it’s social distancing challenges, has really put parents schooling their children at home to the test: no playgrounds at “recess”, no fraternizing in the hallways except with your enemies (oops, I mean siblings), no sports, no clubs, not a lot of anything to let off steam except screens and backyards.

It was a different time and a different place, but for what it’s worth, here’s what I learned while homeschooling my boys – with the perspective of being past it all.

One of the best things I heard at a homeschooling conference once was that educating your kids was like creating a hammock for them. You need to make sure they have the basics to support them – through the next level, through regular life – but there’s always gonna be a lot of holes. If kids only get the basics – like the original trifecta of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, that’s a pretty good hammock. It will hold up. And there’s no way you can ever fill all the holes anyways.

Secondly, what you “routinize” is what your kids will get used to and what they will also do, for better or for worse. Whether it’s schooling at home or working remotely, you get more done if you stick to a routine. Plus, more beds get made, teeth get brushed, fish get fed and books get read. It takes a lot of muscle to build a habit but then after awhile, it just becomes the new normal.

Thirdly, you can’t predict what your kids will remember. While I went off the deep end teaching my boys lots of history and reading them great stories, they don’t remember a lot of the specifics. Frankly, neither do I. It’s pretty scattershot, really. But we did give them learning “hooks”, meaning that if they encounter an idea or some history or a person that we learned about in school, they have a place to hang that knowledge and build upon it. You can’t always remember stuff from first encounters. And now that they are in their twenties with their own Google machines in their hands all the time, they can look it up. (So can I.)

Fourthly, they will remember what was fun and unusual, and mostly, that’s the stuff that families are made of, not school. There were lots of things my boys do remember because we enjoyed them: nature hikes, reading all the Harry Potter books as a family, theatre performances, road trips, music lessons (well, maybe not the lessons, but the knowing how to play afterwards), holiday traditions, sleepovers at Gramma’s house, backyard hockey rinks and road hockey in the summer, crazy youth group events, house renovations. (Oh, wait, maybe that last one was just fun for Rick and me.) And if you think about it, what you remember about school when you were a kid was probably less about what you learned and more about what you did and who you did it with and especially if you had fun.

I’m willing to bet that the COVID-19 classes of 2020 won’t remember a heck a lot of what they learned “in school” this year. Which is not to say that it’s a futile exercise: schoolwork teaches your kids how to learn and it builds their repertoire and frankly, it just keeps them a little busy. But it’s pretty much a guarantee that they will remember all the weirdness, and hopefully a little bit of the wonderfulness, that a quarantine can offer. I mean, you’re in it now: might as well make lemonade out of them lemons. And while you’re at it, your kids can learn math and experiment with taste buds and have (lemonade) drinking contests and then they can wash the damn dishes. Which is also a good skill they probably won’t learn in regular school.

Home, after all, is where they first learned to walk and talk and cut their own hair somehow with child-safe scissors. Maybe they can cut yours now until we get our hair salons back. It could be fun. Just sayin.

About the Austins

Posted on by

And now back to our regular un-Pandemic programming. Sort of.

I’m reading a lot lately. I mean, I always have one or two or three books on the go but Pandemic reading has taken on a new slant: my library and favorite thrift shop are closed, I hate e-Readers and I can’t spend all our money on Amazon orders. Because: Pandemic snacks are more important.

So I’ve been re-reading, shopping my own shelves. Actually, pre-COVID-19, I had a plan for My Reading Year (yes, I’m one of those people) that I would do a great deal of re-reading. It all comes from the moving thing: packing up all my books, shedding the ones that are no longer anything more than dead weight (that I didn’t want to move to a new house) and musing over the favorites that I really should re-visit. And this year I wanted to focus on writers I love that write/wrote both fiction and non-fiction.

Madeleine L’Engle falls into that category. Most everyone who recognizes her name would associate it with her Newbery Medal book A Wrinkle in Time – or the recent Oprah Winfrey/Reese Witherspoon/Mindy Kaling movie offering of the same name. A Wrinkle in Time is a seminal book that is often lauded by writers of children’s books. Or sometimes, as in another Newbery Medal book, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, it is the backdrop of another story. (A very good story.)

It wasn’t until I was in my thirties before I even heard of Madeleine L’Engle. (I know, right?) A teacher friend lent A Wrinkle in Time to me, plus all the ensuing Murray family books, aghast that I had never read them. And so a L’Engle groupie I became.

Whatever story L’Engle told, her framework was always a moderately conventional family and I think that was a big part of her appeal. The families were like none I knew – ones that discussed physics and tesseracts while their mother cooked stew for supper over a Bunsen burner in their attached-barn-converted-into-a-laboratory. Or where another mother – an ex-opera singer – played classical music records while she cooked supper. Or where the family sat around and discussed theology with everyone from the 5-year old to Grandfather contributing to the conversation. Really, Madeleine?

