All I Can Do Is Walk Him to the Bus Stop

My son is eight. He is, for the most part, a calm and responsible boy. He can get carried away with silliness. He sometimes cries about ridiculous things, like the need to wear jeans to school when it is 20 degrees outside. But I trust him as much as I would trust any eight year old. Even so, I have taken to walking him to the bus stop most mornings. I do this partly for him because he is the only one at the bus stop in the mornings. But if I examine my motives carefully, I realize I don't think that being alone at a bus stop is such a terrible thing. The ability to be alone is quite valuable, in fact, and alone for two minutes while waiting for a bus filled with peers is probably not entirely a bad thing. So I have come to realize that, mostly, I am walking Adam to the bus for myself.

I walk my son to the bus because if I don't, I stand at the front door and watch him cross the street and then walk away, out of sight. He walks confidently but without deliberation, as though this is what he does on a normal day, as though there never was any question of him walking down the sidewalk to the bus stop, getting on a bus driven by a stranger (granted, it's the same stranger every day,) and then spending the bulk of his day somewhere other than home with me. As he walks, I see double: I see my dependable and intelligent "big boy" going off to be dependable and intelligent where all the other kids his age are; but I also see my baby, my toddler, my preschooler, and he is walking away, going off without me, leaving me. Both sights are irrefutably true. I must let my child go out into the world because I want him to learn to be independent and to learn about the magic of words and numbers and the stories of our history and the marvels we think we know through science. But I must also accept that my baby is just walking away. My toddler is leaving. He is going off into a life that will be his and not mine, that he will control and I will, decreasingly, only influence. He doesn't need my hands to hold him up any more, and he isn't afraid to stand on a corner by himself and then get on a bus and not look back at his mother, standing alone and watching.

Today a broken and bent man went into a school full of children like my son, children whose parents scolded themselves for being silly enough to almost weep every morning when their brave dependable children walked out into the world, and did the worst thing I can imagine a human doing. There, but for the grace of God, go I. And one can't help but know that even with the grace of God, people are there already. I can't imagine there is a parent in America today who isn't wearing the clothes of the parents in Connecticut, who isn't completely undone by empathic pain, who doesn't look at the school pictures of their children hanging in the hall or at the top of the stairs and HURT to the point of near-paralysis, and who isn't thinking of how a person could, before she even knew what was happening, lose everything. How can any of us ever be brave enough to let our children go out into the world? I really don't know.

And yet, I also know that I must. If I love my children--and I do--I will eventually have to let them cross the street by themselves, even if there are reckless drivers in the world, because I want their world to be larger than my modest suburban house and yard. I will have to let them get on the school bus and spend a day at school because I want them to be able to understand the marvelous world they live in and the mostly marvelous people who share it with them. The horrible horrible truth is that I can walk my son to his bus stop every morning, but unless I am willing to force him to grow up in fear, unless I am willing to sacrifice all of the brilliant things he might become and the fantastic journeys he might take during the life ahead of him, I have to let him get on the bus by himself.

Those of us who are in the season of advent have an uncomfortable mingling of Good Friday and Christmas today. Our streets are lined with lights and wreaths, preparing a path, lighting the way, and yet we watch our brothers and sisters as they hang on their crosses and ask how God can allow such pain. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? And yet, since I became a mother, since I felt my son's presence in my womb, for me, Christmas and Easter have become inseparable. Yes, I await that moment of pure joy Christmas Eve when "Silent Night" becomes "Joy to the World," that moment when I transcend hope and actually believe that God is with us, that the kingdom is near, that swords will be beat into plowshares, that "they shall never harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain." But I also think of Mary giving birth alone, save for a man she had only recently married. I think of Mary loving her baby and then watching him grow up and then.... And I think of God, who knew humanity pretty well by then and still let his whole heart be born flesh--the kind of flesh that is first a helpless and dependent baby, the kind of flesh that must be never out of reach of Mama and then eventually learns to walk on his own, the kind of flesh that eventually must go out into the world if He is to experience life in its abundance, if He is to make a difference on this unreliable planet among broken, bent, and hurting humans.

If you've ever watched a beloved child walk down the street to a bus stop, Christmas is equal parts wonder and terror. He will get hurt. He will be grieved, perhaps even unto death.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed--and a sword will pierce your own soul too." --Luke 2:34-35

Team Chickpea Piccata: Some Thoughts on Deliberately Falling Short

“The true object of all human life is play.  Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.” –G. K. Chesterton

“If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.”  --Jean Piaget

“Imagination rules the world.”  --Napoleon Bonaparte

Comparisons are the death of joy.  I know this.  I know quite well that I ought to go about living my own life the best I can and not worry myself with what anyone else has or does.  Competition, however, is contagious, and it’s a difficult disease to shake.  You would think that abandoning my career and for the better part of a decade earning $0, and that having my running career taken down by a chronically broken foot, and generally doing and having nothing lauded or glamorized or even compensated by our current culture would go a long ways towards breaking me of measuring myself against others, but such a thought underestimates the depravity of human nature.  There are endless ways to keep falling short, even if you protest that you are not really running the race.

The issue I am currently wrestling with is how much is enough.   Likely, the level of enough is different for every family and within each family, every kid.  Still, I think every kid probably has a level that is too much.   Every year it feels like more and more kids are doing everything available, and in an affluent suburb, that’s a lot.  Kids are in soccer—and not just regular soccer, travel soccer with foot skills classes and special audition-only tournaments—and baseball and swim team and Spanish class and piano lessons and scouts.  I feel like Adam is in plenty.  He’s in “recreational” soccer and cub scouts and takes piano lessons.  But all of his friends are in those things and baseball and some sort of tutoring as well.  Maybe football too.  Most are now on “travel” soccer teams.  Today I overheard one mom moaning/bragging that her eight-year-old is on two travel teams and a baseball team.  If you talk to the parents of these over-scheduled children, they will claim that they are doing it for one or both of two main reasons: (1) the child’s friends are all on those teams, and (2) if the child does not play every sport every season, and if he/she is not on the best teams now, he/she will not make the high school team(s). 

Now for my confession: sometimes, I believe these parents.  Sometimes I worry that my son is getting behind by not playing fall ball when the rest of his baseball-playing classmates are.  Sometimes the competitive part of me wonders if I am, when he is only eight years old, causing my son not to “make” the high school soccer team by keeping him in “recreational” soccer while all of the other kids who ought be his teammates and competition are now in travel soccer.  (Side rant: the travel soccer thing annoys me for other reasons too.  If we all just stayed here, the competition would be of the same level.  Instead, people are giving up their weekends to play teams whose members live in our town but on a field 90 minutes away.  And they’re paying a thousand dollars to do so.  Why? Because all of the good teammates and competition have gone to travel teams.  If we all just stayed here, we all could just stay here.  Seriously, folks, get over yourselves.)

Of course, there are all sorts of other ways I fall short of perfect.  Recently, I was at a meeting in a house that was probably close to twice the size of mine and decorated like a model home.  No, much more nicely than a model home.  I was in constant awe.  There were pictures in the bathroom, and they were hung in painted rectangles (perfect perfect rectangles) that matched the matting of the pictures.  The soap and hand towels matched the paint and the matting as well.  And that was just the bathroom.  Moreover, the house was immaculate.  Not a stray anything.  Every surface—and there were a lot of surfaces—was polished and shiny.  No dust on the framed mirrors.  No sock fuzz on the carpets. No toys.  Not even any toy boxes.  No papers.  Of course I didn’t go exploring around the house, so it’s possible the upstairs was grimy and chaotic, but I really doubt that was case.  Gretchen, who did go upstairs to play, told me that she hopes she can go back there someday because the house was even more like a castle inside than it was outside.  I wonder: how is such a life possible? 

