Be the Village

One of the things that I think has been most tragic about the pandemic has been the loss of the village. The village in our western culture was never much to begin with. Some people didn't want it at all. 

I remember hearing the phrase "It takes a village to raise a child" back in the early nineties. It may have been from the mouth of Hilary Clinton and because it came from her it was vilified as socialist ideology and the intent for the state to take parental rights away from parents. Sigh. How quickly we turn anything into a political agenda. 

The truth is it DOES take a village. Some parents, those who are highly competent or uber self-sufficient or just plain paranoid, may not agree. But I think the rest of us see that we NEED each other and we need each other even more when we are doing the hardest task on the planet: raising a tiny human to adulthood. 

Parenthood is hard. Parenthood can be lonely. And no parent has all of what it takes. 

In times past parents could depend, if they were so fortunate, on family members, on friends, on neighbors. On teachers and coaches. On pastors and the church. But not everybody had these connections. For them the village was too small. Or nonexistent. 

But now, now, so much has changed. For almost six months parents have had their kids 24 hours a day with little to no support from the outside world. No school to go to. No soccer games to attend. No playgrounds to let off kinetic energy and meet other moms. No coffee shops to serve as mini therapy sessions with another weary soul. No church gatherings. The village has all but evaporated. 

And while life as kids know it has changed dramatically, the demands of life, work, responsibilities, obligations of parents have not. No wonder parents are just.so.done. 

All this to say, if you have time on your hands or an extra batch of energy in your soul, reach out to a parent and offer to help. Offer to come over and assist with online school or take a child for an ice cream treat or a bike ride. Offer to come sit and be another adult presence in a house of 24/7 frustrated kid chaos. Offer to bring a meal that isn't chicken nuggets or yet another frozen pizza. Offer to listen the the exasperated, exhausted cries of a mother  (or grandmother 😉) who can't do it all. 

In the craziness of life that is 2020, we need the village now so much more than ever. You can make a difference. You really can. 

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Healing, Not Healed

 Earlier today a friend asked me what I had been learning. After spewing out a verbal volcano of old struggles and fresh insights, I hit upon this. 

A few months ago I was yet again beating myself up (one of the few things in life I really excel at) because I am 56 years-old and not yet fixed. (When you see your first psychiatrist when you are eleven you really hope to be fixed by the time your hormones have evaporated and your hair has turned the color of a smoldering campfire.) 

It seemed that some of the lifelong struggles were barnacles on my soul that wouldn't.let.go. On top of that, new and improved experiences were cropping up right and left, causing me to cave inside myself emotionally, feeling incapacitated and hopeless of ever having the maturity level greater than that of a frightened five year-old. 

Then, out of the blue (because blue is my favorite color and that is where most of my insights come from even though it is likely this came from God but God created the color blue in the first place) it hit me. We call them "recovering alcoholics," not "recovered alcoholics." Alcoholics know they are always recovering. They are not a finished product. Never will be. 

So here I am. A "healing Ginny," not a "healed Ginny," because that is not going to happen this side of heaven. 

What that realization did for me is that I was able to take the energy I spent beating myself up for not being healed and funnel it into finding new pathways for the ongoing process of healing. 

We live in a solutions-oriented, task-accomplishing culture. It drives us crazy to not be able to fix a problem and move on to the next. But the souls of people aren't automotive transmissions and life isn't an assembly line. It is a relief to understand that always healing is as good as it gets. 

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Exponential Damage

Hurricane Laura just blasted ashore in Louisiana and one of the reporters reminded me of something. An increase in wind speed can result in not more damage, but exponential damage. Exponential meaning it doesn't add to, it multiplies. 

It seems like life can dish out a lot of hard things. Sometimes the hard thing can flatten us or sometimes we can handle it with grace and finesse and land on our feet (there seem to be people like that). There are so many factors that play into how well we can weather a hard thing. Too many to mention. But add hard thing to hard thing and then another hard thing to hard thing to hard thing and almost anybody can begin to flail. Add the hard thing to the hard thing to the hard thing onto the hard thing that happened five years ago that drained your emotional resources, and the hard thing can hit like an tsunami. Add the hard thing to hard thing to hard thing to perhaps a highly sensitive personality or a brain wired for anxiety and depression or to childhood trauma and you can get a real, excuse the language, clusterfuck. 

