The One Where They All Flew the Coop

So. We had family prayer tonight. Skippy had gone to bed, and I couldn’t help but notice: there were only three of us. Dillon is away at scout camp for a week and a half, and today we left Ethan deep in the heart of Camp Pendleton for Marine Combat Training. The missionaries are moving out in two weeks. Even Cambria leaves soon for a month with her grandma. Everyone is disappearing, and well, maybe I am feeling a little sorry for myself. All this trouble I have taken to surround myself with adoring minions (is that an oxymoron? Maybe it should be loyal minions, or adoring fans, or something. Whatever, as long as I get to be the queen), and I am telling you, all I can hear right now is crickets.

I really do love alone time. But I believe that one cannot truly appreciate alone time unless she is bombarded with nearly constant familial chaos. Thank goodness for Skippy. I remember when I found out I was pregnant with Skippy. I was 39 years old. I did not necessarily have plans to have a seventh child. Okay, so I did allow myself a moment, standing there in the bathroom holding a urine-soaked pregnancy test, to revel in my apparent fertility. You thought I was going to say, wallow in self-pity, didn’t you? No! On the contrary, a little victory dance… because if there is one thing at which I truly excel, it is conception. I have batted a thousand, having never missed on the first try, and in fact have been taken quite by surprise on more than one occasion at the very tenacity of my own fertility. Never more so than that Sunday morning, standing there staring at a pink plus sign that meant Skippy was in there, growing away, about the size of a jellybean.

I found that despite the fact that my family and I are pretty good sports, and that even my teenage sons were excited about a new baby, it seemed that so many others were less than happy for me. My friends were all done having babies, and there I went, upsetting the status quo. I found myself repeating this mantra: “No, really, we’re actually happy about it.” One day a co-worker of DK found out we were pregnant. I braced myself for the abject horror, patronizing condolences, or pitying smile to which I had become accustomed. Instead, this nice lady… her name is Kay… told me she was happy for me. She said something I have thought of many times since: “You will never get to be 50 years old and wish that you had less kids.” I have a few years left before I find that out for sure, but do you know, I do believe she was right.

When my kids grow up and get married and go on missions and join the Marines and leave for scout camp and fly on airplanes all by themselves, guess what… Skippy is still here making a complete wreck of my family room with hundreds of cars that his brothers have all played with, and in fact are probably antiques because many of them used to belong to DK when he was little. Skippy will still paint my white sateen sheets with red nail polish and cut his own hair with school scissors, just as his siblings did before him. He will be here to cry because there is no homemade bread to go with his peanut butter. He will try to sneak out to play with friends even though he is only five, and then sneak back in under the trampoline and through the back door so I won’t know he left, even though I was watching him the whole time. Skippy will still be here to crawl into my bed in the middle of the night and then snore so loudly that DK carries him back to the bottom bunk within minutes. Skippy will still be here to make the helper who hands him out of the car at the curb in front of kindergarten in the morning stand there waiting while he tells me three times that he loves me before he will turn and climb the stairs to his classroom. It is perfectly perfect having Skippy.

Each one of the seven was perfectly perfect… Truly: any single one worth the price of admission… and I am aware of the fact that even Skippy will all too soon turn into a teenager who knows more than I do, who goes off to be his own man (and to be clear, who a few years thereafter will, like his brothers, realize that he does not, in fact, know more than I). But I am resourceful. I think ahead. By then I will have accumulated a sufficient store of grandchildren to keep things interesting around here. I’m sure they will be just as adept at turning my house into a complete disaster as their parents were in their turn.

So as for this week, I won’t feel sorry for myself. In fact, maybe I will just try to enjoy a little of that elusive alone time. Perhaps just long enough to finish these three songs… that would be lovely.

The Mother's Day One, Last Part

This is DK holding Josh, our first baby. That was the day I became a mother. I thought I knew what it would be like, but then he was born, and I found I had completely underestimated the situation. It was ever so much better, and oh so much worse. Euphoric…and dire. It was like safety and danger all rolled into one screaming rollercoaster package. When Adam and Eve chose to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and Good and Evil, they unleashed opposition… and that is what being a parent is all about. High highs, low lows, and lot of in between.

I think one thing that is hardest about being a mother is embracing change. In some ways I love change. I wouldn’t mind moving to new places (DK is a homebody). I change my hair, my clothes, my music… but then there is the matter of the kids. I don’t like change when it involves people I love going away. It only seems like a couple of years since DK held Josh in the nursery at St. Joseph’s, but the years have rushed by, and everything changes.

