My cousin, my mom’s ‘baby’ sister (she’s 89), my mom and I, with my uncle’s two daughters reflected in the window. We had lunch together recently to celebrate my uncle’s life — he was in the middle, and 90 years old when he died last month. My mom is 91.

* * *

She cannot hold it. It floats by, tantalizing, intriguing, possible. But she cannot hold it.

I watch her try to think and the picture that comes is this: the rotating rack in a dry cleaning establishment. You know the one. The attendant looks up your order, punches in the number and the clothes start moving, almost by magic, until they stop. The correctly numbered slot is right there in front, and the cashier picks up the hanger, hands it to you and says, “That will be $10.00, please.”

But for my mother, the right number hardly ever comes up. She punches those numbers for all she’s worth, but someone else’s clothes land in her lap. And she truly doesn’t know what to do with them.

Watching a person’s mind unravel is a sad and terrifying thing. She is so old now, so frail, and yet, there is evidence that somewhere in there, my mom still lives and breathes. Sadly, that evidence is sliding away on a daily basis and I often find myself unraveling right along with her.

I am, by turns, angry and exhausted, sad to the point of tears and frustrated by the reversal in our roles. I never signed on for this — this long, long good-bye. I never imagined it. Never. And that’s a big part of the problem.

What is it that creates this protective naiveté in me? This terrible lack of imagination? Maybe it’s because her mother, my grandmother, lived to be 101 without a single sign of dementia. Anxiety? Oh yeah, by the bushel basket. But she never did battle with her own mind. She didn’t lose herself. She didn’t forget her life.

I fully expected my mom to follow suit. She lost her vision in the same way, at about the same age. But this losing her mind, this dementia? It is a complete bolt from the blue. And to tell you the truth, I am frightened by it. Terrified, to be exact. Because . . .

What if it happens to me, too?

I fold my mother’s small load of laundry each week, buy the king-sized package of Depends at Costco once a month, try to take her out to lunch once a week, visit her several other times, call her when I don’t see her. But underneath all of the good-daughter things I do to assuage my sadness (and my guilt at being unable to have her live with me), there is a large, festering pool of self-pity, self-concern and stark, flesh-eating terror.

All my life, I have valued my mind. It’s a pretty good one, a gift, a blessing, a self-defining characteristic. That means I am sometimes an intellectual snob (even though I am not much of an intellectual) and I am sometimes unduly proud of my ability to think quickly and well. I battle with deep-seated impatience when others don’t ‘get it.’  I like being able to reflect deeply, to articulate things well, to figure out people and problems when others struggle to do so. My cognitive abilities fall on the plus side of the ledger, when many other things about me do not.

To think about losing that identity — well, it scares the crap outta me. Walking through my mother’s last years is pushing all that terror right up to the surface where I am forced to look at a lot of things about myself that I don’t particularly like. I wish I could tell you this whole painful process was making me a ‘better’ person, a kinder one, a more patient one. So far, I see little evidence of that.

I am prayerful about it all, learning to be scorchingly honest with myself, and wanting to want to be less of a freakazoid inside my spirit. And I truly do not want to minimize the anguish of my mother’s experience by focusing only on my own. Some days are better than others, but overall, this journey is lonely, scary and crazy-making.

I wonder where God is in all of this, even though I see tendrils of grace in her sweet face, in the occasional flash of her feisty spirit, in the tenderness I feel toward her, in the valiance with which she is adjusting to the memory-loss unit that became her home six weeks ago. Like Moses, I see God’s backside for a moment here, a moment there.

At the end of the day, perhaps this is the most important thing I can say, the truest thing I know: over and around and under all of the craziness, all of the selfishness, all of the worry, the battle with impatience, the spiritual angst and the emotional weariness, there is this overwhelming reality: I miss my mom. I miss her so, so much.

And she’s still here.

She is still here.

 

 

This is my father’s world, why should my heart be sad?

