Spirituality

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Normalizing Different

The “popular kids” and I have never been what you’d call close. In high school and beyond I have usually had a somewhat adverse reaction to doing what was mainstream just because. Even when I tried to blend in I did it so awkwardly that it was doomed to fail even before I bought my over-sized flannel shirt (yes, I grew up in the 90s, before flannel plaid was worn ironically in a tight-fitting style).

But one valuable lesson I have learned from them is this: if you act like what you’re doing is normal, other people probably will too.

Or, on the flip side, if you act like you are a freak, then other people will treat you like one.

The first time this post started rattling around in my head it was in the context of breastfeeding. If women continue to act as though it is something to be done exclusively in a separate wing of the house, in the car, sitting on the toilet, or worse, then it will always be something that is considered ‘other’ in some significant way. I’m not saying we should all insist on the right to walk around shirtless until our children wean at age 4 (like they do without social issue in Africa, I have it from friends who live in Tanzania and Uganda). Yelling loudly “I am not weird!” is another way of admitting that yes, in fact, you do feel disenfranchised in some way and have to cover your feelings by making a scene about it. It doesn’t normalize the behavior.

Another example of this that comes to mind is that I was reading a story a while back in which this woman was talking about the first time she refused a plastic bag at Target, since she was only purchasing one small item. Her telling of the story revolved around how everyone had treated her as though she was stealing the item and she was very uncomfortable the whole time. I have to wonder; what was her facial expression and body language like? Did she act like she was stealing it?

I have developed the habit of just calmly stating that I don’t need a bag, or a straw, or whatever. I don’t furtively glance at the cashier or my fellow customers as I say this, or act embarrassed to be refusing something they are offering (obviously this is trickier in certain situations…if a dear relative offers my daughter a piece of plastic crap toy certain to break and spread tiny beads of plastic all over my house it is much harder to refuse in a way that isn’t taken personally…I’m still working on that one!).

On the food front, I know people I respect who will loudly declare something to be ‘poison’ for everyone to hear in a somewhat misguided effort to educate those around them on the dangers of chemical additives in food. I’m not talking about how we explain things at home…I want to be clear with my daughter about why she can’t eat certain things. I tell her that there is just too much in them that isn’t food, so we aren’t going to eat it. Bless her, for a long time she didn’t even recognize most candy as something edible. As she’s gotten older, though, I just explain to her (quietly, off to the side…not on a soapbox for everyone to hear…) the reason we are not going to eat something. And then I tell her that other people have different mommies, so they might eat things that we don’t and it’s not our job to make them feel bad about it.

This is also glaringly obvious to me (now) when it comes to sharing faith. I grew up in an evangelical tradition wherein it was highly valued to be ‘bold’ in speaking the truth of God’s love to people. In practice it was often more of the same “I am not weird” rhetoric but dressed up in religiosity. Unfortunately, I was not able to communicate in a way that was at all sensitive to the fact that God might say different things to different people at different times. I was not even able to admit He might change the wording a little. If you tell people in an abrasive or confrontational way, “God loves you!” most people will be put off for the same reason that I suspect people reacted oddly to the woman in Target who was made to feel like she was stealing. If you act like what you are saying or doing is false in any way, it can be sensed. It will ring false and people can tell, even without realizing why they are put off by you.

So in conclusion………..if you really think you should do something, then do it and don’t be afraid to not act like a weirdo about it. Also, I’m certain there will be some point today at which I’ll need to take my own advice, as I do lots of stuff that some people might think is weird. Wish me luck with that.

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The Emotional Palette Revisited

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have come to think of feelings as different paint colors on a palette. The painting we are working on is our emotional interaction with the world around us. We all start out with a  blank canvas and few primary colors, and we get more as we go. Our parents, our peers, and all of our experiences have the potential to affect the hue or shading of our emotional palette.

