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The Playroom: In a pickle

2012-05-25T05:45:00-04:00

The other day, as my husband was clipping my daughter into her car seat, he picked up a pickle slice from the floor of my minivan. I was so busted.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a pickle.”

Oh boy, here we go. He knows it’s a pickle, I know it’s a pickle, but there is a reason I hide the fast food bags in the bottom of the garbage can. My husband doesn’t want me feeding the kids fast food. I don’t want me feeding the kids fast food either, but sometimes fast food happens.

“What is a pickle doing stuck to the floor of your car?”

“It’s your fault.”

“My fault? How is this my fault? I don’t even drive this car.”

“I bought apples.”

“You bought apples. And that is my fault? This is a pickle, not an apple.”

“I bought apples because I know you don’t like it when I buy the kids fast food, so I was trying to be healthy about it so instead of fries I bought apples and your daughter had a fit because she wanted fries and she threw her food all over the car. And if you didn’t give me such a hard time about taking the kids for fast food, then I would never have bought the apples, and if I hadn’t bought the apples then she wouldn’t have had a fit and the pickle wouldn’t be on the floor. So, you see, it’s your fault.”

And this is the part I didn’t say out loud.

And it would be nice if every once in awhile instead of pointing out everything that is wrong around here, like pickles stuck to the floor of the car, you might point out something positive and appreciate what I did accomplish yesterday.

The children are still breathing, all three of them, one of them even ate an entire serving of vegetables. They only watched an hour of television, and it was educational. I was right there when your son stumbled on the stairs so he didn’t take a header and we didn’t have to go to radiology. I spent a considerable amount of time evaluating whether or not we should get rid of all the Fisher Price little people in the playroom that are from when I was a kid because of the potential lead toxins in the paint. And all that started because the baby was chewing on one of them. I ultimately decided that the plastic ones were probably okay but the wooden ones were not. So I had to sort through all the little people and find the few wooden ones we do have left, the ones my dog didn’t chew up in the early 1970s. And then I almost did take the baby into the ER because I was so totally freaked out about lead paint, but I managed to stay calm enough not to. I took the kids to the park and there was just one too many fights in the sandbox over the blue shovel, and then this other kid was completely out of line relative to slide etiquette and so that was another fit, and only the nannies were there and none of my friends showed up because their kids actually take naps and none of the nannies speak English and they only want to talk to each other anyway, so I didn’t get to talk to a single adult person all day other than the lady in the drive thru, so, yeah, I went to McDonald’s.

“Well, do you think next time we could try not to let the pickle actually stay in the car so long that it dries out and adheres itself?”

Yes, I concede that would be fine, and that is a totally reasonable request.

I think a marriage counselor would be pleased with our conflict resolution relative to pickles stuck to the minivan floor.

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

Graduates, you can go home again

2012-05-18T10:00:00-04:00

I was doing a little spring cleaning a few days ago, listening to NPR and dusting my apartment when I heard a jarring statistic: 85 percent of college graduates between 2006 and 2011 returned to their parents’ homes after graduation. I learned as I kept listening that the statistic turned out to be false, and a recent Pew study affirmed that number is actually around 30 percent, which still seemed high. I thought fondly back to two years ago, when I, too, fell into that category of “boomerangers” — the generation of kids who leave home for college only to come full circle and end up back at their parents’ house, jobless.

In the competitive world of undergraduates at Notre Dame, where not having a plan for life post-senior year seems unheard of, the prospect of moving back home after graduation felt akin to failure of the worst kind. More than disappointing anyone else, it would mean a personal disappointment, as the past four years would have seemed wasted. It would surely mean a return to curfews, financial dependence once again, our parents driving us insane.

Complete freedom — financial and emotional from those who reared us — certainly was an end goal of many like me growing up. We worked tirelessly as baristas and babysitters to have a couple bucks of our own, and negotiated and broke curfews, feeling suffocated by the iron fist of diligent parents. In high school we studied hard to get into colleges far from home, and then in college we networked and interviewed to get jobs in our dream cities, close to friends and far from home. The American dream for Notre Dame undergrads.

My American Studies-Spanish major did not exactly lend itself to a shoo-in job after college, however, and I found myself back in my old room in my parents’ house, despairing over my new sentiment as an adult-child failure. I wallowed and job-searched for about two months before doing some real self-evaluating and coming to a refreshing conclusion.

Having supportive parents and a place to go back to, as it turns out, is not the worst thing in the world. Besides rent-free living, wholesome home-cooked meals and nicer stuff than I could ever afford on an entry-level salary, living with my parents once again after four years of relative self-sufficiency proved to be both easy and enjoyable.

I lived (and worked for a bit) at home for almost six months before hightailing to Chicago, sans secure income, in pursuit of, well, life. Now having experienced about 18 months at an established ad agency, bills and rent of my own as well as the blissful feeling of no one telling me what to do, I find myself remembering fondly the days of 7 p.m. on-the-dot dinners, Scrabble nights with my parents and the lovable bickering with my little sister over the then-important arguments, like who put gas in the car last.

There’s a comfort to living with those who take care of you. Yes, my dear roommates also will offer care, but parents are different. I felt the pangs of needing to be taken care of when I was sick a few weeks ago and left work early. Back in the days of living on Summerlake Road, my mother would have taken my temperature, rubbed my back and made me warm tea. With the unforgiving Chicago wind beating at my window on that particular day, however, there was no way I would set foot outside to go to the pharmacy for myself.

Along with the nurturing our parents provide even post-college, a weird transition takes place: Our parents become almost cool. I am not referring to the fact that my parents have both Twitter and Facebook (a fact I find decidedly horrifying), but rather to the fact that I truly enjoy spending time with them now, much like I enjoy passing the time with my friends. Over glasses of Nobilo Sauvignon Blanc on the deck on warm Carolina evenings, my mother and I would talk about politics, books, life plans and everything in between. I looked forward to a Saturday morning run on the nature trail with my dad more than the evening I planned for the night before with friends. These relationships truly blossomed during my time at home post-college, and I look forward to any opportunity I can find now to make my way back home.

Moving back home for those few brief months after the whirlwind of senior year felt like someone had gifted me a pair of training wheels before I launched myself into the scary world of two-wheel big-kid bikes. I understood what it felt like to begin to manage my own finances and start paying cell phone bills, but I had the comfort of my parents guiding me as I took that first ride. I crossed the emotional hump of learning to live far away from the friends with whom I had grown so close during college, but I also had close by my commiserating parents, who had gone through the same thing a mere 30 years prior.

The challenge of growing up lies in a number of areas for those of my generation. Working 9-to-5 (or 6 or 7 or 8) and taking charge of personal finances are the simplest of challenges in light of the real ones we face — taking care of ourselves, finding comfort in the homes we create for ourselves as well as in the people we decide to surround ourselves with. Moving forward makes life easy when we have people helping us though what’s expected next. My interim step of life at home, while not a permanent one, eased that transition in a way I could not have imagined possible, and I am forever grateful for it.

Katie Peralta is a former Notre Dame Magazine intern who now lives and works in the Chicago area.

Photo by Matt MacGillivray.

Believing: A useful reminder from Dorothy Day

2012-05-17T13:00:00-04:00

“Of all hostilities,” Dorothy Day once wrote, “one of the saddest is the war between clergy and laity.” She penned those words in the summer of 1964 as some controversy, long since forgotten, roiled the Catholic Church in America.

