The Pieces of My Heart

Yesterday our pastor, Father Mike, came to talk to the adult formation class. He was supposed to have a list of questions to answer, but he left it at home. So instead, he asked “Does anyone have anything they want to ask?”

One of the dads said “Sure” and opened up the can of gay marriage.

At which point, most people screwed themselves down into their seats. I know I did. When religious folk start talking about gay marriage, I listen fearfully, waiting for them to say the thing that means I have to get up and walk out, the thing that breaks tiny pieces off my heart.

Those pieces have names, children I have known and taught. Most of their faces blend down into one specific child, bullied into cutting precisely spaced lines up both his arms.

Three of those pieces belong to good friends, married almost as long as Shea and me, and their sweet son, who they had to fight to get baptized in a Catholic church. They are good moms, with a strong devotion to Mary, like most Catholic moms. They try to go to Mass every week, but sometimes the tension is too much.

Two pieces belong to distant cousins, together for almost fifteen years.

And two to the couple who have lived next door to my parents for over twenty.

Four to the family down the street, with their sweet and wonderful daughters.

One to a dear friend who is a fierce defender of our faith and also gay and drinks far too much to reconcile those two truths in his life.

So when people of God rail angrily against the dangers and threats of gay marriage, I want to hold these pieces of my heart up and say “But what about them? They are beloved children of God too. And we are hurting them in God’s name. We are turning them away. How can this be right?”

But it wasn’t like that yesterday. No fire and brimstone. No black and white. And best of all, no anger.

Father Mike explained the church’s position clearly, and the biblical basis for definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. He delineated between legal marriage and sacramental marriage. He revisited the church’s position on the sanctity of life and the way we are called to treat all people with love and kindness.

But then he said the thing that I have been waiting for a priest to say. I don’t remember his exact words but here’s the gist:

“This is a tough issue. And we have to struggle with it. It’s not enough to simply say one thing or the other. We have to engage it and pray over it and look to the Word of God.

Because we have these people in our lives who are good and we love them. So we have to understand that it’s messy.”

It’s messy.

Shea and I stand apart from our church on homosexuality. We struggled with it. We prayed. We saw the people that God walked through our lives and we know that love does not come from evil. We contemplated leaving the church. We walked out of Mass when priests preached hellfire and brimstone and sanctioned bullying. We wrote letters to the bishop to complain.

We decided to stay.

We decided to choose love.

Love for our friends and family and their relationships. We witness and support their commitments, and share the struggles of marriage and parenting.

Love for anyone searching for who they are. I always tried to be a safe and soft place for my students to land when they were wrestling with life. Now we try to be safe and soft as a family.

Love for the goodness of the church, for our faith and traditions.

Love for the humility of Pope Francis and Father Mike who remind us that it’s messy.

I asked Father Mike yesterday if my friends would be welcome to sit in his church, as a family. To raise their son as a Catholic.

And he said yes. Because of the sanctity of life. Because we shouldn’t keep anyone from a relationship with God. Because Jesus called us to love.

I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I think Father Mike has the right idea.

You Can Take It With You!

We’re celebrating two years by looking back on some of our favorite posts.

My very first post on Full of Graces was “Here”.

This is part of what I said:

And now…I know this: my life is not a highway anymore. Once I slowed down, I noticed that I had arrived. I was Here.

This is not about being a stay at home mom. That’s not what I mean by Here.

Here is a place for which my husband and I hoped, prayed and worked.

Here is a destination to be savored and explored.

Here there are graces and blessings and peace.

Here is what I wanted; I need to stand still, right Here and live it.

The journey is important. The journey pushes and strengthens us. But every journey needs a destination, or it’s just wandering.

When I wrote those lines, I was more hoping they were true than knowing for sure. But that’s kind of how I roll. I think about how life would be if and then I set out to make it happen.

Sometimes, I succeed. Sometimes, I don’t. And sometimes, a better truth comes from all that effort.

