From Spring to Spring

It was the year that my estrogen went AWOL, my middle morphed into Jabba the Hut, and I got to see a psychiatrist, because menopause will do that to you. I came face to face with my own failure as a mother, hit rock bottom, and found God waiting there for me. Life marches on. We change. Hard years teach hard, but good, lessons. Here's hoping that, along with being older, I'm a bit wiser this spring.

In the past year I have learned:

• What I can (very little) and cannot (most everything) control.
• That if I do the same jigsaw puzzle enough times (Presidents of the United States), I can recognize most former Commanders in Chief by their specific facial features. "That's Grover Cleveland's nose!"
• That I CAN listen to a sermon all the way through if I am doing aforementioned, or any other, jigsaw puzzle. Currently, card tables are not set up in the sanctuary, so my Sunday morning attention span is limited.
• That I could totally fall in love with a dog that looks like a dingo crossed with a bat and doesn't even have floppy ears.
• That puppies make bigger messes than toddlers, if that's possible.
• Why my husband was so wise in forbidding me to homeschool all those years.
• How to walk two dogs at once without being turned into a human wishbone.
• That anything I try to save onto my hard disc (AKA my feeble brain) is rapidly deleted once more info comes in or I've had a hard day, whichever comes first.
• That "I don't understand" does not mean "I want to understand". Counsel accordingly.
• That, as a 48 year-old woman with long hair, there is a fine line between Convention-Defying Free Spirit and Creepy Mormon Sister Wife.
• That maybe nursing school isn't the thing for me.
• That I'm an INFP, except sometimes I'm an E and sometimes an S, but I'm ALWAYS an F. Sigh.
• That I can can learn so much about God from watching CSI:Miami.
• That there is a reason God gave us two ears and only one mouth.
• That Tina Fey and I both think that if we worry about something enough then it won't happen.
• That I can fall in love with a grandchild the size of a gummy bear.
• That you cannot assess the character of someone if you are busy defending them.
• That it isn't about ME.
• That maturity is partly about learning how to manage your biology.
• That I can go to God for help even when my circumstances are my own damn fault.
• That I don't have to understand everything.
• That if I don't write something down immediately that thought is gone... forever.
• That the estrogen patch can be a girl's best friend.
• That I was an arrogant fool to believe that I could parent any better than my mother.
• That technology hates me.
• That there is such a thing as a talking smoke detector.
• That when your newly licensed daughter is driving up a busy road at rush hour in a truck that is about 2 blocks wide, it is best to just shut your eyes.
• That I CAN remain professionally silent when someone serves up schlock like "If you can believe it, you can achieve it." Gag me with a spoon.
• That I can't lift 70 pounds.
• That a large dog can clean up an entire crock pot full of spilled chili and the result will be an even larger dog.
• What the inside of a horse's mouth looks like while it is eating my camera.
• That those people who appear to really have it all together really DON'T. (At least I was supposed to have learned that one.)
• That most people can't relate to people who have it all together.
• That the Island of Misfit Toys is a fun place to live.
• That eventually people will quit complaining about the Facebook change until they make another one.
• That Wii bowling is a lot easier than regular bowling. And a lot less noisy.
• That in all likelihood they will NEVER tell you what they are looking for when they stare into the open refrigerator.
• That corn dogs were never meant to go in toasters.
• That even if someone disagrees with me it doesn't mean I'm wrong.
• That our land line wasn't tethering us to earth after all.
• That most things in life, or people, for that matter, don't fit neatly in a box.
• That sharing at age 48 (especially when it means sharing a computer with a teenage daughter) is just as hard at sharing at age 4.
• That I spend so much of my life doing things out of fear instead of conviction.
• That online computer classes are virtually impossible for techno-idiots like me.
• That sometimes "Honey, dump the narcotics down the toilet before I come home and take them" is a wise thing to say on a bad day.
• That the gospel is never more beautiful than when you're the one that screwed up.

And

• That I don't have to worry about what God will teach me this next year because he is God and I'm not.

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Transparency

NOTE: This is one of those blogs that is more of a questioning rant. It isn't written as "writing" per say, but as thinking on cyberspace as I wrestle with this issue.

Transparency. We want it but don't know how to get it. I hear this over and over again in the church setting. Some of us desire to be real and to be open about our struggles but feel that there just isn't a way to get there. This has me pondering what are the obstacles to transparency.

What does it mean to be transparent anyway?

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary says that transparent is:

a : free from pretense or deceit : frank b : easily detected or seen through : obvious c : readily understood d : characterized by visibility or accessibility of information especially concerning business practices.

