Mother's Day

Several people asked me on Sunday if this was my first Mother’s Day. I told them it wasn’t. Last year Annabelle was a couple weeks old and we all went out to eat a fancy meal in Nairobi after church. She was still wrinkled and blurry-eyed and I was still puffy and severely sleep-deprived. But in the pictures you can tell we are all so happy.

This Mother’s Day was only the second of what I hope will be years and years of celebrating. But I have to admit, this year was one for the books. If you know me at all you know I can hardly ever keep my own secrets to myself. And this space, though public, feels an awful lot like journaling to me sometimes. So I apologize if the following post strikes you as a little premature, a little too intimate, a little too much of me. If a big ol’ slice of the raw inside of my heart is not what you are looking for this morning, you should read something else.

On Sunday morning I sat down in my pajamas to a big cup of coffee. It had the perfect amount of thick vanilla cream swirled though (at least a third of the cup) and was steaming perfectly. Bryan was on the phone with his dad who had just called to wish him a happy birthday and Annabelle was playing with her singing teapot in the living room. I was just about to take a big delicious sip of my morning brew when a thought crossed my mind that made me pause. It was a highly unlikely thought. I came really close to shrugging it off and drinking my coffee down. But it left just enough residue of doubt in my mind, just enough “What if..” that I sat my warm mug down and went to the bathroom.  

I pulled out the box of “just-in-case” pregnancy tests and opened it without looking at the instructions. In my mind this was just a quick act to give me peace of mind. The ticket to another month of guilt-free caramel macchiatos and sushi. I gave the test a cursory glance – no sign of changes – and started to put on deodorant. I piddled around for a couple of minutes and then glanced back down at the test as I started out the door. When I saw that faint blue line I nearly passed out.  

Let me first just say this is exactly what I wanted to happen (sorta). Last time we did this I spent six months paying attention to every little twinge of my body, peeing on sticks and crying at disappointments. In a world where six months to wait for a baby is shamelessly misplaced emotion, I was a tad bit dramatic. And I didn’t want to do that this time. I wanted to be open to possibilities and free from anxiety. Whatever happens will happen in its own time. No great hopes or great fears. Just…whatever, whenever. Well, the first month we were ahem, “open to possibilities” whatever happens will happen happened.

I ushered Bryan into the bathroom mumbling something about needing a second opinion. He was grumbling thinking I was worried that some new dress made me look fat (as if that has ever happened). But when I showed him the test, he was quiet for a moment and then, to my intense relief and joy, he started laughing. Then he kissed me. How I love that man…

I am thrilled. Sobered perhaps by having children less than two years apart, but ridiculously happy. You can’t think of new life and not just be overwhelmed with joy! I am guarded. This is all still very early. I am not too naïve to realize that things could still happen. I feel a little guilty, though I know that’s silly. I have so many dear friends and family members I have who are struggling with waiting (we’re talking years, not months), trying, miscarriages, failed adoptions, and loss.    

Most of all I think I am just grateful. I can’t stop thinking “Thank you so much!” I feel like I have been given such a gift. One that I know I don’t deserve. There is something about bearing a miracle in your own body that is incredibly centering. The future is complicated, daunting and a bit overwhelming sometimes. But today I am a Mama. Today, by God’s Grace, I am a keeper of life whether by washing sticky fingers or taking a prenatal vitamin or praying for help to do it all well.

This Mother’s Day was not at all what I was expecting. But it held surprising joy. I am still reveling in the precious gift I have received.

Mother's Day 2011 

Mother's Day 2012

Farm

I am writing this from a wide brick house in the middle of a cotton field in West Texas. Well, I say cotton even though that won’t be growing outside for several months. Right now it's just a field. I see cows lumbering by in the dusty distance and a deep green machines resting on the side of the barn. A long sprinkler system stretches lanky metal arms across the field. Rabbits twitch in the back yard. When I sit out there in the afternoon, listening to wind chimes play in the background and feeling sharp grass underfoot, I feel happy someplace deep down that only smiles for very special occasions.

