Uncategorized

13Apr

Prepositional Monotony

On the brain:

Spring de-cluttering
Salsa seedlings
Campgrounds on Lake Como (yay!)
A friend we haven’t seen in seven years coming to visit (double yay!)

On the table:
Cold medicine (bah)
A stockpile of tissues (double bah)
An extra-large cappuccino
A slice of Colomba, the traditional Italian sweet bread made around Easter

On the floor:
Sand from the playground
Dust from the perpetually open windows
Gravel from the running track
Brand new kids’ tennis shoes with a summer’s worth of bounces spring-loaded in them

On the bookshelf:
On the Banks of Plum Creek; after a short detour to Scotland, the girls and I are forging back into prairie land with Laura and Mary
Io Non Ho Paura (link is to the translated version); despite not being able to read as quickly in Italian, I’m completely engrossed
Art & Max; since I gave this to Natalie for her birthday in March, it’s never left the reading stack
ESL textbooks galore!

On the heart:
A dozen writing projects dancing just out of reach of time and focus
More time to connect with my sweet little family
The octopus-sized spider lurking in the laundry bag yesterday (as in, my heart hasn’t recovered yet)
Catching up with all of you

Your turn!

31Mar

Catnip

I’ve written before about how my childhood springtimes in Texas failed to coax any drop of sentimentality out of me. In fact, I couldn’t understand why so many people went into raptures around the end of March. Our primary spring imports were mud and allergies, and the weather’s slow slide from warm to really warm hardly seemed worth rhapsodizing. (It’s entirely possible, of course, that I could have put more effort into noticing the seasonal beauty, but I was always loyal to autumn with its crackling leaf piles and nutty breezes.)

Here in Italy, however, this time of year is like personalized catnip. Only a flimsy fondness for decorum keeps me from rolling around in every patch of wild daisies I see, paws flying and propriety punch-drunk on sunshine. Not only have I stopped minding when others wax poetic about spring, I’ve started my own list of celebratory ballad topics:

  • The sight of freshly washed socks tiptoeing on the line rather than slung over radiators to steam dry. (If any of you knows Journey’s song-writing team, you’re welcome to direct them here.)
  • The scent of my favorite lemon perfume laced with memories of Sorrento and excitement over this Easter’s camping trip.
  • The texture of damp earth, the elemental weight of seeds between finger and thumb, and the whisper-touch of newborn plants.
  • The sound of the girls’ laughter spirited away by the open air, waltzing in windows and back out to whirl under their footsteps.
  • The flavor of 2011’s first strawberries, sorbet for dessert, and cherry blossoms dished up on periwinkle breeze.

Plum blossoms in the backyard

What about you? Does anything about this time of year stir you into a feline frenzy and/or inspire you to poeticize socks?

23Mar

Harebrained

Admittedly, our weekend in Rome wasn’t the most harebrained idea I’ve ever jumped on, but it clearly was not the work of a sound mind. One daughter was vomiting, you see. The other was dealing with a bout of “poop juice” (what her term lacks in delicacy it more than makes up for in originality), and I was feverish from a mild case of food poisoning. However, one’s husband only runs his first marathon once, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to cheer him on. Besides, it was Rome. Cobblestone streets, gold-plated basilicas, Colosseums, Rome. We were all going.

As close as we got to the starting line  2

The decision was at least 30% mistake. The family and friends of 14,000 racers seeped along the streets carrying curious tourists along, and a sickly mama with a preschooler attached to each arm was no match for the full-bodied tide. We never made it within 300 meters of the starting line, and we were somehow less successful at finding the finish.  As for my vision of popping up around the city like moles with Metro passes, arriving at famous monuments with impeccable timing to whistle and snap artsy photos as Dan ran past… well, we were actually more like earthworms, inching from the underground stops in pale discombobulation and completely missing our first pre-planned photo opportunity because we were lying belly-up in the sun.

Basking in the sun

However, for all its faults, the experience was one I’m glad I took life up on. Had the girls and I stayed curled under familiar blankets, we wouldn’t have gotten to watch spring wake fresh-faced from her beauty sleep and beam into the niches of the Eternal City. It was a rare kind of pleasure to sit on a marble bench in the Piazza del Popolo with the sun freckling my nose and the girls napping on my lap while we waited for Dan to sweep by on the stream of marathon runners. For that hour, we had no obligation to tour or snap photos or do anything; it was a golden opportunity to just be, and the unplanned respite could not have been more perfect. While tourists milled around surreptitiously snapping photos of us (“I’ve never seen such a sight in all of Rome,” grinned the man who offered to take a shot on my camera), I soaked up spring and the precious nearness of my still-little girls.

