Monthly Archives: November 2016

Will Write for Attention

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kristenJust wanted to let you know you can all calm down: I figured out the Election of 2016.

Okay, maybe I didn’t “figure it out” so much as “choose the theory I find least disquieting among all the ones being thrown around right now.” The narrative of this election, after all, is being told and retold all over social and traditional media. There seems to be no escaping the countless voices clamoring to be heard, the opinions on why the winner won and the loser lost. One of the refrains that caught my eye early, though, and still sticks, is that so many votes were born of a sense of marginalization. Of feeling unheard and unrepresented. Of being an outsider.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!

Looking Back

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lookSitting in my doctor’s office, I tried not to stare out the windows, where the east- and westbound lanes of I-285 rushed by. The whirring cars just made me nervous, but then again…everything makes me nervous. That was kind of why I was here. Well, that and the yearly mandate that comes with being female.

I had sat in this chair so many times before: during pregnancies, while trying to get pregnant, after a scary mammogram, and during a miscarriage. Most recently, I sat here and told him that I needed something extra, a little help. I left with a prescription for Xanax in hand. Today, eight months after that visit, the bottle still holds a few pills–little white tablets whose primary purpose of late has been unwinding my anxiety at night and helping me sleep.

On this day, though, from this chair, I asked him what the hell was going on with my hormones and if it was normal for them to be fluctuating way the eff all over the place. I may have phrased it differently. But I’ve been all over the map lately–literally, and emotionally–and I wondered if it were more than circumstantial. If it might also be chemical. The short answer? Yes. He referenced a drug that several friends have also mentioned–one that has helped them feel more like themselves. I thought that sounded good, since I’ve hard a hard time remembering who I am lately in these throes of moving and marriage and motherhood, and the resistance I’ve been halfheartedly building within my mind–composed of “just wait and see”s and “maybe it will get better on its own”s–they crumbled under the added pressure of medical reasoning. I took the script, got it filled, and swallowed the first one an hour later.

My counselor had taught me a technique awhile back to deal with anxiety, a strategy pioneered by a doctor in Australia (!) that tosses around terms like mindfulness that make me feel the urge to grab a yoga mat and some green tea but really just involve perspective; specifically, stepping outside myself and observing what happens to me when I get all wound up. I said I’d try it, doubting it would work, and as has happened once or twice before, I was wrong. Looking at myself from a new vantage point allowed me to see how much of me is still the little girl who’s afraid of failing. Afraid of looking like an idiot. Afraid of being hurt. Now, though, those fears have the added pressure of a family riding on them. No wonder I often have trouble breathing–I’ve been trying to hold all that up myself.

The day The Husband left for his most recent trip to Sydney, I was pulling out of the garage with the boys in the backseat waving goodbye. I had my eye on TH, trying not to hit him because I was in a charitable mood, and didn’t notice that my left side was inching closer to the garage door until my mirror slammed into it. I should mention that this is far from the first time this exact event has occurred: I’m looking at one thing while another gets butchered. Better car than husband? Anyway, TH secured the mirror with duct tape and we parted ways for a week, The Kid in the backseat narrating what had happened: “Mommy hit her mirror on the garage,” the refrain echoing over and over from the backseat. I tried to remember how I used to have to narrate everything for him. You know, #gratitude. He’s been giving me countless opportunities since then to call upon that memory as my mirror still sits encased in duct tape, evidence of my constant inability to see all things at once.

And it’s funny, because I’ve always told TK that I love how his brain works even as I’ve struggled to understand it, and I read recently about how some people on the spectrum (and, let’s be honest, probably a lot of others as well) have trouble with a thing in the brain called mirror neurons that interpret facial cues and incorporate them into appropriate reciprocal behavior. This results in a type of social blindness, or at least social visual impairment, because the person is focused elsewhere. This, along with sensory overload, can contribute to a lack of eye contact. I’ve read such information with reactions that fluctuate way the eff all over the place depending on my “self” at the moment, but the thing I keep coming back to is how quick the world is to call such differing perspective a disability. I’m looking at the wrong thing all the time, after all. Meanwhile, I’m not sure TK is, like, ever.

