uuMomma

I don’t think I’ve ever voted in a presidential primary where the vote I cast actually meant anything.  A contested election, in May?  Never heard of it.

But here’s my question for you other states who have already been wooed and forgotten: whose picture was on the campaign materials from Hillary Rodham Clinton?

You would think that it would be her photo, wouldn’t you?  As I live in the northwest corner of Indiana, in one of those “sundown” towns you hear of, and where the once-great city of Gary was torpedoed by white-flight, I wonder why her black male opponent’s photo is on every piece of literature I receive from the Clinton campaign.  Whose strategy is this?

Anyone from a blue state receive stuff like this?  Am I overly sensitive?  You all tell me.

This past was not the best weekend with my lovely, eldest daughter. But difficult, I’m finding, is relative.

This daughter of mine is fourteen and one-half.  She pushes the boundaries on everything, but more often does not just stretch them, but stomps and trounces upon them, all the while sneering at me.  But she is also recognizing what an ass she can be, which is good.  Last night she was watching something truly wretched on VH1–I’m not even sure what, but as I walked by all I could see was a variety of people sitting around a living room and skin–lots of rounded, fleshy skin bulging out of places where flesh generally does when clothing is either too tight or too short.

“Inappropriate!” I yelled as I skimmed by.  She argued, then came into the room where I was, and bounced up and down whining “I’m 14; stop trea-TING me like a TWO year old.”  About the time she got to “two” she saw the look on my face (sheer wonder at the idiocy of it all, truly, I’m sure) as she recognized she was having a two-year-old’s tantrum.  She smiled, laughed, walked away and found something else on TV to watch.

Later still we had to argue about her tuba practice charts, which are a big joke and mostly a big lie.  We wouldn’t sign them as she presented them.  She was mad. She went to bed.

I pulled out my laptop, exhausted by her incessant need for drama and wishing I could be anywhere else, with anyone else.  And then I read LizardEater’s post on The Journey about her baby daughter’s recurrance of cancer.  And I found myself struck dumb, self-absorbed, ridiculous, and absolutely exhausted by wrangling with what don’t matter. So, on to wrangling with the stuff that does.

In the meantime, a prayer, I think, for them both:

May you, Little Warrior, 
grow strong,
grow up,
grow independent and …
argue with your mother over things
you know don’t matter.
But in the arguing,
know you are doing the dance
of growing strong,
growing up, and growing independent.

May you, LW, grow long legs and long arms
so that, even when you know the school won’t allow you
to wear shorts or skirts shorter than your fingertips at your side,
you test your mother in the dressing room of a major department store
Insisting that what is visibly too short
is really “fi-i-i-nnne” by twisting your body,
and shrinking your arms up, like an adolescent TRex.

May you, LE, be able to laugh at the sight of this child-gone-partially-dinosaur
and share with others the ridiculousness that is
having a strong and independent daughter of a typically crazy age.

This, and other tedious, treacherous, totally inane moments of an age,
I wish for you both.

And the joy, too, that comes with this ridiculous and ought-to-be-predictable dance
of growing strong, growing up, and growing independent–from each other.

Thinking of you both and wishing, hoping, praying …

As my husband said last night, how bad does it have to be when a teen-age daughter complains that her parents are not paying enough attention to her?  After two nights of bellowing and belligerence (beyond the norm), I called my eldest daughter over to me and said, “what’s the deal?” as nicely as I could.

“It just seems like I’m way down on the list of priorities for you and dad right now,” she said, without pouting, without shouting, without tears.

I couln’t do much more than acknowledge that she was right.  That morning I’d spent a good portion of the hour-long shared commute, bemoaning  to my trapped passenger the very issue of being out of balance right now between family, work, and other. I told my daughter she was right, told her that I’m still playing catch-up with work, church and home in the aftermath of my father’s illness and death and of her father’s back surgery.  I told her what I’d told my husband last week as we had a pass-by snipe at each other.  I said, we can recognize that this is an incredibly busy, stressful time right now and yell and argue our way into making it moreso, or we can give each other some room, some space to be crazy, and a little bit of kindness and make it just bearably stressful.

When I reminded her that she, too, has been very busy (being in the school play, being the manager of the track team, and going to work with her dad on Saturdays), she nodded and agreed.

