Fine, I’m pregnant!

See?

 

12 weeks

 

Too tired and gassy to come up with any announcement more adorable or original than this, but everything is looking good so far.  God willing, Fishie #10 is due in late Feb./early March.  Hooray!

At the Register: Lessons from the ER

–One of the greatest functions of the ER is to illustrate for your children why you do not pay for TV at home. Ninety nine channels, ’round and around and around you go.  See, kids? There is nothing on. Nothing.

–If you are holding a catheter tube, and I say, “Careful, she is little, but she is strong,” then you should listen to me.

Read the rest at the Register.

PIC I’m a bad doctor

Faith, reason, depression, and help

PIC bug in jar

 

There’s a lot of bad information about depression, suicide, and faith swirling around the internet this week. Here are a few things I know:

No, depression and mental illness don’t necessarily take away your free will, turning you into a helpless victim who wings straight to Heaven if you commit suicide.

No, you can’t just pray away the sadness, will yourself to be joyful, or do this one weird trick that will earn you emotional stability and peace.

The truth lies, as is so often the case, lies somewhere in the middle of all these extreme bad ideas.

Many people who are severely depressed are suffering from some combination of spiritual and physical ailments.
Many people who are severely depressed are dealing with some things that are out of their control and some things that are within their control.
Many people who are severely depressed need sacrificial love and patience from friends and family, and also some kind of hard work and self-knowledge in order to make it through the dark times.

And many people who are severely depressed need both faith and reason to help them through. This is not a new idea! Here is a passage from Sirach:

9 My son, when you are sick do not be negligent,
but pray to the Lord, and he will heal you.
10 Give up your faults and direct your hands aright,
and cleanse your heart from all sin.
11 Offer a sweet-smelling sacrifice, and a memorial portion of fine flour,
and pour oil on your offering, as much as you can afford.[e]
12 And give the physician his place, for the Lord created him;
let him not leave you, for there is need of him.
13 There is a time when success lies in the hands of physicians,[f]
14     for they too will pray to the Lord
that he should grant them success in diagnosis[g]
and in healing, for the sake of preserving life.
15 He who sins before his Maker,
may he fall into the care[h] of a physician.

Sirach 38:9-15

And here is a post from John Herreid, writing as a guest on my sister’s husband Bill Herreid’s newish blog,Life, Liberty and Absolute Crap:

Depressed Catholics: God Wants You to Get Help.

Please read it, and please forward it to anyone who could benefit from hearing an honest account by a faithful Catholic who suffers but has gotten help.

John’s experience of depression is different from my own. I haven’t been fascinated with death ever, that I can recall. But I have had the experience where it physically hurt to draw a breath, to move, to get out of bed. I would hear people talking about feeling better, and that was not what I wanted. I just wanted to die, so that I would not feel anything anymore. There was no experience of anything but pain, ever.  I could see the world, the people who loved me, the things I used to enjoy, and it was as if I moved around behind a dome bulletproof glass. Nothing could touch me, and I couldn’t do anything but feel paralysis and suffocation. I couldn’t say anything true, feel anything genuine, express anything worthwhile. The only thing I knew was that I had to live, and I didn’t know why I deserved that.

So.  If someone is telling you to see a doctor, see a doctor. Ask someone to help you make that phone call. Even if the first treatment you try, whether it’s drugs or therapy or something else, doesn’t work, try something. Name the lie that you can fix yourself by trying hard to be a better person. You need help, and God wants you to get help.

At the Register: What does the Church teach about suicide?

The modern Church understands that depression and other psychological disturbances that might lead a person to suicide are true illnesses, which can significantly mitigate both a person’s understanding and free will.

Moreover, even if a person’s death seems quick, with no time to repent before the end, we have no way of knowing what happens between their soul and a merciful God, who wants to bring all of His children home to Himself.

Read the rest at the Register. 

Give me a dumb kid any day.

Today, we went for kindergarten screening with my five-year-old (here in the persona of “A Snooty Waitress”)

 

photo (7)

 

The teacher showed her three sets of dominoes: a group of two, a group of three, and a group of four.  She asked my kid to show her which group had two in it. Kid points to the group of three and the group of four.

I, being the greatest mother in the world, didn’t say a thing, because this is my kid’s moment to shine, and whatever happens, happens. So the teacher gently encourages her to count how many dominoes are in the group of four. “One, two, free, four.” And how many in this other group? “One, two, free.”  All right, now can you show me which one has two in it? She again points to the groups of three and four.

