True revelations: Outings with lots of kids

My friend Rachel and I, after many outings with our combined children, thought that we should publish a book that reveals the truth of what homeschooling or large family experiences are REALLY like, not the Christmas Letter version.  We often fantasized about this to try to bring some sort of artistic cast to one botched adventure after another.

We are both women who love ideas, reading, conversing over tea, and exposing our children to all that is beautiful.  The distance between our ideals and our reality is where we usually find ourselves living.

In light of our experiences, we thought we might offer up some of the lessons we have learned that might get you somewhere from our experienced reality to your ideals.

Here are some suggestions:

1. Plan your departure time within a three hour window.  Numerous things come up--nursing an infant, a blowout diaper, a fight that needs mitigation and subsequent discipline, the finishing up of food preparation.  NEVER expect to leave on time, even if you thought you were generous.

2. Plan easy food and lots of snacks.  This is hard if you have a friend like Rachel whose artistic expression is at its height in food.  One time she stayed up until two in the morning making cornish pasties for our trip to the museum in downtown Chicago.  Different pasties accommodated different food restrictions--the dairy free ones, the tomato free ones, the wheat free ones.  I made pumpkin squares, and we had thermoses of hot tea.  The fact that Rachel slowly pushed a stroller through the exhibits, commatose, diminished the enjoyment of the amazing pasties.  I finally had to curb Rachel's creativity with our co-op lunches, which took an unusual amount of time to prepare, especially the lovely salads with gourmet ingredients.  After I insisted on cheap rice and beans every week or hotdogs or lentils or tuna casserole, we received a letter via post from our children protesting the descent of our meals. I would recommend setting expectations low from the start.
3. If you are going to a museum, call ahead and find out what storage is available for all of the food that you will be carrying with you (since you cannot possibly feed 14 children in those expensive cafeterias).  We did not know that one museum we visited did not allow food even in their lockers.  Since our van was practically parked in a different state, we had to "hide" our food.  We had our children squeezing under bushes into secret parts of public gardens and hiding baskets and coolers.

4. Find out ahead of time if your large van will fit into the underground parking garages.  Measure your height so that you know when it says, "Clearing: 6 feet 7 inches," whether or not you will clear it. I have had to have children stand outside of the van and watch as we try to go under the clearing board to see if we can make it.

5. If you plan to be near any water, throw some old towels from Goodwill into the back of your van.  Let children get wet and dirty, but then have ways to clean them off.  How many times my seats have gotten soaked from wet and muddy children!  I actually keep a large cotton blanket in the back that can be used for spontaneous picnics or to cover seats if children have had an unexpected adventure.  Plan for any water to be an occasion for swimming.

6. Try not to draw attention to yourselves in museums.  Make sure children keep their shoes on, even though the marble may feel so good on their feet. And don't let them point out interesting things in the paintings with pencils; and whatever you do, don't let them climb on the banisters or fall asleep on the benches.

7. Check your calendar to make sure than none of your many children has a music lesson in the middle of your outing.  We have settled in to a nice wooded experience with our folding chairs and thermoses of tea, kids have just waded into the river and begun to find frogs, when one of us will be horrified to realize that one of the children has a music lesson.  Trying to reach the teacher becomes a feat (left the phone (if you have one) in the car, which is a mile away, don't have her number, or the phone is not charged, or she isn't answering).

8. Make sure the parent with the best sense of direction picks up the van.  We have packed up everyone, sent one parent for the van (which as I mentioned is a mile away), trekked with the nursing infants on backs and all the wandering, digressing children to the main road where the van should pick us up, only to wait for a lengthy time for the van.  On one occasion, a woman stopped to say that she saw a large white van wandering around, the driver of which had stopped to ask her for directions, and she wondered if we were the passengers for whom certain driver was looking.  I'm not sure why we looked like a group that belonged in a large van?

9. Beware of strange "hanger-on's" in wooded areas. Large groups of children attract adults who have never grown up.  On one river outing, we noticed some strange characters who then tried to join our picnic.  I had to tell Kevin that we did not know him and felt uncomfortable having him join us seeing that he was a stranger.  During this conversation, Rachel was leading a search party for our two boys who had gone way up the river.  (Note:  Even moms of lots of children who want their children to wander and be carefree worry about their children being victims.  This is normal.  The fact that Kevin's friends were not with him made our creative minds run wild into thinking he was distracting us while his friends went after the animals that were on the edge of the herd).  I told Kevin that I was glad to make a sandwich for him, but he would have to leave once I gave it to him.  He stood over me as I constructed the sandwich asking for more mayonnaise, and could he please have a second piece of bread on top of the sandwich.  I informed him that if we were having open faced sandwiches, so could he.  Kevin and his buddies were later found writing down our license plates and pretending to be cops.  It is a good thing that when the real cop arrived (we finally made the call), she was unfazed by our gaggle of children, as she herself was one of 12.

10.  I cannot over-emphasize the magnet that your group will be for people who want to be with you.  A certain Marcela is in one of our group shots at the Art Institute.  She said she was pregnant with her own granddaughter.  Even Rachel and I, who are very pro-life, could not believe that. (By the way, we got in trouble for climbing on that sturdy lion.  Don't do that when you come to Chicago).

11. Make sure that the river by which you plan to have your idyllic picnic is not one that has recently been drained.  The boys will not notice and will crawl in the mud slop just as happily.  They sat covered in mud while they ate their grilled chicken wraps with grilled vegetables.

12.  Make sure some child is wearing either a cape or a costume that ensures people will know you are homeschooled.

13.  When planning to depart for a full two family camping trip that will last several days, make sure that the husbands have engineering degrees or at least children who are gifted in such ways for the strapping on of the two kayaks, the sleeping bags that need to be packed inside boats, paddles, fishing poles, ten bikes, and tiki torches that go on outside the van.  For the inside of the vans: make sure you pack the children in first;  then you can put containers, tents, duffle bags, coolers, boxes of food, propane stoves, awnings, folding chairs, balls, BB guns, and dog all the way up to the door.   One time we realized the kids couldn't get out to go to the bathroom at a pit stop.

14.  Get a lot of sleep before you leave on a big camping adventure.  We left once when three of the four parents had gotten a half hour of sleep before leaving at 6:00am (we had planned to leave at 4:30am, but since we hadn't gone to bed yet, we indulged in a later departure).  The other parent who had clocked two hours of sleep was the designated grown-up.  One driver pulled into a gas station for gas, put his pillow on the window and promptly fell asleep.

15.  Pack for the right weather.  We have had to run into town to resale shops to buy every reasonable sweater we could find.  Rachel wore a sweater on her head one whole weekend.

16.  Don't worry about firewood.  Since you can never take firewood into forested preserves, just find it local.  Dead trees are all over the ground.  Just make sure you have teenage boys along with all of their saws and axes.  We have burned through a tree before just by sawing off sections into the fire.

17.  No matter what you do, take enough chocolate.

 In spite of all of your best laid plans that go awry, I can promise you that you will have a boat load of memories and shared experiences about which to reminisce.  Just maybe the ideal experience wouldn't have even made it into the long term memory.  The real memory was just so much more...real.

     In the words of the winged messenger, Nike, "Just do it."

   

The Word that Dispels all Darkness: Staying Near Jesus in Holy Week

On the Mount of Olives by Nikolai Ge

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, when giving his nobel prize speech, said, "One word of truth will dispel a world of darkness."  This is the Solzhenitsyn who suffered long years in the Russian Gulag, where the darkness was formidable.  It was a time when hope seem buried in the snows of Siberia along with many of the people who tried to uphold truth and beauty.

Today as our world darkens with the violence of militant Islam, the distortion of gender and the meaning of family, with persecution and peril, with our own fear and cowardice, with selfish ambition, and greed, the Word is spoken that has and will dispel all darkness.

