I went to pick up my nerve pills, cause everybody be wonderin.’ So I get there and the pharmacy tech hands me my prescriptions and I take them out to the car where my water bottle lives. I pick up the bottle marked clonazepam (Klonopin™) and take out two pills. I realize that they don’t look like clonazepam and there cannot possibly be 60 pills in the bottle. It was then that I realized it was escitalopram (Lexapro™) in a bottle marked clonazepam and vice versa. The only reason I didn’t notice immediately is that sometimes generic pills change shape if the pharmacy switches to a different manufacturer… but before I took two escitaloprams, I decided to check the “clonazepam” bottle first. Lo and behold, I was right. They’d given me mismatched bottles.

I wasn’t exactly hacked off about it, but I was concerned that it happened, and decided to go back into the pharmacy. You cannot imagine what an egregious mistake this is for non-medical people who wouldn’t necessarily grab on to the fact that the pills looked different and so was the dosage. If I’d taken two escitaloprams, it wouldn’t have killed me. But there are plenty of other drugs where it would’ve, and I didn’t want to get mad at anybody, but it was a responsibility/liability issue. I am the type person that would have taken them home and switched them out without saying anything in order not to have to interact again…. just not today. I was feeling angry about something else, and though I never let it show, it did give me enough courage to walk back in and talk to them about it.

Of course they were horrified, and should have been. Had I not known exactly what to look for, I cannot imagine what would have happened to my mood and behavior. It didn’t happen to me, but it very easily could have happened to someone else. Doubling your SSRI and halfing your benzo is two different things. Less clonazepam wouldn’t have hurt me, I just might have felt a little more anxiety than usual. More escitalopram would have made me euphoric at first and then disconnected from my emotions altogether after a week or so because my seratonin level would have gone through the roof.

Let me make it clear that this is an actionable offense, but I am not that person. My main concern was calling their attention to it, because what if it had been heart medication and narcotics? Depending on the dosage, the narcotics could have made autonomic breathing shut off, especially if the heart medication was halfed and the narcotics were doubled (again, depending on dosage). It’s not worth a court case, but it is worth writing about it to warn others to check and make sure that the medication is correct, as well as making sure everyone in the pharmacy loses blood in their faces, because they knew what the consequences would have been had I not been nice about it.

Here’s the easiest solution. Register for Epocrates, click on Drugs at the main menu, find your drug, and go to the “Pill pictures” link. That way, there can be no mistake. Or, if the pill looks different, just take it back to the pharmacy and ask if they’ve switched manufacturers or if the bottle isn’t labeled correctly. If the bottle is not labeled correctly, you will get the desired reaction without having to even raise your voice.

In short, be careful. No pharmacist is perfect.

Now that she has been struck down, she will become more powerful than we can possibly imagine. –Kristie Berthelotte

I feel like Carrie Fisher would laugh if I paraphrased her, so Carrie’s death hurt all three of my feelings.

Of course, realistically, it was a gut punch of enormous proportions. I don’t think that people who suffer from mental health issues will realize what an advocate they’ve lost until reality sets in, because right now we are all engulfed in shock. There’s been a disturbance in the force and we are reeling from it. The best we can do is take some of her incredible energy and put it into our own hearts, because that is the part of her which will live on. Because she was an actor, she is immortal.

My best guess is that every ticket for Rogue One today in the nation just sold out, and for those who aren’t going to the movies, the Star Wars series is queued up in binge-watch order. It makes so much sense. Watching her on screen is what keeps her alive, an idea that resonates with me because why do you think I write about Dana and Argo so much? If I do, they’re still with me. They’re still present. They’re still  three dimensional instead of flat and lifeless. They didn’t die, but our relationships did, which is sometimes harder than death because their lives are still going on, their beauty and humor still out there in the world, going on without me. There are solid reasons for it, but beyond logic I am still entitled to feelings about them…. wonderful and terrible… painful, honest, and real. In that way, they have gained immortality (at least, to me) as well.

Celebrity deaths are reminders of the deaths and immortalities that occur all around us, because we can’t say we knew them personally… and yet, sometimes they hurt that much. Star Wars and I are the same age, so Princess Leia has been a fixture in my life since I was born. Thanks to movie theaters and the Internet, she always will be.

I think it’s a classical music sort of day, listening to all the Requiems I love. Through music, I can let the people that their composers wished to be immortal live as well.

Goodnight, sweet Princess… letting everything I’ve lost so personally lie down in green pastures as well.

I got to the church 45 minutes early because I wasn’t sure of the call time this morning and thought it was better to be early and hang out in my office if I was wrong than oversleep. I only got about five hours of sleep last night… more than most parents still putting toys together, but less than I really wanted. I couldn’t fall asleep. I opened all of my presents save the one marked “Do Not Open Until Christmas Day” because my plan is to leave church, get some lunch, and go see Rogue One. I saw The Force Awakens last Christmas Day, so apparently now it’s a thing. In order to be a good Jew, lunch will be Chinese food.

I wasn’t technically raised Jewish, but twice in my life I’ve had Jewish next door neighbors and we’ve celebrated both holidays. The first time was when I was in kindergarten/first grade, and my parents were going to let me go to Hebrew school with the neighbor kids (if it’s allowed- I don’t know) when we got the announcement that we were moving to Naples from Galveston. I cannot imagine how far ahead I would be in life had I learned Hebrew as a child, because learning a language is so much tougher for adults than it is for kids, and both Hebrew and Greek are MDiv requirements.

The second time I had Jewish neighbors, “Mark” showed up on our front doorstep in Ninja Turtle boxers (only funny because he was in his 40s at the time… maybe still is, I’m not good with age) on a Jewish high holy day (I think it was Yom Kippur, but don’t quote me on it) and said, you want some Jew food? Yes. Yes, we did.

As t-shirt wisdom dictates, I am not a Jew, but I am Jew-ish. As Christians, we all are, really… It pains me to think of just how many people there are in this country that don’t know it. But the important thing is that I do.

In other news, today is “Ugly Sweater” day at church, and I do not have an entry in the competition. By the time I found out it was “Ugly Sweater Day” (last night) it was too late to find one. I had to make due with a plain green sweater instead, but underneath I am wearing my t-shirt that has Darth Vader walking AT-ATs on a leash like puppies. If only I’d found THAT in an ugly sweater variety. As Matt said when he walked in this morning, not that it’s a competition, but I’m going to win. If he broadcasts today, I’ll post a picture of him, because his sweater is truly…. memorable. However, if I’d managed to find a Star Wars ugly sweater, I think I could have beaten him…. Win, I would have….

