I’m working on making dinner in my kitchen.  It’s about 4:00–definitely not dark yet.  My kitchen windows open out onto a small parking lot behind the apartments next door.  The comings and goings in the small lot are pretty predictable and things are generally quiet this time of the afternoon so I took a second look when my eye caught movement out the window.  I watched as first one and then about five young boys (maybe 12 years old?) came dashing from the street into the lot.  They made for a corner and came running back one of them wielding a can of spray paint which he used to decorate the AC units and support beams  under the balcony of the apartment building.  I threw up the window and shouted, “Hey!  Get out of here.”  Not exactly threatening and, really, what was I going to do?  I have my baby strapped to my back and the other two kids at home.  But they looked chagrined, “We’re going,” one said.  ”We’re going right now,” another added.

I went into my kids room which has windows on the street just in time to see a man in work clothes and knee pads collar the ring leader.  I opened the window and leaned out.  I didn’t know the man and he didn’t acknowledge me but he knew I was there.  I noticed that the parents of the young girl who lives across the street were out on their patio hanging on their gate watching the scene.  The boys were surrounded and all of us adults knew we had the support we needed to stop them.  The boys had, from the sounds of it, stolen the paint from the man down on the sidewalk although he seemd to already know the first name of the ring leader and where he lived.  He kept his hand on his shirt collar as he walked him down the street saying he was going to “take him home,” and he got the names and addresses of all the other kids while he was at it.

The boys were making mischief.  Looking out my window, there is very little damage to the building next door.  But I’m glad to know that simple mischief doesn’t go unchecked here.

Pray as you can, not as you can’t. –Abbot John Chapman of Downside

Ninety percent of success is just showing up.  –Woody Allen

The above quotes are the themes of many a motivational speech in our household.  Honestly I hadn’t known the source of the first two until I just now googled them and I briefly thought that the third was original to me.  The three together comprise much of our philosophy regarding prayer time with our children.  We have had days–even weeks–when our Morning and Evening Prayer times are lovely, quiet, and recollected.  The children will at the very least play quietly at our feet and often even chime in on one of the more repetitive parts.  Those times are lovely and we certainly expect more of them as our children grow.

Most of our family prayer time is chaotic–even comical.   Our ideal routine begins when we move from the dinner table to the living room.  We light the candles on our liturgical display shelf, Eric and I each take up our liturgies and sit across from each other.  The three kids choose a book to read quietly or snuggle in next to whichever adult is on the couch.  The actual scenario of late has been considerably different.  Too often I am holding two over-tired, crying children on my lap at the same time while our son is doing fast laps from one end of the house to the other including a dangerous S-curve that once resulted in this.  Eric lights the candles and then reads the Office to me and I do my best to respond and participate from memory.   You might well ask why we bother.

Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good

Family prayer is a very great good.  While it is true that Eric and I could be more prayerful if we prayed the Liturgy alone, we really want our children involved in the routine of daily prayer.  We’ve been struggling for several weeks with new routines and schedules and our prayer hasn’t been happening as consistently as usual and the kids notice.  They thrive on the routine.  And though it often seems like they can’t possibly be gleaning anything from our much less than perfect attempts, they often surprise us with their insights and memory.  Our kids often ask us about some new word from the psalms and it leads us into an age-appropriate and lovely conversation about faith or theology.

Pray as You Can and Not as You Can’t

Eric and I can pray the Divine Office imperfectly in the midst of chaos (sometimes) or not at all.  Because this form of prayer is a great good to us we choose to pray it the only way we can.  It is important to point out, I think, that this is not the only prayer time we have during the day.  Each of us has various other kinds of private prayer.  I pray a rosary while nursing my baby to sleep.  Eric meditates on scripture during his commute.  If the Liturgy were our one and only opportunity for formal prayer each day we might reconsider sharing it with our children at our own expense–but we might not.  And, as an aside–though this idea merits its own post–I do think that much of life can be done as prayer.  But I also think there is extreme value in entering into a form of prayer in union with the whole Church.