Then the other teacher points out that my child is indicating which groups include individual dominoes with two dots on them. There are, indeed, two groups with two in them. Ta dah!

This reminds me of my nephew, who went for a well-child check-up. I think he was about five, too. A tricky age! The doctor held up a green crayon and asked him what color it was. He hemmed and hawed and wasn’t sure. The doctor carefully recorded this slightly worrisome deficit.

My sister, his mother, asked him why the heck he didn’t just tell her what color the crayon was. “The doctor was holding her finger over the label,” he explained, “So I couldn’t read if it was Forest Green or Jungle Green. ”

Smart kids. Making us look bad.

Fearless Clare, Intercede for Iraq

Today is the feast day of St. Clare, the abbess who faced down the invading Saracens with a fearsome weapon: the Holy Eucharist.

While the marauders were scaling the convent walls, Clare, ill as she was, had herself carried out to the gate and there the Sacrament was set up in sight of the enemy. Prostrating herself before it, she prayed aloud: “Does it please Thee, O God, to deliver into the hands of these beasts the defenseless children whom I have nourished with Thy love? I beseech Thee, good Lord, protect these whom now I am not able to protect.”

Whereupon she heard a voice like the voice of a little child saying, “I will have them always in My care.” She prayed again, for the city, and again the voice came, reassuring her. She then turned to the trembling nuns and said, “Have no fear, little daughters; trust in Jesus.” At this, a sudden terror seized their assailants and they fled.

The details are, of course, different: today’s Muslim jihadists aren’t mercenaries vying for control of the Papal States. But to the Christians trembling inside the walls, the enemy is the enemy, and the picture is just as bleak. St. Clare, pray for your defenseless children now.

PIC St. Clare stained glass

 

“Pop! Out comes the corpse!” or, fun with the Fishers

Our summer library reading program ended not with a bang, but a howl, then a whimper, then ice cream, and then more howling. It was an unfortunate combination of overtired kids, high expectations, generalized raffle anxiety, and a hideous game which I don’t know who thought was a good idea, where you tie balloons to your ankles and run around getting stomped at by bigger, faster kids. I guess there was a bang and a whimper for that part, come to think of it.

There were also some bad feelings among the other moms when I stepped forward to claim the grand prize (two movie tickets and a pizza dinner) on behalf of my two-year-old, who won fair and square by having some books read to her.  Too bad! The kid has really been looking forward to a night out with her husband, but she just can’t justify it in the budget right now. Fair’s fair.

There was one good thing, though: one of my kids won a card game called Snake Oil, and the whole family has been playing it steadily all week. Yay, no glowing screen!

 

 

One person is the customer. He chooses a customer card and announces his profession or state in life: nurse, billionaire, cheerleader, zombie, plumber, witch, etc.

All the other players get six word cards each.  So you might get: death, balloon, burp, button, lightning, water; or flag, coffin, glove, cheese, leg, regret. From these, you must pick two words to invent a product that the customer would want to buy. Everyone makes a persuasive sales pitch

 

 

photo (48)

 

to the alert, bright-eyed customer

 

photo (50)

 

 

and the customer awards his card to the person with the best product. (Pardon the rubble in the background; I am halfway through painting the living room!)

My kids are good improvisers, and huge hams.

 

 

photo (47)

 

The teenagers like playing, too, and so do I. It says “ages 10+” but it’s pretty easy to let the illiterate ones be “partners,” so really everyone can play this game, and the older ones are so full of ideas that they are willing to help out the little guys.

 

 

photo (45)

 

I can imagine it being fun for all adults, with enough liquor in them.  And you can do a full game in about twenty minutes! And best of all, we now have a new running joke to carry us through the next few months, courtesy of my slightly morbid eight-year-old daughter, who was hawking Water Snakes to a grave robber: “Pop! Out comes the corpse!” (She won that round.)

At the Register: God and the Hungry Belly

[L]et’s make a distinction here. Christ and the saints exhort us to deny ourselves, to voluntarily turn away from the lure of physical comforts, to sell all we have to follow Him. He wants us to learn that we have a choice: to give ourselves over to the demands of the flesh, or to master the flesh and try, instead, to satisfy our spiritual hunger and thirst.

