Thursday, September 27, 2018

Focus

It is the Thursday (my Friday) evening before I take some time off of work. I am in a frenzy trying to write a sermon and prepare slides for an hour long presentation. The presentation needs to include a semester's worth of history, I sit flip flopping between what is most important. Grey's Anatomy premiers in an hour and a half, I was hoping to be done before then. I still haven't gotten dinner on the table. All that stands between me and a much needed vacation are these projects and Sunday.

Yet as I sit here I cannot focus. My mind is swirling with memories of every time he touched me. The cold shivers down my spine and the way my throat closed leaving me voiceless. For years I told myself, it was just a generational difference, or a cultural difference. Even though he was twice my age he just simply didn't know better. I made excuses, for him. Then came the comments about my body, disguised as compliments. It took me mentioning it to a therapist before I understood what I was experiencing was in fact sexual harassment. A lot of time has passed since it first happened, I felt helpless, I should have fought through my throat closing and stopped it then and there.

This is the first time news stories have made me on edge and made my feelings swirl with my own baggage. As I watch Dr. Ford face all this backlash, I have nothing but compassion and admiration for her. Today she did what I still have not been able to do, she brought her story into the light. I feel some sort of small solidarity with her, even though our experiences were vastly different. My harasser was beloved and held in high esteem in the community we shared. I was in my early thirties, well beyond my teenage years. I tried to address the situation when it started to get to me but I had very few people who would listen to me. I am so very grateful for the ones who did in fact listen and share my outrage. It was the ones who could have helped that chose reputation and wrote me off as sensitive that bothered me. Actually, it still bothers me.

I have been gone from that community for quite awhile now. It was a down right relief to leave and for a long time I have felt like it was all behind me. Yet, here I sit raw with emotion, unable to watch the live coverage of a special hearing. I am angry, I am sad, I am trying to figure out how I can lend my voice to the larger conversation in a way that makes the world a place where my daughter doesn't have to learn how to strategically carry a large bag and place it over her thighs. As I watch people defend a perfect stranger because it was a long time ago, I want to vomit. I am years removed and I can tell you my very mild experience has left me scared and scarred.

Today I am grateful for those initial people who listened and believed me. I am grateful for women who are brave enough to speak up, even face unimaginable threats. I am grateful for the male friends on social media who have spoken up to be clear they believe survivors. I am praying I won't be so caught up in noticing those who didn't speak up.

Saturday, May 26, 2018

Cold Feet

A few months before I was set to marry Paul, I had some pretty cold feet. My mind swarmed with questions, it all felt so permanent and as much as I loved him, forever is well infinite. That was almost 14 years ago, we did in fact get married. It is not always amazing because we are humans, but it is often amazing. Big life changes always put me a little on edge, some more than others. I can remember the end of pregnancy and feeling like I would never be ready to take care of a baby, even though I had been taking care of other people's babies for years.

In the past seven years we have made three major moves. While moving always makes me a little anxious those big moves didn't give me cold feet. In January, I was down right excited to be moving back to our home state. We are getting ready to move again just a few months later, we currently live in temporary housing. We opted for a short term lease when we  moved with intentions of buying our first home eventually.

We started the long process of buying our first home a few weeks ago. There is a part of me that is very excited about getting to paint the walls colors of my own choosing. I get excited about having our own yard. This process is not for the faint of heart, it is a roller coaster. I have settled on we aren't even saying we bought a house until closing day when we have the keys in our hands. It makes a lot of sense financially to buy a house, we can build equity, and do all those responsible sounding things. I don't mind being responsible, I have been fairly responsible most of my life. There were probably points in my life where I have been too responsible.

The process is in a lull right now, we are doing a ton of waiting, waiting has given me time to think about what it all means. One of the challenges has been to find a home that is big enough but not too big. I have been adamant that if we buy a home bigger than we need that we must find ways to use that home to serve others. I have also been pretty firm on not buying at the top of our budget because I want to live my life, I do not want to be controlled by home ownership.