In effect, being transparent is about being open and honest about who we really are. This, more often than not, includes sharing the things that get us down. The things that bring us to our knees. The things that make us wonder if we are the only ones.

When we can't be transparent we feel isolated. Shut off from community. Shut off from acceptance. And even shut off from God.

There have been times in my life when all I really wanted was a good bartender. You know, the person who pours you a stiff drink and then lets you unload your burdens on the bar for a spell. And you can know that he won't judge because he has heard worse, much worse. That is when I came up with the concept of God as the ultimate bartender. But I digress.....

What makes it so hard for us to be transparent with one another? I think that if we are going to be able to achieve the sort of openness and honesty that enable us to bear one another's burdens, we are going to have to identify the things that make us shy away from this type of true sharing of ourselves.

In my experience, I have run across two (OK, three) major responses that send me packing and back to my Island of Misfit Toys. The first is condescension. The pat on the head. The coo of "oh, don't feel that way" or "you shouldn't say that". MY TRANSPARENCY IS NOT AN INVITATION TO YOUR CONDESCENSION.

The other is perhaps more common and comes in so many varieties. This is prescription. "You should", "you just need to"......Nothing makes me want to slap somebody across the face like hearing a "you just...." at the beginning of the sentence. Some advice in and of itself is good (praying, for example), it just may be that the person being transparent isn't asking for advice at all.

Advice comes in all sizes. Spiritual advice: "You must bathe yourself in the word." Dutiful advice: "You must make a nice home for him and make sure you are having plenty of sex." (Did I really just hear you say that?) Health advice: "You've got to go see this Wise Woman Wanda at Greenlife and get these herbs that will fix all that ails you." (I'm sorry, but dreadlocks do not qualify someone to mess with my hormones.)
Sometimes someone just wants to know they are not alone. They may want to break the silence of pain or abuse. They may just want to know somebody is there to walk this road with them. Prescriptives aren't helpful. In fact, they often shut down any transparency at all.

And finally sometimes, sometimes, you are open and you are met with silence and a deer-in-the-headlights sort of state. I once shared my testimony with a group of people in a church we attended in Atlanta. Nobody ever spoke to me again. It was quite odd. In my experience, testimonies were a great way to learn about somebody and see the ways God had worked in their life and to find out a way to connect with him or her. Sometimes nothing hurts so much as being met with silence.

What is wrong with just saying to the burdened soul "I can see this is really hard. I am here for you. I don't know the answer but I am willing to go with you to the Throne of Grace and seek God's mercy and grace with you. I need it, too." Something like that would go a long way toward helping someone feel, not like a freak of nature, but more like a broken and hurting child of God who is not alone in the world after all.

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The Childhood Pediatrician

I just joined the "You Know You're From Chattanooga if...." group on Facebook and I'm having a blast. One of the posts has been about the pediatricians of long ago. There must have been only a handful of them around when I was growing up because the same names keep getting mentioned over and over and over again.

Our family pediatrician was Stewart Smith. I think, with four kids (everybody had four kids back then) always needing something checked or fixed, my mother could drive to his office blindfolded. I was a small, sickly, wimpy little tyke and it seems I spent an extraordinary amount of time at his practice—judging, at least, by how vividly my visits are burned in my memory.

The first thing that would hit me when we walked in the door was the smell. It was a smell of rubbing alcohol mixed with cruel intent and fear. Then I would be met with an assault of cries coming from the far reaches of the building. Piercing screams or traumatized wails or exhausted whimpers coming from the mouths of my comrades who had gone before me. It never boded well.

My mother would check me in and then proceed to the waiting room. There were two sections of waiting room divided by the central desk so that the sick kids would sit on one side and the well ones on the other. No matter how sick I was my mother had us sit on the well side so that we wouldn't pick up any other disease while waiting which, of course, defeated the whole purpose of the split waiting system. There I would quiver and quake in fear while I wandered my way through the Highlights magazine, following the lessons of Goofus and Gallant. Goofus was, of course, a jerk but even I, the compliant, shy, "good girl" could not stomach the sweet, sweet sappiness of Gallant. Eventually, after a trip through something or 'nother by P.D. Eastman (always placed for my reading pleasure by some philanthropic organization), I would get called back to face my demise.

Now this part wasn't so bad. A trip through these swinging, saloon style doors, a step onto the scale that was somehow built into the floor (how did they DO that?) and a check of my height (I never seemed to grow) and I was deposited into the examining room. That is where things would get a bit hairy.

