Tag: motherhood

Why You Should Read the Stanford Victim’s Letter

IMG_20131102_182049

I didn’t want to read it.

The injustice is getting enough play on the news. The Stanford rapist who will go to jail for only six months because he’s white and wealthy and the judge felt sorry for him and his dad asked for leniency.

That’s all I’m going to say about him, because it’s not about him.

His victim, she wrote a letter. You’ve probably heard that by now too. I didn’t want to read it because I don’t like to step into that kind of pain unless I have to.

At 2:30 yesterday afternoon, I realized something. I have two daughters. I live in a world of injustice. My God calls me to justice.

I have to read it.

So I did.

In college, the nights I was in that same situation are too numerous to count. The mornings I woke up not remembering a thing—not a thing—of how I got home or who brought me.

Me and all my friends. Every one of us. Over and over.

It’s blind, stupid luck that I did not become a victim. This is not to say that she is at fault. Only to second what she says in the letter—that she was the “wounded antelope of the herd”. And that hunters know what they’re looking for.

I think if you have college aged kids, maybe even high school aged, they should read this letter after you do.

Then you should talk about what it means.

The part where she realizes that she isn’t wearing her underwear anymore and understands how she’s been assaulted. Where she says the man who rescued her was crying too hard to give a statement to the police, because of what he’d seen.

How she found out the details of her assault from a TV news report.

The questions she was asked on the witness stand.

The picture of bicycles she has posted above her bed.

And don’t miss the part where she says she told the probation officer that she didn’t want her assailant to rot away in prison. She reached for mercy. They used it against her.

All of it. Talk about all of it. The drinking. The guilt her sister feels. The frat party where it went down. The judge, and how his justice is not blind, but sees skin color and wealth and privilege. All the things that could have been different, should have been different.

It raises a lot of questions. And the answers are hard. But we have to talk about it.

 

For the full text of her letter: Here’s the Powerful Letter The Stanford Victim Read Aloud to Her Attacker 

To sign a petition to have the judge recalled from his elected position: Remove Judge Aaron Persky From the Bench

 

IMAG0132

Last week, I took the kids to the park. I watch my neighbor’s kids after school, so there were five of them. We had a great play date—the park was packed and the weather was gorgeous.

Just as we were leaving, I heard Gabe yell. I turned my head in time to see Ross, 8,  hit the ground, shoulder first. His feet were still hooked on the rope of the jungle gym. He was completely silent for a moment and then he started to scream, a thin, high, continuous sound. Gabe kept saying “It’s bad mom, it’s bad”,

This is what happens in my head at moments like this: EVERYTHING. All the things. At once.

Ross and I had a conversation that he doesn’t remember. I was holding him still, which he didn’t like, but I couldn’t tell which part of him was hurt. I figured out it was his arm, or shoulder. Gabe and Ross’ sister Sarah, who’d magically morphed into  EMTs, were chirping in my ear that I HAD TO call 911. Or Mercy Flight. And Ross’ mom.

I managed to get all five kids back to the car. I put Ross in the front seat. While I was buckling Annie, Ross panicked.

“Ms. Jen, you aren’t going to buckle me, right? Please don’t buckle me.” Then he started sobbing.

My brain was screaming at me to buckle him, because it was bad enough that his 8 year old self was in the front seat, and the seatbelt would not have touched his hurt arm.

I started to explain but he rolled his eyes up to heaven and yelled “Ms. Jen, can we PRAY????”

Uh, ok.  

I hesitated, but not because I didn’t think we needed prayer. If there was ever a time for Jesus to take the wheel, this was it. But I assume my guardian angel holds a place in the prayer line during emergencies until I can get around to the praying. Right at that exact moment, we needed to get around to the painkillers.

But since it was his pain and he wanted to pray, we prayed.

I can’t say his prayer word for word. He asked God to take his pain away and to be with him.

Then he sure did end with this: “Please God, please. Tell Ms. Jen RIGHT NOW that she doesn’t have to buckle me. Please. PLEASE.”

I almost laughed out loud. This kid–he knows me. He knew I would pray with him and he knew I didn’t want to hurt him and he tried to use God to seal the deal.

But I am a mama, and Jesus had a mama and she was fierce. He knows what’s what. If someone said “Lord, we have a request to change her heart on the seat belt decision”,  the Lord would say “Are you crazy, man?  She’s a MOM.”

When I prayed, I seconded Ross’ request that God ease his pain and come be with him. I asked God to calm his heart and his fears and help me drive quickly and safely to his mom at the ER.

I finished with “Lord, please help Ross understand that I have to buckle him for his own safety. Amen.”