We all end up with a certain amount of black from the hardness of life. I think for me dealing with depression was like adding black to the palette. Once black is introduced, if you aren’t very intentional all the colors are in danger of turning into a murky disgusting mess.

Remember when you were a child; wasn’t it frustrating when someone else colored on your picture? I think that a hard thing about the idea of painting with emotion is that our feelings are affected by so many things beyond our control.

I start ‘painting’ myself a good morning. The yogurt I made turned out really well and tastes delicious with blueberries and granola for breakfast. Mmmm….add some purple.

It’s sunny outside! Actually sunny! Add some brilliant orange in a few places.

A thoughtless driver nearly crashes into my car and speeds off without a second (or even first) look. Tiny grey-brown spatters. Not enough to ruin the picture or anything, but it does change the mood slightly in a small area.

Go to a playgroup. Watch other parents and enjoy talking about a variety of subjects ranging from everything from Food, Inc. to Magic Cards, and from potty training to our various religious upbringings. Many different colors represented here, and I add a bit from each of them to my day. I like how that mom redirected her son…that particular hue of green matches really well with this part of my painting!

I get stressed out when another parent at Whole Foods doesn’t redirect her kids at all and fails to even notice her son pulled a chair out from under E. and is now laughing about it while she sits bewildered on the floor. Then after several more incidents and side conversations wherein I try to encourage her quietly I say out loud, “Tell him no! What he’s doing is not okay.” The other mom finally hears from across the room behind a plant, gets mad and says “I’m SORRY!” in a way that really means…well…not an apology, I feel certain as I meet her angry stare. There will be no productive conversation there, so I move on. A muddy black splotch–all over the corner where the sunshine was. Shoot. What now? That’s not how I wanted that to look…

I really don’t want to paint such a dark picture right there. So I need some white to balance out and take away some of the murkiness. Or maybe I just need to cover it with white and start again in that spot. Where do I get white? People find it in many unlikely places. A smile from a stranger, a hug from a friend, a flower. I think God puts it many-wheres in the world for the finding, as He is the source of white and understands much more than we do how and when we will need it. And if we ask, we may even find some help for how to incorporate it into our own work to make it more beautiful.

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Going from Grey to White is Exhausting.

“Alas!” said Aragorn. “Gandalf the Grey fell into shadow. He remained in Moria and did not escape.”

At these words all the Elves in the hall cried aloud in grief and amazement….

It is hard to watch people you love fall into depression. After my daughter was born I was exhausted and ill-equipped to deal with the emotional turnover caused by becoming a parent, and by the reality of the way she was born. I may share that story here in its entirety at some point (I have told it out loud many times by now but it took me almost a year tell it all the way through from start to finish), but for now it is enough that you know it was an emergency cesarean under general anesthesia and I was left with some post traumatic symptoms- dreams, flashbacks, etc.).

I had a lot of people who loved me and who wanted good things for me (I still do), but many of them were somewhat dismayed by the change in me in the first months of my motherhood. For a long time it seemed like I was past the point where I’d find my ‘self’ again and be the same old Katie. But  s.l.o.w.l.y. I began to find a new me. So I wasn’t good at fearlessly speaking my mind without regard for emotional consequences anymore (mine or other peoples!). But I finally noticed that other people have feelings about and reactions to things that I say (yes, I’m really quick on the uptake about certain things but that one actually took me until almost the end of my twenties to get). And that noticing is a valuable skill, as it turns out. Who knew? (Okay, lots of people…)

One day a couple of months ago I was re-reading LOTR and I came across Gandalf’s description of fighting the Balrog. Something in my heart and mind just…clicked. It lent purpose to what I have gone through as I have struggled with how to react to a near complete upheaval in how I understood my life and identity.

“Long time I fell,” he said at last, slowly, as if thinking back with difficulty. “Long I fell, and he fell with me. His fire was about me. I was burned. Then we plunged into the deep water and all was dark. Cold it was as the tide of death: almost it froze my heart…it has a bottom, beyond light and knowledge,’ said Gandalf.
Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone. He was with me still. His fire was quenched, but now he was a thing of slime, stronger than a strangling snake.