Ninety Percent of Success is Just Showing Up

I developed a good workout habit for the first time in my life this past fall but there were a few days when I felt derailed:  I’d be five minutes into my routine and the baby would wake up an hour early.  I was tempted to be discouraged but I soon realized that just “showing up” for my exercise time was tremendously valuable.  I was much more likely to get back at it the next day if I’d gotten as far as putting on my running shoes and turning on my video.  This applies to prayer as well.  We may have ten days in a row where Eric reads me Evening Prayer over the sounds of our baby fussing.  But the habit is preserved.  It is far more damaging to our habit of prayer when we go two or three days without even making an attempt.  We have found over and over again that just when we think that a difficult situation is going to be permanent, everything changes and we settle into a season when the children are chiming in at the Glory Be and asking thoughtful questions and trying to chant the Magnificat along with us.  Had we thrown in the towel–thinking we know so much about how it’s going to “always be”–we would have missed these times.

If you’ve been thinking about incorporating this devotion–or something similar–into your family prayer life I can offer a few practical tips based on our own experience.  First, do take some time to learn the prayer yourself.  As I said last time, Eric and I had a couple years of praying the Liturgy on our own before we introduced children to the routine.  By then we had it down.  Eric can read most of it to me and I can do the responses easily and sometimes do whole psalms from memory.

Second, peg the prayer time to something you are already doing consistently.  This is abundantly clear in our own life right now:  Evening Prayer happens much more regularly because it falls immediately after dinner which, so far, we have successfully eaten every single night.  Morning Prayer tends to float around to various spots in our routine and we have yet to settle on a peg for it.  As a consequence, Morning Prayer has been much less frequent in our home this year.

Third, bring on the ritual!  Find a special spot for your books, light candles, put up artwork.  We have a very simple acrylic frame that holds an image related to the liturgical season or octave we are celebrating and our candles are liturgically colored.  The kids love seeing these things change.  We’ve been trying to move towards an opening hymn for Evening Prayer and this really helps set the time apart as well.

Fourth, look for the smallest way to include your children.  We began by including our own intercessions along with the standard ones.  Each of us adds our own including the children beginning around age two.  Our kids pray for the same person every single day for months on end.  We recently began asking them to say the Glory Be which closes each psalm.  Next we will probably teach them the Our Father which we chant in Latin.  We plan to reward strong readers with their own books to pray along with us even more.  Start small and work up from there.  In between these moments of participation we ask our children to be quiet and they typically snuggle on the couch with picture books.

That weekend I grabbed coffee and the Advent volume to pore over the instructions.  Something in the opening document made me think that lay people shouldn’t pray the Divine Office and I set it aside.  I had only come back to the church a few months before, anyway, and thought I might put my energy into other forms of prayer first.

My beautiful Liturgy set sat, untouched, for about six months.  After college graduation I was spending the summer before graduate school basically getting paid to read.  I was the police dispatcher at a very small, very quiet school.  I had the day shift and not much happened.  I’d read the atrocious Boston newspaper cover-to-cover, do the crossword with the officer on duty, and then read about five hours a day.  My boyfriend (who is now my husband) had seen my Liturgy on my bookshelves and casually mentioned that I might start praying it in all my copious free time.  I did, though it was more out of love for him than any interest on my part.

Later that summer we traveled together for the first time to his homeland (the Midwest) and had the opportunity to pray together every day.  Whenever we could we prayed Morning and Evening Prayer together.  One of my first discoveries was that I’d been on the wrong week all along–did you know that Ordinary Time actually begins after Christmas and then is interrupted for Lent and Easter?  I didn’t, at the time.  I found that praying the Liturgy together was far more interesting and prayerful than praying it alone though I did continue to pray it alone very often over the next year.

After we were married we launched right in to a communal prayer life.  That first year was very idyllic in some ways.  The two of us said Morning and Evening Prayer together every day.  I think we even included Night Prayer and Office of Readings off and on through the year.  We got to Mass together every day, often prayed a Rosary together, and made a Holy Hour together every Sunday.  We still do most of that, in fact–though not always together.  I always felt, though, that I was going to pray the Liturgy kicking and screaming–at least on the inside.  I didn’t really get it.