There are ways to measure hard things and their damage, such as the Holmes Rahe Stress Inventory, but those things are measured via addition, not multiplication. And I think multiplication is where it is at because, like a hurricane, the increase in another 10mph of wind speed doesn't add to the damage, it multiplies it. 

So think of this year. We have a pandemic with huge amounts of uncertainty. Life as we know it has been wholly interrupted. It has brought changes in work. It has brought changes in how we educate our children. It has brought changes in home life. It has brought changes in our ability to connect with our support systems. For some it has brought a huge change in our ability to make a living, with job loss and potential eviction or foreclosure. It has brought changes in our local landscape, with some of our favorite restaurants and stores, perhaps many of them, closing for good. It has brought fear. It has brought division. It has brought anger. Some of these things cannot even be measured. 

Then we have the racial strife with justifiable outrage over horrific, race-motivated deaths, followed by protests followed by again the division between the Black Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter people followed by the further polarization of the issue. 

Add to that the political landscape of an election year. I can't even begin to describe this level of tension. 

This is just what EVERYBODY is dealing with. And then some people have additional hard things. Death. Divorce. Estranged family members. Loss of some kind. Job stress. Family stress. Physical health challenges. Mental health challenges. You name it. 

And then there are those who, on top of all of this, are grappling with hard, hard things that have followed them from the past into the present and where do you even start? Where do you even begin the cleanup process? 

You begin, I think, by understanding that damage is exponential so you aren't surprised or shocked or ashamed of the mess around you and inside you. The last thing anybody needs is adding shame to all of the brokenness in life. 

I am dealing with this right now. I am looking at exponential damage and trying to understand it. It helps to see how the damage happened and why, even seemingly minor things, had such a huge impact. I am working through the process of identifying and naming damaging events as part of the cleanup. Normally the fact that there has been so much damage would have keep me focused on my own inadequacy to handle hard things, but I have found that understanding exponential damage to be so freeing. Whereas my energy used to be used up by beating myself up over the damage, it can now be used to weather the storm and plan the cleanup. 

It has been a hard year for everybody. There is no shame in being flattened by the Category 5 Hurricane of 2020. No shame at all. 

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True Leadership

I want to say something about leadership and this applies to anybody in a position of leadership or power: parents, teachers, bosses, pastors, elected officials....presidents. Leadership...true leadership...does not dominate or control. It is not obsessed with self-interest or looking good. It is not "do this or else." It is not about making people in your own image. 

True leadership is not about coercion and control but about empowering the powerless and marginalized. True leadership requires knowing those you lead: their hopes and dreams and strengths and weaknesses, their trauma and sorrows. 

True leadership means coming alongside the wounded more than charging the hill to be the biggest or the best. True leadership means a lot more listening than talking. True leadership seeks to understand more than be understood. True leadership means asking what does this person need more than what do I want.

True leadership isn't always convenient or efficient. It doesn't feed the ego. I can't always be measured in ways we want to see. True leadership requires humility. Compassion. Empathy. Conviction. Courage. It requires laying aside the personal agenda for the greater good.

Come to think of it, true leadership looks a lot like Jesus.

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May 15, 2009

(I wrote the following ten years ago today. It marked the one-year anniversary of my mother's death. There is so much more that I could write. Ten more years of processing and pondering things like motherhood and loss, life and death. But I think that, for today, these words will have to suffice.) 

All day I have struggled for the words. I knew today would come and it would be a milestone and
milestones are supposed to mean something. But I'm not sure what.

My mother was 85 when she was hospitalized on March 9, 2009 with atrial fibrillation. She was not real
happy about the situation and really in no mood to die. The prospect held very little appeal. An
attempt to correct the atrial fibrillation resulted in a perforated esophagus and near death. From
there her condition played out like a long, sickening carnival ride. I will spare the details. I can say them but I don't know if I can spell them, those details.

I left home on Friday, May 15, for yet another trip to Chattanooga. Two days earlier her condition had worsened. She was retaining vast quantities of fluid. She hadn't been able to swallow for 8.5 weeks. She was looking ahead to a long and seemingly impossible road in rehab. She had lost all strength. Her oxygen levels began to drop. And she decided that she had had enough. On Thursday she spoke with her doctor who encouraged her to be strong and not give up. Very confidently and by the grace of God she proclaimed, "I have been through hell. I am ready to go to heaven." Her doctor encouraged her not to make a decision about anything until he returned on Tuesday. She signed a Do Not Resuscitate order anyway.

