Things I don't want my social worker to see

One of the things one we have acquired through the adoption process, in addition to two new daughters, is a social worker. Case worker sounds nicer, but in my mind I always use the more ominous sounding term. Even though my eldest daughter is about to become one, the word still strikes fear in my freedom loving, homeschooling heart. This morning as I stumbled into the kitchen in search of morning coffee I began a mental list of things I would never want the SW to see.

1. Three empty wine bottles on the kitchen table at 7 AM.

2. What I was wearing when a child climbed into my bed at 4 AM.

3. The outfits my new daughters choose most every morning. I try to edit their clothing before we go out in public, butI don't always remember.

4. My kitchen floor, an hour after it has been swept for the fifth time today. I'm not kidding.

5. The pile of laundry in my bathroom.

6. The number of hard-boiled eggs, bananas and oranges we consume every day. The resulting compost pile on the kitchen counter.

7. How slowly our computer is running since our new daughters have pressed every button and flipped every switch in sight.

8. The way the girls shreiked when they saw their older brother with coconut halves taped under his shirt.

9.The four large lizards we are babysitting for the rest of the semeste

10. The candy I bribed the girls with at the hospital blood lab.

"Clothes, Mum!"

G got up the other morning with a grumpy face and a demeanor to match. As soon as I came out in the hallway she met me, frowning and muttering, "Clothes, Mum, clothes." She was still wearing her pajama shirt though she had changed her pants; She was clearly unhappy about something.

She led me into her room and opened her middle drawer - the one with the tiny little colored shirt taped on the front, and swept the back of her hand dismissively across the pile of clean shirts - there were probably at least a dozen. "No, Mum," she grumbled, then more insistently, "Clothes!"

At first I tried to interest her in one of the shirts, lifting off the top ones to see if there might be one hidden beneath that was more acceptable, but she continued frowning and whining and writhing about until her little sister entered the room, dressed in a summer outfit I'd picked up on a whim at Walmart yesterday. Then I realized she wanted to wear the matching outfit I'd bought for her.

I stifled a sigh, thinking of how many choices she had, she who just three weeks ago owned nothing. (A friend who adopted at the same time told me she'd acutally been asked by someone if her child came with clothes or was he naked!) G did not come home naked, but she did come wearing one of the many outfits I had brought to Ethiopia for her, since all the clothing in the orphanage was communally owned. Today she had a dresser full of clothing, most of it much more appropriate than the summery, sleeveless shirt she wanted on this 35 degree March morning.

It's hard to blame her - she's just a child. She even had the grace to thank me when I produced the outfit she was looking for from the corner where it had been dropped the night before. But I couldn't help thinking about my own frequent grunbling over the contents of the drawers God has filled for me. Like G, I have nothing outside His gifts to me, but I am so often discontent with the choices I have. I want someone else's talents, someone else's job, someone else's looks, someone else's life. Although I know that "godliness with contentment is great gain," I often don't choose to be content.

I have a restless heart. I don't know if I inherited it with my DNA - my dad changed jobs often and I have heard my mother described as restless - or if I inherited it from Adam, who also was not content with the choices he was given in Eden. Even as I hope to teach my daughters gratitude and contentment, I hope to train my own heart to be more content with what I have received from my good Father.

A Moment in Time

I am sitting in the dark in a rocking chair next to a bunkbed. Across the room an old mantel still presides over a closed-up fireplace, one of five in our house that feed into a massive central chimney. Our home is built in a style called center-chimney colonial, common in 18th century northern New England. The blond wood bunkbed came from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, purchased from a missionary family who used it for their own children but decided not to move it home at the end of theirten year stay in Asia. They were moving back to the states while we were moving to Malaysia, so we bought some of their furniture and adopted their cat. We used the beds for two years there, and decided we would ship them home to the US when we returned. The children sleeping in the bunkbed were born in Woliso, Ethiopia. We brought them home with us just two weeks ago. The rocking chair belonged to my mother-in-law from Ohio.

I am amazed at how much diverse history and culture have come together in this one, small room. The builders of this house may have never heard of Ethiopia or Malaysia, the Malaysian craftsmen who made the bed and dressers have probably never seen a house that looks like this one. The Ethiopian mother of the children sleeping (actually not sleeping) in the bed has never lived in a house with running water or electricity, has never seen snow or imagined central heat. The children have no notion of the age of the house; they probably think every house in America has big, drafty windows with 24 panes of glass and splintery stairs that creak. The whole combination is bizarre.

But it is all part of a grand plan. The house was built to serve many purposes; one of them,unbeknownst to the craftsmen who built it,was to shelter our family 200 years after the foundation was laid in ancient granite. The used furniture ad on the internet served to provide us not only with bunkbeds, but with a friendship that now extends to the Middle East. When we brought the bunkbed home with us just three years ago we had no idea that we'd be putting two little African girls to sleep in it. My mother-in-law passed away less than two years ago, without ever knowing about the granddaughters who would be rocked to sleep in her lovely, caned chair. The pattern is a mystery to me, I who am merely a thread in a complex design that spans centuries and cultures, encompassing people and places and objects and time. Still, it comforts me as I sit here in the dark, to know an Intention greater and wiser than my own is at work in this room.