I know this sounds ridiculous for an almost 40-year-old adult, but my favorite ugly sweaters and t-shirts must have dinosaurs. I went through a phase in elementary school where dinosaurs were all I talked about, so it must be a “throwback” to that time in my life. I have ordered all the dinosaur t-shirts on 6DollarShirts.com, but they were lost in the move. My favorite, which got the most comments from others, had a T-Rex lying horizontally across it and said T-Rex hates push-ups (Big head, little arms)…. another ugly sweater contender had it come in such a variety.

Now that we’ve gone from Star Wars to Jews to dinosaurs, it’s time to grab my music and get to the sanctuary. I can’t believe I just left here 12 hours ago… however, it feels like a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away….

Have a Merry Christmas you will, ya’ll.

 

Despite my best efforts to stop it, Christmas has come, anyway. I just keep thinking what kind of world is this that my mother is not here? What kind of world is this that in some sense, I will never go home again? What kind of world is this where there will be no pictures of my possible wedding, possible kids or step-kids, no possible anything with my mother in them? The only thing I have that even comes close is a few pictures of my high school graduation, and that’s it. No graduation from college, no graduation from divinity school, no ordination, no pictures of me standing in front of my first call or church plant. No pictures of her at the piano playing during my first service. I am certainly not, but there are times when I feel utterly alone, as if no one understands and yet, plenty of people do.

What kind of world IS THIS?

It is new and frightening, not because of world events, but because of my own… although it seems as if my mother’s death should be writ that large. Everyone should know what a light the world has lost, and everyone should share in my pain. Of course, this is impossible… but when you lose a parent, it seems as if earth has stopped rotating on its axis and spinning around the sun. Nothing should ever be the same, because I won’t. It’s selfish and egocentric to think that the world should stop for everyone else, and it doesn’t.

Other people go on about their busy lives as I try to put my own back together into some semblance of the new normal. The only problem is that it can’t be normalized, and never will be. I feel guilty for all the moments I missed, and yet I know that I can’t be held responsible for what I didn’t know. And Jesus, there are so many things I didn’t know.

Why in the crippling fuck did I choose to move? Because at the time, it seemed like the most sensible solution to ending my relationship with Dana, because I never could have done it without a physical boundary. Our relationship was so sacred, so full of energy that I never would have stopped trying, never would have allowed myself or Dana the space to really think about whether getting back together was a good idea, never would have stopped thinking that she was the only person in the entire world for me, because at the time, she was my world. I couldn’t move without thinking of her on the exhale. She was my electricity and my grounding wire all at the same time. In addition to being absolutely crazy about her, she was also my “Danabase,” the person that created location memories because I’m terrible at it, so when I was tearing about the house looking for my keys, wallet, phone, etc. most of the time all I had to do was ask her for it. She was invaluable to me in both romantic and companionate love, the easiest relationship I’d ever had most of the time. Therefore, since we didn’t have children and therefore nothing tying me to Houston, I just left. I know myself too well. I would have fought to the death to get her back and gone through an even bigger world of pain when it didn’t work, and on some level, I knew it wouldn’t. It was better for me to slink off with my tail between my legs than it was to put energy where it wasn’t wanted. I could rebuild. I always do. However, to paraphrase Eleven, I’ll never forget the time that Leslie was me.

What I Know for Sure™ is that if I could go back and do it again, knowing that my world was about to end, I would have stayed put. I would have gone to my mother’s every choir performance, I would have visited more, I would have shown up. I would have completely forgotten my own needs and just spent more time getting to soak up her everyday life, and she would have wanted that. We were always trying to make up for lost time, and it has run out in the most disastrous way possible.

I am not ready for Christmas, and possibly never will be again, but my mother just died in October. It is a cruel joke that the holidays and my mother’s death are so close together. It is so hard to find new life, new hope the child will bring… and listen… to the angels sing.

I just thought the holidays were hard after torching my relationships with Diane, Dana, Argo, and countless others as I turned inward because I’d done so much wrong in so short a time. What I have to remember is that I torched my relationship with Diane because it needed to happen, butt quick. I torched my relationships with others because my reactions to it were cut down to wet cat backed into a corner, claws extended…. except with my mother.

I could cry with her, and her mirror neurons made her cry with me, simply because I was hurt. I could be vulnerable with her in a way that I couldn’t be with anyone else. I got to have conversations with her that I never thought I would have, because I thought that she was too homophobic to have them. Once those issues were resolved, the conversation I remember the most clearly is when Dana and I were trying to get pregnant (we only made it as far as seeing the OB/GYN and exploring picking out a donor) and she listened, telling me her long and difficult story of trying to get pregnant with me. It took five years, and she told me that the reason why is that something was wrong with her uterus. She thinks that she may have gotten pregnant once before, and the implantation stuck before the cells died. She went to the doctor and had the procedure to remove that damaged tissue, and got pregnant relatively easily after that… but she lamented the years she didn’t know what was wrong, and told me that she and my dad were just starting to explore adoption when she found out she was pregnant. She laughed when I told her that Dana was not interested in getting pregnant, but if her family was any indication, she knew she was “fertile Myrtle” if I wasn’t.

It now makes so much more sense about why I was such an attack dog in trying to protect Dana from her own parents, who made it clear that they wouldn’t come to our wedding (finally, finally they changed their minds on that one) and my children would not be their grandchildren. It was the only reason I wanted Dana to get pregnant instead of me… so that their grandparents would see them as valid, because my parents would have, anyway. My mom listened as I told her that if the kid was indeed mine, Dana needed to go and stay at her parents’ house with the baby alone, so that they saw her as the mother of that child and not just a glorified babysitter. We also decided that breast feeding would be limited, so that either one of us could feed our child and have those bonding moments, and my mom just listened.

You cannot imagine how hard it was to say the words to my mother that I wanted to have a baby, because I thought they would awkwardly hang in the air. Relief flooded my body when they didn’t. She just loved me so unconditionally even when she was uncomfortable. Because she was uncomfortable, I wish I’d tried harder to bridge the gap. My main coping mechanism was to have hours-long phone calls in which we only talked about her… and perhaps it was for the best, because I wasn’t running away from her entirely, just self-selecting what she knew about my life and what she didn’t.

For instance, I wore long-sleeve shirts around her for three years so she would find out I’d gotten a tattoo on my forearm so long after the fact that it wouldn’t matter anymore. She didn’t meet anyone I was dating until we we’d been together so long that the relationship was solid. The only people she didn’t meet that I wanted her to were Dana’s parents, because they had dinner with my Dad and Angela, but would have shared so much more common ground with my mom, because she struggled so much harder to accept me than my dad did… and mostly because she was worried about me, as if I had some sort of design flaw that she’d created herself. By the time she would have met Dana’s parents, she’d let go of that idea and if the conversation had steered in that direction, perhaps my mother would have been their own personal PFLAG…. and now I’ll never know, for so many reasons.