How do other people live these lives?  And, because it’s really all about me after all, why do my children and I seem unable to pull it off?  Why are there piles of papers that I don’t have any idea what to do with but am afraid to throw away?  When should I be scrubbing the kitchen floor and tile walls (not that   I have these) and polishing the bathroom counters?  Do my kids have more toys than other kids, since the toys in my house seem not to all have a place to go other than the floor?  Frankly, I suspect that even if my son was on three travel teams, he still wouldn’t be the best soccer player in the third grade.  He’s small and neither particularly fast nor aggressive.  Nothing I do is likely to change that.

I know there is no point in making these comparisons.  In the end, when I’m, say, eighty, I don’t think it’s going to matter to me that my floor was dirty or my mantel was dusty or that my mirrors were splattered with soap and toothpaste.  And, let’s be honest, some of our kids are not going to be on the high school soccer and baseball teams, and that’s OK.  Really.  Some of them (gasp) might not want to be on the high school soccer, basketball, and baseball teams.  Furthermore, when I pull out my rational self for a few minutes and think through this thing, I suspect that it’s too early to either predict or prepare for those years-away try-outs.  If I’m being completely logical, do I think that playing fall ball in third grade is going make that much difference in Adam’s baseball playing two years from now, much less six or seven years from now?  No.  I don’t think it will.  What I actually believe is that there is far more to be lost than there is to be gained.

For example, the other night while I was making dinner—and I’ll return to that activity in a moment—my children got to (read: had to) play by themselves.  Adam had already had a piano lesson; Gretchen had already taken a nap.  We had already had some time together for snacks and a trip to meet Adam’s new teacher and discuss his allergies.  And so my children had something they would not have if they were on multiple sports teams: down time. 

Segway to a snapshot of our home: our dining room is neither elegant nor neat.  We have a big indestructible table covered in colored paper and cardboard, markers and crayons, scissors and tape and popsicle sticks and googly eyes.  We have a play kitchen and a lego table, and the floor is often strewn with plastic food and lego blocks and pretend money and a few stray dominoes and other detritus of childhood.  The chaos of that room often makes me cringe and sometimes makes me angry.  Interestingly enough, however, the response the room more often than not garners from visitors (at least visitors of a certain type) is, “This room is awesome!” 

The chaos of the room more accurately reflects the mind of my youngest than any of the rest of us, although all of us are prone to leaving things where we last used them when we get distracted by (or startled into) the next activity.  Gretchen, though, lives in a world of constant imagination, a world with multiple simultaneous plotlines and lots of made-up songs.  During this one late afternoon, she wandered past the lego table and decided to set up a petting zoo.  She built a number of enclosures that were neck-high to the various animals she was going to display.  She built a slide entrance for the visitors, so they could get in but the cows could not get out.  She mounted pretend lights on tall pillars so that the zoo could stay open past sunset.  She surrounded the penguin enclosure with cooling blocks.   The longer she played, the more details she thought out. 

Adam had returned to the play he had started on a previous afternoon.  He took our big tub of plastic animal figurines and sorted them into teams: the snakes, the frogs, the birds, the sea creatures, the wild dogs and cats, etc.  Then the teams competed in a baseball tournament.  He would periodically call out to me the current score.  On the evening in question, the frogs were winning, although the birds, being able to fly, are usually very good at fielding.  Yes, he could have been at real baseball practice then, had I signed him up for fall ball, but I couldn’t help but think that he has many years ahead of him for organized sports and likely far fewer years to make up a new world, to “believe” that the frogs could play the birds and win, to govern the rules not just of the game but of nature and physics as well.  You can’t sign your child up for imaginary play, but you can sign him up out of it.   

Meanwhile, I was making chickpea piccata over mashed cauliflower on a bed of arugula.  We had roasted squash and zucchini on the side and fresh blueberries and wheat-free, dairy-free chocolate chip zucchini cake for dessert.  It took some time, yes, but the end result was the sort of dinner I wish I could get in a nice restaurant but usually cannot.  I couldn’t help wonder if the people whose children are on two or three travel sport teams at a time ever eat that way, much less every night.  Doug commented to me recently that as he stands in line at grocery stores, he compares what most people buy to the food in our cart. (I confess I do the same, in a shamefully self-righteous way.)   Other people, he said, buy a lot of processed food: chicken strips, pizza rolls, crackers, fish sticks.  It’s quick and easy, no doubt, and it doesn’t mess your beautiful kitchen.  Likely, people eat that way because they don’t have time to chop and sauté, to study recipe books, to plan menus in advance, and then to wash several loads of dishes when dinner is over.  Likely, they do not read labels because their children are not allergic to wheat, milk, eggs, tree nuts, fish, and shell fish.   Perhaps they never think about the impact they are having on the environment by supporting factory farming, the over-production of genetically modified corn, and chemically processed and over-packaged food-like products.  Unfortunately, somehow we’ve come to believe that by making such decisions, we are prioritizing our children’s futures—namely, their chances of making the high school soccer and baseball teams—while failing to recognize that such decisions, in fact, only look towards a few years of sports competitions and not the long-term health and survival of the people we claim to love.

That night, I surveyed my messy house: the kitchen covered in dirty or air-drying dishes, the dining room covered in half-completed craft projects and a lego zoo, the family room set up as a baseball diamond with the birds in the field and the frogs lined up in their batting order, the shelves and bags and tables over-flowing with books and magazines and homework .  My kids did not get “ahead” at anything that evening.  Had someone come to our house, they would not have been impressed by either my domestic prowess nor my interior design skills.  For that moment, though, I thought that  maybe by making dinner and making my kids amuse themselves, we all came out ahead anyway.

Summertime, and the Living is....

**I wrote this almost two months ago and just now got up the courage to post it.  Tomorrow, or soon, I will tell you what I did about moving up.  Or sideways.

June 5-8, 2012

This feels like a hard confession to write, possibly because I want to be someone other than who I am. I do NOT want to be one of those parents who complain about summer and school being out, especially not at the beginning of the first week of summer vacation. Yesterday there was one hour of school, and by dinnertime I was already dreading the rest of the summer. The whining. The bickering. The constant constantness of children. They talk all the time, keeping me from my own thoughts, and yet they do not add any new information. The talk is just sound, biologically and diabolically designed to be impossible to tune out. It could be used as a form of long-term torture by the government, if amendment VIII to the constitution didn't forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. This morning I went on an almost two-hour bike ride, arriving back home at 8am. By 8:30 I had already sent my son to his room because I just couldn't stand the constant little jabs and insults and taunts directed at his sister. I was reminding myself on my bike ride, to psych myself for another day, that really he's a good kid. Compared to any other eight-year-old boy I've come across, he's really quite kind and focused and gentle. But he's an eight-year-old boy. Boy, oh boy, is he an eight-year-old. And the summer stretches out long long long before us.

So here I am, dreading summer. It doesn't help that my foot--the one on which I had surgery last year--is killing me again, on top of the sprained back and broken rib, of course. The sprain and the break are normal and almost healed. The foot is completely mysterious. I wasted a year of my life on it and then on surgery, and it's not better. So summer is taunting me like an eight-year-old brother intent on making me scream.

But injuries aside, I find myself dreading summer--not the summeriness of summer, but, specifically and horribly, all of the time spent entertaining and meeting the legitimate and made-up needs of children. Yesterday, well before dinner, I was suddenly transported back twenty-some years to before I was old enough to have a "real" summer job and did babysitting/nanny jobs in the summer. I remember one job in particular that was most of a workday watching a little girl named Allison, and maybe her brother, although I only remember the girl for sure. I have nothing in particular to say about the girl. I don't remember her doing anything horrible. I don't remember anything particularly wild or disobedient or difficult about her. She was probably a normal kid, maybe seven or eight years old. The thing I remember is that in spite of her being a nice enough kid, I really did not enjoy my babysitting career. I counted the hours, the minutes even, until I was off duty. And I felt that way about most of my day-time babysitting gigs. The night-time gigs I would count the hours and minutes until bedtime. And in the larger scheme of my life, I was counting the weeks until the job was over, the months until school was back in, the years until I could do something else with my life, something a little more...stimulating?

