I am getting old. I am the mom in the book instead of the coming-of-age heroine. I am Mrs. Bennet clucking over five husband-less girls. I am Marilla Cuthbert, mopping the kitchen floor, weeping, after seeing Anne off to Queens while her pretty bosom friend goes on a picnic with cousins.

I am the comfortable marriage and bearable mortgage, not the idealistic dreamer of genteel, educated poverty. More hearth guardian Mrs. March, less fire in the belly Jo.

And yet Anne was a mother, a mother of, let’s see: Jem, Walter, Di and Nan, Shirley, Rilla, yes, six. Why can’t I be a mother like Anne? She never yelled, she probably composed odes to eyebrows and greeted each day as a grand adventure. She made her kids feel loved, and special, and unique, and different in a good way. Recited poetry at the dinner table instead of reminding of the “no singing at the table” rule.

Yesterday Callie was awful at Hobby Lobby and Costco and waiting during Parent-Teacher Conferences for Avery. She ran down the aisles, included Lucy in her crazy shenanigans. She said she wanted to do something fun. I just wanted some quiet. In the car she read books to Lucy and passed crackers to the baby. Lucy couldn’t see the pictures from the back seat and Callie told her kindly to use her imagination.

I thought: this is the Anne Mother Moment. My kids are not a dead loss. They are worth what I am doing here, they are worth watching, worth listening to, worth my attention, worth describing and remembering and liking. (Loving, always, that goes with the heart milk; liking is harder, except when it’s a free gift).

But I am not the Anne Mother. The minivan stops at our next stop and it’s back to fighting or whining or snotty nose crying and I am not the Anne Mother.

I am the Marilla Mother. And I guess the best thing about her is that she really didn’t want Anne, she wanted a hardy farmboy, but what she got was a fragile yet strong, slender and red-haired, day-dreamer, flavor the cake with liniment girl.

And she kept her.

I’m not very musical, despite the obligatory piano lessons in my tweens. But I wrote some words for Esther and Deborah verses for the Jesse Tree. Now for Abish to the tune of Army of Helaman . . .

Esther’s Courage (to Nephi’s Courage)

The Lord commanded Esther to go and wed the king

Haman told Ahaseurus the Jews were rebelling

Esther and Mordecai worked to save their lives

Esther was courageous and she would reply:

(chorus)

I will go, I will do, the things the Lord commands

I know the Lord provides a way, He wants me to obey. x2

Deborah the Prophetess (to Follow the Prophet)

Deborah the Prophetess judged her people well

As she served the Lord and lived in Israel.

She led them to battle with her friend Barak

They defeated Sisera who never more would mock.*

(chorus)

Follow the prophetess, follow the prophetess, follow the prophetess, don’t go astray.

Follow the prophetess, follow the prophetess, follow the prophetess, she knows the way.

*Previous versions of this line included “Deborah knew Sisera would fall by Jael’s hand” and “They defeated Sisera as she did foretell.

Every birthday and Christmas for the past two years, I’ve offered to let Avery get her ears pierced. Every time she has declined, asking instead for books and swim stuff and roller blades and, this year, a punching bag. This morning we had a bra crisis (note: best to own at least two of the acceptable variety at all times) and ditched school for the mall, in search of the perfect under-t-shirt 32-A and new goggles.

Avery was wearing the clip-on earrings Nana brought from Florida this week, as she has every day since Nana’s visit. I mentioned she might want to think about the ear piercings, because the short pinch of pain in the beginning is worth saying goodbye to slow death by clip-on squeeze. It’s like the difference between tights and leggings, I said, except even better because regular earrings become even more unnoticable  once they’re healed.

She thought about it for awhile and I struggled between ensuring it was her choice and thinking we should seize the day before she got scared again. She chose the blue-green zirconium in the white gold post and gripped the arms of the chair tightly.

Tonight I asked her if she brought it up or I did. She remembers it being her idea, which is good, because as I stood there patting her hand, I was impressed that her eyes almost filled but she didn’t cry, she got quiet as she waited for the sting, and once it was over, I felt sick to my throat. While she was relieved and excited, I was filled with mother’s remorse.

I felt like a conspirator to the murder of my daughter’s childhood. It would’ve been easier if she hadn’t looked so grown up in that chair. I can’t even remember getting my ears pierced at eight. Compared to my period starting at thirteen and holding hands with Chris Hansen during a U2 laser light show at sixteen, getting my ears pierced was nothing on the child-to-woman continuum.

Except now I realize it probably was, that or the day I became aware of my underwear showing while doing a cartwheel. (I don’t remember that day, either, but having girl children of my own, maybe that’s first).

I’ll keep telling myself: it was time. She’s almost eleven. It was her choice, and now I don’t have to find a punching bag for Christmas.

I’ve always been too lazy to teach my babies sign language (well, and to learn it myself). Good old-fashioned grunting and pointing work for us. But at eleven months, Avery started curling her arm in whenever we prompted her to say please. We worried about her synapses until we realized we were offering her organic cheerios/diluted juice/twizzlers and then curling our own arms back into our bodies, witholding the prize, as we waited for her to manner up.

At fifteen months, Molly is more understandably verbal than the other kids. Meaning she can say Mahm! and Cat! and sometimes Dah! She can also follow simple directions and keeps better track of her hat, coat and shoes than any other person in this house. Her socks still get eaten by the dryer.

Several times a day she climbs into my lap, tugs at the bottom of my shirt and bobs her head cajolingly, eyes big and locked on mine, mouth in a wide expectant grin.

If only I thought her frequent flailing limbs connecting with my head were accidental.

I was talking to my cousin for the first time yesterday. That sounds pretty lame, but I have about seventy first cousins and this was the wife of a cousin several years younger than me. She is almost due with their second child, and it turns out she is seeing the American Fork midwives like I did and that we have a lot of the same interests and hopes for natural childbirth (by which I mean “least-intervention-ed, un-epidural-ed” childbirth).

As I described Molly’s birth to her, I felt this warm wave of good feeling and my heart stood up and twirled around as I re-lived those moments last September. When I got up off the hospital bed, after pushing an 8 pound 15 ounce baby into the world, snuggling her at my breast, downing two celebratory and hard-earned percocets, and walked, all by myself, to my recovery room one floor down.

I haven’t felt that victorious, relieved, goddess-like, I-can-do-anything, show me a mountain . . . ever. Before or since.

Which tells me two things: 1) I need a new goal, some big, hard, rewarding thing, and 2) I need to do something in support of natural birth in the world. (even if that starts with something as small as this blog post).

My cousin is getting really close, and I was trying to think how to express my best encouragement. When I was fretting over my inconsistent mental preparations, it helped when Andrea told me her epiphany that there wasn’t any one thing she had to do and do right, but rather, she just needed to experience, to allow, to surrender. It helped to know that when I thought I couldn’t do it anymore, I didn’t have to because it was almost over, and I was already doing it anyway. It helped to know that by the time the pain was something I’d sell my soul to avoid, it’s too late to find a black market buyer. (and it was almost over.)

It helps me now, to remember that night and think: If I can do that, I can do anything. If I can do that, anyone can do that. And the thing about not doing it, but allowing it? That also helps for if things go wrong. If something goes wrong and intervention is needed and you have to allow something else to happen, something that wasn’t in your birth plan, that’s okay, because it turns out that was the thing you had to allow, to experience, to submit to. It wasn’t something you failed to do right, it was the thing that was supposed to happen. You can do this. Or that, or whatever you have to.

Giving birth to my baby, naked, lying on my side and indignant that I had to hold my own knee up and out of the way, feeling every stretch and burn and push and fire and thrust and swell and release, that was ecstatic. That was living deliberately, that was building my cabin in the forest by a pond, that was a luxury of wild nights! wild nights!, and squeezing the marrow out.

That was (every expletive you can think of) amazing.

—

Molly’s birth story

What to read when you’re expecting

Thinking about natural birth after thinking I had miscarried

An old one that shows how far I’ve come

I am not a radical feminist, probably because I usually sublimate my frustration in reading romance novels (and no, that’s not an oxymoron), but at a recent family scripture study, Tom pointed out that I was just being crabby with my insistence on substituting feminine pronouns and complaining that in 2 Nephi it says “Adam fell that men might be,” when everyone knows that it was Eve who fell first (and most wisely). Sometimes I don’t have the best attitude after dinner when we read scriptures. Sometimes I’d rather nurse the baby to sleep slowly and then hide up in my room while the normal pre-bedtime sounds echo through the downstairs.

(Who am I kidding? by “sometimes” I mean “always,” except then I am irritated when my routines of kids clearing up the kitchen and making lunches and packing backpacks for the next day and generally behaving like responsible members of society don’t get honored so well.)

But as I was updating my Jesse Tree, I grew more and more dissatisfied with the representation of women in it. Who wrote that thing? Is that the best she can do? (I hope not.) Already I do prod the kids to consider the unnamed or obscured women in each story we tell, but I need to edit my devotional outline to reflect this. For the Moses night, for example, I think I will read my meditation on Jochebed (Moses’ mother). Beyond that, I’m going to add six distinctly female stories: Deborah, Anna, Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, Abish and Mary Whitmer, to my Jesse Tree, bringing the devotional total to 31.

(This exercise has been a little frustrating. Why don’t we have better art and songs about women? Why isn’t there a Follow the Prophet verse for Deborah? Why does the picture of Mary presenting Jesus at the temple include Simeon and not Anna? Why does God hate women? Just kidding, I’m sure he doesn’t!?!)

You can find all 31 of the stories in (rough) chronological order on the Jesse Tree post, but here are the six additions:

Deborah (scales of justice), picture (Judges 4:4-9) Deborah was a prophetess, judge and warleader. Perhaps as judge and temporal savior of her people she is more a type of the Second Coming of Christ. Battle Hymn of the Republic, Hymn #60

Abish (feather) Picture (Alma 19:16-17, 29-31) Abish was the Lamanite woman who hoped that seeing King Lamoni and his household prostrate after the teachings of Ammon would convert her people. She also raised the queen and king from their stupor. Army of Helaman #172

Anna (Bible) Illustrated Video (Luke 2:36-38). Anna lived 84 years as a widow, fasting and praying in the temple. She is called a prophetess. I Know that My Redeemer Lives Hymn #136

Mary and Martha (cooking pot) GAK 219,  GAB 45 (Luke 10:41-42, John 11:21-27) I love Martha. She was admonished by the Savior to care more about spiritual things, and yet, she is the one who told the Savior He could have saved Lazarus, had He only been there. Families Can Be Together Forever #188

Mary Magdalene (spices) GAK 233, GAB 59 (John 20:10-18) Mary was the first person to see the resurrected Lord. He asked her to tell the disciples that He was ascending to His Father. She did. I Know that My Savior Loves Me

Mary Whitmer (milking cow) Fourth Witness movie* (February 1989 Ensign) Mary Whitmer was rewarded for facilitating Joseph and Oliver’s  translation of the Book of Mormon by an angel who showed her the plates. My Life is a Gift #164)

*I can’t find this twenty minute movie online anywhere, but it’s worth buying. I (briefly) dated the producer at BYU, and remember an uncut version that was impressive.

Cooking with mom, chocolate covered pilgrim hats and dogs to clean my fingers.