Someday...

Someday I'm going to be that old lady in church who waits until the second the harried mother who just finished an hour-long wrestling match with an infant and toddler while playing vacuum to every stray Cheerio and using long arms to tap various kids to either stand up, sit down, kneel, keep kneeling, stop stripping pieces off their blessed palms during the silent parts of Palm Sunday's gospel, sing, stop singing loudly while changing the lyrics to a Thomas the Tank Engine song, stop yawning, stop stretching, fold hands, look forward, do what I do, *don't* do what I do when I'm sitting to nurse the baby when everyone else is standing, or in general pretend to pay attention or LOOK more like they're paying attention if they actually are--yes, just one tap and a look can accurately convey the correct message, at least when you have God helping you on Sunday in church (think about it--outside of church you get kids saying, "What? I thought you meant that I shouldn't throw Legos at my brother ON PURPOSE, not that I couldn't throw them at ALL!" Inside church, a tap, a look, and the hands fold or the knees bend--if that isn't because of the grace of God I don't know what is)--anyway, after an hour of watching the mother struggle and feeling her embarrassment as her kids catapult themselves backward into my folded hands or use their palm to pretend to shoot laser rays up at me, I'm going to wait until that moment after the final song is done when she is about to tell them exactly how displeased she is, and then I'm going smile sweetly and say, "I just have to tell you what a *lovely* family you have. And they were all SO GOOD!"

I'm going to know that that mother knows that I'm full of it--she's going to look at my face and see it written right there, all the things I'd be annoyed at if I were her--but I won't be her anymore, I'll be the old lady making up for what I piled on my own kids by sparing some other frazzled mom's kids a scolding even though they don't deserve it (what's more Palm-Sunday-appropriate than that?), and I'll know that she'll have no choice but to force a smile, which after a moment won't be forced because she's going to have a second to think, yeah, they are a cute bunch, and they DID make it through the whole hour, after all, and well, gee, it's Sunday, maybe she should just not scold them right after church. And she will walk her kids to the car with a smile and maybe tell them "It's a good thing for you guys that lady stopped to say nice things about you! I was ready to explode!" And me, I'll go home and call my kids and tell them that I saw a mom who looked fit to be tied in church that day trying to deal with her kids, even though her kids were not being NEARLY as tough to deal with as my own were. IN fact, I'll probably ask them if they remember Palm Sunday in 2010, when Dad sang with the choir and Liam served Mass and I was stuck squashed into a pew with the younger seven on my own? And no one would have made it to the car alive, let alone have McDonald's that day, if it weren't for the old lady behind us stopping me after Mass...

How to take up running

1. Put the baby in the stroller

2. Put the leash of the over-eager dog into the hands of your over-eager autistic teen

3. Realize your mistake for a split second as they immediately run yards and yards ahead of you up the hill

4. Race to catch up to, or at least keep within shouting distance of, the dog and the boy-with-much-longer-legs-than-yours

5. Keep the panic out of what's left of your voice as you tell the baby in the stroller in front of you that this is fun and your butt bouncing along three feet behind you that it had better try to keep up.

6. Continue for half an hour

Sue :)

P.S. My butt still hasn't made it home.