uuMomma

It is quiet here.  I’ve opened a window upstairs and listened to a cardinal sing, watching the tail of one cat twitching feverishly as she longed to jump through the screen and quell that song forever. But it is quiet, otherwise.  It is a holiday morning and everyone else is still sleeping.  I’ve had two smallish cups of not-my-favorite-but-it-is-here coffee and am working on my third.  My eyes are open and I like to think that here, in the quiet of my house, my heart is open, too.

Yesterday in church as part of the Story for all Ages, our minister talked about soldiers and about using silence to honor service and death.  He then had the children stand and be quiet for one whole minute in order to practice for 3:00 today, when many people will honor the fallen through silence.

Our sanctuary is not known for its silence.  Partly because an oft-used train track slides right by our church, and partly because there is a caudry of people who truly believe that laughter and commentary are essential to worship.  But in that moment when our minister instructed our children to stand silently, a hush fell over the room in which I felt, quite viscerally, my own need for the intentional silence.

Lately, when in the company of my eldest daughter, I have noticed an inability on her part to just simply sit. She is tapping and snapping and fidgeting in ways that drive me absolutely–and I’d even say literally–over the edge of sanity. “Please stop it,” I instruct in my cranky way.  And when she does and then resumes, nervously, impatiently, I implore her “Can’t you just be still?”

I’m craving stillness, I realized in that moment of silence which came smack dab in the middle of a four-day weekend with my children and only 8 days from their last day of school which portends some 80 contiguous days of snapping and tapping and general fidgety-ness.

I’m craving stillness and the willingness to let my mind ramble a while–without interruption, without agenda, without reason or rationality. In these early morning moments of stillness, I’ve learned something about my own need to let my mind run like an unbridled pony.  It is in my head and in my heart where I am nimble and quick, where I can jump out of small context, view the large picture, and jump back in with a healthy dose of perspective.  In my head, my arms are free of gravity and can wrap around issues large and small. In my head, my body floats, free of that which defines the physical me.

It is in the stillness I presume upon myself, that I am active beyond measure. In the stillness, I am poised like a hurdler at the starting blocks, my muscles taut and ready, my eyes pointed forward, my ears pricked for the pistol to ring out, my legs and arms twitching to start that synchronized and practiced dance over the obstacles ahead of me. In the stillness, I run and jump, and find myself, waiting at the finish line, ready, once again, to face the snappy, tappy, fidgetyness of a world that is rarely still.

She is dressing to take the garbage out.  Jean’s miniskirt. Black leggings with lace at the bottom.  A stained white t-shirt.  A silver lame belt.  And now, the jacket, because it is breezy outside, a day Pooh would call “blowie.”  The jacket is a little white hoodie, and I mean little.  Her father tells her not to wear it.  “It’s too small.”  He’s right.  He is also wrong.  It is uncomfortable, I’m sure, like the silver screw-in earrings she’s putting on now, her legacy from her grandmother’s jewlery box.  But it (her little hoodie) looks like what she sees the fashionable girls wear–short and tight.  And she looks at herself in the mirror with a smile of satisfaction.  This is exactly how I wish to look, I think she is saying to herself.

Earlier, over English muffins (hers slathered with blackberry jelly, mine with butter alternative) and orange juice, she asks “what would you say if I told you I had a boyfriend?”

“Does he know you have jelly lips?” I ask.

“Maaa-ahm!” she gushes with a smile. “I don’t have one yet.”

She is nine.  And she’s taking out the garbage.  And my heart.

I’m playing hookey today.  Staying home from church on purpose. Even before I got ill this week, I looked ahead at the calendar and said, Sunday–let that be Sabbath, for real.  When you are a lay leader in a small congregation with a part-time minister, generally, Sunday is not a day of Sabbath.  Or, I should say, in my experience it is not.  And I just didn’t have the energy to put myself out there for others today.  Very selfish.  So not what I’m thinking about for the future of my congregation, either.  (Some day, when I’m feeling better, I’ll state that vision clearly, when I am physically and emotionally ready for it to be examined by UUs with very different congregational experiences.  For now, let’s just say I’m hoping we can become the kind of bretheren that remembers to look after “the least of these” in a very strategic way.)

Right now, instead, I’m doing my spiritual practice: writing.  Why has it taken me so long to figure this out?  It’s not like people haven’t told me before that it is my way.  Why is it when I’m most vulnerable, I stay away from the thing that gives me strength?  It is almost as if I am punishing myself for being human.  For being lost. Like those stories of the stereotyped male who is so lost he won’t ask for direction.  I know what gives me direction, focus, care and I put it at arms length.

Today, I couldn’t face going to an “iffy” church service, one that might feed my mind but would skip around the surface of my soul.  I chose, instead, to stay here, in my pajamas with the Kleenex box only a reach away, and find my own way to that place that strikes the chord in my soul that sends reverberations out, I hope, connecting me with others.  For that, I say this prayer:

We are not dropped in a desert, to find our way alone.  We are brought to earth through people, and if we are lucky, they are people who adore each other and us.  They raise us, again—if we are lucky—to learn the ways of the world through watching them and experimenting, ourselves. They raise us to wander into our own deserts at our own pace.  Again, if we are lucky, we find them there, at the other side, arms open wide to receive their prodigal.

And if we are not lucky in birth, if we are born of parents emotionally untethered to each other or to us, and we feel as if we are raised in a desert, we may take a long path to learn that we were not meant to be so. We wander until we are found, a prodigal unto ourselves, able to finally be found by others.

We are not meant to be alone. We are not meant to wander forever, unconnected. We are built for better things. Loving, most of all.  To love without reserve, ah, that would be Godly, indeed. But to love at all, even the smallest thing, is the first step into that Kingdom here on earth.

May it be so.

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.