Night and Day

Tomorrow marks two weeks home with G and A. This time two weeks ago we were somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I can't remember much of anything about last week, but today was a really good day, in stark contrast to last evening. The girls were awake late last night - we had gone over to their cousins' house for dinner about 5:30. We didn't leave till 7:30 after two hours of horsing around with 14 year old J and then just racing around while the grownups drank coffee and attempted conversation. By the time we got into the driveway G was stormy and stubborn and refused to leave the car unless I carried her. Since I was already carrying her sister, this was not an entirely reasonable request. To top it off, the dog had pushed open the backdoor while we were gone and run away, so K had to head out immediately to hunt him down, while I tried to get the two little ones up to bed.

I probably should not admit to this online, but when I finally carried G into the house, moaning loudly like some kind of miserable ambulance, I smacked her bottom and told her she'd better cut it out. I have never been much of a spanker, and I signed a solemn vow that I would never use corporal punishment on my adopted children, but my ancient mommy instincts were just too strong. As soon as I did it, I felt like a criminal. My first thought was that she didn't speak enough English to report me, but I remembered how good she is at miming things, and how easy to mime "angry Mommy striking helpless child" would be. Then, too, as she howled in my ear, I just knew she'd learn how to say "child abuse" before the social worker's next visit.

I decided to skip the toothbrushng and carried her straight upstairs to bed, howling and writhing the whole way. She usually sleeps in the bottom bunk with A, and I put them in bed together at first. G's wails became louder and angrier as the minutes wore on, and her mouth was right next to her sister's ear, so I moved A to the top bunk. I sat in the rocking chair beside the bed, trying to look as if I couldn't hear anything, and she bellowed as loudly as she could. The only time I spoke was to warn her she'd better not throw up when she began interspersing her yelling with threatening gagging noises. I felt heartless, yet strangely calm - I guess that's how heartless feels. Finally I picked her up and rocked her until she slowly calmed down. The wails became a little softer, she actually stopped for breath in between. Eventually she stopped crying and I laid her back in the bottom bunk. A was still awake up above, watching the drama with big, round eyes. I asked her if she'd like to move back to bed with G, never thinking she might say no, but she did. The injustice of the elder child being made to sleep in the lower bunk was just too much for her sister, who turned on the sirens again while stiffening her back and sitting bolt upright on her pillow. "How long, Oh Lord," I silently prayed, trying not to invoke an imprecatory Psalm as well.

Finally I gave in. Pretending it was all my idea, I asked her if she would like to sleep on the top bunk, as well. She was all smiles and clambered up immediately. Almost two hours later the two of them were still awake, laughing and giggling, singing songs in Amharic as well as several choruses of "Are You Sleeping, Brother John." I have no idea where they learned that. Although the sounds wafting down through the ceiling grate were happy ones, I dreaded what the next day would be like when the effects of sleep-deprivation kicked in. So, today was a wonderful surprise.

You Are Here

My niece sent us a sweet homemade card congratulating us on the adoption of our two youngest daughters. The cover of the card was a collage of paper cutouts, one of which was a circle with the words "You Are Here," like the ones you find on maps at rest stops along the highway. It was probably appropriate for a significant moment in our lives - a moment which changes everything, but it made me long for something more.

Whenever I have consulted one of those all-knowing maps which mysteriously seem to intuit where I am standing at the very moment I look at the map, whether it be at a late night rest stop on an all night trip, or in a multi-level mall in a huge Asian city, it has been able to tell me what I needed to know. On a trip, the map has told me both how far I have come, and how far I have yet to go. At the mall it has enabled me get my bearings and to figure out what direction I should turn to get to my destination, be it the taxi stop, the washroom or a particular store.

This time the circle told me only that I am indeed here, wherever that is. There was no map attached to the smart circle, no labels to suggest where "here" is in relation to anything else. Nothing to orient me in time or space or experience. I'm just here.

So, here I am, surrounded by my contemporaries whose children are mostly grown and on their own. Many have grandchildren, most have college students or graduates, a few have high schoolers, almost none have children who have not yet learned to read. Here I am, trying to divide my time and attention between young adults who still need my love and interest and time, and teenagers who need rides to sports and social events and a mother who has time to arrange for drivers' ed and SAT prep. Between a ten year old who has been displaced from her position as cherished baby of the family and two little foreigners who chatter away in a language I don't understand, and cling to me like their lives depend on it. Here I am, in a very strange place with no road map and no directions.

Here I am at 6 o'clock in the morning when a little dark person in a sleeper with the feet cut off wanders sleepily into my bedroom and climbs into bed beside me, smiling into my puffy, tired eyes. Here I am at six-thirty putting off making my precious coffee so I can serve chai and dabo and muz and betacan to two hungry, insistent children who must eat before they can do anything else. Here I am, slipping away for an hour with my last-born child so we can actually exchange five uninterrupted words, we two who have always had time for each other and finished each others sentences. Here I am, feeling guilty about asking my older daughter to start dinner yet again, because I have to referee the cranky, late-afternoon interactions of two little girls who cannot be reasoned with because they don't understand the words "gentle" and "later" and "tomorrow" and "exhausted." I am definitely Here.

Though the orange circle on the card was not attached to a map, I do have an old, familiar map which I have not pulled out as often lately as I wish to, but I've consulted it enough over the years to remember much of what it says. I hope that I am somewhere near Isaiah 58:10 these days, the place which reads, "if you spend ourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday." That's the place I was aiming for when I began this trip. If I'm not there yet, I hope I'm getting closer. For now, all I know is that I'm here.

