Friday April 27, 2012

"I’ve heard it said that every day you need half an hour of quiet time for yourself, or your Self, unless you’re incredibly busy and stressed, in which case you need an hour. I promise you, it is there. Fight tooth and nail to find time, to make it. It is our true wealth, this moment, this hour, this day."

--Anne Lamott

Friday April 20, 2012

Getting ready for baby

"In one of the first teachings I ever heard, the teacher said, 'I don't know why you came here, but I want to tell you right now that the basis of this whole teaching is that you're never going to get it all together.' I felt a little like he had just slapped me in the face or thrown cold water over my head, but I've always remembered it. There isn't going to be some precious future time when all the loose ends will be tied up. Even though it was shocking to me, it rang true." --Pema Chodron

Termites and dry rot and rodents, oh my...

Two weeks ago I had coffee with a friend. I sobbed about something. She reminded me that I was hormonal because I'm pregnant (32 weeks now!). I think I had forgotten. Months ago I had the crib moved to the nursery and figured we were ready. I hadn't thought much about having a baby since then.

That's the thing about getting ready for the third. There isn't too much to be done, and yet, over coffee with my friend, I realized I might need to do something in the real world to signal to my emotional/spiritual self that it's time to get ready.

So I called the painter.

We shall paint her nursery!

I was thinking yellow, but big sister insisted that baby sister should have pink. At the paint store I picked up an armful of pink samples. And by the next day the nursery walls were covered with various patches of pink--and like being pregnant, there was no turning back.

When the painter came he said, "I looovve it!" referring to the pink I chose (which is what he always says about the paint I choose). But then he said, "You know Mrs. Spencer, you have some dry rot on those window sills outside--we should take care of that before the rain."

I was appreciative that someone was looking out for my window sills, because I certainly wasn't. And I agreed, if it needed to be done, let's do it before the rain.

The workers arrived the next day. A troop upstairs in blue booties doing indoor work, and a troop outside working on a couple of window sills.

About three hours in, Jose, the painter came to and said, "Mrs. Spencer, we have a big problem here." He took me outside, pulled back the foliage of a bush and showed me one of my window sills. It looked like it had dissolved, disintegrated, disappeared.

Turns out, when Jose was prepping to paint, the sill gave way beneath the pressure. Termites had eaten up to the exterior paint, leaving behind a shell of a window sill.

By the time we found the termites, the nursery was painted. But our work had only begun.

We called the termite inspectors. The good news was, the termites were local. The bad news was, we also had a rodent who had made its way into our crawl space, and our dryer had detatched from the vent, and our plumbing was leaking, and our gutters needed cleaning, and we needed to get our roof inspected. Oh my!

For two weeks we have had a small army of men at our house. Each small job has unfurled into a bigger job. Multiple times a day I have wanted to tear my hair out with frustration...what started out as painting the nursery pink has turned into a home maintenance overhaul that feels like it will never resolve.

So I had a good laugh and breathed a sigh of relief when I found the quote from Pema Chodoron.

"You're never going to get it all together.' I felt a little like he had just slapped me in the face or thrown cold water over my head, but I've always remembered it. There isn't going to be some precious future time when all the loose ends will be tied up."

I take comfort knowing that when a master realized this simple, obvious truth, it felt like a splash of cold water. I don't need to punish myself for being uptight and craving everything to JUST WORK OUT ALREADY. All that is required of me is a willingness to get wet and let go.

And maybe this is the best preparation for #3 that there could be--a reminder that chaos is normal, that life rarely comes together, and that the easiest way to stop feeling like I want to tear my hair out is to flow with the disruptions and the unexpected hiccups along the way.

Baby, we're ready now!

In Praise of Other Mothers

Here is one of the heartbreaking things motherhood has taught me. There are things I will miss.

When my first daughter was born, I found it impossible to let anyone else care for her. I nursed her, I understood her every grimace or squeal or smile. I thought that no one could know what I know. And maybe I was right, maybe no one could know what I knew. But, what I also learned was that I couldn't do it all. I ground myself to a nub caring for her 24/7, risking my health, my sanity, and my marriage.

By the time my second daughter came, I knew I needed help. So I found it. I scheduled childcare hours the way a thirsty woman would drink from a well.

And then it happened. I missed some things.

