How Hard Have We Got It?

Flipping through the channels while on the treadmill last week, I heard a panel of both men and women say that this is the hardest time in history to be a woman. Skeptical but curious, I tuned in for another minute to see what evidence they would give. Nothing new or surprising came up. They mentioned how women are expected to keep bearing the load of home management and child rearing while working at least 40 hours a week.

While I would concede that we women may be operating at the fastest pace ever, I cringe at the word “hardest.” Does this panel of well-dressed, well-fed, well-paid American men and women ever read about history? Can we even begin to imagine what “hard” looked like for a woman in the ancient world? A woman who had no warm place to live, no hospital or medicine, no lifespan beyond a couple of grueling decades? What about all those women who gave birth in fields, only to watch baby after baby die? Generations and generations of women lived their lives knowing—and fearing—that men viewed them as little more than objects to be used and assaulted. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they also had to sew and wash their clothes by hand.  

In more recent history, I think of the slave women who watched their husbands and children sold on an auction block. Or even the pioneer women, who traveled for months by foot or horseback, enduring violent storms, illnesses, and attacks by natives, only to end up in a freezing cold shack miles away from the nearest neighbor, cooking three meals a day out of whatever they could grow. What about the women who starved themselves so they could parcel out their few morsels of food to their children during the Great Depression? Or the women who saw every man in their lives—husbands, boyfriends, brothers, and sons—leave for the great wars, their minds consumed with worry, their hands burdened with holding down the American fort?

There is nothing simple about American life today, but to call it the “hardest time in history to be a woman” shows a shallow, self-centered view of history. I know that there are women today who still live in slavery, who still have no rights or opportunities, who live in war zones and have babies in fields, but I would argue that most of them are beneficiaries of at least some modern conveniences. And American women? I don’t know one who doesn’t find it difficult to juggle all the responsibilities of her life—but we do it in warm (or air-conditioned) houses, driving warm (or air-conditioned) cars, sipping lattes and checking our e-mail.

Not a day goes by when I am not somehow grateful to be living at this time in this place. It’s far from perfect, and life is hard for everyone, but I’ll take our “hard” over history’s “hard” any day. 

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

A funny thing has happened at kindergarten this year. This mom has learned one of the Big Lessons of her life. I wasn’t looking forward to kindergarten again. I secretly felt done with the phonograms and the “100 Days of School” party, done with meeting throngs of new people, done with that whole phase of life. We’ve been at our school seven years now, and I’ve settled into some deep friendships with other moms. My son Braden’s friends are all first-borns, like him, and their parents are very similar in age to us. We have multiple sets of brother-sister friends and families who mesh nicely, comfortably, easily with our own.

Problem is, I wasn’t done. Camryn was ready for kindergarten.

She was born when I was 36. And a half. That makes me the grandma of the kindergarten class. As the other moms filed in on orientation night, some pregnant, some pushing strollers, I decided that since these were probably not going to be my new best friends in terms of shared live experiences, I’d ask God what role He wanted me to play with this group of parents.

In years past, when I met the kids and parents in my children’s classrooms, I instinctively sniffed out those who seemed to have the most natural friend potential and focused on knowing them. This year I didn’t go in with that (or any other) agenda. And here’s the big ah-ha moment: When I stopped jockeying for social position—both my own and my child’s—I was able to see people in Camryn’s class I never would have noticed otherwise. I spent the entire Thanksgiving party visiting with a mom from another country. Her daughter looks like no one else in the class. (A multicultural school we are not.) Mother and daughter both stayed far outside the circles of cute, social moms and cute, social kids. I didn’t see another person talk to either of them, actually. But their story—which includes an arranged marriage and a college degree earned in an unknown language—is fascinating. And I would have missed it if I’d been focused on “people who seem like us.”

While setting up a mother-daughter outing with this family, I received a simple e-mail message written in broken English: “Thank you for the love.”

It broke me. This is all it takes to show love to someone? Chatting for an hour over “Pin the Waddle on the Turkey” and getting together for a quick play date? Could God really use such minuscule, natural things? Then came a more powerful second revelation: How many other opportunities have I missed over the years to love the unseen? Because I was so focused on myself?

