On Collecting Rocks

I emptied my purse recently, to make sure that I had everything I needed in there, which is not always a guarantee with me. I found a whole lot of random items—a phone charger cable, chalk pens, a jewelry case, some mail, my watch, business cards, credit cards, bus passes. Five different lipsticks, a hairbrush, and my Bluetooth speaker. The contents were a little more random than normal because of the wedding.

My baby sister got married in the middle of January, and as bridesmaid, my purse still bore the remnants of a bridesmaid’s emergency kit. I had used up all the Shout wipes cleaning the hem of her dress after beachfront photography, but there was plenty of evidence for all the ways in which my purse had been used on the day. What I did not expect were three rocks.

Three small beach stones, smoothed by the ocean, gray and innocuous. I held them in my palm for a moment, confused. I’ve been known to pick up rocks to symbolize special occasions or moments I want to remember. Near my fireplace rests a large blue-glass jar that holds my rocks, shells, pieces of pottery, bits of sea glass…the detritus of journeys taken.

Some of my rocks are slightly illegal, picked up on travel to historic places. Some are plain, some are especially pretty. None carry any real value, except to me. Once when my sister helped me move she picked up a small box and, surprised by its heaviness, opened it. “Is this a box of rocks?” she asked, nonplussed. “Yes.” I said. She gave me an acid look and added it to the stack of boxes for the moving truck.

I looked at my jar of rocks, and then at the three pebbles currently resting in my palm. I took the sharpie pen at my desk and wrote a word on each of the rocks.

*******

Over the past year, I’ve been doing an inspection of my life. I’ve come to think of the emotional baggage I carry around as rocks. Some of my rocks are legitimate. Some are really things that I own and should carry around for a while, perhaps because I need to learn from them. Some, maybe, I need to let go, drop them into the ocean and let them be gradually worn away to sand by a force bigger and stronger than myself. A lot of these burdens I carry around unnecessarily. Perhaps I’ve even taken them on without realizing it, as with the three real rocks I found in my purse.

I had two guesses, by the way, as to where those rocks came from. The day of my sister’s wedding, we were taking photographs at a beachfront park with the wedding party, which included all three of my siblings and my two nieces. My youngest sister, who was the bride, wasn’t suspect as she was a) a little busy thinking mainly about managing the hem of her wedding dress, and b) not as explicitly prank-minded as the other two suspects — my other two siblings. Those sassy middle kids. The following story explains why they were my top candidates.

Once, on a family trip out to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state before there were any in-laws attached to our family group, my parents and all four of us siblings hiked to the Dungeness Point lighthouse. Dungeness Point lighthouse is at the end of the Dungeness Spit Trail. The spit is 5 miles long, one of the longest natural sand spits on the west coast, so the “hike” is just over 10 miles to the lighthouse and back. And the word “Trail” is misleading, because walking on a sand spit is not like walking on a trail—the spit itself is maybe 50 feet wide, depending on how high the tide is, with water on either side of it. Like any beach, it is not flat, but peaked in shape because the tides push earth and debris up to the top of it on a regular basis. Since it’s such a narrow piece of land, the tides work on it from both sides.

Hiking the spit is best done one of two ways; one, playing “hot lava” and jumping from driftwood log to driftwood log, where they are arranged along the top of the spit, and the other, to walk it at a lower tide time so that you have more solid, damp sand to walk on. Otherwise, hiking through ankle-deep sand that spills into your shoes, or walking on ankle-rocking seastones are your only options.

We took a few rest stops along the five miles in to the lighthouse, stopping to sit on driftwood to rest our over-taxed ankles, snack on granola bars and sip water, and watch a pair of seals that tracked us most of the way, popping their heads up every now and then and cavorting in the surf.

At the lighthouse, we sat on the sandy green lawns around the buildings and ate sandwiches for lunch. Dungeness Point lighthouse is owned by a collective private group, and each member of this group has the chance to keep the lighthouse for a week every year. Each new group of keepers is driven out by vehicle at the lowest possible tide (the only time the spit is wide enough to accommodate a vehicle), along with food and water for the week. They mow lawns, lead tours, maintain the buildings and, presumably, write beautiful short stories and novels while looking out at the gorgeous pacific sunsets and the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges seen in 360 degrees from the top of the lighthouse. I want to keep the lighthouse one day.

We hiked—or more accurately, trudged—the five miles back out, keeping pace with the seals. I had one earbud in and was listening to music off and on as we trudged through the soft sand toward dinner. Back at the parking lot, we piled into our old suburban. I dug through my backpack for my lip balm or some other such necessity and there, as my hand was swimming through the detritus of necessities, food, snacks, phone, etc., it came across something large, cool, round and heavy. I pulled it out and stared at my hand while my two middle siblings giggled like hyenas. I looked up at them, and held the open bag so I could see more clearly in the late afternoon light. Inside were several pounds, at least, of granite beach stones, most about the size of my palm. At every rest stop along the way, those two chuckleheads had entertained themselves by sneaking rocks into my backpack.

