[Author’s Note #0: Yes, I am — quite ashamedly — posting this as my “April” post… in the final days of May. Will I truly never catch up? <sigh> Perhaps not.
Well, at least I don’t get paid for this.]
As usual, this post is severely overdue — and yet, is backdated as though it weren’t.
[Author’s Note: Though this post claims it was published on April 30, it was *actually* published more than a full month later.]
This wasn’t actually the piece I had intended to post. I’m also in the midst of writing a different story — one describing the busy season that we’re still not quite through. However, though I initially thought that such an explanatory story could serve as a quick catch-up post, it rapidly ballooned into a much larger endeavor than I had anticipated — perhaps, because we’re truly just *that* busy. So busy, it took me weeks to even abandon that late post.
The late post… about being late. (Kinda meta, amiright?)
Thus, at last, I started this story, with the intent of just listing off my children’s current interests and characteristics. Admittedly, that hardly counts as a “story” — which is probably why this post somehow morphed instead into explanations of each my [living] children’s middle names. Specifically, why we gave these particular middle names, and how each of their lives have aligned with our reasoning.
It wasn’t the post I meant to write… but it *is* the post that I wrote. Very, very late. So I don’t have any time to redo it — because, let’s be real, now it’s time to be late for my May post, instead.
So, without further ado….
Borealis
Before he was born, my oldest son’s middle name was “Conquest” — drawn from my nascent sense of his burgeoning personality, coupled with his life verse:
Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
— Romans 8:37
However, my mother — who eventually embraced the name “Borealis” — could not abide the name “Conquest”. Thus, shortly before he was born, Bo’s middle name changed to “Roman” — still in reference to the same verse.
He doesn’t know [or, rather, infrequently remembers] that he used to bear a different middle name. Even so, it’s clear that the original appellation was apt.
Because Borealis… is an absolute juggernaut.
In The [Second] First Day of Kindergarten, I discussed my fears about sending my children to our neighborhood school, specifically with regard to my oldest son’s rigidness. My concern, essentially, was this: that rigid people don’t bend; they break. (I speak from personal experience here.)
I still believe that maxim to be true — and I trust that, in time, God will develop flexibility in my son. Even so, it seems clear that my concerns about his resilience were — if not wholly unfounded — then at least overblown.
Despite my fears, Borealis seems absolutely impervious to extra-familial influences — and hardly pervious to intra-familial influences. I’ve long known my firstborn to be strong-willed. (As, indeed, are all of my children.) However, Bo’s strong-willedness is unique within our family because it is coupled with the blithe obliviousness of the irredeemably socially eccentric.
Here’s a frequently repeated example:
Me: “Borealis, do you want to go help your sister?”
Borealis: “No thanks!”
Me: <sigh> “Let me rephrase. Borealis, you must go help your sister.”
Borealis: “Oh! Ok.” <goes and immediately solves whatever problem she’s struggling with>
Here’s another one: A few weeks ago, we hosted a playdate for a new family from our church. Though I love my firstborn, I wanted to keep the gathering free from his oft-overbearing steering. Thinking only to briefly distract him, I handed Borealis a new logic-puzzle book.
My plan worked — a little too well. Rather than dominating the social setting, Borealis redirected his attention toward the new task at hand. He sat down at his desk, opened the book, and worked consecutively through nearly ninety pages of logic puzzles. He paused only to say a perfunctory, “Hello, my name is Borealis,” and “Goodbye, thank you for visiting us!”. When Taylor and I reviewed our son’s answers later that night, we weren’t surprised to see his near-perfect work. That book never stood a chance.
[Note: Learning from my short-lived mistake, I promptly promoted him to a Sudoku book, which has lasted significantly longer than the two-hour span of his previous workbook.]
In short: Apt comparisons between Borealis and Elon Musk come up with some frequency.
Indeed, like Elon, Borealis also has shocking success with the ladies. In pre-K, he had no fewer than four gal friends who each regularly tapped him to be the patriarch in their games of “Moms and Dads”.
[Note: Yes, I continue to have mixed feelings about this phenomenon.]
This trend continued throughout kindergarten — although, with so many new classmates, I could hardly keep track of all his female friends. Nor, indeed, could Borealis himself. More than once, he admitted, “Um, I can’t remember whose husband I was today.”
“Neither could Solomon,” I’d retort with an eye roll. Perhaps I should be concerned about my son’s harem of school wives — but once again, Borealis has somehow achieved spectacular results with artless indifference. He seems utterly unaware that it is not, in fact, normal to have multiple girls consistently competing for one’s attention.
Certainly, though, one friend in particular stands above the others. I’ll call her Hettie — and she has been positively *unsubtle* about her feelings for Borealis. When asked by her mother about a playdate she was planning with my son, Hettie flippantly clarified, “Oh, you mean… my wedding!?”
“You’re going to marry Borealis!?” Hettie’s mom spluttered. “Does he know about this?”
Hettie shrugged. “Not yet — but it’s fine, because he does whatever I tell him to.”
Which, apparently, means that my son *does* set down his strong will.
