Old Habits Die Hard

"There's something wanting in me. I see you loving Henry, and understanding him better daily, and I know that death wouldn't part you in the least. But I—Is it some awful, appalling, criminal defect?"

Margaret silenced her. She said: "It is only that people are far more different than is pretended. All over the world men and women are worrying because they cannot develop as they are supposed to develop. Here and there they have the matter out, and it comforts them. Don't fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have: love your child. I do not love children. I am thankful to have none. I can play with their beauty and charm, but that is all—nothing real, not one scrap of what there ought to be. And others—others go farther still, and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end. It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences—eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily grey."

Howard's End. E.M. Forster, page 267.

I hide things under our couches. A few years ago, when the couches had skirts, I hid unassembled, wooden cut outs under the couch. When I first got married, we had a Christmas workshop every year in our neighborhood at the local church. Lured by the finished products of women who can turn ribbon, bottle caps, baling wire, and their grandmother's corset into a chandelier, other unsuspecting women would preorder unassembled, unnailed, unsanded, unpainted pieces of wood to make up into Rudolf, Santa, cherubic pilgrims, a covey of American flags, or possessed-looking rabbits. This we did together in the church hall, sharing Styrofoam dinner plates with dots of paint and birthing stories. I dutifully ordered projects every year. Sometimes I finished; mostly I didn't. The unfinished pieces went under the couch; the finished pieces into some cupboard where they sat, remembered weeks after the appropriate holiday when I caught glimpse of them while I was looking for weed killer. I should throw them out, but, if I do, it's like admitting some kind of failure . . . that I tried this way of life and lost.

Wooden porch figures, pistachio jello salad, marshmallow fluff, tuna noodle casserole. . . I've tried.

I do not believe in the Boys Scouts of America—at all. I don't think it should be part of the church program (unless and until there's an equal organization for young women), and I definitely don't think the church organization should be used as a fundraising organism for this private organization. I'm actually appalled that people visit my house, in their capacity as church workers, to ask for money for the Boys Scouts. I fail to see the connection between an Eagle Scout and the driver's license. I do not believe that not having food storage will prevent me from entering heaven. It will help us when and if Kevin and I both lose our jobs at the same time and the dainty supply of Italian parsley, tomatoes, cilantro and basil from the pot plants (bruschetta anyone?) has run out, and we need another source of food with no cash to pay for it. But I don't know about getting into heaven because of barrels of wheat and powdered milk. (I still might be horribly surprised when I find out that's one of the questions.)

I question why white has become the only color in which one may attend church and participate in the sacrament, and why it is that sister missionaries need to look like nuns. Twenty years later, I still miss sleeveless shirts and strapless dresses. I don't think bikinis are immodest, and think every women, of any shape should feel free to wear one. Most Saturday evenings I sigh, thinking of the next morning. I would like to be cremated and spread over my flower gardens, while the Dixie Chicks sing "I wanna touch the earth, I wanna break it in my hands, I wanna grow something wild and unruly," followed by Queen, "I was born to love you." I couldn't think of greater tombstone than a big old maple growing up through me. . . . All these things are under my couch.

Yet, my sleeves have sleeves, Christian wears white to bless the Sacrament, I buy at the Macey's case lot sale; the first son got his Arrow of Light, the others play soccer, baseball and basketball on Wednesday evenings. I wish I could sing in the choir, but can't read music and can't sing high enough to just sing soprano, and Kevin's gone every Sunday anyway. But I schlep these other things with me. I sense, as Helen did in Howard's End, when she spoke of her inability to form a lasting relationship with a man, "There's something wanting in me. . . . some awful, appalling, criminal defect?"

I've paid lip service in previous posts to the idea that we are all God's creatures; we're all part of the menagerie that makes up his animal kingdom. When I tell that story, in my mind, unarticulated but assumed, is the notion that I am the horse, or the zebra, or the sable antelope. I'm never the warthog, or the anteater or the chameleon. There are times though when I come face to face with the opposite "colour" and I retreat. Last Sunday, by the end of Sunday School, I was quivering, feeling "fight or flight" rising inside me, my little warthog tusks shaking. The initial impulse is to run. Wanted to howl with Bono, "I wanna run." Mostly just run to a space that feels comfortable, where I don't feel out of sorts, where I am enough, where there is space for my cripple-crabbed response to the divine question.

Mostly I want to flee when I come up against a person who knows, with certainty, just exactly what the answers are, and just exactly how life should be lived. The question in Sunday School last week was, "Well, wouldn't you want to avoid all the pain and suffering associated with sin?" Offered, rhetorically, as if the only appropriate answer was, "Yes, of course (idiot)." My response, unexpressed, felt like the wrong response. Like the offering a warthog would bring to the animal banquet—a decaying log loaded with woodworms, fitting to her but appalling to everyone else.

The thing is I just don't know so definitely. Sometimes the only way to know is through, through whatever it is that haunts you, follows you, dogs you. And in the getting through, there is bound to be sorrow, pain, and then knowledge. My favorite article of faith, the one I hang on to, is the ninth: That God has revealed, that He does now reveal, and that He will yet reveal. Things will change. One of my favorite prayers is "Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief." It is a frequent plea. Ideas of which I was so certain, confident, sort of like the shocked "my child will never bite anybody" you utter when the childless you watches a nephew bite down for the first time, are waning. The things I do know I gather, in a smallish basket—stones that shine with a brighter, distilled light: that God knows me, and sends people, ideas, books, music, animals, young children, skies, mountains, water and wind to help me. That I can be sent to help others. That life is most meaningful when I help, when I am part of a community. That God still speaks. That I may try again, if and when I feel so inclined, hopefully sooner than later, but never too late. That at the center there is light and truth which is accessible to us all, and which will embrace and heal.

Some tell stories of their spiritual experiences with a beginning and an end. It's neater that way. Makes things more certain—definite beginning, definite ending, definite meaning. Somehow, I always find myself in the middle, always reshaping, always having to give up and to rethink, constantly paring away at the story I thought I found myself in. If I wrote a journal, the narrative would not actually be narratives at all; rather, personal essays, short, lyrical pieces of experience/emotion/fact/observation surrounded by attempts to make sense of the moment. Less absolute, less certain of universalities. More filled with moments of light that apply only to me, my personal brush with grace and revelation. Instead of the novel I supposed I would be able to draft of the things of which I were certain at the end of my life, I think I might be reduced to a haiku—just seventeen syllables but worth every sound.

So, knowing as little for sure as I do, I am shaken sometimes, when, armed with my little collection of pebbles, one cherry blossom, and a winter leaf, I come face to face with an apparent arsenal of absolute certainty, the entire greenhouse of a spiritual Home Depot as it were. I find myself lacking that attribute, and wondering if my soul, engineered as it is, is sufficient for the exacting devotion that seems to be required by those around me. The very same day I posted "Ready, Ready, Ready to Run," in which I said that I know now why Christian organizations build wells before they teach doctrine, I read a woman's account of paying her tithing in which she stated that she would rather have the living water of Christ than water in her pipes, rather have the bread of the Saviour's body than food on her shelves. On reading that, I remembered what I had written, and gave the deep sigh that normally precedes some serious soul searching. I spent the day wondering where was I that I wanted real water first; that I am wary of either/ors, and that my initial reaction was to wonder why she hadn't approached her family for help, or at least the local congregation. (The bishop's storehouse is always full). At the end of such wondering, I always feel less than enough.

Last year, I came to a spiritual resting place of sorts—a place where I needed a decision about the kind of faith and religious experience I would have, and whether I could have this faith within the collective arms of my church, or on my own. Plainly put, I did not want to feel "not good enough" anymore. I needed to identify the source of that feeling and try to move away from whatever black hole it lived in. But, I knew my reaction could not be to throw the baby out with the bath water, reject the good because of the unpleasant. I took out all kinds of doctrines and beliefs and turned them over, one by one, just like looking through the heap for a good fish at the market. Some I realized I didn't know about. Others I knew with as much certainty as experience had given me. Others were, if truth be told, not yet important to me. I looked at practices, and communal tendencies, trying to separate doctrine and culture. I "sat" for a long while, sitting, thinking, listening. I imagined life with, life without (a hard prospect when I have never known without). I came to certain personal conclusions about the kind of person I would be, about the voices I would listen to and the places I needed to be to be found about my Father's business.

