“This is going to change you”.  Someone said that to me a couple of days ago.  It was a kind and thoughtful response to my stumbling efforts to describe the place grief has in my life, especially now, since Maria has moved out of our home and for now has no contact with us.  This person made the comment after describing a conversation he’d had with a man who was kidnapped and held captive in South America for several years and still managed to come out on the other side remarkably strong and well adjusted.  At the beginning of his captivity, the man realized that the experience would change him fundamentally. He made no effort to cling to who he had been and instead focused on who he was and was going to become and one day, he was set free.

I’ve been changing for the past year.  It started the evening I stood in front of my closet figuring out what to take to Panamá and realized I needed to pack clothes for my mother’s funeral.  There was a different certainty to the decisions I made that night. There was also a new center of stillness.   When I got to my parents’ house on the evening of May 23rd, I had to catch my breath, really see that my mom was dying.  By the following morning, I had stepped into a new role when I insisted to my dad that we would meet with the voluntary hospice team that works in Boquete.  I look back on all that with some amazement.  In an eye-blink, I stopped being the daughter and child and became an adult who needed to steer a household not her own through strange times.

I did not stop to question that I had to provide some steadiness, whatever steadiness I could, not just to my dad, but to Pastora, the housekeeper, and Paulino, the gardener, and my aunt, and even some of my mom’s friends who had always been my elders before, and now were wobbly and vulnerable in a way I wasn’t.  My older brother arrived a few days later from Holland and brought his own wisdom and strength but I functioned as the matriarch of our family for the rest of our time together.   About three days after I got to Boquete, my mom sat on the side of her bed, with all the vulnerability and trust of a child and asked me, “Rosita, do you think I’m going to get better?”  I had a split second to decide how to answer, not wanting to be deceitful but sensing that the blunt truth would be too much for her.  “I don’t know, Mom.  I hope so but the cancer’s in your marrow now, which makes everything harder.  I am here with you today and I am so thankful for this time with you.”  I don’t know if it was the right answer but it got us through to the next moment.  There were any number of encounters like that during those weeks, where what I said and how I said it mattered to a lot of people.

In the weeks after Mom died, when several other people I cared for died too, and I had to officiate or participate in a whole series of funerals, I learned that part of being grown up is compartmentalizing and putting your own “stuff” on the back burner to be true to your work and vocation.  I would have thought such a succession of funerals so soon after her death would shatter me.  They didn’t.  Ironically,  I had something else going on, far more serious, far more capable of robbing me of my life.  I had become diabetic and had been stubbornly refusing to recognize the small signs and warnings. Finally, a few weeks after Mom’s death, I managed to overcome my denial enough to go to my doctor.  When she showed me the results of my blood work, I could not play the game of denial any longer.

I got my diagnosis a few days before I was supposed to go on a much-anticipated retreat with the Jesuits in Maryland.   On the morning I was supposed to leave, I had the mother of all rows with my spouse and was confronted with the fact that you don’t pour yourself out to take care of one part of your life, without other parts paying some of the price. I’d walked with someone else’s household through to death and left my own household to fend for itself.  I couldn’t just up and leave again.   To add to the stress, I had thought as soon as I started taking the diabetes medication, all would be well with my blood sugar. I was completely mistaken. My blood sugar levels were still way high and I couldn’t push through the truths right in front of me that I’d have preferred to ignore. I cancelled my trip feeling not regretful but liberated.

Until that day, I had intended to keep the fact that I’d become diabetic to myself—I felt so ashamed that I had let that happen to me.  Somehow, on that morning, a whole bunch of pieces came together that helped me see that I am no longer able to put up much of a front, pretend and pose for the sake of an image of myself that just isn’t real.  I told the leadership of my church about my diabetes and even began to have careful conversations about my weight and food with people around me in ways I had never dared to before.  I can’t say it felt good.  To this day I fight the shame of having to work so hard to manage my eating.  But pretending takes more energy than I have any longer.