Dr. Smith was a large man. A large man with a booming voice and a bushy beard who, despite reports to the contrary, did not like children. In fact, he hated children. He liked to poke and prod and torture them for his own purposes. Most of the time these tortures came in the form of a long, sharp needle escorted to the room by a beautiful nurse in a crisp white uniform with what appeared to me to be a large, paper, Krystal hamburger box on her head.

At the sight of the needle, or even before the sight of it, since I knew the error of his ways, I would haul ass off the table and tuck myself as far under whatever other piece of furniture I could find. Somehow, and I don't know how, this was never a permanent solution to my problem and I would inevitably leave the place scarred for life and with an aching back side. As if it made any difference, some kind older woman at the desk would hand me a small lollipop with a loop handle (remember those?) and send me on my way, usually with a prescription for some awful tasting sludge so that Dr. Smith would continue to work his evil agenda on me for days to come.

A few years ago Matt and I were driving down Brainerd Road and I saw the old building and said "Hey, that's was my pediatrician's office!" To which he replied, "That was MY pediatrician's. Imagine that! We might have shared a waiting room. He might have even caught the flu from me because I was sitting on the well side, fingering the Highlights with my germy little fingers. We may have started sharing our life together long before we ever knew it. And for that, if not for anything else, I can thank mean Dr. Smith.

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Make Me Over

I am not a terribly photogenic person. Or at least I hope I'm not, as in "Please don't tell me that I actually LOOK like that". There have only been a handful of decent pictures taken of me in my adult life. It has become a joke with my husband that it will take about 100 shots to get a decent one in the bunch. That being said, I stare down a camera lens as if it's the muzzle end of a shotgun. The more worried I get, the worse the picture. The worse the picture, the more worried I get, and so on until I resemble a bloodhound with an anxiety disorder.

A few years ago the real estate company I work with was having professional photos made of all the agents for our new website. I was struck with an intense dread until they gave me the news: there would be a professional makeup artist there to ensure that we looked our very best for the camera. How fun, I thought! A real makeup person who knows what they are doing putting real makeup on me. I felt like I was getting to play Princess for a Day. I was giddy with excitement. Maybe someone would be able to make me into a silk purse after all!

Now my experience with makeup has been relatively limited for a 21st century professional woman with no ties to the Amish. I don't wear anything that cannot be purchased in a grocery store or the like. A splat of blush, a swipe of lip color and, if I'm ambitious, a scribble of navy blue eye pencil is about as good as it gets. The entire production takes about 7 seconds. And I'm not the type to get "done up" in any sense of the word. I've never had a manicure or a pedicure. I haven't painted my fingernails since high school. And I used hairspray once and only once in my life, with dreadful, stiff, hay-like results.

So you can imagine the thrill that set in when I heard a professional was going to get a hold of me. Holy cupcakes! She might make me look like somebody! Yee-hah!

She plopped me down in the chair and started to work. She wasn't very friendly. A perplexed and serious look swept across her face. Then she began to mumble and click her tongue and shake her head, ever so slightly. She had clearly been given a sub-par canvas with which to work her masterpiece and was losing confidence in her ability to perform. She muttered something to the effect that she had to make me not look quite so harsh. Harsh? Me? I'm not harsh. I'm squishy. A total wimp. A pushover. I look harsh? Goodness! Had I known I would have used it to my advantage during all those years of herding small children around my house. Anyway, she tisked and clucked and rubbed and daubed and, with a resigned sigh, finished off my face. She rubbed something almost white on my lips, making me resemble what I guess I really am, a child of the 60s. Then she set to work on my hair.

All my life I've had straight-as-a-board hair. I began attempting to bend it, quite literally, to my will in sixth grade with my first set of heat rollers. By high school I moved higher up the hair modifying scale with the perm. I spent a couple of decades attempting to modify the hair God gave me until I grew weary and just let it be. You can imagine my delight when my hair began to wave, not as in greet with a gesture, but as in curve, on it's own, especially in humid weather. It was doing its curvy thing that day. I was overjoyed. And then Lady Cluck and Frown took hold of it. She brushed and combed and pulled and sprayed until my hair was clinging to my head like Saran Wrap.

With an obvious air of defeat about her, she announced she was done and whisked her plastic cape from around my neck. All in all her labors had taken about 15 minutes. She never spoke a word. No "Well, this looks nice." No "I hope the pictures turn out well." No "I enjoyed working with you" even. She just turned away to her next client and squealed in delight at my fellow agent. "Well, look at you! You are so pretty I'm not going to have to do a THING to you!"

So, my life as a cover girl began and ended that morning and I will go on being the plain girl that I am. The photos themselves turned out relatively decent. I even got a few positive comments and one not so positive one: "You looked so good I couldn't even tell it was you." Hmmm. Thanks for the compliment. I think I'll avoid the camera from now on.