As a founder of the pacifist, anarchist and activist Catholic Worker movement, Day was no stranger to controversy. Although she never hesitated to describe herself as “a daughter of the Church,” she occasionally found herself in vigorous public disagreement with such hierarchs as New York’s archbishop Cardinal Francis Spellman. But even amid the most fiery of those disagreements — over an attempt by the New York archdiocese to break a gravedigger’s strike and over Cardinal Spellman’s enthusiastic support for the war in Vietnam — she kept in mind and wrote about Jesus’ rebuke to his disciples when they suggested a sort of divine drone missile strike on some inhospitable Samaritans: “You do not know of what spirit you are” (Luke 9:55).

True, a war in Southeast Asia was raging, she wrote then, “but as for the hostilities in our midst, the note of violence and conflict in all our dealings with others — everyone seems to contribute to it. There is no room for righteous wrath today.”

The plainspoken, outspoken and occasionally law-breaking Dorothy Day knew a thing or two about righteous wrath and may even have indulged in it a time or two, but it scared the hell out of her.

In heaven, where she surely is, Dorothy Day has other things to preoccupy her, but I wonder what she would have to say about the controversies swirling within and around the Church today. Even a cursory tour of airwaves, web and blogosphere reveals a perfect storm of righteous wrath brewing. There are, to name only a few of its inflowing currents, the endlessly festering clergy sexual abuse scandal, the Health and Human Services mandates, the Vatican’s takeover of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, the American bishops’ investigation of the Girl Scouts and the fact that (insert here the controversialist of your choice) has been invited to speak at a Catholic institution of higher learning.

And it may be unavoidable to take “a side” in at least some of these disputes. It is an election year, after all, commencement weekends are approaching and Girl Scouts will be knocking at our doors to sell cookies soon enough.

Those lacerating hostilities in our midst that Dorothy Day noticed half a century ago are back in full force, too, and now, as then, “everyone seems to contribute to it.” Even at weekday Mass here at Notre Dame, an occasional public prayer may be heard from the pews that seems directed less to God than to the rest of us and which includes more than a hint of partisan slant, as if Our Lord is being encouraged to twist a few arms and maybe even break a few heads. We all seem to contribute to it.

But those of us, like me, who don’t mind finding fault with the leaders of church, state and opinion, ought to remember that the need to be right can become idolatrous, that the savor of high dudgeon can become every bit as poisonous as any heresy arousing it, and that, well, we do not know of what spirit we are. This summer of the year of Our Lord 2012 is a good time to be reminded of that.

Dorothy Day, pray for us.

Michael Garvey is Notre Dame’s assistant director of public relations. Email him at garvey.2@nd.edu.

The Playroom: A mother’s day

2012-05-11T05:30:00-04:00

In the wee hours of this morning, I woke up with the dog snoring in my ear, his leg over my shoulder. As I was lying there thinking, “This is so not right,” I also thought about how happy and content my dog was, lying there with his head on my pillow, flews flapping, snoring away. I kicked him out of my bed, said a few grown-up words about owning 153 pounds of dog, and went back to sleep.

Owning the dog hasn’t turned out exactly the way I planned, but then neither have a lot of things in life, such as parenting my kids.

I’m not sure what I thought parenting was going to be like. What the plan was.

If I had thought about it, I might have conceded that there would be some back talk. But I’m not sure I would have come up with “I hate you, you’re the worst mother ever,” from a 6-year old, and it certainly never occurred to me that it would be so difficult to take a bedroom door off its hinges.

I knew I would get tired, but never knew sleep deprivation was a CIA-endorsed torture technique that would make me contemplate gluing my eyelids to my head just to keep them open long enough to nurse a hungry infant. I didn’t know some kids would rather use a shower curtain than toilet paper. And I didn’t realize that following my mother’s advice, “If they’re hungry enough they’ll eat,” is a good way to starve a fussy eater until the child passes out at school from hypoglycemic shock.

My husband often tells me to manage expectations. It’s good advice, and gets me through Mother’s Day every year. But what are my expectations?

I expect that our children have some physical problem with their inner ear and they can’t hear my voice telling them to put their clean clothes away. I expect them to fight in the car, fight when brushing their teeth, fight over the stupid Wii I’m about to throw out the basement window, fight over breakfast cereals, pencils and water bottles. I also expect that, given freedom of choice with the remote, they will watch horrible cartoons about an ambiguously ageless character named Bob, who is a sponge. And no matter how often I try, they will not eat organic kale roots and esoteric grains from ancient Peruvian civilizations that turn out to be better for you than butter.

As their own people, they are never going to do or say what I might plan for them. Like this morning. After I kicked the dog out of my bed and got the kids ready for school, we were on our way out to the car and my son says to his sister, “Hey, I’ll give you 10 bucks to smell the dog’s butt.”

“What?”

As I back the car out of the garage and think, “Who says stuff like that?” I realize we are on time for school and the dog’s vet appointment. I’ve got my coffee, my dog, a beat-up minivan, a house in the suburbs and my kids. I am happy and content, just like my dog. Sometimes everything around here does go according to plan.

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

The Playroom: Nit-picking

2012-04-27T06:00:00-04:00

This is my “Mom Brain” in action. I’m in a book store browsing titles, and I do a double-take on History and Lice, which was what I read on the spine of a book called History and Life.

I’m terrified of lice. More than hurricanes, earthquakes or escalators. I fear the day my kid comes home with nits, and I have to wash the kids, everything they own, everything I own, the car, the entire house and the shrubbery in hot water and special shampoo that costs more than it should because I would pay anything for a product that gets rid of lice.

Head lice is so prevalent in the Chicago suburbs it’s not even a stigma anymore, but the school office still sends home innocuous memos on screaming orange paper,

“This is to calmly inform you that a child in your child’s class has head lice, so don’t freak out.”

Well, who is it?

Within about 15 minutes after pick-up at school, the Momfia knows everything and descends on the mother of the afflicted child with a list of women who will come to your house to shave your kids head or, in the case of a girl with long, really long, red hair like my daughter, wash and comb and comb and wash and comb.

We have distribution channels set up for special rosemary spray that is supposed to deter lice and costs about $400 a spray bottle. We’ve got a product list of soaps and suds to use to wash every potholder and scrap of sheets and bed linens in your house and a phone chain and we all know who to call when the first nit is spotted.

A woman I know, not yet a full-fledged Momfia member, recently commented to me, “Lice? We have lice at school?”

Of course we’ve got lice, this is the suburbs.

Our kids share lockers and car pools, and they throw coats in giant heaps on the floor of the art room. All those little lice just jumping gleefully from one hoody to the next with their little lice jaws chomping, waiting for that long, red hair.

Lice at our school even made it to an agenda item at the PTO meetings, which downgraded quickly from discussing ways to stop the incipient spread and protecting our children to whether or not Labradoodles, Goldendoodles and Schnoodles could get lice from children, since they supposedly had hair and not fur.

As I was sucking the sugar off a Munchkin all I could think was, “I am so bored here. I do not care about your (grown-up word) ’Doodle, and protecting your dog from getting lice is so not the point of this agenda item.”

So after finishing my Munchkin I took a deep, calming breath, which I try to do often during PTO meetings. I told them, the PTO members concerned about their ’Doodles, that this discussion was a wasting our time, their dogs have absolutely nothing to do with the mission statement of the PTO, and then I told them dogs don’t get lice from children, not even ‘Doodles.