So Friday I left to go down and spend the next few days with her, discussing the possibility of
discontinuing treatment altogether and likely making a decision come the beginning of the week. From the moment I left home the day took on a surreal quality. As I drove through the Pigeon River Gorge I was taken aback by the beauty. The sky, barely visible between the mountains, was a deep, storm cloud blue. The vegetation was a brilliant, almost Kermit the Frog green. But it was the water. Every few yards was water cascading down the rocks. I have been driving the Pigeon River Gorge for 24 years and I had never before and have never since seen anything like it. It was as if God was giving me a small glimpse of the beauty that was in store for my mother.

About 30 minutes outside Chattanooga, near Cleveland, TN, Bonnie (my sister) called and said, "You'd better hurry. She's dying." I told her she had to tell my mom that she could not die until I got there. As I walked into the hospital room my mother looked up at me and said, "Ok. Now who else am I waiting for?". She had made her mind up, knew she was going and was ready to make the trip. Once everyone was there (minus my family, which was still in Asheville) she wanted her oxygen mask removed so that she could go. We fumbled around in a Three Stooges-esque sort of way until I finally took her orders and removed the mask, forever branding me, in a bizarrely humorous way, as the child who killed her mother.

Probably my favorite quality of my mother's, and certainly the one that I connected with the most, was her sense of humor. With the oxygen mask removed she began to labor in her breathing. But at one point she stopped laboring, opened her eyes, and asked, "Am I dead yet?". Bonnie's humorous and yet honest reply was, "I think we'd all look a whole lot better if you were."

It wasn't long, only a few hours. I had never seen anyone die before. None of us had. But it was quiet and peaceful and heartbreakingly beautiful to watch someone step from this life into the presence of God.

It has now been eleven years today. Her house is sold, the new owners moving in this weekend. Her estate is settled, for the most part. But in so many ways I find myself living that day over and over again, much the way I relived the births of my four children. I guess in some ways they are similar, birth and death.

They say it gets easier as time goes on, and I'm sure it does. But some days are just hard. Today was one of them.

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On Lament

Yesterday my friend Katie Billheimer shared these words:

Lamenting. Something our culture doesn’t really know how to do. Grief makes us uncomfortable. When someone is going through something and they have questions we can’t answer, we try and fix things, force a positive spin on it, tell people not to be sad or angry as if it’s a switch to turn on and off. In the book of Psalms, 70% are songs of lament where the writer cries out to God out of fear, sorrow, and frustration. It’s not wrong to feel this, even if it is scary. We were made to feel. Made to question. Made to yearn for something better. We’re not going to have the answers for all the struggles in this world—if we did we would be God. But this lack of knowledge is nothing to be ashamed of. We should never make people feel less for being low or like there’s something wrong with them. Just be there. Listen. Hold their hand and don’t say anything. Your presence and the knowledge that you won’t run away or ignore them is enough.

Her words are wise. Timely. I have spent the past few months taking as much time as I can nab to be alone and sit and ponder and acknowledge the loss and the brokenness and cry out to God and ask him lots of questions and then let go of longings and dreams and unmet needs. It is been very good.

In his book Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, Mark Vroegop says this of lament,

The space between brokenness and God's mercy is where this song is sung. Think of lament as the transition between pain and promise. It is the path from heartbreak to hope. 

 He goes on to describe the key elements of lament:

 1.) an address to God, 2.) a complaint, 3) a request, and 4.) an expression of trust and/or praise....turn, complain, ask, and trust....the heart is turned to God in prayer. Complaint clearly and bluntly lays out the reasons behind the sorrow...the lamenter usually makes a request for God to act--to do something...nearly every lament ends with renewed trust and praise.

What struck me about this is how little lamenting we do. Maybe lament doesn't look good. I would imagine some might think it a bad witness, a wallowing, so to speak in your pain. We are so often told, taught, chided, commanded, exhorted to trust God in our pain, leapfrogging from turn to trust and skipping entirely the complaining and asking part that is absolutely crucial and the very heart and soul to lament.

Why are we afraid to lament?