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Rose

I grew up where people had maids. That's what we called them, anyway. Rose came to our family in 1961, two years before I was born. She would ride the bus in the morning and be at our house by seven or so. Then we would take her home sometime in the late afternoon, often after she had prepared our supper. She would occasionally show up on Saturdays, but never, ever on Sundays.

Rose was an immense woman, and her dark, heavy, almost 6 foot, 250 lb. frame loomed large over my life. And she was strong. I would go to school and come home to find an entire bedroom rearranged or furniture transferred from my grandmother's house next door down to our house and she had done this. Alone. There wasn't a jar she couldn't open or hair she couldn't braid or a chicken she couldn't fry. She could iron for hours, watch soap operas for hours, and rock a sick kid for hours.

The first day she came to work she wanted to make my mother a banana cream pie to show off her handiwork. Rose had never used an electric mixer before but she set to work anyway with my mom's Mixmaster. Somewhere along the way she wanted to stop the thing but didn't know how so she did what seemed logical, she stuck her fingers in the beaters to stop them from turning. Best I can tell, her fingers were tangled and twisted and caught up in the beaters like spaghetti around a fork. And then Rose panicked. Her lofty frame grew wobbly and her face turned white. My mom was able to get her on the ground and called the fire department. They weren't able to do a thing for the poor woman but my father came home and, with some wire cutters, freed her strong, meaty fingers. Not a one of them was broken. Rose came back the next day and the next and the next for decades to come but never again used the electric mixer. Or any other electrical appliance.

Rose had a funny predisposition for kleptomania. It was as if, being part of the family in so many ways, she was free to make use of our possessions as she saw fit. One time my mother took her some food after she had surgery and there was Rose, on her bed with her head upon one of my mother's monogrammed pillowcases. My mother wisely didn't say a word. After the occasional visit to her home we would come out exclaiming "So THAT'S where that went!". I doubt she ever took anything of any real value, except for perhaps the Beatles dolls, but even if she had, we really didn't care. She was one of us.

Rose continued to work for my mother and my grandmother until 1991, when my grandmother went into a nursing home. Thirty years of love and loyalty, with some laundry and dusting thrown in for good measure. Even after that my mother kept in regular contact with her and I and my own family would go by and visit when we came in town. The last time I saw Rose she had shrunk a good six inches or so and I could see her eye to eye and I noticed something for the first time, she had the most beautiful eyes. Deep, dark BLUE eyes.

We never knew very much about Rose's history. Somewhere along the way I heard that her mother was born in the 1867 in Louisville, KY. Rose had to come to Chattanooga via New Orleans. Her husband had been killed in WWII. She had a son in St. Louis. But we were really her family.

A couple of years before she died my mother finally found a copy of Rose's birth certificate. She was born in April 2, 1896. She had come to work for us, to begin her almost 40 years as part of our family, at the age of 65. Rose died in February 2000, two months before her 104th birthday. At her funeral, in front of the urn full of her ashes, I got up and spoke about Rose and, with a voice full of longing and sadness and joy, told stories of growing up with Rose as a fixture in my life. My second mother.

Rose had made her burial wishes clear to my mother. Rose wanted to be buried in a dress that my mother had bought her, but Rose's son preferred cremation, seeing how it was less expensive. So cremation it was. About a year later the news story broke about the crematorium in Noble, GA that had not been cremating the bodies but was stockpiling them around the property. Lo and behold, Rose was there. I can't remember if they found her under a tree or if I just picture her sitting there, enjoying the shade, but there she was, toe tag and all. That urn at her funeral was nothing but a vase of Quickrete. I think she would have chuckled. So this time Rose got her wish and was buried. And her son got his wish. He never paid for anything other than a cremation.

Some people assume that those of us from the South, those of us who grew up with black maids, were prejudiced. I don't know. I guess we were, in some ways. Who isn't, if you get right down to it and are really honest? But we loved Rose and she loved us. And that is all that matters.

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Monkey See, Monkey Do?

I warned y'all in my last post that I would be throwing out questions. This one has been tumbling in my head of late and I just have to ask it:

If you are married, how did the marriage (or lack thereof) that you grew up with influence your marriage now?

On a related front, if you have children, how did that marriage influence how you raise and relate to your children?

To be really specific: IF your parents divorced, what impact does that have on your marriage and your parenting?

To be really, really specific: IF your parents divorced, do you find yourself holding your breath until you have been married longer than your parents were?

I think every person, no matter how awful or wonderful their family of origin, enters adulthood, marriage and parenthood with an idea of what they want to repeat and what they want to change. I certainly did. Mostly, I wanted to change things.