Recently, I watched a TV series called Firefly.  In an episodes I really liked, one of the characters says, “When you can’t run any longer you crawl, and when you can’t crawl any longer, you find someone to carry you.”  In a very paradoxical way, the strength I find now is the strength to ask for help.  It has taken an incredible amount of intention and effort on my part not to isolate myself over this past year but I really haven’t had any other choice.

I have also come to terms with complexity at the heart of my life.  A marriage and family are full of complexities and complications.  Being a priest while the church is in serious decline is like navigating through a maze in the dead of night with an enormous responsibility not to fail the people who have entrusted me to provide leadership and steadiness when everything is in upheaval.  How do I let go and yet stay connected to my daughter who was abusive to my husband and me from the moment we received her into our care, who looks like a monster on paper if you read a list of her diagnoses, and has also been one of the true miracles in my life?  The list goes on.  There seem to be hundreds of decisions placed in front of me with a relentlessness I was not aware of before.  In the end, though, they boil down to a very basic choice posed to me by my Creator:  “On this day I have set before you life and death.  Choose life that you may live”.

Before this year, a lot of my life was about anticipation.  “Ya casi es mañana” (it’s almost tomorrow) was long a favorite catchphrase of mine.  That has changed. Surely, I will have new dreams for myself.  But not right now.  I’ve been talking recently about my sense that choosing life right now means staying in the moment, to host  grief.  I guess that’s a fancified way of saying that I am grieving; still, I like some of the implications of framing it that way for myself.  My mother and my grandmother were consummate hostesses and I now use some of the silverware I inherited from them for everyday purposes to remind me of their graciousness.  But there’s another way of being a hostess that I did not learn from them, that I’m learning on my own.  I am learning to open the door to something so unwanted and unlovely I would never have received it before.

In a strange way, having diabetes allows me to open the door to grief when it shows up, not invited but ever so persistent. I used to have all kinds of ways to numb out, but my favorite was eating. I’ve replaced the eating with a lot of walking and in the quiet of nightfall, like the fog, it arrives on little cat feet. Some nights the grief gets so intense on my walks that I have to lean against a tree or sit down as soon as possible because I simply cannot hold myself up.  The thing is, if I will not fight myself, even if I think I’m hurting so much I’m going to die, the pain moves on and I take the next step, and the next, and the one after and eventually, I find my way back home.  I fall asleep, morning comes again and there’s a whole new piece of life making claims and asking me more questions.  I have changed and I imagine I don’t even know the half of how much more I have ahead.  What hasn’t changed is this:  I still choose life.

In today’s passage from Isaiah, we heard how Isaiah found himself in the presence of the almighty, all-powerful, all consuming God and beholding God became achingly aware of his own woeful inadequacy to do the work of God.  And then there was that amazing description of a God who sends a seraph with a live coal—imagine, a red or white hot coal—to touch the prophet’s mouth and then wonders who will go, who can God send to do the work that must be done.   Think about how Isaiah answered.  It was through burned and blistered lips that he said,

“Here am I; send me!” 

Unfortunately, today’s lesson stops a little too soon—it helps to hear what comes next in this beautiful, poetic passage.

And God said,
‘Go and say to this people: “
Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
Keep looking, but do not understand.”
Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and comprehend with their minds,
and turn and be healed.’
Then I said, ‘How long, O Lord?’

That’s the question, today, isn’t it Mallowman?  How long, O Lord?  How long…

Twenty-five years ago, on May 13^th, 1986, five days before Sherod’s ordination to the priesthood, Sherod’s daddy, Earl Mallow, died.  It was not an easy death and it was a hard, hard time in Sherod’s life. He’d just been through a really tough divorce, and was learning how to be single dad to one child and long-distance dad to another.  He was managing the profound disappointment that many felt –he’d been a bright and shiny star in the Diocese of Alabama and now since the divorce he wasn’t, nor was his mama real thrilled with him either, Sherod knew something of blistering pain and burning fear.

