Psalm 139, revised

Psalm 139

For mothers. Of Bett. A psalm.

¹ O children, you have searched for me
and you find me.

² You know when I sit and when I rise;
you perceive my thoughts from afar,
and know when I am angry with you.

³You discern my going out and my lying down;
you are familiar with all my ways.

⁴Before a word has left my tongue
you ignore it completely, O children.

⁵ You hem me in–behind and before;
you have laid your many hands continuously upon me.

⁶ Such limitless attention is too staggering for me,
too overpowering for me to bear.

⁷ Where can I go from your voices?
Where can I flee from your presence?

⁸ If I go up to the craft room, you are there;
if I make my bed in the basement, you are there.

⁹ If I rise on the wings of the dawn
(well, let’s be honest…late morning),
if I settle on the far side of the backyard,

¹⁰ even there your whines will find me,
your sticky hands will hold me fast.

¹¹ If I say, “Surely the laundry room will hide me
and the doors of the basement become impenetrable behind me,

¹² even locked doors will not dissuade you;
your voices will whine like a broken engine,
for locked doors are offensive to you…

¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you
when I hid in the secret place
when I huddled behind the shower curtain in the empty tub,

¹⁶ your eyes saw my outline.
All the days of peace for me
were lonely and dull
before any of you came to be.

¹⁷ How precious to me are your naps, O children!
How short is the sum of them!

¹⁸ Were I to plan them,
they would happen all-together-at-the-same-time each day.
When I awake,
You are still with me.
(You cuddle next to me in bed
and stick your cold feet on my legs.)

¹⁹ If only you would give Quiet Time to the Mother, O God!
Away from me, you needy children!

²⁰ They come to me with selfish intent;
their complaints and beggings are ceaseless.

²¹ Do I not love to spend time alone with You, O LORD,
and abhor those who interrupt?

²² Give me the grace to be patient with them;
and not count them my enemies.

²³ Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my angry thoughts.

²⁴ See if there is any offensive way of mothering in me,
and lead me in the way of everlasting peace.

An Average Day

Yesterday morning while I was finishing washing and grooming the older two children, Navayah was emptying her older sister’s shirt drawer.  By the time I went searching for the naked one-and-a-half year old, she had already taken matters into her own hands and tried to dress herself.  It had been hard for her to find just the right shirt so she pulled out half of Hannah’s shirts, six of which she had around her waist.  She does not like to pull clothing on over her head, but instead prefers to step into them.

Today Navayah found her Tante Holly’s high-heeled shoes.  She put them on and walked around the living room!  I was astonished at the feat.  She is not even two.  She still falls down a lot.  Her feet are less than five inches long.  She was wearing shoes that were not only two-and-a-half times bigger than her feet, but also had a heel height half the length of her foot.  She could be a shoe-model someday.

I decided this week to introduce potty-training to Nayah.  She loves it.  Notice that I did not say that she is potty-training well, but rather I said she loves it.  She loves opening and closing the lid on her potty chair.  She loves sitting (sometimes with bottoms still on) on her seat.  She loves carrying the potty chair around the house…inverted.

But most of all, she loves underwear.  Since I am not very serious about potty-training her, I have not purchased any panties to fit her little bottom.  In fact, she trots around the house with only a shirt on (unless she finds another one… then she steps into the upside down shirt and pulls it over her lower half).  Today she decided to be like her older brother.  She pulled open his underwear drawer–which is eye-level with her–and pulled out three pairs of nunnerwear and one of his shirts.  She pulled all of them over her bottoms.  Eli was not pleased.  He told her she could, under no circumstances, wear his Thomas-Na-Train nunnerwear.  Guess which pair suddenly became Nayah’s favorite?

It is just an average day, I guess, when I have to break up a fight between my three-and-a-half year old son and one-and-a-half year old daughter over who gets to wear which pair of his underwear.

–Bett

Mysteries

A week ago I noticed several dozen moon-shaped indentations in the wall above Eli’s bed.  The sheetrock is new there; we put it in when we moved here almost a year-and-a-half ago.  It should not be so weak that a small boy’s fingernails can gouge it.  When I tucked Eli in for a nap that day, I asked him about them.

“A thpoon did that.”

“A spoon made those marks?”

“Yep.”

“Explain this to me.  How could a spoon have made those marks?”

“Ummmm… I goddit from da drawer and poked it in da walls.”  In the back of my head came this memory from a few days previous.  Eli had gone running back and forth from the kitchen to his room, bringing another spoon with him each trip.  When I tidied up his room later that day, I counted four spoons, all of varying sizes.  Oddly, at the time it did not occur to me that Eli had collected these spoons to use as tools to indent the wall above his bed.

I confess that I am still baffled by the incident.  Where do his thoughts come from?  Was he sitting on his bed, staring at the wall when suddenly he thought, I must pock-mark this surface? Did he try using his fingernail and that failed?  What made him think of running all the way to the kitchen at the other end of the house to grab spoons?  And why spoons?  Why not knives or forks?  Why not Legos or pickup sticks, or some other toy he has readily available in his room?  What made him shove the bowl of the spoon into the wall, over and over and over, covering the area with dents, and what made him stop?

How on earth am I to be one step ahead of THIS?!