Maybe, some days, we both need to let the dishes stay in the sink longer.
The Oversplaining
Men are wonderful. I love them, but they tend to overexplain stuff or problem solve, even to the point of assuming that we women want them to solve our problems when most times we just need emotional support. I’ve read that even one hour a week listening to and observing your child engaged in some activity, whether reading or sports, provides the gift of presence. Simply paying attention is sacred time.
Me: “I’m not sure what I should do about [describe issue that is usually upsetting, frustrating, or causing anger].”
My Man: “Well, it seems to me you have these specific options. Number one . . .”
Me: “OK, so I know all that, but I want you to hug me and tell me it will be OK and that I’m wonderful, beautiful, and confidant and this situation is intolerable. I want to know you will go fight them like Jon Snow in Game of Thrones if they defame my honor and integrity. Actually, I want you to listen to me as I tell you the whole ball of wax.”
So here’s to mysplaining:
We all need to be heard, women and men, so listen. Just listen. Maybe practice.
We’re all responsible for taking care of our own needs.
We’re all insecure and idiosyncratic, but it’s still our responsibility to communicate what we want without resentment or the bizarre expectation that the other person knows what we’re thinking through some Vulcan mind-meld. (I agree that’s cool, but it’s not real.)
We all should quit composing in our heads the list of what the spouse has done for us lately, or not.
We need to realize that marriage is a deal that can’t be measured by an equal division of labor every day. It’s called “More grace, please.”
We might want to let the guys do it their way, and we can do it ours. My sweet husband has no idea why I replaced our china cabinet with a drink station, and I cannot understand why he won’t sell the old 1996 truck that sits in front of our house and doesn’t run unless you give it a jump. Not even Viagra can help that truck, Honey.
Maybe, some days, we both need to let the dishes stay in the sink longer, not as a test to see who’ll do them first, but as a pact we make together to set some limits on all that stuff to which we are giving way too much of our energy. Go rogue and stop, rest, and Sabbath more.
A Night on the Town, Also Known As: Spending Time Without the Kids
We have a fairly large fenced-in backyard for our three dogs. But we still have a lot of canine lounging on my pillows and sofas, with accompanying shed phenomena.
The adopted Pointer, Nori, loves to hunt, especially at night, but only when it’s warm. Understand that she’s cold natured. I wonder if this is the reason the hunting life didn’t work out for her. She’s totally thrilled to come when we call, as long as the temp is low and all creatures great and small are hibernating. But don’t bother her when spring has sprung, unless she’s caught something she wants to lay at your feet. Then, well, she’s all smiles and wags and mission accomplished.
Dogs are not the only ones who like a night out on the town. All married people need them. Victor and I have always tried to keep a standing Saturday date night, even when the boys pulled on my leg and sobbed and cried “Mooommmaaa” as we walked out the door. (I know it’s hard to believe, but they turn off the tears as soon as the car is out of view.) Do all you can to make and keep nights out on the town. If money is an issue, ask family or friends to babysit or look for parents’-night-out ministries.
We’ve done one of those all-inclusive trips to Mexico, with the towels on the bed made into swans and a nice hot tub. I’m all about hot tubs. Our first night there, I used way too much soap, and the bubbles were flying, but it got us laughing, loosened up, and in the mood to reconnect. We slept well, ate well, and read books that are more than twenty pages. Another time, we went to a cabin, built fires, hiked, hot-tubbed, and sat under the stars in the biting cold with a glass of wine. And no one was there to interrupt our conversation. The quiet nearly killed us, and we talked too much about our kids.
The Parable of Thrown Confetti
Marriage reminds me of the parable of the sower, the way we can choose to be fertile soil for God to guide our spiritual transformation.
I updated the parable a teeny bit and inserted self, this fiery me-girl who car dances (and I don’t care if you see me at the stoplight). I renamed it “the parable of the confetti thrower.”
Jesus, that way-too-generous Messiah, spreads love like confetti being thrown at a party. Confetti, like seed, can land anywhere. When it’s thrown in a crowd, some of it lands on the floor to be swept up and thrown away. Then some of it sticks to shoes and travels to who knows where. Some simply falls into places where it will never see the light of day. Thank heavens, though, some of that sparkly stuff sticks to those who are really taking some risks out there at the party: dancing, moving through the world with joy, embracing others, even when it’s so obvious we’re all imperfect and clumsy, just trying to practice our moves and to get in step with one another.
Marriage is an opportunity to practice some indulgent, gracious love, like God does, scattering it like a wild man—or woman. It’s Jesus at the party throwing confetti. I imagine that the sparkly slivers of divine love settle in our hair and on our skin but mostly in our eyes, changing our perceptions, so that we open wide our arms to the spouse who is a far cry from us. Marriage is an opportunity to love with abandon and get bathed in bits of Jesus’s confetti.
CHAPTER 8
THE ANNUAL SIBLING CHRISTMAS COCOON COOKIE BAKE-OFF
After taking the bread and giving thanks, [Jesus] broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
—Luke 22:19
When I was a kid, our family used to watch “Bonanza.” I really liked having a Sunday night TV ritual.
