Take Yourself Out of Your Mind

There are certain things I just can’t do. 1) I can’t fake tan. I tried once, about 25 years ago when I was an undergrad in college. I went to Electric Beach, and stood in front of the tanning bed, just shaking my head. The entire time I was lying there, I was thinking, “What on earth am I doing? What has come over me?” 2) I can’t drive a mini-van. When it came time to get a second car, back in 1998, when we only had 2 kids, I tried. I really tried to drive a mini-van. We test drove every version on the market. Not even the apple-red Town and Country with leather seats could stop the tears. “Please Kev, don’t make me drive a mini-van. Please. Please. I just can’t do it.” 3) I can hardly wear lingerie—at least not without protest, huffing, puffing and adjusting, and whining, “This is so ridiculous. Who on earth designed this thing? There’s no bottom to it.” At which point I rip it off, and, standing naked and utterly floppy, breathe a sigh of relief, “Whew, that’s better.”

Lately, I’ve taken to wearing really bright colors. They make me happy. They make Kevin shake his head and smile. Sometimes he even laughs out loud. My church outfit yesterday was a burnt gold sweater; an orange, purple, hunter green, brown and yellow plaid tulip skirt; gold stockings, and brown and tan Poetic License shoes with a brown and purple rosette on the toe, finished off with a gold tassel. If I had a piccolo, all the children would have followed me down the aisle, out the doors and into the East Union Canal.

I don’t know why I can wear the United Colors of J.Crew, Anthropologie, and Benetton all in one day, but not the turquoise bustier. It’s just part of the picture of me I carry in my head. Somehow tans from electrical sources, mini-vans no matter how grand, and turquoise bustiers are not part of my definition of myself. They’re not how I see me playing out in my head.

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It’s no mistake that John came, wild and woolly out of the wilderness, crying “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” I don’t think John meant for the Jews to turn from sin. I’m sure there were your garden varieties of usury, adultery, hypocrisy and prideful neglect going on in the shadow of every synagogue. But, that’s small change compared to the change John asked of the Jews. He wanted them to change the way they thought, the dreams they dreamed. He wanted them to demolish the very form of the Messiah on which they had pinned their hopes. Only with a changed mind could they actually “see” this Jesus, who looked, for all they knew, exactly like “Joseph’s son.”

The Greek root of the word “repentance” denotes a change of mind. Given this etymology, at the heart of all repentance is the work of changing what’s in our head. It’s about putting in new ideas about God, about ourselves and about the outside world. Paul says it this way: “Be ye not conformed to the world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Ryan Bingham told me this morning to “take yourself out of your mind, away from everything [you] say you are.” It’s different words for the same idea. The change we seek starts with a repentant mind, dismantling the ideas and visions that prevent us from experiencing the truth of the life before us.

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Perhaps the hardest idea I have ever had to repent of or rewire (if the word repent makes you feel too guilty) was my ideas about and reactions towards marital intimacy. That’s a cryptic way of saying, I came with baggage. It wasn’t like the first time between Kevin and I was a tabula rasa. How could it have been, if you grew to physical maturity the way I did.

In my head was a swirl of experiences, doctrines, faulty wirings, protection mechanisms, and object lessons. On the one hand, I had been taught, beginning when I was very young that “Sex before marriage is wrong.” Sex, in this case, meant any kind of touching that went beyond the one-piece bathing suit we were allowed at the time. If you did have sex, you were spoiled goods. On the other, very deviant hand, I had a brother-in-law who hadn’t heard about the bathing suit rule; nor the social taboo of taking sexual advantage of your family members. So, as a young girl, I learned to stay very, very still and not make a sound. On one level, I didn’t want this to be happening to me, but on another, my body seemed to want what my mind and heart said was so very wrong. I learned to distrust those physical feelings. I became afraid of that swelling of passion that welled up so naturally in my very young body.

A few years later, I experienced, with a giddy sweetness, teenage first love: holding hands, kissing, staying out late, leaning against fence posts and walking on walls at midnight. Young, lithe bodies, completely unaware of what it was we could be leading to, always a little breathless, always watching the clock. And always a “no, not there” ready as a response in case the hands wandered too low.

It’s a hard mental jump from “no, no, no” for twenty-four years to “yes, yes, yes.” For some women, especially those of us who’ve put protections in place, it’s not a jump we make easily. It can take years. The wires are set deep. A friend of mine’s daughter spent part of her very beautiful wedding reception in tears because she knew that as soon as it was over, she would be getting in the car with her new husband and then they would be having sex. Whatever that meant!

I had a hard time getting over the habit I had learned of becoming very still and quiet, of almost watching myself from outside of my body. I didn’t know how to ride the passion. Whenever I felt it take me, I clamped down tight, remaining completely and utterly under control. I couldn’t divorce myself from the idea that wanting sex was somehow wrong. Enjoying sex without a hard pit forming in my throat was almost impossible. I had to be either really sleepy or really on vacation—moments in which my brain turned off. The thoughts in my head were more powerful than the feelings within.

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How do you put a new script in place? How to accept a Messiah who heals on the Sabbath and raises people from the dead? Instead of gathering up armies, he says he has come to “heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, . . . to set at liberty them that are bruised.” When you have thought for so long that when the Messiah came, he would liberate you from your Roman invaders, how do you root out that idea and replace it with the notion that He comes to liberate you from your worst self? Even if you really want to believe, even if you’re standing on the banks of the river, toeing at the mud and testing the water, how do you stop the thought, which comes unbidden, as if by rote, “Oh . . . that’s just Joseph’s boy.”