We were a tourist attraction 2

And then my husband ran past—kilometer 37 of 42.2—and it was incredible to see his hard work and dedication in every footstep planted on centuries’-old pavement.   We smiled at each other like married people do, one in sickness, one in health, both calculating the experiences of our life together and coming up rich. Then he turned the corner, the girls and I collected our jackets and sickness bags, and all four of us headed on jellied legs toward the finish.

Daniel at kilometer 37 - Cropped

That was about the time the girls and I got lost and Dan ended up dehydrated and we realized it was three in the afternoon and some of us hadn’t eaten in 24 hours and our parking meter ran out and the glamor of our adventure was trampled under tired feet and I decided that next year I’m limiting my spring-welcoming activities to opening windows and potting flowers. Still, even our least sane ideas lead to experiences that we cherish as our family’s most valuable keepsakes, and there’s no doubt in my feverish, harebrained mind that we left Rome richer than we came.

16Mar

Aftershocks

We drank the last of the coffee this morning. That sentence appearing in “Little House on the Prairie” would send Pa on a four-day drive to Independence through a howling nor’easter during which Ma and the girls would lock themselves in the shabby safety of their cabin with candle stubs and cornbread for company. For us, it just means a stop at the grocery store after swim class. It’s not just coffee though. The crock of Cuban bean soup we’ve been dipping into the last several days is down to a few lumps of carrot and chorizo. We’ve finished all but half a liter of milk. Our choice of fruit is between lemon and lime. It’s clearly time to direct some of my attention to the kitchen.

And yet thousands of people are missing among the cracks and waves of a crumbling earth. Nuclear reactors combust. A displaced sea claims lives, livelihoods. Our planet wrenches on its axis. Three thousand miles away in Cambodia, a friend washes the feet of little girls sold by their own parents to be sex slaves. My heart wrenches on its axis, cracks, combusts. Every compassionate impulse spins like a splintered home in the current, and I’m helpless to do anything but watch and breathe through half-strangled heartbeats that I hope count as prayers.

It is hard for me to assimilate these feelings as anything other than guilt. If only I had the truckfuls of cash to fund relief organizations or the skills to join a rescue team or the strength to hold our world and the innocence of its children intact,  if only I could do more… but I can’t, and leaving aspects of our everyday life undone feels like the only way to atone.

Writing it out like this helps me reassemble the pieces of my perspective. Caring for the everyday minutiae of my family is its own tender act of service. Stocking my pantry may not have any effect on a global level, but it matters to the eternal souls who fill this home, and meeting these small-scale needs in no way diminishes the big. In fact, it affirms our humanness—our ability to care for each other even as we reel in tragedy’s aftershocks.

Still, as I pull out a pen to jot down a grocery list, I would give anything to be filling the fissures and craters and raw, gaping hurts in this world rather than our coffee jar.

14Mar

Picture of [Im]perfection

As you may have guessed, the last couple of days have been rough. I never know what might be a trigger until I’m rubbing my eyes on the other side of a long tunnel, emotions bloodshot, wondering what the hell happened. Thank goodness for work. I’ve heard distraction recommended as a coping strategy for PTSD sufferers, and it was actually a relief to have to get out the door early this morning and focus on teaching a class. It snapped my mental energies back to the here and now, and it always does my soul good to be around people and places who don’t remind me of anything. Later, an irrational translation client had me laughing (I apparently “ruined” the central Italian landscape with my un-poetic word choice and grammatical consistency; I guess it’s true that the pen is mightier than the real world?), so I think it’s safe to say I’m back to myself.

I often wonder how these episodes are going to end up affecting my girls. I worry that seeing me sad and struggling to cope will traumatize them, but at the same time, our conversations during the hard times are incredibly precious. The girls know that my sadness is only occasional and has nothing to do with them. They know their mom is human and fragile and willing to be honest with them about both. They also know love. They’re experts in it already, and their hugs and notes and daughterly concern add up to the most healing treatment plan I can imagine.

