In line at Starbucks…

Oct 24, 2016 | Mothers and Daughters, Women's Voice & Power, Women's Wisdom

Although women’s words have been censored or eliminated from much of our heritage, in the midst of the pain of dehumanization women have nevertheless always been there, in fidelity and struggle, in loving and caring, in outlawed movements, in prophecy and vision. Tracking and retrieving fragments of this lost wisdom and history, all in some way touchstones of what may yet be possible, enable them to be set free as resources for transforming thought and action.
~ Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is

This is probably NOT the stuff that keeps you up at night. It does me, though. Not every night, of course, but still, I do ponder the subject, do pull books off my shelf to bolster my thesis (and remind myself to stay the course), to recognize how tightly woven it is into my writing and thought.

I am quick to realize that this is not the stuff of most dinner parties, not what I see in the news, and definitely not what I hear being bantered back-and-forth while in line at Starbucks.

What if it were? What if this WAS the conversation we had – women together, women with men, even men together?

What if we were consumed with the painful history of womens’ dehumanization? What if we were determined to “track and retrieve fragments of lost wisdom and history?” What if we believed that this was crucial to “transforming thought and action” – which all of us know must happen? What if, indeed.

But we are not talking about it, not devoting our every waking moment to its promulgation, and definitely not losing sleep over it.

Understandably.

Our lives are busy. They are full. They overflow with struggle and frustration, celebration and joy. They are often overwhelmed with schedules and to-do’s and responsibilities. They are rich with friends and lovers and children. And they are subsumed by so much else, so many other messages that either elate or exhaust our souls.

So how and why would we take the time to talk of old stories, to find the threads of our own history as women, to somehow weave them back into our day-to-day lives?

I wish I knew.

Here’s what I do know, though:

If we do not, if we ostensibly forget from whence and from whom we came, we are destined to repeat the same patterns. The plight of women does not improve. The conversation does not change. The world does not transform. And I, for one, think all of these things need to happen.

To shine a spotlight on the censorship and dehumanization of women is the very thing that helps us – now, in this moment, in our day-to-day lives – understand why we think the way we do, why we feel the way we do, why we make the decisions we do (even when they are not the ones we want to make), why we often feel slightly crazy, why we struggle with ways to articulate our position or stance, why we are disconnected from our bodies, why we witness people in (hoped-for) power deny the harm they inflict and attempt to silence the brave women who name such anyway.

It’s hard: the work of remembering. We want to move on, move forward, make headway, not have to look back.

I get it.

I’m not all that crazy about having to remember my own story, in having to look back and honestly acknowledge the places in which I’ve known harm and perpetuated it against my very self (and others, to be sure). And yet, it is only when I do so, that I experience any kind of transformation and growth; it is only when I do so, that I am able to hold enough perspective and wisdom to make different choices today – not only for myself, though that is paramount, but also for my daughters, my family, my friends, my colleagues, my community.

If this is true for me, *just* one woman, how much more – all of us together?

Imagine this multiplied times the infinity of women’s stories – past, present, and future!

That image, that possibility, that future? That’s the one I want and the one we deserve.

I still wish I’d written these two sentences, but love that Elizabeth Johnson did. Hear them one more time; more, believe them.

Although women’s words have been censored or eliminated from much of [our] heritage, in the midst of the pain of dehumanization women have nevertheless always been there, in fidelity and struggle, in loving and caring, in outlawed movements, in prophecy and vision. Tracking and retrieving fragments of this lost wisdom and history, all in some way touchstones of what may yet be possible, enable them to be set free as resources for transforming thought and action.

May it be so.

Happy 18th Birthday, Abby

Oct 7, 2016 | Mothers and Daughters

How is it possible that this day is here?

Surprisingly, miraculously pregnant with you – wasn’t that just a few years ago? Your beautiful, blond curls bouncing as you learned to walk and run and fall – wasn’t that just a few months ago? 5th grade student body president – wasn’t
that just last week? Gorgeous and sophisticated at the prom – wasn’t that just yesterday? My little girl – gone? No. Never.

This reality, this truth will always be mine to hold, feel, and know: you ever-remain my youngest, my last, my little girl, my love.

For all my reminiscing and remembering, it is you today – here and now – who captivates me. You surprise and sustain me with your perfectly dry and perfectly timed sense-of-humor. One single line texted in the midst of painful tension. Two hysterical sentences that capture the exact irony or silliness of a particular scene. The faces (and photos) you post on Snapchat that depict a young woman who does not take herself too seriously, who can laugh at herself, who often needs her own smile more than anything else, who ultimately, eventually, no matter what, lets it light her face.