Well… for one person, at least.
Australis
Our daughter, too, has grown into the promise of her middle name: Reverie.
[Note: Technically, Reverie is her first middle name. Her second middle name, Rose, is a nod to the three most influential female friends of my cross country era. Aza loves to point out that she — as my first daughter — actually had the middle name Rose “before Mommy even met Daddy”.]
As we had for Borealis, we selected Aza’s middle name in tandem with the verse(s) that I believed God chose for her — a passage that appears at the very end of The Birth of Australis: Part II. I am strongly attached the whole section — originally written by Joel, and recapitulated by Peter in the Sermon at Pentecost. If I have to narrow it to just one verse, though, it’s this:
And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God,
That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your young men shall see visions,
Your old men shall dream dreams.
— Acts 2:17
Thus, in choosing Australis’s [first] middle name, I cycled through at least a dozen options that represented the promise that our daughter would be a dreamer. Taylor — who had never before, nor never again, displayed any interest in the naming process — shot down every idea I put forth… until I came to “Reverie”.
“That’s it,” he said. “It’s perfect.”
And, indeed, it was. First of all, the choice sounds lovely with her other names: Australis Reverie Rose. Additionally, it has become increasingly clear that, quite without any prompting from us, our daughter has grown increasingly interested in the ethereal and somnial.
I won’t delve deeply into examples here — mostly because I’m hesitant to spread around stories that are intensely personal to someone other than me. Though Australis doesn’t yet consider her dreams to be “secret”, I anticipate that she eventually will.
Thus, I’ll keep this update relatively high-level in saying that, since last October, Australis has reported seeing spiritual visions at nights.
These visions have been populated by a variety of characters. None of them are *normal*, per se — but a few of these entities are somewhat more to be expected: “balls of light”, embodied angels, and “shadow bad guys”. (Thankfully, many more of the former than of the latter.) Additionally, she has reported seeing deceased members of our own family (not too surprising), as well as the deceased daughter of one of her teachers (a little more surprising, since that teacher disavows ever having told Aza of her decades-old miscarriage). Most significantly, Australis has periodically told us of seeing Jesus and God the Father — although she has remained fairly cagey about those particular dreams.
Now, to get a bit charismatic/metaphysical: I don’t disbelieve my daughter’s reports — although, I don’t unquestioningly believe them, either. Instead, I try to gently push back on her stories to see which elements she’ll defend and which she’ll concede. Indeed, while she’ll waver on certain points, she will vehemently stand by others. Borealis — ever the burgeoning engineer — insists that everything Aza dreams is “just pretend”… but I wouldn’t go that far.
Because, well, God had *told* me that Australis would be a dreamer. I had heard Him with my “heart ears” — which is the language that I use with Aza to describe our spiritual senses.
[Note: To my surprise, she adopted that language immediately and without the need for further explanation. It went like this:
“Mommy, if Jesus is the light of the world, why is my room still dark?”
“Oh sweetie, you don’t see His light with your face eyes; you see it with your heart eyes.”
“Ohhh, with my heart eyes!” <promptly closes face eyes and falls asleep.>]
Thus, nary a week goes by when Aza doesn’t relate a story of something she saw, “with her heart eyes”. Borealis continues to push back — at one point, exclaiming, “Your heart doesn’t have eyes, Aza!”. Even so, my daughter remains both determined and peaceful about her reported visions.
And as for Taylor and me? Well, we’re holding everything rather loosely. Who’s to say, right now, that Aza *doesn’t* have good “heart eyes” — to the extent that her visions align with the revealed word of God? (And perhaps also with the corpus of heaven-related experiences, as reported in books like Imagine Heaven.)
Perhaps this is a phase that will pass quickly — or, perhaps it isn’t.
Truly… only time will tell.
Orientalis
Long, long before he was born — and even before Borealis was born — God told me that I would know absolutely nothing about my fourth child, Orientalis.
[Note: If you’re unaware of our family’s story — my third child, Occidentalis, died before he was born. His loss is chronicled in my magnum opus, The Death of Occidentalis.]
In Faith is the Substance of Things Hoped For, I discuss this foreknowledge about my complete *lack* of knowledge. For more than four years, my fourth child was an utterly impenetrable mystery to me — and thus, this enigmatic child was a serious test of my faith. Would I believe that God gives good gifts — even if those gifts look different from how we might expect? Or would I forego the gift, persuaded instead by the fear of what burdens it might also entail?
Thus, we [read: I] gave Orientalis the middle name “Rubicon”. It’s the river Julius Caesar crossed when he’s quoted as declaring “Alea iacta est” — “The die is cast”. By choosing to have Orientalis, we crossed our Rubicon — and only God knew where our die would land.
To our relief and joy, though, Orientalis was not the second miscarriage I had feared — nor did he exhibit any of the disabilities I had suspected.
Instead, he was a perfectly healthy, happy baby — one whom we nicknamed “Rhys”, because “Orientalis” is really such a mouthful. (Trust me. I’m the only one who uses his full name — and rarely, at that.)