Here’s the image that came to me in one of my few quiet moments this week.  I suddenly felt the need to be shot out of a canon to catch up to my life, which seemed to have gone on without me these last few weeks, months.  But then I had the image of my landing after being shot out of that canon, whereupon I landed face-down, with a grizzly thud and the sickening realization that in the moment I landed and pulled myself upright, my life would have continued on without me, requiring a repeat of the previous process.

I’m trying to figure out how to model grief for my girls, as I’m sure that much of this slowness, this indecisiveness, this inability-to-focus-ness is part and parcel of the grieving process.  And still, I move forward…ish. And in trying to model the grief, I’m not letting them see the tears always at the inside corner of my eyes, but am letting the sadness eek through.  This eldest daughter has said to me on occasion in the last few weeks, “Are you alright?  You just look so sad.”  She’s paying attention.  “I am sad,” I say when she notices.  “And I’m alright.”

I still don’t know how to do this and wonder does anyone.  I am flabbergasted at how I am still taken aback by his death, as intellectually prepared for it as I was.  But there are these moments that seize my heart to breaking.  My daughter–still again the eldest–came to me one night as we had a house full of others and I saw she was upset so we went in my room to talk.  “We played the song we did at the concert,” she said, “and I thought of Poppa …” and she fell into her tears.  We had been at a school concert where each girl played the morning my father died.

Another day, my youngest said, out of nowhere, it seemed, “Debbie and I have one thing in common: we both only have one grandparent.”  We were driving.  Everyone else engaged her in follow-up conversation, I stared out the window thinking of another moment, the day before.  I was in the laundry room and the girls were folding kitchen towels, napkins and placemats.

“Where’d we get these?” one child asked of the rarely-used white placemats.

“Grandma and Grandpa Brown gave them to me for my wedding,” I said, and suddently felt a sickness through my heart, as I thought of my own daughters’ weddings and those who will not be there.

A week or so before that, at an airport, I watched an elderly couple help each other through security. She who seemed to be barely able to stand herself, was helping him on with his jacket. And then she put her arm through his and they walked on, slowly, together.  I felt, as I watched them, as I had when my girls were little and my mother-in-law died, when I saw a grandmother pushing a baby in a stroller as I drove the opposite way.  This is what will not be, I thought.  This will not be a part of their daily routines nor of their glorious days.  This is what will not be, for them, for her, for us.

But what will be, I have to remind myself to look forward with hope, as I have no regrets about what has happened, only about what will never happen.  I have to be reminded to look forward with the hope of what is, and stop living in the hoping of that which can never be.

I have to pull myself back to the now, to the moments when we are together as family, as individuals who love and sometimes even like each other.  Have to pull myself back to the tasks at hand and let my grieving soul sail on ahead, stare at the tulips blooming in the yard even as a gray day provides the backdrop to the reds, the yellows, the pinks.  Perhaps that’s it: I need to live in this gray place right now, while still paying attention, special attention, to those vivid spots of color that bloom firmly, yet briefly. 

But it is the gray where I live, for now.  It is a muted place, where my hearing is dulled as is my vision.  Even taste and touch are affected by the grayness.  My intellect, too, it would seem.  Some will tell me to give it “time” and some days I can hear this without cringing. But if now is all we have and now is when I hurt then how does waiting help that, how does that help me NOW.

It will, I know.  It will.  And I’m quite certain that the grayness right now is in direct proportion to the heightened sensitivity of those last few weeks of my father’s life.  Too many colors, too many sounds, too many tastes, too many touches.  Overdosed, I suppose on the intensity of living while another is dying or recently gone.

So I’ll sit in this muted place being drawn back, inch by inch, into my former life by the residents therein, who need me, need my attention, and need to see the grayness lift, inch by slow inch.

We planned on sleeping in a little on Saturday.  We silly humans who make plans.  And the cats say “ha!”  My big fluffy tiger cat sat by my closed door and whined loudly for attention at the crack of 7:00 a.m.  I grabbed my pillow and then him and went downstairs to the couch to try to find a few more minutes of sleep there, with a cat purring upon me.

When I fell back to sleep, I had the weirdest dream.  I was out, at a party or something, and my cell phone rang.  I looked down to see who would be calling and all I saw was four digits … 2 7 7 9 (I think).  I answered tentatively, “hello?”

“Hi Tina, it’s dad,” came my father’s voice through my ear.  Distinctly my father’s voice. Not his timid, little-boy, end-of-life voice, as we came to call it. No, it was his healthy voice, so healthy, in fact, I thought I heard the faint hint of his general annoyance with all things human.

