At Nana's House

The kids play with a miniature ceramic tea set with broken handles on my nana's green shag carpet.  I remember the silver tea set I played with as a child, but I know it must be tarnished and hidden in the basement.  I have half a thought to go looking for it, but when I open the door to the basement, the steps are blocked with boxes that she has tossed down.  She can no longer climb the steep steps and has no way to store what won't fit upstairs.  We find trash frozen in the freezer so that it won't stink up the house until someone can come to carry it off.  I think about how fastidious she was when she was able, how we would tease her about how she wouldn't sit and talk after family meals but had to be up washing dishes and straightening up her already tidy house.  I would bring back cheap trinket souvenirs for her from our vacations until she started "hiring" me to come and dust all of her knick knacks.  Lesson learned.  But on a recent visit, she handed me a familiar plastic Shamu coffee cup for me to take home.  When I took it from her frail hand, it was heavier than I expected, and she explained that she had been filling it with her spare change for her great grandchildren.  I'm reminded of how she and my papa used to give me my weekly allowance, a five dollar bill folded neatly in thirds, and my weekly school lunch money in change in a brown paper bag, again folded in thirds, and secured with a rubber band.

My husband and I are the ones to slip them money now for the groceries and bills that Social Security doesn't fully cover.  My mom tries to refuse it, guilty and ashamed, but I remind her of the years she worked and struggled to take care of me, working multiple jobs and barely getting by.  She had nothing to put away to save as it all went to living expenses and the opportunity to provide a better future for me.  As a child I pleaded with her to give up a job so that I could see her more and wouldn't have to camp out some nights on my grandparents' pullout sofa while she worked the late shift.  I even promised that I wouldn't ask for anything for Christmas.  I realize now that must have broken her heart as she was working to pay for the roof over our head and the meals on the table.  Now I assure her that we have enough to share, that it is our pleasure, while also feeling guilty and ashamed myself that the little bits we offer aren't enough to replace her leaking roof, to provide a better life for them, to be more present and close in their lives.

Nana gave up driving years ago, but I remember having to call her when I missed the school bus in middle school and she would reluctantly drive the few miles to our house to take me to school.  It made me nervous how she would keep her feet on both the gas and brake pedals as she drove, making for a jerky ride.  She preferred to walk anyway and try to entice me for walks around the block after we ate meals at her house.  I, a chubby kid, would plead that we could drive around the block instead; pushing the pedals would be exercise, after all.  I wonder if she misses getting out.  She stays at home except for the occasional doctor's appointment.  We say she is lucky to have relatively good health and still such a sharp mind at 92, but she is longing for something better, the "golden years" she says she never really had since my grandfather died twenty years ago.

I have watched her and my mother grow closer over the couple years they have lived together, relying on one another and caring for each other in their weaknesses.  They have learned how to communicate better, to show the love that has come more easily between them and me but that has been difficult between the two of them.  We are a family of women, mostly matriarchs.  My grandmother is the oldest of six siblings, with just one baby brother among six girls.  My great-grandmother died in her nineties after outliving several husbands and lived independently until her death.  My grandmother has been widowed for over twenty years now, and my mom, my grandmother's only living child, has been alone since my dad died in his forties (I was five and my brother was eighteen at the time).  There has been much hardship, but it has born a gritty determination, a strong faith, independence, and strength in my grandmother.  I feel grateful that this, along with her love, is her legacy to me.  She is proud that I have always loved to read and learn and takes credit for this (where credit is due).

She wants me to take her dishes, the dishes I wished for years ago when we still gathered around the table regularly for family meals and holiday dinners.  They are totally impractical for our life--you can't put them in the dishwasher or microwave, they are delicate and fragile, and difficult and expensive to replace.  We have small children and a small house, so fine china has never been a necessity or even a good idea.  While I long for this connection to tradition and memories, I have resisted boxing it up.  It is a goodbye that I'm not ready to say, a marker of transitions that remain unspoken.  But there are other things I am collecting and packing up as I think about our stories and what makes up a legacy.

Family Sabbath

I believe in church, even when it is messy and hurtful.  It has often been a sanctuary for me, although I'm not unaware of the pain it can also cause.  I trust that we gain more in seeking together in community than we do individually.  I believe that there is room for the "spiritual but not religious" and "the religious and spiritual" to coexist and learn from one another.  Religion (and church as the institution that makes space for it in my traditon) gives us a foundation for exploring and practicing spirituality together.   Spirituality brings us into the mystery of the divine, a sense of awe and wonder greater than we ordinarily find in ourselves.  I have found that beauty in church and I hope to find it again.

But sometimes, my soul longs for Sabbath, for rest and re-creation.  Sometimes this introvert needs to hide away to rediscover my soul, and to rebuild community with the ones that share the most central places in my heart.  Sometimes I find God when I stop pushing so hard, when I stop seeking in the same expected places and am surprised to learn that I have been standing on holy ground all along. I was looking for burning bushes when instead God is in the messy pile of drawings and half-eaten bowls of cereal on the table.  When I can't hear the still small voice, God is in the laughter and arguments of my children.  

Sometimes it takes a change of plans to awaken me to the holy ordinary of my life.  On these days, Sunday morning church looks like this:

"Surely the LORD is in the place and I did not know it!"

Family systems

I've been on a bit of an unintentional blogging break.  First it was the end of the semester chaos, followed by my own re-entry into the academic world as a student in a doctoral program.  After an intense three weeks of summer school, my brain was pretty fried.  I went from thinking "I should write about this" to the inability of forming coherent sentences.  But I've missed writing, the words on the page, and the internal reflection that precedes it.

After my three week journey away from my family for school (my longest trip away), I am now immersed back into the lovely and frustrating disorder of life at home.  John is now away on a business trip, so I've been caring for the kids solo (and wondering regularly how exactly he survived the three weeks with his sanity intact).  I've scheduled an array of activities each day, each with varying levels of success, and most of the day's activities are completed by noon, opening up the afternoon to boredom (them), impatience (me), and misbehaving (us).  One day, I tried to eat up some time and fulfill obligations by taking the kids to visit my family.  We managed three hours of driving for a two hour visit that ended in tears and screaming by at least four out of the five of us.  I spent the drive home going through my family systems learning over the past few weeks, which was all well and good in the relative peace of kids shamed into quiet in the backseat, but lost its practicality upon the return home when anger and rudeness reigned again, awakened by the demons of hunger, hurt, and fatigue.  It's no surprise to me that we default to our family of origin strategies when we are stressed, and there's nothing like returning home to up my anxiety levels.

But then I checked my phone and I had the sweetest voicemail from my almost 92-year-old grandmother, making sure we got home okay.  She said that I looked tired, and though things hadn't ended well, she so enjoyed our visit.  Then she said that I was doing such a good job as a parent.  That is perhaps one of the kindest thing she has ever said as she was certainly seeing through the eyes of love.  I feel that I did nothing to demonstrate effective parenting.  My kids were rude and out of control, and nothing I did seem to matter, other than making me lose my cool.  I called her back to let her know we were okay, and we talked a while longer about random things--the declining state of the world, how much the kids have grown.  And then she said that it's so hard to be a parent and she prays for us every day.  Perhaps it was the family systems talking, but I heard some of her own grief in that and so much empathy and understanding.  It opened me up in a way that is pretty amazing considering the walls I've built up over the years.  And somehow, when someone later remarked to me that I should cherish these days when my kids are little because they grow up so fast, I was able to smile for a change and believe that maybe this day is an unexpected gift.