Five Dollars and Some Common Sense

An Invitation to Follow Me to My New Blog

2011-12-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

I have been invited to join the ranks of bloggers over at Patheos, a web portal on religion and spirituality. It's a great time for me to renew my commitment to blogging regularly and reach out to some new audiences, with my book coming out in just a few weeks.

So, as of today, I am discontinuing my Five Dollars and Some Common Sense blog. However, I will continue to write about parenthood, faith, and disability over at Patheos. Please click on over to the new blog, and subscribe via e-mail or RSS feed. I will occasionally repost or rework popular posts from Five Dollars..., so some of the material on the new blog will be familiar to you. I will be writing plenty of new stuff as well.

I hope you'll follow me to my new blog, comment, and share what I write. Many thanks...and I'll see you over at Patheos!

The Cathedral is Shaken, and So Am I

2011-08-26T07:27:00.000-04:00

When I lived and worked in Washington, D.C., the Washington National Cathedral was a spiritual home, a neighborhood landmark, and a symbol of how God is both intimately engaged in the world and also transcends it. Over at the Daily Episcopalian, I offer this meditation on how the Cathedral's earthquake damage has both shaken me and reminded me that God can never be shaken.

A Reminder of All I Have Forgotten

2011-07-23T15:05:00.001-04:00

For the past two weeks, while the kids took swimming lessons at a local outdoor pool, a friend and I camped ourselves in a shady spot just next to the park's wading pool. I had a front-row seat to the parade of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers arriving with their parents to get relief from the record-breaking heat. I became captivated by watching these little ones, and a little heartbroken too, at how long ago and far away my own days with infants and toddlers seem now, with my youngest child heading to kindergarten and my oldest to middle school.

A little boy, I'd guess between 18 months and two years, came with his mom every day. This child's whole-body joy at being in the water was something to savor. He careened around the pool, swinging his legs out to the side with each step. He looked constantly a little off-kilter and in danger of falling face first into the water—which he did often, only to bounce right back up and continue his drunken-man wading pool dance.

One day, I noticed a mother walking up the hill to the wading pool with a preschool-aged boy and a baby girl in tow. The girl was clearly in the earliest stages of confident walking. She managed to stay upright, but her chubby little legs were still markedly bowed, and she walked with the deliberate, exaggerated waddle of those still adjusting to life on two legs. As they neared the pool, the baby girl came upon a wide crack in the asphalt path filled with mud. She stopped and considered this obstacle, then carefully but deliberately put one Robeez-clad foot into the muddy dip and, seeing that the ground there was reliably solid, stepped forward. As she moved ahead, she stopped once to look back, eyes wide in appreciation for this surprising little bit of earth.

I couldn't keep my eyes off these little ones. My children are still plenty young, interested in checking out the unexpected muddy dips in their well-worn daily paths. But they are no longer quite as capable of such singlemindedness, this giving of their full attention, brain and body, to the physical experiences of water and mud and the myriad ways that a human being can put one foot in front of the other. They are more socially aware than they were as toddlers and babies, focused on who is and isn't with them, what others are and are not doing. They calculate their actions partly in response to those factors. Their love of water goes beyond the tactile pleasures of splashing and bubbles and reflected light. Now it includes practicing swim strokes, making up games with their friends, and insisting on goggles because they don't like the way the water feels in their eyes. The muddy dip in the road is more and more often just something to be stepped over on the way to the next thing.

I kept wondering if the moms were paying attention, really paying attention, to their children. Did the little boy's mom notice his mouth shaped into an "O" of delight? Did the baby girl's mom take note of the gaping distance between her baby's sturdy legs—all curves and rolls—and my seven-year-old's lanky limbs with their sharply defined calf muscles, their bruised and knobby knees?

Really, my question was this: Did I pay attention when my children were that little? Because, while I know they did ecstatic drunken-man circuits in the wading pool or under the yard sprinkler, while I know they learned to walk on fat-rolled legs and marveled at tiny surprises—feathers and shells and grass, the sound that newly shod feet make on gravel—I can't easily conjure up images of how they looked and moved and sounded then. And I wonder, is this just the way it is? Is it impossible to really, in a palpable way, remember each stage of our children's lives, no matter how much attention we pay?

I know I paid attention. I know I looked at my children when they were babies and toddlers and said to myself, "Look at them. Really look. Because even right now, they are already changing and growing into something and someone else." Yet, I still can't really remember. Which is, I suppose, why we parents take so many photos and videos. I wonder how parents in pre-photographic times bore the grief of knowing that their children's babyhoods were utterly lost to them, knowing that while they might remember particular incidents—what room the baby took his first steps in, how their toddler daughter giggled at the dog's antics—they have nothing concrete to remind them of their babies' fuzzy heads, chubby cheeks, dimpled hands, square little feet, gurgling laughter, high-pitched voices.

Although perhaps it was easier to be a parent in the times before we were so compelled to capture our children's lives on film. Sometimes I don't want to even look at my kids' baby photos and videos, because all they do is remind me how much I've forgotten. And I realize that the children who are so here today, whose bodily presence is so familiar that I cannot imagine a Leah other than the one whose long suntanned limbs are so often stretched out on our den couch while she devours her latest read, a Meg other than the one whose gap-toothed grin expresses her sheer delight with the scooter-riding, game-playing, friend-loving opportunities that each day brings, or a Ben other than the one who is equally happy sucking his thumb with his head in my lap and belting out Hannah Montana songs from the "stage" he has created with our living room sofa—even these children, so incarnate, will one day become something and someone else. And I will struggle to remember, really remember them as they are today. No matter how much attention I pay.

But I pay attention anyway, as much as I can amid the necessary distractions of schedules and chores. This dynamic is just one more reminder of how foolish and full of paradox this endeavor is, this bearing and raising of children. We welcome them knowing that one day we will say goodbye. We shelter them so that eventually they can leave us. We create boundaries with the expectation that they will test them. We give them all that we have and are, so that they will be able to get along without us. We pay attention, though we cannot possibly remember all the sights and sounds, the scents and textures, the baby steps and joyful dances that mark our days as the parents of children.

My Cancer Playlist: Wallowing, F-Bombs, and How We Suffer

2011-07-15T05:30:00.002-04:00

This winter, when I was being treated for breast cancer, I created a new iPod playlist titled simply “Cancer.” Cancer, as crises of various magnitudes tend to do, made me impatient with anything that felt like a waste of time, including listening to music that didn’t tap into something I was feeling, or wanted to feel, or didn’t want to feel but was unsure how not to feel.

My cancer was completely treatable. Knowing how hard even that sort of cancer was, I have a new appreciation for people whose cancer is terminal, requires chemo, or causes great pain. Mine was none of that. It was hard. But it could have been much, much harder.

That said, it was a bad winter. Two surgeries, one each in November and December. Seven weeks of daily radiation—the same weeks when there were not merely inches, but feet of snow on the ground. I understood for the first time what depression really feels like, because I felt it. I stopped enjoying things that usually provide reliable oases of pleasure during the mundane, repetitive routines of family life—coffee, food, books. Was my mood due to my cancer treatment, the gray and cold winter, being cooped up daily with a five-year-old who was completely ready for kindergarten a full year before he was eligible? All of the above.

Music, however, never completely lost its heartening power. So I made a playlist of exactly the songs I wanted to listen to. And I listened to them. A lot. In the kitchen when I was fixing lunches or cleaning up supper. When I’d force myself to take a walk on a relatively balmy 35-degree day. When I was cleaning a bathroom.

My cancer treatment ended in late February, and eventually, even this record-breaking winter ended. I undertook a reinvention of sorts. Cut and dyed my hair. Started exercising six days a week. Joined Weight Watchers. And I put away my cancer playlist.

Recently, I took a look at the playlist again. The thing about suffering is that we usually can’t make it go away. We just have to get through it. What helps us to do that, to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to feel not so alone, to nourish that bright spot of hope that assures us it won’t always be this hard? My song choices, I think, say a lot about both what it feels like to dwell in the shadows of a painful period, and what helps us the most during those times.

We need to feel what we are feeling. I did some wallowing this winter, and chose songs that helped me wallow by putting words to my more unruly emotions. Mumford and Sons’ White Blank Page includes a line about “swelling rage,” in which the music actually swells and the lead singer’s voice takes on a menacing rasp. The line is not just about rage; it embodies rage. Whenever I heard that song, I became more aware of how angry I was that my winter was being stolen out from under me.

I hope my friends and family would attest that I did not go through this winter in a constant state of swelling rage. We need to feel what we are feeling—rage, grief, frustration, hopelessness—but we also need to live our lives without poisoning the very air we breathe. The angry and sad music I chose (Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Sarah McLachlan’s entire newest album, written in the wake of her divorce) helped me to wallow in sadness and anger now and then, and then set them aside so I could continue to work, prepare meals, and help my kids with their homework.

Profanity has a purpose. I chose several songs simply because of their most excellent use of profanity, such as It’s Been Awhile by Stain’d, and Little Lion Man, again by Mumford and Sons.

I have one foot in the evangelical world, where there is some disagreement over whether profanity has a place. When I wrote for Christianity Today about the adults-only picture book phenomenon, Go the F* to Sleep, many readers agreed that the author’s use of the f-bomb effectively gave voice to parents’ fatigue and frustration when their kids won’t settle down to bed. But a few were shocked that a Christian would even consider having such a book in her possession, and had trouble disentangling the f-word as used in the book from its sexual connotations. A Christian author whom I admire once wrote a blog post about how he wishes that Little Lion Man included the line, “I really messed it up this time,” instead of, “I really f-d it up this time,” because then he could allow his son to appreciate the song.

I disagree, with gusto. There is a world of difference in tone and intent between “messed it up,” and “f-d it up.” In the midst of my frigid and tedious winter, I needed some good profanity to adequately describe how much it all sucked. Sometimes an f-bomb is the exact right word.

Laughter helps. My favorite type of humor tends to be a little bit dark; I prefer biting satire to the latest Internet video of a cat (although this one is pretty funny). I also gravitate toward irreverence. Perhaps that’s an inevitable result of going through life as a Good Girl.

My cancer playlist included the Crash Test Dummies’ God Shuffled His Feet, in which God, hosting a picnic on the seventh day of creation, is stumped by his creatures’ questions (Will we get haircuts in heaven?). He responds with a story about a boy with blue hair, which leaves the people scratching their heads: “Is that a parable, or a very subtle joke?” I also included Sublime’s What I Got, which besides some good profanity, includes some black humor about just how bad life can get (“Life is too short so love the one you got, 'cause you might get run over or you might get shot") before asserting that “Love is what I got. Just remember this.”

This sort of humor suited those icy, dark winter days just perfectly.

The best kind of hope is the honest kind. My playlist did not include any bubbly pop songs about how lucky I am to be loved (though I am). But there were plenty of songs about real hope, the kind that acknowledges that life is hard and painful. Really, those kinds of songs made up the bulk of the list: the Indigo Girls’ All That We Let In (“You may not see it when it’s sticking to your skin, but we’re better off for all that we let in”); the Counting Crows’ Long December (“It’s been a long December, and there’s reason to believe that this year will be better than the last”); and Pearl Jam’s The End (“I just want to grow old”).

My favorite song on the whole list is, again, from Mumford and Sons (their debut album was essentially my soundtrack for the winter). From After the Storm: “Night has always pushed up day…There will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears, when love will not break your heart but dismiss your fears. Get over your hill and see what you find there…”

Christians are often really bad at dealing with suffering, resorting too readily to platitudes rather than just keeping each other company, side by side in the dark. Over on my other blog, Choices That Matter, guest writer Mary Caler reflects on Christian responses to suffering, particularly the suffering of infertility. I encourage you to pop over and read her essay, because it offers some valuable material for Christians (or anyone) who wants to be present to people in pain.

My cancer playlist echoes Mary’s main thesis: When we are in pain, we don’t need platitudes about how God is working for our good. We need space in which to name our pain, even wallow a little bit, the assurance that we are not the first people who have felt this way, a laugh or two, and hard-won hope that acknowledges how very painful life can be.

In Defense of Blogging: A Wordy Blogger's Manifesto

2011-07-10T16:25:00.003-04:00

Like many bloggers, I have a love/hate relationship with blog comment sections. On the one hand, I crave comments. They are a concrete sign that people actually read what I write, and find my words engaging enough to respond. But comments can also leave me scratching my head in perplexity, banging my head against the wall in frustration, or shaking my head at the sorry state of public discourse.

Some of the most headache-inducing comments disparage bloggers outright and/or misunderstand the nature of blogging, either subtly or with a good dose of vitriol. Such comments show up on nearly every blog I’ve written for or regularly read, no matter the topic. So I’ve decided to list the most common types of blog-disparaging and blogger-insulting comments, and explain why they are so maddening.

I don’t expect this little rant to transform comment culture, which is a notoriously difficult corner of the blogosphere to manage. But perhaps I can convince just a few of the more thoughtful commenters out there to think twice before they resort to one of these worn and faulty arguments. And maybe I can give my poor head a break from all that scratching and banging and shaking.

Common Criticisms of Bloggers in General

“Bloggers just want attention.” — Well, duh. Yes, we want attention. Anyone who writes anything for public consumption wants people to read it. Blogging is a spectacularly bad thing to do if you don’t want attention.

Most bloggers spend much time, energy, and angst figuring out how to get more traffic. This is not just ego-stroking. Professional writers and aspiring authors are expected to have an Internet presence, which usually includes a dedicated web site and some kind of blog. Newspaper and magazine blogs bring traffic to media web sites, engage readers in conversation about published articles, and provide more content than can fit onto print pages. People who are (or aspire to be) recognized as experts in their field often blog to share expertise and get the attention of potential customers, clients, fans, supporters, or employers.

So yes, bloggers want attention. That’s the point of blogging.

“Bloggers are self-absorbed.” — This criticism is often lobbed at bloggers with memoir-type blogs, particularly women who write about the domestic sphere. “Do these people really think that other people want to read about their unending piles of laundry, anxious kids, and food allergies?” ask the upstanding commenters.

Yes. Yes, bloggers do think that other people want to read about those things, which is why bloggers write about them.

Do people want to read all of that? If a blogger has become successful— he or she has a loyal reader following in the hundreds or thousands, and/or makes some money via blogging, and/or has secured paid writing gigs (magazine articles, book contracts) as a result of blogging—then the answer is an unequivocal “yes.”

Bloggers (and other writers) can get away with writing about themselves if in doing so, they are providing something of value to readers. Unless bloggers figure out a way to make their personal stuff compelling for readers, they’ll be blogging for a bit fat audience of none. Successful bloggers, even those who focus on their own day-to-day lives, offer something valuable to readers: they have a compelling voice, they reliably make people think hard or laugh out loud, they give good advice, they make readers feel not so alone, they share useful information, they inspire.

“Bloggers are lazy.” —To beat a not-quite-dead horse: Successful bloggers are good at what they do. They are often excellent writers. Or they may just be good-enough writers, but possess an irresistible voice, keen powers of observation, or stores of knowledge about some topic of interest to a niche audience. As is obvious from the dismal state of high school essays, grammatically bankrupt e-mail correspondence, and the tendency for competent adults to break into cold sweats when asked to write something for the boss, writing well is hard work. Many people not only can’t write well, they don’t even want to if they don’t have to.

Bloggers have to write both well and diligently. Conventional wisdom says that successful bloggers post a minimum of two or three times a week, every week. (By that measure, I am clearly not a successful blogger. I’m working on it.) Conventional wisdom also says that effective blog posts are between 500 and 800 words. Do you know how hard it is to write something worthy in so few words? It’s really, really hard. Which is why, on my personal blogs, I rarely come even close to those limits (this post is a case in point). When I write for other blogs, I usually spend much more time paring my posts down than writing them.

A blog disparager on Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode blog said of mom bloggers: “I’d much prefer mothers and women become successful because of actually achievements, not because of some amusing dribble they wrote on their blog.” I guess this commenter doesn’t know that writing well, and doing so week after week with enough originality for people to keep reading, is an “actually” [sic] achievement and not just “dribble.” [sic]

“Bloggers need to get a real job.” — This is one of several corollaries to the “Bloggers are lazy” criticism. Others are, “Bloggers clearly have too much time on their hands,” or, my favorite, “I could never blog because I’m too busy working my real job.”

News flash: For most of us, blogging is our job. And a real one too! Or at least, it’s part of our job. A journalist might blog as well as write for print media. A writer might blog in addition to publishing books and securing freelance work. A caterer might share recipes and party tips on a blog, and thus attract new customers. Even those much-maligned “mom bloggers” might earn a few (or many) dollars by selling ads on their blog, getting a book contract, writing for other media outlets, or securing speaking engagements.

“Bloggers are just in it for the money.” — Snort.

OK, seriously. If we were just in it for the money, that indeed would be worth criticizing, because there’s not a whole heck of a lot of money to be made blogging in and of itself. There’s no great blogging empire out there doling out commissions based on how many page views or comments we get.

For many of us, blogging earns a very small bit of money. I get paid for some of the posts I write for other blogs. Some bloggers sell ad space. When blogging earns little or no income, we’re usually doing it for another reason, whether personal (conversing with like-minded folk about a topic of interest) or professional (to build an author platform, sell books, attract clients, etc.).

A relative few bloggers earn a substantial living via blogging. They work many hours a week to maintain a viable blog that will attract thousands of readers a day. Financially successful bloggers will tell you that the actual blog writing takes up a minority of their (substantial) working hours. The rest of the time, they are vetting ads, reviewing products, writing articles for other publications, or traveling to speaking engagements.

So yes, I suppose you could say that bloggers are in it for the money, seeing as most people are in their jobs for the money.

Common Criticisms of Specific Blog Posts

“It is inappropriate/bad form/not nice to publicly criticize or “use” another blogger’s arguments in your own post.” — This criticism comes up frequently when one of my colleagues at Christianity Today women’s blog writes something in response to some other blogger’s post. The criticism is more likely when we’re covering a personal topic. For example, we’ve recently had posts covering marriage and divorce that referred to other bloggers’ personal experiences, as they shared them on their own blogs. But the criticism is not limited to personal topics. This week, one of my colleagues responded to another blogger’s post that had to do with politics, and a commenter accused her of “using” the other blogger for her own purposes.

In every case, the other bloggers were public figures, for whom blogging is only one facet of their work. My fellow writers were not stumbling on the wee-hours ramblings of some unknown housewife, shining a spotlight on an unwilling and unprepared subject. They were responding to the (presumably) considered and polished writings of well-known people.

Blogs, except for those intended for a small private audience (such as a family blog for sharing news and photos, which should be protected by privacy settings), are part of our public discourse. And to go back to point #1: Bloggers want attention.

It is completely appropriate for a blogger to publicly respond, even critically, to material posted publicly on another blog. Most bloggers will actually welcome the attention, even if it is critical (so long as it’s thoughtful criticism, and not nutty). “There’s no bad publicity” often applies in the blogging world. When a blogger responds to another blogger’s post, it will likely drive more traffic back to the original post, and most bloggers will welcome the new page views.

“I wish you had said this, this, and this about your topic.” — No kidding. So do I. But in about 800 words, there’s a lot I can’t say. When you read a blog post, you have to trust the writer’s integrity and sources more than you do for longer articles. When I write that, "In my experience, such as such is true," you have to trust that I’ve actually had experiences to support my thesis, because I don’t have enough words to describe them in detail. When I write that, “Studies have shown that…” you have to trust that I’ve actually seen the studies; I might link to one or two, but blog posts generally don’t include footnotes or extensive explanation of sources.

By all means, use the comment section to ask the writer to clarify or elaborate. Most of us are all too happy to participate in the comment section, and would much rather engage in constructive conversation than defend ourselves against nastiness. But strive to comment on what the blogger actually managed to cram into 800 words, rather than pointing out all of the nuances he or she failed to cover. We are well aware of all that we left out, or had to cut out. All those precious words we lovingly caressed into life are in a heap on our virtual cutting room floor. Believe me when I say it’s more painful for us than it is for you.

There’s much more I could say in defense of bloggers and blogging. About how blogs covering domestic and traditionally female-oriented topics (cooking, household management, parenting, etc.) are more readily disparaged than those covering professional and traditionally male-oriented topics (politics, science, medicine, etc.). Or about how odd it is that all the people who think blogging is such a wasteful, pointless way to spend time so often visit blogs to render these opinions from their lofty perch above the bloggers’ muck.

But my word count long ago became unseemly, and I’ve already wasted too much time this afternoon engaging in my money-grubbing non-job.

Because He Cleans the Shower Drain: A Father's Day Tribute

2011-06-19T02:35:00.001-04:00

Today is Father's Day, and honestly, it won't be that different from any other Sunday. Daniel and I are practical folk (and nearly always slightly overwhelmed by this here life), so we tend to not make a big deal out of Mother's Day or Father's Day. Or even our birthdays, for that matter. Mine was yesterday, and I asked Daniel to get me four yards of mulch and spread it around the gardens. Practical and boring, but just what I wanted.

For Father's Day today, we'll probably go out for pizza and that's about it. But pizza (particularly pizza in an actual restaurant with three wiggly children who don't always behave so perfectly in such confined spaces) seems inadequate. So in addition, I'm offering this too-small written tribute to my children's dad.

You know how we moms have that reputation for quietly, almost invisibly taking care of everyone and of all the little, mundane details that keep a household and family running—a reputation we like to regularly polish and sometimes shove in our partners' faces to ensure that they properly appreciate its gleam? I do that sort of caretaking in our family. But so does Daniel.

No, he doesn't have the pediatrician's phone number memorized or buy birthday gifts for the kids' friends or recite our weekend schedule down to the smallest detail without consulting a calendar. Sometimes I heave beleaguered sighs when he forgets that snacks sent to school have to be peanut-free, puts Leah's socks in Meg's drawer, or refers to a child's long-time friend with the completely wrong name. My sighs are weighted by that tired (tired as in exhausted, tired as in overused) mother's lament: Do I have to keep track of everything around here? Do I have to do everything around here?

No, actually, no I don't. Because Daniel keeps track of all sorts of details that I either don't think about or choose to ignore. Then I insist on believing that the things I keep track of are somehow more vital, more central, less dispensable than the things he keeps track of.

A few weeks ago, I was doing a more thorough than usual cleaning of our master bathroom. I even unscrewed the drain cover to clean out the accumulated gunk. I'd never done that before, despite owning this house for nearly five years. I'd never done it before because Daniel does it whenever he cleans the bathroom. Which is not often. Maybe three or four times a year. But when he does clean the bathroom, he always clears that nasty, stinking, gummy drain.

It got me thinking about all the little things he does every day, every week, every month that I don't even have to think about. He cleans the litter box, and he's not even a cat person. He changes the lightbulbs and knows off the top of his head which wattage bulbs we have and which we need. He disposes of the often-decapitated animal carcasses that the cat-he-doesn't-really-like regularly brings us. He vacuums out my car. He cleans and organizes the refrigerator. He empties the dishwasher. He folds the laundry. He clears the dead limbs from our back woods. Yesterday, he decided the porch windows needed cleaning, so he cleaned them.

It's not just chores that Daniel does with quiet grace. He signs off on Meg's homework, after sitting with her at the kitchen table to help her through a tough assignment. He gives the kids piggy-back rides up to bed, plays a quick game of charades if they are cooperative with the whole pajama/toothbrushing routine, agrees to read just one more chapter of their bedtime story. He shows them planets through his telescope, adjusts the training wheels on their bikes, hikes with them up to Heublein tower, teaches them the proper way to wash dishes at a campsite. When confronted with fidgety, bored, complaining children, he breaks out the Slip 'N Slide, the paints and easel, the Play Doh, the Kapla blocks, the train set.

Did I mention that he is currently working essentially two full-time jobs and spends two hours a day commuting? My book group recently read the classic working-mother novel, I Don't Know How She Does It. I don't know how he does it.

If I had to be a single mom to these kids, I could do it. I would do it. Of course I would. Sometimes I fall into the trap of believing that I already do everything anyway, that the minutiae in my head and the chores that I do on auto-pilot and the ways I most naturally interact with my kids are clearly the only minutiae and chores and interactions that matter. But they're not.

Happy Father's Day to the man whose brain holds the minutiae mine cannot hold, whose hands do the chores that I cannot do (or often just don't want to do), and who loves our children in ways I cannot love them.

What God Has to Do with an R-Rated Picture Book

2011-06-08T10:31:00.000-04:00

Do you ever want your kids to just go the f*@# to sleep? I do. So I appreciate the sentiment behind the new for-adults picture book of that name by Adam Mansbach, and wrote about it for Her.meneutics earlier this week. Then USA Today's "Faith and Reason" blog picked up my post. Not bad for a week in which I am doing little more productive than nursing a sick kid and attending a gajillion end-of-school-year activities!

My Unintentional Lent

2011-05-13T22:54:00.000-04:00

I wrote a piece for the Daily Episcopalian this week about my Lent discipline this year—exercising more regularly and eating better. The interesting thing about this discipline was that I didn't actually choose it at the beginning of Lent; it kind of snuck up on me. The unprecedented thing about it is that I'm still doing it even though Lent is long over. (Compare this with previous Lents in which I gave up sweets, and then promptly gorged myself on jellybeans come Easter morning.)

More Voices on Whether the Resurrection is Real

2011-04-20T09:12:00.000-04:00

Over on patheos.com (an Internet portal for mainline Christians), a number of writers and pastors have responded to the question of whether the resurrection really happened. As I wrote in the Easter post that I put up yesterday, for me, the physical reality of Jesus' resurrection is a central and necessary component of my faith. So I was particularly moved by Presbyterian minister Kara Root's contribution to the Patheos discussion:

It had better be real.
As real as the contractions that ripped new life from my body.
As real as the rattle that strangled life out of his.
I've no use for a spiritual resurrection.
If Hope
for the drowned, damaged, disfigured, disowned,
is emotional ease,
if the pain of flesh and bones
is answered with mystical comfort,
if Guns are stronger than god,
then count me out.
But tell me that Death Loses,
tell me that Life Prevails,
and not in the abstract,
but in pulsing blood, flowing tears, thumping heart,
then the Resurrection
is Hope
for us all.

That about sums it up, doesn't it?

Easter Redux: Believe the Better Story

2011-04-19T13:47:00.000-04:00

Last Easter, I wrote what became my most viewed blog post ever. I had grand visions of writing something new this Easter that would make an equally big impact, but with school vacation coinciding this year with Easter (as I write, great shrieks and loud thumps are coming from upstairs....I don't want to know), writing time is a bit scarce. So instead, I offer again "Believe the Better Story," which I originally published on April 1, 2010. Enjoy, and Happy Easter!

My 10-year-old daughter Leah and I are spending two days in the hospital. Leah and I both have a bone disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta, which causes brittle bones. Because Leah has had several bad fractures this year requiring surgery, we put her back on a medication protocol she was on as a preschooler, and that (we think) contributed to a nearly four-year stretch when she did not have any fractures. Because the medication is delivered via IV over several days, it requires an inpatient stay.

So this is a hospitalization without acute sickness or significant pain. As far as hospitalizations go, not so bad. Leah watches movies, does art projects and plays Nintendo, while I read for luxurious long periods that I rarely get as a mother of three. The nurses and other staff are, as always, attentive and warm. Leah orders whatever she wants to eat via “room service.” Sounds almost like a vacation. And yet it is mostly torturous—long, dull hours in a climate-controlled bubble, in which trips to the bathroom or the play area are complicated by Leah’s being tethered to an IV pole attached to her arm at one end and a wall socket on the other.

Leah’s roommate is a young girl just coming out of spine surgery. Though the curtain between us gives an illusion of privacy, we can hear everything. We hear her vomit after trying to drink something. We hear her cry a hoarse, high-pitched, “Mooommmmy!” every time the nurses reposition her—a cry so quietly desperate that I want to cry too. In that cry, I hear Leah, lying in the ER trauma room with a badly fractured femur, as the nurse explains they’ll have to move her leg to get a good X-ray. I hear myself, waking from surgery, my legs on fire inside their heavy plaster casts, sickened by the lingering taste and smell of surgical gas.

And I’m not sure which story to believe: The one about the miraculous ability of modern medicine to fix problems that used to be unfixable, or the one about the pain that no amount of drugs or toys or soothing words can banish.

