Stay-at-home moms have tremendous pressure to prove themselves somehow. Recent comments by Obama’s friend about a woman who raised five children, ‘never working a day in her life,’ is an old refrain. A woman who is “just” a mother gets no paychecks, no raises, no praises from superiors. There are no annual reviews of her performance. If she were a business owner, she would have her spreadsheet to report on profits.
How does a mother who stays home with her kids know if she’s succeeding? How does she prove that it’s all worth it? I know the answer to that question!
My own mother was a teacher before marrying my dad. But when the first baby came, she stayed home with him. We were never rich, but we lived on the income my father’s teaching, coaching and housebuilding in the summer.
It never once occured to me that my mother might want to go to work outside the home. I believed that we children were the center of her universe. Our successes and triumps were her successes and triumps.
Each day when we came home from school, we called out to her and she would answer. We didn’t necessarily need to see her, but we needed to know that she was there, like checking the pulse to be sure the heart is still beating.
Our mother made all the bread for our family of seven children. We almost never went out to eat, so my mother taught us to help her prepare three meals a day, seven days a week. With a rather meager income, she rationed the more expensive ingredients (like cheese.)  She did laundry every other day and hung it out on the clothesline. We owned a drier, but it was expensive to use and Mom said the sunshine helped to sanitize our clothes and bedding and bleach out stains. No fabric softener can duplicate the scent of clothes dried in the wind.
We raised a garden and learned to enjoy vegetables, (mainly zuchinni) We must have grown some other things, but zuchinni was the dependable crop. If we wanted a baseball bat, we had only to wait a day or two without picking and we’d be all set.
We lived in a house my father built. It stood in the middle of a lovely little valley a few miles from the California coast. The valley was filled with commercial apple orchards and our little one acre lot had about 25 apple trees on it. My mother arranged with our neighbor to trade the fruit from an apple tree for the fruit from one of their plum trees. She had trading partners for apricots and peaches too, so every summer and fall my mother canned a pantry full of fruit and homemade jam,(to go on our homemade bread) Applesauce was our favorite, but it was also the most labor intensive. Some nights she stayed up very late waiting for the fruit to process. I remember her tallying the jars as she arranged them in the pantry. She protected us from hunger.
My mother laughed at our jokes. She praised us for good report cards. She read out loud to us on Sunday afternoons. She kept a large bookcase filled with classic literature and worn-out children’s books in the living room. She never let us watch more than one show on the TV.
My mother didn’t complain about the long hours my father spent in his woodshop or doing church work. He was a Mormon Bishop for most of growing up years. She didn’t complain about the money he spent on lumber and material for his projects. We didn’t buy cheese, but my dad could afford to build a deep sea fishing boat? The Hunky Dory was a success and she was proud of his success. She didn’t gossip.
My mother took us to the beach when our Saturday work was done. She loved play in the surf as much as we did. Sometimes she’d take us to the park instead. She’d read on a bench and never seemed to resent the countless interruptions as we called for her to watch us jump off the swing or climb high on the bars or do any other astonishing feat of courage and prowess.
My mother took us to piano lessons.  She is an accomplished pianist herself, but feared that we would lose our enthusiasm for music if she became impatient, so we had other teachers. (None of us became very good, but several of us delight in good music.)
My mother took us to church every single week. There was never any thought of staying home. Once when my little brother couldn’t find his shoes, he had to come in his stocking feet. (He rather enjoyed the novelty). She read the scriptures every day and told us what she was thinking about or noticing about them often. I’m the only one of her children that didn’t serve a full time mission.
Once all seven of us chicks were fledged, my mother learned to speak Spanish. She renewed her teaching certificate in case my father’s failing health made it necessary for her to teach. She broke her arm playing roller skate basketball with her grandkids. She searved a proscelyting mission for the Mormon church in Costa Rica. She remarried and served a temple mission in Brazil where her husband had once been the mission president. She learned Portugese. She writes skits and poetry. She exercises several times a week. She mows her own huge lawn for the exercise. She wrote her personal history. She regularly holds “cousin dinners” for her grandchildren because she wants them to know eachother well. Sometimes there are over thirty people gathered at her house for those events. She attends football games at BYU. She drives to Cedar City to watch Shakespeare plays. She buys individual gifts for each of her children and children in law and all 43 of her living grandchildren every Christmas and sends birthday cards to all of us, too.
Mom is 82. She goes by Granny now. I see her priorities and personal delights repeated in the next generation and the next and the next. She COULD have been doing many, many other things while we were growing up. But she chose to stay home with us. She paid the price in personal honors
     

Hey, folks, I’m still stuck in non-fiction. This is fair warning to anyone who thinks they want to be a writer. 