And then I got schnoodled.

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

Today

2012-04-26T11:00:00-04:00

“You are going to die today,” I kept thinking. But I couldn’t get the words out. I’ve never had to say those exact words to a patient before. I’ve told dozens of patients they have an incurable disease that will ultimately claim their life. It’s an abstract concept at that point. Farther down the road in the distant future, you’ll whisper “Rosebud” and fall into a deep sleep. There will be time to make amends, say good-bye, ask for forgiveness. Then finally one day is the day you die.

For Julien, that day had arrived.

Most patients are only half-conscious on the day of their death. Through the illness or fatigue or heavy doses of painkillers, they are drowsy and only faintly aware of their surroundings. In more lucid moments they usually focus on asking for medications to alleviate their symptoms, or superficially interact with the family in the room.

When I enter the room, it’s because the family has asked to speak to the doctor about their loved one’s symptoms or their state of being. The patient breathes deeply in the background, the focus of the conversation but not the focus of attention. We may discuss what the next steps are in seeking a cure or the next steps in keeping the patient comfortable. “Anything that we do at this point may prolong his life, but there is no cure. He will not have any meaningful quality of life and will spend the rest of his time in the hospital. Did you ever discuss with him what he would have wanted to do in this situation?”

Julien knew he had pancreatic cancer and that it would eventually take his life. He had decided several weeks ago to be kept comfortable during his last days and forego the prolonged agony of a futile ICU stay. I was the doctor covering the palliative care service at night, and I had been called by the nurse because he continued to vomit despite maximum doses of three medications.

Julien had complete consciousness, but he was weak, his gown covered in black vomit and his face pale underneath closely cropped gray hair. In many ways the consciousness was a gift so he could say his goodbyes and find peace, but it came at a price. He spit up black vomit, and I wiped his mouth with a towel, smearing some into his white stubble. I had to use the back of the towel to complete the job. I sat on the edge of his bed and placed my hand over the back of his bony hand. “Why do I keep vomiting?” he asked, sitting upright in bed, trying to get comfortable.

“The lab results show that you’re bleeding internally. You are vomiting up that blood, probably from the tumor invading your stomach.” The tests showed that the bleeding would continue to accelerate until he bled to death in the next few hours.

“What can we do to stop it?” He sat up and spit into the basin, and then lay back in bed.

“There is nothing we can do to stop the bleeding. I’m going to ask the nurses give you two more medications to try to stop the vomiting and reduce your pain, but they will make you very sleepy and make it harder to communicate with your family.” I changed the subject, trying to focus on the immediate symptoms.

“But then what will happen with the bleeding?” he asked.

“It will continue to happen and get worse until…” I searched for the right words. “I think it’s time to have your family gather around your bedside.” To say good-bye. I recalled an 18th century painting in drab grays and earth tones that showed a dying man with his family gathered at the bedside, holding his hand. The dying man’s other hand hangs off of the bed listlessly while the doctor packs up his things.

He looked up at me and said, “What does that mean, Doc?” His head lolled on his chest again, his eyes shut.

“There is nothing more we can do for you. We can do more to keep you comfortable, but I’m not sure how long we can maintain that state.” Say it. Just say it. “So it’s time to have your family come to your bedside, and be with you.” How can I possibly tell a man that today is his last day on earth while he looks me in the eye?

He tried to hold his head up and make eye contact, then tired of the effort. “Well, that sucks,” he said. He understood. We sat in silence for a moment, and then he turned his hand over, pressing his clammy palm against mine. “I guess I thought there would be more time.”

“I can call your wife and tell her to come in. Is there anyone else you want to be with you?”

“My son. But she’ll know that.” He tossed around in bed, but no position was better than any other. He was far away, running a to-do list in his head. After a few moments of thought, he lifted his brow and threw his hands up, releasing my grip. “Huh. Today.” he shrugged. “Can I have those medications now, Doc?”

Vincent DeGennaro is an internal medicine doctor and a global public health specialist in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. He also works with the international nonprofit organization Partners in Health-Rwanda. See his An American Doctor in Rwanda blogs.

The Playroom: The B word

2012-04-13T05:45:00-04:00

My son has started to say things that are not appropriate. Some of it may be prompted from an incident last summer when I broke my toe and said things I should never say in front of my children. And I suppose some inappropriate language may be learned from his father, or perhaps even his grandmother. But I like to blame most of it on popular music, such as the current hit, “I’m Sexy and I Know It,” by a band called LMFAO.

The first time my son started singing the lyrics and shaking his behind, I stopped in the middle of the school parking lot and asked him if knew the title of the band that sang the song. And I then defined both “sexy” and “LMFAO,” pointing out how inappropriate it was for children and how he was never to sing that song in front of me or anyone else.

I was telling my friend this story the other night while we were over for dinner, and she challenged me. Perhaps I was being too harsh, what’s the big deal, it’s a song. When we were young we danced around singing lyrics to “Cecilia” by Simon and Garfunkel without the first clue what they meant. What was the harm in it?

She had a good argument, and I wasn’t sure of the answer. To prove her point of innocent fun, she called the boys into the kitchen and they did a dance to “I’m Sexy and I Know It” and okay, it was funny and they were cute and they were laughing and everyone was happy and I was feeling like a killjoy. Pondering what is and isn’t okay, and how I was ever going to figure this all out.

As I was stuck in my silent pondering, my friend went back to making dinner and the boys went back to playing hockey in the basement. A few minutes later they were racing through the kitchen.

“What did you say? What did you say!!!”

My friend has gone from zero to 60 in about a half a second. One instant she’s peeling carrots and the next she’s chasing 7-year-old boys down the hallway screaming her head off.

The boys come slowly back into the kitchen, stumbling over each other as they reluctantly face an irate mother, fear in their eyes.

Meekly her child responds, “Bucket, Mom, I said bucket.”

She doesn’t believe them. So she shrieks, “Bucket! You said bucket!”

Wide-eyed, the children stare at her, then one slowly pulls a bucket out from behind his back.

“Uh, we just wanted to drop Lego Star Wars figures off the stairs and see if we could get them in the bucket.”

“Give me the bucket. That is my bucket, it’s dirty, it’s disgusting! I don’t’ want you playing with a bucket!”

“Okay Mom.”

And they go racing off, only to come back moments later to query, “But what are we supposed to drop our Lego figures into?”

“Out! Out of my kitchen!”

I waited a moment after the boys raced out of the kitchen, then I said, “I don’t see what the big deal is, playing with a bucket.”

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

Believing: Sentenced to Life

2012-04-04T10:00:00-04:00

Years ago — on a Notre Dame Magazine assignment, in fact — I spent Holy Week in the Holy Land. As much of that time as possible, I was within the walls of Jerusalem. An anomaly or a coincidence or perhaps even a miracle of the calendar had aligned the celebrations of three feasts sacred to the sacred city’s three faiths, and the streets of the Old City were redolent with the smells of freshly slaughtered flesh, clouds of incense, burning palm branches and smoldering beeswax.