I Am Nothing

I stutter when I try to speak the language of life
I want to shout out loud but I just cry inside
Sometimes it feels so holy sometimes so absurd
So who am I to try and put that into words

I am nothing
But the angels sometimes whisper in my ear
Yeah, they tell me things and then they disappear
Though I am nothing I sometimes like to make believe I hear

I stumble when I try to walk the straight and narrow
I have heard it said God's eye is on the lowly sparrow
Who in spite of everything will sing for all he's worth
You know sometimes I feel exactly like that bird

I am nothing
But the angels sometimes whisper in my ear
Yeah, they tell me things and then they disappear
Though I am nothing I sometimes like to make believe I hear

-Pierce Pettis

Peeling carrots in an old house.

I am standing in front of an open window peeling carrots, listening to the whistle of the 6 o'clock train crossing the Connecticut River from NH to VT. The trestle is about a mile from my house though it sounds as if it were much closer. The air tonight is fresh and comfortably cool, the first dry leaves of the fall are scattered across the yard. I am wondering how many women have stood here in September, preparing dinner for their families in this very kitchen. Tonight's meal is humble - carrots from our garden, potatoes and applesauce made from apples we picked last Sunday when it was still hot and summery. Probably many a housewife before me has combined these three late summer vegetables and fruit in this same New England house.

I love living in an old house. I often find myself thinking about the dozens of people who have lived their lives here before me - for whom these rooms have been "home," who have been born and grown up, married and borne children, and died in the rooms I think of as my own. Several years ago our family volunteered at a colonial fort, dressing in period clothing as reenactors. I would stare hard at my children as they played on the front yard in their knickers and muslin dresses, trying to imagine the house as it looked when children dressed just so actually lived here. I could never do it - I could never make the present fade away even in my own mind, but I liked to try.

In the first fifteen years of my marriage we lived in two other well-worn dwellings. Our eldest child was born in the tiny second floor room of a log cabin. She took her first breath in a bed wedged beneath the steeply sloping roof of a house built nearly 220 years earlier. When my midwife first visited our home she stood in the room thoughtfully, feeling the history there and pronounced it a good place to give birth. We had no idea how many babies had entered the world in that single, upstairs chamber, but there must have been many.

Our next children were born in a newer house - a Mansard-roofed Victorian rowhouse with a stone facade. There our bed was in a huge, high-ceilinged room with and arched doorway, tall windows and a balcony. That room later became our playroom where our children played make-believe and built forts and block castles. Sometimes when I passed through the dark hall at night to check on a sleeping baby or adjust the blankets of a restless toddler I wondered what mothers and children had lived here before me and what, if anything, of themselves they had left in the house. My daughter left a small, handwritten note under a loose floorboard when we moved away.

Here our last two babies were born in what was probably the parlor; they may have been the first of the dozens of babies born here in 200 years to emerge in the best room of the house! We have no record of who entered life in this house, though many of the former owners are buried in the colonial-era cemetery just up the hill. We know our house was built by the Comings family, and we can find their names carved on old slate slabs in the back part of the graveyard. The woman we purchased the house from is also buried there, next to her husband whom we never met. Sometimes I wonder if my name will be on a stone there as well.

Life in an old house makes me feel often the brevity of my life - to remember the Scriptural image of my life as a blade of grass that once withered, will be remembered by few. The King James version says, "It's place remembers it no more." The wind will continue to blow across the wheatfield and the grass will quickly close over the place where that one blade grew. Consumed with the big events of my own life - children's weddings taking the place of their births - I can feel more important than I really am. One day another woman will stand at this window who knows nothing about me; this will be her house and all traces of my life will be gone. It is already so in the other houses that were such a part of my life. No one but my husband, and maybe the midwife, has any memory at all of the birth-days that changed the world for me. No one else remembers the weather on those days, how hot one day was, how gray and chilly another, how the stars were so brilliant that night or how the sun gradually brightened the east-facing room as we waited for the child to be born. One day someone else will tend my lilac bushes and call them her own, will listen to the waterfall through the open window and never think of me.

lost and found life

After months - no, years - of talking and praying about adoption we have finally taken the step, written the check and, it feels, reached the point of no return. Three days ago I stopped at the bank to get the certified check to send with our acceptance documents. As I waited for the check to be printed I felt like I was going to throw up. Really. It was not at all because this was by far the largest check I've ever written in my life, but because I was reeling from the days of indecision, the nights without sleep, the fears without end of how our lives might be changed by this moment.

I could no longer remember why we had begun the process of adoption, why we wanted to prolong our already lengthy parenting stage, why we thought it was a good idea to uproot some children on the other side of the world and try to make them part of our white, middle-class American family. I could not fathom why I should not just send this generous amount of money to an orphanage in Ethiopia and feel good about all the food and medicine it would provide. I had completely lost the train of thought or good intentions that had brought me to this place. I just wanted to go home and have things be like they have always been in our lovely, happy home. I certainly did not want to take a chance on these children I have never met.