The girl’s mother speaks so gently to her, tells her she loves her often, spends 10 minutes at the sink rinsing vomit out of a new Barbie doll’s dress because she knows the dirty dress will make the pain worse and the pain will make the ruined dress worse. Later, I learn this mother has eight children, all of whom, including the girl having surgery, are living with foster parents or relatives. The mother is pregnant again.

And I’m not sure which story to believe: The one about the doting mother ministering to her ailing daughter with gentle strength, or the one about the mother whose life is so out of control that she can neither care for her children nor stop having children she cannot care for.

There are several Haitian children who were airlifted to this hospital because the surgeries they had to treat fractures and crush injuries from the January 12 earthquake were threatened by infections running rampant in their poorly equipped hospitals at home. Their family members were not allowed to accompany them. The children look good. They play and smile, sporting themselves around in wheelchairs or hopping through the halls on crutches. A girl of about seven grins as a volunteer helps her nail together a small wooden house, which she then paints. I hear from nurses and doctors that the children are, of course, so needy. So very, very needy. They have temper tantrums often, and I hear several of these—wailing that goes on for 30 or 40 minutes at a time, because they cannot go outside due to the rain, or just…because. Our doctor tells us that the youngest, a little boy of about two, was so malnourished when he arrived that he just lay in bed, completely still. I pass a staff member holding him on her hip, and he gives me a grin, saying “Hi” over and over as he clasps and unclasps his chubby hand in a baby-style wave.

And I’m not sure which story to believe: The one about dying children’s lives and limbs restored in a place offering them food, shelter, care and love, or the one about children who were crushed under tons of concrete and metal, who are hundreds of miles from their families, and who will return to their chaotic, chronically poor country when they recover.

I am reminded of Yann Martel’s novel, The Life of Pi. Pi, an Indian boy, is the only human survivor of a shipwreck. He ends up in a lifeboat with several zoo animals, including a Bengal tiger he names Richard Parker. When Pi is rescued and tells his story, his tale is met with unbelief. So he tells a different story, in which he was on the lifeboat with his mother, a cannibalistic cook and a sailor, all of whom die in various gristly ways. The ultimate question of the book is: Which story do you believe? Both stories are frightening and full of death, but one—the one with the tiger—also tells of mystery, hope and miracle. Early in the book, Pi writes:

I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!”—and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

I am attuned more closely than I would like to the world’s pain. I often find it hard to believe “the better story.” The memory of that little Haitian boy’s fisty wave mostly haunts me, as I think of what might become of him when he returns home. Will his few months in an American hospital change everything for him? Or not nearly enough? I tend to believe it might not be enough.

But Easter is coming. And what, after all, is Easter about but believing in the better story? I have worshipped alongside those who cannot accept the resurrection as fact, who come to church to be in the company of those who believe in the mystery although they do not. I respect them, but I can't be like them. I need the resurrection. I need it to be the way things actually happened, because without the resurrection, Christianity is just a bunch of nice people doing nice things in the name of a nice guy who lived a few thousand years ago. That may be something, but it does not provide nearly enough light to take on this world’s deep darkness. Without the bright light of the resurrection, I would always believe the sadder stories. They are, after all, so much more common.

I am reminded, too, of my favorite poem, Manifesto: A Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front, in which poet Wendell Berry tells us to “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”

This Easter, be joyful though you have considered all the facts. Believe the better story.

Why I Let My Son Wear Pink

2011-04-18T13:01:00.000-04:00

I've written on this blog before about my son's love of pink (although he now says his favorite color is turquoise). So when a J. Crew online ad ignited a firestorm last week because it featured a mom who had painted her young son's toenails pink, I felt I had to write something in response. My post on the J. Crew controversy appears today on Christianity Today's women's blog. The bottom line: The controversy is less about little boys' sexual identity than adults' obsession with sex.

When Food Is More Than Food

2011-04-12T05:48:00.000-04:00

I have a post over at the Episcopal Cafe today, reflecting on having my family fed by friends and strangers when I was undergoing cancer treatment this winter. The post starts with some thoughts on my mother-in-law Ruby, who knows a thing or two about the importance of feeding other people during hard times. Long-time readers may recall that I've written before about unexpected lessons from Ruby. Maybe some day I'll compile these essays in one spot. I'm realizing more and more that she has a lot of wisdom that I have not always recognized as wisdom at first.

Taming the Media-Saturation Monster

2011-04-11T12:36:00.000-04:00

I have a post over at Her.meneutics exploring how to help my kids safely navigate the world of online media—and examining my own tendency to let media of all sorts define who I am, or think I should be.

What God Asks of "Half the Church": Book Review and Giveaway

2011-04-06T11:34:00.005-04:00

Zondervan, a major Christian publisher, asked a number of Christian women bloggers, including me, to review Carolyn Custis James' new book, Half the Church: Recapturing God's Global Vision for Women. James' book is a Christian response of sorts to Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. This widely acclaimed book by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, who is an expert in global technology and markets, illuminated the atrocities and oppression that plague women worldwide. Kristof and WuDunn also argued that women, when they have the tools and resources they need, have tremendous power to improve life in their local communities.

Carolyn Custis James argues in Half the Church that God calls both men and women to sacrificial, bold leadership on behalf of those who suffer. She does extensive exegesis on Bible stories, such as the Creation and the story of Naomi and Ruth, to argue that God does not call women only to stoke the home fires, having babies and being supportive, while their husbands are out doing the active work of preaching the Gospel and concretely sharing Christ's love with desperate people.

As I read the book, I became increasingly uneasy about how to review it. The problem is that I am not James' primary audience for this book. She is writing for a traditional evangelical audience, an audience used to hearing that God's command to "be fruitful and multiply" was mostly about sexual reproduction, and that men and women have complementary (as opposed to equal) roles in God's kingdom. James argues, on the other hand, that to "be fruitful and multiply" is not just about procreating, but about "vigorous, creative, full-throttled living." She argues that God calls both men and women to leadership and to full use of their particular gifts.

I call myself either an "evangelical with a small 'e'" or an "Episcopalian with evangelical leanings." Like many evangelicals, I stress a personal relationship between a believer and Jesus Christ, and am comfortable talking about my faith and applying it to everyday situations. I am theologically conservative, embracing traditional Christian doctrine, including the fact of Christ's resurrection. (While this is less central to how I define my faith, I also love the kind of guitar-strumming, hand-clapping praise music that is more common in evangelical churches than my more...um...subdued Episcopal tradition.) But I do not embrace the cultural and political viewpoints that are often part and parcel of American evangelicalism. From the time I graduated from college and left behind my traditional evangelical fellowship, I've worshiped alongside Christians focused on issues of poverty, justice, equality, and oppression, both in America's urban centers and globally. The idea of women being fully equal to men, and fully capable of responding to a call to leadership and radical action, is so accepted in my usual Christian circles that it's not even a topic of conversation. For most of my life, I've attended churches where the ordination of women was a given.

So I feel unable to fairly critique James' book because I don't think she's writing for me, but for women in churches that might find her ideas unusual, even threatening. All I can say to most of what James writes is, "Hear! Hear! Now what shall we do to make women's lives better?" The book is focused on persuading readers to consider a theological, Biblical ideal with practical implications. James spends little time discussing practical steps that churches and women can take so that half the church is not sitting on the sidelines while women worldwide suffer unspeakable injustice and cruelty. I wanted more specifics, but don't feel that's a fair criticism of the book, because that wasn't its purpose.

I've been pondering, then, how to write about the book. Lo and behold, my fellow blogger Amy Julia Becker posted a review today on her blog Thin Places. I encourage you to read her review (which I agree with completely), particularly if you have any interest in women's studies, Christian responses to women's suffering, and the roles of men and women in the church. Amy Julia is giving away two copies of Half the Church to anyone who responds in the comment section about their own experience of women in the church (I am providing one of the giveaway copies). So go on over, leave a comment, and let us know what you think.

Why Am I Dreaming About the HGTV Dream House?

2011-03-05T17:24:00.001-05:00

What is it about this year’s HGTV Dream House in Stowe, Vermont, that has me counting the days, slightly giddy with anticipation and sick with the prospect of defeat, until the winner is revealed on March 19?

In past years’ Dream House sweepstakes, I’ve entered a couple of times, admired the virtual tours, and been mildly interested to find out who won. But this year, I entered the maximum two times per day for the duration of the entry period. The Dream House has (literally) entered my…well…dreams. I daydream about spending the entire summer in our Vermont vacation home, welcoming a string of visitors to fill up the copious extra beds, reading by the fire over Christmas vacation, grilling burgers on the patio in warm weather. I’ve had actual nighttime dreams as well, spurred by my perusing the photo gallery, for the bajillionth time, just before going to sleep. I could close my eyes right now and take a walk through the house in my mind’s eye, describing in detail the colors and finishes, the furniture placement and decorative accessories in every single room.

Especially the (OUR) master bedroom. Which looks like this.

Have you ever seen a more perfectly beautiful, classic, comfortable, chic, warm, wonderful bedroom? I have not. It’s mine, I tell you. Mine! Except it’s probably not, which makes me ridiculously, stupidly sad.

My over-the-top desire for this house, echoed in Facebook posts and conversations with friends who are equally smitten, got me thinking: What about the 2011 Dream House has so captivated me and my cohorts? I came up with three reasons.

It’s the Location. Previous years’ homes have been in places like Florida and New Mexico—lovely, slightly exotic places that I’d love to visit. But really, in what universe could a middle-income family from Connecticut afford to fly a family to such locales often enough to justify owning a vacation home there? Besides the expense, there’s all that work involved in hauling a family all those miles—the flight reservations, time off from work and school, packing enough but not too much, airport transportation, entertaining bored and overtired children when flights are delayed. “Work” and “vacation home” don’t go together. With previous Dream Houses, I fantasized that if we won, we’d go check out our new place once, stay for a week or two, then sell it and do all sorts of fun stuff with the profit.

But a vacation home in Vermont? That I can do. We can drive there, even last minute. It’s far enough away that we can actually get away, but not so far that we have to plan weeks in advance and spend a few thousand bucks just to get there. Plus, Daniel and I are mountain people much more than beach people. Our first real date involved hiking in Shenandoah National Park. Vermont is the perfect vacation home location. Perfect.

It’s the House. The Dream House encompasses so many seemingly opposite qualities. The house is cozy yet uncluttered and clean-lined. It is contemporary but warm and a bit rustic. It is large but intimate. It feels safe and sheltering, but connected to the outdoors.

I love everything about this house, whereas previous houses all had too much of some good thing. The décor had too much white, too many florals, too many primary colors. The design was too sleek, too fussy, too rustic. Take, for example, the 2007 house in Winter Park, Colorado. From the outside, it appears to have the same winning combination of rustic charm and contemporary spaciousness as the Vermont house. But look through the photo gallery, and you’ll see that in this house, the rustic, cozy vibe goes too far—bunk beds of rough-hewn logs designed to channel one’s “inner cowboy,” dark beamed ceilings that border on oppressive, and bedroom walls draped in brown plaid fabric. Can you just imagine the havoc that hide-and-seek playing children would wreak on those walls? Not to mention how they would set off dust allergies, unless one vacuumed the walls. Which I would not.

It’s My Age. The Dream House is in a great location, and it’s a beautiful house. But I think the fundamental reason that I (and several friends) want this house so badly is that we are in our 40s with children approaching adolescence.

Middle age doesn’t offer a whole lot that’s new, and what is new is pretty intimidating—health scares, parental illness and death, adolescent attitude and drama, divorce and depression, the realization that retirement is both impossibly far off and much too close.

Contrast this with those early days of starting a family, marked by the exquisite joy and heartache of anticipating a birth. Anticipating family vacations and work accomplishments, school concerts and holiday celebrations cannot compare to the thrill of starting the day with a baby inside your belly, and ending it with a baby—a baby you’ve never seen before but recognize immediately—in your arms.

Birth was followed by all those firsts, some hard-won, others a delightful surprise. First smiles and steps, first taste of birthday cake and singing of the alphabet, first day of school, first connection between ball and bat, first sleepover, first solo.

Our children continue to reach new milestones and master new skills, but delight is often harder to come by and hand-wringing much easier. We know from experience that the new experiences of middle and high school, the first kisses and tryouts and college applications and unsupervised parties, come with the certainty of pain and regret—ours and theirs, sooner, later, and always. We know that the grins, cuddling, and spontaneous declarations of love we have reveled in since our children first bestowed them on us will become rare and fleeting.

Our middle years, then, while still (if we’re lucky) offering the possibility of joy and laughter, require lots of hard work. We save for retirement, re-enter the workforce (or if we never left it, strive for the next milestone offering greater pay, security, or challenge), and face unanticipated crises with inadequate savings accounts. We keep on mopping the same floors and driving the same car-pool routes and rotating through the same family dinners. All the while praying that our children make it to adulthood without car crashes or overdoses or the kind of anguish one never really recovers from. And that they won’t retreat so far into their rooms, their social circles, their passions, or their chosen forays into darkness that we won’t be able to occasionally pull them out and hug them close again.

In these middle years, the idea of a Dream House that is far but not too far, where we can be free now and then from pressures of work and home and school, where parents and children can relate to each other as parents and children, not as objects of nagging or resentment or eye-rolling or frustration or rage, where our world is spacious but cozy, safe but open to the mountains and sky, modern but rooted—well, is it any wonder it’s called a Dream House?

I recently read Katrina Kenison’s The Gift of an Ordinary Day, a memoir about the author’s decision to move with her husband and two adolescent sons from the suburban community where they had built a rich life, to an unknown new life in rural New Hampshire. Early in the book, she writes about the impulse behind this illogical, unexpected desire to uproot her perfectly fine family and seek a different kind of life in a different place:

I am a person who thrives in the familiar comforts of home, a nester, a sanctifier. Since earliest childhood, I have marked and claimed spaces—from the fairy cave beneath a weeping willow tree in my grandmother’s backyard, furnished the summer I was four with soft striped blankets, china teacups, and stacks of picture books, to the rambling, green-shingled house on a short cul-de-sac that my husband, sons, and I inhabited so fully and for so long that none of us thought we would ever, could ever, live anywhere else.

…For thirteen years we were held, loving that house so much that it seemed almost to love us back. Until the day when, to my surprise, being held began to feel more like being restrained. Slowly, almost without my knowing it, I had begun to hunger for something, or someplace, else. Someplace wilder and a little rougher around the edges, with a wider sky, perhaps, a longer view from the kitchen window, and a deeper kind of quiet than could be found in any suburban neighborhood.

…In my mid-forties, with our children on the brink of adolescence, I longed for something I could scarcely name but that our orderly, well-defined life seemed no longer to provide. Watching my sons growing and changing so visibly, almost from one day to the next, I sensed something inside me breaking loose and changing as well, something no less powerful for being invisible. It was almost as if, having strived for years for predictable comforts, urban conveniences, and the security of our well-established routines, I was suddenly haunted by all the things I hadn’t done, the dreams that might never be realized, the sense that the tidy, civilized life we’d worked so hard to create didn’t quite fit he person I really was, or, rather, still thought I might be.

Like Kenison, I’ve always been a homebody and a “nester.” But I understood her longing, for it echoed a longing I didn’t even know I had until I read this book.

Kenison’s and her family’s journey to a new home and a new life was not easy. They lived for a significant stretch of time with her parents (which, while full of blessing in many ways, still involved a family with two adolescent boys sharing a small house with grandparents who thought their days of living with teenagers were over), spent a summer inhabiting a barely functional house that they eventually tore down and replaced, and went through all the usual frustrations of building a new home. But it was worth it, as they developed new and simpler traditions, made unexpected new friends, and learned how to keep loving and living with each other during her sons’ turbulent teen years.

The Dream House offers the promise of what Kenison and her family finally achieved, without all the inconveniences and uncertainty. It’s really a false promise, isn’t it? That by winning a contest for the perfect house, my family and I could somehow achieve the insight, growth, and change that usually only come from hard decisions, leaps of faith, and a few tears of regret and exhaustion along the way, that we could get to where Kenison and her family got, without having to work so darn hard.

I doubt we’ll win our Dream House on March 19. I also doubt we’ll sell our suburban home and go build a new house on a hilltop in New Hampshire, or anywhere else. I and Daniel (who is equally passionate about the Dream House, by the way, and is ready to move our family there, permanently, year-round if we win) will have to figure out some other way to find the something that we can “scarcely name but that our orderly, well-defined life seem[s] no longer to provide.” I have no idea what way that will be, or even what it is, exactly, that we’re seeking. But judging from my friends’ equally enamored drooling over the Dream House, we’re not alone in that seeking.

And someone’s got to win, right?

One Ring to Rule Them All

2011-02-28T12:04:00.000-05:00

(No, not that ring. Though this ring story also involves a smallish being trying earnestly to do the hard work that has been given her to do, while desiring little more than a nice cup of tea and a comfy seat by the fire.)

My Valentine’s Day gift was a new wedding ring. My husband actually had nothing to do with this. I came up with the idea, found a jewelry designer, raised cash by selling off some gold (including my original engagement and wedding rings), and went to pick up the finished product all by myself.

My original engagement ring had a good story behind it. My husband was engaged once before…to a woman I shared an apartment with in D.C. (That is another story indeed, but not for today.) When Daniel decided to propose to me, he took his former fiancee’s ring back to the store where he had bought it, Mervis Diamond Importers. In 1990s Washington, D.C., Mervis radio ads were ubiquitous, immediately recognizable due to owner Ronnie Mervis’ thick South African accent describing adventurous forays into deep, dark diamond mines. The day Daniel arrived to swap the old ring for a new, it so happens that Ronnie himself was manning the store. Once Daniel chose a new ring—bigger, better, more expensive—Ronnie exclaimed, with his distinctive drama and clipped accent, “Ah! A man of decision!”

Daniel presented the ring along with a marriage proposal on the South Transept steps of the Washington National Cathedral, where I had my first job in D.C. after college. Obviously, I said yes. I was so taken with that ring—a large solitaire with five smaller diamonds on either side of it, purchased from the one-and-only Ronnie himself! Daniel had blown his budget on it, though, so we bought my wedding ring—a plain, thin band—from a mall jewelry store in suburban Maryland. I think it cost $99, and we each paid for half. (My grandmother gave me my late grandfather’s wedding band for Daniel, a nice heavy ring that Daniel once lost and then recovered from the bottom of a murky lake populated by splashing children on a hot summer day a few years ago. Sort of Bilbo-esque, don’t you think? The ring will always find its rightful owner.)

We got married at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in the shadow of the Cathedral, just a few hundred yards from where Daniel had proposed. We got jobs and we left them, we moved to Connecticut, we bought and sold houses, we had three babies. When the kids were small and prone to grabbing shiny objects, my rings and watch were the only jewelry I ever wore. I would forget I even had the rings on. I would look down now and then and see my engagement ring, the gold and diamonds dulled by age and grime, but still a reminder of the promises we made when we were living a whole different kind of life—of last-minute dinner plans, subway rides to downtown jobs, and long, uncharted weekend drives south to the Shenandoah or north to Gettysburg.

Then one summer day a couple of years ago, I looked down and realized with a sickening lurch that the diamond solitaire was gone. The kids and I were heading north to visit my sister and her kids in Massachusetts. I figured the diamond had fallen out while I was rushing around packing. Daniel searched the house, driveway, and car with a flashlight. He went painstakingly through the vacuum cleaner dust bag. When we arrived back home, I told the kids I would (really!) give anyone who found my diamond $100. No one ever found it.

For two years, I wore my wedding band alone, figuring that one day I’d replace the diamond solitaire. On its own, the band was so insubstantial, such a poor symbol for a decade-plus marriage encompassing two states, three jobs, one book contract, three children, five homes, 10 broken bones, half a dozen surgeries, and countless baths and bedtimes; dinners out we couldn’t quite afford and On Demand movies we could; family birthdays, weddings, and retirement parties; stomach bugs, colds, ulcers, gall-bladder attacks, and cancers; and trips north, south, east, and west.

A wedding band is just a thing, of course. It’s the marriage that matters, not the wedding or its many culturally mandated accoutrements. But when I looked down at my lonely little band, I longed for something bigger and weightier, not as a status symbol, but as a tangible reminder of our marriage’s longevity and vitality. And I realized that even if, some day, we had a couple thousand dollars to drop on a new diamond, I wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted. The brilliant, sparkling solitaire that had so captivated me as a young bride no longer seemed right for two people grappling with the myriad daily struggles, fleeting joys, and occasional crises of middle-aged parenthood.

So I sold off some old jewelry, including the solitaire-less engagement ring and the paltry mall-store wedding band, and had a goldsmith make me a new wedding ring. He took the 10 small diamonds from my engagement ring and incorporated them into a simple new design. Purely by happenstance, I picked up my new ring on Valentine’s Day, with my five-year-old in tow and while Daniel was at work. Which seemed completely appropriate for a marriage characterized less by romantic encounters and more by divide-and-conquer strategic planning.

I love my new wedding ring. It makes me happy every time I look down and see it. The ring is not particularly fancy. It wasn’t very expensive. But it seems a much better representation of the life we have built together. One day when our kids are grown, if we’re lucky, we’ll once again make last-minute dinner plans and take long, uncharted drives into the countryside. Maybe then, I’ll ask Daniel for another sparkly bauble to wear—a diamond necklace, perhaps. But right now, I don’t need it. I don’t even want it.

My favorite part of my new wedding ring is how it feels, heavy and thick. The weight is not confining, but comforting, like a down comforter on a frigid night. It is affirming, like a sleepy child leaning into my chest—a concrete reminder that in this mundane, often limiting family life, I have found my calling and my place, and am lucky enough to share it with my true companion.

The old rings

And the new

"Chronic Pain Week" Continued!

2011-02-25T08:51:00.000-05:00

Purely by happenstance, this week my blog writing has been focused almost solely on chronic pain and related issues.

A friend from my D.C. days, Carol Marsh, started a blog last summer about chronic pain and spirituality. Carol and I attended the small, ecumenical, coffee house-based Potter's House Church in D.C. (part of the Church of the Saviour) many moons ago. Carol was actually my sponsor when I became a member of that church. When Daniel and I moved away, we stayed in touch with Carol and her husband Tim Fretz largely by keeping tabs on their work at Miriam's House—a supportive housing program for women living with HIV/AIDS and their children.

Last year, Carol resigned from her work at Miriam's House because intractable, severe migraines made it impossible for her to work many days. She continues to deal with these headaches, and the limits they put on her life; for example, she has become cautious about making social plans because headaches often force her to stay home. When we were in D.C. last summer, Carol planned to come hear me speak at some mutual friends' church, but couldn't come because of a headache. Fortunately, the following day, she was feeling better and walked over to the house where my family was staying. We had a wonderful conversation on the front porch, looking out over the trees of the National Zoo while the monkeys engaged in their morning chatter.

I am so grateful that she was headache-free that morning, because that conversation has led to many more. Carol and I have since been in regular touch, reading each other's blogs, and reconnecting around this somewhat newish experience of living with chronic pain and trying to make sense of it spiritually, theologically, and emotionally.

Yesterday, Carol published the first part of a post I wrote for her blog, Chronic Pain and Spirituality. She'll publish the second part later today. Some of it will be old hat for those who have read my other work on chronic pain, although today's post introduces some new ideas. I hope you'll check out the rest of Carol's blog while you're there.

The Way of Pain, Part 2—The Narrative of Hope (and Why It's a Harder Story to Believe)

2011-02-22T08:00:00.003-05:00

In The Way of Pain, Part 1, I described my experience with chronic pain and use of prescription pain medication, as well as an internal narrative of shame that compounds physical pain with self-doubt, anxiety, and embarrassment. This second installment discusses my reaction to some external narratives about pain and pain relief that I came across last fall.

I've received a number of private correspondences from readers who were grateful for the first article, because it named the shame they feel because they are also dependent on some kind of medication. That's a big reason why I decided to publish this; while I have often felt like the only person feeling these feelings, I knew I must not be. I also hoped to offer a corrective to rampant misinformation and assumptions, held by medical personnel and regular people and fostered by inaccurate journalism. All that to say...if you have learned something from this, please consider sharing it.

Melanie Thernstrom’s critically praised 2010 book, The Pain Chronicles: Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering is one of the few resources that has offered me an affirming, grace-filled narrative about my chronic pain. The Pain Chronicles is a mesmerizing account of acute and chronic pain, interpretations of pain during various periods in history, and pain treatment. Thernstrom’s thoroughly researched discussion of opioid pain medication provides a hopeful narrative for someone like me, who has discovered that appropriate use of pain medication can transform a life lived with pain.

Thernstrom debunks the misinformation about prescription pain medications under which even some physicians operate. Opioid medications can certainly be addictive, but only for a very small percentage of those who use them. People can take them for years, in significant doses, without becoming addicted. People who have never abused other addictive substances, such as alcohol, are unlikely to abuse painkillers. Everyone who uses opioids at length will become physically dependent, but dependence and addiction are not the same.

With a physical dependence, the body becomes accustomed to the opioid being present. When the drug is absent, a dependent person will experience uncomfortable physical withdrawal symptoms, such as nausea, insomnia, and headache. For me, withdrawal feels a lot like morning sickness. I can still function, but I just don't feel good. The unpleasant side effects of withdrawal, combined with increased pain, can cause people who are without their medications to become panicky and anxious—behaviors that can mimic that of addicts.

Physically dependent people can retrain their bodies to go without the drug if necessary, lessening withdrawal symptoms by gradually tapering the dose rather than quitting “cold turkey.” In contrast, addiction involves an overwhelming craving that can’t be ignored; tapering the dose is impossible for an addict. Writer and recovering alcoholic Anne Lamott has written about one failed recovery attempt, when she decided that if she could merely limit herself to two beers a day, she could keep drinking without being a drunk. It didn’t work. It couldn’t work, because she was an addict. Stopping at two beers was impossible.

People taking opioids for chronic pain can require escalating doses because of increasing tolerance or worsening pain, but this phenomenon is also different from addiction. Pain experts agree that there is no ceiling dose for opioids, no maximum amount that can be universally pinpointed as too much or too dangerous. Thernstrom also reminds readers that, for treating significant ongoing pain, opioids can be both safer and more effective than drug-store remedies. For example, overdoses of acetaminophen (e.g., Tylenol) and ibuprofen (e.g., Advil or Motrin) can lead to serious complications, including liver failure, ulcers, and internal bleeding. For me, ashamed to admit that I carry opioids in my purse if I’m going to be away from home all day, the knowledge that I might actually be safer than my friends who regularly pop Advil for headaches and menstrual cramps was life-changing.

Pain meds are not the sole answer to my pain. They don’t abolish it, and I don’t expect them to. Beyond that, there are other things I do to manage pain. I swim, walk, and do muscle-strengthening exercises to keep moving and prevent additional injuries. I try to get adequate rest and pace myself (though I don’t always succeed at either). I give myself permission to serve the kids frozen chicken nuggets if standing in the kitchen to fix a real dinner is too much. This combination of strategies—medication, proactive strengthening, energy conservation, and realistic activity planning—works for me. After reading Thernstrom’s book, I began to feel, finally, that I could claim this pain management strategy without shame.

But it’s hard to maintain this more hopeful narrative of my life with chronic pain when I regularly read articles in major newspapers and magazines that discuss the growing problem of prescription drug abuse with no sense of balance, articles that paint a picture of all prescription drug users as surefire addicts and potential law breakers.

Take, for example, two articles from one week last September that stood in stark contrast to The Pain Chronicles (which I was reading at the time). A September 8, 2010, Charlotte News and Observer article reported that sheriffs in North Carolina wanted to access state computer records of people taking prescription pain medication and other controlled substances, in the name of curbing prescription drug abuse. In other words, some people think the names of people like me should be on a law enforcement watch list—like sex offenders and ex-felons.

And a September 13, 2010, Time magazine article on the “new drug crisis” argued that increasing use and abuse of prescription pain relief is the result of careless, uninformed medical decisions; the profit-driven culture of pharmaceutical companies who can sell high volumes of cheap pain medications; and middle-aged patients like me who are unable to resist the siren song of pain medication prescribed too readily for our aches, pains, and surgeries.

The article’s language reveals what the writers and those they interviewed think of those in pain and our inability to make informed, reasonable choices about what we put in our bodies. We are “users.” The prescriptions we get after surgery are “like a little opioid starter kit.” Our brains become “pickled,” and everyone knows you can’t make a pickle back into a cucumber. Once we users become accustomed to our pain meds, there is no hope for us.