Fast forward through the rest of high school and college and graduate school and all sorts of interesting classes and "valuable" education, and here I am, stuck in more-or-less the same situation, always busy, always in demand, and at the same time so bored I sometimes consider whether I should beat my skull against the wall just to be doing something else, something at least slightly more interesting. In some ways my current situation is a bit better: there is no ambiguity about what is allowed, or at least less, since I am the one who decides such things, and there is no fear that the children are hoodwinking me that the real parents are OK with such-and-such. I can change the scenery: decide that we ARE running errands or going to a park. Sometimes I can actually talk to another adult if we meet at a park, although, mind you, those conversations tend to be interrupted repeatedly by requests to play on the slides or to push the swings or for snacks. But in many ways, the parenting gig is even more hopeless than babysitting. There is no off-duty coming in a couple of hours. The end of the "work day" means...nothing. And there are no weekends. The job is not going to end, at least not for many years. You don't walk out of the house at the end of the day or week with a pile of cash. When you go on vacation, the kids come too, and they bicker and whine and ask for snacks from the back seat. Worst, though, is the knowledge that this is it. I don’t have some brilliant and interesting career ahead of me.  In spite of my masters degree, I’m not even confident I could get a job if I had time for one.  This is the fulfillment of all of my teenaged fantasies about the future, about the time when I have a graduate degree and a husband and my own life. Joke's on me. I may have a graduate degree, but it turns out the golden era of my adult life is almost exactly like the time when I was fourteen and helping someone else live her life. Only now I don't have dreams of the future to sustain me, and I can't go hang out with my teenaged friends after dinner every night. The truth is that my life is so tedious most of the time that even when another adult arrives I have nothing to say interesting enough to engage in actual conversation. My current situation is so intensely boring that when I desperately dig around for some little tid-bit to offer up in the name of adult interaction, even my most interesting item causes the eyes of my listener to glaze over and elicits little more than an obligatory nod or grunt of assent before the would-be listener's attention reverts to whatever it can find of more interest.  I’ve taken to breaking ribs just to have a conversation topic. Apparently, that’s what I do when I’m bored.

My mom, the re-teller of family stories, has countless times told us and others how she knew I needed to be moved ahead a year in school: I started coming home every day with a new injury.  Once I had wedged myself into a garbage can.  Once I stuck my finger in a pencil sharpener to clean the crayon out of it.  I came home covered in band-aids with scraped knees and bumps on the head and a restless mental hunger that drove me to constant reading and badgering my parents into teaching me long division.  My first grade teacher didn’t find me a thrillingly exceptional student, but my mom, a very good mom, knew.  I was bored.  My physical well-being, not to mention my intellectual growth, necessitated that I be pushed ahead.  I needed a change.  I needed a challenge.  I needed to be using my strengths.

This week, as I sat in the podiatrists office waiting for an explanation on my mysteriously still very painful foot (I don’t feel satisfied that I received a good one,) I fumed about how in the space of approximately two months I’ve sprained my back, broken a rib, gotten two infections, and reinjured my foot.  Mother, I think, it is time to move up a level, to find something else to do with myself, some sort of challenge for my mind before I smash up my body beyond repair and start in on someone else.

When one is in elementary school, moving up a level can be a matter of simple math: in the case of my childhood, I moved from grade two to grade three.  In my current situation, math does not seem to be the answer.  For some reason I don’t think going from two children to three children would work quite as well.  No, it’s far more complicated and involves some difficult choices.  I will have to release some of the blessings of my current life in order to pursue another.  I’ll have to rebuild bridges that, if not burned, have certainly been neglected and fallen into extreme disrepair.

I don’t know what moving on looks like from here.  I only know that something has to change if any of us is going to come out of this summer unscathed. 

Last Visit

The first time my grandma died was in 1995, and since then she has been increasingly unwell. I’ll confess, though, that even before her first death, there has always been a space between my grandmother and my sisters and me.  Unlike my mom’s mom, she was never a very grandmotherly grandmother.  I am sure that as a child I could not have articulated anything profound about my relationship with my grandmother, but luckily I lived in a world where I never had to question whether or not family loved me.  They did, and I never had to think about it.  She was one of two grandmothers in my life and therefore someone who must love me.  She just was who she was.  She and my grandpa moved down to Florida when I was nearing the end of elementary school, so by the time I was old enough to consider who she was, I once again didn’t see enough of her to feel the need to do so.

When my grandfather died in 2001, we discovered just how much he had been taking care of her. She had to be moved to assisted living immediately. She stayed there for a couple of years before it was clear that her mental functions required more specialized help, and I joined my family in cleaning out her apartment and winnowing down her possessions to almost nothing. In the process, we came across some odd but telling things: cards that were labeled and dated but not opened, broken appliances and duplicate appliances. Most poignantly, we found two watches that I had been missing since I was in junior high: watches I cherished and searched for diligently if not frantically for months and months, watches my parents had scolded me for leaving somewhere odd and losing. Because my room had contained the double bed, it was the guest room when we had company, and, apparently, my two favorite watches and who knows what else had gone home with my grandmother even before her stroke. How does one feel about that sort of thing? Lucky for me, this was found when I was an adult, when I had long since replaced the watches, and when I could see the tragedy as clearly as the inappropriateness of her actions.

Several years ago, when I visited my grandma, she was still in the ward of the nursing home for the confused and mentally unwell. While there, I became convinced that as one begins to lose the edges of oneself, the mental habits of a lifetime become more and more pronounced. An example was a little old woman named Gloria, who I did not know during her normal life but who, I'm assuming, must have been determined to celebrate the joys in life. She came up to my sister and me and said something along the lines of, "It's so good to see you again! I love your hair!" She walked up and down the hallway drifting into residents rooms delighting over this picture or that bouquet of flowers. Most amusingly, she came up to my grandma, who was using a walker and therefore carrying nothing, and said to her, "Oh! Where did you get that cheese?"

My grandma responded, "It's mine!" My sister and I looked around for the cheese in question.

"Well, it looks delicious!" bubbled Gloria, before moving off to admire someone else's imaginary possessions.

It came as a good cautionary tale: when the sense and the details of our daily interactions are eroded away by time or illness, what is the heart that is revealed beneath them? When, someday, I am faced with imaginary cheese, will I compliment it, hoard it, or share it? When my scenery is reduced to a locked hallway, will I admire it or resent it or worry that someone else might take it?

Surprisingly enough, although my grandma seemed not to remember many details about her past life, including some members of her family, during that same cheese walk, my grandma introduced me to an older gentleman in a three-piece suit. "This was my junior high teacher," she told me. The man must have been in his 90s, but he was only at the nursing home visiting friends. To him, my grandmother said, "This is my granddaughter. She's a teacher too." I didn't know that she even knew who I was, much less my current profession, something that had begun well after she seemed to be losing her ability to keep track of such things. I was touched, honestly.

In spite of that moment of recognition, however, I haven't been visiting my grandma, who still lives in that same nursing home about four hours from where I live. My dad and my aunts have reported that she understands and remembers less and less. She doesn't eat. She is too weak to walk and has been moved off the floor with locking doors. She sleeps almost 22 hours a day. She is wasting away to nothing: once taller and far more buxom than I am, she has shriveled down to 82 pounds. Last year they discovered that her body was no longer producing hemoglobin. They gave her transfusions with the hope that it would kick-start her body into producing hemoglobin again, but after repeated attempts, it became clear that this was not going to happen. My dad and aunts enrolled her in hospice.

So I knew that my trip to visit her this spring was probably going to be the last one before I travel out there one more time for her funeral. I was expecting it not to go well. I envisioned that she would not wake up, or, if she did, that she would stare at me blankly. I thought she would have no idea who I was. I was expecting her to be shriveled up and have lost her hair. I was expecting her eyes to be glazed over.  I was expecting neither to recognize nor to be recognized.

