what a very pregnant woman and a potty-training three-year-old have in common?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bFC08_WRnU]
Of course you could.

After three years of motherhood, I am still getting used to this job. I still remember the lovely unencumbered feeling of going where I wanted to without first asking “Will the stroller fit? Are kids welcome? Can they make noise? Where can I change them?” Sometimes I miss the freedom and independence of solitude.

Thursday is supposed to be my day, the day when Az watches the kids and I get to do other things important to me. We have just started this schedule, and I love it, but Sweetpea has been sick for a few days, so today did not work out. Instead of reading and writing and going to the library and coffeehouse, I have been providing mama-comfort to the queen of vommit.

Sweetpea is ordinarily a serene and self-possessed child, but her temper changes whenever something is physically wrong. Hunger, exhaustion, injury and illness turn her into a scolding or sobbing tyrant. Up comes breakfast all over the floor, and she stands in it screaming at us: Make this better! Make me better! Now, now, now!

Among the other changes, though, is a special one: illness makes her cuddly. Ordinarily she doesn’t want much physical affection. It gets in the way of her many goals: grabbing that toy, climbing those steps, flopping on that cushion, holding that book. But when she is ill, nothing will do but snuggling into Mama’s bosom, thumb firmly planted in mouth, clinging to me as though health itself radiated through my body heat. I love this. I eat it up. I can handle a little vommit when this is my reward.

One night, after a tiring day of dealing with one demanding sick girl and one demanding healthy girl, I went in to check on them after bedtime. Sweetpea was sleeping peacefully, curled up with her blanket. JellyBean looked up at me and said, “Mommy, I want some snuggles.”

I lay down in her big girl bed and she scooted so I could slip my arm under her shoulders. Then she turned toward me, put one hand on each side of my face, looked into my eyes and said, “Oh, Mommy. I love you so much.”

Hmm. Solitude is overrated.

I have not posted in a while, but I am still around. I am very, very round.

I walked through the library the other day and passed two young black men. One stared pointedly at my belly and said, “Daaa-yaamm!”

I did not kill him, but I thought about it. For better or for worse, I have an implacably sexist belief that adolescent males are congenitally stupid, so I figured he couldn’t really help it. I know it’s not the most charitable view of teenagers, but occasionally it keeps me from committing murder.

In fact, I have reached the size where most people watch my belly as I approach, rather than my face. Even Az did it today. Most of my shirts do not quite reach my pants, which is embarrassing and awkward, and makes me quite the spectacle. I begin to fear that Pluto lost its classification as a planet merely to make room for me on the traditional list of nine.

Az has decided to amuse himself these last few weeks by goading me with the possibility of a late delivery. Both my two girls were born before their due date, so I have been blithely assuming this one would be, too. But there is no guarantee. Today he has started announcing, in a false tone of encouragement, “Just one more month!” or “Only six weeks to go!” Then he giggles uproariously at my glare. My man likes to live on the edge.

I went shopping for a few new baby things at the mall this week. It was not a pleasure. I had to stop and rest at every chair in the hallway, and I wondered why all the baby stores were at the most spread-out mall in the city. I bought a new mattress for her crib, not because there was anything wrong with the old one, but because I thought a super-firm mattress might take the edge off my insanity. 204 coils in a baby mattress is obviously overkill intended for women just like me, but this once I was willing to pay to ease my neuroses. A mattress is cheaper than therapy.

I also bought a new infant car seat. We have had two in the last three years, and both are broken. I hate that a sixty dollar piece of plastic doesn’t last three years. I suspect Graco started out in the loan shark business.

After two other babies, I had a list of what precisely what I wanted in a car seat:
a buckle across the chest instead of over the head
the “easy carry” handle with the twist in it
a strap at the bottom to loosen and tighten the belts (instead of dealing with buckles behind the car seat)
a canopy that can be moved in both directions (instead of fixed to the head of the seat)
one of those handy slits in the bottom of the car seat that lets it fit over a grocery cart

Of course, I could not find all of these qualities in any one car seat. I could not find any that had the last one, making me wonder where the other moms at the grocery store got theirs. Maybe you need connections. Maybe Graco sells special models to the mob. Maybe there’s a secret mom club that meets in abandoned warehouses and distributes them while the dance music plays to the crowd with ecstasy and glow lights. Any ideas?

