Here in New England, spring can be a frustrating season. Last March ended with a paralyzing snowstorm that cracked tree limbs and flattened my favorite lilac bush. April opened with a ninety-degree day then chilled to misty showers that lasted most of the month, including the week my oldest grandsons came for a visit during school vacation. I’d hoped for sunny days romping on the lawn, but most of our time was spent inside, playing card games like War or Crazy Eight, and their new favorite board game, Sorry, that keeps sending you back to the start just when you’ve almost got all your men safely home.
At the end of the visit, pre-school cousins added to the pile of boys for a sleepover. Dawn comes early now, and at 5:30 AM, they all ran downstairs. After a quick cup of coco, we finally opened the door and together walked into sparkling sunshine. Still in our pajamas, we played Wiffle ball, kickball, dodge ball, and swung on the swings as bluebirds and gold finches chirped, building their nests in the treetops. In all the glorious fun, my four-year-old grandson, threw his little arms around my fuzzy bathrobe at the waist, looked up into my face and said, “Gramma you’re wonderful!”
Oh, how my heart swelled with love for this wonderful child, and I realized this is what our loving God longs for from us, to look him full in the face and call out his wonder.
That afternoon, after all the boys went home, I checked my email and found the husband of a close friend had died while I’d been enjoying my sweet little men. After being flattened by a layoff, his heart formed an invisible crack, and he fell into a paralyzing depression until his weary body gave up the fight.
My heart deflated, as I sat on the couch reminded that at times it’s easy to wonder if God is even good.
The morning of the funeral, I was in my garden adding compost around blooming bulbs and bleeding hearts, sweaty with dew, until it was time to go to the memorial.
Behind the church dais there were photos on a big screen of happier times in the husband’s life, fishing, waterskiing, wedding shots of a glowing bride and groom. Pictures of a proud father holding his firstborn.
At the end of the memorial, we sang some old hymns: “How Great though Art,” “Amazing Grace,” “Softly and Tenderly,” “Precious Lord, Take my Hand,” and lastly “God Be with You Till We Meet Again.”
Friends, there are seasons when we feel like we’re losing the game of life, at war with ourselves, dealing with crazy unexpected circumstances, sorry for so many things and wishing we could start over. You are not alone if you’ve ever wondered if God really loves you because life on earth can be frustrating and cold.
But remember, even in New England, summer cannot be forestalled forever. The daffodils have passed and tulip heads cup the rain.
Both joy and grief can happen in the same day, so let’s hold hands as we walk each other to our eternal doorstep, trusting that as God’s precious children, He thinks all of us are wonderful too!
Maranatha, come quickly Lord Jesus!
“God be with you till we meet again. When life’s perils thick confound you, Put unfailing arms around you, God be with you till we meet again.”
On a cold day in December my adoption became official. My birth certificate stated I was the daughter of my adoptive parents, as if my illegitimate birth and nine months in foster care had never taken place. I had a new name on the document given to me by my new parents as if it was their blood that now flowed through my tiny veins.
Years later, I met my husband while working as a sassy bus girl in a college bar. He was the hunk, I was the babe, and eventually we got married. It was great until it wasn’t.
I said, “I’m leaving.”
He said, “Please don’t go.”
That marriage crisis opened my eyes to the horrible hurt I was capable of causing even to those I loved best. In a nutshell, I realized I was a sinner.
On a cold December night, long ago, a Jewish baby was born in a stable. An angel told his parents to give him the name, Jesus, officially revealing the holy blood that flowed through his tiny veins was capable of saving people like me from their sins.
The Easter after my marriage fiasco, I was baptized, officially taking the name Christian.
In a satisfying story, the end always kisses the beginning.
Christmas kisses Easter. Birth kisses rebirth. A child in trouble. A heavenly adoption. A new name, as if the blood of the holy parents flows through the child’s veins. As if the old had never happened.
That’s my testimony in an eggshell.
P.S. Thanks to my dear parents, long-gone, who modeled the adoption of a good God. Thanks to my faithful husband who modeled the grace of the savior who loves us from the first and never lets go, even when we are at our worst.
Happy Easter!
“This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”
Once words leave our mouths or our pens, they are no longer ours. They belong to the listener or the reader and are subject to their interpretation no matter the speaker or the writer’s intent.
