Late the other night, I had to pick my parents up from the airport. After I dropped them off, I was alone with the radio. Moments like these are rare in my life. I was listening to the BBC broadcast on NPR. I rarely ever hear this broadcast because by the time it's on I'm either scrambling to get our family of five ready for the next day, or trying to grab a moment alone with Josh, or sleeping. As I listened, I heard this story, about the BBC's attempt after World War II to find the families of specific holocaust survivors.
I heard the story of a mother of three girls. Two of her children were chosen to live, and before her eyes, one of her children was chosen to die. This mother held on to that child, despite her horrific fate. She fought men certainly bigger and stronger than herself with a desperation that I hope never to feel, but can sadly imagine. As a result of her choice to hold on to her 9 year old daughter for dear life, this mother was sentenced to the same fate as her daughter. She knew that to love meant to fight for her child despite the cost to herself.
I can't remember the last time I had such an emotional reaction to a story. It's not that I've never been moved by a story of the holocaust. Of course I have, but the reality of this story, my role as a mother, and the proximity in age of my own children to the children in this story, sent waves of despair over me. I despaired for this mother and her choice. I despaired for the children she left behind, I despaired for the fear, and torment of the 9 year old girl.
In general, I want to be in control, and as a parent, on more than one occasion I have thought, "No one could ever take them from me. I would never let any harm come to them. I would run, I would fight, it wouldn't be possible." While listening to this broadcast, it struck me, really struck me for the first time, that it is possible. There is evil big enough to rip children from their mothers, to pull them from their siblings.
I couldn't sleep thinking about what kind of person could look into a mother's eyes, so desperate with the kind of love people will die for, and take her child. I couldn't sleep thinking about how there was no way, I or anyone could make up for this act, and the horrendous acts of so many others. You see, I have a fixing problem. I always want to fix things, and I agonized over my inability to make this right. Then it dawned on me, that I may not be able to fix this, but I could work, hobble together the steps to prevent these things in the future. You see, the future sleeps under my roof. The future eats my food, snuggles in my bed, asks me for advice. The future looks to me for answers everyday.
I can teach my children that there are no real differences between people. That their job is to love. That God is love, and that in order to know what's right, they have to look no further than the love between a parent and their child. A love which I hope they feel in abundance.
And I will do my best. I cannot right the wrongs of the past. I cannot heal the wounds of a people. I cannot erase the cruelty of generations, but I can do my best, everyday, to raise up people who see the value of the love between a mother and her child, and who would never violate that love despite the cost to themselves.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
A Little Dark
There are days where I just totally freak out. We get a letter saying our taxes were under-assessed and our mortgage payment is going to go up by twice the raise I just received and, Jesus, how are we going to pay for that now that E. is going back to school full time and not working anymore. And I look around and think we have not had much good news, financially, for a long time now. I wonder what the hell. I have worked pretty dang hard for a long time now and shouldn't things be easier. Why are we so cursed.
The negativity comes in waves: My grandmother died on the floor by herself, and maybe suffered for a good long time. I sometimes imagine her body on the floor, and wonder if I should have gone up to see it before the coroner got to the house. I wonder if it says something about my character that I didn't.
I am sick again at the end of the semester, horrible sick, stomach flu and respiratory sick. I hear judge-y voices in my head who say this is my fault for working too much and not resting enough. I tell them to buzz off because sometimes you just catch a freaking virus, okay?
Sometimes I get really lonely for my girlfriends, for the women who know me and all my fears and fuck-ups and who don't need a bunch of back-story and who come and drag me out of my house and take me places.
The kitchen needs work and the house needs painting and the fence should be replaced. The big dog's anti-seizure medicine costs $80 a month and the little dog has a weird itch on his back but I don't want to take him to the vet for fear he'll need Botox injections or something that will send us off some financial cliff. Or, God, it's another tumor and he's going to die.
Sometimes I'm plagued with doubts about having moved us here. Every time the girls have troubles or E. falters on his way towards reinvention or we get a bill I didn't expect or I have a bad day at work, there is a little voice that says, see, you should have stayed. Who do you think you are.
The pain feels extra painful. The dark extra dark. And the crutches I used to use--the drinking, the buying, the eating--they just aren't as interesting or useful anymore.
But here's the thing. The dark is extra dark but also the light is extra light. I walk down the street here with a stupid goofy grin on my face because while I am not always happy I am frequently full of joy. The colors feel brighter and my days don't whiz by in a creepy blur and I'm interested in my life. The smallest things--riding the cruiser around town, cheering at Nolie's soccer game, drinking coffee in the sun--fill me with intense pleasure.
That sounds crazy.
What I mean is that I think living with a whole lot more uncertainty (but maybe also less fear) makes me feel more alive. We were rich when we lived in Colorado but I think I spent a lot of time feeling dead inside. I guess we were living with uncertainty, too, but I had surrounded myself with a pretty thick layer of routine and numbing and security.
If the bad can't get in, though, the good can't either.
This has not been an easy lesson to learn. I really dislike discomfort and pain and sadness and embarrassment and shame and failure. Here they are in my face a lot. It's like every day is a mother fucking adventure in what-the-hell-is-going-to-happen-now.
Everyday is a mother fucking adventure.
That doesn't sound so bad.
I don't know what I'm going to get from one day to the next, or how I will handle it, or what kinds of grace or mercy I'm going to need next. That feels a lot like being alive.
Martha Beck says this:
"Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. No one would call it easy, but the rhythm of emotional pain that we learn to tolerate is natural, constructive, and expansive. It’s different from unwilling suffering the way the sting of disinfectant is different from the sting of decay; the pain leaves you healthier than it found you."