I suppose I came to the same place Margaret did, when she advised her sister, "Develop what you have." Like Margaret's lack of love for children, there are certain things I do not love, that I will never get used to, that rub me the wrong way in this faith in which I worship. (Like I said, I love the ninth article of faith). But this faith has given me things I cannot imagine living without: like knowing we have heavenly parents who watch for us, that my soul is eternal, that this body is for pleasure and pain, that we are allowed to ask questions and answers will be given, that progression and existence is never ending, that joy is the ultimate design of this existence, that the souls of my children and my husband predate me and my involvement in their lives so I must be courteous and kind, that learning to choose well is perhaps the greatest skill I could acquire.

So (I'm not resisting well the literary urge to wrap this up in a conclusion and pull out an obvious moral), I'm learning to live in my space with my leaves, pebbles and blossoms, and allowing the others who file in with me at 9.00 a.m. to bring whomever and whatever they need into their own. It's not easy; not easy to come face to face with those "eternal differences" and not find myself either morally deficient or superior. I'm thinking I need to let the ideas/words/assertions come to me and let them flow over me, like water or good memories, feeling the need, the necessity, the desire, just as fervent as mine, to believe.

Title: Mick Jagger, "Old Habits Die Hard"

A Six-Inch Valley Through the Middle of My Soul

In response to a comment, I am posting this essay I wrote about twenty years ago. Originally titled "Drinking Blue Milk," I have renamed it in keeping with the tradition of this blog.

--for vinestreet--

I have often heard of the chastity lesson with the milk and the ink drop: Sister Smith drips, almost tenderly, the midnight blue ink into the whiteness. The point is, I presume, that the milk is supposed to be ruined. I have never seen it done, but would, I think, probably watch in delight as the blue tendrils curl softly, coaxing the white, joining in gentleness until the glass is filled with pale blue. I know I would do it again at home to see the softness of a new color come to life. I have heard that others use chocolate cake: offering the largest teenage boy a slice of cake, then, instead of using the knife, plunging his hands through the cream and crumbs to offer, as it were, a spoilt offering. I cannot but envy his sensation as his fingers pierce cool cream, then rough, warm crumbs, dark chocolate working its way underneath his nails. I would have asked to do it myself, to be able to feel the texture ooze through my tightening fingers like river mud.

I am the fifth child in our family—a girl, who always wanted to be a boy. Perhaps it was my brothers' fault: I wanted to be like them. I have two of them immediately above me in the family line-up: Jonathan, three years older than I, who was small and asthmatic (no longer). He played the piano and the girl parts in the school plays at his all-boys school. We fought constantly, perhaps because we had nothing in common, but maybe because I was just as big as he was until he hit his growth spurt at 17. I do remember though when we both had chicken pox. It must have been an uneasy truce that day. Mom was gone Visiting Teaching, the sky was pure blue and the breeze blew salt through the house—early summer in the Cape. Suddenly we found ourselves naked at the swimming pool in the back garden, our scrawny white bodies dotted in fiery red pox, jumping off the electricity pole into the deep end. The water felt cool against my skin and we laughed.

On the other hand, Paul is big and brawny with bow legs and crooked teeth. My mother was asked to remove him from nursery school, I think, when he was four: he was teaching the other children to swear. He had a mess of freckles strewn across his round face and report cards filled with comments like "A satisfactory result but Paul is not reaching his potential." His room smelled like rugby boots and mud. He played the recorder and the guitar, crooning "Norwegian Wood" into a tape recorder to send to the mission president's daughter up north, and about the only eligible Mormon girl in the country beside his sisters. Paul left for BYU when he was seventeen, the first of the children to leave. I dreamed I would marry Paul, but he loves Janet Nicole, whom he met in the Reserve Library. When she first saw him, he was wearing Easter grass in his moccasins—he wanted to be a walking Easter basket (as I remember or disremember the story). Janet knew it wouldn't be boring to spend a life with a walking Easter basket, so she married him.

I don't remember when my body started changing. I just know I never wanted to be a girl. I even fought once on the rugby fields of Rondebosch Boys High School with a boy who disbelieved me when I said I was a girl. Secretly, I am thrilled, but I have to defend my honor. So we wrestled until he finally conceded my femininity. I was ten years old. I even went through a phase where at night I prayed to be changed. Come morning, I would sneak my nighty up ever so slowly over my stomach only to be disappointed.

Womanhood came early the next year. It came before I wore a bra, before my first kiss. It came when Harry moved his hand slowly across my chest. He whispered roughly, "Let me show you how I love you." I kept my eyes firmly on my book, trying to pretend he wasn't there, that he wasn't doing what he was doing, that I wasn't feeling what I was feeling. "Touch me," he whispered as we walked between the pillars of the garden gate to the front door. His voice was hoarse. "Please, touch me." I ran, pretending I hadn't heard. I was twelve years old. He was my sister's husband.

It's a strange thing when you're twelve, in seventh grade at an all-girls school, and a man touches you. It's a fascinating, repulsive thing when you're eleven and a man shows you pictures, pulled from beneath the Welsh dresser in a secret drawer, of things you don't know the words for. It's an anxious thing hoping the family won't see when he kisses you hello in an open-mouthed masquerade of familial affection. It's an agonizing thing waiting to see who will take you home after a night of babysitting. It's fear rising inside as your sister asks Harry to drive you home; she's too tired. It's knowing his hand will come over the back of the front seat to find you in the dark where you sit huddled in the corner. Most of all, it's a frightening thing, when at eleven and twelve, your prayers are filled with earnest pleadings that your sister's husband will drown at sea and never, never come back.

I didn't know what else to do. I was twelve years old. He was my sister's husband. He was family. He told me it was a good thing, a beautiful thing. He told me never to tell. I never did. I loved her too much. And so I prayed, and feared, and prayed, and felt my body respond in ways I had never known. I hated my body; it betrayed me. I hated him; he betrayed my sister. I loved him; he was my sister's husband. I felt in some way responsible. If only I hadn't started developing so soon. If only I didn't look back when I was seventeen when I was eleven, eighteen when I was twelve. If only, if only, if only. Eventually, I just learned to block it out. I carried on doing homework, I carried on reading, I carried on (with a few bouts of bulimia in between). What else could I do? I carried on, in silence.

Until one summer twelve years later.

I returned home after two-and-a-half years away, half of that spent in missionary service to find our family reeling and an older sister, numb, spirit deadened. After thirteen years, she had finally had enough. Enough of trying to raise children in a maelstrom of emotion, of trying to remain calm in the face of violent episodes, of trying to placate and reassure a hair trigger. In one long afternoon, Mom and I sat at a kitchen counter making chocolate cakes, and she told me the story. Then, hesitatingly, awkwardly, I told her mine. But it was not only mine. It was my younger sister's story too. He had done the same to her, convincing her it was right because Tessa, her older sister, had done it. In her distraught whisper, Mom said, "I must tell your father."

Perhaps the biggest reason that I never told anyone is because my father loves his children. I thought he would kill Harry if he ever knew. His reaction surprised me.

We walked along the beach front at The Wilderness, an isolated village on the east coast. The air smelled of salt and sand and the ocean mist creeping grey across the horizon. Mom and my youngest sister, Alex, and I had joined my father that weekend in his speaking assignment, about 600 kilometers from home, to a tiny branch of about 11 people. Arriving early after the six hour drive, we drifted to the beach where we had come so many summers before as a young family. I can see myself, brown curls sandstapled to my head, turning hand-sand-sky down the slopes of the dunes to land cold in the ocean. I am older now, the sun has gone down, and Daddy walks ahead of me, his legs still lean, his belly a little bigger, his hair grey. I can hear his words, the words I have feared for so long: "Oh sweetheart, I don't know why the Lord gives us such strong urges. It's hard to control them and so difficult to understand. But we must learn to battle them and to be forgiving." I consciously loved my father more then than I had in years. I wondered at his understanding of human nature. Then I remember he too had had to forgive another's urges so that his life and theirs could heal and go on. With his kind and gentle wisdom born of experience, he gave me the family's permission to feel the peace that I had felt for years. At that moment, for all I knew and had experienced, my episodes with Harry were gone and forgiven.

I had forgiven Harry. To enter the House of the Lord, I had to forgive. But the healing began long before that interview day. I don't think I was the one who consciously chose to heal. Through the silent and divine process of time and faith, the pain was gone, first buried to ease it, then washed away in an understanding born of age and time. My bishop asked me whether there was anything in my conduct relating to my family members that was not in keeping with the Spirit of the Lord. I remember searching the faces in my mind: childish fights with Jonathan, harsh words with Laura, but, more recently, letters of love and support; rocking Alex to sleep; Daddy and I watching Silverado on a rainy Saturday afternoon. From a recess, long unvisited, came shadows of fear and anger and Harry. I hesitated then, and said, "Yes, but it's over now." He must have understood because he said, "I sense no animosity." And he was right. I did not hate Harry then, ten years after the fact, and I don't hate him now.

I realize that what happened, happened. Not much I can do about it now. I had hoped my husband would have been the first to touch me so; but he doesn't condemn me. Sometimes, I wish I hadn't sat through youth classes knowing exactly what the teacher was talking about. I wish, in hindsight, that those very strong feelings and passions had not been stirred in me at such a young and inappropriate age. Often, and still, I wish I had not learned to associate those expressions of love and tenderness with sick men and misguided desires. That association is so hard to undo.

To preserve the normalcy of my life, there is another association I have been loath to make. I do not find it easy to call myself "a survivor of abuse," "a victim." Those are words I see emblazoned across angry T-shirts on the nightly news with Tom Brokaw—applicable to someone else more desperate, more vile, more dirty than I am. Or are they? To realize what happened and accept what I am because of a man's actions stirred a smoldering anger that I don't quite know how to deal with. So, sometimes, I smile, in self-deprecating humor (which is only to leaven my anger) at the thought of being a statistic. In the beginning, I used to cry. To be so violated and so young is so unfair, so unjust, so ungodly. While the understanding of human mistakes and the forgiving came relatively easily, my healing continues still. Mostly, I remove myself.

Before I was married, I did not think very often of what happened so long ago, but when I saw the stretch across the back of the mountain sky, or I saw the swell of the hills green in the spring, or when I felt a hand resting warm in the small of my back, and lips gently brushing my neck, then I remembered, not Harry, but the swells of passion and I had to fight against them. I knew, dangerously well, how to focus my mind on something completely unrelated to the activities of my body. I knew how to turn off the guilt; and how to rationalize, even enjoy in a panic-heightened state, what was happening to me. I needed to do that when I was 12. It was vital in order for me to psychologically survive. And Christ knew, even in my youth, how to succor me so that I could go on. He dimmed my memory and dulled the hate, turning me to acceptance and a hazy understanding of why Harry did what he did. At twelve, I did not consider myself a victim. In fact, I did not regard myself as anything out of the ordinary. For all I knew, I was normal, healthy, passionate.

But I am 26 now, married and a mother, and the legacy lives with me still. However, there is no longer one person who must suffer from this period in my life. In fact, when I was alone, I did not suffer. If I kept control of my life and my passions, I could avoid situations like those of 12 years before. But now, married, I think Kevin and I are both victims of what happened. I use the word victim with trepidation. I don't wish to shift the reasons for our situation onto anybody. But, in my case, I can share the blame. What happened is a dark thread in a rich tapestry, useful perhaps to make lighter colors seem richer in comparison. However, sometimes, it is hard for me to see anything but that one thread. I know I would never have chosen so dark a thread as that fear of intimacy and sexual guilt which Harry brought into my life.

I struggle to know that Kevin really loves me. I convince myself, through some strange logic, that if he loved me, he would not ask me to share myself with him. I struggle to dissociate the sacred acts of husband and wife from the perverted acts of a middle-aged man and a 12-year old girl. I misinterpret Kevin's loving caress as gropings. My mind tells me that Kevin cannot be the same as Harry, but many times, that silent, rigid, young girl is closer to the surface than I realize, waiting and watching with bated breath, trying not to panic as a hand comes closer and closer to her body. These are the things I struggle with.

I entered marriage with Hollywood dreams and third hour allusions to the delights of marriage. We were going to live happily ever after in satin sheets and temple garments. I thought, because Kevin and I were so passionate in our dating, that the same passion would continue in our marriage. I could not have imagined the irrational fear and guilt that accompanied our first nights. I needed more than Calvin Klein lace lingerie to still the sobs and screams welling in my throat. My perplexed new husband could not reconcile the stiff, frightened girl before him on the bed with the demonstrative, passionate woman he had been engaged to. We could not have imagined I would fight him, pushing him away to physically escape what I had mentally escaped before.

Our marriage is not smooth at time because of this. Kevin shrinks from expressing his affection (not a natural posture for him), not wanting to be mistaken for Harry. I retreat behind a barricade of silence, protests of fatigue and mountains of books. (Robert Ludlum is the equivalent of a swear word in our family. I took the Bourne Ultimatum on our honeymoon and finished the book—all 700 plus pages of it. Reading is my way of escaping, of going somewhere else when the intimacy required becomes too much.) We are beginning to talk. The talking helps. Knowing Kevin is trying to understand me helps. But how can you really understand a feeling, a fear so irrational, yet so real unless you have felt it yourself. The revulsion comes in a wave so unexpected that even the sweetest kiss turns instantly rancid in my mouth. The swell of passion that causes me turn my body into his freezes me even as I feel it. The fear and guilt are with me still. Even after bearing a child, I still feel afraid when I try to enjoy my body with my husband or try to enjoy his. Just as I learned to fight the passion, I need to now let it ride, climb on its back, do something, anything to enjoy those moments.

Kevin enjoys me. He loves me passionately. He's a remarkably kind, gentle man who entered marriage with the same passion-filled dreams I did but with the capacity to fulfill them. Unfortunately, he married me, a survivor of abuse. I don't think he regrets the decision. Nothing indicated things would be this way between us, that I would be so crippled. But at times, he struggles to know that I love him, that I find him desirable. Because if I did, I would want to make love to him. But, most days, I don't. I tell him it's nothing personal. He doesn't quite buy that. Round and round we go.

So we struggle through this area of intimacy and withdrawal, which may or may not be different, from the struggles each sexually inexperienced newly-wed couple goes through. I often yearn to love my husband but feel myself incomprehensibly incapable of expression, frozen in some adolescent fear of guilt and complicity. I cannot but help it would be easier for me, for Kevin, for us, had we not had to drink blue milk. While I am not ruined as Sister Smith insisted I was, I am irrevocably changed, different. To give oneself clean and undefiled, naive and inexperienced, eager to participate, must be a fearful, reverent, divine moment free of shadows and fear and guilt. It was a moment I never knew. But I know, I hope, that I can come to know that moment. If there is such a thing as forgiveness and a lighter yoke, then there have to be for us, for Kevin, for me, nights and mornings and lazy summer afternoons of sensual, sexual, divine moments. They are not with us yet. God willing, they will be.

Postscript: Fifteen years after I wrote this, I am thrilled to announce that we have been the blessed participants in many "lazy, summer afternoons." There have also been tricky nights and petulant mornings. But enough "lazy summer afternoons" that we keep coming back for more.

Title from Bruce Springsteen, "I'm on Fire"

Ready, Ready, Ready, Ready to Run

I survived May. And might survive June.

The laptop hard drive is still crashed, along with all my legal files for the last three years, the family photos, and the iTunes of over 1,500 songs. Not to mention the hundreds of Sims characters that died with it—to whom Adam didn’t get to say good bye properly. Apparently, I got it so hot it actually melted. The hard drive itself is in a freezer somewhere, right next to Ted Williams, hoping for a resurrection in a kinder technological time and age. That happened May 1st, an auspicious start to the month, that only went downhill from there.

The Supplemental Reply to the Supplemental Opposition to the Reply to the Opposition to the Motion for Class Certification is being stamped at the San Diego Court house as I write. Every case has been checked twice, every subtle allusion to Defendants’ incompetence and disingenuity has been slightly smiled at many times, every legal premise tied firmly to the extant case with a simile so clear even the thickest judge could draw a favorable comparison.

The water has been restored. Turns out the little swamp to the north of the house that gave us bulrushes so beautiful we could reenact Moses in his little basket boat wasn’t really a natural spring. And the pipe that dripped water wasn’t really just part of the old irrigation system, but actually our water main—which the landscaper cut early on a Friday afternoon. (Did I tell you Provo City doesn’t work on Fridays? Part of the very efficient four-day work week). We’ve gone without toilets before (and discovered that our sewer line runs in an L-shape about 650 yards down the hill), but without water for three days! You can’t fix that with an Albertson’s bag and a shovel. No teeth brushing, no hand washing, no dishes, no laundry (the silver lining?), no cooking water, no showers, no baths, no watering the garden, no fresh water for dogs, cats, birds. By Sunday evening I started to understand why Christian organizations build wells and houses before they teach the message. Somehow a Saviour seems just a little theoretical at the point where you have to walk seven miles to fetch water in a paint can propped on your head. Forget living water, just water will do fine.