And in this mysterious process of making meaning out of life, both the writer and the reader are often surprised.
For example, while editing another chapter in my memoir about my adoptive mother’s near fatal car accident, I realized, as a fourth grader at the time, I had no concept of her brush with death or its possible consequences on my childhood.
This was evidenced by the fact that even though my mom was in the hospital fighting for her life with a ruptured spleen, broken ribs and a broken pelvis, a punctured lung, innumerable contusions and a severe concussion, the night of the crash, I put on my flannel pajamas and said the prayer I’d been taught as usual,
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord, my soul to take. God bless…everybody I knew starting with mommy and daddy.”
As a ten-year-old, it never occurred to me to beg God to keep my mother from dying. Death was beyond the boundaries of my cozy bed. God was only a concept, and my rote prayer was simply a long string of words I didn’t completely understand. I might as well have been reciting a verse from Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky.
This mention of the Jabberwocky wasn’t in my previous draft of my memoir. So why did it appear in my latest version? Perhaps because my church has been going though Ephesians chapter six which discusses spiritual warfare. My mind connected the spiritual battle that was going on for my mother’s life, and the future of my childhood with a poem that uses nonsense words to make its case for combating the ever-present evils of this world.
The child hero in the poem takes up a vorpal sword and strikes the fearsome Jabberwock with a snicker snack. The long time manxome foe is vanquished, and although Lewis Carroll uses words he made up, his meaning is clear, the beamish boy has slain our worst enemy, Satan himself. At least, that’s the way the author’s words resonate with this reader.
My point is to set our words free into the universe is a brave enterprise, never knowing how they will be received or what work they will do in another’s inner man.
Writers wish their works to resonate. In other words, by portraying a universal problem we’ve wrestled with, we hope the truth we’ve discovered echoes in our reader.
As a child, I didn’t know God as he knew me, yet the Almighty was already fighting on my behalf in ways I could not see.
But now, knowing His amazing grace in my ordinary life, “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
I take my vorpal sword in hand to write of God’s glory and kindness.
That fearsome accident happened on a dark day in March not unlike this one, yet my mother survived to love me well.
SNICKER-SNACK!
“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
Writing is a process. Big surprise, living is a process. And trusting God is the mother of all processes.
That said, let me tell you what I figured out this week about all of the above.
A few weeks ago, a fellow Hope*writer, Shirley Weyrauch , author of Follow the Breadcrumbs, sent me a You Tube interview with author Molly Baskette entitled The Ethical Memoir. Although the video was centered on how to ethically use parts of other people’s story in your own, something she said as an aside jumped out and bit me. After submitting her memoir manuscript to her agent, her agent replied, “This is not a memoir. It’s a blog dump.”
A blog dump! Maybe that’s what my critique group had been politely trying to tell me about my own memoir in process when they said things like You tell a really good story in such vivid detail, but what is your memoir about?
It’s true, I’d taken parts of essays posted on my blog and pieced them together with additional material to craft what I thought was my final draft. But when I submitted some of my beginning chapters to fellow Hope*writer and editor, Mara Eller. She said something similar about how I bring my stories to life with vivid detail then ended with the overall feeling that my backstory chapters felt like, “random historical vignettes.” I use her exact words because they sound like the dictionary version of blog dump.
So, here’s the thing, like any human being, I’ve lived my life in daily chapters that looked like “random historical vignettes,” seemingly disconnected, perhaps meaningless. And it’s hard when you’re in the thick of your own life to see the thread that runs through it all. I was paralyzed with discouragement until Psalm 139:16 came to mind.
“You saw me growing, changing in my mother’s womb; Every detail of my life was already written in Your book; You established the length of my life before I ever tasted the sweetness of it.”
Psalm 139:16 (VOICE)
Trusting this about God’s power and sovereignty, ensures my life is not random or without purpose and helped me focus on the crux of my narrative.
When I started this story, I didn’t understand how critical my adoption was to my self-concept even when I wasn’t aware of it. I’d always felt like an impostor, a fake, not one of the real_______ fill in the blank. I held back on the fringes, yet was always on the hunt for where I really belonged, personally, socially, professionally. And eventually, I was hungry enough for significance, to compromise what was most precious to me, my marriage, in order to be who I desperately wanted to become—chosen, clean, and wildly loved.