I was just beginning to get to know him and mainly, what I saw was a person who would not quit.  Who had launched himself against a lot of odds on what seemed like an impossible journey with honor, and determination, and passion, who said over and over again, “you don’t quit.”

In the next couple of years he and I dated and then began to build a life together.  We were an unlikely pair.  When we got married, we moved into a small apartment in Huntsville, Alabama.  He didn’t bring much with him, but one thing he brought was a beat-up, half-rusted, standup freezer he was determined to have up and running because deer huntin’ season was coming and where would he put his deer meat?  He suggested it take a place of honor in the dining room in our apartment.  I can still hear the stunned silence on the other end of the phone when I called my mom in tears to ask for advice.  Like all couples who are destined for a long life of marital bliss (or something like that), we compromised.  He found some folks from his church in Huntsville to keep it running in their garage and I agreed to wake up each morning and look at the wall across our bed where Sherod had hung a print of a black Lab with a very dead and bloody duck draped in it’s mouth.

I have had the profound, the extraordinarily humbling joy, of watching his life and ministry unfold in ways that have surprised and sometimes stunned me.  This good ole boy from Selma—and as handsome as he was,  as much as he swept me off my feet with that dimple and sparkling blue eyes—he really was a good ole boy.  It is by God’s irony, sense of the absurd and wonder that he has landed in some really wild and wooly places to do ministry.

In Huntsville, he was priest-in-charge of one of the few racially integrated parishes in the Diocese of Alabama at that time, then he went on to be rector at St. Elisabeth’s in Memphis, in a neighborhood in transition, and finally, here in Southeast Florida.  In each place, there were crazy situations where it had been so easy neither to see nor hear what there was to hear.

In Huntsville, Sherod gathered all the dignitaries of the city on Martin Luther King Day at Holy Cross-St Christopher’s for a service and to read the Letter from Birmingham Jail out loud.  I can still see the white mayor wincing as he read a section where the N word was used 3 times in rapid succession. We were reminded that evening of those dark corners of our hearts that need to be enlightened by the light of the Gospel. In the early 1990’s, AIDS was still decimating a large part of the gay community in this country.  A gifted artist, Julian Bateman, came home to die in his parents’ home in Memphis.  Sherod would go over and carry Julian up and downstairs so his aging parents could spend as much time as possible with him.  And he was implacable against the murmuring voices that militated against allowing Julian to come to communion the few Sundays he had the strength to join his parents for Sunday worship.  A family of color from Guyana, steeped in the Anglican tradition, joined the parish and again, the voices began to mutter and murmur.  Sherod stood in the pulpit and made it clear that he would not allow that kind of racism to stand where he was priest.  For Sherod, it was very simple:  there is a place at the Lord’s table for everyone.  Everyone.

Who All Saints is today, and the ministry we are doing, is only possible because of Sherod’s tenacity and determination that we should be open, honest and transparent and we should love mercy and do justice.  When the first openly gay man ran for the vestry and a nasty campaign to undermine that person came to Sherod’s attention, he stood at this pulpit and quite literally thundered “not on his watch” would that be allowed and told folks that the door that had let them in could just as easily let them out.  It was hard and harsh and essential to move into the future.  We are all God’s children.  Everyone  is welcome.

A couple of weeks ago, Fr. Mark Sims and I were talking about Maria and about the fact that we would be placing her in BARC Housing because we are no longer able to give her the level of care she needs for her own safety and ours.  Mark said something that touched me deeply.  He said, “this has to be unspeakably hard for Sherod. It’s not just that his experience in the military ingrained in him “leave no one behind”.  It’s that he is the guy that has always gone back to pick up the people that did get left behind.”

It is deeply moving to me that Mark sees Sherod in that light.  It also seems to me that this is one of the best definitions of ministry I’ve heard in a long time.  The prophet Isaiah is one of many voices that “get it” about the ways in which we don’t listen, we don’t see, we don’t understand.  Isaiah “gets it” that it is way too easy to leave people behind.  The call is not sent out to just a few, carefully chosen paragons of virtue and righteousness.   We are tempted to think that it’s enough that a profoundly faithful person like the prophet Isaiah, or a wild and crazy man like Sherod, will do that work.  We are mistaken.  It is God’s call to every single one of us.  There are so many who’ve been left behind.  We cannot say we are people of faith without being willing to go back for them.  All of us.  Each of us.