I hear those old words, sung by a new artist bounce around in my car. Normally a song that I sing at the top of my lungs, today the words are bitter in my mouth. In my mind, I start to list off the reasons why my heart is sad. Not merely sad, but completely wrecked. The weight of injustice is pressing in on me. If this is my father’s world, he’s doing a piss-poor job of caring for the people in it that matter to me. I can’t decide if I’m angry or sad. Most likely both. The tears feel like both.

I turn off the music and sit with only my blasphemous thoughts and the sound of the tires thrumming along the old back road to keep me company.

The things that are happening aren’t happening to me, so I barely feel justified in this emotional wallowing that I’m doing. But I’m a feeler, so when badness befalls people I love, it leaves me feeling wrung out. And there’s been badness falling all over the place lately. Abuse, illness, death. I’m just tired. And oh, so sad.

These are the moments that I wish faith came easily to me. So I could pray for healing and expect it to happen. So I could pray for peace and actually feel it. So I could hope for restoration and believe that it would come to be.

So I could easily believe that the Easter story that I just heard was for me.

I struggle with this. And when so much hurt and pain swirls around me, I just want to drink too much and swear too loudly and wish it would just go away. Go away and never, ever, ever come back.

I know that in the coming days and months, people will offer words of encouragement that sound hollow to me. I know that some will offer to pray with me when all I want to do is shake my fist at the heaven. I know that there will be Bible verses quoted at me when all I want is to listen to the angry words in my brain. I know that some will call everything healed already, in Jesus’s name, while I can see only misery and anguish.

And I love them, but I know that I will hate that.

But as I allow the tears to fall, as I allow my heart to hurt, I remember that there are those who understand the need for grief. Those who hold me when I weep. Those who will offer their prayers silently. Those who will let me voice my doubt and anger without shaming me. Those who know that sometimes the darkness of Good Friday extends into Easter, and the days beyond, and will hold vigil with me – lighting candles rather than blinding me with flashing lights.

And perhaps, even in the midst of my blasphemy, I can find moments of reverence.

O let me ne’er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.

But today my heart is sad.

 

By Steve (originally posted to Flickr as Storm Comin) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

During my childhood I went to family court two, maybe three times.

The hallways are long and narrow. Men and women in suits bustled in and out of offices and court rooms. Their shoes clicked on the hard floors.

“I don’t want to be here,” was all that I could think. Whatever I’d said to my parents that brought things to this point, I took it back. I didn’t care. I was far from our comfortable brown couches, my fire trucks that filled the soft carpeted floor, and my stuffed animals who I wanted to hug for protection and comfort. I had nothing other than a few G.I. Joe soldiers and this wooden bench where I did my best to act like I was entertaining myself.

I could fool my family, but I couldn’t fool myself.

When it came time to talk to the judge, I walked into an enormous room with high ceilings.

There were cold wooden benches, white walls, and a judge sitting high in his perch. No one would be so monstrous as to interrogate a small child in family court. I don’t remember anyone grilling me like you see on television dramas where lawyers break a witness to confess his crime. But I was already broken in that huge, hollow room with hardly enough oxygen to take a breath. I had the terror of knowing that my life could change forever in that moment. I feared everything. I feared my mother, my father, and any change to my life as it was. This man who hardly knew us would sit in judgment over us and tell us what the future would be.

For an eight year old child, it doesn’t take too much to get his imagination going. My mind raced from one possibility to another. All the while fear tightened its grip on my chest.

You can’t let go of a memory like that, even if you tell yourself to stop thinking about it. It has a way of seeping into your psyche so that you develop nervous ticks in new social situations. You start to develop anxiety problems and one day find that you forgot how to breath and you can’t catch your breath as an anxiety attack sends you to the hospital searching for answers.

I’ll always be searching for the ways those images have impacted my life. A judge with the power to determine my fate is not easily forgotten. In fact, those experiences may be part of my strong aversion to the court room salvation scene I often heard in my teens.

