On friends and God, writing and sailing

I am sitting in a Panera this afternoon, writing away at my dissertation. In just two hours, I have added 10 completely new pages to my work. The juices are flowing. The writing seems easy, and bright. I am, as they say, in the groove.

Not so this morning. This morning I sat to revise my Chapter 3 and found, despite my highly detailed outline and notes to remind me of the changes I wanted to make, that I couldn't even begin. I sat for a while. Made some more notes. Checked Facebook. Checked email. Checked Facebook again. Decided to re-organize my jewelry box. Purged a bunch of things from my wallet. Sat in the sun. Read a book.

I will write later, I told myself. After my Physical Therapy appointment. I wasn't anxious. I felt like I was trusting for "it" to come, and I had given "it" a reasonable deadline--after getting treated for vertigo at noon, I would come here to Panera, and "it" would show up. I was quietly confident.

And it did show up. Actually, it happened before I even reached PT--in the car, on the way to the appointment, I didn't realize I was even thinking of my dissertation, and I suddenly realized exactly how I wanted to begin the chapter, and why. It was a beautiful insight, and it had come from...?

Last night I had a very, very rare night out with two very, very dear friends. (I promise this is all related). I've talked about these friends on this blog before; they are two moms who both have children with special needs--Cystic Fibrosis and Down syndrome and autism and PTSD are all in the mix when we get together. IEPs and doctor's visits and surgeries and therapists and lives that are too often very, very interrupted. We are exhausted, we sometimes make ourselves miserable with our complaints, and we vent loudly and with a lot of laughter (and irony), always over drinks. These meetings are always, always exactly what I need.

We talked for nearly 5 hours, and much of our conversation was, as usual, about God. I always stumble across some new idea, some new spiritual help, in talking with these ladies, who are so gut-wrenchingly honest about their own lives and struggles in faith. We talked a lot last night about this paradox: How do we find spiritual rest (or surrender, if you prefer) while also managing and juggling tedious schedules and demanding emergencies and awful crises? How do we trust that God is wildly in love with us and that we--and the kids we love--are seen and provided for, while also having responsibility for the phone calls and the research of the latest therapies and the decisions about what's next for our families?

Last night we had a lot of interesting things to say about this. But just now, while writing my dissertation, I thought of a metaphor I heard at church recently: We are sailboats, each unique from the other, but sharing a great and beautiful sea. God is the wind. Our job is to raise our sails, so to speak, to do this little bit of sail raising while profoundly (and, I think, somewhat desperately) keeping in our souls a quiet trust that what is most needed is a great and beautiful Spirit-wind. Without this Love, we are sailboats that get nowhere, stuck out there at sea in our fears and neuroses and our refusals to trust that we are being sought.

Today in my writing--and maybe this is why I love writing so much, because the practice of it metaphorizes for me again and again what I still struggle to capture in the living of so much of the rest of my life--I raised my sails, and Grace caught them, and I leaned with my back out over the ocean, grasping the rope of faith, and felt as if I were flying.

Was I working hard? Yes. Did I feel I was making a great and exhausting effort? Not at all.

This, it seems to me, is the sweet spot that those of us who long to live a life with and in God desire. We long to raise our sails and trust that the winds of Love are on their way. We long to feel that effortless sense of flying and being resourced. We long to experience a God we cannot see.

Mostly I live my life as a sailboat with its sails down, oars in hand, paddling as hard as I can with my own strength of personality or mind or body. This eventually wears me down. Today the lesson is: Put up the sails and wait. Be anxious for nothing, because you are seen, and the winds are on its way. In writing I find I can work-as-trust in a way I am still learning to do in my non-academic life. But for today, at least, I am wise enough to put down the oars. Today I raise the sails and trust for Wind.

Confessions for Mother's Day

I never wanted to be a mother.

This is ironic, because I have been a mother in some way or another since I was a young girl. Family circumstances being what they were, I did a lot of parenting of my younger sisters in my growing up years. After I married, I became a foster mom sort-of-by-accident, because we knew a kid who needed a place to stay, and then another kid, and then another... And then I became an adoptive mom--which, I figured, was a good way to go about it, since adopting older children meant that a) I could skip the much-abhorred (by me) baby stage, and b) the years which I would spend in full-time parenting would be necessarily shortened by my sons' older ages (and if you think that I'm kidding about whether this occurred to me, you don't know me well).

And then within a few months, I decided I would like to birth a child, after all. I can't really tell you why I had this change of heart, except that it had to do with how happy I was at the time, and how willing to surrender my very, very specific life-plan. During our oldest son, Orilus', bone marrow transplant I did a lot of thinking about legacy and family; I still to this day remember nights lying with Orilus in his hospital bed while he underwent chemo and thinking about what would endure in times like that, when death was so near, and suffering so palpable and great. And after his suffering was completed and he was a walking miracle, life seemed a great gift to me, and I wanted to add another to our family.

And now I am a mom to another child who will need me, likely full-time, for the rest of her life.

And I spend way too much time wondering how long that life will be, and how much time we have.

And other times, I spend time worrying that she will live longer than I will, even though that's not as likely.

And--worst of all--there are really dark times when I imagine my life without her, and long for the days before she came when life was not about special needs and people staring and tantrums in public places and too many visits to the OR and the tedium of doctor's appointments and so many medications I have to write them down just so I don't lose track.

Those dark moments are fewer and much, much farther between than they used to be. But I do still catch myself sometimes, dreaming of a life that is beyond the limits of the life we live now.

Topping the huge list of things mothers (and actually, so many of us, men and women, both) don't talk about enough, is this frustration with our lives as they are. Over and over I find myself--again, this week--coming back to this acceptance, this settling-in, to what is.

Today as I was walking, I saw a beautiful flowering tree, bowing in the wind. And I was suddenly struck by this image of bowing to what-is. In nature, most things bow to what is--and they do so as a matter of survival. A tree that will not bow in wind, will break. And though some Americans rarely if ever bow--unless we are bowing to receive praise--in many traditions, bowing is a way to surrender, to prefer, to honor what-is as beautiful and lovely and worthy of respect. As holy.

So this Mother's Day, a holiday that is full of such mixed emotion for so many, I think we could learn from the tree I watched today. And bow to the mess, the awful and holy mess, of all that life is.

For me, the woman who never intended to be a mother and has yet become one in so many forms and ways, I intend to use this Mother's Day weekend to deepen my acceptance of my life, and my children's lives, as God's good gifts.

And so I bow this weekend to Orilus' 7-year bone marrow transplant anniversary--which falls on Mother's Day this year--and to his miracle-life. I bow to the life he is choosing apart from our home, and honor his independence and chutzpah, his resilience and his strength. I bow to the strength of his soul.

I bow this weekend to Jackson, the most fearless bone marrow transplant donor I know, and the countless ways he continues to give his life to others, especially now to Moriah. I bow to his deep and abiding love for her, which touches me in a way little else can. I bow to his intelligence, his quick wit, and the way he too often chooses the path of most resistance. I bow to his choice to grow in this way, and honor the resilience of his spirit.

I bow to Moriah and the spit-fire spirit she inherited from me, a spirit that has made her, too, a surgery-survivor. I bow to her courage to learn even when she is unhealthy. I bow to her curiosity, her laughter, her joy, her tenacity, her independent will, and the complicated medical interventions she needs. I bow to her voice, and her brilliance, and her huge and loving heart.

I bow to the giftedness of each of my children and the unique and precious gifts they have given me--humility, patience, long-suffering, prayerfulness, trust, surrender, courage, faith, love, hope, strength, resilience, courage, advocacy, compassion, discernment...

I bow to what will be.