I remember that at HATCH (Houston Area Teen Coalition of Homosexuals), I won an award for all the public speaking I’d done at local churches, and she went to the awards ceremony with me. She was dating a Republican judge at the time, and she choked on her water when she found out the keynote speaker was Sheila Jackson Lee. She wasn’t threatened by a room full of gay people, but a Democrat was just beyond the pale.

As she got older, she got more and more liberal, but at that time in her life she was all “R” all the time. She used to wear this t-shirt I loved that said, “take the law into your own hands… hug a judge.” I also remember that phone call, the one where she was wailing and said, they found the judge dead in the bed… and the phone was off the hook because he’d been talking to me. She berated herself for a long time because she thought she could have done something, but his heart just wore out… probably from being too big. My mother used to teach in a school that was predominantly black and poor, and the judge poured out his pockets for it. When they needed school supplies or coats, he was all over it. At his funeral, we were considered family, and I remember riding in the limo to the cemetery absolutely not knowing what to say, because there was nothing to say.

Just like there is nothing anyone can say to me now that would carry more weight than the tapes that run in my own mind. One line that is keeping me sane is something Dr. Susan Leo said in a Christmas Eve service long ago… that Christmas Eve is the one night of the year where the membrane between heaven and earth stretches so thin we can reach up and touch it. I can imagine it. I can touch my mother’s face.

I have never believed in the traditional versions of heaven and hell, choosing to focus on the heaven and hell that’s already here… most notably, the heaven and hell I create for myself. But tonight, of all nights, I choose to believe that Susan is right, and that my mother will be reaching down to touch my face as well.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

Yesterday I spent some time shopping (didn’t buy anything) and got my hair did. When I came home, I was exhausted and spent about an hour submitting my resumé for anything and everything I could think of because that didn’t take much energy and then thought, “I’ll take a nap.” I should have set an alarm, because I didn’t wake up until 0400. I didn’t even notice that my phone was ringing, I was so out of it, so I have phone calls to return today. I can only think that it was my body’s way of saying “you thought you were well? Not so fast, Leslie.” However, I feel 100 percent better this morning after having spent an hour or so with Sam drinking coffee and talking about our lives. I may or may not have drunk most of the pot myself.

On the plus side, now I know exactly how much coffee it takes to rip my stomach in half.

I’ve spent more time off the grid because I was starting to feel like I didn’t have anything to write about. There’s only so many times I want to hear that my mother is dead, much less sounding like a broken record to you. But who am I kidding? I am a broken record most of the time….. hello, Dana…. hello, Argo…. hello, incessant tapes running through my head until they’re done….

I’m going out with someone new tonight. She works in the science/medical field, which is completely different from me and yet we have enough to connect on to make conversation. I don’t know if there will be a romantic spark, but I do know that I want to spend time with her regardless. I like having smart people around me, and she’s definitely that. We’re meeting at the Watergate, and I told her I’d never been there before and I might have to geek out and take pictures. In terms of the United States, I live where the history comes from,  to paraphrase Eddie Izzard.

Because we both have Gmail, I sent her a calendar invite, and she commented on it… and I’m like, “oh my God… she might think I’m a real adult or something.” I live and die by Google Calendar because if I didn’t, I’d never make it anywhere. The Google Suite is basically my ADD medication.

So far, I’ve been on a couple of “first dates” that ended up being great friendships because you can’t force a romantic spark, especially when you’re not looking for one. “Dates” in quotation marks because I could force myself to leave the house and have a good time, but seriously still stuck on processing my old life to make room for a new one. I still don’t know that I’m ready, but what I do know is that unless I start dating the girl that delivers my pizza, it’s not going to happen in the comfort of my house.

Although as I have said before, if I do start dating the girl that delivers my pizza, I already know three things:

1. She is employed.
2. She has a vehicle.
3. She already knows the way to my house.

The joke there is that I’ve only had one woman deliver a pizza to me in the entire time I’ve been ordering.

I do want to get out and do new things so that I have more to write about than the past, but depression and anxiety have stopped me from doing many of the things I’ve wanted because I just didn’t have the energy (see above). I want to be able to tell new stories instead of continuing to focus on old ones, but at the same time, it helps for my blog to lag behind my real life so that I have some perspective on what’s happening rather than it being stream-of-consciousness. Sometimes it is, but most of the time what you’re getting is reflection, and hopefully the peace that comes with it. I feel like I have reconciled all I can reconcile and everything else is left up to me.

I didn’t want to give up Argo or Dana, but I did. It “takes two to tango” is a thing, but I very fully own that a lot of it was my fault entirely. There are so many things I could have done differently over the last three years, and reflection on what I’ve done (and left undone) has made it clear to me what I don’t want in the future. I pray a lot, trying to find that still, small voice inside me that directs me where to go next. I listen to a lot of podcasts that are centered on self-improvement, my favorites being The Robcast and On Being with Krista Tippett. I also listen to Tim Ferris, but what’s different with The Robcast is that when he endorses books, I buy them. So far I’ve gotten Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich and Honest to God by John A. T. Robinson. Both are fantastic. Rob hasn’t let me down yet. 🙂

Of course, I’m also reading for fun…. a book I got for free on BookBub called Revenge and a Bottle of Merlot. It’s about a woman who is being emotionally abused and cheated on by her husband, so she and her best friends hatch a plan to get him back for it. Considering how badly the woman is treated by her husband, the book is light, funny and a quick read.

It feels nice to laugh again. I can’t laugh all the time, but when I do, I try to make those moments last. I am trying to emerge from the dark unscathed, but having my mother die so suddenly and its aftermath is a darkness for which I was completely unprepared. I know that no one is ever ready for the death of a parent, but there was no time where she was sick, no time to get used to the idea, no time to do anything but sit in mind-altering confusion.

Though the fog is still all around me, I have at least acquired lamps.

I hope that tonight will be memorable. I hope I have a new friend. Anything more than that is just icing, and if I look at it that way, then I am not afraid of letting new people in. When I take it to the extreme of planning what it would look like to drag someone into my freak show of a life, I get overwhelmed and give up, happy to stay home with a book and some tea. I tend to get too far ahead of myself, because that’s what visionaries do. It is not altogether helpful unless I’m talking about my career, because that is limited to me.

Right now I need to vision myself doing some laundry and polishing my shoes.

Because I’m meeting someone new.

I don’t want to write today, and haven’t for a while. I keep thinking that if I put Christmas off, it just won’t happen this year. On the other hand, I don’t want my Advent series to be missing anything, so I’m sure I’ll finish that, too, once I stop feeling the need to push away the baby. It’s people like me that need the baby the most, and right now I can’t stop myself. Christmas has never happened for me without my mother… not once… so why not just stop all the clocks (a poem that speaks to me deeply because even though it is about romantic love, one line is silence the pianos. Some days, I laugh through my memories. Today is not one of them.

