Celebrating being smacked by the humility bus

To mention just a few of several awkward events this week (ranging from mild to devastating):

I watch Cam’s music class performance (bells and maracas and stuff) and morph into a sad sorry angry mess because he’s left to stare into the blur and no one shows him where to pack away his castanets or when to drum with only one hand. My friend Denise Bishop discovers me howling and mops up the flood. This is embarrassment on the level of good-grief-be-a-grownup.

I have arranged for the College’s resident Professor Emeritus, Stephen Finn, to deliver a Form 4 poetry lecture – on a prescribed poem that he wrote – at 9h00. Which is the time we see the Form 4s for English. In summer. The timetable changes in winter (long story). The Form 4s are seated expectantly in the Auditorium just after 8h00. No professor. The realisation dawns on me darkly. Oops. Everyone laughs; forgives. Yay! Free period! Even the professor graciously scrubs egg off my face.

I’m team-teaching three Matric classes with Bruce Collins. We are discussing the impromptu oral performance of one particular water polo player at the back of the class. I step backwards and trip over three school bags, losing a shoe and most of my dignity while clinging to Bruce’s nonplussed arm and shrieking like a girl. Cringe. This is on the level of squirming-in-my-bed-tonight.

It helps to know that,

The high and lofty one who lives in eternity, the Holy One, says this: ‘I live in the high and holy place with those whose spirits are contrite and humble. I restore the crushed spirit of the humble and revive the courage of those with repentant hearts.’ – Isaiah 57:15

And for Cam, whose brave stillness as he listens for the cue of a bashing tambourine tells me he knows he’s not part of what’s happening around him, it helps to speak these old words:

As for me, I look to the Lord for help.

I wait confidently for God to save me,

and my God will certainly hear me.

Do not gloat over me, my enemies!

For though I fall, I will rise again.

Though I sit in darkness,

the Lord will be my light. – Micah 7:7-8

Confessions of imperfection

Here’s a page from my (Imaginary) Haiku Liturgy for Inadequate Parents, to be read on Sad Sundays:

Temper Temper

Sometimes my dam breaks:

Anger gushes hot, hurtful.

Jesus, forgive me.

Caution: words at large

Let me only speak

Truth and life over soft hearts:

Weigh my ev’ry word

Please please please let it not be so

What if they don’t see

Jesus streaming through the cracks

Of my screwed-up self?

God’s glory in outstripped expectations

May 2008:

Doctors tell us that Cam is destined for a ‘special school’. They say his visual disability means that he will never cope in a ‘normal school’.

June 2008 – April 2012:

God works.

May 2012:

I drive Cam to Hatfield Christian School for an assessment. The stakes: a chance at mainstream education. I am fighting nervous tears and quiet panic but we sing along to Ultimate Bible Songs – Cam’s best – and he stares calmly out the window. Then he says seriously, ‘Mom. Do you think jellyfish have heads?’ The assessment doesn’t faze him. He is charming and chatty and relaxed. He copes magnificently with most things, and struggles with some things. It’s a happy celebration of imminent big school and though we don’t know yet if he has cracked it he jumps through all the right hoops of my heart. Afterwards Granny and Grandpa take him to McD’s for chips and a milkshake. He is monumentally chuffed.

June 2012:

The doctors were right. Cam is officially accepted and welcomed into a very special school. (They were also wrong. No school is normal.) Deo Volente – HCS Grade 00 – Class of 2013.  I'll be there to help him in class or out of class – whatever floats his little boat of learning. We are grateful that Hatfield is taking a chance on us. Hatfield is excited that we are choosing to trust them.

A note for Cam:

Big man, we are so proud of you. You live your life with such exuberance, easy grace, undiluted passion. (You'll want to watch out for that last one. It fuels your tantrums.) We believe in you. More importantly, we believe in the God who had you in mind before he breathed out the universe. He has gifted you scarily. He loves you unimaginably. And although his ways are beyond tracing out, his plans are flawless.

Ultimately all the big things you go through will just become stories that you tell. It’s how you live the big things (and the small things) that will determine the impact of your stories. We are in awe of how you’ve lived your story so far, brave shining star.