In the midst of my contemplation, a new subtitle came to mind: Looking for God in all the Wrong Places because wasn’t what I wished for already provided by God? Colossians 3:12 says we are chosen, holy, and beloved children of God. What was fake and counterfeit was not me, but the sources from which I tried to suck my worth and identity.
A new title also appeared: Love Child, because the heart of my narrative is how I discovered I was not the euphemism for an illegitimate bastard born from the momentary passion of man, but a precious child conceived by the amazing grace of God.
Photo by andres-siimon on Unsplash
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Twice Adopted. Once by loving parents who saw me as a priceless gift. And again by God, my ultimate father. Now I can delete or dump all the other chapters of my life that don’t point to that overarching transformation.
“Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ.”
Philippians 3:8
Thank God for the honesty and skill of friends and colleagues. Thank God for the truth of his Word. Knowing what’s wrong with something is half the battle of making it right. It’s a process isn’t it? But if God is in it, I trust he’ll carry it onto completion.
BTW what do you think of my new titles? How have you titled your story, and how could the love of God change it?
Last week I wrote about SHAME, a painful consciousness of being bad, wrong, and less than because of doing bad, wrong things or having them done to you.
Shame’s remedy is GRACE, being shown favor you don’t deserve. The question is, can you feel grace like you can shame? How does it manifest? Let me tell you about my Aunt Ruth.
I always knew that if my parents died, I would go to live with Aunt Ruth and Uncle Mac. I don’t remember when I was told this legal fact, but I thought it was a great idea because Aunt Ruth and Uncle Mac had two kids, Macky and Donna. Donna was just my age and lived within an hour of my Memau’s farm in Virginia, the best place in the world. Besides, the real possibility of my parents’ death never occurred to me while ensconced in my cozy childhood.
Not even in March 1964 when I was in fourth grade and my mom had a near fatal car accident that made the frontpage of The Schenectady Gazette, “Woman Hit by bus.” An impatient bus driver had rushed a red light, hit my mom’s two-ton, black Ford station wagon broadside and launched her barely one-hundred-pound body out of the car, across four lanes of traffic, and onto a snowbank the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.
That summer my mom was still recovering, so I spent a month in Virginia. Two weeks at the farm with my mom and Memau, and two weeks at Aunt Ruth and Uncle Mac’s.
As Aunt Ruth drove Donna and I up the steep driveway that plateaued at their modest three-bedroom ranch, I recalled an earlier visit while she and Uncle Mack were building their first house. The contractor had cut down several giant oaks atop the ridge, and Donna and I had walked their long, straight trunks like balance beams.
During my 1964 visit, the heat was stifling, and Donna and I often retreated to the cool basement that still smelled like fresh concrete. To one side of the stairs was an old upright piano. Aunt Ruth could play by ear, yet there was a well-worn hymnal on the music shelf opened to “The Old Rugged Cross.” I had started piano lessons, and Donna and I plinked out the song.
“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame. And I love that old cross where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain.”
As a kid, I didn’t get the lyrics, but there was something plaintive in the melody that struck a chord. I wouldn’t have called Aunt Ruth or Uncle Mac religious. They went to church just like me and my family, but when Uncle Mac said the blessing before a meal, he spoke like a man thanking an old friend. The feeling of his prayer was nothing like my rote recitation, “God is great, and God is good…” Actually, for years, I thought it was God is gray not great. As a child I simply mouthed a long string of words. I might as well have been quoting Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”
One day that summer Donna and I crossed her street, and I met a neighbor family of sweaty, tow-headed kids playing tag.
The oldest girl yelled, “Hey, Donna.”
It wasn’t until I came closer that I realized she wasn’t wearing a blouse. I couldn’t take my eyes off the flesh mounded on her chest like small scoops of peach ice cream topped with a butterscotch kiss.
The youngest boy, in nothing but dinghy underpants, touched his sister’s bare bosom and rolled away in laughter. “Ha, ha. You’re it!”
She swatted at his behind, “Get out of here, you brat,” then looked up at us. “Y’all wanna play tag?”
I didn’t know what I wanted. Maybe for somebody to put some clothes on. It was hot but come on!
If I knew that when I was only eleven, why didn’t I know it the summer after my freshman year in college when women nationwide were burning their bras and Aunt Ruth and Uncle Mac came to visit us in Schenectady? Standing in our kitchen, just me, my mom, and Aunt Ruth, my bare boobs jiggled beneath my T-shirt, and she said, “Don’t you think you better go upstairs and put on a brassiere?”
