Rejoicing September 28, 2007

My 5-year old daughter slept in my bed last night. This morning I woke up and just smiled as my “baby” dozed beside me. Her face was as sweet as the day she was born and I sublimely recalled there being no greater joy than watching your baby sleep in beautiful innocence. When she woke up, we snuggled for a long time silently. It was a perfect morning. Looking around my bedroom at the artwork on the walls, she broke the silence with her raspy morning voice and frog breath, “Mommy, did Pop Pop paint all these pictures?”

“He painted a few of them,” I replied.

“Which ones are very expensive?” she asked. I wasn’t sure how to explain that some expressions of creativity are so precious they don’t carry a price. Somehow I’m guessing that nostalgia for how my father-in-law so wonderfully manages to capture the beauty of Italy, along with what may be considered priceless or invaluable works of art, are concepts typically lost on the 5-year old mind. I settled for “All of them are worth more than all the money in all the world.”

I motioned to the painting next to my door. “Aunt Vicki painted that one.”

“Is that Mary?” she asked curiously.

“Yep.”

“Is Mary Jesusses mommy?”

“Yep.”

She seemed to let that linger in her head a while. Then she turned her eyes to the opposite wall, to the watercolor of a figure standing in a field, gathering wheat into a leather sack. The verse reads, Those who sow in tears shall reap rejoicing. “That one was painted by Uncle Jerry’s sister, Sandy. I got it when I went away on a church retreat with my friends before you were born.”

“What’s a retreat?” she asked.

“Retreats are for when you want to go away, like to the mountains or the beach, for a few days just to pray to God.”

“Why?”

“Well, the reason I went on a retreat was because I had just lost my daddy and I was so sad that I didn’t know what to do. So I went to a house in the forest with my friends and just cried and cried and prayed and prayed.”

She looked up at me and said, “You didn’t know I was coming to the rescue?”

Evolution – A Poem? September 27, 2007

i wanted to be pretty
so i worked in a clothing store
for the discount

i wanted nice hair
so i worked at a salon
to figure out how to get it

i wanted to become a veterinarian
so i got a job at a vet hospital
to see if i would like it

i wanted to love my job
to work with quality people that cared
so i quit

i wanted a passionate love life
one with romance and laughter and light
so i broke up with my boyfriend

i wanted to heal
to lick my wounds and forgive myself
so i went on retreat

i wanted to see the world
to learn of its vastness and majesty
so i traveled

i wanted something real
something lasting, something true
so i married the love of my life

i wanted to play an instrument
to feel how music can alter a soul
so i took piano lessons

i wanted touching relationships
with friends and family and neighbors
so i asked questions and listened

i wanted to feel the wind
flowing freely through my hair
so i rode horses

i wanted to help people
to contribute to my community
so i joined a church ministry

i wanted to follow my dreams
to work in a field i could be proud of
so i worked for the environment

i wanted something challenging, redeeming, rewarding
to feel a burning pulse beneath my very skin
so i had a baby

i wanted to raise my child
to watch her grow and thrive
so i worked from home

i wanted to explore my creative side
to see if i really could write
so i wrote a screenplay

i wanted to be graceful
to be soft and beautiful
so i took ballet classes

i wanted to capture beauty
to hold it in the palm of my hand
so i learned how to paint

i wanted to get in shape
to lose my mommy belly
so i ran a 5k

i wanted to be like jane goodall
to understand her life and her love
so i went and met her