When people began to talk about honoring Sherod on this occasion, it was I who suggested that we consider what became the 25 in 25 fundraiser.  This wasn’t about yet another way for All Saints to try to get at your money.  It was another way of saying the same thing—all of us must help through treasure, along with time and talent, to ensure that those that have been forgotten or overlooked or dismissed find hope and joy and new beginnings with us.  This ministry is not Sherod’s.  It belongs to all of us.

There is a fierce and strangely grace-filled symmetry this morning, as we celebrate this occasion.  Like that day 25 years ago, there is deep grief and loss in our family.  On Tuesday of this week, we had to Baker Act Maria and she is at Ft Lauderdale Hospital today.  When she is released, probably on Tuesday, she will go directly to BARC, to her new home.  Sherod must begin the next chapter of his ministry amidst blistering pain and burning fear for our girl, wondering as he did 25 years ago, how he will find the strength to do this work.  His story is no different than anybody else’s—this is how we all do the work of God.  And the only reason our work is possible is because God goes ahead of us showing the way, and we go forward as a community, together, all of us determined that we will go back and gather up those who got left behind.  Together we hear the call, “who will go, who will we send” and together we answer, through burned and blistered lips, “Here am I Lord.  Send me.”

When things were at their worst with our girl in 2009, when she’d been in and out of psych units 5 times in 6 weeks and was suffering from antipsychotic drug whiplash, Sherod and I took a class called “PCM” (Professional Crisis Management).  It was intended to teach us how to manage LM’s violence as safely and humanely as possible.  One of the most painful things our child could do was grab a big clump of my hair and do everything in her power to tear it out.  Sometimes my scalp bled.  It always gave rise to an extraordinarily primitive impulse for self preservation that made me want to beat the living daylights out of her.  We were functioning at the most primitive level of survival possible, all of us.  At PCM we learned a very simple tactic that involves starting with the pinkie finger and, one finger at a time, breaking that kind of grip without doing harm.  I’ve used it many times in these past few years. It isn’t only that I don’t miss the pain.  There is great relief that I don’t have  to brutally clamp down on my own self  to prevent myself from harming her in return.

Today, my life feels like it is clenched just that tightly, in anger, in self-preservation, in despair.  What it is clenched around is hard to describe: the persistent, childlike magical, wishful thinking that resists accepting that one week from today Maria is moving and all the reason why.  I keep trying to clutch these days to myself with an obstinate determination that they should count in some kind of way. We carefully made plans to make these days meaningful with our daughter and she refuses to play, moving into the future in her own way and in her own time.   I am trying to gently and safely unclench and let my life, all cramped and achy from holding on so tight, release its death grip.

This morning, that took the shape of starting to clean up and clear out behind our girl while she spends time with her dear friend and companion, Sally.  I tackled her bathroom.  How could I have known it would be a lesson in archeology?  The space under her sink told a lot of her story.  There was a little plastic plate and spoon, leftovers from her earliest days with us, when I’d get in the tub with her and we’d have bubble tea parties.  I found innumerable Nebulizer parts and pieces from lots of rounds with asthma.  And a small bottle of “Pillow Mist”—something I’d spray on her pillow and tell her would help her have sweet dreams when the night terrors were particularly bad.  Lurid pink and green hair dye from more recent times, when she talked me into letting her put those god-awful “highlights” in her hair.   And all kinds of gunk and goo related to being a teenager who has an unerring instinct for using the most appallingly scented lotions, creams and perfumes imaginable.