The Babbler

Rob got back from his trip to the Philippines just in time for Makayla’s birth. She was breach and had the cord around her neck twice, so she had to come C-section. Marseille doesn’t look like she just had a c-section, does she?
  Rob went on assignment for the MTC to analyze how well the missionaries who received shorter (Tagalog) language training in the Missionary Training Center were catching up with those who got several more weeks of training in the MTC. He looks so tired because of jet lag. He had literally had a 35 hour day! I’m excited to hear the details of the trip, too! The little boys sure look cheerful, too!

I learned yesterday morning  that my daughter in law was going in for a c-section later that evening.  The baby was breach and when they went to do the inversion, they did an ultrasound and saw that the cord was wrapped around her neck. . .twice. I wished they would just hurry and get her out immediately!  I hated the thought of waiting, even a moment, knowing that our precious little granddaughter was in danger. 
   The c-section was scheduled for 6:00pm Utah time and the minutes seemed to crawl by.  How long do c-sections take?  Seven o’clock came and went.  Shortly after that, there was an eager, not-to-be ignored pounding on our door. “Let me IN!  I have news!”  Tricia, my oldest child and only daughter, was obviously in a huge hurry, and we thought it odd that she’d have news before we got it.
But it was true.  Baby Girl Stephenson had finally arrived!  She was in the NICU because she was having a little trouble breathing, but that’s common in c-sections.  They’re lungs aren’t compressed by the birth.  For a moment, I was still mystified.  Why did Aunt Tricia know and we didn’t?
“Rob said he wanted to call me first to tell me that there was finally another Stephenson girl born, (it’d been over 32 years!) And then she told us that like the most recent Stephenson girl,(her) the baby has a cleft palate. 
   When I heard it, I was filled with a strange, warm, sentimental feeling. Just then, the phone rang and it was Rob, expecting to announce the baby’s birth. I suppose he was a little disappointed that Tricia had scooped him, but he seemed to be taking the birth and the cleft very much in stride. 
   I remember well the long nights of feeding wakeful Tricia. She seemed to see no reason why midnight to four was not as good a time as any to get to know each other.
We fed her with a device that looked suspiciously like a gravy baster. We rested the piece of surgical tubing on her tongue, and as she swallowed, (a function that we were able to watch through the cleft in her upper lip) the movement of her tongue would release a few more drops of milk. We soon learned to keep the right amount of gentle pressure on the rubber bulb so as not to drown her or frustrate her.
 But it wasn’t a drowsy job. She sat almost entirely upright clutching the tube with her delicate lady fingers. When she was finished, she gave up her burps on my shoulder promptly and defying common expectations, rarely spit up.  But even so, feeding wasn’t a warm snuggle in the dark with Momma.  To Tricia, it was invigorating! She’d look at me as if to say, “Now what do you want to do?”
The answer was always very clear in my mind, but to Tricia, sleep was something you surrendered to only when you were absolutely out of other options. 
She was also a little bit of a thing and the doctors didn’t want to do the lip repair until she weighed ten pounds. But since humans grow when they sleep and she HATED to waste her time that way, it was a slow process. She was about 14 weeks when they finally closed the cleft lip.
   That started a season of almost a year and a half where her Z shaped scar on her lip was not especially noticeable, but her palate was still wide open. In the normal function of eating, food would migrate through the cleft into the sinuses and she would have to sneeze it out.  Rule of thumb number one, Rob and Marseille.  Never give a kid with a cleft palate an Oreo before going to church. Not pretty!
They used to wait longer to close the palate than they do now, and she was 19 months old.  She had already started to talk and I was concerned that if she learned wrong, it would take years of speech therapy to correct it. But when they brought her back from the palate repair, (they just closed the soft tissue, they don’t actually bridge the cleft with bone) she was able to say “Daddy” as clearly as anyone. It seemed that though she could not form  plosive sounds (B,P,D,K,G etc), she was naturally trying to form them, using the proper muscle and mechanism.  When the surgeon lengthened the soft palate with a pharyngeal flap, it instantly began functioning normally.

