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2Jul

There’s No Place

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

The sky is furious right now, which is my very favorite sky mood besides April-blue. Rain is pelting in five different directions at once, turning the asphalt into a bubbling stew, and setting off car alarms. I’m thrilled. Bring on the hurricanes! my whimsy chirps from its perch next to my ear. (Not always rational, that one.)

To those of you wondering, we are back from our madcap vacation. We accidentally drove halfway into New Jersey while trying to get to Philadelphia, but our return was otherwise uneventful. Relief started setting in once we reached London’s breezy, Euro-chic airport (where security actually checks liquids and passports but doesn’t make you throw out your baby food, take off shoes, or wait for half an hour to do so; America, take note!), and we let out a collective sigh of happiness when our second flight touched down in Rome. “I’m so excited to be back at Italy!” shouted Natalie for all four of us.

It was a golden realization—I am so excited to be back in our tiny apartment with July thunderstorms and the world’s best pizza waiting for us. Even the two-story library in Delaware wasn’t enough to coax homesickness out of me for the American life we left behind, and that’s saying a lot. We may be jet lagged and facing a move in two (2!) weeks for which we have not yet begun thinking about packing, but by golly, it’s good to be home.

26Jun

Packing Unlist

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 2 Comments

Dear self,
You will never do the following things on vacation:

Work out
Conduct a Bible study
Potty train
Teach someone to read
Play tennis
Accidentally go salsa dancing

So please stop packing for them.

Sincerely,
Me

9Jun

Stay-at-Home-FEMA

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 8 Comments

“So,” asks the nice lady at church, “Have you found a job yet? Are you working?”

Huh, I think. There’s no shame in being a stay-at-home-mom, but I always feel guilty admitting to it, as if I’m not pulling my weight in adult society. I don’t want to answer until I’ve shown her my résumé, issued a disclaimer in triplicate, and introduced her to someone’s toddler. Specifically, mine.

Because, have you met Sophie? This sweet baby of mine has a personality that is one part movie star, two parts hurricane, and fifteen parts trouble. She is the reason I am a stay-at-home-mom rather than a stay-at-home-writer or a stay-at-home-gadabout.

And this is her afternoon schedule:

Climb onto the bathroom shelf; dump out all the Q-tips
Spill an entire sippy-cup of water all over the kitchen (how?!); repeat
Get into the drawer of pony-tail holders; scatter across the bedroom
Get the candles off my bookshelf; eat one
Take off her pants and speed-climb onto Natalie’s bunk bed; pee on it
Steal my makeup; randomly decide which to apply, which to toss, and which to taste
Climb onto the kitchen table to get into the bag of cookies; take a bite from each
Turn on MTV; dance
Get napkins out of napkin holder; strew about kitchen
Unfold clean clothes; place in laundry basket
Dump out all the Q-tips again; pee on them
Scream with joy until someone gives her an ice cream cone; eat it from the bottom up
Sift through the trash; redistribute around house
Dump out all the recycling; redistribute around house
Steal my Microplane zester; lick
Unpack the lower section of the credenza; run around with a casserole dish
Ride her dump truck backwards into the kitchen; start the microwave
Climb into the bathtub; wander the floor in wet socks
Rearrange furniture so as to reach kitchen counter; dump out bag of sugar
And pee on it
Climb on top of the table at which Natalie is coloring; color arms and mouth
Do three sit-ups next to me; sit on me for the remaining thirty-seven
Run around the house with a limoncello glass; if anybody notices, throw it

19 months is adorable and horrifying, and I’ve never worked so hard at any job in my life. I thought teaching was a challenge, but it’s nothing compared to planters overturned on the rug or chocolate smeared across the wall, floor, and hair of a giggling girl. Or potty training. By the end of a normal weekday, our house is petitioning for disaster relief funds and my mind is curled up in bed sucking its thumb. If I’ve managed to edit an article or make it to the grocery store or shower, well… that’s just icing on the supermom cake.

“Well, are you working?” the lady presses.

“No,” I smile. “Not right now.”