Oh, God, forgive me! And thank you for using my fourth child, increased age and maturity, and one more round of kindergarten to open my eyes to your ways. 

2012 Reading List

If only there were more hours in the day to read! I did check several books off my list this year, but every time I drive past a library, I feel the pull of shelves full of unread books.

I started the year by jumping on the bandwagon and reading all three Hunger Games books. Like everyone else, I was completely sucked into the story and couldn’t stop thinking about the characters. (Peeta is one of my favorite literary characters ever. If you just saw the movie and didn’t read the book, you’ll have no idea why.) Like George Lucas and J.K. Rowling before her, Suzanne Collins created more than a series of books. She created a new civilization, and I fell in face first. Still, part of me wishes I had stopped after the first book; the others weren’t nearly so satisfying.

Back to Rowling, my big kids and I finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, leaving us with just one book left. Regardless of what happens to Harry, I’m afraid I’ll be drenching the final pages in tears as this special time shared with Braden and Addison comes to an end.

My only other fiction book of the year was The Last Disciple by Sigmund Brouwer and Hank Hanegraaff. First-century persecution of Christians—including the phrase “human torch”—has never been so real to me.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson has been on my list for a couple years, and I finally picked it up, thinking I was getting fiction. Turns out, it’s a real story and reads more like a history book than a thriller. Still, I read it quickly and found that it answered some of my questions about why the world stood by and watched as Hitler rose to power.

Also in the secular non-fiction category were The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman and The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West. I read both of these too late (Flat predicted that some day we’d be able to take pictures on our cell phones), but they were still interesting. The latter, however, felt a little like watching 72 consecutive hours of Fox News. I agreed with it more or less, but the ceaseless political drumming got a bit old.

I edited one autobiography this year and read another. The paid one was the story of a woman who escaped the Liberian civil war with her husband and a toddler strapped to her back. If you don’t know anything about the history of Liberia, google it. We all should have at least a 10-minute education on the subject, starting with why their flag looks so much like ours. The other autobiography, A Heart for Freedom, is the story of Chai Ling’s role in the 1989 Chinese student uprising. I know next to nothing about Chinese history, so this one was helpful, too.

Two friends, one from a long time ago and one I’m blessed to know today, released great books this year. Margot Starbuck was my RA in college, and I always thought she was a mixture of quirky and profound. That’s also how I would describe her book, Small Things with Great Love: Adventures in Loving Your Neighbor, written for people with kids, laundry, jobs, and mortgages who still want to change the world. It’s also very funny, and I loved it. Also in the “loved” category is my friend Becky Grosenbach’s book Flying Cheese: Stories from an Ordinary Life. Becky could write about, well, cheese, and make it meaningful. Don’t let the subtitle fool you; she may appear ordinary on the surface, but she’s a gem, both as a writer and a person. You can get a copy at http://www.beckygrosenbach.com/

Finally, I made some progress in my goal to read all of C.S. Lewis’s published works. The Great Divorce, while not my favorite, is a good reminder that Lewis was not just a great thinker but also the master of metaphor. He is certainly one of the most creative storytellers who ever lived. I’m still relishing the brilliance of the Screwtape Letters, a couple paragraphs at a time. The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed, written 20 years apart and separated by the most significant event in Lewis’s life—his marriage and the subsequent death of his wife, Helen—are best read together. Lewis wrote as a casual observer of pain in 1940; in 1961, he’s in the trenches. He sees the difference himself: “Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. . . . If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labeled Illness, Pain, Death, and Loneliness. I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t” (A Grief Observed). His return journey to faith after Helen’s death is perhaps Lewis at his best, or at least his most real.

I plan to read more Lewis classics in 2013, along with Rachel Held Evans’s book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, and The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan. Braden is interested in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so we may read that one together. And if hours start magically appearing in the day, I would love to read Les Miserables this year after seeing the film a few days ago. There’s nothing I love more than an awe-inspiring story.