Now, I love my siblings and my family, but the best of families can still do this kind of thing to each other in an emotional sense. We may not even know what kinds of rocks we’ve subconsciously added to each other’s burdens. The thing is, it’s up to us to occasionally take the time to review our rocks, take a conscious inventory, look at the things we’re carrying with us and decide if we need them still. Perhaps there are things we can learn from carrying some weight for a while. But sometimes I just need to lighten the load. The truth is, once someone has unloaded a rock into my purse, whether intentionally or subconsciously, it’s mine and I get to decide what to do with it.

I haven’t thrown out my rock jar, but I have begun labeling them. I write the date and sometimes their found location. Every once in a while I sift through them, remembering moments of realization, moments of grief, anger, joy, peace from when I picked up those stones. They are tangible reminders to me, and they tell my story when I need to be reminded of the truth about myself that I sometimes forget.

Those three little rocks are now labeled, too. They had their portrait taken and posted to instagram, and my brother very much enjoyed his little joke.

And they, too, are reminders to me—reminders this time of what I do not have to carry.

To Our Mother Friends

My mother-friends.

They are beautiful. They hold the impossible potential of a child in their arms, and rest under the incredible burden of loving their children. I am old enough now that I have lots of friends who are mothers, and some of them invite me in to their homes and lives and let me learn and observe and play and pick up from school and twirl in circles and make cookies and paint pictures, and generally bounce back and forth between my mother friend and my new child-friends with the energy of a temporary installation. I have conversations with these little ones, who are fed, clothed, diapered, and rested almost entirely in spite of themselves by their mothers. These little ones who could do nothing by or for themselves, and prove it daily with their runny noses and eating habits. I watch them move in confidence of each provision for their welfare, utterly faith-filled in their unconscious expectation of the good from their Mothers.

I see them grow older and awkward, quiet, morose, angry, confused, rebellious, a little ridiculous, as we all were. And I see my mother friends hold the impossible potential still, a little more bent by the storms of becoming A So-Called Person that seem intentionally aimed to hurt the mothers, to resist and estrange them, to separate from their families—this second labor that seems to hurt as much as the first. I see my mother-friends who have suffered unutterable losses, multiple deaths— not only of life, but of hope, of joy, of health, of promise or expectation, of friendship of Son or Daughter (or in-law), of unborn-stillborn-miscarried. I hear the conversations of wondering, worrying, of dread and fear and sorrow and stillness and unanswered prayers that continue into infinity because Mothers. Never. Quit. No matter how much they want to.

You are beautiful, my mother-friends. I see in you the stories of Mary, Elizabeth, Hannah, and Sarah. You are consistently exhausted and exhilarated and filled with a passion that defies understanding. You are hiding in your bedroom for one more minute of peace before facing the enthusiastic barrage of questions, contradictions, commands, and cuddles, and yet the instant something threatens the noise-makers you can move with lightning-speed. Know this; it is a privilege to watch you love your children—even when you (or they) are irritated, frustrated, or disappointed and (obviously) unable to hide those honest emotions.

Even when they call you out on your shit in front of strangers, family, or friends. Even when they melt down while we are shopping for their Halloween costumes. Even when they give me sticky food-faced kisses or pick their nose for twenty minutes solid or loudly act up when I’m visiting. Especially when they make very honest and usually hilarious observations about my age, marital status, relative maturity (“are you big or little? Cause you look little. But I think you’re big.” “Are you in college?! No?! BUT YOU SHOULD HAVE KIDS BY NOW!” and, recently, “How old are you again? You’re THEWTY-EIGHT?! One-two-thwee-fou-five-twelve-eleven-thewteen-sixteen-seventeen…”). It is an honor to hear you speak about the joys and sorrows and fears and inadequacies you feel as you parent, to hear you dream about their futures, and to talk about the talents and troubles you see taking root in them as they grow up.

Your love is extraordinary, and it is transforming you into the woman you were meant to become. Your love changes the world. One diaper at a time. One recital, one soccer game, one swimming lesson at a time. One meltdown, one rebellious, scathing comment, one prayer at a time.

*the photograph above was taken by my friend Laura, on a short weekend trip with the girls, which for the first time included a second generation, my niece Lucy.

Rage Against the Sheetcake: Tina Fey’s Delicious Satire

“sheetcaking” has been a recent addition (I think–it was hard to sort through all the google search results of editorials vilifying and heroizing Tina Fey’s recent appearance on a special SNL Weekend Update.) to American vocabulary. It basically means “eating your feelings.” If anyone does know the origins of the term, I’d be happy to learn it.

Of course, just last week the term went viral. I saw friends on both sides of the political spectrum share the video. Some accepted its sly lampooning of white privilege with good humor, some took it seriously as a riotous emblem of the current esprit de corps and accompanied the post with hashtags like #fuckyeah. Others took it seriously as a direct criticism of either themselves or their political perspectives and dismissed it as tone-deaf at best, a flagrant indulgence of white privilege at worst.