I missed understanding the exact nuances of my second daughters night time feedings. I did not miss her first smile, but I missed her second, third or fourth. I did not miss her first steps, but I missed the exact moment when those steps switched from being frankenstien waddles to a real run. I saw the transition happening, but couldn't tell you the day she got the hang of it.

For me, this is a bittersweet heartbreak. I know I needed the rest, the time to center myself, to connect with my mate or to help out my own mom. But my heart could break for the moments I missed.

Today I'm seeing these moments of missing differently. Today I am seeing them from a daughter's eyes. And what I'm seeing is that while a mother's heart may break, perhaps a daughters world is expanding.

Today I am returning to a home I have been to many times. Snugged a mile inland from the New Hampshire Seacoast there is a house that feels like one I could have called my own but didn't. It is the house where my best friend's family lived. In my girl days it was green and had a widows walk on top. The family room had red carpet, and the counter at the kitchen had two stools where we would sit while my buddy's mom, the woman of the house, cooked us dinner, made us carrot cake, and welcomed us home on many weekends during our boarding school years.

My parents were farther away. They were getting divorced. They were working hard at their own lives, doing what they had to do to right a course that had gone wrong. Our whole family needed them to be doing this work. But they missed some things. And I'm sure they feel heart break for the moments their burdens kept them from me or my brother.

But in exchange, I had the pleasure of many happy times with my best friend's mother. She was not my mother, she was an other mother, but a woman who cared for me as if I were her own.

In particular, I remember one gloomy winter night at boarding school. We had all just returned from Christmas break and the prospect of a long and arduous winter term pressed on in on us. My best friend called her mom from the pay phone in the hallway, and in an hour she was there, after curfew, to rescue us from the night. Our house mother gave her permission to spring us from the dorm where we lived with forty other girls. She drove us down Main St to Friendly's where we ordered sundaes with butter crunch ice cream. She hugged us as we cried our high school girl cries. But by the end of our sundaes, we were laughing. We were out past sign in. It was bitter cold. And we were eating ice cream. We felt better.

Today I'm in a plane on my way back to the coast where you can get butter crunch ice cream at Friendly's. It is early fall. The weather will be crisp and clear, the best of what New England has to offer. But it is not a happy visit. This other mother of mine has surrendered to an illness, which she managed and fought, with the tenacity and gumption that defined who she was. And in the midst of this moment, I am, in a way, grateful for some of the moments that my own mother missed. The small heart breaks of missing that she endured, that enabled me to have my time with this other mother. To be cared for and loved by her. Because her way was a different way than my own mothers, not better or worse, just different. And in experiencing the difference I got to learn something about the kind of warmth and friendship the world outside my family could offer me.

As the plane launches me east to care for this part of my life that requires my presence today, a new other mother enters my life. She has brown hair, a big smile and a daughter in the same Kindergarten class as my own. We ride bikes to school together in the mornings. She trails her daughter behind a red townie with Hawaiian flower decals. I ride next to my own daughter whose purple mermaid two wheeler sounds part bike, part train as she clickity clacks along our street still on training wheels.

Today this other mother will pick up my girl from school. She will tenderly click the snap of my daughter's pink bike helmet, careful not to pinch the chin it protects. She will help her unlock her bike and walk it through campus. Then she will ride two five year old girls safely home. And by doing so, she will, in the way that only other mothers can, show my girl something new about how the world outside our family loves her.

Shield Your Joy

Summer has gotten the best of me. After a month or so of steady posts, I slipped, I tripped, I did a double flip...and haven't posted in awhile. In the spirit of summer, I'm going to go casual--dirty hair, flip flops, and a fast and a couple of fast and loose blog posts.

About two months ago, Gretchen Rubin, author/blogger of The Happiness Project(blog), and The Happiness Project (book) published a post that asked "Do You Shield Your Joyous Ones?"

She posted the following prayer:

A prayer attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo includes the line, Shield your joyous ones:
Tend your sick ones, O Lord Jesus Christ;
rest your weary ones; bless your dying ones;
soothe your suffering ones; pity your afflicted ones;
shield your joyous ones.
And all for your love’s sake.


And followed with this comment:

"Once I started to reflect about my “joyous ones,” I began to appreciate the people I know who are joyous."

