Palm Sunday

Today was Palm Sunday, which meant that we were going to get some palms at church. This is always a little awkward for me because we have lots of palms already but few places to put them. Our cats are pretty adventurous and love to chew on palms so there are not that many places we can put them where the cats won't get to them. We already have two behind our cross in the living room, and more on a shelf waiting for me to hang another picture we can stick them behind.

"You can never throw away palms, you can only burn them," I said to Mike as we walked to church. "I wonder how that works."

"You bring them to the parish office," Mike said.

"Really?" I asked.

"I don't know," he shrugged. "But they make the Ash Wednesday ashes out of the palms, so they must collect them somehow."

"But you never hear about a big palm collection," I said. "You can bury an American flag, at least. But you can't bury a palm."

"You can't bury a flag," Mike said, "there's this big ceremony for flags. I've been to one."

"I'm pretty sure it's okay to just bury it too. But you can't ever just bury a palm," I said.

Sure enough, we went to church and a little kid handed us each a palm. But then Mike's palm cracked into two separate fronds, so we had three.

After Mass we walked home and I said, "I think you can fold the palms into crosses. Maybe I'll Google palm origami when we get home and turn them into crosses."

So I did.


Two of the crosses came out good, but one was very lopsided. It was just very resistant to folding. I thought about putting a dot of hot glue on the back to hold it together, but I don't think you're supposed to hot glue holy objects.

So now I have three palm crosses. I suppose I'll hang one in Philo's room, and put another on a shelf in the living room. I also read that palms can be burned during storms while you pray for protection, so I guess the lopsided cross and the old palms will go into a box to be saved for that.

Next winter I'm going to see about giving them to someone to be burned. I feel bad about constantly hoarding my palms.

Music Video

For some reason, this just tickles me.



It's almost as good as Sir Mix-A-Lot's version.

Bah

My belly is now big enough that I have trouble kneeling in church. If I kneel with my back straight my belly bumps into the back of the pew in front of me. If I kneel and stick my butt out I feel off-balance. So now I kneel and rest my butt on the seat of the pew behind me, which makes me feel silly.

You'd think that a religion with such stereotypically large families and frequently pregnant mothers would have come up with a solution to this, but apparently not.

Worry

Today in church the priest was talking about people who wind up entrapped by daily life...things like bad relationships, loneliness, disappointing circumstances, things like that. One of the things he named was worry.

Now, this made me sit up a little straighter and listen because I worry quite a bit. People tell me that I shouldn't, but that's like telling someone not to blink or breathe. Worry comes naturally to me. So I was curious to hear what he was going to say.

He started saying, "How many of you worry about..." and filling in pretty mundane things. But then he started talking about bigger problems. The war. Homelessness. Things like that. And that made me feel even worse because although I worry a lot, the perimeter of my worry runs exactly along my pregnant belly. I do think about other things - my husband's job, the fact that I'll be looking for a new job for the fall, my health - but mostly in terms of how they'll impact the baby. Right now most of my thoughts and concerns are directly related to the child I'm carrying. Perhaps this is how it has to be right now...I only have so much energy, and the baby takes up a lot. But it makes me feel awful because not too long ago I was concerned about the war, homelessness, hunger, other peoples' well-being. Now unless it happens at work or might affect my baby it's almost completely off my radar.

I still do things to improve the world. I still commute over an hour each way to work at a high school full of needy, impoverished kids. I still tutor people who can't speak English every week. I still go to church and do what I can for the environment.* None of that has changed. And maybe since I'm doing things, worrying about things isn't as essential. Still, I feel bad that I don't have concern for everyone and everything like I used to.

So, I'm not sure. I guess I don't know where to draw the line between being compassionate and being a worrywart, between nurturing my family and closing out the outside world. Since care and concern for others is one of the main qualities I want to instill in my son and keep up in myself I'll have to think about this more.



* My biggest contribution lately has been ordering cloth diapers for the baby...yeah, I know, more baby stuff.

New Year's Eve

Tomorrow is a holy day of obligation and I'm totally going to go. I'm 28 years old and have only gone once, when I was in college. It's odd because by that time I had pretty much lapsed in terms of my church attendance, but for some reason I felt that it was very important to drag my hung-over self to Mass that morning. I don't remember much except the feeling of misery and the knowledge that if I took any Communion wine I'd probably hurl.

Mike and I didn't go last year because he had an asthma attack after midnight which was pretty severe. I think he had a respiratory infection at the time too...anyway, he spent New Year's Day in bed and I stayed home to watch over him.

I've always thought that it was rather cruel to have a holy day of obligation after a late-night celebration like New Year's Eve. But I suppose it's another situation where you have to make a choice that's right either for your secular life or your religious life.

At least this year the pregnancy will make that choice easier. No partying, and certainly no drinking. Making it to Mass by 10 AM won't be tough this year.

Questions

I regularly read Ask Metafilter. I was going to post this question anonymously, but chickened out.

I’m a good Roman Catholic woman who decided to eschew her birth control pills in favor of Natural Family Planning. I was never really happy with my pills and their side effects, and I also found the idea of my husband being so involved with, accepting of, and intimately familiar with my body and its processes quite a turn-on (I grew up with a lot of body shame issues).

So we gave it a shot. I got pregnant within six months. One night we were on a vacation, in a hotel, it was at the very end of the “don’t have sex” period, and we thought we could take a chance and have it turn out okay. We were wrong.