Throughout the week as I watched the drama, horror, conflict, pathos, and ugly demonization meted out on those who stated almost any opinion at all develop out of the horrendous events at Charlottesville, I struggled with what to feel, how to feel, and if there was anything to share in it. Sometimes, as I commented on Katrina’s recent post, I’d just rather listen. But then, as she discussed, staying silent, too, became a problem. Here is the list of items about me that contributed to my sense:

1-My family on both sides emigrated within this century. I’ve got no familial connection to either honoring or denigrating early America and the choices thereof. Of course, I now bear all the privileges of an American, so there’s not point in saying I’m not involved at all, but there’s a sense of removal, certainly. The furthest east my relatives have ever lived is Michigan, which would have been both Union country and wild frontier during the times before and after slavery. The Netherlands–from which most of my family emigrated–certainly contributed to the slave trade during its heyday, but any real connections to the industry are lost to time.

2-I’m white. I’m white-white. Not only am I white, I’ve grown up in one of the whitest areas of the country. I could count on one hand the black kids at my high school. Hispanic students were more common, but still a vast minority. I can think of one South Asian student, and he was adopted. I now live in Seattle, one of the least diverse–not for lack of trying–cities in the nation. This predominantly white experience wasn’t through any lack of trying to experience culture, or any desire to be removed from other cultures, just because there was very little available.

When I moved to San Francisco after college to teach school, white students were in the minority; my classes were filled with Hispanic Americans, Indian Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans. Middle school students notice cultural differences, but I did not see a lot of racist actions. The most racist thing I ever heard was a complaint about attributing a fart to someone on the field trip bus; “It smells like curry!” I loved how my students brought culture to conversations, and how being different seemed to be simply and easily accepted. All the same, I couldn’t fail to notice that the teaching staff was predominantly white (also female–another conversation for another day). I did during the last year of my time there actually see firsthand a gang-related conflict go down at a large church youth event. I saw kids punching each other; girls screaming with their hands buried in each others hair, I pulled fighting students apart and held a girl’s hands behind her back to keep her from scratching her opponent’s eyes out. It still feels like a strange, underwater nightmare. I remember shooting incredulous looks at my fellow youth staffers as we separated instigators and spoke to the police.

3-I’ve been in the South only a handful of times. I know racism and militant neonazism exist; I’ve watched the editorials and movies. I’ve read about these groups occasionally, heard firsthand accounts of how violent racism is still alive and well in the South. I’ve rarely if ever experienced it or seen it firsthand; I feel distinctly unqualified to make judgements. I can unequivocally condemn Nazism as a damaging ideology. But it makes no difference to the people involved in it. It doesn’t change hearts or minds. It doesn’t seem to help anyone for me to rant and rave.

Watching Tina Fey dig into an American flag sheetcake felt at once enlightening and…therapeutic. I watched it again, and I thought, as many people did, of Marie Antoinette’s famous words prior to the French Revolution; “let them eat cake.” Words used to define wealth, privilege, and ignorance. A phrase that has gone down in history as a damning foreshadow of the thoughtless pride that lead to the downfall of the ruling aristocratic class in France.

As the news covers more and more examples of the widening chasm between rich and poor Americans, the loss of the middle class, the evermore pride-filled flagrant indulgences of the wealthy, from Kardashians to Trumps to NFL players’ ridiculous salaries (yes, I said it, Hawks fans), parallels to pre-revolutionary France are often made. Fey’s play on that richly-weighted metaphor was both deeply resonant and challenging. It was one of the things that let me know both that a) it’s ok to feel at a loss, unable to do anything really valuable, and b) that inability to understand firsthand what all of this means doesn’t preclude me from saying something about it.

In case anyone misunderstands, Nazism is evil. Neonazism is evil. Those who embrace these ideologies are at best misguided, at worst sold out to an evil ideology. Anti-fascists who respond to violence with violence are wrong. Slavery is wrong, and white supremacy is wrong. As a Christian, actually, pursuit of the supremacy of any one person or race over another is wrong. White privilege may not be directly my fault but it is in my power and in my responsibility to be a part of changing it. While I’m still learning what that looks like, maybe this is a start.

My friend Corrie recently wrote the following challenging words to her audience, regarding still more recent conflicts about memorials to the US Civil War:

“Compassion must be lived out loud. You *cannot* say “All lives matter” and yet insist on keeping monuments and flags representing only one kind of life at the brutal cost of others….You *cannot* say a piece of concrete is worth more than the pain of your neighbor. Pain must not be mocked. And when you do, perhaps with catty memes or retweets, you are actively participating in deepening an already painful divide. If one part of the body hurts, it all hurts. When was the last time you listened to anyone who mocked your pain or said it didn’t matter?

It matters to me. There, I said it. Now let’s eat some cake.

Unmothers’ Day

I may stay single permanently, and for me, that means giving up motherhood. Some might debate this–I have friends who have done artificial insemination, or adopted or fostered children. I do not think this is a path down which I shall go, personally. So for me, one of my occasional difficult emotional battles around singleness is when I wrestle with the idea of never being a mother.

