A legacy of reading

Me: Who gave you this book?

Him: You did.

Me: And this one?

Him: Aunt Patty. I love reptiles.

Me: That’s right! What about this one?

Him: Oh, Nina got me that before I was even born!

My husband and I may often read on our tablets instead of holding a paperback, but our children have inherited our love of reading. But I have to back up and point out that we didn’t start the cycle… it’s been passed down. We are so blessed to be in a family of readers. That particular blessing always makes me smile when I read books with my kids.

It’s so special to me that my sons know where their books have come from. It gives me a giggle when I hear the 6yo tell the 3yo, “Be careful with that one, it was daddy’s when he was a little boy and it’s very, very, VERY old.” (Yep, just like Daddy, it’s being held together with six layers of scotch tape!)

We use our books hard, and of course there have been the occasional tearing incidents that any kids go through that make me angry… but the truth is that books don’t really get old. The story is always there, frankly, even if the middle spread where Thomas finally gets to the bakery and picks up the milk is missing. You can just sort of figure it out and keep going. (Plot points in children’s books aren’t that hard to improvise.)

Looking through my children’s bookshelves, I found at least one signed book from basically every living family member (except my one sister doesn’t sign her books!), plus books from those who are already with Jesus. I found books inscribed to my husband on various childhood occasions plus books inscribed in my amazing aunt's childhood cursive (the original Curious George book), one inscribed to my brother-in-law (#sorrynotsorry, Mike), and one addressed to my cousin from our mutual uncle with a note dated 1977 (In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak). I was particularly pleased to find one my husband received on his first Christmas from his Great Aunt Naomi who just went to heaven this week. A legacy that lives on...

Thinking about all the little hands who have read these words makes me so happy. The legacy of reading in my family is such a blessing, and I’m thrilled to be able to pass it on to my kids.

the things I haven't said to my kids

• The Farmer in the Dell song is broken forever. I killed it, and I have no regrets.
• Who are you talking to? You didn't say my name 64 times so I wasn't listening.
• How oh how oh how do you destroy clothing so quickly? Are you actually Edward Scissorhands?
• I would like to play Chutes and Ladders with you again, but I'm afraid that if I do, my brain will melt.
• If I step on another Lego today, your vocabulary is going to rapidly multiply in new and creative ways.
• I don't want to play that, so I'm going to stand here at the stove and pretend to cook dinner instead.
• Your breath is so bad, like worse than I imagine a coyote's would be if he's just eaten a skunk.
• No, I do NOT know the muffin man. Stop asking. Also, you're terribly off key.
• That picture doesn't look like a castle. It looks kind of like a box covered in beetles. Did you try to draw a box covered in beetles?
• This is a toy box and that is the dusty, hidden space under my couch. Why is it hard to tell them apart?
• What? I didn't hear you. Please repeat yourself in a higher pitch and at a progressively higher volume.
• Please behead my flowers one by one, leaving a long line of bedraggled green stalks that represent the herbivore edition of Game of Thrones.

the parable that's always annoyed me

Last night, my church's Lenten series "Parables of Eternal Gain or Loss" continued with the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard. Huge eye roll from me. Sorry, I know that ALL of the Bible is useful for teaching, training, rebuking, etc., but this parable has always infuriated me. I get a bad feeling when I read words of Jesus and find myself as the one receiving the rebuke. 

To summarize Matt 20: 1-16:  Field owner negotiates in the morning with some workers to pay them X to work all day. Every few hours, he recruits more workers, saying he'll pay them what's fair. Finally, some people work only an hour. At the end of the day, he pays the single-hour worker X and the guys who worked all day think they'll get (X+more), but they don't; they get X just like they agreed to. They are mad, but the field owner points out he can be as generous as he wants. Many who are first will be last, and many who are last will be first. (This repeated twice: in Matt 19:30, the verse right before the parable starts, AND in Matt 20:16, the last verse of this section.)

Ok, this is the worst because it seems a bad way to run a business AND because I feel like the all-day workers are totally justified in being annoyed. I would be really mad.

However, I am pleased to see how much I've been missing the point.

I will expand with the notes I took that helped this parable make some sense. 

