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CHAPTER 1

Family

Expecting the Unexpected

One of the first things I noticed about my friend's house, when I stopped in last Christmas, was that her Nativity set looked like it hadn't moved an inch from where she first set it weeks before. This friend, I should add, doesn't have children.

I have five children and, at my house, I never knew what my Nativity set would be doing when I walked into the living room. Sometimes I found Joseph and the shepherds lying on their backs because 1-year-old Jenny thought they needed to go night-night. At other times, I've found my 10-year-old using the figures to act out the Christmas story, with Mary pinch-hitting as a wise man and riding off on the camel.

I can't help but compare my friend's life, with its order and routine, to mine, with its constant unpredictability.

When our first child was born, I didn't know what to expect in my new role as a mom. Fifteen years and four more children later, I still don't. This was a journey into the unknown, with unexpected curves in the road and surprises around each corner. Motherhood keeps me guessing, always a bit off balance, braced for a twist in the plot when things appear most predictable.

For one thing, I am often amazed at how much it hurts to be a mom, from the pain of childbirth to the sick, bottomless ache when a child is lost. Even more, I am stunned by the joy — when I hold each child for the first time, when the lost ones are found, when I get a hug from a difficult child when I least expect it.

Another unexpected twist is the questions. I always knew that young children ask a lot of questions. What I didn't expect was when, where, and on what subjects. The most startling ones were hissed in my ear when I was absorbed in the sermon at church.

"Mom! Do you have a baby in your tummy or are you just fat?"

"Did you know the Blackbird airplane flies so high that the pilots have to wear space suits?"

In addition, there are what I call Clear Blue Sky questions, which pop out with no preliminaries.

"Did we go opposite of the other people?"

"How does Becky hold carrots?"

"What's that stuff beside the other stuff?"

Appearing out of nowhere, these questions make me dizzy, and I end up asking 10 or 15 questions myself before I figure out what they're talking about.

As a mom, my plans seldom work out like I think they will. My fear of snakes and crawly things is, I believe, a learned phobia, and I was determined not to pass it on to my children. So I let them read National Geographic books with explicit photographs of snakes and even took them through the reptile house at the zoo. "Oh, look at the pretty snakes," I gushed, and tried not to let them see me shudder.

I was successful: none of my children is afraid of snakes. But I was much more successful than I planned to be. Matt wants a snake for a pet, and Emily sits in the garden and drapes earthworms over her hands. One day, when the baby was fussy, Amy gave her a rubber snake to chew on. I turned around and there she was, blissfully gnawing. I gasped, horrified, and thought, This wasn't what I had in mind at all. All I wanted was for them not to be afraid to walk through tall grass.

My family, I found, doesn't fit into the experts' easy models. Discipline, according to the books, is supposed to fit a formula: clear instruction plus logical consequences would equal disciplined kids and satisfied parents. One spring I bought an expensive rainbow-colored stamp pad for making greeting cards. I knew my daughters would want to use it, so I gave them clear instructions.

"You can use this, but when you're finished you always slide this little knob over here so the colors don't run together, and you always put the cover back on so it doesn't dry out. Do you understand?"

They understood.

A few days later, I stopped by my rubber-stamp desk and there was my new stamp pad, cover off, colors bleeding together. Nine-year-old Emily was the culprit, I soon found out.

"Do you realize how much I paid for this thing?" I ranted. "And I told you to take care of it, and you didn't, so you won't be allowed to use it anymore."

Emily looked at me with big, blue, tear-filled eyes. "I'm sorry, Mom." Then she added softly, "I used it to make a Mother's Day card for you."

Then there was the day when I had four children under nine years old and we were all having a bad day. Everyone was grouchy and uncooperative. Nothing I did seemed to change things, so, even though I knew better, I tried to fall back on guilt.

"I feel like quitting!" I announced dramatically. "Nobody likes me. Nobody listens to me. Maybe I should just quit and let someone else be your mom."

There was a brief silence and then my 4-year-old chirped, "Okay! I want Aunt Bonnie to be my mom!"

Someone certainly went on a guilt trip, but it wasn't any of the children.

On another bad day a few years later, I wasn't happy with how I handled things. That evening I sank into a chair in the living room and moaned to my husband, "Please tell me I'm a good mom."

Paul can be expected to indulge me even if he has to stretch the truth. He managed to sound sincere as he assured me that yes, I'm a good mom. What I didn't expect was the sudden chorus of little voices agreeing with him.

"Yeah, Mom, you're a good mom."

"You are, really."

"I think you're a good mom."

Things don't stay put at my house, my plans seldom work out, and I never know what to expect from one minute to the next. But, all things considered, I wouldn't trade this job for anything.

Matt Learns to Drive

My son Matt seems 4 years old again, walking from my parents' house to his cousin Leonard's next door. He grows smaller and smaller on that long, dusty lane as I watch from the porch.