My car is, like me, a bit beat up and held together. My phone is, like me, a bit cracked, and the camera only works in selfie mode, forcing me to change the way I take every picture. Forcing me to take less of them and, instead, just look ahead. My children, though, are looking at each other and laughing. They are tubing down fake snow-covered hills and jumping around bounce houses and taking chances and believing in a way they don’t even realize that they are taken care of. And on Saturdays, TK and I go to the indoor pool that serves as swimming lesson location on one side, senior citizen exercise center on the other, and the man swimming laps gets a big grin from TK. Later, while TK paddles with his instructor, the man walks by me. “You have a wonderful boy,” he says. A minute later, the woman who teaches water aerobics passes between me on one side, TK in the pool on the other, and smiles at me. “Beautiful,” she says. I think about all the ways grace is working, all the things it is using to make me who I’m meant to be, this fluctuating mixture of prayer and people and pills. I think about all the moments I’ve caught TK staring at something I couldn’t see with a delighted grin on his face. About all the things I read telling me what he can’t see, and all the more that he’s showing me he can.

Signs

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trackWhen I was in high school, I saw something that I’ll never forget. On a ski trip to Colorado with my youth group (there’s nothing white Christian kids love more on spring break than to hit the slopes for Jesus!), I was fresh out of ski school and toward the end of a green trail which, it seemed, had LIED TO ME because the finale of that trail was a downward slope that might as well have been a jump off a cliff. I turned to my right, hoping a snow angel would appear to escort me down, and noticed a group of skiers congregated together, all wearing fluorescent bibs over their ski suits that read “BLIND SKIER.”

Well shit, I thought (though at the time I was a Good Girl so it was probably more like, Well good grief, Charlie Brown), my self-pity forcefully evaporating in an instant. If they can do it… I turned my skis toward the bottom of the cliff, arranged them in a V open toward me, and made my way down my own path at approximately 0.5 miles per hour, terrified but moving.

While living in New York, I attended church one evening and heard the familiar strains of one of my favorite hymns, “Be Thou My Vision.” I had listened to Ginny Owens’ version countless times in the years preceding my move, typically from the bottom of relationship valleys or the top of ill-advised personal cliffs I couldn’t see a way safely down, and it had saved me from despair so many times, pointing me home. On this occasion, it being New York, I looked up and saw Ginny Owens herself take the stage, and was reminded immediately of one of the primary features that had led her to a life of music: her blindness. And girlfriend was singing “Be Thou My Vision.” I thought about that. I thought about the blind skiers. I thought about all that had changed between that moment and this one, how in high school I had seen the skiers as a reminder from a lesson-oriented God that I should be more grateful. And how now, I just felt loved by him because of this woman he had put in my path who, in her weakness that was actually strength, pointed my skis back toward him before he picked me up, reminding me he can carry me down every cliff.

So imagine my shock recently when I realized my vision still isn’t perfect, after all these years.

The Kid is very into signs right now. He asks me what every sign in the world says, saving particular urgency for the “do not”-type signs: the forbidden sins of the law. I’ll tell him (amending the content at times; the “no guns” sign on the front of his school, for example, becomes “don’t bring your own toys because we have some here”). Each time I provide him the directive represented by the sign, he says he wants to do that very thing. My sweet little rule-follower; he and I both know the closest he’ll come to law-breaking is just saying he will. What he wants to know are the consequences. They give him context for what these rules mean. So when I tell him we can’t make a U-turn here and he says let’s make a U-turn and I tell him again that we can’t, he leans back in his seat and responds sagely, “That would be a time out.”