Scott has performed the double-thick aqueous-cream head-smear three times this week. Slow learner that I am, I have now hidden the cream. 

Let’s play visual-aid-visual-aid!

Of brothers and anything but boring

He ain’t heavy

Puzzles are hard work for Cam. We practise. Yesterday at my Mom’s place, she was building puzzles with both boys. Cam found the piece with the beehive and told Granny, ‘I need the one with the bee.’ Scotty picked it up and passed it to Cam. No fuss. Just being the calm little eyes for big bro.

Sometimes they help each other too much. This afternoon Cam helped Scott onto the coffee table, where he danced and chortled dangerously. Scott likes to help Cam to wake up in the mornings by performing full-body power slams. Repeatedly.

The little Scott is doing some serious testing of the boundaries at the moment. He bites and scratches and hides the keys and takes the batteries out of the remotes and turns on the washing machine and runs when I’m about to catch him.

But then he hugs me close and tells me long soft stories and plasters my cheeks with wet loving smooches and raises his hands to worship Jesus when we dance in the lounge and his eyes are a blue sea drowning my frazzle. Sigh.

Cammy comments and conversations

Waving me off this morning: ‘Be careful to drive carefully, Mom! Don’t get dead!’

----

Cam: What’s Pluto for if there are no people on it?

Me: Just for God’s glory. To show how great he is. He can make planets! It’s too cold for people to live there, and there’s no oxygen.

Cam: I think Pluto is just there to keep winter at the right degree.

----

Cam overheard someone saying, ‘You screwed up. You’re just human.’ He proceeded to say it several times during supper. This led to a conversation on original sin. I’m explaining, ‘And God said, “Don’t eat the fruit from that tree!”’ Cam was not to be taken in. ‘No. You must eat fruit! Fruit is healthy.’

----

On Sunday Cam was hurtling through church after the service. He discovered the baptismal pool. Breathlessly excited: ‘When can we swim in this?!’

Anyone can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the apples in a seed. – Anonymous

A letter: some memories in mid-May

My boys,

Here are some things I thought I’d store for you.

Yesterday, Cam, you asked me, ‘Mom, why did Noah’s boat land on Mount Aromat?’ Salt of the earth, I guess…? J

We also had the following conversation, on the way home from taking Lola for a run at St Alban’s:

Cam: Why did Jesus make some animals nocturnal?

Me: [Explanation involving nocturnal and diurnal habits of animals, ending with…] So like, people, we’re diurnal ‘cause we play in the day and sleep at night.

Cam: No. That’s not actually right. We also sleep after lunch.

This morning Dad left to ride Sani2C. Cam, you prayed for him when we said goodbye. Brave shining star, what a big man you are becoming.

This afternoon Thandi was in an awful accident and you were both with Granny and Grandpa when they rushed to the scene. I’m glad you didn’t really understand what had happened, and I’m proud of you for waiting patiently while the ambulance and the police did sad and serious grownup things.

Tonight we ate lasagne but it was too quiet without Dad and blowing out the supper candle wasn’t hilarious like it usually is.  

Scott, you are a little man of few (actual) words, except of course for your astounding repertoire of animal sounds, which you can witness here. But you jabber in earnest and with great enthusiasm. This morning while you dribbled rusk crumbs in our bed you scolded Cam with vociferous intensity and a very intentional index finger. Cam retaliated by quizzing you – in Afrikaans – on all your body parts (‘Waar is jou maag / kop / rug / ens.). We were a bit shocked when you obediently and correctly pointed out the relevant bits without so much as batting your long blonde lashes.

Speaking of those lashes. Gosh. They will be my undoing. You are frikkin’ naughty. And your big soft blue eyes plead innocence as you climb wine racks and railings, couches and counters. We have to check dustbins, appliances and flowerbeds for things you’ve tossed. Yet you are equally mesmerised by the quiet adventure of books, and when you are worryingly quiet, you are as often immersed in slow, gentle, ponderous page-turning as you are in digging up my sweet peas. Sweet child of mine.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. – Psalm 34:8

Sleep tight now,

All my love

Mom

xx

 Teatime way up high...

