Making stuff up as I go

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
~Paul's closing instructions to his friends in Thessalonica

I love these instructions because they seem so hopeful, so truth-full. But if there's one current life situation that I don't know how to be thankful for it's potty training and our 2 year old. I won't go into the gory details but it's one gigantic ARGH!!!! in my life. Frustration, despair, anger, shame, guilt, I've got it all.

But today, I'm going to make up a list of stuff to be thankful for about this situation.

My thanksgiving poop list:

1) I am thankful that my daughter has well-functioning excretory system.
2) I am thankful for disposable diapers that pull down easily when she does want to sit on the toilet.
3) I am thankful for toilets and modern sewage systems.
4) I am thankful for the bits and pieces she does get:

• "Poop goes in the toilet"
• Taking clean diapers to her teachers when she's soiled hers
• The times she does let someone know she needs to go

5) I am thankful for the cluttered poster of stickers that represent the times she has used the toilet

6) I am thankful she's only soiled the carpet once (or twice).

7) I am thankful for my mother's help getting her to the toilet when DW was a newborn.

8) I am thankful she's never had a UTI.

9) I am thankful for all the times my husband has cleaned her up, especially the morning of "the incident"

10) I am thankful for the opportunity to learn humility, patience, and gentleness*

As I said, I'm making this stuff up as I go. Mostly, I'm angry and bitter that this process is not done and over with. I hate poop, but I'm learning to be thankful.

*I'm a really slow learner

Thankful for the screams

I hate baby screams. My husband says I take them personally, so it's been a rough couple months with our infant son, although the past week has been a dramatically wonderful turn around. He hasn't been colicky; he just hasn't slept the way we expected him to be sleeping and our lack of sleep made, well, lots of things difficult. Among those things were being pleasant, grateful, and compassionate.

But yesterday I was talking to a mom whose 2 y.o. got a stomach bug so virulent that after a couple days she stopped walking. My similarly aged daughter darts around. It's hard to imagine her awake and not moving around (unless there's a TV on). But I remember when she was in the hospital in April and how lethargic she was as well. And this reminds me that as cranky as sleep deprivation made us, our son's crying was well within the healthy baby range.

Not only that, for a period, they were appropriate indicators that he wasn't getting enough milk. Now it took us a number of weeks to seek help and figure that out, but at least we had some kind of warning. How heart breaking would it be to have a weak, listless baby?

As we head into Thanksgiving week, I want to take a look at some of the things I've been bitter about and re-examine them. So first off, I want to be thankful for the cries of our son; instead of really mad that I'm not doing what I want to be doing which is usually sleeping or resting.

Redefining what counts

It's disorienting to be in new spaces; moving to a new place, moving to a new job, moving to a new stage in life. Having done all of those in the past 2 years, I've had a lot of time to be disoriented and to think about it.

A friend recently moved from East Africa to the States and discovered that her expert malaria-prevention skills are useless, kind of like my parallel-parking skills and my turning-left-on-red skills. Instead I've been boning up my navigating-the-medical-industrial-complex skills and taking-the-kid-to-preschool skills.

My sister-in-law is a newly minted mom and bemoans her days of "getting nothing done." Actually she and all moms do a lot, just none of it counts. It's a particularly hard adjustment if your previous life had easily identifiable to-do lists. She's a pharmacist and there are obvious pharmacist things to do and patients to not kill. I was a teacher and grad student. I had specific hoops to jump, lessons to deliver, and papers to grade.

The new mommy check list is woefully short: Keep baby alive and clean. When possible, rest and feed yourself. So I was very encouraged to read the exhortation to find "quiet ways to love and serve others without applause" That really sums up new motherhood, particularly for stay-at-home moms. There is tragically little applause and lots of demands.

However, the more I walk this Jesus journey the more I think this is the call to all Jesus followers. Flash and bang, shock and awe should be the exception not the rule. This is something I so value in my husband, his faithfulness in the ordinary. Actually, it can be irritating because his service can appear to be inflexible habit, but he's so consistent about it; doing the dishes, taking out the trash, closing up the house for the night, tending to our electronics, tending to the church electronics, tending to the neighbors' electronics and so forth.

My bent is to think that things you could proudly tell a stranger are the things that count; publications, projects, travels, etc. Changing diapers, burping babies, taking out trash, and fixing computers are not things you would discuss and do not count. And that's crap. All those hidden hours of love and service count, and they count in the eyes of the one who matters most, our Creator.

No regrets, you have been worth it

Dear Children,

I have been fairly public about this process of transitioning into motherhood. It's taken me a lot longer in my head to become a mother than it took for me to biologically become one. A big part of the process has been grieving the loss of my previous life and a change in my perspective and understanding of how my time should be spent. I think it's been important to document this journey because 1) there's this belief out there that becoming a mom is this easy, breezy, feel-good thing for everyone, and 2) there are two camps of thought on women and working. Some think work and children coexist well, and some thing work and children cannot coexist. Whichever way it is, there's an emotional cost that must be paid. These are the things I'm trying to document.