The Time article names real problems that deserve attention, such as rising overdose rates. However, dangerous overdoses often involve pain drugs taken with other substances, such as alcohol and anti-anxiety medications—a fact that doesn’t often make it into news stories about opioid use. Actor Heath Ledger’s death, for example, resulted from a toxic combination that included multiple painkillers along with other prescription drugs. The Time article didn’t mention that fact. Instead, it issued this ominous warning: “Like Ledger, some users don’t make it out alive.” Other valid concerns include kids’ taking prescription drugs out of their parents’ medicine chests and either selling them or sharing them at parties, and the proliferation of poorly regulated “pill mills” where people can get prescriptions without anyone trying to figure out if they are really in pain, and why.

The problem with this article, and others like it, is that they focus solely on one side of the story. By failing to mention that people can use these medications safely long-term, even in significant doses, they imply that addiction always follows prescription, and suggest solutions that run counter to the professional opinions of pain experts. The Time article, for example, recommended that, “Doctors need to be less cavalier about prescribing drugs and stingier with the amount they do allow.” In contrast, Thernstrom argues in The Pain Chronicles, after interviewing dozens of pain experts, that for patients for whom opioid pain relief is appropriate and effective (which is not everyone with chronic pain), physicians need to prescribe the dose that provides relief, and not set arbitrary limits based on the false assumption that higher doses are more dangerous. My own physician, like many pain experts, believes that legitimate chronic pain is more often undertreated, rather than overtreated with unnecessary prescriptions.

One-sided media reports, a misinformed public, and our medical system have failed to clearly differentiate between those who abuse pain medication and those who are helped by it. So those of us for whom prescription pain medication provides real relief and increased function are left with our burden of shame. We are pegged as addicts-in-the-making, with our questionable needs, overly eager willingness to seek chemical relief, and naivete somehow implicated in the "epidemic" of prescription drug abuse.

I worry about what increasing fear, concern, and regulation will mean for my access to the medication that allows me to function well, day after day. I worry about what I’ll do if my doctor, who has already become hesitant to recommend pharmacologic pain therapy for new patients because of increasing regulatory pressures and reporting requirements, decides he will no longer prescribe opioids even for existing patients. When everyone is on the lookout for potential abusers, would I be able to convince a new physician that my daily opioid use is a therapy, not an addiction?

The FDA recently decided to lower the amount of acetaminophen in common prescription pain relievers such as Vicodin—the combination of hydrocodone (an opioid) and acetaminophen (the ingredient in Tylenol) that I take. When people either take more of these pills than prescribed, or take them along with other medications that include acetaminophen, they risk liver failure. Whenever the FDA and medical experts debate the safety of drugs like Vicodin, inevitably some experts recommend that the drugs be banned. What will I, and those like me who rely on Vicodin to be energetic, functional members of our families and our communities, do if that happens?

These worries lead to more shame, because after all, I must be too dependent, maybe addicted to this medication if I worry about what I’ll do if it’s taken away. Except then I think about all the medication that most middle-aged and older people take to get through the day—medication to regulate blood sugar and blood pressure, to alleviate crippling anxiety or depression. How would people who rely on these common medications feel if they regularly read about how law enforcement, physicians, the government, and the pharmaceutical industry need to crack down and get them out of people’s medicine cabinets? How would people on insulin or anti-depressants feel if getting a prescription was contingent on finding a physician who is not only knowledgeable and competent, but also willing to trust that they are not deluded addicts or cunning criminals? I imagine they might feel a little worried too.

Ultimately, which story will I tell about myself? Will I embrace the hopeful narrative, in which vital medication, thoughtfully prescribed and appropriately used, allows me to live a full and active life? Or will I continue to revert to the shameful narrative, in which I am overly dependent on a dangerous substance carelessly doled out by physicians in league with pharmaceutical companies eager to make a buck off an aging, achy population too ready to believe in the quick fix?

I could embrace the hopeful narrative much more readily if it weren’t so easily drowned out by all the voices shouting alarms that are inadequately supported by facts.

The Way of Pain, Part 1 — The Narrative of Shame

2011-02-21T12:00:00.030-05:00

Last fall, I wrote a long article about prescription pain medication and the competing narratives I grapple with concerning my use of such medication. The article was a response to a cluster of books and articles I read about chronic pain and opioid medications. Ultimately, I didn't submit the article anywhere, for practical reasons (a cancer diagnosis, for example), but also because the narrative of shame that I discuss in the article is so powerful. I was embarrassed, ashamed, and certain that I must be the only person who struggles so mightily with a love/hate relationship with my medications. I put the article away.

Yesterday, I spoke at my church's adult forum about disability, suffering, pain, and faith. When I had lunch with my co-presenter last week, we kept saying what a relief it is to talk to someone who knows how it feels to be in pain, to struggle with not being able to do what others do so easily, and to regularly confront rules, assumptions, and medical systems that perceive users of prescription pain medications as potential "drug seekers" and addicts. We talked about those assumptions to our church audience as well. Afterward, several people mentioned, tongue in cheek, that they too are among the "drug seekers" and "addicts." I am, it turns out, far from the only person who relies on opioids to function, and who struggles with rampant misinformation and false assumptions among both professionals and regular folk. I decided to dust off my article and offer it here, in two parts. By challenging the abundant stereotypes and misinformation about "pain patients" like me, I hope that it is enlightening both for those who don't live with chronic pain, and those who do.

I take prescription painkillers every day and worry about how I’ll cope if some day, I’m unable to obtain the medication I’ve come to rely on.

Is that a simple statement of fact? Or a confession? The answer depends on whom you ask. And if you ask me, my answer will depend on which story I’ve chosen to believe about myself on that particular day—the one that says I’m a weak-willed addict taken in by Big Pharma, or the one that says I do what is necessary to care for my family and myself.

I’ve had a genetic bone disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) for my whole life, but I have only had chronic pain for the past few years, starting in my late 30s. OI causes fragile bones; I’ve had about three dozen fractures, mostly of the legs and most before puberty. Today, fractures are less of a problem than the bone deformities they left behind. My spine is curved and one leg is longer than the other.

As a child, I had plenty of acute pain—pain that has a specific cause, such as a broken bone, and that goes away when the cause is treated. Chronic pain, characterized by its duration and interference with daily activities, has invaded my body as I’ve gotten older. Years of walking with an uneven gait on a weakened skeleton has taken its toll on my joints and muscles.

Like many people with chronic pain, I can trace its start to a specific event, after which pain and its attendant complications grew beyond the initial complaint. When I was pregnant with my third baby, I tore the meniscus (a piece of cartilage) in my left knee. It was surgically repaired when my son was three months old, but that knee has never been the same. It continues to hurt, and to give out at random times so that I temporarily can’t walk (usually for a few minutes, occasionally for longer). After my injury, I began losing some muscle strength and favoring the “bad” knee, thus putting more stress on my “good” leg, which has led to increased knee and foot pain on that side. Due to my bone disorder, I have also developed two common ailments of older people, osteoarthritis and osteoporosis, even though I’m only 42.

Still hobbled by pain and instability six months after my knee surgery, I went to a physiatrist—a doctor who specializes in rehabilitation medicine—at the suggestion of others with OI who said that physiatrists can help people maximize function. That’s what I wanted, to figure out what exercises or equipment could help me function well—care for my three children, clean our house, cook meals, and go hiking or swimming with my family on weekends. My doctor suggested some physical modifications to lessen the damage from my uneven gait and worn joints, including a lift on my shoe to partially correct the leg-length difference (which has helped a great deal) and bracing for my left knee (which turned out not to be feasible because my joints are so out of alignment that any attempt to align them through bracing just leads to more pain).

He also suggested I’m a good candidate for prescription pain medication. Unlike many chronic pain syndromes, whose cause is not clear and which involve nerve pain, my pain has clear, mechanical, musculoskeletal causes. My bones don’t line up. My cartilage is wearing away. I have dozens of healed fractures and not-quite-straight bones. Medication could lessen the pain from a lifetime of damage enough to allow me to care for my kids and our home.

Before starting on prescription pain relief, I rarely even took Advil. My husband used to joke that it wouldn’t surprise him if I mentioned at breakfast one morning that my arm had fallen off a few weeks ago, and I was beginning to think I should see a doctor about it. The doctor’s suggestion that I take pain medication regularly challenged my lifelong notion of myself as a tough girl.

But I decided to try it and, most of the time, I’m glad I did. The medication lessens the pain, but also alters my perception of it. I am often aware that something hurts—my knees, my back, my ankles—but am able to do whatever physical task needs doing anyway (cooking dinner, gardening, going grocery shopping) because the medication both relieves some of the pain and helps me not to dwell on it. One standard by which experts measure whether prescription pain relief is appropriate is whether it increases patients’ ability to function, as opposed to leaving them in less pain but so completely out of it that they can’t do anything useful. In my case, medication definitely increases my function. Over time, the medication’s sedative effect has lessened. I am generally alert, active, and able to engage fully in whatever I’m doing. I time my medication so I don’t take it just before a long drive, or if I’m planning to have a glass of wine with dinner.

After about three years on medication, I found that the prescribed dose wasn’t always effective. I started taking extra medication (usually one-half or one pill more per day than prescribed), and regularly ran out of pills earlier than I should have. Eventually my carelessness with the dosage, combined with some bureaucratic glitches when my doctor’s office accidentally called in prescriptions to two different pharmacies, caused my insurance company to deny me more medication. For a few pain-filled, shame-filled days, I was pleading with pharmacists and my doctor’s office on the phone, unable to get any more meds even after my doctor called in a new prescription.

My doctor and his staff understood that I wasn’t taking extra medication to get high, but to care for my family. We decided to try a higher dose, which works much better. But I’m still red-faced with shame and shaky with anxiety when I approach the pharmacy counter, certain that the staff has pegged me as a drug seeker and worried that my insurance company will suddenly invoke rules I’ve never heard of to deny me medication. Limits on opioid medications exist for good reasons, in response to growing rates of prescription drug abuse, but I sometimes feel like I’m attending a school where no one tells you what the rules are until you break one, at which point you are suspended immediately and forever labeled a problem child.

I’ve also learned that there are times I need to just accept and work around my pain, rather than try to obliterate it with more medication. And while I’m grateful for having this tool of modern medicine to help me live my life, I also carry the heavy weight of a particular narrative of pain and pain relief—a narrative of shame.

In this narrative, I am weak in mind and body, relying on a dangerous drug because I want to make my life easier. I am not strong or spiritual or dedicated enough to manage my pain through meditation, prayer, acupuncture, diet, or exercise. I am just a pill away from a depraved life of addiction. This narrative roars to life whenever I read about yet another dead Hollywood celebrity whose medicine cabinet was full of Vicodin, hear the testimony of someone who conquered his or her pain with alternative medicine, or have a casual conversation with someone who says, “I never take medicine. I don’t believe in it.” As if people in pain can become well if they simply choose to believe in something other than medication.

Daily, I come up against the culture’s (and my own) expectations for women like me to function well, in a highly efficient, independent, she’s-got-everything-under-control manner. Women like me are supposed to greet our children each morning with well-rested cheer and a nutritious breakfast; maintain hygienic homes where the day’s clutter is sorted nightly into color-coordinated storage systems; grow organic vegetables in the backyard; cook a balanced, from-scratch family dinner each night; participate in self-improvement exercises including exercise and spiritual disciplines; and be physically and emotionally available to our spouses.

I do many of these tasks on any given day. But it is impossible for me to do all of them regularly, and on some days, I can only do one or two. My body hurts. It tires easily. Both too much and too little activity take their toll. A day spent working in the garden and a day spent on the couch with my laptop can both leave me feeling achy and out of sorts. I have to weigh my family’s needs for healthy homemade meals and weekend activities against my body’s needs for rest, pain relief, and exercise that keeps me healthy but doesn’t wear me out or lead to injury. I constantly engage in mental calculations focused on energy conservation, ensuring that I have sufficient physical energy for an entire day’s worth of activity. My narrative of shame comes easily when, at the close of nearly every day, I can think of a long list of responsibilities that I didn’t tackle because of pain or fatigue.

Narratives about pain are not only internal—the stories those who hurt tell ourselves about our pain and our very selves. There are external narratives about people in pain as well, including well-worn platitudes (“God must have given you this pain for a reason”) and media coverage of the medical, social, and spiritual aspects of chronic pain. I read a lot about disability and pain, both because of my experience and because I’m a writer for whom these topics are central. The external narratives I come across can occasionally challenge, but more often support my internal narrative of shame.

Part 2 of "The Way of Pain" will discuss some external narratives about pain (books and articles), and how they have either challenged or supported my internal narrative of shame.

Tucson's Many "What Ifs": Guns, God, and the Lives of the Beloved

2011-02-05T08:24:00.027-05:00

It was the women's stories that got to me in the days following the shooting in a Tucson grocery store that left 6 people dead and 13 injured.

I wept for Christina-Taylor Green’s mother, who sent her bright, curious 9-year-old off with a neighbor that Saturday morning, only to learn hours later that despite heroic resuscitation efforts, her beloved girl was dead from a gunshot wound.

I cried again reading an interview with Suzi Hileman, the neighbor who took Christina to meet Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to encourage the girl’s interest in politics and public service. Hileman said simply, “I am a woman who took a little girl to the market.” How does one carry the weight of such sorrow springing from such ordinariness?

The mother of gunman Jared Lee Loughner was apparently a doting parent who encouraged her son’s musical talents. She and her husband have now joined a most terrible club, of families who have not only lost one of their beloved — to mental illness, prison, and possibly execution — but are fully aware that their flesh and blood devastated other families.

Since I became a mother, this is the lens through which I view the news, acutely aware of women who become vulnerable to the deepest anguish there is by loving the children in their midst. I too have a bright, curious girl who impresses adults with her diverse interests. I too take neighborhood children with me on errands or to get ice cream. I too have friends and family members who have lost their children to mental illness. I cannot stop thinking about these women and their losses.

But I’m also pondering a man’s story in Tucson’s aftermath. Joseph Zamudio arrived at Safeway just as the shooting stopped. Zamudio, who had a 9 mm tucked under his jacket, wondered how many lives he might have saved if he arrived just a few seconds earlier, pulled his gun out, and shot Loughner.

The odds of a level-headed gun owner stopping a criminal in his tracks are unfortunately low. Statistics make clear that private citizens’ guns are much more likely to be used in a homicide, suicide, or accidental shooting. Gun-control advocates cite FBI and Centers for Disease Control data indicating that there are about 200 legally justified self-defense homicides each year, compared with more than 30,000 gun deaths. My brother-in-law and his girlfriend killed themselves with a gun that my husband’s father owned for protection on trips to the bank with cash from his small business. While many factors contributed to the suicides, the gun’s easy availability in a moment of pain and chaos ensured that moment’s awful finality.

Nevertheless, I’m not interested in taking guns away from people like Zamudio or my late father-in-law. The Tucson shooting, however, raises legitimate concerns about firearms in America.

Gun legislation has been low on the national agenda for more than a decade. On April 19, 1995, when Timothy McVeigh detonated a massive truck bomb in Oklahoma City, murdering 168 people, I was working for a national association of police chiefs, finalizing plans for a press conference later that week. Our member chiefs (not exactly your stereotypical bleeding-heart liberals trying to rob people of their Second Amendment rights) planned to reiterate their support for the 1994 assault weapons ban and encourage measures to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, such as closing the so-called “gun show loophole,” whereby private gun sellers (as opposed to licensed firearms dealers) can sell their wares at gun shows without conducting criminal background checks on buyers. A devastating act of terrorism, however, pushed other national conversations to the back burner. We scrapped our press conference.

A similar dynamic, writ large, has kept gun control on the back burner, as we have been consumed with the aftermath of 9/11 and a troubled economy. In response to Tucson, though, gun-control advocates are once again urging small steps to lower the terrible toll that gun violence takes on American families. Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, for example, has previously introduced broad legislation to reinstate and even expand the assault weapons ban. For now, however, she is focused more narrowly on banning high-capacity magazines for semiautomatic weapons, like the 33-round magazine Loughner used in Tucson.

Christian silence has been part of the years-long cultural silence on guns in America. American evangelicals, for example, while vocal on other issues concerning the preservation of human life, have had little to say about guns in recent years. They are not alone, of course. President Obama has been criticized for failing to talk about guns in the State of the Union address that took place just a few weeks after the tragic shooting that targeted a public servant.

There are clear differences in Christian opinion on gun laws, stemming from political and cultural diversity among believers. Fundamentally, though, all Christians follow a Savior who preached God’s intimate love for all people, especially “the least of these,” like 9-year-old Christina. Might it be time for Christians to support restrictions on weapons designed not for hunting or self-defense but to kill as many of God’s beloved children as possible in a few horrific seconds? Might this limited effort at gun control—banning weapons whose only purpose in a civilian context is the murder of many—be a place of common ground for Christians of diverse political perspectives?

I would much rather be writing about a gun-wielding hero than three women and one man haunted by the “What ifs?” of that morning. For me, a big “What if?” is this: What if Loughner had been unable to obtain a semiautomatic weapon and/or high-capacity magazine because the American people had recognized that such murderous weapons have no place in a civil society—even one in which we affirm the citizens’ right to own guns?

Why I'll Never Be a Tiger Mother, or a Best-Selling Author

2011-01-19T12:36:00.002-05:00

OK, here it is. My contribution to the "Tiger Mother" story.

I avoided writing about this all week because 1) I wasn’t sure what to say about it (other than “What the….???!!”), and 2) pretty much every other blogger in the universe has already written about it. I figured maybe this was my big break, a chance to make MY blog stand out from all the others. I would remain silent on the Tiger Mother and make blogging history!

So far though, the agents and publicists are not knocking down my door, yearning to make a buck by sharing my unique blogging restraint with the world.

Before I try to make a different sort of unique contribution, here are the basics of the story. (I’m not going to bother putting in links to all of the relevant articles, because if you Google “Tiger Mother,” “Chinese mother,” or “Amy Chua,” you’ll find a treasure trove of articles and about a zillion blog posts.)

Yale law professor and Chinese-American writer Amy Chua has released a book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, about her “Chinese parenting” style with her two daughters.

What matters in Chua’s home: Consistent excellence in all endeavors, particularly school (only A’s are good enough), piano, and violin, but including lesser tasks such as homemade birthday cards. Chua will throw a daughter’s card back in her face if she doesn’t believe it reflects her child’s best effort.

What doesn’t matter: Any other grades (even B-pluses), playdates and sleepovers, any instruments other than piano and violin, and any other activities, such as school plays, television, and computer games.

How Chua enforces this model of success: Yelling until she’s hoarse, being liberal with insults (including “fatty” and “garbage”), enforcing piano practice for hours without water or bathroom breaks, and yelling at her husband when he suggests she might be going a little overboard.

The Wall Street Journal published a book excerpt last week under the title (not chosen by Chua) “Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” In the excerpt, Chua sets up her parenting style as a correction to Western-style parenting, in which a focus on self-esteem, creativity, and each child’s unique traits leads to coddled, mediocre children. While I agree that modern American parents (including me) often emphasize negotiation, fairness, self-expression, and each child’s special qualities at the expense of discipline, self-control, hard work, and deference to adult authority, Chua’s household sounds like a miserable place to be both a parent and a child.

Not surprisingly, Chua’s article sparked much conversation, with readers comparing her to Joan Crawford, wondering where her husband is when his daughter is being held captive at the piano bench, and saying their own Asian mothers were strict and achievement-oriented, but not insanely so. Shock, disbelief, and outrage were rampant. Chua then did dozens of interviews explaining that she had been misunderstood. The excerpt, she said, did not reflect that the book is really a memoir, not an instruction manual for a clearly superior parenting style. She understands the need for balance, she said, and softened her stance when her younger daughter rebelled at age 13. She claimed to be surprised by readers’ disapproval.

This morning, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is the fourth best-selling book on Amazon.

That, to me, is the most maddening part of this story. Was the whole series of events—Chua’s trumpeting of an extreme viewpoint, followed by contrite backpedaling and insistence that she is just a regular mom who loves her kids and wants them to succeed—an accidental or a brilliantly planned PR campaign? I don’t know. But accidental or planned, it worked.

Yes, I’m envious. I know I’ll never even come close to her success, for lots of reasons, some of which I can control and some of which I can’t. She might be a better writer. She is a previously published author.

But her book also succeeded because she did something I will never do. She shunned nuance and introspection in favor of extremity and certainty. Chua’s book is one example of what I’ve started to call “discourse via firestorm.” Those with extreme viewpoints get attention, and lots and lots of press. Moderation, balance, compromise—qualities that most reasonable people recognize are necessary for us to actually make decisions and take action in most areas of life—are nowhere to be found. (My favorite response to Chua comes from David Brooks at the New York Times. He argues that Chua’s daughters, with their focused, solitary efforts to achieve excellence in school and music, are failing to engage in the much harder, and more essential, work of getting along and making decisions with other people.)

Discourse via firestorm is apparent in our political talk—a subject much discussed since the Tucson shootings. It’s certainly apparent in journalism covering reproductive ethics, my professional focus right now. Well-connected writers publish articles that appear on the New York Times magazine cover, but they are idiosyncratic, non-introspective personal stories that fail to engage the significant cultural and moral issues involved in reproductive technology. Such stories sell newspapers and ignite firestorms of comments, but don’t actually inform meaningful cultural discourse about what uses of reproductive technology are and are not acceptable in a free society.

I am a realist. I’ve never expected to become even remotely famous or rich by writing. But I do want what I write to have an effect, to help people think about significant topics—parenting, disability, reproduction, genetics—in a fresh way that helps both them and me figure things out, make good decisions, and understand ourselves and our world a little better. I choose to write with balance and nuance, to invite conversation, even with those who think differently. I don't want to alienate people by spouting extreme viewpoints that only those who agree with me can stomach.

With her latest book, the Wall Street Journal excerpt, and the dozens of interviews that followed, Amy Chua chose to employ extremity, attack, and a touch of well-timed contrition to sell books. I am dismayed that her way seems to be the only way to get people, a lot of people, to pay attention to what someone has to say.

It's Pageant Time Again

2010-12-10T13:08:00.000-05:00

My apologies for the sparse posts lately. Cancer treatment combined with holiday prep, kids' birthdays (our children all have birthdays between October and January...very poor planning on our part), and the normal chaos has meant little time, and even less inspiration, for writing. I'm taking the lazy way out today by referring you to an essay I wrote last January reflecting on the annual Christmas pageant. My church reprinted the essay in our December newsletter and I've gotten lots of appreciative comments. So here, again, is "Learning to Love, and Live, the Christmas Pageant."

Cultivating Gratitude in an Age of Food Anxiety

2010-11-24T12:17:00.001-05:00

I have a Thanksgiving eve post over at Christianity Today reflecting on food, anxiety, and gratitude.

Is Facebook Good for the Soul?

2010-11-08T10:27:00.000-05:00

I have a new post on the Daily Episcopalian today about the dark and light sides of Facebook and social networking—their capacity for both nurture and narcissism.

Another Impossible Standard for Parents?

2010-10-12T12:39:00.000-04:00

For good reason, there has been much in the news about bullying. I have mostly been breathing great sighs of relief that my kids are not yet old enough to be truly persecuted for their differences—Leah's lack of interest in typical tween passions, Meg's timidness in situations that many 7-year-olds have mastered, Ben's love of the color pink and Hannah Montana. But Pamela Paul's article in this week's New York Times Style section confirmed something I already knew but didn't want to acknowledge: Bullying, particularly stereotypical "mean girl" behavior, can start in preschool and elementary school.

In recent weeks, I've also learned that one of my kids has behaved in less-than-nice ways to another child at school. I truly believe it's not intentional, rooted less in calculated cruelty than in insecurity, a desire to fit in, and a lack of social skills (for example, not knowing how to explain that the reason you don't want to play with a particular friend is because you want to do a different activity, not because you don't like the friend). But the fact remains that, on more than one occasion, my child's behavior has caused another child no small measure of hurt. Suddenly, I can better understand how a child could participate in mean or bullying behavior, and the parents could have no idea. I know about what's happening with my kid because a friend was forthright enough to just tell me—an act of courage and honesty that I truly appreciated.

There are so many layers to all this bullying/mean kid stuff, and I'm just beginning to figure it all out. But there's one question that has been gnawing at me, and Pamela Paul named it in the article I linked to above:

[S]everal...experts point to a shift in childhood play, with a focus on controlled environments, techno-goodies and material objects. Instead of working out issues themselves during free play outside, children are micromanaged by parents who step in to resolve conflicts for them. Debbie Rosenman, a teacher in her 31st year at a suburban Detroit school, said that helicopter parents simultaneously fail to provide adequate authority or appropriate forms of supervision.

I am struggling with how to "provide adequate authority or appropriate forms of supervision." I feel like this is another area in which modern parents simply can't win. My kids spend a lot of time in unstructured, largely unsupervised play. We have a situation that many parents long for: We live on a cul de sac with several neighborhood children nearby who are close to my kids' ages. When we are home, our kids are almost always with our neighbors, and we usually provide only the most basic supervision. We know where they are, and we check every now and then to make sure everyone's wearing a bike helmet, respecting our limits for how far down the street they can go, and cleaning up after themselves.

Here's the down side: I don't think that free play, away from parental micromanagement, actually helps kids learn how to work stuff out and treat each other well. If anything, I think the opposite happens. When I overhear the dynamics in our little neighborhood posse, I often witness exclusion, name-calling, and low-level physical violence. They "work it out" only in that they are all still friends at the end of the day, which is good, certainly. But I suspect there are a lot of hurt feelings and dominating behavior that I'm not aware of. And this is in a group of kids who are fundamentally kind, cheerful, and cooperative.

My gut reaction to learning that one of my kids has been, intentionally or not, hurting another child's feelings was that we need to rein that child in. We need provide more structure and supervision, because when left to their own devices, this child has trouble figuring out what is appropriate and what is not. If money and time were unlimited, I would sign this child up for every after-school and weekend activity I can think of, just to keep them busy in supervised environments, where there are fewer opportunities for the kinds of unscripted, unstructured interactions that this child is having trouble with right now.

On the one hand, parents are supposed to allow kids to play without constant supervision and management. On the other hand, parents are supposed to teach kids how to interact well with others, which requires...constant supervision and management.

What's the compromise between too little and too much supervision, especially when it comes to how kids treat each other? Thoughts?

Lessons of a Cluttered Life

2010-10-04T09:51:00.000-04:00

My mother-in-law Ruby has taught me a few things about what's important. Here is an insufficient tribute to her fortitude and wisdom, which I have not always appreciated as much as I should.

Does God Want Us to Suffer?

2010-09-24T12:23:00.000-04:00

My second post on Christian perspectives on physical pain appears today on the Her.meneutics blog. The post explores the tension between understanding pain as potentially transformative/redemptive and understanding it as devastating/destructive.

Is Pain Relief a Human Right?

2010-09-23T09:33:00.000-04:00

I've written a series of articles on pain, after reading Melanie Thernstrom's critically acclaimed new book The Pain Chronicles. I have a two-part post on Her.meneutics; today's post asks "Is pain relief a human right?" and tomorrow's will look at how the Christian story (i.e., believing in a God who knew great physical pain in his incarnate body) affects how we interpret pain's meaning. I've also written a much longer article exploring my experience with acute and chronic pain and relatively recent use of prescription pain medicine. A friend has edited the piece and is encouraging me to submit it to a magazine...we'll see how that goes.

Christianity 101: Violence Begets Violence

2010-09-10T12:14:00.000-04:00

Sometimes it’s just so embarrassing to be a Christian.

Take, for example, the Florida pastor who has been planning to burn Qur’ans on the anniversary of 9/11 tomorrow. The latest news: He has offered some cryptic comments that he might (or might not) call off the burning. The most ridiculous part of all of this? Responding to reports that Muslims around the world are protesting his actions, and that violent protests could endanger the lives of U.S. service personnel and others, the pastor said the possibility of violence is not his fault. Threats of violent protests, rather, reveal the inherent violence of Islam.

I have news for Pastor Jones. Burning people’s holy books is just as much an act of violence as Muslims threatening to harm or kill Americans.

Christians so often seem confused about violence. Violence is not just physical, the act of fist hitting flesh or bombs tearing it apart. Violence is any action that tears vital connections asunder, that begets alienation and fosters rage, that leaves its victims feeling assaulted and alone. Merriam-Webster includes these words in its definition of violence: injury, distortion, infringement, intense, turbulent, furious, destructive, jarring, clashing.