Eid-al-Adha, the feast of Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son, drew throngs of Muslims toward the Mosque of Omar; the first day of Passover brought thousands of Jews to the Western Wall just below; and we Christians, of course, were cramming the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Standing in the church’s rotunda, at the site of Christ’s tomb, I noticed, as had countless pilgrims preceding me, the truculent jealousy with which Franciscan, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic priests competed in their custodial duties, each acolyte seeming to “claim” the site for his segment of the Church. They comported themselves less like men at prayer in a holy place than like alpha dogs vying for a shot at a fire hydrant. An uneasy agreement had been reached a century and a half earlier to give their three communities “rights” to the tomb; the Ethiopian and Syriac Orthodox communities have also been granted “rights” to various nooks and crannies in the ancient church.

“It is, of course, all very unseemly and unedifying,” as Evelyn Waugh said of this arrangement when he visited the site in 1951, but he also hearteningly observed that “there is all the difference in the world between a quarrelsome family who still share one home and jostle each other on the stairs and one which has coldly split up into separate households.”

Perhaps. But especially during Holy Week, the truly ironic thing about that unseemly and unedifying arrangement, as about the brawls which occasionally break out among the shrine’s custodians, is that the whole point of revering the place is that it is empty.

This crucial phenomenon of absence seems to have been forgotten. Venerated from the earliest days of the Christian community until now, the site is almost certainly authentic, but if so, it is authentically the place where the first Easter visitors found, not Jesus, but two preemptive strangers who chided them for even showing up there: “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

There is no greater feast day. This year, as every year, I long to see the flames of the Pascal fires in the evening streets, to add my candle flame to the swelling illumination at the vigil Mass, to hear and sing the first “Alleluia,” to taste the roasted lamb and Rhone wine with which I’ll end the Lenten fast, to ponder what we mean — what I mean — by saying over and over again, “He is risen.”

Nevertheless, I must admit that when it comes to “getting” Easter, I’m no less occluded than those grumpy custodians of the Holy Sepulcher, those bewildered women who first visited there, the hysterical Mary Magdelene, those clueless apostles on the Emmaus road. I have grown fond of my sins and complacent with my comfortable perch in a world that is charming enough, even if it must decay and die.

But if He is risen, He is risen indeed, and He has turned that world inside out. A charming enough world will no longer do. His reveille is so loud it fairly deafens me, and the potency of his joy can evoke something very much like dread. “I order you, O sleeper, to awake,” He says in one of our most ancient sermons. “I did not create you to be a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead.”

He has sentenced us to life.

Alleluia.

Michael Garvey is Notre Dame’s assistant director of public relations. Email him at garvey.2@nd.edu.

The Playroom: Stuck on you

2012-03-30T06:00:00-04:00

Some days when I get to feeling sorry for myself and the fact that I don’t have a job I can escape to, a place where I can away from all these kids every once in awhile, I start to dream about having a cubicle or a desk drawer where I can find a pair of scissors and a roll of Scotch tape. One of the occupational hazards of being a stay-at-home mother is not having any office supplies.

My furniture gets decorated with Sharpie markers my preschooler takes out of my desk, my scissors are always missing so I use steak knives to separate the part I’m supposed to sign from the part I’m supposed to read on all the Girl Scout permission slips, and I never have any Scotch tape.

It doesn’t matter how much I buy, I still never have any. I typically buy about six rolls at time figuring my kids might take pity on me and leave me a couple slivers on the sixth roll, but they don’t.

I also hide it really high up in the kitchen cabinets where the kids won’t see it and can’t find it, until they see me use it and then they know it’s up there. Then the next time I hire a babysitter, they’ll punish me for it by mounting some stealth mission in the dead of night that involves broken spy gear, the steppy stool and their robot claw, and they’ll take my tape. And there I am wrapping birthday presents in duct tape again.

Where does it all go? Some of it gets used to tape Pokemon cards to the bedroom walls, some of it gets used to tape 16 rolls of toilet paper to your best friend and turn him into a scary mommy instead of a scary mummy, and some of it is spooled off to make into tape balls that are colored with Sharpie markers.

Just the other day I needed Scotch tape to tape a sunshine star to the refrigerator for my son’s gold-star effort at conflict resolution. When his sister went into his room and took one of his favorite toys, he didn’t lose his temper but instead used his words and expressed himself in an appropriate manner. Since I couldn’t find a Sharpie marker I just wrote “Good Job William” in Morse code (I’d learned from the Girl Scouts) by stabbing the star with a steak knife and then went to tape it to the refrigerator.

Standing there holding the sunshine star in my fist while searching for the Scotch tape, I started using my words and yelling about this and yelling about that and yelling about you kids always climbing into my kitchen cabinets and into my desk drawer and taking my stuff and where’s my Scotch tape, “Why is it that I never have any Scotch tape!”

“It’s okay Mom,” my daughter responded, “you can borrow some of mine.”

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

The Playroom: I am woman; hear me fall

2012-03-16T06:00:00-04:00

When we took the backyard ice rink down, the man who took it apart asked, “Should I just put the gear above the garage?”

I answered, “Yes.”

The rink was down for the season, and we had no need for the goals, the piles of sticks bought at garage sales, all the pucks dotting the yard.

“Put it in the attic space above the garage,” I told him. Except I forgot something.

That something was the word “gear.” The pads and the skates and the bag my son needed at precisely 5:45 that evening as we prepared to load the car and head off to a three-on-three tournament.

“Where’s William’s bag?”

Three children and I standing in the garage staring at where the hockey bags should be, always were, but not there.

My brain slowly churned up the answer. The man who took down the rink put the children’s hockey bags in the garage attic. Who would do that? Clearly some guy whose kids never played hockey, because any hockey mom would know that there are no two consecutive weeks during the year when you aren’t lacing up a pair of skates.

So I got out a stepladder and went to pull down the stairs to the garage attic, the stairs my husband told me never to pull down by myself, ever. And that is why my son never made it to the three-on-three tournament. Instead, he is in his room wailing and I am in my bed on an ice pack, drugged on ibuprofen and muscles-relaxers, my husband out of town on business. I am wallowing in self-pity as I replay in my drug-addled brain how that last pulley system was supposed to work.

I have friends who tell me they don’t need a man. If anything happens to their husbands they will never marry again. They do everything by themselves anyway. Really? Everything? As for me, I do need a man, and I like having my husband around. I realize that most when my husband is gone, working, traveling on business again. When I miss him, and I really do have to do everything, even getting hockey gear out of the garage attic.

The stairs were what my husband and his buddy spent an entire afternoon jerry-rigging with some ridiculous pulley system. Meanwhile, the stairs are at least 70 years old, completely antiquated; they weigh about a hundred pounds and are covered in layers of toxic lead paint. Why not just go buy a new pull-down ladder you can actually use without an adrenaline rush?

That was the question I asked the contemplative duo that afternoon while they stood in the garage listening to classic rock and staring at the ceiling, making comments to each other,

“No, no, this will work, this will work.”

Apparently not very well.

But then buying a new pull-down ladder, one that actually works and is safe and nontoxic, is something I would have done. Something a woman would have done. I’m a woman. The one who thinks she needs a man.

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

The Playroom: Out all day

2012-03-02T06:00:00-05:00

My youngest child is now 4 and she goes to all-day preschool, every day. This prompts such questions as, “What are you going to do with your time now that your kids are in school all day?”

Well, uh, exactly the same stuff I did when my kids weren’t “in school all day.” It doesn’t matter if I have a 2-year-old in diapers or a 4-year-old in preschool, as a stay-at-home mom I still have to run the same errands, pay the same bills and do all the other stuff you do with kids in tow, like be insulted by a dad at school pick-up on a Thursday afternoon who can’t believe I’ve got an MBA and I’m a stay-at-home mom. After pick-up, it’s 3 in the afternoon, and my kids are no longer “in school all day.”

“In school all day” is a complete misnomer. For starters, my kids aren’t in school “all day.” I drop them off at 8:30 and have to pick them up at 3. And the average number of days that all three of my kids are “in school all day” until 3 p.m. in any given week is only slightly higher than three, if you don’t factor in summer vacation, and then we drop below three days. Most of the time, my kids are still here, with me.

Turns out there are things called Institute Days, which we never had when I was a kid and I’m told have something to do with continuing education for the teachers, who all have more education than I do. There are half-days to torment the unorganized mother, like me, who never sees them coming. There are holidays like President’s Day, Columbus Day, Martin Luther King Day, this day, that day, the-first-Monday-in-every-March Casimir Pulaski day and in the winter we sometimes get the dreaded “snow day.” There are holidays at Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving, and then they get a break because it’s spring?

Despite all the holidays and days off that are part of the school year, the average number of hours a week I am at home without parenting might present me with some amount of “all that time” if I ignore the laundry and don’t renew the dishwasher warranty, but someone always gets sick. If one of my three kids isn’t sick, then I’m sick or the dog is sick or my friend’s kid is sick and I’m the one watching him because she’s got this other thing she’s got to do. And even if they aren’t sick, there seems to be a litany of health-care professionals my kids need to go see, from pediatricians to dentists, orthodontists to orthopedic surgeons, all lined up to take a look at their limbs and crooked teeth.

I get it that people who aren’t at home with their kids have trouble understanding just how busy you can be when you don’t have a career, even my kids sometimes ask what I do all day. I tell them I soak the poop stains out of their underpants. I also tell them that what I do all day is something I love doing: I support our family.

What I don’t tell them, because they are too young to understand, is how much I also miss having a career and how hard it is not to feel valued or respected by others at pick-up on a Thursday afternoon. I don’t mention how hard it is sometimes to give back to them, their father, our home, our family, because I’m actually not that great of a person. I’m not that good at being selfless, especially on Casimir Pulaski day.

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

Believing: Lent again

2012-02-24T09:30:00-05:00

On Ash Wednesday, the 12:10 Mass in the crypt of Notre Dame’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart was more crowded than usual, in fact, a standing-room-only affair. It was to be expected. On Sundays and 10 other holy days, Church law requires Catholics to be at Mass, but not on Ash Wednesday, when every Mass seems nevertheless to be jammed to the rafters.

There are other ironies to notice in the way most of us begin our Lent, such as the pointed disregarding of the Gospel admonition read to us from the pulpit that day: “When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you may not appear to be fasting.”

We hear that and then go through the rest of our work day sporting a conspicuously smudged charcoal gray cross on the forehead. (In some regions of the political blogosphere, there was even speculation before and wry comment after Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, both Catholics, appeared with clean foreheads during the televised debates in Mesa, Arizona.)

Nor do we look all that gloomy, come to think of it. Hypocrites we may well be, but most of us came out of the crypt yesterday chatting companionably as we returned to our various workplaces, this after being reminded singly and severally that we were dust and that into dust we would return.

At least for a few moments after Mass, it felt fine with me to know that I was dust — as if I knew that the dust which I was and would return to was dust I could well afford to lose, as surely I could afford to lose a few pounds by my fasting, to lose a few dollars by helping out the poor, to lose a few enemies by refusing to have enemies, to lose the craven being I’d made of myself by despairing of it for the time being, and letting God make something better. At least that was how it felt. And the expressions on most of the ash-smeared faces of the others suggested that I was not alone in that feeling.

I knew, of course, that the feeling was as ephemeral as the ashes themselves: As the days of Lent lengthened, my resolve would wane and my temper shorten. Ash Wednesday begins “the time of tension between dying and birth,” that T.S. Eliot’s eponymous poem describes, and the Lenten weather forecast is raw, gray and rainy.

Mildly cursing as I scraped a thin coat of ice from the car windshield early Thursday morning, I ruefully noted how much that rime resembled the coating of a chilled martini glass. The sun was rising sluggishly, but enough to make the hoarfrost sparkle, to make each glint suggest a tiny Pascal flame.

Michael Garvey is Notre Dame’s assistant director of public relations. Email him at garvey.2@nd.edu.

The Playroom: The brushoff

2012-02-17T06:00:00-05:00

My son walks into my bedroom. He has discovered something in the depths of the bathroom linen closet or perhaps buried on a back shelf of the medicine cabinet. It’s about an inch square.

“Hey Mom, what is it?”

“It’s dental floss.”

“What do you do with it?”

“You floss your teeth with it.”

“What’s floss?”

I define floss. Jumping up and down he asks, “ I wanna try it, I wanna try it, can I try it?”

“Sure.”

As I begin to show him how to use dental floss, he tells me, “Oh, I know how to do this. John had one of these and I told him he was a weirdo because I didn’t think anybody did that.”

“Did what?”

“You know, put string in their teeth.”

And then my son takes the floss and instead of moving the string through his teeth he moves his head back and forth, the way a T-rex might if they were working on disjointing some luckless raptor. He tells me how dental floss tastes like mint and then asks why we do it. Mother of the Year award is so mine this year.

All the things we’ve done and seen and worked on, why we wear shoes, looking both ways to cross the street, not running with your hands in your pockets, why one should exit a house through a door and not a window, wearing underwear, eating vegetables, eating breakfast, drinking milk, sharing toys, taking turns, the meaning of a raised middle finger and all those reasons why you do not want to jump from up there. And I forgot dental floss.

Why did I miss it? I don’t floss. Well, unless I’ve got something stuck in my teeth or it’s late summer and we’re eating sweet corn, which always gets stuck in my teeth. And I do floss for about three days after I go see the dentist, because I’m filled with renewed vigor to save my teeth for my dotage. But I’ve never made a point to floss in front of my children, to teach them this life skill that sits directly under spontaneous social occasions and rolling up a garden hose on the big long list of things I’m no good at.

I realize, as my son is vigorously swinging his head back and forth holding a piece of mint-flavored string, that if I want my children to floss their teeth, I should start flossing mine. I should be the good example for them to follow and I should take the time to teach them.

Conceptually, I’m a big fan of flossing and I’d like to think I’d make an effort, floss with my kids, but realistically it’s just not going happen. I might change a diaper, change a light bulb, change a life, but I’m not going change that. I guess our “poor flossing habits” is just another one of those things none of us will improve, just another one of those things that defines us as a family.

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

The Playroom: Normal boy stuff

2012-02-03T06:00:00-05:00

When my son was 3, I signed him up for skating lessons at the local ice rink. Somehow now, four years later, I’m a hockey mom. And I spend a lot of time lacing up skates in boys’ locker rooms.

Most of what I hear doesn’t bother me. It’s your average potty talk, poop and butts. Then some dad will growl at the boys to stop it, and they’ll giggle and turn on some hip hop song and circle back around to wiggling butts, and then another dad will growl at them. Normal locker room stuff, “normal boy stuff,” I don’t mind it much.