Not only do I give up the idea of physically popping out (ew gross, I hate that term) a child of my own body, but I have to give up on my perceptions of what a role of motherhood means to me. When my younger brother and sister and I played together as kids, they went out on adventures from the playhouse. I stayed inside, tidying up and cooking “dinner” for their triumphant return. I hung curtains. I drew pictures for the walls. I set the table.

Motherhood and homemaking, to me, always seemed to be ideal roles in life. To do it well, you had to enjoy being creative–my mom, for example, sewed, cooked, read, and did all kinds of projects for fun, some for budgetary considerations, and mostly for the sheer joy of creating beauty around us. She shopped and thrifted and planned and reupholstered things, arranged simple and affordable meals to look lovely, used the nice plates for birthday cake, and worked side by side with my dad on Saturdays to clean up the yard. As a pretty sensitive kid with a soft spot for beauty and a love for making things, I saw the potential in the role, and from early on, looked forward to that life.

It’s been a long and difficult process to give up the idea that in missing out on falling in love, I’ve also somehow missed out on my dream ‘career,’ in a way. But it’s deeper than that, too. I remember thinking about the millennium when I was about 9 years old. I calculated my age–I’d be twenty years old. Of course that seemed like a VAST age, old and wise, and far removed from impending teenagerhood. I wondered what life would be like. I’d probably be married, I thought, and have one, maybe two kids by then. (haha, kids, amiright?) I thought maybe it would be fun to have a baby in the year 2000–a true millennial. In reality, the year 2000 was my second year at university, and I had to laugh at myself as Y2K came and went, and I was just as close to marriage and babies, apparently, as I had been at 8 years old.

Singleness means giving up Grandmotherhood. I mean, it means giving up grandmotherhood for me, obviously. But it also means giving up seeing my parents as Grandparents. It was a tense, long time of wondering for my parents, if they would ever be grandparents. My mom endured plenty of ‘Gratefulness Brags’ from her friends about their many grandchildren. Thank goodness I now have nieces from my sister and brother-in-law. At least one of the four of us kids has given my parents the chance to enjoy being grandparents, and I love watching my mom and my little niece Lucy develop their sweet relationship–I love seeing my dad laugh at her antics and proudly take pictures holding her sweet tiny sister, and hearing him tell me how he held me the same way, stretched along his forearm with my preemie head in his hand.

I love every rich moment with my family, and I don’t regret a single one, nor would I trade them. They are special in a different way for me. I’ve been able to be there within hours of both my nieces being born. I’ve been able to bring gifts and shower attention on my sister. I’ve been able to spend time with my siblings and parents in different ways than if I had family obligations of my own.

All the same though–I feel a little bit on the outside of things. I watch my sister and our mom talk about parenting, discipline, stages of growth, medical needs. I watch them develop something new and different in the way they treat each other with respect and kindness, the way my sister reaches out to my mom for help and advice and time, and the way my mom lights up when she sees her grandbabies, and when she watches her daughter be a mother. It’s beautiful, and I still do think of that relationship with longing.

Odds are I may never know what it’s like to be a mother. And people may say you can’t miss what you never had, but that’s a lie. I miss, sometimes, what I would have been, what would have changed in me through the deeps and darks and dreams of motherhood.

The Daily Fraidy-cat

Sometimes for me, being single means facing fear every day. It means looking the cultural expectations of the American Dream life trajectory straight in the eye and saying “you don’t define me.”

It means responding with kindness and presence instead of embarrassment when people make inadvertently rude comments about feeling old-maidenly at age 23, or when married friends say equally insensitive things like “you don’t know what tired/wisdom/anxiety/joy/frustration/love is, until you have kids/a husband.” Recently at a family wedding, I was standing next to my brother-in-law watching my niece play, when the photographer walked up and said “let me get a picture of you two!” Not that I don’t like my brother-in-law, but I could tell the photographer thought we were a couple, so I smiled awkwardly, and when he was done with the photo, I said “do you want to take a picture of him and his WIFE?” “OHhh, sure…” said the photographer, realizing his mistake. It’s hard to know what to do in those moments. It takes constant attention to respond out of grace instead of sadness or fear.

Part of that fear is related to really giving up on family. The obvious interpretation is the giving up of a ‘family of my own.’ But it also means giving up my birth family in some senses, because I cannot be healthy and remain a dependent child forever (at least, so my counselor tells me); and yet in so many ways I still identify and feel needs for family support, advice, and influence, especially when making larger life decisions.

Being single means accepting that those decisions will never truly matter as much to anyone else as they will to me. When it comes to what jobs I do, or where I live, or what financial choices I make, I’m the only stakeholder. And yet, making big life decisions like moving, buying a car, or career decisions in a vacuum just doesn’t seem wise. I crave investment and wisdom, perspective and assistance in a very noticeable way. Self-sufficient as I can appear at times, it’s (a bit of) an illusion. No one is totally self-sufficient, nor should they be. Just because no one is present to witness my breakdowns of helpless fury, grief, or how-can-i-get-it-all-done low points, doesn’t mean they don’t happen.