“Dad?” I answered, fully aware that he was dead and that this contact was, in fact, impossible. “Where are you?” I asked him.

“I’m here with God,” he said, and this time I totally heard the unsaid “duh!” in that statement, which, in and of itself was absurd.  “Where’s your mom?” he asked me then.

“I don’t know, did you try the house?”

And then I sat up, the full force of this exchange charging me up, cutting off any further connection.

It was absurd.  My father?  With God?

And yet, it wasn’t.  I had gone to sleep that night fully aware of how cut off I have been from my own practice of “prayer,” for lack of a better word.  I ached to pick up the pen and re-begin the process of writing, as I have on many occasions, what could be called “journal entries” but all of which begin with “Dear God.”

When did I stop?  Why?  Haven’t a clue. It would require me to look at that notebook, those pages again.  And even fully aware how much I missed this as I went to bed Friday night, I refused to get up and look.  Why?  I really don’t know, but will figure it out once I start writing again.  I spent the day in a somewhat silent way.  Doing laundry, cleaning up, doing the banking and delivering children where they needed to be.  All the time processing, returning to that phone call and asking myself, was it real?  Did I really hear his voice?

At one point I began to panic.  Why was he looking for mom?  Was she supposed to be on her way, too?  But an email from her allowed me to believe that no, she was fine, and what I was hearing was an echo of a conversation my dad and I had in our last two weeks together.

I did process the dream, and later called my mom so she could laugh with me about it.  But, I didn’t come away from the dream with a certainty of God and of the goodness of that loving God who would not only embrace a skeptic and a heretic like my dad, but let him use His/Her cell phone, too.

No, the dream provided me with an affirmation of my own faith in my belief that there is a God who loves us all, period. All of this is so contrary to how my Dad felt and thought that it does seem like my own form of heresy, and makes me feel like I’m 13 all over again, defying my father just because I can.  

The dream reminded me of Anne Lamott quoting her spiritual advisor/friend as saying “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; certainty is.” The only certainty I hold right now is this: that I will have doubts and that I can live in a place of faith and doubt at the very same moment. And that allows me to interpret my dream as about me and my faith and not about what is real beyond what I can see.

You see, it would be like my father to phone me from a place alongside God and act as if they had always been first-name friends. Presented with the fact of God when he was alive, my Dad would, no doubt, have claimed that he never said he didn’t believe but that he waited for God to show up and for His/Her existence to be proven.  The dream affirmed not only my sense of God, but of my Dad that, given proof, he would change his mind and act as though he never changed a thing.

But the dream gave me what I needed.  And that was all it was. There is no proof in it.  Just a four-digit number, my dad’s voice, and the insistent echo of my own soul, reaching for God.

I am in New Orleans, tonight. Well, just outside of it. This has been a whirlwind weekend and I pack up and leave in the morning, having come here to do the work I need to do. This is my first trip to Louisiana, my first trip to anything like this.

I cannot begin to speak of this, as it would be like sticking your pinky-toe in the ocean and declaring “It’s blue.”  My experience is so shallow. Still, I feel called to raise it up, and as I sit here, in a hotel room, all alone, struggling with whether I should even try, I found this blog entry from NOLA Rev, called “What It’s Like Here, pt. 2.” Here’s some of what she has to say:

Then, there’s the relationships crashing. In a congregation officially less than 90 adults, I know of 3 divorces/split ups; there may even be more than I’m not yet aware of. One couple in my church, long-time members, are planning to live at least 6 months away from the city, having purchased a house out of state. The wife is traumatized and can’t take it here any more; she doesn’t feel safe. A New Orleans attorney, friend of mine for close to 30 years, says that right after Katrina it was the men who went crazy while the women held things together; 2 years later, the men are doing OK and the women are dropping like flies. My friend says that periodically his wife brings up leaving the city — and they go round and round for a while, talking about where they might live, and in the end, they come to the conclusion, Where would we go? How could we live anywhere else?

There will be more, but for now, I go to sleep in my hotel bed, looking forward to “going home” assured that it–and everything I own–waits there for me.  Ah, that I could wish the same for those who lost so much more than possessions.

(Updated 4/4/08: Feel called to say what seems obvious to me, this was inspired entirely by the opening words of the movie, Love Actually–which if you have not seen, you must, even though it is a Christmas movie and which you may not wish to watch with your children because of some nakey bits and some refreshingly adult humor and language.) 