And then I did it, before he knew what was happening.

In prayer, as in life, the mama knows best.

Ross had a broken elbow that required surgery the next day. Two weeks later he has a rad, neon green water proof cast. I took them all to the pool yesterday and he swam like a fish. He’s counting down the weeks until he has his arm back, which will be–thankfully–before the Fourth of July. 

Summer saved.

 

Turning Your Wedding Dress Into Something Old and Forever

Kate makes her First Communion on Saturday. And she’s doing it in my dress.

This is kind of a thing in our family. Back when my brothers and I were getting married, my mom used her dress and my grandmother’s dress to make garters for the brides. They were our something old, and especially meaningful for me, since my grandmother passed in a horrible car accident only a few months before I met Shea. She should have been there on my wedding day and the garter made me feel like she was.

When the grandbabies started coming, my mom made a christening gown. Five grandsons later, she got to make a bonnet for Kate.

As soon as she found out Kate was going to wear my Communion dress, she sent me some lace from her dress to trim the veil and satin covered buttons from my grandmother’s dress.

My grandmother, Virginia (1944):

368BBB3D-8F9D-4072-8901-E58503AD6854

My mom, Terri (1968):

photo_2
Ted and Terri, August 17, 1968

Me (1979):

IMG_20160516_113051

Kate in her christening gown (2008):

Scan1_0001_0019

Kate in my dress with lace trimmed veil:

20160418_2027

My mom says all she has left of the two dresses is scraps. I think it makes her a little sad.

But the wedding dresses are a magical part of our family history. They could have hung in closets for the last 50 years, and for what? My grandma was tall for her generation, but still five inches shorter than my mom, so even though my mom wanted to wear her dress, it was too short.

I am the same height as my mom, but…how shall I say…more bosomous. I didn’t fit in her dress.

They would be hanging there still if my mom hadn’t had the courage to make them into something new, and lasting.

Now I have a garter to pass on to my girls when they marry. Or I will make them new ones from my dress and pass mine on to my granddaughters. Maybe eventually, there will be a collection from which to choose, our version of the Crown Jewels.

The christening gown is embroidered at the bottom with the name of each child who has been baptized in it—all three of mine and one of my nephews. It’s a living record of faith that I hope gets handed down for generations, until there’s no more room for names and a descendent of mine cuts up her wedding dress to make a new one for her grandchild.

In the meantime, Annie swears she will also wear my Communion dress when the time comes. And before anyone goes bridal dress shopping, I’ll pull my dress out of storage, just in case. If not I won’t be afraid to take scissors to that thing and make precious heirlooms for the grandkids that come along.

Just like a wedding is about a marriage and not a day, a wedding dress is about a family and not a bride.

The Power of Mothers

 

Grace

You know we have great moms. You know we aspire to be great like them. On Sunday we will celebrate them in love and thanksgiving.

We will also patiently endure the love offerings of our own chicken nuggets. At the dinner table this week, Kate asked me what I wanted for Mother’s Day. I said “No jewelry. No appliances. Nothing for the kitchen.” And she turned her face to me, sweet forehead all scrunched up and asked “Well, what’s left?”

Did you know that the original idea for Mother’s Day was never meant to be about mothers?

It was supposed to be for mothers, a day when mothers all over the world came together to use their collective voice for peace.

I learned this from Glennon at Momastery.

Julia Ward Howe issued “An Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World” in 1870. It reads:

Arise, then, Christian women of this day ! Arise, all women who have hearts, Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears ! Say firmly : We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, man as the brother of man, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

— Julia Ward Howe

What happened next was that, because she was a woman and a suffragette and she spoke the family business of her repressive marriage outside the bedroom, she was generally ignored.

Almost 40 years later, on May 10, 1908, Anna Jarvis observed the first Mother’s Day at her church. It was in honor of her mother, and again an effort to put the role and voice of mothers in the forefront of society. Her version was more palatable, and Mother’s Day became an official observance in 1914.

Then Hallmark realized there was money to be made and the rest is ugly history.

I don’t know any mother who says “Yippee! Mother’s Day!” For me, that’s because the rewards of my motherhood seem to flow towards me more than from me on any given day, to the point that I honestly feel I should thank my children for the love and joy they bring to my life.

But this iteration of Mother’s Day, as a call to action and justice—that feels real to me. It feels important. It feels powerful.

Mothers are powerful. Yes, we are. Helicopter moms and grizzly bear moms and tree hugger moms and granola moms and stay at home moms and working moms—we have some power.