This was a hard week in other ways. On Tuesday I said goodbye to my beautiful 19 year old daughter for at least six months. She was headed to Boston in a compact, heavily-packed, low-riding car with a cousin who was also leaving home, though the cousin was only traveling as far as Baltimore. C was catching a flight to Thailand. She took so little with her - only a backpack for the whole time even though I reminded her often that she was allowed two large suitcases on an international flight. She was wearing the same pants my older daughter had travelled around Thailand in three years ago, her money tucked away in a tiny inside pocket A had stitched by hand for that purpose. She had cut her long, wavy blond hair for the trip, so she'd be cooler and less encumbered. Everyone thought she looked darling, but I couldn't help but feel as if she were a little, shorn sheep in her tiny t-shirt and Chacos sandals. I didn't help at all with her packing over the last several weeks; I couldn't watch her empty her shelves and drawers. I surreptitiously went through the bags of paper and trash she kept bringing downstairs, saving an old scrapbook from 10 years ago, some old letters from her sister. Maybe she didn't need them any longer, but I did.

The same morning our smallest cat delivered a litter of four lovely orange kittens. I had worried that she might be too young or too small to give birth, but the kittens were large and healthy looking. Two days later we found one dead in the corner of the box, and the next day another died. I was so sad I could hardly bear to think about it - which seemed a little strange to me since I've officiated at many pet funerals over the years. I kept wondering why this hit me so hard, but my emotions were already like a cup filled to the brim. The slightest unsteadiness would cause them to spill over the rim. I felt overwhelmed by change which felt like loss.

I realize as I think about my daughters - the one who just left, the two who have not yet arrived, as well as the three upstairs asleep - that what I really want to do is to save my life. I want to keep things the way they are. I've had a picture postcard life, and I don't want to lose it. But that is exactly what Jesus warned his disciples about. The surest way to lose your life is to try to save it. The only hope for saving one's life is to lose it - on purpose. Young's literal translation of Matthew 16:25 reads, "for whoever may will to save his life, shall lose it, and whoever may lose his life for my sake shall find it." For me, at least, that means I have to let C go to care for orphans in Thailand, and open my nice home and my not-so-nice heart to these two little orphans if I hope to find true life in the end. And I do hope to. I do hope. I do.

North of Concord

I wrote this in June - the vegetation is different today than it was then, but the road is the same.

One of the things I’ve grown to love about living in the Upper Valley is the road home. It seems that most often when we have been away we end up returning on Interstate 89. Last weekend we went to Boston for a graduation party and returned in the late afternoon of a perfect spring day. I remembered my first visit to the area almost fifteen years ago up the same highway. Wondrously, nothing has changed.

The road slopes upward from Concord. You don’t notice the other changes at first. There are seven cars heading north with us at Hopkinton where the mountains start peeking out above the trees. At first you only catch glimpses of them and then they slip back behind the trees. If you are not looking, you can miss them at first.

Five cars exit toward Henniker, leaving us and only one other car in sight. The highway suddenly feels different. We round a bend and the land falls away, exposing a wide vista, a range of low mountain peaks you can’t miss, though they are soon hidden behind the trees again. This section of the highway always makes me feel as if I’ve crossed a border, as if I’ve entered a different region. Though the peaks are not visible again until exit 6 for Contoocook, I know they are there and I feel as if I have left the cities and the suburbs and the trafficked places behind.

Road signs tick off the miles in increments of two tenths of a mile. North 89, 13.8 is followed by North 89, 14. The bridges are all carefully numbered as well; bridge 29 occurs at mile 27.2. In this well-watered region there is a bridge almost every mile. Signs indicate the mileage to Warner, New London, Sutton, Bradford, Grantham, Springfield, Kearsarge, Sunapee - old English names interspersed with names created from Native American languages. Exits are few and usually look like country roads. There is only one fast food restaurant on the 60 mile highway between Concord and Lebanon and no billboards, of course. We pass only two trucks, one a lumber truck carrying roofbeams and one an Atlas moving van.

Further north, Kearsarge Mountain becomes visible. As the road curves the mountain seems to move, now to the right of the highway, now to the left. The forested hillside is mottled with a dozen shades of green, patchy with sun and cloud-shadow. The bright new greens of the leafy trees contrast sharply with the gray-green needles of the pines . The occasional fragile birch flutters its yellowy leaves lightly. A cell phone tower, badly disguised as a fir tree, rises awkwardly above the natural treetops, but little else disturbs the pristine landscape. Moose crossing signs replace the deer crossing signs we saw near Concord. There are no moose today though we pass a dead porcupine on the shoulder of the road, an unfortunate, spiky mound.

The sky is big today, not like a Mid Western sky with its low horizon, but bright blue and filled with cirro-cumulus clouds that try to tower but become wispy and distracted at the edges and drift apart. For long stretches the dense forests on the sides of the highway turn the road into a corridor, a tunnel with the roof lifted off. The occasional breaks in the trees most often are filled with water. There are bogs punctuated with dead trees, gray and straight as telephone poles growing multiple knobby arms, lakes dotted with small piney islands, small rivers and brooks that disappear under the roadway.

I think every time I drive this stretch that living in northern New England is like living on a cul-de-sac. Few people come here except those who belong here. We are not, like Dayton or Indianapolis, on the way to anywhere, unless you count the Canadian border. People come here to vacation then turn around and go back or they come here to stay like we did.

The last major landmark before home is a rest area on a granite outcropping above the highway. Then the exits begin to become more frequent again as we pass the tiny Whaleback Ski Area, the Upper Valley Humane Society. Signs for exit 16 display the name "Purmort", a made-up name taken from the name of an early settler in order to meet naming conventions for interstate exits. The only Purmort on the map is a family cemetery. The next exit is Methodist Hill which we use in good weather. We cross over the interstate, down a road that looks like a wrong turn to nowhere and begin the steep climb up the country road that will take us over the hill into Plainfield and then home. It’s good to be back.

