When Bad Things Happen To Good People (Like Me)

Published on January 27, 2011January 27, 2011 by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

You want to be a downer at any party? Bring up the issue of suffering and ask what it’s purpose is in the world. This, I can guarantee, will make your party circle dissipate. That, or a LOT of people will suddenly excuse themselves, muttering their need to use the rest room or half empty drink classes that need refilling.

Not only is suffering a dismal, darkening corner of any person’s life, it is also such that because it’s so widely mysterious. There are as many theories about the function and role of suffering as there are theories about God. The age old question, “Why do bad things happen to good people,” is a question that can quiet any soul. Why? Because no one knows. The unanswerable question, the spiritual vacancy that begs to be filled remains vacant. Is it God testing us? Is it punishment for something we’ve done? Is it an evil in the world that strikes as randomly as a roulette wheel?

Or is it that it can be as simple as trying to find goodness and life-giving moments in times of distress and despair?

I recently heard an explanation that one of the seven Catholic sacraments, Anointing of the Sick, was not so much about that a person’s physical health rebounds, but more of a prayer for someone’s spiritual health; that the person does not slip into despair and emotional destitution.

Yesterday morning, I had packed Isaiah up and was ready to run errands with him and decided to clear out the trunk so I could fill it with groceries. Awkwardly positioned, one handed lifting with my right, I blew something in my lower back that felt like a pull in my lumbar region which quickly radiated into my sides. I fell to the garage floor in pain while Isaiah, stuffed in his bear snow suit gazed wide eyed at his fallen Mama Bear. With teeth grinding and groans of pain, I picked him up out of the cold and nearly fell onto the living room carpet with him as he cried in surprise. I called anyone close by for help. I couldn’t move and I was terrified that my lower back was numb to feeling. After a few hours, after a coworker came by to help with Isaiah and Nick left his classes early to come home and tend to his downcast wife, I began wondering. The cliche set in. WHY ME? I had just deeply sliced my left thumb open last week and it was still healing and periodically bleeding from overuse. My body was just clearing itself from a nasty and debilitating cold that racked my body since Sunday. Despite all of this, I had been on the healthiest run of my life since I was pregnant: regularly working out, lifting weights, and running. I felt terrific.

Immobile and feeling sorry for myself, I turn to pillows and tears as I could barely pick up Isaiah and had to ask Nick for every little thing: picking up something on the ground, helping me up from the couch and even slicing a fruit. Asking for help was never so humiliating, even if the person being asked was my spouse. Needless to say, staying in bed or on a couch made things even worse. I was in a foul, foul mood.

This morning my back was stiff and uncooperative. As Nick emailed his professors explaining his absence and Isaiah looked at my with his puppy eyes wondering why I wouldn’t pick him up, I decided to feel sorry for myself and hang my head. That is until Nick decided to show me a video of Cher’s, “If I Could Turn Back Time” on YouTube and implemented his own song lyrics to fit my back dilemma:

If you could turn back time

If you could find a way

you’d never pick up that stroller

and you wouldn’t sway

You shouldn’t reach for the stars

Cuz your back still hurts

And you’d love me, love me

Like you used to do

Whoever would have thought that the topic to get me out of my funk would be Cher. Not the most poetic lyrical adaptation, but performed in our living room with Nick screeching high notes and Isaiah clapping like an enthused fan, a gigantic laugh erupted from Couch Misery. The rest of the day unfolded similarly. We made each other laugh and exchanged loving and comical glances during the day. I remarked that it reminded me of our college days; the days we used to spend together with nothing but hours between us. Lately, between job, classes, Isaiah-care, programs, meetings, family, holidays, and general life, neither Nick or I could remember the last time we were forced to stay home, just the three of us, and not go anywhere or do anything except spend time together. I couldn’t do anything except lie down, sit up, and channel surf. And Nick couldn’t do much except watch Isaiah tackle every wire and pillow in the house.

And suddenly, through the throbbing of my back, I felt grateful. Grateful for a life that allowed to have my husband stay home with me and make me watch Cher on YouTube. Grateful for a son that crawled into his toybox and waved from the other room. Grateful for a warm home, deli meat in the fridge, and caring family members sending emails asking if I was better. I was grateful, mostly, for Nick, and the time to just sit on the couch side by side for hours and talk while we watched Isaiah try to balance a block on his head (so adorable but unsuccessful).