I didn’t even mind when I got a hockey stick stuck down the back of my jeans when I crouched down to lace up my son’s skates. At my age I’ll take any compliment I can get. But I think the dad who did it was as surprised as I was, so I guess that wasn’t “normal boy stuff,” it was more of a mistake.

So I’m used to boys’ locker rooms, potty talk and hockey sticks and all. But today my son did something that kind of surprised me and made me uncomfortable. I think it’s probably “normal boy stuff,” like the time he and his best friend dropped their sticks and started clobbering each other on the backyard ice over who was supposed to shoot and who was supposed to pass. I was kind of upset after we had to pull them apart, but my husband just gave my concerns a chuckle and called it “normal boy stuff.”

The other night my son and his friend were playing video games down in the playroom. They didn’t know I was watching. I was enjoying myself, taking a break from the laundry, watching the boys have fun. When my son won the game, he pulled down his pants, wiggled his butt and mooned his friend. I was shocked. The boys thought it was hysterical, as did my husband when I marched upstairs to report “what those two have done now.”

I was told once again it was just “normal boy stuff,” like jumping out the windows, off the porch, on the beds and into the car, offering your sister 10 bucks to smell the dog’s butt, giggling at farts, making poop in a blender and shopping for weapons. And although I’m used to it, sometimes I falter a bit raising a boy. I question if my son is okay, normal. As a girl, I’m not always comfortable with “normal boy stuff.”

So the other day I was standing in front of our school, where we have a beautiful new statue of Mary holding the infant Jesus. As I was admiring the statue, I got to thinking that the Holy Mother raised a boy, too, and since I was just standing there waiting for my son, I started to pray and ask for some guidance. I asked for a little more patience and understanding and maybe even a few ideas on how to handle all the butt talk.

While I was praying, a little boy who was tired of waiting for his brother to get out of school walked up to the statue, dropped his pants and peed all over the Holy Mother’s feet. He pulled up his pants and ran off into the bushes to play, just normal boy stuff.

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

Homily for Sister Jean Lenz, OSF

2012-01-30T16:00:00-05:00

Funeral Homily for Sister Jean Lenz, OSF
Mass of the Resurrection
Our Lady of Angels Chapel
January 25, 2012

Once again, on behalf of the Joliet Franciscans and Jean’s family and friends, I want to thank you all for coming and welcome you to this commemoration and celebration of Jean’s extraordinary life in Christ. These are sad days for those of us who have such fresh memories of a woman who inspired us, taught us, changed us, and loved us — and whom we deeply loved in return. Indeed, there is a hole in our hearts and a hole in the congregation tonight. This is the group that Jean would have loved to be with, to tell more stories, to relive great days, to shine that incredible smile, to simply share the moment, or as she would always say, to “enjoy the local color.”

But for all that sense of loss, these are also days of genuine joy that Jean is at last home with God, set free from the limits of this world and now fully immersed in the love that filled her heart for 81 years. As we come together this evening around the Word of God that so imbued everything Jean did, and the Eucharist that formed her sense of service and generosity in imitation of Jesus, we recall the gift from God that Jean was — to her family; her Franciscan community; her cherished friends; to students, faculty, colleagues, staff, alums and others connected to Notre Dame; and to the many, many people who came to know her and treasure her through the years. I am keenly aware that I’m only one of hundreds here tonight who could offer memories of Jean and her profound effect on our lives — our sense of what’s important, our faith in God, our desire for goodness, our love of others.

I will take my cues from the first reading from Sirach, “to praise the godly in their own time, as . . . their virtues have not been forgotten.” A few of Jean’s virtues that will not be forgotten:

Jean was humble. In a world full of self-absorption, Jean was comfortable enough in her own skin that she didn’t have to draw the attention, didn’t have to press her point, didn’t have to make sure she was in the mix. Indeed, she actually enjoyed some of the “hiddenness” of her life. True, she was best friends with the president of Notre Dame, and trustees and lots of influential people sought her out constantly, but she was also best friends with the head housekeeper in Farley, she knew the cooks in the old Oak Room by name, she would carry on with the groundskeepers about the lawns. She could engage the most serious topics with the most important people, but she saved lots of time simply to play with nieces and nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews.

She would read a book and have by far some of the most astute things to say about it, but she would always lead with interest in what others thought, what others took away from it. In meetings, she would listen intently before saying anything. (Now there’s a distinction we could base her canonization on.) In fact, Jean was the gold standard for the art of listening. She actually listened to people. She wasn’t just waiting to talk; she wasn’t just gathering her thoughts; she wasn’t just trying to create a pause for the sake of drama. She really listened, and because she combined that listening with profound compassion and uncanny intuition, she offered people sacred time and space for understanding, hope and healing. She gave generations of students the room to grow, grow deep and grow up. No one was a better counselor, adviser, confidant or spiritual director. Humility does that for you.

She was honest — probably the most striking example of truth practiced in charity I’ve ever known. Colleagues could carry on for an hour about the dimensions of a particular challenge or mini-crisis in student life, and then Jean would wrap up the discussion in a phrase that would capture the whole thing perfectly. I mean perfectly. We would not only have a grasp of what was at issue, we would know what had to be done, whether the path was easy or difficult. She did that truth-telling for colleagues, but she also did it for students, for parents, for friends, for seekers, for the lost and abandoned, for the smug and powerful, for anyone who would care to listen. And she always did it with unfailing charity.

Those who knew her well came to appreciate that when Jean found something “interesting,” it was code language for what the rest of us would have said in words much more judgmental, dismissive and oppositional. Whenever she would roll those eyes and back up a little bit and pronounce something “interesting,” all of us would know that major disapproval had just been exercised. Truth, grace and charity . . . always in combination.

Jean had the soul of an educator. She loved knowledge, she loved teaching, she loved learning. She asked a million questions and was one of the most intellectually curious people I’ve encountered. Sometimes that disarming honesty would team up with that love for knowledge and she would ask the question that nobody else would have the courage to pose. When she was lost in a good book or article, you just didn’t want to disturb her. I can’t tell you how many times I passed her at her signature booth in LaFortune and did not stop to say hello. Why? Because she was totally immersed in the Chicago Tribune and I knew it was a moment of unvarnished pleasure for her.

Wouldn’t you give a couple university endowments to hear her laugh one more time? That laugh — full of body language and sparkling eyes and sometimes a very red face! Jean’s humor was an expression of a deep sense of joy — genuine joy — that few attain. She was so grounded in and so appreciative of the human condition that she saw immediately the beauty, the irony, the pretense, the foibles, the connections. And her first impulse was to smile, to light up, to laugh with, to enjoy the gift and grace of it all.

Jean lived in the moment. It explains why so many years passed at Notre Dame without her really counting them. In that vein, please indulge me one more story. When I visited her at Thanksgiving, I found her, like many of you did, to be moving in and out of touch with her surroundings. She would sing a love song to Jesus and then suddenly she would talk about some advertisement that was actually on the TV in her room. In the midst of all that flux, I attempted some conversation and said, “Jean, think of all those incredible years at Notre Dame.” She immediately shot back “38 of them.” Startled, I said “and all the time you spent in Student Affairs. So many years first with David Tyson, then Patty O’Hara and then me.” Her eyes widened and she looked me straight in the face and said, “Oh my God, do you think it’s finally catching up to me now?” And then she was back to singing.