—Anne Lamott
Normally, it’s balmy in my home state during the month of December, but there are exceptions. A few years ago, freezing weather actually landed in the middle of our smallish southern city. Many side roads were closed, and the church parking lot was a solid sheet of ice. I should have bought that snow shovel, the one that made me laugh hysterically while shopping at a neighbor’s garage sale.
The exceptional weather meant no one could get to the church building safely, so a techie helped me arrange for plan B. We would stream a devotional online from my home with my family as we lit the second Advent candle. We wouldn’t be in the beautiful sanctuary, but we could all be safe and warm and connected.
On my end, it meant I had to get the laptop set up near our Christmas tree, with a view of our own Advent wreath in the shot, showing the four traditional candles to mark the season and the center candle that represented Christ. My cell phone served as a monitor, so that I could view what the online worshipers were seeing and hearing. My husband gathered our boys, who sat nearby, curious at our makeshift altar.
As we went live online, I welcomed those who had joined us. Getting prepared for Jesus to come, I began to talk about the season of Advent. I then read some words appropriate for the second Sunday, probably one of the Gospels’ sermons about repentance and cleansing fire from John the Baptist.
While trying to juggle the whole candle-lighting production, I noticed that one of the boys was watching our faces on my computer screen. Wyatt leaned into the camera shot between the computer screen and the Advent candles, which had already been lit. Trying very hard not to move the makeshift equipment, I tried to catch Victor’s eye to communicate the worrisome situation unfolding in real time with a particular starstruck child. As my sweet spouse prepared to corral him, Wyatt said, “Something smells funny.”
Something did smell funny.
It’s singed hair, I thought. Oh no, my child’s hair is on fire! My child’s hair was on fire.
Fire (and stuff on fire) has a way of catching our attention. Maybe John the Baptist’s ser
mons and crazy rituals really do help us pay attention to what matters most.
Sisters, we are born into rituals, and we make them, from small sacred moments to grand celebrations.
To this day, those alarming, comic moments of trying to celebrate Advent remind me of the ending of the classic holiday movie A Christmas Story. Ralphie’s father had been waiting all Christmas day for the roast turkey, only to have the neighbor’s dogs steal it off the kitchen table. The family ends up having their holiday dinner at the local Chinese restaurant. Although Peking duck is not on the typical American Christmas menu, Ralphie’s weirdly normal family is thoughtfully serenaded with some verses of “Deck the Halls.” The Chinese American waitstaff tries to make this crazy Christmas derailment meaningful with a chorus of “fa la la la la, la la la la!”
I have a pastor friend who takes his family to eat Chinese food every Christmas Day because he’s insanely funny and because pastors and their families are exhausted on Christmas Day, even more so than Santa. We birth Jesus and bring the presents in the same night.
Similarly, I pause and embrace the moment every December when I see a neighbor’s picture window displaying a fish-net-stockinged leg lamp, a nod to the same movie. I love that leg because it’s on the crass, tacky, and especially, fleshy side of life. And life, particularly family life, isn’t sanitized. At any moment, the ride can turn brutally painful or brightly beautiful.
I view the tantalizing, bold leg as a solid way to de-sterilize Christmas and family from what’s trending on the tree and to sit with our human messes, confusion, and imperfection. It’s my belief that Jesus didn’t come for the cleaned-up sparkles. He sits cross-legged in the floor, tinsel in his tangled hair, cookie crumbs hanging off his beard, and bits of Play-Doh stuck to his modest shirt. He sits with us in the middle of loud, spoiled children, having overheard that thing you shouldn’t say to a spouse during the season of God becoming one of us. Or loving me in the midst of my coziness with what I know to be an unnecessary materialistic freak show. It’s just that I love me some holiday swag and matching bedazzled family sweaters.
Sisters, we are born into rituals, and we make them, from small sacred moments to grand celebrations. In her book Grounded, Diana Butler Bass reminds us that the words habit and habitat are from the same Latin root, meaning “to hold or possess.” As the nearest of neighbors, the immediate family with whom we live and dwell gives us opportunity to regularly practice important behavior we will take into the world: “sharing, eating together, praying, conversation, critical thinking, acceptance and forgiveness, and charity.” In other words, how we perform domestic rituals, how we lean into and sustain traditions, and how we foster habits at home that shape who we are and affect the wide world beyond (God’s world).
The necessity for such grounding is especially welcome when families are up to their elbows in chaos, from daily routines to seasonal slogs, like the gargantuan task (and very unspiritual pilgrimage) of back-to-school shopping. No matter what the source of family busyness or chores, we all need the steady rhythm of singing our thanks around the meal, which, in our kitchen may accompany a cacophony of pots banging, laughter, screams, and, yep, thrown food. (Maybe that’s why we continue to call low-lying food grub.)