This year, let’s use it. After church and the brunch and the school crafts and the “gifts” have been attended, eaten and opened—find a way to use your power.

Donate to Glennon’s Compassion Collective, which is feeding 6000 families every day.

Adopt a child from World Vision and become a “mother” for a child stuck in grinding poverty.

Send an email to the presidential candidate you support and the one you dislike the most and tell them why. Ask them to advocate for kids and peace.

Decide that this is the year you will become a Sunday School teacher or choir director or troop leader or coach and be an important adult in the lives of someone else’s kids.

Commit to a month of rosaries, asking the Blessed Mother to bring peace and love to this world.

Mothers are powerful and the world needs us.

Happy Mother’s Day.

 

 

 

 

Making the Pieces Fit: The True Story of My Quilt

In 2012, my recovery from postpartum anxiety coincided with the first Fall in 35 years when kids went back to school, and I did not.

Instead, I stayed home with a 5 month old who still took two naps a day. I found myself with a lot of time on my hands—twitchy hands that needed something to do.

At first, to battle the guilt and stigma I still felt, I allowed them to feed me. Graham crackers and Nutella. In November my friends ran a Nutella intervention but by then, the 15 lbs of damage was done.

I needed something else to do.

I’m going to make a quilt, I decided.

I know. Of all the things. But when I was younger, we had a third grandma named Opal who lived down the street. In the quiet moments when she sat to watch a show, she had a stack of quilt pieces next to her that she patiently hand-stitched together into flowers and then transformed into quilts.

I can do that, I thought. I can make those flowers.

All that late Fall and Winter, I sat on the couch while Annie slept and hand-sewed flower after flower with tiny little stitches, until I had a stack of 20.

Then I discovered that by making the flowers first, I had sewed myself into a corner. I wrote about it here. I showed you these pictures:

I hoped it was all coming together.

It didn’t.

Instead, I ended up with this:

IMG_20160501_201912

I stopped. The next summer was rolling in and my feet were under me. I hit my stride as a stay at home mom. I joined the gym with Dana. I started writing about my postpartum experience. Shea and I had an idea that maybe we should move to Oregon.

It was a busy and fruitful time, and I didn’t need the soothing, quiet stitching. The pieces sat for almost two years.

Last Fall, when Annie joined Gabe and Kate on the first day of school, my guilt came back. For three hours every day, I was alone while everyone else in my family worked. I started feeling anxious again. My twitchy hands came back. I did not buy Nutella, but only by the grace of God.

One morning, I pulled out my sewing box to mend a shirt of Gabe’s and there it was: my pile of flowers.

I am going to finish this quilt, I thought. I’m not going to read any directions either.

Whatever happens will be enough.

I knew this was about more than a quilt. It was therapy in those early months, soothing stitch after soothing stitch, quiet and productive. But then it became a reflection of me, shattered into pieces, and trying to fit them back together again.

When they didn’t fit back they way they were, well. It took a while for me to understand what that meant.

It was supposed to be queen sized. It ended up 2 feet by 3 feet. The edging is ugly on one side, although in the process of doing it wrong, I learned how to do it right next time. I used white thread on blue cotton, which is very unforgiving. I threw away more of my flowers than I kept, hours of hard work into the scrap bin. It doesn’t cover anyone completely.

But it’s enough.

I was supposed to be Mom Invincible. From the outside, I looked pretty good, but underneath was a mess waiting to happen. I was the woman everyone could rely on, a reputation which is very unforgiving in a personal crisis.  Then I was forced to show my crooked stitches  to survive. Some of the things I held onto were unnecessary and I cut them away.  I don’t have to be so big. Lots of things are not my job. I am scarred and have spoken my scars.

I am enough.

IMG_20160502_102702

Some people would never show this quilt, but I do. It sits on the big chair in the living room, visible to everyone who comes through my front door.

It’s the truth about me, and so many mamas just like me. We had a vision of what life could be. For a while, the pieces didn’t fit, or make sense.

Maybe we thought about quitting.

But we didn’t, and through love and prayer and hard work, we put it back together into something whole. Crooked. Wiser. Messy. Precious.

May is Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month. Perinatal mood disorders can start in pregnancy. They can look like depression, mania, anxiety. If you have a history of mental health issues in your life or your family—as I did—you may be at higher risk. But PMD can strike any women in any pregnancy.

Here’s what you do:

If you need immediate help, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

#askher: Ask the pregnant and newly delivered moms around you if they are ok.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call the Ob/GYN first and then visit www.postpartum.net for support. If the doctors cannot or do not help, call Postpartum Support International at 1-800-944-4773.

PSI Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month Blog Hop