I am violent when I lose it with my kids, yanking their arms a little too hard, screaming at them to get out of my sight because I don’t want to hear one more word, or interrupting them with sarcastic one-liners. I always know when I’ve been violent (as opposed to responding to bad behavior with appropriate expressions of anger and reasonable consequences) when, once the storm has blown over, one of my kids sidles up to me and asks in a tentative voice with hooded eyes, “Mom, you still love me, right?”

I am violent when, tired of my time and ears being monopolized by everyone else’s worries and concerns, I simply tune out or walk out on my husband’s or child’s long-winded explanation of their latest struggle, instead of looking them in the eye and saying, “You know, I’m really wiped out and just can’t focus on what you’re saying right now. Could we talk about this later?”

I am violent when I engage in gossipy, complaint-filled chit chat about how everyone else’s wrong-headed ideas and misplaced priorities cause me inconvenience, worry, and expense, instead of differentiating between big problems and small problems, keeping my mouth shut about the little ones, and talking directly to those with power over the big ones to figure out how things might improve.

Christians think it’s important to stand up for what they believe, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t unreasonable. That’s what Jesus did. That’s what his first disciples did. That’s what extraordinary Christians throughout history have done.

But sometimes we think that standing up for what we believe justifies violent behavior.

Pro-life protestors behave violently when they assault women arriving at abortion clinics with posters of bloody fetuses and superficially “loving” comments, such as offers to pay for child care for a woman’s baby. I recently interviewed a mother who terminated two pregnancies after devastating prenatal diagnoses. She recalled her husband saying quietly, as they made their way past abortion protestors, “I would do anything to pay for day care for this child.”

Christian leaders behave violently when they declare that "those who live by the Koran have a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews" or that God allowed Hurricane Katrina to devastate New Orleans because of a planned gay-pride parade.

There’s a lot we can’t know for sure about what Jesus would say about current events. Jesus didn’t address gay marriage, Internet porn, or genetic screening of embryos. But Jesus was utterly clear about violence. Violence begets violence, and we are called to turn the other cheek, love our enemy, and treat others as we wish to be treated.

When we respond to the horrific events of 9/11 by burning holy books and condemning entire groups of people as hate-filled killers, we’re responding to violence with violence. As my fellow writer Sarah Cunningham has written, our job as Christians is “to make a purposeful attempt to pump love and grace into our culture rather than to add to volatile or antagonistic attitudes that could fuel further violence as it escalates.”

Pump love and grace into our culture. What a radical idea.

The Massachusetts Bible Society has decided to do just that, donating two copies of the Qur'an to hospitals, shelters, and prisons for every one that Pastor Jones burns. Now that’s the sort of thing that makes me proud to be a Christian.

P.S. This is a stretch—an ungraceful way of linking to my latest Her.meneutics post, but another thing that embarrasses me about being a Christian? We can be sticks-in-the-mud. We need to find our funny bones and learn to laugh at ourselves and the world.

Manna from Cyberspace

2010-08-25T20:44:00.000-04:00

People say this online world we inhabit creates distance between people, fueling self-absorption and superficial relationships conducted via tweets, status updates, and abbreviated, barely-English text messages. Certainly that is true—sometimes. And sometimes this online world creates connections that leave me in teary gratitude as I sit with my laptop while the chaos of a late-summer day with restless children swirls around me.

I had a post on the Daily Episcopalian today about “Why I go to church,” which cited some recent articles about clergy being burned out and overworked in parishes where people want soothing happy talk, not challenging Gospel talk. I linked to retired UCC pastor Richard Floyd’s satiric “Ten Highly Effective Strategies for Crushing Your Pastor’s Morale.” A few hours after the post went up, I got an e-mail from Floyd himself, thanking me for referring others to the link, but also noting that we have a few key traits in common—we’re writers and Christians who define ourselves as theologically conservative and socially liberal. And we both live with disability.

He referred me to his recent post titled “Disability and Grace,” written upon the 10-year anniversary of his sustaining a traumatic brain injury in a bike accident. I clicked through to read the post, and that’s when I went from merely psyched that someone I don’t know and am not related to and who is not a Facebook friend actually read my piece (Will I ever get to a point where I’m not surprised that random strangers want to read what I write? I think not…) to a little blubbery.

Because I’m tired.

I’m tired because there’s one week until school starts and we’re broke until payday and the fun summer activities are all over and my house is overrun by antsy children who still expect to be fed and entertained even though I’m really done with the nonstop kidfest and the snack cabinet is empty and even a simple supervised craft requires more effort than I want to expend. But I’m also tired because my body hurts most of the time and the nonstop kidfest means there isn’t sufficient time for things like exercise, reading, and writing—activities that restore my physical energy and mental outlook. So my outlook stinks. And being with the kids all the time—camping and gardening and swimming and acting like their 45th chatty observation of the day is as scintillating as their first (it’s not)—makes clear that I simply don’t have sufficient energy for keeping up with three active kids. I get worn out quickly—partly because I am an introvert so constant interaction, even with the people I love most in the world, costs me dearly. But partly because my body doesn’t work as it should. My disability limits how available I can be for my kids, what I can do with and for them, and for how long.

That’s a hard, hard truth. And I know all you friends who are reading this would tell me (have told me) a thousand times over that I’m a great mom, and I know that you mean it. But when I stay behind at the campsite while my family goes swimming and kayaking, when I insist that we have to head home before the kids are ready because I’m feeling fatigued, and when I make it through the nightly rituals of cooking dinner, cleaning up, bathing, and putting the kids to bed only with the help of pain meds, gritted teeth, and forced cheer—I don’t feel like a great mom, I feel like…well, like someone who is broken and in need of fixing.

That’s how I was feeling today when I read Richard Floyd’s essay about disability and grace. First, I read this:

A lot of dealing with injury is self-care, and it is frustrating how much of my time and energy goes into just keeping healthy. (Oh yeah.)

And this:

The daily challenge is to find the sweet spot between too much and too little activity, and of course, when you live with others, this balance is not always completely under your control. (Tell me about it.)

And then there was this:

[I]n some very real sense my injury is a family affair, something that has to be factored in to all our interactions. I want to be strong and brave and independent, but have to face my reliance on others. The positive part of this is that I often experience [my family’s] care for me as grace, that is, as something freely given though undeserved. And I am often in awe of their patience and forbearance with me, for [this is where the waterworks started] I am not always the easiest person to be around, especially when I am tired, which is much of the time.

Something about reading someone else’s confessions of fatigue and limitation felt like freedom—freedom to admit that I too am tired much of the time, consumed by the effort necessary for simple daily tasks, and as a result, am not always the easiest person to be around. I harbor a great fear that when people ask my children when they are grown what they recall of childhood, they will say, “My mom was always tired. She was always asking us if we wouldn't rather watch some TV.”

Here is the great tension of being a person of faith grappling with ever-present physical pain and limitation: On the one hand, I know that we all—every single human being ever born, even those who run marathons, proudly eschew all pharmaceuticals, and have optimal BMIs—are broken and in need of fixing. To be limited, dependent, and in need of grace, from God and other people, is the human condition. Looked at in that light, physical disability is just one of a million ways we humans are limited and in need of help just to get through the day, and in need of even more help to flourish.

On the other hand, I still believe that disability is a concrete manifestation of how human life is not as God intended or wants it to be, that disability is a specific kind of brokenness in need of healing. (I explained this view of disability more fully in this essay for Christianity Today.) This view is not universally shared among those living with and theologizing about disability, but it remains central to my faith. So I experienced Pastor Floyd’s closing reflections as balm for a frazzled, fatigued, self-doubting soul:

The scripture that speaks to me most about disability comes from the vision of John the Divine as reported in the 21st chapter of Revelation. John looks up and sees a new heaven and a new earth, and a New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven. He says, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

I take comfort from this promise that God’s ultimate intention for us is a community where we don’t suffer pain or death or loss. That would have to include disability. No more sleepless nights, no more depression, no more chronic pain, no more anxiety and fear, no more shame. No more of all the things that beset us in this earthly life. Quite a vision!

Say what you will about the impersonal, self-aggrandizing, stunted-attention-span-spawning qualities of online interaction. This particular interaction, with a retired pastor from Pittsfield, Mass. whom I’ve never met, was exactly what I needed.

Only six more days until the kids go back to school. Not that I'm counting.

I'm Probably Going to Regret This But...

2010-08-12T22:16:00.001-04:00

...I'm going to write about gay marriage.

I appreciated Ross Douthat's New York Times op ed on the subject, as I did Andrew Sullivan's response to it. Douthat rejects several common arguments against gay marriage, such as these:

Marriage is an ancient institution that has always been defined as the union of one man and one woman, and we meddle with that definition at our peril. Lifelong heterosexual monogamy is natural; gay relationships are not. The nuclear family is the universal, time-tested path to forming families and raising children.

Douthat debunks those arguments as a misreading of both science and history. He also points out that concubinage and polygamy have been prevalent in human cultures as ways of accommodating evolution-based urges for men to spread their seed far and wide, and women to make babies with men genetically predisposed to strength and success—urges that must be suppressed if we hold up lifelong, monogamous marriage as our ideal.

But Douthat goes on to say that in Western culture, heavily influenced by Christianity, the ideal of heterosexual, monogamous marriage still has merit:

This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest— as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing. And recognizing the difficulty of achieving these goals, it surrounds wedlock with a distinctive set of rituals, sanctions and taboos.

I appreciate his acknowledgment that many common arguments against gay marriage/relationships are faulty (and I would include arguments based on references to homosexuality in the Bible that were written with a completely different understanding of homosexuality than we have today). I’m also sympathetic to the idea that those who believe in a God who created people in God’s own image can reasonably argue that marriage is a unique institution that honors the complementarity of and difference between the sexes (a complementarity that reflects God's own self), and that the ability for such unions to create new life also has meaning beyond just allowing people who want babies to have them; the drive toward and mechanics of procreation might also reflect who God is and what God intends for humanity.

But, as Andrew Sullivan points out, even if the ideal of heterosexual marriage has integrity within the context of faith, it doesn’t make sense for churches (he specifically addresses the Catholic church) to insist that the ideal “be enforced as an act of civil exclusion in the secular sphere, even on people who are atheists.” Sullivan also points out that, if churches are going to hold up this ideal of marriage, they need to apply it more broadly, as divorce and contraception—even adoption—undermine the ideal just as gay marriage does.

Because holding up heterosexual, procreative marriage as the ideal arises from theism and we are not a theocracy, I can’t see any good reason that the state can disallow gay marriage. It would make sense for us to move to a system where all marriages, gay and straight, are legalized by the state, with religious institutions voluntarily blessing/celebrating unions, not legalizing them. Then churches could choose to bless or not bless gay unions—and reasonable, thoughtful Christians can disagree on whether blessing gay unions is something they want to participate in or not.

I say all that, and I mean it. But part of me also just wants to say that when two people are willing to commit to a lifelong monogamous relationship, we, including and especially the church, should stand behind them. My gut says that the “lifelong” and “monogamous” parts are vastly more important than whether the two people involved are the same or opposite sex. My gut says “amen” to Andrew Sullivan's conclusion:

We gays are here, Ross, as you well know. We are human beings. We love one another. We are part of countless families in this country, pay taxes, work hard, serve the country in the armed services, and look after our own biological children (and also those abandoned by their biological parents). Our sex drives are not going away, nor our need to be included in our own families, to find healing and growth and integration that alone will get us beyond the gay-straight divide into a more humane world and society.

As with my work in reproductive ethics, I am less concerned with defining and broadcasting a clear position than with participating in discussions with others willing to honor the emotional, theological, and moral complexities of applying centuries-old beliefs to modern circumstances. I hold in tension an interest in pondering valid questions concerning what Christian belief says about human identity, relationships, families, sexuality, and procreation, and a gut feeling that Christian people should be first in line to support equal rights for those who want to commit, body and soul, to another human being for the rest of their lives.

We have worshipped for the past 11 years at two different Episcopal churches, both of which have welcomed gay couples and employed gay clergy people whose talents for preaching and ministry make clear that they have responded to an authentic call. I still think reasonable, thoughtful Christians can disagree about gay marriage (and assisted reproduction and the death penalty and immigration and…), but I spend my Sunday mornings with those who strive for the “healing and growth and integration” that Sullivan claims as vital for homosexual men and women.

Breast is Best, Except When It's Not

2010-08-12T11:39:00.000-04:00

Several months ago, I wrote a piece for Her.meneutics, arguing that while the evidence is clear that breast is best and mothers need much more support to successfully breastfeed, we also need to stop beating up on mothers who decide for good reasons (including her own mental health) that breast is not best. Today, Lisa Belkin's Motherlode blog tells the story of Katie Allison Granju, a blogger and long-time breastfeeding advocate and author, who is feeding her newborn daughter formula. While Granju tried breastfeeding her daughter for six weeks, she eventually switched to bottles when it became clear that she was not producing adequate milk and the baby was not getting enough nourishment. Perhaps the problem has something to do with Granju's state of mind; her teenage son died after being severely beaten during a drug deal gone bad when Granju was in the latter stages of her pregnancy. Perhaps her body couldn't handle the stress of burying one child while birthing and nourishing another. Whatever the reason, my heart goes out to Granju for her pain and my gratitude goes out to her for her honesty. As Lisa Belkin wrote, we should admire Granju "as an example of a mother who is doing the best she can," and who is willing to make public her own difficult decisions.

The Difference Between Being Noticed and Being Seen: Thoughts on Disability

2010-07-21T14:23:00.000-04:00

I have a guest post today on Thin Places, my friend Amy Julia Becker's blog on Beliefnet. Amy Julia, whose daughter has Down syndrome, writes about many of the same issues concerning disability and parenthood that I do. Every week, she invites a guest blogger to contribute to her "Perfectly Human" series, which is meant to "provide a picture of life with a disability in all its possibilities and limitations, gifts and struggles." I am grateful to Amy Julia for her writing, friendship, and the opportunity to share my writing on her blog.

More on Skipping Church

2010-07-14T14:48:00.000-04:00

My post two weeks ago about the challenges of church attendance has taken on a life of its own. It sparked many comments (one of which referenced Satan and implied that if I allowed my husband to embrace his role as head of our family, my problems would be solved; blogging brings a treasure trove of new experiences). I've also had some fascinating conversations with friends about it, and was asked to contribute a chapter to an anthology being published about how parents can (or can't) instill values in their children. There is lots more to say on the topic, and I plan to say it, in dribs and drabs. My book editor, Jana Riess, has a fabulous new blog called "Flunking Sainthood." (Need I explain why I love it so? I think the title says it all.) She graciously allowed me to post the next part of the church-skipping conversation.

Confessions of a Church-Skipping Mom

2010-06-30T17:28:00.000-04:00

We never used to skip church unless someone was sick or we were away. Now we do it more often. Am I ruining my kids or shortchanging my own faith? I have a new post on Her.meneutics exploring those questions.

For the Love of Bacon: Food, Bodies, and the Christian Life

2010-06-24T07:50:00.000-04:00

I have a new post on Daily Episcopalian today exploring how we approach food, indulgence, discipline, and our bodies as both God's gifts and mortal flesh.

"Picking Dandelions": A Spiritual Memoir for the Rest of Us

2010-06-16T00:52:00.003-04:00

I am thrilled to be stop #1 on Sarah Cunningham’s summer blog tour to promote her new memoir, Picking Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life’s Weeds. Sarah’s lively and humorous prose has been compared to two of my favorite memoirists, Anne Lamott (author of several novels and memoirs, including Traveling Mercies and Operating Instructions) and Haven Kimmel (a.k.a. “Zippy”), so I eagerly signed up to post a review.

Picking Dandelions is Sarah’s story of growing in faith, although not in life-changing spurts precipitated by dramatic crises, as in many spiritual memoirs. Sarah, the daughter of a Baptist minister, travels a relatively smooth road from childhood to young adulthood to marriage and impending motherhood. Along the way, she keenly observes the change-resistant adults who inhabit most churches, hatches world-changing plans in her urban outreach work, and eventually turns her attention inward, recognizing that it is not only stale church dynamics and struggling neighborhoods that could benefit from a few changes. The latter part of the book focuses on what Sarah calls her second conversion (her first conversion being her childhood acceptance of faith in Christ, an event that she can’t really remember). In her second conversion, Sarah catalogs her flaws—a sense of superiority and arrogance chief among them—and makes daily efforts to recognize, confess, and correct them.

Sarah is witty, concise, observant, self-deprecating, and gently sarcastic about the dynamics of church life. At nine years old, Sarah started attending the business meetings at her father’s church. Her story of how a proposal for re-shingling the church devolved into warring factions’ arguing about progressive mauve shingles vs. traditional brown will elicit knowing laughter from anyone who has had the privilege of serving on church committees.

I identified with a lot of Sarah’s story, in part because we share some specific traits and experiences; we are both pastor’s kids who embraced faith-based urban outreach work after college and went on to become writers. But I also identified with her story because it is so straightforward, and therefore familiar to someone like me, whose faith journey has been similarly lacking in high drama. Sarah’s story shines a light on the funny and poignant moments of everyday life—all those church meetings, the first time a boy asked her out, working (as a volunteer at Ground Zero after 9/11 and as a high school teacher several years later), or going to a chiropractor for chronic back pain.

But the lack of drama, while it allows readers like me to recognize ourselves in Sarah’s story, is also the book's greatest weakness. Picking Dandelions is a collection of beautifully written vignettes, but I was pining for more of a story. I was waiting for a central conflict that never materialized. For example, her second conversion starts with a confession as she sits on her front porch and realizes that she is capable of true hate.

Like, you know that adrenaline rush you get when you build a strong case against someone who has wronged you? How with a few sleights of hand and twists of the tongue, you can turn people into monsters? Or failures? And then you can hate them for it? Yeah, I can get a little too into that sometimes, God.

Yeah, me too, and I wanted to know more. Who does she hate? When? Why? Give me details, not because I want to voyeuristically drool over her failings, but because details bring a story to life.

The remaining chapters focus on Sarah’s attempts to confront her flaws. She cleans out her closets to deal with her overabundance of possessions. She apologizes to her high school students for losing patience when, after her twenty-minute spiel, they still don’t have a clue what the assignment is. Again, these attempts at self-improvement are familiar (cleaning out clutter is one of my standard responses when the chaos of life in a household with three young children threatens my sanity, and I’ve offered oh, several hundred lost-patience apologies to those same young ones). But, after the apparent turning point of Sarah's second conversion, I was expecting something a little more radical, some dandelion digging that went a bit deeper.

But perhaps that’s exactly why Picking Dandelions deserves a place of honor in the spiritual memoir genre. If you want radical drama, read Anne Lamott’s tales of asking Jesus for help after figuring out that her plan to limit herself to two beers per night just wasn’t going to work. Sarah's story, in contrast, reminds us that you don’t have to be an alcoholic, a partner in an abusive marriage, or clinically depressed to realize that you make a lot of mistakes and could do better. Even chronically optimistic, unfailingly energetic, funny preacher’s kids are screwed up and in need of God’s help and grace.

Notes and Such: I received a free copy of Picking Dandelions for agreeing to write a review. Sarah is also creating a “Best of the Best” reading list and asking her reviewers to nominate their three favorite books. This is a tough one, but I think I’ll go with:

My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

The Stand by Stephen King

The entire Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

Sarah Raymond Cunningham is a high school teacher, part-time college professor, and chief servant to her son, the emperor Justus. She is a popular church and conference speaker, author of Dear Church, and contributor to several books, including unChristian. Sarah, her husband, Chuck, and their son live with their manic Jack Russell terrier in Jackson, Michigan. Learn more about Sarah at www.sarahcunningham.org

It's Not Really About the Shoes

2010-06-09T14:00:00.000-04:00

I have a guest post on BLOOM - Parenting Kids with Disabilities today. It's about my complicated relationship with shoes (and explains why I can't have a conversation about Crocs without my blood pressure going up).

In Praise of Small Acts

2010-05-29T13:03:00.002-04:00

My friend Sherri wrote on her blog yesterday about the pleasures of living a "small" life—one dedicated to daily tasks and pleasures, to family and pets and work that will never make you rich or famous. She wrote, "Does this add up to a big life? No, but it adds up to a fine small one. I’m not going to save the world. I’m not going to walk down any red carpets or sign any autographs. I am here to praise the small life, the opportunities it brings me to learn exactly how to love my neighbor (by which I mean, friends and family, those pesky people who I take for granted and who know me well enough to call me on what I need to be called on. Loving my neighbors and strangers is a breeze by comparison!). The chance I have to learn to feel compassion for those whose lives bear little resemblance to mine. The opportunity to not resort to road rage, to irritation, to constant complaining, as just a few examples of lessons I am still learning."

(If you click through to read the whole thing, you'll see my comment, which I'm going to polish and expand on a little here. In other words, I am repeating myself, so you might choose to read one or the other unless you just love my writing so dearly that you can't get enough. In which case, you are now my favorite blog reader.)

Sherri and I attended the same church back in the 1990s—the small (30-40 people on a good day), ecumenical, coffeehouse church that I've written about before. This church attracted people who did radical things in the name of Jesus; many people left behind comfortable suburban lives to raise families in D.C.'s Adams Morgan or Shaw neighborhoods, live in group houses for people living with AIDS or mental disabilities, or start new nonprofits with nothing more than a few thousand dollars and a lot of volunteers. Our church emphasized the figuring out of one's call or vocation, and I was dismayed when, time and again, it became clear that I was called to have children (and to write too, but at the time, the call to parenthood was much stronger—a hurricane wind, while the call to write was more of a mild, steady breeze). Having babies seemed such a small, insignificant work compared with the great works my fellow believers were engaged in. It was embarrassing, really. Yes, I am called to wipe pureed plums off some drooly kid's chin while you all are saving the world.

Fast forward several years. Daniel and I moved to Connecticut, back to my hometown, and in 1999, I had the first of three children. My life became defined—consumed, really—by smallness. In several essays I wrote when my children were smaller, I referred to the experience of motherhood as "small chaos." Spending all day, every day with babies and toddlers was in many ways unpredictable and surprising, requiring a tectonic shift of perspective, and yet the days were caught up in smallness.

I honestly can't remember what exactly I did. I did small things: meals and cleaning up after meals; grocery shopping; laundry; walks to the drug store, the playground, to nowhere in particular; peek-a-boo and sing-songy chitchat games. It was exhausting and tedious, and yet I knew it was where I was meant to be. And it was not merely tedium; each day brought dozens of small pleasures—a baby's smile, a toddler's clever use of words, the shape of a child's tensed calf muscles as he climbed the playscape—that made clear why for many of us, parenthood is the most anticipated, most treasured work of our life.

Now, it is different. I still have a preschooler at home, but have carved out time for a bigger work—writing my book, my blogs, and articles for others. I have no illusions that I will become a rich, famous writer, but I do thrive on signs that what I write makes a difference—whether to a fellow mother who sees in my writing a reflection of her own experience, or to people living with a serious genetic disease and trying to decide whether or not to have children. Nothing gives me a spring in my step like seeing a nice big rise in my Google analytics blog stats, seeing several friends share my blog post through their Facebook pages, or getting a thoughtful comment on something I've written. There are lots of writers who say they love writing too much not to do it, and it really doesn't matter if they ever achieve publishing success. I love writing too much not to do it, but I desire success too. I spent 10 years almost solely devoted to the work within the four walls of my home, and now I'm ready to reach beyond those walls. I'm ready for something bigger.

But these two works—the mothering and the writing, the small and the big—are not separate, but connected. I cannot imagine that I would be a writer if I hadn't had kids, because being their mother has given me not only topical focus, but also a passion and a voice I didn't have before. If I hadn't had kids, I might still be writing for nonprofits as I did before, penning clearly worded, well-edited newsletters and PR materials. But I doubt I would crave my working hours, be energized and nourished by them, as I am now.

My days are still caught up in smallness, dictated by the repetitive details of keeping everyone fed, getting them where they need to go, and maintaining order in my home and garden. I am not always grateful for the small acts around which my life revolves, but I try to be. Because small, daily, repetitive acts sustain us all, don't they? When I occasionally despair at the great pain of this world and my inability to do anything big to fix it, I find solace in engaging in small acts of love. Perhaps I can't save the world, but I can do this: Fix a meal with basil from the garden, put my clean children to bed beneath clean sheets, send a box of hand-me-down clothes to my goddaughter. Amid those daily tasks, I can make connections and write about what it all means, what's important and what is not, how to ask difficult questions about parents and children and communities and try to answer them together with my readers. The small work nurtures the big work, the big work gives shape and meaning to the small.

On my walk this morning, the Indigo Girls' song "All That We Let In" came on my iPod. It is a meditation on the losses we must live with if we choose to love other people and engage the world, on abiding with both personal tragedy and global threats. One verse goes like this:

We're in an evolution I have heard it said
Everyone's so busy now but do we move ahead
The planets hurling and atoms splitting
And a sweater for your love you sit there knitting.

Every time I hear that, I think yes, that's me. The ice caps are melting; the bombs are going off in Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan; the kids are getting hooked on meth and bullying each other to death. And here I am, mopping the kitchen floor, packing the lunches for tomorrow's school day, pulling weeds. The song writers do not seem to intend this observation as an accusation or even a lament. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of how necessary it is to go on with our small daily acts of care even as the world spins out of control.

Birthday Party Angst: How Do You Handle It?

2010-05-26T18:06:00.001-04:00

Today’s New York Times Motherlode blog topic is kids’ birthday party etiquette, stemming from a reader’s question about how to handle the fact that her five-year-old daughter was the only girl in her class (out of eight girls) not to be invited to a classmate’s party. As usual, I’m most fascinated by the comments. (If I ever get a Ph.D. in something, I think I’ll write about how Internet comment boards reveal rich sociological data.) Many of the comments express two opposite views: 1) It’s mean-spirited and exclusive not to invite all of your child’s classmates to a birthday party. This mom is clearly a grown-up Mean Girl teaching her daughter to be one too; or 2) Huge, all-class birthday parties are excessive. Kids have to learn how to deal with rejection. And those big, expensive parties might just be a case of parental one-upmanship or efforts to buy kids’ affection.

I tend more toward view #2 (except for that last part). I have never hosted a party for my kids to which the whole class is invited. We usually have eight to 12 guests at their parties—a combination of school and family friends. I want my kids to celebrate with the friends they really know. Big parties are chaotic and expensive, and the birthday child can’t even interact with most of the guests. Plus who really needs 20-plus additional Barbies and art sets and floor puzzles? Although we have done parties at different places, we often do them at home, where smaller is better.

My kids and I strategize about guest lists together, and I sometimes suggest additions (if there is a child I think is a good match for mine, who is friends with so many of the other guests that I know he/she might feel excluded, or who has regularly invited my child to his or her smallish parties, where it’s clear that my child was included deliberately, not as part of an blanket class invitation). I also sometimes suggest deletions (if my child is obviously just naming every kid he/she can remember from his/her class, or inviting all girls and one boy—and it’s a boy who might not be thrilled with that honor). I drill into their heads that we never discuss birthday parties—our own or others’—at school (and am grateful for teachers who reinforce this rule). Our family does group birthday parties from about age four to about age eight or nine. Before that, it’s family only, and after that, the kids invite one or two friends to do something special.

Reading the Motherlode comments, I was feeling a little defensive because the invite-the-whole-class party planners so often portrayed the smaller-is-better party planners (like me) as rude and exclusive. But then I realized that I often think less-than-charitable thoughts when my kids are invited to an all-class party, when I have to shell out $15 for a gift and figure out how to work the party into our weekend schedule when I’m not even sure who this kid is. I realized this is one of those topics where people’s deeply held opinions simply differ, and rather than being annoyed and accusatory toward the opposite philosophy, we all need to just accept that different families celebrate birthdays in different ways.

But are there any essential rules for birthday party planning? I came up with three.

1. Families celebrate birthdays in different ways and, for most parents, planning their child’s birthday party is a source of some stress. Let’s avoid making assumptions about other parents’ motives if they do it differently than we do.

2. Birthday parties are not the definitive expression of kids’ friendships. I’m friendly with a lot of people around town, but there are only a handful I would invite to a dinner party to celebrate my birthday. It’s more important to focus on whether kids are kind, accepting, and inclusive (or mean, snobby, and exclusive) on a day to day basis than whether they choose to invite a whole bunch or just a few to their birthday parties.