In case we are tempted to give in to despair or to wonder what God is about, God himself shows us. The word he speaks is himself given up for us all.  There is nothing he will not do for us.  In the Garden of Gethsemane on Thursday, we will be with Jesus as he cries out to be saved from this hour. On Good Friday we will be at the cross where Jesus willingly offers himself to be betrayed by friends, stripped of influence and dignity, and humiliated so that in his death we could have life.

In the same way that in creation God spoke a word, and light exploded into all that was formless and void, Jesus' broken body is the one Word of Truth that explodes into history, dispelling our darkness.

Holy Week is the time to set aside all suspicion of Jesus, all ways that we doubt God's love.  He does not deserve it.  It is time to crush the head of the serpent who is always asking us if God has not withheld something good from us.  Holy Week is the final Word that he will withhold nothing.  He will lay down his very life for us.

We may be with Jesus in the Garden grieved and heavy, begging God for relief and to save us from this hour.  But he is with us, and if we stay with him, we will also share in the deliverance that does come because it is for us. Jesus asked to be saved from that suffering.  God answered his prayer by saving us.

We may be with Jesus at the Cross, broken, feeling forsaken, cast aside, more dead than alive.  But he is with us, and if we die with him, we will also share in his resurrection.

During Easter Vigil, when we are waiting at the tomb for some miracle, some hope, we can be confident that we will encounter Jesus.  We may not recognize him at first, but he will speak our names, and we will know him.

In November, my husband and son were in Nigeria, a country in which the persecution of Christians is a daily reality.  One day they were at Archbishop Ben Kwashi and Mama Gloria's compound where sixty orphans have been adopted and been given the Kwashi name.  Some bishops' wives had traveled there to help out and pray.

At one point, they were having a prayer meeting in the courtyard, and the Spirit was moving.  One of the bishop's wives said, "I would like to pray for all of the children who saw their parents murdered in front of them.  If that happened to you, please come forward, and we will pray for you."

All was silent.  My husband and son were paralyzed.  Were there truly children here who had suffered such an atrocity?  And if they were here, would they ever come forward?  It was silent and still for awhile.  All of a sudden, a small girl, maybe eight years old, stepped out, tears streaming down her face.  Then another, and another, until twenty five children were standing in the center of the courtyard.  By now, all were in tears.  The magnitude of this suffering in the lives of children seems insurmountable.  Did these Nigerian women gathered to pray believe that God could dispel such horror inflicted on the hearts and imaginations and lives of little ones and bring a resurrection?

Apparently, so.  They have faith in a God who wins out over evil.  They all circled around these children, all those mothers.  And they began to call out to God to bring his healing light to encircle and infill and uphold these children that now are his.

And God is doing it...through miraculous prayer moments, but also through the simple love in day in and day out meals and schooling and care from the Kwashis and others.

When we have questions, sometimes no number of words can satisfy.  The only answer to such evil or despair is only THE WORD, which is the incarnated Christ.  In Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, the character of Orual is writing her complaint to God.  And when she finally gets to face him with her accusations, she finds that it all turns to naught in her mouth.  Then she says this:  "I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer.  You are yourself the answer, and before your face all questions die away.

May we know again this Holy Week that Jesus has the last word, and he utters it with his very life, holding nothing back.

                       

Crucifixion by Nikolai Ge

Stay close to Jesus, and you will share in the dawning light that will dispel the darkness, not only from the world, but from the very corners of your own soul where his light can seep in.  This is accessed simply by being with Jesus in confidence that his light is greater than the darkness of your confusion and doubt.  May your journey with him this Holy Week bring you into resurrection light.