In seeing seemingly everything, he is showing me all I am blind to; all the things I miss. He never fails to notice where the sun and moon are, whether they’re little or big or orange, or whether the clouds are white or purple. And it’s beautiful, it really is. And it’s not lost on me that a few short months ago, he was “asking” me what things were by pointing at them and screeching. Now, it’s “that one Mommy, what’s that one?” It’s so wonderful and exquisite and blessed and sometimes I feel that if he tells me how to drive one more time I will RUN THE CAR OFF A DAMN BRIDGE.

Because the thing about having a suddenly verbal and always-bright child is that he has A LOT TO TELL YOU. Particularly, about how to get home. Like which lane to take, and where to turn. Like his mother, he would prefer that a driver go ahead and pull into the exit lane way ahead of the exit–but his preference is on the order of miles. So I hear his whining from the backseat whenever I don’t move according to his timetable, and I hear myself saying things like, “You have to let me drive, buddy. You have to trust Mommy to get us where we’re going.”

Good advice. I should listen to it myself.

As I dispense this advice, I hear grace whisper into my ear, gently and not in a lesson-oriented way, but unmistakable all the same, about the irony of my saying such things. About my own inability to take my hands off the wheel, my own need to direct the car, whichever road trip I’m currently on. “No thank you, we will not be uprooting our lives and moving across the world,” I directed, before pretending I was open to it by asking for a change of heart if necessary, and clear signs. Because that’s how we overly-spiritualizing grown-ups do it: we pray for clarity, which is really just asking for a sign, which is really just asking for control over the situation. A hand on the wheel. When the whole time, we’re always going to get home.

Let the little children come to me,” goes the old story, and we talked about it on Sunday, how that may mean something different from (just) what we were always taught: how it might not just be about blind faith like children seem to have, but it might also be about the divine recognition of the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy things about kids–their petulance, their demands, their insistence on knowing the way–and that same divine recognition of all that stuff still in me, and the fact that we’re still invited in. The kingdom still belongs to us, not because we’re (just) joyful and trusting and excited, but even when we’re not. Maybe especially when we’re not, because it’s then we know that it was never about us or what we did/were in the first place.

As for my sign that we should move to Australia? It’s sitting in our entryway, boxed up and ready to travel with us: a wrought-iron plate with a post that will be embedded in our front yard, and on the plate, our family name and the numbers of our new latitude and longitude there. I didn’t see it in the catalogue until after we made the decision to go, after the whisper in my heart was unmistakable, even in the absence of a neon YES or NO. Maybe that’s because we’re not given signs; we’re given invitations, and once we recognize that the “yes” was always there, on our side and on grace’s, we get the signs then.

This is (All of) Us

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broey“…this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness–the beauty and mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books–can re-dignify the worst stung heart.” –Mary Oliver

I didn’t want to like the show This is Us. The early photos bathed the characters in a gossamer glow that I know for a fact is NOT a component of real life. The first trailer left me writing the whole thing off as a melodrama that my cynical self would be better off avoiding. Then the magical word, twist, was mentioned, and I headed to the internet for spoilers, and despite my intentions, with the pilot’s biggest secret already lodged in my brain, I watched that first episode, and the one after, and every one since. I love it. There’s melodrama, sure, but there’s also a healthy dose of self-deprecation, along with the absence of pretending like what makes each character an outsider–the color of his skin, the number on her scale–is either not there or is the only thing about them. They do difference well. They do…differents well. And I know about some different. (Also, in case you’re wondering, I’m such a Randall. Quiz forthcoming.)

