Another Perspective

This is what my husband wrote about his experience. Thought I would share it, too:

On Saturday evening August 26, I was in the Lexington, Kentucky airport returning to Atlanta. My fellow travelers and I learned our flight, the last one out, was cancelled. We were given a choice of 6:00 am of 9:00 am flights the next morning. I wanted to hurry home to see my family, but I hesitated and decided on the later, 9:00 am flight. As I arrived the next morning, I was denied entry to the terminal by what was an unexpected and alarming number of emergency personnel. Then the news--the 6:00 am flight was Delta-Comair 5191 that crashed upon takeoff killing 49 onboard.

Thinking back, had this been a business day, I normally would have taken the early flight. I then remembered the man in line ahead of me who asked for the 6:00 am ticket--he lost his life. I didn’t know his name, but I remember his face. All day Sunday, it really didn’t sink in. But over the two days since, I’ve gone over it a thousand times. What would have been? My last conversation with my spouse the night before would have been a silly discussion about movies we wanted to see. I would not have seen her or my son again. I would not have seen the birth of my second child expected in December. Who would care for my mother who is ill, I thought?

I came to the realization this week that we can only tangibly affect the present. Sure, we can strive to do good work, choose to raise children and instill ideals that might outlive us into the future. But, it’s really the day to day life, the present tense where have the most impact. What would your last conversation of Saturday August 26 have been about? What would your actions on that day been spent toward?

I am not overjoyed. I am thankful for the days I have had since Saturday, but I am very sad for those who lost their lives, many due to a simple choice of two plane tickets. In honor of those lost in the crash, I would challenge each of us to consider every moment more carefully. We should choose more carefully the way we treat others and speak to them, just in case those are the last words and actions we’re remembered by. We should strive to contribute work in the office and in the community that has lasting quality. We should try to be a positive influence on others. If we do these things, no matter how many days each of us has on Earth, they will add up to a life worth living.


When I read this for the first time, I had no idea the guy ahead of him chose the 6:00 flight. Gave me chills to read it.

A few friends and family have mentioned to us that God spared Moon's life for a reason, that there is an unfulfilled purpose in Moon's life, something he must do, and this was made more obvious when his life was spared.

While I certainly don't believe in random fate pushing us all about the stage of life like so many dust bunnies swept up by some clown with a cosmic broom, I wonder about that statement. I wonder if the fact that he's here with the living today and the guy ahead of him in line is not means more than that. Surely my husband wasn't the only one in line God was looking out for, or the only one God cared about. Surely my husband wasn't the only one with unfulfilled dreams and purpose standing in that line at the airport, trying to get home to Atlanta.

One of my personal catchphrases over the past few years has become "life sucks, but God is good". In this world, people die too young and too soon. Bad things happen to good people. Bad people get away with doing horrible things. There is no perfection, no utopia, no protection from the reality of evil and good co-existing side by side. It is why, like Saint Augustine, I believe "our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God". It is why I believe in Heaven.

Maybe my husband's life was spared because there is some great unfulfilled plan for him that still must unfold. Or maybe it was just not his day to die. Ultimately, I think he sums it up well in his assessment of the whole thing--we can only tangibly affect the present. This minute is really all we have. I read a quote yesterday from Lawrence Scupoli from his work The Spiritual Combat: "God has granted you the morning, but he does not promise the evening. Spend each day as if it were your last."

What would our lives look like if we really took that to heart? How would I live this day differently if I thought it were my last?

This day. This minute. It's really all I know I have.

A little brush with mortality...

This past Saturday, my husband had a 50-50 chance of survival. No joke. And I was completely oblivious.

Here's the deal:

He flew down Friday to Lexington, KY to help his sister get settled in her new digs there, with plans to fly back Saturday night. I was okay with this, although not thoroughly thrilled--I am NOT a fan of spending nights alone, mainly because I'm ridiculously afraid of the dark for a thirtysomething mother. But it was cool. I had Monk and Psychic to get me through the darker hours before bedtime, and a new mystery novel. Of course, Max chooses this particular weekend to come down with a mysterious virus complete with fever and vomiting and staying awake all night, but that, I've learned, is part of the Murphy's Law of mothering--the worst events with your children will occur when you are sans spouse.

So Friday night passes in a haze of USA Network programming, whodunits and vomit cleaning. I survived.

Then Moon, my spousal unit, calls me Saturday evening around the time he should be boarding his plane and tells me that due to a plane malfunction his flight has been canceled and he has to reschedule for the next morning. He was offered a choice of the 6:00 or 9:00 flight back. He chose 9:00AM.

I was not a happy camper, as I now faced another night alone with a sick baby and a raging case of cabin fever from having been locked in the house all day with said sick baby. But this is life, and I must deal. Sunday it is.

"I'll see you around 12:30 or so," he tells me.

Max and I spent another sleepless night, broken only by a 2-hour respite he offered me while he slept through my watching of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle on cable TV. (yeah, yeah, yeah, make fun if you wish, but sleep deprivation and intellectually stimulating movies do not mix.) I am REALLY looking forward to Moon's homecoming, if only for the chance of sleep it might provide.