And then there is the way you lead – still catching me off guard. Stepping up, signing up, saying yes. You, the petite and often quiet girl who over and over again takes on responsibility for others, for friends, for projects, for timelines, for tasks – and all in alignment with what and who you most love, your values, your priorities, your heart.

I watch you navigate the space between youth and adulthood, the way circumstances and emotions pull you one direction or the other, and I smile (even through tears, at times) because I sense your struggle, but more, your strength. I witness what wounds you, what breaks your heart, what pierces your soul and increasingly recognize that there is less and less I can say or do, more and more for me to learn as you grieve, restore, and rise, yet again. I see how you must navigate deep and stormy relational waters, over and over again; the ways in which you straddle self-interest with your heart’s desire to be kind. I observe and marvel at your ability to make hard decisions, your clear and definitive voice, your wisdom and strength.

You will be fine. I probably say this more for myself than for you. In fact, you probably already know.

In a little under a year I will be taking you to college, leaving home, setting out. How is it possible that this day is almost here?

You will be more than fine. You already are.

Yes, Abby, walk and run and fall…and fly. You can, you are, you’re ready. No more bouncing, blond curls, but a trail of brilliance and strength that transfixes and transforms me still. Always.

I love you, sweet girl.

On Writing – #2

Aug 30, 2016 | Mothers and Daughters, Writing

This week, I’m offering a series of posts on writing – ones I’ve written before, new ones yet unseen, anything and everything that reminds you of just how powerful the act of writing is – whether you have any aspirations of ever being a writer…or not.

Turning this Impossible Page
[Written almost exactly a year ago. Incredible!]

I bought a new journal a few weeks back. Planning ahead. Knowing my current one was nearly full. Wanting to make sure I didn’t run out of pages. But here I sit, the last sheet of lined paper filled with words, and yet unable, unwilling, to close the cover.

“It’s just a page,” I tell myself. “Turn it, then open up a new one.” Impossible.

How could I have known that I would finish my most recent journal on the very day that marks my first-born leaving home, the day before I take her to college, the day that perches precariously between all that has gone before and all that is yet to come? The symbolism is not lost on me.

~~~~~~~

With every journal I complete, I feel a certain sense of satisfaction, of accomplishment, of “success,” somehow. It’s a physical sign of something completed. I close the cover and hold it in my lap for just a moment – palpably aware of all I’ve experienced and expressed in and on those pages. All I’ve grieved. All I’ve imagined. All I’ve hoped.

I can’t bring myself to close this one, these 18+ years, these everyday days. I can’t bring myself to open a new one to late-night phone calls and weekend visits and home-for-the-holidays. I can’t bring myself to face the empty page, the now-empty half of her room, the empty space no longer filled by her everyday presence. How can I?

As my hand hovers on this last page, this tome that is Emma Joy, I am flooded with so much of the same. She has been physical sign, daily reminder, visceral presence in my life. A life that, with and because of her, is complete and rich and messy and whole. Every word, sentence, paragraph, and page so full, so true, so worthwhile. I held her in my lap for hours, the most-profound and miraculous manifestation of me-as-creator, the end to infertility’s grief. More than I ever imagined. More than I could have ever hoped.

How can this day be here? How can this journal be filled? Wasn’t it just yesterday that I opened to the first, fresh, brilliant page that was her? Wasn’t it just yesterday that she scribed herself across my heart?

~~~~~~~

As I (will, eventually, necessarily) close this journal, it is Emma Joy who opens the new one.

As it should be! Blank pages upon which she has yet no idea, no notion, no preconceived idea of all the glorious prose and poetry and music and drama and grief and imagining and hope that await her powerful, poignant writing – on the lines and between them. This is the gift of a new journal, of life itself: wide open space, freedom, and stepping into an unknown that awaits creative engagement, consistent presence, honest truth. What more could I possibly wish or hope on her behalf?

Turn the page and write, Emma!

College-ruled paper. New pens. Words and stories and experiences and expressions to create, compose, and live. Write yourself! No pseudonym. No holding back. No editing. No restraint. Because you can. Because you know how. Because you’re ready. Because you will change the rest of the world just as you have changed mine. And remember that it will require
no more effort to do so than your
willingness and maybe the occasional reminder from your mom that this is what you have always done, that this is who
you are – indelibly inscribing yourself onto every heart you touch.

“It’s just a page,” I tell myself. “Turn it, then open up a new one.” Not impossible, just not yet.

