Month: May 2016

We hear that one cannot call oneself a true Catholic if one does not pray the rosary, if one does not have a particular devotion to Divine Mercy, if one doesn’t go to daily Mass, if one doesn’t have a certain number of children, if one chooses not to vote, if one does not tithe, if one does not attend rallies in support of the unborn, if one does not directly, personally interact with the poor. I even heard, recently, that if one didn’t know that Fulton Sheen used to have a TV show called “Life Is Worth Living,” then one might want to reassess which church one actually belongs to.

Well . . .

Read the rest at the Register.

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Image by Forsaken Fotos via Flickr (license)

This ^^ was yesterday.

Sweet Corrie was screaming because, monsters that we are, we tried to get her to eat her yogurt in her high chair, rather than on the couch. I’d include an audio clip, but I’m pretty sure you could hear her from where you are, wherever you are. The kid is loud. And angry. About everything! All the time! She goes completely berserk for no reason, and no one and nothing can get through to her when she’s having one of her fits. One minute, she’s chirpy and charming and full of fun, and the next minute, she’s flailing on the floor, writhing and drooling and thrashing around.

I’ll stand over to the side and let the geyser of unsolicited advice rush past.

Red Dye! GMOs! ADHD! Oppositional Defiance Disorder! Heavy metal poisoning! Failure to pray enough rosaries in utero! Kids these days! Parents these days! What are they putting in our water! What do you expect when you listen to David Bowie! My child loves her Tula wrap, and she never even wakes up, much less cries. But it has to be an original Tula, not one of those awful Target ones . . . 

Feel better now? Thanks for the advice, but I already know what’s wrong with her.

She’s about to learn something. She’s almost 15 months old, and is a smart little thing, so I suspect she’s about to start putting two or three words together. Her tantrums may be incredibly painful, but they sure look familiar.

Whenever my kids — say, age 4 and under — are about to hit some new, exciting milestone, they turn into horrible little rage demons for a week or longer beforehand. It’s like their brains are on fire, and they don’t know what to do, so they try to kill everybody. It happens before they walk, before they talk, before they figure out anything big and new. As soon as they learn the new thing, they’re happy and calm and reachable again (more or less).

I have no idea if this is normal behavior for all children (I gave up reading baby books after the first baby, because they were making me crazy) but it sure is normal for my kids, and for some of my nieces and nephews, too. It’s still not pleasant, but at least we know that it’s a passing phase, and we’ll get something out of it at the end.

Another benefit: it gives me a little insight into what other moms are dealing with, when they have kids with special needs. I have several friends whose kids behave like this routinely — the irrational tantrums, the unpredictable rage. But it’s not a passing phase, and they won’t get any kind of reward, and it’s not due to any kind of bad parenting or poor diet choices. It’s something that the kid and the parents endure despite the best research and medical support and the most devoted parenting; and it’s a cross that’s heavy enough without strangers passing by and shaking their heads in disgust.

So the next time you see someone’s kid acting like a complete monster, may I suggest that you either just pass by quietly and say a prayer for everyone’s mental health — or, if it seems appropriate, murmur, “Hang in there, Mama!” Recall that Miss Manners, arbiter of etiquette, considers it “excruciatingly incorrect” to correct a stranger.

And if it’s your own kid who’s gone bonkers, don’t despair. Look, maybe there really is something wrong with your child. I’m not a diagnostician, and I have no way of knowing how you can tell the difference between normal and worrisome tantrums. The only thing I’m an expert in is my own kids; and so the only thing I can tell you, with complete confidence, is that it certainly can be normal for bright, healthy, well-loved, reasonably-disciplined children to turn into the Tasmanian Devil from time to time.

Now, if you have any other questions, please direct them to your pediatrician. I’ll be hiding in the bathroom, at least until the baby figures out how to pick the lock.

Looking for something new to accompany me on my treadmill, I looked up one of my old favorite albums from college: Post by Björk. It held up pretty well! Here’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”:

John Herreid liked the video and said,

My kids loved watching this music video when they were little. At some point one of them (Bertie, I think) asked if we could watch the “song video with Mommy in it” again and it took quite a while to unravel that he meant this one, with him assuming that it was Aletheia in the video.

