Category: At-Home

Yes, I am at home. I have learned to be a good cook over the years, tho’ I specialize in soups (my husband says) and pies (so say my friends.) I drive my children to and fro, dealing with the complexities of having them. I write. I do small photography gigs. I volunteer in the community.

{On Parenting and Being}

Parenting is undoubtedly the most difficult job I’ve ever done. It’s not instinctive for me or intuitive, though Tom frequently argues with me on this, the fact remains that I do not feel like a good mother.  

I’m a perfectionist. I’m hard on myself. Most days I fear I’m such a f-up that I can’t raise healthy kids.  I fear that things that made me the way I am will be repeated in my children.  I vacillate between fear that I am too hard on my kids and fear that I’m not hard enough.  And I know that no matter what I do, kids ultimately make their own choices. How does one become a good parent before it’s too late?

If we look at how we were raised we can compare but there’s so much left …

to sheer randomness,

to the personalities of parents and each child,

to the context or environment,

to the spirituality of every person involved.

So we observe others.  We learn from our friends. We work on our personal shit. I find myself hoping  that the days will s t r e t c h out.  And that time will slow down.

Who doesn’t need more time to improve upon themselves?   With life moving so quickly and my children dashing into their teen years, I suddenly want to press the slow motion button. I see how quickly we got here, If only there were more time.

If the Bible were a parenting manual (which it is not) I think perhaps it would say work on yourself (character) first and the fruits of your life (spirit) and then perhaps God will add to these things, but there are no guarantees.

One thing I know. The more you try to control the outcome, the less likely you’ll get it exactly the way you want it.

So what’s a person to do?   Getting my kids report cards, I felt as if I was back in middle school.  I want so much more for my kids than what I had, everyone does.  I don’t want their choices in life to be limited by their current lack of imagination, or willingness to work hard, or the incentives as they perceive them.  And as I rail internally against my own feelings of failure, I relive my wretched school years and I cry a bucket of tears, full of my own regrets and feelings of failure.

I am left with more questions.

How do we teach our children that we love them unconditionally – that no matter what they EVER DO, seriously I mean EVER — That our love is irreversible?  This is a super power, this unconditional love.  If they get this one thing I believe all the rest will fall into place for them.

I never believed I was unconditionally loved growing up.  I thought love I received or didn’t was connected to my behaviours, choices, failures and successes, “the B should have/could have been an A” because nothing was ever good enough to make my father happy.

How do we make it absolutely clear to our children that no matter what job they do some day, or what grades they get or what degrees they accomplish, or what hobbies, interests, sports or other talents they choose or naturally have, no matter, they are loved!

And I think perhaps parenting is a daily laying down of my life — giving up my rights — my power — my control, and sitting with the Holy One, admitting my weakness, my brokenness and that I cannot do it alone.

For a perfectionist it is hard to admit there is no perfect parent, that mistakes will be made, are made daily.  And ultimately I am not in control.

For a perfectionist it is hard to let go and accept that who my children become is entirely up to them!

Celebrate them.  Enjoy them.  Affirm them.  Give them every opportunity.

And also give them space to find themselves.

Just as I am.


{Listening for God}

I listen for you.

But I am no good at hearing.

For you, my God speak quietly; a whisper.

Hints of your love

blow in the grasses,

the bird’s song,

the wind wafting in the trees,

in children’s laughter.

I listen for you.

Help me to hear.

{When You’re Not Qualified to be Alive}

So I’m trying something new.  Picking a subject at random that I seem to obsess about or fixate on, something that grips my imagination in compulsive and ugly ways, (I started with one of my secret obsessions.) I’ll write honestly without  a lot self-editing or controlling “the message” to see what comes out.  No answers. No over spiritualizing.  Just the real, gritty, sometimes awkward me. I’m trying to push myself in my style to loosen up a little. Have you noticed that I take myself a bit too seriously? This is my second excursion into a different kind of real. 

Parenting surely is the most difficult job I’ve ever had.  Many times in a day I think “I am not qualified.” But it’s too late, for those regrets.

No one is qualified to be a parent, not really. 

Yesterday, I was reflecting on our exceptionally verbal, strong as steel, at times tyrannical daughter  who is so like my father!  I just wanted to fall down on my knees, humbled by my own lack.  Again, as if a prayer, whispering this time as a lament: I am not qualified to be a mother.

I went through most of my life in some strange, surreal auto pilot. 

I went through forty years utterly afraid of life.  I sometimes think back, strange as it sounds and wonder aloud how I even survived the catastrophes of living in our home.  My father’s spirit and soul crushing rage destroyed me, my personality and I spent many years just grieving who I might be, might have been.  That sort of grief is debilitating.

Oh there were moments, especially outside of home, where I found  parts of myself.  I loved my youth pastor; he listened to me and allowed for my incessant questions about the Bible. He listened to my ideas and fears.  He never once yelled at me, or told me my sarcasm or sense of humor or quick thinking and verbal sparring was bad.  He somehow validated me and I loved him.

But for the most part I went through my tens and twenties and thirties heart-sick, depressed, and afraid.

So when my daughter rages at me (I told you she is like my dad) or the world, or she stands up to me, or questions … every little thing, a small part of me is cheering inside!!

She is alive.

She is breathing, kicking and screaming, going into the world believing that her thoughts, her questions, her jokes, her ideas matter and for that I am so pleased.

She is alive and I am slowly coming alive too.  I believe my father had to die for me to begin living.  A new friend, after hearing about the childhood that I had said to me yesterday “It’s a wonder that I have any faith at all.”

I am simply grateful I am alive.  Yes, this life of believing is really hard; harder for me than it seems to be for many people I know.  I’ve come to accept and understand this to be a part of what makes me, me.  And yes, this is something I embrace.

I may not be qualified, but I am grateful to be alive.

Step On A Crack {A poem about Living}

She drank coffee

at 4:29 in the afternoon but knew it won’t do the job on a soul that’s stopped dead.

And no amount of caffeine

is going to wake it.

It happened a long time ago, so far back in time

she can’t see

it, certainly can’t remember when a little girl of puddles and jumping, cartwheels

and skinned knees stopped dreaming. Mistrust

became more real to her than hope. Forever

uncertain, she lost

Wonder.

Step on a crack, break your Mamma’s back. Did she do that?

When mamma’s don’t dream children are left

to the Monsters — imagined enemies

everywhere. This little girl got scared, petrified and turned to

Stone, too afraid to live. Now she’s the Mamma she’s got to get up,

Dance in the rain, again! See

this is real, the bad dreams are gone.

Find courage.

Live.

MOTHER [a poem about a parent aging]


Something shifted in the cosmos today as I became a giver, her One.

The one who thinks like a pastor, fondly listening inside to her heart which is lonely.
The one who touches like a nurse, open to the clues, simple hints about pain.
The one who creates food to share, serving the body and soul.

Daughter became caregiver to Mother.

And altered who I am.

Only, she isn’t frail, broken down or helpless — not just yet but it’s coming.  Even so she asks and I answer, and I tag along.  In case something is missed, she says.

Even so she still bails me out and listens as my heart bursts open, pooling over the edges of my day.  The “middle school” years, I am tender, raw with anguish.

Oh yes, she is still Mother, but today something in the cosmos shifted, and I became a Giver.

I became her One.

MHH

Other Poems.

EATING ANIMALS by Jonathan Safran Foer

For the last two weeks I have been enjoying life meat free.  I never thought that was possible.  Here’s why I no longer eat animals from America’s factory farms.

This review originally appeared on The Englewood Review of Books website.

 

“99% of the meat sold in the United States today comes from a factory farm.”

In the 1970s, my missionary parents uprooted us from the barefoot paradise of Papua New Guinea and planted us in Southern California.  My mother, suffering a bizarre set of health issues, began looking for answers in healthy eating practices.  While other kids ate Twinkies and Ding Dongs, Mother read Adelle Davis books on nutrition and force-fed us cod liver oil.

Perhaps because of this, my need to fit in urged me to become a steak-loving “normal” person. Food, for me, was always more than mere sustenance; it was a visceral, beautiful, even creative thing. But as far being a political statement or a critical health issue, well that was strictly for the weirdoes.

Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals was the first time that I seriously considered that the Chicken Parmesan in front of me or the meat neatly stacked in my refrigerator was once a living thing.  And confronted by the horrors of modern animal farming, as recounted in shocking detail by Foer, I had to face certain facts: factory farms are disgusting and dangerous for our health.