But over the last six years my appreciation has grown.  We’ve grown more bold about inviting dinner guests and weekend guests to join us in our prayer time.  Truly one of the most extraordinary things about being Catholic is liturgical prayer–these regular forms used by the Universal Church that friends can step in to.  We’ve hosted Sunday Evening Prayer for Evangelical college students when we were dorm parents.  It was a wonderful blessing to introduce young, faithful Christians to a beautiful form of prayer they hadn’t tried before.

And now with three children our prayer time is all the richer for sharing it with our little ones–or sometimes praying it despite them!  Our two older children chime in with their own intercessions at the appropriate moment.  Our musical little daughter tries to sing along when we chant the Magnificat.  Our now five-year-old was an avid signer before he could talk and used to sit on the couch with us listening to the psalms and occasionally signing a word he recognized.  Our littlest right now is such a monkey that I usually station myself on the couch and let him jump and giggle all over and around me while my husband reads the entire office to me from across the room.

Most days we are not as recollected as we would like but during this season of our lives just showing up is an accomplishment.  But somehow, despite all the craziness of our family prayer times, the Liturgy of the Hours has become an important part of our family’s rhythm.  It feels festive to set up seven ribbon markers just to get through Morning Prayer during the Octave of Christmas.  Psalm 63 was always a favorite of mine and now it says, “Feast Day!” to me.  Pulling out my brown volume after Easter seems like a refreshing return to the normalcy and the promise of a long, lovely summer ahead.  Switching to the green book in August reminds me that fall is coming.  Morning and Evening Prayer are the bookends to our family time together.

Next time (no promises about “tomorrow”):  How the heck do you pray liturgically with small children?

I am fairly confident that the main dumpster raided by my acquaintances is at a Trader Joe’s.  I have been an avid Trader Joe’s fan for some years and it remains one of my favorite stores.  I was in one only yesterday doing my monthly grocery run.   After years of shopping at several different Trader Joe’s in several states I have come to expect a small, clean, easy-to-navigate store.  The shelves are stocked with the food I love, the employees bend over backwards trying to help me, and I leave with several bags of delicious food at a pretty good value.  They always ask me, at the checkout stand, if I found everything I was looking for.  My answer is always, “Yes,” because their stores are so consistent in their offerings that I never even put something on my list that can’t be found there.

Last month I was thrilled when a new Trader Joe’s opened up close to my husband’s workplace–about half the distance from home as the one I’d been going to.  I rolled my family through the door early on a Monday morning just days after the grand opening to do my shopping.  The employees were still putting the finishing touches on everything and there were far more of them than customers that day.  I was pretty annoyed to find that they weren’t stocking any heavy cream.  And in the fruit and nut aisle the prices weren’t even up yet!  I had my new price book all ready to go so I could double-check the prices against the nearby Costco!  At the checkout the service was fine but the woman didn’t even ask me if I’d found everything I wanted and she didn’t give me a chance to gush about how excited I was about their holiday offerings.   It is only now occurring to me that the Trader Joe’s employee was probably totally fried from getting a new store ready to meet the exacting standards of loyal shoppers such as myself.  In fact, we saw her again yesterday and after saying hello she showed that she not only remembered seeing us last time but also remembered where we live and where my husband works.

So why can’t this top-notch store better plan its inventory so as to not fill a dumpster with broccoli at the end of the day?  Because they don’t know how often I’m going to shop there, or what I’m going to buy each time.  Sometimes I buy broccoli at Trader Joe’s; sometimes I don’t.  But they do know that someone like me has a more pleasant shopping experience when the broccoli spot is filled to overflowing when I stroll past.  And they had better keep everything else stocked to the brim as well lest I get annoyed at having to shop elsewhere for my heavy cream.

This should have been obvious to me from the start based on my own experience of dabbling in small business.  I have a small, home-based, inventory-dependent business.  It might seem obvious that I could make the most money in the shortest amount of time by stocking only the exact products my customers want.  But my customers just aren’t that consistent.  And when they call they want their stuff.  Only last night a customer called wanting something she’d never tried before.  I had it on hand.  She was glad.  That’s good customer service.  But the result is that I have much, much more product on hand than I sell in a given month.  Fortunately, my products have a very long shelf life.

