8Mar

Lice or Death

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 9 Comments

It’s been my recurring fear since the first day we dropped our girls off at school. Bullies, I could handle. Learning disabilities, I’d take in stride. But an infestation of tiny wiggling brown things feeding off our scalps? Ohmygoodnessno. When it comes to insects, I’m not known for my soundness of mind. I fear creepy crawlies the way some people fear the zombie apocalypse, and this school year has been especially agonizing with two different classfuls of children passing around lice like trading cards. A new notice is posted every few weeks, and I rifle through my girls’ hair as if it were a matter of life or death. Because it is.

Mercifully, we’ve always escaped the nitmare. Always, that is, until yesterday morning. With Dan out of town on business, I was doing my epileptic octopus routine trying to get both girls ready for school at once, and it wasn’t until halfway through my final pigtail that I noticed the wings. Or at least, they looked like wings. (Whatever you do, never ever ever search for close-up images of lice to determine whether or not they have wings. Ignorance, in this case, equals the bliss of keeping your breakfast down.)

I called our pediatrician in my most nonchalant and responsible grown-up voice to let her know hello, good morning, and I just saw a louse in my daughter’s hair. In the following second of silence, something of my mental state must have transmitted through the phone line because the doctor’s next words were “IT’S OKAY.”

Now consider my viewpoint: A second brownie after dinner is okay. Whipped cream on my latte is okay. Flesh-eating parasites laying their eggs in my baby’s hair is not even in the same space-time dimension as okay. However, when you’re the parent on duty, no one else can challenge the forces of hell for you. It has to be you, and well… I guess it just has to be okay.

That is the only plausible explanation for how I was able to massage pharmaceutical mousse into a nest of nits and then pick them out with my own fingers. (So much shuddering in my soul at this moment, I tell you.) It’s how I could pile all the linens from the house into the laundry equivalent of Mt. Doom and not faint at the sight. It’s how I could clean for eleven hours straight, tuck two little girls who had been shampooed and combed within an inch of their lives into sleeping bags, and get back to cleaning. Had my husband been home, I probably would have spent the day relocating to Antarctica, but since our lives scalps were depending on me, I somehow tapped into new reservoirs of strength.

And good thing too, because this morning started well before dawn with a little girl wailing for me from a sleeping bag full of vomit. Pre-Infestation Me would have freaked out because I only have two hands whereas ten or eleven were clearly called for, and our washing machine isn’t big enough to fit a sleeping bag, and my brain doesn’t do problem-solving before noon, and do you know how many hours I spent cleaning that particular child yesterday? New me, though—strong, capable, nit-picking me—smiled gratefully at the vomit because it wasn’t alive and told herself, If I can survive my child bringing home head lice, I can survive anything. And I realized that the doctor might have been on to something because even as the mess and the need and the undignified demands of parenting grew around me, everything was really, truly okay.

Lice laundry
Expected completion date: March 2015

~~~

Please consider this a golden opportunity to share your own personal horror stories. They will be salve to my soul which, while it is fundamentally okay, can never unsee those search results. 

7Mar

Dormitory Night

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

When he’s away, I clean the kitchen at 10 p.m. The house sleeps around me while I sop up crumbs and shuttle coffee cups into the dishwasher, but my martyr act falters when I remember that shining counter tops have only ever been for myself. He would tell me to go to bed, so I do… once every accessible surface smells like lemon.

When he’s away, I make a nest of our bed, my bare toes wriggling puppy-joy under the covers, and settle in with late night guitars and peppermint tea. (More than one longing glance goes to the Chimay stash, but that’s ours, and some unwritten pacts are not to be broken.) I can never decide whether I relax best by reading or by writing, so I waltz between the two as minutes slip by in the lamplight.

When he’s away, I tell myself that this will be the time I take advantage of his absence—transform overnight into a monk and spin productivity out of the silent pre-dawn—but it never feels like an advantage at midnight when his side of the bed is still cold and I can’t remember how to sleep alone. I wait until the lowness of the hours makes my head spin. It’s the feeling of oxygen deprival, of dormitory nights.

When he’s away, I tuck a pillow under the covers where his chest would be and keep this contour of us, together warm until he’s home.