Last week I came across the idea of collective effervescence, which has to do with group unity conferring sacredness (and not buying the world a Coke, like I had guessed). Connectedness has been on my mind lately as The Kid is getting older and more aware of the world around him–and, wonderfully, interacting with it and its citizens more. While his growth toward people and even into simple friendships has been heartbreakingly welcome, it’s also left me heartbroken over leaving: leaving this place that is not just our home, but his, this place where he is known and embraced, where he has a place. Or, as he put it this weekend in the car, where he has something else: I was driving him to his swim lesson and telling him about all the people who love him, and after a beat of silence he responded, “James has people.” And he does–we do–these friends who are family: girls with whom I drink wine and commiserate over motherhood and special needs; sisters (both from the same and different misters) who gather at a hotel for a night away with me, at least half of which consists of either sleeping or reading silently near each other; friends who open their homes to us and our children and know our stories so well that those homes feel like an extension of our own. Kids who see something of themselves in TK and engage in endless chasing and rule-breaking games of “Duck Duck Goose” with him, who refer to him as “my James,” and people who tell me about how content Little Brother is, and how joyful. And we’re LEAVING THIS?!

Hey God, testing one-two-three: are you sure? And is this mic working? And is that a megaphone in your hand?

And so the days that began so darkly back when TK was on tables and in waiting rooms begin to gather this light around the edges until it seeps in everywhere and I begin seeing everything differently: how his anxiety can be managed, like mine, just by knowing him, our family of four sitting for lunch on a restaurant patio where LB, child of us both but especially of his father, grins easily and placidly from his seat and I watch TK take frequent “motor breaks” to circle the tables. I am learning which battles to fight and when to lay down the armor, and it helps. What helps most, maybe, is seeing myself in him, in knowing that whatever outsider status could be conferred in him will be swallowed up by a greater acceptance, the source of which also issues the plan for his life that includes redeeming all the hurt and all the pain and all the dark days. I see that the other world he inhabits is overlapping more and more with everyone else’s, and the joy I feel is aided and abetted by an acknowledgement of the beauty of his world–the things in it I never would have seen without him–and what was my fear regarding that world is being transformed into gratitude for it. Gratitude for what makes him, and each of us, different, those differences driving him to all the places and people that are for him.

Which is what I’ve been praying for with this move: that a place, and people, will be prepared for us–and us for them.

I go to his school early to pick him up and tell his teacher about our impending cross-world transfer. She tells me when I enter the room that when the intercom informed her of a visitor, TK proudly announced, “That’s James’s mom.” He hurls the door open for me and can’t stop grinning, his person finally here for him. A few minutes later, we’re walking down the hall together. We’re greeted along the way–so many people know his name! So many people know him, and soon more will–and when I turn to glance at him, he reaches for my hand and locks eyes with me, the grin deepening in his cheeks and he looking like he can’t believe his luck, to be here with me. His luck. This moment, like the one later with LB on my lap while I read to him, like so many that just keep adding up, bathed in a gossamer glow I never knew was this real.

You Again

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halloweenLast week, The Husband and I were both able to go to Little Brother’s preschool fall party. We walked in ambivalently, feelings split because a) we love LB, so we wanted to be with him; and b) we are true introverts, so the thought of awkwardly conversing with parents we don’t know while our kids “make crafts” in front of us was enough to send us both burrowing into Netflix for the afternoon instead. Alas, we persevered and, when LB saw us in the doorway, his face lit up. He proceeded to show us around his classroom–and by that, I mean that he pointed to artwork on the walls and declared, “Apple!” to identify…well, everything. His joy at our being there, his pride in something that is just his, his growing confidence–it all reminds me of The Kid, now. But it also stands in stark contrast to The Kid, then. Back when he didn’t point, or show us things, or say a word. Back when he was himself, but not as fully as he is now. A version of him that is growing into more. LB starts in a different place than TK did, and I find myself grateful for the battles he doesn’t have to face even as I know he’ll have his own, even as his ease reminds me of TK’s difficulties. With all their similarities, they each have their own path. We all do.