3Jun

Ring-Around-the-Insanity

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 8 Comments

Less than two weeks until our Stateside vacation, and the detail-hoarding squirrel in my left hemisphere is thisclose to frantic. We Bassetts have a noble traveling tradition of insanity, and those mad dashes across foreign cities take a lot of preplanning. Schedules to be calculated. Maps to be downloaded. Accommodations to be arranged. Insurance to be finagled. Suitcases to be precision-packed (I let my Tetris champion husband take care of that one). And must not forget the passports, wedding gifts, swim diapers, teething medicine, SIM cards, kitchen sinks, and brain cell refills.

I also have a hairy editing project to finish, so date night this week consisted of Dan and I side-by-side on our computers, eyes glazing over, forgetting all about supper. Chick flick material, I know. Add an upcoming move and potty training (why, God, why?) to the mix, and you have the kind of busyness that thunks around in the pit of my stomach at 3 a.m. Priorities keep playing ring-around-the-rosie in that way they do when I’m no longer seeing straight.

So, in the interest of preserving senses of adventure everywhere, please share: What was the craziest travel experience that you (or someone you know) survived?

31May

Holy Writ Hives

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 6 Comments

“I like gypsy moths and radio talk
‘Cause it doesn’t remind me of anything…”
(Audioslave)

I was one of the coolest twelve-year-olds to enter our church’s youth group, oh yes. All the other denim-clad girls envied my broomstick skirts and the knitted granny shawl I wore as protection from the A/C. I was widely admired for my mad worship-band-understudy flute skillz, and the guys were always ogling the sexy training bra outline on my cookie sheet chest. Everyone cheered when I alone took on the youth pastor’s challenge and memorized the entire biblical book of James to get a free trip to youth camp. Oh, and a mere two days into that camp when I was sent home with a case of the mumps? Well, that cemented my position as the most popular teen in church history.

Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha. Oooooh, boy. ::wipes eyes::

I know I’ll be dashing some hopes here, but this entry is not about junior high fashion. (Sorry!) Nor is it about the many reasons to vaccinate your children, youth camp being one of the more compelling. No, this is about the holy tradition of Scripture memorization and why I think it sucks.

See, my brain is a neurotic sponge. I never had much trouble memorizing, whether it be Shakespeare or sacred texts or shampoo ingredients. I routinely dazzled my Awana leaders by breezing through the required ream of Bible verses to then learn hefty chunks of the New Testament. I blasted through the competition to win first place in regional Bible drills. I could even recite the lineage of Old Testament kings by heart. (See above re: popularity.) I memorized and memorized and memorized and memorized and didn’t learn a thing.

It turns out that the proper ordering of words does little to reach a heart. In fact, the tuneless march of verses through my mind made reading the Bible impossible once I reached adulthood. I found myself paralyzed by each familiar page, with memories of the words leading to memories of the past leading to fog-banked panic. The holy writ gave me hives. It wasn’t until a friend bought me The Message (and, uh, it sat on the shelf under my suspicious glower for a few years) that I was able to understand what Jesus and Paul wrote. The Bible finally made unrecognizable; what relief!

As I’ve discovered the power of newborn words to seep far below my skin into soul territory, I’ve shunned attempts by family members to help Natalie memorize Bible verses. I don’t want forced familiarity with God-commissioned words to breed contempt before my daughter even has the chance to work out her own beliefs. This has kept me consistently uneasy about her Sunday School class, as week after week, Natalie’s classmates recite Bible verses for a gold star sticker leading to a yearly prize. Should we make her memorize the verses too so she’ll fit in? Should we remove her from the class, risking a million kinds of confrontation? Should we keep ignoring the issue?

This morning in Sunday School, things came to a head. In preparation for a church presentation next week, the children had been memorizing Psalm 23. Never before has a peaceful poem of cross-stitching fame wound a person as tightly as it did Natalie’s teacher. “Why can’t you say it all together?” she yelled at the group of preschoolers shifting in their hard-plastic chairs. “THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD—Fabio! Straighten up this instant! Ester, sit down! No, no, no, Gabriele, be quiet, we’re starting from the beginning, QUIET! THE LORD IS—Laura! Why aren’t you saying all the words? What is wrong with you? Well if you’re tired, you should have gotten more sleep last night, huh? No, Beniamino, you can’t go to the bathroom until we get the whole thing right. STEVEN, QUIET! Do you all want your parents to be disappointed in you?”