i wanted wisdom
to have patience and prudence
so i prayed for it

i want to evolve
every single day
so i…

Bear Cubs & Baby Calls September 27, 2007

Having a baby is no small thing. Aside from the obvious social and financial impacts, a baby awakens instincts you never knew you had. When I gave birth to my daughter, I was instantaneously head over heels in love beyond anything I could possibly articulate. I wanted to hold her and rock her and soothe her and comfort her and make her smile and giggle. I cherished the maternal bond with my baby and basked deeply in her perfect innocence. Her sweet, cherubic face was beyond anything I had ever once deemed beautiful. I was also completely terrified. Being a mom heightens our natural instincts to nurture and protect. We are built to innately understand our own. They know our cues. We know theirs. They know our “call” – like a mother bear to her cub. If someone or something causes that cub to feel insecure or frightened, the baby will call out to her mother and the mother will instinctively react, sometimes even ferociously. Humans are different, right? We have the ability to reason, so our “reactions” should be more socially acceptable. Vastly different from nature. Curious, because I had my second baby recently and I’d venture to say my ferocious maternal instincts are alive and well. Unfortunately I had no choice but to go to work outside of the home following his birth. This was an utterly gutwrenching reality for me. Every day I’m missing major milestones. I’m missing his coos and his smiles and the way he longs to cling to his mother – the very basic of an infant’s needs. I am virtually crushed when I leave the house each morning. I miss him so much that often it is inconceivable to me that I am even able to arrive at work and accomplish anything. I have his picture on my desk. He is a smiley, handsome little gift from Heaven. If it weren’t for bills and debts and vacation plans, I’d have clocked out for good a long time ago. I have to trust that he knows I love him, even when I can’t be there to hold him and hug him and whisper to him that “Mommy’s here.” I know it all sounds dramatic. After all, kids are resilient. He’ll be fine. He IS fine. And there are so many parent-child relationships out there exactly like this… almost all of them in this day and age. But somehow that does little to comfort me.

I have friends that can’t have babies. I have friends that have asked me to have babies for them. I have friends that after discovering they were pregnant, have chosen not to have their babies. I have friends who’ve miscarried or worse, had stillborns. And I have friends that don’t have any desire to be mothers. For all the heartache that surely accompanies each of their journies, I can’t relate or attempt to fathom. Regardless of where one might stand on the parenthood parallel, despite the experience or lack thereof, there exists in any woman’s trajectory an internally maternal sense of hope and grief, despair and delight, reflection and regret. And for all my intellect and ambition, goals, hopes and dreams, I never thought I’d be solely defined as “Mother.” I wonder if there is anything more wonderful, more satisfying, more frightening, more exhausting, more exhilarating, more beautiful, more validating, more heartbreaking, more frustrating, more gratifying than being just that.

Significantly Insignificant September 26, 2007

Today began like any other. As I stepped into my hot shower, I visualized my stress being washed away. A normal routine for me, I often find water to be soothing and healing. For some, showering is just another item on their to do list, a necessary step to prepare for the day. For me, my shower is my chance to completely let go. I relax. I unwind. Often I just stand there and let the water hit my skin, just to reconnect with sensory perception. Today though, my conscience was suddenly altered as I oddly found myself thinking of people suffering throughout the world at that same moment. It’s a dark thought, I realize, and not a cheerful way to begin the day. But as the water ran down my body I became increasingly aware that there are horrific, tragic, frightfully horrendous things happening somewhere at this exact moment, not even necessarily very far away, and it awakened a sense of accountability in me. Here I am in my shower, relaxing and unwinding. From what? As if I have it so rough? While I’m typing this… while you’re reading this… someone is being beaten, someone tortured, someone starved, someone violated, someone robbed, someone murdered… and so it goes. What are any of us doing about any of it? When my kindergartner tells me she’s “starving” for a snack, I realize (and hope) she’ll never truly know what starving really means. We live in our boxes, insulated and isolated from the horrors of the world. We deal with our own personal stresses and tragedies, which certainly can feel overwhelming. But at what cost? There are people that need us. There are people that need me. Need you. What can any of us do? And how may we soothe our sense of helplessness? Someone’s child is dying, and someone’s mother, and someone’s father. Someone has lost everything. Lost their job, lost their home, lost their mind. Someone is scared beyond reasoning, with no hope that life will ever NOT be scary. As I shower, with the hot water soothing whatever (in)significant stresses I’m “dealing” with, I realize how blessed I am to even have a shower. To even have hot water. To even have plumbing.

