Month: November 2016

First, Lord: No tattoos

First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.

May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.

When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer.

Guide her, protect her
When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.

Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels.

What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.

May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.

Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.

O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.

And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.

And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.

“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.

Amen.

–  Tina Fey, Bossypants

I know I’ve shared this before, but this prayer runs through my head on a very regular basis, and now and then Matt and I quote parts of it to each other under our breath, when things with our teenaged daughter get a little rugged.  SO GOOD.

 

Hair trigger

It hasn’t been a very calm few months at our house.  Which is strange, because in other ways it’s been very calm.  We haven’t done much other than work, physical therapy, and homework (me, Matt, and kids, in that order).  But everybody feels frayed and tense, not to mention tired, and we seem to be blowing up at each other with uncomfortable regularity.

Often the mornings are bad.  We bicker and argue over breakfast (and “we” here is usually the children and me) and then pile into the car to make the 0.75 mile drive to school.  There’s some escalation of the disagreement in the car and by the time I drop Grace and Whit off I am filled with a toxic mixture of sorrow and regret.  I feel awful about having argued with the kids, usually it is at least partially my fault, and I can’t shake it off.

While I have said over and over and over again that Grace and Whit don’t belong to us, I do know that Matt and I to a certain degree create the weather in which they are growing up. I feel terrible that I’m responsible for too many tense moments and thunder storms in the last months.

I started this post before the election results and it feels self-indulgent to write about how things are snappy inside our house when I worry about the state of the country generally. But at the same time, I realize that maybe the only thing I can possibly influence IS what’s inside my house, so I need to focus there. Since November 9th I feel enormously more sorrowful and anxious, but somehow, also more focused on keeping things peaceful at home.

There are several things that keep running through my head these last few days, but chief among them is the line that I have used two times on our family holiday card.

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.

This is what I want to do, to be, to model.  I just have to figure out how to stop snapping long enough to do it.

How are you doing, out there?  I’m honestly curious.

 

The new world

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Moon rising, November 12th.  This made me think of Desiderata, “With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.”  I hope that is true.

I went to bed on election night around 10:30, full of Tylenol PM and a deep foreboding about what was coming, even though it wasn’t yet official.  There’s no ambiguity that Hillary Clinton was my candidate. I woke up at 5:30 and checked my phone in the dark of our room and saw the news.  I went upstairs to see Matt, who had slept fitfully and moved to the couch around 3am.  I knelt next to him in the pre-dawn blackness of our family room, glancing up to see the tree that I have watched and loved for so many years.  I had tears streaming down my face when I woke him up.

How?

I don’t know.  He doesn’t know.  None of us know.  I woke Whit up and then had to go to work before Grace got up, so I left her a note.  I’ve felt numb for days and have been unable to express the strength and amplitude of my reaction.  It’s about losing the chance to have a woman president, and about the choice of a clearly sexist man over an incredibly qualified candidate who happened to be female, for sure.  But it’s about more than that, too. This John Pavlovitz essay says it best, in my view: this loss is about believing in a certain kind of world and realizing that almost 50% of my country believes in a different world.  It’s dark versus light, inclusion versus exclusion, being open versus being closed, fear versus faith.

Maybe I was naive. Clearly I was naive.  I have said over and over that I don’t know if I am more heartbroken or more shocked to have been so entirely, completely out of touch.  I had a festering anxiety about her winning that many around me said was ridiculous – the polls and data supported it being a done deal, I heard!  But I couldn’t ignore my tummy rumble and my fear.  Still, the basic fact of his win and her loss did shock me and does still.  This is the world we live in?

I’ve read a lot since Tuesday, but my favorite pieces so far are three: the John Pavlovitz one, the letter Aaron Sorkin wrote to his daughter and wife after Trump’s win, and John Palfrey’s comments. I need to write something to Grace and Whit but my thoughts aren’t yet clear enough. I love what Sorkin says about his daughter’s first vote, in 2020.  Grace will vote that year, too. And when she woke up to the news on Wednesday morning, one of her first reactions was dismay that she would not be able to vote for Hillary, and a woman, in 2020.  I know the feeling.  I share it.  I also love Sorkin’s reflections on his grandfather, which reminded me of how vividly present my grandmothers have been during this election season for me.

My favorite piece on this post-election world are these comments John Palfrey, head of school at Andover, made on the morning of November 9th. I share his cautionary, anxious sense that there’s a place in the world where tolerance of intolerance has gone too far, and his assertion that that time is now.  I love his exhortation that young people should consider lives of service and politics which reminded me of Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary, gracious concession speech in which she said “please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.”  Indeed.  And how.

The only way forward, though I walk it with a heavy heart, is to model open-mindedness and compassion for Grace and Whit and to keep believing in a world that believes in those values.  I believe we have to stand up to the kind of fearful anger that I worry will now rise up around America (already I’ve heard terrifying stories about behavior that horrifies me). Truthfully, I feel a little lost, a lot daunted, and extremely sad.  But there’s no choice but to move forward in this new world.

I shall joyfully allow

I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what C.S. Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.

~Clyde Kilby in “Amazed in the Ordinary”

Another beautiful passage from my friend Emily’s lambent blog Barnstorming, which is one of my absolute must-reads, every single day.

Things I Love Lately

Stronger Together – this open letter in the Harvard Crimson gave me goosebumps.  The Harvard women’s soccer team, famously described and derided in the men’s soccer team’s “scouting report,” addresses the situation.  They are named, and they speak for themselves.  I love what they say about learning to work hard, move past challenges, and that we are stronger together.  I very much appreciate their ackowledgement that there are a great many good men in the world. I’m sorry to see their acknowledgement – which resonates with me – that the reduction of women to their looks is still common in the world.

30 Best Young Adult Books of All Time – Thank you so much for Hilary & T for sending this along – what a marvelous list!  I of course love seeing my favorite book, A Wrinkle in Time, on here, as well The Giver.  But I also love the way this list isn’t the same as all the others, and includes several titles that are new to me.  I will be exploring these books for sure.

Love Warrior – I am finally reading Glennon Doyle Melton’s book (thank you, Pam, for sending!).  Oh. My. God.  It’s like a freight train of glory already, heading at me at a million powerful miles per hour.

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.