And the reason why my pulled muscle happened to me suddenly didn’t matter as much as the good things that came out of it. Yes it means I’m backed up in work, and will spend several more days recuperating and not doing what I want. Yes it means that Nick will be behind in his school work and can’t miss any more classes the rest of the semester, but our house is a little more full of light-heartedness, a little more radiant with laughter at Isaiah pushing his toys all around the house and yelling DAH DAH DAH DEE!

And that kind of uplifting, in the midst of physical suffering, feels quite miraculous.

(Thanks, Cher.)

Letter #16

Published on January 24, 2011 by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

Dear Isaiah,

I know I missed your 13th month birthday and I sit here not really sure which is more unthinkable: that I missed it or that you’re 13 months old.

You are growing by leaps and bounds. Last week, you climbed up the stairs by yourself, looking for me. I was in the bathroom, your Dad in the kitchen when we both heard very loud handslapping on the hardwood flooring. Sure enough, there you were, crawling up and never looking back.

And your appetite is reflecting your constant movement. You demolish bread like it’s nothing and stuff pasta in your mouth like fuel for a hungry machine. Last week you started sipping out of my cup and drinking powdered G2 Gatorade. Your eyes remain open as you drink, the opening of the glass cup nearly putting a soft indent in your skin as you stuff your face into the cup to drink. Your father and I just laughed.

You’re almost walking! You cruise pretty quickly along the couches, and anything sturdy and walk with toddler toys with wheels. It’s so strange, still, to see you standing on your own, legs a little less wobbly, a little less cautious everyday. The house is wrecked every 3 hours by your travels and need to pull everything out of their place.

Your Da Da Da DA! is hilarious to me and emotional for your Pops to hear. We know you are just weeks away from walking and your talking to yourself proves that words will soon be on the heel of your independent mobility. But we’re in no rush. This weekend, your grandparents came in while your Dad and I went out for the first time in many months. We feasted at the Saffron Patch, an Indian cuisine restaurant, and then front row of the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, my favorite place in Cleveland. We enjoyed ourselves and relaxed, breathing you in from afar for a change.

Today is the first day you are not with your father and I during the day and I have already cried and it’s not even 10am yet. Watching your Dad pack you up had me more nervous than I anticipated. Flat on the bed, I listened to the car back itself out of the drive, the snow crunching beneath the tires and then the buzz of the accelerator as the car hit the dry road. My eyeballs never moved from the ceiling. A quiet house. It both thrilled me and devastated me all at once.

I showered and took my time, realizing that I could. I ate breakfast without side glances at the high chair and piecing off bread for your tray. My neck bears a necklace this morning and I stared at it a long time, realizing it had been so long that I wore jewelry without chubby little hands clamoring for it. There were no stains on my sleeves or pants from your messy hand prints or applesauce dots on my face when you purse your lips together and blow during breakfast. I missed you.

My office hadn’t seen me this early in a long time and my coworkers were sympathetic to my transition, asking how I was dealing. Of course I cried. And my small cold didn’t make it any better. I thought of all the little things you’ll be doing and accomplishing without me and think, “This is good for Isaiah. This is good for all of us.” And while I know it’s true in my heart, it doesn’t really wipe the sadness from the windows of my heart, wishing I could be there just to watch you interact with the world in the trusting and innocent way that you do.

You are always with me.

Love,

Mom

Guns, Feminism, and Catholic Social Teaching

Published on January 20, 2011January 20, 2011 by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

There was outdated brown, squishy carpet underneath my feet when I first heard about the Columbine shooting. It’s odd the details that stay with you after a decade of processing.

I was in college, a bright eyed resident assistant in my resident director’s office, complaining how my overly scheduled academic life was taking over my spirit. (Remember the unabashed self-absorption of college?) And Tracy, my supervisor is barely listening (who can blame her) and mutters, “This is terrible,” as she watches a small TV in the corner of her office.

In my young adult life, I hadn’t listened to much national coverage about gun violence. Local news covering Over the Rhine violence was enough for me. Only two years removed from high school myself at the time, I could not comprehend the magnitude of what had just occurred.

