Looking back with Lot's Wife

When I had my first child, my normally very reticent mother ran down the hospital corridor with m clothes in her hand yelling, “That’s my daughter” when they wheeled me into the delivery room. I was in labor for days, right before Christmas, walking around department stores with Braxton-Hicks contractions every few minutes, playing board games with my husband for hours, waiting to somehow get to when the pains were steady, countable and strong. Don’t you love to tell your delivery stories? Everyone loves to tell baby delivery stories and they are the greatest when they’re yours because they always seem so interesting. Which says something about how often anything really interesting and unusual happens to most of us. Having a baby is just really the final frontier because its so uncontrollable. Women who wax their floors weekly and scrub their bathrooms daily still cannot organize or plan when their babies are going to come. The most amazing advice I ever heard was from Vicki Curtis dow...

Heroic Housekeeping As of today, Monday, December 13, 1999, I still have pumpkins on my front porch. Along with my bale of straw. No lights. No garland. I’ve taken in the scarecrow that used to adorn the bale, but he’s right by the front door on a chair with the chaffs of wheat that also used to be out front. They are, technically, no longer on public display. We don’t have a tree. The decorations are on the living room couch where they have been for the last two weeks since we got them out in an early unjustified, unsustained burst of enthusiasm for the season. Half the presents for our eight kids are bought, but the missionary in Romania still doesn’t have a box in the mail. And we are almost the only family in the neighborhood with no icicle lights on the eves—in this place which is clearly, however unidentified and unrecognized, the National Capital of Icicle Lights. And, furthermore, I have no idea what I’m going to put in our Christmas letter—unless I send out this column...

Heroic Housekeeping As of today, Monday, December 13, 1999, I still have pumpkins on my front porch. Along with my bale of straw. No lights. No garland. I’ve taken in the scarecrow that used to adorn the bale, but he’s right by the front door on a chair with the chaffs of wheat that also used to be out front. They are, technically, no longer on public display. We don’t have a tree. The decorations are on the living room couch where they have been for the last two weeks since we got them out in an early unjustified, unsustained burst of enthusiasm for the season. Half the presents for our eight kids are bought, but the missionary in Romania still doesn’t have a box in the mail. And we are almost the only family in the neighborhood with no icicle lights on the eves—in this place which is clearly, however unidentified and unrecognized, the National Capital of Icicle Lights. And, furthermore, I have no idea what I’m going to put in our Christmas letter—unless I send out this column...