Up-Hill

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when 'ust in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labor you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
-Christina Rossetti

I am sitting alone in the early morning trying to just be quiet. My husband has left for work and my children are not stirring yet. Only the dog and the restless pregnant cat are awake. I find it very difficult to quiet my heart - I can never seem to be really still.

The coffee maker coughs politely in the kitchen. The antique clock never stops counting the seconds, somewhere there is the very small sound of trickling water - the shower drain?? Birds chirp in the woods across the street, their chittering, high, voices sound urgent and rushed. A jay's sharp voice interrupts in warning or complaint. I don't know which. The dog sighs in his sleep.

Even if I hold myself completely still, the room is never still. The pendulum swings in its case, its tarnished brass face reflecting the light of my reading lamp, the open door into the next room. Outside the windows leaves are fluttering in the lilacs that brush the two front panes. A single wisteria bough from the vine that wreathes the kitchen door reaches out in front of the window next to the busy clock. It bobs lightly in the breeze, buoyed by some invisible force. Through the same window I can see the restless wood across the street. Leaves flutter silently, then are still for a time, but begin to stir again when the wind returns, as if they are passing secrets to each other in whispers which can be seen but not heard.

The clock strikes the half hour with a mellow, predictable note. It is usually a background noise, but just now, when I am seeking for quiet, it is loud. I hear steps on the stairs. The quiet hour is gone.

summer surprise

My teenage daughters sleep on the fornt porch most summer nights. It's not really a porch - more of a stoop - a raised wooden platform big enough for two, maybe three girls and a cat. The four corners are bounded by large flower pots, some painted,some plain clay.

They are there this morning when I open the old screen door to let the dog out. He'll have to use the kitchen door since I don't want to disturb them - ever. I want them to always be there on cool, damp late summer mornings.

A single toe sticks out of the blankets, a jumble of mismatched textiles. An old, faded quilt with a fraying jade green border is ripped in several places, some of it's 1950's vintage squares are just shreds. The corner of a paisley, Indian sheet shows beneath a burnt orange, woven bedspread, also of Asian origin. A rust colored, silk basket-weave afghan is tangled with the old quilt, and under the heap are a pale yellow comforter and a folded green sleeping bag for padding.

A very old, lumpy black and white cat with a smudgy nose sleeps between the two girls, mostly on the orange pillow, his head nestled against some touseld golden hair that is not attached to anything visible.

They could be a bundle of blankets - ragged ones at that - left out on the porch after a picnic or little girls' tea party. They do leave their blankets there most days after they climb languidly out, making the porch seem messy and unkempt. But I don't mind. They've been sleeping there off and on all summer, but it is still always a surprise to me to open the front door in the morningand find there are girls in the jumble of quilts and blankets - as if they magically appeared in the summer night while I was sleeping. So I never disturb them. I want them to stay on my porch as long as they will.

heavy heart

No one told me that

when they removed the weight from my womb

they implanted another in my heart.

A tiny, nearly imperceptible pebble

that was alive

and would grow.

It must have been placed there

while I was anesthetized with joy

giddy with relief

mesmerized by the weight in my arms

I did not notice the subtle slice into my heart.

It waxes and wanes

fueled by fevers and tears

by loneliness and fears

which are not my own.

Still they hurt my heart.

My condition feels acute

but I know it is chronic.

I will not die of it.

It will not show up on the autopsy report

but it is incurable.

Some days I forget the mass is there

it shrinks so small, so light

I am sure it is gone -

I am cured.

But not for long.

Meditation on a toothache

This morning I woke up with the words to the song "I am a flower quickly fading, here today and gone tomorrow" running through my mind. How true- the reminders are everywhere including the crumpled, damp teabag in a plastic cup atop the stack of hopeful books on my nightstand. For some reason teabags help to relieve the pain of gum injuries, so I'd fallen asleep with one wedged in my mouth. All week I've been afflicted by a painful tooth abscess in a molar that sports an expensive gold crown. I've lain in bed wondering if the crown will have to come off to repair the root, and, if so, will they give me the gold and what will I do with it? I've read macabre stories of stealing gold from the mouths of dead bodies, so presumably it is valuable, but I've never read what they do with it. Ebay?

Then I've spent some of the painful night watches wondering whose fault this is - mine or the dentist's. I always feel that blame must be assigned, though I don't always know where to deposit it. I suspect the dentist did not do his job when I paid him the $1700.00 to repair a single tooth, but I am sure he will not admit to it; then I might not pay him another $2000.00 to fix my current, painful problem. But even if the original decay were my fault - for not brushing my teeth after every meal, for not flossing every day of my life, for growing up before water was routinely flouridated, for generally not being perfect, he was supposed to have fixed it - didn't I really pay him so I would have one less thing to worry about?

Of course, I know there is not enough money printed by the US government, not enough diamonds mined by unscrupulous men, not enough gold in all the mouths that have ever trusted dentists for relief to remedy the creeping decay I live with, to remove the curse under which I was born. Floss, flouride, sugar-free gum can only retard the process which causes us to fade like the late summer blooms in my garden. The lovely red spikes have nearly all fallen off the proud bee balm that the hummingbirds adored, the few bright orange lilies which we did not eat in a wonderful salad last week are shriveling, their once satin-smooth petals are puckered and distorted. Jesus encouraged his disciples to consider the lilies of the field in their prime - more glorious than Solomon in his riches, but Isaiah also reminds us that after their brief glory they fade, and then disappear. Even the place where they bloomed so brightly remembers them no more. They are simply gone. Withered hath grass, faded the flower, For the Spirit of Jehovah blew upon it, Surely the people is grass reads Young's literal translation of Ecclesiastes.

