La la la
About 2 months ago I did something I have been putting off for 13 years. I took a deep breath, picked up the phone and rang a man I’d never met before, never spoken to and asked if I could meet him. I’ve been wandering around this long while pretending a part of myself didn’t exist, too shit scared to dive in and see if it was still there because deep down I was pretty sure it wasn’t.
For the first 18 years of my life I was a singer. It was a massive part of my identity and activity – singing lessons, school musicals, festivals, competitions, church solos and then all of a sudden it stopped. I moved to a new town and was too busy to practice or join groups, I got rusty and embarrassed that I was rusty. I got fed up too of my competitiveness,of comparing myself to anyone else who could string a few notes together and getting smug or insecure, it was all a bit exhausting. It was easier to just shut my mouth than to challenge the proud monster within. But I lost quite a bit of who I was, of who I was created to be and have felt myself to be not quite all there these silent years.
Don’t ask me what made me do it. Literally one day I said to myself ‘Enough’. Enough remembering the glory days, enough ignoring the disappointment inside. I picked up the phone and booked my singing lessons. I am amazed how alive I feel for that half hour a week when it is me, a piano and a captive audience of one belting out some tunes. I am both better and worse than I thought I would be but man does it feel good. Life right now is a lot about being present for my nearest and dearest and all their nappy/culinary/theologising needs so this is a little chink in my week which quite simply is all about me being me. I am working for my grade 8 in Musical theatre in the spring and then the diploma after that which I can hardly believe. That darn monster still needs tamed but I think it’s high time it got taken head-on.
So, coming to a street corner near you this festive season it’s the rusty warbler! Not bloody likely, need a few more lessons ( and a serious amount of wine) before I expose the public to this work-in progress. But do you know what? Life’s too short to piss around ignoring the good things in your life all because of a wee bit of wounded pride.
Now, excuse me while I go force Jayber to watch ‘Calamity Jane’……
espero does theology
Not a very espero blog this one but live with a theologian long enough and something is bound to rub off. These thoughts started banging around my head about a year ago when I did a class on ‘Sermon on the Mount’ and have been marinating there ever since. Time to let them run wild….
‘Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted’
Maybe like me you have skipped over these verses or tucked them away for a time when bereavement comes your way. It’s a nice sentiment, Jesus helping out the sad people but not exactly one that gets you between the eyeballs. Unless Darrell Johnson is explaining it and then the world starts to tip upside down.
It all starts to change when someone explains that what Jesus meant was not him coming into a town and comforting those who have lost loved ones but Jesus coming into a town and calling people to him who then begin to mourn deeply. I mean what the flip? Why on earth does Jesus choose mourning to be a characteristic of the gospelized, those who are part of his kingdom? What happened to happy clappy Christianity?
It all happens in the gap. As we tag along with this guy Jesus, invite him into our present and let him participate in the way we live we start to notice that the picture he paints of this new community of faith, this new paradigm for living that he has ushered in is beautiful but foreign. We are blown away by this vision of freedom and wholeness that we have tasted but the contrast just gets starker. Because still we do ’not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing’ and we feel an ache somewhere. We lift our gaze to the world in which we find ourselves in all its intolerable cruelty and pain and it’s hard to bear after that vision of a new kingdom and the ache gets deeper. Then back at our own hearts and the painful experiences, the disappointments, all the broken relationships and heartache and we start to grieve. Because this is not the way it was supposed to be and in the reality of that truth we start to mourn.
We are given in this beatitude the freedom to grieve, not to stuff it down or ignore it but to feel the pain we see in the world and ourselves and grieve it deeply. How can we receive deep comfort unless we have really let ourselves grieve?
Blessed are those who are vulnerable before the pain of the world and dare to feel the pain.
And I want to run. Run far away from mourning or grieving or sorrow. I have created for myself a bubble of contentment that works very well thank you. I do a nice surface job at examining my heart which goes along the lines of ‘Must try to be more patient with the kids, maybe should stop throwing things when I argue with Jayber’. There is a careful filter on books and media which cross my path, put there to protect me from really engaging with the reality of the pain in the world I live in. I can feel myself disengaging as soon as the news comes on and I’m much more of G2/T2 kinda girl when it comes to reading the papers. Gets a bit trickier when it comes to managing all those disappointments and hurts and painful memories which still come back to bite but to heal those would mean grieving them and grieving would mean feeling them and pain has no place here in my bubble of contentment.