Then there’s a local bakery where we shop two or three times each week.  Our baker, Georgie, works in a shop his grandfather founded 102 years ago.  It’s been in the same location almost the entire time it’s been open.  His shop is just around the corner from us–close enough that I’ve often been tempted to grab the baby monitor and run over there during naptime to get bread for dinner.  It took us a long time to figure out Georgie when we first moved here.  He’s open “8 to 8″ except in the summer–which apparently extends into September.  And he’s not open while he’s out doing deliveries which is, I guess, mid-morning.  Ish.  And if you want to stop by mid-afternoon for a snack his door might be open but if he’s busy back in the kitchen you might as well forget about it, “Come back later!” he’ll shout.

He sells baguettes, round loaves, sub rolls, dinner rolls, and other seasonal items.  He also brings in some dessert-type products from other local bakers and every Saturday and Sunday he runs over to a Jewish baker and brings back a couple big bags of the best bagels we’ve ever had.  The baguettes are hot at 6:00 . . .  or so.  The round loaves can be sliced for you but only in the morning once they’re cooled.  If you need your bread at six and it’s not done yet he’ll substitute some sub rolls for you.  If you’re too late on Saturday and all the bagels are gone, oh well.  Come back tomorrow.  If you’re a regular customer he’ll make you wait at the back of the line while he takes care of the more high-maintenance folks who might have come in after you.  If he’s really busy he’ll toss you a brown bag and have you hop out to the kitchen to fetch your own darn bread.   You might call his store a “cafe” except that the word connotes something picturesque and his place has dingy brown walls, a green plastic patio table (which he hauls outside when the weather is nice) and a self-serve coffee urn.  I’m not sure if the coffee is complimentary or not.  His stuff doesn’t keep.  The baguettes and bagels aren’t very good even the very next day.  And he only takes cash.

So why do we shop with Georgie so much?  The biggest reason is that his bread is really, really good.  We wouldn’t go there if that were not the case.  It tastes wonderful and it doesn’t keep because there aren’t any preservatives in it–not even sugar.  It is also very inexpensive.  Even buying my yeast in bulk I can’t beat his prices by making my own bread.  But all the little things that would be totally unacceptable to me if I were at Trader Joe’s aren’t a problem at Georgie’s.  If I go at 6:00 looking for a baguette and he’s not quite ready I can just run back home and finish setting the table before hopping back.  It takes less than a minute to get there.  I’d send my three-year-old alone if she didn’t have to cross our street on the way.

When we stop in on a whim and come up short on cash he says, “No, problem, pay me tomorrow,” and hands us our bread anyway.  The kids drag us in there every chance they can because they know Georgie will give them, at the very least, a free cookie from under his counter.  They usually score a day-old dinner roll or some fresh dough to bake at home as well.  Once he gave my son an old basketball and my daughter a fluffy purse that only she could love.  If business is slow he’s usually sitting at his plastic table with some neighborhood old-timer and we hang out for awhile slaking our thirst for local (very local–as in, our block) history.  I’m pretty sure Georgie throws away very little–if any–of his wares at the end of the day.  His dumpster would not be a profitable dive.

I don’t know the answer here.  I will, for the time being, continue to shop at both Trader Joe’s–where everything is clean, orderly, well-stocked, and predictable–and Georgie’s–where, though we are firmly part of the “in-crowd” I am still figuring out how to do business.  But I never buy my bread at Trader Joe’s anymore.

Most new churches have them–a small, soundproof room towards the back of the church.  Usually it is separated from the rest of the church by a large glass window so that the celebration of Mass can be seen and the celebrant is miked and piped in over speakers.  Many wonderful pastors and church architects believe they are making Mass more “family-friendly” by incorporating cry rooms.  They are sometimes stocked with children’s toys or books and sometimes the bathroom is even located there.

I hate cry rooms because the implicit message is that you should use it.  After all, why would you not want to take your squirmy two-year-old to a comfortable room where she can be entertained and make as much noise as she wants while you (the parent) can actually concentrate on praying at Mass.  There are at least three reasons I would not want to do this.