Babies with with cleft soft palates, (like my granddaughter) often have malformed Eustachian tubes, (that keep air in the middle ear). So if milk or food migrates into the tube, it causes inflammation which causes swelling, which causes the tube to close off. If there is a void anywhere inside the body, it soon fills with fluid, and the fluid in the middle ear causes pain.  Most cleft palate babies need ear tubes. But ear tubes come with risks.  Tricia had normal hearing until the repeated installation of ear tubes and the type of tube used damaged her drum irreparably.  They tried to repair it twice but each time it failed, since the Eustachian tube was still not functioning well.
   Tricia tolerated all the procedures and surgeries like a champ. She developed a high pain threshold and never complained.  She was born loving books and I have fond memories of lying on her hospital bed  with her, reading Ann of Green Gables together as she sipped apple juice.
    I suppose those long hours together are the root of the sense of warmth and peace that I felt when I heard that our little Makayla has a cleft palate.  She and her Mommy (and Daddy too,) are going to spend a good deal of quality time together. A terrific bond will form between them and each will learn even better to depend of the Savior when times are tough.
And there will be tough times. Parenting is no picnic in the easiest cases,(do those really exist) but nothing else can elevate us a little lower than the angels than midnight (all night) feedings and countless acts of selfless, tender service. Nothing gives empathy better than suffering a bit oneself.
 I wonder if Rob and Marseille would understand if I were to extend the special congratulations I feel deep down. I know what this will help them become. I know the look and feel of the Lord’s polishing tools. Birth defects are pretty heavy grit sandpaper.
Maybe they wouldn’t understand now, but they will. They will.

Today’s story is not fiction.

There was nothing in our conversation that had particular significance to us, other than the fact that we approached the summer with mixed feelings. Let’s face it, summer is quite work intensive for mothers of grade school kids. We might have said something about looking forward to the time when our youngest children were in school, (Janet’s already was).  It seems to me that we talked about life after preschoolers. But I don’t remember exactly what was said as we three friends sat on a bench on the last day of school.

