Here’s our family’s annual holiday video song! Wishing you peace and joy this holiday and in the new year.
Parenting
Child-Woman
I closed out another journal this morning. Here’s an entry from earlier this year, written after a particularly painful evening of parenting.
Oh ten-year-old girl with the rages and rolling eyes, the cry and play of a child, the body and mind leaning towards adulthood. You are loved, and lovely. You are unpredictable, awkward, unkind, collapsible. Headstrong, indecisive, brilliant and naive.
I, young one, am your mother. I am wise and baffled. Patient and irritated. I love you. I do not always like you. I am not old and wise enough to never feel pain at your unkindnesses. (No, that’s not where wisdom would be found. Love feels the pain. Wisdom – and love again – can reach beyond it, to embrace you, to envision you in truth, a child-woman writhing in growing pains.)
Sleep tonight, my small darling. Sleep and be refreshed. You are not in-between two realities. You are fully functioning, smack-dab in the center of one reality, this one, the reality of your living self at age ten-and-one-half. And I am honored to know you here and now.
Surprised by Adequacy (and what the wind did with it)
The kids wanted a fire after dinner. My habitual “no” rose to my throat and then fell before making any noise. I would have said no, I don’t make good fires, no, you need to get ready for bed, no, we don’t have time, no, I don’t want to deal with the mess, no, no, a thousand times no.
But a lifetime only has room for so many yeses, and I had been filling my opportunities for yes with way too many nos, and what did I have to lose anyway?
Yes, I told them. Luthien got the s’mores ingredients. I hauled out the lighter and newspaper, and built a sorry little leaning firewood tepee in the firepit. Wadded the newspaper, lit it, threw in some tiny sticks. Repeated several times, then several more. Tiny blazes flamed up and died down, but nothing really took for good. Still, we roasted our ‘shmallows and made our s’mores with the heat we did manage to produce. And my anticipated failure surprised me with its adequacy.
Bedtime came. The firepit seemed barely hot, a little smoke puffing here and there. I decided not to throw any water on it because we might want to have a fire the next night, and I didn’t want to soak the unburned wood. My firewood tepee stood unharmed, sheltering the fluttery newspaper ash below it.
Pajamas, toothbrushing, potty, prayers. Kitchen cleanup, dishes. An hour later I opened the back door to toss something in the recycling bin, and a blaze of orange caught my eye.
My “fire” was crackling away, blazing and burning and looking, smelling, sounding for all the world like an actual backyard fire might do if an actual person who knew something about making fires had started one.
The wind had picked up in that hour, and it had done what wind does in combination with fuel and heat. It had breathed on my little backyard offering and transformed it into something larger than my adequacy.
I wonder, what might happen with your heat and fuel if the next time you were asked to start a fire, you said yes instead of no, if you did your best and then let whatever it became sit out in the open air on a starry night? What if the wind picked up? You just never know.
*Of course you should never leave a fire unattended, however pathetic a fire you think it is. I would have put the cover on my fire pit (it’s one of those metal containers with a grate that fits over top), but the tepee was sticking up too high for it to fit. I’d like to say I would have peeked at it again before going to bed, and thankfully that’s what I did.
Why I Wish I’d Kissed Him Sooner
My man and I have been through a lot together. Including a hands-off, touch-less pre-marital relationship.
Sixteen years later, we’re still living with the consequences of our choices.
Oh yes. I know, that sort of talk usually refers to the choice of “too much, too soon,” and I don’t disagree that we live in a hyper-sexualized culture. But for some of us, more needs to be said about the dangers of overly-prohibitive romances.
Nathan and I fell in love over our guitars. My first memory of him is a long-haired, earring-bedecked, goatee-trimmed Minnesota boy lazily strumming a guitar, sitting at the church missions fair behind his booth about his recent travels in Romania. I was hooked. He doesn’t remember much about the first time he met me, but he says he fell hard for me when I pulled out my guitar and sang a song I had recently written.
The summer of ’96 was one long conversation, deep into the night, punctuated with music and, I assume, eating and sleeping too.
But not touching. We had both been in previous relationships with a strong core of making out, and, doing our best to protect ourselves and one another from the dangers of sexual sin, about which we had heard plenty throughout our years in church youth groups, we agreed to a hands-off policy.
No, really. Hands-off. In premarital counseling with our pastor, when the subject of sex came up and he somehow discovered that we didn’t even hold hands, he looked concerned. He said something about light switches and wedding nights, akin to the idea of 0-60 in 10 seconds flat, and that maybe this wasn’t the healthiest way to go about building a marriage.
Considering his advice, we agreed to hold hands before our wedding.