Locate and Hallow the Sacred Family Portals
My boys have always been fascinated by keys and locks with combinations. When I was a little girl, I had a secret diary that locked, a jewelry box with a key, and a treasure chest I once ordered from a cereal box. I don’t think it’s unusual for kids to keep objects with a certain reverence. I believe it is the beginning of connecting particular, treasured memories to the minutia of life. Sifting through our keepsakes reminds us of important information and mirrors the way we’ll decide to hold onto a valuable time during our spirit journey and continue to reflect on what we keep and let its meaning shape us.
After moving my mom to a care facility, my siblings and I cleaned out her home. I took some of her books, which can tell you a great deal about a person. My mom liked fiction, theology, biography, politics, and current events. I received Mom’s punch bowl, which had many times held a lime-green-colored frothy drink made of sherbet and ginger ale. I took her VCR-taped movie collection, to help me recall her taste in movies and her neat, cursive writing across the labels. I ended up with some boxes of cherished family photos, dating back to my great-grandparents. Victor and I adopted her blind thirteen-year-old cocker spaniel, Daisy, an aging, red-furred creature who was snippy, was spoiled to food scraps, smelled perpetually, and lived, to our astonishment, another three years.
More important to me, Sister Gayle also put aside the red, round, wooden Christmas tray for my family. I cannot remember a Christmas without the presence of that tray. In old English letters, it announces, Christmas in the country, Christmas in the town, Christmas in our hearts, Christmas all around.Schmaltzy and sacrosanct is a thing.
When Sister placed the red tray in my hands, she blessed me with something she knew connected me to the past, to Mom, and to my history. It was something I would use with my children. It offered one way to keep our family story going and, with it, who we are becoming. It’s never merely about physical objects; memories accompany the physical objects and support the rituals and traditions we need in a culture in which everything is changing at a speed faster than most of us can accommodate or embrace.
An uncle of the boys made a wooden box in a distinct color for each one and painted each boy’s name on his box. These boxes store shells from the beach, fossils from family hikes, found seeds, shiny metal from a park, a birthday card here and there, some stickers, loose beads, a tube or two of glitter glue, bottle caps, and even parts of past Halloween costumes. This childhood collection is the beginning of what matters to my boys as they gather the ingredients of their stories. At some point, one of them may take hold of the red Christmas tray and make it a symbol of hospitality, welcome, or Christmas, a symbol first held by their grandmother, then their mother. Or maybe they’ll hallow the platter they made for me, a design with four red elf socks that the boys made from their own footprints.
OK, my red tray will probably go to Goodwill. Although it would be nice if I got a daughter-in-law who is either an anthropologist or archaeologist. I’m really open to a good therapist too.
Family Movie Night as Spiritual Practice
Every family is different, which makes how we live and work and play unique. The ways me and mine strengthen our bond aren’t yours. Some families have game nights or sport nights, but with our tribe, one of our big bonding moments are movie nights.
As our boys have grown, we have set aside Friday evenings as our end-of-the-week celebration. Sometimes, we’ll go see a new release at the theater on a Friday afternoon and enjoy the big bucket of popcorn, the candy, and a cool, dark theatre with a huge screen and reclining chairs. But most often, we settle in together on the red couch in the den with throws. Some nights, I make cookies for us, or sometimes we gather around bowls of cheese dip, dripping across the glass coffee table and chins.
Porches, doors, tables, and words of welcome are sacred materials with which to build families and relations.
I believe watching movies and talking about the characters may offer us ways to overcome obstacles, to deal with people who are different from us, and to examine our fears (fears of loneliness, rejection, loss, and death). I believe this about books as well. There was the night we watched The Little Princess. As it became clear that the amnesiac father in the story might not recognize his little girl, who was screaming for him after their long separation, I looked to see every child of mine with tears streaming down his cheeks. These powerful reactions make it possible for us to talk about the hard things we might not otherwise explore as a family.
There is also a past lodged in our particular ritual. I sat next to my mother on the couch many Saturday evenings while we watched old classics. She taught me to appreciate Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Olivia de
Havilland, and Cary Grant. “Oh, Honey,” she’d say, “I first saw this picture down at . . .” It was some theater that no longer existed and where, she claimed, you could watch a double feature for a dime. Even when I was home from college, we watched the networks’ airing of The Sound of Music or The Wizard of Oz. Each time, we worried about the von Trapp family’s escape or Dorothy getting home to Kansas, not to mention the secret desires of growing up, being accepted, and learning what bravery might look like.
Mom wasn’t a snob, though. She liked new stuff too. She was so into the first Star Wars movie, she gave me a light saber that Christmas, for which I was too old. OK, it was a really long plastic flashlight, but I knew it meant more. The gift was implicitly about her strong belief in the triumph of good over evil and the implicit nod to the light in the darkness.
The last movie we took Mom to see was Toy Story 3. A grown-up Andy is headed off to college. What will become of his favorite toys, friends who have been with him all his life? Will Andy throw them away, or will he pass them along to another child? I cannot watch this movie without crying. At the end, my boys look back at me, knowing that joy and sorrow are sometimes mixed together. It’s all mashed up in my trembling lower lip and the tears that fall: Mom, movies, love, loss, and the next chapter of life.
Stepping on Cheerios Page 8