Of fried chicken feet, world travel and divine appointments on pavements

You’ve got to love Africa.

Murray picked up the boys’ passports today. They have quite a few stories attached to them already and they haven’t even been stamped.

In short:

We enlist the help of a perfectly amiable agency (i.e. some chaps who use a cell phone booth as a base for their trips to Home Affairs and Beyond). Forms are filled in. Wads of cash change hands. Ben, the entrepreneurial promise-maker of quick-quick-passport-delivery, insists that Murray accompanies him to Home Affairs, to prove he’s the dad of kids that really exist. At Home Affairs it becomes disconcertingly and infuriatingly apparent that Ben has lost one of Cam’s ID photos. You need two. So Murray drives back through town to fetch Cam (while Jo, his self-appointed car guard, Home Affairs advisor, bouncer and ID photo negotiator, risks death by practically lying down in Pretorius Street to save Murray’s parking bay). A marathon clogs the streets. Eventually Murray returns with the live exhibit. Cam poses for new photos on the pavement outside Home Affairs, on a beer crate neatly covered with a towel. The white backdrop is the reverse side of a Vodacom street pole ad, held up behind his head by the photographer’s able assistant. The photos emerge immediately, from a printer next to the beer crate, plugged into an extension running into the Portuguese café selling chicken and Coke and bread and hope. Everyone is fascinated. Cam and Murray are having a blast. Ben thinks it’s a sign from God that he and Cameron Benjamin Reyburn have a name in common. Fast forward a month or so. Home Affairs has had a slight problem with a scanner. Ben has gone home to his family in Zim. We have gone on holiday. Eventually through the power of voicemail and persistence, Murray brings home two brand new stark little travel docs and a world of opportunities. Praise God.

We got the passports because it’s good to have passports, not because we have plans for imminent travel abroad. Although now that we have them I’m itchier than ever to throw the boys into our backpacks and take them somewhere. All in good time I guess.

I don’t have many specific dreams for our boys. I mostly dream for them just to live out every bit of their potential, to become what God has planned. But one dream I do have is that they will travel the world, because as Miriam Beard said, ‘Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.’ I pray that whatever stamps fill these pages, each journey will be a celebration of God’s wonder in history and creation and train stations and weird tastes and weirder accents. I pray that travel will remind them that life is about people more than it is about places. I pray they will know that Jesus journeys with them, directing their paths. And that he summons each new generation from the beginning of time (Isaiah 41:4), choosing their time and place in history. I hope that our boys will always celebrate their earthly roots while fixing their gaze on a heavenly inheritance. I hope they will go where God leads. 

A Celebrating Life suggestion: L.L.A.P.

This one’s for you if:

1.       You want to be an awesome parent

2.       You feel like you’re not an awesome parent

Options 1 and 2 are true for me every day.

So I have an awesomeness gauge. A checklist that I run through a couple times a day. It helps me feel less overwhelmed by my ideals and my failings, and more as if parental awesomeness is within reach. Regardless of the levels of ordinariness or exhilaration on any given day, I ask myself four questions about what I’ve done with my boys:

Laughter?

Have they laughed? Like, really laughed. Contagiously and unstoppably. If not, am I willing to cartwheel out of my comfort zone to make sure that this day doesn’t end until they have?

Learning?

What have they learned? This could be anything. Like, ‘God knew he was going to make you before he had even made the world.’ Or, ‘Don’t put metal in the microwave.’

Adventure?

Has today been fun? Wild? Exciting? Different? Challenging? Interesting? In even a very small way? Like, did I let them run naked through the sprinklers? Or, did I say yes to spontaneous pancakes and trampoline-jumping with their cousins down the road?

Prayer?

Have we prayed? Before school? Before meals? Before bedtime? Randomly, in the car, on our way to something nerve-wracking or exciting? Instinctively, mid-chat on the couch?

‘So commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these words of mine. Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Teach them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that as long as the sky remains above the earth, you and your children may flourish in the land the LORD swore to give your ancestors.’ – Deuteronomy 11:18-21

Mr Plod, attending to urgent business…

Murray camped with Cam in the garden last night (Scott came inside at bedtime)

Discovering the pedals…