I read a romance novel. You have to know that’s another one of those things that’s not part of my self-definition—me, the feminist, career-woman, weight-lifting, no hairstyling or homemaking skills person who wishes she grew up on a farm and could ride horses at a full gallop. I don’t read romance novels. Or at least never confess in public to reading them.

But one day, about eighteen years in, I was at the library prowling through the stacks. I must have taken a wrong turn and ended up in the Romance section, which merges with the Mystery shelves. On one of the display shelves, there’s this book, some kind of historical romance. On a whim, I pick it up, see that it’s one in a series, find all the books in the series, and then shove them face down between two hefty tomes of non-fiction I’ve also selected. I choose the self-checkout so that the clerk doesn’t see me taking home pastel-colored paperbacks with images of pearl necklaces or swans or a Regency folly. (I also took them back through the drive-through book drop so that I wouldn’t be seen carrying them back into the library.)

Guess what I met in the pages of those Easter-basket books: a new script. I finally read the words that showed me a better way to react to the feelings of passion and arousal. The women in those books didn’t freeze up. Perhaps at first, because of course that’s what a morally respectable Regency lady does, but even in the freezing, she’s admitting that she enjoys the feelings that are surging through her, that she wants his hands on her, that she wants to feel his body against hers, that she wants to touch him.

When I first read those passages, I had to stop and read them again, not quite sure of what I was reading. Then I had to stop because my idea of a woman inside of sex had been blown apart. Here was a good woman who welcomed those feelings, who didn’t feel the need to repress them and to knock down the hands that moved towards her. I had never seen a different way of being other than my own. I had never had that conversation with anybody before. The intimate, spoken word doesn’t come easily to me. (I think it would be a conversation more easily had if I were slightly drunk; a little less inhibited. Seeing as I don’t drink, that options not really open to me.)

Maybe I’m just really slow on the uptake, but, for the first time in my life, I could see another way of being inside my own body. I must have read a dozen of those romances in about a three week period. (I’m a very diligent student). As I read, I repented, in the truest meaning of the word, of the idea I carried with me of myself as a sexual being. I removed the idea that had taken root at such a young age that sexual arousal was something to fight against and to ward off. In its place, I planted, very tentatively at first, the notion that sexual arousal was to be welcomed, embraced and moved into. At first, the old feelings of restraint would well up inside me, the old wiring working like it always had. But, I knew, because of what I had read, that restraint and closure weren’t the only reactions available to me when I became aroused. I deliberately chose to feel another way.

It has made all the difference, replacing this tightly held but incorrect idea, with something I never before had supposed.

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What other ideas are there, grasped tightly in our monkey fists, that if let go, would open up avenues of experiences we haven’t yet supposed? I’ve thought of a few, centered around the triumvirate of God, self and community:

• In order to be a “good” member of my church, I must be completely satisfied with all it contains. Or, conversely, in order to be a “good” church, it must satisfy all my needs.
• Blessings come only because of my obedience to the commandments.
• God watches me with a critical eye.
• I am a bad person—because I only tolerate, not full out love, some of those around me; because I tend to examine before I come to know, and for some ideas that process can take years; because I don’t know all that I should know; because I don’t care to know some things; because I can no more get excited about the Adult Session of a regional church meeting than I get about matching socks.

About two years ago, at the age of 42, just past the Benjamin exit heading north, I had a realization. I was driving home from Colorado with my family, having spent the Fourth of July weekend with the cousins in Boulder. Kevin was driving. I was slumped in the passenger seat, mulling over I don’t know what. Out of nowhere, like the dew, an idea settled in my chest: “I am good. I’m a really good person.” I thought about why I was a good person. I was honest, kind, hardworking. I was compassionate, generous, committed to my family and to keeping my promises. I was thoughtful, tolerant and enthusiastic. I embraced difference and tried not to let my weaknesses get in other’s way. I loved this earth, its Creator, and worshipped my thanksgiving.

I looked across at Kevin and said, in a voice that must have sounded a little bewildered, “You know, I’m a good person. I’m a good person.” He looked at me with this puzzled expression, “I never thought you were a bad person.” “I know,” I replied. “But I did.”

I had thought, because I did not automatically want what I was told to want, because I questioned what others took upon themselves so easily, because I tended to tilt my head and narrow my eyes when some spoke or acted around me, because some commandments were hard for me, that I was somehow rotten at the core. I didn’t see then what I know now: that my particular feet and mind and heart would always journey in this particular way.

Once again, it has made all the difference, replacing this tightly held but incorrect idea, with something I never before had supposed.

Title, “Change Is,” by Ryan Bingham.

Girls in Their Summer Clothes

Christian, who entered his phone number under the name “Boy of Destiny” in his father’s phone contacts, left his car key hanging in a locker of the Visitors’ locker room at the high school he played against in Friday evening’s game. The key is laser cut and apparently will cost $500 to replace. (Maybe our car dealer friend told him this to impress upon him the need to not lose the key).

So, once Christian gets off the team bus after the hour drive home, to discover no key, he calls in a panic. I spend the midnight hour scrolling through the high school’s directory, trying to match Head Custodian names to listings on DexKnows. Finally, Saturday morning, I stumble across Assistant Principal Stacy Salmans. How many men can there be named Stacy Salmans in one valley? So I call his home and talk to his wife.