Still fuming at how badly the children had been treated, I got in the car with Dan after church and told him, “Those kids are never going to voluntarily memorize another Bible verse for the rest of their lives.”

And then…

I grinned.

26May

Proof

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 3 Comments

When Natalie was born, I had some doubts as to her origin. There was absolutely no question that Dan was the father—she was a tiny Bassett photocopy with his Lebanese ancestry peeking through her impossibly dark eyes—but who her mother was, none could tell. Neither her features nor her easy acceptance of being alive pointed to my genetics. And while I loved seeing the many bonds she shared with her daddy, I ached for more proof than leaking milk and a C-section scar that she was my girl.

Fast forward four years. I am yelling at Natalie out of frustration, and feeling guilty because I’m not a yelling mom, I’M NOT, and wondering how my sweet preschooler ends up so deep under my skin, and wallowing in the shame of misplaced intentions when I finally see it: her personality. Proof that we are cut from the same emotional fabric… and yes, the reason why we so often run into each other like road blocks when we’re trying to connect.

She and I have precision wound tightly into our DNA, a virtue I finally started to see as a fault in adulthood. Things must be just so, or the world will fall to bits. We are right, and if this is not universally acknowledged, our heads will implode. The IKEA mug goes there. “Caramel” is pronounced like this. Blue-green is so very different from green-blue. I was at least halfway through college before I realized people are allowed to have various and conflicting opinions, and I continue to be grateful that the burden of rightness is no longer mine to foist on humankind. However, relativism is still beyond the grasp of four-years-old. I get frustrated that she will not taste my soup created from ingredients she loves, and she gets frustrated that I force her to use dinnerware that is neither pink nor princessy. Our brains lock.

And then the next morning, she wakes up with a fever. It’s nothing serious, more summer flush than griddle-hot skin, but her small voice wakes up every mother-urge in me. Natalie finds a nest on my pillow, and I find another piece of proof: tenderness, the kind that cannot be manufactured for anyone else’s children. Fierce, elemental tenderness, strong enough to carry us through any kind of sickness and deep enough to carve allowances into our personalities. And I realize this, this, is my daughter’s origin.

21May

Slumbering Magic

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

At least once a year, I read Ray Bradbuary’s Dandelion Wine cover to cover. It has been a soul tradition since I first picked up the paperback at age 15 and lost a bit of my heart among the pages. And who wouldn’t? The book is a celebration of childhood and summertime equally, of life and death and the daily discoveries that make them so much more, written in the most delicious prose I’ve ever tasted.

“His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened.
I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before…” *

Magic.

Every time I venture into its pages, I am twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding. I suddenly feel the need for tennis shoes and old-fashioned lime-vanilla ice, plus a sip of the mysterious dandelion wine just to try. I experience all the curiosity and fear and wondering joy woven into the stories. But despite how much I love the book, my heart floods with a soft pale-pink sadness at the end of each chapter because I wish it were mine. The writing. The nostalgia. The memories in print.

I have a hard time explaining the way Dandelion Wine tugs at me because it’s not jealousy… yet it is. I dearly want to write a book that captures people’s imaginations in the same way, and I think I could. I feel the magic slumbering just beneath the surface of my ability. But I’m missing the nostalgia, and that’s one thing a writer can’t make up. My childhood memories will never make the cut for an exploration of whimsy, and this dear adult life of mine needs a few more years to brew still.

So I take the book for what it was to me at 15—a miraculous first date with metaphors—and what it is to me now—a diamond trembling with a thousand emotional hues. My sadness is not an enemy, nor is it the face of defeat. Rather, it’s the whispered promise of nostalgia in my future. You will write of your own magic one day, you will…

—

* I had a ridiculously hard time choosing an exemplary passage from the book because every sentence in the thing is perfect. Some lazy day this summer, pour yourself a tall glass of lemonade, pick up a copy of Dandelion Wine, and read until your toes begin to tingle. That’s an order.

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