Yesterday morning when I awoke, I was certain of four
things:
- I had just dreamt I was
drinking white wine out of an Aveeno baby shampoo bottle.
- I was actually coming
down with a cold; my throat felt like sandpaper.
- My three-year old was
scheduled for dental surgery in 40 minutes.
- I had overslept.
But
I did not yet know, with absolutely certainty, who the president was going to
be for the next four years.
I
did what any of you would have done under the circumstances. I burst out of bed, calling on my sleepy
progeny for help, wakened my poor husband (who had similarly overslept) to have
him dress my unsuspecting preschooler, and jumped into the shower. Chatty daughter in tow, I flew into the
mini-van, raced carefully to the hospital, and convinced my daughter she liked
the new blue pj’s and would soon recover her princess shirt. Carrying my
sternly pouting child into op, myself dressed in white and a blue pancake cap,
I held her chubby, bewildered, suddenly masked face on the operation table and
looked into her eyes with what I hoped was a reassuring way. “It’s okay.
Mommy’s here. I love you.” I stroked her cheeks while she succumbed to
the anesthesia; one long muffled scream, one quiet sob, a couple whispered
“Mommy?” then her eyes rolled back and she was out. Dazed, I wandered to the chapel, barely remembering to rip off
my white paper jumpsuit before doing so.
After half an hour, I tried to get a bagel at the café, realized they
were cash only, located the lobby, located ATM hidden in lobby, returned for
bagel and decided my baby might like a banana, a fruit cup, and some pudding
too when she woke up, bought them all, realized the cashier had no bags,
balanced all small items in my hands, and found post-op waiting room. Then I called my mother.
“Mom,
she’s fine. Who’s the president? Oh.
Yeah, I was afraid that might be true about OH. Oh my.
Oh well…”
I
was then treated to my mother’s ever calm and rational view of stressful
situations: how she was going to go underground when authorities came to
euthanize her when she turned 70, and she had a sewer cover picked out for this
eventuality. She told me the secret
signal I would have to have when I visited her there. How we as a nation got what we deserved. How she was still quite upset with me for
consenting to general anesthesia for my daughter’s four cavities. How I really should have extracted the
problem teeth myself using string and a rolling pin.
As
I waited with the two verbose Italian men who were grumpily anticipating their
wives’ recovery from colonoscopies, I had time to reflect on the four things I
knew now.
- We had not just elected
a new deity. (I took some
unsuccessful pains to convince a couple individuals of this fact prior to
the elections). God was the same
yesterday, as He was today, as He would be till 2016… yep, 2016, and
infinitely beyond that.
- God was not
alarmed. Nor surprised. Nor despairing. Nor panicked.
- Many of my friends were
going to be alarmed, surprised, despairing, and panicky.
- God, as the ultimate Weatherman, had a hand in the election results. For instance, people’s perception of Obama’s help during Sandy caused the incumbent’s ratings to rise…
I
also had a strong sense that we are going to get through this, by God’s grace,
one day at a time. Not counting one
horrible possible outcome at a time.
Not figuring out how we are going to manage socialized health care and
limited religious freedom, then taking those two probable problems in one
smooth instantaneous mental leap to the worst case scenarios (which we humans
are so adept at imagining): widespread martyrdom of Christians and religious
leaders, mandatory euthanasia, the enforced gay marriage of every adult, the
prohibition of chocolate…. That we should not head for the sewer covers yet. That today certainly had enough dental
trouble of its own.
Thomas
More is my all-time favorite saint. I
love that he was a husband and father, an educated lawyer, a writer, and a man
of wit and wits. And no, the play A
Man for All Seasons didn’t hurt my favoritism either. As a government official, he was at the
front lines when Henry VIII started the protestant ball rolling. Faced with a king (not a term president, a
lifelong monarch) going increasingly mental with wives and power, he did not
immediately count himself doomed, though his doom was likely and in the end
inevitable. Rather, he tried to find a
way to operate as a man of conscience despite the cultural climate. In the end, as a leading statesmen of
scrupulous morals, it did cost him his life.