Though I’ve been coming to this house of my father’s oldest sister for as long as I can remember, I still know precious little about farming other than it can be stressful. This week alone my uncle has been hard at work plowing, mending fences, spraying weeds and swathing alfalfa so it will be ready for baling. The walls of the house are coated in decades of prayers for rain. And yet this farm has always been a haven of peace for me. I sit on the back porch swing and breathe in the smell of dirt and grass and cows, and muscles I didn’t even know were tight start to let go.

Yesterday I was driving to town and got hit by a dust-devil boiling across the road like it was a column of dirt leading a nation of tumble-weeds through the desert. It passed and I watched it trudge across the flatness towards the perfectly rounded horizon. I was surprised to realize in that moment how much like home this feels. Or a home, anyway. My Georgia-bred husband looks around and asks where all the trees are. He says he never knew people actually wore cowboy hats outside of October 31^st until he met my cousins. I look around and marvel at how safe this bizarrely barren world makes me feel. As though my own wandering body recognizes its birthplace.

I didn’t feel that way as a kid. But now, in a season of transience, I feel a thirst for roots that this place slakes. I am surprised by this feeling, but not unpleased. Perhaps in a life spent seeking out strangely beautiful pockets of the world, it is nice to know I have one of my own. In some ways equally unfamiliar, but a place to be from. We need those places. I need those places.   

Mouse

I am sooooo……sleeeeepy.

We didn’t sleep very well last night. Lately Bryan and I have gotten into a bad habit of starting into deep discussions about the direction of our lives around 10:15 at night. Our recently weaned one year old is newly insecure about the world and wakes up at six in the morning hollering for company. But the reason we didn’t sleep well last night has nothing to do with either of these things, and is in fact an altogether much smaller reason.

We have a mouse in our room.

I had seen suggestive evidence of such a creature in our room earlier this week but had brushed it off with a rather naïve hangover from my childhood: “It can’t be a mouse. This is America.” But of course last night, right after we had finally wrapped up our thoughts on facing the future with courage, I heard an unnerving scratching under the bed. I flipped on the lamp and sure enough, a brown ball of fuzz scurried under the bedside table.

I nearly had a heart attack.

   

We spent the next 30 minutes trying to whack it with shoe then scrounged up a trap out of the garage and planted it strategically on the floor in the corner, all the while terrified that Annabelle would somehow miraculously climb out of her crib in the night, open her closed door, walk into our room and step on the trap. I went back to bed cramped with the suspense of waiting for the trap to spring shut (Did it get my baby?) and deeply angry at the tiny rodent in our house. How dare a mouse come into my bedroom!

I have distinct memories of rodents in our house in North Africa that could carry this little guy here around in their mouths. One of the first nights there we were sleeping in a mud tukul when we heard the jaws-of-death trap that Bryan was always afraid would take his arm off every time he set it up snap shut with a crack like a gunshot on the other side of the room. We laid there in the dark for a moment and then recoiled in horror as we heard metal being dragged slowly across the cement floor. Another time, our cat Nimir brought a rat almost as big as he was into our living room and then let it go at the feet of our horrified American guests. The maimed animal scurried and bled all across our house with our sadistic cat chasing and batted at it while I uselessly ran after him trying to shoo them both outside. It was terrible. But on both of these occasions, and many others in between (I won’t mention the rat in the toilet incident), I remember laughing. Yes, of course, it was disgusting and irritating, but it didn’t really upset me. It just seemed to come with the territory. It was just part of the deal. But last night I was downright mad.

Expectations, I am learning, are everything. Realistic or otherwise, they have incredible power to shape your perspective. Expect a few rats and you get free entertainment. Expect a pristine home and you get a sleepless night and a headache the next morning.