Even though the word straight had gained the connotation of uncool, Aunt Ruth remained as plumb as the tall oaks that remained atop the ridge where she and Uncle Mac had built their home.
Throughout the decades, Aunt Ruth never failed to send me a birthday card that landed exactly on the day I was born–even when my own life was shifting father and farther out of plumb.
Not only were her cards on time, they somehow contained the words that salved my sore spot of the moment, saying things like, You are beautiful when I was a brand-new mom trying to regain my shape and equilibrium.
You are unique and creative when I was home with toddlers feeling like I’d lost my professional identity and verve.
Words that told me, the world was a better place because of me.What a special niece I was. How lucky she was to have known and loved me. Me? The bucktoothed tomboy who lost her temper, the high school girl who lost her virginity, the foolish young bride who almost left her husband? The baby my birthparents couldn’t keep and put up for adoption?
When I first trusted Jesus and was flush with the joy and cleansing of rebirth, Aunt Ruth was one of the first people I told because, somehow, I was sure she’d understand. We’d never spoken about her faith. She’d never shared the four spiritual laws or tried to evangelize me. My parents didn’t die young, and I’d never officially lived with her, but she’d adopted me as surely as my parents had and tucked me deep into her heart as one of her many darlings.
My mom once shared that when Uncle Mac met Aunt Ruth as a young woman he’d said, “I’ve met an angel and her name is Ruth.”
Ruth was the brown-haired beauty who’d sat by his bed and taught him to read again after he’d sustained a head injury during WWII. She was the one who’d cared for him again in old age until the former pilot took flight into glory.
I’m not saying there was anything extraordinary or supernatural about Aunt Ruth. No tulle wings or glowing halo. She grew up on a truck farm in Ohio, and most of her adult life worked as a secretary. She kept a tidy house, spoke the plain truth, and loved to laugh at a funny story. But remember the trend where people wore bracelets marked with the letters WWJD for what would Jesus do? All my life I could have worn one marked WWRD for What would Ruth do?
Now pushing a hundred, I just want my Aunt Ruth, and you dear readers, to know what I’m sure Uncle Mac meant.
“So, I’ll cherish the old rugged cross, till my trophies at last I lay down. I will cling to the old rugged cross, and exchange it someday for a crown.”
Shame is subtle. It never names itself, rather it names you by your every faux pas, misdemeanor, and disappointment. Idiot, Jerk, Loser and worse in a precipitous cascade of taunts and ridicule.
Shame is a sticky substance that multiplies and hardens into a heavy, yet brittle armor worn over your real self.
Shame is a parasite, that feeds on your low self-esteem and never lets go.
Shame is a bully, an abuser, a monster. Once clenched in its powerful maw, it chews, and chews, and chews up your soul until you no longer know who you are or what you’re worth, so you’re willing to do anything to prove yourself and feel loved.
Whatever metaphor I use, shame grew to be my inferred identity until I was rescued from the monster and given a fresh way of seeing myself through the love of Christ. That’s the gospel, the birth of good news.
I wrote the above in response to homework given to me by editor, and Hope*Writer, Mara Eller when she asked me to describe the before and after me in the memoir I’m polishing. It was supposed to be only one or two sentences which this isn’t, but sometimes you have to write more to get less.
In a nutshell, the before me was living in the past out of an identity of shame, based on what I did and didn’t do.
The after me was living in the present out of a fresh identity based on what Christ did for me out of love.
She also asked me to list the lies I believed about myself before the moment of transformation.
I believed I wasn’t pretty enough
smart enough
or clean enough to be loved
She asked me to contrast a list of truths I learned through my trials.
Pretty doesn’t equal lovable
Smart doesn’t equal worthy
Clean in this corrupt world is only through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for all of us
She asked me to list key revelations about myself I learned on my journey
I was an insecure follower willing to compromise to belong
I used the beauty and accomplishments of those I associated with to reflect well on me
I assumed I’d be rejected if I didn’t hide who I really was
She also asked what I learned about the nature of love through my struggles
I thought love was conditioned on merit
I thought love equaled sex and sex equaled love
Yet pre-marital sex disqualified a woman from true love because she was used, damaged goods
I was so confused!