“We fought far under the living earth, where time is not counted. Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him, till at last he fled into dark tunnels…Now I have walked there but I will bring no report to darken the light of day. In that despair my enemy was my only hope {some of my Christian friends may have an adverse reaction to this…it isn’t that the Balrog is the only hope, it’s just the only thing he could see so he had no other option at that time. To move forward sometimes we have to follow paths we don’t like or choose, and I humbly assert that that’s mainly what is meant here.}, and I pursued him, clutching at his heel. Thus he brought me back at last to the secret ways of Khazad-dum: too well he knew them all. Ever up now we went, until we came to the Endless Stair.”

“There upon Celebdil…Out he sprang, and even as I came behind, he burst into new flame…a great smoke rose about us, vapour and steam. Ice fell like rain. I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin. Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.”

“…I was sent back…until my task is done. And I lay upon the mountain-top. The tower behind was crumbled into dust, the window gone; the ruined stair was choked with burned and broken stone. I was alone, forgotten, without escape  upon the hard horn of the world. There I lay, staring upward, while the stars wheeled over, and each day was as long as a life-age of the earth. Faint to my ears came the gathered rumour of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping, and the slow everlasting groan of overburdened stone. And so at the last Gwaihir the Windlord found me again, and he took me up and bore me away….” 

“Gandalf,” the old man repeated, as if recalling from old memory a long disused word. “Yes, that was the name. I was Gandalf…”

…the dwarf looked up and laughed suddenly. “Gandalf!” he said. “But you are all in white!”

“Yes, I am white now,” said Gandalf. “Indeed I am Saruman, one might almost say, Saruman as he should have been.”

I am a firm believer that fiction can teach us things that nonfiction can’t. I didn’t actually climb an endless stair or get carried away to Loth Lorien by a giant talking eagle. But I did come through a time that was very hard for me, and I do feel sometimes that I’ve been through a great battle in the past couple of years. But anyone who knows the story of Gandalf knows that what happens in the dark tunnels and on the mountain is what makes him into Gandalf the White, who is more powerful and wise than ever before. He doesn’t come back as the same person. Not really. But it was worth it.

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Fear Itself

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

I find this quote inspiring and infuriating at the same time.  Fear itself is really very….scary.

I have been having horrible dreams of late.  Wake up in the middle of the night and grab on to J. dreams.  Go into E.’s room to make sure she’s okay dreams.  Dreams about being kidnapped, attacked, or worse.  Dreams about people doing terrible things to me or to people I love and being powerless to stop it or to help them.

And the truth is, really bad things do happen.  This world is broken.  There is a lot of ugliness in the world and there is nothing I can do that will erradicate it.

My friend M. sells tie-dyes at the market I go to on Saturday mornings.  She is this really cool hippie buddhist chick.  When I was there today she showed me a new wall hanging she was selling and told me about it.  It was the world in a peace sign and surrounded by a heart.  She told me that the heart represented the Bodhisattvas.  When I admitted that I have no idea what that means and asked her to explain, she was happy to.  Basically she said they are enlightened beings who take all of our bad and filter it, giving us back good.

Not being a buddhist I didn’t know any of that (I had to look ‘bodhisattva’ up on Wikipedia to know how to spell it) but I have to say it sounds like a great deal to me.  But it also made me think about my own faith.  What am I to do with all my badness/fear/sadness/anger?  How am I to feel about raising children in such a broken world?

A couple of things that come to my mind are:

“Cast your anxiety on Christ, for he cares for you.” – I Peter 5:7

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.”  I John 4:18

Fear can be a basic biological response.  I’m not talking about getting rid of the fear that will cause me not to walk down a dark alley at 2 in the morning if I see potential attackers there.  But there are other ways that fear will work its way in and take over my very way of relating to everyone and everything around me.  It can be crippling.

