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.

Why I Won’t Coach My Own Kids

My brothers and I grew up playing soccer, and my dad coached us all at one point or another.

It did not go well the season he coached me. The team did well, he would want me to point out. But our relationship was no bueno. We are very much alike in terms of intensity and I was at an age where I needed to push back—from safely across the room or huddle; my mama didn’t raise a fool. Things were tense between us the entire season.

Directly afterwards I switched to volleyball.

I felt then what I can verbalize now: for me to be good at something, I needed the full love and support of my family, in the stands and on the sidelines, cheering me on.

And if my dad was my coach, I wasn’t getting that from him. I was sharing it with ten other girls.

I didn’t want to share it. And for the rest of my career, I didn’t have to.

This is the first reason I will never coach my own children.

I did spend seven years coaching other people’s children. Honestly, I struggled to have the patience to coach high school students. Some of my players were using volleyball to fill time until their favorite season started. This was hard for me. I wanted everyone to give the same dedication to volleyball that I had given. And I had a hard time dialing it down. My teams were fun and successful, but I was a hard coach to play for, and I know it. There are a whole pack of young women on Facebook who consider themselves “survivors”.

They are all still in touch with me, and lead amazing lives as grown ups so it must not have been that bad. Even so, this is the second reason I will never coach my own children. It’s all well and good to have survived a coach.

But I never want my kids to feel like they survived their mom.

The third reason has to do with the sport parenting culture these days. It scares me.

We saw it in football this season, parents who already feel like so much is at stake, that their 8 year old’s NFL dreams live or die in Mitey Mites football.

There was maneuvering for starting positions. There were dads looking ahead to high school, talking about moving into school districts where the rosters were not so deep. And there was tension and hostility towards the coaches’ kids, and accusations of favoring.

I don’t want us to lose sight of our basic family values. I want to insulate my children as much as I can from the greedy and self-serving culture of youth sports today. It wasn’t like that when my brothers and I were playing. I want my kids to love it for the same reasons we did, because we were strong and fierce and challenged. But I also want them to keep their values and their souls about them.

I can’t do that from the bench. I have to do it from the stands.

Somebody has to coach the kids. I get it. I know parents who do it well, including my younger brother, who coaches with old school values and a lot more patience than I ever had.

But I will never do it.

We should all know our limitations as parents, and this is one of mine.

Oregon Trail Part 1: Campgrounds and Football Games

They said they were coming at 7 am, and the big truck rolled down the street at 6:45. Shea put flip-flops on to take the kids to school and when he came back, every single other pair of shoes was packed. I got distracted while moving the kitchen supplies into the trailer and when I went back at 9:30 am, all the pots and pans were packed.

I had a pile of laundry because I thought they weren’t unhooking the appliances until the next day. “Good news!” Dan the Moving Man told me at noon that first day. “You don’t have as much stuff as we thought! We are ahead of schedule so I am wrapping up the appliances.”

I texted JFK Amy: Can we come over tonight to say goodbye? And stay for dinner? And baths? Can I borrow some pots and pans? And can I do some laundry?

We planned to leave by 1:30 pm on Friday and by 1, there was a crowd of friends to see us off.

I will never forget that.

We drove 180 miles across LA on a Friday afternoon and made it to Bakersfield in four hours. I was feeling pretty good about that. We didn’t have to sedate the dogs. The kids were calm. And we pulled the trailer over the Grapevine with nary a shudder from the engine.

This is our sweet old girl Sugar, cuddled up with Kate in the backseat.

The only thing was, it was dark. And every person with an RV knows that you should never set up your brand new RV for the first time in the dark. This trailer has a side pop out. That’s new for us. We learned that you have to place the trailer carefully so the pop-out doesn’t pop into the water spicket or the power pole.

In our case, it took two tries to learn that lesson.

The next morning we were up and off pretty early. It was the Day of a Thousand Stops. In our hurry to leave Bakersfield, we forgot to send the kids to the bathroom one more time, but we did make sure they had full water bottles.

Why can’t everyone have to pee at the same time?

We were trying to get to Merced by 1 pm, since there was a very important football game that needed watching and I had picked a campground with cable hook-ups for this very reason.

There is no shame in this game. Every new trailer comes with this kind of outdoor tv hookup. — Even Lizzy likes the Tide!

It was a little slice of river heaven.

The next day was our long day, 250 miles to Redding. It was colder, and the landscape was changing from the flat farmland of California’s Central Valley to the rolling ranchland of Northern California. We started to see more water, although I can tell you that California’s drought is real. The lakes and rivers were disturbingly below their normal levels, with sometimes hundreds of feet of exposed bottom. At Lake Shasta, we drove past a houseboat marina that had dropped more than a football field below the dock, left dangling on the hillside.

Redding looks more like Southern Oregon, and it was the first time we were cold during the day. We huddled up in the trailer with the TV on and had a movie night with Maleficent.

We arrived home the next day, ahead of the furniture. We slept on the floor in the master, all seven of us, and woke up to frosted sidewalks.

In the first week, we unpacked all the boxes that came into the house. Which doesn’t mean that we found all our things, only that we unpacked all the boxes that came into the house.