Her post coincided with the opening weekend of Camp Deer Run, the evangelical Christian summer camp I attended as a girl.

Despite the fact that I have struggled with many aspects of Camp Deer Run's theology, my memories of summer camp continue to shimmer with joy and sweetness, as they do for many of my fellow alumni campers. And on the first weekend of camp I couldn't help but find myself humming our song,

"Camp Deer Run is the camp for me
boom boom boom boom
Camp Deer Run is the camp for me
boom boom boom boom
I'm as happy here as I can be
now ain't that heavenly!"

In June I still feel like I should be packing my steamer trunk. My dream life takes me on frequent journeys back to this place. I arrive in my cabin, and await my old friends to join me. Presumably we are hoping to return to the shelter of a place that was so good at "shielding your joyous ones."

What Rubin's post had me thinking, and then was highlighted as I read Camp Deer Run's "tweet" announcing opening weekend, was that to some extent, we are all joyous ones. Certainly there are those (Andrea, thank you) who are most likely to be our sparkling cheerleaders, but inside all of us, there is a spark of joy--and it has done me good this summer to think about ways to shield my inner "joyous one."

I became aware that I more frequently ruminate about potential future disappointment, or current minor set backs, than I celebrate a joyous moment or feeling. The good moments seem to flit in and out, while I find myself wiling away long stretches of time thinking about the bad things that could befall my kids, my husband, my parents, my brother....insert the infinite list of people and things I care about.

So for those of you who also find yourself more frequently ruminating than celebrating, here's a list of things I found that help me shield my joy:

1. Singing.

This one is number one for me, not because I do it most, but because it works well for me and I think I should do it more. As I thought about shielding joy, I developed an appreciation for how the evangelical tradition focuses on worship--which at camp, mostly was by way of singing. For those of you who don't have a religious tradition "worship" is going to sound like getting on your knees and submitting, but in the evangelical tradition, worship is about celebrating (and by celebrating, experiencing) how awesome God is. I recently finished reading The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinners Sememster at America's Holiest University, by Kevin Roose. It's a young journalists account of attending Liberty University, Jerry Falwell's evangelical school in Virginia. He describes worship at Liberty like this:

"The French sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote about 'collective effervescence,' a special kind of energy that forms around mass gatherings...Liberty, for all its flaws and quirks, fosters more collective effervescence than any other place I've ever been. Every Wednesday night and Sunday morning, you feel it at Campus Church. Three times a week you feel it at convocation...It's the sensation you get when your mind is swallowed up by a sort of group mind, when the hundred-decibel worship music and laser light shows and the people jumping and screaming and hollering all around you combine to form a social organism all its own."

OK, I don't get that when I'm humming or singing to myself, but I DID get that at camp--and so when I sing the old songs, I tap into the effervescent feeling. If you don't have praise songs in your repetoire, try "This land is my land, this land is your land," the Marines Hymn (From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli), or "Take me out to the ballgame"

2. Follow the kids' lead. Kids seem like joy machines to me. They laugh all the time, and while there is a fair bit of whining at our house, it is short lived. They move on to the next happy moment surprisingly quickly.

3. Find some nature.

4. Play with the dog.

5. Learn a joke.

6. Take up an old hobby you had as a kid--for me this is coloring. Even though my kids are coloring all the time, it took a trip to a spa that had the exact coloring book I had as a girl to remind me of how much I liked coloring. For me, it is a different boost than singing an upbeat song, but it is a happy practice all the same.

7. Connect with friends.

That's my short list. I would love to hear about any ideas that pop up for other people.

And a big thank you to my camp friends, protectors of my joy, friends for life. I so appreciate the conversation we've all been having this last week.

Cheers!

The worst mistake I've made in my marriage so far

Once upon a time we had no children, and then one day, we had one.

My delivery had not gone according to plan. Indeed, before the baby came we had the good instinct not to make an official plan, but the surprise, of course, was that we had a plan, we just didn't know it. And when that plan went south, well, let's just say it wasn't pretty. One un-pretty thing led to another, and by the time my first baby was three months old we found ourselves literally in the woods.

About a half mile from our house there is a grove of eucalyptus trees where we often went, and still do go, to play frisbee with our dog. It's close, but away--in that it's a different place--wild and woodsy--not neat and manicured like the blocks of our neighborhood. We go there a lot, and we went there one day when Gwendolyn was three months old.