Now I know, human love, however true, is always flawed and incomplete
Only God’s love is purely unconditional, and forgiveness is the true source of freedom
I share my homework here because surely some of you readers have been confused and misled just as I was about your identity and worth. We all have our reasons, and they are as varied as we are. And yet, the cure is the same because we are all created in the image of the same God, and we are all under the same curse, created for paradise, but living in the presence of sin’s pollution from without and within.
For my fellow writers, the rest of my editorial homework is to sift and list the scenes from my memoir that portray how I learned the lies about myself and how I learned the truth.
For the future readers of my memoir, I know an outline is insufficient to grasp what coming of age and coming to God has meant in my life, so I must finish my manuscript for you. I share this here to hold myself accountable.
Until then, I’ll just say, if you’d met the old me, I would have said, “Hello, my name is Shame.”
The new me says, “Hello my name is Ann, which means grace.”
This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!
Today I’ve completed 70 years of life. Where has the time gone? Days flash by in a blur. Is it a Wednesday or a Thursday? I’m only aware of the exact date if I’m scheduled to babysit a grandchild, take a walk with a friend, or when I punctuate the week with Sunday at church.
As a little girl, time was so much longer. Maybe because there was still so much ahead. In third grade, I remember sitting in my classroom at the end of June watching the janitor mow the lawn out the open window. I could smell the grass, and longed for the school day to be over, but the five minutes left before the bell felt like hours. In fourth grade, I visited my grandmother’s farm for a month that felt like a year. And every year of my childhood, waiting for Christmas felt like forever!
Over my lifetime so much has changed. I was born before pomegranates and avocados were in grocery stores across the nation. I remember when TV dinners seemed like a treat, not a gross substitute for a real meal. I remember when every family I knew sat down to supper together and there was no such thing as fast food.
In first grade, I stood in line to receive a pink sugar cube containing the polio vaccine booster from the school nurse. One of my dad’s friends had had polio as a child and walked with a cane. Other children didn’t survive the disease, or lived the rest of their lives in an iron lung.
When I came of age, as a peer said recently, “Hippies roamed the earth.” Guys had long hair and women didn’t shave their legs or armpit. In college, streaking was a new phenomenon, meaning students ran naked through the cafeteria, across campus, or down dormitory halls. And pot was sold in dime bags, not chic dispensaries.
My first airline flight as a young adult felt glamorous. I dressed up in a linen suit and walked across the runway to board the plane via a portable stairway. I was served a hot, full-course meal by a stewardess, that’s what we called them back in the day, who was always a woman expected to look like a model. There was no security check, travelers were polite, and the plane took off and landed on time—with your luggage.
I know I’m sounding like an old fogey, as if times were better back in the good old days when we walked two miles to school in a snowstorm and didn’t complain. No, I rode the bus, and kids were both as silly and mean as they are today.
Somethings, though, were definitely worse. Women went to the hairdresser once a week, and sat under a stationary hairdryer with their hair in bristly curlers until the hairdresser sprayed the finished coif with hairspray until it had the hardness of a military helmet. Women wore shirtwaist dresses and wore high heels while preparing meatloaf recipes from Betty Crocker or ambrosia salads made from canned mandarin oranges and marshmallows. Most ladies, that’s what women were called, were secretaries, teachers, or nurses, and all were underpaid, called things like sweetie, or honeybun, and expected to fetch the boss’s coffee.
My adoptive mom was one of the first few women to attend her state college, and graduated with a degree in home economics, before other studies were offered to female students. My birth mom started out at college but ended up getting pregnant with me out of wedlock, what we now call an unplanned pregnancy. As a result, she left school and went into hiding until my birth. As the unwanted infant, I was placed in a foster home for nine months and adopted by my mom and dad who longed for a child and didn’t have the benefit of fertility treatments available today.
All to say, there’s been a torrent of water under the bridge these 70 years. I made my own mistakes, and through them found the one true God and the meaning of life. That sentence might sound grandiose or pompous, but actually, finding Jesus was as humiliating as it was exhilarating, and experiencing his amazing grace in my ordinary life is still awesome.
Dear readers, I’ve tried to describe all this and more in granular detail, in the form of a memoir, so you can relate on some parallel thread of your own life.