When we arrived, however, she was sitting up and watching TV, the only thing she has done with her waking hours for the last decade or two. Her hair was white but still thick and was combed and pulled back in a headband. She was under a blanket, so her body was not really visible. Her color was normal. She looked different than she had when I was child, but she still looked very familiar, somehow. Did she look familiar because one fourth of my genes and the genes of my sisters are hers? Because half of my dad and half of my aunts are her?  Did she look familiar because back when I was a child, she was my grandma? Or did she look familiar because somewhere under there, she still is my grandma? I don't know. The strength of the sense of recognition was both shocking and comforting.

I reminded my grandma who I was, and my parents reintroduced themselves. Then we introduced my children. I told her their names and ages and that they are her great-grandchildren. She said, "Bless them!" Then she said to us all, "You may go now." Her speech was very clear and formal--not at all what I was expecting—but the dismissal was not a surprise. Still, it's anti-climatic to drive four hours for a three minute meeting, especially if the meeting is the first in years and potentially the last of a lifetime.

We all left the room and found a large empty gathering room where the kids could run around and be kids. After a few minutes, I went back in to my grandma’s room. I was told not to be surprised if she didn't remember that my previous visit had been less than ten minutes ago, so I reintroduced myself. This time, without the crowd of people, my grandma looked at me for a moment and said, "You look so beautiful." My eyes filled.

I didn't know quite what to say to my grandma, who has had no interests for decades and whose interests from long ago do not in any way intersect with my own. I told her about being a runner. I told her that I am a stay-at-home mom. To this, she said, "I sure do love you."

For that moment I would have driven twice as far with twice as many children.  The trip was suddenly more than worth it.  Those few minutes alone with my grandmother redeemed the last two decades of personality disorder and estrangement.

I could be cynical and question how sincere this declaration really was, given that she doesn’t actually know me beyond perhaps being able to identify who I am and how I am related to her and that immediately afterwards my identify if not my presence was forgotten in my grandma’s desire to be moved to her bed.  It could very well be that she just knows that if someone comes to visit saying she is your granddaughter, even if you don’t really remember her, and if she fits your notions of beauty and feminine virtue, you must love her.  Maybe she had enough social savvy to know what to say or to know that hearing those words was I had come.

Then again, even if my cynical suspicions were to prove accurate—if one could ever find a way to prove anything regarding the mysteries of love and the human heart—those few moments were still worth the drive.  Even if my grandma saying she loved me was little more than conditioned response or the fulfillment of how she knows things ought to be, I think it still has value.  The love between the two of us is not sacrificial.  It’s not something we ever put into some grand action or even some mundane routine.  It probably wouldn’t be enough love to live on, if that was all I had.  But it’s not all I have.  Not by a long, long measure.  Two children sat in a car for four boring hours across featureless Indiana and never complained or criticized the trip because they knew it was important to me.  My husband did the driving all weekend, and he also never questioned the worth of spending money and two days of vacation.  My parents came on the trip as well and stayed at the same hotel and swam in the pool and took us to dinner.  Two cars full of love carried me into my grandma’s small room to hear those words, and that’s saying nothing of the love I left back home and scattered across the country in the form of friends, past and current, and more family.  In such a case, a little more love feels like enough.

Years ago, I had thought that my grandmother’s personality, at its most elemental core, was about her things.  How sad, if that had been the truth, given that each time she slipped farther and farther into her illness, she was moved from smaller to smaller abode, stripped, in the end, of nearly everything but a few trinkets that decorated her tiny nursing home room.  But in the last trip to visit her, I was forced to reconsider this assessment.  At the previous visit, years ago, only two things had seemed worth comment: her things (even the imaginary ones,) and her granddaughter.  Perhaps I should have thought about the fact that she wished to share me with others rather than the fact that she wished to hoard her imaginary cheese and squirrel away my watches.  Maybe, it counts for something that on my last visit to her, weeks before her death, she said to me, “I sure do love you.” 

What exactly that word “love” means has been debated by far more eloquent writers than I and in far more controversial settings than the one of which I write.  For me, the statements come down to a belief that whatever the word meant to my grandma, she meant it when she said it to me.

My grandma died on Saturday.  She had been unwell for so very long that the news was more a fulfillment of the inevitable than such news usually is.  And, truthfully, it doesn’t change a thing about my daily life.  I will confess that I too seldom even paused to think about my grandma asleep in her small room, or watching a TV show she couldn’t quite follow.  But her death still feels like a loss. There is one less person tying me to the past, anchoring the roots of my family tree, providing a clue to what makes me who I am.  With her life over, it seems like it will be far too easy to forget all about my grandma, about the twang in her speech, the bite in her remarks, the sound of her laugh.  But it’s not all gone.  I think maybe, if she were able, she would say that something good survives.

About ten years ago, when we were already quite aware that my grandma was slipping, we gathered at my aunt’s house during Christmas break.  My grandma commented that having seven grandchildren was a good showing for one lifetime.  When all but a small remnant of her had already fallen away, I’m glad I had the chance to hear from her lips again that she knew what was truly valuable.

Rest in peace, Grandma.  I love you too.

Enjoy the Walk

This weekend was the two week anniversary of my back sprain.  The physician’s assistant who diagnosed me refused to give me a timeline for recovery, but from my subsequent internet exploring I learned that a sprain generally takes from two weeks to two months to heal.  Clearly I am not on the two week plan.  On Wednesday, I tried running in 30 second intervals, but my back couldn’t make it the full 30 seconds.  Oh well. 

The truth is—and hopefully this confession does not disqualify me as a “real runner”—that I have been enjoying walking.  Every so often I see someone running and think, “Oh, I’ll do that again someday,” but really any agitation I feel from being downshifted to walking is more about the events I’ll miss because I won’t be in shape for them.  I meant to run a 5K this weekend, but this is obviously not going to happen.  I meant to run a 10 miler in May.  Also not going to happen.  Triathlons in June are probably out.  These things make me sad.  (And of course it makes me crazy that I can’t do the things that I see need doing: a trip to Costco, gardening, mildew cleaning.  Honestly, I don’t particularly love to clean bathrooms, it’s just not having it done that annoys me, but that’s a rant for another day.) 

The background truth, again at the risk of losing my runner status, is that I’ve been slogging through my runs for a while.  I knew I ought to be enjoying them, but my hips were sore all the time.  I did stretches and leg lifts and hip hikes all day long.  Nothing seemed to make it any better.  My body felt  heavy and slow.  I have been feeling unreasonably fatigued.  When I tried to fix the sluggishness by doing some speedwork, I found I didn’t have any speed.  I just plain ol’ could not get myself around the track quickly, and that was demoralizing and depressing, even though I wanted to be able to shrug it off and just appreciate that I could run at all.  I was frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t keep up with my running groups.   I was embarrassed that I was so slow and so easily worn out.  I maybe should have hung it up for a while at that point, but that’s not my style.  Instead, I figured the only solution was to try harder, to run more, to start doing speedwork again, to try a new lighter “natural” running shoe.  And that, my friends, is how a person sets herself up for something like a sprained back.

I’m not going to abandon running.  I am mentally prepared for a long slow road back to health.  I’ve been here before.  Several times, actually.  There will be weeks of short easy runs then months of base building.  If I’m lucky, I might be ready to do some races again by late summer or fall.  The reality of that timeline makes me feel a bit impatient in advance, but in the meantime I am surprisingly content to walk.

Last weekend I decided to have a goal to walk about 20 miles this week.  So far, I’ve walked 26 miles in six days, averaging about four miles a day.  Of course, it takes me almost twice as long to walk four miles as it would take to run it, but for some reason, I’m OK with that.   This is one of the ways that walking is healing me.