We had a conversation that went something like this.

Me, sobbing and screaming: "I'm angry, I'm just so overwhelmed. I need help from you and I feel like I'm not getting it."

Graham, who, at the time was launching his second company: "Honey, just tell me what to do. All I want is to know what to do."

At which point, I burst out, "that's exactly my problem right there. I feel like I'm drowning and you're standing on the boat with a life ring in your hand, saying 'honey, tell me what to do.' I don't KNOW what to tell you what to do. I'm so tired and so overwhelmed. I just want you to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING."

And right there, in that moment of conversation, I made the biggest mistake I have made in my marriage so far. I'd like to say I've learned my lesson, which I haven't, but what I can say is I'm learning my lesson...and here's what I know so far.

The biggest mistake I ever make in my marriage is to perceive my husband and me as separate, him on the boat and me drowning at sea.

At the time of our conversation in the woods our first baby was very young, I had just had an emergency c-section, I was nursing for the first time and sleeping not at all, and I thought all of this was happening to me.

And, of course, it was happening to me. But what I failed to understand was that it was happening to him too.

He was a new father, he was launching a company, his new baby was crying every hour on the hour, and his wife was going down the tubes--how I thought that guy might be on a boat with a life ring just shows how desperate I was for SOMEONE to be on the boat with the life ring.

What it took me a long time to see, and still sometimes eludes me, is that when I am suffering, he is suffering too. My problems are his problems and his problems are my problems.

Over time, and with the help of wise counseling, the attitude we've tried to cultivate, and we're sometimes able to find when we need to is, "Um, Houston, we've got a problem here."

We use the clunky metaphor of a bucket to remember that we're in the colorful mess of our lives together. Some things fill up our bucket (date night, wrestling with kids before bed, action movie night for him, long walks in the hills for me) and some things drain our bucket (his meeting at the office with a blow hard colleague, a long morning of toddler negotiations, first, over mismatched sippy cups and, second, over our tragic lack of a clean pair of pink sparkle socks, cat barf on our new comforter).

Either way, being in the bucket together creates space for things to be complicated and helps us recognize that energizing one of us has the positive effect of filling our shared bucket at the same time.

This insight, of course, is no new or original enlightenment, just our way of claiming other people's hard won wisdom for ourselves.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk and scholar, more elegantly explains it this way in his book Teachings on Love:

"Happiness is not an individual matter; it has the nature of interbeing. When you are able to make one friend smile, her happiness will nourish you also. When you find ways to peace, joy and happiness, you do it for everyone."

Everyone--the whole big bucket.

Working toward Thich Nhat Hanh's idea of interbeing is the work of a lifetime. Being in the bucket together, making space for shared frustrations and complications, as well as mutual joy is the work that most married couples find themselves up against. And to me, any couple, same-sex or heterosexual, who decides to take on that work, to bind their lives together, raise a family if they choose, and do the best they can to build a safe bucket for their children and each other, that couple deserves all the rights and privileges of any married couple.

Like the worst mistake I've ever made in my marriage, thinking that same sex couples and heterosexual couples are separate, is one of the worst mistakes we could make. Marriage is marriage. And any couple, same sex or heterosexual, who figures out how to keep their own bucket full is a treasure to families and communities. As each couple does it for themselves, they do it for everyone.

An Afterlife I can Live With

The fault line in my Christian faith that eventually led to my seismic faith shake up, had to do with what happens when we die. I could never accept, and still do not accept, a concept of heaven in which good individuals who had not specifically accepted Jesus as their personal savior, would be excluded from Heaven.

When my uncle died this past May 2nd, I was reminded of how intense this personal fault line is for me. I was reminded of how mystifying the passing of a human being really is. And, as I ponder it, I join everyone who has ever lost someone in wondering how to make sense of the brutal shift between having someone day after day, and then having day after day without that person.

My uncle's funeral was held at The Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola in New York City, a cathedral so gorgeous, the sheer awe it inspires might tempt a skeptic to reconsider the possibility of becoming Catholic.

The mass's main message was that death is not the final chapter for Christians. For Christians, there is victory and hope in The Resurrection, so as Father Whit explained, "life does not end with death, Christians experience life, death, and Resurrection."