But he was level-headed and sane in the crisis, as he successfully
protected his family and tried to find a way to avert disaster. He didn’t panic, but many conservatives are,
with much less cause than More. (Click here for more info on More.) Historically, Obama is unlikely to be the worst thing that ever happened
ever. We are still very blessed, very
fortunate, to be Americans… hopefully we can extract the baby from the
bathwater here…
While
waiting beside my daughter’s cot with instructions not to wake her, I inspected
her IV, oxygen mask, and steadily beeping monitor, blotchy face, and fresh
ether smell, silently cursing all fruit snack companies that made chewy sweet
things my daughter adored. Sighing, I
took her hand, reading the ever-helpful post op instruction sheets. I was not to force food on her in the next
24 hours. I was to start her with a
liquid diet. She would be dizzy, so
crowded bouncy houses were contraindicated for the afternoon. Caillou, however, was strongly
indicated. (Groan.) Fevers, convulsions, and comas were bad, and
should be noted immediately as such.
Feeling the weight of such new wisdom, I activated my smartphone
Facebook capacity to read the feedback.
Frequent
word occurrences included the following: prison, horrible, Obama horrible,
election horrible, end of freedom, firing squad, end of healthcare, usherance
in of the new Hedonistic States of America (okay there was only one occurrence
of that one.) Several other posts
beginning with, “I’m taking a break from Facebook because I can’t stand
everyone talking about how bad everything is” followed by a detailed
description of how bad everything was.
Close second most-frequent post to this was “I’m taking a break from
Facebook because I can’t stand so many people celebrating; I don’t know how you
can judge me when you just elected the antichrist.” Quite a few “May God help
us all” or similar deck-of-Titanic sentiments.
And least most popular post was, “Hey, I just fried homemade corned beef
hash” and a truly alarming picture to go with it. (General note: photos of what you just cooked rarely
communicate—at all—that these dishes are actually appetizing. Pots of soup, stuffing, yeah… it don’t look
good, really. Please desist.)
Meanwhile,
group hug everyone! Group hug…
squeeze! There. God has guided his people through far
stormier seas.
“Mommy…
my princess shirt…” My daughter
groggily came to, lurched forward in a daze, and shakily started to rip every
lead from her body. I hailed the nurse,
who rushed in to distract my daughter with a cherry Popsicle. I resisted a sudden urge to ask how a
red-dye-40-frozen-corn-syrup-stick was truly going to help her recover. Instead I chose to focus on her comfort. Cold.
Wet. Sweet. I helped her into her princess shirt,
watching sticky drops fall unnoticed onto it from her melting pop as she gazed
blearily at Toy Story 5 ½.
Maybe
it feels like God just handed our increasingly ill country a red-dye-40-corn-syrup
President. Or at least allowed us to
grab it ourselves as a nation. But I’m
seeking to remember that our Father loves everyone in this nation. That God loves Obama, who is not beyond hope
of salvation. Neither is this
country. That God works all things for
the good of those who love Him, and many Americans still do. That sometimes maybe it’s better to drug up
the patient and perform messy surgery than to rip the offending tooth out
directly. That if anyone can bring good
out of this mess, it is our Divine Physician.
My
little one is snoozing now. Okay duh,
it’s 2 in the morning… I’ll be editing this much later I’m sure. (As before mentioned, it’s sleep or write
sometimes.) My kid ate like a horse
today. She played whenever Caillou did
not amuse, but fortunately only fell off of one chair and ran into one
wall. She’s going to be okay. But her beautiful face, inside her huge
smile, is some serious bling. In my
hesitation to make the right treatment decision, two of her poor lower molars were
too far gone for regular fillings.
Instead, two stainless steel crowns peep out from between her white
pearly teeth. Oh my friends, I cringe as I can hear the gasps of my fellow moms
now. Particularly my
mother-in-law. “What HAPPENED?!? Oh, poor baby!” And my girl, blissfully unaware and proud of every part of her
small body, will reply, “Oh I not a baby.
I a BIG giwl!” And she will
scamper off while I will have to launch into my personal discovery of the evil
of allowing gummy fruit snacks. The
crowns aren’t pretty, but they’re healthy.
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Maybe Obama’s affects will prove the
same, in the long run. I hold on to
hope. Meanwhile, this ain’t the Douay-Rheims, but I this translation speaks
directly to my fears today. I will hold
onto hope. –TLC
“Do not be over-anxious, therefore, about
tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own cares. Enough for each day are its
own troubles.” Mt. 6:34