First, because a cry room concentrates all the squirmy, noisy kids in one spot.  The last thing a slightly noisy child needs is another slightly noisy child.  They start to play off each other and each gets noisier.  Once you have more than one child in the cry room your attention is completely off Mass and on supervising the impromptu playgroup:  making sure your child is taking turns with the Jesus puppet and so forth.

Second, the cry room inhibits teaching children how to behave at Mass.  If every noisy toddler gets shuttled off to a playroom there is a strong disincentive to behave in the pew.

Third, the existence of the cry room decreases the tolerance other parishoners have for the noises of children.  Those who are on the fence about having kids at Mass are that much more likely to shoot a disapproving look at the parents.  This only increases the number of children in the cry room, thereby adding to the first problem.

Now, I am not saying that children should always remain in the church no matter how much noise they might be making.  Parents should do their best to keep their children from being unduly distracting at Mass.  But it is a daily judgment call on the part of the parent as to when that line has been crossed.  During our daughter’s second year of life she was very difficult at Mass.  We were making a concerted effort to get her to behave at Mass so her behavior was being judged relative to herself.  There were months-long stretches where a good day was one where she did not have a full-out, on the floor, kicking and screaming tantrum.  If she was only making chattery toddler noises we tried to look on the bright side and keep her in the pew.  She now behaves beautifully at Mass about 95% of the time.

So, what do we do with our noisy children if it becomes necessary to exit the church?  We first take them to back and hold them the entire time.  Our children are taught that they have more freedom of movement if they stay in the pew.  I have found that simply standing in the back and moving around slightly is enough to settle a noisy baby.  If it becomes necessary to leave after that I use a side door to duck out into the narthex.  The narthex is usually cold in the winter which is good for two reason:  first, it encourages me to duck back into the church  at opportune moments if my baby is settled and second, it engages the sympathies of the congregation.  No one at our parish thinks I should spend more time than necessary in our cold narthex where there is no place to sit.  I reserve this area for really screaming babies but otherwise try to stay in the church, or in the pew.

What can priests do to make their churches more family-friendly?  First, being vocally welcoming, from the pulpit, towards families is very important.  It is embarrassing (for me) when I have the only children at Mass and the priest makes a generic statement about children being welcome after mine has screamed for twenty minutes straight.  But I’d rather have the support and take the embarrassment than not have the support.   This sort of thing is easy to work into homilies on a regular basis.

Second, a very small family room can be useful.  At our last parish the only bathrooms with a changing area were very, very far away.  There was no cry room because it was a very old cathedral.  The pastor re-purposed a large closet directly off the main church.  It already contained a window and sink.  He added a comfortable rocking chair, nursing stool, changing table, and privacy screen.  There was a speaker so Mass could be followed but the room was so small that there was no idea that parents should hang out in there.  You changed your baby, calmed a screaming baby briefly, or could nurse privately if that were important to you.  But no one lingered.  There were never two kids in there at once.

Taking two minutes at the very craziest time of my day to do something completely unnecessary is a bit jarring–in a good way.  It is just far too easy, for me, to lose perspective in the sea of laundry and dishes and kid needs and tinker toys that surrounds me day after day.  I would love for my husband to come home every evening to a tidy house, happy children, dinner on the table, and a calm, relaxed, smiling wife.  I’m working on it but I’m not there yet.  All last year–a year made stressful by job loss and a new baby–I noticed my habit of greeting my husband each evening with the most harried look I could muster.  He would walk through the door and be assaulted by the mess, screaming toddlers, dinner in (at best) the early prep stage, and then see that look on my face.  And the worst part was that sometimes I would legitimately have a really bad day.  A day when the chaos was worse than usual and even less in my control.  The kind of day when you ask your husband to pick up pizza on the way home.  But my husband could not distinguish these legitimate bad days from most of the other days.  After several months of this happening a few times a week (or more) it occurred to me the one easiest thing for me to change about the evening scenario was my face.