At 7:00AM Sunday morning, he calls me again.

"Hey," he says, "are you watching the news?"

"No, I'm watching Dora the Explorer with Max while brain cells trickle out of my ears," I tell him. I am running on about 2 hours sleep total, and my hugely pregnant state does not allow me to consume massive amounts of caffeine to compensate. As a result, I am not in the best of moods.

"Well, I won't make my flight. There's been a crash and the airport's closed."

"WHAT???" I said, stupidly.

"That's all I know," he said. "Except that I think the plane that crashed was the plane I was supposed to be on at 9:00."

The impact of all this didn't hit until around 9:30, when the news networks picked up the story and every major Atlanta channel was carrying the story of Comair Flight 5191. My knees went rubbery as I sat there watching the whole story unfold--the crash itself, the fact that all but one person on the flight died. One of the passengers was a dad who had been visiting family in Lexington and took the earlier flight because he wanted to see his kids. Moon came within a hair's breadth of being on that plane. "Do you want the 6:00 or the 9:00 flight?" he'd been asked, and had a 50-50 chance of living or dying in the answer he gave.

When he finally got home around 7PM that night, I was never so glad to see him.

It's funny how quickly our life settled back into the grooves of, well, life--you think that when you brush against death's veil that closely you would take some time to ponder the whole profundity of the thing. But by now Max was recovering from his virus, and had his own case of severe cabin fever that he exhibited by screaming at the top of his lungs and running around the house in circles like a rabid dog. One of our cats had been bitten by a spider the night before and had to be taken to the kitty ER because the allergic response to the spider bite was causing it to try and scratch its face off, and he was getting blood all over my carpet. One of us had to take dinner over to a sick family member. We were out of diapers. That sort of thing. Life just shoved itself into the cracks too quickly to allow us to ponder the cracks in the first place.

I thanked God, of course, but it was a weird sort of thank you. How do you say thanks for the preservation of one life in the midst of the loss of 49 others? "Thanks that such a horrible thing didn't happen to us" seems a selfish sort of prayer. I'm profoundly grateful my husband will get to see the face of his unborn child, which he almost didn't. But what of the newlywed couple just starting a brand new life who were on that plane?

So, I'm grateful and sad and relieved all at the same time. Death seems to have been dogging our family for a few years now with the loss of both of my grandparents and Moon's dad, so it's nice to see us get bypassed this time, even if I'm still reeling a bit from the way the Grim Reaper's black robes brushed a little too closely against my husband's ankles. And as in-your-face a reminder as it was, it was still a reminder that after 11 years, I am still crazy about my husband, and have no idea how to even contemplate a full life without him.

So here we are on Tuesday, all of us still alive, Max fully recovered, cat in one of those awful conehead things and healing, Moon back at work, me blogging, fetus kicking the snot out of me, diapers bought, life moving on. Our biggest concern today is who we can get to babysit Max this Thursday while we go to an Earth, Wind and Fire concert (not my first choice, but the tix are free and Moon is a huge 70s music fan. I would have preferred the recent John Prine/Patty Griffin show, but that is neither here nor there). But somewhere out there are 49 families whose lives have been totally blown apart, and my heart and prayers are still with them, because I came this close to joining their ranks. If you get a chance today, you might want to offer up a prayer/good thought as well. The Valley of the Shadow of Death is a pretty horrible place to be.

Confessions of a Housewife

Just checked to see when I last posted something--over a month ago. Who was it that said "life is what happens when you're making other plans"? I'm finding that particularly apt right now.

Since my last posting, there's been a lot of life--tinged with the shadow of death--around here. My baby boy turned three years old. Some close family family members are moving to start a new chapter of their life in Kentucky. My sister-in-law is dealing with a cancer diagnosis just passed down to her mother. A close member of our extended family (who, being proud and disinclined to enjoy having minutae about his/her life paraded across the Internet, shall remain nameless) is sick, very sick. We've been doing a lot of caregiving over the past month, wondering what the final out come of all this sickness will be. It's been reminding me of the vigils we kept last year at my father-in-law's bedside just before he passed away, and the time my grandfather lived with my husband and me after my grandmother passed on.

Caregiving. It seems to come with the territory of family, those who are bound to you through blood and marriage. At least, that's how it's seemed in my life. I've been spending a lot of time this past month babysitting so other relatives can visit at the hospital, preparing meals, running errands. Doesn't leave a lot of time to write.

The thing about being a stay-at-home mother/housewife in this day and age is that, well, we're a bit of a dying breed. There just doesn't seem to be a lot of underscheduled people in the world. There's not a lot of options for spur-of-the-moment babysitters, meal cookers, errand runners. (Believe me--I've been looking for a spur-of-the-moment babysitter for three years.) And I've been a little proud of the fact that my life has room for emergencies, room for unscheduled stops and u-turns. I'm grateful for it. It makes me remember why I wanted to do this in the first place--to have time for my family, not just my immediate family, but my extended family as well. To have a life that has space in it.