Once you turn God into the judge, it doesn’t matter that Jesus is there pleading my case. I’m already lost. I can’t worship that God. I feel the cold bench. I hear the echoes of accusations. I feel my faith slipping away.

You can’t make a family in a court room.

If Jesus is truly making us part of his family, then we have something that no court can give or take away. We have been healed by a doctor, adopted by a new family, and rescued by a self-sacrificing warrior.  I don’t begrudge anyone their court room analogies for the work of God in their lives, but it has nothing to do with my own experience of God. I don’t find the God who welcomes home the prodigal in a court room.

I take heart in knowing that God uses many different ways to describe the saving work of Christ and our inclusion into his family.

God is not dogmatic about his metaphors.

We, on the other hand, can take our metaphors and run with them, clouding our ability to see reality if taken too far. Many of us haven’t ever left that court room, begging for God’s mercy and reclaiming the sacrifice of the cross. We act as if Satan still has us in chains when we’re the only ones clutching our chains as we wait for a merciful judge.

Even worse, sometimes we think of God holding us down in chains until Jesus rescues us.

Jesus never taught us to pray the “Our Judge.” He scandalized the people of his time by calling God Father and taught his disciples to do the same.

Our sins have been forgiven. We have new life. However, we miss out on the greatest gift of all if we don’t realize we’ve been irreversibly adopted.

It’s time to leave the cold, hollow halls of the court room behind forever. We have been adopted into a new family where our Father leads us out into the warm sunshine, lifts us into his arms, and holds onto us forever.

Matthew and I are so happy to bring y’all another video blog about parenting.

Today we’d love to know your thoughts! Do you “tag-team” with your spouse? Do you always do baths and your spouse always do storytime? What works for you?

 

Sometimes, we get these ideas in our heads about what being Christ-like means, only to find that maybe our perspective is a bit distorted.   I am an introvert with a capital I.  You know those personality quizzes?  There are a few things that have changed for me over the years or even over the same day according to my mood when taking the test.   But they are all consistent about my introversion.  I love people, really.  It is just that I am exhausted if I spend much time with them.  To this day, most of my best friends are fictional characters or people I met online.

If I believed that God had a really twisted sense of humor, I would suspect that He has been chuckling most of my life.  I grew up in a pastor’s family.  My parents were actually great about that, partly because my dad was also a preacher’s kid and understood first hand the pressures involved.  However, it is a given that you are supposed to be friendly and greet everyone and make small talk with visitors or other guests after the service.  I would escape and hide at the first opportunity.

Just I was beginning to make peace with that side of my personality, I married an extroverted Hispanic who loves to host parties.  And we had four kids.  That we decided to homeschool.  Suddenly, I was caught in the tension of my expectations and who I really am.  I watched with envy as my mother in law played with the kidlets for hours at a time.  Although I love them more than life itself, playing for more than a few minutes leaves my soul gasping for breath.  I read blogs and posts by amazing moms warning of the need to put down our phones and be fully engaged with our children, and felt weighted down with terrible shame and guilt for the number of times I check Facebook during a day.

My kids need friends, and some days I feel like I am failing them because playdates don’t come naturally to me.  I am not shy, exactly–I will talk about anything with anybody.  It is more like easily overwhelmed.  Competing noises from several people at once fry my mind.  And related, but different, is that I suck at small talk.  My brain just totally freezes.  Not to mention the inherent difficulties of focusing on a visit with another adult when I am constantly keeping one eye and ear on the kidlets.

Did I mention that there are four of them?  Each only two years apart?  And that I am with them all day every day?  The truth is that that *is* working for our family.  But I had to let go of a few things.

