Written on the Body

In the same way that one encounters a word or idea and inevitably hears it or sees it in print within a day or two, I had the experience of seeing - for the first time - a tattoo with a message seemingly intended just for me and, within a couple of days, seeing another one!  And then it seemed like everywhere I looked I was seeing prophetic messages on upper backs and wrists and biceps.

Two of these fleshy billboards, in particular, stood out.  I saw the first while riding my bike.  I noticed the woman riding in front of me had two images tattooed on to the back of her upper thighs and every time we stopped at a red light I looked to figure out just what the images represented.  On her left thigh was a replica of a human heart - all valves and ventricles - and underneath a single word: Realist.  On her right thigh was a mirror image, of sorts, the kind of heart we all know how to draw - a Valentine - and underneath, in cursive script, the word, "Optimist."  The second tattoo I saw was on a woman seated in front of me on the streetcar.  She was wearing a tube top so I had a clear view of the sentence she had etched on to her left shoulder blade: "Change is the result of Awareness coupled with Action."

I don't know why these messages stood out for me except that in them I recognized some kind of Truth.  "Which are you?"  The tattooed hearts seemed to ask: realist or optimist?  Do you see things as they are or as you'd like them to be?  The second tattoo offered straightforward observation; I don't think you can argue that no matter how "aware" one is change doesn't happen without diving in and taking action and without awareness, action is just meaningless movement.

There is much meaning in each of these messages but for me they simply offer further proof of Marshall McLuhan's dictum that the medium is the message, after all.  Our Truths are simply what we decide to embody, what we project to others; those words that would reveal themselves on our skin if our skin could write what we are all about.  In sum: we are what we carry within us - those attitudes and actions that we live, day in, day out, at breakfast, lunch and dinner, through endless months of schlepping to work and lessons and grocery stores.  We are, in essence, messages writ large.  We speak through our bodies, often louder than we do in words.

Bend and Flex

When I stop to think about it, I see that I get frustrated when I buck against reality, instead of bending with it, as a tree would bend when faced with the reality of a very strong wind.  Let me be less cryptic: this afternoon - following umpteen efforts to detach myself from Sebastian (a restless sleeper at the best of times) - I finally managed to wriggle off the side of the bed and tiptoe out of the bedroom and into an hour of pressing "to-do's."  It felt good to settle myself into my office chair and know that I wouldn't be interrupted.  Creativity welled...and then I heard the bedroom door bashed open and Sebby come stomping out, howling.  So much for the to-do list.  Now it was frustration that welled inside of me.

For whatever reason my son consistently wakes up minutes after I sneak away, sensing that I'm gone, needing to be close again.  It's not that he's not tired; he falls asleep again as soon as he's in my lap, which leads to my dilemma: my son needs me to be able to sleep and I need to be unencumbered to tackle the to-do's.  It's much harder to type with a toddler on your lap!

Trouble is, when I try to fight the reality of my son's need for his mom I never end up with my tasks complete.  Instead I'm back and forth from computer or chores to the bedroom, locked in a cycle of productivity interrupted that fans my frustration like oxygen on a fire.

Giving into my son, comforting him, holding him on my lap seems a defeat of sorts.  He gets what he wants and I...don't.  At least I thought I didn't.  Today I decided to go ahead with the to-do list anyways, with him sleeping on my lap.  And it's slightly uncomfortable, yes, but I'm getting things done. 

One of the traditional practices of Christianity is the practice of submission - not the kind where you let people take advantage of you - but a deeper recognition that, like it or not, we don't go through life on our own.  Most of us, most of the time, go through life in relationships with other people and sometimes this makes us subject to other people's needs.  We can be mad about this and buck at it, but it doesn't make people's needs disappear - it just makes us frustrated and prone to snap, like a brittle branch.  Submission is about embracing flexibility and creativity - bending to fit our reality, rather than bucking at it.  Lo and behold, everyone's needs get met. 

I know Sebby will grow out of this - this fretful sleeping, this neediness.  His brother and sister both did. I guess that's submission's gift: that it asks us to let ourselves be needed - at least for a little while - because it knows the experience is time-sensitive.

That Vivid Emotion of Pleasure

Lately I have had a lot of moments where I feel overwhelmed with just how much there is to do when you're raising a family and working to support them; paralyzing moments where there are honestly so many things that need to be done right now that I don't know where to start.