It really does look a bit like his lovely wife, although I don’t know how prone she is to prancing around in tire stores.

The story made me remember how, when I was little, I assumed that the smiling woman in the red bonnet on the Sun-Maid Raisin box was my mother. Why not? It did look a bit like her. To a kid, who knows so very, very little about the world, it actually makes more sense to eat raisins that come from Mommy than raisins that come from some stranger. Why do we eat Strange Woman Raisins, anyway? Kids’ versions of reality aren’t necessarily stranger or sillier than reality; it’s just that adults are used to the way things are.

When I was in kindergarten, Olivia Newton-John’s “Hopelessly Devoted To You” was on the radio. My father worked at the Vocational Techincal College, known as the “Vo-Tech.” So naturally, I assumed it was a song about one’s dedication to one’s job, where one would “Hold the seedy Vo-Tech to you.”

Now you tell one. What secret celebrities are lurking in your family tree? Is Mr. Clean your Uncle Rick? Maybe one of the Knights of Columbus in your parish moonlights on the Quaker Oats box? I love these stories. Kids need the world to make sense, so they make it make sense.

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Photo by David Prasad via Flickr (license)

Sara Mujica of Danbury, CT is seventeen and pregnant. A pretty common story. What is unusual about her, at least in the U.S., is that she has Zika virus. She caught it in Honduras, where she travelled to visit her boyfriend. She started showing symptoms of the disease just after she found out she was pregnant.

Mujica, who is in her first trimester, has started a GoFundMe account to cover any medical costs if her baby is born with the profound birth defects that may come with Zika. She says:

I have Decided to keep my Baby , Because it’s what God has given to me & I am taking Full Responsibility Of MY Actions &  I do NOT believe in Abortion so I would never do that . Thank you so much .  The Funds That I Receive, Will be used on All Medical Needs For My Baby & Things My Baby May Need.. Thank You So Much Once Again, God Bless You All !

A lot Of People Are Wondering What I Would Do If My Baby Came Out Normal , Well I Would Donate The Money To People In Need !

The Giant Internet Hand of Spanking sprang into action and declared that Mujica is an opportunist, a liar, a cheat, a fraudster, a hypocrite, and of course a slut and a whore. They note that she shouldn’t have been having sex, she should have been using contraception, she should have been in school, she shouldn’t have a boyfriend in another country, she shouldn’t have come home again, she shouldn’t have believed her doctors who told her at age 15 that she was infertile, and she shouldn’t assume that her baby will be born with birth defects.

Most of all, she should get an abortion. She must get an abortion. They could easily forgive her for all her missteps, as long as she makes the only responsible choice now. It’s wrong not to, for her sake (she’s only 17!), for the baby’s sake (he might have microcephaly!) and most of all, for the sake of society (THERE’S MONEY INVOLVED).

There is another choice besides giving birth. If she’s so worried that there will be something wrong with the baby she shouldn’t have made in the first place, she should just unmake it. On the GoFundMe page comments:

Lilith Jade (with 76 favorites): “You’re being selfish and opportunistic. You should abort the fetus before it becomes another burden on society. Also if you’re fine with premarital sex then you can’t use religion as an excuse not to abort.”

Diane Pressly (60 favorites): “You are a selfish attention whore. Shame on you. If you were a real mom and loved your child at all, you wouldn’t put an innocent life through what’s ahead. Begging people for money to pay for your poor choices just makes a bad situation worse. So sad.”

Is Mujica some kind of fraudster? I have no idea. Maybe she’s lying about all kinds of things. Maybe she already knew she was pregnant and went to Honduras anyway. Maybe the baby will turn out healthy and she’ll spend the money on sassy fairy tattoos and ill-conceived business ventures. People are stupid and irresponsible and impulsive even after strangers have been kind to them. This is nothing new.

But here’s something else that’s as old as humanity: as soon as death is an option, it becomes the only responsible option. Once death is one possible choice, it looks like the only choice. That’s what kind of thing death is. It is a devourer. It is never satisfied. As long as there’s another victim to offer, the living will be eager to make that sacrifice, hoping to appease death to save their own lives.

