Additional Columns by Sherry Antonetti: The Wedding Feast The Real Life Jacket Asking for the Gift We Do Not Know We Need If Today You Hear His Voice Feeling like a World of Sparrows Haiku Prayers The Year of Paul the Apostle The Gifts of Sons Teen Tips for Surviving to Adulthood, Spritually Intact The Luminous Mystery of Marriage, A Primer for All of Us Prayer Spam My Son Peter Meets the Pope Being Spiritually Awake for the Feast Why We Don't Always Get What We Want...And Shouldn't "Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame!" Becoming a Great Story Learning to be Unafraid to Ask The Gift of Courage Coming Home to the Wide Open Door of the Father To Do List for the Day, Every Day Delighting in the Unexpected Immediate Intimacy of Answered Prayers Celebrating the Song of Songs on Saint Valentine's Day Forty Lenten Resolutions

Congratulations to the Antonetti, who welcomed Paul to their family on September 17th!

How to tell Grace is Just Below the Visible

It’s almost a joke, as grace abounds, more abundant than oxygen for the taking if we wish.

However, such moments of victory are often snatched to defeat by the scourges and scratches of both large and small issues that threaten our ability to see “All is Grace” in a moment.

On a personal level, I always have one “hell day” after having a baby. Hell day is marked by the inexplicable timing of large appliances and cars, normally reliable equipment dying, the discovery of a wasp nest, mice, snakes, cavities, the flooding of a floor by a toilet, the computer by a virus, spilling of rice, syrup, coffee and m&m’s –all at once, and papers that indicate somewhere in the past two weeks, we missed vital communications from school that would have made the bad grade much better. At least three of the afformentioned events occurred with each child's birth. I've left out some because it felt like too much reality to bear. Hell day always marks the day I break, the day I cry, hard.

Once, it was the day I lost my diamond earrings –they were found later. This time around, it was the day the marble cutting board broke in two. How does a marble cutting board just break? Funny you should ask. You see there was this mouse. It ran over my foot. It seems one of my kiddos left the door to the garage ajar and darned if the little critter didn’t think, “That’s a much nicer place to lodge than this bush.” He scurried through the kitchen as six of my nine found spots on the chairs while screaming. Breakfast had just been served. I had finished putting together lunch bags and was clearing the island/table before going to get dressed. The scurrying movement and simultaneous screaming made me jump and drop the board in the sink.

Persuading the kids to subsequently get into the cars was a breeze. They couldn’t wait to leave. Neither could I.

I prayed on the drive to our appointment, harassed by traffic, distracted from giving St. Bridgette’s discipline my full attention by the slogging pace in between stop lights and phone calls from my spouse who was meeting me at the doctor’s for our son’s check up after dropping off the older kids at school. He’s usually got a great understanding of my psyche and spirit…”You’re not quite right yet. I know you’re trying. But your heart isn’t in it yet.”

I chaffed at his accuracy. “I’m three weeks post partum.” I snapped. I wanted to rant, to rave. “It’s legitimate to be insane three weeks after birth at least for a moment…you try strapping four children into car seats…the house is a mess…we need to grocery shop…” the list in my head of things I wanted to scream about should have slapped me with how angry and silly it was. I wasn’t able to hear my own madness in the moment but I had the good momentary sense to at least stop at “post partum.” I knew he was right. I just fought it in my mind. The nags piled up in my head faster than the laundry or my 4 year old son’s requests upon finding a Christmas catalog.

And then I opened my Magnificat, a daily prayer book I highly recommend. God was laughing, waiting to spring this on me, October 7th. The reading was from the holy Gospel according to Luke. “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.”

Reading the passage I almost couldn’t take it all in, here he had orchestrated all things if only I would surrender. I went to do the dishes and discovered the broken slab. The hardness of heart, like the marble slab had broken and I laughed as I realized, this would have been a really bad day if the thing had landed on my foot. It’s all grace. I just needed to breathe.

 

Sherry Antonetti is a mother of eight children and a freelance writer of humor and family life columns with prior publications in Absolutewrite, the Catholic Standard, Beaumont Enterprise and the Washington Post. She can be reached at Smwbmpfjm@netzero.com. You can read additional pieces from her blog, http://sherryantonettiwrites.blogspot.com.