One thing I’m afraid of is fitting into the stereotype of being self-focused and selfish. The truth is, trying to stand on my own two feet does take a ton of energy. I balance work, housework, finances, househunting, lawnmowing, future-planning, traveling to family events because they’re never at the single person’s house…and so on. And while I say this, I can hear my married and parent friends laughing ruefully and unbelievingly. But I’m not joking. I realize that taking care of kids is a more than full-time job, and that part of the reason my married and parent friends are laughing has a lot to do with sleep deprivation and exhaustion, and all they really want is what I have plenty of…a few quiet moments.

But when, for example, my car breaks down, my life becomes singularly devoted to the task of getting to work, the car shop, and home. It takes up all my spare time, all my spare money, and all my spare focus.

So, am I self-focused? YES. I am. Because very few others are focused on my life in a real, practical way. People are around, and happy to have me around occasionally. But when it’s tax time, I’m in the trenches alone. No one is going to sit down (at least, unpaid) and muddle through the tax code voluntarily. When I have to decide whether I’m going to live with a roommate or pay the higher rent to live on my own, no one’s going to make that decision with as much at stake as I am.

Doing these big things alone is scary sometimes. What if I get it wrong? What if I end up bankrupt? What if I lose my job or get sick, who would help me? What if I die in my apartment on a Friday night? NO ONE WOULD FIND ME FOR AT LEAST 3 DAYS! They might wonder where I was…they might comment that I hadn’t shown up for work. but they probably wouldn’t start raising the alarm for real until Tuesday morning. You see? These are the morbid, real possibilities of singleness.

While being single certainly has its advantages, and it can look luxuriously quiet and self-focused from the outside, especially from the position of a noisy family, it still carries at least its fair share of daily fears.

Giving Up and Getting Over, Part 2

In last week’s post, I shared, frustratingly, half of a story. Now you get the rest.

So here I was, on the brink of a potential–something. A relationship? A friendship?

We exchanged notes a few times a week. Long letters.

The notes got briefer as we both ran short of time. Soon I was sending paragraphs; he was sending sentences. I felt a slight prickle of worry. But it was a busy season.

And then the responses stopped.

I waited for two months. Two months that included my birthday. For the past years, even though we had never met, he had always wished me a happy birthday. But there was nothing this year.

Thanksgiving passed. Nothing.

I spent much less time composing my next letter. I sent him a note giving him a graceful out.

He responded quickly; “I’m sorry, I’m bad at keeping in touch long-distance.”

That was it. What, after all, did I have to lose? Hope, that’s what.

Year 36. Having asked out the only person I had truly liked for a span of unspecified years, I felt curiously hollow. In Hannah Hurnard’s allegory Hinds Feet on High Places, Much-Afraid asks the Shepherd to remove the ‘plant of human love’ growing in her heart. She knows it will be painful, as its roots grow deep, and it is. The deep roots are torn out, leaving a jagged wound.

Perhaps it’s good that I didn’t get a flat rejection. I don’t know that I could have handled it. Rather than having the deep-rooted plant yanked up violently from the earth that had fostered it for so long, it was more like a bird leaving the nest. I’d coddled this little bird of hope, and kept it safe and warm, and fed it on little scraps of conversations, reading between the lines of comments and ‘likes’. I faced my fears when it started flying, little hops and trips from the nest, and was glad when it came home to rest. But that was only temporary; and one day, the little hope-bird didn’t come back home. A gentle leaving, but still, the unworded pain of losing something precious that I never owned anyway. The pain of watching the horizon for signs. The pain of resignation to the unwanted truth.

I still sometimes wonder how and why it happened, like everyone who’s been disappointed by the outcome of a failed relationship. What happened along the parallel journey from Very Interested to Not Interested Enough? How did we start out from the same point and arrive at such different destinations?

So, here I was, hollowed out, empty of my long-term hope at the end of a short-term blind date of sorts, and pondering the new/old problem of what long-term singleness really means to me, this time at age 37.

I’m now in my late thirties, having been somewhat unwillingly single most of the time. A friend recently told me that at age 27, having heard the whispers that she was being maybe too picky, maybe waiting too long, she decided that she would go out on every date she was asked on, unless it was clearly an insincere or negative situation. She made herself give each guy two dates, at which point she was free to say no, if she chose to. And following this protocol, she fairly soon met her husband. I thought that was great. Laudable. Smart. Kind. Important to make that choice. Bit difficult to make that determination if you’re never asked out. It’s kind of like giving up cigarettes for Lent when you don’t smoke anyway.

I have, in fact, said yes to probably a similar percentage of dates, in far smaller proportion, to my cute-as-a-button, outgoing, bubbly friend. So ‘never’ is slightly hyperbolic–but only slightly.