~~~

Those of you whose significant other travels frequently, how do you adjust in his or her absence?

 

6Mar

Loved Dizzy

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 3 Comments

New days don’t feel quite so new when I wake up muffled in allergies, my head packed with fiberglass wool. This blog entry probably couldn’t get any further from profound, but life right now involves gouging my eyes out on an hourly basis, and one of my aims for this year is to present myself as accurately as possible, so here you go:

Self-portrait with allergiesYou’re welcome.

In fact, I sounded like nothing so much as a hyperventilating goose last night on the phone with Rain, but that’s the thing about soul sisters—they don’t care if you sound (or look!) like a barnyard death scene or if your thoughts trip at the back of your throat and send your conversation skittering in a thousand directions. When you speak the same heart-language, conventional ones aren’t really all that essential… and this is how I see God the most clearly.

Have you heard of the 5 Love Languages theory which suggests that each person senses love primarily through one of five ways: affirming words, quality time, gifts, service, or touch? I can easily pinpoint the love-receptors of many of my friends and family, but my own falls outside the standard categories. I feel the most loved when I’m the most understood, when others can see my heart between the lines or untangle my intentions from their emotional trappings. I realize that this is a tall order for my dear ones, impossibly tall, because what I’m really asking for is intuition, and how can a kinship of heartbeats and brainwaves be engineered?

Yet impossibility has a way of coaxing miracles into the open, and the sweetest mystery of my life is that I do know love. I am heard and understood and loved dizzy by precious people all over the world, and it’s why I continue to write, to reach for the goodness that you all see in me. It’s also what stirs the embers of my relationship with the divine. I can’t attribute this meeting of souls to coincidence, and I can’t compartmentalize the life that flows between these other growing, glowing beings and myself. My heart has always recognized its kin.

So to each and every one of you who sees through the itching insulation, who hears through the honking, who understands through the far-strewn words, thank you. You are my own personal proof of light and Life, and it’s not just the spiky green pollen leaving me dizzy this morning; it’s realizing that you’ll read this and know exactly what I mean.

Soul sisters
 Selves-portrait by Rain, who always leaves me brimful

5Mar

Comeback

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 4 Comments

Over the weekend, a great galactic second hand shifted. The earth and sun paused to wink at each other just like they did one morning seven years ago,  and a not-so-little girl woke up to a sea of balloons.

I am tired, core tired. Between the grocery runs and party prep and Hello Kitty cake pops (making fondant is the culinary equivalent of a triathlon, I’ve discovered), keeping up with the old birthday traditions and latching onto new ones, ongoing dramas of who to invite and the tears of partied out guests and a parade of sugar-strewn days, this birthday business is a lot for one introvert mama to handle.

It’s such a good kind of tired though, this depletion from wholehearted love. I haven’t often had time for Natalie over the last year, so this weekend was a comeback of sorts—extravagant, unhurried hours poured entirely into celebrating her—and the gift of it was for us both.

7th birthday girl

Happy 7th, my girl.
Goodness, do I love you. 

28Feb

The Bramble Squad

Posted by: Bethany in Marriage Letters 6 Comments

Joining Seth and Amber again for Marriage Letters: I Knew You Loved Me When. It’s a tender topic for me this week, so please read gently.

~~~

Dear husband,

You’re probably not expecting another marriage post this week given our stalemate conversations over the past few days, and honestly, I wasn’t planning to write this either. Our decade together has been one long series of transitions, yes, but this, learning how to share an office as two dream-chasing freelancers, is a big one. It remaps our individual orbits, and the gravity of being so near each other so much of the time pulls issues out from under the tide-pools. We knew it would be like this, but we’re still taken by surprise when conversations take a nosedive into territory neither of us particularly wants to visit. When we’re down there, neck-deep in brambles, it’s hard to see what we’re doing as progress.

But do you remember all those hours we used to talk perched on the dryers at our university laundromat, and how one evening, you looked at me across the low rumble and I knew? You caught it in my eyes too, weeks later across a tiny restaurant booth, and I didn’t need to say anything. We loved each other, and we knew it.

Yesterday, when you walked in with bits of sky still reflected in your eyes, and I was head to toe in flour rolling gnocchi as a peace offering, we knew it again. Everything shifts when love is the perspective, doesn’t it? With one look, we remember that we’re teammates on the bramble-clearing squad and that this hard work is all part of landscaping our future. We love each other still, and knowing it helps us sweep the stalemate off the board and plop down on it to continue our conversation.

The dryers might have been comfier, but I’d rather be here, now.

Bethany

~~~

Previous letters here and here.

