How My Children Play, 2022

(7 years) Our daughter loves to draw "photographs": mommas holding babies near stoves with cast iron skillets, huge smiling faces in sudsy bathtubs beside hooks of robes and towels, groups of beaming children vaulting into water parks. Their ages and relationships, hairstyles and fashion choices are chosen and announced with care. She devises hammocks and nests for her "pet" squirrel ornament, placing teacups of water tenderly beside him, then leaving him to rest while she dashes over to coax her live pet bird onto her wrist with his mirror and bell. 

(6 years) Our oldest son engrosses himself in origami folds, games of strategy and patterns, the infinite possibilities (negative numbers!) of a basic calculator he purchased at Goodwill.  He hunches over his allotted thirty minutes of Candy Crush, advancing through the levels with the volume blasting. When not gaming, he dons boxing gloves and dukes it out with his brother in the attic, or fires snowballs in the yard. 

(4 years) Our youngest stages battles between animal figures from his perch on the wooden built-ins that divide the living areas. The floorboards beneath are pock-marked with tiny dents from fallen good guys and bad guys. He zooms his styrofoam airplane ("Far-Flyer") across the room, or involves it in contests of speed and strength against numerous toy foes, or offers it a snack from the toy kitchen. He builds elaborate forts of pillows and blankets and furniture that never quite measure up to his lofty ambitions. 

(29 weeks) And all day and all night the child in my womb practices squirms and kicks, readying himself to enter these chaotic playscapes in his own right. 

What I Have Learned About Hospitality

Folding others into a welcoming space of genuine love and fellowship is the true hospitality to which I aspire. This cannot be achieved by sacrificing the very qualities of peace and order and attention that make such an atmosphere possible.  This means limiting choices that in the past, wishing to avoid seemingly arbitrary restrictions and refusals, I would permit others to make in our home: small choices that did no harm in their own right other than the cumulative damage of trending us away from discipline and harmony, toward pandemonium and conflict.

This lesson is hard-won, after a year of unstinted hospitality that left us depleted and scarred, and likely did less good to those we welcomed in than we would have hoped. 

Entering a new year, I am first revoking the standing consent that held too many doors open to our guests, thereby allowing chaos and predation to slink in alongside fellowship and compassion. Then I will work to restore a nourishing home atmosphere within my family. After this is reasonably established, I look forward to again flinging open the front door and welcoming. 

But this time I will vigilantly guard the homeostasis of what Sarah Vap calls our "family animal." And that homeostasis is preserved by foundational habits ( rules) of mind and body which encourage us towards virtue and health.  Hopefully I will be able to safeguard these habits with flexibility, warmth, and tact, which will prevent us from lapsing into rigid legalism.

Year's End in Minneapolis

 It was late afternoon of New Year's Eve 2021. I was pouring scalding hot cocoa into thermoses so we could prolong our planned sledding excursion despite the single digit cold, nagging the children into their snow gear. Jonathan, phone held up to his ear, motioned me to him and said in a low voice, "There is somebody hurt in the alley, don't let the kids outside. I will warm the car up." 

We didn't go sledding after all. A fifteen year old boy was killed that afternoon in our alley, his death the third homicide on the block in 2021. 

Yellow caution tape and flashing police cars barred the passage in and out of our drive. A red vehicle with deployed airbags was battered against a garage on one end of the alley, a lifeless body and a handful of bystanders and cops at the other. As we unbundled from our minivan, a woman's keening wail hung in the air for a long minute or two. Jonathan and I shared a wince and herded our crestfallen children into the backyard. 

We attempted to salvage the outing by starting a little fire in our yard, chatting with our neighbor over her fence, soaking up the scent of campfire and sipping the mugs of cocoa we'd packed while tiny snowflakes drifted in the failing daylight. 

The lights continued flickering blue and red against the neighbors' houses in the gloaming and long past nightfall. Bursts of automatic gunfire vied with fireworks deep into the night as the city turned into a new year.

So we find ourselves taking stock, the faces of our children and the faces of our neighbors cycling through our minds against the backdrop of gunshots, squealing tires, and neon lights.