This photo is from the last Thanksgiving we were all together as a family. In 2004. (yes, Ethan regrets the Mark Hamill hair-do) Then Josh left on a mission, and before he got back, Tyler left on a mission, and before he got back Casey left on a mission. Everything changes. Does that make me sad? Yes. And also fiercely happy and proud. It is that opposition thing again.

When Skippy was born, I really learned how much things had changed. I wondered when I was expecting him, what would it be like to have a baby boy again, but this time in a houseful of teenage boys. I will tell you how it turned out: Magic.


Skippy was not just my baby…he was everyone’s baby.


Everything was a little sweeter. A little gentler. A lot happier.



I remember reading about how an only child turns out to be more successful, because he gets his parents’ undivided attention. Looking at Skippy, I think how sad it would be if all he had was his parents’ undivided attention.













And so everything changes. And today I am expecting a Mother’s Day call from a missionary.






For the fifth year in a row. And if all goes well, for five more years to come.











It stabs my heart a little that I don’t have all my babies around me anymore…because they aren’t babies anymore. And at the same time, what could be better?

Happy Mother's Day, everyone!

The One Where She Holds the Line

To answer Nan’s question, I will happily be called Grandma. It was good enough for Neva and Dora, my two perfectly perfect grandmothers, who were, between the two of them, everything a good grandma should be. A lot of people have asked me, what do you think about being a grandma? to which my pat response has been “Weird,” or “I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it.” Which responses were completely true. I really had no way of saying how I felt about it until I actually experienced it. But now I have been a grandmother for two and a half days.

I realized :( as we pulled up to the hospital where Josh, Jessi and Jif were recovering from birth, that I was very excited. I thought that it would be so fun to see my son and daughter-in-law in the role of parents, and see this little stranger for the first time. But then we walked in and I saw him. I had the same reaction to him that I had when I saw Josh for the very first time, and then each of my seven in their turns. This was not the stranger baby I was expecting to hold for the first time. I could have walked into the nursery full of babies, and picked him out without ever having seen him before. I knew that when I saw Joshua as a newborn, too. I looked at him, and thought, Well, of course that is him. He is so perfectly part of us. So familiar. I have known him forever. The thing is, I just didn’t expect to already know Jif.

People always say that being a grandma is way better than being a mom. You can love them, spoil them, and then send them home to their parents. I know you have heard this...everyone says it, right? Well, I am sorry, but that is just not true. At least it is not for me. I could not pry myself out of that hospital room for several hours on Saturday. The problem (if it is one), I finally realized, is that I would be perfectly happy to trade them. They can leave, and I will stay here with this perfect baby tonight. I will sit with warm blankets on my swollen abdomen to soothe the afterpains; I’ll take the icepacks and the bleeding. I’ll brave the cracked nipples and grit my teeth to nurse when his mouth feels just like a pair of pliers. I will take that sensation where when you stand up to hobble to the bathroom, it feels like all of your insides might just fall out. I will sit awake all night, holding him skin to skin, or just look at him for hours under that fluorescent light, and think how entirely amazing he is...how smart, and alert, and incredibly, impossibly beautiful. Here is the deal: I want to be a mother forever and ever and ever.

Please don’t take this the wrong way. I love what great parents Josh and Jessi already are. They are so patient and calm and wonderful. It doesn’t even make me feel old to be called Grandma. I don’t get jealous when I look at other people’s babies, and wish they were mine. I am going to love being a grandma. But I am not going to lie and say that it is better than being a mom. Jessi got the better end of this one.

I don’t think that I am one of those “over-mothering” mothers. I don’t follow my big kids around and try to tell them what to do all the time... and I’m sure that if I don’t speak the truth, here, they will feel free to comment and correct me. But what in the entire world could be better than having children, watching them be perfect babies, and then adorable two-year-olds, and then teenagers who are smart and funny and make all kinds of mistakes, and then, before you know it, grown-ups who are better at everything than you ever were? There could not be anything better. So there I will hold the line.

Grandma I am; and I have to say that including a new grandson in my family can only be described as life-altering. I love him like crazy. But please don’t cue the Circle of Life music quite yet. I am not done with the first part. And I don’t ever intend to be. I am going to be a mother for eternity.