Not today. Maybe tomorrow. But for now, I’ll hold it in my lap just a little bit longer. Pen in hand. Heart on sleeve.

Where the Women Gather (and why)

Jul 25, 2016 | Mothers and Daughters, Sacred Stories, Women's Voice & Power

How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you? A place for you to go … a place of women, to help you learn the ways of a woman…a place where you were nurtured from an ancient flow sustaining you and steadying you as you sought to become yourself. A place of women to help you find and trust the ancient flow already there within yourself…waiting to be released…

A place of women…

How might your life be different?

I won’t speak for you, but I feeeeeeeeeel the longing within me as I read these words, as I let them soak into my pores, enter my imagination and bloodstream, and transmute my deepest hopes and strongest desires.

These emotions are being prompted, at least in part, by my ongoing awareness of just how much I think…and think…and think. Trying to make sense of things, figure it all out, reason my way through, find an answer. But in this place, where the women gather, all this thinking and reasoning and processing, though allowed and understood, is not the native tongue.

In this place, where the women gather, we feeeeeeeeeel. We trust. We know. Tears flow. Laughter abounds. No words at all need be spoken. And here, the truest, deepest part of us is honored and made whole.

In this place, where the women gather, we are surrounded and nurtured and loved.  Balm for the wounded soul. Comfort for the most tender of hearts. Strength for the weary and worn.

This place, where the women gather, is why I return to the ancient, sacred stories of women, stories worth telling. Because I desperately long for (and find) a gathering of women who serve as mothers, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers, great- and great-great-great grandmothers, the closest of friends. As I reimagine and redeem their stories, I reimagine and redeem my own. As I stay with them, and they with me, I slowly-but-surely let go of my thinking and reasoning and processing. They invite me in, offer me shelter and solace, courage and strength, and give me permission to just rest, just wait, just be, just feeeeeeeeeel.

They invite you in, as well.

Can you imagine?

How might your life have been different if there had been a place for you…a place of women, where you were received and affrmed? A place where, after the fires were lighted, and the drumming, and the silence, there would be a hush of expectancy…a knowing that each woman there was leaving old conformity to find her self…a sense that all womanhood stood on a threshold.

And if, during the hush, the other women, slightly older, had helped you to trust your own becoming…to trust it and quietly and prayerfully to nurture it…How might your life be different?

Imagine it. And then…just ask.

(Both quotes from A Circle of Stones: Woman’s Journey to Herself by Judith Duerk)

A story for Mother’s Day

May 8, 2016 | Hope & Encouragement, Mothers and Daughters, Spirituality

Mother’s Day used to be the hardest day of the year for me – when lost in the throes of infertility. That is no longer the case. But I never want to forget. I never want to not acknowledge just how difficult today is for those without children, for those who have lost children, for those who have chosen to not have them, for those who have lost mothers (living or dead), sisters, friends, for so many women…and men. So today, this – in the hopes that it will encourage your heart, strengthen your faith, summon forth grace, and remind you that hope, yes always hope, endures.

A story in 3 parts:

The Ending:
One day, out of the blue, unexpected, unanticipated, unbelievable, I was pregnant. And again, 15 months later. Emma Joy is now 16, Abby 17. They are miracles. It is a miracle that I am a mother.

The Beginning:
I was 31 years old when I got married. Behind the power curve (in my insular opinion) where such a significant life-marker was concerned. Children were up next (and fast) on my make-up-for-lost-time agenda. There would be no leisurely year of nuptial bliss before we began the process of trying to get pregnant. The clock was ticking. There was no time to waste – or for which to wait. I was in hot pursuit.

The Middle:
After a year of trying with no success, the fertility consultations and moderate treatments began. By year two, we’d moved to more intensive, invasive testing. And with still no success or answers that satisfied, in-vitro was the next recommended attempt. Once. Twice.

Nothing.

And then I couldn’t bear any more. I was tired of waiting. I was tired of trying. I was tired of hoping. So I stopped. No more treatment. No more planning. Little-to-no conversation. Time for life to move on. It did, of course. And it didn’t.

In the nearly-three years that followed, no matter how I tried to ignore my longings, those emotions would not be aborted. No matter how I tried to put on a spiritual happy face and quote Romans 8:28 (And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love God…), I raged inside. No matter how I tried to tell myself that God had other plans for me, that my life would have other “births,” that my world would be rich in unimaginable ways, I was miserable.

But not for lack of trying to summon up any other emotion, any other perspective, any other experience. I tried to pray. I tried to be patient. I tried to let go. I tried to trust. I tried to have faith, thinking that would make sense of things, but every effort was impotent and infertile.