I don’t want to sugar coat something that was hard for us. The sound of Gabe wailing as we drove away from the best friends he has ever known left a wound on my heart. Sometimes when Kate feels lonely, she says “Mom, remember the day we left California and all my classmates gave me a hug and a goodbye card?” Overall, I think they were a great age to make a move like this, and they have adjusted well in Oregon. But Shea and I knew that we needed to get the trip part–in-between the old life and the new–right. It had to be a fun adventure, a special time for us to be together as a family. The kids needed to know that while lots of things were changing, this part, the family part, was not. It was still the same mom and dad, same way of doing things, same crazy dogs.

Things they can count on, things that don’t ever change.

Friday: Oregon Trail Part 2: The First Six Weeks

Women Who Come Running When

I bought these as favors for Anne's baby shower. There have never been sisters in my family before, and I wanted to let the important women in my life know that I learned about sisterhood from them. This is who we try to be. — I bought these as favors for Anne’s baby shower. There have never been sisters in my family before, and I wanted to let the important women in my life know that I learned about sisterhood from them. This is who we try to be.

On Halloween we trick or treated with neighbor friends, because that’s how we do. Steffani and Laurie know each other through me. They both have three year old daughters, Clare and Abigail, who decided that they had to trick or treat holding hands. Since Annie refused to get out of her stroller, I kept up with the older kids as they ran from door to door. Pretty soon, Steffani and Laurie were half a block behind us.

We all caught up again at Lara’s home, where as we stood outside with the kids milling around, Laurie gave Steffani her phone number.

Suddenly I was twelve years old again.

Wait, what? Why are they exchanging phone numbers? If they become better friends, what will happen to me?

Now, I know that this is silly.

And I further know that I am the one moving away.

But for one really solid moment, I felt alone.

I am blessed with an abundance of wonderful women friends. They live everywhere, from Maui to Canada and points in between.

But Steffani, Lara, Dana, Laurie, Amy, Jennifer, Angela. These are the women within shouting distance. They are the ones who come running when. And any woman—but especially a mama—knows that you cannot do life well unless you have a solid core of other women who come running when.

From midnight trips to the ER to parenting advice to playdates over muffins and coffee while the babies play, these are the friends who make the daily business of parenting joyful from the simple knowledge that I am not alone and there is always another way to cut the cake or skin the cat, depending.

So I’m sad.

Because these women right here, right now? They will always be my friends, but they won’t be within shouting distance, and for a while I’m going to feel like I lost my safe place to land.

They have taught me: we all need women who come running when. Women who love us and support us and answer the phone at 2 am. Women who laugh with us and at us and don’t see the dirty dishes or the pile of laundry. Women who travel with us and celebrate with us and cry with us when it all goes wrong.

They see us at our best and our worst and they still come running when. They show up for it all.

I want to say thank you to these women for making my life here so beautiful and full of love and joy. I couldn’t have done it without you and I love you.

And here’s to all the women who come running when.

May you know one and may you be one.

Pennies on the Dollar

It’s October.

You wearing pink?

Dana and I have stayed away from this because even though I am a survivor of not-breast cancer and her dad passed away from not-breast cancer and America is coming to the realization that the whole pink thing is kind of a sham (where the money doesn’t go where they say and cancer-causing chemicals are sold in pink bottles), we do have boobies.

But I just read something that pushed me out of my silence. And that’s saying something. The first week of October I took a phone call from one of those breast cancer faux fund-raising companies where the person on the phone is being paid a commission based on the amount of donations they get, and less than half of the money actually gets donated to research. When I stopped the lady mid-sentence to explain that we donate to another kind of cancer, because I am a survivor, she paused and then said “So?”

This thing that made me get up in the middle of the morning on a Monday when there is laundry to do and a shower to take and Dana and I were going to repost last year’s Halloween posts because we just need a break? Here it is:

“A little more than 4 percent of the National Cancer Institute’s annual budget goes toward childhood cancers. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society allocates 8 percent of what’s donated to research for cures for kids. In the past ten years, there have been nine drug approvals specifically indicated for pediatric cancer, which is a fraction of the number of adult cancer-fighting drugs approved each year. Even though childhood cancers do account for less than 1 percent of all cancers annually, they remain the leading cause of death by disease in children…

(P)art of the problem has to do with profits. Almost 60 percent of medical research in the United States is funded by pharmaceutical companies, not by the government. Because children’s cancers impact far fewer patients than adult cancers do, the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t have a financial incentive to invest money in developing new chemotherapy drugs for children because there isn’t a way for it to get a return on the investment.”

(“Your Child Has Cancer…”, Elizabeth Foy Larson, Parent Magazine, November 2014)

What does this have to do with pennies?

For every dollar donated to the American Cancer Society, one penny goes towards childhood cancer research. One.

From the Lymphoma and Leukemia Society—covering Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, which is the most common type of childhood cancer? Two pennies.

The National Cancer Institute? Using our tax dollars? Only 4% of their annual budget. Four pennies.

Wow. Our childrens’ lives are worth pennies on the dollar.

Are boobies more important than babies?

If you don’t think that’s a fair question then how about this: How many women would trade their boobies for their babies without a thought?

Right. See what I’m saying?

This is not about valuing one life more than another.

And it’s not about a “my cancer is worse than yours” contest. Yuck.

Boobies are important. But the kids need a fair shake, which is something they don’t often get in the good ol’ US of A, where we value too many things more than we value the lives of our children.

Do you have pennies? We have pennies. What if we all took our pennies, turned them in and sent the money to organizations dedicated to childhood cancer research?

You can find a list of those organizations and how they use the money at www.cac2.org

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: