Birthday

On Tuesday I started the last 365 days of my twenties. It was a good birthday. I got both the quiet evening at home with cake and loved ones, and the romantic night out on the town with Bryan. I had the three million facebook posts and long skype calls with family far away. There were even a few cards in the mail from the persistent few who have managed to keep up with our ever-changing address. It was a good start to 29.

Like every one does, I took one last good look at the year I was packing away before I wrapped it up in tissue paper and tucked it safely away in memory. I ran my hand over the broken places - some just worn bare from sweet overuse, others chipped from more painful drops. I savored one last time all the people, places and changes that have come and gone and stayed and left. It's been a crazy year. One of the most significant and difficult of my life. But without a doubt, when I look back on this year, I will always remember it as one of the most beautiful a lifetime could ask for. Because it is the year I met Annabelle.

This child of mine brings me more joy than I thought possible. And I had high expectations too. Yes, yes, the first few months were harder than I thought and I haven't completely forgotten the long nights and bone-numbing exhaustion. But I whole-heartedly embrace one of the biggest cliches out there when I say having a child is one of the most wonderful things that can happen to you. They aren't lying. It is simply amazing.

There are new fears. For the rest of my life every time the doctor wants to take a second look at something my heart will stop, and every time I leave her with someone else, no matter how great the reason, a part of me will not relax. But it is so worth it! Just watching her taste watermelon for the first time or go down the slide by herself (yes she did!) or hold her first ladybug makes it all so incredibly worth it. Lately she's into hair barrettes and will bring them to me by the handful to clip into the silky strands of peach fuzz on her head. She also leaves them as her calling card around the house, so when I see two hundred ziplock bags strewn across the kitchen floor, the tiny purple hair clip lying in the middle of the mess might prove a helpful clue as to who is the perpetrator. She's dang close to walking and her new favorite words are "Wow!" and "Yum-yum!" ("Wow" as when she saw me in my new black dress - attagirl, and "Yum" as in when she licked the lotion off my knee - hmmm). She will lie face-down on the floor and cry when you ask her not to touch the fire-poker. But she'll obey. Every day she is more little girl and less baby. I am having so much fun getting to know her.

So as I near the dreaded 3-0, I find myself sailing forward quite happily. The next few years might mean more coloring books than novels, more Disney than dates, more walks than runs...and to that I say, welcome!

       

Animal Dreams

Last Tuesday, I read a piece I had written at a show in a little theatre in downtown Dallas. I’m not going to lie, it was some of the most fun I have had in a while. I got to work with an editor for the first time and she was amazing at helping me find my voice and massage my narrative. I got to wear a black dress, sit on a barstool in a blinding spotlight and have a captive audience sit and listen to what I had to say. I got to bask in a standing ovation (for the entire cast) and the bubbly feedback in the gallery afterwards. I loved it. (Okay, if you corner my husband he will tell you that there was a couple weeks of nerve-wracking re-writes, anxious last minute editing, day-of panic attacks over leaving baby with a babysitter and general bouts of insecurity ranging on everything from toenails to coherency. But I will never admit that. I maintain that it was just awesome.)

Taking a few cautious steps a little deeper into the world of writing has sent me running back into the arms of the books that bring me my deepest comfort and inspiration, which, quite frankly, is just about anything written by Barbara Kingsolver. The other day I was flipping through Animal Dreams and I came across a passage I had highlighted the first time I read it. And it blew me away all over again. It’s a letter between two sisters, one off in Nicaragua trying to save the world, the other in her small hometown trying to find herself. The sister abroad writes:

You’re thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what’s been there, figuring out what to do that won’t clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that’s what I do. You ask why I’m not afraid of loving and loosing, and that’s my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost.


Codi, here’s what I have decided: the very least you could do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.


I can’t tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. I wish you’d stop beating yourself up about being selfish, and really be selfish, Codi. You’re like a mother or something. I wish you knew how to squander yourself...


I wish those words were mine. They feel like mine. But I didn’t write them.

On some days I feel like I am squandering myself recklessly. I look at my life and think, “Yes. This is it. This is worthwhile.” On those days I feel like I can touch the walls of that hope too.

But on other days I feel like I am hoarding myself up, too scared to dole out even a little bit. I think about raising a daughter in a refugee camp or not owning a house or, on some days, just being nice to a neighbor, and I recoil into my shell. People have often told me I’m brave (usually for something silly like ordering five star curry or jumping off a high-dive). But when I hear that, I always want to say, “If you had any idea how often I am terrified…”

For whatever reason, today has been one of those days. I feel the nearness of well-known fears breathing down my neck with unwelcome intimacy.