What are these commenters really saying, with their anger toward this girl they’ve never met? They’re saying, “I’m not a burden. I’m not irresponsible. I and my family, we’re not going to suffer, because we’re not hypocrites. We’re legal. We’re healthy. We’re responsible. We’re pure. We’re not like her and her unauthorized baby. We deserve to live.”

No one wants to be pro-death, exactly. When there’s a baby involved, we sweeten the deal and say, “Just start over. Maybe you’ll get a better baby next time.” When there’s an old person involved, we say, “He had his chance. Now he needs to move over and let other people enjoy their lives.” We insist on death for some in favor of the living, as if death in all its current popular forms — abortion or euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide — will improve life for the multitudes. We argue that one person’s death makes life better for other people. Choosing death, we argue, is a choice for freedom, for health, for happiness, for life itself — if not for the victim, then for someone else, someone who deserves it more.

Ask the 80-year-old who knows very well that he is tedious, he is smelly, and he is expensive, and his children wish the old fool would croak already and stop gobbling up their inheritance. Ask the married, stable, loving parents of a baby boy whose brain is growing out the roof of his mouth. Ask the woman in the wheelchair, the sexual abuse victim, the burdensome ones. Ask them if a stranger has ever suggested it might be better if they just, you know, die.

As if we weren’t all burdensome. As if we weren’t all disabled. As if we weren’t all needy, all victims, all expensive beyond all reason. As if we don’t all come at a price.

But we don’t want to face what we are. We want to see ourselves as worthy, as indisputably worthwhile. We’re different! We deserve to be here, unlike those others, those living errors, those heavy lives who are dragging us down. And so, as soon as death is a possibility for a stranger, we spring up and tell him that he has no right to continue living. We line our avenues with trees, so that our conquerors may march in the shade. Let death take what it has coming to it, we say, and maybe it will leave the rest of us alone.

But death will not be appeased. It will not rest. It is hungry. It does not stand back and say, “I’ve taken my share; now the rest of you living can abide in peace.” Death is an indiscriminate invader, always looking to expand its territory.

Nothing can appease death, but it can be disarmed. One thing only can accomplish this, and that is self-sacrifice. Not the sacrifice of other lives. Never the sacrifice of other lives.

 

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image: screenshot of gif by Nina Paley

 

 

Behold, the week that was eleven  years long.

SATURDAY
Meatball subs, chips, root beer floats

Saturday was number 1 son’s birthday! Here he is in his happy place:

[img attachment=”102799″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”moe meatballs” /]
Sorry about the blurriness. He’s fourteen; lots of things are . . . unclear.

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SUNDAY
Stuffed shells with meatballs, garlic bread, salad, croissants, cookies, eight pizzas from Dominos, and a stained glass cake.

On Sunday we finally had my daughter’s First Communion.

[img attachment=”102814″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”lucy first communion” /]

Poor kid was the only one making her First Communion that day, so Monsignor made a big fuss over her. This is not, as you can see by her expression, her favorite thing ever. But she survived!

We were unsure, up until the last minute, if we would have three guests or 17. I am not sure what the actual final headcount was, but we had a blast! Thank you, norovirus, for forcing us to postpone things until family was in town for college graduations. Six of the eight Prever siblings were there, and everyone brought food and beer and puppies and kids, and it was just great.

[img attachment=”102813″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”6 siblings” /]

I more or less followed this recipe for stuffed shells, but I added some nutmeg to the cheese.
The cake was a box mix of angel food cake. Then I iced it with royal icing and let it dry. Royal icing is what you want to use if you care more about having a flat, dry decorating surface than you care about the taste.

I used a recipe that was just egg whites and confectioner’s sugar. If you get nervous with raw eggs, there are varieties with cream of tartar or powdered egg, but we’re daredevils and just go with egg whites. To separate eggs, I just pluck out the yolk with my fingers and let the white drop into a cup. Is that disgusting? My hands are clean. It’s way more efficient than any other method.

When the icing was completely dry, I used store-bought black icing to make a design that I copied off the internet.

[img attachment=”102802″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”cake white” /]

Then I let that set for a while, and then used a little spoon to fill in the shapes with different kinds of jelly that I whipped up with a little water.

[img attachment=”102804″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”cake color” /]

I was in such a rush, you can’t imagine, so it’s pretty sloppy; but I do like stained glass cakes for sacrament parties. In the past, I’ve done more Eucharistic designs of grapes and wheat. I feel like one year I made a cake version of the Holy Spirit window at St. Peter’s, but that may have been a fever dream. I feel ooky about making a cross or a Host out of icing. I don’t think it’s a moral issue; it just makes me feel ooky.

Then, for some reason, I told the birthday boy that, for his upcoming party, I could definitely make an Aladdin Sane stained glass cake, just to keep that cycle of ambition and regret perking along.

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MONDAY
Leftover stuffed shells, English muffin pizzas

[img attachment=”102805″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”mini pizzas” /]

I had run out of sauce, so we made these with sliced tomatoes, pepperoni, black olives, and cheese. Always popular. With me, anyway.

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TUESDAY
Pulled pork sandwiches with red onions on kaiser rolls, spicy fries, cole slaw, salad

[img attachment=”102806″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”pulled pork sandwich” /]

Again with the blurry pictures. Probably if I got a clear view of the way this week is headed, I’d just go back to bed anyway.

I guess this will have to do for sandwich of the week, even though it’s not a new recipe. I covered the pork with an IPA and salt and pepper and let it cook for several hours at a low temp, and it was mighty tasty.

The cole slaw was the perfect contrast in that it was almost tasteless. Don’t ask me how I screwed up cole slaw, but there it is.

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WEDNESDAY
French toast for the kids; mental health steak for me and Mr. Man

Date night! My husband gets home around 7:30 at the earliest most days, but the rest of us eat at 6. If we’re planning to go out for dinner, I have the worst time not eating while I’m waiting for him to get home, because I am five years old and I can’t deal with not having a full tum tum at all times. So I end up noshing on whatever the kids are eating, and then when we go out, I feel like a pig eating all over again.

This time, I was determined not to ruin my appetite. The upshot was that I broke down in tears on the way to the restaurant, 95% because I was hungry. And no, it doesn’t help to tell yourself, “What if you were in a concentration camp, eh? Don’t you think people in a concentration camp get hungry, too? But they don’t cry; they smuggle in Bibles and encourage each other! Boo, you.”

Anyway, we had some excellent steaks cooked by excellent Mexicans, and life seemed worth living again. The margaritas did not hurt, either. They were so good it didn’t even occur to me to take a picture. My husband did get a shot of this fine artifact on the restaurant wall, though:

[img attachment=”102801″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”aztec picture” /]

By coincidence, this is exactly how my husband and I met.

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THURSDAY
Grilled chicken, salad, tortilla chips and salsa
This was the first time in my life I sprung for skinless, boneless, pre-cut chicken tenders. Worth every penny. I mixed the meat up with lime juice, olive oil, salt and pepper, and a ton of fresh garlic, and threw them under the broiler. Yum.

[img attachment=”102811″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”chicken salad chips” /]

This was of those rolling salads that we’ve been eating half of and refreshing all week since Sunday. I guess it’s about time to retire it. Those tomatoes look pretty weary. Or maybe I’m projecting again.

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FRIDAY
Korean-style tuna rice bowl

Gonna try this recipe today. And I have some asparagus and some seaweed. But I am going to skip the egg yolk, because I am just too white.

“It seems that my mother has forgotten almost everything but how to love,” says my sister Rosie in this post, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re welcome to stay.” Rosie says:

There have been a lot of comings and goings in our house lately, and my mother, who has Alzheimer’s, can’t keep up. She walked into the living room yesterday, saw my husband playing the piano, and said “oh, are you spending the night too? Well, I don’t know who you are, but you’re welcome to stay.”

Can you imagine being so generous? I’ve heard that when Alzheimer’s strips away everything else, it leaves the core personality. My grandmother, for instance, was reduced to one word near the end, but that word was “honey.” The doctor was impressed. “I’ve heard a lot worse words from Alzheimer’s patients,” he said.* “Your grandmother must have been a loving woman.”

My grandmother was a loving woman, indeed. When she could still string two words together, she once saw someone peeling a banana and crooned, “Oh, poor thing.” She would follow me around with an anxious smile, trying with her bare, trembling hands to piece together the ripped knee of my jeans. She was a mender, a soother.

My grandmother had also been an intensely sociable person who was known, decades ago, for her cocktail parties. Everyone liked her. She was a visiting nurse in the slums of Brooklyn — an ideal vocation for someone who wanted to see people and wanted to make them better. I can just see her, climbing stairs, knocking boldly, doing what needed to be done. She entertained, introduced, tried to make matches and friendships everywhere.

My mother, though? My grandmother’s daughter? Not a sociable person, to put it mildly. She always used to say that she felt a strange affinity for this tiny shack on stilts that stood in a swamp on the side of the road. You could only reach it with a ladder, and there was nothing inside but some broadcasting equipment for the local radio station. That was her ideal: to have privacy, peace, simplicity, and a beautiful, austere isolation that allowed her to send her message out to the world, but to be utterly undisturbed.

That’s not what her life looked like, at all. In a cluttered, ornate Victorian house, she bore eight living children and spent all her days surrounded by them, home schooling, feeding, and changing them, enduring sleepovers, parties, and weddings, battling her way through a profound fog of shyness and introversion to meet our friends, welcome our spouses, embrace our children. It did not come naturally to her, not at all.

So when my mother, artlessly broadcasting from the austere simplicity of her Alzheimer’s, says, “I don’t know who you are, but you’re welcome stay” — my God, that is even more remarkable than you might think. That willingness to accept people into her home is a willingness that was cultivated, painfully, deliberately, intentionally, over many seasons of life, until her hospitality grew such deep roots that it now apparently flowers on its own.

Dementia has relieved her of any real responsibility. No one expects her to make lasagna for forty anymore, or to put on a robe and find beds for eleven unexpected guests. But no one can persuade her that she can lay down that burden of intentional generosity. I joke (not really joking) that it’s a good thing I won’t know what I’m doing when I get Alzheimer’s, because it’s going to be awful. I am awful, deep down, and someday I won’t be able to hide it anymore. How humiliating, no longer to be able to disguise who you really are.

But look at my mother. Look at the flower of her love, so carefully cultivated. This is who she is, but only because this is what she trained herself to become.

All right, then. To work.

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*My sister, Abby Tardiff, has this very important clarification.

“I do fervently believe that my mother is expressing the love at the core of her being, and that my grandmother was, too. Simcha has it right. However, I would like to add that sometimes Alzheimer’s creates paranoia and anger that is not an expression of the person’s true being, but simply an artifact of the disease.

My grandmother’s vocabulary was eventually reduced to the one word “honey,” which expressed her personality well; but a bit before that, she developed a sailor’s vocabulary that I’d never heard from her before!”

Alzheimer’s may take away inhibitions and may spare some true core personality traits, but it is a degenerative brain disease which ultimately drastically changes the personality, especially in its more advanced stages. An Alzheimer’s patient who exhibits grotesque or violent behavior is not revealing his or her true self; his brain has been transformed against his will by the disease.

I sincerely apologize for unintentionally implying that dementia patients are somehow responsible for their behavior, or that we can read the soul of someone suffering from brain disease. My intention was simply to pay tribute to my mother’s long legacy of love and self-sacrifice.

 

Cons:

• Passing truckers will honk at you.
• Every once in a while, someone’s tooth gets embedded in someone else’s skull and the sound of your femur snapping in half will haunt you for the rest of your days. Big deal. Like that wouldn’t happen eventually anyway.

Pros:

• It’s really, truly fun for all ages. As long as your neck is strong enough to support your head, you can have some kind of good time on a trampoline, whether it’s gently bopping a little baby up and down, or turning ridiculous back flips designed to freak your mother out, or just gingerly springing up and down like a big gooney gooneybird. Also popular: running as fast as you can in a circle while chasing a shrieking toddler. Optional: pretending you’re on the moon.
• It’s a great aid to those “games” where you get to lie down. The kids climb on you and roll around and, because of the motion of the trampoline, they think you’re participating. You can call it the tiger game or the mummy game or the digging up dinosaur game, whatever, as long as you get to lie down in the sun and call it “parenting.”
• It is damn near impossible to bounce for five minutes and still be mad when you get off.
• There is no better sound than the sound that can float in through the window than the sound of previously surly, gloomy, crabby, sullen kids suddenly shouting and laughing together.
• People look hilarious trying to get down.
• It won’t actually help you go into labor unless the baby is ready; but, again, hilarious.
• You always know the answer to the question, “What will we do with all these party guests?”
• If you’re completely the most amazing parents ever, you will also add a sprinkler and a boatload of water balloons to said party activity.
• No little kid can say “trampoline.” “Troppineen,” yes. “Chapoline,” probably. “Boing,” definitely. Look, it’s cute. I’ll take it.
• Add a trampoline to any formal photo shoot and get instant drama (poofy skirts and long hair are a bonus).
• It’s the best possible viewing spot for a meteor shower. You can also rest a little cocktail on your collarbone and pretend you’re watching a meteor shower, as long as it’s not actually pouring rain.
• Passing truckers will honk at you.

In conclusion:

• You should get a trampoline.

Babies come from women, so we know who to blame when babies keep turning up. We tell women over and over and over again that the worst thing that can happen to you is to have baby. The worst thing that can happen to a baby is for it to be born. The worst thing that can happen to the world is for your baby to be in it.

Of course they throw their babies away.

Read the rest at the Register. 

Little babies receive Holy Communion in Eastern Catholic Churches. How do you like that? Mark Shea tells a wonderful story about a man who was scandalized when he found out about this practice. “How can you give the Eucharist to little children?” he demanded of the priest. “They can’t possibly understand what it really is!”

“Well,” the priest replied, “Do you?”

And the guy had to admit, heck no, he did not. Not really, not fully, not even more than the tiniest little bit.

It’s a good story for us parents of first communicants to tell ourselves. I keep hearing stories about other kids who floated home from Mass on a cloud of Eucharistic bliss, begging their parents to wake them up early on Monday so they could receive Jesus again as soon as possible. I have not yet managed to raise a kid who says stuff like this. I did have one child who received his first and second Holy Communion at the same Mass. It’s possible he was experiencing an extreme hunger for the Bread of Life, but it’s a lot more likely that just he flaked out, got lost, and drifted back into line with his classmates when he couldn’t find the right pew.

Tarcisus and Imelda, my kids ain’t. However, there’s a reason they call it First Holy Communion: It’s the first, God willing, of many. Many, many, many. Catechism class generally ends for the year around this time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to your kids about what it all means.

As I’ve mentioned, we started reading The How-To Book of the Mass in the evening, right after family prayers and before the little kids go to bed. They start trying to kiss me goodnight and scamper away, and I shout, “Wait, wait, don’t go anywhere!” There is groaning and sighing and flopping and a sudden interest in getting math homework done, and I ignore it all. It’s part of my grand plan to fling bits of theology at the family without ceasing, and hope some of it sticks. This goes for the kid who just received her first communion, and for the kids who’ve been receiving for years, and for the kid who still spends most of the Mass under the pew. And it goes for me and my husband, too. Like the little Ruthenian Catholic baby, we can’t possibly understand what the Eucharist really is. But we’re working on it.

We only read for about five minutes. I’ve found it more helpful to read quick little bits of spiritual reading often, rather than longer chunks less often. The key is to keep going, keep chipping away at it, keep coming back to it when we fall off the wagon and forget to do any catecheis for . . . oops, yikes, mumbledy-mumble waytoomany weeks. Keep coming back to it.

Even if the kids don’t understand everything they hear, at least they are hearing about their faith all the time, so it’s not weird to hear the name “Jesus” outside of Mass. This way, if they do have a question, they will have a natural time to ask it, rather than remembering on their own to broach the topic of religion. (And it’s ten thousand times more useful to answer spontaneous questions the kids have, than for parents to bring up questions they don’t care about.)

Keep coming back to it. That’s the only way we’ll ever make any progress at understanding the unimaginable gift of the Eucharist. That’s the only way our kids will ever make any spiritual progress under our guidance. That’s the only way to live, whether you’re a baby or a callow youth or an exhausted parent. Keep coming back to the well of information about the Faith, just like you keep coming back to the Eucharist. That’s what it’s for!

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a sucker for a good story about old married couples. The older I get, the less likely I am to get over this predilection!

As Joanne McPortland cannily pointed out, such books for children are “not common, on purpose, since the original roots of children’s tales are teaching how to survive in a world without the stabilities of home and family.” She’s right, but boy, have things changed. Maybe stories of couples who are stable and still in love are likely to become more common, as the idea of old married love becomes more of a fascinating fantasy, something that has to be learned and striven after, rather than something that is inevitable.