I thought cleaning her bathroom would bring relief—after all, we only have two bathrooms in this house and I am already coveting that bathroom space for my own stuff.  I’d talked myself into thinking I’d feel good getting to see just how much space I’d be able to lay claim to soon.  Instead, in one more way,  I had to revisit  hopes,  failures, the ever-so ordinary stories and bits of memory that I’d have thought were lost but were only put away in the bathroom cabinet until a day like today.  The day after my mom died, my dad asked me to clean out her closet and I did.  I thought that was hard.  This was harder.

I have to stop in these kinds of moments. I have to tell myself to breathe.  Even when I think I can’t finish and I want to walk away and disappear, I make myself keep going because there is something so important about going through, and not around this time. And so I do. A lot got thrown away. What is left in the bathroom cabinet and drawers, she will take with her.  There will be a lot of empty space and I will put it to good use.

After I was finished, I sat down to check in on some of the blogs I read most regularly—my friend Robin’s blog  and QuantumTheology by Michelle, whom I don’t know but who constantly inspires me.  In her latest posting, Michelle makes reference to a poem, so I followed the trail to that place.  Now that I’ve read it, I wonder if later, decades from now, I will still be able to practice the kind of archeology of choice, grief and life I’m in the middle of. I hope I will.

A Cedary Fragrance
Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water –

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.

by Jane Hirshfield, from Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001

Solveig’s Song from the Peer Gynt Suite by Edvard Grieg

Still trying to find my way, still trying to find the words.  Click here for my latest attempt.  Still trying to make sense of it all…

I’ve never been real crazy about “Mother’s Day”—I think it’s a largely commercial, manufactured event that too easily romanticizes motherhood.  I’d just as soon let it slip through unnoticed.  This one had some really sucky parts to it. Pardon the French but that’s just the truth.  I woke up a little earlier than usual for a Sunday morning and reached for my iPhone/alarm clock to check the time.  I saw it was 3:54 and that I had an unexpected and particularly painful text message.  No point trying to stay in bed after that.  My cup of coffee tasted good and I remembered my mom who was always up much earlier than the rest of us, drinking her coffee.  I’m not her but I am her daughter.

I was aware of my mom’s absence all day and a couple of times during the morning services, I felt the grief start taking over and managed to save it for another day.  But I was cranky—I was cranky with members of my congregation who’d poured themselves out to have a lovely celebration, I was cranky with my spouse. I was really cranky with my daughter on the day we were celebrating her 16th Birthday (the actual date is Wednesday but we had friends over for cake and “fixings” yesterday evening).  It was when she was blowing out the candles on the cake and I realized that she’s crossing the threshold I’ve been dreading (after Wednesday she is eligible to move into BARC housing and there are now only two weeks to go), that the hard rock of anger, disappointment and fear dissolved into the enormity of the horizon I see ahead at every turn.

I have to help a group of truly wonderful people find a way as a congregation through more loss, more confusion about who we are and how we serve as a community of faith.  I have to trust that the decisions we’ve made about our girl are life-giving for her and Sherod and me.  Yesterday, I saw quite starkly that I need to find some new ways to deal with anger.  Not fun work, to put it mildly.

And hard as all that was, there were also gifts.  Lovely gifts.  LM made a breath-taking Koosie for me.  It’s so pretty it hurts.  She made one of those signs you hang from the door knob.  One side says, “Don’t Disturb Mom”.  The other side has a wobbly heart and “Come in please. I need a hug”.  She and Sherod gave me a pendant—of a small heart contained within a larger one.  Her heart in mine.  Mine in hers.  We in God’s heart.  Any way I think of it, I find comfort.  My spouseman gave me another huge gift.  We just finished getting our dock rebuilt.  Over the weekend, he bought a big piece of Styrofoam, fitted it out with two-by-fours and set it up as a floating extension to our new dock.