Me: I don’t know how you can still like me. I’m not nice, I’m not funny. I’m just large. Large and grumpy.

Him: You are still my witty wife. You’re just tired of being pregnant.

Me: But all I do is moan and groan and I’m not even nice to you.

Him: Honey, don’t take this the wrong way, but for the next few weeks, I plan to ignore most of what you say.

And I couldn’t be happier about it.

O shut me round with narrowing nunnery-walls,
Meek maidens, from the voices crying ’shame.’
I must not scorn myself: he loves me still.
Let no one dream but that he loves me still.
So let me, if you do not shudder at me,
Nor shun to call me sister, dwell with you;
Wear black and white, and be a nun like you,
Fast with your fasts, not feasting with your feasts;
Grieve with your griefs, not grieving at your joys,
But not rejoicing;

- From Tennyson’s “Guinevere”

In Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Guinevere functions as his everyman, the representative of ordinary humanity. Her betrayal of Arthur and her reconciliation with him speaks not only of the nature of adultery, but of sin and the universal human condition.

After her affair with Lancelot is discovered and she has fled Camelot, Arthur finds her in the convent where she is hiding. For the first time she faces the significance of her actions, and Guinevere recognizes that her sin - and symbolically, all sin - is ultimately a failure of hope, a rejection of the greater things God has for us. God places joy in our hands, and sin consists of carelessly letting it drop, reaching for something else. In her famous words:

Ah my God,
What might I not have made of thy fair world,
Had I but loved thy highest creature here?
It was my duty to have loved the highest:
It surely was my profit had I known:
It would have been my pleasure had I seen.

We do not look up high enough; we do not aspire. I have always found uncomfortably true the confession from the late musician Rich Mullins: “I’d rather fight you for something I don’t really want/ than take what you give that I need.”

Repentance and forgiveness offer to us a restoration of vision and hope (though rarely a return of passed-by opportunities).

The quote with which I began this post is Guinevere’s closing penitential speech to the nuns with whom she will live. Despite the insight Tennyson offers in the rest of his poem, here I think he missed the mark. Tennyson tries to show us the sincerity of Guinevere’s repentance by promising that she will never participate in joy again. While she hopes in heaven, she still will never let herself feel anything but penitence.

Today is the second Sunday in Lent. Lent is a period of traditional fasting and self-denial in preparation for the events of Holy Week, when we remember the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lent is the forty days before Easter - except it isn’t. The season of Lent is forty days plus six Sundays.

Sunday, in Christian liturgical tradition, is always a feast day. Christians took the seven day week from ancient Hebrew tradition and worship, and transformed the Sabbath into Sunday in honor of the day on which Jesus rose from the dead. Every Sunday, even during Lent, we rejoice and celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Even in the midst of fasting, we remember the resurrection and we feast.

This is where the Guinevere poem is so dissatisfying. Guinevere does not need to abstain from all joy forever. Our goal, even in Lent when we formally meditate upon our sins, is not to be in constant self-recrimination. Every Sunday the resurrection breaks through and lets us know that God is bigger than sin, even bigger than death. Every Sunday we receive the fresh assurance of the possibility of new life, freeing us from the old. Every Sunday, God’s forgiveness shakes the ground and rolls the stone away again.

Refusing to ever feel joy is a kind of denial of this constant and resurging grace. It is ultimately the opposite of humility. Humbly receiving the joy and love God offers, rather than insisting it could not really be for screw-ups like us, is the mark of real repentance. To do otherwise is to once again let the joy slip from our hands.

“For His anger is but for a moment; His favour is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Psalm 30:5

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I meant to write this post last week for the first Sunday in Lent, but I was too worn out. I will try to write a post each Sunday until Easter on the themes of fasting and feasting, but sometime during Lent I may have a baby, which will surely mean a blog hiatus (or maybe I should say a blog fast).