* * * * *

I was teaching a class at Miami University, exploring the dimensions of race, class, and difference to undergrads. I showed the movie Higher Learning, in which a disturbed student who was prone to teasing, awkwardness, and shame went on a shooting spree at his university. Remy, the shooter in Higher Learning, was a lost soul who only further confused himself by turning to a white supremist group to deal with his isolation. I handed out a follow-up assignment to my class, asking them to consider why Remy ended up committing such violence at a university when, as he states before he takes his own life, all he wanted “was to become an engineer.”

The next day, Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people – five faculty members and 27 students, at Virginia Tech.

* * * * *

It was my homepage on Facebook that I learned of Christina Taylor Green. It was because of my interest in feminism, girl and women issues, that someone forwarded along the news that a 9 year old girl, who was born on September 11, 2001, who was the only girl on her Little League team, who was just elected to her student council, was fatally shot, along with eight others at a Safeway in Tucson, AZ, while meeting with her Congresswoman.

And while these particular stories have been obsessed and covered and re-thought on their anniversaries (save the Tucson tragedy), comparatively, I find very little coverage about gun violence against communities of color, or disenfranchised populations. Or the poor. Brown. Black.

* * * * *

My heart breaks at these tragedies, but this isn’t the whole story, is it? These dog-eared tragedies of my life only show spike in media’s interest in violence, not a spike in violence. The shootings are always there. The violence, unfortunately, is a dog under a fancy living room table. Once it a while it shows its tail, but the animal, the movement of violence, is a momentum that has not slowed. And it shows no signs of slowing so long we continue to acknowledge only the violence against the few and ignore the violence on the street corners of so many ordinary neighborhoods.

In a few weeks, I have to give a presentation about Catholic Social Teaching; a talk that explains social justice and what modern ministry means to me, how I personally define love-in-action.

These shootings have been ruminating in my head as I read through the dogma and doctrine of the Catholic faith…doctrines that use words such as “dignity,” “liberation,” “preference for protecting the poor and vulnerable,” and “solidarity.”

What is Catholic social thought in today’s world of violence? Factors of mental illness, accessibility, gun control, public policy are being argued by every media outlet in the nation. What about your social thought? How do you see these tragedies? Do you honestly let yourself feel – or even try to feel – the fear, the enormity of what happened in Arizona? Or do you let yourself feel momentarily and then ask yourself, “What is the world coming to?” before you move on with your evening? How much of the world are you really living in? How much of it do you dismiss?

Western culture, particularly the United States, has a wonderful amnesic quality to our social conscience. We feel momentarily and then we are indifferent because, clearly, there’s nothing we can do for those people who are suffering. Perhaps.

But what about the people suffering who are not in the news, but are still devastated by tragedy? Do we feel for them? More importantly, do we ACT?

Do we disregard the mentally ill only until a national tragedy prompts us to wonder about how we (the norms) deal with THEM (the crazies) and what are we (read: they) doing about it?

What is to be learned about catholic social teaching that teaches us we are one human family, with many of us in privileged of immediate news, media, and communication, but still, we do not believe we are affected by those outside our immediate family unit?

Do we allow our values to breathe new oxygen? Do we allow our beliefs to morph in context to how the world is teaching us (as it always is) to find better ways to respond to one another? Better ways to love?

Is THIS the best I (read: you or we) can do?

Answer that question.

* * * * *

I think about the parents a lot. Not just of the parents of the victims of Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Tucson. I think about the parents of the shooter. I wonder what their lives are like today. If the shame and disbelief ever let up for one moment.

I wonder about the mothers of shooters and how they grieve, dissociate, separate, mourn, and question.

Mostly, I think us; about the United States’ culture. I think about how deeply we hurt, but how very little surprises us anymore. We are horrified by tragedy and then we move on.

Until the next time. And then the cycle repeats itself again.

A Catholic Feminist’s Notebook

Published on January 18, 2011January 18, 2011 by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

One of the things that I’ve been trying to do more is write about my spirituality. Since writing, for me, is an intensely spiritual and often cathartic experience, writing about my spiritual journey should be a seamless task. *Should* is a funny word. Because it’s not easy. What *should* be easy is not.