Oh, how I wish I could say that my (im)patient waiting, hoping, and tenacious trust resulted in a profoundly dynamic spiritual life; a seismic and never-to-be-questioned-again faith.

Even more, how I wish that I could say to others who struggle with such intolerable
heartache that “just having faith” will, indeed and ultimately, engender and enable a hope in God that comforts and sustains.

I cannot. I will not.

I grew up believing that faith was something I needed to (and could, with enough work) attain. It was a developed skill, a worthy goal, a near-requirement for the believer in God. I also grew up believing in some kind of Divine barter system: if only I could have what I wanted, what I desired, what I fervently prayed for, then I would have faith. I ask. God comes through. My faith exponentially grows.

I am still growing, but here is what I believe now:

Faith is not ours to work toward, aspire to, or command at will. It will not appear at our beck-and-call.

Faith grows in chasms of doubt. It is nurtured in the darkness of pain. It slowly, silently, almost imperceptibly multiplies in long, wide, and deep spaces of waiting, of questioning, of aching, of asking.

Faith is not a sense-making activity, quality, or attribute. It is a crazy, defiant, and nearly certifiable choice – made an infinite number of times within one day, one life, one heart. It does not come in miracles and breakthroughs, but in the pregnant spaces of life that are more-often filled with desolation than hope. Still, an occasional tinge of awareness that something is growing and will be birthed, but a complete and helpless inability to will it to arrive any sooner. It is a mysterious, un-navigable, impossible-to(pre)determine journey.

Faith is much like pregnancy: experience more than event. And faith is much like infertility: despairing, but waiting-trusting-hoping anyway.

Faith is living one day after the next. One foot in front of the other. One wish-and-a-prayer that is too-often dashed, but whispered yet again. One broken heart that somehow mends and loves again. One longing for success that decries a dwindling bank account. One more blog post when creativity wanes. One more load of laundry. One more commute. One more prayer. One more push.

Faith is not the ending of the story, nor is it the beginning. It is the way in which we be; the way in which we live in the middle.

Naturally, the gift of my two daughters – then and now – nearly takes my breath away.

Naturally, I am deeply grateful to the Divine for their presence in my life. But I have learned that the faith that spikes in such places rarely sticks. The faith that stays – and sustains – is that which is nurtured in the well-worn path of worry, the sleepless nights, the inconsolable heartache, the insatiable desires. In between the lines. In the middle.

I am aware that my story could have gone so differently. But my faith was not what made the difference. It was grace. And that would have been true no matter what…

Happy Mother’s Day to each of you: daughters, sisters, aunts, mothers-or-not, friends, women, men. May faith be yours. May grace overwhelm. And may hope, yes always hope, endure.

A POSTSCRIPT: I would not be writing any of this, thinking any of these thoughts, believing (and sometimes doubting) any of this were it not for my mom and her faith. Thanks, Mom. I love you. Happy Mother’s Day.

[Portions of this post first appeared in January of 2013.]

Nearly 20 years ago . . .

Oct 31, 2015 | Mothers and Daughters

It was nearly 20 years ago that I hastily opened the drugstore-purchased home-pregnancy test, that I tried to pee on that small pink stick without making a mess, that I left it sitting on the counter for the allotted time as I walked into the next room – disciplined and determined to wait the exactly-prescribed amount of time before I looked, that I held fast to my unswerving certainty that no line would appear, no plus mark would be revealed, no wishing, no matter how fervent, would ever be rewarded.

Over the next two days, I took six more tests. (Months later I found them all in a drawer and laughed at the evidence of my highly-honed doubt and disbelief.) And in the early-evening of the third day I went to the doctor because clearly, the over-the-counter tests could not be trusted. I needed an expert’s definitive declaration before I would allow myself the luxury of inhaling, of imagining, of believing that what I had longed for, prayed for, and grieved over for nearly five years could possibly be mine.

Every once in a while I can capture the emotion of being suspended between complete disbelief and overwhelming ecstasy. Every once in a while I can remember what it felt like to breathe in truth, to let in hope. Every once in a while I can recall what it felt like to finally feel whole, complete, and worthy. And every once in a while I will weep as I picture the moment they placed my daughter in my arms – how all the waiting and wishing and depression and despair vanished in an instant, how every fear evaporated, how something in me knew that I was forever changed by this miracle, this gift, this girl.

I was right. Forever and endlessly changed by her.

By you.

Happy 19th Birthday, Emma Joy. I love you.