While any makeup I’m wearing is superficial and definitely not the most important feature of my face I have found that taking a minute to look at myself in the mirror, and freshening my appearance a bit grounds me.  It reminds me that my husband wants to see my face when he comes home.  It reminds me of our courting days when I would take so much care about every detail of everything to please the man I loved.  And, honestly, I smile more when I’m wearing lipstick. We seldom have the same evening scenario we had last year.  The kids are usually happy–even if they aren’t outside.  Dinner is usually close to on-time.  And while my husband would probably love to come home to a clean house everyday I’m pretty sure it’s not the most important thing for him.  Most days now I greet him with a smile.

I have no idea, really, if my husband notices  my lipstick or powdered nose but I wouldn’t care if he went our whole marriage completely oblivious to my little evening ritual because I don’t do it for him.  I do it for me.

It was interesting, actually, to visit Target after a long break.  I found it pretty bland and uninteresting.  I didn’t want to browse anything.  I efficiently made it through my shopping list:  shirt for Joseph, socks for William, diapers all around, and got out of there.  Whole Foods was another story.  I began to feel as if there are many parallel food worlds.  There is one where an entire aisle is dedicated to Coke and Doritos and the baking aisle contains only chocolate made by Hershey’s.  Then there is our neighborhood where it’s like the international foods aisle greatly expanded, plus the Hershey’s chocolate but way overpriced.  Then there is the world where there is no chocolate on offer containing less than 60% cocoa and the sodas are made from hibiscus and evaporated cane juice.  Snobby as it sounds I have mainly inhabited that third world and it was really good to be back there today.  And this Whole Foods was huge.  Amazing.  I probably would have spent hours there–and a lot more money–if I hadn’t had all the kids with me.  But I didn’t even realize the best part about going there until I got home.  I’d picked up a free copy of Edible New Jersey at the checkout and just now paged through it.  The articles didn’t really grab me but the ads!  Farmer’s Markets!  Food Co-ops!  CSAs!

See, food acquisition shouldn’t be a big problem for urbanites.  In fact, at the height of our time in DC we were acquiring almost all of our food from co-ops and a local produce delivery service.  But it took a long time to find all those things–or for the right combination of people to meet each other and start it up.  But when you live within walking distance of 50,00 people (or more–or even a little less) it is not hard to find enough people who want local farm food to make it worth some farmer’s while to deliver to you.  And once you’ve got that it doesn’t take long for it to explode into a co-op large enough to entirely sustain a single farmer.  We saw this happen first hand in DC where we got fifteen families together and got an Amish farmer to truck stuff in for us each week.  Within one year he was so busy that he helped two of his neighbor famers begin off-shoot co-ops.

It’s a beautiful model, isn’t it?  Feels so anti-capitalist and all.  But what to do if you’re new to the area?  Or if you’re a farm just getting into the co-op model?  Where are you going to find like-minded people who want good food?  Whole Foods.  I’ve never really shopped regularly at Whole Foods (which Eric calls Whole Paycheck) because I’ve always had similar, cheaper options.  But this morning I wanted two things:  bulk foods, and something comforting and familiar.  I got both and also a whole slew of co-op ads.  Off to do some research . . .

Most days I walk Margaret up to the front pew where she rejoins her father and brother, drop off the back carrier and return to the back of the church where I will quietly pace behind the last pew or, more usually, retreat to the narthex and listen to Mass through the speaker system.  On a really good day I remain in our front pew but by the time I’m heading up for Communion my shirt is covered in drool and spit-up, the collar is stretched out, my sodden scapular is hanging outside my shirt and my little boy’s bald head is covered in lipstick marks.

When this routine began a month or so ago I was tempted to despair.  But I’ve been through this before.  Twice before.  This time is a little different.  For one thing, I’m grateful for the seven or so months when I was able to remain in the pew most of the time.  William’s laid-back temperament has been a blessing.  With Margaret we went almost two straight years without ever sitting through an entire Mass.  On the other hand, the two older kids do better if Dad remains in the pew and Mom takes the baby so this time around it’s always me who is hightailing it out the back.

I also feel confident knowing that the very small, very aged daily Mass crowd at our new parish think our kids are little angels sent from heaven to bless their days.  They are kissed and caressed every day (I’m not kidding) and have lots of prayers and rosaries coming their way.  The two priests at this church are also very supportive of our Mass attendance.  This hasn’t always been the case.  We’ve been glared at by fellow Mass-goers in the past.  My husband (three years ago today, actually, on the day of Margaret’s birth) was threatened with bodily harm if he continued to bring Joseph to Mass.  The pastor there–our pastor–didn’t want to “take sides.”  That same pastor many months later published a bulletin announcement–two weeks in a row–asking parents of small children to please participate in Mass from the (unheated) narthex.  At another church I was once asked to leave the foyer with my noisy daughter and we were once asked from the pulpit, during a homily, to leave Mass.   When we didn’t leave that priest angrily confronted my husband after Mass asking, “Why do you bother coming?”

Why, indeed?  I confess I’ve asked myself that more than once.  During the season when I would typically be the one in back holding my daughter who on one occasion was screaming so loudly that a police officer left Mass to see if I needed medical help and look in at my husband only to see that he had to keep up an almost constant sotto voce chatter with my son to keep him from going berserk with boredom it was very hard to keep at it.  And then I would find that I was too-narrowly defining prayer.  There is some ideal, I suppose, in kneeling at Mass, head bowed, rapt in silence and meditation.  But how much more powerful is the prayer of the mother or father standing as a witness to the culture of life, enduring sometimes outright persecution, straining to create some interior silence in which to embrace the cross–all the while quite literally embracing his or her vocation–hoping for a few crumbs of grace from the table of the Lord.

Fortunately the Lord offers us more than crumbs and Eric and I know that without that regular infusion of grace we would never make it anywhere–never mind daily Mass.  And at Mass, as in all things, it is so hard to gauge when a child has turned the corner.  One day I expect I will realize that I haven’t had to take William out of the church for some time.  And it is hard to believe now that the same girl who blesses herself with holy water, runs up the aisle, genuflects and sits more or less attentively for thirty minutes every day is the same one who subjected us to daily tantrums for months on end.  And that introspective boy sitting in his chair on the aisle?  The one who sometimes acts a bit spastic at the most reverent points of the liturgy?  Who knows what grace is entering his young heart and forming his character.  I expect the Lord will bless Eric and I with many all-too-silent years of prayer.  For now we bring our children in hope.

This situation persisted until I entered college.  I had a list of things I was good at and a list of things I wasn’t with the great preponderance on the former group which contained all the “important” things anyway.  College was one long confusing slog for me.  I majored in music because I’d been the best in high school.  I’d never practiced and didn’t know how to practice.  I had almost no real innate musical ability but my high school music teacher (a wonderful, wonderful man who kept me sane, just for the record) almost never called me out for this.  I was the best–what was he going to do?  I got a 4.0 in every class except my music classes but stubbornly stuck with it because “music” was on my “can do and can do well” list.

I did eventually almost change my major and broaden my college experience a little but the whole thing left me really confused.  I graduated, dabbled in graduate school, got married and started my family.  At a job I held for a few years I often had the opportunity to do a little writing for an alumni publication.  I was always encouraged to write and never felt up for it.  I couldn’t really understand my reluctance because writing was certainly on the “can do and can do well” list.  Heck, I’d even “improved”–whatever that means–in seventh grade.  I was reading something by Flannery O’Connor one day about the craft of writing and it struck me–for the first time–the craft of writing.  Writing was a craft.  It needed to be worked at.  You could learn to do it–or at least learn to do it better.  I’m ashamed to admit that this was a startling revelation for me.  So startling, in fact, that I failed to transpose this knowledge to any other area of my life.

But probably around the same time–I’d been married a couple years by then and had one, if not two, children–I became utterly fed up with the state of my home.  It was always messy and we were in perpetual panic/recovery mode.  Why could a basically competent person like me not keep her home presentable?  Just before throwing in the towel and adding “housekeeping” to my “can’t do so well” list I realized that home making  and house keeping were skills.  They could be taught.  Honestly, I think I can credit the blogosphere with this revelation.  I discovered this huge community of women really working at their homes and realized I could do that too.  Progress has been slow but considering that I now have more children, more things to do, and a bigger home and have not actually gotten worse in this regard I’m going to call myself “improved.”