By a series of nice-people-in-the-world events, Stacy Salmans’s wife calls Stacy Salmans who calls Athletic Director who leaves his house on a Saturday morning to travel to high school in neighboring town to retrieve Boy of Destiny’s key from the Visitors’ locker room. (Now, I just need Athletic Director to come walk University Avenue with me to try find Boy of Destiny’s basketball shoes which he left on top of his car this afternoon after practice as he pealed out of the school parking lot. Somebody else, other than Boy of Destiny, is now enjoying a pair of black 10.5 Nike Hyperfuses. I kid you not.)

So that’s why on a Monday morning, I am driving 45 minutes one way to Westlake, which, true to its name, is on the west side of the lake on who’s east side we live, with no way around it except around the north end. An unusually warm three days has melted the snow, revealing a winter landscape of blonde white winter grass and silver, ruffled winter ponds. I’m enjoying the drive.

There’s something soothing about driving when there’s no kick-off I’m racing to meet, no kids behind me controlling the iPod and jolting my synapses by only playing about one-third of every song. (Just as I figure out what words to sing they’re onto the next one. Drives me nuts.) It’s just me and the highway, in the middle lane, with my own iPod playing Pearl Jam, as it happens to be this morning. I can feel the warmth of the winter sun on my chest as it comes through the windshield. It’s a feeling I haven’t felt in snowy months. I’m smiling.

Our valley is benefitting from Obama’s federal dollars infusion program. Well, at least Layton Construction seems to be benefitting. They’re building miles and miles of new freeways along the same stretch they just rebuilt five years earlier. (Boy of Destiny is now breaking in his Kobe Zoom VI’s (look them up) by running up and down the hallway, and asking me as he sprints by, “Can you feel that wind?” I think he might have purposefully left the Hyperfuses on his car just so that he could get the Venominators.)

The highway I drove that morning is actually brand new. It’s misnamed Legacy Highway, and cuts a wide swath through historic cattle pastures and river lowlands. Along its sides have sprouted Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee housing developments: cul-de-sacs hanging like phalanges off a central spinal cord, filled with 3-garaged, 4-bedroomed, 5-bathroomed natural-colored stucco homes with a panel of river rock somewhere and mock-Monticello columns framing the entryway.

The yards to these homes are neat and orderly. The barbeque has its winter cover on. The Russian doll bicycles, each a little bigger than the one before, are stored, step-like, in bicycle racks. The Little Tykes slide is still bright orange, and the trampoline’s royal blue pad covering the springs is neatly tied. All this on 0.28 acres. These are the newcomers to the landscape, taking advantage of underground utilities, sound barriers with mock-Anasazi figures etched in relief, and a convenient on-ramp.

A few miles along, on the other side of the highway whose major legacy seems to be the destruction of natural habitat, sits another house. I’m thinking it was built back in the 1930s or 40s when Center Street ran straight out of the south side of Lehi and from the back pasture of the house to the tie-up outside Lehi Rollermills was a 25-minute horse ride.

The style is a version of a Dutch Gable, with a glass-paned sunroom on the back, and an overgrown orchard to the south. The front path runs straight from the road to a wide, shaded porch. To the north runs a hedge of trees, maybe poplars or Russian olives, which seem to stand along what must be the irrigation ditch. In the west field behind the house, the RV is parked in what seems like the spot of the last 17 years and counting. I can’t see how it’s getting out of there. I think the highway took out the west fence with its gate. To the south was, I am thinking, the horse pasture or alfalfa field. Now, it’s home to the legacy—a concrete behemoth of a shortcut for those drivers not wanting to meander through one-lane Main Street with its traffic circles, railroad tracks and 2 stop lights.

I have wondered about this house each time I’ve driven by. The symmetry of its placement has been destroyed. It looks like those pictures of hotels in the aftermath of an earthquake with the back wall torn away, where you can see the interrupted lives of the people unlucky enough to check in the night before. For this house, the privacy and solitude just got ripped away for convenience sake. Instead of a comfortable country mile between neighbors, now 300 cars an hour pass by not more than 150 feet from their kitchen door.

We’re close enough to see that they’re hanging the artificial grass outdoor carpet over the porch railing this morning, and that somebody left their muddy boots on the steps; that they just tossed the Christmas tree out the back door when they were done with it; and that the south side of the house, which was hidden from Center Street by the orchard, has served for decades as the resting ground of gas cans, farm contraptions, broken hoses, and empty 5 gallon fruit tree buckets. If I drove slowly enough, I swear I could see whether or not they need to water the geraniums on the kitchen windowsill. Poor things: they’re on parade.

I actually apologize to the house when I drive by—and wonder what has changed since voters in SUVs and F150s approved the bond. What sounds have been replaced by the slightly venomous hiss of night tires on concrete? What moon shadows used to shimmer their trail through the marsh grass to the kitchen window? No more neighbor’s barnyard light blinking in the poplars through the south pastures. All gone now—to ease the commute of people who want to live in their own solitude west of the lake.

I also wondered, as I drove by: If that were my house, and suddenly my thirsty geraniums, my muddy hunting boots, and my porch furniture left to overwinter and develop mildew on the back deck, was on display, would I clean it up? Would I put back the plastic grass runner on the deck as soon as it dried? Would I paint the peeling wood trim, or rehang the rain gutter and scrap the ploughs?