Maybe all this is just me getting healthy.
Here's the other thing. I'm pretty sure I believed strongly in "meritocracy" as life philosophy. I believed if you were good, people would be good back, and if you did everything right and paid your bills and showed up and checked the boxes, good things would happen to you.
Cheryl Strayed, who doesn't believe in God but to me is a beautiful incarnation of God herself, writes in Tiny Beautiful Things, "To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion.... It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising--the very half that makes rising necessary--is having first been nailed to the cross."
I'm not saying I'm Jesus here, of course. Or that our challenges have even been that bad, in relative terms. I am saying that I have spent a whole lot of time trying to prevent bad things from happening to me by being good, believing that if something bad happened it was because I was not good enough.
But no. The darkness is not your punishment. It is your friend. The dark things are what lead you to the light. The cross is what leads you to redemption.
The flipside of trying to always do "right" is I feel like I spent most of my life barreling through to-do lists, forcing things to happen by sheer force of will without even being sure I actually wanted them to happen. There was so much supposed to happening there. I'm not talking about morality; I still think we strive to be our best selves, whenever possible, and to not hurt others, and to be kind and loving. But for a long time I was being someone else's version of that best self.
That is a lifetime of conditioning that needs undoing, because shoulds and supposed to's are dulling mechanisms. Figuring out what you actually want, apart from what you think you should do, is much more interesting. And radical. And terrifying. And good.
The negativity comes in waves: My grandmother died on the floor by herself, and maybe suffered for a good long time. I sometimes imagine her body on the floor, and wonder if I should have gone up to see it before the coroner got to the house. I wonder if it says something about my character that I didn't.
I am sick again at the end of the semester, horrible sick, stomach flu and respiratory sick. I hear judge-y voices in my head who say this is my fault for working too much and not resting enough. I tell them to buzz off because sometimes you just catch a freaking virus, okay?
Sometimes I get really lonely for my girlfriends, for the women who know me and all my fears and fuck-ups and who don't need a bunch of back-story and who come and drag me out of my house and take me places.
The kitchen needs work and the house needs painting and the fence should be replaced. The big dog's anti-seizure medicine costs $80 a month and the little dog has a weird itch on his back but I don't want to take him to the vet for fear he'll need Botox injections or something that will send us off some financial cliff. Or, God, it's another tumor and he's going to die.
Sometimes I'm plagued with doubts about having moved us here. Every time the girls have troubles or E. falters on his way towards reinvention or we get a bill I didn't expect or I have a bad day at work, there is a little voice that says, see, you should have stayed. Who do you think you are.
The pain feels extra painful. The dark extra dark. And the crutches I used to use--the drinking, the buying, the eating--they just aren't as interesting or useful anymore.
But here's the thing. The dark is extra dark but also the light is extra light. I walk down the street here with a stupid goofy grin on my face because while I am not always happy I am frequently full of joy. The colors feel brighter and my days don't whiz by in a creepy blur and I'm interested in my life. The smallest things--riding the cruiser around town, cheering at Nolie's soccer game, drinking coffee in the sun--fill me with intense pleasure.
That sounds crazy.
What I mean is that I think living with a whole lot more uncertainty (but maybe also less fear) makes me feel more alive. We were rich when we lived in Colorado but I think I spent a lot of time feeling dead inside. I guess we were living with uncertainty, too, but I had surrounded myself with a pretty thick layer of routine and numbing and security.
If the bad can't get in, though, the good can't either.
This has not been an easy lesson to learn. I really dislike discomfort and pain and sadness and embarrassment and shame and failure. Here they are in my face a lot. It's like every day is a mother fucking adventure in what-the-hell-is-going-to-happen-now.
Everyday is a mother fucking adventure.
That doesn't sound so bad.
I don't know what I'm going to get from one day to the next, or how I will handle it, or what kinds of grace or mercy I'm going to need next. That feels a lot like being alive.
Martha Beck says this:
"Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests, and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes parts of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. No one would call it easy, but the rhythm of emotional pain that we learn to tolerate is natural, constructive, and expansive. It’s different from unwilling suffering the way the sting of disinfectant is different from the sting of decay; the pain leaves you healthier than it found you."
Maybe all this is just me getting healthy.
Here's the other thing. I'm pretty sure I believed strongly in "meritocracy" as life philosophy. I believed if you were good, people would be good back, and if you did everything right and paid your bills and showed up and checked the boxes, good things would happen to you.
Cheryl Strayed, who doesn't believe in God but to me is a beautiful incarnation of God herself, writes in Tiny Beautiful Things, "To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion.... It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising--the very half that makes rising necessary--is having first been nailed to the cross."
I'm not saying I'm Jesus here, of course. Or that our challenges have even been that bad, in relative terms. I am saying that I have spent a whole lot of time trying to prevent bad things from happening to me by being good, believing that if something bad happened it was because I was not good enough.
But no. The darkness is not your punishment. It is your friend. The dark things are what lead you to the light. The cross is what leads you to redemption.
The flipside of trying to always do "right" is I feel like I spent most of my life barreling through to-do lists, forcing things to happen by sheer force of will without even being sure I actually wanted them to happen. There was so much supposed to happening there. I'm not talking about morality; I still think we strive to be our best selves, whenever possible, and to not hurt others, and to be kind and loving. But for a long time I was being someone else's version of that best self.
That is a lifetime of conditioning that needs undoing, because shoulds and supposed to's are dulling mechanisms. Figuring out what you actually want, apart from what you think you should do, is much more interesting. And radical. And terrifying. And good.
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