In want of beauty
I’m looking
for relief and inspiration
for my weary eyes
my weary heart
my longing soul

Like love
Like God
I open my eyes
and find

a bloom in a weed by the side of a highway
dirty from old salt, old snow, old crashes

in a smile, gap-toothed, with a ring
of dried saliva, there
around my own child’s lips 
clamboring to kiss me goodbye

in the twitching of a cat’s tail
as that cat stares, achingly,
at what an early Spring morning
brings to our front window:
birds, all atwitter,
his own personal wide-screen entertainment

Like love,
Like God,
Beauty is, actually,
All around.

A quote from Maya Angelou, on a sympathy card:

We are living art,
created
to help others
to hang on,
stand up,
forbear, continue.

Here’s to continuing.

Church today was an incredibly and somewhat surprisingly uplifting experience. Our Tween/Teen group did the service. Four voices and an original percussion piece performed by the 6th grade composer and his 3rd grade sister. Two of the voices belonged to my eldest and middlest daughters. The sermon was titled “Could a UU ever become president” (selected long before, I should add, Senator Obama’s ability to be president was challenged by years-old sermons by his minister).

I’m swelling with parental pride right now.  I should let them own their own pride, but right now I’m just so overwhelmed by who these children are and how they choose to be in it, I’m excited about what the future holds for all of us.

This was their first experience with original content from the pulpit.  They have been up there before to deliver words others have written, but never to deliver their own thoughts. They were led by their 18-year-old mentor/teacher, who managed to pull a pretty good worship experience together.  I won’t describe what they said, just that they did it and they did it well.  As I told someone over coffee and cookies later, I am most impressed that they expressed an interest in leading a worship service, managed their time (mostly) wisely, and followed through with very good results.  I don’t get to experience that (follow-through) often with my daughters … projects get conceived and then dropped so much around this house … that this, itself, was spiritually moving for me.

While they were getting their things together in the hour before the worship service, I sat around a table with our adult forum group. The VP of the Board was leading a discussion revolving around the new UUA video and he asked people to say how they found out about our church and then why they chose to stay.  Lately, we have had a great number of people start attending our church regularly and have even had some join.  There’s an energy around the church that is palpable, though I can’t say exactly from where it is coming. Three of the people who spoke and at length were relative newcomers and all self-identified as Pagans. Their introduction to the church was through our local Pagan group and they each spoke about how great it was that we were a church that didn’t seem like one.  One person even intimated that we shouldn’t call ourselves “religious” but “spiritual” in order to attract people. Others talked about how great it is that we aren’t Christian and that the word ‘church’ evokes too much of the Christian tradition.

I started to twitch, thinking of all the things I’d like to say. The woman next to me started to twitch, too.

I let them speak, and I did address some of the things I thought shouldn’t be left out there hanging as if they were absolutely true. Other old-timers did, too.  It bothered me that people still come to our church thinking that we are “not that” rather than that we are Unitarian Universalist.  But the truth is, that’s how I came in, and it was years down the pike before I came to see that the church wasn’t placed there solely to allow me to figure out what is right and true; that there is a framework and a history that comes from being a religious body that is good, time-tested, and true; that what I wanted was not to know that I was right, but that I had a brain, a heart, and a spirit that was willing to be tested by being in community with people who were ALSO right.

Then my daughters did their sermon and it hit on these very same concepts of what it is to be UU, what it is to be “other” in a Christian mainstream, how that “otherness” works both against and for their connections in the outside world.

And then we drove home and a Bonnie Raitt song caught my ear.  I don’t have the CD case in front of me or I’d tell you the name of the song, but it is a song about a woman who loves someone who doesn’t love her back. She knows she’s not going to be around him (or her) much longer, but she’s taking this last night to pretend that she is loved.  The song got me thinking about yet another conversation I want to have with my daughters some day, about how–in my experience–it is easier to be alone than to be with the wrong person. This got me thinking about church.  (go ahead.  think on that for a minute.  I’ll wait.)  Okay, so it got me thinking about people who stay in relationships because they would rather be with someone who is wrong or bad for them than to be all alone.  It takes faith to be alone–faith that the person you are looking for will, eventually show up (not to mention faith that you will recognize them when they do). It takes faith to not be in relationship just because everyone else is. And this place of alone-ness is also a place of deep integrity. You aren’t stringing yourself along or telling yourself half-truths to get through the day.  You are just there, being alone and either loving it or hating it, but you aren’t wrapping yourself up in anyone else’s life.