Quite the opposite, writing about my spirituality is difficult. I’m often hesitant and intimidated at the thought. Spirituality now is such a hard topic to address. It’s as if you have to write generally to make an agreeable point sometimes and since my spirituality shares significant space with my Catholic beliefs – and since Catholicism is so controversial in the faith and feminist debates – I take pause when the urge to write about God comes. After all, deep conversations about the intangible, unseeable world is hard to discuss in person, let alone express to a screen of faceless readers.

Which is why I started reading “Things Seen and Unseen: A Catholic Theologian’s Notebook.” It was floating around the office, a Christmas gift that took a hot potato turn from one set of hands to the next. No one seems interested in reading it. Then it landed in my hands. It’s essentially the quick and private thoughts of a Notre Dame professor who puts down on page the things that capture his attention: memories, ideas, epiphanies, quick thoughts. All theologically framed, some hard to understand, but strangely interesting.

I often read books that will serve as a psychological trampoline; something for me to bounce from. Ideas from a gifted and articulate spiritual educator seems like a good place to start. I can’t promise revelations. I can’t guarantee provocative questions. What I can promise is a genuine and honest response to questions I have struggled with for what seems like eternity:

Who am I and who is God? How are we connected? What reveals God to me and what is God communicating to me and me alone? Where am I and where is God?

These seem to be the rotary of questions begoggling my soul. The pieces of social injustices, suffering, death and dying, miracles, prophesy, church as institution, sin, redemption…all these other issues which fascinate me are veiled by the curtains of much larger questions or origin and identity. These are questions that I know, deep down, somewhere in a quiet space where verbal language is not my primary means of communication, that these questions shall remain with me until the day I die. But I think there’s more purpose and meaning to life when we approach our questions as if they were meant to be answered by the life and earth surrounding us now. Today. And like a voracious and relentless investigator – I must know the truth. Or, at the very least, know that I am trying to live in a way that reveals its depth to me.

So, here we go…

Embarrassingly Understanding the Hype…

Published on January 18, 2011 by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

of Jersey Shore. It is, by far, the most ridiculous waste of television space that has ever burned on the screen…which is why I can’t take my eyes away. I watched 2.5 episodes and the only reason I didn’t watch more because Nick was throwing me out the door so we could run family errands together. There are scratch marks on the door frame, I believe, from where I was grasping to watch the last minutes of Jersey Trash before Nick threw me in the car.

And then I talked with a Jersey accent for an hour.

*pff* I’m so sure.

The Other Planet of Reading

Published on January 13, 2011 by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

Yesterday I woke up with the strangest and extremely powerful urge: to read a print book.

Yes, that’s right. I woke up with an urge to pick up a book.

So I did.

I walked to our huge Ikea shelf, the one that looks like 24 tiny boxes smooshed together to form one big grid. And I picked up the first book my hands fell on. I didn’t read the whole thing, just a few paragraphs and I felt an odd sensation of calm, peace, serenity. As my eyes moved over paper, not a screen, I felt alone in the best way. Like I was in my own world but my world was me sitting outside with a voice from the sky telling me story. I was momentarily lost.

Then Isaiah woke up and started asking for love. So I went to love him.

But that feeling, that urge to pick up a book, was something I can’t really explain and can’t really trace. I suppose it depends on what feelings we associate with different acts, and when our subconscious is craving that emotion, we have an itch. Apparently, I was craving the feeling of quiet and aloneness I associate with reading. I live on another planet when I read. I am so deeply entrenched in every morsel of the book that I sometimes think I’m not all living in the present world when I’m in a book of fiction. And even after I am finished with the book, it’s like an actual voyage to another planet, to outer space; it takes me a long time to return home. For my mind to blink and see people again and not characters. For my head to clear itself from the haze of narration and smell the fresh air of human existence, not the page. I get lost. In the best way.

Where are you when you read?

Snowflakes

Published on January 11, 2011 by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

The conversations of my life…like snowflakes breezing over my face are hard to catch all at once and are equally unique and memorable…Here are a few gems. Gems for different reasons…

Nick: I don’t think every conversation has to have the answer. I think sometimes even just talking about the uncertainty for the sake of talking about the uncertainty helps you along the way.