Fellow writers, I just sent the first few chapters and a full chapter summary to editor and fellow Hopewriter, Mara Eller, for her suggestions and critique.
Last Sunday we sang the song, ”In Christ Alone My Hope is Found,” so I will leave you with these lyrics that struck my heart, knowing that no matter how your years have added up, these words are true for all who call on the name of the Lord of heaven and earth.
“No guilt in life, no fear in death This is the power of Christ in me From life’s first cry to final breath Jesus commands my destiny.”
Valentine’s Day has come and gone. It’s the day when we celebrate romance by sending boxes of chocolate, and sweet cards to those we love. Yes, love is a gift, but it’s also a verb.
Here’s a story from my childhood to explain what I mean.
BTW, for those writer friends following the progress of my memoir, this is a chapter I may edit out, so I thought I’d share it here.
It was the week of mid-winter school vacation, February, 1960. I was in second grade. The snow was deep. The air freezing, and after church we drove forty-five minutes to have Sunday dinner with the Swensons at their farm in Sharon Springs, New York. Arne was one of my dad’s oldest friends. He was a tall, ropey dairyman. Marta, Mrs. Swenson, was his round, smiling wife.
Arne sat at the head of the oval table in the middle of the dining room. His table was covered with a pink tablecloth, set with rosebud china, and adorned with three beautiful daughters: Cindy, the oldest, Karen, my age, and Trina, a blonde baby. Mrs. Swenson set a roast chicken before her husband and returned with steaming bowls of mashed potatoes and a gravy boat balanced on a saucer to catch any slurpy spills. We all dug in.
After dinner, the adults went through open French doors into the living room with two maroon armchairs and a squishy maroon sofa facing a roaring fire. Karen grabbed a pink and black afghan off the back of the sofa, and we wrapped up together on the piano bench in the drafty dining room. She opened the red cover of John Thompson’s Teaching Little Fingers to Play and showed me how the black ants on the page matched the white keys on the piano. With Karen’s help, I tapped out “Row, row, row your boat. . . life is but a dream.”
After a quiet afternoon it was usually time to go home, but this Sunday, my mom had packed my round, red suitcase with the loop handle and a white felt poodle on the lid because I was having a sleepover with Karen. I kissed Mommy and Daddy good-bye in the front hall next to a radiator draped with drying mittens. Through the open door, I watched the taillights of our black Ford station wagon fade into the frigid night.
Karen shared a room with her older sister. Mrs. Swenson positioned an old mattress in between the twin beds and made it with pink and blue bunny sheets. A tall bureau stood on one side of a frosty window. On the other side was a dressing table, its bubbled veneer topped with child-sized bottles of pink lotion and violet eau de toilette.
In the morning, Karen and I walked down the road to the barn. A concrete runway separated two aisles of cattle. Arne and his hired man were moving amongst the cows hooking up stainless steel milking machines that squished and squirted while the radio played country western tunes. Karen and I petted the big-eyed Holsteins looking out the barn windows full of cobwebs.
“This one is Maybelle. She’s going to have a calf in the spring.” Karen scratched the cow’s nose.
After a lunch of alphabet soup, Mrs. Swenson said, “You girls want to go sledding?”
Karen and I look at each other and squealed.
Mrs. Swenson helped us squirm into our snow pants and zip up our parkas. We pulled on our knit caps and flipped up our hoods. She bent down and tied red scarves around our necks and clipped our wool mittens to our jacket sleeves. All bundled, we were ready for the arctic.
Two Flexible Flyers waited on the front porch. We grabbed their ropes, waddled down the front walk, and trudged single file along the country road towards the pasture. Karen climbed over the fence, and I passed her our sleds. Our breath formed alternating clouds as we huffed and puffed up the steep rise.
The snow was covered with a glistening crust, so our boots broke through with every step, leaving jagged holes in the slippery slope. Finally, at the crest, we planted our bottoms on the sleds and placed our red rubber boots on the wooden cross pieces used to steer. Holding the ropes, we pushed off.
“Yee-haw!” We were riding bucking broncos across the snowy plain.
Down, down we slid, streaking shadows in the low winter sun. The thrill was but an instant. Without a word, we climbed the hill over and over. With each slide, we grew wilder, going down headfirst, then headfirst holding hands.