But, but, but. This is not a place I can stay. Because what I really long for is comfort and freedom and joy and none of these can get into the bubble. They are the fruit of engaging with the pain of this broken world, of my broken heart and they bring dignity to the disaster I see around and within me.
A wise friend who I was downloading all of this onto made a comment that was enough to lure me out of the bubble and has been circling in my head for the last year. She said this:
‘As we mourn the ‘death’ we see in ourselves and the world we remember that it is a natural God-law that death always leads to life’.
Now maybe that seems staggeringly obvious to you, and of course we know that the Resurrection gives us the hope in the future that life will follow our own deaths. But when we start to think of this God-law not just being something we look forward to God activating when Jesus returns but something that he activated on the cross, that it is a God-law meant to provide comfort and power in our lives now then it becomes a whole other story.
Because if I believe that in these things I mourn, these deaths I see as I look around the world and within myself, that God will bring life now, then it changes how I live, how I behave. If death always leads to life then the gospelized can be bringers of hope to the darkest places in our communities. When heartache comes to call I can bring it to Jesus knowing that even though the circumstances may not change I can hang on to this God-law and expect to see life somewhere in the middle of it all. I can prick up my ears and scour the landscape of my pain for hope.
Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.
Welcome Home
“Well, are you glad to be home?”
The question du jour. It always makes me pause, a brief moment to remember to smile and I find myself mumbling “auch yes, it’s lovely to be near family again’. I yearn for home, that place of safety and belonging, I just don’t know where I put it. Like the car keys, I know it should be around here somewhere. We exist at the moment on our own little patch of no-man’s land, neither here nor there, with the strangest feeling of being exiles and a strong sense of deja vu.
We end as we began with the bewildering task of settling in this land. It’s somehow harder this time round because I feel I ought to know my way; like remembering a familiar tune but completely forgetting the words. I feel wrong-footed, dislocated and confused. It’s not just that we’ve changed or we can’t find our way round Tescos but that everyone else has moved on too. We have not shared their joys and sorrows these last two years, nor they ours. Nothing that time and a few bottles of wine can’t fix but there is a yearning to be known and a grieving for those we have loved and left in Vancouver. Here as there I must begin again the slow dance of friendship and let the landscape get under my fingernails.
I’m struck at the symmetry of going and coming back – one a mirror image of the other. Houses emptied and filled, filled and emptied; the heartache of goodbyes with dear ones and the awkwardness of hellos; letting go and desperately clinging on. I see myself in that mirror and watch as my younger self deals with that first transition to Vancouver. How little compassion she has for herself and how very afraid she is – that she will not cope, that there will be no place for her.
It is so much harder than she thought it would be, a much anticipated pleasure cruise turns out to be white water rafting. She shakes her fist, kicks the stones and rages and rages at the heavenlies. Hope lost and found and lost again. Three wise women arrive: to midwife the birth of deep truths, to lift her to the one who heals, to love her well. With them the gifts of wisdom, strength and friendship and the knowledge that I am not who I was. Then peace, laughter and those longed for green shoots finally break through the barren ground.
The end of one adventure and another begins. Still a little afraid of what these changes mean to my new-old life here but breathing a little deeper, trusting a little more. I cling to the parting words of one of my wise women: ‘All that has been given to you, it will not be taken away’.
Oh, my Aslan, you are not safe but you are very, very good.
Dare to discipline
Caleb is our eldest. Our eagerly awaited, longed for firstborn.
We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into.
I think the term is ‘strong-willed’ but we prefer to say he has great spirit; Caleb loves life, people and adventure and has energy that could solve the oil crisis. This child was born for wide-open spaces and so he pushes every boundary he comes across. I am so proud of him and so exhausted by him. Even the laid-back, extraordinarily patient Jayber gets pushed beyond endurance as time and again Caleb cartwheels over the lines we draw for him.