When I made my life still and calm and prayerful, into the stillness came a loud awareness that we needed to make a change.

Let me tell you, it wasn’t very long either. Makes me wonder what other stuff I missed in my loud and busy previous life.

So we made a journey. And the journey taught me a lesson about Here.

Here is a lot like Truth. Static AND dynamic. Here is more about heart and people than it is about place. My Here is here, same as it was there. The same graces and blessings and peace. Same God. Same gratitude.

We just picked it up and moved it 750 miles.

But if I had never learned to stand quietly and still, I wouldn’t have recognized my Here. And then either we wouldn’t have moved or I would have left my Here behind.

Then there would be no Here here.

Or there.

Holy Dr. Seuss.

My point is that first we have to learn to stand still and quiet in our Here, filled with graces and blessings and peace. And then it doesn’t matter what happens next because the Here is portable.

We can take it with us.

Still Planting, Still Growing

We’ve just passed up our two-year anniversary here on Full of Graces. Last week, Jen and I were talking about some of our favorite posts that we have written. Immediately my mind jumped to the post I wrote about Planting Trees. I remember that we had just moved into our new house and the kids were so little. My husband’s parents gave us a bunch of trees, nine to be exact, to plant in the bare landscape of our back yard and I had purchased three beautiful lavender bushes and a jasmine to plant as well. As we (and by we I mean my husband) were planting all of these lovely things in our yard, it really felt to me like we were planting roots. It felt monumental, like this was now our home. We were both so eager to have a big yard for our kids to run around in, to have a safe neighborhood to Trick-or-Treat in, and we were sure that this place was it.

Two years later, now, our roots are definitely taking hold. The trees are growing slowly, and beginning to show signs of giving fruit this year. The lavender and jasmine bushes grow like crazy and fill our evenings with their beautiful fragrance. We’ve added a vegetable garden that nourishes our family. And as I sit out on the patio, rain or shine, morning, afternoon, or evening, I am so thankful for all of our roots. I’m thankful for this beautiful place to raise our girls, but I’m also thankful for the intrinsic roots that ground us all together. I’m grateful for the family and friends that have graced our home at Christmas parties, birthday parties, and dinners together, and that fill our lives with everyday laughter and love.

Our roots are beginning to run deep. And our lives are beginning to truly flower. Thank you for being a part of that.

I’ve Run Out of Spoons

One of the things I was looking forward to most about my daughter starting preschool was the opportunity for ME to meet new friends. I was really hoping to find a really cool group of women who have the same kinds of values with different backgrounds, and that we would all hit it off amazingly well and have coffee together and talk about the trials of Mommyhood. And guess what… it happened! I have met the neatest people at this preschool. I really like them, and I really like their children.

Now, when I say that it happened, I mean the first part happened. But it’s just amazing how, no matter how hard we try, we just can’t seem to find the time to get together for a cup of coffee, or sometimes even for a 5 minute chat after drop off. So when there was a flier in my daughter’s cubby for a Tuesday morning group called Moms Supporting Moms, I was all over it. We’ve started reading a book by Lysa TerKeurst called “The Best Yes,” which is about learning to say no, and learning to say yes to the best option for you and your family.

The other day, our conversation turned to the fact that many times, we all just feel overwhelmed. The other ladies in the group and I are all in different situations: a mom who works full-time, a mom with a child in grade school and a preschooler, me, the mom with a two-year-old and a four-year-old. I said to the other ladies that sometimes I feel ridiculous saying that I feel overwhelmed. I stay at home with my girls, who are still little, so we don’t have a million activities to do or practices to attend. We have family and friends that are close by who are always willing to help out. And yet, especially for the last couple of weeks, at the end of every day I sit down and realize that I didn’t get half of the things done that I wanted to, and yet, I can’t really put my finger on one thing that we did do.