The U12 AA Division 2 soccer championship has been won, which required me coaching games about every night of the week for the last week of April and the first week of May, at the same time as Little League started, as the same time as Spring Basketball started, at the same time as All-star Softball started, at the same time as every possible end of school year function and important sporting event: Softball Banquet; National Honor Society banquet; Senior Prom; Senior Dinner Dance; Senior Tribute; Seminary Graduation; Seminary Graduation Talk; mother-in-laws Mother's Day Brunch; Ranger’s soccer tryouts; the dance festival; the third grade Legends of the Corn God play in which Adam played a rock; the fifth grade American Heroes Wax Museum, in which Seth played Colonel Saunders with live chicken in a cage; the New Scouts overnight; the Cub Scouts day camp (not attended—more guilt); the UVU basketball camp; the interminable weekend spring basketball tournaments; the Fathers and Sons camp; the AAU tournament; the beginning of lacrosse. All the while, I was thinking, I have no documents from the past three years; I have no documents from the past three years; I have no documents from the past three years, and our family has ceased to exist in photographic form.

New soccer teams have been found and formed for next season—which all need to be registered for tomorrow, and I still need to figure out how to resize a photo, and track down a birth certificate for a boy whose parents are, apparently, in Denmark.

The oldest child, and only daughter, has graduated from high school. If the pictures showed my ankles that day, you could see a dirt ring where the mud from the pond that leaked oozed over the top of my sandals about thirty minutes before the ceremony started. The curly hair is not a style; it’s a minimal effort, and has, if you could touch it, dirt in it, which only provides more volume. The tears that burst out of me like (no joke—a broken water main) when she walked across the stage were completely spontaneous. I turned to Kevin and sobbed, “I can’t remember her life at all. Did she have a good one?” “Pure Victorian hysteria,” said was the expression on his face.

The Senior All-night party, thrown on the night of graduation, is over. The consequent sinus infection is almost. I had not believed it possible to entertain fifty seventeen- and eighteen-year old boys with five dodge balls and a basketball from midnight until five in the morning. Who knew? Those 3.99, Ben Stiller, dodge balls were the afterthought bought hurriedly at Shopko after the ping pong tables I lined up to deliver to the high school all proved too big to get out of their basements. They’d all been assembled down below and had never seen the light of day. The basketball was dredged up from the back of the car, a remnant from basketball season, and covered up with balls, cones, pinnies and ladders from soccer season. Forget the inflatables, the bingo, the karaoke, the DJ, the hypnotist. The boys played dodge ball for hours across the width of the gym, with a basketball game played blithely in the middle of the killing ground.

The stream through the backyard has been relined with river rocks. (My children DO know how to work!) The hill behind the house is cleared of Chinese Elm and partially planted with perennials and covered with chocolate bark. The others still wait. So far I’ve lost one ruby red gaillardia to unplanting and a few speckled yarrow are looking iffy. But the cone flowers and the sage are doing swell, and I’m sure the transplanted red hot pokers will make a strong comeback next year. (I laugh at the plants in the nursery whose tags say, “Prefers well-drained, evenly moist soil with regular fertilization.” Yeah, don’t we all?) The baby blessing for 60 and the surprise 40th birthday party for my sister with about 100 guests five hours later on the same day came off without a hitch; barely a rain shower.

The sprinkler system is currently being installed. For one brief shining moment that was known as June 6, 2009, the back garden in my own home matched the back garden in my dreams. No more. Now it looks like a giant mole has made its home beneath us. Either that or a really low budget WWI movie is being shot on site. No more irrigating with moving pipe and skirts tucked into my underwear. I’ll miss those mornings, when the water arrives with a rush over the waterfall. My best watering days were on Sundays when I’d run home between meetings to check to see whether it had shown up yet (we’re at the end of the line). If it had, I’d strip off my dress and shoes, and running in underwear and pearl earrings, move sprinklers and watch watering patterns, my feet soaking in the cold water moving across the lawn. I’d return to church, wet around the edges and under my bra, hair dripping mist, smiling—my own communion.

The trek has come and gone, as has the post-trek commemoration a week later. Enough! I haven’t finished that laundry yet, or returned the borrowed tents. I also still haven’t mailed out our Christmas cards or Julia’s graduation announcements. I might do that by the end of the summer. While I’m at it, the Christmas wreath is still under the couch; and as I don’t remember using it this Christmas, I’m thinking it was from last Christmas; but we might have used it as a centerpiece this year; that’s a definite maybe. (It will take me about three minutes to take it downstairs to the wall in the basement that holds the various wreaths. But, last time I was on my knees looking for the remote under that particular couch, I thought, "Aaaagh, is that still under there?" and made no move to take it downstairs. Don't know why I resist so.)

In the very middle of it, I swore off matching socks for the rest of my life. The vow went something like this: “I am not matching socks anymore. From this moment on, I am not matching socks. See that bin right there. You can all go dig in that bin. Matching socks makes me feel very bad about myself. I don’t want to feel bad about myself anymore. “

Three days later, “Mom, I can’t find any socks.” “I told you, I am not matching socks anymore. See that bin right there. You can all go dig in that bin. Matching socks makes me feel very bad about myself. I don’t want to feel bad about myself anymore. “ “But what else do you do all day Mom, except play on the computer.” “I am not matching socks anymore. See that bin right there. You can all go dig in that bin. Matching socks makes me feel very bad about myself. I don’t want to feel bad about myself anymore. “ He’s been wearing the same pair of yellow baseball socks (unwashed) for the last five games. He takes them straight off, sometimes after sleeping the night in them, and pairs them back up so that he knows where they are. It works for us both.

Not to mention, it has rained for three weeks straight. Grey skies; hail on Father’s Day. It feels like Utah has up and moved to Oregon, or London, but with no added benefit of Wimbledon. I'm getting to the point where I pack eggs away in the microwave and my keys in the fridge. As for the six-layer dip that we bought at Costco last week and Seth swears he brought in from the car, I'm afraid to find out where it actually is. We haven't seen it and can't find it. I'm sure we'll smell it pretty soon.

Yet I breathe.

And can I tell you my deepest thought, after all this? I fear I am at the stage in life where my boobs have become a bosom—that broad, table-like shelf, one continuous form, upon which one might rest one’s arms, a baby, or one’s dinner plate. The body part whose configuration forces one to choose either above or below when learning up against a window sill, or a fence, or a counter. The kind of body part that looks good on the front of ship or the front of a hospital matron who walks competently through the dimly lit corridors, clipboard clutched to side of said bosom, said bosom trussed up in a contraption (that comes with its own instruction manual) from Dillards Lingerie department and draped in water-colored silk, with a brooch pinned to the upper left, the first thing one sees as it breaks the air in front of her. “Good morning, I’m Sister Tessa, and this is my bosom.” I don’t mind getting my mother’s hands. They’re earned through months of mornings and afternoons spent pulling weeds and planting. But, my grandmother’s bosom! I already have her Shetland pony legs. Did she have to bequeath me the bosom?


Title: Dixie Chicks, Ready to Run.

'Til You Are Sleeping

Sitting on a bus dressed in quasi-pioneer clothing (half Banana Republic/half J.Jill), surrounded by 48 teenagers in same said clothing, precious bottle of Diet Mountain Dew (bought at the Bear River State Park, Wyoming vending machine with borrowed quarters) clutched in my lap. We had a 5 a.m. start and there are miles to go before we sleep. My bowels are sluggish and not timed to coincide with rest stops. I wonder how they will fare with the longdrop toilets, two per gender for 260 people.

The kids are worried about the 8 miles we get to trek this afternoon pulling handcarts and who will be assigned to which handcart families. I'm worried about how the tennis shoes are going to look with my outfit once I take off the Franco Sarto silver-buttoned sandals and hit the trail. I think I would have been the woman who insisted on taking her piano in the handcart, and her books, and her favorite, bright red shawl with orange poppies embroidered on it. Flour? Pans? What? I might have wandered off to look at the stands of Indian paintbrush. Later, around the fire, Kevin would ask, "Have any of your children seen your mother?" "I don't know Dad. Last I saw, she was rounding a hill, running with wolves." "Well, I guess we can unload the piano."