“We’re versions of each other; we’re not the same,” said Norman Lear this week on Pete Holmes’s podcast, which is, I think, a more succinct way of expressing what I just wrote. I saw my likeness in TK last week, when TH and I took him and LB to the neighborhood playground, a site of some of my darkest fears and deepest anxieties. My children hanging from metal structures as if defying gravity, and my own breathlessness rises with their bravery, their growing confidence, side by side doing the things that, only recently, neither could. Growing in tandem and teaching each other, TK’s improving motor skills and confidence the source of so much of their movement and my anxiety. Brutal beauty. My likeness showing up as he steps out in air, then in hesitation pulls back: not yet. A few other kids show up, and the familiar cocktail of emotions assaults me: hope, fear, nervousness. At one point, TK runs over to a group of them, hovering around the edges, present but observing more than participating, and I am that kid again, on the outskirts, and in this moment I would do anything to protect him from the inevitable hurt of just growing up even as I know what gifts it can bring with it. I want to rescue them both, scoop them up before they ever hit the ground, intervene before feelings are ever bruised. The certainty that I can’t kills me. He runs back over and he’s smiling. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll start breathing again soon.

The next day I’m still battling the anxiety and the fear that kept me up the night before, that began on the playground and played out into the future as I lay in bed and wondered what their lives will look like. If people will understand TK, if LB will stand by his big brother, if…they will be okay. I “run into” my friend at the gym and she knows from my questions about her son, a decade and a half older than TK yet so similar–versions of each other–that I’ve worked myself into a knot. That I need reassurance, and truth, and hopefully those are the same thing.

They are.

“Don’t borrow worry from tomorrow,” she tells me, and I already knew this but somehow in the hearing it helps me breathe again. It reminds me of what my pastor and friend says, what he told me in his office when I came to complain about God moving us across the world: He’s still on the throne. Don’t take him off and put yourself there. It reminds me, too, of what I read this morning, that peace isn’t about the absence of something–challenges, difficulties, struggles–but about the presence of something bigger. Grace, which never leaves. The throne, it is taken. I begin to open my eyes, to look up. Ephphatha.

I think about how my friend, whose kid faces his own challenges that are different from ours but somehow make us all look more alike, how all they’ve been through has put them in contact with people, into friendships, they never would have known otherwise. “Our people,” I tell her, and when I go with LB to pick TK up from school that afternoon–one of our favorite parts of the day, jointly–we welcome him into our arms and I hear a kid in the office a few feet away exclaim, “There’s James!” I look over at him, this face I don’t even know who knows my son’s and therefore mine, and I search for meanness or ridicule. There is none. There is friendliness, and kindness. “James is a friend,” TK tells me all the time. And on Halloween–the first one we’ve actually participated in, the first year he goes up to each house boldly and excitedly–when we head back home, he puts himself in charge of handing out the candy. “More friends are coming to our house!” he turns to me and says, grinning, and the cynic in me wants to warn him, to prepare him for the people who won’t be “friends”–but something inside is changing. I am still me, but I’m growing into a version that is more fully me. And I grin back at him, nodding through tears, because that’s what life is–smiles and tears–and he, we, will have both. But right now he is all joy. Right now, there is a quote book inside that I bought because now we have words from both of them that could fill it. Right now, I am being emptied of all my crap, slowly but surely, so that I can live and love more fully. All the parts of me are coming to life, and breathing, and this is what being fully alive means: the hurt, and the fear, and the joy all there.

And I think of another thing I heard, how the voice had said what the author had written: “Sometimes I wonder if the burdens we carry don’t end up carrying us.” I gently amend it in my head, knowing the point, which is grace–that the burdens can all be blessings–but that we are carried by more. We, in all our versions, are carried by the one who never changes.

Will Write for Attention

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girl4A couple of weeks ago my husband, back from an extended work trip, gave me the greatest of gifts: an overnight stay in a local hotel. No, not with him. This was the gift of solitude for nearly twenty-four hours, a joy rarely experienced by mothers of young children and highly coveted by the same, particularly the introverted sort such as myself. Granted, the gift was born out of a demand on my part after a sleepless night and an overflowing toilet, but let’s avoid looking at this horse directly in the mouth, shall we?

When the time arrived, my plan was set…

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!