It might not sound like a very romantic gift but it. is. AWESOME.  I now have a way of to use the paddleboard I got for Christmas whenever I want.  So this morning, when the New River was still glassy-still, I paddled.  In the process, I had to: Negotiate a piece of equipment that’s almost 11 feet long onto a wobbly dock.  Get my self on the paddleboard making sure I did what I am supposed to do to protect my bionic hip.  Deal with something that stays afloat but is totally unsteady under my feet.  Be out there with all my uncertainty, all my ignorance, all my inexperience hanging out for all to see.  I can’t do my favorite trick of being a duck looking calm while paddling furiously below the surface.  At one point, I tried to turn too quickly and lost my balance.  I did not want to fall into the New River so I figured out to drop down on my knees and do it quick.  At that point, I figured the way forward is taking one baby step at a time.  I stayed on my knees to paddle back to the dock.  I suspect there’s lots of kneeling ahead for me.  I was trembling when I got off—muscles I don’t use much tired out and feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility for steering that small and insignificant vessel.  It struck me then.  The gift you get on Mother’s day—any day really—is the gift of your own life.

Very soon after Sherod became rector at All Saints, he led what amounted to a “coming out” process in the parish.  There were many same gender couples; most everybody knew that, hardly anyone acknowledged that truth about who we were.  The silence carried an unbearable lie.  Finding a way to come out to ourselves was not easy.  I watched my husband and our community struggle, falter, sometimes get overwhelmed, and yet persevere.  Until one day, we were truly one in Christ, open and honest and real.  We started this a number of years before the ordination of Gene Robinson and way before any state had legalized same gender marriage.  I am filled with awe today when I consider my husband’s courage and the faithfulness of the people of All Saints.

In the past few years, a number of our same gender couples have been able to go to other states to have their covenanted relationships sanctioned by law.  One couple are the proud parents of the most beautiful little boy imaginable, who has the best dads in the world, in my mind.  And Bishop Frade has approved a liturgy for the blessing of same gender marriages for the Diocese so anyone who has been married out of state can now receive the official blessing of the church.

Tomorrow, 9 couples are going to have their marriages blessed at All Saints.  As Sherod himself said earlier today, “The nine couple total over 214 years of committed life together. I am humbled to find myself in such a role. Amazing arc of life and ministry for a guy who grew up in Selma”.  Yup.  That’s our church.  That’ my husband.

I pulled out one of our wedding pictures and while he’s off rehearsing with all these amazing people, I’ve been fixing a nice meal, polishing some silver and taking out the nice tablecloth.   LM is out till the late evening today and we are going to celebrate marriage tonight, Sherod and I.  It hasn’t been easy—in fact, these past years have been quite horrid for us as a couple, with all the stress and pressure.  But the yeses being said tomorrow are a call and the response is, yes.  Mallowman, after almost 24 years you can make me absolutely weak-knee’d. Still. Marriage: a most admirable estate.

About 6 weeks ago, I began a pretty cool adventure.  Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, wrote something called “The Spiritual Exercises”.  Tim Perrine describes it this way:  “Derived mostly from St. Ignatius’ conversion experiences in 1521-3, Spiritual Exercises has provided guidance and encouragement to its readers for several hundred years. The aim of Spiritual Exercises is to assist people in finding God’s will for their life, and to give them the motivation and courage to follow that will”.

Usually, you make a 30-day silent retreat to do the Spiritual Exercises.  Some day, maybe a lot sooner than later, I will do that.  It felt like the 8 days I spent at Eastern Point in Gloucester in January went by in an eye blink and I was just getting into the groove of things when it was time to come home.  Restless and a little confused, I was hugely fortunate to be able to talk about my experience with MRC, a blog friend I have come to know and deeply respect over these past years.  MRC is a Presbyterian minister who has training as a spiritual director in the Ignatian tradition. As we talked by phone and blog and email, the possibility emerged that she would become my spiritual director and walk with me as I do what’s called the  “Spiritual Exercises in Daily Life”.  Pretty self-explanatory—you stay where you are and bit by bit, work your way through it.  I get a set of assignments for a 2-week period, assignments that give me time for reflection, writing, prayer and silence.  MRC and I use video conferencing technology and we visit every 2 weeks.