I would do well to remember this. It seems like sometimes I forget that trying to live faithfully, to make a difference, to carve out a life of compassion, to try and live to our fullest human potential – whatever you want to call it, living well, is going to cost us sometimes. It will put us around a few rats from time to time, whether they are situations, or feelings, or people or…well, rats. But somehow knowing that going into it all helps me so much. They honestly don’t seem so bad when you know they are coming. In fact, sometimes their nasty little presence helps remind me that maybe I’m in the right place after all.

I’ve spent too much time being mad at mice lately. I’m ready to laugh at rats again.          

                                        (I'm sorry, I had to.)

Journal

I rarely go back and read journal entries from earlier seasons in my life though I have been filling up notebooks since I was nine years old. There are trunks of my daydreams, prayers and poor attempts at poetry scattered in attics and back-bedroom closets around the world. My best friend got a journal for a birthday and just like I refused to ever let him out-run, out-climb, out-karate me, (at least not without some competition) I wasn’t about to let a boy out-write me. I am pretty sure he gave it up after a day or two. He runs Ironmen for fun now while my skinny jeans have long-been relegated to the bottom drawer. But I’m still writing.

Of course, to be fair, long seasons of my life are represented only by blank pages. When I am my happiest I can’t seem to find time to write, or perhaps the need. Other than a few emails or stray blogs, I have no written account of my fist kiss, my wedding, the birth of my daughter. If you picked up my journals it would be easy to mistake me for depressed woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But then you would look up and see that there are long months, sometimes years between the dates.    

So I’m not sure why I started thumbing through my most recent journal the other day. But I did and stumbled over May 28^th of last year. We were sitting in Nairobi a few weeks after Annabelle’s birth, agonizing over whether we should return to our home in North Africa while rumors and reports of approaching conflict were spiraling out of control. And now almost exactly a year later, I am sitting in Dallas, TX as we listen to the rumbles of new war from a thousand miles away and wonder what this will mean for us and our future. A year ago I wrote…

I am remembering the day they found the landmine on our compound right now. I am remembering sitting on the porch while Bryan was out talking to the UN or something, and feeling a torrent of emotions. I remember writing that morning and using pen and paper to sort through my emotions, trying to identify each one and arrange them in some kind of order. I feel like that right now. I need to write in order to organize my emotions and give appropriate attention to each…

…I sit here with my baby on my lap and laugh for feeling so worked up about the most predictable thing in the world. I knew we were going to have a baby. I knew politics in S were going to get messy. And yet here I am pulling emotions off the shelf like I never knew I was going to need them. So how am I feeling?

Well, scared for one. The thought of covering Annabelle’s head while we lie in a ditch because the North is shelling K makes me sick to my stomach. All this new motherly instinct is coursing through my veins making me think, “Are you freaking out of your mind?” Coupled with the fear is a bit of guilt. Am I being unfair for taking my daughter into this mess? Am I a bad mother? Plenty of people would think so.

And then I’m feeling impatient. We’ve been away from S for so long. I feel so disconnected from people, language and daily life. I feel anxious to get back, to get involved, to catch up and plug back in. The thought of being delayed, even for the most legitimate reason imaginable makes me sad.

And then, to my shame, I feel excited. The thought of lying in a ditch covering Annabelle’s head because the North is shelling K makes me sick to my stomach – in a tingly sort of way. What an adventure. What a story to tell. This is the kind of life I have always dreamed of…

We did go back to North Africa a few days after I wrote those words. Months later we were on the last plane out, minutes before bombs fell on the dirt airstrip where we had just stood. Was going back wise? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. But those last days there were some that I can still feel the most vividly. The oppressive cloud of war that hung over all of us made each handshake, each sip of tea feel so present that even all this time later I can still taste them. I savor those rich memories.

Today I have felt myself pulling down those jars of emotions that we all knew we would need to use but that still somehow seem unexpected all over again. They are the same. Fear. Guilt. Impatience. Excitement. They are still exhausting. But in a world where none of us escape the weight of heavy things, I choose these. This is still the life I have always dreamed of.

I need to remind myself of this sometimes.   

      

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 )