Where Does My Help Come From? Living Life with a Challenging Child

It was a normal day in the Ruch family.  I was trying to be productive with three small ones with little to show for my efforts.  I needed to go to the store for some home items, so I packed the 5, 3, and 1 year olds in their carseats, tight as stuffed sausages because of all their winter garb.  We parked at T.J.Maxx, and I got the baby situated with a click, carseat to cart, my oldest daughter and son walking beside me.  I knew I was an idiot to try and go through this store accompanied by curious and creative children yet to be raised, but I had no other option.

About five minutes into our foray, I noticed my 3 year old son getting agitated.  He began to wander a few feet a way from me and refuse to respond to my instructions to stay close. I quickly began to put the things I needed in my cart, aware that the time bomb was ticking.  (I wish we as parents could know how long it will take the burning fuse to lead to the explosion.  I was too generous in my estimate).  My son was picking up speed;  he was dashing down aisles.  I was losing track of him.  The chase was on.

As my child whipped and twisted down aisles with crockery, ceramics, frames, and glass pitchers, I tried in my strained but projecting voice to demand that he stop.  It was only a challenge.  Though I was wheeling a cart and holding on to a five year old, I finally caught up to him, grabbed him around the waist while he kicked and screamed.  To be able to push my cart with my baby, I had to lay him down horizontally in front of her carseat while I speedily pushed toward the door.  I knew if I let go of him, he would run away.

By now, I was creating one of the scenes that give other mothers such pleasure.  Either they feel so good about their own parenting because no child of theirs would ever behave like that, or they feel gratitude to find out that they are not the only loser parents around.  I was sure some shopkeeper would dial DCFS with the way I was handling my son.  But it was the only way to get him out of the store.

I made for the door.  Somehow, while still holding on to the three children, I emptied the items in my cart, leaving them in a free cart, and rushed into the parking lot toward the van.  I managed to get everyone situated and turned for home.  But my son who had started into a full blown meltdown, was only beginning.  He managed to extract himself from his carseat and began running around the van screaming.

Pulling over in a parking lot, I called my husband in tears.  "I can't even get home," I said.  "Please come and help me."

This was the secret life with my son.  Few knew what our daily lives were like--the animalistic screaming and aggression, the forced feeding (the doctors said he had to eat), the sleepless nights, the fits that looked like seizures with writhing on the floor, the compulsive control (we must cross the street a certain way, if not, go back and do it again...if not, possibly a half hour of screaming?).  One day he screamed for 90 minutes.

I faced every day exhausted and with dread.  I cried in the shower and begged my husband not to leave me at home with him.  When I tried to describe him to others, I could tell that they couldn't even grasp the intensity of what I was trying to describe.  He would grow up;  I just needed to figure out how to discipline him. They had just never seen what it was really like inside our doors.  When a friend who had raised four boys (all one year apart) once witnessed a full-blown meltdown, she said she had never experienced anything like it in her life and could only sit and pray for me until it was all over.

How could I explain that absolutely no discipline seemed to accomplish anything?  I had even held him down in timeouts with a baby on my back while he kicked me and hit me the entire time. I had to keep my son separated from his sisters, cloistered in his room listening to audio books all day. I was seriously looking at a future with a family life so much different than what I had dreamed.

This was not the sum total of who he was.  He would often weep in remorse for rash actions he had done.  He was close to us and would let us hold him and even sleep with him when he was totally impossible.  He was clever and funny and had a sensitive heart.  But all of this was obscured by something much greater.

During these years, I prayed desperately for God's intervention.  People laid hands on him and prayed for him.  One day I was taking him to the doctor, and the Lord spoke to my heart before I left, "This doctor will have an answer for you."  When I described my son to the doctor, he cut me off and said, "He has allergies."  I was a little aghast.  Allergies could cause this level of neurological disturbance?  He recommended a book called, Is This Your Child? by Doris Rapp and gave me the name of a clinic we should take him to.

I came home and set to work on taking everything out of his diet that was a typical allergen.  He still was a mess.  We were down to quinoa and a "smoothie" I made every morning from sunflower seeds that had soaked over night, to which I would add a banana and vanilla.  Then one day, the same doctor called me accidentally when he was trying to reach someone else and happened to ask about my son.  He said, "Why have you not taken him to the clinic?"