Still, I will wend my hopeful way to the endodontist next week for another temporary fix. But I won't expect too much. I know it's only a matter of time.

Is anybody still out there?

It's been a long time since I wrote anything. I'm not sure why. I would like to become a more disciplined writer, writing whether I feel like it or not, but I'm clearly not there. For some reason my muse departed last year and hasn't been seen in quite a while.

I plan to start writing again, though perhaps in a different vein. I've chosen a new template color to mark this new episode. Kevin and I are in the last stages of a homestudy in preparation to adopt a sibling group from Ethiopia. Adoption is something we've talked and prayed about for years, but never seemed to be in the right place for, either because of our finances or our life situation. Finally we feel like we have a green light. Strangely, it comes when we have three kids in college. Our finances are still stretched very tight, and our kids have had to give up the private college educations we dreamed about for years - they are at UNH and River Valley Community College, not Wheaton or Boston College. But God has given us the money to begin the process, and we finally have some free bedroom space in the house!

So, I want to chronicle the process as we walk through it, and keep anyone who cares to read about it informed. I actually began my blogging today by trying to add a Paypal button to my sidebar so anyone who cared a lot could help with the cost of bringing two or three orphans to our waiting home, but I was not able to make it work. I had mixed feelings about asking for financial help, anyway, so maybe I'll pursue that elusive button, and maybe I won't!

Ignoring the warning light

We own a fleet of old cars. Now that we have three and a half college and high school drivers we have four and a half old cars in our driveway. We've always driven geriatric cars, not because we are particularly fond of them, but because we don't like car payments. And maybe also because my husband likes an automotive challenge. Maybe that's the real reason; I'm not sure.

When I first met K he was driving a lime green Chevy Vega. The car was being rapidly eaten away by leprous rust and sometimes lost body parts en route. I remember one weekend when he was traveling home from college along a Midwestern interstate he lost a fender. He carefully stashed it behind some underbrush, noted the mile marker and picked it up on the return trip. It later miraculously reappeared on the car. He was a wonder-worker. Maybe that's the real reason I married him; I'm not sure.

Over the years he has has kept a huge assortment of vehicles running, sometimes in very creative ways. We've had cars we had to drive with the heat on full blast - in summer- when the temperature guage began to rise. We've had cars that had to be started with a screwdriver wedged in a particular spot under the hood; we owned that car when I was eight months pregnant and could barely fit behind the wheel, never mind under the hood. In our first year of marriage when we were living on love instead of money we had a tire that went flat every night and had to be pumped up every morning with a bicycle pump. In recent years we've had numerous cars in which the Check Engine light stayed permanently on - at least until it was time for inspection.

My husband still does most of the fleet maintenance work himself and is a first class diagnostician. Click and Clack have nothing on him, other than their fabulous Boston accents and their incredibly annoying wheezy laughter. I can't begin to count the times I've called my husband, sometimes from the other side of the world, to describe a symptom or a sound and he's told me almost immediately what the problem is and what to do about it. So if he says I can ignore a rattle, a clank or a warning light I do.

For the past few months I've been ignoring the Check Engine or Service Engine light in two of our cars - the van I usually drive and my husband's Saab which I sometimes use on the weekend. K has determined they are both false alarms and should not be taken seriously. It's amazing how little time it took for the once-disturbing light to fade from my conscious notice, and to eventually become nearly invisible to me. It is as much a part of the normal dashboard landscape now as the fuel guage or the odometer. Just a friendly little message glowing quietly amongst the lighted guages.

Yesterday, however, I felt the consequence of ignoring a warning light. The Check Engine light is on the lower right side of my dashboard display, just above the ignition, just below the fuel guage, just to the right of the speedometer. That quadrant is also home to an additional warning light which reads Check Guages. Those two seemingly innocuous words are often the first clue that something is wrong that needs immediate attention. The lettering style, the lighting, the color of the two Check warnings is identical, and they appear right next to each other. I discovered I had become so used to not heeding the one warning, that I didn't even notice the other until I heard that suspicious tapping noise that even I know means the oil level is dangerously low. Not till that moment did I notice the glowing words, Check Guages right next to Check Engine.

How long had the second warning light been on? I really don't know, but I suspect it was probably there when I drove the car earlier in the day, maybe as early as the previous day. I, however, had become so accustomed to ignoring the fatuous Check Engine light that I treated the new warning with the same indifference. I had successfully quieted the alarm I would normally feel when a glowing message appeared on my dash. I had turned down the volume, shut off the smoke alarm, ignored the warning signs - to my own peril.

Thank God I stopped driving in time. Thank God that three quarts of oil delivered by my favorite mechanic solved the problem. Thank God the van purred happily when I next turned the key. But things could have ended disastrously. And yes, there is a lesson. There always is. I remembered a verse from my youth that saved me from moral or financial dangers on more than one occasion, Proverbs 27:12. A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the foolish continue on and are punished for it.