For me, the idea of a resurrection that includes a reunion at the pearly gates with Jesus and all my loved ones (who had the good sense to accept Jesus into their hearts) feels like the kind of confabulation that has been witnessed in split brain experiments, which have been described many places, but which I most recently read about in The Accidental Mind by David Linden. Here's his description of one split brain experiment:

"Split-brain patients provide a unique opportunity to see how the left and right cortices process information independently. In one famous experiment, a split-brain patient was placed before a specially constructed screen, designed so that the left cortex received only an image of a chicken's claw...while the right cortex saw a winter landscape with snow...When asked to pick a card with an image to match, the right cortex...picked a shovel to go with the theme of snow, while the left cortex...picked an image of a chicken to go with the claw....When the patient was asked why he chose those two images, the response...was, "Oh that's simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean the chicken shed."

Linden's analysis follows:

"The left brain [which controls the language centers of the brain] saw the chicken claw, but not the snow scene. When faced with the shovel and the chicken, it retroactively constructed a story to make these disparate choices appear to make sense...The narrative-constructing capacity of the left cortex has now been clearly observed in more than 100 split-brain patients in many different situations."

These experiments prove that our brains, on their own, are driven to create narratives that make sense out of disparate and even conflicting facts. And with the recent passing of my uncle, I was reminded of how the finality of a death feels like it just doesn't make sense, like that it is something unreal, that one day someone is here, and then the next day their body is here, but their personality is gone. Disparate is an understatement for how death feels.

The mass the priest delivered at my uncle's funeral offered the following narrative for how to make sense of the jarring disparity of death. Humans are born, live life in a godly way, die and are resurrected in heaven with Jesus.

It's one possible story, but I have problems with it. The first is that it's not available to people who don't know Jesus. And the second is that intellectually, if taken literally, I can't wrap my head around a resurrection in which all the good souls end up in a real place called Heaven.

So in the wake of my uncle's passing, I've chosen to construct my own narrative that makes sense of the disparate facts of life and death. I've chosen to take comfort in what church offered--a magnificent ceremony that honors a human life in the most profound way--and from there I've gone my own way.

Here's how my narrative goes:

I choose to remember my uncle, as will my aunt, my mom, my cousins and everyone who knew him. Here is some of what we will remember:

He called me stretch;
He sat by me and sang Christmas carols and marveled at my kids;
He called me his hero;
He filled my drink;
He stood by me on the deck and teased me that he had to buy new deck chairs to make room for us;
He counted how many bottles of wine we drank;
He swept the patio;
He said, "you're a pain in my ass!" And he wasn't kidding, but he laughed and he loved us anyway;
He gave me a sparkling teardrop for Valentine's Day

The evening after the funeral we sit around a table at dinner and let memories swell. We tell stories out loud, we merge them together, and remember them again. We feel he is around us, because when we tell stories we remember what it was like to be with him. We resonate with one another, echoing for all time, what Ed feels like.

And this is happening, it has me thinking, perhaps this is my idea of resurrection, of life after death: for each of our lives to become stories that mean something, that merit re-telling, and that in the re-telling remind those left behind that they were loved.

That's an afterlife I can live with, and one I would be satisfied to have.

I'm part of the largest growing religious group in America, are you?

This December I learned that I am part of the largest growing religious group in the United States. No, I'm not an Evangelical Christian (that segment is also a growing group), but that is where my interest in spirituality started.

I was 10 years old when I asked Jesus into my heart. It was my first summer at Camp Deer Run in Alton, NH. I did it silently sitting on a rock outside. I closed my eyes and prayed that Jesus would enter my heart. And then I prayed that he would open my mom's heart so that she could go to Heaven too.

I didn't feel rapture or receive mystical guidance, but I felt safer in the world. I knew I had a god on my side who could part rivers, move mountains with mustard seeds, could raise the dead and heal the sick. He was also promised to take me under his wing so that I would never have to feel my skin burn in Hell.

That guy, Jesus, would have been a big help the previous school year, which had been a rough one. At various times I was called Brain, Leech, and Loser. On the playground kick ball players migrated into a tight radius when I was up. And when arrived home after school the house was empty except for a Brazilian housekeeper/nanny who was gray faced and sad, and, and spoke no English at all.