24Feb

A Personal Kind of Grace

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 7 Comments

[Photo of Vesuvius snapped on Easter morning 2010]

Everywhere, it seems, I’m reading about Lent, and I’m trying to let the words sink in, but they float just above my level of comprehension. Ashes, fasting, sin, mortality, dust to dust… Maybe it’s because I’ve never attended a church that practiced Lent (though I know that’s not a prerequisite to participation). Maybe it’s because I’m on such tenuous terms with organized Christianity. Maybe it’s because words like “sin” and “fasting” shut me down trigger-quick with oppressive memories.

My being with you this year doesn’t just refer to posting more often. The internet offers a shiny, gilt-framed backdrop for whatever image of ourselves we want to project, but it’s a hollow allure, this self-sponsored PR. If I’m only offering a mirage of who I want you to think I am, any attempts at connection will vaporize with the illusion, and I believe that connection is the reason we are on this planet together. Thus, with = authenticity.

Are you ready?

As far back as I can remember, the Easter season has symbolized a very personal kind of brutality to me. The story of Jesus’s crucifixion is horrific, no matter the religious paradigm. A man who devoted his adult life to teaching kindness, spreading hope, standing up for the marginalized, and living out compassion is tortured to death by religious leaders who feel their legalistic system threatened. The injustice is instantly recognizable, the tragedy deeply felt. And it is all my fault.

That’s what I was taught from the beginning, that the shards of glass ripping his back to shreds, the iron spikes hammered into his wrists, the agonizing hours on the cross as his lungs collapsed were all my fault.  It sent me into hysterics as a young child. Hearing the unthinkable details of Jesus’s suffering and then being told I was responsible was too much for my heart to handle intact. Jagged, uncontrollable laughter spilled through the wound, and my guilt doubled. No punishment was enough.

“Jesus died for your sins.” I swallow hard every time I hear this line at church, wondering what concept it is shaping in my daughters’ minds. I know that many people take it as a message of hope and love, but I have trouble seeing the barbarism behind the statement. Death by torture is somehow the sacrificial equivalent of my imperfection? Is it not enough to acknowledge my need for redemption without also accepting the blame for Jesus’s death? More often than not, these questions have led me down a spiral staircase of doubts from which I couldn’t see hope, not even a glint, through my anger at God for orchestrating such horror.

I can’t turn off my mind or cauterize the raw edges of my heart against pain, but I have learned to look through new eyes. A few years ago, my friend Rachelle Mee-Chapman’s article Your Kindergartner Did Not Kill Jesus, and Neither Did You helped me see the Easter story as a powerful continuation of Jesus’s life rather than a violent tit-for-tat. Gerry Beauchemin’s book Hope Beyond Hell showed me a God of love instead of torture. Other resources, music, and open-minded conversations have helped me find a third path beyond blind acceptance of religious dogma and angry rejection of the whole Christian construct. I can now love Jesus honestly, without having to shoulder or celebrate his death.

I admire those of you who make sacrifices during these forty days in order to draw closer to God, and I want you to know that I respect your ashes. They aren’t for me, though, at least not in this stage of my life. I’ve spent so long pinned in the dust by Jesus’s suffering that meditating on it now would be like returning to a prison. Perhaps I will be able to do it one day when my new perspective is strong enough to cocoon old wounds. But for now, I’m focusing on words and life instead of sin and death, meditating on the kindness Jesus taught rather than the evil he suffered. My soul was designed not for guilt but for grace—bright, sweeping, extravagant grace that becomes especially personal to me when I meet with God here on this third path and (s)he loves my split heart a little closer to wholeness.

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