God puts lots of warning lights in our lives. Sometimes they flash glaringly in front of us, but just as often they appear more subtly, in the corner of our minds, at the edge of our vision, part of the display of our busy lives. We can train ourselves to heed each warning and take its caution to heart, or we can ignore the little lights and keep driving. What would the prudent man do?

The Grace of Forgetting

I was remembering this morning some dear friends we knew in another life - or so it seems. I was remembering what wonderful, kind, selfless friends they were to us, and how unworthy I sometimes felt of their friendship. So much of the initiative in our relationship always seemed to come from them. I was busy, jealous of my solitude, needing always to plan ahead rather than do something on the spur of the moment. It gives me a bit of a pang now that they are far away and can never call and say "We're in your neighborhood. Can we stop by in five minutes?" Then I remembered a time when God allowed us to help them out of a financial bind - something I had honestly forgotten. I felt grateful that we had been able to contribute that gift to the friendship, but I found I could not remember the amount, or even much about the occasion, or if it happened only once or more than once. . . . and I was grateful for the grace of forgetting.

God, the Omniscient, the Beginning and End, the Ever Present actually talks a lot about forgetting in the Holy Scriptures. He promises that He will remember our sins no more, through the Apostle Paul he urges us to forget those things which lie behind. He blots things out like the record of transgressions against us, He casts things into the deepest sea, presumably meaning He is not going to consider them any longer. The saying, "out of sight, out of mind" could have come from the mouth of God. God's intentional forgetfulness, if it can be called that, is a wonderful grace.

These days I fret often over difficulties remembering where I parked my car, or where I left my keys. While I feel chagrined and a bit panicky when I cannot remember someone's name - we fifty-somethings all know where this is heading - I realized this morning that forgetting is not always a bad thing. It is good to forget about good deeds we may have had the chance to perform, not to rest upon our laurels. It is even better to forget about offenses or slights we may have endured. It is an amazing blessing to look into the face of someone who has hurt us deeply and not remember the former pain, but only feel the pleasure of the present fellowship. Sometimes it is better to forget than to remember.

Of course there are things which should never be forgotten - the faithfulness of God, the many ways God has led us and provided for us, the calories in the bowl of ice cream I already ate this afternoon. Just as there is a time for every purpose under heaven there are times and occasions for both remembering and forgetting. Wisdom comes in knowing the difference.

Harbingers of Spring

I wrote this post in February. It sat in my box for a while waiting for me to get to the crust part, but I've moved on to other metaphors now that spring is here! So, I'll just post my musings on icicles, rather belatedly.


Two metaphors have been skirting around the edge of my thoughts these days – icicles and crusts. February is the month of icicles here in northern New England. Old colonial houses with steeply pitched roofs abound, and the snowfall this year has been generous. For weeks snow piles up on the roofs and in the gutters, biding its time till a sunny day. February’s skies are bright blue after January’s gun metal expanse, and the snow begins to soften and then to drip. The sun is deceptively warm, but the air is still cold. The combination makes for icicles which lengthen during the sunny days and harden in the cold, dark nights.

Some roofs look like they have grown sharp fangs overnight, the rows of closely spaced icicles fringing the roof like shark’s teeth. Others are more elegant and assymetrical, long, thick sharp sabres alternating with shorter, more delicate points. My children love to watch the roof across the street and make forays into the yard when the owner is not home to harvest her icicles. Sometimes they have short lived sword fights with them, more often they bring them home to the freezer to try to extend their natural life span. They coexist in the dark with bags of peas and ice cream cartons until someone, usually me, tosses them out to break on the porch.

Suddenly in February the public signs which have been ignored all summer and fall – Caution, Falling Ice- begin to have portent. Parking too near the edge of a building could have serious consequences during February. We park, drive and walk at our own risk during these bright days which lure us outside. Icicles are at once the harbingers of spring and the reminders that winter is not over.

Some days I feel like an icicle. I can melt, or be melted, by the misfortune of others, by the needs I encounter all around me, by a friend’s pain or a husband’s struggle, but my heart can harden again just as easily. I wish for it to be always spring in my heart, but I am stuck in February, I fear. I weep, but then I forget what I’ve seen, I feel touched by the feeling of another’s infirmity, but I don’t stay soft; I slip back into the icy shadows of my own wants and needs and cares, the cold darkness of my own night. My heart so easily hardens toward others and I am sharp and brittle and frozen solid. The cycle of melting, hardening, melting and hardening seems to go on forever. I know when I look at the calendar that sometime soon the icicles will melt away for good, that mud season will inevitably overtake winter. But when I look at my heart I cannot predict spring so infallibly. Though I ache for spring, though I drip in anticipation, winter could be here for a long time. For good if I let it.

Redemption, recycling and Bernie Madoff

My daughter and I were discussing the indictment and guilty plea of Bernie Madoff a few weeks ago. I heard a commentator on NPR express the near certainty that Madoff would "spend the rest of his life in prison." I expressed my own opinion that such a penalty is meaningless - completely unrelated to the crime, unlikely to do anything to either help the victims of the crime or to restore the perpetrator. I think the same could be said of 90 percent of the prison sentences handed down in US courts. A small percentage of the 1 in 40 adults incarcerated in the US are truly dangerous and need to be locked away, but we can't seem to think of anything else to do with lawbreakers, so they all end up wasting their own time and taxpayers' money.

My daughter made a very perceptive comment at that point. She said, "You know, our society isn't really into redemption at all. Not in any arena. We don't redeem people, we don't recycle goods, we don't reclaim wasted food, we don't redeem our time." I think she cut right to the heart of the matter.