No. I don’t think I would. If providing bins for boots and recycling five-gallon buckets weren’t in me to do for myself when hidden by a row of Nordic spruces, I probably wouldn’t be able to summon up the energy to brighten the view for the unwelcome strangers who drive by. In fact, I’d probably let it get just a little worse. Serve them right.

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I don’t even know why I wrote this. I just felt bittersweet, driving that day. A peaceful stolen few hours, with a winter sun that was warmer than it should have been, on a road that was smooth and sleek in its newness. And then, that house.

Seeing it evoked the regret that always fills me when I see a freeway or a gilded glass and faux marble hotel wrapped, tumor-like, around the decrepitly proud bones of a Queen Anne mansion. Similarly, I flinch when I see that self-contained former farmhouse with stained-glass window in the front white gable and a rose-lined path that runs into a twenty-foot retaining wall because zoners and planners and voters decided that that particular front garden, circa 1872, was the best place to put Exit 372A. Fills me with visions of bones and dreams.

Title, "Girls In Their Summer Clothes," by Bruce Springsteen

The Hopes and Fears of All The Years

I finished The Birth House, by Ami McKay, on the plane back from Florida this week. (Swimming in the sea in the days before Christmas is a childhood memory come back to life. Somehow it seemed right. One particular swim, just after dusk on the Tuesday evening after the eclipse, was marked by the bloodred rising of a full moon out of the belly of the Atlantic. The moment was mystical. If I were Aztec, I would have fallen to the ground in fear. As it was, we all stared in awe at this orb rushing out of the horizon; even the waves seemed to forget to roll.) But back to this beautiful book about a remote Nova Scotian fishing village, Scots Bay, during WWI and the decades beyond, and its women healers who helped "sing the babies down."

Dora Rare, the first daughter to be born to a Rare man in generations, is taken under the wing of Miss Babineau, an aging and wise Acadian healer and midwife. Miss B. trains her to take her place among the women who marry, birth and die in Scots Bay during the 1920s and 30s, before running water, electricity and hospitals with maternity wards.

Dora's experiences are revealed to us partly through her journal. I was moved by her entry for December 26, 1917:

December is a month shadowed in darkness and fear. With every lamp blazing, with oranges and stockings, ribbons and holly, whether Christians rejoice or not, this is the truth of the season. As a young girl, I felt the shock of the annunciation, my belly sinking into hurt every time I listened to Gabriel standing winged and menacing over Mary. The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee . . . Not once did sugar plum faeries dance through my window on Christmas Eve. Instead, my dreams were filled with the hiss of Gabriel's whisper bringing the terrible message that heaven had made a mistake and I was to take the Blessed Virgin's place. With a blanket over my head, I would wait for the dawn knowing that poor Mary must have suffered more than anyone ever knew. That in that hour, she swallowed the spirit of the Christ Child down into her belly, crying into the night, knowing He would have to die. [Some] might call it blasphemy, but when I told Miss B. about it, she said, "That's a sacred dream. The blood you share with the Holy Mother is what sets you achin' like that. The same blood she shares with all women."

Having and raising children must be perhaps the most faithful work ever. After all, we cannot see their particular end. No matter how hard we try, we cannot even control their particular path. Too often we find ourselves kicking up against the immovable force of who this child really is. And, there are times when we have to stand and watch, knowing that the particular steps are their journey to take. We cannot take those steps for them. To try to is to deny our children the benefit of learning through experience those things that cannot be learned any other way.

Yet, there is something I believe we mothers can do. Dora tells it this way.

She and Miss B. are preparing to help Mabel, "a plain living and dependable" mother of two, birth her third. Dora cannot help but notice Mabel's effect on her family as she sends her children to her neighbors so that she can concentrate on "do[ing] what she needs to" without "frettin' over givin' them a fright."

Her belly almost too wide between them, Mabel leaned towards her shy, quiet husband, giving him an awkward kiss on the cheek. She tousled the hair on her little girls' heads saying, "You be some good for your auntie. Mind your daddy and say your pleases and thank-yous." Two little strawberry-blond heads nodded together as they looked up at their mother, smiling, reaching out their hands to rub the roundness of her one last time. . . . Big as a barn and nearly ready to drop, Mabel Thorpe still made motherhood look easy. Miss B. says, "It's a mama's faith what keeps her children right. I'm not talkin' 'bout the churchgoin' kind, neither. Miss Mabel's got faith in goodness. Tell me you can't help but believe in it too just by lookin' at her."

Faith in goodness. That's within our grasp, to believe utterly that at the root of this world and the hearts of others lies goodness, and to show our children that this is so.

Merry Christmas.

Title, from "O, Little Town of Bethlehem."

Tomorrow Never Knows

I am a very capable person. I know how to work hard. I can even work smart sometimes. I'm good at solving problems. I know how to plan for all eventualities: Say we go to the lake, in the middle of July when the temperatures 105. Well, I've got extra towels, a flashlight, toys for nieces and nephews, sweatshirts and pants of all sizes (even sizes my kids are not), enough food for two meals—in case we decide to stay overnight or maybe the glacier pulls loose above Stewart Falls and blocks the canyon road, I don't know. I coach soccer with two extra jerseys, of both home and away, two extra pairs of socks and shin guards, three water bottles, two goalie jerseys of different colors and an extra pair of goalie gloves. I like being (over)prepared. It takes the guess work out of everything for me. There are no unimagined eventualities. Call me pessimistic, call me anal, call me compulsive but knowing that I have a pair of cleats, or shin guards, or three pairs of socks, and a 401K in the back, allows me to relax, and focus on the task at hand.