I haven’t got to a lot of her published journals or non-fiction offerings yet, but any biographical information I’ve read about her suggests that it was exactly the kind of family she was in herself. Minus maybe the space travel and alien abductions. I assume. And Ms. L’Engle always asserted the importance of every person in her fictional families, no matter what their age or how much they misbehaved.

Grandfather, is in fact, one of my favorite characters in Meet the Austins. A retired minister who exudes wisdom, he lives by the ocean in a converted horse stable: the individual stalls are especially conducive to bookshelves that hold Grandfather’s copious book collection. His granddaughter Vicky describes him as a bibliomaniac. (And then parenthetically, tells the reader to ‘Look it up!’ Such cheek!)

Grandfather doesn’t just keep his favorite words in his books or in his head: the most meaningful to him he has transcribed onto the very walls around him. In his bedroom, a quote from Hildevert of Lavardin circa 1125, reads:

“God is over all things, under all things; outside all; within, but not enclosed; without, but not excluded; above, but not raised up; below, but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly without, embracing; wholly within, filling.”

This quote is so obscure that I couldn’t even Google it. But L’Engle brings attention to a medieval mystic’s words as effortlessly as Hermione Granger waves her wand and pronounces ‘Alohomora!’ to a locked door. (Look it up!)

In the loft, where the children sleep, a poem by Thomas Browne is painted:

If thou could’st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, ‘This is not dead’,
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes, He says, ‘This is enow
Unto itself – ’twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.’

Have I – pre-slow-and-crawling-days-of-Pandemic – been too full of ‘shrewd activity’? Or even now, with my books and my phone and my TV am I ‘replete with very thou’?

There’s something about the writing on the walls that strikes me, the constant reminders of things that Grandfather believed and wanted to remember. In the bedroom, where the first quote is, he has no other pictures except the picture window, because no picture could complete with the ocean view. But the simple juxtaposition of words reminded him of Whose view it was and Who made it.

What do I write on my walls? What do I want to be reminded of?

Besides hanging pictures or words on my walls, I have a way of remembering some of the lovely things I find in books: I put them into another book. My siblings can attest to how I used to cut and paste and make scrapbooks when I was young, sometimes much to their chagrin as ‘the making of many books’ consumed me – and all the homemade flour paste that Mom could make.

I still cut and paste and draw:

It helps me to remember the things that are important:

And not to mistake the wonderful things:

Good writing and good writers can teach us so much, remind us of what’s important and show us what is possible before it happens. The wonderful things can’t last forever but we can remember them and look forward to different, wonderful things.

About Retrospective Parenting

Posted on by

(When my adult children sometimes take days to answer my texts, it’s helpful to remember what it was like before they had cell phones – heck, before I had a cell phone – and I couldn’t stop them talking to me. Here: another trip in the time machine back to 2002.)

            Parenting can be such a negative experience. The words “no”, “don’t”, “stop it”, “quit that” and “never” become indispensable to a parents’ repertoire as soon as a child discovers that they are independent beings with the capacity to jump on couches, bite hands and other appendages that don’t belong to them, spill their food all over the new carpet, careen through the house at the speed of light, slam doors with explosive force and test the sound barrier with that weapon of weapons, their voice. It’s usually the voice that gets them in the most trouble. All the other acts can be attributed to normal childhood behavior, no matter how nerve wracking it is. But the power of speech can singularly drive a parent up the proverbial wall.

            Take for instance the average trip to the grocery store. Thirty minutes, fourteen aisles and the whole experience should be a piece of cake for the seasoned parent of a child old enough to talk. However, each shopping trip provides at least 1543 opportunities for your child to ask for something. (This statistic must be multiplied accordingly by the number of children you are blessed to have along on grocery day.) Correspondingly, there are an equal number of times that a parent can practice the most repeated word in their vocabulary. As the child moves from item to item, the parent is subjected to a well-known interrogation technique: ask enough times and you will break down all defenses. Even with strategic moves on the part of the parent to avoid high-density candy and toy areas, children have an innate tendency to ask if they can have everything from dog food to Tylenol to oranges. The unsuspecting parent will automatically respond “no!” to every request even if it is healthy, on sale and on the shopping list. But after resolving to yourself not to give in to any of the child’s queries along with the ultimatum that you will not buy anything they ask for, you find yourself between the rock and hard place of giving in or leaving the store without half the items you came for. 

            Current parenting lore will encourage you to: a) ponder the question before the “no” reflex occurs, and b) think of ways to respond to your children in a positive manner. Considering the question first may result with a happier dog, a migraine-free mom and a chance for the family to ward off scurvy. Positive responses can be worded like, “Of course you can pierce your belly button over my dead body,” or “My, your leaping-off-the-couch-distance has improved since last week.”

            Such strategies can be a real help to all parents. At any rate, you’ll have plenty of Tylenol in case you do break down. And at least the dog will be happy.