3. All kinds of birthday parties are great opportunities for teaching basic manners: Say thank you for gifts (in person and with a note later), be gracious about all gifts even if they’re not what you would have wanted, thank the host parents and child for the party (and don’t ask, “Where’s my goody bag?”), don’t talk about upcoming parties at school or other group activities, (for parents) don’t assume that siblings are invited to tag along, etc. And good manners also means avoiding actions that might appear capricious or mean-spirited, even if they were not intended to be—don’t invite seven out of eight girls, don’t exclude a special-needs child because you assume he won’t be able to participate in the chosen activity, etc. (Although even there, it's a judgment call. Last year, two neighbor kids had a joint party at the Jump Zone and the parents let me know that, while both kids are friendly with Leah, they figured it wasn't a great activity for her, especially since she was still recovering from her major accident last summer. I actually really appreciated that they didn't invite her and put us in a difficult spot. I was not at all offended or hurt by it.)

What do you think? A fair enough list? Any other essentials? What are your birthday party preferences, and pet peeves?

"I Hope in Me She Sees Something of Herself"

2010-05-18T15:50:00.000-04:00

I have a guest post on BLOOM - Parenting Kids with Disabilities. Louise Kinross, who manages the blog and edits a print magazine by the same name, asked me to write about sharing a disability with my child. You can read what I wrote by visiting BLOOM.

Writing this post raised some questions for me about how much to invite Leah into my writing on disability and faith, as she gets older. I write about me, but in doing so, I write also about her, and to a lesser extent, the rest of our family. Part of me would like her to read this post (and others), and hear what she thinks. But part of me worries she will merely be self-conscious, and that the big questions around identity, pain, body, and spirit are still too large for her to grasp. I imagine much of what I'm writing now will make excellent fodder for mother-daughter conversations when she is a young adult, making decisions about career, marriage, and family. But I don't have a good sense of how much to share with her in the meantime.

I often feel disconcerted (perhaps a little guilty?) when I'm busily tap-tapping at my laptop and Leah comes in to kiss me goodnight. Here I am, writing about us—her and me, our bones and our bodies, the decisions Daniel and I made because she was born with OI, how being her mother (and Meg and Ben's too) has shaped me. And she doesn't know anything of what I'm writing. Is this conniving self-promotion on my part, or motherly discretion? I'm not sure.

In any case, I invite you to read my post over at BLOOM, and as always, I welcome your comments either there or here.

More Reflection on Motherhood and the Body

2010-05-05T08:28:00.000-04:00

I have a short essay published on Literary Mama today about how motherhood has helped me come to terms both with my body's amazing capabilities and with its limits.

The Gift That Counted: A Mothers Day Reflection

2010-05-03T09:09:00.000-04:00

I’ve never thought much of Mothers Day. It’s just another holiday hyped by retailers who want us to spend money we don’t have on gifts people don’t need. When my husband asks how I want to celebrate, I usually ask him to entertain the kids and take care of dinner so I can have a few hours off.

On Mothers Day 2006, I was even more uninterested in celebrating than usual. I was a limping, angry mess who woke each day with no clue how I would get my three children fed, clothed and where they needed to be. In December 2005, when I was eight months pregnant with our third baby, I had torn cartilage in my knee. My genetic disorder, osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), makes my bones and other connective tissues fragile, but this was my first major injury in years.

I hobbled around that last month of pregnancy, barely functional. Benjamin was born in late January and I quickly recovered from my c-section, but my knee failed to get better. By late afternoon most days, my knee was screaming. But there was still dinner to be made and children to be bathed, so I allowed myself one strong pain pill each evening, leftover from my c-section, and batted away the fear that I was medicating myself at the expense of my breastfeeding infant. My doctor reassured me that the medication was safe, but I still wondered whether regular exposure would fry the baby’s brain, and whether I was getting a little too attached to the relaxed mood that came along with the pain relief.

Finally, when the baby was three months old, I had surgery to repair my knee. I was sent home with information such as, “Crutches are not usually necessary,” and, “Pain will last up to four days.” I thought that, within a week, I’d be back to singlehandedly caring for my kids while my husband worked. My ability to care for my children—to carry a thrashing, overtired toddler to bed, or push my daughters on swings in between weeding the garden and nursing the baby—was a huge source of pride for me. As a child, I used wheelchairs, crutches, and leg braces, and spent months in plaster casts. And here I was now, not only walking, but caring for three children—children my body had carried, given birth to, and nourished.

My knee surgery brought my independent world crashing down. Days went by, then a week, then two weeks, and I still needed crutches. My knee was still painful. My parents stepped in to drive my oldest daughter to and from school, take my toddler to their house, and do my errands. I was once again a fragile little girl who couldn’t function without my parents’ help. That’s when I began to get angry. Anger is inevitable when one is caring for small, needy, and messy humans all day. But in my helpless state, my anger evolved from occasional moments of impatience to a simmering state of being.

My anger erupted early one morning. My husband’s normal routine was to get himself ready, help dress our two-year-old, then go to work around 7:30, leaving me with the remaining morning chores. One day, Daniel finished his morning tasks by 6:45. I took a final sip of coffee and said, “Okay, I guess I’ll go take a shower.” “Yeah,” Daniel replied, “it would be good if you went ahead and did that.”

“Why?” I asked, narrowing my eyes. “Are you leaving?”

He backpedaled, “Uh…no, no, I’m not leaving.” Too late.

“It drives me crazy when you get yourself ready earlier than usual,” I said through clenched teeth, “and your first thought is, ‘Hey, I can leave for work early,’ instead of, ‘Hey, I can help Ellen a little more before I leave.’”

And I walked as huffily as I could, given the crutch, to the bathroom. I shut the door and stood for a moment, so angry at him for being able to leave, for not seeing that if ever I needed extra help, it was now, for being able to effortlessly carry and dress our children when I could barely serve them cold cereal because I was doing it with only one hand and one leg. I raised my fist and banged the bathroom door as hard as I could, sending vibrations through our little house.

So that’s the state I was in when Mothers Day dawned a few days later. Six-year-old Leah presented me with a piece of pink paper, with the word “Mom” in the middle, and several lines coming out from there, each with a word describing something about me. Included were several of my favorite things (“blue” and “choclit”). But what stilled my angry heart were the lines that said simply, “giv brth,” and “milk.” With no idea how powerful her words could be, Leah honored the work my fragile body had done to nurture three children. She saw that work, as I do, as one of the most important things about me.

Then Daniel presented me with a bright yellow gift bag. A surprise gift from him was unprecedented, because I come from a family that makes detailed wish lists for Christmas and birthdays, complete with sizes, colors, and catalog pages. Daniel would dutifully present me with whatever cookbook or sweater I had on my list, and I would thank him sincerely, because that’s what I wanted.

I opened the bag and there lay a new watch, gold with an almond-shaped, mother of pearl face and tiny, delicate hands. It was beautiful, expensive, and unnecessary. It broke every one of my gift-giving rules.

After opening my gifts, I sat at the breakfast table, listening to Leah’s recounting of how she made my presents, and never once wished she would stop talking so I could read the paper. I said “yes” to two-year-old Meg’s requests for a second, third, and fourth helping of cream cheese on her bagel, instead of being annoyed that lately, nearly every sentence she spoke started with “I want…”. I looked down at Ben nursing, and admired his deep blue, heavy-lidded right eye as he locked his gaze on my pajama top. His eyes have always struck me as the most boyish thing about him, so different in some way I can’t quite name (more deeply set? a heavier brow?) from his sisters’ eyes, and all I wanted at that moment was to memorize the way that eye looked as I fed him. It occurred to me that I hadn’t felt this good without benefit of narcotics since Ben was born.

My family gave me exactly what I wanted for Mothers Day, even though I had been too lost in my shame and frustration to know what I wanted. I wanted to be reminded that I was not really the person I had become recently. When I was feeling betrayed by my body for being unable to do the most important work of my life, Leah’s gift reminded me that this imperfect body had given life to three new little people. When I was feeling sure that the even-tempered and capable woman Daniel had married was gone for good, his gift told me that he knew she was still there.

In the years since that Mothers Day, I have gone back to caring for my kids on my own for most hours of most days. But I have been forced to let go of the denial—not necessarily unhealthy—that propelled me through college, working life, marriage, pregnancy and the early years of motherhood, when my body functioned well enough that I could mostly ignore the physical side of my disability. In those years, my abnormal genes were of more concern than my fragile skeleton, as my children each had a 50 percent chance of inheriting my disorder.

Now, at almost 42, I can no longer deny my disability. The same knee that caused me problems three years ago is disintegrating, the cartilage thin and jagged from years of my abnormal gait, breaking off in chunks that make my knee buckle and get stuck in the wrong position for minutes, hours, sometimes days. I had surgery again about 18 months ago, but that was just a temporary fix. I need a knee replacement, but how does a mother of three young children function with only one working knee through months of rehab?

There are certain physical acts that are so universal among mothers, that are such instinctive acts of care, that they serve as symbols of Mother Love: The mother pacing for hours with a fussy infant in her arms, bouncing, walking, bouncing, walking. The mother picking up the exhausted preschooler, really too big to be carried, and letting him drape himself over the full length of her torso as she totes him the final 25 yards to the car. The mother squatting down on her haunches, looking her child straight in the eyes, to give words of praise or a full-body embrace. I cannot do any of those things. But I push myself to do more than seems possible, so that lifting my children, pulling them in a wagon or bending over to bathe them become acts of will and courage as much as they are acts of strength.

I am terrified of what new disabilities my future might bring. I know what it’s like to use a wheelchair and be bedridden and completely dependent on others for the most basic and intimate tasks. I never want to be in that position again, but it’s likely I will be. I don’t know how we would rearrange our lives to care for our children if I were to have a major fracture or surgery and be incapacitated for months. My Mothers Day watch, lovely as it is, is not a powerful enough talisman to guard me from those fears, or from the messages pervading a culture that commonly portrays mothers as supremely capable, tireless towers of strength. In the face of all the forces, within and without, fueling my sense of inadequacy, all I can do is continue believing that I am the best mother and wife my family could have, simply because I am theirs.

We're Just Not That Into You (or Your Kid's Bruise)

2010-04-30T23:01:00.000-04:00

Do you worry when you're out in public that people will assume, upon seeing your child's bruised countenance, that you are Mommy or Daddy Dearest?

A writer called "Neanderdad" does. He worries so much he wrote an entire essay on today's New York Times Motherlode blog about the distress he felt being out and about with his son, who sported a black eye. Every casual encounter or sidelong glance propelled Neanderdad into sweaty bouts of anxiety and escape plans.

I get (or I think I get) the angle Neanderdad is writing from. We live in an age of both hyperparenting and hyperscrutiny of parents (whether one has led to the other is an interesting chicken-and-egg question...which I will not even try to answer). I'm a pretty laid-back mom, but I'm not immune to cultural pressures to be a certain kind of parent.

But I found myself bristling—actually, downright hyperventilating-ly mad—after reading this essay. As much as I don't want to walk around with a chip on my shoulder or indulge in a lot of woe-is-me talk, the reason I got so angry was that our family knows something about about living with pain and injuries far worse than a black eye—and confronting daily the assumptions, curiosity, or bald-faced nosiness of strangers who know nothing of that pain.

Mostly, when I read this essay, I thought of my friend Melissa, whose beautiful daughter Sonya has osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), the same brittle bone disorder my daughter Leah and I have. A few months ago, Melissa was accused of child abuse by a complete stranger in the grocery store, because Sonya had a cast on her broken arm. Melissa knows a thing or two about actual—as opposed to imagined—suspicion of child abuse. As do many other families living with OI.

I couldn't help myself. I left the following comment on the Motherlode post:

I and my daughter have a serious physical disability that causes frequent broken bones. I try, really try, not to be one of those world-weary parents dealing with greater-than-average child rearing challenges who goes around grumbling about other parents who don't know how good they have it. I have, after all, been known to complain ad nauseum about my kids' whining and mess-making and picky eating instead of gratefully acknowledging how lucky I am to have them, and that our medical problems aren't worse than they are.

But after reading this essay, I'm going to take a moment to be a world-weary parent grumbling about others who don't know how good they have it. Here's a little perspective:

- Children who have our bone disorder (osteogenesis imperfecta) have been taken away from their parents--usually temporarily, occasionally permanently--because ER doctors, police, lawyers, and various other folks conclude that a child who frequently breaks bones MUST be abused. This condition is rare enough that even some doctors don't know that mildly affected children don't LOOK disabled, but they still break bones easily.

- A friend whose daughter has our condition was in a grocery store check-out line with her daughter, who had an arm cast. She was assaulted--there's no other way to say it--by a woman who started lecturing her about how she knew all about "parents like you" (who abuse their children). The woman actually followed my friend out of the store, snapped a photo of her license plate, and said she planned to call the police.

- My husband and I have never had the bad fortune of being accused of child abuse when we bring our daughter to the ER with yet another broken bone. (She's 10 years old and has had 10 fractures, which she has gotten walking across the living room floor and slipping on a piece of paper, among other ways.) But we, and our daughter, sure know how it feels to be scrutinized out in public. Try taking a child out in a wheelchair, with her leg in a cast and her arm in a sling. Even well-meaning people are compelled to ask what happened. We teach our daughter that to be polite, she needs to answer. But what I WANT to tell her is to make up some ludicrous story. Lie. Pretend she doesn't hear them. What I want to do is ask all the people who ask us these questions how they would feel if every time they go out in public, strangers felt free to ask questions about why they look the way they do.

I realize this is a rant..but honestly, all that self-absorbed angst over a bruise?

What do you think? Overreaction on my part? My situation is certainly not the norm; is it unfair of me to expect others to share my viewpoint? I'm interested in some other perspective, because I'm not sure whether I have lost mine or not.

Say "Yes" to Breastfeeding, "No" to Guilt

2010-04-23T08:28:00.000-04:00

I wrote a post on Christianity Today's women's blog this week reflecting on a new study showing that breastfeeding has massive life- and money-saving benefits.

Props to Some Brave Women

2010-04-13T11:14:00.002-04:00

I have a post on Christianity Today's women's blog about several Catholic women writers whose public statements of faith and identity are courageous and beautifully written. It's also about Christians' tendency to label people, including (especially?) other Christians, which is a topic I've also written about here.

Believe the Better Story

2010-04-01T15:46:00.005-04:00

My 10-year-old daughter Leah and I are spending two days in the hospital. Leah and I both have a bone disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta, which causes brittle bones. Because Leah has had several bad fractures this year requiring surgery, we put her back on a medication protocol she was on as a preschooler, and that (we think) contributed to a nearly four-year stretch when she did not have any fractures. Because the medication is delivered via IV over several days, it requires an inpatient stay.

I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!”—and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

I am reminded, too, of my favorite poem, Manifesto: A Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front, in which poet Wendell Berry tells us to “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”

This Easter, be joyful though you have considered all the facts. Believe the better story.

How I Became Attached to Detachment

2010-03-11T23:18:00.001-05:00

It was more than 15 years ago, but I still remember exactly how the preacher at my little coffeehouse church in Washington, D.C., pronounced the word at the heart of her message—“detachment.” She put such emphasis on the “ch” and the final “t” that the word became an onomatopoeia, her precise separation of its clipped syllables perfectly illustrating its definition.

I did not like that sermon. Not one bit. Detachment from things that keep us from hearing God’s voice and responding to God’s call is, of course, a perfectly sound proposition for Christians. Jesus had plenty to say about detachment—from wealth and possessions (Matthew 6:21: For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also), from the demands of others (he often left needy crowds to go off by himself to pray), and even from one’s own family (Luke 14:26: If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.)

But sound theology or not, I have always bristled at the idea of Christian detachment. Not just because cultivating detachment is so hard in a culture that encourages attachment to everything from our property values to the cell phones we literally stick to our ears. But also because our messy attachments to people, places and things give texture and meaning to our daily lives, even as they also complicate and distract.

The little D.C. church I attended as a single twenty-something encouraged detachment, with its core disciplines of spending at least one hour a day in solitary prayer and tithing a minimum of 10 percent of gross income. (Interestingly, this church attracted mostly young single people and middle-aged people who were single, divorced or married to someone who worshipped elsewhere. The few young married couples usually left, for either a different church or a new home closer to extended family, by the time baby number two arrived. Detachment, it seems, is a bit easier to cultivate without one child on your hip, another clinging to your leg, and a diaper bag full of goldfish crackers, crayons and sippy cups slung over your shoulder.)

The church disciplines made sense, but I struggled with the detachment ethic. My most significant encounters with God have nearly always been firmly rooted in earth, flesh and object. In January 1991, I made a three-mile march from the Washington National Cathedral to the Capitol building with other Christians who opposed the imminent Gulf War. Every weary step of that march, made harder by the bone disorder that has left my legs crooked and weak, was a plea to God to lead our nation down a different path. My sneakers striking the road, my muscles gathering into knots that would hurt for days, my shoulders brushing against friends and strangers—these connections of feet to asphalt, muscle to bone and believer to believer were the opposite of detachment. They coalesced into one of the most authentic prayers I have ever offered—a prayer that was purely physical, neither solitary nor spoken.

When my broken, disabled body was transformed by pregnancy and breastfeeding into a conduit for life, I received a new understanding of redemption—the idea that God does for us what we are unable to do for ourselves, that God can rescue what has been lost. No amount of exercise could help me reclaim my body’s worth the way that bearing and nurturing three human beings did.

The spiritual texts I have found most relevant to life as a mother and housewife are written by female authors, including Kathleen Norris and Margaret Kim Peterson, who argue that repetitive, physical household tasks such as laundry, cooking and cleaning should not be dismissed as mindless drudgery, but embraced as opportunities for worship and prayer.

Enmeshed in the physical demands of children and home, I find the detachment necessary for traditional spiritual disciplines to be elusive. I have often wondered how Christian life and practice would differ if God had become incarnate as a nursing mother instead of an unmarried man. But, although I never practiced so-called “attachment parenting" (the physical weakness associated with my bone disorder means I can’t even wear high heels, much less a growing baby), an overabundance of attachment in my life with young children has led me to re-evaluate my discomfort with detachment. Given that I have come to consider a solo car ride as a treat on par with a luxury vacation, I am beginning to understand the appeal of detachment.

I recently started working part-time at home to devote more time to writing. We have restructured our home life so I have clearly defined working hours during which my husband is the sole parent “on duty.” This new schedule requires detachment, not only from my kids during certain hours, but also from our home. With less time for cleaning, I have learned how to walk over a kitchen floor sticky with spills or to kiss children goodnight in bedrooms littered with yesterday’s clothes, and then go straight to my home office to write. I do not stop to put a few things away. I do not waste time dwelling on how our home no longer meets my standards of cleanliness and order.

With my writing vocation blossoming into a potentially life-long career, our entire family is discovering a wholeness and balance missing from our former patterns. We are more interdependent as the household becomes less singularly dependent on me. I am energized by the tangible sense that in my writing, I am answering God’s call. That energy, in turn, animates the other work to which I am clearly called—being a mother to my three young ones. A little detachment from the ideals of the always-available mother presiding over an orderly home is transforming our home life.

I am finally beginning to see that while our attachments are indeed life-giving and vital, detachment is not synonymous with barren isolation. Rather, detachment can make room for faith, wisdom and new perspectives to grow. Even the greatest gifts that God gives us—the people, places and things that make us feel at home—can, if we become too attached, swallow us up in a great wad of needs and expectations that becomes impenetrable to God’s spirit working in, around and through us.

And the Winner Is...

2010-03-11T23:16:00.000-05:00

Abbi! (Who commented on Facebook which is why you don't see her comment here.) Abbi - I'll drop the books at your house!

OK, you've convinced me to keep at it. Which thrills me, because I really do love writing the kind of thing I post here, even if I do break the rules about: 1) keeping it short, 2) posting regularly and 3) offering incentives for comments. I guess I'll keep on breaking the rules because you all don't seem to mind.

Because I break the rules, I know this blog will never have a huge following. But I am trying to build a writing career, so I could use your help to attract a few more readers. If you ever read a post that you really, really like, please help me get it out there by e-mailing a link to someone you think would like it too, or posting it to your Facebook page. Not all the time, just if a particular essay really stays with you. Some of you already do this. Thanks!

And now, as a runner-up prize to everyone who didn't win my sweepstakes extravaganza, I'm going to put up a new post too. Thanks again for all the comments!

Tell Me What You Think - And Enter to Win Free Books

2010-03-05T14:39:00.002-05:00

Hello dear readers! I am seeking some feedback from you, whether you are a long-time faithful blog visitor, someone who stops by now and then, or a first-time visitor.

I’m trying to decide whether to continue this blog or not. I started it two years ago, long before I had a book contract, because I was frustrated at receiving rejections for essays I worked hard on, submitted to publications I was familiar with, and felt confident were of high enough quality to compete with the usual stuff those publications used. I had so many ideas to write about, and would spend a couple of months developing something, then wait a couple more months to hear back from a pub, then get rejected. I started the blog so that when I write something I think is halfway decent, I can just post it and move on, and only spend the additional time for submission/waiting (and still, often, rejection!) if I am confident a piece is such a good fit for a particular publication that it’s worth the extra time investment. Plus, the blog allows me to get some feedback from readers to determine if I really have anything interesting to say.

While my blog traffic is piddly compared with blockbuster blogs, I get around 250 visits a month. Many regular readers are friends, but some aren’t. I’ve gotten a couple of invitations to contribute to more established blogs after people read something here they liked. It still provides a great outlet for essay ideas that I’m not developing for a particular purpose or publication. I wrote yesterday’s “Great Song Lyrics” piece because my brain really needed a break from the weighty issues I deal with in my book. I am fortunate to have people who e-mail me or stop me around town to tell me they liked a certain piece I wrote.

But last night, I went to hear the fabulous, funny Kelly Corrigan talk about her latest book, Lift; her first book, The Middle Place; and the writing life. Her publicist encourages her not to write anything “disposable,” as in magazine articles that people will skim in the doctor’s waiting room and then promptly forget. She has young children, and limited writing time, and her publicist thinks she should focus on things that will last—her books.

Given how I’m struggling to find time to write my book, write articles and blog posts for other publishing venues, and post regularly to both of my blogs, this got me thinking. Blogging is, in some ways, the most disposable writing form there is. There is not even a paper magazine hanging around on someone’s coffee table. Once someone clicks off the blog, poof….what I’ve written is gone.

So I’m not sure what the next step is. Of everything I do, this blog is the least connected to developing my “platform”—developing name recognition and a reputation as someone who is an expert in topics related to my book. On the other hand, I consider myself a writer, not a Christian bioethicist—even though that’s what my book is about—and really want to develop a writing career that encompasses the three topics most meaningful to me—faith, motherhood and disability. This blog showcases the type of writing I most enjoy and that I hope I can continue for the rest of my career, even as I do other types of writing. My passion is mixing the serious with the lighthearted, faith with pop culture and the craziness of daily life, the mundane and the extraordinary, the dark and the light.

I’d love some feedback from you, to help me decide where I should focus my non-book writing time: on both of my current blogs, on only one blog, on writing things suitable for publication in other venues, etc. I’d like to know: What purpose does this blog serve for you? What do you like about it? What don’t you like? I break many blogging rules, including the one about keeping posts short—Do you like this, or does it interfere? Would you read more regularly if I wrote shorter posts? What about the topics I choose? Too all over the place? Or do you like the variety? Do you read my other blog, and which of the two is more valuable to you (and why)? Any other feedback? (Really, I want to hear both the good and the not so good.)

Ideally, I’d love to get feedback on the comment form below. That allows a conversation to start, with commenters responding to each other. But if you are comment-shy, you can either e-mail me at 5dollars [at] comcast [dot] net, or, if you came here through a link on Facebook, you can comment there. While this blog has served a number of purposes for me, my ultimate goal as a writer is to offer something valuable to readers. So what you have to say is the key consideration.

The other blogging rule I rarely follow is to offer incentives for comments—it seems a little sleazy, like paying for people to pay attention to me! But this time, I’m going to give that a try. Everyone who comments, through any avenue, will be entered in a drawing to win one copy each of Kelly Corrigan’s books, The Middle Place and Lift. Guys (and ladies who have either read them or don’t like mom lit), if these don’t interest you, they would make great Mothers Day gifts for your wife, mom, or another woman in your life. I will post the winner here on Friday, March 12. I will post whatever name or nickname the winner uses in his/her comment. Anonymous commenters will be identified by the time and date of their comment (for example, Anonymous 11:15 a.m. on March 6). The winner can then privately e-mail me with their actual name and a mailing address.

Thanks in advance!

Great Song Lyrics as Cosmic Band-Aids

2010-03-04T14:40:00.001-05:00

Sometimes when I need a break from writing and Thinking Great Thoughts, I add to my list of best-ever song lyrics. I consider songwriters to be some of the best writers out there, and am inspired by their ability to write a lyric that says so much in so few words. Brevity is not my gift. I could learn a thing or two from songwriters, and I’m trying.

Here is my list so far, in no particular order:

Can’t find a better man. (Pearl Jam, Better Man): A great double meaning here. The guy thinks she means he is the best man for her, while she really feels stuck in a dead relationship but doesn’t believe she can find anything better.

He thinks he’ll keep her. (Mary-Chapin Carpenter, from the song of the same name): Again, this line reveals the huge disconnect between a husband’s and wife’s view of their marriage. He thinks, “I’ve got a woman who gave birth to and is raising my kids, who does all the chores and gives me everything I need. I think I’ll keep her.” The wife, planning to leave her empty marriage, understands that while he thinks she’s sticking around, he is wrong.

If you want to kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel. On your knees, boy. (U2, Mysterious Ways): Apparently I am some kind of sicko who enjoys glimpses into other people’s messed-up relationships. I just think this is clever.

I sound like a housewife. Hey ‘Chelle, I think I’m a housewife. (Michelle Shocked, Anchorage): Which of us moms/housewives haven’t had those moments, while we are changing a poopy diaper in between filling up the crock pot and driving to toddler story time at the library, when we think, “Good gracious, what have I become?” Becoming a housewife is not a bad thing—what I love about Anchorage is the gracious way the song treats inevitable separation between old friends, one of whom is a “skateboard punk rocker,” and the other a housewife—but it is a little freaky sometimes.

You've got your ball, you've got your chain tied to me tight, tie me up again. (Dave Matthews Band, Crash): I just love how this line takes this cliché image of boring, stifling marriage and naughties it up a little bit.

Never was a cornflake girl. Thought that was a good solution, hanging with the raisin girls. (Tori Amos, Cornflake Girl): I recall a friend once saying, “I have no idea what that means. But I like it anyway.” Ditto. When I Googled the lyrics to make sure I had them right, Google gave me the option of clicking on “cornflake girl lyrics meaning.” I declined. I don’t really want to know.

East of Virginia where the bay meets a river, down in Mary's land. The wind pulls your sleeve like a long lost lover whose heart can't understand how you ever could leave the view you behold. Ain't it fine and ain't life grand when you don't need nothing but some beer and a bushel down in Mary's land. (Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Down In Mary’s Land): We lived in Maryland when we first got married, and this song reminds me both of the actual Eastern Shore and of our many care-free weekend drives out into the Maryland and Virginia countryside. I have no doubt that being in Connnecticut is right for us now, but sometimes my heart still can’t understand how we could ever leave our life in D.C. and the surrounding land, where both Daniel and I grew into ourselves, separately and together.

Jimmy is married and he lives down South, and his wife lives somewhere colder. (Shawn Colvin, The Facts About Jimmy): Again, such a clever, original way of painting a portrait of a marriage in trouble.

(Golly, this makes it look like I’m obsessed with.doomed marriages. Let me just say: I love my husband. Keep that in mind when you read the next lyric.)

It seems our love was destined to be caught in other nets. (written by Jerry Jeff Walker, sung by Nanci Griffith, Morning Song for Sally): We all have one, right? The one we thought was “the One,” until it turned out they weren’t? Have I mentioned that I love my husband?

You gave me nothing, now it’s all I’ve got (U2, One): Best one-liner ever.

I wonder about my mental health when I look at this list. Why all the doom and gloom, all the lost love and the twisted, sad perspective on relationships? Maybe I need to listen to happier music.