The big day came, and soon enough, that first kiss. Of which I remember hardly anything. Shy and public are good descriptors. Hundreds of people observed this model couple’s first kiss, and I’m sad to say that we heard from more than one family afterwards, how our kissing decision was held up as a standard for their own children.
Listen, kids. Life is a struggle. We try things and fail, then try again, and sometimes we succeed. But always we grow, if we are willing to. That includes the decision my love and I made about touching each other. We have grown. But because we chose not to touch before our wedding, even while building profoundly deep emotional and cerebral bonds, we’ve had a little trouble connecting our sex life with the rest of our relationship.
The first few months, we were the stereotypical 1950’s newlyweds, exploring and enjoying sex like hungry adolescents. But if sex has been forbidden for most of your life, especially if you are a girl and are told you are responsible for protecting boys from temptation, then you can’t just jump right into it one day and feel that everything is good now. A subtle sense of self-loathing built up in me, which I began to vent by verbally abusing my husband, along with petty arguments, dramatic cry-fests over small disagreements, all of which seemed to come from a basic feeling that I was not lovable.
I wonder if a woman who has been told that sex makes her dirty, premarital sex makes her “damaged goods,” feels some sense of that consequence even after she has supposedly done everything right, secured the marriage license and kept all the rules.
And maybe it isn’t any easier for those couples who did kiss or – gasp – go further before their wedding, but felt compelled to hide this part of their relationship from that same church-induced sense of shame.
(And I am only beginning to listen to – and still far from truly understanding – the pain and shame heaped on anyone identifying beyond assumed heterosexual norms who grew up in church youth groups like mine.)
“It is not good for the [hu]man to be alone.” That’s fundamentally what sex is about – companionship, partnership, intimacy. As we parent our children, as we encourage the young ones – and really, everyone – in our midst, we must give one another space and grace to fail and grow in our reaching out for companionship, partnership, intimacy.
Go on. Kiss him. I’m talking to you, woman married twenty years who still habitually fends off the “temptation” to touch your husband.
A rough draft of this post has been in my drafts folder for nearly two months. Thanks to TC Larson for posting on this topic today and inspiring me to do the same.
Apple of My Eye
In early June in Minnesota this year, it seemed we lived in a world of rain, a land of gray. I think we spent two continuous weeks under granite skies, and my nine-year-old daughter began to feel it in her light-hungry soul. The perpetual gloom, combined with the haunting bedtime thoughts about death and loss that are common to her age, brought an above-average precipitation of tears welling up from a previously-unplumbed depth of grief and questions in her being. We were packing to move across the country that month, far from the familiar hugs of grandparents, a thousand miles from the back doors of the neighbor girls she loved like sisters.
This girl was not my idea. I was not inclined towards having children, because although I have always adored babies, children (those little people who want birthday parties and sleepovers and repeat, “watch this!” over and over and interrupt intelligent conversations to repeat their favorite lines from inane movies and litter the world with cheap plastic toys and fingernail polish) are not my strong suit.
I was a child once. And this does give me a window on my own daughter’s childhood. But just as her birth was not my idea, neither is her self. As I wrote here, she is a whirlwind of imagination and action. My child self was a model of compliance. Trying to understand her most mystifying elements through the lens of my childhood too easily leads to comparison and value judgments.
But when I remember that Luthien was never my idea, and that her continuing unfolding is not my idea, I relax a little more into the One whose bright and colorful idea she is. I support, encourage, seek to inspire, educate, discipline, celebrate and love this inexplicable human, but she is not my grand idea to be worked out precisely the way I think best.
She is the apple of my eye and the stars in my night sky, but apples don’t feed eyes and stars at night don’t keep their beholder warm. My baby, my child, my girl came from me, changed and changes me, has marked me forever – and yet, she has her own road to travel, distinct from but ever intertwined with mine.
Here’s a song I wrote in those gray weeks in June.
Lyrics:
You are the apple of my eye
But eyes cannot eat apples
You are the stars in my night sky
But stars are too far away to keep me warm
You are my darling baby girl
And babies need their mothers
I am your faithful failing world
I rock you in my arms and cry along
A long long night
Oh will it ever end?
A hard hard fight
I wish we both could win
You are a flash of color bright
Inside a kaleidoscope
You ask me sometimes late at night
Is anybody there looking through?
You are a mirror in the woods
Reflecting all around you
You show the trees they’re looking good
But secretly you’re lonely for a face
A face of love
A face with patient eyes
A face you’ll know
From your feeling of surprise
You’re growing into summer now
You’re thirsty like a flower
With all my heart I’ll show you how
To spread your petals out and drink the rain
The rain that soaks
And chills you to the roots
But don’t lose hope
The sun will come out too.
Julia Bloom 