I'm watching Wyoming go by through the bus window. I'm wondering. First, just why? Second, why did somebody build a luxury hotel with free ice cream and a 31-inch screen in every room (if the billboards are to be believed) in the middle of Wyoming? Third, what does one do in Green River, other than eat at the Arctic Circle? Seems to me if I lived in Wyoming, I couldn't live in a town. The towns spread out beneath the Wyoming sky just reinforce how small and insignificant they really are. I would have to live out, out and away, just me and a home and a barn and fences and pronghorn antelope, beneath a sky that dwarfs any pretensions of grandeur and clouds that lift one's eyes heavenward by their very nature. Where, when the wind blows, you can see it move through the grass like water, echoing the river's face, and the clouds' trace across the sky. Where, when the wind blows, you don't measure its irritation by the sound of the branch banging against the loose rain gutter and the damage it could do to your potted plants, but its power as it moves across the space of your vision into other worlds.

The place we're going is Martin's Cove, a place where Mormon immigrants pulling handcarts into the face of an early winter blizzard were rescued, but not before starvation, exhaustion and death. I've been there before. Six years ago, in exactly the same pioneer outfits, with some of the same kids. So, I know what to expect. It's ground like Gettysburg. Hallowed ground, where lives were given for an ideal, laid down in front of the very rocks and trees I will walk between. I know I will feel those spirits in my bones, as I did at Gettysburg.

But today, I'm not thinking about death and sacrifice, today I'm thinking about rescue. About what it takes to rescue and be rescued; how it's so much easier to rescue those who are dying politely, quietly desperate for your help.

I try to imagine the scene as the forward parties of rescuers who had been travelling from Salt Lake City since October 6^th or 7^th came upon the desperate companies between Devil's Gate and Martin's Cove. These men had been on the trail from Salt Lake City for two weeks, leaving, it's said, their crops in the field, taking their best horses and wagons, racing against time and a startlingly early winter to reach those still walking toward the valley. One man's responsibility was to keep the roads over the mountain passes open by trampling the waist-deep snow with his oxen. Imagine that duty, to keep the roads open at the top of Rocky Mountain passes during blizzards. You don't even get to be the hero riding in on the wagon. You just get to trample snow until you've made a passable road, not knowing whether what you do will be of any effect.

I'm thinking it's best for the rescuers to come upon those waiting to be rescued when they're half frozen, with blackened feet, in a circle of rocks outside Devil's Gate, surrounded by unburied corpses, and trying to survive on four ounces of flour a day in wet clothing and temperatures below zero. You'd get greeted with the kind of humble ceremony and gratitude you'd think fitting. When you're helping, particularly if you're leaving your crops and taking your best horses on a two week slog into early winter, you expect those being rescued to be appropriately humble, grateful, and fittingly destitute. It's a little off putting when they offer opinions about your help, or request the exact manner in which they would like to be rescued, which of course, is not precisely the manner in which you envisioned it, and by their comments, your best efforts are obviously falling short of their expectations.

What if the people needing help (the notion of what help is needed is also up for discussion; sometimes the help given is an attempt to get their lives to look a little more like ours) are like the penguins that need rescuing off the coast of South Africa after oil spills.

Some haphazard, oil tanker goes aground of the Cape of Storms. The tank ruptures and oil spreads through the breeding grounds and rookeries of thousands of penguins that live off the coast, on rocky outcroppings and islands. The penguins get covered in oil. Oil-covered penguins sink in water. So boats rush in, filled with rescuers who scoop up the oil-covered birds, which birds, in turn, bite, and hard.

I remember seeing pictures of oil penguin rescues in the Cape Times, when I was a kid. The rescuers hands and fingers were wrapped in thick tape and bandages, either to ward off against the penguins' beaks, or to cover cuts and bites already inflicted by the birds. It looked like they'd been playing with chainsaws. The penguins were held in a death grip on the cleaning table, and still they turned their heads, Chucky-like (never seen it) to bite the hands cleaning them.

At some point, say after the fifteenth bite maybe, if I were the rescuer, I would be wont to throw my hands up in the air and say, "Alright then, okay then . . . die, sucker . . . just sit in this oil and die." Which response might be marginally okay when it's penguins, except if they're on the endangered species list. (But judging by the colony at Boulders, the penguins are doing fine, Liberian ship captains notwithstanding.) But not such a good approach to take with people—especially people with children whom they drag along with them, to a fourth generation of misery.

As I think about this on the bus, William Faulkner-like stream-of-conscious, I wonder, when is it okay to abandon the rescue? When it gets unpleasant (penguin crap on your shoes); dangerous to limb (penguin beak slashing across your hands); dangerous to life (penguin beak in your eyeball penetrating to your brain)? When those to be rescued don't really want you there? Do you turn around and leave? Can you do that? Abandon ship mid-rescue?

I suppose an easy cut off point is when your tour of duty is up: your one year in Vietnam; your eighteen months in Billings, Montana; your nine months as the fifth-grade teacher at Wasatch School. Even though the need might not yet be met, the artificial finish line gives us a sense we've done our part. But for those rescues with no finite finish, with those that involve the people around you whose need you have noticed and responded to, I'm sensing it has something to do with what/who started you on that rescue; with the impulse that motivated you; with the purpose behind the impulse to rescue. I'm thinking that on one hand it's not okay to stop when the impulse ends. The decision to stop has to be more than just "I'm not feeling it" anymore. After the fifteenth bite, my impulse is to let the sucker drown.

I am reading Freshwater Road this week, about a young "high yellow" woman, Celeste, who leaves Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is going to college in the sixties, for Pineyville, Mississippi to run a voting project to enlist black voters during Freedom Summer. As she stands on the street corner in Jackson handing out voter information sheets to black and white alike during her training, she thinks about her mother who has opted out of the race race by moving to New Mexico where classifications are not as rigid as in Pineyville, Mississippi. She senses her mother's disdain for what she is doing, her incredulity that Celeste would put out for people who would not do likewise:

She shook off thoughts of Wilamena's . . . assumed superiority, as if every kind or giving gesture toward another human being qualified as a favor that had to be reciprocated. Wilamena never got what the gesture did for the person offering—not as something to lord over others, but as an expression of one's humanity. Just like the graduation.

Wilamena couldn't put herself out to attend her own children's graduations from high school, and yet thought it just fine to continue asking them to come to New Mexico. Some people got it and some didn't. There was no blessed community in required reciprocity, but there certainly was in flat-out giving.

There in, perhaps, is an answer. We rescue because we are able. We give because we can and have. We continue until we are no longer able, or no longer needed. How long? Not when authority tells us to stop, but until we don't notice need anymore. In the legal world, if you give somebody notice, you make them aware that an action is starting against them. In my internal world, when I notice, I know I have been called to action. If I notice, like the Good Samaritan, I believe I have been called to rescue by a universe that knows all need. There is some combination of what I can give and what is needed that causes me to notice. Ironically, as I move to fulfill need, in my movement toward and my commitment to, I become more genuine, more filled with compassion, more human; and our community, more blessed.

Title: from Les Miserables, "A Little Fall of Rain."

A Decent Melody

In American society, there are times when a court has to decide what the legislature meant when it drafted a particular law or statute. One of the rules of statutory interpretation or construction requires that every part of a statute be presumed to have some effect, and should not be treated as meaningless unless absolutely necessary. In other words, when reading a statute, the court must read the language to allow all parts of the statute to stand. If a court were to read a statute in a way that a particular provision was superfluous, the reading of that court would most probably be overturned on appeal. Logically, it doesn’t make sense for the legislature to include provision (iii) if the way the statute is applied makes provision (iii) unnecessary.

For example, the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution of Tennessee states that “the General Assembly shall have no power to . . . alter the salary of any office” until the term of that office is over. So, when the Commissioners of Shelby County voted themselves a pay raise while they were still in office, the Tennessee state court got to decide whether they could do that. The court looked to the Sixth Amendment, and, reading the language, decided that, if they allowed the Commissioners to change their own salaries while they were in office, the introductory phrase of the statute would be unnecessary i.e., the General Assembly shall have no power, was superfluous. The only way to make sense of the whole statute was to actually give the General Assembly no power. So, the court held that the Shelby County Commissioners acted in violation of the Tennessee Constitution when they gave themselves a pay raise.

This rule of statutory construction has been on my mind lately. Not as it relates to reading statutes, but as it relates to trying to make sense of the triumvirate of divine mandate, prophetic counsel and a personal inspiration available through the Holy Ghost or Spirit. Seems to me that many of us live using only two of the three. It’s safer that way; less room for error. Which one of the holy three is superfluous? Individual spiritual discernment.

I remember reading a fridge magnet about twenty years ago. The language on it boggled me. Sort of still does. It read: “When the prophet speaks, the discussion’s over.” I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that believing that God speaks to a prophet and provides guidance and counsel through him requires the cessation of all discussion. I still can’t.

The application of the prophetic utterance is, I believe, my jurisdiction. That’s where I take the counsel, consider the underlying commandment, and contemplate the most appropriate way to live that in my life and the life of my family. That “application sphere” is where I practice becoming an agent. Problem is that in becoming that agent I could make the “wrong” decision. By that I mean a decision that might, at worst, lead to pain, heartache, or, invariably, just messiness and ambiguity. (A decision is not wrong just because my application of it looks different than another’s.) To eliminate the potential pain and to live as “clutter free” as possible, it’s tempting to live only according to prescribed formulas (preferably published by Deseret Book, because it makes them all the more righter). Where do we find these formulas? Sometimes, we just make them up.

In our religious culture, the interpretation of direction/counsel tends to morph beyond principle into dogmatic prescription. Counsel, provided initially in principle form, mutates into rigid steps on how to live (with a plaque/locket/charm to commemorate them). Not that the giver expects such lock-step adherence; it’s the hearer’s reluctance to be found wrong or out of line that creates a need for prescription, for lists, and for turning to authority on how to live.

Take green tea for example. (I chose this because I just encountered two diametrically opposed viewpoints on it. Both believers convinced.) Can we or can we not drink it? The thought never crossed my mind and I really have no idea. But my trainer’s convinced it’s verboten, and an other friend swears, uneasily, by it. So she's going to her local leader for permission. I'm thinking that if you’re coming to your leader to determine whether you can do something, then something’s amiss. That fact that we feel to ask means that somewhere in that internal mechanism which measures our ethical temperature drinking green tea feels slightly out of line. But we want to drink it; it helps us lose weight. So, to reduce the internal discomfort, the nagging fear we might be doing something wrong, we seek confirmation outside of ourselves on a position that actually runs contrary to our internal promptings. In essence, we seek to make our gift of spiritual discernment superfluous. We turn over to our leaders the responsibility for our actions.

Never are we a happier people than when we are told exactly what to do, because then we couldn’t possibly go wrong. Rather than deciding what a principle means to us and finding the way to live it that sits well, we turn elsewhere: back issues of the Millennial Star, obscure treatises published by who knows which press, our local church authority. Yes, there is a security that is found in specifically following prescribed ways of living. One never really has to consider whether that way is right, wrong, appropriate for the situation, or optional. One doesn’t have to question one’s position. If things go wrong, we are safe from the self-reflection that normally accompanies mistake, error or reversals of fortune. After all, we were following the counsel of our leaders. The danger in this approach is that that we learn to trust only authority outside of ourselves, and we develop very little personal capacity to reach our own decisions, to practice the necessary art of choosing and deciding when there is no clearly defined way.

For me, this method of decision-making violates the rule of statutory construction. This particular world view makes the gift of the Holy Ghost as a tool for decision-making superfluous. Of what use is the gift of the Holy Ghost, if we're asking others how to live our life? Did God give us a party favor? Sort of like a “Thank you for coming, here’s a treat for the ride home.” Where is the growth, the emotional, intellectual and spiritual confidence that must naturally come by wrestling through life’s choices and decisions and coming to stand, however uncertainly at first, within the circle of your own conclusions and decisions? If I don’t do that, how can I be the agent I am designed to be, how can I bring about that good of my own free will and choice? If the answer is always to be found somewhere else outside of myself, how do I develop the self-sufficiency, the self-reliance to make decisions for which I stand fully accountable? In order for the gospel to have any internal consistency, I have to believe that I have been given what I need in order to make informed decisions: a mind, a scriptural base, inspired counsel and the discerning power of the Holy Spirit that is mine and mine alone to listen to. I must use all four of those components in order to reach an authentic, responsible position.

Here's a position I have reached recently. After the vigorous discussion following the post concerning my sister-in-law, I’ve done some thinking and reached some conclusions about the counsel to marry the right person, in the right place, by the right authority. I might not end up in the same place you do, but I have found a place for me to stand, my “decent melody, [the] song that I can sing in my own company.” Here’s how I reached my conclusion-for-now.

The initial, grounding commandment is to multiply and replenish the earth. Is the commandment to multiply and replenish the earth qualified by the “in the right place” counsel? If so, then should one only marry when one has the opportunity to marry in the “right place” or “the right person”? Essentially the question becomes, which holds more power: the first commandment given to our first parents: “multiply and replenish the earth, that you might have joy in your posterity” or the counsel given centuries later, “in the right place, by the right authority, to the right person.” (For some of us, this question never arises, because our life facts are different. But for others, it is the crucible in which faith is tested. Each of us has a question like this, one in which we face the hard edges of our realities.)

What happens then when you live in South Africa, and there is no “right place” for thousands of miles? Do you not marry, even though you might be marrying somebody of the same faith? Of course not. You marry and then save up for the trip to London, even if it takes ten years or it never happens. This application of the right place counsel seems to suggest then that the right place initially, for some, is not always within the temple. That a Rwandan right starting place, given the situation, will be different from the right starting place of another.

Or what happens if you never have the opportunity because you’ve never been invited to marry by the right person i.e., somebody of the same faith? Are you barred from marrying at all? Does the fact that there are no men of the same faith who find you attractive and have asked you to marry them bar you from experiencing the sweet fruits of marriage? Is it really God’s will that a woman is barred, in this life, from the experience of loving a man, of making love, of bearing children, of feeling the child turn in her womb, of teaching and raising children, of working side by side with her husband to fashion a home, a family and a life because a particular kind of man didn’t ask her.

When push comes to shove, I’m not sure I believe in a God who says, “Yes, because of the cultural anomaly which has developed in western civilization where marriage is dependent, not upon family ties and contracts (which used to ensure that just about every woman but those destined for the convent married), but upon men asking and women waiting, women who are not asked by “the right person” do not get to experience marriage in this life.” I just can’t believe in that kind of Father. The Father I prefer to believe in, and I fully concede I might be creating God in my own favorable image, is one who provides the possibility of “the right time, right place, right authority” to all those souls who seek it.

As I think through this, my mind starts to realize that perhaps some interpretations of the meaning of “in the right place, at the right time, by the right authority” are far more circumscribed than the Lord intended it to be. That in our determination to have very clear rules about marriage so that we are taught it correctly, teach it correctly and apply it correctly, we have narrowed beyond divine intent the meaning of his words. Some have created a marriage construct that allows for no deviation, for no alternatives. There can be only one way of approaching marriage; only one way to start; and no other way to get to that right place and authority. (I ache for those with this worldview who find themselves before the unexpected, completely different altar, offering up their fondest desire in order to stay consistent with their beliefs. I only hope it’s a sacrifice God really requires.)

For me, when it comes to the application of principles, the only Christian response is one which starts with “as for me and my house” and which allows all others the same privilege to decide and live how, where or what they may. Can it possibly be that an answer to this, and any other question including green tea, is yes for some, no for others, doesn’t matter for whoever is left over? How can that be? For the same reason that Nephi slew Laban, and Martha cooked while Mary listened. The spirit’s way is a mysterious and personal one. It’s a way which I must come to recognize and trust in my life.

What’s the danger in this approach? Institutionally—that there are many different versions of righteous living, and facing that variety gives some heartburn and leads to interesting conversations with children around the kitchen counter. It requires individuals to stand more fully grounded in the reasons for why they live as they do when others don’t. Personally—that there will be times when I flail around a bit, when my life is not so graceful, when months and years look like rehearsals, instead of the grand performance. I might get it wrong. Perhaps because I desire something so much I cannot see the way clearly. Perhaps because I search and think through with a desired end in mind, instead of an open heart and an open mind. Perhaps because I am listening not to spirit, but to ego, pride or fear.

No matter. Getting it wrong, being clumsy is to be expected as I learn how to make good applications--not right, just good. For the privilege of becoming good and of using all the faculties I have been given, I am willing to stand corrected, in a new place, and begin again the process of finding my way.

(Title: from U2, Stuck in a Moment)

The First Cut

When I was twelve I learned the meaning of despair. It was the Christmas holidays--a six-week stretch of summer days we filled with beaches, movies, and selecting two rand Christmas gifts for the nine members of our family. The closest shopping center was two suburbs away, about two miles, along the Main Road, in Claremont. We walked there and back. It took about half and hour at a brisk pace, weaving in and out of oak trees planted in British rows next to the pavement.

One afternoon I set off for Claremont alone. I'm not sure where Kim was, my other part. But no matter. I liked walking alone. I conjured up the lives of the people who lived in the houses I walked by. I wondered who put the shawl in the window, who drank all the beer in the bottles piled outside a gate, and why in the world would anybody own a Pekingese.

The walk that day took me past Newlands Cricket Club, where I caught a glimpse of the pitch as I went by the ticket turnstile. Suddenly, just as I started my hands running against the bars of the wrought iron fence, I stopped dead in my tracks. I couldn't move. I felt as if somebody had tied my insides to a stick and was slowly turning them, like I had seen Indian dyers doing to sheets of cotton streaked with indigo. Twisting, turning, wrapping my intestines round and round until all I could do was breathe. I sank to the ground, leaned against the bars, gripped them with my hands and squatted there under the trees. ( I would later become very familiar with but never accustomed to menstrual cramping, but this was my first severe attack.)

I waited for the pain to pass. It didn't. I made myself walk ten steps before sinking to the ground. I started to pray, to plead, to beg to anybody who would listen or could hear. To my mother whom I knew was at home, to the people driving by in the street not twenty feet away, to God who could pluck me up and transport me home if He really wanted to. I must not have been desperate enough. My mother never came. She didn't hear my cries as I was sure she would. Every moment of those two hours it took me to creep my way home I expected our red-and-white VW bus to pull up to the curb, with my mother rushing out, saying, "My darling, I heard you. I knew you needed me. I'm here." Even God didn't seem to see me, bent over double, hanging on fences and walls, as I tried so very hard not to cry out loud. All I wanted was the pain to subside so that I could run home. That didn't seem very much to ask. I held my breath after every wave, waiting for a longer break, for some sign that He had noticed me. But the pain continued to come, a relentless assault.

That was the first time in my memory I made bargains with God, bargains I fully intended to keep, and bargains that apparently fell on divinely deaf ears. It's been thirty years. I still remember the bewilderment as plea after plea floated uselessly heavenward. I couldn't quite believe He had acted so callously. I knew that if I had had a child, I could not have left her alone to suffer so. I carried the betrayal around with me for weeks, like a bruise in the center of me. What hurt most was the thin ribbon of hope that sustained me after every cramp/prayer combination, that perhaps that prayer was fervent enough, maybe this one was offered with enough faith to cause Him to turn His gaze my direction. Post-episode, I felt embarrassed, almost shamed at my neediness, at believing, so hopefully, that if only I prayed properly, He would come.Inevitably, I thought I was somehow less loved, less worthy.

It's a lonely place to sit in. That place where you meet the real God, not the fairy tale version. The God who does not come in on the white horse, charging to your rescue. The God who does not heal you, make it stop for you or work a miracle, delivering seagulls and parted seas on cue. The God who is not the heart of it all, moving pieces and parts to His pleasure, and whom we curse then abandon when things don't work out. The God who appears to forget His side of bargain that we've, unilaterally, made with Him. That place where you slowly realize that because he is God, He does not always act or intervene or even warn.

It's a terrible realization, arriving generally after significant pain, and at a significant price. A daughter is molested by a family member. A father backs his truck down the driveway and runs over his son, killing him. Parents are left with a shell of a child after a doctor infects the newborn with a virus that attacks her brain. A wife, faithful and true, is left by her husband after decades of marriage for a younger woman. A son is killed in war. Another son returns, maimed physically and mentally. Yet another survives unscathed. A bus driver over corrects and destroys a school bus filled with children. A single woman yearns desperately for marriage; a childless couple desperately for a pregnancy. A woman ends her own unwanted one. A child is born apparently defect. Hundreds of thousands of children die of starvation in the horn of Africa, while the U.S. government pays farmers not to plant corn. A young father contracts cancer and dies a protracted, painful death. A mine shaft collapses trapping miners underground, and collapses again, killing the rescuers. Or a young girl, hardly out of puberty, crouches, wracked with pain, on a busy public street.

Hardly seems fair. Hardly seems right. Seems completely within His power to change; and if not to change, at least to hint; maybe even just the slightest cough behind His powerful hand or a breath of whispered warning.

I read a powerful book about a month ago: The Judas Field, by Howard Bahr. (I'm working my way through his series of Civil War novels.) Bahr described, more truthfully than most things I have read, the proper place of God and his connection to our human existence. This particular novel follows the journey of three Civil War veterans who return to a battle site twenty years after the war, accompanying a childhood friend suffering from cancer, who is gripped by a desire to unearth the bodies of her father and her brother who died at Franklin and bring them home. As the veterans wander through the battlefields--both real and remembered, they try to make sense of the carnage and waste war requires. Included in their reverie was a question asked of God: "Where were you?"

"Well, where was He?" asked Lucian [an orphan newly conscripted to the company].

"He was there," said Roger [a piano teacher ill-suited for war]. "He was there all along, watching and grieving. If we live, I will take you over the next field myself, and maybe you will learn what you can only learn the hard way: that God is there with you, and whatever sorrow you are feeling--well, how infinite must the sorrow be in His heart? It is the only way. Once a man decides that God planned all this, once he points to God as responsible, then his faith is gone. No mortal can bear that, no matter what he says. We have lost pretty much everything, but faith we cannot lose. That is why we pray, and fervently--but not for preservation, mind. That article is left to you and your pards, not to God. To ask Him for it, and be spared when so many are not, will only doom your faith.

"What do you ask for then?" said the boy.

Roger pulled the quilt around his shoulders. "To be forgiven," he said.

After the battle, Lucian, the orphan who has joined the company, wanders, dazed and deafened through the battlefield:

Lucian knew Cass [self-appointed, reluctant guardian of both Roger and Lucian] spoke to him, but he was still deaf and couldn't hear his voice, only felt it. He couldn't hear, but he could see, and he could smell the odor that hung over the battlefield as if the earth itself were bleeding. . . .what Lucian beheld by [the illumination of the torches] was more terrible than anything old Pelt [the preacher at the orphanage] had ever told of hell. He remembered how the little ones of the orphanage had listened to old Pelt. They cowered and were silent, and later in their dreams they saw once more the torn and blistered souls consumed in flame, burned and swollen to bursting, only to be made whole again, to burn again. Still that was only imagination. Now, at Franklin, the boy . . . had come to that place old Pelt had spoken of, and he knew [Roger] was right: God, if he loved as He was said to love, could not be blamed for this, could not have planned this back when planets were still being flung across the sky. Something else--vanity, madness, illusion, he would never know--had risen from the Will of Man and laid all this under the moon. God grieved among them, as bent and helpless and alone as any, while each prayer of the dying pierced Him like a nail. God suffered more than any, for He had seen this countless times before and knew He would see it again and again, and the hammer would ring again and again. God was greater than them all and must suffer more than any, and suffer for them all.

In the closing moments of the book, Cass, the sole surviving soldier stands in the cemetery at the grave of his adopted son Lucian, watching a cat play death games with a mole who has surfaced, unluckily, in just the wrong spot:

In spite of all he had seen, Cass still believed in the fundamental decency of cats and men. He knew that God believed in it, too, in spite of all He'd seen--in spite of all His grieving and all the lies told about Him down the bloody ages. He was God after all, and had made all creatures, and He had taken the noble chance of granting to one of them a will of its own, and in the end, the gift had been worth all the trouble. Maybe the right to choose was the best gift of all and the best proof of love. It was more precious even than life itself, for without the possibility of defeat, the victories would have no meaning.

The realization that God does not always deliver us from evil, while costly, is perhaps the most liberating of all realizations. Why? Because then it's not all His fault. It's my fault. It's my neighbor's fault. It actually is, despite my protestations about the system, my child's fault. It's a random universe. It's Matthew's rain that falls on the just and the unjust. It's Job's trouble and sparks flying upward. It's the shadow cast by other's self-absorbed choices. It's the evil, vanity, and selfish will that can rise up in all of us and wreak havoc--loud, bloody destruction or quiet, multi-generational, rippling havoc.