Of all my babies, Rhys was the one with whom I bonded the quickest and most seamlessly.
[Note: Anecdotally, I can attest that the “gentle birth experience” really does work. The gentler the experience, the easier the bonding — and the more you have to fight blood loss to stumble to your car, only to go get borderline verbally abused by hospital workers… well, let’s just say that it didn’t achieve quite the same result.]
To my surprise, though, that instant bond did nothing to clarify my sense of Rhys’s personality. Rather, I was intensely in love with a total stranger. Would he be sweet or grouchy? Driven or laidback? Funny or serious? Social or solitary? The only thing we could guess was that he would be a physically strong kid — judging by his build and birth weight.
As the months went on, I continued to exist in a weird limbo of not knowing my child’s personality. Even as Borealis became more of a conquerer, and Aza became more of a dreamer, Rhys became more of… what? We still couldn’t tell.
Slowly, though, a phrase began to resolve in my mind: “A lover, and a fighter.”
As always, I initially discounted this “revelation” as self-generated. But, I couldn’t make it go away — and each time I thought it, there was a soul-level rightness to the prediction.
And so, eventually, I conceded. Alright, Lord. Orientalis will be a lover *and* a fighter. Like Samson. Or David. Or… Julius Caesar.
[Note: Indeed — Rhys’s sort-of, kind-of middle-namesake was both a noted womanizer and a lauded battle genius. So, perhaps “Rubicon” was always a sort of double entendre — one that we were just too close to see.]
These nouns — “lover” and “fighter” — are definitely double-edged swords. One can love selflessly — but one can love selfishly. One can fight justly — but one can also fight unjustly. In this manner, these titles are like those of his siblings (“conquerer” and “dreamer”); that is, they do not guarantee either good behavior or bad behavior. Rather, being a “lover” or a “fighter” just suggests taking a certain approach to the world.
And, incidentally, Rhys has absolutely lived into the promise of both such approaches.
First of all, Rhys is a lover. (But thankfully, not yet in the same way as Julius Caesar was.) This kid is sooooo sweet. Everyone falls in love with him — from the lady standing behind us in line at Hobby Lobby to the groomsmen in far-flung weddings. He is charismatic in a way that neither of his siblings is — and he uses that fact to his advantage. (Which is to say, he isn’t the wholly unwitting object of female attention, á la Borealis.)
Secondly, Rhys is a fighter. As sweet as he is, he is also unafraid to throw a punch — either physically or verbally. (Yes, this does generate some tricky disciplinary situations.) While Rhys isn’t domineering in the same way that Bo is, my youngest is nevertheless determined to fight for his desires — although, usually in a “subtle” way.
Somewhat surprisingly, his secret weapon — in both roles — is humor. Because, more than anything, Rhys is *so* funny. Like, laugh-out-loud funny.
Here’s a recent example — to close out this final reflection. As I was tucking Rhys into bed one night, he calmly ordered, “Mommy, please go outside, Mommy.”
[Note: He’s quite fond of overusing familial names right now. Also, his toddler-speak definitely sounds more like “pease go ow-side”.]
I laughed. “You want me to go outside?”
“Yes.”
“Do you just want me to go outside so that you can be naughty?”
Rhys smirked. “Yes.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Rhys, if you’re naughty, then I’m going to have to come back in here and spank you!”
“No, Mommy. I don’t like spankings.”
“Well, then, don’t be naughty!”
Rhys reached up and gently stroked my cheek. “Mommy, please go outside, Mommy.”
I laughed again. “No, Rhys — you can’t be naughty!”
Rhys: <silence>
“Rhys! No being naughty!”
“Mommy, no say ‘no be naughty’.”
“I will say ‘no be naughty’! No be naughty!”
Rhys grabbed my head and pulled my face against his neck. “Mommy, pray.”
“You want me to pray?” I mumbled into his chest.
“Yes.”
I pulled back into a kneeling position and closed my eyes. “Heavenly Father, I thank you for my son Orientalis. I pray that You will teach him to love well and to fight well — to protect the vulnerable, to seek justice for the oppressed, and to shine Your light in the darkest places. In Jesus’s name, amen.”
“Amen,” echoed Rhys — and then, while my eyes were still closed, he poked one and observed, “Mommy’s eyes are green.”
“Yes, they are,” I agreed as I squatted away his hand, “but please stop poking them.”
Rhys blinked up at me innocently. “I love you, Mommy.”
My heart melted. “I love you too, sweet boy. Are you ready to sleep now?”
Rhys grinned impishly in response. “Mommy, please go outside, Mommy.”
So, in summary: Bo is Sheldon Cooper, Aza is Luna Lovegood, and Rhys is… well, I’m still not entirely sure. Finnick Odair? Emmett Cullen? Fred and George Weasley? None of them is quite right — yet.
But this is just a snapshot in time, after all. I pray that my children will continue developing into the people who God designed them to be — and I trust that He’ll equip me to help them along their paths. In the meantime, though… I’ll be here for the battles, the aspirations, the failures, the triumphs, and everything in between.