I worry, however, that you may believe that I regret your existence. Don't do that; you would be believing a lie. You won't remember these early years together, but let me tell you that I have not covered myself in glory. I have been selfish; I have been removed; I have been uninterested. But slowly, slowly, slowly, by the loving grace of God, with every nursing, every hug, every diaper, every song and every giggle, I am becoming less selfish, more connected, more attentive. You are already an irreplaceable part of my life.

I have deeply grieved the loss of opportunity to pursue a tenure-track professorship. You may be tempted to think that I would have rather taken that path. Even though I grieve that loss, I count it a privilege to be with you made possible because your father can support us on his own. It is precisely because you are so precious that I willingly give up something that I value dearly.

I have no regrets about these past two and a half years with you, L and half a year with you, DW. You each have been supremely worth it.

I love you both,

Mom

Too tired to (not) connect

It's been a rough six weeks. We are really tired, we've been really tired. It's Friday and like most Friday's recently we've just barely made it.

And most days around 7:30, 8 o'clock, the kids are in their beds and my husband and I look at each other, and we are totally beat. And a couple nights a week, we'll put in a DVD, snuggle up on the couch, and watch something fun. Yes, we're not eyeball to eyeball talking about deep issues, and yes, we're not even being silly and goofing off over a video game, and yes, it's not a dress up date, but that is us, a few quiet moments, resting together, and that's it. Apart from the general figuring out of how to keep our four lives going, this is how we're connecting.

Spiritually, my first thought is that I am way too tired to connect with Jesus. Not only do I have little time to myself, when I do have physical space, I have very little mental space. What I need is a couch and DVDs with Jesus. A little place to be safely exhausted yet with.

And as I ponder this, I realize that I'm way too tired to not connect with Jesus.

I don't have the how's figured out, but the following words of Jesus have come to mind.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
~The good news according to Matthew, chpt 11

Role Models

Avie Carlisle, Cindy Megginson, Lillian Froude, Grace Mutzabaugh.

I had the deep privilege of growing up with these women at a formative time in my life. They have this in common: loving Jesus, being single, doing adventurous kingdom work. And by adventurous, I mean foreign countries, dangerous diseases, lengthy travel, oppressive governments, ground breaking, Bible smuggling, church planting.

As a young teenager, I was very unsure what it meant to be a woman, but these women gave me hope that whatever it meant it could be cool. It could be cool and it wasn't dependent on being married. And it could be cool even though or because it was Jesus centered.

Two of these saints have passed away; the other two forge on. God bless them all.

Subversive Grace

Today is the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy--you know, in case you live under a rock and didn't know.

I was living in Kazakhstan at the time, having arrived in country two weeks earlier to begin a year teaching English. My team was getting ready to give placement exams that week. I was in my flat and around 10PM a neighbor came down to tell us that some plane had flown into some building. I imagined a confused Cessna. We didn't have cable hooked up at the time and being new in country, US news wasn't really on the forefront of my mind.

Then an American expat called. We had met him the first day in town and it turned out he was the US embassy liaison. The embassy was 20 hrs away by train. Apparently, it wasn't a Cessna and it was a big deal. It was an attack and we were told to lay low. The embassy later emailed us instructions to change up our route to work and to continue to lay low. Except that there were only 50 odd Americans in town and we lived on the outskirts with only one road into work. So yea, not really going to be able to change up our route. I mean, this side of the street or that side of the street isn't really a big change. And how low can you lay when you're clearly foreign. Actually, I was the least foreign looking of my team--heh.

I was politically neutral then, raised Republican, but skeptical of their intentions toward minorities. After Kazakhstan, I moved to Los Angeles and started grad school. This pretty much ensured a leftward movement in my politics, but eventually the strident polemics of my colleagues pushed me rightward again.

But today, 10 years later, as I reflect on how I've been making sense of the world beyond my immediate circle of life, it is clear that politics as it is being played out in the soundbites in the media has nothing to offer. Jesus subverts it all. Jesus is not a Republican, and Jesus is not a Democrat. I think God-fearing people really need to let that sink into the marrow of their bones. Bush was never the end of the world, nor is Obama. Really.

This is what Jesus said about himself: "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (The gospel of Mark, chpt 10)" That's not a liberal agenda; it's not a conservative agenda. That's the Jesus agenda, rescuing people from darkness and ugliness and offering peace and beauty in the kingdom of God.

10 years later, I find that on facebook the apolitical friendships I had in college have been tainted with a hard crust of partisanship--Republicans are reprehensible. Democrats are evil. Whee, Obama won!! Yay! Osama is dead.

The Jesus call is to "act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with [our] God." These words were written collectively to the nation of Israel, but to carry it out would require the heart of individuals to change. As we interact with people and institutions, as we carry about our business, this is the grid we should be pushing everything through. Am I acting justly? Do I have an opportunity to extend mercy? Does my conduct reflect the reality that the Almighty God is near?

"On earth as it is in heaven" is a line from the Lord's Prayer. When our lives are characterized by justice and mercy and humbly living with God, we become part of extending the reign of the kingdom of God on earth. In the wild chaos of our current "Great Recession", Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. He's the only way and his way doesn't look like the ways we understand or are comfortable with.