My parents didn't have a good marriage. They managed to stay together for 31 years and 11 months, but it was not a good marriage. I may or may not, one day, make my best attempt at a detailed analysis, but I know that my conclusions would be skewed by limited information and my own subjective experience. But as I moved my way toward adulthood and seeking a husband for life, I already had in my mind so many ways I wanted things to be that were different from my parents' experience.

On the whole and by the grace of God and with the help of my most awesome husband, I have experienced a marriage beyond my imagination. There is nothing like sharing my life, my whole life, with my best friend. When I have been fed up on a husband/wife level, I have hung on anyway because, after all, he's my best friend and what would I do without my best friend? I know that this level of companionship was not something that my parents ever had. On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being darn near perfect) I would currently put ours at perhaps an 8.5. Room for improvement, but overall a pretty good thing.

Yet with all of this goodness given to me, I get uneasy. The other day I was thinking about how we are closing in on being married for 24 years. Statistically speaking, that's pretty good. Yet I was struck with terror. My parents were married for almost 32 years. Twenty-four doesn't mean anything, it doesn't guarantee anything. If my parents could throw in the towel after 32 years......All the marriage books and all the sermons and all the articles and all the counseling in the world still doesn't take away that uneasiness for me. In my world dads leave and moms are left holding the bag and cleaning up the mess.

That is just one example of how my personal experience still colors my marriage. Parenthood isn't excluded either.

Matt always remarks how I tend to take on more responsibility than is actually mine, especially when it comes to parenting and guilt. Only today was I able to explain to him that when I say that I feel like I've failed as a parent because I didn't do this and I didn't do that, that I'm NOT saying this because I feel he has no right or no role with my children, I am saying this because this is all I know. My father was absent physically and/or emotionally for most of my life. Other than the dispenser of the really, really hard spankings (in my tender tush experience), he pretty much had very little role in my life. In my experience it all falls on the mother (and is therefore always the mother's fault). Sometimes I even forget that there is a role for the dad in our family because I don't really know what dads do.

Again, it isn't that there aren't enough books out there to detail every jot and tittle of family life, it is just that, when the rubber meets the road, it's a case of Monkey See, Monkey Do.

I know that God is in the business of changing lives and changing patterns. But I think he usually does this by first pointing out to us that which needs changing in the first place. How can we give him the glory if we don't even know what he has done? If we aren't aware of the influences in our lives, we aren't aware enough to ask, "Am I doing what is best or right or healthy or am I doing what I know?" For some of us it is a matter of having to drive the truck out of the well worn rut and blaze a new trail.

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The Written Word and Questions

In case y'all haven't figured this out yet, I'm a relationship kind of person. Not just in a task oriented vs. people oriented sort of way, but also in a cause and effect sort of way. I am fascinated with how our experiences color our thoughts and our thoughts influence our feelings and how both our thoughts and feelings, for better or for worse, govern our behavior.

So the other day I got the hankering to ask a question but, alas, there wasn't anybody around to ask it to. I suppose that my kind of questions would be appropriate for group discussions but finding a venue is tedious and my topics aren't necessarily the stuff of riveting social amusement. I could try to ask some of my questions in a church type setting, but I rarely have an audience. Anyway, I suck at the spoken word.

There is something about opening my mouth in a group of people that renders me, well, speechless. My brain circuits fry and my mouth dries up and my tongue turns to stone. I stammer a bit and look to my husband with pleading eyes and beg for help because of course he is bound to know exactly what I am trying to say. He gives me that helpless, exasperated, amused shrug and I, realizing that I am on my own, manage to blurt out a tumble of words and phrases that make about as much sense as the instructions for my washing machine which were translated into English by kindergartner from Seoul.

I learned long ago, after a rather unfortunate transaction with a realtor who must have authored the book Bulldozing for Dummies, that I could stand my ground much better in writing than on the phone with someone who took the descriptions of demanding and ruthless to new levels. On the phone I'm a wimp, but in writing I'm a confident, information machine and can turn bulldog, if need be, to protect my client.

On a more personal front it is just easier to let thoughts tumble in my head for a while until the words spill out. If it takes me 38 seconds to think of that word that was just on the tip of my tongue, so be it, and nobody's the wiser. I am also someone who really, really needs feedback. It is totally unnerving for me to speak up about something in a group only to be met with those awful blank stares and hollow eyes and question marks hanging in the atmosphere like half inflated helium balloons. Yes, I can see them there.

So it is with the written word I will stick. And I will ask questions. And I will want answers and discussion. Be aware that an invitation to written dialog is coming soon to a blog near you.

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