1. Jesus starts with "and the Kingdom of Heaven is like a master of a house..." He does NOT start with "and the Kingdom of Heaven is like workers who were seeking employment." Huge difference. The primary lesson here is about the master's generosity, not anything the workers do. (Obviously, not grumbling is important, but that's not Jesus' focus.) The lesson here is about the wild generosity of God, represented by the vineyard owner.

2. The early workers were like the Pharisees to whom Jesus quoted Hosea 6:6 (twice in Matthew): I desire mercy, not sacrifice. The Pharisees and the early workers AND ME all seem to think that our hard work and sacrifice on earth are going to put us "higher" on God's list, give us a leg up in the Kingdom, earn us one more crown. We have high expectations for ourselves. But the truth is, mercy triumphs over sacrifice. The headline is always THE MERCY OF GOD and never THE SACRIFICIAL HARD WORK OF KELLEY [insert your name here].

3. This parable is not about labor relations, but there is sometime to be said for the fact that the vineyard owner went back over and over and hired the people that others considered unemployable. He also paid them generously, at great cost to himself.

4. None of the workers were mistreated in this man's field. They ALL got what they'd agreed to and many got abundantly more.

The pastor's two key points were:

• The gospel levels the playing field.

• Mercy triumphs over sacrifice.

Bottom line: What I'm starting to see from this series of Jesus' parables is that I am so much worse than I imagined and God is so much better than I hoped. I can trust a God like this vineyard owner.  

foster care nonsense in pop culture

I obviously don't own this image. It's from the ABC show "Once Upon a Time."

I don't watch much live television. I'm a Netflix and Amazon Prime binge watcher.  And while I used to watch a lot of new movies, parenting doesn't leave me as much time for the theater anymore. We RedBox whatever looks interesting! This is my excuse for why some of my references below may seem dated to people who watch current TV and have twelve movie ticket stubs in their coat pocket.

Foster care comes up occasionally in pop culture. What I've noticed is that I'm usually the bad guy -- "I" meaning the foster parent. If the foster parents aren't the bad guys, the social workers are.  My concern with this is that when Hollywood only portrays foster parents and social workers as family-destroying, child-stealing, money-hungry abusers, they're making it harder to inspire and recruit loving, self-sacrificing people to make the system better for the kids.

Here are some examples...

Once Upon a Time

Up front, I love this show. However, since foster care, adoption, and parenting are HUGE themes in this show, there are way too many things entirely wrong from my perspective. I will summarize that an adoptive mom is literally the Evil Queen and that a perfectly healthy white baby girl is apparently thrown around from home to home with no one willing to adopt her, leaving her an emotionally scarred adult. Oh, but before that, after years of this instability, she moves in with a family in her teens and after two weeks is perfectly adjusted, calling the adults "mom" and "dad." I guess that's all just part of the fantasy of the show?

Longmire

In an episode titled "Dog Soldier," social workers are stealing children from a Native American reservation to somehow collect federal money that comes to the group home caring for them. I read a quote about this episode that said something like, "This depiction of foster care is about as accurate as the way Dirty Harry portrays law enforcement." The history of Native American kids being taken from their homes and communities is obviously horrendous, but from what I've read, there may now be far more cases of government over-correction that leaves kids endangered than cases of government over-reaching. One interesting element of this episode is, despite a corrupt group home housing most of the kids, there is one very good foster family who is earnestly trying to help a young boy.

Despicable Me

The woman in charge of the group home is the problem here. A weird, single man shows up and asks to adopt three young girls and they are immediately sent there to spend the night? Um... No. No. No.

Blue Bloods

There have been a couple of weak portrayals of foster care in this otherwise outstanding series. The one that bothered me the most was a child whose mother and father were both killed. The next morning, someone in the precinct had "started adoption paperwork" because "no family had stepped forward." Whoa. Yeah, your timeline is off by about 2 years there. Simmer down, Sergeant.

Anne of Green Gables

Have to include this classic in the list! Obviously, since it's set in a historical context, I don't really know how much was true then that would be different now. But I will say that if you are a foster parent, it might be a good idea to discuss the themes of this story before just turning it on for your kids. 

Free Willy

Same as above. I remember loving this movie as a kid, but the beginning made my six-year-old cry, and we had to turn it off. I hadn't remembered that the beginning shows the young boy lying, stealing, and running away from foster care. Ultimately, the foster parents end up as good guys, but it may be worth giving your kids a heads up.