I am sure this is a passing feeling, but it’s where I am.

My friends have been over-the-top in their love and care of me, and it is working. But at the same time, there’s only so much other people can say which ease my mind for more than a moment at a time. People have often told me what grief is like when they’ve lost a parent, but grief is as individual as a fingerprint. There is no overarching message, no one-stop shopping to fix it based on learning about the experiences of others.

No one told me that I’d be extremely jealous of people who still have their mothers, especially when they are so much older than me. No one told me that there would be moments I’d actually forget my mother was dead, and everything would all come crashing back as if it was happening all over again. No one told me that I’d feel in some ways as if my future was ruined, not overall, but that immense, intense part where my mother is on the front row of everything I do, cheering me on.

No one told me what it was like to feel like half an orphan, that in a lot of ways, even though Lindsay and I are into our 30s and I will be 40 in September, it feels like my dad is taking on the role of single parent even now. For the record, he’s doing a bang-up job. It’s just that now I have one less person to call, one less person that will talk to me until we both run out of things to say… or, more accurately, my mother transitioning from talking to asking for tech support.

One time she even flew me in from Portland to fix her computer because it was cheaper than taking it to Best Buy. Unfortunately, this is completely true.

Speaking of Best Buy and Christmas, I know I’ve told this story before, but it should be put here as well. You can download Red Hat disc images and burn them yourself to install, but if you bought it at an electronics store, it came with a year’s worth of tech support. I put it on my Christmas list that year… it must have been my sophomore year of college. The following conversation ensues:

Mom: I need a copy of Red Hat for my daughter for Christmas and I have no idea what that is.

Best Buy Guy: Wow! Linux is a big operating system for a little girl!

Mom: She’s 20.

The look on Best Buy Guy’s face was priceless, because he didn’t say anything after that.

And honestly, I can’t say anything more, either.

I just took a big heaping dose of Chloraseptic, just sprayed it down my throat until I couldn’t feel anything, because I have two hours and 15 minutes until I need to show up for choir. I had a conductor once who said never to sing after you’ve used it, because it’s like singing while wearing white gloves. It’s a mask that covers up pain so that you cannot tell what damage you’re doing because you don’t know to stop when it hurts. When I’m on vocal rest, as I am now, it’s invaluable because not only does it make my throat hurt less, it stops whatever irritation is making me cough, and I will take anything I can get in that arena. I have decided that I have been sick long enough that I’m going to go to the doctor tomorrow. My GP is fantastic in that you don’t need an appointment. If you get there before 1500, you can just wait in line.

Now that I’ve been sick for a week, I think I need a course of antibiotics, because now I’m convinced that the stuff coming out of me is infected and this is not just a passing cold. If he’ll do it (read: has the equipment), I also want a shot of Depo-Medrol to bring down all the inflammation in my vocal chords. I know how some of you feel about steroids. Shut it. This is the solution that works for me and has for many years because I don’t do it unless there is a major need for it. I am coughing so hard I’ve thrown my back out and I have a HUGE singing engagement next Sunday. HUGE. It’s not just that I’m in a quartet and therefore featured. It’s that next Sunday is basically a choral festival with no sermon and there are two services, one at 9:00 and one at 11:00. We’re talking two solid hours of singing with very little break in between. It would be “Lessons & Carols” if we were Episcopalian, but instead of basic carols, it’s monster anthems in which my head voice (high range) is in use most of the time. Nothin’ says lovin’ like being this sick and having to pull a high A out of nowhere… meaning that there is no scale up, I just have to find it and hold it for six beats. Finding it is not the problem. When I’m sick, it’s harder to have the kind of breath control to keep it in tune that long, and/or hold it for one beat, much less six. I was kidding the choir that since it’s a capella, could they please just keep getting flatter as a group so that no one notices that by the time we get there, it’s actually an F sharp?

Today’s anthem is The Yearning, by Craig Courtney. If you hear it and you know my mother, you’ll know it is exactly the sort of thing my mother would have picked for her own choir. It has a gorgeous piano accompaniment, which my mother preferred because even though she COULD play the organ, it wasn’t her instrument. They seem the same, but they are most definitely not. The first time I heard it, I heard my mother in it, and I was weeping by the end. After the last chord rang, I turned to Ingrid and said, “did it just get all Christmas in here?”

It did.

It’s been nice to be off the grid for the past few days, but mostly I’ve been sleeping. I have a terrible cold/infection (not sure yet) and it has laid me out. I went to choir practice and sat by myself, because through the magic use of abdomen muscles, I was mostly able to avoid singing from my throat. I would have stayed home, but that was impossible because I’m the soprano in a quartet and we had to practice on our own. It’s pretty much the only time I’ve left the house this week, except that I ran out of peanut butter.

In part, I think my room is making me sick. I have made progress on it, but it’s not the perfection I am seeking in my Virgo/Marie Kondo simplicity. I just haven’t had the energy. However, my coughs are productive and getting things out has helped immensely, especially in the singing department.

It’s been kind of weird being sick during Advent. Normally, I get this kind of thing during Lent. Spring is my least favorite season because even though it’s beautiful, it’s deadly. I have a lot to fill my time, though.

I’ve been doing a lot of updating the church’s web site from my office there, and I am learning a new CMS called Squarespace. It’s not WordPress, that’s for sure, but some of the skills are transferable and some are not. The biggest drawback is that I can’t see real code or style sheets, and figuring out how Squarespace deals with these things has been a lesson in humility. However, it is something so low energy I can do it while feeling half-dead, so I am productive in my misery.

I have done all of my Christmas shopping except for one present, and that’s because I don’t have the address. It will be coming shortly, and I can’t wait for her to see it. No hints as to give it away, but sufficed to say I am good at the gift giving game. I take into account all sorts of things, like what their interests are and the “when you see it, you’ll think of me” factor. The only time I use Amazon wish lists is when I am picking out books. They’re so personal that it’s hard to judge someone’s taste. Better to pick out something they’ve already said they’d read. Although once I bought a book that someone had added as a professional guide, because I couldn’t think of a better gift now than more money later. Then, I hit send and Amazon in their “suggestions” list put up the perfect present. Like, so good I wish I’d thought of it myself, because it was just so star-spangled awesome that I felt impotent in my gift giving ability, because seriously, WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THAT?

I ended up getting both. Problem solved.

Not many people get two gifts from me, but this was the no-brainer of presents.

The excited and happy thank-you note was the complete indicator that I’d scored big, and it’s to Amazon’s credit.

That didn’t happen this year- all of the presents I picked out were all my idea, and it makes me feel good. Two presents are so particularly awesome that I think they’ll flip when they get it, but again…… Spoilers.