And it shouldn’t be.

I think my fear is a forgetting of God as my Father.  I think it’s a lack of trust–I have simply not learned object permanence with God.  I’ll try my hand at a makeshift parable.

When E. was new, she would cry if we tried to play ‘peekaboo’ with her.  She really thought we disappeared when our hands were in front of our face.  Then that was okay.  Next step–be out of sight for 10 seconds.  10 steps later–go to another room by myself.  She would come running after me, shrieking, “Where you go?”

Now, she’s mostly okay if I tell her where I’m going.  As long as she’s not upset about something.  But if she is, I just have to settle in and realize I’m going to have a 2 year old watching me use the toilet.

Not that God uses the toilet (at least not the one at my house) but I have to think He’s even more patient with me since I am doing this without having a physical place to follow Him to.  Also He’s just infinitely more patient and loving than I am.  I lose sight so often and get wrapped up in my own worst-case scenarios.  It’s like E. assuming I will go to the basement to change the laundry and never come back.  I just try to remind her I am there, that I love her and that mommies come back.  And I try to remind myself that God is at least as good to me as I am to my daughter.

In that vein, one last quote:
“Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? If you then, being evil {read: broken; imperfect}, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!”

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Lost and Found and Anacronism?

This weekend we celebrated my mom’s birthday.  In the afternoon, we went to the Great Lakes Medieval Faire, and in the evening we saw Lost and Found play (a band I have followed since high school).  It was great fun, but it also reminded me what a small demographic I belong to.  I am a member of the tiny segment of society who enjoys creative anacronism and occasionally goes to concerts held at churches.

I was chatting with some of the vendors that I have gotten to know a little at the faire and it came up that we were going to a concert.  Here’s a rough rendering of how the conversation went down:

“Oh!  That sounds like fun!  I’d like to go to a show tonight.  Where is it?”

“Well, um, it’s at a church.  B-b-but it’s not what you are probably thinking right now…they are total hippies–one of them is even a vegan.”

“Hah!  You’re a christian?”

“Yes.  But again, probably not what you are thinking right now.  I don’t even really like to mention it until I know people better because of all the baggage associated with…well you know.”

“Totally.  I didn’t think you were like that.  I didn’t get that kinda vibe off of you.  I think it’s so cool that you guys are here with your mom.  My mom is very religious (Southern Baptist) and she would never come to any of my things.  Yeah, this is a pretty godless bunch around here.  Most Christians don’t like us too much.”

I wished I could disagree with her, and say that the church welcomes people at least as much as the rhetoric in the program represents.

Lacking the time and inclination to change into more normal clothes, we just showed up in our costumes.  When we got to the Church where the show was being held, we were offered a private room to sit in and eat our food.  It was very nice and roomy with lots of couches and people seemed to take special care to come and offer us baked goods and welcome us to their church.  A couple of the people who came in said, “were you out in Geneva!?  That’s a great festival.  Did you have fun?”

But there were many more who looked at us as, at best, an oddity.  I apparently got several angry looks from men that D. said seemed to imply that I was dressed inappropriately (I was wearing a halter top with a meshy-shrug sweater over it and a floor length flared skirt).  D. was confused by this as he is my brother and would not have bought anything for me to wear that was immodest as that would be, um, wierd.  J. pointed out that my clothes probably drew negative attention not because they were actually inappropriate, but because they were different.  If I had wanted to fit in, I could have worn short-shorts and a tight t-shirt or tank top and no one would have noticed me.  But…even when I have tried to fit in in the past it never works anyway; so I have mostly stopped trying.

The thing that I took away from the whole experience was that I am not sent to the people in that particular church, and so it is not necessary for them to approve of me.  I am to be gracious and loving to all people the best I can, and wherever I see that God’s grace goes out from me and seems to take root in another person I am to encourage that growth the best I can.  Even at the ren faire.