Take Tuesday afternoon, for instance.  All of a sudden a lot was going on, all at once.  I had work I needed to finish while the baby slept, but my son called from school to say he had vomited all over the bathroom floor so could I come and pick him up, which required an immediate text and phone call to the piano teacher who needed to know that she shouldn't expect us later on.  I wondered whether I should wake the baby who still had a good hour's worth of napping to do and thought about who I could ask to watch him while I nipped out.  But then I remembered I didn't have the car that day and so there would be no nipping out anywhere.  At the same time I was thinking about what to make for supper that would be quick and easy and would allow me to get out the door at 6:30pm to be on time for that night's board meeting while simultaneously plotting when I might find time to give the house a good vacuum as the night before the kids had watched a spider literally eat a fly from it's web on our living room windowsill.

Everyday life at work and at home brings with it so many competing needs: the house needs cleaning, the dinner needs cooking, the children need fetching, the cub badges need sewing, the piano needs practicing, the baby needs nursing, the work needs doing.  And it's all equally important and it all needs to be done, and done NOW. 

This past weekend we tried to put on hold all the things that needed doing to go out to dinner as a family, try to enjoy life a little.  We got a table but the baby wouldn't sit down.  He'd arch his back and scream when we'd try to put him in the high chair; instead he just wanted to run around, pulling napkins and cutlery off the nicely-laid tables and going right up to other customers and patting their legs and looking up at them as they tried to enjoy a quiet meal.  We ordered our food and then my husband took him out of the restaurant while I ate and once I'd finished I went out and took over with baby so my husband could go in and eat his meal.  Oh joy, I said to myself, sarcastically.

Out in the lobby baby amused himself with the restaurant's automatic doors, pushing the big silver button to open the inner door to the lobby and then running to the outer door and pushing the adjacent button and stepping outside as the double doors opened, turning around to wave at me from the sidewalk.  Then he'd run back in and do it all again.

Doing what needs to be done when it needs doing is hard.  It's hard to rise to whatever occasion is before us, mainly because we think that there is much we could be doing besides tending to a never-ending list of needs.  We could be traveling or reading or shopping or exercising or vegging out.  We could be alone.

From where I stood on the sidewalk I could see in the windows of the restaurant.  I could see my husband and the kids sitting together, smiling and laughing.  I could see the baby's reflection, hear him squeal and giggle as he ran from door to door.  I should have felt frustrated that I wasn't sitting with the rest of my family, enjoying a rare evening out.  I could have felt angry, that I was standing outside, having to look after someone.  I could have felt regret, resentment, irritation and a sense of being hard done by.  But when I paid attention to how I was feeling, I was surprised to discover that in that moment, what I was actually feeling was pretty good.  It comes as a surprise that hard isn't necessarily bad.  It comes as a surprise that hard can be good. 

Marianne Williamson said, "joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are."  By most of the world's standards I have it pretty easy, but still those moments do come when I feel that meeting the demands of the day require more than I have in me.  I suppose that's where joy creeps in, in the visceral feeling that small and daily challenges have a hand in shaping me, in refining me, in making me into more than what I currently am.

I had to admit it was actually kind of fun, watching the baby push the buttons and open the door for people and giggle and squirm as I tried to catch him and bring him inside.  The other customers in the restaurant enjoyed watching the spectacle of our family.  "Boy you're working hard," a woman said to me as she left the restaurant that evening.  I couldn't help but wonder if instead all the hard work was simply working on me.

   

Knowing How to Love

Now I may have hurt my mom's feelings with that last post and so, in an effort to grow not only in love but in humility, I have to say that there are so many times when making life easier on the people around you is - most definitely - the loving thing to do.  I am the envy of all my friends and colleagues when my mom comes to visit and have been the blessed recipient of my mom's TLC after giving birth and every single year during periods of stress when I've just needed an extra pair of hands around the house my mom dutifully flies across the country and makes everything better.

My struggle is the personal struggle of knowing how best to love a child depending on the situation, how to figure out what response is called for, and when to push them to meet a challenge and when to step in and help them out.

It's ironic because I work in a church, but I rarely turn to prayer to help me figure this stuff out. Maybe I should start...

To Love Is Not To Rescue

I had an interesting experience on Sunday that got me thinking.

I had asked a young man in our congregation who has autism to help lead the call to worship at church along with other members of his family.  Seconds before the service was about to begin and just as we were all about to walk into the sanctuary this kid told me he was too nervous to speak into the microphone.  Wanting to avoid any possible bad feelings I said, "that's okay; do whatever you feel comfortable with."  And thinking I was being the epitome of the loving and compassionate minister I added, "your mom and your sister can take over if you're too nervous." 

And then I listened as this young man said the same thing to one of the other ministers: "I'm too nervous to speak into the microphone," and this minister said, "you know, I get nervous speaking into a microphone too.  We all get nervous, but you can do it," he said.