The Book Thief

I'm currently reading this, so I don't think I can comment prematurely. But I'm not a fan of the foster mom being an evil, screaming monster.  Foster dad thus far is admirable.

As I've said before, I know there are terrible people doing evil things in this system that is set up to protect children.  I won't pretend that foster care or adoption are perfect solutions with a red bow on top. Far from it -- I know the system is dramatically broken.  My point is that it will not help us bring GOOD people into the role of foster parent when we are only portrayed in pop culture as the bad guys.

men, women, and mirror images

I've discovered an interesting dichotomy in the responses between male and female readers of The Senator's Youngest Daughter.  Up front, I will admit that it's probably a story more geared for women but in a setting/context that's more traditionally aimed at men. My hope is that this makes it more appealing to more people.  

This "what women like" versus "what men like" conflict is a unique issue for me, particularly with movies and books.  For example, I generally HATE romantic comedies and LOVE "bang bang shoot 'em ups" as my dear mother would term science fiction, spy, war, superhero, crime, westerns -- basically all the good genres.  There are always exceptions to this, but this is me generalizing.

Concerning the narrating character's internal dialogue, two common responses I've heard from female readers:

• She's so funny!

• I feel like I'm having a conversation with you, Kelley.

Two responses I've heard from male readers:

• "Why did you write a book about an ugly girl?" (This is a direct quote.)

• "You throw in these zingers about a physical shortcoming, and it’s kind of like pricking a balloon with a pin." (This one is copied from an email so it's verbatim.)

I think I'm realizing that men aren't aware of the self-deprecating thoughts many normal women have constantly running through our minds. They hear women always saying things like "our culture impacts the way we view ourselves," but they don't know what that actually looks like in the life and mind of the everyday woman. And maybe that means that they don't understand why we are so insecure, because the men who love us think we are pretty great.

In contrast, women seem to know that we beat ourselves up in our heads, so they aren't surprised that a perfectly normal girl like Brenna views everyone else as more attractive/more talented/more important than she is. My female readers seem able to find the humor in this frustrating everyday battle, and even relate to a character who might be just like them. She's not Quasimodo, but she's not going to have a tiara placed on her perfect hair anytime soon, either.  

daddy isn't a babysitter

There's a weird element of family culture that bugs me. Maybe people don't talk about it, but it's sort of understood in certain circles. There's a weird idea floating around that in two-parent households, Mommy is The Parent, and if/when she's gone, Daddy steps in as The Babysitter.

Mommy does things a certain way. She's human. She knows her limits and her kids, so she's established systems of how things work.  Monday through Friday, the shoes are here, the cup is there, and we know at which stage of the routine we take that last-minute trip to the potty. Things aren't always smooth because of, well, humans, but we get it done by following point A to point B and so forth.

But then, it's Saturday and Daddy's home from work (or, more likely, Sunday and you're trying to be less than ten minutes late to church). The extra hands means everything's different. Kids are screaming, teeth are gnashing. I can't pee with my sneakers on!  I only drink milk in the Darth Vader cup! These are my brother's socks!

I do understand that kids respond to routine and habit, but as mothers -- and as people in general -- we need to be able to tell the difference between what's wrong and what's another way of doing things.  I'm not going to 'correct' my husband for putting a child's shoes on before he goes pee. (Logic: He does not take his shoes off before he pees anywhere else. I hope..) 

Mommy, don't be so ruled by your child that you begin to believe that it's reasonable for him/her to demand that ONLY you open his juice box.  Maybe you put the wings up and maybe Daddy bent the straw, but the message to your child that his/her father is incompetent is damaging.  That undermines not only his entire position as a father, as a leader, and as a man.

How will your kids ever believe that Daddy is the God-ordained head of the household if all they ever see is him deferring to Mommy on everything that matters to them? Do you think your kids tune into your discussions about finances or some topic where you are more readily willing to submit? Here's a hint: they do not. If you want your kids to see Biblical submission in a marriage modeled, they need to see it in a context that is in some way relevant to them. So chill out, Mommy, and don't communicate that Daddy is a sub-standard, fill-in Mommy. Let Daddy be Daddy. He's probably really good at it.