How is this like church, you ask? It takes great strength, courage, and integrity to leave a place of worship that is not healthy for you–even moreso to step into a relationship with a new church, with your own expectations of who you are, what the church is, and how the two of you will be together.

These new people coming to our church and describing their love for us in terms of what we are not, are still in the early stages of infatuation, I realized as I sat at the drive-through of Burger King on the way home from church. They don’t know the whole of us, yet. They’ve seen the initial attractive spark and have cast onto that spark what they want us to be, as a community, as a partner for their spiritual well-being. And guess what?  That’s okay.  I just have to remember that rather than twitching in lathered irritation; and then I need to form my responses from that place of knowing who “we” are, but also of knowing that these people will ultimately alter who we are and how we are together.  That’s their job.  Just as it was mine, nine years ago.  And, just as I had gentle mentors who urged me into a place of seeing that I might need a little alteration, myself, perhaps there will be a time and a place to suggest this to these people who are new to our congregation, to our faith.

This is a jumbled up mess of thinkin’ for a time when I’d do better to nap.  But it was one of those days when all of the pieces seemed, at first, to be disjointed, and then, in a flash of semi-brilliance, seemed to sparkle as one entity with a Bonnie Raitt soundtrack.  In the telling of it, though, perhaps the nap would have been a wiser move.

I came up the stairs at about 8:00 a.m. from where I’d been working to find two daughters in the living room.  “Go back to bed,” said the middle child.

“Back to bed?” I said.  “I’m working.”

“So am I,” said youngest child.  “I have homework.”

“Homework, over spring break?” I asked her.

“I didn’t finish it last week. Too many distractions at my table,” she said, sighing heavily. “Like people,” she added with a dramatic flair.

“Don’t I know it,” I said, reflecting on all the distractions before me today (last day of Spring Break, husband home recovering from yesterday’s back surgery which required an additional day and one-half off of work when I’ve worked so little over the last few months due to other requirements of the human condition–oh, and the surgery went very well, if it had not, I would not be kvetching so).

I told my eldest two daughters the other day that I’ve been feeling like the monk who curses the frogs to stop singing so he can pray, only to find, in the silence, that the sounds of the frogs and the wind in the trees, and all the other noise around is part of God’s voice, and in silencing them, he silenced his prayer, as well.  (Correct me if I’m wrong on that, I couldn’t find my source and couldn’t find it online in a quick google.)  In any event, I’m trying to live in the distractions rather than waiting for them to cease, as I don’t see the cease of distraction coming until I cease to breathe, and even then, I haven’t a clue what distractions will arise.

That said, I’m ready for an hour or two where all I’m doing is one thing, all I’m doing is paying attention to what is before me.  I learned that with my father’s illness; I relearned it yesterday, as I sat waiting to hear the surgery was over and all was well and I thought I could use that time to “work.” Sometimes you do get to do one thing, but it better be something very important.  The rest of the time, all you can do is let the frogs sing.

Since my dad loved to take photos and since we didn’t want to order flowers for the service, we ended up printing out a bunch of his flower photos (6 or 8 to a sheet, so they were smallish), then tacking them to colored popsicle sticks and “planting” them in little pots of African Violets. 

It was an incredibly silly idea–one that took far too much time and effort in the conception, though, in actuality, very little in the construction (16 pots for 8 tables, with the extra flower photos tossed about like seed packets). But it kept many hands busy for a little while and I can’t fault that. It is the kind of crafty crap that has earned me the nickname of “Marge Stewart” (yes, that would be a merger of the blue-haired bombshell and the “lifestyle” maven).  Still and all, it was cute. And my father would have hated it.  Still and all, we did it.

My best friend’s mother, who is Catholic, picked one of the photos up as she left and said “these are such nice little prayer cards.”  And that’s just what they were for the man who believed in here, now, and flowers.  Prayer cards.

I have yet to unpack those that were left at the church.  My daughter has something in mind for them–and seeing as she is her mother’s daughter, I’m terrified of what that may end up being.

Still and all … we had a project to do during the week of his service and now we have a memory of a silly little crap project that my dad would have hated, but would have loved the story that will bloom from those silly little prayer cards as, at future family gatherings, we tell it as if it mattered.  Because it didn’t.  And it also did.