I lived in the Bay Area after college for three and a half years. Young, single, employed, urbanish–the ideal single years, right? I was never asked on one date. I had friends, jobs, meaningful side projects, a church, volunteer activities. I wouldn’t trade those years. But not one “could I take you out for dinner sometime?,” nor yet a “wanna catch a movie?” in my post-college days. (speaking of college–I don’t mention it because at my smallish university, the ratio of females to males generally ran at about 3 >1, a common situation for small religious institutions.)

Upon returning to the Northwest in my late twenties, again, I went out on a few dates. Some, I certainly turned down. Again, I had friends, jobs, meaningful side projects, a church, small groups. In Seattle, I went out on several dates over a period of 6 months with “The Deacon,” a kind, smart, thoughtful friend of a friend. We had many good conversations, and talks. I just couldn’t connect with the relationship, and I drifted away from it–much like my online friend drifted away. Ghosting, it’s called. Perhaps it’s Karma.

It’s difficult to understand how I can want marriage, and family, and love, and yet not be able to make them happen. Perhaps some will say I could and maybe should fight harder. I wish I could say, ‘this is what I want, here are my options, I choose door a, b, c,’ and figure it out from there.

I have to remind myself sometimes that I’m not where I am in life because it’s an accident. I wasn’t overlooked by God, somehow. I did choose, somehow, to be where I am. I said no and yes to opportunities and made decisions that got me here, to 37, to a life without some of the relationships I thought or assumed it would include. It’s also a life with relationships that are good, and surprising, and wonderful in ways I never could have predicted.

So perhaps I can remind myself by writing this, that there is a reason to write still about singleness, even if it’s as simple as because I am single today. And what it means to be single, and how it changes and shapes how I think and learn and love and interact with the world should be honored, and expressed, and questioned, and corrected, and understood, and even–maybe–loved.

Giving Up & Getting Over, Part 1

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been writing much lately. Some of you probably don’t even know that this blog is supposed to include posts from two people who agreed to do it together, and I am the lame duck half of this arrangement.

We can pin it on work, which has been busy and absorbing for the past year-and-a-half, a move or two or three, and other things which are boring to list because they’re really just life things that everyone deals with. Add to that, TV that must be watched because…well, it must.

We can blame it on whatever we want to, but the truth is I’m not writing much these days for my own personal enrichment about being single. In my twenties, I had a lot–too much, actually–to say about being single. To be fair, there IS a lot to say about being single that needs to be said. I’m just a bit tired of it all, these days.

Part of the reason these stories must be told is because the cultural narrative of ‘the life well-lived’ in the American Dream sense is quite narrow. It leaves many people in the margins, wondering what that vision means for them once they go off the rails of the well-trodden path of childhood-teenagedream-collegepartyanimal-sexysingle-married-marriedwithkids. Speaking from the margins, reminds people–me included–that they are not the only ones who live there. And they (me) need to be reminded, to have those “oh, me too!” moments.

So all that is to say that I still believe writing these stories and experiences down and sharing them matters. And yet, I find myself struggling to do it. I wonder sometimes if I’ve just given up on the whole issue of my personal struggle with singleness. Given up trying to make sense of it. Given up trying to fight it. Given up trying to change it.

The truth is that I stopped writing right around the time that I ended a very brief online friendship/conversation/flirtation with someone I had secretly been interested in for a very long time before that. (I don’t want to tell you how long, but let’s just say it’s a “you’re justified for judging me” length of time). We had never met in real life. (it took me forever to write that sentence and I changed it 27 times, and it never got better. So I’m now just putting it in there as bald truth.)

There it is. I had fallen in love with a hope. It wasn’t a fantasy, either. The dream had a connection to reality, which actually made it worse than if it was total fiction. It was possible. Not probable, but possible. So when I fell in love with hope, several years earlier than last fall, that small sense of potential kept me a little bit insulated from the ups and downs of being single and lit my path through the darker elements of being alone, struggling in a career, navigating difficult roommates, and surviving the marriages of two younger siblings and twenty-five or so friends.

The fall of 2015, for some reason, was the time for change. I started a new job, was preparing to move to an adjacent city, and one day I simply decided that the half-hearted letters introducing myself that had piled up in my drafts folder had to stop. Potential wasn’t good enough anymore. I kept asking myself “what have you got to lose?” After all, he didn’t go to my church, wasn’t someone at work, he wasn’t even in a community nearby–if it was an awkward “no thanks” in response to my carefully crafted question, it would change nothing in my life, and disappoint no one in my immediate circles. This may seem like an odd benefit, but it’s difficult enough to develop good friendships in your 30’s without then alienating those friends by dating and/or dumping their friends. I’ve damaged near-lifelong relationships by disappointingly not falling in love with a friend of a friend.

But back to the crucial moment of hitting send. After all, I was 35. It was about time I asked someone out on a date.

So I wrote the note, and sent it. Then I shut down my computer and went to bed. I even deleted the app from my phone. I couldn’t bring myself to open my inbox the next morning, so I waited for my lunch break. I couldn’t melt down in the office, after all.