Last year at this time we were departing on an epic summer road trip! I told Paul last week, I kind of wish we were taking another epic trip and not wrapped up in this process. We have joked about calling off the whole thing and buying an RV to live in. The thing is my entire life, if the toilet broke and we couldn't fix it ourselves we just called someone and it got fixed, the cost included in our rent. We never had to worry about the roof, the furnace, the plumbing.

Thinking about it all gives me cold feet, ice cold bare foot in the South Dakota winter, cold feet. In about three minutes Elsa is going to be singing up in here. I want to run in the other direction. This is so long term! Can we really afford this? Are we ready? Will we still be able to take awesome road trips? What if my whole life becomes about taking care of a house?

Then I overheard a conversation about how "young" people want so much more today. I chuckled to myself because there I was dreading home ownership and worried about what was too big. Also most of us can't afford what the generation before us did. We are lucky if we can buy a car let alone a condo. Its funny because it seems like people a generation or two older than myself who know we are doing this are more excited than I am. There was a time in my life when I longed to be able to do this home buying thing and now I stand on the threshold lacking enthusiasm.

Lest I sound like I am complaining about an opportunity not everyone gets, allow me expand a bit. I am super anxious about all this and I know that will pass. Perhaps 14 years from now and half way through our mortgage payments I will be full of joy or at least satisfaction. If I set all that aside, I wonder about the theology of home ownership. How will this allow me to serve others more fully? How will it hold me back? Jesus wandered and never had a permanent home. Can I reconcile that if I say I follow Jesus? (Of course he wouldn't have even had my current apartment.)  What do I do with all that stuff Scripture has to say about sharing with others. How can I celebrate my own ability to do this big thing, own a home, while others struggle to feed their own children? It wasn't all that long ago I struggled to feed my own child, with a SNAP card. It wasn't that long ago I lost the respect of people I cared about because my family benefited from the Affordable Care Act while I was a student. It was just a few years ago I didn't know how we were going to pay the rent each month, every month it felt as if it might be the month we had to separate our family in two states just to survive.

At this point at least a few of you are thinking, you pulled yourself out of that place. That is not true, it was through the ordinary miracle of community that we made it through. It had very little to do with us as individuals and nothing at all to do with the proverbial "boot straps" we hear about pulling on. For months we survived because a variety of people with whom we shared community volunteered to help us. People offered to open their homes to us. People paid our rent while I job searched for my first call. They cared for our child and pets when I went on interviews all over the country. It's not to say we didn't do anything to get to this place, it's that we didn't get here all on our own. We had help, a ton of help, help that many people do not have access to.

Now that I am in a more stable place, how do I use these gifts to help others? I fear perhaps that when I hold that key in my hand, when the walls are painted the colors of my own choosing, I might forget where it was I came from. That I will fail to see with fresh eyes those who need help finding their boots. It can be almost paralyzing at times if not overwhelming.

Today I am grateful for all the opportunity, the community, the life, the highs and lows that I get to experience. May God use me to serve the beloved community as they have served me.

Saturday, May 12, 2018

Josephine

It has been a year since I had surgery to remove my Fallopian tube along with what was an ectopic pregnancy. It was a decision I made after chemotherapy injections proved adverse and ineffective in removing my pain. Willingly giving up a piece of your reproductive anatomy when you have spent years testing and trying to make it all work is no small decision. I would have done anything for relief, I would have done anything to put this experience behind me. I woke up from surgery and my road to physical recovery was well underway.

Emotional recovery is trickier than physical recovery. I have been deep in grief this year, a grief that is unlike any of the others I have experienced. I am grieving for something so complex it is hard to name. It is a grief that is not welcomed into conversations, no one calls to see how you are doing, people get uncomfortable when you bring it up. I have often felt left alone to deal with the complexities of it all. The first part is trying to figure out what exactly I lost. When I talk about this, I say I lost a pregnancy, not a baby. I say this because there was never a heartbeat, never an embryo, just hormones, placenta, and blood clots. (I saw the images from my surgery.) There is also a strong sense of defeat when after 8 years you finally see that second line appear only to have your heart broken. The last two years of that 8 involved many tests and interventions. Getting to that little second line took hours of testing, hours of the least sexy sex you could ever imagine, and money so much money.