Jesus sounded pretty good.

Twenty-seven years later. I've got a few friends. I'm rarely called names. And even though I'm probably still no good at kickball, at 37 it matters a lot less.

I still close my eyes to pray.

I continue to think highly of Jesus--I'm reminded of my husband's friend Kevin who says, "yeah, I'm into the Jeez."

But even though the idea of Jesus still means something to me, I don't consider myself Christian in a formal sense. Jesus has been demoted. He is no longer my spiritual sun, but one star in my Milky Way, one prick of light in a large somewhat ordered collection.

And oddly enough, in my undefined spiritual identity, I may have found my tribe.

A December 2008 poll (you'll need to scroll to read the general report) reported that the largest growing religious affiliation in America is not having one. That number has grown from 8% to 15% since 1999. In 2008 an additional 11% of respondents refused to answer the question at all. And, more telling than either of those, I think, is that 27% of Americans believe that their funeral will not be religious.

In my adult life, I happen to know a lot of people who have no religious affiliation. The authors of the ARIS poll call them "nones.". And, in my experience, these folks, like me, are not entirely un-spiritual. Many of them have a strong set of beliefs and moral values. They live meaningful lives and are looking for ways to articulate that meaning. Many of them, like me, even pray.

One of my friends in this group is an atheist, but I believe he is one of the most spiritual people I know. And as a therapist, my mom, who is also a "none," regularly offers spiritual advice and sees people through periods of spiritual growth, but she never did ask Jesus to be her savior like I hoped she would that summer (and for many years after).

These people--this group--you are my tribe--I dedicate my blog to you.

To anyone who has ever wondered why we're here, who has wondered what it means to have a meaningful life, and who has found their religion's official answer wanting--I offer my best effort to you.

That we may all be able to recognize goodness when we see it in ourselves and others, that we may leave our kids a world that is better than the one we found, and that we may all seek and know peace.

This is my prayer. Amen.

This is going to get personal

Consider yourself fore-warned:

There are a few people out there who have signed up to follow my Twitter and my blog posts. You've seen occasional quotes, but not too much else.

I'm giving you fair warning that I'm going to start posting more frequently, and that some of my posts are going to have to do with religion and spirituality. If that is too woo-woo for you, now's your chance to disembark from my thought train.

However, let me try to persuade you that it might be worth staying subscribed.

As many friends of mine know, I have a long and somewhat tangled religious/spiritual history. Most notably, I was an enthusiastic "born again Christian" from age 10 to about 18, despite the fact that my family barely ever went to church. Strange, right? If you want to hear about that, stay subscribed.

Between the ages of 16 and 18, I experienced a genuine crisis of faith. I stayed up late at night crying about whether or not my family was going to Hell. I prayed that God would help me understand why innocent good people would go to Hell if they had not specifically asked Jesus Christ to be their Savior. This was before I started reading The Sacred Canopy and other philosophy texts in college, which dealt the final blows to my childhood faith. It was a dark time for me, and if you have ever had one yourself, stay subscribed.

Life went on, I lived in New York City, moved to California, and got married. My wedding was the first occasion I returned to the patterns of religion and spirituality on my own terms, which healed some things for me.

But soon after, I had a personal crisis, which landed me in therapy (no surprise since my mom is a therapist). If you're curious about therapy, what it's like, what it can do, and what its weaknesses are, stay subscribed, because I'll probably talk about that too.

As a preview, I'll just tell you, that I think good therapy is a kind of spiritual practice. This and other experiences have led me to circle back to my interest in faith and spiritual practice. And while spirituality does not, on the surface, appeal to everyone, there are core patterns which when you separate them out from woo-woo, mystical and fundamentalist belief systems, have real benefit for people who crave purpose and passion in their lives. Intrigued? stay subscribed.

I will be drawing on stories from real life experiences (mine and others), research in neuroscience, anthropology, sociology and new evidence in psychology to try to convince you that spiritual basics like saying prayers, following the "golden rule," selecting a "guru,"and finding a like-minded values-based community are endeavors that still matter and can be of benefit.

Oh, and, like all bloggers I reserve the right to chat about whatever happens to be on my mind, even if it doesn't fit exactly ;-)