This afternoon I came home hot, tired, and feeling weak. We had a busy day driving here and there gathering what we needed for Arthur's first birthday party tomorrow. The stores were extra crowded, it being July 3rd. The babies dealt with the heat better than us grown folks, and Charlie, the champ that he is, maintained order in the backseat for us as we dragged the children from one place to the other. We ended up staying out far longer than we anticipated. Both Sylia and I found ourselves completely drained from the heat, the walking, and the wrestling with two toddlers all day. By the time I dropped her off, we were both ready to crash; then I remembered a dinner date. Michele's birthday dinner at Kanpai was at 7:00 and it was already 6:00 when I dropped Sylia off. I quickly traded shoes with her, put on some fresh makeup and headed out the door. By the time we reached the end of the driveway I got a text that Michele wasn't able to get to dinner, so I decided I would not go either--I couldn't have made it on time anyway, and without the birthday girl, what's the point? So we grabbed some drive-thru grub and came home.
As Charlie and I unloaded the car, I noticed my neighbor, Nell, on her golf cart up by her garden. (She's also the landlord, although our relationship is much more friendly than business.) I came inside and gave Charlie an envelope filled with the rent money and asked him to run it up to her while I finished putting things away. In a few minutes he came back, short of breath from running and said, "Nell wants to talk to you."
"About what?" I asked.
"I don't know." He said, "I think she wants to know if Senior Action is closed tomorrow."
"Okay," I siad. "I'll run up and talk to her."
As I approached I took in the sight of her, in her mid-80's, she looked, at a distance, strong and able bodied as she hoed away at the weeds growing up around her tomato plants. My mind flashed back for a second, to my daddy having us kids hold back the plants while he used the tiller to destroy the weeds growing up around his squash, cucumbers and melons.
"Who put you to work?" I asked, teasing her as I approached. She didn't hear me.
When I finally reached the edge of the garden after tromping through high grass in the back yard, she stopped her working to ask me the schedule for this week. I told her we'd be open again on Thursday as usual. I always know, deep down, that when Nell calls for me to come, I am going as a vessel. I can try to give her friendship, comfort, even rent money, but on days like today all she really needed were some ears, willing to listen, and a heart that could sit with her and hold her grief for just a little while.
People need to tell their stories. They need a safe person in their lives to tell those stories to-someone who won't brush them off or change the subject or start talking about when their great uncle's wife died in some freak accident. Nell often needs to walk through her yard and remember her husband. She needs to keep him close somehow and her story--her grief story is one way she's able to do that.
I never knew Bud. He and Nell were the best of friends from what I hear. Their children all grown and moved away, Bud died on the afternoon of his brother's funeral. Nell had only turned her back for a second. When she turned around he was lying on the ground where she last saw him standing. She believes he was headed for the porch swing, but never made it. She turned him over, and seeing his face, knew right away he was gone. That image of his face remains etched in her memory, a stark reminder of how instantaneous loss can be.Traumatized by that image, her dreams prevented her from his visage for months afterwards. She dreamed of him often, and longed to see him as he was in life, but her mind only let her see him from the neck down.
She turned and sat down on the seat of her golf cart as I leaned against the front of it. I listened as she spoke from her heart, while I brushed fire ants from my feet, trying to look unfazed by the stinging bites.
"I am half alive." She said to me. "What I really want to do is go curl up in a corner and cover myself up and just be alone. But I know I can't do that. I push myself to get out and do things because I know that's what he would expect me to do."
She told me about a conversation Bud had with their daughter a few days before his death. "If something ever happened to me, I know your mama would be alright." He told Sharon. "She would go on and she would take care of you kids and make a good life for herself despite me being gone. But if something happened to your mama, I wouldn't make it."
"I can't quit on life because I know what he expected of me." She said, a far off look in her eyes as she gazed across the vast field--land she owns, among so many other worldly possessions. I think she would give it all just to have him back again.
One night after a particularly rough day, she said she had a very realistic dream that she and Bud were getting the kids ready to take off on a long road trip somewhere."I remember in the dream, telling the kids to hurry up so we could get on the road early. Then I went into my bedroom and I could hear Bud in the
bathroom. I opened the bathroom door and he was standing there, wiping his hands and face with a towel and I finally was able to see his face. I threw my arms around him. I laughed and cried and just hugged him so tight, and it seemed so real, like I could just feel him in my arms. I asked him, 'Please tell me this is real, that it's not a dream. Please tell me you are really here with me.'"
"He didn't tell me it was real, but he looked me straight in the eyes and said, "I am always with you."
"Back then there was a towel bar in my bathroom, and I always kept a hand towel hanging there. He would use it and he'd always leave it hanging there crooked. I fussed about it all the time, and I'd go behind him and straighten it back up. When I woke up that morning and went in my bathroom that hand towel was hanging there crooked, just like he'd been there."
Goosebumps popped up on my arms, and tears welled up in my eyes and hers. It seems God gives us sometimes, these little gifts of comfort in the most unexpected ways. I really believe it to be true.
I've listened to her tell his death story many a time, but every time there's something new she has to say. We talked about how difficult her life became when she lost him, how even 23 years later, she has to push herself and will herself to live.
And I suppose that's what we all do to some degree. We live with the pain of our losses, carrying them always close to our hearts, perpetually only half-alive without the presence of the ones we've loved. We always hear people talk of "moving on," but today I learned that most of us just carry on as best we can.
The truth is, out of all the emotional experiences life throws at us, grief is the one that sticks to your soul with all the strength of the love we held in our hearts for the ones we carry on without.
Best friends. Partners for life. That's what they were. Through good times and bad, they were a team. "When you've had the best in life, it's hard to live with something less." She said to me.
"You were very lucky to find a love like that." I said to her. "Most of us spend a lifetime just dreaming about it."
"I know I was." She said. "I was very lucky."
Grateful to be her confidant, I stood with her a little longer and listened. She is teaching me, with every story, that some things in life transform us. Grief is a pain that doesn't ever really expire, but even so, it must not define us or prevent us from living. We often treat it like a race to be run and finished, when it's really just a river that ebbs and flows through life. We revel in the beauty of our memories, and ache at the pain of our losses, never really knowing or understanding why or when the waves of emotion will rise and fall.
What I've learned best, is that the stories of our losses make up the stories of our lives. We memorize them, detail upon detail. The memories keep us close to he ones we cherished, and the aches we feel at their absences become in some way, all we have left of them.
Love sometimes dies, joy often gives way to despair, happiness is always fleeting, but grief? Grief is ever present. It never, ever dies. It just lies beneath the surface, tied to the best and the worst of our memories, memories that even death can never take away.
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
Friday, June 22, 2018
Surfing Through the Lies Landing in The Chaos of Truth
A while back I watched a documentary that focused on the amazing surfing ability of a teenage boy. At the tender age of fourteen he took his surfboard out into the ocean and conquered waves that would swallow up a grown man. Clearly, he possessed a gift, a skill bestowed upon few. Still, his father who was a surfer as well, worried. How could he not imagine losing him to the tremendous power of the sea? Yet he watched with pride, his son taking on the ocean not to battle with it, but to assimilate himself into it, bend himself to its will, humbling both himself and the sea, leaving both the powers of the deep, conquered surrendered. The ocean bowing to his will, his spirit overcome with grateful respect for the power on which he glides. His father, though filled with anxiety and anticipation never hinted at discouraging his son from the danger that awaited him upon every tall wave. His eyes bespoke a heart overflowing with pride at the bravery of his child. It does take brave kid to set out to conquer the ocean. I think though, that his father's bravery may far outweigh the son's. He wears it with humility, but with a fierceness of spirit rarely found the world over. He gives his son over to his dreams, releasing him to the deep, never knowing whether one day, the deep will claim him for good.
Experience is a fine teacher--a better one than any other I know. And those of us who come at life without it often find ourselves facing walls of adversity that rival those 40 foot waves under that fourteen year old's surf board; only less equipped to ride out the wave until they reach the safety of the shallows, where their feet can finally touch the sandy ground. I am often one of those people. I often think I've weathered every kind of enormous wave that life could roll over me, but just like the endless undulation of the sea, life remains ever-changing, and I find myself sometimes under the swell.
A few days ago, I found life coming at me at speeds that rivaled the enormous Hawaiian wave you may recall from the memorable show of the 70's, "Hawaii 50." I remember the intro music, the drums in the background, a quick clip of a hula skirted girl swinging her hips, and then, the Wave. I only caught glimpses of it as my mother hurried me off to bed as a child, but I recall that for some reason, it set a kind of terror in my mind that rolled through my dreams often. I dreamed of being engulfed by it--lost inside a tunnel of water, unable to catch my breath or scream for help. I suspect that my near drowning experience at Lake Murray when I was seven conjured up some of those ephemeral images. I was probably 12 years old before I saw the ocean for myself, and never swam in it until I was 20. I always imagined it as one roll after another of those big Hawaiian billows that haunted my childish dreams.
When I think about the vastness of the ocean, the ships that sit buried beneath its surface, the life that teems, deep below the tumult of those humongous waves, the lives it has devoured and the lives that through time and tribulation, were borne across it seeking safer shores, I am left in awe. We live on a planet made of water, it swirls around us, affecting weather patterns and fueling storms that devastate the modest slips of land that we like to think we own and command. But we really possess so little in the way of power; the reach of our control extending no further than the ends of our own noses, if we find the wisdom to ever acknowledge the truth.
All this talk about water. Sometimes, I don't even know where I'm going when I start to speak of the things that tumble around in my brain. But this time my life drew me to the water--or to the way it behaves and expects us to keep our footing as it continues to morph and move, forcing us to comply or suffer the consequences.
Over the lasts few weeks I feel like life threw me a surfboard and said,"hop on, we're going for a ride." I had no choice, of course, but to oblige. There were days when I knew my need to control came in second to other things. Sickness, injury, end of school ceremonies and beginning of summer chaos took over my life there for a while, and I had no choice but to ride it all out. In some ways I'm still riding--I might have never made it to my feet on that surfboard but I can belly surf with the best of them through the extraordinary struggles of life.
Then again, I find myself in a state of overwhelm often. I find that social media's wealth of misinformation and the strong opinions of my acquaintances flood my mind and my emotions to the point that I want to shut myself down completely. I am confused by much of what I see there--the blind followers of a party, a leader, or a belief system they've never taken one second to examine or test or dig deeper into--they fill me with a sense of familiar shame and dread. I recall that I used to be one of them, someone who wanted to be told what to believe and who happily accepted what I was told as the truth. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but when life comes at you with a reality as big as a 40 foot wave, ignorance makes a poor life preserver.
Once in a while I try to speak my own truth, but it falls on ears that are stuffed with bias and dogma and fear of finding they lived an entire lifetime believing a lie. Perhaps to them, the nightmare of allowing their beliefs to be challenged is akin to my dream of that enormous wave swallowing me up. What are we without our beliefs, and who are we if our beliefs get challenged and then changed?
So because of our deeply held beliefs, we live in a world of fear.. We fear anything different from what our mama's and our preachers teach us. We fear anything that comes from the mouths or the hearts of the "other" that does not abide with us in our bubble of belief and separation. Religion and politics aside, there seems to be so little space on dry ground for equality and and respect between mankind. Our human spaces are filled with limp justifications of the atrocities done to our fellow man. The Christian masses somehow stand on the side of persecution and merciless accusation while those they vilify as evil and ungodly try to unite in love and in defense of those who are downtrodden and looked upon with disdain. Those who merely want to follow The Commandment--that we love our neighbors as ourselves, seems to apply only to the neighbors who look and live the way we do.
Folks, I grew up sitting with my skinned up knees showing past the hem of my Sunday dresses, sitting at the feet of my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Sarah Davis, who taught me more about the Jesus many say they serve, than most high-minded Baptist preachers can even hope to know before they stand behind the pulpit screaming and sweating railing at their congregations about the travesty of their sins and about the God who eagerly awaits his chance to dole out punishments so severe you leave your church on Sunday never knowing that Jesus came to Love, not to condemn. Sarah Davis taught me that Jesus sat down and ate with the undesirables. He never sent the children away. He spread grace and mercy everywhere he went--and example to us all, Christian or not, of how we should approach life, and how we should regard the welfare of our fellow man.
Never mind who Jesus was, or that we say we are his followers. Our fear of being wrong outweighs our duty to Christ to be his hands and feet, to serve our fellow man as if we were taking care of Jesus himself. We must find rationalizations for the evils we see perpetrated in the name of the law. Must we convince ourselves to believe the worst in others in order to feel better about the choices we've made? How else could we sleep at night, knowing we have failed at the most basic and most important commandment Jesus gave. We cannot love God with all our hearts and treat our fellow man with anything less than the love for our neighbors that he also commands.
I fear that instead of becoming experts at finding our own weaknesses and working hard to overcome them, the waves of truth are building momentum and as they gain speed, as they pick up momentum along the way, we will all find ourselves washed ashore beside our fellow human beings, moms and dads, lost children and the broken, life-worn elderly, the drug dealers and the addicts, each one as human as the next, each speaking their native tongues but hopefully, finally accepted, loved, understood. For it is only in the darkest of times that human beings tend to come together to face whatever evil threatens to harm them all. Right now we stand divided, but only now.
The tide is changing. The waves grow stronger with every truth revealed. We might all feel overwhelmed and heavy with the news of it all, but eventually, this turmoil will unite us. It must, or we will find ourselves consumed by our prejudices, never to embrace the entire human experience or richness with which it was intended from the beginning of time.
Experience is a fine teacher--a better one than any other I know. And those of us who come at life without it often find ourselves facing walls of adversity that rival those 40 foot waves under that fourteen year old's surf board; only less equipped to ride out the wave until they reach the safety of the shallows, where their feet can finally touch the sandy ground. I am often one of those people. I often think I've weathered every kind of enormous wave that life could roll over me, but just like the endless undulation of the sea, life remains ever-changing, and I find myself sometimes under the swell.
A few days ago, I found life coming at me at speeds that rivaled the enormous Hawaiian wave you may recall from the memorable show of the 70's, "Hawaii 50." I remember the intro music, the drums in the background, a quick clip of a hula skirted girl swinging her hips, and then, the Wave. I only caught glimpses of it as my mother hurried me off to bed as a child, but I recall that for some reason, it set a kind of terror in my mind that rolled through my dreams often. I dreamed of being engulfed by it--lost inside a tunnel of water, unable to catch my breath or scream for help. I suspect that my near drowning experience at Lake Murray when I was seven conjured up some of those ephemeral images. I was probably 12 years old before I saw the ocean for myself, and never swam in it until I was 20. I always imagined it as one roll after another of those big Hawaiian billows that haunted my childish dreams.
When I think about the vastness of the ocean, the ships that sit buried beneath its surface, the life that teems, deep below the tumult of those humongous waves, the lives it has devoured and the lives that through time and tribulation, were borne across it seeking safer shores, I am left in awe. We live on a planet made of water, it swirls around us, affecting weather patterns and fueling storms that devastate the modest slips of land that we like to think we own and command. But we really possess so little in the way of power; the reach of our control extending no further than the ends of our own noses, if we find the wisdom to ever acknowledge the truth.
All this talk about water. Sometimes, I don't even know where I'm going when I start to speak of the things that tumble around in my brain. But this time my life drew me to the water--or to the way it behaves and expects us to keep our footing as it continues to morph and move, forcing us to comply or suffer the consequences.