I've found myself drifting a lot this summer, watching time float by. I've been restless and resentful of these large blocks of unscheduled time that seem only able to be filled with the relentless constancy of tedious chores--the same dishes, the same diapers, the same laundry, the same dirty carpets and empty cat bowls. I've felt invisible and useless. But this past month I have remembered the blessing of being able to say "yes" when someone desperately needed a chunk of my time. I forget sometimes, holed up inside this house, that in this insanely overstuffed, multitasking world that the gift of time is a very great gift indeed.

It'sa delicate business, being a housewife in the modern age. Most of us stick with the "stay-at-home mom" label, and I usually do, too. It makes what you do seem noble enough that the modern world at least pays lip service to your sacrifice, even if they don't really mean it. You are sacrificing your career potential to stay at home for your children, to give them the best you can possibly give.

But there's more to it. I'm not just a stay-at-home mom. I'm a housewife, too. Some stay-at-home moms may be just that, with housekeepers or maids to take care of the housewifery so they can solely be mothers. I can't speak for them. (I can't afford regular maid service.) So I'm a housewife, too. And boy, is that an unappreciated job. No one even bothers to pay lip service to that one--in fact, the term 'housewife' is suspect, as if you're a Stepford Wife Clone in a 50s housedress and apron. In our culture, housework is reviled. It is not something to take pride in, it is something to be foisted on to someone else at the earliest possible economic opportunity. When speaking of housekeeping, it is only respected or admired if one is discussing it in the way of Martha Stewart or Real Simple magazine--if one is speaking of making a home beautiful, decorating it, organizing it with $5,000 worth of cunning little bins from the Container Store.

But meanwhile, someone's got to clean the toilets, vacuum the crumbs off the carpet, wash the fingerprints off the windows and iron the laundry. Someone's got to change the sheets, wipe down the sticky railing, pick up the toys and cook dinner. Every day. Again and again and again and again. And the main thought that runs through your head as you pick up the same stupid dump truck off the same stupid playroom floor for the 50th time that day is THIS IS NOT THE REASON I EARNED A MASTER'S DEGREE. You can finesse a little glory and prestige out of staying home to raise children. You can massage some respect out of serving as your home's interior designer and organizer. But to stay home to be the maid? C'mon. It's pretty humiliating in this day and age.

But housewifery is what takes up the bulk of my day. The running of a home is a colossal, constant unchecked "to do" list. There is always a chore to be done. I am as much housewife as mother. Right now, as a I write, the living room is covered in toys, the kitchen is full of dishes (and then there's that sticky place where Max spilled his juice this morning), a washer full of damp clothes to dry, and a list of errands that need running.

I just finished To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife by Caitlin Flanagan. And it speaks to this issue (although Ms. Flanagan speaks as one who has both housekeeper and nanny and a full-time stay-at-home dream job with paying writing gigs, so I took some of her words with a grain of salt.) I went looking for answers but didn't find many. It's a good book, though, and one that provacatively addresses these issues. In the chapter "Drudges and Celebrities" she writes:

There was a time when the measure of a home was found in the woman who ran it--who was there all day long, who understood that certain aspects of 'hominess' had less to do with spit and polish than with continuity and permanence. As these old standards wane, a new one has emerged, and it is [Martha] Stewart's...But almost any project she cooks up is less daunting than the one it is meant to replace: keeping a family together, under one roof, home.

Sometimes I feel caught between generations, between cultural shifts. I'm grateful for the women's rights movement of the 1970s, because it opened up a world of options I never would have dreamed of otherwise. I also feel a little defensive reading Betty Freidan, or some of the newer feminist writers, who make me feel that my life choices are somehow a smack in the face of feminism, a retreat. I also find myself at times getting a little cross-eyed with boredom in the world of stay-at-home mothers, wishing that sometimes we could find something to talk about besides our children. (Don't even get me started on those weird suburban "Moms Night Out" evenings I've been invited to involving houseware or makeup parties or worse, that weird Bunco game.)

I care about my family, passionately, and I refuse to apologize to anyone for that. I honestly believe it is important that my kids grow up with a readily available mom, and that if my husband is working 10-12 hours a day to give me that privilege, the least I can do is make things
neat and tidy and maybe have some semblence of a home-cooked meal on the table when he comes home at night. I have grown to appreciate the calm and peace that comes from a clean, well-ordered home, and I'm willing to scrub a toilet or two for that calm. Maybe when my kids are older, I'll say "to hell with all this" and jump into some new endeavor--and here is where I respectfully doff my hat to feminism, because without the activists of that movement, I might not have the option to do so. But I'm not going to apologize for being a housewife, either.

I have written before about Buddhist monks who create these beautifully-colored, intricate mandalas from sand, sometimes taking all day to do so, only to wipe it away and begin fresh the next day. In our society, a pointless exercise in futility. Yet to them the point is the activity--the meditative and spiritually open state that comes only through the banality and tedium of the task. I've seen this, too, in the writings of Catholic Benedictine monks who see an intrinsic link between their mundane tasks of keeping up the abbey and the cycles of their prayer. I believe my housework is my mandala, my liturgy of the hours. (At least, I believe this on my best days, when I'm not grumbling under my breath about the pointlessness and futility of it all.)