There was a response. It was kind. He was flattered. He was funny. He appreciated the note, and said “I would be very interested in getting to know you better.”

VERY INTERESTED.

I was suddenly the incarnation of joy. I’d never felt so elated. For one thing, I was right. I am always afraid of my reads on people, especially men. But I had read the situation correctly. Maybe my intuition was actually working in my favor this time.

I had been brave, thought I, patting myself on the shoulder, and sacrificed potential on the altar of truth. I had killed my darling. It had taken me years, and tears, and wondering, and doubting, and being afraid to exchange the phantom potential for a concrete answer. I had words, actual words. Words of affirmation, and appreciation, and kindness.

I wondered why I had been so afraid. I think I smiled for days. So this was it. This was what I had been waiting for fifteen years. It all seemed worthwhile, where in the past this long-term single situation of mine had felt arbitrary, desolate, and punishing.

Next week: Part 2

We Need to Talk About Anne-with-an-E

I wouldn’t call it “hate-watching.” Not exactly. Perhaps a more accurate phrase would be “hope-watching.” One hopes that someone else will really get your favorite characters, and that the translation from book to script to production to actor will be like the most perfect game of telephone you’ve ever played.

While really, you’re probably expecting us to be talking about the really big news of the Gilmore Girls and their infamous Last Four Words, PBS made a move to compete by kicking off the holiday season with a film-length remake of Anne of Green Gables.

I’m not going to dwell on the surface mistakes like the carefully placed freckles and spectacularly frenetic shade of red hair forced on Ella Ballentine’s Anne, Marilla’s drastic eyeliner, the face-full-of-manure farm joke that occurs in the first scene, and how Diana Barry’s hair is FAR from raven black. And don’t even get me started on the instances of “oh my gosh!” and “yeah, ok.”

Of course, the definitive Anne, produced during the 1980’s and starring the most perfect Anne ever seen on film, Megan Follows, is hard to beat (side note–who must she have wronged to deserve that imdb profile photo??). Follows’ portrayal is hard act to compete with, as is Richard Farnsworth’s portrayal of sweet, shy Uncle Matthew, and Colleen Dewhurst’s stoic Marilla, although actors Sara Botsford as Marilla and Martin Sheen as Matthew turn in respectable performances. I found Sheen’s character hilarious to watch, though. He’s so irrepressibly charismatic, at odds with the painfully-shy character of the book’s Matthew.

Two mistakes are common when the movies adapt from novels; one is diverging so strongly from the original story that it becomes unrecognizable, and the other extreme is simply stringing together dialogue out of the book so faithfully that the film is composed mainly of words–it tells you the story instead of showing it. While the first is annoying, and the second is presumably more faithful to the book, it still fails to reveal the heart of a character, focusing instead on surface appeals to drive the plot.

The character of Anne Shirley in the books written by L.M. Montgomery is an unstoppable force, driven by an unending thirst for beauty and love. While the new production focuses on her dramatic tendencies, passionate emotional outbursts, and fanciful imaginings, and no one could accuse it of glossing over her abused first years by way of a few on-the-nose flashback memories filmed in black and white, what it misses is her authenticity. It’s a horribly difficult nuance for a young actress to portray, and that’s what made the older Megan Follows so wonderful at it. In the new film Anne seems as overly precocious as her perfectly-glossed lipstick and perfectly-spaced eyeliner dots…I mean freckles.

Plenty of small details are included that show the filmmakers are fond of the characters. Marilla uses a magnifying glass to inspect a small seam while she is sewing, referencing her weak eyes, and scenes from Prince Edward Island are nicely fitted in; sunrise over the tide flats, oysters being shucked on a wooden stump, the pastoral scenes of farm life, the change of seasons along the avenue of trees.

But Anne as written by L. M. Montgomery was far from a pastoral, old-timey cliché. Anne Shirley was a spark, something of a revolutionary, a change-maker, a poet, a believer and a dreamer. She defied the odds dealt to her by life and persevered. She was not spun-sugar daydreaming. The enduring character of her indomitable optimism, her fits of rage, her deep sense of sorrow and grief, her ability to feel everything so keenly and yet survive lends depth and direction to her dramatic episodes. Montgomery’s life was difficult, and she reflected in Anne her ideal response to the darkness of life, the ability to rise above circumstances through education, idealism, and a wild pursuit of beauty and truth. We need to talk about Anne, and Emily of New Moon, and Pat of Silver Bush. We need to not forget them and their ways of wrestling with bitterness and sorrow, and somehow finding the sweetness and joy in it all anyway. Perhaps the 2017 miniseries in the works from Netflix will get it right. We can always hope.

What about you? Did you watch Gilmore Girls or Anne of Green Gables?

Didn’t We Pray?

So maybe this story begins as many do. With a “sweet friend’s” post on Facebook. You know the kind of Sweet Friend I mean. The sweet eternal optimist, whose every dream or whim seems to get fulfilled. The champion tennis player, who also toured nationally with the select choral group in high school, who garners accolades and yet never seems affected by success.