The hardest part was not picking out a gift for my mother. Last year I got her some earrings that were flowers encased in clear resin, a teardrop shape that I thought would flatter her face. I never got to see her wear them.

The Winston Churchill talking action figure I got my dad was a big hit, too.

Dana prides herself on being right. LOVES IT. So one year I got her a t-shirt that says, “I’m right 97% of the time… who cares about the other 4…” She got the joke and put it on immediately… along with taking the bows off the wrapping and sticking them to her head.

I wish I could say that I’m looking forward to Christmas this year, because there have been so many great presents and moments over the years. But there’s nothing that anyone could get me or say that will erase the fact that a gift from my mom will not be arriving with a sweet card containing all her hopes, dreams, and love for me.

As Lindsay would say, “Mom was the best.”

 

 

 

As you all know, I dread Finnish Independence Day, although now I hate it a lot less now that I’ve started calling it Finnish Independence Day instead of Diane Syrcle‘s birthday. I know next to nothing about Finland, am hard-pressed to name TWO Finnish composers (because there’s Sibelius, and……….) and though I am very adventurous in the kitchen, of the Finnish recipes I’ve read I can pronounce maybe a sixteenth of the ingredients. Pretty much the only thing I have in common with the Finnish people is our shared love of avoiding others.

Finnish Independence Day is celebrated on 6 December because it’s when the official Declaration of Independence from Russia was adopted by Parliament after having been written by the Senate two days earlier.

I didn’t write my own line in the sand on today’s date, but it helps to think that someone else did. This is because on holidays, I still get rattled. 25 years is a long time to celebrate something and then just…. not.

I’ve told this story before, but I’m going to tell it again.

When Diane turned 24, I enlisted my mother’s help. I got her to call a florist so that I could get her a present delivered at school (Diane was a middle school choir teacher then). My mom asked me what I wanted, and I said, “one rosebud.” My mom said, “that’s it? You don’t want to get her some balloons or something to make her room look pretty?” “No,” I replied. “I have this joke I’m going to do and it’ll all make sense.” So my mom orders said rosebud and calls me over to the phone when the florist is ready to take the message for the card. I say, “for all you do… this bud’s for you.” My mom rolled her eyes and paid.

I am sure that there are many more gift stories, but the only other one I really remember is that I got her a GORGEOUS turquoise bracelet at Saturday Market on Festival of the Last Minute. She opened it on Christmas Eve and her joy was palpable. I said, “I figured I owed it to you after totally punking you on your birthday.” What did I get her for her birthday?

Well, first of all you have to know that when people know you like something, they’ll get you anything and everything having to do with it. For instance, my mother liked white geese. I don’t think she got a present for six years after she told people she liked them that didn’t have a white goose on it. Diane was complaining that now that people knew she liked dragonflies, it didn’t matter what the thing looked like, if it had dragonflies on it, people would buy it for her… that the overall aesthetic could be hideous, but if it had a dragonfly on it, it wouldn’t matter.

After (over)hearing this conversation, we were shopping and I found the ugliest “embroidered” dragonfly toilet seat the world has ever seen. Dana and I looked at each other, then wordlessly put it in our cart. We each knew, without saying anything, that this was a legendary find.

Good memories duke it out with bad on holidays, wrestling each other without keeping score. However, I have to remember that just like Finland, I have written my own Declaration of Independence, and the Parliament in my head has adopted it. When I feel sad at what I’ve lost, I simply look at the blue and white flag, and know what I have gained.

 

 

I apologize that this is late- I have been laid out with a cold for two days straight.

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…yelling doesn’t make a thing any more possible.

-Angie Sage

What if John the Baptist was wrong? He was baptizing people from all over the region and saw the Pharisees and Sadducees coming… but in this pericope, they never speak. What if John lost his ever-loving mind over Jews who had changed their minds?

To put it mildly, he did.

He called them a “brood of vipers,” asking them who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? He is, in effect, shaming them for living these largely sinful lives and trying to get redemption at the last minute.

But did it accomplish anything?

Did the Pharisees and Sadducees walk away humbled at their behavior? Did they act any differently after their baptism than before? Did John’s rant of shame do any good whatsoever?

He thinks that The Messiah is coming to baptize with Holy Spirit and fire, putting the good people safely into a barn and torching what’s left of the threshing floor so that everything burns to the ground and we can just start over with all good people… rather than having to get out there and help the ones that will do better when they know they can.

John got part of the message right- he is not worthy to carry The Messiah’s sandals. The part he got wrong is why. Jesus was not coming to earth as a professional Jewish Superhero who was going to smite all those who sinned against God. He saw no reason not to forgive people at the last minute. Jesus never met anyone he didn’t think was worth something… worth a lot, actually, no matter what they’d done prior to meeting him.

John the Baptist thought that The Messiah was coming to reconcile all our sins…. to put us in our places… to make the miserable and the pious claim their fates.

But the one we’re waiting for, the one far greater, keeps no such ledger.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces

There’s no rhyme or reason as to what or why I feel right now. Grief is a funny thing in that your mind doesn’t settle on any kind of order. Elizabeth Kubler Ross was right that there are five stages of grief, but wrong in that there is a particular order. It’s more like they all hit at once, your mind a TV blaring with five thousand channels of thought.

My three trunks are myself and my mom, Dana, and Argo. Everything I feel is somehow derivative of one of those three things (my mother and me being the same in her absence).

I’m thinking about how much I love them and how much each of them changed my life and then two or three memories of each of us pop across my mind in a way that I can’t direct them because they are disparate and out of order, or five memories blended together. I can only let it happen. This will get better over time, but I can’t imagine a more unfortunate series of events that would create recovering from mind-altering grief quickly.

The tapes for Dana speed up because I don’t want to think about them. Our bad moments so overshadowed our good ones at the end of our relationship that I’d just rather not deal with it as an overarching problem, just as they come up…. which is often, but less than people who recognize all the things of which I am capable. Dana didn’t want to be married to a writer, and I understand that implicitly; we are prone to wander through life lost in our own heads and because she was in my life, she showed up in my writing and didn’t always like what she saw. However, I have taken the steps to torch my own writing before, and it was such an enormous cost that I was not willing to give it up again. If it was being married or being a writer, the thing that is closest to my true self wins.

As I was telling Lindsay, I’m old enough now that I can picture never getting married again…. which is good, because I am technically married in two states…. possibly the only good thing to come out of the Trump election so that when sanity is finally restored I won’t have had to do any paperwork. #worksmarternotharder

You have to have a small, select group of people in your life that understand how you tick, and writers are impossible to live with. There will always be a couple of people who understand different parts of you, but hardly ever one person that understands it all… and even when they do, it’s scary for them to think they have to put up with it. When I least expect it, I am sure it will happen… that I’ll find that woman who understands the creative process and doesn’t feed the crazy, just acts as a sounding board and calming presence until I become the calming presence while she has her emotions about her calling, too. I don’t think there’s much more to love than that.