One of the overarching question for the past couple of weeks was, “In what ways has God carried you through life”?   Sometimes I get exasperated at how platitudinous my responses sound.  By now, though, I find it’s a whole lot easier to be who I am and tell it like it is, rather than contort and strain to impress my own self with the depth of my insight and the brilliance of my intellect.  You just sort-of march on in all the commonplace-ness of your own, ordinary life.  And then, there are these brief, resplendent moments filled with joyful revelation.

Those of you who read my blog with any regularity know how central walking has become to the hope and promise of my life in the midst of great loss and dislocation.  I have now lost over 40 pounds which allows me to do things I couldn’t have dreamed of doing ever before.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa:  that has unleashed the shoe goddess within.  I am having the time of my life buying shoes.  The picture shows my most recent acquisitions and there’s even another pair on the way, a really cute pair of espadrilles I may get to wear this Sunday.   They let me be taller or shorter at will.  As you can see, one pair is really sturdy and practical for my daily walks.  Last Friday night we had a Salsa party at church and I could hardly believe how my life has turned out that it even includes me being able to wear red heels and go dancing, even if it is just dancing with the delicious kids from El Centro.  I am not the only clergy person of the female persuasion who sneaks shoes in to subvert  the staid (boring?) clerical appearance on Sunday mornings.  But I bet I’m enjoying it more than most.

When MRC and I talked last time, it suddenly occurred to me that there’s a very simple answer to the question, “in what ways has God carried you?”.   God’s carrying me in the shoes.  The playful, silly, I hope somewhat sexy, smart and sassy shoes.  Thanks be to God!

Somewhere on one of the many hard drives that now live in our safe at home, there is a picture that captures who I have been for the past 11 years, one month and 15 days.  It was taken in México when we had already had custody of LM for over a week.  A pattern had emerged to our mornings.  We were staying at the home of a gracious friend of friends.  At about 4:30 or 5:00 Little Bit would wake up and we’d tiptoe into the kitchen to prepare a quesadilla for her, trying not to disturb our kind hostess.  We’d sit on the kitchen floor, learning to be a family.  Most mornings we had to shuttle around government offices, slowly putting together all the pieces necessary to bring her home. So by, 7:30 or 8:00, I’d give her a bath and dress her.  Soon after, she’d fall asleep, almost like an infant, going down for her morning lap.  At 10, the cab that was driving us around would come pick us up to run our errands.

On this particular morning LM was wearing a yellow dress with a flower print; she crawled on my lap, something she was so hesitant to do, and promptly fell asleep.  In the picture you can see her amazingly long lashes resting on her cheeks.  Our daughter was exquisitely beautiful.   You can also see the joy in my face.  For that little while, in the midst of all the commotion and chaos of Mexico City, there was a safe, warm, quiet place for a child who had known very little of any of those basic rights of an infant.  And it was my body providing that space—this was as close as I would ever get to understanding what it means to be “heavy with child.”  I had become a mom.

Later in the fall of that year and into the next, and especially as the episodes of rage became more consuming, her sleep disorders sort-of exploded on us and we found ourselves having to buy a king sized bed so she could sleep with us—the only way we got a decent night’s rest.  Night after night, I’d wake up to find her on top of me, holding on like her life depended on it.  I was also quite wicked, at that point still a lay person who came to church as the priest’s wife who sat dutifully on the front row, pulpit side.  I conditioned the girl to fall asleep at the beginning of Liturgy of the Word and sleep until it was time for the Peace—I used classical conditioning techniques and they worked like a charm.  I even relished how she drooled on me—again, a glimpse, a hint, of the normalcy we all want for our lives.  All new moms have that drooled on look, don’t they?

Last night, Maria came out of her room where she had been engrossed in yet another Nintendo Super Mario game.  I was sitting on the sofa reading while Sherod watched TV. Before I knew it, she had straddled me and put her head on my shoulder like the old days, a flashback, a gift and a burden.  As sweetly nostalgic as the moment started out to be, I realized very quickly that the size and weight of her felt suffocating;  there is not enough of me to give her the safety, quiet and warmth she needs.  In another one of those moments of time both bending back on itself and racing forward in an instant, I could understand through my body what we are in the midst of.  The time comes when we must, we simply must let go, no matter the pain, the cost, the harshness of this labor of love.