Thank you for your encouragement too. I always ricochet between feelings of stupidity and feelings of guilt whenever I let on that I might not be the picture of psychological perfection (might not, mind you). Authenticity will probably always be a struggle for me considering my background. However, Jennifer pointed out that naming something is powerful in lessening its hold, and I’d like to think that writing about it goes a step further—aims typeset floodlights into the shadow, illuminates the sniveling nightmare, and says I’m not afraid to expose you (even if I am). I’d also like to think that my honesty with the girls will help them flip the tables on their own fears one day, though hopefully with less neurotic two-stepping. More than anything, I’d like to think that my ability to write this today means that love is the one winning this struggle.

13Mar

I Want to be Well

Sometimes PTSD steals my breath out from underneath and suspends me midair like a hooked fish, gasping for the oxygen that chokes me.

Sometimes PTSD steals into my dreams on tiptoe, so softly that I don’t realize I can ever wake up again.

Sometimes PTSD steals a conversation away from its original intent and plunges it headfirst into dark water—bottomless, surfaceless, directionless, hopeless.

Sometimes PTSD steals with bone-sharp fingers the joy from happy moments and plants new sets of memories with old pain.

Sometimes PTSD steals away for a week or a month, maybe even a few at a time, to let me get back to living in present-tense, but it often returns when I’m least prepared.

Sometimes PTSD steals glances at the liquor shelf or the medicine cabinet; they’re only brief glances, but I catch them all the same.

Sometimes PTSD steals over my body and paralyzes me from the waist down, the shoulders down, the brain down.

Sometimes PTSD steals a march on my logic and arrives at conclusions that circumvent reality now in favor of reality then.

Sometimes PTSD steals my heart from the ones who cherish it the most.

Always, PTSD steals.

~~~

[Impolite-but-apt vocabulary warning]

10Mar

Sigh No More

One of the first pieces of literature I ever memorized was a Bible verse familiar even to those who have never set foot in a fundamentalist Christian home: “God is love.” It’s a nice sentiment, and it probably sounded adorable in my toddler lisp, but I was already on my way to a very unhappy understanding of the verse’s meaning.

“God is love” meant that he was willing to defile himself by sifting through the filth of humanity and saving a worm like me.

“God is love” meant that he would inflict (or sanction) whatever pain necessary to insure my soul against hell.

“God is love” meant that he would play the gentleman and let people make “unbiased” decisions between Christianity and eternal suffering.

(Alternately, it meant that he had predestined me over less lucky humans for salvation. I experienced my fair share of Calvinism.)

“God is love” meant that he had paid my debt, so I was forever in his.

In practical terms, “God is love” translated into fear. God’s love was conditional, you see, and it wasn’t particularly affectionate to start with. When I was Baptist, any little mistake would put my salvation into question. (You couldn’t lose your salvation per se, but if you messed up… well, Jesus clearly wasn’t alive and well in your heart.) When I was Presbyterian, my soul was secure, but God didn’t love all of my friends and family enough to choose them. From my earliest memories, the unthinkable torment of hell—burning alive forever and ever and ever—dangled over my head  and that of everyone I knew. And this was God’s love.

Which brings me here:

Maybe you’ve heard about this. Maybe you don’t care. Maybe you care so much that you’re brandishing every weapon in your arsenal against heresy. Or maybe you’re like me, wanting to weep for the hope of it all.

Even though “Love Wins” is not yet released, prominent theologians have already consigned the author to hell… simply for suggesting that perhaps God is not torturing the majority of his creation for eternity. A dear friend writes about the divide between real, aching hearts and those “who are more concerned with winning than with loving,” and I want to ask those people, those self-assured theologians and heretic-slayers, Why? Why would you rather follow a God who allows babies to be born knowing that nine out of ten will burn forever… who handpicks some for his utopian afterlife but not all, or who makes our fates dependent on accurate guesswork… who expects us to rejoice while billions die… whose love only concerns itself with right vs. wrong… Why would you rather follow that God than explore the hope that true love doesn’t require us to shut down our hearts?

I was terrified the first time I posted about hell; I expected anger, hatred, and Molotov cocktails (approximately the treatment Rob Bell’s been getting), but it was worth the risk. I couldn’t not share the spacious peace I had found outside of religious tradition. The idea that God actually could be love—kind, unconditional, crazy-about-us love—is worth spreading no matter the cost or the dissenters. In fact, it might be the first piece of truly good news some Christians have ever heard.

Play us out, Marcus:

© Copyright 2019, all rights reserved.
Site powered by Training Lot.