Now, don’t get me wrong. After we got over our initial shock we were very happy, and I’d never want anything to go wrong with this pregnancy or my baby. However…before when my husband and I would have sex it was entirely recreational. It was about me and my husband having fun and being in love. This experience has been a crash course reminder that sex is actually for procreation…whenever we get intimate now, I just keep thinking, Oh yeah, this is how babies are made.

Maybe it’s because I’m still pregnant and still very much the victim of my own hormones, but I feel like sex will never be the fun, carefree, loving experience it once was. Now it feels like an obligation, and I’m afraid that later it’ll feel like the consequences of another pregnancy are too dire to really enjoy the experience.

I really want to shift the focus of sex off of procreation and onto recreation, but I don’t know how. If anyone can give me advice about recapturing the fun of sex without suggesting that I change birth control methods or bashing my religious beliefs I would really appreciate it. I like sex too much to never enjoy it again!

I guess part of the reason I didn't do it because I figured I'd get two types of responses:

a) people telling me to just go back to the pills anyway

b) people telling me that if I was really Catholic I'd just resign myself to having a zillion kids

I guess if having a zillion kids is in my future, that's what it is. I'm certainly grateful for the one I'm gestating, perhaps I'd be thrilled to pop out ten more. But right now sex seems like more of a risk than a romp, and I'm not sure that it'll feel any less risky after my pregnancy.

I guess I'm worried that if I approach my friends about this problem, they'll have the same reaction...just change your birth control. If I ask someone who's more religious, they'll tell me to just accept it. And if I ask my priest...cripes, how weird would that be. I can just imagine him sitting there thinking, Wow, you can't have sex whenever you want it. How incredibly rough for you.

I guess I just miss the carefree attitude I used to have. I guess if I tried to embrace God's fate for me more fully I wouldn't feel the need to worry so much. Or maybe if I took a class in NFP at the local Catholic hospital (yes, they do have them!) I'd feel confident enough in it again to feel comfortable.

I also feel weird talking about it, as if I complain too much about the way I feel God will take away my baby because I'm ungrateful. I want to just re-iterate a thousand times that I'm intensely grateful for the son I'm carrying and I don't want anyone to think otherwise. I'd be devastated if something happened to him and I pray every day that if it's God's will he'll be born alive and healthy. Although judging by the state of the world today, God doesn't automatically take things away just because you're ungrateful for them. And not thinking about it out of fear isn't going to help me address the problem. I need to be honest about how I'm feeling if I'm going to figure things out and do what's right for me, my husband, and our religion.

My husband says to wait until the pregnancy hormones die down and then see how I feel. I guess he's right. We've got another four months and 22 days before I can get knocked up again. We have time to work it out.

Help

This is a hard thing to explain.

My pregnancy was, of course, unplanned. The way my husband put it was, “We bet against the house and the house won.” We knew we were having sex at a time that was a little risky, but we figured we’d be safe. One time can’t get you pregnant, right? We were on vacation for the first time in a long time, staying in a nice hotel we’d probably never visit again, and had just attended a beautiful wedding. We’d probably be okay.

Well, no. A few weeks later we found out that one time can get you pregnant. I should have known…after all, we tell that to the girls I work with all the time. We went from dismayed and scared to happy and excited pretty quickly, and now I wouldn’t trade this pregnancy and this baby for anything. I pray every night and at church every Sunday that my child comes into the world all right.

However. That doesn’t erase the fact that we weren’t planning and weren’t ready for a baby. We’re making strides quickly, but financially we’re far from set. My husband and I had decided to pour a lot of our income into our debts, and we were making great headway in paying off our student loans, credit card bills, and my car loan. We only had a few grand in the bank, but our debt was shrinking at a nice rate. I still think that this is the best plan for two adults with reliable cars and good health insurance. It’s not the best plan for a couple expecting a baby. I worry quite a bit that the costs of the delivery and the costs of a new baby will deplete our savings almost immediately and I’ll have to pawn stuff or something. It’s not a likely scenario, and my husband and I are doing everything we can to make our situation better, but I still worry that we won’t have enough money for a baby.

At this point I’d love to do the clichéd Catholic thing…just smile and say, “I know God will provide.” But I feel like I can’t.

I got into this situation because of my misjudgment. Conceiving now was my fault. I feel like I should deal with the consequences alone. I feel like it’s a cop out to just sit back and expect God to take care of me. Whenever I think this I feel so guilty, as if I’m calling my child a mistake. I know he’s not a mistake. I don’t regret getting pregnant and I don’t want anything to stop the pregnancy. I’d be devastated if anything happened. However…I also feel like I don’t deserve God’s help the way another couple might…a couple who planned their pregnancy, who had their lives and finances in order, a couple who had been married for a longer time and had carefully considered the ramifications of pregnancy and decided it was what God wanted them to do. Mike and I didn’t do any of that. We took a chance and it turned out differently than we thought it would. I just feel like I don’t deserve God’s help as much as someone else might.

But then, that begs the question, do any of us deserve God’s help? I suppose we don’t. And yet, He helps us every day. I know He’s helped me before and I probably don’t deserve what He’s given me. Can any of us really, confidently say “God will provide” as if we deserve it? Or do we just count on the fact that He loves us enough to help us whether we’ve followed His wishes or whether we’ve screwed up?

It’s something to think about.

Throughout my pregnancy my prayer has been, “Lord, let Your will be done during this pregnancy, and if it is Your will, please, please let me have this baby.” I suppose after the child is born I’ll pray, “Lord, let Your will be done to my child, and let us provide for our baby in the way that is best for Your plan.”

I think that’ll work.