Slowly, slowly I’m beginning to see that I can learn to do things.  I don’t need to just consider myself as a finished project blessed in some areas and lacking in others.  There are natural talents, to be sure.  And I’ve got some.  It’s not as hard for me to learn some things as others.  But I could learn most things.

Eric has a friend coming over this evening and while they chat after dinner I plan to hunker down in the corner and eavesdrop while I crack open my knitting book and the box of new yarn that arrived today.

After that apartment we moved to the very edge of the same neighborhood.  There were murders not too far away, there were drug dealers six feet from my bay window.  There were regular muggings at intersections I frequented.  Though I did walk in this neighborhood during the day (alone and with the kids) I was never at ease.  At night I was nervous going from my car to our front door.  Eric did sometimes go for nighttime walks and I was always nervous for him and asked for a precise return time.

All last year we lived in St. Paul, MN.  We chose perhaps the most mixed-use walkable neighborhood we could find apart from downtown itself.  The crime rate in St. Paul is nothing compared to DC but in this neighborhood I also felt a bit on edge walking alone during the day.  I felt nervous if Eric went out at night and I was uneasy, again, going from my street parking to my front door.

Now we live in Newark, NJ and I think nothing of running errands by myself, on foot, after dark.  I let my children play outside unsupervised.  Eric goes for walks alone late at night and I don’t worry at all–sometimes I even leave our front door wide open until he returns.

As I was making my way to the grocery store the other night I was reflecting on all this.  How is it that I feel perfectly safe in Newark, of all places, but felt uneasy in St. Paul Minnesota?  It occurred to me that darkness is not the issue.  Use is the issue.

Our first neighborhood was sort of mixed.  You could go five to six blocks and hit a busy commercial area that was busy well into the evening.  Immediately around our apartment the non-residential units were only in use during the day.  By day the neighborhood was bustling.  If I were walking home from a restaurant at night I felt less safe the closer I got to home.

Our second neighborhood was cut off from the “nice” area of The Hill by a wide, blighted commercial corridor (in the process of a fantastic revival).  Our street was such a busy vehicle route that drug dealers ran a drive-thru right outside our window.  The number of vacant properties made it just statistically much less likely that a neighbor would be out with you–at any time of day.

St. Paul, on the surface, looked like the “safest” neighborhood.  Cute houses, neat yards, nice people, etc.  But all those yards meant that it took much longer to walk up to the commercial boulevard and the time in-between was eerily quiet.  Since we weren’t living cheek-by-jowl with our neighbors I didn’t know them.  Which meant I didn’t know them.   My brother-in-law who went to high school 1.5 blocks from us (and whose students gave us the 30 minutes of daily foot traffic we saw on our sidewalks) suggested once that there was just as much drug traffic in our new ‘hood as our old but we just couldn’t tell.  The police reports were short but regularly told of muggings, shootings, robberies, etc. within a couple blocks of us, often in broad daylight.  I would bet that the per-capita crime rate of that neighborhood was similar to that of parts of DC.

Then there is Newark.  Now, to be fair, we live in the Ironbound which is completely different from the rest of the city.  I’m not going to write about any other neighborhoods because I don’t know them.  Our current neighborhood probably looks to outsiders like it should be the least safe–very dense, very hodge-podge, lots of litter (why is that?) but it is the safest place we’ve lived yet.  I can walk alone at night because there are people out–lots of people–at all hours of the day.  Our street connects two very busy thoroughfares and dumps into a park at one end.  Even though our block is long pedestrians use it to connect the two streets or to visit the bar halfway down the block.  As I walk up to our main drag I pass people running errands or going out.  There is essentially no zoning in this neighborhood so almost every block–and certainly every corner–has commercial use.

I can leave my door open in the evenings when Eric isn’t here because our neighbors across the street sit on their patio talking until late.  I can let my kids play outside while I work in the kitchen because I know the neighbor kid’s mom is watching from her porch, too.  And the lady across the street is hanging her laundry.  And the guy two doors down will be coming by in a minute and will stop to chat as always.

Running errands at night is safe because all the streets on my route are in heavy use.  The darkness doesn’t affect it.  By way of counter-example, I would not cut through the park after dark because no one uses it after dark.