I felt this was a nudge from the Lord.  So we began the long journey of allergy testing that builds an antigen that neutralizes the reaction.  It turns out Ellison was allergic to 18 molds.  It wasn't even foods, but environmentals.  And why the agitation in TJ Maxx?  He was allergic to formaldehyde present in most new clothing.  We did a long and extensive clean-up of mold in our home, and he started on daily shots.

The day after his first shot, he was a new person.  I was afraid to believe it.  Any one who knows him now at age 15 would never guess what he was as a child.  He is actually easy-going, affable, flexible, and full of life.  I felt like his true person emerged.  It was not the end of the trials, as he would still have reactions, but they became less and less frequent, and as he grew older, he was able to understand his own reactions and begin to manage them.

Ellison is not the only child I have had that was a challenge.  I have had the the garden variety willfulness, the children who can't stand tags or wearing clothes or baths or transitions. I have had the child that would not stop hanging onto me for four years, whose intensity and neediness exhausted all my energies.  I also have the boy that is the stereotypical storybook redhead--flying into rage at the slightest provocation, yelling things his older five siblings would never have dreamed of yelling.

My children eventually grow up and change, and I change.  I have lived with just enough to have the deepest empathy, however, for those who have special needs kids who don't grow out of their difficulties.  Instead, they just manifest differently at each new stage of life.  These people deserve our mercy, our help, and our solidarity.  It is a lonely life.

I know what it is like to have children that defy the books on parenting.  Certainly, I have been deeply helped by practical suggestions for connecting with and disciplining my children, for help with sleep or eating (all of these are a good place to start, and living on a strict diet has helped our family culture tremendously).  But when you have a challenging child, you feel isolated.  You fear that no one can understand what you live with day to day.  The techniques that work on other kids don't work on this one.  Getting out the door takes so much energy that you just aren't sure you want to go out.  But then, again, you feel trapped at home and it is hard not to blame this child for the absolute disruption of your family life and dreams.

So if I were to write a book on parenting, I would start with the premise that God is raising a parent. We have to be divested of our control issues, our dreams shaped by the culture around us, and our perfectionism.  He will reveal to us what we need to know about each child if we listen and receive his wisdom with the intent of using it (James 1:5-6).

To engage with the real family God has given us, we must relinquish our ideals.  The ideal becomes the enemy of the real.  As a friend with a special needs child said to me the other day, "I've become more thankful for the small things."  What makes a good day is the small things, the sunshine coming in the window, a child sitting still on your lap, a funny conversation with a four year old. And we always pray into the future as God shows us how to pray.

In all of my parenting years (and I have many more to go), I could not have lived without the prophetic words of encouragement that have come to me through Scripture and through others. When I was having a hard time not rejecting one of my own children because I felt he was sucking me dry, the Lord kept saying to me gently, "Receive him."  Many times I have felt like pulling back, and God calls me to press in, to love, to be vulnerable.  I must not escape in my heart, but I must pray.

I pray the promises of God over my children.  I pray that they will love one another.  I pray that all their challenges will lead to greater love for God and greater capacity to serve others.  We cannot lose vision because the present is challenged.

The other day my daughter came in from taking the SAT.  When her siblings, who were all in the basement, heard her voice, they came charging up the stairs and crowded around her, asking, "How did it go?  How did you do?"  I was touched because I realized that even with all the years of sorting conflicts, crying out to God for help, love had prevailed.

My desperate cries in the shower changed.  Now they are a call for the Holy Spirit to fill me for all the day requires.  God cannot do miracles as long as I insist they look a certain way.  He wants to do something that looks a little different.  And I don't want to miss it.

Where does my help come from?  The maker of heaven and earth, (Psalm 121). That is the kind of help I need: creative and ordered.  As long as God is my help, I can face the day or the child that is even now getting ready to press my buttons.