I am also dismissive and judgmental when it comes to finding love as a verb because I have impossibly high standards… which leaves me finding the tiniest things that annoy me about a person within seconds. The easiest arrow to my heart is “dumb.” If I find you boring, I’m out…. even though with time the conversations might become more interesting if I let myself breathe.

I have to like your face, and while I am not at all particular about the types of bodies people have, your face must have “that thing.” Maybe it’s a cute little mole on the side of your lip or a scar you got in a skiing accident or the way your eyes look like there are joyous secrets behind them. Maybe I recognize part of your facial features in someone else subconsciously, so your face already feels like home…. or, at least, I imagine it could be.

Because I’m turned on by brains and not bodies, I don’t think I’ve ever had a girlfriend that was classic trophy-wife beautiful. It was that their quirks made them beautiful to me.

Although who knows? Maybe my next girlfriend will be six feet tall with long blonde hair in a power suit with her cleavage showing a little too much… or perhaps leaving the house in Class As that I want to rip back off. But not if her face doesn’t look like home…

because otherwise, I wouldn’t even notice her at all.

I’ve reread a lot of what I’ve written over the past few days, and what’s jumped out at me is the dance of intimacy I present with Dana… how fully fleshed out she is in terms of how much I love her and don’t. I fluctuate between pushing her away and wishing she were here in the biggest breaths of my life. Knowing for certain that she doesn’t want to reconnect doesn’t keep me from wishing we were closer, and it also doesn’t keep me from talking about the bad parts, either, which are what keep me from wanting contact even as laughter envelops me when I think of one of our legendary adventures.

• When I told Dana that when I met her, I thought she was a loud obnoxious blonde woman, she started putting that on her name tag at church.
• When I moved to Houston the first time around, Dana made me a cat at Build-a-Bear, complete with her famous Stitch impression that used to illicit tears… because she said that line.
• Dana drove with me to Houston and flew back. We’re punch-drunk as hell trying to make El-Paso for dinner. We come up with this bit… “Excusth me, do you have a margarita asth big asth my head?” “I want a margarita asth big asth her head, too, ’cause she’sth got the bigger head.” “Yesth, your head might be taller, but mine hasth more circumferenceth.” We never actually did get margaritas that night- we ended up at Sonic. How I let her get on the plane back to Portland is beyond me.
• I remember seriously planning our first child in the moments after our first kiss, because my biological clock exploded as if my uterus was talking to me, telling me I was home.
• Dana used to work at a grocery store, and the first flirt I really remember was that every time I went to the counter, she’d say, “hay sugar” and wink as if I was the only person in the room.
• When Dana and I were in the same room, the air was different… electrified. It not only energized us, but fed others…. mostly by being explosively funny.
• We were Jeopardy! fiends, and constantly amazed each other at the sheer amount of random shit each of us knew. This led us to compete in pub trivia, and one of the moments my pride for Dana knew no bounds was when she won THE ENTIRE THING BY HERSELF…. and she was playing for money.
• One of Dana’s ex’s friends was playing on our trivia team one night and David and Nathan knew something was up. They knew that we were thick as thieves and it was only a matter of time. We giggled in just that way, and just got a knowing look. So, said friend goes to the bathroom and David says, “ok. What’s up?” I said, “we’re so in love we can hardly see straight.” David: WELL IT’S ABOUT GODDAMN TIME. When Dana called her dad, even he said, “I’m surprised it took this long.” And that’s just two people in a two page list.
• I was celebrating my breakup with Katharin when Dana came over and we got trashed to Talladega Nights. I don’t handle alcohol well, and the next morning when I woke up, Dana was gone. In my deepest Southern drawl, I said, “did I do anything last night for which I owe you jewelry?

Looking back on it, that’s when the barrier broke for me, and I couldn’t stop wanting her, when before I was stuck on the idea that all this emotion was just what best friends had. Surely all best friends can finish each other’s sentences… surely all best friends wake up in the morning and snuggle? Surely all best friends are automatically assumed to be a couple wherever they go because they act like it.  Surely all best friends avoid going on dates because they feel coupled enough? Moving to Houston was the best thing for us, because it forced us to realize that the people we loved were fine for someone else and treating us like crap so that the timing for us was finally right.

When I was living in Portland the first time around, Dana was married and I was single and badly needed a friend…. and over time, pushed away dating in favor of hanging with her. When I got to Houston, I had two girlfriends who were both convinced Dana was my soulmate and I was just trying to hide it by being with them. They didn’t give themselves enough credit, because I valued my time with both of them, but ultimately they were right. I was lying to myself because I had to.

I think it’s the reason I remember our first real night together so clearly, because it was so emotional. Everything that had been bottled for almost four years we drank in with laughter and tears, because it was a moment a long time in the making. I went to sleep with tears of joy streaming on my cheeks because I felt home.

In that time and place, she was my sun- accurate because she’s blonde.

 

I just sat down and realized my mother was dead. In an instant I see her as the children’s choir director when I was in third grade with her little skirt and jacket combo… which she later replaced with a scarf because of Liz Claiborne. She’s sleeping next to me in my queen-sized bed and we’re talking late into the night and I see her at McDonald’s carrying a second full order of food because I had already gotten our food, sat down, and she told them they’d forgotten our number. I ate too much Filet-O-Fish but I hadn’t eaten in two days so I didn’t mind… until we went on a tour of the city and I felt like a Sumo wrestler as I walked. There’s the moment at my thirteenth birthday party where she told me I was getting my own phone line and crying at the prose on the Hallmark that she wrote under the obligatory rhyming poem. There’s sitting on a stool at the bar doing my homework while she cooked and I couldn’t do math. There’s watching her call out every name in the house until she gets to the dog. There’s the way she drove, rocking the accelerator so you felt like you were on a dinghy about to get sick. There’s my third grade birthday party set up as a Peter Pan amusement park and I was Peter Pan. There’s my mom after me coming home from a date with a boy and I had a hickey on my neck and failed to convince her it was a curling iron burn. There’s the way she carried the picture of my junior homecoming in which I was wearing a rainbow ring and standing next to my beard for years on end, but said it was just a good picture and it was really the last one she’d see in which I looked remotely heterosexual. I am positive that it stayed in her wallet until she died, along with my eighth grade prom picture I made by myself because my boyfriend went to a different school and I couldn’t invite him…. but there was no way I was wasting that makeup and that hair. There’s everything she wanted me to be and everything I actually was.

Tick.