Over the lasts few weeks I feel like life threw me a surfboard and said,"hop on, we're going for a ride." I had no choice, of course, but to oblige. There were days when I knew my need to control came in second to other things. Sickness, injury, end of school ceremonies and beginning of summer chaos took over my life there for a while, and I had no choice but to ride it all out. In some ways I'm still riding--I might have never made it to my feet on that surfboard but I can belly surf with the best of them through the extraordinary struggles of life.
Then again, I find myself in a state of overwhelm often. I find that social media's wealth of misinformation and the strong opinions of my acquaintances flood my mind and my emotions to the point that I want to shut myself down completely. I am confused by much of what I see there--the blind followers of a party, a leader, or a belief system they've never taken one second to examine or test or dig deeper into--they fill me with a sense of familiar shame and dread. I recall that I used to be one of them, someone who wanted to be told what to believe and who happily accepted what I was told as the truth. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but when life comes at you with a reality as big as a 40 foot wave, ignorance makes a poor life preserver.
Once in a while I try to speak my own truth, but it falls on ears that are stuffed with bias and dogma and fear of finding they lived an entire lifetime believing a lie. Perhaps to them, the nightmare of allowing their beliefs to be challenged is akin to my dream of that enormous wave swallowing me up. What are we without our beliefs, and who are we if our beliefs get challenged and then changed?
So because of our deeply held beliefs, we live in a world of fear.. We fear anything different from what our mama's and our preachers teach us. We fear anything that comes from the mouths or the hearts of the "other" that does not abide with us in our bubble of belief and separation. Religion and politics aside, there seems to be so little space on dry ground for equality and and respect between mankind. Our human spaces are filled with limp justifications of the atrocities done to our fellow man. The Christian masses somehow stand on the side of persecution and merciless accusation while those they vilify as evil and ungodly try to unite in love and in defense of those who are downtrodden and looked upon with disdain. Those who merely want to follow The Commandment--that we love our neighbors as ourselves, seems to apply only to the neighbors who look and live the way we do.
Folks, I grew up sitting with my skinned up knees showing past the hem of my Sunday dresses, sitting at the feet of my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Sarah Davis, who taught me more about the Jesus many say they serve, than most high-minded Baptist preachers can even hope to know before they stand behind the pulpit screaming and sweating railing at their congregations about the travesty of their sins and about the God who eagerly awaits his chance to dole out punishments so severe you leave your church on Sunday never knowing that Jesus came to Love, not to condemn. Sarah Davis taught me that Jesus sat down and ate with the undesirables. He never sent the children away. He spread grace and mercy everywhere he went--and example to us all, Christian or not, of how we should approach life, and how we should regard the welfare of our fellow man.
Never mind who Jesus was, or that we say we are his followers. Our fear of being wrong outweighs our duty to Christ to be his hands and feet, to serve our fellow man as if we were taking care of Jesus himself. We must find rationalizations for the evils we see perpetrated in the name of the law. Must we convince ourselves to believe the worst in others in order to feel better about the choices we've made? How else could we sleep at night, knowing we have failed at the most basic and most important commandment Jesus gave. We cannot love God with all our hearts and treat our fellow man with anything less than the love for our neighbors that he also commands.
I fear that instead of becoming experts at finding our own weaknesses and working hard to overcome them, the waves of truth are building momentum and as they gain speed, as they pick up momentum along the way, we will all find ourselves washed ashore beside our fellow human beings, moms and dads, lost children and the broken, life-worn elderly, the drug dealers and the addicts, each one as human as the next, each speaking their native tongues but hopefully, finally accepted, loved, understood. For it is only in the darkest of times that human beings tend to come together to face whatever evil threatens to harm them all. Right now we stand divided, but only now.
The tide is changing. The waves grow stronger with every truth revealed. We might all feel overwhelmed and heavy with the news of it all, but eventually, this turmoil will unite us. It must, or we will find ourselves consumed by our prejudices, never to embrace the entire human experience or richness with which it was intended from the beginning of time.
Monday, June 18, 2018
Escape
I do not know what it is like to live in constant fear of what my own country might do to me or my family. I do not know how it feels to live in a country whose government turns its head, blind to murder. Or I should say, murders, some of them orchestrated by people in the highest ranks of power. I never got in my car to drive to the store or to work, thinking I might not make it home because there's someone out there who is looking for a chance to kill me. I've never lived without enough food, never lay in bed at night and listened to machine guns and bombs going off all around me. My privileges are many and my experiences in life threaten to leave me with the impression that the rest of the world lives as I do.
As Americans, we tend to think that working hard and being a Christian is all a person needs to possess abundance. We have no reference point for real suffering or fear. We cannot fathom the urgency to escape the lives we worked so hard to build, just to save our lives and those of our children. Many of us possess no understanding of the world outside our own bubble of existence. We paint the whole world with the brush of our own reality, never considering that the neighbor across the street struggles with depression or that people all around the world go to bed every night in fear of what might happen to them before dawn. We see our privileges as "blessings," and our accomplishments as gifts from God. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Philippines little children are digging through garbage to find their next meal. Our obtuse view of the world hardens our hearts to the very real terror and suffering of other human beings, whether they live next door or in South America, Central America, or all the way across the world.
Information is at our fingertips, if we care to find it. In China, Korea, Russia, people only know what their government wants them to know, and often the information they get is manufactured to look like the truth when in reality, it contains nothing but lies. We have the freedom to Google anything we want, but how many people care to research why droves of people leave their lives behind them, their homelands, to seek asylum here.
Imagine for a moment, that sometime during the night tonight, your home is attacked by strangers. They burst in with guns and demand that you hand over all your money--everything in your bank accounts, your savings, whatever is in your kids' piggy banks, everything. Imagine that these people take up residence in your life. They move into your house and they tell you when you can come and go. They ration the food our of your own refrigerator. They constantly threaten your family. You live your life in terror, knowing when you go to bed at night that there are men with machine guns in your house who might decide to start shooting at any moment. Men have taken over your neighbor's houses too, so you can't just go there. The police are in on the whole deal--they know that people are living this way, but they do nothing about it. Imagine that one day you and your neighbors all get together secretly and decide to escape under the cover of night--you're going to the next state over where people live in houses where there are no machine gun wielding strangers guarding every door. So you pack up what little belongings you can carry and make the journey, a dangerous one through forests with no well-trodden pathways, where men in uniforms with weapons lurk in the shadows. You live in tents or sleep in the open for days because your journey is long and arduous, but you persevere because you just know that people who live in a state that values freedom and liberty will shelter you from the oppression of living in a house guarded by men who threaten your safety at every turn. You travel, hungry, tired, dirty. You lose a few neighbors along the way who were just not strong enough to weather the journey. Perhaps an elderly neighbor suffered a fall and couldn't continue on, a child falls sick and the family gets separated because someone has to stay with the child. Imagine the day you finally reach the Georgia state line! What relief and hope fills your heart! You are finally at the threshold of safety with the promise of a new life where fear and poverty do not define you.
Then you find out, Georgia doesn't want you. Georgia doesn't care that you are escaping a life of fear and oppression. Georgia thinks you're there to overcrowd their state, to steal jobs from current residents, to bring down their property values, and mooch off their taxes. Georgia can't be bothered with your sob stories, they are hard working Americans--Christians who go to church every Sunday. You aren't just unwanted, you are vilified, treated with disdain. You are corralled, separated from your children and told to wait. Wait for what? You don't know. You don't know what will happen to you or when you'll see your children again. You don't know who is caring for them or if they are upset or hungry or afraid. Georgia thinks this is best for you. Georgia doesn't care how you feel--this is not about feelings, it's about their tax dollars and your threat to their way of life.
I know, my attempt to reach you is lame. I realize I cannot create empathy in a person who lacks it merely by asking them to imagine something other than the sheltered lives they lead.
You can dress a hypocrite up in nice clothes and call him a good man, but he'll still be a hypocrite.
I'm afraid that's where we now stand, as humans, as a country, and as the Christians many claim to be. Perhaps compassion, empathy, kindness and love are the internal workings of the soul that cannot be taught. I believe they must be cultivated slowly over time, starting before we even put our bare feet to the floor and take our first wobbly steps. Is it ever too late to start the process? That's a question for which I have no answer. I only know what I hear and see around me.
You can call it politics, liberalism, bleeding heart Democrats, snowflakes whining about us not giving handouts to undeserving low-life trash; what it really is though, is sad. I'm not talking about politics here. I"m not talking about your religious beliefs or who you voted for in the last election. I'm not asking you to change your views on abortion or to make a comparison between abortion and separating families from their living, breathing children. I'm not referring to your opinion that I, as a Democrat, would be okay with a woman murdering her baby but bothered by what's going on with these children today or how your attempt at justifying what is happening by making that assumption or comparison proves your lack of understanding or empathy for other human beings.
I'm merely talking reality. The reality is, what's happening to people at the hands of America is wrong. It's wrong if you're a Democrat. It's wrong if you're a Republican. It's wrong if you're Baptist, or Catholic, or Agnostic or Atheist. It's just wrong, and no amount of pointing fingers or making justifications for it will ever make it right. So, if you're pro-life, shouldn't you care what is happening to these children? Is it a stretch for us to ask you to care? Should we stop caring about a child as soon as it's born? How is that Christian? How can anyone with a soul not care? I, as a human being care. Can I ask you, as a fellow human being to put aside your biases and put aside your political grudges long enough to see this human suffering for what it really is?
We are America. We can do so much better than this.
Here, I am leaving a link for you. It only vaguely describes what these people coming to America to escape from. I hope you will take the time to read it, ponder what it would be like to live under the threat of gang violence, government corruption, extortion, and the threat of murder. Imagine worrying whether your sons or daughters will be picked by some gang member to carry drugs for them, and given no choice in the matter. Imagine worrying about whether your sons will live another day. Imagine having a list of family members you've already lost to violence. And while you're at it, open your heart to the possibility that these truly are human beings who need safety and need shelter from the constant threat of death.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/central-americas-violent-northern-triangle
As Americans, we tend to think that working hard and being a Christian is all a person needs to possess abundance. We have no reference point for real suffering or fear. We cannot fathom the urgency to escape the lives we worked so hard to build, just to save our lives and those of our children. Many of us possess no understanding of the world outside our own bubble of existence. We paint the whole world with the brush of our own reality, never considering that the neighbor across the street struggles with depression or that people all around the world go to bed every night in fear of what might happen to them before dawn. We see our privileges as "blessings," and our accomplishments as gifts from God. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Philippines little children are digging through garbage to find their next meal. Our obtuse view of the world hardens our hearts to the very real terror and suffering of other human beings, whether they live next door or in South America, Central America, or all the way across the world.
Information is at our fingertips, if we care to find it. In China, Korea, Russia, people only know what their government wants them to know, and often the information they get is manufactured to look like the truth when in reality, it contains nothing but lies. We have the freedom to Google anything we want, but how many people care to research why droves of people leave their lives behind them, their homelands, to seek asylum here.
Imagine for a moment, that sometime during the night tonight, your home is attacked by strangers. They burst in with guns and demand that you hand over all your money--everything in your bank accounts, your savings, whatever is in your kids' piggy banks, everything. Imagine that these people take up residence in your life. They move into your house and they tell you when you can come and go. They ration the food our of your own refrigerator. They constantly threaten your family. You live your life in terror, knowing when you go to bed at night that there are men with machine guns in your house who might decide to start shooting at any moment. Men have taken over your neighbor's houses too, so you can't just go there. The police are in on the whole deal--they know that people are living this way, but they do nothing about it. Imagine that one day you and your neighbors all get together secretly and decide to escape under the cover of night--you're going to the next state over where people live in houses where there are no machine gun wielding strangers guarding every door. So you pack up what little belongings you can carry and make the journey, a dangerous one through forests with no well-trodden pathways, where men in uniforms with weapons lurk in the shadows. You live in tents or sleep in the open for days because your journey is long and arduous, but you persevere because you just know that people who live in a state that values freedom and liberty will shelter you from the oppression of living in a house guarded by men who threaten your safety at every turn. You travel, hungry, tired, dirty. You lose a few neighbors along the way who were just not strong enough to weather the journey. Perhaps an elderly neighbor suffered a fall and couldn't continue on, a child falls sick and the family gets separated because someone has to stay with the child. Imagine the day you finally reach the Georgia state line! What relief and hope fills your heart! You are finally at the threshold of safety with the promise of a new life where fear and poverty do not define you.
Then you find out, Georgia doesn't want you. Georgia doesn't care that you are escaping a life of fear and oppression. Georgia thinks you're there to overcrowd their state, to steal jobs from current residents, to bring down their property values, and mooch off their taxes. Georgia can't be bothered with your sob stories, they are hard working Americans--Christians who go to church every Sunday. You aren't just unwanted, you are vilified, treated with disdain. You are corralled, separated from your children and told to wait. Wait for what? You don't know. You don't know what will happen to you or when you'll see your children again. You don't know who is caring for them or if they are upset or hungry or afraid. Georgia thinks this is best for you. Georgia doesn't care how you feel--this is not about feelings, it's about their tax dollars and your threat to their way of life.
I know, my attempt to reach you is lame. I realize I cannot create empathy in a person who lacks it merely by asking them to imagine something other than the sheltered lives they lead.
You can dress a hypocrite up in nice clothes and call him a good man, but he'll still be a hypocrite.
I'm afraid that's where we now stand, as humans, as a country, and as the Christians many claim to be. Perhaps compassion, empathy, kindness and love are the internal workings of the soul that cannot be taught. I believe they must be cultivated slowly over time, starting before we even put our bare feet to the floor and take our first wobbly steps. Is it ever too late to start the process? That's a question for which I have no answer. I only know what I hear and see around me.
You can call it politics, liberalism, bleeding heart Democrats, snowflakes whining about us not giving handouts to undeserving low-life trash; what it really is though, is sad. I'm not talking about politics here. I"m not talking about your religious beliefs or who you voted for in the last election. I'm not asking you to change your views on abortion or to make a comparison between abortion and separating families from their living, breathing children. I'm not referring to your opinion that I, as a Democrat, would be okay with a woman murdering her baby but bothered by what's going on with these children today or how your attempt at justifying what is happening by making that assumption or comparison proves your lack of understanding or empathy for other human beings.
I'm merely talking reality. The reality is, what's happening to people at the hands of America is wrong. It's wrong if you're a Democrat. It's wrong if you're a Republican. It's wrong if you're Baptist, or Catholic, or Agnostic or Atheist. It's just wrong, and no amount of pointing fingers or making justifications for it will ever make it right. So, if you're pro-life, shouldn't you care what is happening to these children? Is it a stretch for us to ask you to care? Should we stop caring about a child as soon as it's born? How is that Christian? How can anyone with a soul not care? I, as a human being care. Can I ask you, as a fellow human being to put aside your biases and put aside your political grudges long enough to see this human suffering for what it really is?
We are America. We can do so much better than this.
Here, I am leaving a link for you. It only vaguely describes what these people coming to America to escape from. I hope you will take the time to read it, ponder what it would be like to live under the threat of gang violence, government corruption, extortion, and the threat of murder. Imagine worrying whether your sons or daughters will be picked by some gang member to carry drugs for them, and given no choice in the matter. Imagine worrying about whether your sons will live another day. Imagine having a list of family members you've already lost to violence. And while you're at it, open your heart to the possibility that these truly are human beings who need safety and need shelter from the constant threat of death.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/central-americas-violent-northern-triangle
Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Chance Encounter
It's not everyday that you get to meet an unforgettable character. Whether by chance or some sinister twist of fate, I found myself in that position today.