An Advent Prayer: "Jerusalem in my Heart"

Every night when possible I lie down next to my youngest child to cuddle him or her to sleep.  This all grew out of nursing the youngest to sleep and continued beyond weaning to the ritual of lying down together at the end of the day.  It has been a precious time for me with each of my children.  It is a time when I sing old hymns to them that they grow to love; it is a time to pray and chat about whatever surfaces and reconnect after a hectic day when this little one might have gotten sidelined in the whirl of the others' needs.  And very often, I fall asleep first and have to rouse myself and stumble down the stairs to finish off the day.  My other children and my husband will have finished up the dishes and have begun gathering for reading and prayer in the living room. (It is not, however, always as smooth as it sounds.:))

Last night I was lying in bed with three year old Becket, my fiesty red head.  I began to explain to him what Advent was.

"Advent means 'coming.'  We are waiting for someone to come and getting ready for his arrival."

"Do you know where Jesus lives?" I asked.

Becket: "In the sky."

"In heaven, yes, and in our hearts."

Becket: "And in Jerusalem." (someone has been listening during Bible readings with the olders)

"Yes.  So Jesus comes to make his home in our hearts, and we get ready for him, like we do when we clean up our house and get rid of broken things and junk that clutters our home that doesn't give us space to live.  We try to get our hearts ready for Jesus by getting rid of anything that makes it crowded so that Jesus doesn't have space.  We get rid of disobedience and anger and meanness. Do you have anything in your heart that you need to get rid of?"

Becket: "I have meanness.  I am mean to Nathanael sometimes."

"Would you like to pray that Jesus will take away your meanness so that you will have space in your heart for him?"

Becket: "Yes, I would."  At this point, Becket began quite a long whispered prayer which I could not quite make out.  When he was finished, I asked him if he would like to share with me what he had prayed.

Becket: "I prayed that Jesus would take away my meanness and that he would put Jerusalem in my heart."

Jerusalem in my heart.

How I was struck in that moment by the image of Jerusalem in my heart--the holy dwelling of the Lord.  Out of the mouth of babes!   One of the most healing verses in my life has been John 14:23, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him."  But I have never pictured the home that Jesus makes with me as Jerusalem.  But truly, the new Jerusalem is meant for my heart now and the full realization in the Second Advent, when we will live with the Lord and the full community of saints.

I had sensed that this Advent would involve reflections on "Home" for me since so much of this year has been caught up with issues of house and home.  But I did not expect the riches of the reflection on the home of Jerusalem and how God ministers it to me now.  Jerusalem has been both the symbol of and the actual dwelling of God.  Jerusalem has become the image for God coming to live with his people.  And as we live in the Advent mystery of the coming of Christ's kingdom to us now and the future fulfillment of Christ's kingdom, we live in the mystery of the Jerusalem within and the Jerusalem to which we journey.

Now, I have no illusions that tomorrow Becket will wake up and not be mean to his brother and fully live out of "Jerusalem in his heart."  In fact, he shared that part of his prayer was for his brother--that God would take away the meanness in HIS heart...of course...none of us can linger long with our own sin before looking around for another who might be less deserving of favor than ourselves. Nevertheless, I do believe that every prayer of surrender, every submissive action that makes way for the Lord, every heartfelt confession, every desire for more of Jesus and less of me, will move each of us closer to the new Jerusalem both now and in the future.

May this Advent prepare our hearts to be the Jerusalem to which Christ comes to fill and renew. May he find our gates wide open to receive him.



And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. It had a great, high wall, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel were inscribed— on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. Revelation 21: 10ff

Prophetic words about Jerusalem: "And they shall be called The Holy People, The Redeemed of the Lord; and you shall be called Sought Out, A City Not Forsaken." Isaiah 62

For reflection on Jerusalem as the dwelling of God and of our future dwelling, meditate on Isaiah 62 and Revelation 21 and 22.