An Apt Mommentary Commentary.....
or or Elinor Dashwood says it all.....
Above all, I've said it, and I stick to it: anyone who claims, in the presence of parents, that children's noise or movement distracts them, has to expect to be laughed at. If I permitted my attention to wander every time my children were cranky or restless, they and I would have been dead long ago. Toughen up, folks, worse things happen in war. In fact, worse things happen in the sanctuary and the pulpit, so ease up on parents.

We’ve always tried to remove our children from the pews before they became an outright menace to society and we’ve managed to avoid any truly nasty comments from fellow parishioners. Some of the things I’ve heard from other moms are just outrageous - one mom on one of the homeschooling lists I belong to said that an elderly woman approached her in the parking lot after Mass and told her that Satan uses little children to distract people during Mass. Oy!

We have to attend to our ‘business’ at Mass - and be willing to offer up our distractions and aggravations, whether they be squirmy babies or old folks coughing like they just escaped from the local TB sanitarium.

I must admit I did succumb to disraction at Mass the other morning. There was a mother and her very active 3 year old son (last time he visited the rectory he wandered off and made it 2/3 of the way upstairs in the thirty seconds it took his mother to fill out a form or some such paperwork. Retrieving him made me very nervous - women just don’t go up there. I think the cleaning lady does, but that’s the only exemption.....) in attendance and I found my mind wandering in a sort of sweet nostalgia. Remembering the times when I had wanderers. It was almost enough to make me cry. But then I remembered how I could leave church drenched in perspiration and I was glad (in a bittersweet way) that those days are behind me. BUT that distraction was my problem, not the little boy’s. He was just being....a sweet little boy. A sweet little boy fortunate to have a mother who brings him to Mass.