espero

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.

…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….

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.

www.thestoryofstuff.com

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.

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.

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. The only bum note, and every year it was the same, was when Dad was asked to come in and trim the trunk of the tree and fix it straight in the pot. Not a natural at any kind of DIY, his grumpy reluctance always managed to put a dent in the happy atmosphere.

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.

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.

A bit more on the aforementioned frustrations of being at home with the kids. This vomited itself on to the page a couple of months ago. I don’t pretend to be a poet, as you will discover.

I want to have dirty hands.

Hands that know the goodness of work and purpose.

I want my fingernails to have layers of indefinable gunk,

So you will know I have engaged with life.

Dish, spoon, diaper, steering wheel:

I am more than the sum of these parts.

My hands need pen, book, people and brush.

Trowel, seed, balm and bandage.

You will say ‘But motherhood!

No greater task! You have work enough!

And it is, and I do.

These chubby smiles fill up my heart.

But I have more than heart.

I have hands.

Hands that want to be dirty

With more than poo and puke.

Hands that will work

To show me who I am.

(no pun intended)

The past few days has seen some serious discussion in our house, (in between furious blog watching). It’s not something I had imagined would be up for debate and there will no doubt be a few gleeful readers delighted to see me eat my vehement words: ‘I WILL NOT BE HAVING ANY MORE CHILDREN’. And boy did I mean it - as only a women can when labour, stitches and breastfeeding are still causing flashbacks after child number two.

But we’ve been looking at our wee family of late and we’re not sure it’s complete yet. There’s room for a bit more mayhem and wonder, in fact it’s beginning to feel like we might miss a key player if we continue to base our decision on how much I hate pregnancy and all that it and newborns entail. Not to mention the systematic destruction of the body I once knew and loved (well, maybe not loved, but it’s all relative).

Anyway, I like to approach these things with nice tidy columns of ‘pros’ and ‘cons’. But unfortunately those aren’t the most helpful categories in this decision because on the ‘cons’ side the list seems endless; the biggest factors being time, money and environmental impact. The last of these is probably the one that is making me hesitate most and I find myself tied in knots as I try to bring my thoughts on Christian family and Godly stewardship into conversation with each other.

Does God have an opinion on the number of children I have? Kids are part of his blessing to us aren’t they? Would he rather I save the planet or follow the desires of my heart for good things?

I don’t want to make this decision in the bubble of my family and their needs. Some of those who study the impact of population growth on the environment recommend we simply replace ourselves: two kids at most to limit the damage we are doing to our world. I want to take seriously my call to be a good steward of God’s creation and I know that means a bit of self-denial and sacrifice for the greater good – and let’s remember the ‘greater good’ includes my own two children and the world they will inhabit. But in this case isn’t the cost a little high? In later life I may get to sit smugly and remember how I helped save the world but what about the regret of the child I never had. Is that desperately self-indulgent?

Which brings me back to my nice, tidy, useless little list and the ‘pros’ side. And here it is: I would really love to have a third child. That’s it, that’s all I got. Despite my struggles with motherhood, and the frustrations of being a stay-at-home Mum (more on that in another post) my family doesn’t feel complete yet.

Luckily, environmental impact is about far more than numbers:

‘If we had 9bn people who were all vegetarian and walking to work, that’s very different to 9bn Americans driving to work and having hamburgers every day. For sure, if there were 1bn people we wouldn’t have the problems we do today, but numbers per se are not the problem alone - we have to look at the other side: consumption.’

The Guardian to the rescue once again.

So maybe deciding to have a third child goes hand in hand with a commitment to a more radical lifestyle - one that doesn’t just pay lip service to being ‘greener’ but treats seriously the call to sustainable living. I could almost get caught up in the romance of a plot of land, organic veg and a rain butt…… until I think about the realities of reusable nappies.

Hmmm….more thought and discussion to be had with Jayber I think.

He may escape the scalpel a little longer.

Responding to the kerfuffle started by meinmysmallcorner here and continued by Lilytodd here

As a woman in the same generation as Lilytodd and me in my small corner a lot of this resonates very deeply with me. The sense that I am just as capable, talented, gifted and spiritual as the man sitting beside me on the bus is a given. But what about the man on the pew next to me? Suddenly 30 years of church culture takes my self esteem and my self-worth and divides them by 2. I become hesitant, apologetic, willing to stand on the sidelines and careful about venturing an opinion.

Like Lilytodd I am tuning in more to what God thinks of me as being more important than what the church and society say. I am convinced that God delights in the feminine, is staggered by the beauty and talent of his own creation and created me to do more than complement man but to complete him as only an equal can. I am so much more than the church allows me to be and I am sick of the lip service of religious men saying, “Yes, yes, of course we are all equal in the eyes of God – just different”.

The legacy we have inherited as Christian women from our mothers and their mothers is one of oppression and abuse. Those who say I must cover my head, keep my mouth shut and limit my ministry only to women or children may believe they are acting biblically – but what is the fruit? An impoverished church and women who do not know who they are.

Without wanting to get too theologically out of my depth (too late…), I don’t believe God intended the bible to be bad news for women. The problem lies with the fact godly fallible men, some of them wearing misogynist spectacles and all of them products of their own cultures, have been interpreting scripture. And so what in its time was extraordinarily radical good news for women was twisted and misinterpreted to become an utter perversion of the truth.

The other problem is that we are reading these 1^st century documents as if culture hasn’t changed at all in the last 2 millennia. In some ways we would do better to treat them as a transmission from an alien planet which needs decoded and set in its context before it becomes useful. The difficulty with this is that there are actually very few people taking the time and the effort to do this vital decoding and even fewer doing it in mainstream Christianity. And where does this leave the women in our churches? Bound and gagged.

We women are so backed into a corner at this stage that protesting at our fate only seems to make our situation worse. We get labeled ‘feminist’ and deemed no longer worth listening to and so the legacy gets carried on to the next generation. Ironically, our hope of salvation lies with the men.

Come on, you know who you are. In the privacy of your own home you may expound on equality. But get your ass off the sofa and into the pulpit and start acting a bit more like Jesus. Quit tolerating that which enslaves and wounds. Start protecting and empowering your sisters so we are free to live freely.