First of all, a terrible cold has plagued me for the last 4 days, creeping its way through my body, from my clogged up sinuses to the ever-growing tickle in my throat that makes me want to cough my lungs loose, it continues to make its way through my respiratory system with reckless abandon. I actually lay in bed this morning and fought that battle with myself. You know the one, where you know your body is not going to keep up with the demands of the day, yet you feel the only option before you lies in your responsibility to others. So I dragged myself up and got ready, dropped my boy off at school, drove up to the center and got the van and started my day of picking up senior members to attend Senior Action for the day.
In a way, this day snubbed me with irony at every turn. Off for 5 days in a row, I didn't recover from my cold fast enough to get back to normal before going back. The new van driver was supposed to have started today, but got held up by HR paperwork. The rain is a bitch when you're loading and unloading elderly folks from that large vehicle. You could say if imaginary straws were drawn for this day, I drew the short one.
Once I got the van and started driving down Slater rd. I started to feel better about things. The ride up highway 11 o pick up one of my members is a pleasant drive--relaxing even, and I started to look forward to it.
Then I happened upon a chance encounter with a woman named Karen.
At the end of Slater rd. I pulled up to the traffic light which was red at the moment. I stopped with my right turn signal on, looked to the left, let two cars go, then looked back up at the light. In that short amount of time the light had changed to green, so I while looking to the right out my windshield, proceeded to turn left. Suddenly I heard a scraping and crunching sound. "Crap!" I said. "I hit someone.!" I couldn't even see what or whom' I'd hit.
I got out of the van and ran around to see for sure what I had hit. It was another car. The woman inside wore her long graying hair in a ponytail. She smelled of cigarettes and her car was filled with garbage, prescription bottles, you name it. At first glance I thought she was elderly and I felt so badly that I reached in and hugged her and told her and asked if she was okay. She said she was fine, but she was worried about her car and worried someone was going to hit her from behind. I told her turn her flashers on as I called the highway patrol to report the accident. Once we moved our vehicles out of the way, I invited her to come sit in the van with me where there was AC so she would not get so hot. This woman was a character!
She had an expensive smart phone, but no service on it. I had t let her use my phone to call her husband and daughter. When she got out of her car and saw that her door was dinged and her tire was flat she went into panic attack mode. I had to help her breathe through it and try to keep her in the moment with me instead of letting her mind rush off to the worse case scenarios of the future.
Her abusive husband showed up--yelling at her and then trying to yell at me. I relished the opportunity to stand up to him and tell him he would not speak to me in that manner. The lady asked me how did I do that without being scared. I didn't have a real answer for her, I just know that a man isn't going to speak to me that way, no matter who he is/
Apparently it was a busy day for the Highway Patrol. We waited 3 hours for an officer to arrive to file a report. Three hours I was with this woman and intermittently her husband and 21 year old daughter who has suffered numerous serious injuries from car and 4 wheeler accidents.
The thing is, when you meet people in Marietta, you never really know what kind of person they are at first. This lady, whom at first glance I would have guessed was in her 70's, was only 53. She smoked like a chimney, then confided in me that her doctor told her she has heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure, none of which she manages with any kind of medication. She's had cancer removed from her face and has been told if she doesn't stop smoking she will end up losing more skin on her face. I spent a long time talking to her about how important it is to take care of yourself by accepting that you have illnesses and taking steps to mange them. Her response was, "I don't claim any of that." I guess if you don't acknowledge something, it doesn't exist, huh?
I learned all about her 12 grandchildren and her youngest daughter who by the misfortune of 2 separate accidents has suffered head injury and partial paralysis of her right side. I learned that her daughter was airlifted from an accident she caused on Highway 25 in Traveler's Rest a year or so ago, and that as a result of her accident on a 4 wheeler years before that, she has a "Titanic" plate in her head now. I learned lots of new phrases and words I'd never heard in such contexts before. I learned that if a person gets badly burned, they can get a skin "draft" that will fix them. That "Titanic plates" can fix head injuries, and that the past tense of "Sperm Donation" is "Sperm Doned." I got a front seat show to the daughters tattoo display, front, back and sides as she partially undressed beside Geer Highway right in front of a State Trooper.
"See her purdy angel wings? I didn't even know she had them till I saw her in the ICU after her second accident." her mother beamed.
"They're....Nice...." I said. I wanted to say, "Put your clothes back on girl, I don't need to see your angel wings, your bible verses or your matching doves on your butt dimples. To each her own, but if I don't ask to see your most intimate tattoos, it's probably best to keep em private.
Today was the first time I accidentally told someone her husband had cancer as well. Total mistake on my part, but she made me walk right into it. She told me that her husband recently had blood work done and it showed an elevated white blood cell count. She said he had no infections and that he was very secretive about his appointment with his doctor after the blood work. Then, she said, a few days later he called her into the bathroom to show her a piece of bloody tissue paper. "Oh, it's just hemorrhoids," she said she told him.
"Well," she said he replied, "I didn't tell you last week, but the doctor said I have cancer."
As she relayed this story to me see seemed confused. "Why would he say that to me?" she asked me. "What does that even mean? White blood cells don't mean you have cancer and if he has cancer he might die and I don't know how to take care of anything without him. Why did he say that to me?" She pleaded with me.
Exasperated at this point, I gently said to her, "Do you think that might have been his way of telling you that he does, indeed have cancer?"
She began to cry again. I could see her mind racing ahead to the future, his death, her financial ruin, her feeling lost and unable to take care of herself. I tried to reel her back in to the present and that worked. I tried to give her some kind of hope to cling to--maybe there's treatment that can help him, maybe it's not aggressive cancer, maybe its something he can beat. She remembered her daughters fight and decided that her husband could make it through cancer if her daughter made it through both accidents.
You hear all the time to be kind to others, because they could be fighting a battle you don't even know about. I am the first to admit that I had a true encounter with someone today that rates right up there with the Twilight Zone experience; but all the same, she was human and I just as human as she. She's a woman who never learned to take care of her own physical health--she was more concerned about the dings in her car than her high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. She's a woman who is somewhat controlled and at least verbally beaten down by her spouse--a spouse she's so dependent on that if he dies, she son't know how to do life. And that spouse she depends so much upon likely has cancer. She has a daughter with severe disabilities who will likely need care for the rest of her life.
I didn't tell her much about me personally. I just listened and let her talk, finding some of her language anecdotes highly entertaining. I tried to keep my patience and help her stay calm in the midst of a highly stressful situation. Then when the police got there she turned into a monster with two heads, arguing with the cop, telling him I said things I didn't say, suggesting that she wasn't beside me in my blind spot, etc...I could have felt angry I guess, after having kept her in the van with me for hours running the air so she could breathe better, letting her eat my breakfast and use my phone and giving her information on Medicare, Disability and Medicaid for her daughter, but what good would getting angry do?
I'm just glad everyone got out safe. No one needed any titanic plates in their heads and no one had to get skin drafted.
We won't even go into the story about Karen's real father who "Sperm doned" her. I can't even.
God bless us everyone--Especially Karen. Hopefully life will look much brighter for her again soon.
And hopefully I will not "run into her" again anytime soon.
First of all, a terrible cold has plagued me for the last 4 days, creeping its way through my body, from my clogged up sinuses to the ever-growing tickle in my throat that makes me want to cough my lungs loose, it continues to make its way through my respiratory system with reckless abandon. I actually lay in bed this morning and fought that battle with myself. You know the one, where you know your body is not going to keep up with the demands of the day, yet you feel the only option before you lies in your responsibility to others. So I dragged myself up and got ready, dropped my boy off at school, drove up to the center and got the van and started my day of picking up senior members to attend Senior Action for the day.
In a way, this day snubbed me with irony at every turn. Off for 5 days in a row, I didn't recover from my cold fast enough to get back to normal before going back. The new van driver was supposed to have started today, but got held up by HR paperwork. The rain is a bitch when you're loading and unloading elderly folks from that large vehicle. You could say if imaginary straws were drawn for this day, I drew the short one.
Once I got the van and started driving down Slater rd. I started to feel better about things. The ride up highway 11 o pick up one of my members is a pleasant drive--relaxing even, and I started to look forward to it.
Then I happened upon a chance encounter with a woman named Karen.
At the end of Slater rd. I pulled up to the traffic light which was red at the moment. I stopped with my right turn signal on, looked to the left, let two cars go, then looked back up at the light. In that short amount of time the light had changed to green, so I while looking to the right out my windshield, proceeded to turn left. Suddenly I heard a scraping and crunching sound. "Crap!" I said. "I hit someone.!" I couldn't even see what or whom' I'd hit.
I got out of the van and ran around to see for sure what I had hit. It was another car. The woman inside wore her long graying hair in a ponytail. She smelled of cigarettes and her car was filled with garbage, prescription bottles, you name it. At first glance I thought she was elderly and I felt so badly that I reached in and hugged her and told her and asked if she was okay. She said she was fine, but she was worried about her car and worried someone was going to hit her from behind. I told her turn her flashers on as I called the highway patrol to report the accident. Once we moved our vehicles out of the way, I invited her to come sit in the van with me where there was AC so she would not get so hot. This woman was a character!
She had an expensive smart phone, but no service on it. I had t let her use my phone to call her husband and daughter. When she got out of her car and saw that her door was dinged and her tire was flat she went into panic attack mode. I had to help her breathe through it and try to keep her in the moment with me instead of letting her mind rush off to the worse case scenarios of the future.
Her abusive husband showed up--yelling at her and then trying to yell at me. I relished the opportunity to stand up to him and tell him he would not speak to me in that manner. The lady asked me how did I do that without being scared. I didn't have a real answer for her, I just know that a man isn't going to speak to me that way, no matter who he is/
Apparently it was a busy day for the Highway Patrol. We waited 3 hours for an officer to arrive to file a report. Three hours I was with this woman and intermittently her husband and 21 year old daughter who has suffered numerous serious injuries from car and 4 wheeler accidents.
The thing is, when you meet people in Marietta, you never really know what kind of person they are at first. This lady, whom at first glance I would have guessed was in her 70's, was only 53. She smoked like a chimney, then confided in me that her doctor told her she has heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure, none of which she manages with any kind of medication. She's had cancer removed from her face and has been told if she doesn't stop smoking she will end up losing more skin on her face. I spent a long time talking to her about how important it is to take care of yourself by accepting that you have illnesses and taking steps to mange them. Her response was, "I don't claim any of that." I guess if you don't acknowledge something, it doesn't exist, huh?
I learned all about her 12 grandchildren and her youngest daughter who by the misfortune of 2 separate accidents has suffered head injury and partial paralysis of her right side. I learned that her daughter was airlifted from an accident she caused on Highway 25 in Traveler's Rest a year or so ago, and that as a result of her accident on a 4 wheeler years before that, she has a "Titanic" plate in her head now. I learned lots of new phrases and words I'd never heard in such contexts before. I learned that if a person gets badly burned, they can get a skin "draft" that will fix them. That "Titanic plates" can fix head injuries, and that the past tense of "Sperm Donation" is "Sperm Doned." I got a front seat show to the daughters tattoo display, front, back and sides as she partially undressed beside Geer Highway right in front of a State Trooper.
"See her purdy angel wings? I didn't even know she had them till I saw her in the ICU after her second accident." her mother beamed.
"They're....Nice...." I said. I wanted to say, "Put your clothes back on girl, I don't need to see your angel wings, your bible verses or your matching doves on your butt dimples. To each her own, but if I don't ask to see your most intimate tattoos, it's probably best to keep em private.
Today was the first time I accidentally told someone her husband had cancer as well. Total mistake on my part, but she made me walk right into it. She told me that her husband recently had blood work done and it showed an elevated white blood cell count. She said he had no infections and that he was very secretive about his appointment with his doctor after the blood work. Then, she said, a few days later he called her into the bathroom to show her a piece of bloody tissue paper. "Oh, it's just hemorrhoids," she said she told him.
"Well," she said he replied, "I didn't tell you last week, but the doctor said I have cancer."
As she relayed this story to me see seemed confused. "Why would he say that to me?" she asked me. "What does that even mean? White blood cells don't mean you have cancer and if he has cancer he might die and I don't know how to take care of anything without him. Why did he say that to me?" She pleaded with me.
Exasperated at this point, I gently said to her, "Do you think that might have been his way of telling you that he does, indeed have cancer?"
She began to cry again. I could see her mind racing ahead to the future, his death, her financial ruin, her feeling lost and unable to take care of herself. I tried to reel her back in to the present and that worked. I tried to give her some kind of hope to cling to--maybe there's treatment that can help him, maybe it's not aggressive cancer, maybe its something he can beat. She remembered her daughters fight and decided that her husband could make it through cancer if her daughter made it through both accidents.
You hear all the time to be kind to others, because they could be fighting a battle you don't even know about. I am the first to admit that I had a true encounter with someone today that rates right up there with the Twilight Zone experience; but all the same, she was human and I just as human as she. She's a woman who never learned to take care of her own physical health--she was more concerned about the dings in her car than her high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. She's a woman who is somewhat controlled and at least verbally beaten down by her spouse--a spouse she's so dependent on that if he dies, she son't know how to do life. And that spouse she depends so much upon likely has cancer. She has a daughter with severe disabilities who will likely need care for the rest of her life.
I didn't tell her much about me personally. I just listened and let her talk, finding some of her language anecdotes highly entertaining. I tried to keep my patience and help her stay calm in the midst of a highly stressful situation. Then when the police got there she turned into a monster with two heads, arguing with the cop, telling him I said things I didn't say, suggesting that she wasn't beside me in my blind spot, etc...I could have felt angry I guess, after having kept her in the van with me for hours running the air so she could breathe better, letting her eat my breakfast and use my phone and giving her information on Medicare, Disability and Medicaid for her daughter, but what good would getting angry do?
I'm just glad everyone got out safe. No one needed any titanic plates in their heads and no one had to get skin drafted.
We won't even go into the story about Karen's real father who "Sperm doned" her. I can't even.
God bless us everyone--Especially Karen. Hopefully life will look much brighter for her again soon.
And hopefully I will not "run into her" again anytime soon.
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
Nothing But Blue Skies
It's early summer, or late spring, whichever you prefer to call it. Here in SC winter often shockingly gives way to summer without much warning in the way of springtime. This year the cold seemed to linger far too long before giving way to sweltering hot days and humidity laden afternoons that try to steal your breath away. Over the last week rain began to make a daily appearance, either by tapping on our roofs all day long, or by gathering darkly in a far corner of the sky, then descending in a deluge almost without warning.
Yesterday while I waited in the car line at school with my sunglasses on I suddenly realized I didn't need them anymore. Headed South from home, the sun shone directly through the windshield, necessitating my glasses and sun visor. When I turned into the school parking lot though, the sky on the other side greeted me with low, dark, foreboding clouds. They stretched from the trees, far up into the sky, casting their ominous shadow over everything. At one point my car sat situated so that on one side of me I saw darkness and on the other, a perfectly sunny day. At the time I merely sat in awe of nature. I pondered how two such opposing forces could exist in the very same sky. Had I never turned from the road I from which I started I might never have seen that dark sky or been aware that in a few short minutes, I would end up driving through such heavy rain that I could barely see the road.
The rain fell so hard on my car that it drowned out the sound of the podcast Charlie and I tried to listen to as we drove into town. Puddles formed quickly in the road, so deep that as I drove through them they tried to pull my car toward the edge of the highway. I slowed down, of course, giving full attention to my driving. We turned off the podcast and sat in silence, just listening to the rain pummeling the roof of the car, hoping that soon we might drive out of that storm and once again find the other half of the day--the part where the sun shone brightly and we could once again turn the radio on.
Lately I feel as though inside my head a storm brews. So many things happen in the world, and now, thanks to social media and news everywhere we look, we can't avoid knowing without making a willful effort to avoid knowing. Much like avoiding seeing that storm by staying on the road on which I first started my journey yesterday, most of us try, in life, to not see things that challenge us or make us feel afraid. Sometimes just hearing something that goes against what we believe and hold deeply as truth scares us. It gets our hackles up, makes us defensive. We search out that route where we began, when we saw nothing but blue skies ahead--no challenges, no information that threatens
our stability on the road or storms so loud they drown out what we really want to hear.
Today I saw the news about Paige Patterson's removal from his position with the Southern Baptist Association's Seminary as a result of his past comments and teachings regarding violence and sexual assault against women. I admit, I felt relief that finally something seemingly is being recognized about the danger of the attitudes that he and others like him perpetuate among members of the largest protestant denomination in America. Unfortunately those attitudes and beliefs now invade the denomination, and many of the Baptist off-shoots of Southern Baptists, like the Independent Fundamentalists, the Free Will Baptists and Missionary Baptists. The idea that women must take a back seat role to men in all things, in my experience, is a dangerous one, despite scripture that seemingly commands women to subject themselves to the wills of their husbands, or if they have no husbands, their fathers, and if they have no father, their pastor. The argument is often softened with, "Paul also commands that husbands love their wives as Christ loves the church, and if husbands do what they're supposed to do, then women will find it easy--even safe, to submit to the will of her husbands."
If I wanted to argue Biblical ideology I could. I spent the first 30 years of my life in an Independent Baptist church, deeply involved in studying scripture on my own and with the guidance of pastors and teachers who gave their own perspectives as to how those scriptures should be interpreted. Being fundamentalists, we were taught to take scripture in its most literal form while also hearing regularly that to question the authority of our pastor would lead us down the wrong spiritual path. Never once, in all those years, did a pastor, preacher or teacher actually speak about scripture in its true context.
Instead of arguing Biblical ideology, let's talk about the word "context." As a Fundie, I was always taught "People will try to confuse you by using pieces of scripture out of context." However, not one person ever looked at scripture in its true context, historically, socially, or even with consideration of the attitudes and beliefs of the time period in which they were written, and then explained what they meant. In the Baptist world, church members are encouraged to study scripture for themselves, then apply it to their lives today--two thousand years after it was written. Surely times have changed a bit since then, right?
In Biblical times men often had more than one wife. In fact men often had harems of sorts, with numerous concubines to satisfy their sexual appetites and provide them with children, yet by choice, we do not follow that Biblical practice today. Even in the New Testament, we are taught that if a woman's husband dies, her husband's brother is to take her as his wife, even if he already has a wife. If that happened in any church today it would be positively scandalous. Bible scholars fail to mention that in the social climate that existed during Biblical times, women were little more than currency. If you were female in those days, your fate lay directly in the hands of your father, or your husband, or even a brother. You made few choices of your own--women were traded like cattle, told to stay silent, to keep themselves at home, care for their husbands and not make waves. Women were blamed for the lustful sins of men, while the men themselves took no responsibility for their actions. If your husband thought that you, upon your wedding night, were not a virgin, he could abandon you, which for a woman of that time could mean a cruel existence, or even death. Women followed the constricts of their day because to not follow them meant struggle, poverty, starvation, they would find themselves ostracized from everyone they knew. We thankfully have evolved as a society, past those old constructs now. For the life of me though, I cannot figure out why we hang onto some parts of those old ideas, and throw out others, as if they never existed in scripture to begin with.
These kinds of thoughts continue to gather in my head over the last couple of days, making my mind feel as heavy and dark as those thunderclouds hanging low in the sky over my son's school yesterday. I try to keep the thoughts to myself--I know they are not appreciated, I know they threaten people whose beliefs follow a straight line where a storm of questions and stories of real lives torn apart by their deeply held beliefs never blows them off course. But not looking away from your own path doesn't mean another entire world of experience doesn't exist. It is there, looming darkly over all of us, if only we can find the courage to look at it, examine it, and take measures to understand it.
Millions. I mean millions of women, and children go through life with the heavy weight of abuse, sexual exploitation, even rape and molestation on their backs. A lot of these things happen to them at the hands of the husbands to whom they are told they must submit if they truly want to honor God. Many of them experience sexual assault by clergy members or even just men who sit on the pews near them every Sunday. Trusting their pastors, the leaders of their church, millions of women, families of children who were molested, go to those leaders for guidance when horrific things happen to them. Millions of those same people hear, "You, as a Christian, must forgive them and keep quiet about this. It could destroy that man's ministry if you tell people what he did to you." They're accused of provoking assault, made to apologize in front of the entire congregation for having been sexually assaulted by a member of the church staff. They've been told their virginity is worth more than their very existence at times.
Domestic abuse in America is at epidemic proportions. I find it hard to believe that religious beliefs do not in some way contribute to this problem. Empowering men while completely stripping women of all power cannot lead to good things for society at large. One in 5 women (who actually report abuse) have or will experience an abusive relationship in their lifetime. Think of 5 female friends you know. One of them either has been abused in some way, or will be. Maybe that person is you. Who would you go to for help?
The problem with submission, and even the idea of a man loving his wife as Christ loved the church is this: how far do we take it? Who decides? Who decides whether a husband is loving his wife as well as Christ loves the church? Is a mere mortal man, imperfect as all humans are, even capable of loving a wife with the same kind of love God supposedly showers upon the church? And if God loves the church so much, why is "the church" so often the very place where women and children in particular, are harmed in such life-changing, life-destroying ways? Who decides these things for us, when we cannot appeal directly to God himself for a direct answer? As Baptists, you'd depend on your pastor as a spiritual leader to give you guidance on just how far to take the idea of submitting to a husband, a father or the pastor himself. If we give men this kind of absolute power over us, that power will absolutely lead to our demise.
Please don't read me as saying all Christian or Southern Baptist men are evil abusive people. I absolutely do not believe that. I know though, from personal experience, that the well is poisoned and far too many of those men buy into the idea that women were placed on this Earth solely for the purpose of fulfilling the needs of men. They take the term "Help Meet" from Genesis and decide it means "servant." Should a woman have dreams and goals of her own, or is her number on goal in life to help her husband achieve his dreams and goals? His "calling" if you will. Is servitude to men and children really the only valuable contribution we can make to the world, spiritually or otherwise?
How short are we selling our own worth when we adapt these kinds of ideas to our ONE CHANCE at life?
I've been around long enough to know that for every question I ask here, some Baptist will have a rationalization handy. I too, was taught to have a scripture at the ready to combat any question someone might pose to me about what I believed when I was in the Baptist faith. Those rationalizations backed by scripture taken out of historical and often spiritual context were burned into my brain. You can come at me with them, but I've heard them all before. My questions remain valid, your answers are not sufficient.
I feel right now like my thoughts are falling like rain drops--a deluge of their own, falling in useless puddles along the roadside. Perhaps some of them will get someone's attention and persuade them to take a look past their own sunny path of belief, into the dark abyss of misery and despair they've helped to create in the name of God, or religion, or being Baptist above all else.
It's getting late. I have a busy day tomorrow, and so, so many more thoughts thundering around inside my head. This post is the beginning, not then end. It is not a mere statement of my opinion, it is a testament to my own experiences, and to the experiences of so, so many other women who find themselves forever changed by the abuse they've suffered at the hands and words of pastors, husbands, Sunday School teachers and "Christian" counselors. There is more. So, so much more and I want to share it all with you if you can be brave enough to turn your head just a little, and look at the darkness that exists in the same realm as the light in which you bask. I ask you to accept, for just a while, that belief on its own is not enough. I ask you to listen, try to understand a kind of pain and spiritual damage that seems unimaginable, but exists all the same, as a result of the religious teachings you've probably clung tightly to all your life. I ask you to go on this journey with me, to examine the truth that exists outside your bubble of belief, and maybe even along the way, learn something profound about love.
I hope you can stick with me past the bright sunny sky of your belief, into the dark, stormy world of reality.
Yesterday while I waited in the car line at school with my sunglasses on I suddenly realized I didn't need them anymore. Headed South from home, the sun shone directly through the windshield, necessitating my glasses and sun visor. When I turned into the school parking lot though, the sky on the other side greeted me with low, dark, foreboding clouds. They stretched from the trees, far up into the sky, casting their ominous shadow over everything. At one point my car sat situated so that on one side of me I saw darkness and on the other, a perfectly sunny day. At the time I merely sat in awe of nature. I pondered how two such opposing forces could exist in the very same sky. Had I never turned from the road I from which I started I might never have seen that dark sky or been aware that in a few short minutes, I would end up driving through such heavy rain that I could barely see the road.
The rain fell so hard on my car that it drowned out the sound of the podcast Charlie and I tried to listen to as we drove into town. Puddles formed quickly in the road, so deep that as I drove through them they tried to pull my car toward the edge of the highway. I slowed down, of course, giving full attention to my driving. We turned off the podcast and sat in silence, just listening to the rain pummeling the roof of the car, hoping that soon we might drive out of that storm and once again find the other half of the day--the part where the sun shone brightly and we could once again turn the radio on.
Lately I feel as though inside my head a storm brews. So many things happen in the world, and now, thanks to social media and news everywhere we look, we can't avoid knowing without making a willful effort to avoid knowing. Much like avoiding seeing that storm by staying on the road on which I first started my journey yesterday, most of us try, in life, to not see things that challenge us or make us feel afraid. Sometimes just hearing something that goes against what we believe and hold deeply as truth scares us. It gets our hackles up, makes us defensive. We search out that route where we began, when we saw nothing but blue skies ahead--no challenges, no information that threatens
our stability on the road or storms so loud they drown out what we really want to hear.
Today I saw the news about Paige Patterson's removal from his position with the Southern Baptist Association's Seminary as a result of his past comments and teachings regarding violence and sexual assault against women. I admit, I felt relief that finally something seemingly is being recognized about the danger of the attitudes that he and others like him perpetuate among members of the largest protestant denomination in America. Unfortunately those attitudes and beliefs now invade the denomination, and many of the Baptist off-shoots of Southern Baptists, like the Independent Fundamentalists, the Free Will Baptists and Missionary Baptists. The idea that women must take a back seat role to men in all things, in my experience, is a dangerous one, despite scripture that seemingly commands women to subject themselves to the wills of their husbands, or if they have no husbands, their fathers, and if they have no father, their pastor. The argument is often softened with, "Paul also commands that husbands love their wives as Christ loves the church, and if husbands do what they're supposed to do, then women will find it easy--even safe, to submit to the will of her husbands."
If I wanted to argue Biblical ideology I could. I spent the first 30 years of my life in an Independent Baptist church, deeply involved in studying scripture on my own and with the guidance of pastors and teachers who gave their own perspectives as to how those scriptures should be interpreted. Being fundamentalists, we were taught to take scripture in its most literal form while also hearing regularly that to question the authority of our pastor would lead us down the wrong spiritual path. Never once, in all those years, did a pastor, preacher or teacher actually speak about scripture in its true context.
Instead of arguing Biblical ideology, let's talk about the word "context." As a Fundie, I was always taught "People will try to confuse you by using pieces of scripture out of context." However, not one person ever looked at scripture in its true context, historically, socially, or even with consideration of the attitudes and beliefs of the time period in which they were written, and then explained what they meant. In the Baptist world, church members are encouraged to study scripture for themselves, then apply it to their lives today--two thousand years after it was written. Surely times have changed a bit since then, right?
In Biblical times men often had more than one wife. In fact men often had harems of sorts, with numerous concubines to satisfy their sexual appetites and provide them with children, yet by choice, we do not follow that Biblical practice today. Even in the New Testament, we are taught that if a woman's husband dies, her husband's brother is to take her as his wife, even if he already has a wife. If that happened in any church today it would be positively scandalous. Bible scholars fail to mention that in the social climate that existed during Biblical times, women were little more than currency. If you were female in those days, your fate lay directly in the hands of your father, or your husband, or even a brother. You made few choices of your own--women were traded like cattle, told to stay silent, to keep themselves at home, care for their husbands and not make waves. Women were blamed for the lustful sins of men, while the men themselves took no responsibility for their actions. If your husband thought that you, upon your wedding night, were not a virgin, he could abandon you, which for a woman of that time could mean a cruel existence, or even death. Women followed the constricts of their day because to not follow them meant struggle, poverty, starvation, they would find themselves ostracized from everyone they knew. We thankfully have evolved as a society, past those old constructs now. For the life of me though, I cannot figure out why we hang onto some parts of those old ideas, and throw out others, as if they never existed in scripture to begin with.
These kinds of thoughts continue to gather in my head over the last couple of days, making my mind feel as heavy and dark as those thunderclouds hanging low in the sky over my son's school yesterday. I try to keep the thoughts to myself--I know they are not appreciated, I know they threaten people whose beliefs follow a straight line where a storm of questions and stories of real lives torn apart by their deeply held beliefs never blows them off course. But not looking away from your own path doesn't mean another entire world of experience doesn't exist. It is there, looming darkly over all of us, if only we can find the courage to look at it, examine it, and take measures to understand it.
Millions. I mean millions of women, and children go through life with the heavy weight of abuse, sexual exploitation, even rape and molestation on their backs. A lot of these things happen to them at the hands of the husbands to whom they are told they must submit if they truly want to honor God. Many of them experience sexual assault by clergy members or even just men who sit on the pews near them every Sunday. Trusting their pastors, the leaders of their church, millions of women, families of children who were molested, go to those leaders for guidance when horrific things happen to them. Millions of those same people hear, "You, as a Christian, must forgive them and keep quiet about this. It could destroy that man's ministry if you tell people what he did to you." They're accused of provoking assault, made to apologize in front of the entire congregation for having been sexually assaulted by a member of the church staff. They've been told their virginity is worth more than their very existence at times.
Domestic abuse in America is at epidemic proportions. I find it hard to believe that religious beliefs do not in some way contribute to this problem. Empowering men while completely stripping women of all power cannot lead to good things for society at large. One in 5 women (who actually report abuse) have or will experience an abusive relationship in their lifetime. Think of 5 female friends you know. One of them either has been abused in some way, or will be. Maybe that person is you. Who would you go to for help?
The problem with submission, and even the idea of a man loving his wife as Christ loved the church is this: how far do we take it? Who decides? Who decides whether a husband is loving his wife as well as Christ loves the church? Is a mere mortal man, imperfect as all humans are, even capable of loving a wife with the same kind of love God supposedly showers upon the church? And if God loves the church so much, why is "the church" so often the very place where women and children in particular, are harmed in such life-changing, life-destroying ways? Who decides these things for us, when we cannot appeal directly to God himself for a direct answer? As Baptists, you'd depend on your pastor as a spiritual leader to give you guidance on just how far to take the idea of submitting to a husband, a father or the pastor himself. If we give men this kind of absolute power over us, that power will absolutely lead to our demise.
Please don't read me as saying all Christian or Southern Baptist men are evil abusive people. I absolutely do not believe that. I know though, from personal experience, that the well is poisoned and far too many of those men buy into the idea that women were placed on this Earth solely for the purpose of fulfilling the needs of men. They take the term "Help Meet" from Genesis and decide it means "servant." Should a woman have dreams and goals of her own, or is her number on goal in life to help her husband achieve his dreams and goals? His "calling" if you will. Is servitude to men and children really the only valuable contribution we can make to the world, spiritually or otherwise?
How short are we selling our own worth when we adapt these kinds of ideas to our ONE CHANCE at life?