Christ and the saints did not exhort us to deny others, to prevent other people from enjoying physical comforts. He did not tell us to make the choice for other people. Instead, He told us, over and over and over again, to feed His sheep. And that’s what the saints did: they fed people. Yes, with plain old physical food, that poor people could eat with their bodily mouths and digest with their earthbound bellies.

Read the rest at the Register.

Ann Coulter to Jesus: Fix Bethlehem First!

People keep telling me that I don’t understand Ann Coulter’s tone: that she speaks tongue in cheek, deliberately exaggerating her point so as to make us think.

Well, here is what I think about her piece Ebola Doc’s Condition Downgraded to Idiotic. As is often the case with a Coulter piece, it’s hard to tell what her main thesis is, so I’ll just focus on one paragraph:

If Dr. Brantly had practiced at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles and turned one single Hollywood power-broker to Christ, he would have done more good for the entire world than anything he could accomplish in a century spent in Liberia. Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects the world.

It seems that she believes that Dr. Brantly, who is a medical doctor, has some mysterious power as a Christian to evangelize “Hollywood power-brokers,” and it’s only his vanity (“Christian narcissism,” she calls it) that sent him off to the third world with his medical supplies, rather than — what, trotting up to Quentin Tarrantino’s gate, introducing himself as an M.D., and suggesting that Mr. Tarantino repent? And this would have been more effective than ministering to the dying in Liberia.

Let me explain something. The man is a medical doctor. He heals people’s bodies. He apparently felt the call to go far, far out of his way to minister to people in horrible need of his expert help. This is, in general, how good people operate: rather than always doing what is obvious or easy, and rather than doing something they are neither suited, nor trained, nor able to do, they do what they think they are being called to do.

Was Dr. Brantly truly called to travel to Africa and work with ebola patients? Who knows? That’s between him and God. But Coulter seems to believe that the very act of stepping across the border marks an unforgivable sin of . . .  pride, I guess? Show-offiness?

But that short paragraph of hers contains a second, even more hideous idea. Coulter says,

Ebola kills only the body; the virus of spiritual bankruptcy and moral decadence spread by so many Hollywood movies infects the world.

Yes, isn’t that just like those benighted third world ninnies? So obsessed with this childish, petty desire to stay alive. Why can’t they think about important matters, like the spiritual state of people watching movies in America? No, all the time it’s, “Wah, wah, my eyes are bleeding” with them.  Ugh, foreigners.

Here’s the deal, for anyone who thinks Colter is kinda sorta mean, but kinda sorta has a point: yes, it is true that there is such a thing as missionaries who do more harm than good. Yes, it is true that some people claim to be serving God, but really they’re just trying to make themselves look good.

Is there any evidence that Dr. Brantly is guilty of any of that? I honestly don’t know. I haven’t been following the story. Coulter doesn’t give any evidence in this piece that she knows any more than I do from reading headlines.

Coulter is playing to the crowd who always say, “Fix America first.” And I always say, “Why?” Are Americans more important than citizens of other countries? Is their suffering more meaningful? If we evangelize them, does their conversion give less glory to God than the conversion of an American? If they die of starvation and disease, do their families grieve less than the families of dead Americans?  And if not, then what could possibly be wrong with going to help them in the way that you know how?

Xenophobia is just racism for people who think big. There’s nothing noble about turning your back on people who suffer, even if they’re people who speak a different language or live in places with silly names. If we were all just supposed to hunker down and play to the home crowd, then the apostles themselves were off to a pretty bad start, gallavanting all over Greece and Ethiopia, Persia and Turkey. Didn’t they realize there were still some people back home — their own countrymen — who could have used their help?

For that matter, why couldn’t Jesus just stay put? I guess he never heard of Fix Bethlehem First. Instead, He had drag Himself all the way to Jerusalem, and then climb all the way up on a hill, and then all the way up on that cross, as if to say, “Look at me! I’m saving everybody!” And meanwhile, I suppose His mother and his friends had to think about the hotel bills, the travel expenses  . . .

Talk about a Christian narcissist. Yeah, Dr. Brantly is just like that. What an idiot.

At the Register: A New (Old) Way to Apologize

The teacher started scheduling weekly “clean-ups.”

Students relished in the opportunity to admit wrongdoing, share intent to change, and restore friendships. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing. They walked out stiff and uneasy, and returned with bright smiles on their faces.

Sound familiar? Read the rest at the Register.