One of my new friends in the group, Becky, said that she read an analogy recently in which a woman said to imagine at the beginning of the day, you have a handful of spoons, like a handful from the cafeteria line. And every task that you need to do takes a spoon. Make breakfast? There’s a spoon. Get yourself and the kids dressed? Another spoon. Grocery shopping? Spoon. But where it gets tricky is when extra things pop up that take an extra spoon. Breakfast takes one of your spoons, but what about when the two-year-old keeps playing with her cereal milk, even after you’ve told her not to, and just when you get up to get another cup of coffee, the bowl ends up on the floor? That takes up one of your spoons. A tantrum at the grocery store? That takes up two spoons, on top of your already allotted grocery spoon. Sometimes at the end of the day, you reach in your pocket for another spoon and there are no spoons.

Let me tell you, lately, I’m out of spoons by, like, dinner. Violet is shaking off her nap, which means that she needs to nap, but has realized that Mazie and I do stuff while she sleeps, and she’s missing out. So by about 4:30 on days that she doesn’t sleep, she is losing her mind. And Mazie is at the age where she super wants to help with everything: mopping, washing the dishes, making homemade bread, cleaning the toilets, folding the clothes. It’s really sweet, but those of you who have a four-year-old know that when they “help” it isn’t really help, and the task itself then takes minimum twice as long. Throw in teaching SAT tutoring classes, blogging, hosting essential oils classes, and a ton of other things that I want to do, and I’m all out of spoons. There was a day last week that I woke up and reached for my spoons for the day, only to find that my stash had not been replenished. Perfect.

And honestly, I just hate when I get low on spoons. I feel my patience slipping away and it seems like my kids just can’t do anything right. In my worst moments, I feel like they must just see an angry face in mine all of the time and it breaks my heart. Because I have great kids, and they are so enjoyable. I look around the house and I see the things that I just didn’t get to. My floors need mopping, I forgot milk at the store, and I haven’t replanted my vegetable garden. My friends are noticing that I’m out of spoons. Jen called me on it last week, which is how I know she’s really my friend. She didn’t let me off the hook when I said, “I’m ok, just a little overwhelmed.”

Unfortunately, I don’t really have the answer at the end of this blog post. But I will say that it helps to talk about it; it helps to know that it isn’t just me who is drowning out there in Mommyhood. There just might not be an “answer.” In “The Best Yes,” TerKeurst writes that we often fly the flags of things that we have overcome in our past, but that we rarely talk about the shortcomings that we are struggling with in our present. So here I am. I’m waving the white flag of the Overwhelmed Mama, hoping that you will see it and take solace that you aren’t alone. I asked Grandma Betty once how she survived being a single mom of two little kids who were only 15 months apart and she looked at me and said, “Some days I didn’t.” While that seems a little bleak, it was also very comforting. It means that I’m not some horrible failure as a mother, as a woman, or as a person. It means that we all go through valleys where the struggle is real. It also means, though, that we will come out on the other side having survived after all.

Redwood Highway

We’re beach people. Even more than that, we’re So Cal beach people. With a big dose of Maui thrown in the mix.

So when we decided to move to Oregon, a state in which there is one major freeway in the entire state, and only about three highways that turn left towards the beach from that freeway, it was a big gulp moment.

Saturday, we drove the first of the left turn highways.

Yeah, it’s January. So? You can take the girl out of So Cal, but you can’t take the So Cal out of the girl. Or her kids. They packed bathing suits.

We took the Redwood Highway, which is the 199, from Grants Pass to Crescent City, CA.

(Oregon fact: Oregonians do not say “the” in front of the highway name; when I do, it instantly identifies me as a California girl. I want my Oregon readers to know that I know that. But if I go south for a visit and say I’m taking 710 to 91 to 15, people are going to want to know why I’m talking like a caveman.)

The beauty of this drive was remarkable. I thought I’d share. I took all of these pics with my HTC smart phone and only some of them are filtered with Instagram. That’s when you know it’s good, right?

Take a look: