Getting in Shape

For the most part, I attempt to keep a positive attitude about rearing four females. It is not easy. I hated it when older women with crinkled lips, a voice two pitches lower than Lauren Bacall's, drooping, shrivelled breasts, and permanently furrowed brows would feel the need in line at the market, upon seeing all my daughters to warn me: "You just wait until they get older. My boys were so much easier. They'll make you crazy." There would my girls stand: ribbons in their smoothly brushed blond heads, the large bow of their lips stretched into a smile, revealing their pearly-perfect teeth, enormous blue eyes, blinking up at them, and they tell me this crap? I wanted to pinch their weltered bosom and wring their puckered mouths.

This is the hardest thing I have ever done. Ever. Ever. Ever. I refuse to think that rearing any child of either sex is easier than the other. It can't be; to do this job correctly will lay you flat on your back. It will stress you; frustrate you; and steal your very heart without you even noticing. And just when you think you finally have it together, something else will come along and challenge your pithy smugness. I have been kept humble and been humiliated. I have endured the delivery of four human beings from my very body, dealt with swollen leaking, painfully engorged breasts, been bitten, puked on, pooped on, gone without sleep, and many material things. But those are nothing to helping my two adolescent daughters know themselves and know this world in which they live; to understand the frailties of both themselves and their fellow human beings; to keep that in context with our religious beliefs; to help them learn to establish boundaries that are healthy and when and how to let someone else know them; to learn the gracious gift of charity- that is, to examine one's motives and intentions before reacting. I wish I could shove them all back in, carrying the weight of their bodies in extra girdth. Surely the stress gained in my body would be reaped in the relief of my soul?

More and more, I am finding that this making of them is becoming the making of me.