He is 7, calmly posing for a photograph while he waits for his ride on his first day of school, then asking sweetly, "Now would you like me to take a picture of you crying?"

And he's 11, calling, "Mom, look at me!" from 70 feet up a Douglas fir at Alsea Falls. And I, forcing myself to stay calm, am shouting back, "If you fall out of there and break both legs, don't come running to me!"

And now he's 15, counting the days until he gets his driver's license.

Matt has always had a tall-tree-and-lightning relationship with disaster. He imitated Calvin and Hobbes, washed a disposable diaper with a load of black jeans, and almost set the house on fire with his scientific experiments. He needed ipecac, tetanus boosters, and emergency surgery.

When he learned to drive, I only imagined more disasters. I pictured him on dark streets coming up on grandmas at crosswalks, and on I-5 making split- second decisions among wolf-packs of cars and semi trucks roaring behind him like charging bulls.

After he got his permit, the first time Matt drove the car was to church one evening, where he sailed down the driveway and kept going so fast that he almost hit the brick planter at the end of the parking lot. Even his mild-tempered dad raised his voice.

The next morning Matt drove the van to school, again with Paul supervising. He turned into the driveway, I was told later, and didn't straighten out the wheels but drove onto the grass, where he bounced along for 50 feet and then turned back onto the driveway while the other students at school and the sewing-circle women in a nearby church-fellowship hall watched in astonishment.

"Why did you do that?" everyone asked him later.

He had no idea.

I found that I couldn't chew gum while Matt drove, for fear I'd inhale it while sucking in air through my teeth. I also found myself leaning to the left, not politically, but literally, as though it would keep us from lurching off the edge as he hugged the white line on shoulderless country roads.

Paul let him drive on the freeway when we went on vacation. To me, it was sheer, terrifying lunacy to fly along at freeway speeds with the fate of our van, family, and vacation in Matt's uncertain hands. I finally convinced my husband of this — or so I thought. Then I heard him having a little man-to-man talk with Matt in the front seat, and it sounded suspiciously like, "Well, we both know you can drive perfectly well, but Mom is kind of scared, so let's humor her, shall we?"

"It's a guy thing," my sister told me later. "They love freeways and think they're the best place to train new drivers. My-father-in-law takes the freeways all over Seattle," she went on, "and my mother-in-law hates them and takes all these complicated back roads."

Drivers'-education classes started in October at Linn-Benton Community College in Albany. The teacher was a brisk, no-nonsense woman who seemed capable and intimidating — just right for teaching this roomful of 15- year-olds to drive.

A parent was required to attend the first class, so I got to watch a gut- wrenching film about accidents involving newly-licensed drivers. The parents in the audience wiped their eyes. The teens didn't seem affected.

Every Monday night for six weeks, we made the half-hour drive to Albany, where I shopped or read for three hours until the class ended.

"A policeman showed us slides of accident scenes," Matt told me after one class. "One picture showed half a body over here and the other half 10 feet away"

I said, "Eeewww, how awful." I thought, Yes! Bring it on. Whatever it takes.

On the night of the final exam, Matt came to the car with a dejected look on his face. "How did you do?" I asked anxiously.

His shoulders slumped. "Flunked," he mumbled.

I admit, I screamed — thinking of all those hours and all that money wasted. Matt let me rant for about 30 seconds then sat up straight and grinned. "Just kidding, Mom. I actually did fine."

Then came the behind-the-wheel sessions, where I again dropped him off at the parking lot and hung around town for three hours, certain that every siren I heard involved my son.

Rain blasted down like a Minnesota thunderstorm the night of Matt's last lesson. I half expected his teacher to tell us that the session was postponed. But no, there she was, waiting in her car, smiling, even. I pictured myself riding with two 15-year-olds in the pouring rain, gathering darkness, and glaring streetlights. Never.

Afterward, Matt casually informed me that his instructor told him he was driving too fast and if he goes over the speed limit once — once! — he fails the course. He passed. I drove home in the storm and Matt — Matt? — kept asking me nervously to slow down.

After Christmas we took a trip to the Middle East to visit my sister. Matt loved to stand at her upstairs window and watch the traffic below. Battered white Toyotas wove in and out of traffic in a constant game of "chicken" and the only requirement for drivers, it seemed, was knowing how to honk the horn.

"Man, I wish my drivers'-ed teacher could see this," he kept saying. "She'd think I wasn't so bad after all."

Matt no longer sighs when I hand him newspaper clippings of accidents involving teenage drivers. He stays in the center of his lane and glances over his shoulder before changing lanes. Paul lets him drive in Eugene and tells me he does very well.

Sometimes my daughter wants to go to the library and I don't have time to take her. Or I'm making supper and discover I'm out of cheddar cheese. Then I think, with sudden, satisfying anticipation, You know, Matt gets his license in only 26 days!

Just Like Mom

I came home from a dentist appointment one Monday in March and found six lambs in my kitchen. Only a day old, baaing hungrily in cardboard boxes, these were "bummer" lambs whose mothers were unable to care for them.