But really, I think my favorite lyrics reveal that I crave words that tell the truth—not in the sense of overarching, meaning-of-life mystical or religious truth, although I appreciate that too—but in the sense of revealing some raw glimpse of what it means to be a flawed human being who loves other flawed human beings in a world where loss is written into everyone’s story. This is why I’m writing about the ethics of reproductive and genetic technology from the perspective of story rather than treatise. All of these lyrics are powerful because they tell a story that reveals something true about human life and relationships, with more power and fewer words than a point-by-point discussion of the topic. Instead of telling us that a marriage where one partner takes the other for granted, and the other partner feels that she’s doing an awful lot of work for little or no benefit, will fail, Mary-Chapin Carpenter tells us, “He thinks he’ll keep her.”

I listen to popular music, and don’t worry about my kids listening to it, because I appreciate how really good songwriters tell stories and tell the truth. The truth is not always pretty, and popular music is not always either artistically good or appropriate for young ears. I do occasionally turn off a song that is just way over the top when my kids are in the car. But not often. The other day, Leah and I had a conversation about the Oasis song Wonderwall. Actually, it was not much of a conversation, since we both have no idea what it means to tell someone that they are your Wonderwall. (If it means something horribly inappropriate for a 10-year-old, please don’t tell me. Let us maintain our innocence.) But we agreed that we like the song, and Leah was humming it the rest of the day.

You know what I don’t get, though? The Kidz Bop CDs. A bunch of pre-adolescents singing jauntily along to Fergie’s Clumsy? Now that is disturbing. Listening to Smells Like Teen Spirit or Boulevard of Broken Dreams because that's what Mom listens to? Not so much. There’s much of the truth of life that I hope to shield my kids from a little longer, but I do want them to learn what good music and good writing sound and look like. Because music and writing can remind us that we’re not alone in our pain and befuddlement. Like a band-aid and a kiss from Mom, they can’t make the boo-boos go away, but they can make us feel a whole lot better.

Have any favorite song lyrics you want to add to my list?

When Everything Just Isn't Enough

2010-02-10T22:56:00.002-05:00

I felt like I did everything right as a mom today. It was a snow day, and though I was tempted to take advantage of the lack of agenda to get chores done, I didn’t. I made a cake, and let everyone help. Meg and Ben wrote poems (included below for your reading enjoyment), and I typed them up and added illustrations. I played Hungry, Hungry Hippos and Operation. Besides the cake, I made some kick-ass spaghetti sauce that made the whole house smell good. We made a fire, served dinner in the living room so we could enjoy it, and let the kids roast marshmallows to make s’mores for dessert (because the cake we made did not meet entirely with kid approval, with its ground nuts and lack of frosting).

And you know what? All that great mom stuff I did? It wasn’t enough.

The spaghetti with kick-ass sauce went uneaten. There was pestering and whining and fresh talk. The kids seemed able to focus only on what they wanted and didn't have, instead of on all the things they did (parental attention, no school, unorthodox dinner arrangements, chocolate). I won’t catalog all their sins here, because I’m not writing this to justify my anger or humiliate my kids if they read this years from now. Suffice it to say that there were many, many straws, including a last one, and the camel’s back broke—though even then, I lost my cool like a good mom, downstairs in the kitchen while they were all obliviously upstairs. I threw a few things (some of the kick-ass spaghetti sauce somehow ended up on the kitchen window) and used a few choice words about how it feels to go through an entire day doing your very, very best for the people you adore, only to have those people ignore, forget or just not give a crap about all the things you did. My lovely husband let me rant and then, in his infinite wisdom, volunteered to go on upstairs and get the wee ones in bed.

Mommy blogs and parenting magazines love to list surprising aspects of parenthood, all the things people say they never knew or understood before having kids. Usually, the things on those lists (“I never knew I could love another person so much,” or “I never knew I could function so well on so little sleep”) don’t resonate with me. Not that I don't experience those things, just that I never found them all that surprising.

But the truth of motherhood that I confronted today—that no matter how much I do, sometimes it’s not enough—now that catches me up short and leaves me feeling completely inadequate for this task of tending three human beings into adulthood. Yes, children’s love for their parents can be breathtakingly forgiving; Ben will snuggle into my bed at 5:45 tomorrow morning as if my dinnertime ultimatums—“Any more fresh talk from you, mister, and you’re going to bed with no dessert and no stories”—never happened. Yes, as I often write about on this blog, kids can turn out OK, better than OK, even when their parents are inconsistent, lazy, inept, or just not interested in following all the advice doled out by parenting gurus and other parents.

But sometimes, kids just want more and more and more. Sometimes, instead of appreciating everything a parent does for them, they can only see what the parent doesn’t do. An arm and a leg? Mere appetizers. Sometimes, they want all of me, everything I have, down to my last hair follicle and cell membrane. And then a little more. Memories of all the games played in front of the fire fade in the harsh light of mom’s refusal to play a game tonight because she needs to do the dishes. The fourteen hours of most days that mom is available for snacks and snuggles, homework help and hugs, are meaningless to a four-year-old who wants his mommy on Saturday afternoon, when she is unreachable, holed up in the home office, working.

Or at least it feels that way right now. I hope that somewhere deep in my children’s gut they understand that the games played, the hugs given, the presence offered hour after hour, day after day in this long, long string of days, most of them too mundane to really remember, matter far more than the games not played, the hugs given half-heartedly, the occasional absences in body or mind. I hope, with a desperate, grasping hope, that the childhood stories they tell their college friends and first loves and spouses and children will be about the cocoon-like comfort of snow days spent playing games by the fire, about a love of baking rising from the flour-strewn kitchen table where I taught them how to crack an egg, about maternal arms flung wide in acceptance and love.

This is the thing that has most surprised me about motherhood—that the only recognition and reward I really desire in this life is that my children remember their childhood as a happy one.

What's Next? Mandated Butt-Wiping Lessons?

2010-01-29T13:18:00.002-05:00

Sigh. Here we go again. If you’re not in the mood for a rant, you might want to go visit a blog with less whining.

The New York Times has an article today about a new mandate in Massachusetts that children who eat a meal at day care or preschool, or who are there for more than four hours a day, must brush their teeth. This means that teachers have to add yet another activity to a busy day, and some teachers quoted in the article say that toothbrushing cuts into rest time or other scheduled activities. The description of a classroom of four-year-olds with toothbrushes will not surprise any parent or teacher: the kids stab each other, rub their toothbrushes in the carpet, and brush their noses and chins as much as their teeth. The mandate suggests that teachers help those who cannot brush well independently. Which, based on my experience, means they have to help everyone. Just what I want my kids’ teachers to be doing—supervising a bunch of inept toothbrushers. Yup, that’s why I send my kids to school.

A spokesperson for the agency that crafted the Massachusetts mandate argues that poor dental care can have “devastating” effects.

I think we need to get our vocabulary straight. The Haiti earthquake was devastating. Children being gunned down in our urban neighborhoods is devastating. The recession has been devastating for many Americans. Poor dental health is a public health concern, but it is not devastating.

Let me get the disclaimer out of the way: I know that poor oral health has been linked to other health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and low birthweight babies. But even the American Dental Association makes a point of saying that, “just because two conditions occur at the same time, doesn’t necessarily mean that one condition causes the other.” In other words, poor dental health is correlated with a number of health conditions, but that does not mean poor oral health causes these health conditions.

My encounters with dentists—my own and my kids’—generally consist of me nodding politely through lectures about how I need to supervise my 10-year-old’s brushing habits, consider spending thousands of dollars on sealants and gum surgery, and My God Woman, if you don’t do something now your teeth might fall right out of your head and then your life will be over!!! And then I go home and ignore their advice. (Sorry to any dentists reading this. It’s really nothing personal.)

Again, disclaimers: Yes, I take my kids and myself to the dentist regularly. Yes, I instruct my kids to brush morning and night. Yes, I have dental floss available and make sure they know how to use it. I am a dedicated flosser myself; honestly, I can’t settle down to sleep if I haven’t flossed at night.

But we just got dental insurance this month, after years without it, so all our dental expenses have been out-of-pocket. And though I have had receding gums for years, I’ve never had a cavity and I’m darned if I’m going to go under the knife (for what, the fourteenth or fifteenth time in my life?) to get my gums fixed, thank you very much. And—let me make this very clear—I will not brush my children’s teeth for them, or even stand over them making sure they do it right.

I suppose I can afford to be a little cavalier, because it seems like teeth are one of those things that are what they are. In my experience, people with “good” teeth avoid cavities and disease no matter what they do, and people with “bad” teeth get cavities and disease no matter what they do. Despite my gum issues, I have never had a cavity, and it looks like my kids inherited my strong teeth, because so far, neither have they. I know families who are much more conscientious than we are about sweets and fluoride rinses, and their kids have had a bunch of cavities. Maybe I’d get more worked up about my kids’ teeth if they had a lot of problems.

More important, the Massachusetts mandate is yet another example of how parents and teachers are held to unreasonably high standards. Parents and teachers are told over and over again, by doctors and dentists and state regulations and public service announcements, that there are all these things we need to make sure our kids do. Brush their teeth, eat five a day, exercise for an hour, turn off the TV, pack their own backpacks, help around the house, prepare for standardized tests. And then, parents are criticized for overscheduling and helicoptering, and schools are criticized for having 20-minute lunch periods and giving too much homework.

You need to let kids be kids, the experts say to parents and teachers. But first, you need to pack your day full of non-negotiable activities and scrutinize your kids’ every move to make sure they are meeting the standards we set for health, academic achievement and well-being.

When Meg was in her second year of preschool, we arrived at school each day to find a question posted on the wall. I would read her the question, and Meg would decide whether to put her name in the “yes” or the “no” column. One day, the question was, “Did you brush your teeth today?” As someone who thought I might be arrested by the Mommy Police if I didn’t do a forced march to the bathroom sink every morning, I figured every kid would have his/her name under “yes.”

But they didn’t! About half the kids said “no,” they had not brushed their teeth that day. And their moms weren’t even embarrassed about it. Ever since then, my policy has been that I’ll ask the kids to brush their teeth before school, and I’ll even put the toothpaste on the brush for the younger ones. After that, it’s up to them to do it well, do it poorly or, occasionally, not do it at all.

I can confidently report that my lax toothbrushing rules have not resulted in any consequences even remotely devastating. As a matter of fact, given that the handful of times that I have really, really lost my cool with my kids have almost all occurred between 7:45 and 8:15 a.m. on school mornings, when the number of tasks to be completed by cranky, tired people feels overwhelming, I think that my laissez-faire attitude toward toothbrushing qualifies as devastation avoidance.

I feel sorry for Massachusetts preschool teachers, who do not have the option of either shrugging off the toothbrushing mandate or going completely apeshit when little Johnny, in great need of a post-lunch rest, is using his toothbrush to scrub the tiled floor instead of cleaning his teeth.

Social Media: Fostering Connections or Self-Indulgence?

2010-01-28T11:17:00.001-05:00

On a web site called Spirituality and Practice, Frederic A. Brussat lists 25 reasons why using Twitter is a spiritual practice. The 25 reasons have to do with things like connecting with other people and the wider world, learning to listen to others, and learning to pay attention to one’s own thoughts and feelings rather than going through life on auto-pilot.

I am dubious.

I do not Twitter. While I may have many gifts as a writer, brevity is not one of them. My blog posts, most at more than 1,000 words, break all kinds of blogging commandments—and I usually edit them significantly before posting. Using Twitter, with its 140-character limit, might be a good discipline, but would be so difficult that it would take far too much time out of my day. And I just read a blog post saying that the ideal number of daily tweets is 12 to 14. My attention is scattered enough without stopping 12 times a day to organize 140-character thoughts.

I also think that, rather than fostering productive soul-searching and connections among people, social media (Twitter, Facebook and yes, blogging) can actually breed an inward-focused self-indulgence that disconnects us from each other. I intend my blog posts and even my Facebook status updates to engage people in some way—make them question, make them laugh, make them think “Oh yeah, I know that feeling!” But I know I don’t always succeed. Sometimes what I write is more for me than for other people. It makes me feel good about myself (“Ooooh, look at that sentence I just wrote—How cool is that?!” or “I'm having a lousy day but at least my blog stats look good!”). The narcissistic potential of blogging, in particular, kept me from trying it for several years. Even now, I have regular crises of confidence when I wonder if I’m doing this for all the wrong reasons. Those crises are currently fed by my efforts to use both my blogs and Facebook page to build a “platform”—that is, to build name recognition and interest in my work—so that I can sell my book down the line. I am making a focused effort to use social media for my own ends, although I don’t want to sell my book only for selfish reasons. I’m not writing it for the money (it would be a colossal waste of time if I were), but because I hope what I have to say will really help people and move the discussion about reproductive and genetic ethics forward.

On the other hand, Facebook and my blogs have definitely fostered connections—real connections that I value—with old friends that I would otherwise have lost touch with, or with new people who find me through my blogs, and who both share and challenge my perspectives.

I’m curious what other people think. Do social media foster or discourage connection and thoughtfulness? Or maybe do a little of both? What makes you read a blog post or respond to someone’s status update or tweet? What makes you write off someone’s post as irrelevant or self-indulgent?

Christmas Pageant Reflections

2010-01-21T12:25:00.000-05:00

I was recently invited to become a regular blogger at the Daily Episcopalian, part of the Episcopal Cafe web site. My first post reflects on unexpected lessons from this year's Christmas pageant.

Seeking God's Grace for a Broken Nation

2010-01-16T21:21:00.007-05:00

When I think of the images from past disasters that have stayed with me—haunted me, really—I realize I remember them because of some common experience that helped me to identify with the victims’ pain. For example, in the days following Hurricane Katrina, a TV news reporter interviewed a couple who had fled the Gulf Coast in their SUV with their children, the clothes on their backs and no cash. The mom was teary with relief at finding a CVS drug store giving away cookies and juice, because her children hadn’t eaten since the day before. I think of that family often, especially when I become annoyed at my children’s constant requests for snacks, complaints when what is offered is not what they want, and grocery store pleas. What a privilege, to always be able to feed my children when they are hungry.

With this latest, most overwhelming of tragedies—the Haiti earthquake—I cannot stop thinking about the woman who responded in French patois to a CNN reporter’s questions about why she was waiting, with hundreds of others, outside a medical clinic’s doors. She unwrapped a blue cloth from her thigh, and I did not need a translation to know that she was saying her femur was broken. I know what a broken femur looks like, sounds like, feels like. Which is why I was stunned into heartbroken silence by this woman, who was sitting calmly, dry-eyed and silent, waiting for help that, if it came, would probably be inadequate to banish her pain and properly set her fracture.

A friends’ husband, who is an emergency room doctor here in Connecticut, just arrived in Haiti to work on behalf of the International Medical Corps. They report that broken bones are among the most common injuries, and that pain medication, bandages and other necessary supplies are scarce. Reading this, I am jolted back to a hot June morning, sitting on the scorching playground blacktop with Leah just after she broke her femur and humerus this past summer. It was a terrible day, and yet I recall all the ways that it could have been so much worse, all the moments of grace that made a terrible day bearable. Grace came in the form of a skinny, fresh-faced EMT, who lay down on his side next to Leah, and from that awkward position on sunbaked asphalt, managed to start an IV in her hand within seconds. A few seconds after that, the morphine that would make the coming hours slightly less horrific was traveling through her veins. I saw God’s grace in that EMT because I have, more times than I care to remember, been poked and prodded to the point of near-fainting and deep bruising by medical personnel who could not manage to start an IV on the first, second or seventh try, in the relative comfort of a hospital room. I saw God’s grace in that EMT because I have known medical personnel who insist on moving a child with a painful fracture for their convenience, the child’s comfort be damned.

But I realize too that, as difficult as Leah’s and my bone disorder is to live with, our most painful moments are made bearable not just because God is good, but also because we are lucky. We have access to economic resources and a medical infrastructure that others do not. Too many in Haiti will not know the blessed relief of opiates coursing through their veins, the calm attention of doctors and nurses in well-equipped emergency rooms, or the gift of skilled EMTs willing to do whatever it takes to make a terrible day a little better.

Tragedies like this one in Haiti make us wonder what’s up with God and this world he professes to love. “Really God?”, we are tempted to ask. “You allowed this to happen in the one country in the Western Hemisphere least able to handle it, where the infrastructure, government and medical facilities were already insufficient? Really?” Some Christians (you know who you are, Pat Robertson) think they are being prophetic by naming massive suffering as a divine curse resulting from past sins.

But I think even Christians who recognize Robertson’s “cursed Haiti” scenario as cruel and preposterous sometimes err, with the best of intentions, when they speak of God’s role in suffering. I wrote about this two weeks ago on my other blog, in discussing the meant-to-be-comforting assurances that people offer to those who are dealing with infertility or genetic disease—clichés such as “Everything happens for a reason,” or “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” These sayings sound so helpful. They might even provide a bit of comfort to some suffering people who hear and embrace them. But they crumble to dust in the face of overwhelming tragedy, like that in Haiti this week. It is monstrous to believe that there is a divine reason for a child who survived harrowing hours pinned under a fallen building to die for lack of proper medical care hours after being freed. It is ludicrous to believe that that the broken-legged woman waiting patiently for help that might never come was given this pain because God knows she can handle it. It is obscene to believe that an entire nation of people broken, bleeding, homeless, starving and grieving has some divine purpose, some God-given intention behind it.

The Haiti earthquake does not make me question God’s goodness, because this random, heartbreaking pain has nothing to do with who God is, and everything to do with how the world is—a fallen, broken, imperfect world in which a God of love is still at work against darkness and chaos. Yesterday, the journal First Things republished an essay that Eastern Orthodox theologian David B. Hart wrote in response to the December 2004 tsunami, because his words are just as relevant in the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake. It is not easy reading, but if you are struggling with what to think about God in the face of this immense pain, it is worth the effort.

Hart writes, "I do not believe we Christians are obliged—or even allowed—to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred.” He also writes, “Simply said, there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel—and none in which we should find more comfort—than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.” Some meaning may come later, in how we (sometimes) see good come out of bad, in how we embody God’s radical love for us by radically loving those who are in pain, in how moments of unexpected grace can make terrible days ever so slightly less terrible.

There was no grace in the moment that my daughter fell from her scooter and felt her thigh bone break in two, no grace in the unfairness of a routine childhood mishap resulting in excruciating pain, surgery and a lost summer. But there was grace in that sweaty EMT doing more than he had to, laying himself down on the potholed asphalt and sliding a needle, almost painlessly, into my daughter’s vein to give her some momentary relief. There was no grace in the earth’s shaking that brought tons of concrete and metal crashing down onto fragile human skeletons, no grace in the hordes of broken-boned people waiting at medical facilities that lack the staff and supplies to help them. But there is grace in the foreign medical teams hastily departing their comfortable homes to travel to Haiti, in the people digging through rubble with whatever tools they can find, in the nurse holding the hand of a young woman whose leg has to be amputated, and in nonprofit web sites slowed because of overwhelming traffic from people wanting to donate money.

God promises us that he is creating a new heaven and a new earth, one in which “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain…” In the meantime, it falls to us to wipe the tears of those in pain and respond in love to death and mourning. I invite you to do one (or all) of the following:

Give to one of the many organizations sending help to Haiti. Right now, most organizations say what they need most is cash. Here are three organizations I admire and support, but there are plenty of others.

International Medical Corps
United Nations World Food Program
Episcopal Relief and Development

Comment to this post. One word or one hundred—it doesn’t matter. For every comment posted, I will donate $5 to the International Medical Corps, up to $150. (Note: This is not a marketing ploy. I'm not collecting e-mail addresses or trying to increase traffic or anything like that. You can comment anonymously. You can comment anonymously five times if you want, and I'll count that as five comments. It's just a way for me—and I hope you—to do just one more very small thing for the people of Haiti.)

Pray for all those suffering in Haiti, that they might know God’s grace in the outpouring of care and support from around the world.

My New Year's Resolution: More Work, More Rest

2010-01-04T23:39:00.003-05:00

My kids all got exactly what they wanted for Christmas. Not the toys so much. Leah didn’t really ask for anything specific, and the other two are at the “I want everything I see on TV and in every toy catalog that arrives at our house after October 1” phase. When I say that they got exactly what they wanted, I mean that they got us. Me and Daniel. Our mostly undistracted, unrushed attention. Our presence.

I’ve written about our Christmas-New Year’s week patterns before, so I won’t belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that it’s the only week of the year that I just don’t care that there’s a gooey gray spot on the kitchen floor that sucks at my shoes every time I walk over it. It’s the only week of the year that what we want to do almost always trumps what we have to do. It’s the only week of the year when we respond “yes” to about 95 percent of children’s requests for us to play a board game or eat nachos by the fire instead of a real dinner at the table. “No” is reserved for reasons so valid that even the children recognize them as such. “No, we can’t go play outside because it’s so cold that Dad’s goatee froze when he went out brush the snow off the car,” for example. Or, “We’re all out of nacho ingredients. Would you settle for a tuna sandwich if I throw in an extra Christmas cookie for dessert?”

It struck me this year that I treat this holiday week as an annual Sabbath of sorts. It’s not that I don’t do any work, but I lower my expectations, label many regular chores (like mopping the gray goo off the kitchen floor) as temporarily unnecessary, and stress a lot less about what is not getting done around the house while I am diligently working to better my Mario Kart rank.

I admire God for his practicality. The Sabbath is not about us being God’s copycats; God rested on the seventh day, so we will too. The Sabbath serves a purpose. God understands that human minds and bodies do not function well in a constant state of high alert. We need to occasionally stop functioning at a high level of activity in order to continue functioning at a high level of activity. Rest is good for us, and for the work we do when we return from it.

Today was the first day back to normal life after my annual Sabbath, and it was a fantastic day. I swam, played with Ben in the pool, hosted a friend and her son for a short play date, did three loads of laundry, hung some pictures that have been sitting under my desk for three months, signed Meg up for ice skating lessons, played some games with Ben, wrote for four hours, and served a made-from-scratch dinner, including fresh-baked bread (though, to be fair, I used the world’s easiest bread recipe). After a week of letting go of responsibilities, I was ready to take them on again.

The problem with an annual Sabbath is that if the positive benefits last for just a few days, even as long as a week, that leaves me with 50 more weeks of responsibilities and a serious lack of motivation and energy. I’m guessing this is why God suggests we keep Sabbath weekly instead of annually. I have never done well with the weekly Sabbath. The idea is nice. A day of rest. Who wouldn’t like that? But actually carrying out the idea requires me to 1) accept the word of an outside authority that I really do need a day of rest more than I need to go to Stop & Shop so I do not have to endure one single more complaint about how we do not have the desired cereal choices for breakfast; and 2) accept that, for a mother of three children, “rest” can no longer be defined as staying in the same position on the couch for eight hours straight, alternating reading with napping, rising only to use the bathroom or forage for Vienna Fingers. For years now, I have been unwilling to accept these two conditions. Hence, not so good at the Sabbath.

But it’s the time for resolutions, and keeping a Sabbath—a real, weekly one—is part of mine. My overall resolution is time management. I may have mentioned that I was offered a book contract in December. Did I mention that? Just in case I didn’t, let me mention it now. I was offered a book contract. I haven’t actually signed the book contract because it is buried somewhere on my desk, part of a pile that somehow only grew during my week of not worrying about getting stuff done. But I have one. So for the first time in 10 years, I have an actual responsibility to meet the expectations of people to whom I am not related. I can no longer write only when the kids are in bed and I have an idea of something to write and the house is reasonably clean and a perusal of the on-screen TV guide reveals that there are, for some inexplicable reason, currently no opportunities to watch House, CSI, any version of Law and Order, American Idol, American Idol Rewind, a Harry Potter movie, a Will Ferrell movie, or an episode of House Hunters that I haven’t seen more than three times already.

So I’ve developed a weekly schedule with designated writing time, but also designated time for those things that are either necessary in absolute terms (laundry) or necessary for me to have enough peace of mind to write without constant prickling of my guilty conscience pondering everything I’m not doing while I write (cleaning the bathrooms once a week, baking and cooking from scratch for some meals). By contemplating my own bare minimum for household chores and making sure that my weekly schedule accommodates that, I have freed myself to practice a real Sabbath. If the fridge is looking empty on Saturday night, but I know that Monday morning is grocery day, then I am free not to go shopping on Sunday. If I get inspired to write a new blog post on Sunday afternoon, and I know that on Monday night, Daniel is prepared to put the kids to bed because it is one of my scheduled work nights, then I can just jot a note to myself to keep track of my inspiration, rather than opening the laptop and spending three hours writing. If I notice the grey goo has reappeared on my kitchen floor one morning, I can live with it for a while, confident that when the designated mopping day comes along, I will banish it once again.

In the quasi-conversation that took place on the First Things web site as a result of my last post on male vs. female spirituality, a commenter named Anne offered some suggestions from her own life as a single mom besieged by inescapable chores. In suggesting that it’s important to keep a Sabbath, she made an obvious but perspective-changing observation about how the Bible speaks of the Sabbath. We all remember the seventh day is for rest bit, but do we really stop to think about the six days are for work side of the equation? Anne said that focusing on the six working days helped her, and it is helping me too.

The schedule I’ve set for myself is ambitious, but I thought about it long and hard, considering my own physical and emotional needs as well as those of my family. I realized that if I am willing to really work six days of the week, then the day of rest will be a natural and welcome break, not an imposition keeping me from accomplishing what I need to do. And really working does not mean unending, exhausting drudgery. It does mean forgoing some of those TV reruns that I only half-watch as I troll Facebook. It does mean being more focused on getting my work done (whether the work is writing or housework) when my kids are at school so I am available to them after school, instead of trying to finish things up—write a concluding paragraph to a piece of writing, pay those last three bills, vacuum one last room—just at the time when my hungry, weary children are most in need of my full attention.

Neither I nor my kids can always get everything we want. Our holiday week—our annual super-Sabbath—will continue to be my very favorite time of year because it is such a departure from our normal, somewhat unforgiving routine. During that week, we all learn the gift of being present, to each other and to our own needs for rest, refreshment and freedom. Christmas cannot last all year, but I’m hoping that, with some effort and intention, the gift of presence can.

Update on Yesterday's Post

2009-12-25T21:13:00.011-05:00

So a very cool thing happened yesterday, which is that Joseph Bottum, editor of the journal First Things and the author of the essay that I responded to in yesterday's blog post, read my post and wrote a response. He also invited comments from other readers, which were few in number and all along the lines of, "Dollar is whiny and has too much time on her hands," which was kind of upsetting. But it helps to know for certain that while I may certainly be wrong, having too much time on my hands is most definitely not my problem. Which was kind of the point of the whole piece I wrote yesterday.

Anyhoo, if you want to see Bottum's response, the comments, and my response to the comments (good grief, I need to stop), go check it out here.

Now off for my long winter's nap. Merry Christmas!

Is There a Male/Female Spiritual Divide, or Do I Just Have a Chip on My Shoulder?

2009-12-23T22:44:00.003-05:00

If, over the next few merry days, you are sitting by the fire with a hot drink and your laptop, here is a very beautiful piece of Christmas reminiscence to read. Titled Dakota Christmas, it is a series of scenes from author Joseph Bottum's childhood Christmases in South Dakota, written in rich, descriptive prose. He recounts tales of lost horses and aspic salad, beloved Christmas books and unexpected gifts. (Warning: It's really long, so do not attempt to read unless your fire is roaring, your mug is full, and your children are in a sugar coma or completely absorbed in their new toys.)

But although it's beautiful, there are some things about this piece I didn't like. At the end, Bottum (editor of the journal First Things, published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life) recalls one Christmas when, as a 16-year-old, he went out onto the frigid, barren Dakota prairie, separating himself from his family's holiday festivities and the "mess and clutter of our overpopulated Christmas desires, ruined by their secular attainment." He realized that, "To stand along the prairie’s rim was to understand the clean, impatient truth that where man is, God is not—to know that the divine always lives apart from people."

Come again?

That seems such an odd conclusion to reach on a holiday celebrating the coming of God into the world as not just a person, but the most vulnerable, needy and messy type of person there is. Seems to me that the message of Christmas is that where man (and woman) is, there God is, and we cannot ignore him even if we want to, because he nurses every hour-and-a-half and, whoops, he just messed the manger again. Joseph, will you fetch some fresh hay please?

To be fair, Bottum amends this statement in the next paragraph, saying, "I have been forced to learn the harder truth: God calls us in charity not to the prairie but to the towns. Where people are gathered in his name, there he is."