I’m at a SBX waiting for a glasses shop to open. I love my black and white-checkered frames, but I also really like my blue wire-rims and I think when I fixed them with my own screwdriver, I pushed one of the prisms to a different angle. There’s no appreciable difference in my vision, but of course as a Virgo the lack of symetry is intolerable. It will be my Christmas present to myself, and it may not even cost a thing. I will probably want more frames in the future, because my earrings are semi-permanent and, well, fashion.

Since I have both blue and black glasses, I need a brown pair. The ones I have now are keyhole bridge tortoise shell and way too big for my face. Working Girl is just not what we’re doing now. When I ordered them, I thought they were tiny and cute. When they got here, I thought, “the eighties called. They want your glasses back.” In the right fit, keyhole bridge is timeless… an axiom for fashion. There will never be a time in which sport coats, crispy button-downs, and Converse All Stars™; for whimsy and comfort will suddenly be Right. Out.

I need to take my brown Converse to the shoe hospital because they need to be re-soled and stitched in a few places. The reason I’d rather pay for that instead of just getting new ones is that they’re leather and keep out rain, even when I step in shallow puddles.

It’s funny how I got them. I was shopping at Ross and there was only one pair in boys’ five and a half. This woman was saying out loud that she didn’t think they’d fit her nephew and I said (a little too loudly), “can I have them?” I said it so fast that she started laughing and said, “you clearly need these more than me.” Yes. Yes, I do.

Because I liked the brown ones, I bought the black ones with black rubber as well. Converse for every outfit, although I’m wearing my hiking boots more than ever because they accomodate huge wool socks. I look a bit funny considering that with their classic fit, my hiking boots make my feet look huge…. and there is no euphemism for that. #lesbianproblems

We’re supposed to get cold rain for the next two days, thus Bigfoot. Ugh. When it gets a little warmer, my leather Chucks will be ok again. If I lace them tightly, I even get feeling in my feet.

Again, too cold with no payoff…. no pictures of beautiful trees, no snow angels, no nailing the kid on my street with a snowball for having a Doctor Who backpack out of jealousy.

Last night, I was playing around on Facebook™ and found this quote on my wallpaper changer. Posted it with #INFJ….. Also me: Strong people don’t put others down. They lift them up and slam them on the ground for maximum damage. -Abhishek Shukla

The duality that has lived in me for so many years is finally ready to laugh at. When I walked in darkness, I wanted to. It was an unexplored version of myself that I didn’t know existed. And then I got tired of that duality and show mode melted more than it ever had before. Integrating my compensity for both lightness and dark, it has been an interesting process of rejecting the past and rewiring a ton of neurons that were just dead before. New pathways are growing and I listen to music for it the most, because if you set words to melody, it makes recall mostly instant.

I had that moment with Nine Inch Nails, listening to Closer and ruminating on everything that had happened to me from 14 on. What jumped out at me is how much the song changes when you think of it as the dance between an abuser and a target. It started with you let me violate you, and all of the sudden I pictured every abused child I’d ever known…. My skin crawled as I realized that you let me violate you are the words that create back-door access to someone trying to gain control of you. Because if I let you, it’s all my fault, and that abuser will pull those strings until he/she can’t because you’ve created your own scab over the wound, because no abuse victim gets closure. They just get stronger.

The death of innocence is every big a grief as losing someone close to you, with one giant exception. Your body betrays you. You know it’s wrong, you know you should run, and you are frozen in place with loving the idea of having secrets. Your brain turned off to save you from fear, betrayal is getting wet or hard. Part of the guilt and shame that lasts your whole life is that you knew it was wrong and you loved it, anyway…. because inappropriate or not, nerves go off autonomically and your brain associates this terribly wrong thing with something incredibly desirable. The majority of abuse is done by someone you love, someone you trust, someone you can’t even imagine doesn’t love you in the same way or is even capable of it…. which makes it harder to break away because there are genuine moments in a twisted reality. How do you think they keep us hooked? They twist us into believing they own us…. “pet people.”

As you realize the extent of the abuse, you resent the genuine moments because you learn just how much they weren’t. You let a hacker in the back door because there are no security updates for threats of an emotional nature. As Brene Brown says, and I’m paraphrasing, shame is the one thing every therapist in the world is trying to uncover. You can be absent from your abuser for years, and reestablishing contact opens all those doors you thought were closed. One sentence becomes a rootkit in a matter of hours, and there you are, under control once again. If you are an adult when this happens, you’ll be surprised at how fast you regress.

What adult could not be undone by seeing the person that abused them?

So many people went through much worse than I ever did. The dopamine and sexual rush was all in my head… but not of my own hand. As I have said before, it was a plant that outgrew its pot quickly. I remember with clarity a letter Diane sent me that said, “I shudder to think the depth of emotion you’ve had for me.” Meanwhile, all the time reinforcing our verbally abusive relationship so that I was the one who was always trying to make things right in a relationship that never should have happened in the first place. What child wouldn’t give you more emotion than you could handle when I think I am as close to you as my own parents?

I never thought of her as anything else until she planted a seed in my imagination and my body betrayed me. There are plenty of people out there who absolutely cannot believe this is what happened, but they weren’t there and we were. Who’s we? My parents, my sister, and all of the choir members who saw it happening and didn’t say anything then, but have come forward now that the statute of limitations has run out to say that yeah, they knew something was off, but they couldn’t quite put their fingers on it so it wasn’t worth pursuing, because they loved Diane just as much as me. Surely this person who charmed everyone couldn’t be the same person that was traumatizing me?

My mother was the first to say she wanted to press charges, but for what? She could have gotten a TRO, but it wouldn’t have worked. We found ways to sneak around. There’s nothing that would have broken us apart until I realized what was happening and stopped it. No contact has been the right choice for me, because I don’t spend my time processing what she’s doing and being afraid I’m not there to protect her…. so much love and care dumped into a hole when I was too young to understand why.

I will protect all of my friends to the death, because I know for sure they’d step in front of a bus for me, too…. they know I’ve got their backs. That’s been the biggest revelation in this whole thing…. noticing when I am pouring love and protection into people who wouldn’t do the same thing for me. If there is no reciprocity, there is no relationship anymore.

It’s called (really) the INFJ door slam. We require equillibrium, and we’ll do anything to get it. If the relationship is off to an enormous degree, we will love your ghost eternally while not interacting with you. It’s not that we don’t love you, don’t care about you, don’t wish you well. We’re just done.

There are so few people that fit this mold for me, but the relationships I’ve severed have felt right for me over time, because I realized how much they were draining my ability to practice self-care. I was always pouring from an empty cup. My closest friends know to bring water.

With me, there are so many types of social interactions that leave me drained, and others I could maintain for days. Some people are just exhausting, and some give away their life energy in sync with as much as you’re giving them. It’s this mutual admiration society that keeps me going in the face of enormous obstacles.

My job this year has been to learn to reach out and listen more, talking less. It’s just one more step into being able to welcome someone else in my life, because I am trying to create relationships that have an easy give-and-take like I do with my friends. Being more compassionate all the time won’t hurt, but especially in romantic relationships, I’d rather be ready for one than try to jump in unprepared. Some people believe that jumping into a relationship helps fix those things… I don’t think it does. I think you create the same pattern with the new person that you had with the old, fighting about new things in the old dance of intimacy. Last time around it was the brand of toothpaste. This time it’s the dishes by the sink…. the small issues that are covering up deep wounds.

Let’s start with the deep wounds instead, so that the dance is new- with music in a different key.

In order to understand the past, you have to understand the future.

It was October 2nd, 2016 that I was sitting at my computer, completely in the writing zone, typing 80wpm, when my sister called me to tell me that my mother was dead.

Two weeks earlier, I texted her to call me ASAP. This was not, in fact, a good idea. I wanted to ask her if I should just get in my car and drive down because she broke her foot and my dad was going through a series of surgeries. It was, like, 9:45 and I just wanted to talk to her early enough that I could stil get going depending on her counsel. I emotionally “fell asleep at the wheel,” because why did I have to base it on permission- or at the very least, approval and a heads up that I was on the road? For some reason, she didn’t get the message until 2:30 in the afternoon and by then thought I was mangled horribly or dead. She called me, and I didn’t reach the phone in time. I called her back, and she was on the phone with my sister trying to decide just how much danger I was in. In retrospect, I should have known that if I wrote “as soon as possible,” it didn’t mean “as soon as possible.” It means that I am telling you I am getting mugged at this very moment.

I didn’t keep watch.

I slept through my life as my father recovered from surgery and my mother died instantly. If I’d listened to my intuition, I would have been there. I could have done something… not to save my mother or heal my father but to just be there when our world exploded. My sister needed me and I needed her. There’s no way I could have known that I was coming home to a funeral, but at least I would have been there in minutes and not hours, getting to spend two weeks memorizing my mother’s face before it was embalmed and never the same. Before she died, it had been a year since she’d visited.

I didn’t keep watch.

It only took one crack in the foundation of my marriages to let the water flow through and erode the cornerstone. I buried myself in other things, convinced that there was no such thing as a Schonanagan or a Bambelanager divorce. Through the years, we’d developed an intricate emotional shorthand and a language all our own. We could have entire conversations with our eyes, as well as conversations no one else in the room would understand… to their consternation that we were just being too “inside.” There were plenty of things wrong that I own, but I do not own that our marriages came apart in one moment. The last moment was just the last moment. Kathleen and I were married for 11 mos, but we’d been together three and a half years before that. Dana and I were married for seven years, having an intense best-friend relationship for almost four years before that which didn’t make a lot of appreciable difference in our relationship after we married except for about a third…………….

The roots withered on our family trees while I was completely oblivious to the role I was playing in all of it. Those things that could have been small, but grew into great big things before I paid attention.

I didn’t keep watch.

From the very first moment I met Argo, her words were strong, secure- so much love and respect that if I could have bottled it I would have used it as hair product. By the time I told her flat out I can’t do this anymore. I have feelings for you and I cannot continue to be friends and stay married to someone else. I can’t look at myself in the mirror, she told me that I was tossing away a friendship like it was nothing. She was willing to let me have my feelings and let them be large and watch the process it would take for me not to feel them anymore. I assumed that the energy I was throwing at her was not the kind of energy she wanted in her general direction, and the assumption cost me, because I stupidly didn’t realize how much I meant to her and how much she was willing to try and understand, even when it seemed impossible. She was willing to walk in my inner landscape as long as I was willing to walk in hers. Again, a crack in our foundation that allowed the water to disfigure our rock.

I didn’t keep watch.

I’ve let friendships go that would have been lasting because I didn’t recognize their depth of feeling for me and let go in my own worthlessness… I could not see that I was worth their time, but they could. I was so attuned to how I felt that it kept out what would have been enormous had I taken it in. I could have had the support system I needed no matter where I’ve lived, but I could not trust myself to open up to create it. My personality type dictates that I have lots of acquaintances and very few friends, so the idea of reaching out to people I did not know well was intimidating.

I attended a youth group trip to an amusement park minutes after Diane’s graduate school going away recital was over. I was crying so hard I couldn’t stand up straight, embarrassed to be emoting publicly and my parents made me go, anyway. Instead of trying to shut off my brain and reach out to the people around me, I went straight from distraught to show mode, because I was fine. I was not open to friendship, because I couldn’t focus on what might be coming… friends my own age who could help me re-focus on eighth grade banalities so that they became reality again.

I didn’t keep watch.

In this first Sunday of Advent, it is this very idea to which we are called, for we do not know when the Son of Man will be lifted up. Our meditations center on the ways we’ve checked out of our own lives, shutting ourselves off to the possibility of what might happen. There is a lot of language about how we, as Christians, need to behave… but they are not just for Christians. It is not a calling out of immorality, but a refusal to do those things which allow you to zone out the easiest. Perhaps in those days, it would have been taken that way, but I have to believe that it is just an example of how not to live our lives with only the instructions on the shampoo bottle… Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

As the sun grows darker, we turn inward, but not in a penitential sense… it is a call to arms, apocalyptic language that says to examine what you are doing that will keep you from recognition of greatness when it arrives. There are two scriptures, taken together, that are our invitations and anthems:

Jesus said to the disciples, “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

Matthew 24:36-44

The disciples did not know when Jesus was coming back, and did not think it was going to be in their lifetimes. The Epistle, written in the spirit of Paul, attests to this fact because Matthew was not written down until about 50 years after Jesus’ death, borrowing heavily from Mark, indicating that according to everything this “early blogger” had read, we’re still waiting. Note to self: put on pants.

You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Romans 13:11-14

It is a story repeated through time.

If you get there,
before I do,
comin’ for to carry me home…

Tell all my friends
I’m comin’ too
Comin’ for to carry me home.

Who are those children all dressed in Blue?
God’s gonna trouble the water.
Must be the ones that made it through.
God’s gonna trouble the water.

To the Freedom Fighters call,
Black, Brown and White American say,
Segregation must fall.
Good evening freedom’s fighters,
Tell me where you’re bound,
Tell me where you’re marching,
From Selma to Montgomery town.

Keep your mind sharp, your bags packed, and your sandals on your feet, because you never know when something is about to happen.

In order to understand the past, you have to understand the future.

Some people were not open to the glorious signs all around them, asleep to the rest of the world. Love arrived with the simple words “I’m pregnant,” such an ordinary thing few would have paid much mind…. unless they’re the family that’s expecting.

We have the advantage of knowing we are. I’ll meet you at the hospital.

I’m keeping watch.

Amen.
#prayingonthespaces