Shhhhh… September 25, 2007

We are living in a time where we can’t necessarily trust our own judgment. Our ability to discern has become clouded… murky. We are living in the technological age, filled with instant information and never ending stimuli. There once was a time when people would retreat into peace and quiet at the end of the day for silent reflection and prayer. The benefits included increased patience, tolerance of physical, mental and emotional stress and perhaps most importantly intuition. People that have gone before us seemed to know, beyond any doubt, that silence is absolutely essential for hearing the still, small voice that quietly calls to us, offering gentle guidance and loving support. We are so inundated with external noise today that many of us, if any, even know anything about our internal voice. A whole generation of people are being raised with no knowledge of how to hear that voice, much less how to seek out peace and quiet so they might one day recognize it. When you find yourself in quiet silence, what do you do? Drown it out with music? TV? A book? White noise? After all, surely the voice in your head sounds crazy. Hmm. Maybe truth does sound crazy sometimes. But as we’ve long heard, it’s the truth that sets us free. Shhhh… listen…

“DON’T Worry.” September 24, 2007

“… and free us from all useless anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

How many times have I heard this said in Sunday mass? How often have I mouthed along through the liturgy, passing by this simple phrase. For a long time it seemed only religious rhetoric, a logical progression of words leading up to the consecration. Once a simple phrase – now profound invitation, for I spent the majority of my weekend in an anxiety attack of not-so-small proportions. What began with one relatively minor concern soon devolved into petty annoyance followed by major irritation culminating into a full-scale hissy fit. Over what? Useless anxiety. But how utterly simple to ask to be free from it. Free from worry. Free from fear. Free from the shackles of anxiety? After all, anxiety grants nothing and consumes everything. Paranoid hypotheticals cultivate weeds of thought. Once those roots take hold, the weeds will freely take their course, running rampantly across the landscape, allowing little room for anything of substance to grow. Negativity inevitably crowds out potential and blocks the warm, soothing comfort of light. Ultimately the anxious overgrowth is the focal point of this garden, not the beauty suffocating beneath. But there is hope. There is joyful hope. When we ask to be freed from a useless thing, the answers will come. The Weed Killer does arrive. For anxiety surely is useless… and weeds aren’t in the Big Guy’s landscaping plans.

Working At It September 21, 2007

“Motivation is when dreams put on work clothes.”
- Milton Berle

I recall once again when I was unemployed last year, my unemployment counselor gave me a brochure that said “Unemployment is a full time job.” It occurred to me that if the jobless majority chose to spend even 20 hours a week tweaking their resumes, networking, applying and interviewing for positions, they would indeed change the face of this country’s unemployment rate. Long after the proverbial crap has hit the fan, we can choose to either take action and clean off the rusty blades or let it just sit there and continue to stink up the place. I call to mind my 5 year old daugher, Michaelina. When she and her friends play together in youthful exuberance, they pull out every toy, every craft, every miscellaneous doo-dad. I watch them thinking they are blissfully adorable and reminisce about life being simple and sweet. When instructed to put it all away at the end of the play date, the dreaded denial ensues and abruptly alters the beauty of sublime narcissism. “I didn’t do it,” she says smugly. (And we clean it up together.) The point of course being that at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter who said or did what. The only thing that matters is how we choose to live our lives. If we don’t mind living with mess all around us and inside us, then we may feel free to keep saying “I didn’t do it.” If, however, we’d prefer to embrace our lives as abundant and rich with blessings and opportunity, then we best get to work.

If not you, then who? September 20, 2007

“Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”
- Henry Van Dyke

I saw a poster with this quote hanging in my church one day last year. I had just lost my job and was wondering what I was going to do with my life now. It’s true that desperate times call for desperate measures, for a zillion zany ideas tend to race through your head when you are feeling broke and panicked. Job listings for things you would never dream of doing start to at least look interesting, if not entirely appealing – If for no other reason than simply offering the opportunity to keep the cash flowing. I remember sitting in my pew during mass and staring at that poster. “The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.” Talk about a sign. Literally. I was struck with the notion that I don’t have to be the best at what I love to do. I just have to do what I love to do. Every day. Any of us can choose (and all too often we do) to resign ourselves to complacency, opting to walk the path of least resistance for practicality’s sake. More often than not we are simply going along to get along and the desires our soul has for us fast become pipe dreams, wishful thinking or just plain foolish. This path on which you’re walking… is it not paved with a false sense of sure footedness? Does your path not present a veritable obstacle course of exhaustive challenges? Is it a path of convenience? A path of safety? A path of (in)security? Your soul is tired of walking uphill. The real challenge now, the true call, is to step off the path and begin your own.