It’s hard on the firstborns. They may get more one-on-one time than any other child in the family but they also get all our ‘practice’ parenting. Let’s face it, we’ve never done this before and we haven’t a clue. Seems like we spend a lot of time going back to the drawing board as each new discipline strategy bites the dust. We dip in and out of countless parenting books, swop battle plans with other maxed out parents, consult our child psychologist and drink a lot of wine. It’s trial and error and we just pray that the errors don’t leave too much damage.
It’s hard on the parents. We have these 2 paradigms of parenting that we try and steer a course through; if I’m too tough with him I’ll crush his spirit, if I am too lenient he’ll get out of control. It’s fear based parenting and I’d like to dump it please. I end up dis-empowered and second guessing myself whatever I do.
And so here we are with the current working theory. I try and be firm with Cabes and make the boundaries clear (which is good), but I’m also trying to learn to treat him with compassion, (which is really, really hard when he is driving me nuts and I could cheerfully put him on the next plane to his grandparents), to pay attention to his heart and what he is feeling underneath all the behaviour, to respect his needs and desires more than my need for perfect behaviour and control.
Parenting is a journey of repentance and grace. Of getting it wrong and starting fresh. I’m not good at it. I prefer to keep thinking I’m right until I feel really guilty and then beat myself up about it: woe is me, I’m the worst mother in the world. So I’ve thought of another mantra that every parent needs to get tattooed somewhere, right alongside “This too will pass’ :
‘My love is more powerful than I know or understand’.
It is the soil in which they grow and flourish, the wall that protects them from the worst of their mother’s legalism and perfectionism. It is the covenant I made with them when they were in the womb with God himself as the witness. I will fail them, I will fuck it up but I will love them and that will be enough.
My love is more powerful than I know or understand.
espero is not dead
…she is just chilling out. I’ve had tonnes of posts swimming round my head but whenever I try and write them down they all sound like jibberish. All my blog-ablility has been going into daily bread, my 365, so head over there for the time being.
I’ll be back….
This just might change your life
I’m not sure whether to curse Lydia or thank her for forwarding me the link to this short movie.
Now I have an informed conscience that I’m not sure what to do with. That said, it’s very well done and even if 5% of what she says is true then the way I live has to change.
Watch at your own risk.
Sweating the small stuff
January always seems to strike hard and leave me somewhat bewildered and flustered. Not, certainly, by the weight of countless New Years resolutions; I gave up on those sometime in adolescence. I may not have had much self-awareness then but I knew this: I am fickle.
Somehow January gathers around it all of the Un-done, like a hangover from the previous year. E-mails, bills, tax returns, multiple car hassles, official letters that have lain for months in a threatening pile. At the very same time it conscientiously assumes responsibility for the burdens of the 11 months following it. And so I find myself drowning in To-do’s: thank you’s, phonecalls, dentist, tyres, cheques, fundraising and how the hell do you Air-Care your car? (bloody Canada). I can’t even find the eye of the storm – if I could do that I would at least know where I was. But instead here I am, dizzy from circling, exhausted from worry and terrified something might fall through the cracks.
I hate being a grown-up.Way back in the day, when I was that fickle teenager, being a grown-up seemed amazingly sophisticated and meant one thing: freedom. Having your own house, driving, a credit card (we’ll gloss over the job….and maybe the kids). But the small print of freedom and self-determination is burdens and responsibilities. I’m hardly wanting to return to those days of furious blushing, zits and teenage-girl-power-games but I’d still like to find somewhere to hide from the army of To-do lists that grow legs in my dreams and chase after me with drawing pins.
So I’ve upped my intake of herbal stress meds and increased my merlot dosage. I try and take on Jayber’s mantra: ‘Even the end of the world wouldn’t be the end of the world’, but it isn’t really cutting it. Probably because 1) I’m a perfectionist and a control freak, and 2) It’s easy for Jayber to hold forth when family ‘management’ gets delegated to me. Not that I’m bitter……
I wrestle with what my faith means in broad daylight. If I pray will God send me a personal assistant, a nanny? Will the piles of letters and sinister To-do lists disappear? Cheesy faith and one-line answers I no longer have any patience for. He says we are to have freedom, peace, joy. Not as some pie in the sky aspiration but knowing the world in which these things are to have their context. (I’d like to argue that 1st century Palestine didn’t have car insurance premiums and canadian bureaucracy, but I think that misses the point). Somehow I get to rant and rail and ask for help and help comes: perhaps not in the prescribed form, but it helps nonetheless. My job is to prise my sticky little fingers off my worries and stresses and admit that I can’t cope and that is probably the hardest part. Truth be told I still want to be in control, to be self-sufficient. As my son would say, “I want to do it MYSHELF’.
The thing is, self-sufficiency is a bit tiring and not much fun for those who have to live with me. I can’t make up my mind if it seems too easy or just too hard to ask my Father for help.Dying to my pride and handing myself over to the mystical or living with a head full of stress and a heart full of worry. I’m such a stubborn eejit.
Right, enough pontificating. I’m away off to ask for some help – freedom, joy and peace are looking good right now. Good enough to get off my high horse for.
Confession
My name is espero and I’m a recovering depressive.
Some days I want to tattoo this on my forehead, or give it out on bits of paper to everyone I meet who would like to be my friend. Because I want them to understand, to make allowances and judge me in the light of what I have lived. What is now shadow was once substance and light.
‘It’s not you, it’s me’, I want to say. I keep my distance because I’m not that long out of exile. I’m awkward because I’m not sure of who I am anymore and seem to have forgotten the ease and rhythm of friendship. Maybe I want you to respect my big boundary fence, maybe I want you to storm the barricades. Life post-pit is confusing and disorientating.
My downward spiral began September 2005 and quickly climaxed to being unable to get out of bed, at times unable to speak and terrified of leaving the house. Engaging with people, even dear friends, was a no-no, except for a very small handful who had walked this path themselves and instinctively knew how to be a safe presence. How could you know, except by having been there, that asking ‘How are you?’ was guaranteed to send me back to the safety of my duvet? Life lost all its colour and sparkle and, for the most part, became a bland and grey terrain where everything seemed pointless and joyless. I say ‘for the most part ’because there were times when the grey deepened to black and a deep fear and terror settled on me. Survival meant living a ‘small’ life; doing simple things, living day to day and keeping to my wee community who were loving me back to life
The story of how my healing began is long and very precious to me. I’m not sure I can entrust it yet to the public domain, or that it’s what this post is about. Come have a cuppa with me and I’ll tell you all about it, I just want to protect it, for now, against comments and skeptics. Suffice to say I left the duvet behind and began to emerge again little by little into the Big Bad World.
If this were a movie I would, of course, go from strength to strength and be full of happiness and productivity. I’d be heading up my own counseling empire, having started a national campaign to give holidays to depressed mothers, given birth to 4 more children and be in constant social whirl with countless BFFs.
Life, however ain’t like that. This journey of healing toward wholeness is slow and dominated by struggle. Sometimes it feels as if I teeter on the edge of the pit and a slight breeze would send me down to its depths once again. Yes, I can function but I have been stripped bare of those things which used to define me and give me a feeling of self – who the hell am I and what is it that I bring to this life, this world? It’s hard to broaden my horizons from the small life that served so well in my recovery – it was full of comfort and safety, like a well loved blankie. My heart wants to embrace life and people and experience, but truth be told I’m shit scared. That the shadow will never once again become substance, that hope will get deferred.
My experience of depression is paradoxical. It has been my greatest teacher, my gateway to truth and brought into my life the most extraordinary women who have walked with me. It has also scorched the land of my life, leaving a fertile but barren place. It is here that I sit, waiting for the green shoots of life and hope.
Bear with me.
Comfort and Joy
Tree’s up, lights are on. Have been for a whole week now. This was prompted not by the warm, premature glow of Christmas spirit but by another force entirely: keeping up with the Joneses. Yip, Xmas comes early to community housing and once one family has their outside lights twinkling brightly round a window the race is on. What we lacked in outside lights we made up for in the Xmas tree heat – ours being the first up takes us straight into the semi-finals. Of course a place in the final is only guaranteed by the presence of a singing Santa, preferably one that can withstand the outdoors, but I know when I’m beat.
I was secretly delighted to have the excuse to put up our Xmas things in November, something I would never dream of doing back home. The penny is only really beginning to drop for our 3 year old about Christmas (something about Jesus, who is kind of God but a baby? Like my brother? So, is my brother God?) Needless to say he was VERY excited when I suggested we put our tree up. I put the traditional xmas music on (Michael Card, much to Jayber’s disgust) and got the big box down from upstairs to squeals of delight and anticipation.
It began as I started assembling the tree and by the time I was doing the lights the transformation was complete. Nice-Xmas-spirit mummy, bestowing goodwill to her family and sweetly introducing her oldest child to the joys of Xmas tradition became Mean-control-freak mummy aspiring to reproduce the picture in the IKEA catalogue.
Little hands were encouraged to ‘Put that down, now!’ and told ‘Yes, yes, you can help…in a minute’, followed by ‘I don’t want that there’ and the grand finale ‘Go and play outside until I’ve finished’.
Much later as I gazed at my ravishing tree I began to remember when I was wee and we decorated the tree. Mum didn’t care in the least what her tree looked like, the point was that she and her two girls did it together and all got into the festive mood, warbling along with The Andy Williams Christmas Album. Looking back, most years the tree looked a bit of a sight – ancient chipped baubles, ropey tinsel and every single decoration my sister and I ever made graced its branches. But we loved the ritual and we were proud and happy of our tipsy looking tree.
At the end of the day, my tree may look pretty classy, but it has none of the heart of the bedraggled one from my youth. And I don’t want my kids to look back and remember a grumpy Mum who was more interested in the vanity of a good-looking Christmas tree than their joy of participation. Jayber has already banned me from being in charge of Xmas festivities next year and I’m thinking that may not be a bad idea. Let the little sticky hands take over and toilet roll Santas and cotton-wool Snowmen abound.
You dunno what you got til it’s gone
I fought a demon tonight.
For those of you who know I’m studying Inner Healing and Deliverance at the minute, be not alarmed – not that kind of demon. I mean the ones that sit on your shoulder, looking a lot like you only redder, with horns, and whisper all kinds of nasties about who you are, sticking their little prongs into your pain.
My wee shoulder demon has been sticking her prongs into a new pain of mine, maybe you could call it a grief. It may sound absurd but I promise you my loss is profound.
Gluten. Dairy. Sugar.
Apparently this unholy trinity and I do not a healthy life make. Actually, when the test results came back it was put a bit starker than that; rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune diseases and cancer were mentioned. Nothing like the c-word to ensure compliance. And so as my body embraced a better way of being, a little bit of my soul died.
First it was the loss of the actual food, the worst being baguettes, scones, toast, chocolate and all baked goods. A cardboard box now sits sadly in my pantry, filled with all the banned baking ingredients that I used to get such joy from mixing and sifting. Markets and gourmet food halls are now avoided – I just get too sad. And any extended foray outside the front door is planned with military precision, ration bag stocked with rice cakes and nuts a-plenty. But as the months have gone on I have realized that the food itself is just the tip of the iceberg; that I can cope with. It’s the loss of community that I feel most sharply.
Suddenly you are no longer on anyone’s Must-have-to-dinner list. Pot-lucks become fraught with peril, as do church lunches and nipping out for a bite with friends. Take-away is a no-no. But the worst, the absolute worst is communion. Ribena and Hovis leave me empty handed, passing the plate on and feeling a little like an outcast.
And so back to the demon, who whispers words like freak, lonely, hopeless (and let’s not forget hungry) and prods me toward self-pity. But I fought back tonight. I got out my mixing bowl and my whisk and fended him off with chickpea flour and maple syrup. Twenty-four cardboard cookies later, it’s not quite a hallelujah moment, but it’s a start. Tonight I saw myself tiptoe out from resentment and sadness and sniff the air for hope.