The price of this realization requires me to give up my notions that God controls my world; that He sat idly by, blithely playing the fiddle while my world burned. It requires me to place myself fully centered in my own life, responsible for my acts and reacts. It forces me to abandon my anger that God didn't intervene. It does not allow me to abandon Him in a pique of self-preservation or indignation. Now, there is no reason--unless one can fault Him for the gift that allows us all to become, in all our terrifying, glorious forms. Because I know this, now I must ask the right questions. Not, where were you? Or, how could you? But, what have I done? What can I do? How can I help?

(Title: Rod Steward, The First Cut is the Deepest)

Dreams in the Mist

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope,
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
--T.S. Eliot

We have a sign hanging above our kitchen door that we can see every time we leave the house--if we look up. I got it from the Art Co-op on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado one Thanksgiving weekend. It's a bronze sheet with the words of Thoreau cut out of the metal: "Live the life you've imagined." I bought it as a gift for Kevin. He unwrapped it that Christmas morning, and I promptly commandeered it. I wanted our family to have a mantra of sorts, to help us imagine something more, to give our kids a doorway to a dream or an imagining entirely theirs. (In my dreams, when Christian opens on Broadway or Madison Square Garden, he will thank me by making reference to the sign that hung above the mustard-colored kitchen door.)

I imagine lots of things. I imagine that the exercise balls at the gym have feelings. I imagine that when they see my rear end coming down on them, they try to move out of the way. Sometimes I start laughing so hard at the thought of what the balls must think/see that I can't stay centered enough to do my crunches. Sometimes I think my car talks to me, especially when Kevin's driving and he forgets that my engine has about twenty three more cylinders than his sensible European model and he doesn't need to gun it off the stop. I can't drive by a line of poplars that are the only indication of a now-crumbled irrigation canal without wondering about the people who planted them.

And if poplars and cottonwoods get me going, you should see what explodes in my mind when we happen upon a long abandoned homestead, with a still proud brick home trying its golden vain best to remain upright against a backdrop of tumbled silver barns, corrals and winter cheat grass. Julia and Christian will hear my sharply drawn breath and say, in mocking unison before I can give voice to the words, "Oh, just imagine . . . just imagine." They've heard it so often, they have the rise and fall down pat.

I used the exact phrase last night. I picked Christian (15-years old) up from his night out, and we were waiting in the drive through line at Wendy's for our mother-and-son midnight junior bacon cheeseburger, when he said, "I was born in the wrong era." "When should you have been born?" "Oh sometime in the Middle Ages, so that I could do heroic things with horses and lances and ladies in towers." "Oh, could you imagine what your teeth would have been like. . . . the snaggletooth hero. . . just imagine." I start laughing; he starts groaning. Our almost-joke is that he will still be wearing his braces about the time he earns his Eagle Scout which will be around the same time he finally gets his driver's license just after he graduates from college, which college might be ITT Tech, because not only does he imagine he wears his rubber bands, he also imagines he hands in his homework.

The problem with imagination is that it can be more powerful, more influential, and a whole lot more satisfying than what is right in front of us. We live, many of us, in an imagined world, upon which the real world sometimes intrudes. The strongest pull of the imagination is that which involves our notions of ourselves: who we are, what being "Tessa" means, in my case; what actions, behaviours and attitudes are consistent with my imagined self; what life situations are acceptable, and which are not.

Most of us have definite notions of what being ourselves means. For example, I don't dance in public--ever; Santiagos bring honor to the family name; Meyers forge their own path; our family volunteers; I come from a long line of married people; I am an athlete; I am not the kind of woman who gets manicures; I am the kind of man who provides for his family. Whatever our definition of self is, we act accordingly because we have imagined ourselves in those spaces and places and know what to do. Things get interesting when life presents us with situations in which we have never imagined ourselves, in which our imagined self crashes into what actually is, and there are only pieces left to pick up.

I have been watching the disintegration of a marriage in our neighborhood. For years, a man has been at a crossroads. His wife wants a different life: she doesn't want to compromise anymore; she wants a straighter, more committed way. She wants a more truthful road. She wanted it with him--initially. He has been invited, cajoled, and given options, opportunities to make different choices, chances to change and to create together a new vision. But he won't do anything at all. He is frozen by the idea that this, this reassessment of what his relationship is with his wife, is happening to HIM. He cannot conceive that he could possibly be part of a marriage that is troubled. Therefore, in his mind, he is not. The problem is, of course, entirely hers.

He is angry that the wife that he thought he knew is acting in a way that he could not have envisioned, that she morphed without his permission. He is shamed that, on this particular occasion, he is the one to be found lacking. He cannot get passed the idea that this is actually happening, and worse, that it is happening to him. In his strutting and posturing and indignation, he has missed completely the opportunities for reconciliation, for change, the chances to make anew. He does not yet have the emotional humility to let go of his image of what his life was (never mind that it might never have been that at all), which imagining threatens to undo what and where he actually is--which is at the crossroads with the chance to choose anew, to start again.

The image that comes to mind as I think about the husband's reaction to the changes in his life is that of a wild animal, say a wildebeest, who has found himself trapped in the corner of game preserve where the rivers have run dry, the veld is overgrazed and the rainy season is still a long way off. He's being moved to another part of the preserve, where a watering hole is filled with water all year long, and the grass grows long and green. Only he doesn't know that. So as the wardens load him up into the trailer, he's kicking and snorting and hyperventilating. He injures himself in the loading process. He continues to kick and bellow, until the doors open and he sees before him a grassland lush and thick. But, it's not the territory he knows, the one he's familiar with, and so, he remains, backside pushed up against the back of the trailer, head thrashing, hooves flailing, stubbornly refusing to come out. Chances are when he finally emerges from his self-confinement, he will attempt, beyond logic, to return to familiar, barren ground.

His struggle, and ours, is to be brave enough to box and shelve our imagined self and life (perhaps donate it to the Salvation Army for somebody else to try on). We must live in what is actually before us. One of the most limiting beliefs is that there is no way other than the one we have imagined. We have visualized, time and time again, the future, including a particular path, or a way of living, or a notion of ourselves, our partners, our marriages, our children. This visualization becomes our way. We work towards it; we plan for it; in many ways, we bank on it. Then when the real is not the dreamed, we struggle because we have conceived of no other way. If what is happening to us is not as we have imagined does that mean that what is happening is not good, or will not ultimately become good? If we could stop the comparison to the imagined, would the now be so disappointing, so unendurable?

I had one of those moments in church this morning. (It's a small moment, I admit. It doesn't involve divorce, adultery, loneliness, death, poverty, or loss of faith, at least not yet. But it's still my imagined life pushing against the real). I sit by myself with our four children; Kevin's up in front, facing the congregation. Christian spent the last part of the service, including the closing hymn with his head tipped over the back of the pew, his jacket hood pulled up over his face, unibomber style. During the second verse, he broke from the pose to sucker punch Adam in the gut. Adam promptly doubled over, looking at me with stricken eyes, but as he didn't look up again or make a sound, just remained doubled-over and we were on opposite ends of the pew, I didn't know whether he was for real or not.

I felt the big sigh rising up from the pit, escaping through my shoulders. I sat there thinking, "Why is it that I have to do this on my own? When do I get to sit next to Kevin, thigh to thigh, shoulder to shoulder, enjoying whispered asides, passing written questions and responses to each other. Why am I the lucky winner of eleven years and counting of religious single parenting?"

I caught myself in the act of that thought; stopped myself as soon as I heard the multiple I's, and the plaintive creation of an ideal that served no other purpose than to make me feel worse. I considered the actual: Julia to my left, her arm across my shoulders so that she can tell me more about prom without drawing too much attention; Christian (prior to sucker punch) entertaining Adam with drawn cartoon adventures of the three brothers, clad in underwear and capes; Julia's fingers entwined in Seth's hair; Seth's quiet voice carefully picking out the tunes. Every Sunday I am like a nursing mother dog in the center of a brawl of puppies, my lap their basket. Two weeks ago, my body became the bed across which Adam sprawled on Easter Sunday, cadaver-like; he lay so still I noticed, and wondered if he might actually be listening to the choir. As they finished, his hands moved outward like he was signaling a touchdown, then he brought them slowly down again. He turned to me and said, "Oh . . . that was so good, I just wanted to clap. . . wierd."

This is my real, my actual, perhaps not the thigh to thigh warmth I have imagined, but good and sweet . . . which goodness and sweetness I can taste if I turn from the imaginary to the world actually before me.


(Title: from Heart, These Dreams) (Alternate Title: Maze of Imagination, from U2, Beautiful Day, one of my favorite songs)