After all, my early immersion into punk rock taught me that just because something is considered right or wrong by societal norms does not in any fashion make that right or wrong. One hundred million people have been wrong before. So sue me--I'm a housewife. You got a problem with that?

Confessions of a Suburban Miser

I just finished a book: Around the House and in the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing, and Home Improvement by Dominique Browning. It was good, in a wealthy, suburban sort of way. Browning writes about the home improvements she made to her home--in essence, the re-creation of her home--after her divorce. And it really is a lovely book. But it was hard for me to relate to Browning's re-creation of home, which involved thousands of dollars of new furniture and home improvements, and the purchase of a second home, a summer cottage in Rhode Island.

With a toddler in tow and another on the way, our family's idea of home improvement has become mowing the lawn. We'd love to do all sorts of things--replace our mission-style furniture in the family room, for instance. We bought it before we had kids, and never realized that the sharply-angled corners of our oversized, solid wood coffee table would pose hazardous to careening babies approaching it at eye level. It worked beautifully in the front room of our Victorian monstrosity in Kentucky, but seems out of place and awkward in our white-on-white new-ish house in Georgia. I'd love to replace our furniture with big, comfy, highly-washable sofas and leather ottomans, hang some sort of curtain that would work to cover our windows that soar 3/4 of the way up our 20-foot ceiling. I'd love to buy some big, colorful pieces of art to hang on our bare walls. Our house, even on the best day, is rather drab and tired-looking, sort of like a dependable yet boring hotel. With cheap, stained carpet and fingerprints on the glass.

So reading about Browning's angst as she repairs her life and her home didn't really touch me the way I think it was supposed to touch me. I kept thinking that the ability to buy out Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma might go a long way towards easing my troubled soul. Who couldn't create beauty and order out of those kind of resources?

Yeah, so I'm a little jealous.

I grew up poor. Not dirt poor, but poor nonetheless. I remember days when dinner consisted of canned beef gravy poured over white bread because that was all we had. Of paper grocery bags of staples left on our doorstep by generous friends who knew of our plight, or the Christmas that only happened because some some friends of my parents left a bag of toys and clothes on our front stoop one winter. I remember my mom crying over the monthly bookkeeping, trying to make two impossibly short ends meet. There was never quite enough money to go around, even in times when our financial circumstances grew brighter. There was never quite enough.

In my early 20s, when I moved out on my own, I was still poor. I lived in a 3-room shotgun apartment with holes in the walls. I used my first tip money from my waitressing job to buy the largest container of boric acid I could find to stuff in every nook and cranny of my kitchen, to combat the roach problem I inherited with the apartment. I lived on ramen noodles and the free food I got at the restaurant where I worked. I was a connoiseur of thrift shops and bargain bins. I occasionally dated just for the free dinner. I cried over the monthly bookkeeping.

Then I married a man who grew up in the suburbs, and had always been solidly, staunchly middle class. His parents had been able to afford braces for him when he was young, and health insurance. He shopped in department stores and owned a driveable, dependable car (in fact, one of the first incredibly sweet presents he gave me when we were dating was to ransom my undriveable, non-dependable car from the garage where it was being held hostage until I could pay for the repairs.) He's careful with money and talks about retirement funds and dream houses. Now, 11 years into our marriage, I live uncomfortably in his world. At 37, I'm finally getting the braces I always wanted as a kid. We are solidly, staunchly middle class couple. But still, I'm uncomfortable around money. I still crave it, dream about what I would buy if I had it--just the way I did when I was kid. When I do have it, I tend to spend it quickly, still believing it will disappear, dry up--that money is a feast or famine sort of thing. I careen between gluttony and starvation when it comes to money. I roll my eyes at the comfortably rich and some secret, ugly part of me wants to hate them, to feel nothing but contempt for them for having more than I have--the same part that envies them their wealth and comfort.

In the suburbs, I feel the pull even more to acquire, to have more. It isn't good for me to drive down streets laden with strip malls, with little grassy strips by the curb filled with colorful signs screaming BUY BUY BUY. My husband is completely oblivious to it, but I am not.

I am realizing, slowly, that growing up poor left me with a miser's soul. I begrudge every financial generosity, fearing I might be giving away more than I can afford. I am afraid of waking up with nothing, and it is a binding fear, one that keeps me from truly enjoying what I have.

The question is: how do I get from the fear and this poverty-stricken soul to a place of true contentment and generosity? And how do I get there in the consumption-mad suburbs, which for me is like putting a compulsive overeater to work in a chocolate factory? And finally, why is it that every one of those books on "Simple Abundance" and creating a beautiful life from the ordinary ultimately requires you to PURCHASE SOMETHING?

I'm at a loss. Comments on my predicament are welcome.