I think part of my frustration with Bottum's first "truth"—that God is found where people are not—stems from an earlier piece he wrote on how Christmas has swallowed up (i.e., ruined) Advent. His piece on Advent, in fact, was one of the things I was responding to in my last post about my impatience with all the ways people criticize American Christmas celebrations as too much, too little, too religious, too secular, too sad, too happy, etc. (Another warning: If you choose to read Bottum's Advent piece, avoid reading the comments. They will make your head hurt.)

Here's where I'm going with all this: Bottum's two essays—both so gorgeously, lucidly written that I wanted to lay my hands on my laptop screen, hoping I could soak up just a teensy bit of his graceful way with words—both struck me as so male.

About eight years ago, I read Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster—a classic book on the Christian disciplines (prayer, solitude, service, etc.). In the chapter on prayer, I came across this passage: "The most notable feature of David Brainerd's life [Brainerd was an 18th-century missionary to the Native Americans] was his praying. His Journal is permeated with accounts of prayer, fasting, and meditation. [Brainerd wrote,] 'I love to be alone in my cottage, where I can spend much time in prayer.'"

I laughed, out loud, when I read the "alone in my cottage" bit. Alone? With an entire cottage to myself? Heck yeah, I'd pray. And sleep. And eat without popping up every 27 seconds to refill someone's milk glass or go wipe someone's bottom. Keep in mind that, when I first read this book, I had one child. One. If I were to read it for the first time now that I have three children, I think I'd throw the book across the room and go find a Law and Order rerun to watch instead.

The alone-in-his-cottage dude was, of course, not just a man, but a long-ago man living in primitive conditions and engaged in a full-time religious vocation. Our lives are vastly different, so of course his way of living faithfully would be vastly different than mine. But Foster used Brainerd as a role model in a modern book for modern people. And I've come across similar advice—set yourself apart, beware the busyness of life "out there," hunker down in your cottage, deny, simplify, focus—in plenty of other books and essays and sermons that advocate separation and simplicity as keys to the spiritual life: Spend more time in solitary prayer, set aside Sunday as a true Sabbath by forgoing all but the most necessary chores (because, you know, I spend the rest of the week doing unnecessary chores), and, of course, stop spending your Advent getting ready for Christmas. For the most part, this sort of advice seems to come from men.

I feel terrible writing that. I really do, especially because I know there are exceptions (I'm sure there are women who give the same advice) and because I have so many male friends who are living out their Christian faith in such exceptional ways. And I'm also sure there are plenty of men who are just as involved in caring for children and households as I am, who would also roll their eyes at the impossibility of separate-and-simplify edicts when one is living a life in which even the most basic bodily functions are public, and urgent needs for things like food and parental love never cease.

This is the big spiritual question of my life as a wife and mother: What are the patterns and disciplines that make sense for someone who can so rarely separate because my job, my calling, is to be present and available, always, to the most vulnerable, needy and messy type of people there are? Is there a way to cultivate simplicity when love—the kind of love we try so hard to share in our disorderly, hectic, loud, contentious, joyful, funny, precious, blessed family life—is really not that simple? Do the patterns and disciplines offered by centuries of Christian thinkers, so many of them male, make sense? Is it me who needs to change, or the expectations of what a believing person must do to grow in faith?

I don't know the answers to those questions. I don't know if they are even good questions, or if I am just another worn-out mom who spends too much time being "unbecomingly pissed off," as one mother-writer once said, and looking for someone to direct my pissiness toward. Ah, male theologians, that's it!

I do know that the most helpful spiritual books I've read in recent years were written by women. These include Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies (and everything else she has written, but especially that), Margaret Kim Peterson's Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore's In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice, and Kathleen Norris' The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work." I have found solace and encouragement in these authors' confessions (e.g., the sheer drudgery of getting children—complaining, unhappy children—ready for church makes you wonder why the hell you do it every single week) and eagerness to name the chores I do every day (laundry, cooking, cleaning) as valuable and necessary, not just for our physical lives, but for our spiritual lives as well.

Speaking of those necessary chores, there are several waiting for me, even now, at 10:30 p.m., because it is two days before Christmas, and I still have plenty of preparing to do. I could go up to bed now, read a Bible passage, say an Advent prayer. Or I could go into the kitchen and frost the cakes, finish the dishes, wipe the counters, then crawl into bed and whisper a quick "Thank you" before falling asleep. That is what I'll do, hoping (knowing?) that the truth of God may be found on a frozen prairie, but it is found here too, right here in the "mess and clutter," in kitchen counters laden with lovingly baked treats, the coffee pot ready to brew, the dishwasher emptied of its clean cargo—everything ready to receive the wild, buzzing, joyful energy of children on Christmas Eve.

Have Yourself a Merry, Melancholy Little Christmas

2009-12-10T15:12:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago, standing in line for my first Starbucks eggnog latte of the season, I spied a copy of Sting’s new CD, If on a Winter’s Night, at the cash register. I am a complete sucker for melancholy Christmas music, preferring plain, minor-key hymns (In the Bleak Midwinter, Of the Father’s Love Begotten, etc.) to the triumphant processionals that we belt out at midnight on Christmas Eve. So I bought the CD and as I listened to it at home later that day, I scrolled through some online reviews. A lot of reviewers hated the CD, and while I like it, I admit that it is odd. I was not the only purchaser to initially wonder if something was wrong with my CD player, because Sting’s vocals sound unfamiliar, drawn-out and almost garbled on some songs. But beyond the strange song choices and vocals, a number of people hated this CD because of what it is: a stark, somber collection of songs, complete with images of a burning baby Jesus and a sailor whose ship is foundering within sight of the lighted windows of his coastal hometown on Christmas Day. There were a lot of comments to the effect of: “Jeez, Sting, take a Prozac. Christmas is supposed to be a happy time!”

Is it? Of course, most people understand that Christmas can be intensely lonely for those who are, well, alone, or mourning some loss made sharper by memories of past holidays. But even for people like me, who adore Christmas rituals and are surrounded by loved ones, Christmas carries some hints of loss. It is such a brief time of light and warmth in a cold, dark season. I cannot enjoy my favorite traditions—the light displays that make driving down the same old streets feel like a treasure hunt, the music that accompanies our decorating and baking, the recipes we make only once a year—without an undercurrent of sadness, because these joys are so fleeting. Come January, I will drive down these same old streets in dim, icy winter light that warms nothing, barely noticing the houses shut tight against the cold. This undercurrent of loss seems appropriate for a holiday that celebrates the birth of a baby whom we all know will eventually be executed.

“Don’t worry, be happy,” is only one of the ways that other people like to tell others how, or how not, to celebrate Christmas. It is trendy these days to advocate simplicity—fewer gifts, a shorter to-do list, etc. Magazines champion simplicity even as they feature articles on time-consuming ways to wrap gifts (“Wrap a band of contrasting paper around your gift and adorn with a pinecone that you find on a family nature walk!”) and immaculate homes in which every holiday decoration conforms to a particular color palette. Life—particularly life with young children—is not simple. Every day is crazy. Every day around Christmastime is crazier. I’ve decided it’s best to just go with it. Yes, Christmas activities and gifts can get excessive, and we can lose sight of why we’re celebrating, but the excess is also part of what makes it extraordinary. This is the only time of year when we have seven different kinds of homemade cookies on hand, and wake up one morning to a magically appearing pile of gifts and a glittering world gone quiet—mysteries that we might as well embrace, because they are so rare.

In a variation on the simplicity theme, religious leaders like to rail against the sale ads, ever-present Christmas music and overflowing calendars that cause us to gloss over Advent, which is supposed to be a time of waiting and preparation. I struggle with the implication that Advent is a time for spiritual preparation only, and that all other preparations—the lengthy lists of tasks to be done before December 25—are, at best, unimportant, and at worst, barriers to proper spiritual readiness. I'd like to ask these preachers: How do you expect to wake up on Christmas morning to a lovely breakfast and a few simple, tastefully wrapped gifts under your lighted tree if someone hasn’t spent several weeks preparing all those things? The admonitions to slow down in order to embrace Advent make about as much sense to me as the Gospel story in which Jesus praises Mary for sitting adoringly at his feet while Martha slaves in the kitchen to get the meal ready. (When Jesus comes back, I really, really want to ask him about that one.) The only way I can have a decent spiritual life these days is by doing what needs doing with steady hands, mindful presence and a grateful heart. If I waited for sufficient time and space to foster a deep prayer life, I would never pray. So I pray as I work, sometimes with words, but often with hands and feet and attitude. Franticness and distraction are enemies to spiritual health, but activity itself is not. Rolling out cookie dough, decorating a tree, singing along to Christmas music, and even trolling the aisles of Toys R Us can foster mindful preparation if I do it with care and thanks, rather than frenetic, exhausted, begrudging exertion.

Advent is a big deal in our house; this year we have five separate Advent calendars in addition to the purple and pink candles on our table wreath. The fact that we use our Advent time to get ready for Christmas, by anticipating Jesus’ birth and checking tasks off the massive to-do list, does not diminish our celebration of Christmas itself. Rather, we cherish it that much more, because we’ve worked and waited for so long.

I am much less bothered by pre-Christmas craziness than by the way Christmas ends abruptly at midnight on December 25. On the 26^th, I flick on the radio, and the station that has been playing holiday music non-stop since Thanksgiving is back to playing Billy Joel and Jim Croce. The roads, parking lots and stores that were so beautifully, peacefully empty on Christmas day are full again. Bedraggled, naked trees appear on curbs. “Christmas lasts for twelve days, people!” I want to shout. “Slow up! Quiet down!” But I don’t shout. Instead, we have created our own rituals to maintain a twelve-day Christmas. Daniel stays home from work all week, but we don’t travel, so we have a full week of long, lazy days doing jigsaw puzzles and playing in the snow. I don’t worry about cleaning up the toys every night before bed; Christmas gifts are left under the tree where they can be picked up and admired or used whenever the mood strikes. When my parents gave us a crèche made in Italy a number of years ago, we adopted an Italian custom: When we set up the nativity scene a few weeks before Christmas, we leave the wise men out of it. Then some time on Christmas day, I instruct the kids to go look for them; they are usually upstairs somewhere, far away from the crèche. On each of the next eleven days, the wise men show up somewhere else in the house, a few steps closer to the baby; they go from bedrooms to stairs to kitchen to dining room and, finally, to the living room, arriving at the Christ child on Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas. By that time, our tree is gone, the gifts are put away, the Christmas cookies have been eaten. And I’m finally ready to bid this favorite season goodbye for another year.

Christmas is a time of contradictions that make it a unique, sometimes hard but often lovely season. There is room for both the merry and the melancholy, the sacred and the schmaltzy, the elaborate and the simple. Christmas is too long, and it is much too short. Christmas is far too much, and it is not nearly enough.

No, I Really Can't...and That's OK

2009-11-17T23:16:00.006-05:00

One day last spring, I was in the hot tub at our local indoor pool, stretching after swimming laps. A class for parents and infants was about to start, so moms and dads were gathering near the hot tub, their wide-eyed little ones wrapped in towels. A tall, tanned young mother strolled in wearing a bright orange bikini with itty-bitty boy-short style bottoms. Her abs and cleavage and toned cheeks were on full display. Two of the older gentlemen in the hot tub looked at each other, then one rolled his eyes and said, “I’m not sure why she bothers to wear anything at all, that thing is so tiny.”

I realize that these men, gray hairs and all, may have been getting a few jollies even as they spoke so dismissively of the young mom’s swimwear. But I just have to love a place where it’s the statuesque blonde who becomes a target of sarcastic comments.

On weekday mornings, there are two main groups of pool users. There are mothers like me, who swim regularly for fitness and either have kids in school or take advantage of the pool’s $3/hour babysitting service. And there are older people who either swim or take part in a variety of water exercise classes. Bikinis are rare. Lap suits and skirted tankinis rule the day. As I sit in the hot tub after swimming, I get a good look at the various infirmities and imperfections that are on full display. There are a few younger people with obvious disabilities—cerebral palsy, amputations, muscle-wasting diseases. And there are dozens of older people with scarred knees, bent backs, canes and walkers, not to mention the more run-of-the-mill signs of aging—shapeless, puckered thighs, knobby toes, poor eyesight, and plenty of spots.

I’ve become friendly with several women whom I see regularly. We chat in the locker room as they huff and puff through getting dressed, sitting down to take a deep breath every few minutes. I admire them for making their pool visits a priority, especially when it’s obvious that the whole ordeal—undressing, showering, exercising, showering again, dressing—is physically exhausting for some. And I emulate the freedom with which they shuffle and limp around the locker room and pool deck; the bodily damage from their decades of living never seems to cause a moment of self-consciousness or embarrassment. I, with my own wobbly flesh and limpy gait, feel like I’m among my own kind.

I sometimes imagine what my pool companions might have looked like 30 or 40 years ago, trying to catch a glimpse of their younger selves in their still-strong shoulders, their still-shapely calves or their graceful, long-fingered hands. Back then, did they ever contemplate how their bodies would change, become untrustworthy and fragile, lose their resilience?

I am beginning to contemplate my own body’s decline. I don’t know if this is a function of my age or my disability. Probably a little of both. There was a time, in my 20s and early 30s, when I could count on my body to do just about anything I needed it to do, within some fairly broad limits. The fragility of my childhood was long gone, and the fragility of middle age had not yet set in. But even then, I could be caught up short by the realization that I dwell in a different world than non-disabled people. After a winter storm, other people see icy sidewalks and roads as hassles leading to a longer commute. I see them as an enemy that I simply cannot engage, because I will surely lose.

It is this difference of perception, I think, more than difference in ability or experience, that makes me feel most alienated by my physical disability.

When I attended the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC, I once gave a sermon in which I spoke about feeling betrayed by my body, how the needs and desires of my soul and spirit could be thwarted by my body’s inabilities. After the sermon, as we talked around our tables, a friend remarked that she simply couldn’t see things my way. To her, body, mind and spirit were all so interconnected that it made no sense to speak of the body betraying some other part of one’s being. I realized that of course this made no sense to her. She was a tiny woman, the kind one might refer to as a dynamo. All muscle and movement. She ran regularly and passionately. She gave birth to both of her children without any medical interventions, the second one at home. She needed to run, and she could run. She needed to birth her babies without help, and she could birth her babies without help. She had never known what it is like to desire something with all her heart, and be unable to do it because her body wasn’t up to the task.

I was reminded of this exchange recently, when I read a blog post recounting a woman’s decision to have her fourth baby at home, assisted only by her husband. After describing the details of her daughter’s straightforward birth, she concluded, “Human women have been having babies unassisted for more than 200,000 years. I’m not strong or brave or exceptional. If I can do it, you can too.”

To which I say:

No.

I.

Can’t.

Let me make clear that I understand and support the desire to avoid overmedicalized birth. I seriously considered studying to be a midwife many years ago. I am frustrated when I hear story after story of women whose labors were induced for no reason other than their being a few days overdue (although I am also sympathetic to uncomfortable, cranky mothers-to-be who jump at the chance to be induced just to get the darn kid out of there). I think that home births can be the right choice for some women under some circumstances. I think that women deserve more choices and more control over how they give birth, and I also think that any birth that results in a living, breathing mother and baby is a success.

The blog post I read told a lovely, intriguing and thought-provoking story, and I was glad I read it. But saying that “you can too” in reference to unassisted home birth is just as ludicrous as saying, “I just finished a $100,000 makeover of my kitchen. You can too,” or “I just got my Ph.D. in 19^th-century German literature. You can too,” or “I just through-hiked the Appalachian Trail. You can too.” In theory, anyone could do all of those things. But in practice, all of us are a tangled web of strengths, weaknesses, circumstances, gifts, burdens, desires and needs. We do what we can with what we have.

A common theme in literature advocating for natural, home and unassisted childbirth is that women can and should trust their bodies. But bodies cannot always be trusted. Bodies change, they break, they fail. Just as with children, we can nurture and love our bodies, giving them everything they need to be healthy and strong, and then be bitterly disappointed when they fail to behave as we expect them to. Even the nicest, most well-adjusted teenagers sometimes sneak the car keys and end up totaling the family minivan.

There are lots and lots of things I cannot do, many of them physical, and the list is growing. I wonder sometimes—more often now than I used to—which abilities will go next, and when. To me, living life to the fullest does not mean pushing myself to the limit, insisting that with enough hard work and perseverance and courage, I can do anything. Rather, it means continuing to haul myself to the pool two or three times a week, crooked limbs and all, knowing that even if I can’t do everything, I can still do this. It helps to know that, once I get myself there, I will be in good company.

Hands Off My Halloween Candy, Mom and Dad

2009-10-27T16:39:00.002-04:00

I'm working on a new post, but in the meantime and in honor of Halloween, I'm re-running my Hartford Courant op ed from last October. Now I think I'll go have mini-box of Dots from the Halloween stash. Happy Halloween!

Let Them Eat Candy

Particular Notions

2009-10-14T09:51:00.006-04:00

"I identify as a Christian, but sometimes when I say that, people have a particular notion about me." - Author Silas House, from his blog post A Certain Kind of Christian (Parts One and Two)

I have spent much of my adult life wriggling out from under the particular notions that people have about Christians, or specific kinds of Christians. Too often, people want to wrap people of faith into in tidy little packages that incorporate not only doctrine and theology, but also politics, economics, personality, and lifestyle.

Even though I am a preacher's kid who attended church every week growing up, I didn't really claim my faith until college. After a decent freshman year, I returned as a sophomore and immediately, everything fell to pieces. A lot of the connections I made as a freshman didn't really suit me. I hated frat parties, but that's what my friends did on the weekends, so that's what I did. Partly because I had no idea who I was and what I wanted, my roommate and I fought a lot at the beginning of my sophomore year—real fights, with screaming, accusations, tears. I felt lost and just wanted to go home.

Then my friend Brad invited me to an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) worship meeting one Friday night. IVCF invited me into a new world of lively and open faith. A born-and-bred New England Episcopalian, I surprised myself by embracing contemporary "praise" music accompanied by guitars and clapping. Several of my IVCF friends and I took as many classes as we could from an engaging professor of American religious history who assigned classic books about faith, and encouraged us to drive out into the Virginia countryside to visit little churches that epitomized certain periods in church architectural history. Instead of counting the minutes until I could escape beer-soaked frat houses, I was staying up until 2 a.m. to discuss The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Brother to a Dragonfly with my friends as we studied together for religion finals.

IVCF, and the friends I made there, gave me a center and focus that I desperately needed. My IVCF membership defined my college years and set my course after, when I moved to D.C. to live in an intentional Christian community and do full-time volunteer work. Even though my D.C. community was run by the Episcopal Church, not evangelicals, I never would have applied if my college fellowship group had not helped me define myself as a Christian, as someone whose faith was central enough to influence my choice of career and living arrangements.

But despite my immersion in IVCF, I never really became an Evangelical with a capital "E" because I never embraced all of the social and political norms that come with that label. My IVCF friends didn't drink at all. I didn't drink much, but now and then, my roommates and I would drown our boy-related sorrows in a few beverages before a Saturday basketball game. My IVCF friends nodded gravely as one of our Friday night meeting speakers outlined the Biblical injunctions against homosexuality; I wondered why this group of people who loved Jesus so darn much never had speakers talking about compassionate responses to urban poverty or AIDS. Everyone I knew voted for Bush in the 1988 election; I—God help me—voted for Dukakis.

In D.C., I joined a small, ecumenical church with the unusual distinction of taking both Jesus and social justice seriously. Unlike in many mainline Protestant churches, people at the Potter's House Church were not embarrassed to use the "J" word in casual conversation. The faith and music were just as lively and open as they had been at InterVarsity, but here, the ministry focus was not on people's private lives but on the city's streets. The Potter's House was part of the larger Church of the Saviour, which had, over many years, founded many of D.C.'s most vibrant ministries to the urban poor: a medical facility for homeless men, a home for women living with AIDS and their children, a day care center, a job counseling program.

But even though the Potter's House suited me well with its combination of evangelical fervor and mostly liberal politics, I still ran smack into plenty of particular notions. The church's success in running so many urban ministries meant that some people looked down their nose at similar efforts of mainline churches. I worked for an urban ministry program run by the Episcopal Church, and was frustrated when my fellow church members spoke dismissively of the organization I worked for because they had trouble believing that uptight Episcopalians could do anything valuable. Many members of my church had been disillusioned, even severely hurt, by their experiences in traditional churches. The Potter's House was a novel experience of church that brought healing and hope. For some, anything that came out of mainline Christianity was suspect, potentially damaged or damaging.

Today, Daniel and I are reluctant Episcopalians. Like me, Daniel's college fellowship experience, with the Baptist Student Union, was defining and central, and he and I met at the Potter's House Church. Moving to Connecticut in 1999, we knew we'd never repeat either of those church experiences. For about eight years, we belonged to an urban Episcopal church known for its history of neighborhood ministry. Last year, we transferred to a suburban Episcopal church, closer to our home and with more established and lively programs for children. It's a lovely church. The clergy (of which my father is one, on a very part-time basis) are thoughtful, decent people and good preachers. There are plenty of ministry opportunities—toiletry collections for homeless people, toy collections at Christmas, one-on-one healing prayer offered at every service—and the children's programs are vibrant and well-attended. Thanks to the children's worship service, Ben has become fond of randomly asking people, "Do you know that Jesus is in your heart?"

But Daniel and I are aware that we are often just going through the motions at this church. We miss the lifeblood connections with people that we had in our D.C. church and our college fellowships. We miss the experience of church as primary community, the first place to turn for friendship and support, the commitment that always takes priority. But we've stopped looking for a different sort of church. That is partly for practical reasons. We got tired of looking around. Our children still weep on occasion when they talk about missing our first Episcopal church , where they were all baptized (we remind them that they complained about going to church there, too, but that doesn't seem to help). If we keep dragging them to new places, they will just feel more disoriented and disconnected. Best to just stay where we are, embrace the idea of blooming where we are planted.

But, besides weariness, the other thing preventing us from exploring local churches with livelier worship and music is the fear of being pegged by the particular notions of what kind of Christian attends that kind of church. I am afraid, quite honestly, of being the only Democrat in a sea of Republicans. I am afraid of conversations at coffee hour in which people will assume that, because I like Jesus and sing along enthusiastically to "Awesome God," I therefore subscribe to a whole set of beliefs that tend to go along with an evangelical-style faith. It's not that I don't want to worship with people different from me. It's that I don't want the people I worship with to assume they know what I believe about human sexuality, abortion, the government, our two wars, or wine with dinner. I don't want to be silenced by other people's particular notions of what it means to be a Christian.

Of course, my fear reveals my own particular notions about other Christians. When I label people as evangelical or Episcopalian, nontraditional or mainline, assuming I know what they think and believe based on those labels, I diminish them, even as I fear being diminished by the labels they might put on me. What's that Bible story about judging the speck in your neighbor's eye despite the big, honking plank in your own? Oh. Yeah.

I fear others' labeling of my faith, but I put an awful lot of effort into labeling myself for others. I tell people I am a liberal evangelical. Or that I'm an Episcopalian for practical reasons only, not in any deep, fundamental way. Or that I'm theologically conservative, socially moderate and politically liberal. Better to say this: I am a Christian. That statement feels so naked, so in need of qualification and explanation. It feels inadequate in this culture that celebrates self-identification and private, individualized efforts to achieve "spirituality." But I'll leave it at that. I am a Christian.

Things Hoped For

2009-10-02T23:19:00.003-04:00

I unfolded my scrap of paper and read my list out loud to the rest of the class.

“New England. Motherhood. Writing.” I folded the paper again, then looked up at my classmates, curled up on couches in this cozy room above our little coffee-house church. Rebecca, one of the teachers, remarked, “I can’t wait to see how those three things come together. I’m sure that, someday, they will.”

The assignment in my Christian Growth class—one of five classes required for membership in my small, nontraditional church in Washington, D.C. nearly two decades ago—was to list three passions. Though I named my passions easily, I did not share Rebecca’s certainty that they would come together.

I grew up in New England, and when I visited my family there, the sight of crumbling stone walls and blazing leaves against blue skies hatched an ache in my chest that lingered for days after my return to D.C., eventually fading as I again embraced the city that had become my home. Washington’s Rock Creek Parkway—a ribbon of asphalt weaving among wooded hillsides and hugging its namesake waterway from the northern border with Maryland down to the Potomac River, its rambling course at odds with the rest of the city’s numbered and alphabetized grid—had become as familiar to me as my hometown’s Main Street. I drove the parkway to and from every place that left its mark on my soul in D.C.—the Washington National Cathedral and the three homes I lived in within walking distance from it; my office on upper 16^th Street; Adams Morgan and Mount Pleasant, where most of my friends lived; Independence and Constitution Avenues alongside the National Mall; and the bridges that took me across the Potomac, south to Fredericksburg and Richmond, west to Front Royal and the Shenandoah Valley. I loved D.C.; it was the place where I grew into myself. I had no reason to leave.

I had known since childhood that I was meant to be a mother. But as my 20s marched along and I attended more and more weddings as a solo act, I wondered if I had misread my longing and certainty as signaling a call to motherhood. The dating was not going so well. Beyond my dismal love life, I had weightier concerns—the 50 percent chance that I would pass my disabling bone disorder on to my children.

My passion for writing, at least, looked promising. I built a career writing and editing for nonprofit organizations. One of the greatest gifts my little church gave me was the understanding that I could use my writing to do more than impart information. I began writing worship services for occasions as diverse as Advent, Independence Day and baby dedications. I saw that my writing could lift spirits and provoke thought.

So I felt sure I could, and would, write something more than just a darn good newsletter. But my other two passions seemed to require too far a detour from the road I was already on.

Yet here I am at 41, back in my Connecticut hometown, living in a house shaded by oaks and maples whose leaves will, in a few short weeks, blaze bright against a vivid blue sky. My husband and I have three children who were carried and nourished by my broken body; one of them inherited my mutated gene and fragile bones. I have a book proposal that is being seriously considered by a respected publisher, and a reasonable hope of once again earning money by writing—but this time, the words come from me, not from an organization’s strategic planning document.

My D.C. church asked a lot of me, sometimes too much. Now, I belong to a church where expectations are not so impossibly high. But in asking me to name my passions, my little church showed me, more effectively than any Bible study, that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1).

A Cupcake Manifesto

2009-09-19T16:38:00.014-04:00

My children happen to attend the Very Best Elementary School in the Universe. I know! What are the odds?! My kids usually ride the bus, but for the first few weeks of this school year, I drove them to and from school so Leah wouldn’t have to negotiate the bus steps with her lingering injuries. This Monday, they will start riding the bus again, and while I will relish the convenience, I will miss the way my twice-daily trips to school put a little spring in my step. The school practically hums with the energy of so many creative, engaged people—parents, kids, teachers. I bring this up because, without exception, we have adored our kids’ teachers at this school. Adored. Keep that in mind when you read the rest of this piece. It is not a criticism of these teachers, but of the culture in which we are raising our children and they are teaching them.

Every year, on Curriculum Night, the teachers talk to parents about food choices. There’s the Birthday Party Lecture—no cupcakes please, no sweets, how about fruit or, even better, no food at all? There’s the Snack Lecture—send them with a healthy snack, something fresh, with a little protein, instead of prepackaged junk with a long list of bizarre chemical ingredients.

I hate this part of Curriculum Night. It makes me angry. I do not blame the teachers, because I know they give these lectures for good reasons. Because the nurse told them to, in part. (For the record, I adore the school nurse too.) But also because, day after day, they watch kids scarfing down Doritos or “fruit snacks” that are simply candy marketed as health food because they contain a smidge of fruit puree and an injection of Vitamin C. By teaching about healthy snacking—that a few crackers with cheese will actually satisfy and energize in a way that a Twinkie will not—teachers are using their influence with kids to help change bad habits. I get it. But the lectures still make me angry.

In part, I have the knee-jerk, “Don’t tell me how to raise my kid,” reaction. That reaction is out of character for me. The thing I most value in the early school years—and one of the reasons I would never home school my kids (the other reason being that I love them, but don’t actually want to talk to them all day, every day)—is that being in a classroom with 20-plus other kids teaches a vital life lesson: It’s not all about you. It doesn’t matter if you’d like to continue drawing a picture; when the teacher says it’s time to circle up for Morning Meeting, then that’s what you do, for the good of the group. I reassure my kids that they are unique, loved and valued, but stop short of fostering an entitlement and individualism that exempts my special children from rules that apply only to everyone else. Just as Leah needs to turn in her homework on Friday, even when she’s had an especially busy week, or face the consequences of a lower grade, so I need to accept the school’s rules on classroom eating, even when I don’t agree.