Things I Love

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT CHRISTMAS

Christmas music (I would listen in August if that’s when the radio stations started playing them)

Ornaments with my kids’ baby pictures

Fun mail interspersed with the bills

People who really get into their lighting displays

Watching my kids watch Elf

Happy, singing bell-ringers outside Walmart

My mother-in-law’s cranberry cake

My Carpenters’ Christmas album

Caroling

The peppermint shake at Chic-fil-a

Live nativity scenes

Luke 2

Kevin off of work

Christmas trees in windows

Nester the Long-Eared Donkey

Little girls in Christmas dresses

Cars with antlers

Candlelight services on Christmas Eve

Christmas break with the kids: going to bed late, sleeping in, no lunch-packing, playing games, watching movies, wearing our PJs until noon, teaching Braden where we keep the silverware and the syrup a mere four months after we moved

Anticipation

THINGS I DON'T LOVE QUITE SO MUCH

12 Days of Christmas workouts, complete with 144 push-ups

Stocking stuffers

Never having enough tape

Overspending

Gluttony

December 26

Processing the Unthinkable

I usually don’t sit down to write a blog post without knowing my point in advance. This time I don’t know what my point is. I’m just processing.

Three and a half years ago, I watched my friends go through the brutal, agonizing, unimaginable process of losing their teenage son to cancer. About the same time Ian died, a local news story threw me for a loop. Two college girls, home for spring break, were getting ready for a family outing by filling the family vehicle up with gas. Somehow a truck ran into the fuel pump, igniting a fire ball and trapping the driver between the vehicle and the pump. She was gone within seconds. Ian experienced the ups and downs of cancer treatments, prolonged hospital stays, and prayer vigils, while this girl was alive and well one minute and gone the next. Such different experiences, yet two families experiencing the same devastating loss.

Now another set of parents we know are enduring the cancer journey. Instead of starting kindergarten with my daughter this fall, their son was admitted to Children’s Hospital in Denver, where he’s been for the past four months. His cancer is aggressive and scary. Their battle has been the talk of our school. On Friday, the school held a blood and money-collection drive for this little boy.

I went in about a half-hour before school got out to drop something off for him. An armed guard stood at the front of the school. Very odd. I walked around to the office door, where the secretary ushered me in. As I walked down the hall, an announcement was made that no children were allowed to walk between buildings without an adult. Carpool would also look different today. After dropping off my card and appreciating all the hard work that had gone into the fundraiser for this little boy who is fighting for his life, I called Kevin to find out if he knew something I didn’t. He told me about the shooting in Connecticut. Twenty children dead, many of them kindergartners. They went to school alive and well—probably thinking about spelling tests and Christmas parties and what they’d do at recess—and ninety minutes later they were gone. Just like that.  

Do I have a point? I’m not sure. I just know that I’m struck by the contrast of parents who endure grueling, endless battles for their children’s lives with those whose lives are ripped apart in a second. Certainly neither is preferable; both are heartbreaking. Both seem so wrong, so appalling.

Not knowing what to make of any of this, I wrote to my friend David, Ian’s dad, to see how he’s processing the news from Connecticut. Is it different for him, I wonder? He was kind enough to make his response available to us all, for whatever we can gain from it as we all seek to process Friday’s horror.

One thing I can say for sure. Anyone’s pain touches me more deeply than it did before Ian’s suffering and death. So as I read about the shooting in CT it brings tears to my eyes and leaves an ache in my soul. As I was listening to a report on the radio my whole body recoiled inside. In the past my response would have been much less intense. Unlike many others, I can and do imagine what those parents may experience in the coming days and weeks and months and years. So I grieve with them differently than others might.

I can also say that even with a prolonged illness and when you know that death may be imminent, the death of your child takes your breath away.  Death of any kind is so final, so violent, so “wrong."  It is an ugly tear in the fabric of life as life was intended to be. I don’t know about others, but I never emotionally or mentally rehearsed for Ian’s death. I did not expect him to die. I was fully believing that he would live. So although others may be puzzled in view of what transpired before Ian’s death, I was shocked when he died. 

However, I had a “privilege” that none of those parents in CT had. I was THERE when Ian died. I was able to say goodbye. I was at his side when he drew his last breath here on this earth. I imagine that those parents are horrified by what the final moments of their child’s life was like. And imagination can be worse than reality.  That’s a horror I’ve not experienced. 