Except for the fact that we all were certain that we were done with childbearing. It had been a quandary for me, since I always wanted eight and only had six. But my youngest was three and my husband felt that it was time to be done. He was soon to celebrate his 39^th birthday. He’d be too old, he reasoned, to do for another child what dads need to do. I admitted the considerations and thoughts regarding it to those two trusted friends.
Pam was already in her forties and said with a laugh, “Well, I know I’m done. I’m older than Jeff!” Janet assured us that she was also sure of being done. She was in a rocky marriage, (though at the time, neither Pam nor I knew how rocky.)  That was the gist. We don’t write down casual conversations with friends, do we?
Fast forward about five months.  I was having strange symptoms that seemed oddly like pregnancy. But I also had a few menopausal signs, too. My hair was getting some stray grays and I had PMS like never before.  I was only 35, but nobody can predict the changes in life. But I took a pregnancy test, just in case. Positive. Positive! 
I was sorry for about fifteen minutes. I had planned to go to school when my next youngest went to kindergarten. I had begun to wonder what it would it be to grocery shop alone. But it was not to be.  But then the wonder and the joy and hope and sense of honor settled on me and everything was all right.
Jeff’s response was much the same as mine. He quickly calculated how old he’d be when our baby graduated from high school. “I’ll be an old man!” he said. “I’ll be retiring right after the baby finishes school!”
That very night, my husband went to a church meeting that my friend Pam was conducting. At the end of the meeting, she announced that she was almost five months pregnant. She told me later when she saw the look on Jeff’s face, she knew that I was, too. We had told nobody, not even our children, but Pam marched up to him right afterward and asked him. Our news was still bouncing in his brain, looking for a place to settle. He denied it.
Pam called me the next day.  “Are you pregnant?” I was tempted to deny it, too, but with Pam’s super nose for news, I recognized that lies would not avail. 
About two weeks later, Pam called me again. “Janet’s pregnant, too. It was that bench!”  Pam herself had three older children. I thought it was a little naïve to blame a bench outside the school gym for three pregnant women.  But then again, it was rather miraculous that 42-year-old Pam, 38-year-old Janet and I, at 36, could all suddenly, unexpectedly be having babies.  But Pam called them Bench Babies. She threatened to take up a collection to put a warning sign on the school bench.
Pregnancy for older women is difficult. You might say, “It ain’t no picnic for young ones either,” and that’s true. But it seemed to be hard much earlier. I remember the last five months being ponderously waddley, achiley exhausting and tiresomely conspicuous.  But my two bench sisters had it just as bad. In fact, Janet, whose marriage had not been helped by the situation, undoubtedly had it worse.
Never the less, when I was about four months along, I got a card in the mail from Janet. It was an official membership card for the O.P.L. club. In tiny letters that I needed to polish my bifocals to see I saw that O.P.L. Stood for Old Pregnant Ladies. It gave me the right to mood swings, eating anything any time, and all the moaning and groaning that I needed.  I think there was something about sleeping late and bon bons on there too.
  By the end of the following school year, Pam had a new baby boy she named “Spencer.”  Janet and I were due within two weeks of each other and in to the full blown misery stage, complete with swollen ankles and puffy everything . . .then again, at our ages, it might not have been the pregnancies’  fault.
Janet jumped ahead of me and had Jeffrey almost a month early. Jeffrey had a traumatic time of it with his airway impeded and the doctors worked frantically to revive the darkening infant.  And they succeeded!
By the end of the summer, little Spencer, Jeffrey and Thomas were the dotage of our ward. Two more members had joined our club, and they also had boys. But they hadn’t been on the bench. So it makes far more sense that there was something in the drinking fountain at church.
But Jeffrey’s rough start had left an imprint on him. Janet took him to therapies and treatments throughout his preschool years.  He seemed fine to me.  I remember asking Janet if she was certain that his pace wasn’t just his natural development patterns. She patiently explained that he showed unique signs of birth trauma and that the therapies were helping.  
Before long, the boys’ personalities began to emerge. Spencer was a daredevil in the frightening extreme. “If this boy lives, it will be a miracle!” his mother said.  He was still preschool age (if I remember right) when he broke a bone swinging off a vacuum hose from the balcony in their home. He was rather vague about the details.  I hope Pam doesn’t know about the part my own children MIGHT have played in some of his legendary antics.
Jeffrey always reminded me of Curious George.  At church, when he went to the children’s meeting, (called Primary in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,) he would sit on his chair with his heels hooked on the rung so his knees stuck up. He looked like a grasshopper ready to spring. He would hold onto the sides of his chair sometimes. I think that was mostly to delay the inevitable leap. Jeffrey tried to be good, but sometimes his exuberance got the best of him.
He was tender-hearted, too. I remember once when I was in his school classroom as room mother. I had the children making some sort of Christmas ornament and Jeffrey came and just stood close to me. “Do you need something, Jeffrey?” I asked.
“No,” he answered. “I’m just looking.”
You might think I’m easily flattered, but I was. He seemed to be proving to the other students that he and I were friends. There was something extra between us that the other students didn’t have.
  He was so curious and engaged that he wanted to be in the middle of everything. He wanted to touch and feel and see and hear.
Thomas was a cheerful, obedient, little boy with some tendency to fearfulness. It was important to Thomas to “be good,” and he was sometimes troubled by his buddies’ naughtiness. At least that’s the way I heard it. With Spencer’s daredevil and Jeffrey’s curiosity, we three mothers thought of them like gunpowder and fire. Thomas might have been a bit of a cooling agent in the mix, but he liked to spend time with both of them. Vibrant personalities like theirs are just FUN!
But in the course of Jeffrey’s young childhood, his parent’s marriage fell apart. His older siblings were either teens or early twenties, so Jeffrey became a sticking point. I cannot comment publicly on such a private matter as those years, but Janet and I became deeper friends. We confided to each other more often.
  We had both gone back to school to finish our degrees through the BYU BGS (distance learning) program.  Janet anticipated going to work to support herself, and I felt I needed the degree to be ready for the next phase, whatever it held. We took many of the same classes, though not simultaneously, and commiserated together on the difficulties of the process. We discussed our families together and analyzed Jeffrey’s responses to the struggles he was being subjected to.
Maybe it was that final bonding before Janet moved to another state, but we have kept good contact through the years. Not too much later, we also moved away from Colorado. But the miracles of email and facebook allowed us to “keep track” of each other quite consistently.
  Despite Janet’s desperate attempts to keep Jeffrey with her, she ended up with a shared custody with Jeffrey staying in his Colorado home.  His father had remarried and his stepmother had a boy his age.