From cowboy to circus star, I stood on my sled, the rope taut in my snow-pilled mittens. The thin metal runners hit a footprint in the crust and lodged in the soft powder beneath. The rope yanked out of my grip. My chin cracked the ice. My slick nylon snowsuit accelerated my descent. Lips, nose, cheekbones rubbed and ripped against every icy opening in my path.
When Karen slid to my side, the snow beneath my face was the bright red of a bloody snow cone. We were both too terrified to cry. Silently we tossed our sleds over the fence and hurried for home. Up the country road, past the barn, down the walk.
Karen pushed the front door open. “Mommy!”
Mrs. Swenson carried me into the kitchen and set me on a stool beside the white enamel-topped table. She flew to the bathroom and returned with a box of band-aids and two clean blue washcloths. With eyes as big as Maybelle’s, Karen watched her mother fill a bowl with warm water. Mrs. Swenson wet the terrycloth and gently wiped my abrasions. Blood clouded the water as she rinsed again and again. Karen winced as a deep gash above my upper lip was revealed. Mrs. Swenson pinched the skin back together and secured it with two tiny blue band-aids covered in silver airplanes. She opened the freezer, pulled out an ice tray, and filled the dry washcloth with a handful of cubes. Gently placing the cold pack in my palm, she told me to hold it over my mouth. After gently peeling off my boots and snowsuit, Mrs. Swenson led me to the squishy maroon couch, and Karen tucked me in with the black and pink afghan.
I don’t know how long I laid beside the fire before Mrs. Swenson and Karen were back at my side. Cindy was holding the baby. Mrs. Swenson exchanged my bloody washcloth for what looked like an empty hamburger bun spread with butter. I sat up and took a timid bite. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted. An empty hamburger bun? At home we always ate Blue Bonnet margarine, so how could I imagine the glory of fresh, sweet butter, sun-kissed blades of summer grass transformed by the herd, churned, and spread with the kindness of a farmer’s wife?
The small scar above my mouth is still there, a constant reminder of the taste of my own blood, exchanged for something infinitely better.
The love of God is so much more than a box of chocolates, yet sometimes it’s just an empty hamburger bun.
Last week I watched a movie entitled Genius about author, Thomas Wolfe. What caught my attention was the voluminous manuscripts Wolfe brought his editor, Max Perkins, and one scene in particular where Perkins says, “Thomas, put down your pencil.”
Last week I also received feedback from a group of trusted Beta readers who critiqued my memoir about coming of age and coming to God during the Woodstock generation. One reader said, “It took a long time for the plane to get off the runway.” Although worded differently, I believe she was expressing what Perkins said to Wolfe. I too needed to cut many words, in my case, beginning chapters which failed to focus the theme and slowed the story’s take off.
Whether you’re a genius or an ordinary writer, we all have to write lots of chapters that never make the final book. Some deleted chapters may appear in some form in another work. Even those cut and never seen in any volume, I’d argue were worth writing, because there’s value in getting thoughts out of your head and organized on a page.
Some coaches and editors recommend mapping your content before you start writing your book. It’s a great idea to nail down the best route to your destination, so you don’t wander down dead ends or get lost and give up before you get there. This is especially helpful when planning prescriptive non-fiction.
My messy writing process was more like creating a map by first putting dots all over a blank page. Although I was sure of my destination, without even a compass rose, it took me a long time to make out the metaphoric towns, topography, and roads that connected them. Maybe because I was writing a memoir.
Here’s the thing about a memoir, it’s not about your whole life, and yet sometimes, it takes your whole life to understand the aspects of your life that have plagued you for a lifetime. It’s called a memoir because it contains specific memories that shaped you. In my case, it was finding the mile markers that illustrate how desperate I was to belong. Why I was willing to follow friends and lovers who I knew were leading me astray. And why I was willing to betray anybody, even those who loved me best because, although I couldn’t have put it into words at the time, I didn’t think I was worth loving.
All this happened of course in the larger context of being a human on earth. Even as a child, I always felt there was more to existence than met the eye, something, or someone invisible, yet obvious. Something or someone magic expressed in the beauty of the natural world yet somehow above it. In every fiber, yet not of it. Something or someone wonderful I knew was there yet could not name. And as I grew older, there was obviously something wrong with life on earth, and something desperately wrong with me. Why did I do things I knew were bad and not do things I knew were good?