She loved Francis and the Joliet Franciscans. She loved her family and was totally animated whenever she talked about Jack and Pat, Ray and Ethel, Trudy and Mike, as well as nieces, nephews and others that were the light of her life. She would return from Lake Wawasee each summer floating on a cloud of great family stories. She loved Chicago. She loved Notre Dame.

She loved all of her students, but (dare I say it) in a special way she loved those women who had joined Notre Dame when it first went co-ed — because she was one of them. The talk in recent times really is not overblown or exaggerated: She truly was a trail-blazer, a pioneer, a legendary figure in the institutional history of Notre Dame. The University had known 130 years of male-only student life when Father Ted invited her to come serve as rector of Farley and help move Notre Dame to a new place. Yes, 130 years. It was a change, a transformation to “loyal sons and daughters” that only Jean’s authenticity, discernment, wisdom, courage and humor could pull off.

In describing those early women she grew so close to, she would tell you with no prompting that they went on after graduation to do such amazing things — distinguished physicians and researchers and judges and wives and mothers who raised beautiful families. She always left off the last part — that they had achieved so much because of her encouragement, her belief in them, her simple, powerful witness that faith in Christ was the strongest foundation anyone could ever have to build a life on. And she cared so much for them individually as they navigated the big questions. As Sheila O’Brien wrote to me a few days ago, “Who will have their arms open to us now?”

Finally, Jean was full of faith. When Jean said she was going to pray for you, you knew it wasn’t a throw-away line . . . that she was actually going to spend time . . . in prayer . . . with God . . . about you. As he has so often, Father Ted said it best, “The time students spent with her exposed them to goodness, fun and deep beauty. Her teaching brought them face to face with the Christ in whom she deeply believed.” Indeed, the time all of us spent with her brought us face-to-face with Christ.

At this time of sadness, let’s draw our deepest consolation from a truth that Jean taught with her life — that those who are formed and transformed according to the Way, Truth and Life of Jesus do not die. They live forever with the God who raised Jesus from the dead, the God they have come to know and love. They are welcomed into a Kingdom they have already begun to build. Tonight let’s remember, believe, give thanks and celebrate that even as we pray for her here, she is with God in a place she recognizes well and loves with all her heart. Welcome home, Jean, to eternal company with God, the source and fulfillment of your amazing, blessed life.

Sister Jean Lenz, OSF, former assistant vice president for student affairs at Notre Dame, died Jan. 21, 2012, at Our Lady of the Angels Retirement Home in Joliet, Illinois, after a long illness. She was 81 years old.

Father Poorman is the executive vice president at the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon.

The Playroom: Sound and fury

2012-01-20T06:00:00-05:00

I am sitting on cement bleachers at an ice rink southeast of Chicago’s O’Hare airport, our home ice. The kids and I are nearing the end of our day, I am tired and my butt is cold. I would like for the women seated near me to stop talking.

Endless, mindless chatter about nothing. What merit is left to silence? Do these women ever stop talking? Why doesn’t anyone just sit and listen? Sit and pay attention to the sounds of hockey practice, the sounds of children, of Tuesday nights and an hour spent at the rink.

The whir of fans in the large pipes suspended from the roof. The slide of sticks on the ice. The sound blades make as a skater picks up speed, the smack of a puck against the boards, the sharpness of a precisely executed hockey stop. The muted calls from coaches I can’t quite understand and the boisterous calls of siblings I do understand. The sounds of children as they climb the bleachers, chase each other and play games with tennis balls, rolls of tape and old Gatorade tops.

“Why isn’t that kid on the ice?” Constituted mutterings about the cost of ice time and these kids and how they mess around in the locker room and don’t get out there. Instead of walking over to the child and asking him if he needs help, one hollers across the rink, “Hey, come here! Let me lace your skate!” And I hear the expletives the child does not.

They talk even while they are lacing skates. When there is no more idle chatter they dial their phones and find other voices. How do people talk this much about nothing! I am tired and the voices create noise that sounds do not. I prefer silence and solitude to voices.

There is a need for voices to communicate, to reach out to colleagues, lovers and friends, to share. A need to give thanks, give directions, give back and sometimes ask for more. There is a need to conduct business, heal the sick, teach, research, comfort. Words can soothe a wounded psyche, encourage, elevate and inspire. Yes, we need voices.

But the noise of these women’s voices has driven me away from them. These women here at the rink are hockey moms like me whom I see on different days and nights depending on our intermingling schedules. I never sit with them, and if I end up too close to them, like I have tonight, I move away.

At best they probably think me a snob. Am I? Do I think myself better than they are? Maybe I do. These women annoy me, and I do not think I annoy people by not speaking. But then I realize that me and my solitude, my yearning for silence can be offensive. It is possible to offend people by saying nothing, by not using my voice, not speaking?

My brother is angry with me again, and I don’t know why. I am afraid that I have offended him. I want him to know how much I love him. But I have spent so much time being silent and sitting off by myself on the bleachers listening that I am unable to speak. I wish I could ask him, “What have I done to hurt you?”

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

The Playroom: A perfect morning

2012-01-06T06:00:00-05:00

A friend recently asked me for advice on how to manage mornings better. Evidently in her house, mornings were stressful, with much yelling and nagging and conflict. I responded politely, telling her that although I sympathized with her plight, I had no good advice to offer since mornings in our house run so smoothly.

My children leap out of bed at 6:30, immediately make their beds without being asked and then patiently wait to take turns using the bathroom. They get dressed by themselves without any direction from me, and they never get distracted by the toys that are never on the floor of their room.

My son always wears an undershirt, and my daughters always find clean socks. They brush their teeth, brush their hair and skip cheerfully down the stairs so they can study their spelling words before breakfast.

During breakfast they don’t spill their milk or talk with food in their mouths or push their little sister off her chair just because they think it’s funny. They don’t cry over the color of their sippy cup or moan for sugared cereals. They eat their oatmeal and never say things like, “I don’t like oatmeal. Why did you make this, it looks like barf with raisins in it?”

They certainly don’t have conversations about barf and what barf looks like and all the different kinds of barf, if a zombie can barf and if a zombie barfs do zombies barf up brains, the meaning of the word vomit and if vomit is different than barf or if they are the same thing.

After breakfast they ask to be excused, clear the table, help with the dishes and then offer to feed the dog. They don’t slosh through the dog’s water bowl or edit their lunches and demand more “fun stuff.” They don’t tell me my teeth are getting yellow and my hair is getting gray, and they certainly never ask why I have to drink so much coffee.

They do ask where I’ve put their rain boots because they would much rather wear their boots than get their school shoes wet and muddy, and they do not care in the least when I can’t find the Hello Kitty umbrella and then they help each other with remembering lunch boxes and backpacks.

Since they packed up their backpacks with all the appropriate permission slips and fund-raising forms as well as their books and homework the night before, there is no mad rush around the house at the last minute trying to scrounge up the eight dollars for the field trip fee only to end up taking it out of their little sister’s piggy bank while she’s on the toilet.

I can always find my car keys, we treat each other with respect, we don’t fight or call each other names and I never have to say such things such as, “Stop it, stop it, stop it, give me the stupid light saber.” The dog even ignores the cat, and we always leave the house promptly at 8.

And when my 4-year-old asks gently from the back seat, “Mommy, why did you yell at Daddy?” I have no idea what she’s talking about.