I've been around long enough to know that for every question I ask here, some Baptist will have a rationalization handy. I too, was taught to have a scripture at the ready to combat any question someone might pose to me about what I believed when I was in the Baptist faith. Those rationalizations backed by scripture taken out of historical and often spiritual context were burned into my brain. You can come at me with them, but I've heard them all before. My questions remain valid, your answers are not sufficient.
I feel right now like my thoughts are falling like rain drops--a deluge of their own, falling in useless puddles along the roadside. Perhaps some of them will get someone's attention and persuade them to take a look past their own sunny path of belief, into the dark abyss of misery and despair they've helped to create in the name of God, or religion, or being Baptist above all else.
It's getting late. I have a busy day tomorrow, and so, so many more thoughts thundering around inside my head. This post is the beginning, not then end. It is not a mere statement of my opinion, it is a testament to my own experiences, and to the experiences of so, so many other women who find themselves forever changed by the abuse they've suffered at the hands and words of pastors, husbands, Sunday School teachers and "Christian" counselors. There is more. So, so much more and I want to share it all with you if you can be brave enough to turn your head just a little, and look at the darkness that exists in the same realm as the light in which you bask. I ask you to accept, for just a while, that belief on its own is not enough. I ask you to listen, try to understand a kind of pain and spiritual damage that seems unimaginable, but exists all the same, as a result of the religious teachings you've probably clung tightly to all your life. I ask you to go on this journey with me, to examine the truth that exists outside your bubble of belief, and maybe even along the way, learn something profound about love.
I hope you can stick with me past the bright sunny sky of your belief, into the dark, stormy world of reality.
Sunday, May 6, 2018
The Good Book
Sunday afternoons we sit on the porch and watch nature. In the spring we watch baby rabbits hop around timidly, looking for tall grass or a shrub to hide under. By Fall we'll find rabbits scarce. The foxes will show up sooner or later, or the coyotes. The little rabbits are easy prey for them. Still, every Spring we see the little ones hopping about, proof positive that rabbits will probably never dwindle to extinction.
Mama usually sits on the porch swing with knitting on her lap. She hums the hymn we sang at church earlier, just in fits and starts between short bits of commentary she offers on the latest church gossip. Today she said, "Next week is Homecoming Dinner. I wonder what I should make." She went back to humming a few lines of "Just As I Am," then added, "I hope Betty Crowe don't bring that warm potato salad again. I always end up gettin' a spoonful of that before I realize what I've gotten ahold of."
"Bible says ta eat at home." Granny said. Granny Jo is sort of like the Holy Bible; you don't think about her much, but she's still always making you feel guilty about something. She sits and rocks, back and forth, back and forth, seemingly in her own little world, but you can rest assured she hears every word that's said around here. She wears her soft, thin gray hair in a tight little bun at the back of her neck. The stretched out bobby pins sometimes show, though in the past she took care to assure they remained well-hidden among the waves of thick chestnut locks that once cascaded over her shoulders. I know because a picture of her at about 23 sits on the mantle next to a picture of grandpa in his Navy uniform. Grandpa died before I my birth, so I only know him through the stories Granny Jo and Daddy sometimes tell. Lately, Granny Jo only speaks here and there. She rarely even notices when Daddy starts telling one of her favorite stories about Grandpa. Her feet just barely reaching the painted blue porch floor, she uses just her tiptoes to push off. Her brown house slippers show signs of wear, just where her toes inside them make contact with the floor. Mama said last Sunday it looked like Granny was going to need new slippers soon.
"She'll have em worn out again in a week." Daddy teased.
Nobody answered Granny Jo's remark. It hung in the air for what seemed like a long time when Daddy spoke up to answer Mama.
"Well I think you aughtta make a coconut cake." Daddy said. "Nobody ever makes coconut cake anymore." Once in a while on Sunday he sits with his guitar, picking out little tunes as he stares off into space. On this particular Sunday he sat motionless, his eyes darting back and forth across the field in front of him. Once in a while he'd gaze up at the end of the driveway, like he was expecting company or something.
"Bible says if a man don't work, he aught not ta eat." Granny Jo stopped long enough to say before pointing her toes at the floor again, starting back into the slow, steady rhythm she prefers.
Mama sighed, put down her knitting and looked down at me playing on the floor of the porch with my dolls. I could feel her watching me. I looked up at her and smiled and she smiled back. "Child, you are outgrowin' all your Sunday dresses. Look how short that dress is on her, Chuck. We need to go shoppin' this week."
"Yeah," Daddy answered, not even glancing in my direction.
"Can I get a purple dress for Homecoming Sunday?" I asked Mama eagerly.
"Well sure you can!" She answered, "If we can find one."
"What if it costs too much?" I asked, always aware of our humble means, I never wanted to ask for things that were out of my family's reach.
"I think we can manage one purple dress, darlin'. Don't you think we can, Chuck?"
"Of course we can, well I'll just rob a bank if I have to,." Daddy teased, still not averting his gaze.
"Thou shalt not steal!" We heard from Granny's side of the porch. She spoke up with such force that we all finally looked in her direction. Without rocking, she turned her head towards me and pointed her long finger, " And Bible says not to adorn yourself in costly array."
I looked at Mama to see if Granny was right. Mama just looked back down at her lap and shook her head as she picked her knitting back up again.
After several minutes of silence passed. The warm air of summer blew across the porch now and then, but as the sun made its way across the sky, the big water oak in the side yard fell out of its path, and the porch swing was soon invaded by its warmth. With the sun shining on her back, Mama sighed real loud and said to no one, "Well the Bible also says that women aught ta dress modestly and she can't go around with her fanny shinin' in them dresses that are too little."
Granny Jo kept rocking.
"Yep." Said Daddy.
"It's gettin' hot out here." Said Mama.
I kept playing with my dolls, imagining myself in my new purple dress with lace and frills. As Granny Jo rocked I could feel the floor boards of the porch ripple beneath me.
Mama got up all of a sudden and threw her knitting work into a basket. "I think I'll go get the dishes washed up." She announced.
"Alright." Said Daddy.
Mama went inside, letting the screen door slam behind her. We listened as her Sunday shoes clip-clapped down the hall. After her footsteps faded Granny looked over at Daddy and said kind of quiet, "Bible says ye aught not work on Sunday."
"She's just goin' to wash up the dishes, Ma." Daddy said back, not even looking up.
Granny stopped rocking for a few seconds, as she glanced in Daddy's direction, then she resumed her rhythm and the porch boards began their rippling again.
One person can change the mood of a lazy Sunday afternoon as quick as the summer sky can whip up a thunderstorm. Feeling the tension build between everyone, I decided to go walk around in the yard barefooted. It was May, after all, and the bare soles of my feet had yet to feel the warm tickle of new spring grass or the still cool patches of dirt where the bare spots of our yard sat beckoning me to make mud pies. I took off my Sunday shoes, tucked my lacy socks inside them and set them by the front door. I felt the cool wood floor boards beneath my feet for a minute, still dipping in rhythm to Granny's rocking chair, before I took off down the steps.
"Don't get your dress dirty, now." Daddy warned. "You gotta wear that back to church tonight."
"Okay, I'll be careful." I promised. Then I ran around the side of the house to see if the new kittens had opened their eyes yet. Mama said I couldn't touch them until they did.
They were under the side of the house where, from my bedroom window, I could watch the mama cat come and go as she fed them. I could hear them mewing sometimes during the night and I wondered if they might be cold out there all alone. I'd pray for those kittens, "Lord, please don't let that black dog get the kittens tonight. Please keep em warm and safe." I guess I checked on them every day as much to see if the Lord was answering my prayers as anything. They were tiny still, curled up on top of one another with the mama cat beside them, keeping watch. I wanted to hold one so bad, but I just sat there on the ground watching them root around for their mama.
Eventually the damp ground began seeping through my clothes. I jumped up and felt the back of my dress. It was a little wet. I decided I'd go back to the porch and play dolls, hoping daddy wouldn't notice the red-clay stain on my rear end.
When I walked back up onto the porch Daddy asked me how the kittens were doing. "They're still too little to hold." I told him, disappointed.
"They'll be weaned soon enough." He assured me. Then you can play with them all you want, but don't you get your heart set on keepin' all them things."
"I won't," I said. But I already knew if I begged hard enough he'd give in and let me keep them all.
"Run get me my Bible." He commanded, finally breaking his gaze from the treeline in front of him.
I tried to slip past him to the door so he couldn't see the back of my dress.
"Don't let that slam." He ordered as I successfully made it around him, hiding my mud-stained dress and opened the screen door. "Your mama might be takin' a nap."
"She's washin' dishes." I reminded him.
"Well don't let it slam."
I felt relieved that I made it inside without him seeing my dress. I found his Bible on the table by his chair. It felt heavy in my hands. The edges of the pages were shiny silver when when you closed it tight. I turned it over and looked at the cover, "Holy Bible," it read in gold lettering at the top, and then my daddy's name in smaller letters at the bottom, "Charles McKormick." I carried the large book back outside to him and laid it on his lap.
"Here you go, Daddy." I said cheerily.
"Thank you sweet pea." He patted me on the head and smiled. Without even thinking I turned on my heel and went to pick up my dolls again.
"What's that on the back of your dress?" He asked me.
"Whatcha mean?"
"Is that mud on the back of your dress? Was you on the ground watchin' them dang kittens again?"
"Yes sir." I said, my eyes downcast.
"Better go see if your mama can get that stain out. You need to find a clean dress for church tonight."
"Can't I just put on some play clothes for now?" I pleaded with him.
"No. You ain't wearin' no britches on Sunday!" He said emphatically.
"Okay. I'll go find another dress." I said. I opened the screen door again, forgetting to let it close slowly. "Snap!" it said behind me. I felt sort of angry. A child can never begin to understand the disparate rules of religion or society, especially as they relate to females. I never understood why my cousins who were boys, could wear whatever they wanted to on Sunday afternoons, while I stayed trapped inside a dress, unable to climb or play or even get a little red clay on my butt.
"Girl, don't you be slammin' doors now!" Daddy hollered behind me as I hurried to the kitchen to find mama.
Granny picked up on the tone in Daddy's voice.
"Bible says spare the rod, spoil the child." Said Granny Jo. "You aught not be afraid to put a switch to that girl." She added as I ran to Mama as fast as I could.
I found her in the kitchen whipping up a banana pudding for after church later. "Don't tell your granny I'm cookin'." She whispered with a grin.
"I won't!" I whispered back.
"I got my dress dirty." I told her. She spun me around so she could see the red-clay stain.
"Well we should have put play clothes on you after church anyway."
"But Daddy said I can't wear britches on Sunday."
"What Daddy don't know won't hurt him." She said, shaking her head. "Go put on some britches and go out the back door and play. And don't let your Granny see you."
I spent the rest of that afternoon wandering around outside. I waded in the creek, climbed a tree, went up into the loft of the barn in my bare feet and sat there with my legs dangling over the edge for a while. I checked on the kittens two more times, but they still had their eyes closed tight. "Lord, please make em open their eyes tomorrow." I prayed.
As the sun crossed over the peak of our house and the grass under my dirty feet grew cooler, I heard Mama calling me back in to get ready for Sunday evening service. Daddy and Granny were still sitting on the porch when I came sneaking in the back door.
"Heavens to Betsy!" Mama exclaimed. "What in the world have you been doin' all day? How does a girl get so dirty?"
"I don't know, Mama." I said."I just play is all."
"Go get in the tub." She said in a low voice. "Before your daddy comes in here and catches you in them britches."
I took off. I ran myself a bath and got in. I washed my feet and my belly and arms, then got out to dry off. Mama came in with my clean dress just as I was reaching for the towel.
"I think you forgot to wash something." She teased, as she picked up a washcloth and roughly scrubbed my face clean.
Freshly dressed in my rescued Sunday dress and shiny shoes again, I grabbed my little white Bible and headed out the front door with Mama.
"Time for church." I announced.
Daddy was asleep with his Bible lying open on his lap. Granny Jo was rocking a little slower.
"Where'd the day go?" Daddy asked as he stretched and closed the Good Book. "Guess we better get going. We don't want to be late for prayer meetin'. "
"Bible says forsake not the assemblin' of yourselves together." Said Granny Jo, looking proud of herself for remembering that one.
Granny Jo hadn't been to church in so long I didn't remember ever seeing her on a pew, but every Sunday my folks invited her anyway.
"You goin' with us tonight?" Mama asked.
"No." Said Granny Jo. "I reckon I'll just stay here. Bible says women aught to be keepers at home."
"Alright then, " mama said rolling her eyes. "Don't sit out here after dark. You'll catch cold."
"Yep." Said Granny.
We drove off to church, Granny still rocking on the porch, the sunset falling low behind us in the rear view mirror. Mama hummed a little bit of "Just as I am," before she said, "I wonder if Martha Coggins is gonna be wearing that skirt around her hips again tonight. I wish she'd pull that thing up to her waist where it belongs."
"Yep." Said Daddy, rolling down his window.
In the back seat, I stared at my white Bible on my lap as the wind from Daddy's open window blew my hair into my face. I wondered if someday I might know as much about what the Bible says as Granny Jo. I decided that even if I did, I'd keep it to myself.
Mama hummed a few more bars. Daddy reached over and patted her knee.
"Lord sure gave me a good wife." He said. "Not many find a woman like you that honors and obeys her husband."'
Mama glanced at him and gave a faint grin, as Daddy reached over and took her hand.
"Lord sure is good." Daddy said.
"Yep." Said Mama, expressionless, as she gazed out the windshield at the road ahead.
Mama usually sits on the porch swing with knitting on her lap. She hums the hymn we sang at church earlier, just in fits and starts between short bits of commentary she offers on the latest church gossip. Today she said, "Next week is Homecoming Dinner. I wonder what I should make." She went back to humming a few lines of "Just As I Am," then added, "I hope Betty Crowe don't bring that warm potato salad again. I always end up gettin' a spoonful of that before I realize what I've gotten ahold of."
"Bible says ta eat at home." Granny said. Granny Jo is sort of like the Holy Bible; you don't think about her much, but she's still always making you feel guilty about something. She sits and rocks, back and forth, back and forth, seemingly in her own little world, but you can rest assured she hears every word that's said around here. She wears her soft, thin gray hair in a tight little bun at the back of her neck. The stretched out bobby pins sometimes show, though in the past she took care to assure they remained well-hidden among the waves of thick chestnut locks that once cascaded over her shoulders. I know because a picture of her at about 23 sits on the mantle next to a picture of grandpa in his Navy uniform. Grandpa died before I my birth, so I only know him through the stories Granny Jo and Daddy sometimes tell. Lately, Granny Jo only speaks here and there. She rarely even notices when Daddy starts telling one of her favorite stories about Grandpa. Her feet just barely reaching the painted blue porch floor, she uses just her tiptoes to push off. Her brown house slippers show signs of wear, just where her toes inside them make contact with the floor. Mama said last Sunday it looked like Granny was going to need new slippers soon.
"She'll have em worn out again in a week." Daddy teased.
Nobody answered Granny Jo's remark. It hung in the air for what seemed like a long time when Daddy spoke up to answer Mama.
"Well I think you aughtta make a coconut cake." Daddy said. "Nobody ever makes coconut cake anymore." Once in a while on Sunday he sits with his guitar, picking out little tunes as he stares off into space. On this particular Sunday he sat motionless, his eyes darting back and forth across the field in front of him. Once in a while he'd gaze up at the end of the driveway, like he was expecting company or something.
"Bible says if a man don't work, he aught not ta eat." Granny Jo stopped long enough to say before pointing her toes at the floor again, starting back into the slow, steady rhythm she prefers.
Mama sighed, put down her knitting and looked down at me playing on the floor of the porch with my dolls. I could feel her watching me. I looked up at her and smiled and she smiled back. "Child, you are outgrowin' all your Sunday dresses. Look how short that dress is on her, Chuck. We need to go shoppin' this week."
"Yeah," Daddy answered, not even glancing in my direction.
"Can I get a purple dress for Homecoming Sunday?" I asked Mama eagerly.
"Well sure you can!" She answered, "If we can find one."
"What if it costs too much?" I asked, always aware of our humble means, I never wanted to ask for things that were out of my family's reach.
"I think we can manage one purple dress, darlin'. Don't you think we can, Chuck?"
"Of course we can, well I'll just rob a bank if I have to,." Daddy teased, still not averting his gaze.
"Thou shalt not steal!" We heard from Granny's side of the porch. She spoke up with such force that we all finally looked in her direction. Without rocking, she turned her head towards me and pointed her long finger, " And Bible says not to adorn yourself in costly array."
I looked at Mama to see if Granny was right. Mama just looked back down at her lap and shook her head as she picked her knitting back up again.
After several minutes of silence passed. The warm air of summer blew across the porch now and then, but as the sun made its way across the sky, the big water oak in the side yard fell out of its path, and the porch swing was soon invaded by its warmth. With the sun shining on her back, Mama sighed real loud and said to no one, "Well the Bible also says that women aught ta dress modestly and she can't go around with her fanny shinin' in them dresses that are too little."
Granny Jo kept rocking.
"Yep." Said Daddy.
"It's gettin' hot out here." Said Mama.
I kept playing with my dolls, imagining myself in my new purple dress with lace and frills. As Granny Jo rocked I could feel the floor boards of the porch ripple beneath me.
Mama got up all of a sudden and threw her knitting work into a basket. "I think I'll go get the dishes washed up." She announced.
"Alright." Said Daddy.
Mama went inside, letting the screen door slam behind her. We listened as her Sunday shoes clip-clapped down the hall. After her footsteps faded Granny looked over at Daddy and said kind of quiet, "Bible says ye aught not work on Sunday."
"She's just goin' to wash up the dishes, Ma." Daddy said back, not even looking up.
Granny stopped rocking for a few seconds, as she glanced in Daddy's direction, then she resumed her rhythm and the porch boards began their rippling again.
One person can change the mood of a lazy Sunday afternoon as quick as the summer sky can whip up a thunderstorm. Feeling the tension build between everyone, I decided to go walk around in the yard barefooted. It was May, after all, and the bare soles of my feet had yet to feel the warm tickle of new spring grass or the still cool patches of dirt where the bare spots of our yard sat beckoning me to make mud pies. I took off my Sunday shoes, tucked my lacy socks inside them and set them by the front door. I felt the cool wood floor boards beneath my feet for a minute, still dipping in rhythm to Granny's rocking chair, before I took off down the steps.
"Don't get your dress dirty, now." Daddy warned. "You gotta wear that back to church tonight."
"Okay, I'll be careful." I promised. Then I ran around the side of the house to see if the new kittens had opened their eyes yet. Mama said I couldn't touch them until they did.
They were under the side of the house where, from my bedroom window, I could watch the mama cat come and go as she fed them. I could hear them mewing sometimes during the night and I wondered if they might be cold out there all alone. I'd pray for those kittens, "Lord, please don't let that black dog get the kittens tonight. Please keep em warm and safe." I guess I checked on them every day as much to see if the Lord was answering my prayers as anything. They were tiny still, curled up on top of one another with the mama cat beside them, keeping watch. I wanted to hold one so bad, but I just sat there on the ground watching them root around for their mama.
Eventually the damp ground began seeping through my clothes. I jumped up and felt the back of my dress. It was a little wet. I decided I'd go back to the porch and play dolls, hoping daddy wouldn't notice the red-clay stain on my rear end.
When I walked back up onto the porch Daddy asked me how the kittens were doing. "They're still too little to hold." I told him, disappointed.
"They'll be weaned soon enough." He assured me. Then you can play with them all you want, but don't you get your heart set on keepin' all them things."
"I won't," I said. But I already knew if I begged hard enough he'd give in and let me keep them all.
"Run get me my Bible." He commanded, finally breaking his gaze from the treeline in front of him.
I tried to slip past him to the door so he couldn't see the back of my dress.
"Don't let that slam." He ordered as I successfully made it around him, hiding my mud-stained dress and opened the screen door. "Your mama might be takin' a nap."
"She's washin' dishes." I reminded him.
"Well don't let it slam."
I felt relieved that I made it inside without him seeing my dress. I found his Bible on the table by his chair. It felt heavy in my hands. The edges of the pages were shiny silver when when you closed it tight. I turned it over and looked at the cover, "Holy Bible," it read in gold lettering at the top, and then my daddy's name in smaller letters at the bottom, "Charles McKormick." I carried the large book back outside to him and laid it on his lap.
"Here you go, Daddy." I said cheerily.
"Thank you sweet pea." He patted me on the head and smiled. Without even thinking I turned on my heel and went to pick up my dolls again.
"What's that on the back of your dress?" He asked me.
"Whatcha mean?"
"Is that mud on the back of your dress? Was you on the ground watchin' them dang kittens again?"
"Yes sir." I said, my eyes downcast.
"Better go see if your mama can get that stain out. You need to find a clean dress for church tonight."
"Can't I just put on some play clothes for now?" I pleaded with him.
"No. You ain't wearin' no britches on Sunday!" He said emphatically.
"Okay. I'll go find another dress." I said. I opened the screen door again, forgetting to let it close slowly. "Snap!" it said behind me. I felt sort of angry. A child can never begin to understand the disparate rules of religion or society, especially as they relate to females. I never understood why my cousins who were boys, could wear whatever they wanted to on Sunday afternoons, while I stayed trapped inside a dress, unable to climb or play or even get a little red clay on my butt.
"Girl, don't you be slammin' doors now!" Daddy hollered behind me as I hurried to the kitchen to find mama.
Granny picked up on the tone in Daddy's voice.
"Bible says spare the rod, spoil the child." Said Granny Jo. "You aught not be afraid to put a switch to that girl." She added as I ran to Mama as fast as I could.
I found her in the kitchen whipping up a banana pudding for after church later. "Don't tell your granny I'm cookin'." She whispered with a grin.
"I won't!" I whispered back.
"I got my dress dirty." I told her. She spun me around so she could see the red-clay stain.
"Well we should have put play clothes on you after church anyway."
"But Daddy said I can't wear britches on Sunday."
"What Daddy don't know won't hurt him." She said, shaking her head. "Go put on some britches and go out the back door and play. And don't let your Granny see you."
I spent the rest of that afternoon wandering around outside. I waded in the creek, climbed a tree, went up into the loft of the barn in my bare feet and sat there with my legs dangling over the edge for a while. I checked on the kittens two more times, but they still had their eyes closed tight. "Lord, please make em open their eyes tomorrow." I prayed.
As the sun crossed over the peak of our house and the grass under my dirty feet grew cooler, I heard Mama calling me back in to get ready for Sunday evening service. Daddy and Granny were still sitting on the porch when I came sneaking in the back door.
"Heavens to Betsy!" Mama exclaimed. "What in the world have you been doin' all day? How does a girl get so dirty?"
"I don't know, Mama." I said."I just play is all."
"Go get in the tub." She said in a low voice. "Before your daddy comes in here and catches you in them britches."
I took off. I ran myself a bath and got in. I washed my feet and my belly and arms, then got out to dry off. Mama came in with my clean dress just as I was reaching for the towel.
"I think you forgot to wash something." She teased, as she picked up a washcloth and roughly scrubbed my face clean.
Freshly dressed in my rescued Sunday dress and shiny shoes again, I grabbed my little white Bible and headed out the front door with Mama.
"Time for church." I announced.
Daddy was asleep with his Bible lying open on his lap. Granny Jo was rocking a little slower.
"Where'd the day go?" Daddy asked as he stretched and closed the Good Book. "Guess we better get going. We don't want to be late for prayer meetin'. "
"Bible says forsake not the assemblin' of yourselves together." Said Granny Jo, looking proud of herself for remembering that one.
Granny Jo hadn't been to church in so long I didn't remember ever seeing her on a pew, but every Sunday my folks invited her anyway.
"You goin' with us tonight?" Mama asked.
"No." Said Granny Jo. "I reckon I'll just stay here. Bible says women aught to be keepers at home."
"Alright then, " mama said rolling her eyes. "Don't sit out here after dark. You'll catch cold."
"Yep." Said Granny.
We drove off to church, Granny still rocking on the porch, the sunset falling low behind us in the rear view mirror. Mama hummed a little bit of "Just as I am," before she said, "I wonder if Martha Coggins is gonna be wearing that skirt around her hips again tonight. I wish she'd pull that thing up to her waist where it belongs."
"Yep." Said Daddy, rolling down his window.
In the back seat, I stared at my white Bible on my lap as the wind from Daddy's open window blew my hair into my face. I wondered if someday I might know as much about what the Bible says as Granny Jo. I decided that even if I did, I'd keep it to myself.
Mama hummed a few more bars. Daddy reached over and patted her knee.
"Lord sure gave me a good wife." He said. "Not many find a woman like you that honors and obeys her husband."'
Mama glanced at him and gave a faint grin, as Daddy reached over and took her hand.
"Lord sure is good." Daddy said.
"Yep." Said Mama, expressionless, as she gazed out the windshield at the road ahead.
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Morning Glories
My father over his lifetime, cultivated a healthy hatred of morning glories. They grew around the perimeter of our garden, sometimes winding their way almost over-night past the edge of the row, winding themselves round a cornstalk or bean pole. I loved them, and never quite understood his disdain of them. They, like me, opened themselves up to the coolness of summer mornings. They showed off, low to the ground lying in the damp red Earth or covered in big dewy droplets, circling their way in and around the beans, swirling around the tomato plants. Again, like me, they closed their big dewy faces as the heat of the day hung overhead, waiting for the coolness to return, for the dew to fall, and for the comforting breeze of summer morning to coax them awake again.
My father also hated Kudzu, and like any good Southerner, I learned to hate it too. It grew like a scourge around our gardens, our barn, our back yard. Over many years, I watched my father chop at it with long machetes, watched him burn it back to keep it from encroaching on our territory. He chopped and poisoned and fought it with all his might, but a tenacious curse, it refused to give way to the human will.
After he retired, the gardens grew over with grass. Morning glories still popped up from time to time, but after years of no one cultivating the rich red soil, even they eventually faded away. The Kudzu though, it never gave up. It now takes over more than half the space where my father used to work, dripping sweat from his forehead into his eyes, working barefooted in his white T-Shirt and work pants all afternoon growing food for all of us.
This isn't a story about reminiscing over wandering out into the soft damp soil to find a ripe juicy tomato warmed by the sun to bite into. It isn't a story about how victoriously my father fought against the forces that conspired to choke out the plants he nurtured and needed to thrive.
My dad spent his life teaching lessons through the way he lived. He never knew anyone was watching, and certainly never thought of his routine life of hard work and determination as a metaphor for something much bigger and more important that what it actually was. He was a provider. He worked hard and played hard and devoted his life to spiritual things that even he couldn't quite comprehend. All the while, I watched. I saw things he did at face value, but as I've grown older and looked back I see so much wisdom in the way he lived and the lessons he left us to be gleaned from his life, if only we take the time to examine them.
When I was about 15 I developed a crush on a church boy. I liked him partially because I knew that if I won him over, I'd gain the acceptance of so many other people, including my parents. Of course he was too old for me and I never did win him over, but that never stopped me from dreaming and wishing and hoping. In fact, I spent most of my teenage years fixated on winning the love of this one guy, only to end up with a broken heart. I settled for someone else, got married too young, had two kids, got divorced.
After my divorce I thought life would just lead me to the right guy for me. The ex-husband, he was okay, but I never loved him the way I thought love should be. I knew he loved me, but I never learned how to BE loved. So I went searching. I dated the guy who cheated on me every chance he got. I dated the alcoholic guy. I got into a long term relationship with the mentally ill guy. I dated so many losers I lost count somewhere along the way--I felt at one point, like a lone warrior, fighting my way through a forest of Kudzu to find just one tiny blooming Morning Glory.
When I found out I had to start dialysis in 2013 I instantly decided the fight, for me, was over. No one wants to be stuck with a sick woman. My body changed in ways that most men would find off-putting, I decided. A tube in my abdomen, small but still there, hooking me up to a machine at night while I sleep so I can buy some time. I prayed a lot back then, that God would make me feel okay about spending the rest of my life without a partner. It felt inevitable, but scary. I didn't want to do life alone--I wanted companionship, a real best friend kind of guy who could accept me for who I am. Life in general didn't change much for me after dialysis. I had a little more energy, but my clothes still fit. I felt like the same person, but I knew that to the average man, I was and am, damaged goods.
Now before you feel sorry for me or try to tell me I'm wrong, just listen. Because over time God answered those prayers of mine. He answered them by letting me get myself mixed up with an evil, vile man who wanted to use me and toss me aside like yesterday's garbage. I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt--It hurt far worse than any surgery or physical ailment I've ever had to endure. But you know what else it did? It made me perfectly content to spend the rest of my life alone. I learned by that experience that life without a partner is far better than life with the wrong partner, and I learned that because of my age, parental status and disease, the odds of my finding a man to share my life were minuscule.
A couple of days ago on NPR I caught the tail end of a conversation about young women will serious illnesses. It was stating statistics about what happens in marital relationships when the female becomes seriously ill. It said that in 60% of cases where the woman in a marriage gets a serious illness, her husband ends up leaving her. When men in marriages get seriously ill only about 20% of wives leave them. Some people have questioned my decision to give up on relationships over the last few years. They tell me "not all guys are bad." I never said they were. Or they say, "Someone out there would love you despite your illness." I doubt it. If more than half of married men leave the women to whom they've made vows for better or for worse, who he heck is going to sign up for a relationship with a sick gal right out of the gate--unless of course he's sick too. And that brings me to another dynamic with which I am not willing to live.
One sick person in a household is enough. Sure, there are nights when I am so tired that I wish I had someone here to get my dialysis machine set up for me. When I was training for dialysis I watched a video of a man on dialysis asking his wife to get his machine ready at night because he was just "too tired." His wife very sweetly set everything up for him while he rested in bed. I knew even at that moment that having someone do that for me--well it would never happen, and I know I would not have the patience or the energy to "mother" a sick man and still be a good mom to my son. I can't imagine making him live with TWO adults who are in the kind of shape I'm in!
My disease encroached upon my life in much the same way the Kudzu inched its way into our garden every year, only I had no fire or machete or poison with which to fight it back. It slowly took over my kidneys, and then my whole life, swallowing me up until I had nothing left but to accept it. It made my world smaller, it limited my options in life, it took away a tiny glimmer of hope I once clung so tightly to, that I wouldn't grow old alone. The one consolation in that? I likely won't grow old at all.
I can only hope that as time marches on and more and more of me is lost to this illness, some beautiful moments pop up along the way and wind themselves through the pages of my life in bright colors and temperate blossoms of dew-drenched color. Maybe along the way, those glorious moments of joy and contentment will line my path and leave behind a sweet legacy of a life beautifully lived and appreciated, even as I've walked the most abandoned pathways to my final destination. Maybe someone else will find them there and glean from them, a lesson the way I often find lessons in the every-day labor of my father's hands.
May my footsteps leave a path through the damp red clay from which I sprung; footsteps that lead to acceptance and peace, and a wisdom that only years of looking at where you've come from can give.
My father also hated Kudzu, and like any good Southerner, I learned to hate it too. It grew like a scourge around our gardens, our barn, our back yard. Over many years, I watched my father chop at it with long machetes, watched him burn it back to keep it from encroaching on our territory. He chopped and poisoned and fought it with all his might, but a tenacious curse, it refused to give way to the human will.
After he retired, the gardens grew over with grass. Morning glories still popped up from time to time, but after years of no one cultivating the rich red soil, even they eventually faded away. The Kudzu though, it never gave up. It now takes over more than half the space where my father used to work, dripping sweat from his forehead into his eyes, working barefooted in his white T-Shirt and work pants all afternoon growing food for all of us.
This isn't a story about reminiscing over wandering out into the soft damp soil to find a ripe juicy tomato warmed by the sun to bite into. It isn't a story about how victoriously my father fought against the forces that conspired to choke out the plants he nurtured and needed to thrive.
My dad spent his life teaching lessons through the way he lived. He never knew anyone was watching, and certainly never thought of his routine life of hard work and determination as a metaphor for something much bigger and more important that what it actually was. He was a provider. He worked hard and played hard and devoted his life to spiritual things that even he couldn't quite comprehend. All the while, I watched. I saw things he did at face value, but as I've grown older and looked back I see so much wisdom in the way he lived and the lessons he left us to be gleaned from his life, if only we take the time to examine them.
When I was about 15 I developed a crush on a church boy. I liked him partially because I knew that if I won him over, I'd gain the acceptance of so many other people, including my parents. Of course he was too old for me and I never did win him over, but that never stopped me from dreaming and wishing and hoping. In fact, I spent most of my teenage years fixated on winning the love of this one guy, only to end up with a broken heart. I settled for someone else, got married too young, had two kids, got divorced.
After my divorce I thought life would just lead me to the right guy for me. The ex-husband, he was okay, but I never loved him the way I thought love should be. I knew he loved me, but I never learned how to BE loved. So I went searching. I dated the guy who cheated on me every chance he got. I dated the alcoholic guy. I got into a long term relationship with the mentally ill guy. I dated so many losers I lost count somewhere along the way--I felt at one point, like a lone warrior, fighting my way through a forest of Kudzu to find just one tiny blooming Morning Glory.
When I found out I had to start dialysis in 2013 I instantly decided the fight, for me, was over. No one wants to be stuck with a sick woman. My body changed in ways that most men would find off-putting, I decided. A tube in my abdomen, small but still there, hooking me up to a machine at night while I sleep so I can buy some time. I prayed a lot back then, that God would make me feel okay about spending the rest of my life without a partner. It felt inevitable, but scary. I didn't want to do life alone--I wanted companionship, a real best friend kind of guy who could accept me for who I am. Life in general didn't change much for me after dialysis. I had a little more energy, but my clothes still fit. I felt like the same person, but I knew that to the average man, I was and am, damaged goods.
Now before you feel sorry for me or try to tell me I'm wrong, just listen. Because over time God answered those prayers of mine. He answered them by letting me get myself mixed up with an evil, vile man who wanted to use me and toss me aside like yesterday's garbage. I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt--It hurt far worse than any surgery or physical ailment I've ever had to endure. But you know what else it did? It made me perfectly content to spend the rest of my life alone. I learned by that experience that life without a partner is far better than life with the wrong partner, and I learned that because of my age, parental status and disease, the odds of my finding a man to share my life were minuscule.
A couple of days ago on NPR I caught the tail end of a conversation about young women will serious illnesses. It was stating statistics about what happens in marital relationships when the female becomes seriously ill. It said that in 60% of cases where the woman in a marriage gets a serious illness, her husband ends up leaving her. When men in marriages get seriously ill only about 20% of wives leave them. Some people have questioned my decision to give up on relationships over the last few years. They tell me "not all guys are bad." I never said they were. Or they say, "Someone out there would love you despite your illness." I doubt it. If more than half of married men leave the women to whom they've made vows for better or for worse, who he heck is going to sign up for a relationship with a sick gal right out of the gate--unless of course he's sick too. And that brings me to another dynamic with which I am not willing to live.
One sick person in a household is enough. Sure, there are nights when I am so tired that I wish I had someone here to get my dialysis machine set up for me. When I was training for dialysis I watched a video of a man on dialysis asking his wife to get his machine ready at night because he was just "too tired." His wife very sweetly set everything up for him while he rested in bed. I knew even at that moment that having someone do that for me--well it would never happen, and I know I would not have the patience or the energy to "mother" a sick man and still be a good mom to my son. I can't imagine making him live with TWO adults who are in the kind of shape I'm in!
My disease encroached upon my life in much the same way the Kudzu inched its way into our garden every year, only I had no fire or machete or poison with which to fight it back. It slowly took over my kidneys, and then my whole life, swallowing me up until I had nothing left but to accept it. It made my world smaller, it limited my options in life, it took away a tiny glimmer of hope I once clung so tightly to, that I wouldn't grow old alone. The one consolation in that? I likely won't grow old at all.
I can only hope that as time marches on and more and more of me is lost to this illness, some beautiful moments pop up along the way and wind themselves through the pages of my life in bright colors and temperate blossoms of dew-drenched color. Maybe along the way, those glorious moments of joy and contentment will line my path and leave behind a sweet legacy of a life beautifully lived and appreciated, even as I've walked the most abandoned pathways to my final destination. Maybe someone else will find them there and glean from them, a lesson the way I often find lessons in the every-day labor of my father's hands.
May my footsteps leave a path through the damp red clay from which I sprung; footsteps that lead to acceptance and peace, and a wisdom that only years of looking at where you've come from can give.
Monday, February 19, 2018
Things That Are Lovely
Sometimes I think I could drown inside my own head. On days like today I wake up with a swirling, dizzying overload of thinking crowding my brain until there's barely room in there for reason. I lay in bed too long after the alarm, talking myself into getting up. My limbs felt heavy. My room, still bathed in early morning twilight wrapped around me, too much like a cocoon. I knew that outside the covers the chilly air would shock me out of my complacency and I wanted too badly to cling to it. So I kept lying there, even after the second and third alarms.
My life is quite perfunctory of late. I do what is required of me and little more. Still with my obligations met, so many things that should matter more seem to get lost in the clutter of my brain. It's as if I forgot how to discern the important from the nonsensical. Lost in the limbo of neither succeeding or failing, I feel on the verge of just rolling up in my blankets and going back to sleep.
Last night I heard a talk about storytelling. The guy said there are three important components to every story. The audience, the characters, and a sense of wonder. I thought how like real life a story can be. After all, life at its essence is nothing more than a story with a beginning, middle and end. Hopefully there's some wonder sprinkled in here and there, and whether we like it or not, we always have an audience. I am struck by the realization that I have lived my whole life in front of an audience of critics who make it their business to judge, reject, applaud, approve or disapprove of the way I am living my story. The speaker says we writers must always be conscious of our audience, we write for them, after all. If they don't like your story, you failed at telling it in a compelling way. I think about all the ways I fail at living out a story of which anyone would approve.
With that on my mind, I fell asleep last night to blissful nothingness. Dreams did not intrude upon my already used-up mind. I drifted along on the blackness of night and the silence of stillness until my alarm jarred me awake. The sound assaulted me so fully that within a matter of seconds, my mind was all aswirl with thoughts of how I fail so often at life. I refuse to dwell in the past, so today became my muse. I woke up knowing already exactly how my day would play out. The story, told before it began. Maybe I felt as though actually getting out of bed might passive aggressively give the finger to Monday.
Eventually though, I did swing my feet over the side of the bed, flung the covers back and let the cold chill of morning take over my senses. A few minutes later, I could barely remember my cocoon that now sat wrecked, not unlike a chrysalis after the butterfly finally escapes.
I'm not going to even say I showed up for this day with beauty and grace. I plodded along. I grouched and griped and shook my head a million times at all the wrongness around me. I made my way to work, where a conversation about politics nearly sent me scurrying back out the door, but instead I changed the subject then watched as the arguers shook their heads and griped and groaned. One left--offended perhaps, but I was in no mood to care.
It's funny to me how everyone is entitled to an opinion as long as they agree with the opinions of those around them. It's even funnier to me that people with their full cognitive capabilities still intact can lash out angrily at someone who is functioning as best they can, with basically no short-term memory at all. This is not a demonstration of kindness or graciousness. It isn't "Christian" at all. But dare I say what I'm thinking? No way. I keep my silence close, almost use it as a shield to protect myself from the verbal onslaught of ignorance that waits to assail me concerning things of which it knows nothing.
It's my job, in a way, to just put up with it.
I'm not so fond of my job today.
When I got home this afternoon I caught a glimpse of my little weedy flowerbed in the front yard. Tiny purple Crocus are popping up everywhere. I found the teeny bulbs last summer, buried under one of those pieces of fabric that's supposed to keep the weeds out of your flowerbeds. I pulled up all the fabric, softened the dirt and left the bulbs there, not knowing if they'd come up in the Spring. My boy and I got out of the car and walked over to examine them. It's as if 30 more have popped through the soil overnight, a reminder to me that nature stops for nothing once it's set free. I wonder then, what is keeping me from blooming?
Perhaps my own thoughts sabotage me; I cannot stop the flood of negative thinking once the gates pop open. I let the current drag me down. I get covered up like those Crocus bulbs--blocked from the light and rain and even the mounds of snow that make wintertime the perfect time to hide.
There is a time for everything, and for me, times are changing. So now, instead of dwelling on all the ways I fall so short in life, I will think of something lovely: My pretty purple flowers, beset by weeds but blooming all the same.
"...whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things." Philippians 4:8
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Love Shows Up
The day of their wedding, my mother readied herself at home. My dad told me a few years ago that throughout that day, her father antagonized her. "Charles is not coming to get you." He told her. "He ain't gon' marry you." Over and over, as she got herself dressed, her hair styled, her lipstick on, she listened to her father's cynicism until she started to believe him. But my dad, true to his honest and faithful nature, showed up on her doorstep that evening wearing a suit that was a little too big, a smile plastered on his face, ready to take her to Preacher Newton's house. They were married on the back porch with my mother's sister and my dad's brother as witnesses. It wasn't until after my mother passed away that I finally saw a single photo of them on their wedding day. Taken at my Grandma and Grandpa Curtis' house, they are sitting on a swing, the wind blowing my mother's dress up just a little, my dad looking contentedly happy with his arm around her. She isn't smiling exactly. She looks a little anxious, or maybe stunned that her man showed up and swept her away to a new life.
Parental romance never seems appealing to us until we reach an age that allows us to appreciate the serendipity that must happen in order for love to bloom and grow. Indeed, not only bloom and grow, in the case of my parents, but to also endure.
Neither of my folks even had a high school diploma. My mom grew up looking after other people and their children. She quit school at a young age to babysit her uncle's kids so his wife could go to work. She talked often of her father's alcoholism and the way she worried about her mother. She wanted to protect and take care of her mother even, from the time she was a small child. She remembered instances of violence, her mother ducking just in time to miss a bloody nose, her father's fist instead, going through a window. She had siblings then, two sisters, one older, one younger. They remember things differently, but my mother always stuck to her version of history and I believe it left a lasting impression on the very fabric of her being.
My dad quit school young to help his father farm. Life was hard for an uneducated man, and my father met the challenge better than anyone else I've ever known. He started working at the Singer plant in 1970, the year I was born. He retired when I was 26. By then the factory had changed hands and he knew how to run every machine in the place. I don't remember that he ever missed work because he was sick, except of course when he landed in the hospital with kidney stones once. He showed up at that factory every night, with gouty feet, with fevers, with tired and aching bones from tilling a garden in the hot summer sun. He rested on Sundays, but not until after he drove a church van to pick up elderly folks and children, then had dinner with us. Even then, his respite was brief; a nap or two would settle on him during Sunday afternoon football as he sat in his recliner. Sunday evening he piled us all back in that van and we all showed up at church again for evening service. Then, back at home after church we ate supper together in front of the TV, watching "The Jeffersons" before I was sent off to bed and he started getting ready for work. Third shift began at midnight, so his Monday commenced long before we even opened our eyes to get ready for school.
Likewise my mother's work was never done. She woke up early every morning and got us off to school, but not before she cooked a Southern breakfast fit for a king. My dad came in the door around seven o'clock every morning to homemade biscuits, bacon, eggs, grits, the whole spread. Of course, we ate too, but I think we all knew for whom that big breakfast was made. He slept during the day while we were gone and met us, awake and busy as we got off the bus in the afternoon. With 3 of us girls still at home and a grandchild next door, my mother didn't get much down time. She showed up to cook two full meals every single day, cleaned up after them, then prepared for the next feast. She kept up with laundry for all of us. I remember it waving on a very long clothesline that stretched the width of our yard and then some. I remember my sisters complaining about bringing the laundry in, or about hanging it out for her. I remember myself, whining about washing dishes. I think about me in comparison to her--I lack the motivation to put my clothes in the dryer sometimes. How did she do it all and never give up?
Motivation. All of us need to find it somewhere. We need inspiration, something in our lives that makes us keep putting one foot in front of the other, something we know is worth our effort--makes us want to show up. My parents kept inspiration somewhere in the space between them where they reached not only for one another, but for the family they created together. It strung us all together like clothes on a line. It gave us room to breathe, but kept us close, made us secure; it ultimately gave us all a sense of purpose.
The perfect romance never existed. It never will. Love, though, is impervious to the whims of romance. It persists through years of financial drought and illness and the trials of raising children. It clings tenaciously to whatever dregs of hope it finds and somehow keeps on growing. Love is, as I learned after my mother's passing, stronger than death. Against all the illnesses, struggles, misunderstandings and even annoyances that come with living with someone for decades, Love prevails. Real Love withstands whatever tries to tear it apart. I believe that even on their worst days, my parents knew real Love. Their love for each other ultimately nurtured us. It fed us, clothed us, sent us to school in clean clothes. It taught us about disappointment and made us resilient. It grew in us our own insecurities, vulnerabilities and strengths. It made us girls all seek out that same kind of love for ourselves. Some of us found it, some never will; so scarce it is.
I can appreciate the bond my parents shared so much more now that the years have smoothed the rough edges of memory and life-experience has taught me how hard-won even the simplest things in life often are. My parents possessed a rare gem. They never knew wealth, but knew something that few people find and fewer still are able to keep. It lives on far beyond who Bonnie and Charles were that December day on the preacher's back porch. It lives, scattered across the Earth in the hearts and minds of five girls, eleven grandchildren, fifteen great-grandchildren. It will continue divide itself across time and space and it will live on even after I am dust.
The inspiration? It lives on as well, tethered to the Universe by a single moment in time when Love showed up in the form of my father on the doorstep of the Lee household, ready to take his bride.
Monday, January 8, 2018
Making Them All Matter
Lately my attitude stinks, especially about my job.
"What???" you say. "But you love your job, Rebecca!"
And to that I say, yes. Normally I do; but in every job a little dissatisfaction must sometimes come along to muck up the works. Kinks in the process, if you will.
Years ago I took a job as an Activity Director at an Assisted Living Facility (ALF for short). My excitement uncontrollable, I sat down at the computer and made out my first month's activities the day I got my job offer. Hired as Activity Director, one of my other duties involved managing the bus driver and all transportation scheduling, including transportation to doctor appointments as well as trips "just for fun." My first week there the driver called in sick. I got pulled from my job to drive 4 seniors to doctor appointments all over Greenville county. Four people, doesn't sound so bad, huh? Well, it doesn't until you consider that the appointment times are spread out, so you can't make Mrs. Smith hop on the bus at 8:00 when her appointment is at 10:00, and you can't get two people to 9:00 appointments at the same time when their appointments are 20 miles apart. Then there's the matter of going back to get Mrs. Smith who isn't ready to go, then getting her dropped off while the doctor's office of the guy you dropped off at 8:00 has started calling you every 15 minutes since 9:00 that he's ready to go...So you see, it was a bait and switch situation. I thought I got an opportunity to do what I loved, and ended up with a job I hated. In the two years I worked there, I probably was the bus driver at least 1/2 of the time. At times I accepted it. If they wanted to pay me a AD salary for driving a bus, what's it to me? But then corporate came in and wanted to know why no one was doing activities. They were not pleased when I answered that I had not yet figured out how to be in two places at once; but if they could figure that out for me I'd be glad to oblige their whims.
I quit that job.
Fast forward to now. About a month ago I witnessed a sub driver for our site driving erratically and reported him. My punishment for trying to do the right thing? I got the dubious assignment of being the van driver and director. Now while this van driving job is much easier than the ALF one, it's not what I signed up for. I'm supposed to be part time--but with my 4 hours at the center, 4 hours driving and a couple of hours doing work from home every day, I'm exceeding a 40 hour work week. I don't talk about it much, but my poor body can only handle so much before I am physically burned out.
With that physical burn out comes a whole load of other unpleasant baggage. Frustration, my word of the day lately, keeps my adrenaline unhealthily high. Then there's the anger that this who situation might not have happened the way it did if management had not dawdled months ago when they knew a change was imminent. I too often find myself feeling like an overpaid van driver, janitor, key holder and coffee barista. In a nut shell, I feel like nothing I'm doing makes a hell of a lot of difference in the world.
Sometimes though, it takes waking up to a surprising text on my phone to ground me again and remind me why what I do is important.
Sunday morning a family member sent me a message that said, "I regret to inform you that Mary Kay died this morning at 4:30 a.m."
What can I say about Mary Kay? She came to us back in the spring, quiet and a little insecure at first, it took a little while for the group to warm up to her. Some teased her about her name, asked her if she had a pink Cadillac parked outside--alluding to the makeup goddess. Mary Kay took the jokes in stride, understanding the humor in them. I regret to say I don't know much about her early life. She came to us at 63, intellectually disabled, but eager to find a sense of community. Slowly, each member in our group established their own kinds of relationships with her. Some were her silent meal partners, some sat around the table and listen to her stories about the Sioux City community center where she played BINGO and Uno before she move here with her cousin. We learned all about her dog Buddy, who died years ago, but who remained close to her heart. She impressed us with her knowledge of music; we often play old tunes during the day, and without even looking at the TV screen, she'd say, "That's Dean Martin" Or that's "Bing Crosby." Music, movies and great stories of the adventures of others fascinated her.
On December 13 we took her with the group to The Biltmore House for Christmas. I held her hand and helped her tour as much of the house as she could, but even then she struggled to breathe. A sinking feeling started to grow in my gut that day, that she could be very sick.
The next week we had another Christmas outing to the Hyatt in Downtown Greenville to view the pretty trees and have lunch. Our driver, Eric, took Mary Kay by the hand and walked around the big building with her slowly, giving her time to rest when she grew weary. She enjoyed the attention he gave her, enjoyed her lunch although she ate very little, and enjoyed the company of her friends, most of all.
The very next day she showed up at our SA Chrsitmas party with her $5.00 gift in hand--proudly ready to give it away. We played the Left-Right game, and I don't even remember what gift she ended up getting, but I'm sure she was satisfied with it--her biggest concern? Was the person who got HER gift that she brought, happy with theirs.
After the party I drove her home--for the first time ever, I had to drive up into her driveway as close to the door as possible. She used to walk the big hill up that driveway with a little skip in her step, but the skip was gone that day. I walked her to the front of the house, slowly, laboriously. When we got to the steps, she sat on the first one, her Christmas goodies scattered all around her. I rang the doorbell to let her cousin Lynne know that she needed help getting inside.
That day, that image of her sitting on the bottom step, two jackets on, her visor a little askew, Christmas bags and her big purse scattered around her is my last mental image of Mary Kay.
Waking up to that message Sunday morning bummed me out. The frustration already weighing me down felt even heavier. I sent messages our members, telling them the news. One of them said back to me, "I think we did our best to make her life a little better."
That one simple phrase snapped me back into the reality on which I need to focus. Yes, a lot of days get complicated. Yes, I hate feeling like an overpaid van driver, or janitor. I hate that I can't seem to appeal to the masses, even though the masses of which I speak are from several different generations. My oldest member is 100. My youngest was 64--Mary Kay. I never find the task of making everyone happy all the time, doable.
However, I believe that together, I and our members at Senior Action gave Mary Kay a wonderful last Christmas here on Earth. We included her--she made many of the ornaments that went on our tree. She got to do new things--Like visit Biltmore and the Hyatt. On one of her last days at Senior Action we had a sing along group, a children's choir and Santa and his helpers drop by. She participated in all the singing and dancing and merry-making of the season. We had no idea at the time, but the seemingly ordinary things we were doing, were exponentially improving her quality of life. On her last day with us she ate a plate full of sweets, drank soda and played fun Christmas games. She was able to give of herself, and able to accept the kindness of others. I figure if nothing I did in the month of December mattered to anyone else, it mattered to her, and that makes it all worth it for me.
Mary Kay, a lady who probably lived far longer than her family expected, said goodbye to her parents, her dog, Buddy, her old friends in Iowa and came here to live with her cousin. Senior Action became her anchoring place. There she found friends who showed her patience and understanding, who made her laugh, who challenged her to learn new things, and who most of all accepted her for who she was. We could all stand to learn from the way she lived.
She showed kindness to everyone always. She made a point to remember names, to find out personal things about each member and to frequently ask, "How's your puppy doing?" or with me particularly, "How are your grand babies and Charlie doing?" She talked about her friends back in Iowa, to whom she still faithfully wrote letters. She spoke of her Cousin Lynne and of other family members with great fondness. She was proud to do her part every day, whether that meant bringing in plastic bags or helping hand out the milk or fruit before lunch. There were days in the recent weeks when I'd ask, "Mary Kay, do you feel bad?" Her color ashen, she seemed less like her spunky self, but she would always answer, "No, I don't feel bad. I feel fine." I never heard her complain.
Still, that day I dropped her off in the cold December afternoon, I never imagined that would be the last time I would speak to her.
"Merry Christmas Mary Kay!" I told her. "Get some rest so you will feel better. I'll see you next year," I joked. She said Merry Christmas to me, then I watched as her cousin helped her inside.
Now there are two ways you could look at this situation. You could say I waste a lot of my time on people who might not be long for this world anyway--that maybe my efforts would be better spent supporting the young and struggling. But I tell you this, the elder who has struggled all her life needs a place in the world where she matters too. She needs friendship and fun and a sense of belonging just like anyone else. That last day that Mary Kay spent at Senior Action was just as important as some four-year old's first day at preschool. Sure, one was an end and the other a beginning--but both made a difference like ripples through time and spirit and the flow of life in general.
This is why I do what I do--not for money or accolades or even to be understood by people who can never grasp the simple need of a senior, a person with a disability, to find a sense of love and belonging in the world. If I can help create that place for just a handful of people, I know I will have made a difference in the world--if only one simple life at a time.
Here's to Mary Kay--to living an uncomplicated life where loss is accepted, where every person is a potential new friend, and where love and family matter more than anything else in the world. May we all learn to live with the values she cultivated throughout her life.
"What???" you say. "But you love your job, Rebecca!"
And to that I say, yes. Normally I do; but in every job a little dissatisfaction must sometimes come along to muck up the works. Kinks in the process, if you will.
Years ago I took a job as an Activity Director at an Assisted Living Facility (ALF for short). My excitement uncontrollable, I sat down at the computer and made out my first month's activities the day I got my job offer. Hired as Activity Director, one of my other duties involved managing the bus driver and all transportation scheduling, including transportation to doctor appointments as well as trips "just for fun." My first week there the driver called in sick. I got pulled from my job to drive 4 seniors to doctor appointments all over Greenville county. Four people, doesn't sound so bad, huh? Well, it doesn't until you consider that the appointment times are spread out, so you can't make Mrs. Smith hop on the bus at 8:00 when her appointment is at 10:00, and you can't get two people to 9:00 appointments at the same time when their appointments are 20 miles apart. Then there's the matter of going back to get Mrs. Smith who isn't ready to go, then getting her dropped off while the doctor's office of the guy you dropped off at 8:00 has started calling you every 15 minutes since 9:00 that he's ready to go...So you see, it was a bait and switch situation. I thought I got an opportunity to do what I loved, and ended up with a job I hated. In the two years I worked there, I probably was the bus driver at least 1/2 of the time. At times I accepted it. If they wanted to pay me a AD salary for driving a bus, what's it to me? But then corporate came in and wanted to know why no one was doing activities. They were not pleased when I answered that I had not yet figured out how to be in two places at once; but if they could figure that out for me I'd be glad to oblige their whims.
I quit that job.
Fast forward to now. About a month ago I witnessed a sub driver for our site driving erratically and reported him. My punishment for trying to do the right thing? I got the dubious assignment of being the van driver and director. Now while this van driving job is much easier than the ALF one, it's not what I signed up for. I'm supposed to be part time--but with my 4 hours at the center, 4 hours driving and a couple of hours doing work from home every day, I'm exceeding a 40 hour work week. I don't talk about it much, but my poor body can only handle so much before I am physically burned out.
With that physical burn out comes a whole load of other unpleasant baggage. Frustration, my word of the day lately, keeps my adrenaline unhealthily high. Then there's the anger that this who situation might not have happened the way it did if management had not dawdled months ago when they knew a change was imminent. I too often find myself feeling like an overpaid van driver, janitor, key holder and coffee barista. In a nut shell, I feel like nothing I'm doing makes a hell of a lot of difference in the world.
Sometimes though, it takes waking up to a surprising text on my phone to ground me again and remind me why what I do is important.
Sunday morning a family member sent me a message that said, "I regret to inform you that Mary Kay died this morning at 4:30 a.m."
What can I say about Mary Kay? She came to us back in the spring, quiet and a little insecure at first, it took a little while for the group to warm up to her. Some teased her about her name, asked her if she had a pink Cadillac parked outside--alluding to the makeup goddess. Mary Kay took the jokes in stride, understanding the humor in them. I regret to say I don't know much about her early life. She came to us at 63, intellectually disabled, but eager to find a sense of community. Slowly, each member in our group established their own kinds of relationships with her. Some were her silent meal partners, some sat around the table and listen to her stories about the Sioux City community center where she played BINGO and Uno before she move here with her cousin. We learned all about her dog Buddy, who died years ago, but who remained close to her heart. She impressed us with her knowledge of music; we often play old tunes during the day, and without even looking at the TV screen, she'd say, "That's Dean Martin" Or that's "Bing Crosby." Music, movies and great stories of the adventures of others fascinated her.
On December 13 we took her with the group to The Biltmore House for Christmas. I held her hand and helped her tour as much of the house as she could, but even then she struggled to breathe. A sinking feeling started to grow in my gut that day, that she could be very sick.
The next week we had another Christmas outing to the Hyatt in Downtown Greenville to view the pretty trees and have lunch. Our driver, Eric, took Mary Kay by the hand and walked around the big building with her slowly, giving her time to rest when she grew weary. She enjoyed the attention he gave her, enjoyed her lunch although she ate very little, and enjoyed the company of her friends, most of all.
The very next day she showed up at our SA Chrsitmas party with her $5.00 gift in hand--proudly ready to give it away. We played the Left-Right game, and I don't even remember what gift she ended up getting, but I'm sure she was satisfied with it--her biggest concern? Was the person who got HER gift that she brought, happy with theirs.
After the party I drove her home--for the first time ever, I had to drive up into her driveway as close to the door as possible. She used to walk the big hill up that driveway with a little skip in her step, but the skip was gone that day. I walked her to the front of the house, slowly, laboriously. When we got to the steps, she sat on the first one, her Christmas goodies scattered all around her. I rang the doorbell to let her cousin Lynne know that she needed help getting inside.
That day, that image of her sitting on the bottom step, two jackets on, her visor a little askew, Christmas bags and her big purse scattered around her is my last mental image of Mary Kay.
Waking up to that message Sunday morning bummed me out. The frustration already weighing me down felt even heavier. I sent messages our members, telling them the news. One of them said back to me, "I think we did our best to make her life a little better."
That one simple phrase snapped me back into the reality on which I need to focus. Yes, a lot of days get complicated. Yes, I hate feeling like an overpaid van driver, or janitor. I hate that I can't seem to appeal to the masses, even though the masses of which I speak are from several different generations. My oldest member is 100. My youngest was 64--Mary Kay. I never find the task of making everyone happy all the time, doable.
However, I believe that together, I and our members at Senior Action gave Mary Kay a wonderful last Christmas here on Earth. We included her--she made many of the ornaments that went on our tree. She got to do new things--Like visit Biltmore and the Hyatt. On one of her last days at Senior Action we had a sing along group, a children's choir and Santa and his helpers drop by. She participated in all the singing and dancing and merry-making of the season. We had no idea at the time, but the seemingly ordinary things we were doing, were exponentially improving her quality of life. On her last day with us she ate a plate full of sweets, drank soda and played fun Christmas games. She was able to give of herself, and able to accept the kindness of others. I figure if nothing I did in the month of December mattered to anyone else, it mattered to her, and that makes it all worth it for me.
Mary Kay, a lady who probably lived far longer than her family expected, said goodbye to her parents, her dog, Buddy, her old friends in Iowa and came here to live with her cousin. Senior Action became her anchoring place. There she found friends who showed her patience and understanding, who made her laugh, who challenged her to learn new things, and who most of all accepted her for who she was. We could all stand to learn from the way she lived.
She showed kindness to everyone always. She made a point to remember names, to find out personal things about each member and to frequently ask, "How's your puppy doing?" or with me particularly, "How are your grand babies and Charlie doing?" She talked about her friends back in Iowa, to whom she still faithfully wrote letters. She spoke of her Cousin Lynne and of other family members with great fondness. She was proud to do her part every day, whether that meant bringing in plastic bags or helping hand out the milk or fruit before lunch. There were days in the recent weeks when I'd ask, "Mary Kay, do you feel bad?" Her color ashen, she seemed less like her spunky self, but she would always answer, "No, I don't feel bad. I feel fine." I never heard her complain.
Still, that day I dropped her off in the cold December afternoon, I never imagined that would be the last time I would speak to her.
"Merry Christmas Mary Kay!" I told her. "Get some rest so you will feel better. I'll see you next year," I joked. She said Merry Christmas to me, then I watched as her cousin helped her inside.
Now there are two ways you could look at this situation. You could say I waste a lot of my time on people who might not be long for this world anyway--that maybe my efforts would be better spent supporting the young and struggling. But I tell you this, the elder who has struggled all her life needs a place in the world where she matters too. She needs friendship and fun and a sense of belonging just like anyone else. That last day that Mary Kay spent at Senior Action was just as important as some four-year old's first day at preschool. Sure, one was an end and the other a beginning--but both made a difference like ripples through time and spirit and the flow of life in general.
This is why I do what I do--not for money or accolades or even to be understood by people who can never grasp the simple need of a senior, a person with a disability, to find a sense of love and belonging in the world. If I can help create that place for just a handful of people, I know I will have made a difference in the world--if only one simple life at a time.
Here's to Mary Kay--to living an uncomplicated life where loss is accepted, where every person is a potential new friend, and where love and family matter more than anything else in the world. May we all learn to live with the values she cultivated throughout her life.
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