Face to Face with the Human Condition

Tuesday I had to get some blood drawn for some routine pregnancy tests. I went over to my friendly neighborhood lab to have the work done. It's a depressingly gray one-story building with the best lab techs I've ever known--they never have to stick me more than once, and every other lab I've ever been to usually has at least one false start before finding a good vein. (Do you care about any of this? Of course not. But since I have, for better or worse, fallen into the category of "high-risk pregnancy" I have become a human pin cushion, so for me good lab techs are right up there with ice-cold Coke and finding an extra buck in my pocket in the "good things" category.)

So here I am in the depressing lab, signing in and passing over my insurance card to be copied. It's a busy day in the lab--the reception room is full of people sitting in chairs, waiting to be called. Pregnant women flipping through American Baby magazines. A large African-American woman slumped over across 2 chairs, sleeping. An elderly couple sitting close together, stiffly upright and looking suspiciously over at the colorful assortment of people around them. And next to me, to my left, sits a Hispanic woman--little more than a girl, really. She looks barely out of her teens. She has long, curly black hair and a white tank top on. She's about as pregnant as I am--maybe 5 or 6 months at the most. She is waiting alone.

When you're pregnant, you can scope out other pregnant women as if you've got radar. Without even knowing them, you know you're in the same club. You eye them from the belly up. When you catch each other's eye you smile. But this girl wasn't looking at anyone or anything in particular. It was as if an invisible barrier stood between her and the rest of the room.

Well, maybe not that invisible. It was hard to ignore her grossly swollen upper lip, even as she tried to cover it with her fluttering bird-hands. Or the vaguely sinister purple markings that showed around her cheekbone and nose. It was obvious that someone, very recently, had beaten the crap out of her pretty face. This young, pregnant girl, waiting alone in a room full of people.

What do you do when you see this? When you see someone in horrible trouble for a split second in a waiting room and know there is no way, no time, to offer any help? Her body language made it clear she was not open to conversation. I got the feeling that if I asked her what happened, I would have been told she tripped and fell into a door, not some loved one's fist.

I've wondered about her for the past two days. I've prayed for her a lot--prayed for protection for her and that unborn baby. In the area of town where the lab is, there are a lot of Hispanic immigrants, and I wonder if she is one of them. I wonder if she even spoke English, and if she lived in one of the run-down rental houses a few blocks down, those houses with graffiti sprayed across the peeling siding, with windows broken out and curtains for doors where so many of the day laborers who wind up in this area live. Or maybe she lives a few miles out in the suburbs like me, in a nice house with a nice yard in a nice neighborhood. I've learned over the years that things like abuse are not limited to the poor, run-down areas of town. They're everywhere. They're sitting right next to me.

You get isolated in the suburbs. It's not intentional, it just happens. Your life becomes smaller and smaller, focused on your house, your family. It's easy to forget there's a world outside of the little life you have constructed, easy to let the details of your busy life crowd in, to shield yourself from life's darker side in your comfortable house or driving down the interstate in your comfortable, air-conditioned car. I know I've fallen victim to this. In the city, the darker side of life was right next to me, right next door. The house next to ours was owned by a church, and homeless men would often be allowed to camp out on their front porch overnight. They would occasionally stumble over to our front porch, singing some song off-key, staggering a little, telling us stories and begging for change. One guy tried to break in to our newborn baby's nursery while he was blind drunk, thinking he was at his grandmother's house--this was about when we decided to move to the suburbs.

In the city, I felt like the human condition, the good and the bad, was always laid out in front of me. Here in the suburbs, I confess I sometimes forget the bad stuff. Until the beaten face of a too-young pregnant girl brings it back to me. And then I remember that the darkness, like poverty, is always with us. It is important to always remember, to occasionally have it sit next to you.

If you get a chance, offer up a prayer or some good thought for that girl and her baby tonight. God knows she probably could use it. I know I will.

No Such Thing as Happiness and Other Joyful Thoughts, Part II

I've been avoiding writing about this part of my happy/joy treatise because, quite frankly, I'm still working my way through it. And I do so hate to write about things I don't know well. I much prefer always sounding like an expert, the one who has all the answers, who has spent all of her time Thinking Great Thoughts. Much preferred over letting you know who I really am, a blind woman stumbling in the dark, a dark that scares her to death.

I grew up in a seriously strict, seriously fundamentalist, seriously fire-and-brimstone and God-loves-you-so-much-he-pretty-much-hates-you church and school. (Oh trust me, there will be LOTS on this throughout!!)I was taught God is not a fan of failure or weakness. God won't tolerate it. God will beat it right out of you any way possible. So even now--when I know this teaching to be a lie, and thoroughly anti-God, I struggle with seeming imperfect, struggling, lost. So I've been avoiding saying anything about joy. Especially because joy, for me, is intrinsically bound up with God, flowing from God. I can't write about one without writing about the other.

In truth, we are all lost, blind, struggling. It's the human condition. To quote one of my favorite songwriters, the late great Mark Heard, we are all "soot-covered urchins, running wild and unshod"...So from one urchin to another, here's what's been coming to mind about the whole joy thing, so far...

Joy is real, far more real and lasting than happiness. And a lot harder to come by and keep, too. Joy is a choice, a determination, a deliberate state of mind and heart. It has more to do with an outward focus than an inward focus, less to do with feeling than will--at least at first. The feelings seem to be a result of the willingness to be joyful. I'm starting to believe joy has much in common with words like "rejoice", "hope", "gratitude", "service" and "worship". And it has a lot to do with pain, too.

During the darkness of my past year, I first came upon an inkling of joy in a book on mourning, Michael Card's A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching Out to God in the Lost Language of Lament. In the book, Card looks at the Biblical story of Job, which is a good one to look at if you want to look at sorrow and grief.

It's the anti-happy book. Wealthy, religious, happy and healthy Job with his big family, good health, houses and herds and lands loses everything in one fell swoop to a series of calamities and natural disasters--fires, earthquakes, thieves, illness. He winds up in rags, covered in ash, covered in festering sores and prostrate with grief. His friends come and pat him on the back and say "Man, you must have really screwed up big time for God to punish you like this." (Nice friends--for the record, in situations like this, the proper response is to envelop the griever in a huge hug and cry with them. A big ol' casserole with lots of fat and cheese would not go amiss, either.) His wife comes to him and lovingly says, "Babe, curse God and die." (I can't be too hard on her, though--she had just lost all of her children. She was in a pretty black hole of despair herself.)

And Job's response to all of this?

The Bible says "he fell to the ground in worship."

Now, I'd read this before. I'd always had a problem with it, really. If I were Job, I would've taken his wife's advice and killed myself, not fallen to the ground in worship. His response seemed to me to be too Christian, too...inhuman. The spontaneous, instinctual human response to suffering is not joy, or worship. I saw him as one of those goody two-shoes who was so blinded by his fundamentalist zeal for his faith that he deliberately refused to see the reality of his situation.

But Card's take on it blindsided me, and woke me up to the possibility that Job's response was, while certainly heroic, still definitely human. He says...

"Job is the sort of man who will simply not let go of God. To him, this is what worship means. He will stubbornly cry out in the groanings of this lament, which is worship until God answers...Job had the audacity to worship God in the midst of such indescribable pain."

Worship, obviously, is different from joy, and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But the two are tied up together for me. To me, worship is recognizing some aspect of God's goodness and meditating on that aspect, focusing on it and recognizing it for the awe-inspiring thing it is. It can be as obvious and overt as singing along with a chorus in a church, or as subtle and personal as finding a tiny piece of cobalt sea glass on the beach, its edges rounded by the great, gray ocean. It is something that leads as if by instinct to joy.

Worship as it is too often done in the Christian church has left me cold, especially in the midst of all my loss. Too often last year I was not able to sing along with some chorus or hymn because tears were choking me, running down my cheeks. When I looked around my congregation, people were smiling and lifting their hands in the air, and bringing my grief into that sanctuary felt too much like being the embarrassing, drunken, blubbering killjoy at someone's birthday party that everyone wishes would just shut up and go home.

But here in Job I found out that God never asked me to go to church and sing happy, happy songs with upbeat rhythms. Coming from me, at the place I was in, that wasn't worship because it wasn't authentic. Where I was in my life--which felt a lot like Job's at the time--worship simply meant showing up and saying, "Why?" Because by asking "why", it showed I still believed God could answer the question. It showed that I had the audacity to believe that God and all the good things that flow from God were still real, still available, despite death, despite pain, despite grief. That I believed that pain and suffering were not the end all and be all of existence, that there might be more.

The ancient Greek myth about Pandora and her box is one of my favorites. Pandora has a box that is given to her by the gods and it contains all suffering, illness, and evil. She is told never to open the box, but curiousity gets the better of her and she does open it. The sufferings and evils go flying out to infect the world forever with their darkness, but underneath them all was one miraculous discovery that remained: hope.

Joy starts there, with hope. And hope is, by necessity, a resident with the dark things of this world. Why would we need hope, if we had no suffering, no grief, no illness or evil? What purpose would it serve? What need for faith, which the Bible defines as "the substance of things hoped for", if pain was not shouting its very real existence every day?

So here is one thing I know for sure: Joy is real. I believe that to be true. God is real. I believe that to be true. And right now, as I come blinking and raw into the sunlight after a very long night of the soul, my statement of joy is as simple as this: I believe. Still.

A Quick Aside, and the Discovery of a Theme...

First, let me apologize for my silence--my son, Max, got sick on Friday with one of those mysterious viruses that knock one flat but seem impossible to truly diagnose, and my weekend was spent nursing him. He's back to his old tricks today: watching too much TV, eating butterfly-shaped peanut butter sandwiches and asking me four million questions about everything from my prediction of what the next TV show is to why one cannot repair a balloon that has lost its air ("the batteries," he patiently points out as he holds up the bottom of the balloon to my face, "go here, mommy!").

That being said, I picked up Alexandra Stoddard's Living a Beautiful Life from the library this weekend and have been skimming through it. When I'm feeling blah or in need of a lift, I enjoying skimming through her books because they're full of delightful suggestions--some useful and reasonable, some the ridiculously "simple" suggestions that can only come from the very spoiled or very rich--about improving the quality of one's home life, and as much as I chafe against suburban living, I am a passionate believer in the home, in home-making as a beneficial and necessary part of successful family life. I may not have June Cleaver's take on the whole thing, but there's a lot to be said for creating an environment of peace, beauty and order for one's self and one's family. Right now, in my family, I'm the one with the time, passion, and ability for the job, so I try to take home-making as seriously as I take mothering, because for this moment, they are my profession and calling as much as writing is.

~End of (slightly defensive-sounding) soapbox rant~

Back to Ms. Stoddard.

While reading the first chapter, I came upon a passage she quotes from Maria Ranier Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, which is one of my Top Ten Most Influential Books of All Time. As I read the passage, I realized it summed up exactly what I wanted to do with this blog, and so let me quote it here to give you a theme of sorts for what will come:

"...So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you: describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty--describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place."

As you might have guessed, I am NOT a fan of suburban life. Not only do I feel it to be an isolating environment that too easily leads to self-absorption, but I feel it encourages a lifestyle of mass consumption and waste, is too often damaging to the natural world around us, and--at least for me--offers up a lot of difficulties when trying to live a life that I think Christ would have me lead. However, due to finances and the needs of our extended family and a host of other reasons, this is where I and my family are right now, and where it looks like we're going to be for a while. Attempts to escape over the past year or two have proved futile, so I'm led to believe that for whatever reason, this is where I am supposed to be.

To simply snarl and criticize and grouse about my surroundings would be easy, but not very useful. How much better to realize the dangers and pitfalls of suburban life, look at them honestly, but recognize too the offerings of this everyday life of mine, and honor them as well? What if I see it not as poor, but rich in its complexity?

So I take Rilke's challenge, and am determined to prove myself a poet worthy of my current theme.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

No Such Thing as Happiness and Other Joyful Thoughts...

Okay, I said today I'd talk about happiness.

Let me preface this whole discussion by stating that today, right now, this moment, I'm "happy"--I finally made my doctor's appointment today and had my ultrasound, which showed that curled up inside me right now is a little baby boy, all fingers and toes and organs in the right places, with a beautifully beating heart. I saw the curve of his tiny spine and the four chambers of his heart pumping in amazing rhythm. Since I'd already gone through all of this with child #1, I thought I'd be a bit more jaded, but I wasn't. Seeing him on the black and white screen took my breath away.

I'm happy because in 2005 I had 2 other ultrasounds, one in July and another in November. Both of those were supposed to show tiny babies, one at 10 weeks and the other at 6 weeks, and both were terrifyingly empty, showing a void that stretched out like a tomb. So seeing my baby boy on that screen today was a miracle of sorts, and I'm very grateful. I'm joyful. I'm, well, happy. For the moment.

See, 2005 was the year I learned that what I'd always considered happiness was a fleeting, illusory thing. An uncatchable butterfly. It's a lesson I learned, as I learn most important lessons, the hard way. The hardest.

It's an American thing, the pursuit of happiness. It's literally part of our Declaration of Independence. And it certainly plays a key role in American suburban life. That's why all us suburbanites are here, for the most part: the pursuit of a better life, better schools, safer neighborhoods, bigger yards and more-house-for-the-money. And bigger and better should make us more comfortable. And being more comfortable should make us...happy.

I bought that hook, line, and sinker when we moved here. I was the new mother of a 4-month-old baby, leaving the city where I had lived for 10 years. We left the city for a lot of reasons--foremost among them because the job opportunities for my husband in Atlanta were far better than where we were before. We were buying in to the American dream--I was going to be a stay-at-home mom to our son, we were going to be closer to our extended family, we were going to have a nice back yard with room for a grill and patio furniture and a house that wasn't falling down around our ears in disrepair.

But happiness, at least what I thought was happiness, has proved to be difficult to find, and not at all attached to any of the things I was told would bring happiness. I thought happiness was something I could acquire through the creation of the environment I chose, an environment of safety (I'm a fearful girl, laden with neuroses, and safety is always right up there next to cleanliness and Godliness for me) and beauty; one of wealth and comfort. I believed that is was up to me to create my own happiness.

But then in 2005, my grandfather died. And I miscarried twice. And my dear, sweet father-in-law suddenly died of complications from a massive stroke at the ridiculously young age of 59. And as my own grief swept over me in tidal waves, I would turn on the television for comfort and instead see image after indelible image of the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina: the houses smashed flat, the streets flooded with putrid water, the bodies left undiginified and alone in deserted corners, the precious belongings of thousands of families floating in the black water like dead things. There was no protection against this, against death or flood or destruction. They happened in an instant. My acquired happiness was useless in the face of such things. All I saw was sadness, and evil, and the black soul of nature ripped wide like a wound.

My vision changed because of all this. When I would drive down the road to take my son to preschool, I used to see the beds of flowers planted in neat rows at the entrances to the subdivisions, the blooming crape myrtles and birds and butterflies. Now my eyes could only see the roadkill on the sides of the streets, the dead squirrels and possums, the way the trash piled up in gray, helpless lumps beside the sewers.