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

The Sweet Sixteen Solution

2011-12-22T09:10:00-05:00

Every year the Bowl Championship Series recycles one or two of the controversies that illustrate its inherent contradictions. The system purports to identify the two best teams to play for the national championship, while preserving the importance of the regular season and protecting the bowl system. It accomplishes this more or less by the method used to judge figure skating: a bunch of supposed experts with nationalistic conflicts of interest — East German judge Nick Saban, for example, voted Oklahoma State No. 4 in his final poll — make subjective judgments that separate competitors by hundredths of a point.

What could possibly go wrong?

This year, the BCS logic exposed as nonsense is that “the regular season is a playoff.” For Alabama — and only Alabama — it turned out to be double-elimination. Fellow one-loss teams Oklahoma State and Stanford must now appreciate the legal and emotional stance Boise State has taken toward the BCS all these years: antitrust.

There’s a simple solution. Institute a 16-team playoff with the 11 conference champions and five at-large teams. That wouldn’t eliminate controversy, or subjectivity over seeding and excluding teams, but it would be much more fair and inclusive. And it would respect the paramount importance of the regular season more than the current system does.

In my bracket, Alabama, Stanford, Arkansas, Kansas State and South Carolina would be this season’s five at-large teams. A handful of denied teams — Boise State especially, along with Michigan, Michigan State and Virginia Tech — might have cause to holler about being left out of the last couple spots. Let them. There’s nothing wrong with controversy as long as the argument originates in the right place — at the bracket’s back door. If any of the rejected teams had won even one more game they would have made the field. In this playoff format, a second loss would leave teams, at best, scoreboard watching with fingers crossed. Regular season preserved.

There also might be some quibbling about whether Alabama deserved the No. 2 seed over Oklahoma State. That’s debatable but minor compared to a system that has no choice but to deny one of them outright. A playoff would give them the chance to advance and settle it in the semifinals.

Here’s how this season’s tournament would have worked: on December 10, the higher-seed teams would have hosted the eight first-round games. The following week — this Saturday, December 17 — there would be four quarterfinal games. After a week off for Christmas, the tournament would resume December 31 with the semifinals. Then, on January 7, the two remaining teams would play for the championship.

Although the bowls would be affected, the BCS itself and the glut of chamber of commerce boondoggles have dilapidated them enough already. Consider the Cotton Bowl, once upon a time a New Year’s Day heavyweight. This year it features probably the best non-BCS game, pairing two teams that would be in the playoff. Can you name the matchup without looking? In a tournament, both teams would host a first-round game, a much bigger opportunity than a one-off glorified exhibition against each other.

At the other end of the postseason spectrum, Arkansas State and Northern Illinois play January 8 in the GoDaddy.com Bowl. As conference champions, both teams would be in the playoff instead — Arkansas State at Oklahoma State and Northern Illinois at Alabama. I’d venture a guess that the players would prefer that chance to the Tree Falls in the Forest Bowl they have been assigned as their reward.

I think most college football fans would prefer that too.

Jason Kelly’s Sweet Sixteen Pairings

1 LSU
16 Louisiana Tech

8 South Carolina
9 Wisconsin

4 Oregon
13 Southern Mississippi

5 Stanford
12 West Virginia

6 Arkansas
11 TCU

3 Oklahoma State
14 Arkansas State

7 Kansas State
10 Clemson

2 Alabama
15 Northern Illinois

Jason Kelly, a former sports columnist for the South Bend Tribune, is an associate editor of the University of Chicago Magazine. His most recent book is Shelby’s Folly: Jack Dempsey, Doc Kearns, and the Shakedown of a Montana Boomtown. Email him at jasonkelly545@gmail.com.

ND monogram winners serving at Pearl Harbor, 1945

2011-12-22T09:05:00-05:00

John Hickey Jr. ’69, son of John Hickey ’44, found the attached photo in his father’s scrapbook recently. “He told me that someone had gathered all the ND monogram winners they could find serving in Pearl Harbor some time in 1945,” Hickey wrote.

The photo shows, left to right: Jack Wiethoff – Track ’43; John Hickey – Baseball ’44; Ralph Vinciguerra – Basketball ’43; Frank Leahy – Football ’31; Bob Faught – Basketball ’44; Ray Brancheau – Football ’34.

The senior Hickey, his son wrote, also won the Byron V. Kanaley award in 1943. The Kanaley Award has been presented each year since 1927 to senior monogram athletes who have been most exemplary as both students and leaders.

Believing: Amazement

2011-12-22T09:00:00-05:00

It appears early each Advent season, the massive crèche mounted on a platform of hay bales at the eastern edge of Notre Dame’s Grotto. Vibrantly colored, oversized figures of Mary, Joseph, an adoring shepherd, the oncoming Magi, some eerily well-groomed livestock and a girlish angel overhead, all symmetrically arranged around an empty patch of stable floor. All the figures, even the animals, have credulous and startled faces. The Baby is not yet where their apprehensive gazes fall.

While it is unlikely to be mistaken for a great work of art, this Grotto nativity scene is nevertheless irresistible, and not just for those small children whose parents bring them there to marvel and gawk and wonder where the Baby is. Naïveté is commendable in this season.

Early in the 13th century, after constructing a manger scene that was probably very much like the one in the Grotto, Saint Francis of Assisi choked up a bit. His contemporary biographer, Saint Bonaventure, reported how Francis “preached to the people around the nativity of the poor King; and being unable to utter His name for the tenderness of his love, he called Him the Babe of Bethlehem.”

At a Christmas Mass three years before he came to Notre Dame to receive the 1989 Laetare Medal, the novelist Walker Percy experienced something similar and reported it in a letter to his friend Robert Coles. The Mass had begun and an unremarkable homily had been preached when, according to Percy, “a not-so-good choir of young rock musicians got going on ‘Joy to the World,’ the vocals not so good, but enthusiastic. Then it hit me: what if it should be the case that the entire cosmos had a Creator, and what if he decided for reasons of his own to show up as a little baby conceived and born under suspicious circumstances? Well, Bob, you can lay it to Alzheimers or hangover, or whatever, but — it hit me — I had to pretend I had an allergy attack so I could take out my handkerchief.”

It seems appropriate that the astonishment of the Incarnation, of God showing up as an inconvenient baby, can erupt even from banal art and sentimental gesture, from the music of a not-so-good choir, from the words of a dull homily. The doctrine celebrated in the feast of Christmas is an unwieldy one, even faintly preposterous.

At about the same time the Baby is placed in the Grotto crèche, the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, the genealogy of Jesus Christ (Matthew 1:1-25) will be read at the Christmas vigil Mass in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Those attending Mass may be forgiven for drowsing as that long list of occasionally unpronounceable names is read, but even in that monotonous litany, as Dominican theologian Father Herbert McCabe once noted, an arresting truth is glimpsed.

“The thing to notice,” Father McCabe said, “is that God’s plan is worked out not in pious people, people with religious experiences, but in a set of crude, passionate and thoroughly disreputable people. [Jesus] belonged to a family of murderers, cheats, cowards, adulterers and liars — he belonged to us and came to help us. No wonder he came to a bad end and gave us some hope.”

Even people who have strolled by and prayed at the Grotto crèche for many years find it difficult to remember exactly what the yet-to-arrive Baby looks like. Perhaps it will blend in perfectly with the other crèche figures. Perhaps not. We’ll have to wait and see. In amazement.

Michael Garvey is Notre Dame’s assistant director of public relations. Email him at garvey.2@nd.edu.