I am so thankful to be surrounded by people who make a regular practice of squandering themselves. They never cease to pull me back into the beautiful fray. They adopt nine year olds out of the foster care system. They work to develop charter schools in low-income communities. They make unlikely friends and plant gardens and write poetry. They go to Nicaragua and stay in the towns they grew up in. They inspire me. I’m thankful for them today.

Dr. Adaha

This morning over breakfast I opened an email from a friend in China. The one-liner read, “Is this your friend?” followed by a link to a BBC news article. I took another bite of blueberry bagel and clicked on the link. I scrolled down and sure enough, buried in a long article about the conflict in North Africa, was his familiar face – dark skin, big teeth, sad eyes. Our friend, Dr. Adaha.  

The article talked about how he stayed in the town we lived in until the last possible minute, (when government troops were finally within shelling range, if what he always said would be go-time turned out to be true), before loading up the ambulance with whatever hospital equipment he could carry and driving across the southern border. But instead of driving on to bigger and better things, he parked that ambulance right in the middle of 80,000 refugees and got to work on gunshot victims and pregnant women. And every once in a while he apparently turns right back around and drives back across the border to carry injured people out – soldiers on his side, solders on their side, civilians, POWs. “Anyone who is desperate” the article quotes him as saying.

God have mercy, this sounds like the man I know.

I wasn’t so sure what to make of him when I first met him. I remember one of the first times I was around him. We were sitting with a few friends on the front porch of their kitchen, swatting mosquitoes as we ate beans and rice out of flimsy plastic plates. Dr. Adaha joined us late, looking worn from his evening rounds at the hospital. But even as he unfolded heavily into a chair he warmed to our conversation and from the many questions tossed his way I could tell he was known for his stories. He told many that night, but the one that has forever stuck in my head, epitomizes all those I have now heard him tell a dozen times or more. With his legs crossed neatly while he ate, Dr. Adaha told us of a battalion of rebel soldiers he had attended to during the war. They were badly beaten in a battle deep in the bush and he was rushed out to treat them. There he found men ripped apart by bullets, bleeding to death in the middle of nowhere. “There was this one guy whose intestines were all spilling out of him,” he said matter-of-factly that night while he chewed his beans. “And he wanted to die so badly that he had stuffed dirt and grass into his open wound.” As he described the man’s injuries, Dr. Adaha started to laugh. “He was so miserable, that he actually tried to kill himself by putting grass in his body…” His eyes squinted tightly and his body shook with laughter. I remember staring at my plate in horror that night and thinking, this guy is crazy.  

And he is. At least by some standards. In a world where he could be making a ton of money in a nice hospital, he lives on the salary supplied by a relief organization (when they haven’t already evacuated). When he could be living in a comfortable home with his wife and three sons, he sleeps in a mud hut alone and thousands of miles away from his family. When he could cash in his seventeen years of noble efforts in difficult place for well-deserved praise and rest, he earns his heroism by working eighteen hours days in a refugee camp most people less educated than him simply visit. Stark raving mad. And I don’t know if I have ever met anyone more inspiring.

In two and a half years of living next door to Dr. Adaha, I came to love his stories. I never failed to be surprised at the things he would laugh at and the things he would not. He once swore the crocodile in the river near his boyhood home was sixty feet long, sixty feet, and he looked positively annoyed when I burst into laughter at the tale. But he could speak of a child soldier shooting a verbally abusive POW in the head and chuckle like he had just told a great joke. But I came to realize that when he laughed at these narratives of intense human suffering, he did not expect me, or anyone else to. He laughed because he had been there. And we had not. He laughed because, really…what else do you do? It seems like when your choices are to laugh a little or to sit in the dirt with your head in your hands and weep, some days, most days, you will choose to laugh. Then you wipe your eyes, and get back to pouring your life into some of the hardest, greatest work imaginable.

The past couple of weeks Bryan and I have been encouraged to see progress in our own plans. I will share more details soon but for now it looks like we may be working with the same community of refugees that Dr. Adaha is in the near future. Which means that someday soon I may be hearing some of his stories again. And I have this deep feeling, somewhere between terror and hope, that maybe one day I can have the great honor of laughing with him.   

(To see the BBC article about Dr. Adaha click here )