Perhaps so much of it is our Christian culture. We are encouraged to do, do, do, do, do. To be studying our Bibles and praying and evangelizing and discipling and raising up our children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord" and so often are told exactly what that all should look like. And, of course, we should at all times and in all places have that "attitude of gratitude" (insert sing song-y voice and syrupy smile here.) Stop gazing at your navel and get on with the show.

Perhaps so much of it is our theology. We have a theology of sin, but not of suffering. We think the whole of the Christian life, the whole of it, is about sin and repentance. So any suffering requires not complaint, but confession. Any suffering is your own damn fault.

Perhaps it is because we think if we hurt enough to need lament, we are doing it wrong. We have been fed a lie that if we come to Jesus he will clean up our house and tidy up our rooms a la Marie Kondo and pain and suffering and brokenness and the terrible messiness of life here on this earth will touch us no more. Or if it does, we will be so filled with the "peace that passes understanding" that we can just float above the fray in our Happy Jesus Balloon.

But the older I get and the more messy I see life truly is. The more broken I feel. The more pain and suffering I see in the world and in the lives of people I hold so dear. The fewer answers I have. And I find that all I can do is lament. And it is good for my soul.

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Drinking the Kool-Aid

I remember the day they drank the Kool-Aid. It was November, 1978. I was in 9th grade and I watched, along with the rest of the country, as the nightly news played on our monstrous console televisions images of hundreds of people...adults, children, entire families...laid out on the ground, seemingly asleep. But dead. Dead from drinking a lethal concoction of cyanide and Flavor Aid. Brand names being what they are, the phrase was born: they drank the Kool-Aid.

The members of Jim Jones's People's Temple followed him and his ideology to their deaths. Well, some followed. Some were forced. Many wanted to leave and flee the abuse but were unable to. In the end there was no choice. Drink the Kool-Aid.

It's easy to do, to drink the Kool-Aid. It tastes sweet. Cold. It goes down easily. But that syrupy goodness masks the toxic taste of something deadly.

I've drunk the Kool-Aid. I've done it so many times in so many situations that I can't begin to count. I've believed something too good to be true. I've bought in to a system because it promises me something I think I desperately need.

I did that with parenthood. I drank the Kool-Aid, and in the the message that I should and I even COULD control the outcome. That if I did it right, my kids would make all the right choices, with right being defined by the standards of the community, and would make me proud and prove that I was a good mother.

Here's the hitch. Here's the terribly deadly thing about this particular pitcher of Kool-Aid. When you drink this up, you drink this cup, parenting is all about you. Your child's report card becomes your report card. His or her choices, your job evaluation. And if he or she fails to measure up, struggles to compete, or chooses a different path from the one you are told is the right one, you become the failure.

And what happens then? All of your energy is then focused on yourself. Beating yourself up. Or groping in panic to whip your child back into shape to fit inside the box.

I beat myself up for years. Not because there was anything wrong with my children, but because they didn't always make the choices I was told they were supposed to make and I was told it was my responsibility that they make. It was horrible. It was horrible for me because I felt that I had somehow failed God by not doing it right and it was horrible for my children because I became focused on licking my own wounds rather than what they needed from me.

I suppose it is easy now for me, years down the road, to see this. All four of my kids are well into adulthood and such incredibly wonderful, fascinating, and outside the box that it is a blast to know them as people, not just as offspring. But I wish I had known this then.

I wish somebody had told me that my job was not to ensure that they made it to adulthood as industrious, courageous, sharp, modest, ambitious, college-educated, Bible-verse quoting, smiling virgins but to love them as they are with all of their biology and brain chemistry and strengths and weaknesses and hopes and dreams and come alongside them and guide them, as best I could, based on who they were and what they needed. I wish I had spent my energy asking "How can I love him? How can I love her? Here. Now. In this situation. What does my child need?" Instead I spent my energy feeling intense shame and beating myself up every time I got a sideways look from another parent or a rebuke from a leader because my child wasn't marching to their orders.

I can only apologize to my children who I love more than life for not being there emotionally for them because I was too busy beating myself up.

I drank the Kool-Aid. I believed that my value as a person depended on my success (whatever that meant) as a parent. And even more than that, that my value to God depended on my success as a parent.

The truth is this: parenthood is not an accomplishment. It is a relationship. Anybody who tells you differently is putting something in your drink. Take note of what is in your Kook-Aid.

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