For much of this year I knew I was sad and angry, this grief often feels like it has broken me. I could not put my finger on it and mostly I went it alone (this is not advisable). A few weeks ago I found myself on a retreat, life slowed down enough in those sacred days that I was able to let myself really feel the grief. As the week came to a close, I found myself in a worship service for healing. I sat and asked leaders for prayer for all the brokenness, those were the only words I could muster. My hands held, my head anointed with oil, tears longing to spring forth, I accepted the prayers offered for me. I returned to my seat in the worship circle. I closed my eyes and even though I don't believe in God being geographically "up", I tilted my head back as if looking at the sky.

I let the slow silent tears stream down my face. I remembered early on in the pregnancy when we fluctuated between viable and not viable. As a means of coping we named this situation growing inside me embryo Jo because it could be Joseph or Josephine. In that moment, I let myself see her, she was Josephine. I saw a girl, with my nose and dark hair. I saw Paul's hazel eyes and lighter skin. I watched her grow up, a free spirit but quiet. She loved people and colored pencils. I watched her loved by her sister, running through the same field in Vermont. I saw her and I loved her.

Then I imagined her with my sister in law, Donna, in "heaven". I saw D hold an infant Jo, I know she would love her. Then I saw the rest of my departed family gather. My dad came first, my Grammy, Tim, my Pop-pop, even my dead dogs showed up. I took Jo and I put her in a baptism gown. I blessed her and I handed her to my dad. I saw my dad holding my baby. I saw him as her grandpa. He smiled and it was as if I could feel in the very fiber of my being, his heart leaping with joy. In that moment I don't know who I longed to hold more, in that tender space I allowed myself to remember how very much I miss him. Perhaps this is a survival skill, the pain could easily consume me, swallow me whole, burn me up, it is not meager. Then walking up behind him I saw his best friend, my Uncle Doc, who died recently. He said. "Isn't it great?"

In that moment all the grief that breaks me was present together and there was in that togetherness a sacred joy and the peace which surpasses understanding. I knew that if anyone could take care of my could-have-been-baby, it was these people who loved me far to briefly on this side of life. I can trust them until I can be there, wrapped in the arms of my dad and Jo can finally feel mine. Eventually, I saw Jesus there too. The peace that was there renewed my belief that one day I will know peace again too. Not everyday will feel so heavy as it does now. I wish I could have photographed this transcendent moment with more than my words.

---
The next day, I wrote about all this in my journal, and for the first time I ugly cried because I knew what I lost. I lost a potential baby, something the science of a placenta will never quell in my heart. I have felt much lighter since this experience, I have in some ways found a new peace.

I have debated for nearly 6 weeks if I would share this story with anyone aside from those closest to me. It is so unlike anything else I have ever experienced. I wrestled for awhile with what to call this: a dream, a visualization, a vision. I have let go of calling it anything other than a gift.

People ask me what I think heaven is like all the time, it comes with the job. I don't know what heaven will be like. I do not know if indeed I will get to see these beautiful souls again. Sometimes I imagine heaven to be entirely different. When I reflect on these tender sacred moments, I wouldn't mind if heaven included this community and togetherness.

Today I am grateful for the space in worship to focus on my own healing. I am grateful for all the love I have known and will know in this life. I am grateful for this gift that has made grief more bearable. I am grateful for all the women who find themselves being brave in the face of infertility and unimaginable loss, especially the ones who have walked with me and whom I get to walk with. When I started this blog, it was to remind myself that though parenting was hard, I wanted to remain grateful for my LG everyday and I am profoundly grateful for her. Even in this moment as she yells from her room about how silly it is to have to put her laundry away. Especially at 3am when she crawls into my bed and I feel her breath on my face, its never promise, but always a gift.