I wrote this poem ages and ages ago but never thought it was very good. But lines from it keep popping into my head lately. So I thought I’d share. I am the willow in winter Long swaying branches like tenticles dance on frigid air tinkling an icy fugue the leafless branches are all beauty, no life. I will be the willow in spring reaching down to … Continue reading I Am The Willow In Winter
Each of my children has a story we tell them about some way in which their lives have mattered. I believe that it’s one thing to tell a kid they are important and that they matter, but it’s something of a gift to them to be able to tell them how they have mattered. Then they’re not just a lowly child floating out in the world with no real base or purpose to start with. It grounds the message that they have value in their real world. It’s concrete evidence for them that just because they exist, the world is a different, better place.
My oldest Noah was born when his father and I were not married. If it wasn’t for him, we would not have formed a family and his siblings wouldn’t be here. And his birth also changed me. Before having him, if you had walked up to me at any given moment and said, “I’m sorry, only real humans are allowed here. Penguins such as yourself belong elsewhere” and I would have shrugged at being caught and thanked you for telling me I was a penguin – I had been wondering about that. I had a bad case of imposter’s syndrome. Practically from the start, parenting Noah was something I just knew how to do and I felt completely comfortable doing it. It was almost like working out of an area of spiritual blessing and was an important step on the way to me knowing (hopefully) more and more of who God created me to be.
Collin, who is now 12 was born while his dad was very sick. His medical care was awful but we were young and hadn’t yet realized that the system works differently once your illness has no identifiable cause or treatment. They eventually told us that he was crazy – really, they did. They even gave us a black binder with a report saying so. Continue reading “Do Your Kids Know Their Own Story?”
I met a woman a couple of months ago who may have saved my life. At the very least, she brought a much needed spark of laughter and joy into a dark time. And I don’t even remember her name. She was a short woman, with slightly beaver like teeth, but it was a faux-masquerade ball at the local science museum for geeky adults and she was wearing a sequined mask, so I never saw her face. I went because not only am I a geeky adult, I’m also a member of the museum so it was free.
In the course of talking I mentioned that I had 5 kids and was separated from their dad. Turns out she was divorced as well. I listened to her story and expressed sympathy for her painful experience. And then she turned to me and said, “well, and I hate to be a Debby Downer here, but you do know you’re never going to get another man again. Not with 5 kids you’re not. No way. You’re going to spend the rest of your life alone.” At which point it took every ounce of self-control for me not to burst out laughing. Who says something like that? What is wrong with this person? How do you even respond to something like that? Do you burst into tears, confess your fear of being alone forever and let her shake her head knowingly at the shame of it all? If you try to protest that you’ll be OK she’s just going to assume you’re in denial and maybe humor you. I could have told her she was rude, but she was such a character I hated to see her leave in a huff. I told her I hadn’t started processing that aspect of my loss yet.
Now, if this had been all the woman said, that would have been enough to make it worth my drive out that night. But I will take it that God knows my sense of humor and put this dear woman in my path that night. Continue reading “The Prophetess of Doom and Gloom”
When I was a kid, every time one of my parents said, “don’t be a smart aleck” I had to supress the mighty urge to respond, “would you rather I be a dumb aleck?” (I’m pretty sure my attempts at repression failed more than once.) Even worse was when my dad would get frustrated with me and tell me, “ah- you just think you’re right.” Well, yeah – of course I think I’m right. If I thought I were wrong, I would change my mind. Duh. Change my mind if I’m so wrong. (At this point my father is saying to the monitor: “finally – she tells it like it really is!” To which I must simply point out that I was a teenager who never drank, smoked, did drugs, went to parties, dated or had sex. And I was usually on the honor roll and attended mass daily. The challenges of raising me could probably be viewed as the parenting equivalents of first world problems.)
My favorite people have always been the ones who I could crack wise with to my heart’s content. Part of the bond I always shared with the qxh (quasi-ex-husband) was the fact that I could say almost any outrageous over-the-top thing that popped into my head around him. Which can create its own complications. I had to sit him down a couple of years into our marriage to explain that we don’t actually live in a sitcom and if he didn’t tone it down, he was going to find himself in the middle of a family melodrama with no batteries in the remote.
Last night I attended a divorce care recovery group where it was recommended that we make a list of what we have lost in divorce. One of those things for me has been having a place for my personality to just sprawl out where ever it wanted to go. Continue reading “An Aspiring Dumb Aleck Speaks”
Remember when everyone was writing their “25 Random Things” lists on facebook? Believe or not, it’s been 2 years since that became such a big thing that news outlets devoted coverage to the phenomena which I think means it’s time to take a look back and see what’s changed, what’s the same and maybe what we wish we hadn’t said. I invite you to share your “25 Random Things” list in the comments below. If you are a blogger, this is an easy blog post – link back here or put a link in the comments below.
Here’s my list from January 17, 2009:
1. I always put the toilet lid down before flushing. You should to.
2. For several years when I was little my dad owned a small Cessna airplane. Except for my dad’s airplane, I have not flown since I was 3.
3. I am very funny. Sometimes other people even agree with me.
4. I am often stunned at how beautiful, smart and funny my little girls are.
5. I’m not entirely sure what my natural hair color is.
6. I have a spiritual director I meet with once a month.
7. I will be putting pictures of the plants I start from seed and grow under lights up on facebook all spring. They make me very, very happy.
8. I’m not a very good gardener. But I am sure that in 10 years I will be.
9. I did prison ministry in college.
10. I am taking the test to join Mensa next Saturday.
11. I’ve never met anyone I like (and sometimes hated) as much as my husband.
12. I enjoy reading stories about people’s near-death experiences.
13. I had my first alcoholic drink the fall after I turned 20.
14. I am currently writing my spiritual memoir and I’m very happy with how it’s going. (Please send any writer’s agents you may know my way!)
15. Two of the guys I dated in college broke up with me because they said I was intimidating. Continue reading “What were your “25 Random Things”?”
by·word/ˈbīˌwərd/
| Noun: |
|
My children know one of my old classmates by name. Not that they have ever met her. And it’s not even because I have told them stories about her. I have told them stories about lots of people I have known without bothering to add in their name. No, I’m kind of ashamed to admit that they know her name because when I was a kid, her name became a byword to me. Her name stood in for a set of behaviors which I associated with her and wanted desperately to avoid myself. I called it “Sally Ruthersbrodt* Syndrome” (*Not her real name!) My kids and other people who were very unlikely to ever meet her know her name and what it meant to me. In my mind her name meant thinking that people liked you when they didn’t.
I’m not even sure how that became such a big fear for me, but it was. I got that not everyone was going to like me and I was cool with that (eventually). But what if the people who seemed to like me didn’t really? That was an intolerable thought to me. The idea of thinking that you were safe with people who weren’t really safe freaked me out. And like any good geek, I believed that gathering as much information as possible was the solution. Because then I could figure out how to avoid this perceived threat. So, to that end, I applied my powers of observation to watching the people around me looking for signs that I might be turning into a Sally Ruthersbrodt.
Unfortunately for me, if there is a disorder which is the opposite of Asperger’s that makes you inappropriately hyper-sensitive to non-verbal social cues, I have that. Continue reading “I’m a byword for neurosis”
A friend recently sent a note in which she commented on the lack of “why me?” talk on my blog. Silly girl – I was raised Catholic. I can think of at least 100 reasons all of this is my own fault right off the top of my head! That, plus the fact that life has been handing me inexplicably little help for as long as I can remember means that I let “why me?” go a long time ago. There are only two answers: “you’re doing it wrong” or “because this is the way you need to go“. Either I’m screwing something up and should fix it – hence the Catholic guilt – or this is one of those things that will only make sense later. Frankly, Catholic guilt gets a bad rap – it’s downright empowering in light of the alternative!
This was a tough week. It was one of those weeks where an emotional rough patch and a life rough patch collided and made a mess all over the highway of my life. (I keep telling God he needs to pave the damn thing.) And just to make sure that all of this doesn’t get to be too routine, my wonderful parents were visiting, so I had an audience. (My poor parents; I’m glad and grateful that they were here, but I know it’s only marginally more fun to watch someone you love go through things you are helpless to do anything about than it is to go through it yourself. I have to remind myself that God must have his reasons for asking them to walk a path which includes me and my mess of a life.)
If you read my book The Upside Down World ~ A Book of Wisdom in Progress, you will remember that I first met God in a fit of enraged blasphemy. Which means that I’ve always felt free to itch and moan and be as upset as I want to be in prayer. Besides, Jesus was said to have prayed with “loud cries and tears” himself. So by the end of the week, my prayers had devolved into demands: “I can’t do this. I’m not going to do this. You need to fix this. Not just spiritually, but for real. In the real world. Continue reading “It Will Be Alright. Or So I’ve Been Told”
One of the worst things I ever did in my life was pull my sister Shannon’s hair. Well, it wasn’t just the hair pulling; hitting her repeatedly just before pulling her hair was pretty bad too. I was in my early teens and had been left to babysit my younger siblings, including Shannon who is 8 years younger than me. I have no idea what started it exactly, but I do remember that she was refusing to do something or another that I had told her to do. So, I hit her. And she laughed. Which enraged me. So I hit my very slight little sister again harder. And she laughed harder. Completely besides myself with frustration and anger, I hit her again and again and she laughed at me again and again. Finally, I yanked hard on her hair and she suddenly started sobbing. Which shot right through my anger to the part of me that can’t help but feel empathy towards someone in pain.
Saying that it was one of the worst things I ever did is a bit of hyperbole. More accurate would be to say that out of all the things I have ever done, this was one that I felt worst about. I had lashed out at someone smaller and weaker than myself in anger. I love her and had been entrusted with her care, but because I had not been able to control myself, she had wound up being hurt – emotionally if nothing else. As an adult, I went and apologized to her for this incident and learned (not too surprisingly) that she has no memory of it. Honestly, I’m quite certain it wasn’t the first time I had hit one of my siblings in an attempt to get them to do what I wanted or needed them to do. But her hurt this time was so raw it made a huge impression on me. I was married before I ever let myself get that angry again. Continue reading “Drinking Anger’s Poison”
We have heard with our ears, O God;
Our fathers have told us
what you did in their days,
in days long ago.
I heard a story the other day about a woman who needed potatoes. To make potato salad. And apparently she needed a lot of potatoes. I probably wasn’t listening very attentively, because I have no idea why she needed to make potato salad – church picnic, family reunion, Paula Deen was coming for a cook-out, I don’t know. But the woman needed potatoes and had no money for potatoes which was causing her a good deal of stress. People were depending on her potato salad. And then she got a phone call from a friend who worked at the weigh-station outside of town: “there’s truck here that’s 150 lbs overweight. It’s full of potatoes – do you know anyone who might need 150 lbs of potatoes?” Why, yes, yes she did. And potatoes fell down from the heavens like manna.
At the completion of this story, another man in the room exclaimed, “isn’t it amazing how God provides? Over and over I have seen things like that – even in my own family, God provides in the most unexpected ways.” Several others in the room nodded in agreement. Not me. I’m like the psalmist – I have heard of these things, but I haven’t seen them. Continue reading “Psalm 44: “You have made us a byword among the nations””
After a longer string of good days that I’ve had in I don’t know how long, I woke up pretty out of sorts this morning. Which is bound to happen. Especially, you know, every four weeks or so. So, rather than ruining my whole day by pushing myself until I’m too overwhelmed and drained to function, I grabbed my still groggy, crabby 2 year old and went back to bed to cry like a baby myself until it passed.
After a couple of minutes, Olivia looked up at the corner above the bed and began pointing towards the ceiling. She does this fairly often. I always say, “do you see an angel?” although I never see anything in the corner she’s pointing to. Continue reading “Angels in my Bedroom?”
The Upside Down World 