My challenge now, is to weed out the rabbit trails from the interstate that led me to Jesus. I could be discouraged by my circuitous writing process. I don’t have the genius of Thomas Wolfe, or an editor par excellence like Max Perkins. I am an ordinary person writing about my circuitous ordinary life, but I do follow the God who called himself the way, the truth, and the life.
So if you’re another writer like me, or another ordinary person trying to find meaning in your own life, here’s the full quote from Jesus to his disciples who were, at the time, just as confused as we can be.
“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me.There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. And you know the way to where I am going.” “No, we don’t know, Lord,” Thomas said. “We have no idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?” Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you had really known me, you would know who my Father is. From now on, you do know him and have seen him!”
I spoke recently with a younger friend who said, “Do you remember what perimenopause was like?”
My answer, “Oh, yeah! Let me tell you a story.”
Back in the 90’s I was next in line at the grocery store checkout. It was after work. I was tired and impatient.
The cashier asked the customer in front of me if she’d prefer paper or plastic.
The woman answered, “Plastic,” and it was as if she’d pulled the pin on a grenade.
My mind exploded. How dare she choose plastic! Hasn’t she seen all the plastic bags tangled in treetops? Hasn’t she seen them floating down rivers? Going out to sea! Fouling beaches! Killing baby turtles! Suffocating whales!!!! Doesn’t she know the whole earth will be covered in ugly, non-biodegradable plastic if she doesn’t stop?PLEASE STOP!!!!!!!
Not a word of this came out my mouth. I paid for my items, walked to my car, and sat in the driver’s seat stunned by the ferocity of my response. Oh my gosh, I was ready to kill that woman for simply putting her bananas in a plastic bag.
“That,” I explained to my friend, “is not your brain on drugs, that is your brain on hormones.”
That incident happened before anyone knew massive swirls of plastic garbage were accumulating in ocean gyres. That was long before environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, was old enough to protest.
My point is, I was proved right about paper or plastic, but being right wasn’t the issue. The issue was my reaction was so far out of proportion to the poor woman’s choice.
Perimenopause doesn’t make your reaction to any offense wrong. It just flings it into outer space. And even knowing that, in the moment, doesn’t help you control it. It just makes you aware of your hormonal craziness.
During that period of my life, excuse the pun, my husband affectionately named the week before I menstruated Kill Week.
After I got my period, the sky was miraculously blue. The clouds a glorious white. It was a “bright blessed day and a dark sacred night,” and I realized my heart was singing along to Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World.”
What a difference a few chemicals can make in a woman’s body and mind. Therefore, to protect both the innocent and the guilty, I adopted some personal rules for Kill Week.
As a teacher,
Don’t call any parents about their child!
Don’t tell any administrators what they’re doing wrong!
Don’t share your opinion at faculty meetings!
As a parent,
Remember, my children are immature, so have mercy.
Remember, I can love my children and not their irritating behavior.
Remember, relationship is always more powerful than punishment.
As a person,
Don’t condemn myself as the worst mother in the world.
Or the worst wife ever.
Or the ugliest, most worthless person that ever lived.
And resist the urge to tell anyone else what I think is wrong with them.
Above all, don’t make any important decisions
Considering my conversation about perimenopause with my friend, I realize the rules I made for myself were a precursor to seeing myself and others through the lens of God’s grace. Perimenopause makes you extra sensitive and inflames your emotions. So does living in a world that deserves judgment.
But judgement always ends in murder, literal or heartfelt. Think of Paul as a Pharisee dragging Christians before the court for what he judged blasphemy. I would have dragged the woman ahead of me in the checkout line to customer service if I thought there was a jury behind the counter.
Yes, people can be jerks. But it’s not our job to rip their heads off.
Yes, people make poor decisions, but we’ve made poor decisions too.
Yes, people can be ignorant, but we are not always the smartest person in the room.
Yes, people can be harmful, damaging, and evil abounds
But the apostle Paul’s revelation was that we all deserve judgment, yet through Jesus, God’s grace abounds.
Another friend recently sent me this meme summarizing Paul’s message of grace.
So, keep the faith friends, whether perimenopause or some other monumental crisis or craziness triggers judgment. And when the cashier wants you to pick paper or plastic, remember there’s always another choice – grace.
“Be gentle and ready to forgive; never hold grudges. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others.