For the capable, like me, faith as a working principle is not really a necessity. When you're well-educated, married to a good man, the daughter of good parents, and the mother of healthy, mentally stable children who haven't yet flown right off the edge of the cliff when they've tested their wings, faith as a working principle is more of a purse dog. You carry it around, it looks pretty, but it doesn't really have to do much work. By this I mean, my life, its traditions, culture, communities and people, have prepared me to be able to make my way. And if I can't make my own way, I know people who can help me find the way. The future has always taken care of itself, because I have been able to take care of myself.

Lately though, the future's been a little less controllable, a little less viewable. Despite all the counting, the scrutinizing, the planning and knowing and extra pairs of shin guards, there are some days and months even I can't see how it is to be done. By "it," I mean anything really—finding employment, envisioning a child's future, making sure he hands in his assignments in college, carrying out necessary educational goals, meeting financial obligations, preparing for the next soccer game, trying to teach moving off the ball into passing zones, or procuring the fiancé visa from the American Embassy in Amsterdam in time for a wedding—anything where intellect and reason cannot see, let alone make, a way through. You know those moments (days or months): when you look ahead and it's like your life screen suddenly switched to Aux2, and no amount of pushing the remote is going to get it to play Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.

It's not a place I'm comfortable in. "I don't know," is not an expression that sits easily. On those rare days, in my employed state, when I could see the edge of the abyss and had no solution, I have traditionally resorted to hyperventilation, then chocolate and white bread. Loads of chocolate and white bread. That's not a healthy place to be. Filling the hole in the center of me with food and chocolate, while questions in the vein of "what am I . . .? what are we to . . . ?" run through my head. It's the controlled panic of those with a little faith; people like me who keep faith groomed and tucked, like a Shih Tzu with a pink ribbon, in the Sunday bag next to the lesson manual and a spare bag of Swedish Fish.

Lately, I'm learning to stand in a more faithful place. It's really hard work to stand there, and remain there. This is no miniature schnauzer faith. This is blue heeler, English pointer, Kentucky bloodhound faith. Faith that keeps eyes fixed forward, nose tilted in the air, body low to the ground. Faith that listens for whistled or spoken commands from a voice it knows and trusts. Faith that moves forward, following a whispered scent of something that passed that way before.

I used to watch sheepdog trials on television when I was a teenager. (Television had just come to South Africa. We'd watch anything including sheepdog trials and bowls a.k.a. lawn bowling). A huge hillside, a group of long-legged, black-faced sheep huddled on one side of the bowl, a small pen tucked somewhere on the other side of the valley from where a single figure and a single dog stood. The camera would focus on the dog, on its eager eyes, its tongue hanging out, its body low to the ground, just waiting for a command. Could be a whistle, a low "walk on" even a hand gesture, and off the dog would race, down the hill, across the stream, like a streak of black-and-white against the green. From above you could hear a string of whistles and chirps as the handler directed the dog toward the sheep at just the right angle to start the corralling process. Sometimes the sheep would head straight for the pen, sometimes they'd run, like startled chickens. The dog kept on working, head cocked, making adjustments, right turn, left turn, creep slowly forward, dash to the rear, its eyes would never leave the sheep. Listening, always listening. That's working faith. Faith that waits, at the ready, listening. Then moves forward steadily, into space, moving toward a pen it sometimes cannot see.

What does Margaret, black-and-white Border Collie, think, when she sits there, at the crest of the hill, next to the leg she knows so well. Down below she sees the pen and the sheep. Do thoughts of "You seriously want me to get those sheep into that pen . . . again? " Does she recognize the stubborn ewe with the white socks that always, always takes at least three others with her somewhere else, and roll her eyes? Does she worry, "What am I going to do with that ewe? Why can't you get a different group of sheep?" Does she, eyes closed, lower her head onto her paws in fear that she just won't be able to get those sheep in the pen this time?

When she hears, "walk up" coming from the hill telling her to approach the sheep in a straight line, does she think, "I really think I ought to go right, around that knoll and sneak up on them from behind. Walk up's kind of a dumb approach to take right now. Besides if I walk up, then I've got to go through the thistle, and that hurts." When she hears, "take time" and knows her handler wants her to put more distance between her and sheep that are easily spooked, does she barrel on forward because she wants to get those sheep in the pen as fast as she can. From what I remember, Margaret sits, enjoying the sun, sensing the change in the pulse around her, catching the wafting scent of lanolin on the air. Waiting at the ready, trusting that her handler will send her and direct her as he always has in the past.

I recently finished Matterhorn, by Karl Malantes, a novel set in the Vietnam War. In one chapter, two black soldiers, who have opted not to go on a nighttime mission (which is sure to mean death for at least one of the squad), start a conversation in the silence they are left in when their platoon leaves without them. This exchange captures for me the hard work of a working faith.

"You think we go to heaven when we die?" Jermain asked.

"I don't think nothin'. I believe Jesus take care of us when we die." Cortell looked at Jermain. "Believin's not thinkin'."

Jermain took that in for a while. "What if you're wrong?"

Cortell laughed. "What if you wrong? You been worse off than me all you life. I got the safe bet, not you."

"I didn't say I didn't believe."

"No, you just playing it safe and not choosin'. Jesus don't want you to play safe. You don't get anyplace if you don't choose."

"I don't want to go nowhere but back to the world."