Foer made a three-year investigation into the sickening story that is American meat, describing with ghastly precision the disease, deformity and eventual mutilation of animals that defines factory farming today. I was filled with revulsion as Foer chronicled his grisly experience and quickly came to understand why Ellen DeGeneres has called Eating Animals “one of the most important books [she’s] ever read.”

The story is heart-wrenching, repulsive and barbaric.  One learns that the idyllic family farms we picture in our minds (think Charlotte‘s Web) have been transformed into secretive, highly secured factories lined with rows of “confinement pens” where animals languish, never seeing real daylight.  Foer admits to clandestinely breaking into a turkey farm to discover locked pen doors, gas masks on the walls, chicks with blackened beaks, and both dead and living birds matted with blood and covered in sores.  He details dozens of eerily similar stories indicting the farming of pigs, chickens, cows and even fish:

“The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.”

In a riveting (if also occasionally, rambling) narrative, Foer contends the meat industry is corrupt, with structures supporting the consumer-driven “need” for cheap meat.  Foer notes that prices haven’t substantially increased since the mid-fifties, and that the “efficiencies” of the factory system are the source of this “benefit.”  I was stunned to learn that only 1% of the meat we consume comes from family-run old-fashioned farms.  The rest is from factories where biodiversity is replaced by genetic uniformity, and the antibiotic-laced animals may be contributing to strange flu like symptoms ravaging millions of Americans.

With gritty specifics, allowing for many perspectives, Foer draws personal conclusions, while making it clear that our collective actions can change these practices.  But only by agreeing individually to stop purchasing factory farmed meat.

In this philosophical horror story, I was confronted with my “need” and realized I can no longer be a part of supporting this corrupt system.  A “normal” evangelical Mom, I am choosing to no longer eat animals unless they come locally and humanely from a farm.

We the collective consumer must make conscious choices, even sacrifices.   Foer says it well, “We are defined not just by what we do. We are defined by what we are willing to do without.”  We need to put meat in the middle of the plate of our public discourse.

Melody

What’s changing, so that I can be writing!

This is such a busy time for folks with kids.  We are living the last month or so of school and for whatever reason my kids seem to teeter on the brink of things this year academically, spiritually, emotionally — this has been a challenging and demanding year.  With summer looming, there will be any opportunities to stick our feet in the river and less time to write.

I am thinking about that tension.

I’m starting to work more seriously on writing projects. As I listened hard at the Festival of Faith & Writing  and looked at my writing life and habits, I realize that I need to cut back on some things before I can ever dream of space to write every day.  (I know I have a lot to tell you about that experience, the festival.  We’ve been back a week and there’s been no time!)

Projects that I’m working on:

I am working on a book review of the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer for The Englewood Review of Books and hope to do more of those, both for Englewood and other publications.

I continue to write for Provoketive magazine:  This included a review of  the book Resignation of Eve by Jim Henderson, a piece titled The Accidental Stay-At-Home Mom and others, but by far the most popular essay was The Voice of the Feminine.  That content is not repeated here on my blog  so you will have to pop over to there to read it.  I hope you will.

I am working on a short series of articles on “The F word and the Church.” (Yeah, that F word: feminist.)

I am really excited to hear that I will have some poem in a book about fear titled Not Afraid to be published around August, 2012 by Civitas Press.  (This is the same press that published my essay on Depression in their book Not Alone which is available now. If you know someone who suffers from depression this book may help.  I have been told by many people that it has been a good, honest resource.  I also have many pieces on my blog about my personal trials with the black dog of depression.  They are collected here. )

What I want to change:

One thing that I find to be soul crushing and destructive for me is Facebook.  Being at-home with such great flexibility to my schedule  I see that I allow many things to interfere with the “work” of writing and with spiritual growth.  Facebook is such a time waster for me.  I’m inherently curious, nosy kind of person and the fact that I can vicariously follow along other’s lives is bad for me.  That’s where the soul crushing part comes in.   It’s like high school insecurity all over again.  So I’ve been tempted to quit completely.

Image by JJ Pacres on Flickr

But at the Festival of Faith & Writing I heard over and over that writers must have online presence and following.  We have to nurture that and  be able to “prove” our popularity to a publisher.   But the flip side of that is that it is just not good for me!

If I don’t have time

to think,

to be,

to write and

to allow the Holy One to mold and move me (not really in that order.)

So I’m backing off of social media  for a season — except here.  I’m really going to try to do this moderately.  When I got hooked on Farmville (of all things — proves I can get addicted to anything!) I had to quit cold turkey and I did.  I don’t want to do that with Facebook because I don’t like being an all or nothing person.  But I’m going to try to limit my time there.  And set some writing goals for the next few months.  I look forward to sharing those with you.

Another thing that I learned at the festival was that I need to hone the purpose of my blog.  Mine has multiple messages and intents.  I have been known to write about:

  1. family (dysfunctional and otherwise.)
  2. God and devotion, faith and (dis)belief
  3. women in the church, feminism as a Christian’s option
  4. various justice issues
  5. my alcoholism and addictions
  6. my church – Blackhawk Evangelical Church
  7. poetry on all these topics
  8. prose on all these topics

Is there anything in particular that you come here to read?  Where do you see my passions and strengths converging in helpful ways?  Would you add more of anything?

Grace & Peace. Melody

Today I Said No

Today I said no.

I said no to something that might have been sweet and good, something that I would enjoy and that would make me feel good about myself – helping other people.  It was something that was even noble.  Can I be honest and tell you that I need some things to do that make me feel good about myself?  The recent Stations of the Cross exhibit, which I was a part of, was profound for me in that it was a thing that I did, for me.

Today I said no.

No because there are other good things, needs, jobs for me to do.  And I have to be careful as an addict, to not feed that need to help others.

Things are going on in my family, screaming out to me, which need resolution and clarity and my time.  My children are of the age that they need my daily prayer, daily.  My attention, fully.  My love and affirmations, honestly.  This takes the kind of attention that I haven’t had for them as of yet.  My widowed mother living alone needs more of my attention, care and to be blunt she needs errands accomplished.  My sisters each deserve my love and attention in a way that I haven’t ever had the courage to give them.  My marriage isn’t perfect; it has holes that need patching even though, after eighteen years together, we know it’s for life.  We’re in the boat together but we’ve sprung a few leaks.  No one’s sinking but we deserve to give the time that a good marriage requires.

So, today I said no – no to something good.  So that I could say yes to being a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife and more than anything I said yes to be a writer.

Today I said yes.

Good People (those that toil, so that others can create)

There are people,

good people who toil every day

at work they don’t love and some

days simply endure.

Why do these people, good people do that?

They’re partnered with a creative soul;

a dreamer, someone

who scribbles words one after another, collected into pages

of an idea that is yet to come;

that hears a different drum beat and dance;

who changes others’ trajectory through an image or a song;

who observes  life for its beauty and complexity;

who follows an uncomfortable path into the unknown.

These people, good people do

their everyday work because they love a dreamer.

Here’s to the good people whose love’s labor

is a gift to us all.

 

For Tom and Carol and the other good people.

the middle years (a poem about aging and knowing that you don’t know…much of anything)

The middle years
of middle age come without fair warning.
Raising the young
who think they know everything.
And those of us solidly wedged into midlife know
with confidence, that we know next to nothing.

The middle years are half way to a certain death,
while breathing in a life we did not pick.  For
life happens even as you make plans, dream dreams, and pray.

The middle years
when the body betrays,
the heart is crushed
by what actually happened,
not our plans.
The mind with every strong conviction
is suddenly even more
uncertain.
Oh, for the days of knowing everything!
But then going back there to certainty
would mean doing this
all over again.

Silent for Days, becomes Years

Silent for Days, becomes years
when the Girl Child now Woman is afraid of her own words,
allowing her many fears to overwhelm.
sometimes offering Powerful Utterances
that shape, guide, portend,
sometimes paralyzed.
Deep calls to Deep, inside
the Place Where She is Full, saying
lay down, let go.

Silent for Days, becomes years
when the Girl Child now Woman
knows and comes to love
herself and comes to believe
in the One who Gave His Life for us all.
Still waters, Silent
deep, deep inside
the Girl Child now Woman is daily groping,
hoping not to misstep.  knowing
she holds one, two, three, four
Souls in her sweaty, grasping hands.
she is hopeful and
needing, wanting to nurture and heal.
so much faith, so much potential, so much possibility.

