Sham Rock

Twelve years ago I took this photograph of Tony with my much-loved 35mm camera. To this day it is one of my favorite pictures. We were visiting Newgrange, a prehistoric site in Ireland. We traveled to Dublin, stayed at a youth hostel and drank up as much of Ireland as we could in a few days (Tony kept his sights on the local Guinness; I called anything on a tourist map). 

 

“Be the Rock,” I said to him.

“Got it,” he replied.

Traveling to Ireland is really as Irish as we’ve ever been. Tony told me that re: raising the twins, it is my job to determine how much of my own heritage to insert; he would take care of his. 

Fair enough.

I started by diving off the deep end, “Donovan” I told them, “which is the last name Mama had before she married Daddy means descended-from-the-dark-haired.”

Henry and Sophia pretty much stared at me (and my hair) and we left it at that. 

It’s not that I am ignorant or unwilling to share my parents/grandparents/great-grandparents heritage. I’m just not sure how you begin. Short of doing a DIY Saint Patrick preschool craft web-crawl and becoming your kids’ personal on-demand shamrock/rainbow/pot of gold drawing machine, how do you start to talk about something as complex as cultural traditions without being confusing? Perhaps you just have to embrace the mystifying. Which is probably why folklore lends itself so perfectly to my children. 

 

I have learned that when it comes to holidays, celebrations, decorations, new signs and symbols that four-year-olds are pretty fabulous with their suspension of disbelief (be it willing or not). I can pretty much get them to believe anything I say. So when I took our standard sugar cookie recipe and made up a story about how leprechauns ran loose in the kitchen and stepped on all the cookies (and hid bits of rainbow inside), I had a captive audience who believed (immediately) in the power of mischievous fairies who ran about while mama made her Americanized version of Irish Soda Bread. 

I use the expression a lot of blarney (there’s a more colloquial expression I’ve heard too. But I like to think of this as a family-friendly blog and it is not nice). I’ve never actually kissed the stone, I like to think I have a lifetime of gullibility which I’ve passed on to the next generation.

This is a recipe of my own hybrid-creation. We once ran out of butter and I used the grapeseed oil instead; use butter if you like. Also, the standard recipe in my cookbooks make way too many cookies. This is just the right amount for us.

Leprechaun Sugar Cookies

Ingredients

¾ cup sugar

2/3 cup grapeseed oil

1 ½ tsp baking powder

1 ½ tsp vanilla extract

½ tsp salt

1 tsp cream of tartar

2 eggs (or ½ cup avocado to turn the cookies green & be vegan-friendly)

2 cups flour

Rainbow sprinkles

 

Directions: 

Preheat oven to 350. Line cookie sheet with parchment. Combine flour, powder, salt, and cream of tartar with a whisk. Set aside. Cream oil and sugar in a bowl. Add eggs one at a time (or avocado). Add vanilla. Gradually stir in flour mixture. Add rainbow sprinkles.

Form into small balls. Press thumbprint (or back of a spoon) into the center. Bake 8-10 minutes. Remove from the oven, let cool and tell your children a story about how their cookies were stepped on. Delight in their shock as they look at the “footprint” on their confection. 

A Letter to Tony

"Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony." Colossians 3:14.

I remember our first meeting, but not as well as I do our second. It was the spring term in 2001. We were outside the college library. I have a mental snapshot of you in that moment. It was snowing; you were wearing a winter hat; you had a pile of books under your arm; we didn’t expect to see one another. You smiled at me like I was the only person in the world who mattered. And from that moment, I was sunk.

If that meeting is indicative of anything, it is that we were fated for stories.

I love books, yes. But most of all, I love our story. I love what we have done and what we have not. I love that you can master any freaking task in an HOUR; that you are willing to show me anything and forgive my tendency to space out. I love that you’ll finish coma-worthy nonfiction in a matter of days and take a decade to finish a novel. I love that we have a daughter obsessed with pink. I love that these last two facts continue to baffle me.

Most of all I love that loving you has been the easiest thing in the world.

I’ll admit when I found out we were pregnant again I had some severe reservations. How could I find any more? At some point love has to run out, right? Or take from other things and people in your life? I am already completely obsessed with the results of the first pregnancy. Which I teased five years ago was the consequence of over-love. One baby couldn’t possibly hold it all.

So God gave us two. 

 

And here we are again – facing new life. And looking at the strong possibility that our little square family will shift shape into something resembling a circle. Which if they were books on the shelf would roll around and come tumbling out. But maybe this new book movement is onto something. Maybe they shouldn’t all have four corners.

Or maybe we’ll have to bring back the scroll. 

I won’t pretend that this couldn’t all change in an instant – and that there won’t be things we don’t understand. But for right now I’ll be content knowing how hopelessly wrong I was just a few months ago. This is amazing. This is you – and I will keep my promise to encase him or her in the best that I can give. 

I find myself thinking about faith and love – and that our position has always been that if you’re not keeping the two of them together at all times you’re doing it wrong. Everything else is just noise – whatever else you put in front of it.

I am so joyful that we’re figuring out a way to edit our little life; our small home, small car, small bank account, to include room for one more. As far as what worries everyone else – birth plans and nursery options – all that matters in the world to me is that you were there in the beginning and that you are there in the end. 

 

Nothing makes me realize the potential of light-out-of-darkness quite the way a sonogram does. There was nothing – and then all of a sudden, there is. A head, beating heart and little hand.  

Thank you, Tony. For this little gift growing bit by bit. Who is completely obsessed with granola and hummus. Who had me crawling on my hands and knees for the last quarter of 2013. 

And for letting me fall in love with you outside a library constructed in the shape of a circle. Which at the time seemed a silly shape for a building to hold rectangular objects.

But now seems just right.