I tried to find solace in nature. I had grown up in the rural Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey, and by walking out my back door would be in the woods, surrounded by fragrant cedars and pines. The woods were my sanctuary as a child, and I looked for that now. But my vision was still impaired, and instead of beauty I saw a garden orb spider, huge and brown, spin her perfect web in my front window. I watched her snare insects in that web, watched as she pulled them close to her body and fed on them with a lethal relish both horrifying and fascinating to see.

I tried to buy happiness back. I would sit in front of my computer, too shattered to venture outside my house for very long, and I would order little gifts for myself and my family off the Internet. Toy trains for my son, CDs and books for my husband, clothes and books for me. I would get the packages delivered to my door and I would open them, waiting for the rush of elation, the lovely feeling of holding something new, and perfect, and spotless, of knowing that perfection was mine. But it was like buying heroin--the feeling would come for a moment, in a rush, then disappear as quickly.

I stopped believing in happiness as anything more than a momentary, fleeting emotion. It is impermanent. It is not real. This devastated me when I realized this--perhaps because I had seen happiness as some sort of defense against the darkness of this world, a shield of sorts. Something tangible I could hold and mold and use to make me invulnerable.

But realizing this leads to the ultimate next question: So what, then? If happiness is an illusion, and death and destruction and darkness are as real as flood waters and as cold as graves, what then? If this is true, what makes us get up in the morning and function, and not look for the nearest implement to end it all?

Ah. Good question, if I do say so myself. And I'm starting to formulate an answer, I think, although it looks nothing like I thought it would.

I'd love to tell you right now, but my son has woken up from his nap and is calling for me. End of my tea-and-conversation break for now, but there is more, much more...don't be put off by the darkness yet. There's more.

Tomorrow: The Secret of Joy

Starting Backwards...

I have no clue what I'm doing.

That's a usual starting point for me. I've thought about blogging for months, in between loads of laundry, changing my son's poopy diapers and throwing up from morning sickness. That's one thing I've learned since becoming a suburban, stay-at-home mom--I have lots of time to think. No time to write any thoughts down, of course, but the mundane routines, the constant banality, the isolation of the suburbs allows one a lot of time to think. I live in my head most of the time. It's not the healthiest place to take up residence. Even my journal would be a better place to live, but that would require me actually finding my journal, and a decent pen that writes...oh, and the time to sit and write more than a grocery list in longhand.

But today I find myself with an hour to kill. I was supposed to have an ultrasound today to find out the sex of my unborn child, but I wrote the appointment down on the wrong day, so the time set aside for the appointment was suddenly wide open. (On a side note, I have discovered that nothing robs you of simple, common sense and intelligence like pregnancy. I am a walking zombie most of the time.) So, I decided to start a blog about what's going on in my frenetic little head, and how an aging, over-educated, under-employed, post-punk Christian mystic and former urban pioneer manages daily existence in the Suburban Jungle. Without throwing up or losing my mind. Most days.

The basics are as follows: Late 30s. Married. Mother to 1 and 1/2 kids (Child 1 is a toddler, child 1/2 is due in December). Abiding in a ticky-tacky subdivision full of cookie-cutter houses somewhere in the Southeast, about 30 minutes outside of Atlanta. Possessor of an MFA in Writing, which has so far provided me with about $40,000 in debt and no writing gigs. Rabid reader of anything I can get my hands on. Anything. Watcher of far too much TV. Hater of exercise and housework, lover of naps and Assam tea (made properly, with decent tea and boiling water and a dollop of milk, for the love of all that's holy, NOT cream...) . Mad lover of music without an ipod or working radio in my car.

Currently reading/Just read:

• Great Lies to Tell Small Children/The Book of Bunny Suicides by Andy Riley
• The Solitary Summer by Elizabeth von Arnim (not really liking it, honestly, but I'm halfway through it now, so...)
• Blue Like Jazz by Don Miller (lots more on this later. This book smacked me in the head very unexpectedly about 3/4 of the way through...)
• Jane Grigson's English Food by Jane Grigson
• Happiness: A History by Darrin M. McMahon (mainly because I'm trying to prove a hypothesis I have about happiness being illusory. More on that later...)
• Under the Overpass: A Journey of Faith on the Streets of America by Mike Yankoski
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Current Life Soundtrack:

• The Art of Virtue, Adrienne Young and Little Sadie (I am SO diggin' this album right now!)
• O.C.M.S., Old Crow Medicine Show
• Nickel Creek, Nickel Creek
• The Very Best of Peter, Paul & Mary, Peter, Paul & Mary
• Illinois, Sufjan Stevens
• Drunkard's Prayer, Over the Rhine
• Various tunes from Gnarls Barkley, Ani DiFranco, The Band, Patty Griffin, Matisyahu, Kirk Franklin, The Replacements, Green Day, Switchfoot, Tree63, James Blunt, Gary Allen, Johnny Cash, Aimee Mann and Richard Thompson, to name a few...

OK. That's enough to get us started. Laundry and dirty dishes call.

Next up: why I don't believe in happiness anymore, and other joyful opinions...