The biggest thing for me was realizing that Jesus was not an extrovert.  I am not saying that He was an introvert, either.  If He has created you as someone who is energized by time with others, that is a beautiful thing. But I had absorbed the idea somewhere that God wanted me to be more outgoing, to enjoy being with more people, to be fully engaged all the time, and that when I didn’t live up to that that there was something wrong with me.  Then I started focusing on the verses in the Bible that describe Jesus often leaving the crowds and going off by Himself.  He even ditched the disciples a few times.  And though He loved everyone, and ministered to them all, He also chose twelve people out of the thousands around Him to pour His life into.  There were three that He spent special time with, and only one who laid on His chest.   What if godliness is not defined or limited by personality traits? Maybe, just maybe, that ideal that I had created in my mind was not the standard God had for me.

I have learned that it is is not only OK for me to protect and nurture myself, but good.  Some times I leave the kids at home with my husband and go to a bookstore or Starbucks for a few hours to recharge.  (And the times when I lock myself in the bathroom or closet with a dark chocolate bar don’t even count.)  I balance those spurts of being fully engaged and active with my kidlets with other times where I am supervising them but also checking my phone or reading.  Some days I load everyone up in the van and drive somewhere simply because I know it will mean at least twenty minutes of relative quiet with no one climbing on me or expecting my attention.  I savor the moments when everyone is asleep, even when I am exhausted.  I make it a point to focus purely on them at times, but also to let them play on their own or with their friends.  I enjoy the treasured people that are a part of my life, and the even wider circle of friends that my children now have, but I’m OK with lulls in the conversation and don’t feel embarrassed about slipping away for a few moments when we get together (even though I am a huge advocate for nursing in public, I used to take advantage of hiding out with a breastfeeding baby at regular intervals).   Even if all these things don’t look like being a good mom, they are helping me to be a better mom.  And I think that Jesus approves.

Image credit: One Way Stock on Flickr

 

 

“Daddy, I left you a note.  Read it later, okay?”

Elizabeth is getting older.  It seems with each passing day she grows more into someone I have loved, someone I miss looking ahead and someone I love to have conversations with now simultaneously.  It is all very different for me, even disorienting.

I am not used to this as a parent.

Up to this day, my world as dad has consisted and been defined as wrestler, human airplane and catapult, storyteller, teacher, dance off partner, prankster, hero, partner in the kitchen, cook in the making, confidant and defender against gross boys . . . that I know are becoming less and less gross to her.

Things are beginning to change.

Elizabeth is growing, and I am having to trust a little more than I’m used to.  Quite honestly, more than I am ready to.  Some days, I watch her interact with her friends and listen to her talk about her day at dinner and all I want is for the little girl known in my heart forever as, Schmuggie McGuiness, to be there.  For context’s sake, she acquired that name from me.  I gave her a fitting Irish name during her first international trip to Ireland at the ripe old age of 6 months.  That’s the little girl that stared at me, a captive of my every word.  While she isn’t exactly packed up to move out, it’s becoming more evident too quickly that she, like my two other loving daughters, are in fact, growing up.  And I have to deal with it appropriately.

I will always be her dad, but she will need me in different capacities.  So it’s bittersweet.

I want what she is no longer while I am excited to be her dad on changing levels.  We have a unique bond.  As the oldest, it is a little different than with the younger girls.  I’m still the dad that I know how to be to them …and that is an amazing thing to me.  But with Elizabeth, she is blazing a new trail in my heart soon to be traveled on by her younger sisters.

Elizabeth is a strong little girl with a heart that loves loyally and with that same heart, wants to belong.  She is smart and perceptive.  Throughout this past year, she has been more to me than I really believe she can understand right now.  One day, she will know better just how valuable she has been in my life as a support and strength.  It is a bond that is so deep in my heart.

We struggle a little more in our relationship. As she is growing older, she is getting more complex and reasoning on a different level.  She is exploring and discovering more about herself in social situations, and in turn, she is stretching out a bit and pushing limits.  Let me not be misleading here.  Elizabeth is truly an amazing little girl with a compassionate heart that I pray will only grow so deep and rooted in God’s infinite grace.