I have no desire or sense of leading to personally connect with those parents in CT. It feels presumptive to think that we could somehow truly understand their pain. When one is in deep pain, and someone says, “I understand,” you know that they don’t, and it feels like they are treating your pain as commonplace. 

On the other hand, I think that every parent who has heard of the shootings in CT feels a heart connection with those families. President Obama clearly does. But my emotional nerve endings may be a bit closer to the surface and a bit more tuned to resonate with the pain of those parents. 

What to Do with the Virgin Mary?

Last night we were reading Christmas verses with the kids, stumbling over the repeated use of the word “virgin” and the “union” that Joseph didn’t have with Mary until after Jesus was born. Of course someone’s gonna ask, “Hey, dad, what’s a virgin?” Of course dad’s going to quickly blush, then just as quickly regain his composure and say, “Well, remember when mom took you on that trip to Denver—just the two of you?” Now the asker is the one blushing.

Kevin and I chuckle at the level of “ah-ha’s” rippling through our living room. Our oldest, with his own “camping trip with dad” experience—not to mention his place in the junior high world—no doubt understands what’s going on here more than any of the other kids. He’s clearly ready to move on to the shepherds and the wise men and get past the virgin part already. Our 11-year-old, the one who asked the question in the first place, shows just enough familiarity and discomfort with the topic that I feel the “trip to Denver” was not made in vain. The 8-year-old wants everyone to believe she knows exactly what we’re talking about. “Oh, yeah, I know,” she says with great wisdom, and then moves into a conversation about Ferraris on Union Boulevard. (Your guess is as good as mine.) I give a quick sigh of relief that we live in a culture in which 8-year-olds can still be little kids. And what’s our 5-year-old doing? Picking her toe jam and singing a little song to herself. I’m not sure she even knows we’re having a conversation, let alone that it involves virgins and unions.

Thank you, God, for your creativity in saving the human race, and for the interesting conversations we get to have with our kids because of it! 

Living Fully Present

Last year my daughter’s preschool teacher told us the story of her own daughter’s birthday outing. The girl was turning 13, and she invited a few friends to go out for dinner. The three girls sat in the back seat, birthday girl in the middle, while the mom drove. Before long the two friends had pulled out their cell phones and were texting other kids and even each other. Instead of giving their attention to the guest of honor—not to mention the one who was paying for their dinner—the friends focused on what they might be missing elsewhere in the world.

I thought of that story as I read an article in Newsweek several weeks ago, “Just How Many Facebook Friends Do We Need?” The article documented what I see all around me and what I dread for my children:

“All of which leads to the crux of what makes friendships different for young people today: the nefarious Fear of Missing Out. It’s because of FOMO that 20-somethings are so focused on their smartphone screens, so preoccupied with potential friends that they forget to be with the friends they already have. The FOMO mentality is leading millennials to become smartphone-addled cyber-sluts, constantly texting and emailing, always on the prowl for the next better thing.”

Cyber-sluts. Harsh but accurate.

I feel like I need an entire lifetime to teach my kids how to do well in the area of relationships. I’m still learning every day myself. But beyond following the golden rule, I think the best instruction I can give them is this: Be fully present. The person with you gets the best of you. Period. Whether that’s the drive-thru guy at Wendy’s, the pastor at the front of your church, or the friend sitting next to you in the car, they get your best, not your scraps. And in cases where that’s just not possible, you ask permission—yes, even of the Wendy’s guy—before you turn your attention elsewhere.

This seems like a no-brainer. And yet it’s not unusual to find a family of four ignoring one another at a restaurant table, smart phones in hand, texting wildly, on the prowl for the next better thing.

How do we avoid becoming that? How do I teach my kids to live fully present? Like most things, unfortunately, it starts with what I’m modeling. I have to live fully present. I have to remember that my attention is a gift and to hand it out intentionally, strategically, lovingly. It really comes down to loving others. More than a phone. More than our appetite for entertainment. More than our desire to be included. More than ourselves.