Adoption Update, et. al.

Last night we started in on the mound of paperwork required by our homestudy group, Familes First. And I do mean mound. The stack is more than an inch thick! Included are various permission slips allowing them to invade our every privacy from financial to personal to criminal, but the prize-winning sow in the pen is the 11 page "autobiographical form" which we must each fill out, containing such questions as "What type of student were you?", and "What areas of your marriage do you feel can be improved upon?" Talk about a landmine question! Just surviving the filling out of this form should qualify us for a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Anyway, last night we began plowing through the stack, with a goal of finishing it all in the next week so we can get our home study underway. In the meantime we have both garnered our notarized work letters, and are making appointments to get out medical forms done. Police reports are not too far off on the horizon. We're getting there!

Meanwhile, my all-time favorite author, Guy Gavriel Kay, is about to publish a new book, his first in several years. Am I crazy for wanting to own this? But honey, it's for a good cause!

On the home front, my most recently completed project was this. Ask me what the hell that's all about, I dare you. Not for the technologically faint-of-heart! We're also about to begin redoing the closet in the guest bedroom at long last. I tore out the old "shelving" yesterday in preparation to find this lovely hole in the drywall behind the "boards" they used:

It's not the first time we've found a sub-par job done on some do-it-yourself remodel in this place - you should have seen the closets in the bedroom when we first moved in! Anyway, I'll send after-pics when it's done.

And I'm an atheist ferchrissake!

As I was waiting for the St. Philip's Christmas midnight mass to get going I found myself in an unexpectedly contemplative mood. And for no reason I can recall, I found myself thinking about, of all things, Mary. I had an image in mind of a young girl still exhausted from labor, holding her infant son in her arms, knowing that the life of the child in her hands doesn't belong to him, but rather Him, and how much grief and bitterness it must have caused her (I just cannot see the Saintly Mary, so often depicted giving up her son to God so gladly - but my thoughts on the matter of children are twisty and complicated these days).

Crosswise from this thought I had an image of my father, standing in the doorway of my childhood bedroom and singing the only lullaby I ever needed or wanted as a child, "Ol' Sleep Tight", which my dad made just for us (for he is a composer, you know). I will sing this song for my children (and I will add a verse of my own), for it is a song full of light and the promise of a bright new day to come.

Mary would have had no comfort such as this for her son, and it must have been a crushing sadness to deal with. So out of all of this came the words for a christmas carol which I hope to set to music this year some time (I have to finish the Phos Hilaron I've been writing for 2 years first). This is not the final draft of the text (it needs a first verse - I think the two verses I have now are verses 2 and 3), and it's just a working title, but it's getting there. I would love to hear commentary.

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The Grieving Mary

Be thou at peace, Shalom, my son
God ease you on your way
Through you alone is His will done
Oh my dear son, lulay.


Would that god could spare you
for all the world's grief bear you
now in your mortal hands
and though my son it cost you all
to leave the comfort of the stall
you must the burden stand

refrain

Go forth and be their saviour
if this be your life labor
it must be as god wills
be not to love a stranger
if only in a manger
among the shepherd hills

refrain