As my husband mixed the milk and fed them, he explained that a call came unexpectedly that morning from the Oregon State University sheep barn. The lambs were available, but the little shed he was building for them in the orchard was only half finished.

Until the shed was finished the next day, the lambs stayed indoors. My 2-year-old daughter Jenny fell in love with them. She'd reach out hesitantly to pat their backs, then squeal wildly when they touched their cold noses to her arm.

I was cleaning up the kitchen after lunch when I heard a little voice behind me commanding, "Hold still! Now, blow your nose. Blow your nose!"

I turned around. There was Jenny, leaning over the side of a box, trying to hold a tissue to a lamb's nose. The lamb was shaking his head from side to side, and Jenny, getting more and more frustrated, was determinedly trying to wipe a bit of moisture off that small black nose.

The scene was adorable, of course — a pert little girl with red-gold curls trying to control a woolly, long-legged lamb that had no intention of cooperating. But the reason I stared, dumbfounded, was because in that moment I saw my mother in my earnest little daughter.

It was over 30 years ago, the spring that Dad traveled so much. We had a flock of sheep in a pasture across the creek, and whenever Dad left, the sheep immediately began giving birth. One evening we spent several hours penning up the new mothers in a shed and making sure the lambs were nursing.

I still remember the icy cold in the air that evening as we finished up and Mom, my sister Becky, and I left the shed to return to the house. We hadn't gone far when a sad-faced old ewe came wandering over to us, looking like she was begging for help. She obviously had a cold, with a terribly runny nose, which Becky and I thought was disgusting.

Mom, however, took one look at the ewe and pulled an old handkerchief out of her coat pocket. With a quick swipe, she reached out and wiped that awful slime off the sheep's nose. That was even more disgusting, I thought, but we all laughed anyway. The ewe looked grateful, and we walked on to the house.

Whatever quirky little gene inspired my mother to wipe a sheep's nose apparently lay hidden for a generation and then suddenly showed up on this Monday afternoon in my feisty 2-year-old.

I find it fascinating, these mysteries of mothers and daughters, of genes and generations. What is it that makes me repeat my mother's habits and patterns, or that makes bits of my mom show up, at the most unexpected moments, in myself and my daughters?

Shopping for comfortable shoes, I try on a pair, look down, and there I see an exact replica of my mother's ankles and feet. I glance in the mirror while braiding my daughter's hair, and there are my mother's hands, braiding my sister's long brown hair with the same firm strokes.

Even the circumstances around the lambs held an uncanny resemblance to Mom's experiences. Just a few days after we got the lambs, Paul had to leave for a 12-day trip to Mexico to visit several churches he oversees. I was left with the responsibility of mixing milk for the lambs and feeding them four times a day. Paul felt badly about adding to my duties, as he had hoped the lambs wouldn't arrive until after his trip.

When Dad left to do his research on Amish schools that spring in the 1960s, Mom no doubt felt some of the same resentment I did when her husband's project turned into another responsibility added to her enormous load. But I remember the rapturous smile on her face whenever she saw a new baby animal on the farm. I have a feeling that, like me, she found the newborn lambs irresistible as they braced their skinny legs and drank hungrily, their tails fluttering like a flag in a stiff wind.

On Sunday afternoons, my mother was always making scrapbooks to give away to elderly people or invalids. These were not the photo-album variety that are so popular now, but her own unique blend of pictures and Bible verses. She would scan magazines and junk mail for appropriate illustrations. Then she'd glue a picture on a scrapbook page and find a coordinating Bible verse to write underneath it. To this day, whenever I see a picture of mountain goats I immediately think, "The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats" — Psalm 104:18.

Our 11-year-old daughter Emily decided to make a book for Jenny's third birthday in April. She nosed through catalogs and magazines, then sat snipping and gluing at her desk, utterly absorbed and contented, a replica of Mom at the dining-room table on a Sunday afternoon. The result was a revision of "Little Miss Muffet" in which Little Miss Jenny sat on a penny and a bug gave her a hug.

"She's just like your mom," my husband told me, amazed, leafing through the book and looking at the cut-out, glued- in magazine pictures of a little girl, a bug, and the shoes Jenny wore to chase the bug away.

Mom is almost 82 years old, and the gradual loss of her sight is curbing her boundless creativity. Much as I hate to admit it, I know she won't always be with us. But I am comforted knowing that, years from now, I will turn around at unexpected moments and, in the mirror or in my daughters, I will catch a vivid glimpse of Mom.

Wallpaper Gifts

I believe we were on the third strip of wallpaper when I quit wondering what was wrong with our marriage.

Every year, with the flood of holiday advertisements, I find a nagging little question deep inside me: If our marriage is as solid as I think it is, why do Paul and I have such a hard time buying Christmas gifts for each other?

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Excerpted from "Ordinary Days"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Good Books, Intercourse, PA.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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