Our small struggles have as much to do with me as they do with her; sometimes much more with me and my death grip on who I still want her to be at times, little Schmuggie McGuiness.

She left me a note recently.  They each have their own way leading directly to the center of my heart, but it is an especially direct route with Elizabeth.  She’s getting older faster.  In every passing day, I realize that I can do nothing to stop her growth forward, slightly away from me and into her own.

I read it as we walked to her room so I could tuck her in and tell her goodnight.  I’m gonna do that for as long as I can.

Reading those words, I decided all over again that with little thought I would walk through a mountain for my little girl.  I would go to hell and back for her every single day for her.  I’d fight an army single-handed and absolutely anything else that opposed her.

I would.  I would want to.

But let’s face it truthfully.  I’m only a man; a man who is just trying to be a dad and has his hands full just with that.  I couldn’t do those things.

Emotionally, I’m convinced I could, and I promise you I’d try.  I’d even fail at trying over and over again.  And do you know what I realized after my emotionally charged romantic notions of being her hero subsided?  I would be wrong each attempting and failing time.

Too many times, my steps reach to be leaps longing for validation and security, overcompensating for poor choices.  My daughters do not need a dad too busy with himself, set out to prove his way in this world and striving for image improving reflection.  They need a dad present, one who loves God enough to trust fully and admit that striving for right in his own might will always lead to ruin.

What my daughter will always need no matter how old she gets and how much she changes is a dad.  That is it from me.  She already has a hero, and he actually has been to hell and back, moved mountains on her behalf and opposes all that opposes her.  And so, the hero died within me and gave room for the versatile dad to be rightly present within me instead.  Elizabeth has a Father in Heaven who sent a hero in Jesus and a dad in Guy.  She will always be well taken care of.

I love that she finds happiness in calling me her dad.

 

It was as the mashed potatoes were being passed, as I recall, around our crowded dining room table, that moment when my sister’s proclamation rang forth.

My dad hates Catholics.

It was a classic record-screeching moment. A beat of silence and then my parents, wide-eyed and horrified, stuttered and stammered protestations and apologies, desperate to erase any damage done.

I was in third grade, not too much older then than my own oldest child is now. One of us, my sister or I, had invited a friend for an overnight stay and around the dinner table, my parents had casually asked our little friend where her family went to church. When she answered that her family was Catholic, my sister unintentionally brought forth into the warm light of the dated light fixture overhead a prejudice my parents would have preferred to remain in the dark of family privacy.

The truth is, of course, that my dad does not now nor did he then hate Catholics. A few years after this awkward moment shared over mashed potatoes, my parents would meet a couple who happen to be Catholic and also happen to have been their nearest and dearest friends for the past two decades. But why would my sister say that?

Because more often than my father realized, Catholics had been punchlines for jokes, little jabs made as we passed their churches, “Our Lady of the Pool Hall” and other little turns of phrase that slowly, subtly sank in, leading my sister to come to the conclusion that Catholics and Catholicism were targets for derision, not fellow participants in our faith.

I haven’t thought about that story in a long time (though believe me, we do tease my sister mercilessly about it), but watching the news coverage of the selection of Pope Francis shook the memory loose. Oh, it would be easy to just laugh at this little archive from family history, so easy it is to roll my eyes at my much younger, much less experienced father, wondering how he could so unaware of the prejudice he was guilty of, so oblivious to the beliefs we learned through he cast-off comments when he thought we weren’t listening.

It would be so easy to laugh it off. But I sit and I listen and I hear in my own cast-off comments the prejudices long held. And I’m horrified and I stutter and stammer and avoid my own accusations.

But the truth is, it’s there. And rather than run from it, I need to run at it, tackle it to the ground and deal with it. Better to get dirty wrestling it out now than to hear any of that ugliness come from the mouths of my children as we smile and make nice and pass the mashed potatoes.

photo by Jess Pac