"Yeah, I be right there with you." Cortell said. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Ever'one here think it easy for me. I be this good little church boy from Mississippi with my good little church-going Mammy, and since I be this stupid country nigger with the big faith, I don't have no troubles. Well, it just don't work that way." He paused. Jermain said nothing. "I see my friend Williams get ate by a tiger," Cortell continued. "I see my friend Broyer get his face ripped off by a mine. What you think I do all night, sit around thankin' Sweet Jesus? Raise my palms to sweet heaven and cry hallelelujah? You know what I do? You know what I do? I lose my heart." Cortell's throat suddenly tightened, strangling his words. "I lose my heart." He took a deep breath, trying to regain his composure. He exhaled and went on quietly, back in control. "I sit there and I don't see any hope. Hope gone." Cortell was seeing his dead friends. "Then, the sky turn gray again in the east and you know what I do? I choose all over again to keep believin'. All along I know Jesus could maybe be just some fairy tale, and I could be just this one big fool. I choose anyway." He turned away from his inward images and returned to the blackness of the world around him. "It ain't no easy thing." (Karl Malantes, Matterhorn, 466).

__________________________________

I live surrounded by flowers. As the sun shifts lower into the sky, and the temperatures break from ungodly hot to blissful, the garden beauties are having their last hurrah. The pot plants have burst into a second blooming now that the scorching mid-summer sun has passed over head. The Echinacea, the English daisies, the fall asters, the foxgloves, nasturtiums, bellflowers, zinnias, and English geraniums, even the scullery maid petunias, are giving it all they've got left on the back slope and in the front beds. The immigrant sunflowers, who've taken root at the edges and hems, are pushing ten feet, despite the limbs and heads they've donated for my vases all summer long. All these plants need is water, light and soil, in the right ratios and consistencies. Give a foxglove morning sun, afternoon shade, and long, soaking water, and it's remarkable what it can become. Give the Russian sage relentless heat all day long and little water, and it thrives, turning dry places, like Las Vegas traffic islands, into cloudbursts of lilac.

Matthew tells us to consider the lilies of the field, "they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet, I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Matthew goes on to admonish, "Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, 'What shall we eat? Or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? . . . Take no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself."

Just what exactly is it we're supposed to consider about these flowers. I think it's the grace and steadiness with which they grow and prosper: "they toil not, neither do they spin." This capacity to become, without wasted effort and worry, I am coming to learn so very slowly, is part of a working faith. I'm coming to know from the pit of me that when, like Cortell, I choose to continue to believe, the necessary happens, not through my own efforts, but through generous divine attention that has noticed me and will cause events to come together in a way that my "morrow" is sufficient.

Sometimes, I try to envision what the creation of this earth must have looked like. The creative team is told to cause the dry land to appear, to cause the sun and moon to appear, to cause the earth to be filled with moving creatures and all forms of plant and animal life. What must it have felt like to stand, at the edge of uncreated space, and to start in motion the movement that would cause the earth, the oceans, the skies above to appear? That's the faithful place. The place inside us where we stand and choose to believe the story and to speak the words, when ahead—as far as we can see—is only raw chaos, unrefined, unmoulded, a nothingness.

It's the time between the spoken word, the articulated need, and the response that is my greatest schoolmaster of faith. I've filled this space with panic and pleas. It doesn't do anything except make me so nervous I can't breathe. Yet time goes by all the same. Whether I choose to breathe deeply or to hyperventilate has no effect on when the manna comes. As I look back on this learning curve, I am half-embarrassed at my flailing, my wailing, and my nervous motions as I wait for God to work his will. I almost don't doubt that God will be able to work things; but, it's as if I must have been convinced that the volume of my distress (the sighs, the deep breaths, the panicked walking up and down the mountain, the talk-talk-talk at Kevin) could somehow speed up the response time.

I only wish I could have been more poised in my faith place. I'm getting there. Being a part of conclusions that are more than the sum of what I am or can do creates poise, because I come to know, again and again, that all I can do is walk and work towards and into. The manna always comes.

Title, "Tomorrow Never Knows" by Bruce Springsteen.

The Difficult Part

Let the fragments of love be reassembled in you.
Only then will you have true courage.
–Hayden Carruth.

WE HAVE A PAINTING in the hallway to our bedroom. It’s called “Lovers Running” and shows a man and a woman dressed in white on a green hillside, holding hands, and running in their bare feet. Sometimes I get the title mixed up and call it “Running Lovers.” (I imagine they’re running away from their house filled with dripping toilets, incontinent bulldogs, and children with science fair projects that need to be done.) The same artist, Brian Kershisnik, has another painting called “The Difficult Part.” It shows a man and a woman in black leotards trying to perform a gymnastics move. One figure is standing on his hands while the other holds the feet. The woman holding the man’s feet is trying to balance one of her feet on his upended head. While the bodies look smooth and pliant, the move itself looks difficult and the stance is clumsy. Brian has said this piece is his metaphor for marriage. I know what he means.

I am, even after all the feminist seminars and graduate degrees, a die-hard romantic. I read them all: Jane Austen, Anne of Green Gables, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, even Anne; Little Town on the Prairie; Love Story; Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Wuthering Heights, not to mention the forbidden-by-my-mother Mills and Boon romances I would buy for five cents at the used bookstore or the Saturday fete and hide in the upstairs bathroom towel box. So my image of marriage involved both of us eating breakfast on the outdoor patio of a restaurant with yellow-and-white striped awnings and wrought iron chairs, laughing at something as we ate raspberries and cream, followed by bacon and brie on crusty rolls.

