Two Birthdays and a Bit More

My bedroom floor and bed are completely covered with books opened up and standing like tents -- toy motorcycles, airplanes and cars parked around and inside of them; and I'm typing this in the midst of a mass of wires, electronics, and kid papers.

It often seems that nine kids aren't possibly living in this house. (And that any visitor stopping by would surely leave shaking their head in awed wonder over the lack of chaos -- all their negative assumptions about large families flipped 180 degrees.)

But today? Ohhh ... it seems like there are nine all right. More even! From the moment Mette and Hans's pounding feet and screams woke me (and woke Starling!) early this morning (apparently Mette was trying to "be nice" by insisting Hans play something with her ... and when he was not interested in her niceness, she was, I guess, going to beat some nice into him) it has felt like nothing but mess and tantrums and utter madness. (And I've been thinking a bit dispassionately that my work here in mortality looks and feels about as inglorious as anything possibly could.)

(Though you wouldn't think it from these cute photos.)

 

But! I suppose, if you are going to have ten kids, you ought to expect that some days will in fact feel like it. 

Speaking of these kids:

Recently I walked into a room and inadvertently startled Hans -- who screamed. 

"It's just your mom," I laughed. "I'm not scary."

"Well," he said, defensively, "you're sort of scary."

Also, Starling was wandering about the living room crying the other day. Jesse, who had heard enough, said, "No no, Starling." She stopped her crying, walked over, smacked him with her tiny hand, and then went back to her wandering cry. 

She's learning to hold her own in this family. (Though one might question if that is the exact sort of way one might most wish a child would learn to hold their own.)

Lastly, we celebrated our Aug. 13th birthday twins! Mike and Mette. 44 and 5.

With that birthday in mind, and with Summer having just had her birthday, perhaps I will share here just the last section of a talk I gave in church last year. The theme our bishop asked me to speak on was "eternal perspective" and just a general ... seeing our lives as the Savior does. I won't share it all, but this last bit seems fitting right now.

Here it is:

It probably won't surprise any of you who know the full row I usually sit on to hear that I've had a wide variety of birth experiences. And to end I wanted to tell you just a little bit about two of those.  

 

So, when I was pregnant with our seventh, I decided I was going to have another natural childbirth. I don't know why, because I think they're terrible, nevertheless, that was what I was going to do. Anyway, I approached that labor and prepared for it with a very spiritual mindset; and when I was in labor – and Mike and I were in that hospital room, it really felt like there was just this force field of light and protection surrounding our room. I don't think the veil has maybe ever been more thin for me. I KNEW there were angels all around us. I could FEEL them. I knew they were helping me and helping this baby and even helping the doctor and nurses. And it was really just an incredibly sacred experience for me. And really amazing for me to be able to see that little moment of my life with an expanded view where I could more clearly see everything that was going on and how involved heaven was and how significant this moment was.  

 

In contrast to that experience, only one short year later, I was expecting our eighth child. It was a few weeks before my due date, and my babies always come late, so I wasn't ready or planning on her coming. It was actually Mike's birthday, and we had spent the day down in Salt Lake. It was like a 95 degree day, and we'd been wandering with our kids around Temple Square and McDonald's and City Creek, and everyone was just hot and dirty and tired. But on our way home, I went into labor. And by the time we got our kids home and got me to the hospital, I was just in this black cloud of pain, and there was no time for an epidural, this baby was ready to be born. Only then, they discovered she had turned herself into some odd breach position. My doctor wasn't even there yet and there was no time to consider options, and I was just in horrible pain and the thought of having to be prepped for surgery and receive an epidural in the state I was in was just horrifying to me, but that's what needed to happen. Only I was so tense and unable to hold still that it took them four attempts to get the epidural in correctly (during which time I was holding on to some nurse's arm so tightly that she probably still, four years later, has bruises). And once the epidural was finally placed, my blood pressure dropped causing me to feel this kind of claustrophobic, dizzy panic as they finished up the C-section.  

 

And I will tell you, that that experience I saw 100% from a mortal perspective. There were no angels. There was no thin veil. All I saw was fear, and shock, and pain, and botched epidurals, and the dirty kids and uncleaned bathrooms that hadn't been taken care of back at home.  

 

That was all I saw of that experience.  

 

However, over the course of the next few days, as I held that beautiful new baby in my arms (and she was a particularly beautiful baby), the Spirit really testified to me that my view of that experience was only the tiniest portion of the reality of it. And that if the veil were to have been removed and if I'd have been able to see that experience in its entirety and seen how involved the Lord was in the events of that day and how heaven and angels were helping and how significant that moment was for our baby and for our entire family, it would have been too much for my mortal self to even comprehend. And the interesting thing was that, as the Spirit testified that to me, it kind of washed back over that birth, and even though it was an awful experience, it made it actually become sort of beautiful.  

 

And that really is my testimony for each one of us.  

 

I know we all have circumstances in our life that cause us to see our life really squarely from a mortal perspective. But my testimony is that Christ really truly is woven into and working through all of it bringing about miraculous things. And all of our opportunities to learn, and to grow, and to serve, and to become who we came here to become – are existing right in the midst of the untidy mess of our ordinary lives. He can't just pluck us out of our circumstances. We need this resistance for our faith to be tested and to grow, but that is my testimony – that He is busy working in us and through us in all of it; and that someday we will look back and see clearly where it was all leading and how involved the “powers of heaven” were all along.

 

And I suppose (it's blogging-me writing again now) that's my surety about this entire business of raising these kids. It's certainly a slower process. (All the labor and fear and unknowns of Mette's birth produced, pretty rapidly, an amazingly worth-it and beautiful outcome [that baby!].) But a process I trust in all the same. (Which is helpful on days like this!)