Sometimes in the attempt to be loving I take away a person's chance to do something hard.  I now see that I do this all the time with my kids.  "Oh, you go play and I'll make you a snack" I say to my nine-year-old who is more than capable of making his own snack.  "Oh, don't worry about doing your after dinner chores tonight...you're tired - why don't you just go to bed" I say to the seven-year-old who is actually ready to learn how to push through being tired to give other people a hand now and again.  Somewhere I got it into my head that to really love someone is to help make their life easier (says she whose own mother never sits down when she comes to visit but rushes about putting in a load of laundry or washing up the kitchen floor because it only takes a second and then it's done and you don't want to have to do it yourself, dear).

But I wonder whether rescuing people from the harder parts of life is really the most loving response?  I wonder if the truly loving response to someone who is nervous or anxious or dealing with big responsibilities isn't to bolster their confidence instead, to remind them that they are capable people and that they have it in them to do hard things.  How I wish I reminded this kid of all the other times he'd spoken with such courage at the front of our church.  Instead, I showed my lack of confidence in him and in turn he passed the microphone to his sister when it came time to say his line during the call to worship.

It doesn't feel good not to have to rise to meet the challenges and responsibilities in our lives; it feels good when we surprise ourselves with how well we've dealt with the challenges and responsibilities that come our way.  I need to remember this the next time one of my own kid faces a challenging situation: that the most loving response isn't to deal with the challenge for him or to remove it from her path, but to remind each that they have it within themselves to do the job, to accomplish the task, to rise to the occasion - that they are up to it, and that I'm up to cheering them on.

Ubi Caritas

I am learning that it is impossible to grow more loving without first growing in charity.  Charity is what unblocks Love's dam; it is to Love what wine is to conversation, or grease to a pan, or wax to cross-country skis - Charity is Love's lubricant.  Love doesn't flow as easily without Charity; and so comes the saying: where Charity is found, there is Love. 

We tend to think that being charitable is something we can quantify in tangible terms: giving "x" amount of money to a certain cause, or donating our old clothes and books and furniture, or sharing our house or our car or our food with people in need.  But being charitable can also mean being giving and generous with those things we can't quantify; giving of our patience and understanding and sympathy and forgiveness, and I think it's when we're really generous with these intangibles that we really grow in love for someone else.

Think how much we all love newborn babies, for example.  We are so giving towards them!  We get into their heads and try to imagine what life is like for them as a means of explaining their temperament.  If they want to be held for hours on end we say "of course, imagine - they've just traveled from one world to another."  If they are crying we commiserate and cuddle them, "after all," we say, "being born can't be that comfortable."  We grow in love towards our newborn babies in large part because we are so charitable towards them that we can empathize with them and want to do everything we can to make them feel secure.

Does the perception that kids become more badly behaved as they grow older stem, in part, from a lack of charity on our part?  What I mean is that when our children are newborns we tend to think that they're all good.  If they're doing something irritating, like crying or clinging, we tend to rationalize that it's because they don't feel right on the inside.  But as babies grow up we lose that charitable take on behaviour.  A kid acting out doesn't have a problem that we can help them sort out, they are a problem.  Take the young adults we hear about every September who are off to university or college for the first time and who binge drink and take part in all kinds of humiliating initiation pranks and chant lewd verses to songs they would never have sung a month ago at the cottage in front of their parents - are they a lost generation, or can we see that a whole whack of kids feel so insecure that they'll do anything, even stuff that's harmful and embarrassing, just to feel like they fit in?  Which response makes you feel more loving?

We had a humbling experience this summer that really made me revisit the importance of charity in all our relationships as a means of facilitating love.  One day on our summer vacation our little 18-month-old just changed personalities.  This normally sunny little boy who rarely cried unless there was a reason became horribly cranky and he wouldn't let me put him down, and he squirmed when he had to get his diaper changed and screamed when I put him in his high chair.  We couldn't see anything wrong with him - he didn't have any cuts or bruises - so we concluded that he must just be in a bad phase, the terrible twos must have started six months early.  The next week we were visiting my parents and my dad, who is a doctor, noticed a lump that had formed on this boy's collar bone.  It turned out he had somehow fractured his collar bone and the tricky thing with injuries to the collar bone is that you don't see the bump (which is the growth of the new bone over the injured area) until about a week after the damage has been done.  Our baby didn't show any signs of physical distress on the outside and our lack of charity prevented us from seeing that his crying and clinging was because of pain he was feeling on the inside.  We had passed off the effects of a fractured collar bone as "bad" behaviour!