Speaker at a presentation I attended: I wouldn’t worry so much about censorship in this country. I’d worry more about where people are getting their information.

My Sister, Carmen: I want personalized wedding stuff. It probably is rooted from somewhere in my childhood because all those personalized keychains, all those personalized bracelets in those jewelry stores – they never had my name on them.

Acquaintance: I was in conversation with someone who thought that disease was evil. Like, from the devil. It was a long discussion.

There is No Grind

Published on January 10, 2011January 10, 2011 by Lisa Category: Daily Resistance, Self-Actualization

There is no greater falsehood that is perpetuated in the new year more than the cliche, “It’s back to the grind.”

Grind. Is that the way, is that the best descriptor we can come up with to summarize how we live our lives?

Ah, yes, the catch — that’s assuming that we are, indeed, living our lives to the fullest. I wouldn’t dare describe myself, my life, or my routine of life as the grind unless I was, well, grinding.

You grind coffee. You grind things, but life, life is not meant to be grinded nor are we supposed to be grinded by life either. I guess we’re somewhere in the middle. The place where I live is part routine, part inspiration. The half and half of life is the have to-s and get to-s. I have to work, but I get to work on really beautiful and amazing projects that tap into freedom and creativity. I have to exercise, but I get to attend these really amazing dance classes that make me feel free and beautiful. I have to take care of my son but I get to spend time with this angel of a person called Isaiah.

The grind is the life where we find ourselves, not what we choose for ourselves. What we choose for ourselves is much more powerful than a grind.

Many years ago, I stopped groaning on Sunday nights about Mondays. I stopped yawning at work and rolling my eyes at 4:45pm. I stopped doing this when I noticed that so many people at work complained about Mondays, caffeinated themselves on Tuesdays, bitched about how long the week was on Wednesdays, couldn’t wait for the weekend on Thursday, and left early on Fridays. And they complained about the weather everyday.

There is no back to the grind for me. If I must use a cliche, I use this: Life is what you make it.

Indeed. If you create nothing for yourself, back to the grind you go.

The Shhhh World of Doubtful Mamas

Published on January 6, 2011January 6, 2011 by Lisa Category: Uncategorized

What is the ideal family?

I took a short walk with a neighbor – a mother of two girls – and we started talking about the “reality” of motherhood. Not too far into the walk, I felt like we were using each other as priests: confessing our shortcomings as mothers, the moments that we feel like we are failing our children, disappointing our partners, half-assing our work, shaming ourselves in grocery stores by our appearances, and all the while carry the motherload (no pun intended) of all emotional baggage: GUILT.

As informal as the conversation was, I felt monumentally renewed. We walked briefly but stood outside her house longer, not ever completely finished with our sentences before the other person started a new topic of complexity: letting your kids be exposed to germs and bacteria to build up their immune system, feeding them ready made toddler food instead of homecooked table food, not child proofing every last inch of your house, and, finally, talking to other mothers about your shadows and imperfections. “It’s isolating,” she repeated more than once, “this whole mom-n-kid thing, it’s isolating. And I don’t care what anyone says – I love my kids. I’d walk through fire for them, they’re my life, but a lot of this just sucks. There. I said it.”

She said it alright: (a lot of times) IT SUCKS.

I’ve got all kinds of data to support any decision I make regarding work vs. staying at home. I’ve got attachment parenting on one hand which allows me to heave one big sigh of relief when I feel all I want to do is comfort and be close to my child. On the other hand, I’ve got the modern whistleblowers to the domestic dream when all I want to do is feel a sense of personal and professional fulfillment which diapers and lullaby songs cannot offer.

The problem with being an independent thinker and cowboy/girl of rebellion is that you often find yourself alone; on the other side of the tracks, walking the opposite direction of mainstream. Some think it’s a lovely walk. Some think confident women make confident mothers. Let me just clarify those misconceptions: NO. It’s not true. It’s confusing and upsetting. I think people assume that once you give birth, you have the knowledge of veteran mothers. Not true. My identity as a mother is still forming and, perhaps even moreso now, I’m uncertain which paths are best for me and even more uncertain about which paths are best for my family.

In my previous life, before I knew the glory of sleeping in a rocker with my arms protectively and instinctively flexed around a child, confidence was my best friend. And now, there’s a perpetual haze of doubt surrounding both my cerebral cortex and ventricular arteries. I cannot walk down a grocery aisle without stopping to rethink what I just picked out for Isaiah. I can’t envision what my professional dreams are without wondering if my dream resides in a good school district.

In this early new year, in a year of unprecedented uncertainty, I have found that the best way to move forward is to abandon, as best as I can, expectation. Comparisons. Measurements. Milestones and charts. Supposed to-s and Shoulds. All of these are poisonous to the healthy mind of motherhood. It’s critical to spend more time narrowing down one’s true desires and formulating a plan to accomplish it than to read one more God awful opinion on what worked for Nancy Jane, Wonder Mom in Jeans, who taught Billy to swim at 18 months and Johnny 23 words in sign language by the time he was 8 months.

Nope. I’m spent on opinion. And while I can never entirely wipe my memory of all that I’ve ingested, a daily reminder that just a few houses down, there is another mother allowing her kid to eat an unearthed cheerio or forgetting for the umpteenth time to dry the wet laundry, gives me a small space of company. Of much needed company.

And the isolation is that much less.

That’s my plan: Run. Run as far away from other people’s experiences as I can. Run.

Then find someone real and talk about what I think. What I’m finding. And then formulate my own rules.

Love & the Body

Published on January 3, 2011January 3, 2011 by Lisa Category: Body Image

There’s never been a time when I never thought about my body. For as long as I can remember, dating back to 1986 when I was seven years old and someone commented that my belly was cute and my lisp was cuter, I remember having a third eye. Two eyes on the world, and one eye, located in the central part of my temporal lobe kept a vigilant eye on my body. Similar to the Eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings that’s always waiting for Frodo to slip the Precious on his finger so the Eye can locate its whereabouts. The Eye never sleeps, just waits.

There’s no other time of year where one’s body is more punished than the new year, and by punished, I really do mean punished. It’s looked upon with frowns, wrinkled foreheads, pokes at the mid-lower-higher-frontal-back area with short, frustrated breaths. Vows to “get into shape” sound more like threats upon oneself than promises to be healthier. The Fiery Eye is hard at work.

Women, especially, punish our bodies. If not physically, we certainly torment our bodies mentally. Scheming, thinking, plotting on different ways to *finally* get the body, shape, piece or area of ourselves to look *just* like that way we think it should. And women are never at a deficit for resources to put their plans into action.

Nearly every woman I spoke to recently mentioned transforming their bodies this year. And I began thinking of the toll this kind of mentality has on us. I began wondering how our perspectives, our self-inflicted mental knife wounds, about our bodies, scar and limit us. I began looking around at us – covered in scarves, hats, and heavy warm clothes, and wondered what our bodies would say if they could talk beneath all the layers we wrap them in. More importantly, what would our bodies say to the thoughts we have about our bodies.

Nothing can take the place of being healthy. But being healthy is such an encompassing endeavor and it often gets mutilated to solely mean what you put in your mouth. We forget that how much sleep we allow ourselves, how stressed out we become, how often we say yes when we really mean no, how often we allow the time to make love with our partners, whether or not we smoke, whether or not we bike and walk instead of driving, when and if we pray, when and if we cook really good and healthy foods – all of this matters. Caffeine. Alcohol. Processed foods. Laziness. TV. Depression. Reluctance. Darkness. These are all factors of health.

It’s not just about carbs, see.

If you’re like me and you do want to have a magnanimous healthy year, follow some advice that was bestowed on me: if you want to change, do something different. If you don’t want to change, keep doing what you’re doing.

If it hasn’t worked for you in the past, it won’t work for you this year.

Try something different this year. Try love.

my ecdysis

An archive of personal & political considerations

When Bad Things Happen To Good People (Like Me)

Letter #16

A Catholic Feminist’s Notebook

Embarrassingly Understanding the Hype…

The Other Planet of Reading

Snowflakes

There is No Grind

The Shhhh World of Doubtful Mamas

Love & the Body