I had not envisioned fights. I had not envisioned aloneness. I had not thought of separation, of doing on my own, and of difference. I certainly had not contemplated dishes. Dishes had not been a regular occurrence in my childhood, growing up as I did in South Africa in the apartheid era. I think Kevin entered marriage realizing it would entail dishes but not thinking it would be his responsibility, growing up as he did in Provo, Utah, a place that fought vigorously against the ERA. As a result, it was sometimes days before dishes got done in our new house. I probably walked by and looked at the sink and thought, “Wow, look at those dishes.” He walked by thinking, “For the love . . . look at those dishes. When is she going to do them?” It didn’t really cross my conscious threshold that those dishes were, in any way, my responsibility—at least not more than once a week. And they certainly weren’t more my responsibility than his. Such is the assumption built into a woman raised with domestic help. I knew how to work hard. It just had never involved dishes before. (I still wake up every morning and hope for housekeeping.) I believe it took about a decade for the idea that dishes must be done daily to sink in.

While dishes might be a simple thing, they are an emblem of the unexamined assumptions and expectations we enter marriage with. Some, myself included, thought marriage was an endless love affair, and we’re continually disappointed the first, fifteenth and hundredth time we find ourselves doing the laundry or the fourth grade Indian report alone. I don’t know how often I have stood in my son Christian’s room, or the laundry room, or surrounded by 300 unmatched socks and thought, “Who signed me up for this?”

It would have been good, at the beginning, to decide the following: Who does what and why? Who folds our socks? And, are those socks pinned or tucked? Who cleans our toilets and cooks our food? Who pays our bills? Who spends our money, and on what? Who makes our money? And why do they do it? Because they’re good at it, they enjoy it, hate it less than the other person hates it, don’t mind doing it, have more time, or (please . . . no) they are a man and a woman.

Do we hold hands in public, and rub feet under the table? What about Santa and the kinds of gifts he brings (are they wrapped or unwrapped)? What constitutes devotion and modesty? What about nudity in front of the children, about sex, about talking about sex and euphemisms for sex, about football on Sundays, about sex on Sundays, and dessert after dinner. About spanking children, raised voices, what exactly constitutes swearing, and which words on which continent? Whether it’s better to read a book in the middle of the day or clean out the back of the car. How to fight, which includes reading minds, reaching out, who apologizes first, and how long any particular marital Cold War will be allowed to last. Because, as much as it alarms me, we fight—not well, very quietly, but still cold fighting.

Still, after twenty years of living together, Kevin and I still don’t read the situation accurately because of the assumptions we brought. Just last week, Christian and I were doing an experiment for his junior biology class. It involved Jell-O and laundry detergent and enzymes. I wanted to go all out, with photos and a visual timeline of the changes in the Jell-O’s surface structure. He wanted the Ford Pinto version of the experiment. So, while we set up, we debated whether we needed the camera and the ruler and the spotlight. I was talking over Christian; he was talking over me. He might have called me “Tessa,” and I might have accused him of taking the lowest common denominator approach to life. We bumped into each other and grabbed things from each other. I probably uttered a guttural “Ugh!” or my standard, teeth-clenched, “Child of mine” in frustration.

Kevin stood at the stove watching us. Then he said sharply to Christian, “Don’t talk to your mother like that.” I looked up in surprise. “Like what?” I asked, genuinely perplexed. “Raising his voice.” I looked at Christian; he looked at me. We squinted at each other and cocked our heads, as if to say, “What’s his deal?” We both said, “We weren’t arguing. We’re just figuring out how to do this.” “Oh, well, it sounded like arguing to me.” I’m thinking, “And so what if we were arguing . . .”

After some thought, the penny finally dropped (hanging, as it had been, over my obtuse slot for twenty years) that this soft-spoken man had been raised by soft-spoken parents, who probably didn’t raise their voices when they said, with regularity, “Damn it to hell, Kevin, what did you do that for?” On the other hand, “cackle” and “raucous” and perhaps “irreverent” are the words that spring most easily to mind when encountering two Meyers in one room. Not right or wrong, just different. But this difference strikes at the heart of Kevin’s assumption about a happy home, and I become troubling to him. It is only the last few weeks that I realized my way of expressing myself loudly, viscerally, is, at some level, still disconcerting to Kevin. He doesn’t know yet that my noise, like a blue jay, is just to mark my presence and means no harm.

Comes a time when the answers you thought you knew don’t work for you, or you don’t work in them. When the conclusions you reach or are being drawn to (and are a little reluctant to own) are different than the dreams you dreamed together watching sunsets while eating burnt almond fudge. Experience brings want into sharp focus. After all, it is easy to shoot for the stars before the story’s even started. But when you’re in the middle marriage chapters, it may become clear that, even though you dreamed about a four-volume historical biography with him, the marriage you are capable of and interested in delivering is more like a quick summer read or maybe a slim volume of poetry published posthumously. The question is, how to tell, especially if in the telling, you trample his dreams.

After four children, I’d had enough. Not that the Lord had told me I shouldn’t have any more children. I was just done. Kevin wasn’t. I was. I suppose I could have decided to have just one more, to really prove my devotion. I probably would have loved it anyway. But I didn’t want to. Four was my limit, the place beyond which I just couldn’t go. Is that the line at which my faithlessness manifests itself? Perhaps. There are moments when I wonder, as I look at my four, what another would have been like; sometimes, I apologize to Kevin for not having another. I traded in our dream of driving the gleaming black Cadillac Escalade of families and provided Kevin, instead, with a serviceable, tan Ford Taurus.