In Caleb and Kate, written and illustrated by William Steig,

[img attachment=”102232″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-05-09 at 1.42.41 PM” /]

Caleb storms out of the house after a fight, and is turned into a dog. He realizes that the only way he can stay with his wife is to be her pet, so that’s what he does. She grows to love him, but does not realize who he is. His fidelity is rewarded one night when robbers invade the house, and everything is restored, better than before.

A common theme in books about old couples is that they love each other and have a pretty good life, but they certainly wish they had children. It’s a very old story indeed, hearkening back to Abraham and Sarah. Thumbelina, Snow White, The Gingerbread Man, and other traditional fairy tales pick up this theme, where a loving but barren couple finally get the child they longed for — but there’s a catch.

Various children’s books salve the sorrow of childlessness in various ways:

In Millions of Cats, written and illustrated by Wanda Gag,

[img attachment=”102233″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-05-09 at 1.32.53 PM” /]

the old husband sets off to remedy his wife’s loneliness by searching for a pet cat. He stumbles upon a valley of millions of cats     (My smart-alec kids insist that the one, small, homely cat was not so much a survivor as an all-devourer.)

In The Rainbabies, written by Laura Krauss Melmed and illustrated by Jim LaMarche,

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a sudden rain brings an unexpected gift: a shower of tiny, perfect rainbabies, each small enough to be cradled inside a drop of water. The devoted foster parents care for them and protect them from a dangerous world, but eventually get some unwelcome news — and then a reward. I always found this story a little unsettling, but the outstandingly lovely illustrations make up for a lot!

In One Potato, Two Potato, written by Cynthia DeFelice and illustrated by Andrea U’Ren, 

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the couple has had their children, but they are all grown and moved away. The poverty-stricken husband and wife are entirely devoted to each other, out of affection and necessity, sharing a coat, a blanket, and even a chair because they’re too poor to have enough for both of them. But they long for friendship, beyond what the spouse can provide. In their direst day, digging up the very last potato in the garden, the husband finds a magic pot which gives them everything they need.

My kids think they should have kept the pot, but I think they buried it again for future generations to find, when their need is so strong that they dig deep enough to find it.

Yonder, written by Tony Johnston and illustrated by Lloyd Bloom, 

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is less a story about a specific couple and more a narrative poem about the seasons of the year and the cycles of family life.  Gentle and moving, with plain language and illustrations that glow.

Not a book, but the movie Up is probably my favorite story of an old couple. As internet wags have noted, the first eight minutes of it — which almost wordlessly tell the story of how the couple met as children, how they fell in love, married, built a life together, suffered together and found joy together, and were finally separated at death — is “still a better love story than Twilight.” Heh.

But it’s just the introduction! What blows me away is that the rest of the love story — the rest of the work of the marriage — happens to Carl after his beloved Ellie is dead.

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Carl thinks he is honoring his wife’s memory by pulling off one final, spectacular adventure and bodily dragging their home to the mythical Paradise Falls. In tribute to her, he rejects the old folks’ home and moves his entire house to the land of their dreams, meeting their childhood hero in the process. But in the end, what she really inspired him to do was to allow himself to be carried up and away — away from the static, nostalgic, scrapbook-bound story of his life, even giving up all the last physical reminders he had of their love together.

Because of the kind of person she has helped him become, he can ultimately respond to the people (and creatures) who actually have need of him. The wonderful thing is, in order to be a hero, he does not need to become a new kind of person. His lifelong old-mannish ways are exactly what is called for in the end. As a child, his wife likes his stolid ways (“You’re weird. I like you!”). And because he loves her, he undertakes adventure, which is how he comes to be thrown together with Russell. And finally, as an old man, he finds himself back home again — and how delighted Ellie would have been to see him fathering the boy in his stolid, old-mannish way. As Russell says, “That might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most.”

It’s an extraordinary book that can make “the boring stuff,” which is the bedrock of married love, into a good story. I heartily recommend all the books (and of course the movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, you must!). Which are your favorites?

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Movie still from Up (2000) via Pixar Studios