But even if I accept that being part of a school community requires curtailing my own family’s choices, the in-school food lectures still make me weary. As I’ve written before, I rarely seek out parenting advice. But I absorb plenty nonetheless, because admonitions about what makes a good parent, particularly a good mother, abound—in the newspaper, TV commercials, school newsletters, playground conversation. The school Snack Lecture becomes just another reminder of how I fail, every day, to do what is absolutely best for my children.

On days when I have sufficient time, energy, and pantry staples, my kids’ snacks and lunches are models of healthy eating. I scoop hummus into reusable containers, slice a crisp local apple, smear goat cheese onto homemade bread and add a few basil leaves from the garden. On other days, when time, energy and/or pantry pickings are in short supply, I dig chocolate chip granola bars out of the snack cabinet or rejoice in finding a neon blue Trix yogurt in the back of the fridge, behind the shriveled grapes and nearly-empty milk carton that’s beginning to smell funny.

To paraphrase the saying about fools, as a parent, you can do all the right things some of the time, or you can do some of the right things all of the time, but you can’t do all the right things all of the time. Most of my kids’ teachers are parents too; I’m sure they understand this. But it’s hard to really believe that, to internalize it, to accept yourself as an imperfect parent, when we are bombarded everywhere, including school, with messages about what we should be doing better.

Beyond my simple weariness with impossible parenting standards, I object to the Birthday Party Lecture and the Snack Lecture because they reflect our culture’s really screwed up relationship to food. We are a culture of extremes these days. On one side is the obesity epidemic, fueled by reliance on industrialized, portable, chemical-laden food requiring minimal cooking time or skill—or none at all. On the other extreme are those who see food as something to be feared and tightly controlled, who believe that non-organic produce, white flour and sugar are instruments of Satan. These are the folks who want to shield children from Halloween candy, or who will tell you, in casual conversation in the store check-out line, that the foolproof key to optimum health is simply to avoid eating anything white.

These two extremes have something in common. In both cases, food is simply a means to an end. It is fuel—something to be inserted into one’s body to achieve a particular goal, whether that goal is hunger relief or good health. America’s growing waistlines are in part the result of people eating on the go, at their desks, in their cars and in front of the TV, grabbing food out of take-out bags or plastic packages and consuming the food quickly, alone, so they can move on to the next thing. Super health-conscious folks begin to see food as medicine, something we consume solely for its nutrients and health benefits, to stave off not only those dreaded extra pounds, but also cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and even death itself. (Several years ago, I read about people who severely restrict their caloric intake because such diets have been shown to slow aging. The wife and daughter of one man reported that his diet made him flatulent and irritable. Sounds like just the kind of guy I want to have around for an extra 20 years.)

Food is more than fuel. When it comes to healthy eating, nutrients matter, but other things matter too. Context matters. Ingredients matter. Intention matters. Place matters. There is a world of difference between sucking a Mocha Frappucino Light through a giant green straw while strolling the strip mall, and sipping a home-brewed cup of coffee while nibbling a freshly baked cinnamon roll and reading the Saturday paper on the back porch. There is a world of difference between a 100 Calorie Pack of Keebler Fudge Stripes and a handful of chocolate chip cookies made in my own kitchen with real butter and good quality vanilla extract and chocolate chips. There is a world of difference between sitting on the couch watching Law and Order with a bag of potato chips at my side, and putting a small pile of those same chips on a plate, alongside a sandwich made with last night’s leftover roast chicken. Most important for the school birthday celebration debate, there is a world of difference between a Crisco-frosted grocery store cupcake and a pumpkin cupcake, made with locally grown pumpkin that I cooked and pureed myself, and topped with homemade cream cheese frosting with a little fresh lemon juice squeezed in. Mass-produced foods may sometimes win the nutrient battle, with fewer calories, less fat or more vitamins than the homemade stuff, but that’s the only battle they win. Homemade food, eaten at a table with other people, wins in every other way.

I do not want to leave the impression that I make everything from scratch, and that my family gratefully consumes it at an artfully set table, accompanied by sparkling intergenerational conversation. I do love to bake, and make a chocolate layer cake so delicious that several people have suggested I sell them. (Chocolate cake anyone?) I have lots of ideas for how I will fill my time once all three kids are in school full-time (I know…ha ha), but one I am particularly serious about is setting aside one day per week to bake. I will make several kinds of bread, a batch or two of cookies, maybe a cake or pie, so that we can stop buying industrial baked goods altogether.

But until that day comes, I will help keep the Nabisco and Pepperidge Farm companies in business. I go regularly to our local Dream Dinners franchise, which provides ingredients for ready-made meals that I assemble, package and freeze, and my family is well-acquainted with boxed macaroni and cheese, hot dogs and frozen fish sticks. But even convenience foods and the occasional fast food meal are—usually, not always—consumed together, at the table, on plates, with conversation, although not always of the sparkling variety.

But back to the Curriculum Night lectures. Teachers are in a really tough spot. They supervise our children for nearly eight hours a day, and what they say really matters to many kids. They see terrible eating habits daily, and the extra pounds that can come with those habits. They deal with parents who get angry when told they can’t send in cupcakes for their children’s birthdays, and parents who get angry when the teacher offers candy as a special incentive for good classroom behavior. Obviously, teachers can’t allow homemade cupcakes and ban store-bought cupcakes.

So once I’m done with this little rant, I plan to zip my lip when it comes to food rules at school. I’ll do my best to send healthy, or healthy enough, snacks. I’ll encourage my kids to choose fruit kebabs for their birthday snack, or to embrace their teachers’ assertion that celebrations don’t require food at all. They’re right; celebrations don’t require food. Except for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. And July Fourth cookouts. And Passover Seder meals. And Champagne on New Year’s Eve. And anniversary dinners at the nicest restaurant you can afford. And whatever food your husband can get his hands on when your newborn is one hour old and you are absolutely starving. (That first post-childbirth meal may be the only time that hospital food tastes good enough to qualify as a celebratory meal.) And your son’s favorite spaghetti and meatballs that you serve the first time he returns home after leaving for college. And, and, and…

Food is an important part of celebrations, and of the families and communities in which those celebrations take place. I don’t want to teach my children about healthy eating. I want to teach them about good eating. They are not necessarily the same thing.

A Golden Time, and I am Wishing It Away

2009-08-25T08:00:00.006-04:00

Because this post further develops themes from previous posts, like this one and this one, faithful readers will recognize some familiar phrases and ideas. I apologize for the repetition; I initially wrote this to submit for publication. Upon receiving a rejection letter yesterday, I decided that, rather than rework and resubmit it elsewhere, I would simply post it here—to kickstart a return to regular blog posts, to help me move on from the rejection and focus on my book proposal instead, and to help me make sense of this difficult summer as it is ending. As always, I thank you for reading.

I’ve realized that I feel about summer the way a grieving widow must feel about Christmas. We are both bombarded with images of a culture immersed in traditions and activities that we either cannot or don’t want to be part of. January’s frigid monotony and September’s frenetic back-to-school pace promise relief after so many weeks of observing other people’s joy from inside our bubbles of grief and regret.

Unlike the widow, I have lost nothing so vital as an actual person. Everyone I love most is right here—my two daughters, my son, my husband. My summer mourning stems not from death but from disease—osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), the brittle bone disease that my oldest daughter, Leah, and I both have.

My repeated childhood surgeries to replace the metal rods that stabilized my leg bones were scheduled in the summer to minimize school absences. I spent many bright days lying in a hospital bed in our den, encased in plaster from chest to toes. Summers without surgery were better, but fractures happened without warning and with little provocation—a slip, a misstep, an awkward fall. Photos of me celebrating my June birthday or sitting on a Cape Cod beach feature a leg or arm in a plaster cast covered with messages from friends, or wrapped in a plastic garbage bag to protect it from water and sand. With pain and plaster as much a part of my summers as sun and sand, I observed lengthening days and rising temperatures with a subtle dread.

I broke my legs and arms about 35 times before my eleventh birthday; I have not had any major fractures in the 30 years since. But into adulthood I retained my dismay at summer’s approach. Heat intolerance and excessive sweating are two of the more annoying symptoms of OI, so even as I began spending summer weekends hiking with my boyfriend, now husband, I continued to count the weeks until September’s fresh breezes would lift August’s soggy torpor, until October’s frosty mornings would allow me to cover my scarred legs with jeans and my crooked spine with bulky sweaters.

Motherhood proved to be the only force powerful enough to chip away at my stony refusal to embrace the season that symbolizes freedom—from school, heavy clothing, rigid schedules, stale rooms. I did not realize how seasonal mothering would be. Our daily activities—from how we get to the bus stop in the morning to whether my fall-back dinner is pasta or burgers on the grill—depend more than I could have imagined on whether it is hot or cold, sunny or rainy, muddy or windy.

Many of summer’s rituals are highly stressful when you have very small children. Think nursing an infant in an unshaded playground while watching a toddler who can’t quite be trusted on the climbing equipment, or supervising three children with vastly different swimming skills, from nonexistent to pretty good. For those first years of motherhood, I still gratefully anticipated colder weather so at least my children could endanger themselves in the familiar confines of home, where there was always the TV or a strong cup of coffee available when things got a little dicey.

But last summer, with my children two, four and eight years old, I began to understand why some parents actually like summer. With everyone capable of coordinated, independent movement, the beach and the playground were not such fraught places. Our days began without the weary nagging and expert foot-dragging that make school mornings so unpleasant.

This year, for the first time in my life, I dared to look forward to summer. But then, in mid-June, Leah fell off her scooter and broke her left femur (thigh bone) and right humerus (upper arm bone)—the eighth and ninth fractures of her life. After an ambulance ride, surgery and three days in the hospital, we brought her home to recover. She was in terrible pain and prone to anguished laments over all she had lost: a vacation, time with cousins, summer camp, the final two weeks of third grade, independence, control, the idea that life could ever be fair.

In some ways, those early days of her recovery, when I neglected housework and we ate whatever food friends had left in my refrigerator, were easier than those that followed. Leah’s pain lessened and she began scooting herself around. The rest of the world jumped into their summer plans—and we were still here at home, with hardly any plans at all. I couldn’t even take the children to the grocery store with me: How would I push my daughter’s wheelchair and a shopping cart at the same time?

We survived by inviting friends over, occasionally venturing out for ice cream. We did crafts, played games, watched a lot of TV. Good friends, that most precious resource for mothers struggling to keep it all together, dropped off scores of DVDs and books, taught Leah to knit and do origami, and stayed with my kids so I could get out now and then. When I say the help of friends and my parents kept me sane, I am not just using an overdramatic figure of speech. Some days, I felt I could not stand one more minute trapped in this house with these children; knowing a friend was coming over so I could go swim laps kept me from abandoning my children to the TV and retreating to my bedroom to sleep the dull hours away.

Driving past the town tennis courts during a rare foray out of the house in July, I saw a young boy, around 11 years old, practicing his serve. I hated that little boy for embodying everything Leah, and the rest of us, were missing—spontaneous activity, exercise in the sun, freedom from watchful adult eyes. My hatred didn’t make any sense, any more than it would make sense for that grieving widow to hate me for making six different kinds of Christmas cookies. But this summer wasn’t making sense either. I wished it were February, because we were stuck in a February sort of life, one lived indoors, embracing creature comforts in a failed attempt to make up for a lack of sun, water, grass, sand and sweat.

Illness and disease bring with them physical agony—following Leah’s accident, I witnessed plenty of that—but disability goes beyond pain to separation. For years, my brittle bones separated me from the freedom and engagement with the outdoors that defines summer for so many people. Leah’s accident severed the shaky connection I was beginning to make between warmer weather and a more forgiving family life.

I am counting the days until Leah will begin fourth grade (I had hoped she would be on her own two feet, but it looks like she'll have crutches for a while), Meg will go to kindergarten and Ben will start preschool. I imagine the school doors swallowing them up and my returning to an empty house to do as I wish, free of the mocking presence of sun and heat, the oppressive weight of bored children.

In wishing this summer away, I am defying the counsel of older women who admire my children in the grocery store and pool locker room. They plead with me to treasure this time, because it will go so fast. I suspect such exchanges are so frequent and urgent because these veteran mothers were unable to do what they are asking me to do—cherish every moment with young children, even those marked by boredom, discontent and unappreciated labor. I wonder if, now that these mothers live ordered lives in quiet houses, they still carry guilt over those times they wanted nothing more than to be free of their children, with their endless needs.

Maybe this is another impossible ideal of motherhood, like changing and ironing the sheets weekly or never yelling, that fosters pointless guilt and needs to be revised into something more attainable. Treasure your children when you can, and the rest of the time, muddle through and try to minimize the damage.

I love my children. I love being their mother. It is the best job I’ve ever had, and more—the defining work of my life, my calling, a wellspring of delight, gratitude and wisdom. But I cannot treasure this broken season, only brief moments of it here and there—a trip to a cherry orchard, Leah picking the low-hanging fruit from her seat in a wagon; a backyard campfire; watching fireworks with friends; arriving at our Cape Cod rental cottage last week and hearing Leah say, “I can’t believe I’m finally here. This must be a dream”; watching her bob for hours in the chilly waters of Nantucket Sound, no pain, no labored limp. I add my regret over wishing this time away to the cascading pile of regrets I have collected this summer—all the ways I wish things had turned out differently. I crave the cool autumn days, not only for their blazing leaves and energizing fresh air, but because they will signal, at last, an end to this, my unredeemed summer.

Summer Hiatus

2009-07-22T08:08:00.003-04:00

I normally try to post something new every couple of weeks; it has been nearly a month and I'm not even close to having sufficient coherent thoughts to post something. The good news is that I am still writing, but have used my limited (very, very limited...sigh) writing time to write an essay that I just submitted for publication, as well as make some changes to my book proposal and manuscript to prepare it for submission in the next few weeks.

So...apologies for leaving the blog silent for so long. But if you are looking for something to read, note the "Favorite Posts" list I recently added on the right side of this page. "Favorite" is loosely defined; these are previous posts that I felt particularly good about AND that I got a lot of comments on, either on the blog itself, on my Facebook page, or in actual face-to-face conversation.

For those who have asked about my daughter Leah, who is recovering from two fractures earlier this summer: She is doing much better physically, able to swim for exercise and starting to use a walker. We are still somewhat homebound because of simple logistics (a nine-year-old in a wheelchair, a five-year-old and a three-year-old out in public with only one parent—it ain't pretty). But we are grateful for friends who continue to entertain us and looking forward to getting away for some vacation in August.

Happy Summer!

Lesson Learned (Sort Of)

2009-06-29T09:21:00.004-04:00

All I wanted to do was weed the butterfly garden, maybe throw some mulch onto it. I figured if I started around 10:30, after a leisurely breakfast with the newspaper, I could be done by lunch, leaving the afternoon free to pay some bills, straighten up the first floor, and do something interesting with the load of veggies we got from the farm yesterday. I had visions of roasting some beets, coating and baking oven-fried chicken and tossing together a salad, all ahead of time, so that come 6:00, I could just spread everything out on the table. It would be the perfect weekend day, with a healthy balance of outdoor and indoor work, chores and leisure.

Ha.

I started, as planned, around 10:30. I gathered gloves, my weeder and a bucket. I invited Leah to help, as the butterfly garden is her creation. We experimented with how best to transport her, with her broken leg and arm, from the front door to the garden. We settled on the little garden cart—kind of a mini bench on wheels—but once she got to the garden, she was seated too high to reach the weeds. So we transferred her to a low beach chair. She decided it was too hard to weed with her left hand, so I turned the chair around so she could use her right hand.

It was 11:15. Okay, a bit of a late start, but now let’s get going.

Meg, who up until now had been happily helping Daniel pick up branches littering our yard after a bad storm last week, sidled over. “Mom? Mom? I’m hungry.”

“We’ll have lunch in a bit,” I answered. I don’t know why I thought a delaying tactic would work. It never does. Meg ratcheted up the whine factor, which caught Ben’s attention, and he announced he was hungry too.

Garden gloves—off. Weeder—anchored with a thud into the moist garden soil. Bucket—set down in the grass.

After distributing goldfish crackers to all the starving children, I made my way back to the garden. Leah was frustrated. Her right arm is the broken one, and while she can still use her right hand, the arm is understandably weak. She was having trouble digging deep enough with her weeder and was just stripping the weeds of their leaves, leaving the roots behind. We tried arranging her chair in several different positions, but finally settled on a division of labor. I would uproot the weeds with my sinister-looking Dutch weeder—a wedge of sharp steel at the end of a long rod—and she would pull them up.

It was getting close to noon. I had a quarter bucket of weeds and a garden that was still dangerously close to reverting to lawn, what with all the unwanted growth sprouting up among the legitimate plants.

I noticed that Ben had disappeared. I figured he was in the house, because Daniel was working up near the road so I knew he would have seen Ben had he tried to wander off. But I did not have a good feeling about Ben’s absence. He is a social fellow who rarely leaves my orbit. When he disappears, there is a reason, and often not a good one. But, gosh darn it, I wanted to get this weeding done, so I pushed away my concern with what Ben might be up to and tore into another clump of crabgrass.

“Mom!”

I looked up to see Ben marching from the house, eyebrows furrowed, mouth set in a stubborn scowl.

“You weren’t in the house and I had to tinkle and you weren’t there and I tinkled in my PANTS!” He was deeply disappointed in me.

Again, gloves off, weeder anchored, bucket set down. I was beginning to understand that my productive yet leisurely day was falling apart. And I was beginning to get a little testy about it.

As I stripped his wet pants from his damp legs, helped him into dry clothes, and scrubbed at the spots he had left on the couch and rug, Ben and I had a few words. Afterward, I stomped back out to the garden. I hacked at the weeds, tearing them up in great clumps, not particularly caring if a stray verbena or zinnia happened to die in the process. Daniel, to his credit, could tell I was teetering on the edge of a very high precipice, and that when I fell, I would bring everyone else down with me. He grabbed Leah’s weeder, which she had abandoned in the dirt, and helped me finish purging the garden of the most obvious uninvited guests. He promised to mulch it after lunch.

“Mom? Mom!” It was Meg again. “I’m hungry!”

“Me too!” This was Leah, slumped in her beach chair.

“OK,” I sighed. “There’s leftover pizza. Is that all right?”

Daniel chimed in. “Why don’t you just heat up all of the pizza? I’m hungry too.”

So I went back inside, dumped all the pizza on a baking sheet and put it into a low oven. I came back out to put away the garden tools.

Meg skipped over to me. “Hey Mom! Can we go in the sprinkler?”

Ben started jumping around on his tiptoes, flapping his arms like some sort of uncoordinated but enthusiastic bird who was sure that this time he would make it off the ground. “Yeah! Sprinkler! Can we go in the sprinkler?”

Given the chance, I would happily—and I really do mean this—happily breastfeed a baby at 3 a.m., change noxious diapers and walk a fussy baby around the block a dozen times again. Those tasks are all exhausting in their own way, but I really did not mind them. But this? This endless loop of activities? This constant replenishment of supplies? (Bathing suits, towels, sunscreen. Connect the sprinkler, straighten out the kinks in the hose. Then Leah decides she wants in on the action, so another bathing suit, another towel. Pills to ward off increased pain following this burst of activity. A drink to wash the pills down. Beach chairs for the little ones, because Leah has a beach chair, so of course they want one too. Plates. Napkins. Pizza. Juice boxes. Straws poked through the little holes. Check-check-check-check-check-check.) This type of thing is, to me, exhausting in an irredeemable sort of way. Give me a poopy, fussy infant over this any day.

As I grabbed my own lunch, I realized there was no way I was going to roast beets and pay bills that afternoon. Not when weeding a four-by-six garden patch had taken more than two hours. So I gave in. I sat myself down on our garden bench with two slices of my favorite pizza (California Pizza Kitchen’s tostada), a cold Diet Coke and a book (Kelly Corrigan’s memoir The Middle Place, about which I will say this: Wow. If you like memoirs, go get this book. You cannot have my copy because I love it too much).

And, of course, that’s when it happened. Everything and everyone clicked. No more whining, no more neediness, no more cranky scowls. The kids sat in a row in their beach chairs, dressed only in their bathing suits, their summertime hair tangled and stringy and damp. They were singing a song from some TV show about spelling, and giggling with glee when the little ones spelled everything wrong. Leah was correcting them, but not with the slightly offended and annoyed demeanor she can often adopt when other people get something wrong. She was laughing too, and singing along. Now that I was no longer trying to accomplish anything, I was getting what I had been hoping for all morning. They were entertaining each other, and they didn’t need or want anything. For about 45 minutes, I read and ate and was happy.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in this. About how I should give into the chaos, just allow myself to be carried along on the waves of my children’s needs, because my presence and attention makes them feel secure. When I simply accept and respond to their needs, they are free to relax and be satisfied.

But, unfortunately, I took away a more cynical lesson. The little buggers are completely exasperating. This is such a typical pattern: When I need them to be self-reliant and disengaged, they can’t stay away from me. When I need them to stay with me, they are self-reliant and disengaged. So, for example, at 7:49 on a Tuesday morning, when we have approximately 11 minutes before we absolutely must get ready to leave or we will miss Leah’s bus, the three of them will be engrossed in an elaborate Polly Pocket drama. But at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, when I really want to read the New York Times magazine cover article and drink a second cup of coffee, they are complaining that there is nothing to do and they are bored and what are we going to do today, anyway?

After lunch, I did clean up the first floor and bake the chicken. I did not roast beets, nor did I pay the bills. I was annoyed at the day’s many interruptions, but I also enjoyed my little lunchtime interlude, especially because the sight of the kids lined up on their beach chairs in their bathing suits allowed me to pretend for a few minutes that this was just a typical summertime scene. I could ignore the fact that Leah was stuck in that chair because of her broken limbs, and that the sprinkler has to suffice for now because the beach is still too much of a stretch.

So I guess the lesson I ended up taking to heart is that chaos rules the day. The weeds persist, as do children and their needs. But so do the phlox and the bee balm in our butterfly garden—for the moment, weed-free and lovely—and the simple pleasure of reading a good book in the sun while your children giggle nearby.

Reflections After a Break

2009-06-23T09:16:00.003-04:00

It is surprisingly easy to adjust when some big event shatters our normal routine. Surprisingly easy, and also the hardest thing in the world.

Just over week ago, Leah broke her left femur (thigh bone) and right humerus (upper arm bone) in a scooter accident. The consequences of that accident are so vast that I won’t even try to describe them all in detail. But I need to write down a few impressions, if only as a way to etch them into my own memory, because it feels already like this event is some kind of pivot point in our family life.

I knew, from the moment I answered the phone call from a friend who was with Leah when she fell, even before I arrived on the scene and saw her slumped, unmoving, on the hot blacktop, that this was a bad one. Maybe my brain just picked up enough clues—the urgency in my friend’s voice, even though he retained the gentle rhythm that characterizes his normal speech, or Leah’s cries that I could hear in the background—to understand that this was a serious accident. But I remember several times when I was Leah’s age, and knew as I was falling, before I hit the ground, that something would break this time. This knowledge is terrifying but useful, because it fosters a clear-headed acceptance that is helpful in a crisis. It is a bit easier to cope with disaster when you can see it coming, even if only minutes or seconds ahead of time.

I wonder if I jinxed us when, after an hours-long ordeal at the emergency room several months ago when we thought Leah had broken her tail bone, I insisted, out loud, several times, that I would never take a child to the ER again unless his or her injury was bad enough to require an ambulance. This one was, and arriving by ambulance does make a tremendous difference, with a crew of doctors and nurses greeting us on arrival, pain medication offered at regular intervals, and one nurse assigned solely to our care.

Riding in the ambulance, the siren sounded very far away, not ear-splittingly loud as I expected. I kept having to remind myself that the siren I was hearing was right over my head.

Leah had surgery that night and spent three days in the hospital. Being there with Leah alternated between being oddly relaxing—while Leah slept, I read, having no other children to care for—and harrowing. Her pain medication would wear off about an hour before she was due for more, and in that hour, the agony emanating from her broken body filled the room. I was helpless to do anything but sit beside her and let it wash over me. We were pummeled by both her physical pain and her anguish over what would be lost, including summer plans and the independence we had (foolishly? I’m not sure yet) allowed Leah in recent years, to ride her scooter down the street alone, attend overnight camp, or go to birthday parties without my staying in case something happens.

The hospital and its routines are a world unto themselves. I would emerge for an hour or so each day, to run home for a shower, and marvel at the people I saw, sipping their coffee and chatting about errands or work. That sense of separation from normal life—my own and that of the outside world—has continued at home, where I sleep on the sofa with Leah and an entire day’s worth of energy goes into washing her hair and changing her clothes.

This new life has begun to seem normal. The human capacity to adjust to new circumstances is really something. For me, the hardest moments are when I am suddenly reminded that our life right now is not normal. I went to fill the tub a few nights ago for Meg and Ben, and found two perfect, muddy footprints on the porcelain surface—left from when I insisted Leah wash off her feet after playing outside in our mulch pile and before going to play at the friends’ house where she would fall and fracture. I stared at those footprints for a moment before turning on the tap, marveling at the strange miracle of Leah having two perfectly functional, weight-bearing feet that could climb in mulch piles.

And every time I open my cell phone, I see the little envelope icon indicating that I have voice mail. I cannot bring myself to play that message, though I know I don’t have to listen. I could just hold the phone away from me and let the message play, then press “7” to erase it forever. But I can’t even do that. The message was left at 12:04 p.m. on the day of Leah’s accident, when I didn’t pick up the phone because I had left it charging in the kitchen while we went to pick up our weekly allotment of farm vegetables. About 10 minutes later, our friend tried calling again, and by that time, we were home and I picked up the phone. “We have an injured girl,” he said. I heard Leah wailing in the background and just knew that we were in this for the long haul.

My favorite writer, Anne Lamott, says that she has two basic prayers: “Help me,” and “Thank you.” Since Leah’s accident, I have been unable to pray in any systematic way. Even in the worst moments of the day she was hurt, the words, “Help me,” were more than I could muster. My prayers took the form of deep breaths, hands smoothing Leah’s hair away from her forehead, and whispered assurances of “I know….I know.” (One benefit of having passed these fragile bones to my daughter is that I really do know, though I’m not sure that gives Leah any comfort.)

But I have been able to manage plenty of “Thank you” prayers. I am grateful for the paramedic who lay on the blacktop next to Leah to insert an IV needle on the first try, a conduit for the morphine that would make the next few hours bearable. I know too well the agony of having someone fish around in your arm for a vein, and if that paramedic had been less skilled and had to fish or poke Leah more than once, I might have grabbed the needle and started poking him instead. I am grateful for friends who took Meg and Ben into their home for hours, even putting them to bed, so that Daniel and I could give Leah all of our attention. Other friends have brought books and meals, taken Meg and Ben out to play, called or e-mailed, and come over to spend an hour entertaining Leah. One neighbor came over to cut my and Leah’s hair; another neighbor, a physical therapist, helped us figure out how to get Leah from bed into her wheelchair.

I am most grateful, though, for modern medicine and all the ways it made Leah’s injuries less horrific than they could have been. As someone who spends too much time thinking about the world’s darkness—environmental degradation, consumerism, disconnection between people—I am easily tempted to wish I lived in an earlier time. But I realize that Leah and I owe too much to medical advances for me to really wish that. When the ER doctor brought in an X-ray of Leah’s broken femur, I was horrified. The strong thigh muscles pull on a broken femur bone, so that the two pieces of Leah’s femur were not lined up end to end, but were instead parallel. In an earlier time, before anesthesia, Leah would have had to endure those bones being pulled back into place wide awake. Even when I was young, traction (attaching the foot to an overhead bar so that the leg is pulled upward) or surgery followed by a hip spica cast (a cast going from the chest to the toes) was necessary for such fractures. After many hours in the ER, comforted by regular doses of morphine, Leah was allowed to slip into an unknowing sleep (in the terrible moments right after her accident, she begged all of us to just put her to sleep). Her femur was repaired with nails inserted through tiny incisions and then wrapped simply with an Ace bandage. Since then, there has been plenty of pain, but I am still grateful for these many small mercies.