In recent years, I’ve read Janet’s posts as she counted down the days to visits with Jeffrey. What a relief it was to read that when Janet remarried, Jeffrey and his stepfather developed a good relationship.  He seemed to be getting along okay. But he had it tough. 
Janet sent a note yesterday. “Our three little boys are down to two.” Jeffrey died last Tuesday. As I write this now, fresh tears start. How can that be? Our children do NOT precede us in death!

I picked up Thomas from school and gave him the news. “My Jeffrey Meacham?” he asked.

“Yes. Your Colorado friend.”

He asked some questions and I told him all I knew. He wept softly, his head turned away. At fifteen, Thomas has  the body of a man but for a moment he was a little boy, weeping for his boyhood friend.  When his emotion subsided, he asked, “Can we go?”

“We’ll see.”  It’s a ten hour drive. But I wanted to go, too. There’s nothing to say or do that will ease the dreadful pain for my friend. I want to go and let the angels carry up the message to Jeffrey that there are many, many people that love and care about him. I want his family to know that we mourn with them and blend our tears with theirs over the harshness of mortality. Jesus wept at the death of his friend, Lazarus, even knowing that he would immediately restore him to life. He wept over Mary and Martha’s pain. He weeps for us as we suffer. But his hands are stretched out still. He holds the balm and soothing ointment. I hope that I can help to pour it in.

This is for Janet.

I forget an instant,
My present pain:

My universe
Is ever changed

Father? Receive my son
Into the power
Of Thy love.
You sent me your
 Beloved One,

Thou who art merciful to save,
Have rescued from a hopeless grave!

Jeffrey’s obituary can be read at dignitymemorial.com
Jeffrey Meacham and the state is Colorado.

By the way, I lied about the post yesterday not being allegorical. But here’s my collective, direct response to the facebook discussion as well as the posted comments. THANK YOU ALL FOR COMMENTING. I THINK IT HAS BEEN GLORIOUSLY STIMULATING.

Pictures at the bottom!

One small comment:The earlier article is not meant to shame anyone. It’s meant to point out a problem with the concept of certain mindsets or behavoirs, not limited to Bunko. It applies to ANY clique. They’re deadly to Christian virtue in every form.

I’m talking about my FLOWER GARDEN. Now there’s a subject that will bore you to tears. Except that I have noticed some interesting things about it.  If I ever have another daughter, I’m going to name her after one of the flowers that grows in  my garden. I’m going to name her “Iris.”
 I started to feel warm and fuzzy about Iris when we lived in the high desert of southern California. Under a flowering plum in our front yard, someone had planted Iris and then left them to fend for themselves with no water.  I watered them and they soon bloomed like Diaphanous fairies.
 Iris are  tough. I moved some of those iris to Colorado. When our neighbors found out about my affinity for them, they told me that they had once belonged to an iris society that experimented with cross pollination. When they got bored with it, they tossed their experiments on the back of their lot. I was welcome to plant them and see what they were. We lived at an arid 7500 feet and most of the long forgotten plants were only two or three inches tall.

I can’t figure out how to rotate this. For some reason the program won’t highlight the little rotate arrow for this picture. But it is so cute that I couldn’t resist showing it anyway. Chris is in Bulawayo now. It’s not green and lush like his first area near Mozambique, but veld with lion king type scenes.

Okay, folks, I’ve been minding my own business for too long. I feel it’s time to stir the pot a bit. If there’s a different take on this, I’d be THRILLED to have you respond, either on facebook or on this post. There may be aspects I’ve never thought of, that ought to be addressed, so GO FOR IT! Feel free to disagree, (politely).