It came not a moment too soon.  Day before yesterday, we got word  that all the bureaucratic steps that needed to be taken are complete and Tallahassee has approved our daughter’s placement.  Yesterday at noon, I talked to the director of BARC Housing and finalized plans for the light of our life to move into BARC on June 4^th, the day before the 1^st anniversary of my mother’s death.  So we know now.  Even my body knows, even hers too.  It is almost time.

Yesterday my girl and I went to a Birthday party for several members of her new community.  BARC Housing hosts these parties once a month—gathering all the residents for Birthday cake, ice cream, dancing and to celebrate the folks whose birthdays have fallen on that particular month.  There had been much anticipation in our household about this party and I find myself needing to be very careful to manage myself and all the paradoxical responses and feelings that ebb and flow in me, unpredictable and shocking.

I continue to work on my health and that includes more actively planning to ensure I get enough exercise daily.  All those things they tell you, about how exercise can help manage stress?  They are true.  So I had made plans to walk before taking LM to the party both to make sure I got that exercise in, but also because I have a hard time figuring out how each of those visits will affect me and I am determined to be a source of calm strength to my daughter.  Unfortunately, my well-laid plans did not work and there wasn’t a whole lot of time to do anything but go, steeling myself and breathing.

I am not sure I have ever gotten sweeter and sloppier kisses than I got when we arrived.  The same was true for my girl.  Other residents are coming to know us and several of them are exuberant and unrestrained in their welcome.  Although I’ve been asked to be present at these visits, I try to leave plenty of space so LM can make her way without me hovering like a helicopter mom.  Instead, each time I go, I try to talk to other folks and stay out of her way.  There’s a young man who obviously has difficulties walking, whose eyes go in every direction but straight, who is just barely verbal, though incredibly expressive.  He was curious about me so we stood and visited waiting for the party to begin.  I gently teased him about whether or not he was going to dance and his face lit up like a Christmas tree, he looked sort of abashed and then gestured for me to follow him.

A woman in her late thirties was sitting with her legs up on a divan and he introduced her to me in a way that made me think she was special to him so I asked, “Is this your girl friend?”  Again, that light and life that animate his face and make him so piercingly beautiful.  She is, but when I asked if they were going to dance together, he made falling-down gestures, making me understand that they can’t because she might fall and hurt herself.

Then there is T, who has no front teeth, is bent over, has a mop of bright red hair,  and laughs with the most delightful joy imaginable.  There’s M who had on her sparkly green Christmas sweater and wanted to visit lots and lots and the other M who gave me one of those delicious kisses on the cheek.  I don’t want to romanticize and idealize a group of people who are just as much ordinary, broken and holy folks as you and I.  But my daily living has not included much space for them and now that we are thrown together like this, I find myself broken wide open.  There is such beauty, such a different version of our humanity, such confrontation of much that I take for granted in my life.

Last night, I felt tenderness and gratitude and I also felt enormous pain.  I came home understanding for the first time  why folks cut themselves compulsively.  I found myself wanting to do that to myself.  The sting of a cut would be more bearable, a welcome distraction from the real thing.  Of course I didn’t and instead, went on one of my walks even though it was already late in the evening.  The pain began to untie itself from around my heart, I felt the heat and humidity of summer quickly approaching, stars were out and a couple of planets shone brightly.  This is life—neither more nor less.  Just life.

I write about these things perhaps because I am presumptuous enough to think that I can open a few small windows into a world that is so easy to ignore.  The persistent, insistent question that keeps forming itself in my mind these days is this:  “So what does it mean, really, to be a human being?  What defines our humanity?”  We need to be careful and suspicious of easy answers and half-truths shaped in the comfort of our first-world lives.  But when I look for answers beyond that, they have the ability to shake me to my core.