In replying to my questions (which were really missives seeking his blessing to stop), Kevin’s response to my unwanting was always, “You know what I want, but you’re the one who has to have them.” Just last weekend, we were catching up lives with one of Kevin’s high school friends. Jay, who played forward to Kevin’s two-guard, has six children. Our first four are within days of each other. Where we stopped, Jay and Jill carried on (all the way down the hill without spilling a drop). I heard Kevin say, “I would have liked more but Tess had to have them all C-section.” Jay, an oncologist, said sympathetically, “Oh . . . that’s rough.” I sat there in the hot tub of La Quinta Inn Red Rock/Summerlin and thought as I looked at my husband, “Ah, you sweet man. That’s the story you tell others so I look brave.” In his telling and his soft voice, I sense again the goodness at the center of this man. I see, for the very first time, that in living with me, he has jettisoned his larger dream of many children. And has done so quietly, without so much as a ripple in my particular pond, dropping his stone quietly at my edge.

On the other hand, my dreams have not been so gently set aside. I have clutched them tightly to my chest, tickets to some longed-for Broadway play I’ve only read about and haven’t seen. Did I know that when I married Kevin he would be a hardwired entrepreneur? I should have probably guessed, but I came to our marriage with the assumption that if one went to law school, one became a lawyer. All the discussions about what businesses he could start, and how to develop his cookie dough idea, or his sports camps idea, or his reading program idea, didn’t ring as loudly to me as his action of starting law school. Now, twenty years later, I know differently. It was a hard thing to know. I kept looking back, comparing what I thought I was getting with what we actually were. Lot’s wife and I could have been sisters, frozen as we seem to be in the motion of backward-looking.

I don’t know what was so attractive about the notion of Sodom or an attorney husband. Maybe Ildeth and I know those particular ideas. We’ve turned them over in our heads, and built futures in them. They feel like home to us. Both Lot and Kevin have paid dearly for our wanting to nest in a dream.

In one of my sacred ceremonies, the words “give” and “receive” feature prominently. The woman is supposed to “give” herself to her husband. The man is to “receive” his wife. I have struggled with that difference and others in this ceremony for years. There’s a chagrined corner in my soul that the religion to which I devote myself appears to treat men and women with such a different, uneven hand. In fact, I didn’t attend these ceremonies for a few years because the explanations for the discrepancies sounded contrived, even patronizing, and I had not yet found my own.

I know now why I am directed to give myself to Kevin. It is my nature to give all of me to those children (granted only four) whom I mother; to be present with my husband with one ear listening for a knock on the door, and a slice of brain composing grocery lists. It is in my particular female nature to look back, to hold onto, to make sure everything is perfect, and to compare the real to the ideal. It is my idealist’s inclination to give only my best parts. I don’t want the others to see light of day. Some part of me, the part that mourns the lost new-clothes feeling after the item is washed for the first time, wants only new, only good.

Marriage reveals me to be the kind of person I suspected I might be but never thought would be dragged to light. What’s more, the revelation is a public one. Being Kevin’s wife and the mother of Julia, Christian, Seth, and Adam means they see me flail about trying to figure out how to live with them. You know, it’s not like I’m going at it sideways. This is the bedrock center of a meaningful life: wife, mother, daughter, sister. I’m really trying. And still I fail, often and routinely, with those I care about most.

Kevin doesn’t like it when I am helpless or make demands on him that he doesn’t want or know how to fulfill. He doesn’t like it when I retreat into silence. He doesn’t like it when I swear at our children. He’s perplexed, even slightly troubled, by my fascination with old, female nudes (as in geriatric, not antique). He would go to bed every night at ten if he weren’t married to me. He would also have more money. He would be able to drive the route he wants and pick his own parking space, without my constant correction. He wouldn’t live in the old house we do now, with cracking walls and two acres to tame.

I never before supposed I would be the cause of Kevin’s disillusionment. That merely being me, with my blue jay noises, my average capacity for child-bearing, my need to hyper-control, would cause him to drop his dreams silently by the way. But, he receives me. Every single part of me, including the part that spends too much money and doesn’t match socks and only wants four children. He makes room for me in his life, under his breastbone, next to his rib. Despite my noise, my mess, my irreverence, and my utter obsession with the material and not being found lacking (just a few of the many), I am, I am starting to believe, his favorite person and his favorite place to be.

There, for me, is the rub of marriage, the most difficult work, the hardest part, and the most grace-filled: that on some days, even my present best is not good enough for the marriage and family I want. I hate those days. Those days when I realize that this requires so much more of a better me than I had ever before supposed. And that this—this me, with the grease stain on last season’s crew-neck which is missing a button—is all I have to give. And still, still, Kevin looks for me. He looks for me when I walk into church. He looks for me when he enters the gym. He comes to find me wherever I am in the house when he comes home. He reaches for me across the bed and pulls me in.

That painting in our office, with the woman and the man in that awkward stance. It looks, in a certain light, like she’s trying to stand on his neck. And, while he’s doing his vain best to balance on his hands with his feet in the air, he’s letting her.

Originally published in Segullah, Vol. 6 (2010): Inside and Outside of Marriage.