So we began to talk about whether those things are related - is our attitude toward criminal justice really related to our handling of our trash? Do our buying habits and our leisure time activities say anything about our worldviews? Could you predict someone's attitude toward crime and punishment based on whether they have a recycling bin in their kitchen? Well, maybe not, but then again, maybe so.

My daughter posited that most of us have just become lazy. We all tend to do what is easiest, unless we have a compelling reason or belief that makes us choose the road less traveled. Our phenomenal affluence has coincided with the loss of any understanding of the value of and the need for redemption. We Americans have become so accustomed to throwing things away instead of fixing them, to tossing out the leftovers (or, in my case, letting them rot in the refrigerator for three weeks and then tossing them out), to filling our trash cans and our prisons with the things and the people we don't want to keep around anymore, rather than doing the hard work of redeeming them, making them into useful products or useful citizens. Maybe it's not a coincidence at all that our landfills and our prisons are both burgeoning.

As Christians we claim to walk as Jesus walked. We hold up the life of Christ as our role model. More than that, we stake our lives on the truth of His redemptive life and death. His sole purpose in His earthly life was to redeem that which had become soiled and ruined by sin. His life and death demonstrated the enormous value of redeeming what would otherwise be lost. He was willing to die to do the hard work of redemption.

We have the opportunity every day as individuals and as members of society to model a redemptive lifestyle or a careless one. We can demonstrate for our children and our neighbors the virtues of reclaiming and renewing things and persons that are soiled and damaged by use or by sin, that may look as if they have no usefulness left in them. Or we can teach them to toss them away as so much garbage - paper, plastic, aluminum and people.

Matters of taste

One of the many unfortunate physical changes that occurs as you get older is that your skin grows thinner. Last summer my Mom was telling me how easily her skin tears these days, and, I have to admit, even at my age I have noticed not-so-subtle changes in the texture of my skin. I think it is particularly cruel that this kind of thing should happen just when you seem to need a thicker skin - when your kids grow up. Most of my children have moved way beyond the stage in life where Mom is beautiful, wise and always right. All of them have moved beyond the stage where Mom knows anything about clothes, music or youtube. Even though I know they are probably right, I still forget sometimes.

I have (almost) finally stopped trying to buy any items of clothing for my daughters, with the possible exception of white sports socks. (I don't always get those right, but I have an 11 year old who will still wear just about any style for basketball practice. I know my days are numbered with her.) My older girls have been very kind to me for years. Countless times I have pulled something out of a shopping bag with a "Ta-da" flourish only to hear them demur, "Oh, Mom, that's really interesting." "OK, maybe I could try that." "That's really nice, but I'm not sure if it will fit; you know how ridiculous I am about how things fit." Later they try to slip them out the back door in opaque bags bound for a local charity so I might not notice. Nice girls.

It's not that I'm completely clueless about my fashion weaknesses. I admit I just don't notice the subtle differences between brands and cuts of jeans; I can never remember which backpocket designs are OK and which are anathema. It's one of my blind spots. And I know, too, that vintage finds that I think are fabulous, that make me exclaim, "Oh, I would definitely wear this if I were 20 again" will never interest my girls unless it happens to be October 31. I do understand a few things. But I thought I could still do an adequate job of choosing my own wardrobe. Apparently not.

One Sunday last month I arrived downstairs ready for church only to hear my fourteen year old say, "Mom, that outfit looks like it came from "What Not to Wear." Seeing she had hurt my tender fashion feelings she quickly backtracked with, "No, no! I meant what they choose for the woman to wear, not what she started out in," but I got the point. My eldest son arrived home from college for spring break a few weeks ago. He gave me a big, warm hug and then stepped back for an appraising look. "Mom, are you wearing your wampum around your neck?" he asked when he noticed the new necklace I had just bought to make a bold statement. Wampum was not the look I'd had in mind.

I take some comfort from the knowledge that I am not wandering all alone in the fashion wasteland of midlife. I was discussing skinny jeans with one of my age cohort a few months ago. I mentioned my girls had frowned disapprovingly when I casually brought them up in conversation. They shook their heads and murmured things I could not quite hear, but could not misunderstand. My friend confided that her daughters had gasped, "Mom, don't even think about it" when she eyed their Ugg boots with more than cursory interest.

I can still remember my own mother's fashion faux pas when I was young and cool, like her stiffly sprayed hair that was refreshed once a week at the salon. In spite of her best efforts to sleep carefully for the next six days it became flatter and more misshapen as the week wore on. You could pretty much tell which day each of her friends had her regular appointment by the state of their hives. That was 1972. I also remember her picking out "cute" things for me that I would not consider going to bed in, much less wearing to school. I remember the myriad ways I had of saying "Are you kidding?" so it sounded more like, "I think I have enough clothes to last me for the next three years, but thanks anyway." And I remember my relief when my mother eventually stopped buying me clothes, though I missed the moment of excitement I used to feel between the announcement, "I got you something great!" and the unveiling of the actual item.

So, I should not be surprised to find that I have reached the same stage in life. It was inevitable. I should not feel like a complete failure just because I will never get a job as a fashion consultant to anyone under thirty - really, for anyone at all. The wisdom which comes with age doesn't have much to do with taste, I guess. I should probably turn my energies to other pursuits, like growing a thicker skin.