Someday You'll Be Dead

Big, messy, unedited unloading of thoughts ahead.

The sermon this morning was about the second book of John in the new testament.  The whole book was read.  The idea was about how we should, as Christians, be known for love.  Love, love, love.  When the world hears the word Christian, they should think: love.  This is not really so true right now.  This is a problem.  We should fix it.  We should know that we are loved and then go love others out there in the world.  

I sat there agreeing with everything the pastor was saying.  About half-way through, I was itching for him to tell us some examples of how we should love.  Is it just about being nicer to people?  He  began repeating himself.  Love.  Go outside these doors and love people.  Ted and I started passing notes back and forth about how he needs to give concrete examples of people who have lived selflesslessly and how we can imitate them.  Give us ideas.  We are dumb sheep who like our comfort, and we need to be inspired by people who love well.  At least for me, I need this.  I suspect others might too since Ted overheard someone say that what he got out of the sermon was that he should "pray more." 

The last five minutes of the sermon was devoted to how we need to really understand that God loves us.  The whole thing imploded in on itself.  The navel-gazing began.  

The pastor prayed for us, that we would know God's love and then go out and love.   A song began, and I couldn't help feeling really cynical as I watched people in the crowd lifting their hands receiving God's love, having not been really encouraged in any tangible, concrete way to go out and live any differently than they had been before walking into the building.

Jesus taught by telling stories.  He didn't give us rhetoric the way we got this morning (admittedly, I do agree to every bit of the rhetoric I heard today).  My complaint right now isn't about what was said but about what wasn't said.

I kept wishing for a story about someone like Rich Mullins, the Christian songwriter who, as a multimillionaire, lived in a mobile home on a reservation as he worked towards getting his degree in education so he could teach music to the Native American kids living there.  Every year he told his accountant to set his yearly salary as the median blue-color worker's and then give the rest away.  He never knew how much money his talents ever really brought in.  He died in a car crash in 1997 before he finished his degree.

Or he could have told a story like this one, something that happened to one of Ted's students:

"I watched the man from across the street.  He looked like he was in his early 40’s.  His skin was light brown, but I couldn’t determine exactly which ethnicity he was.  He had thick, black curly hair.  His legs were in the street, but his torso was on the sidewalk, and his head was hanging at an odd angle.  And he was barely breathing. He wasn’t just sleeping; he was unconscious.

I got out of my car and went over to him.  I said, “Sir, can you hear me?”  He didn’t move.  I raised my voice and said, “Sir, please wake up!”  But he didn’t respond.  He had snoring respirations, the sound people make when their tongue is blocking their airway.  I rolled him onto his side, and his respirations became easier.  I grabbed his wrist and checked his radial pulse, which was steady and strong.

Once I had assessed him, I called 911, and asked them to send an ambulance.  When I hung up with the 911 operator, I realized that the man’s head was still not well supported, so I knelt down and put his head in my lap.  He started to wake up, and he was crying, sobbing, before his eyes were fully opened.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Jessie,” he slurred, and I could smell the alcohol on his breath.
“Jessie, are you okay?”
He shook his head.
“What do you need?” I asked.
“I need love,” he sobbed.
I gave him my hand, and he held it in a vice grip.
“I need love.  I need love,” he said, over and over again, as we waited for the rescue squad to come."

How many of us have ever been willing to do what she did?  I never have.

What about telling us the amazing story of those nine women in Tennessee who delivered care packages to people in need for thirty years, all in total secret?  How about encouraging us to secretly give to people in need?

What about having a foster parent get up on the stage to tell us about what it's like to love kids who've been pulled from their homes?  

What about giving people a list of nonprofits that could use volunteers?  Nonprofits like SMART (Start Making a Reader Today) where you simply read for an hour every week with a kid who needs some extra attention at school?  I did this for a year before we had kids and ended up assigned to a little boy whose mother was in prison.  Every week, he'd pull some tiny object out of his pocket, usually something like a sequin or rock, and tell me about how he was going to mail it to his mom.  

How about encouraging us all to simply invite someone out to lunch after church?

As Ted said at lunch, why have we in the American church set the bar so low?  If Christ's sacrifice in death is the standard by which we are to love, then few of us have ever come anywhere close to this level of selflessness.

The whole sermon, I kept thinking about the east African widow I met a month ago.  She has a high-energy five-year-old son and a year old baby girl.  They have been here less than a year.  Her husband, the sole breadwinner in the family, was diagnosed with stage four cancer a few months after their arrival as refugees, and he soon after passed away.  She was left destitute and then homeless.  She and her two children ended up in a women's shelter until a nonprofit got her into temporary housing.  I have been to her apartment.  As her son played outside with an adult neighbor on one of the busiest and loudest streets in Portland, she offered me food and wept in front of the large framed photo of her deceased husband.  She breastfed her beautiful baby and wiped tears from her face.

Her son looks like my son.  They were homeless.  Her son and infant daughter.  Homeless.  Here as refugees.  Deceased husband.  Shelter and temporary housing and shut-off notices from the light company, and how the hell are they going to make it?

I can't get her out of my brain.  If I were in her position, I would be wracked with fear every waking minute.  

So couldn't the pastor have told us about the people like this in our city who could use the helping hand of the church?  Maybe people just don't know there are people like the African widow out there.  But they're here.  THEY ARE HERE.  And what the hell are we going to do about them?

Will they know we are Christians by our love, by our love, just the way the song says?  I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.  Christ set a high standard.  I long to hear a pastor stand up in front of a church and say, "You have one life. It is short, and soon you will be dead.  What are you going to do with it?"

Dead, dead, dead, one day we'll all be dead.  Even the writers of Southpark know it.  Maybe what the church needs most is a healthy reminder of our impending death, not of how much God loves us.  I don't mean to diminish the importance of the message of God's love.  It's everything.  God's love is what sustains us and makes us who we are.  But if we aren't picking up the homeless drunks on the filthy streets, reading books to kids whose parents are in prison, and providing food and shelter to the widows and orphans, then what is the point? 

 I refuse to be a "navel-gazer."  I prefer to be a doer.  So far, I fail at it.  I am not holding myself up as the example of how we should show love.  I just want pastors to stand up on Sunday mornings and start shining the light on the needy in our communities so that we, in our comfortable and tidy lives, know. 

Dead, Dead, Dead, someday you'll be dead
Dead, Dead, Dead, someday we'll all be dead.
The minute we're born, we start dying,
We die a little more every day..
Young or old, rich or poor,
There's nothing we can do to stop it..
So look long at that Christmas tree,
It may be the last one that you see..
Decorate your house in green and red,
'cos someday you'll be dead..

--Trey Parker and Matt Stone

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do no break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” 

--Jesus of Nazareth

Dinner Theater

End of the road?

When does one stop an ongoing project that started five years ago?  What is the ultimate goal of this little blog?  At one point, it was to be a source of information and encouragement for others in the process of adoption.  I hope it did that to some degree.  Now that we have no more plans to add to this family, writing here feels more self-indulgent and a potential invasion of my kids' privacy than it already did.  

My opinions have changed so much since starting this five years ago.  Even the name of this blog is not something I would choose if I were starting out right now.  I'm much less touchy about semantics than I was in the beginning.  I somehow feel like there are now bigger fish to fry.  

This blog has been a wonderful creative outlet for me.  I have used it as a dumping ground for the things I want to catalog in life, a good example of which were the daily New York City moments from the winter of 2009.  I was conflicted as I wrote down those moments in this forum.  Was this the right place for it?  I mean, this was an adoption-blog, not a travel-blog.  This is an example of feeling that I was becoming self-indulgent.

So what to do?  Should I write a final chapter to this story here about the formation of this family, only to reopen if some dramatic change happens (and maybe not even then)?  

If I started a new blog, what would be the purpose of it?  Would it be completely anonymous?  Is that even possible?  There is a plethora of creative and informative "mommy blogs" out there, so I feel no need to add my voice to that lovely chorus. 

I spent some time last night reading the blog of one of my husband's acting students.  Her words and her spirit inspired me and even made me a little jealous. She's a beautiful person, and if it's possible to be jealous of a cancer patient, I am.  It's called Tropic of Cancer, and you should spend some time there.

It just took me fifteen minutes to write that last paragraph because the kids are now up, and we're having a conversation about how it's not fair that daddy is always the one to take the puppy out to poop every day.  So we're knee-deep here in the minutia of how to get a farting dog to relieve his bowels in the morning.

Sigh.  Where to go from here?  I mean, besides taking the dog out for healthy shit.

First and Last

First day of kindergarten

Last day of kindergarten

I started crying the night before as I wrote the thank-you note to her teacher.  I would post the letter here, but I'd just start crying again as I typed it out.  What this woman meant to my daughter is impossible to capture in a card.  My friend Julie called her daughter's first teacher in the U.S. a "first responder," and I find this a good description.  Our daughter's teacher was also a surrogate mother from 8:30-3:00 every day, a woman who went above and beyond to make sure Beti felt secure, nurtured, supported and validated at every moment of her day at school.  That is not an exaggeration: at every moment.  She never once flinched at the prospect of welcoming at the 11th-hour a newly adopted child from a foreign country who spoke virtually no English.  She will forever be one of my life's heroes.

On the last day of school, she showed all the kids and parents the 20-minute DVD she's put together of highlights from the year, set to Michael Jackson and White Stripes songs.  A solid half of the parents were crying through it.  She gathered all the kids together, stood above them, pulled out a wand, and declared them all first-graders. 

The kids ran to hug her, and after it was Beti's turn, I grabbed her too and thanked her.  I held on tight.  I couldn't hold back the tears, and as she hugged me, she assured me that Beti would be okay and that she could write her as many emails as she wanted over the summer and come visit next year.  I squeakily and tearfully asked, "Can I come too?"

I have always loved and respected the teachers I've known, but now that I'm a parent of school-aged children, the value I give them has grown exponentially.  We are so lucky, so thankful, so happy that Beti experienced what could not have been a better kindergarten year. 

What an emotional week.

Middle-age is a'comin.

It started with my excitement about going all by myself on a trip to the newfangled "JCP" store to look for a swimsuit for myself and Father's Day gifts for next weekend.  

I sent Ted a photo of myself in a suit that made it look like I actually had something up top.  He showed it to the kids, which they thought was hilarious.  Mama usually ain't got cleavage.

JCP will make you sexy, you know it.

Later, I drove across the street to look at discount shoes and then walked two stores down to a party supply place.  I was in these stores only twenty minutes, and my car was gone.  This was not one of those complicated, multi-layed parking garages.  It was just plain ole outdoor lot in front of a strip mall, and my car was missing.  I wandered around for five or six minutes, getting more and more panicky.  I felt the heat rising in my neck.  One of my first thoughts was about my brand-new swimsuit that was just stolen along with the car, dammit.

I called Ted to tell him what was up.  

"Honey, the car is gone.  It's just not here.  I was only in there for twenty minutes, and it's just gone." 

I went into the first store and told them to call security, and they told me to call the police.  "You mean, just, like, dial 911?"  

"Yes ma'am.  They're right around the corner."

So I walked back outside and called the police.  I kept scouring the parking lot, but I had remembered the exact spot I'd been in, and my car was simply not there.  I tried to be calm as I talked to them about my emergency.  Since first realizing I couldn't find the car, I'd been hitting the 'lock' button twice to listen for that telltale "beep" of the horn to signal where my car was.  I hadn't heard anything at all.

At least not until I was on the phone with the 911 operator, having already given my name, phone number, car make, model and year. 

I had just bought a JCP swimsuit for myself and then completely lost all memory of having driven my car from one end of a parking lot to another.  And not only that, but I was so convinced my car had been stolen that I acted on my panic and called the police.  

(In case you're wondering why I'd driven my car from one side of a parking lot to another, it's because I hadn't seen the party supply store until I was leaving this strip mall.  I'd done a quick turn-around to go to the other store.)

That is the end of my little story about how I'm getting old.  It is not poetic or profound or anything.  Just me losing my mind.

The Garden of Your Mind

I am unashamed to admit that I love Mr. Rogers.  Beti loves when we watch the show online.  Whenever he asks a question to his television friends, she always answers him out loud as if he were sitting across from her.  She used to do this when she first got here and would watch Tsehai Loves Learning.  I love this about her. Abe complains when we watch Mr. Rogers, saying that it's "boring," but one night this week, when Mr. Rogers suggested we all go to the land of make-believe, Abe sat up straight and yelled, "Oh! I love this part! Yay!"

I am also unashamed to admit that I sat through this video with a growing smile on my stupid face and then was crying by the end of it.  There was never a purer soul than Fred Rogers.

The Parade

While sitting waiting for the parade to start tonight, it hit me that at last year's parade, I had just returned from meeting Beti in Addis Ababa.  I was still jetlagged even.  I'd met her.  I'd put a temporary tattoo on her arm, watched her push the little kids around on a decrepit push-toy, and then I'd had to leave her there.  She has told me that she knew who I was even though she wasn't supposed to know who I was.  At last year's Starlight parade in downtown Portland, my neighbors and family were sitting around me while she was with her friends in Addis.

This year, she and Ted ran the 5k Starlight Run.  She wanted to dress as Darth Vader in a clown wig.  Ted tried to put together an Obi Wan costume but we didn't have any brown hooded things laying around the house, so at the last minute he ran as a Scottish 1950's high school basketball player in black leggings. 

She, of course, was one of the first kids to finish the race.  They didn't keep track of it, but my suspicion is that she was the youngest to finish first.  I just saw some bigger boys ahead of her, plus adults.  Then her.  In a Darth Vader costume.  Holding her dad's hand and slapping her brother's hand as she ran by.  I yelled loudly and tried to get a picture, but she was way too fast.

It got dark and the parade started (the grand marshals were these guys who were as adorable in person as they are in this famous video).  The firefighters started the parade with a routine of taking turns jumping off a ladder onto a hand-held trampoline.  She turned and asked, "Mom, can I go?"  I let her.  She ran up to them, and they put her on the trampoline and gave her a bounce up in the air.  She ran back with huge smile.  With anything physical, she is fearless.

On the way home, she passed out asleep, mouth gaping open in the back seat.  Inside, she discovered that the dog had chewed the nose off a toy gorilla and thrown it back up.  The dog had also brought down one of her baby dolls and taken his pants off.  She laughed about that.  I laughed too.  I turned to do something.  She fell flat in the middle of the floor and started crying.  I went to comfort her, and she cried-almost-sobbed into my shirt.  I rubbed her back, asked what happened, said to Ted, "One minute she was standing and the next, she's on the floor! I have no idea what happened!"  I was having fears of some running-related latent injury.  She kept crying into my shirt.  Then she looked up at me and smiled.  She was faking.

I was angry.  Really angry.  I scolded her and put her on a chair so I could cool off.  Ted did this to me once the first year we were married.  I was walking out the door, and he collapsed on the floor while grabbing his chest.  I panicked.  I ran at him, grabbing for my phone to dial 911.  He saw the look of panic in my face and let me in on the 'joke'.  There are few things that make me angrier than someone tricking me into thinking they're hurt.  And who does this anyway?  Who is it funny for?  I was livid then, and I was livid tonight.

There are two actors in our house.  Two.  They are both really good actors who commit fully to the role they're playing.  But Sweet Jesus, up on high in our eternal home and residing in our sinful hearts, if either of these actors ever trick me again into thinking I need to get an ambulance for them...  I don't know how to finish this thought.  They both know they better never do it.

I gave her a hug and sent her to bed.  Then I called her back.  I hugged her again and told her I love her.  She furrowed her brows but leaned into me.  She does this sometimes.  I think it's hard for her to remember that even when I get mad at her, I still love her.  And I do.  I hugged her tighter and told her again, just to say it twice.

I am not an actor.