Silent for Days, becomes years
when Girl Child now Woman
lays down her life, lets go
of control,
of results,
of Knowing her Future or
knowing anything at all.
building calluses on her knees, head
bowed, tears flowing, hands
open, heart
free.

the Girl Child now Woman knows
how little she knows.
she lets go.  her heart
bursting from the agony of it,
the birthing of the one, two, three, four lives
put into her hands and
her One Life.
Just ahead, Looms.  Just ahead,
the One who Gave His Life for us all
Asks it of her
and she lets go.

When It Hurts to be called out by God’s Spirit

This now has a part two.  It is found here.

I’ve been uneasy and perturbed.  I am a Slow Learner.  I know that an edgy, even grumpy unsettled spirit inside me usually means that there’s business to attend to and something to be learned.  I am  drawn down into a Place of Reckoning.  I am learning in the place of Love where God begins to change and shape me into Someone Other Than Me.

It usually requires time. And when finally my ego shrinks down to a normal size, I am ready to start.  This time I shakily verbalized it to Tom.

Bless him, my Tom has my rhythms down.  He knows when I need an ear, when I want (need or don’t need) advice, and the instances that I must simply talk (out loud.)  Introverts will know what I mean.  We introverts talk all the time, right?  It is just in our heads, which is sometimes unproductive, unhelpful or unclear.

Gideon was the most unlikely of people to lead the people of Israel and perhaps ironically, his name means “Destroyer,” “Mighty warrior,” or “Feller (of trees).”  His story read in chapters 6 to 8 of the Book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible was not one of a giant faith, in my opinion. Really his faith was immature; he was often testing and always questioning God’s power, before he would act.  He had a “do this for me and I will do x for you” attitude.

That’s me.  I suppose what most convicted me by thinking about Gideon’s story is the obvious ways that I’ve flailed about, unsure and doubting myself every step of the way over the last few years. I have made some messes and done some stupid shit.  Recently (the last two years especially) I’ve been angry and unsatisfied, especially wanting “clarity about my career.”  I have asked for it, even demanding it. [As if God cares, really what I do.  Okay, he cares some but ultimately, this is only measured against who I am and how I treat others. How do I love?  Do I serve the needs of those who are powerless among us? ]

How very ungrateful I have been.

My heart lurches.  I know ingratitude when it sneers at me.

Fact is the Strong Independent Me believes deeply that women should have a job. (Everyone should have a “job” men and women, young people, old people …  I fundamentally believe in the idea that everyone should contribute to the community, everyone is obligated to this.)

It is especially important to me that women have careers and “represent.”   Do you know what I mean?  I live with a lot of guilt, even shame that I don’t have a career right now. Or even simply a job.  Just a job. Any job.

And this is how it goes in my head. Beyond the value to the community, a job earns “Respect.”  Respect would make me feel validated and valuable and valued.  A job where I go to a different place (than my home) and do “things.”  If I am most honest, things that will build me up and help others recognize my value.  Then bring home a paycheck for all the same reasons.

I’m a writer.

I know with certainty that I would write even if I never got paid or published because I have been a writer for as long as I can remember and it is who I am. The same goes for my photography — I live and breathe the pulse of life through a lens.  I put word by word, ideas together as an offering.

But as I toil in relative obscurity, Ego Me leaps out saying that this won’t do.  Who cares if you are an essayist or poet, who cares if you are writing here on this blog if no one knows and applauds? Bingo! That’s the crux.  Validate me world!  Say what you think of me please.

A friend got mad at something I said.  Mad because I said that art is useless.  I know that is not true.  And I don’t even believe it, but the voices in my head tell me otherwise.

That’s crazy, and besides, in God’s framing of things it shouldn’t matter.  I have to know my value is legit no matter what I do. 

And I have (to learn) to believe that creating art is not useless.

And so for now at least, I will write.

And what I felt most convicted about from the sermon this week was my infantile attitude and my lack of gratitude for this life that I have.  Shame on me.   My anxiety comes out of this place.  My fear comes directly from that spigot, gushing, flowing, spilling all over me in ugly incomprehensible ways.

Gideon tested God on more than one occasion.  He never complained, but he didn’t believe.

Do you flail about in an infantile way demanding that God meet all your needs as if you deserve to be happy, fulfilled and useful? 

Have you learned the slow path to contentment and spiritual maturity that involves a way of relaxing into Him, both by trusting and by stepping out into an unknown future looming ahead?

May it be so.

P.S.  As I mentioned, this has a part two.  It is found here.