Walking through my injury forces peace upon me.  I do find peace in running, but often my running is about, well, running.  Even when I say I don’t care about my pace, I still notice it.  I’ll come clean: I had said I only wanted to finish the Lost Dutchman Marathon and that if I had to have a time goal, it would be to finish in under four hours, but then when I did finish in under four hours, I was still disappointed in myself.  Yes, that was a “race,” so maybe it invites those types of emotions, but for me, so did group runs.  I too often cared who was running ahead of me; I cared that there was a whole world of people with whom I just couldn’t keep pace.  I told myself not to care, but I did.  Even when running alone without a watch, which I almost never do, I felt slow and sore and therefore disappointed in myself.  More: even when I felt great, the running was about running.  Putting forth a sustained effort takes some mental as well as physical effort.  The ease of walking, in contrast, allows me to pray, to notice more details—in the last two weeks I’ve seen three Eastern bluebirds, wild turkeys, a toad, baby killdeer, several hawks, and some wonderful spring blossoms—and  to work out some internal tangles.  Being injured, being a walker, I also find that I am far easier on myself.  I am not bothered when people run past me.  I don’t even keep track of time, other than to make sure I get back home when I need to be there.  I walk with the time available, and whatever distance that happens to be, I accept.  I’ve never once calculated my walking pace.  I have tried, in the past, to have that attitude about running, but it’s difficult.  Being relaxed about running is its own kind of effort, an annoying oxymoron.  There is always a little corner of my mind where I store a speck of panic that somehow I am falling behind, that I’m not running far enough or fast enough.  Enough for what?  I couldn’t tell you, exactly.  Perhaps I’m chasing down the runner I used to be, or maybe I’m chasing the runner I wish I could be.  When I walk, I’m not chasing anything.  I’m never behind.  I’m always just outside, moving, being alive and glad of it.

More importantly, walking has helped me regain some perspective.  On Wednesday night, I had the pleasure of walking with my friend Joe, who is also a downshifted runner, having had bypass surgery last summer and a heart attack this spring.  His running suspension is a bit more serious than my discomfort. I had just told him that although it had originally been my plan, I probably won’t be signing up for the Philadelphia Marathon this fall.  It seems not to matter how many 20 milers I put in beforehand, something about the marathon seems to beat me up to a level where I can hardly recover.  It’s happened too many times to be coincidence.  I’m not going to be well enough to do another one this November.  At that moment, Sasha and Elena ran past us, the first of the running group.  They had just run the Boston Marathon a week and a half before, and Elena had placed third in the 50-54 age group, beating Joan Benoit Samuelson.  And back in February, one week before I ran my marathon, Elena WON a marathon.  Not just her age group, THE MARATHON.  As in, she was the first woman to cross the finish line.  Pointing to Sasha and Elena I asked, “Why can they do it, and I can’t?”

“Do you think Cassie ever sees you and asks that?” he replied.  “You play with the hand you are dealt.  That’s all you can do.”  Good point.  I can never trump the Cassie card.  We walked.  “You know about Bruce, right?” he asked. 

A man from our running club, someone around Elena’s age, was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  I was silent for a moment.  Bruce is a great guy: joyful sense of humor, world traveler, proud father of three.  “There’s no getting over that, is there?” I asked.  “It’s a death sentence,” Joe replied.  Worse, it’s not an easy way to go.  The news silenced me.  I hadn’t known about the diagnosis.  What I did know was that Bruce had recently walked a marathon with Joe and that they had signed up to walk another one in the fall.  He’s living the life he has.  On facebook, someone had posted that Bruce is his hero.  Mine too.

Wednesday was a beautiful evening for walking: clear, cool, with trees all covered in their tender new leaves, a green that only exists for a couple of weeks mid-spring.  Living where we do, we have the blessing of seeing, repeatedly, mercilessly, undeniably, that it’s OK to break down, to come to a halt, and to start anew.

Yes, Elena is one of my running role models.  I’ll never achieve what she has because I’m not starting with the same body, but what inspires me even more than her national-level rankings is that she is setting marathon PRs in her 50s.  I want to think that my best running years might still be ahead of me.  I’d like to think that with time and determination and my love of running restored, I’ll someday be able to keep up with more of my talented running friends (but not Elena.) For now, though, I am content to keep walking.  It makes my sprained back feel better: loosens up tight muscles, helps me to straighten out my sore spots.  More importantly, it’s been helping me straighten out some things that matter more than muscles and ligaments. 

Even when we were both running, Bruce was never faster than I was, but it turns out that he, too, is one of my running role models.  Yes, I’d enjoy being fast, but if I had to choose one, I’d rather be courageous.  I’d like to know I could keep up with the winners, but rather than lament what I am not, Bruce reminds me to live out the life I have.  Eventually we will all slow down.  Sooner or later, the bodies of even the fastest runners will shut down, will crumble, will break.  This needn’t be the case with the spirit. 

There isn’t anyone, fast or not fast, who doesn’t have to live with mortality and make peace with it.  If you’ve been given a today, and if today you can still put one foot in front of the other, at any pace, consider this a blessing.  Enjoy the walk.

Mr. Awesome

Last night the kids played school. "Penelope" came home from the first day of school with a take-home folder and a form for me to fill out about my child. It was hand written by her teacher, "Mr. Awesome." Mr. Awesome was, appropriately, an awesome teacher. He sent home daily progress reports on how Penelope did with her soccer lessons and her xylophone lessons. He helped her make a craft: a flower in a flower pot that he himself cut out and decorated. School with Mr. Awesome is what all parents wish school could be for their children: full of creativity and excitement and plenty of individual attention. He's a dream come true.

When bedtime came, Penelope knocked on the door where Mr. Awesome was showering. He let her brush her teeth, wash her face, and go potty while he was in the shower. They talked, during these activities, about how it was that they share a bathroom. Turns out, one lives next door to the bathroom and the other lives right across from the bathroom. Both teacher and student were excited by this discovery. Mr. Awesome read Penelope her bedtime story, and when there was a little time left on the timer, he read her another.

After Penelope had gone to bed, Mr. Awesome confided in me that the next day there would be a new student Penelope's class. He was up after hours coming up with lesson plans.

My book club arrived late, but even after we were all gathered, someone noticed that Adam's bedroom light was still on. Mr. Awesome was supposed to set his timer for fifteen more minutes and then turn out the light. Recently, Mr. Awesome has discovered Roald Dahl and has been unable to stop reading Fantastic Mr. Fox even when he should be turning out the light. Mr. Awesome heard me coming up the stairs, and his light went out just as I was almost level with his door.

On the way to the camp-out today, Mr. Awesome was very pokey about getting dressed because it's really rather difficult to put on shoes and a sweatshirt with an open book in one's hand. He asked, finally, if he could take James and the Giant Peach with him to the cub scout camp-out. I warned him that there probably wouldn't be much time for reading and then said, "Of course." I understand completely. My insides are celebrating. Awesome.

Empty Space

This poem arrived in my e-mailbox today from Poem-a-Day:

Ghostology
by Rebecca Lindenberg

The whistler's
inhale,

the white space
between is

and not
or after a question,

a pause. Nothing
isn't song:
a leaf hatching
from its green shell,

frost whorling
across a windshield,

an open door
opening

Oh Lord, teach me to be thankful for the empty spaces. Help me to hear the silences as a part of the song.

I have never been one to deal well with emptiness. Or, rather, I have never been one to allow much emptiness to exist. On the rare occasion when I have chosen it, allowed emptiness can feel like a blessing.

I've been stiff and sore and oddly fatigued for the last week or two. I ran anyway. I thought maybe more running would make me feel better, more fit, more able to face the apathy and fatigue that seem to be haunting me.  Instead, I felt stiff and sore and sluggish while running more.  So I figured what I really needed was a good yoga class. Power yoga. Turns out that was NOT what I needed. I found myself unable to do some of the positions that I usually can do effortlessly.  Friday evening I was quite sore and quite stiff, so I planned to swim in the morning and see how that went before I planned my run. It was a big concession for me. By Saturday morning I was unable to move and nearly unable to handle the pain. For someone who runs and does triathlons for fun and who gave birth twice (once with pitocin) without pain killers, that's saying something.

And so I took Saturday off--mostly. I am a stay-at-home mom, a type-a, and an exercise addict, so taking a day off never ever happens. But it did. I stayed in bed for most of the morning. I got Gretchen dressed and sent the whole family out to do a Cub Scouts electronics recycling project without me. I slept, off and on, for most of the morning. I went downstairs for lunch, after it was mostly assembled by my husband. I did take Adam to his baseball practice, where I stood around, afraid to sit lest I get stuck and unable to get up. I came home exhausted and lay around some more. I slept through family dinner, which was OK since I had a dinner date with an old friend from high school. We had a delicious dinner followed by chocolate fondue and a walk that blistered up my feet but kept my back fairly limber. I had been invited to go see a friend's band play at a nearby bar, and although I wanted to see my friends there, I decided I had pushed myself far enough and went home to lie down again.

Sunday I marveled at how I had actually let myself off the hook multiple times. Realizing I could not bend enough to get into my swimsuit, I did not exercise. I didn't do the service project. I didn't make any meals or do any laundry or wash any dishes or floors. I considered the possibility that maybe the one who keeps me "on" those "hooks" is me. My husband picked up the slack, and he did it without accusation or complaint. My family did not eat as usual, but no one said anything about it. My friend never accused me of being wimpy for taking 20 seconds to stand up after dinner. The gym never called to ask why I hadn't come to swim. My running friends will be there next week and the week after.... Turns out, the emptiness was lovely. Freeing. And restful.

Of course, I couldn't repeat the performance on Sunday. I considered not going to church, not singing in the choir, but I went anyway. I sat through Adam's first piano recital, of course. I went through with the previously extended invitation to have friends over for pizza. Then when they wanted something other than pizza, I didn't hang myself all that high, but I did boil some pasta and heat up some store-bought pasta sauce. Nothing major. But not quite as empty as Saturday. I was not entirely off the hook.

Monday I woke up in much much worse pain. Saturday I didn't swim because I thought I couldn't bend enough to get into and out of my swimming suit. Monday I didn't swim because I was pretty sure I would get in the water (if I could get in the water, that is) push off the wall, immediately spasm, freak out, and drown. It seemed a poor risk.  Pain or no, I was going to have to be on duty again. Sure enough, while packing Adam’s lunch, I got stuck in the garage when I went to retrieve a juice box. I couldn't pull myself up the step without a railing. My legs wouldn't do it. Later, I cried, then coughed, then spasmed and screamed and hyperventilated, each while continuing the previous occupation. So I called the doctor.

The diagnosis: sprained back. Lumbar and sacroiliac. The treatment: rest.

Suddenly I find myself not only released from all of the activities that take up my time--kettlebell, running, swimming, yoga, laundry, washing floors, gardening, picking up after others, ridding showers of mildew, vacuuming, grocery shopping--but more or less forbidden them. Suddenly, what only days ago was freedom is now prison. A day off is lovely. Watching weeds invade the garden and dust gather and laundry piles grow is stressful. While I probably should take some time more regularly to be still and contemplate, I find that having nothing to do but be still and contemplate feels almost as painful as the injury itself.

To add to the emptiness, yesterday I was finally forced to face the reality that my covenant group is disbanding. I’ve seen it coming for a while. And most people are not coming to book club either. The plate that was, a few weeks ago, frustratingly full now has a fair amount of white space on it. I feel like suddenly most of me is empty space. In one week, I've lost most of my job, my covenant group, my running group, my yoga and kettlebell classes, and my race ambitions. I shouldn't even be sitting here writing, since sitting is one of the things that aggravates my back. I can’t sit and practice my horn or support the weight of it while standing. So what am I to do with all of this life I have?  More than once a day I find myself staring at nothing in particular or drifting off to sleep because the alternative is pondering the possibility or even likelihood that my existence is quite pointless.

Today I walked extra on the way home from preschool, walking being one of the few things I am allowed to do with myself. And, of course, I can think, not that I have that much to think about. I was struck, pretty forcefully, with the sudden understanding that I feel stagnant, stuck.  I recently read the autobiography of Beryl Markham, whose adventurous life in Africa was pretty much as far from mine as conceivable, and was stabbed by her assertion that “A life has to move or it stagnates.  Even this life, I think.  Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.” Ouch.  I’ve been doing the same thing for eight years now.  I have a master’s degree, but I have spent more years doing housework than any other full time pursuit in my life.  Oh, sure, the childcare needs have slowly shifted as my children have become potty trained and able to eat solid food and have begun to have sports practices and homework.  And I do change the details from day to day: what I make for dinner, which load of laundry I do.  It’s like the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Harry questions Sally about her dull recurring sex dream in which a faceless man rips off her clothes and Sally says, “Oh sometimes I change it a little.”  Harry asks how, and she says, “What I’m wearing.”  Should I mention that I have worn pretty much the same clothes every day for the last eight years, varying a bit by season?

I don't want to admit that I've been bored more or less since I quit my job eight years ago, but there it is, whether I like it or not. I love my children. I find raising children challenging to the point of being almost impossible, and I will readily agree with anyone who (condescendingly or sincerely) declares that raising children is the most important thing a person can do, but even so, it doesn't provide the sort of constant intellectual stimulation I seem hardwired to prefer. I need something else.  I have filled up my time with other pursuits to supplement the chores: band, running, triathlons, choir, covenant group, Bible study.  In a time when my body forbids physical activity, and the people who would potentially provide mental stimulation via book club or covenant group or Bible study are too busy with their own lives to concern themselves with my restlessness, I cannot deny that I am, in spite of my full calendar, miserably aimless and empty.  I survive from day to day.  I make the dinner and process the laundry.  Then the next day I make another dinner and wash a different load of laundry.  A dinner that will be eaten and forgotten.  Laundry that will be dirty again in a couple of days.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Repeat.  Indefinitely.  For years.

Oh, I know I should appreciate the blessings I have.  As Warren Zevon would sing, “Poor, poor pitiful me.”  I have not only enough of everything, I have too much.  And I have to wash it.  Boo hoo.  I have the luxury of lounging around whining about existential things while other people are worrying about where to sleep, how to stay warm, and whether or not they will get a meal today.  Those are the kinds of worries that are real, and the kinds of priorities that make lives like mine and Beryl Markham’s seem cushy and arrogant when we want something else.

So I am sidelined.  I’m not going to starve because of it.  Rather, I should probably use this time of forced stillness to figure out which direction I should move when I am able to go again.  When most of the buzz of constant motion is silenced, when all of the activity I use to distract myself from the emptiness is put on hold, what is left?  Who am I underneath the things that I do?  Why am I here?  If, as Lindenberg claims, “Nothing/ isn’t song,” this injury, this perceived emptiness has value.  Eventually, the whistler will exhale.

Holy Week: The Music

A friend asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would still believe in God if it wasn't for music. I'm not sure if he meant it as a serious question or a teasing question, but it felt serious internally. Would I? Hmm. Maybe not. And if not, is that entirely bad? Is it wrong that the way I physically experience the divine is through an art form? I rather think not.

Last night I stayed after the Good Friday service for choir rehearsal and after rehearsal to hear what my dad is singing at the early service on Easter. Sitting in the sanctuary at that time, I was privy to a conversation between Bill, the senior pastor, and Scott, the director of music, about the choir processing in at the beginning of the 9am service on Easter morning. This, I know, means that we will not be in the sanctuary for Widor's Toccata. It wasn't my place, of course, to mess with the high-church plans the staff was making for EASTER SUNDAY. Plus, I'm all for pulling out all of the stops on Easter. Give me Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus. Give me a trumpet fanfare on "Christ the Lord is Risen Today." Fill the sanctuary with so many flowers their scent wafts out into the street. Let's have everyone wear their very best clothes and hats with ribbons and shiny new shoes. Let's eat chocolate while we worship! Let's clap and cheer and weep and throw streamers and hug and kiss and slap each other's backs and butts and hands. Let's take buckets of sidewalk chalk and hundreds of balloons and festoon every block of the downtown with color. So yes, by all means, let's have the choir wear robes and process. But, as I told Scott, half seriously, I will QUIT CHOIR if being in the choir means I miss the Toccata.

At first, I had a hard time believing the Good Friday service last night. My mind kept going elsewhere.  I was fully present at the Maundy Thursday service, but it took a long time for me to get to Good Friday. The Bible readings helped, of course, but what really moved me to grief was the "Agnus Dei" Scott had written. I was blessed to get to sing the solo descant, and by the end, I was singing it for the death of my best friend, for the loss of all hope in a new world. Afterwards, there was darkness. There was regret. There was sorrow. And then on the last verse of the last hymn, Scott did something with the organ that made my heart break. I was crying, nearly weeping. I am a word person. I love the Bible. But music. Music. Music expresses what words cannot come anywhere near. Of all of the people in my church who have contributed to what faith I have, Scott probably has the single largest share. There maybe are not words enough make Good Friday real again, 2000 years later, on the other side of the globe, in a different culture. But there certainly are organ pipes enough. There are a capella choir pieces. I cannot fully describe a broken heart, but Scott can break your heart for you, make you feel it all over again.

Likewise, Widor's Toccata, for me, is Easter. It is the mystery and anticipation of seeing the stone rolled away, a high and quick obbligato. Then, underneath that racing heartbeat, it is a joyful proclamation, heard over and over and over. Surely the voice of an angel would replay in one's mind endlessly: “He is not here; He is risen!” Those two things: physical response and exclamation, right hand and left hand.  It lifts the heart, or swells it. It quickens the pulse. And then.... Oh, the pedal tones! You can feel them in your rib cage and the soles of your feet. They shake the church. They are the sudden understanding of what all this means. Not a quick exuberant joy, not a sharp in-your-face kind of victory, but a dawning realization that the very foundations of civilization have been rolled away with that one tomb boulder. Oh, we had lost hope, but it is possible that Jesus was right all along, that his way is the way, and that you can't kill that kind of love with weapons or betrayal or armies or governments. God is bigger than that.  Big enough to shatter buildings and institutions with the vibration of his voice and big enough and loving enough not to do so but rather to starve in the wilderness with us, to carry a cross with us, to drink defeat, to wear humiliation, to weep, to die and then still to live. I cannot describe the power of that emotion with words—certainly not better than the authors of the Bible and the thousands of saints and scholars who have written since—but I feel it in my body and my soul when I hear Widor's Toccata.  For a few short minutes a year on Easter morning, I hear the voice of God, and God says “I AM.”  Or, rather, God sings: this.  This! Believe. Rejoice. Carry on.

Would I still believe if there was no music? Lord, I hope never to find out.

Holy Week

April and her four kids were here from Monday evening to Wednesday afternoon. Oh, it's wonderful to be with April. Even after not seeing her for months and months and not talking all that much either, there is no period of reacquaintance. The time and space that have been between us are immediately irrelevant. Although she is rarely a part of my daily life, I feel most myself when I am with her. There is never any question that I'm not going to be good enough in any way. I already am. And this is not because she only sees me at my best. She knows some of the messy little corners of my life. She has seen me sick and tired and discouraged and pregnant and hungry and indecisive. If April's love was ever a thing that I needed to earn, somehow I earned it long long ago. More likely, though, I think that I never earned it. It just flows from her generous and loving heart. It took no effort or decision. I don't believe it was earned or that it will be revoked.

Being around April makes me a better person. It never crosses my mind to do anything just to impress her, but without meaning to I strive to do things she would approve of or admire. When I do something well as a parent and April comments upon it, I want to be a good parent all of the time. April said once that she thinks I am brave, and so when my courage fails, I remember that, and I am brave. April thinks my house is lovely and clean, and when I remember that, I clean my house with a happier heart. April admires my cooking, and I wish that I could cook for her more often. April thinks I am smart and helpful and caring, and so I am, and so I wish to be. Not because April will love me more but because I wish to live up to the love I already have. I do not want to disappoint April or to make her sad. And yet, I trust her with my weaknesses, knowing that she carries my hurts with her but will never use them against me. They will never make her love me less.

It occurs to me, as I write about April, that this sort of love sounds strangely familiar. April is not God. She is not perfect. I do not mean to imply that she is or to burder her with such a comparison. But because of her, I begin to see how God might be.

Tomorrow is Good Friday. Sunday is Easter. It's a baffling time of year to be a Christian. Why must Christ be killed? I don't quite buy any of the major atonement theories. I don't like the picture they paint of God. But if I think of Jesus as a friend like April, someone whose love is absolutely certain, whose judgment is more like compassion than verdict, who has endless hope in me and in my capacity to be someone truly wonderful regardless of the confused and flawed human I have been and still am, who would look upon my worst crimes not with condemnation but with agony over the gap between the faith she has in me and my behavior, I begin to understand. God is that kind of love. The life of Jesus says to us that that kind of love is what changes the world, not with demands or punishments or threats or force, but one friend at a time, one day at a time. Good Friday and Easter Sunday promise us that it's a love so powerful I cannot kill it. I cannot ruin it. I can refuse to interact with it; I can forget to spend time on it; I could probably even ask it to leave me alone, but it will still be there year after year after year. It's always exactly what I need. Even if I lose faith in that kind of love, it still has faith in me.

How can I not go forth in confidence having experienced that kind of love? How can I want less than to show that kind of love in return? How can greed or hate or selfishness or even apathy ever triumph in the end if everyone lives with that kind of love? It cannot. It does not.

Holy week.



John 13:34
"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."

It could always be worse

Yesterday, on the way home from visiting my grandmother, we toured an enormous dairy farm. The farm is so very very large that approximately 80 calves are born there every day. With multiple births an hour, they can make the birth process a tourist attraction, and so we were called into the birthing barn in time to see a cow deliver.

It began with what looked like a couple of little hoofs protruding from the cow's rear, just under her tail. As she labored and the feet came out further and went back in, of course some poop came out from pretty close to the same region we were all watching so intently. This was a fascinating development to my seven-year-old son, who happened to be seated between me and my mother. For some reason, he chose to ask his Nana his questions in an exchange that was pretty amusing. My four-year-old daughter was seated on the other side of my mom, and she was apparently listening in.

Son: Ew. There's poop coming out while she's having her baby.
Nana: Yeah, birth is messy.
Son: Were you messy?
Nana: I had to be cleaned up afterwards.
(Short pause.)
Son: Where did it come out?
(Pause.)
Nana: Between my legs. I'm not built just like a cow, so it's a little different.
(Long pause.)
Son: I'm glad I'm not a girl!
(Very long pause.)
Daughter: I'm glad I'm not a cow!!

First Fast

In the midst

I think that if John Wesley had the job of planning a menu, grocery shopping, preparing meals and then cleaning up after them, and if, during the rest of the day he was taking care of a preschooler and being repeatedly asked to play rabbits or to provide snacks, he might have found fasting less of a prayerful activity.  At least, that’s how I find it. 

Perhaps I am just a wimp.  I ate breakfast only seven hours ago.  I had a cup of chai with soy milk mid-morning.  I’ll eat a later-than-usual dinner with my family.  I’ll get in maybe ten hours at most.  I’m not even doing a full grown-up fast, but my head feels funny already, and I am very hungry.  That sounds silly to say while fasting, but there it is.  I am aware, though, that the reason my body feels so very hungry is that it is used to being fed constantly.  If I did this more often, or if I was actually, out of need, starving, seven hours since my last meal would not be such a big deal.  I am spoiled and soft and self-centered.  A wimp.

But I am not a wimp.  Four days ago I ran a marathon.  More to the point, I ran those last six miles when every cell in my body was asking to please please please stop.  I did not run them quickly, but I was still running when I crossed the finish line.  Perhaps I should have run them more prayerfully.  And surely I ought to be fasting more prayerfully as well. 

It just doesn’t feel holy.  Or maybe it just doesn’t feel holy yet.  It feels hard.  I am in the habit of eating rather constantly.  It was hard not to grab handful of almonds as I was preparing lunch or putting away groceries or cleaning dishes.  When a dribble of applesauce stood on the lip of the jar, my instinct was to scoop it up with a finger and eat it.  Packing (and unpacking) carrots for Adam’s lunch, my hand could almost not help picking one up and popping it in my mouth.  And a little voice in my head kept telling me that those little crumbs of food wouldn’t count.  I would still be fasting.  And it’s at least true that I would still have been hungry.  But just being hungry isn’t the point.

My woozy head, then, is asking, “Well, what is the point?”  Why am I doing this?

The wrong (but also true) answers are that I am fasting because it is part of my religious tradition, because I have never done it, and because I am afraid of it.  Isaiah writes about fasting (that you shouldn’t just do it because of tradition.)  Jesus fasts (for forty days!!)  Jesus tells his disciples how to go about fasting (not in public—so should I not post this?)  Saints are infamous for fasting.  John Wesley fasted.  We talk about fasting in my covenant group and, oh yeah, it’s in our covenant.  We talked about it at the retreat I helped plan.  Apparently, fasting is a way to draw closer to God.  But aside from the time about a year ago when I had to fast for the 12 hours prior to my surgery, I have never tried to fast.  I’ve given up chocolate.  I’ve given up dessert altogether.  But I’ve never given up food.  I am wildly dependent on food.  I’ve seen me without food (for, oh, a couple of hours at times,) and it’s a frightening thing.  My mind refuses to focus, and my memories of these times are like memories of dreams.  Lights are too harsh and my perception of distance is skewed.  My speech slows down and my movements falter a bit.  I stumble rather than flit.  The world and my place in it become so heavy and desperate: no way I can possibly endure another minute of whatever benign activity is annoying me.  And then my husband says to me, “You need to eat.”  I will continue, with slow and slurred speech, to insist that whatever situation I am bemoaning is the real cause of my misery.  My husband will not respond with anything other than, “I think you need to eat.”  Generally about half an hour after I’ve had a good meal, everything is better.  Magic.  Food.  I am afraid of intentionally getting really really hungry if accidental hunger can have those effects.  A part of me wants to try to fast just to face down the fear, to show myself that I do not need to be afraid, which is perhaps to some a noble reason, but it’s not a Godly one, I don’t think.

I should be fasting as prayer.  I might be fasting in solidarity.  I should be fasting as a reminder of what I have and from whom all blessings flow.  I am fasting as self-discipline.

Honestly, when it comes to appreciating my blessings, I think I’m above average.  Above average is not the goal, of course.  Complete and utter humility and constant gratitude are the goal.  Without God, I would have nothing and be nothing, and this is a taste (pardon the pun) of that.  So I guess this is supposed to be teaching me my complete reliance on God. Is it?  Maybe.  We’ll see where I am in a couple of hours. 

I’m not all that bad at self-discipline either.  I regularly get up well before dawn to run interval or hill repeats.  I sometimes get in nine miles before breakfast.  I run when I don’t feel like running, sometimes even when it hurts.  I like meat but haven’t eaten any in over a year, even right after a marathon when we were in a little blue-collar town with only meat-based restaurants.

I’m not sure I’m getting the prayer thing.  But then, I’m a novice pray-er.  I was sort of hoping that fasting would make prayer easy, like music does for me, but I suspect that fasting as a form of prayer is an advanced technique.  If anything, the hunger and the discipline, the not putting the handful of food in my mouth, is a reminder that is a day set apart for something different.  If I am not constantly communing with God, at least I am behaving in a way that makes me remember some aspect of God.  How many people in my church have brought up that the true order of faith is “behave, belong, believe.”  So I behave.  Well, in this small thing I do.

The solidarity thing makes sense to me.  It reverberates within and sets to singing my decision not to eat meat.  I abstain from meat because if everyone ate meat, there would not be enough earth to feed earth’s people.  Already, there is not food to feed earth’s people.  I cannot solve that problem, but I want to acknowledge it constantly.  I want not to contribute to it.  I want to stand as witness to the fact that we can live another way.  Heck, we can run marathons another way!  Of course, I still eat plenty.  I might even eat too much on a regular basis.  The fact that I am, with a lifestyle choice, acknowledging the issue of hunger is, to me, a matter of holiness, but how much more holy to actually be hungry as well once in a while.  Ah, now there we are starting to pluck some of my heartstrings, to get my soul into the song.  Perhaps is it just my brand of faith that I would rather do something for other humans than for God?  Perhaps Jesus and Isaiah would be OK with that sort of religiosity?

Day after: Reflection

The afternoon and evening went well.  I took Adam to his basketball practice, and while I was interacting with some other moms there, people I have come to consider friends, the hunger didn’t bother me.  It was still there, of course, but it was just there.  It wasn’t eating at me.  It was just sitting there with me.  I didn’t mind.  I even, in a way, liked it.  I liked that on the outside I looked normal (I hope) but had something different going on inside, a little secret between me and God.  Interesting that Jesus admonishes his followers not to fast in public.  I understand his point.  I would not want my fasting to become a topic of conversation in that setting.  I’m certain it would have made the fasting about me: how religious I am (I have nothing against being religious, but that label always feels false to me,) how hungry I must be, how hard it would be, etc.  Ick.  That certainly would have made the hunger less holy and more disturbing. 

We had left-overs for dinner, and although I had intended all along to break my fast at dinnertime, and I did, I felt like somehow staying in the spirit of the fast.  So I served everyone else first, and I ate the half-serving of sweet potato chili that was left.  I had some broccoli and a few crackers.  It was a meal, but it wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy my hunger.  It wasn’t even as much as I would ordinarily eat after eating all day.  I did not have my usual post-meal piece of chocolate.  I went to choir still hungry.  I went to bed still hungry, something I rarely do.

I am very aware of the fact that as fasts go, mine was very small, but it was a beginning.  It was an attempt.  In looking back at why I did it, and thinking back about what I got out of it, I think it is an exercising worth repeating. 

I believe it did make me more aware of the plenty around me.  It made me conscious of how easy it is to pop something healthy and sustaining in my mouth without thought.   Yes, we say grace before meals, but I do I say grace while I am making my son’s lunch and sample the sunbutter?  Do I give thanks for the left-over popcorn I munch while I’m cleaning up the kitchen?  Do I remember that every mid-day handful of almonds is a great bounty of nutrients and therefore a blessing?  No.  Today I will, I hope.

It was also, I think, a sort of prayer.  It wasn’t always an uplifting prayer.  It wasn’t a prayer with words or a clear direction.  But it was a way of reminding myself that I am trying to be with God, and I am pretty sure that God gives partial credit for effort.  Paul tells us, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). Hopefully the Spirit did something with the fast, small though it was.

The most profound affect it had on me, however, was one that I originally thought was not a holy one: I faced down a fear.  When I wrote that yesterday, it seemed a very secular reason to do something.  It is true that a person not seeking God might undertake some adventure simply to face down a fear.  But, as I realized yesterday, the process of releasing a fear is also a holy one.  For me, it was the most holy result of my fast. 

I realized with a start last night that fear is a thing that ties us to this world.  This time last week I was afraid of the marathon.  I was afraid of disappointment.  I was afraid of pain.  I was afraid of despair.  And yes, this time yesterday, I was afraid of hunger.  I was afraid of what these things would do to me and what I, in turn, would do.  But in the last week I have been in pain.  I have been tired to the point of tears.  I have felt despair at ever finishing the last three miles of a marathon.  I have been hungry.  And I have come out the other side.  These things are not exactly pleasant, but there is great value in knowing for certain that if they are demanded of me, I can do them.  I need not turn down a call, should one come, because I am a slave to fear.  The Bible says that perfect love casts out fear, but I suspect that, to some extent, fear also prevents perfect love.  If I am afraid of discomfort, I am living for myself.  If I am living in fear, I am tied to my security.  I am tethered to food.  I am tethered to pride.  I must think first of avoiding my fears rather than thinking first of living fully.  If I am about food, I am not about the life that food enables.  I do not believe that God wants me to be hungry, but I also do not think that God wants my life to be about not being hungry.  As for pain, humiliation, and despair, Psalms 51:17 says, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”  God is not looking for perfection and complete competence.  God is looking for us to be willing to walk into whatever lies ahead of us and not think first about whether or not we have packed enough snacks.