We automatically become a lot more loving towards people if we decide that they are basically good and that any "bad" behaviour is actually a sign that something is not right with them on the inside.  This doesn't mean we don't call people on their bad behaviour, but a commitment to charity does make it easier for us to approach others from a more loving place and get at the root of whatever problem is making life difficult for them at the moment.

That All-Important First Look...

To my dear children,

You couldn't help but see JCPenney’s back-to-school commercials on TV this summer, the ads that featured the cute kids who tell you that “the only thing anyone really cares about” when it comes to school is that “first day” and the outfit you choose to wear.  “I’ve been told this stuff can make or break your entire year,” you heard one mom say in another of the ads while you watched a visual of her son alone at the lunch table because he’s not wearing the right kind of clothes.  According to the commercials you saw the most important task of the first day of school is to “cement your legacy of awesomeness with your first day look.”  The ads would have you believe that without cool clothes you’ll never be more than just a big loser when it comes to school.

You already know that it is important to try to look your best.  What we wear affects our confidence and other people’s confidence in us.  Dressing sharply gives others the impression that they are important to us - worth making an effort for – and of course, our clothes are a great way to express ourselves and what we’re thinking: it’s not for nothing that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institution just wrapped an exhibit of the safety-pinned leather jackets and tartan pants of the Punk era.

But children, please don’t listen to all the back-to-school ads that try to tell you that the sum of what you are is what you wear.  Even the coolest clothes in the world won’t cement your “legacy of awesomeness” as much as your character will - at school or anywhere else.

I remember the outfit I chose for my first day of junior high. In elementary school a great outfit was simply an outfit in which I could play easily.  But in junior high I would have to leave playing behind; a great outfit in junior high was an outfit that showed you were grown up.

I decided on a side ponytail (brushing my hair so carefully so that I wouldn’t have any “bumps”), a purple long-sleeved shirt and overalls – yes, overalls.  I can’t tell you now just what I was thinking when I put this outfit together, but I can tell you that I put a lot of thought into it.  When I said goodbye to my parents and road off on my bike to my new junior high school I was glowing – I felt so grown up. 

Unfortunately this outfit did not “cement my legacy of awesomeness” as I hoped it would but instead cemented me as someone who, to this day, is always one step behind when it comes to fashion.  The “grown up” and “cool” look that year, I soon discovered, wasn’t overalls at all but Levi’s 501 jeans, which weren’t available in the children’s department of the Bay, where I had done my back-to-school shopping with my mom. 

What really makes or breaks us is being faithful to the principles we believe in, and one of the most important principles of any faith is being compassionate towards others. 

One of the coolest boys at my junior high school was Jon (of course he spelled his name without an ‘h’) and I had a big crush on him.  Because in most classes we were seated alphabetically myself and my friend, Kelly (who also happened to have a big crush on Jon), were the lucky girls who always got to sit next to him.  Now Kelly and I were not the cool girls at our school (remember that I was the kid who wore overalls on the first day of gr. 7).  If you were concerned about "cementing your legacy of awesomeness," you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time talking to us.  

But Jon was a different kind of cool because, while he always looked great on the outside, he was also a person of character - a genuinely nice guy with a lot of compassion for others.  Most of the really popular people at my junior high were popular because they were somehow intimidating to the rest of us, but Jon was popular because he was kind.  Everyone liked him because he really seemed to like everybody else.  Everybody wanted to be around him because he made sure everybody around him was having fun.  His jokes were funny, not just making fun, and to this day I can’t recall him ever saying a mean barb or sarcastic comment to anyone.  If you polled the girls at our school I think you would have found that it wasn’t just Kelly and I who had a crush on him.

I never saw Jon after grade 9; we went to different high schools and I’m not sure where he’s at or what he’s up to today.  He might have a great job, a big house, a lot of money, or he might not.  But one thing is certain: he managed to cement a legacy of awesomeness not because he looked better than everybody else, but because he genuinely cared about everybody else.  He didn’t stand out for me at the time because of what he might be some day, or how cool his clothes were or how many parties he got invited to; he stood out simply because he took a stand, for kindness, for compassion, for goodness, for fun, for friendship and, most importantly, for humility – for thinking of others now and again and not only of himself.  Not surprisingly, he’s one of the only people whose names I can actually remember from my junior high school – a legacy of awesomeness if there ever was one. 

So when you get dressed for that all-important first day back at school, don’t forget that nothing makes you look as good as all the goodness that’s already inside of you.  Your character will always be your greatest accessory.