The one who, years ago, tearfully prayed in youth group about being called to be a missionary…in Paris. And then actually went to Paris, and actually did mission work there for 3 years while you were slogging it from dorm to classroom and worrying about failing Philosophy of Religion. In the rain. Uphill.

That same Sweet Friend who went cheerfully to every prom and dance in a beautiful dress with a nice boy who also happened to be quite good looking. That same sweet friend who seemed in some way to be elevated above true drama and bitchiness that might come with such a role for less worthy people. In fact, she was the prom queen that everyone actually liked. You know, because that was the only dance in high school that you went to.

That same Sweet Friend who was asked to sing in a friend’s band in New York City when she was 25, just back from Paris, and while there, met the portrait photographer/Craft Woodworker/expert drummer who of course fell in love with her very white teeth and her shiny long hair that never seems to have a bad day, and her clear skin and her smiling eyes, and oh yeah, her actually glowing, phosphorescent, pearly personality and kind heart.

THAT friend.

The friend you can’t hate. The friend who actually empathizes because she is kind and sensitive, although she may not truly understand. But it doesn’t bother you because she actually never gives you those abhorrent chunks of romantic advice like “it’ll happen when you’re not expecting it,” because she’s also eminently sane and smart and doesn’t have a death wish.

THAT friend.

That friend who you cried for in the bathroom at her wedding, just because you’d miss her, and then you redid your mascara and went out to smile and dance, not because you had to, but because you wanted to.

That Sweet Friend, of course, who posted a beautiful, emotional tribute about her husband of 5 years, which ended with an exhortation to girls to pray for their future husbands, because she had prayed for this man since she was little, and God had answered her prayers and more by bringing this wonderful man into her life.

I direct you to my go-to author on this matter, the great C.S. Lewis, speaking in the voice of Aslan the Lion to Aravis in The Horse and His Boy: “I tell no one any story but their own.”

This Sweet Friend of course has her own story about the events of her life. Far be it from me to assume that she has no trials, no heartaches, no sadness, because her life has been dissimilar to mine. I don’t need to know, perhaps, all of her story. Perhaps it is all true. She has prayed for this man to come into her life since she was small, and God said yes.

But…I can’t help but feel that I know a few women have prayed for a husband since they were small, and, to use Sweet Friend of the Shiny Hair’s rhetoric, God has said (so far) no. Many weddings I’ve been to have been marked by teary parents saying that their greatest prayer for their daughters have been answered. There are songs about it, even, praying for the little boy your daughter will grow up to love (which sort of creeps me out).

But what about those parents who have prayed faithfully, prayed in tears, prayed and prayed for their sons or daughters, or those sons or daughters who have prayed to be part of a family of their own?

I know it’s the bride’s day on her wedding day, but I always felt my face grow hot with shame as I sat with my parents at a reception table, poised to race to the bathroom at the opening notes of ‘All the Single Ladies’, while the bride’s parents praised God for answering their faithful prayers.

It helps to understand that “no” is also an answer. It isn’t that my parents haven’t been faithful in prayer. I’m not single because I’ve dreamed about it my whole life and prayed faithfully to be single forever.

No. It may not have been the answer I wanted. But it is an answer. Some might be tempted to say that sometimes a “wait” answer to prayer looks like a “no” answer. In fact, a friend of mine who has been single far longer than I have and has even written several books on it got married just this past weekend. I’m sure that she didn’t think she was waiting anymore. As it turns out, her answer was not a no, but a wait. And wait she did, faithfully.

Whether my answer is a no or a wait is not for me to decide. For now, I just want the catharsis of noting that just because God answers one girl with a yes, doesn’t mean he will answer every girl with a yes, no matter how much they might pray.

Instead of “praying for your future husband,” how about just pray? Pray for yourself. Pray for your neighbors. Pray for your pastors, your leaders, your friends. Pray for the people who will come into your life, male or female, because God knows they will need some prayer to deal with you. Unless you find yourself relating to the Sweet Friend in this scenario more than to me.

In that case, I love/hate you. Hugs, I really love you. You and your shiny hair and white teeth and Paris vacation-oops-I-mean-mission-trip, too. I may not like you very much, but I do love you.

Read Katrina’s new post on SheLoves Magazine!

You’ve read posts from Katrina here on a regular basis. To change things up, our friends over at SheLoves Magazine are sharing her post today. Check out the excerpt below, and click through to read the full story on growing up in the dialysis room:

The dialysis unit of the children’s hospital is in the basement. A dark, quiet room with ground floor windows. Old plastic recliners face each other, separated by thin sheets, with accompanying TVs and wiped down antiseptic remote controllers. Guest folding chairs sit beside each recliner, or rather “parent” chairs. No child brings a friend here.

The two cribs in the corner have no TVs above them. No parents complain. The rocking chairs next to the cribs that are well used, the other parents eye them covertly, but they would not for the world trade places. Near the door is the nurse’s station, regularly abandoned. Most patients here are regulars too.

Full Article: http://shelovesmagazine.com/2016/dialysis-room/